by Marisa Mangani
“People should know that Hawai`i is a country and should be respected as such. Because it was forcibly annexed to the United States does not mean that it is the US, except by conquest.”
– Alice Walker
I arrived on Maui from Oahu in 1971, an eleven-year-old sharing the back seat of my mom’s turquoise Maverick with my baby brother and cages full of yowling cats. Mom and Stepdad occupied the space up front, driving through the cane fields on the dusty, two-lane Mokulele Highway from the Kahului airport. They had bought us a house in a new subdivision in Kihei to start a new life away from the racial strife of Oahu, where haoles like me were being knifed in school bathrooms. (I had overheard Mom and Grandmother talking about this.) Continue reading
Hawaii Pacific Review 