Two Hawaiian-Language Plays: Interview 1 with Jean Charlot, September 26, 1975, John Pierre Charlot

I just wanted to start off in a very general way by asking you how you came to write Hawaiian-language plays.1

Well, as you know I was a student of Samuel Elbert.2  I was actually the first one to enter his first class.  That must have been in the summer of ’49, I think.  And it was a very small class.  I think we were eight or nine people at the time.  And Sam had not taught languages before, so that there is a bond there that remained through the years between us.  Now we did have homework to do.  And I wasn’t terribly interested in the majority of the things contained in our first textbook, which was mostly conversational.  In fact, that was the title: Conversational Hawaiian.  But the conversation—that is quite understandable—was really between people whose interests were not mine.  And I remember an old lady meets another old lady in the street, and they say “How are you?”  “Well, I have a stomach ache, and my baby has a stomach ache,” and so on.  It was a way, of course, of getting in the language.  And also the question of numeration and those things that correspond in other languages: all those things about the umbrella of my aunt, and the book of Tom, and all those things.  I realized and I learned, of course, with those early phrases a certain sound and a certain logic or perhaps illogic that is existent in the Hawaiian language.  And I got really quite excited about the differences between the Polynesian bones we could see of the language or cartilage because they are not as solid as bones, in relation to the European languages, for example, that are pretty strongly based on Latin.  Very soon however, we came to some higher-class, I would say, quotes, which were taken mostly from Fornander,3 just introductions to tales and so on, that whetted my appetite for what we could call the literature of the Hawaiian language.  And we had at the time—it was easy to get them from the Bishop Museum—we had some Fornanders with on one side the Hawaiian, on the other side Fornander’s own translation into English, which we did not take as gospel truth because we had in a way other ideas, and we made our own translation that sometimes was at odds with Fornander.  But I did remain tremendously grateful to Fornander, who in, let’s say, mid-nineteenth century found informants who were still speaking a language and remembering stories, some of them histories, some of them episodes, that were tied up with the ancient thoughts of the Hawaiians.  And I felt much more at ease perhaps with the lyrical, with the epic quality of those tales than with the conversational Hawaiian we had started from.  So I did my homework, and I had to do homework, and one of my masterpieces of homework was “The Story of the Three Bears” that I put in Hawaiian.  That was the first time I tried a literary form.  Of course, the basis of “The Three Bears” was not a true Hawaiian story for many reasons: one of them that—as another student remarked immediately—bears did not exist in Hawai‘i.  But the presentation of the thing was perhaps my first literary attempt.  And “Goldilock” in Hawaiian makes a very good story.  And from then, I graduated, I would say, to the tales that are in Fornander, and even though I’m not an expert on texts, I tried to get the kernel, the older parts or somewhat first and let go of things that seemed to me, not I would say additions, but the work of people who had interest in putting their own stories, their own personality in a framework that had started with somebody else.  It’s a little bit like Homeric things, but I think you can get into the old text because it has a seriousness, it has a united thrust that the different other episodes do not quite have.  So the first thing I tried to clean up, so to speak, from my point of view was that story of Laukiamanuikahiki.  Naturally, it’s in Fornander; naturally, I didn’t attempt to embellish it, but as I say, it was really a cleansing of the thing that goes into all kind of side roads in the text of Fornander.  And I was interested in the human or humane side.  And as Elbert himself finds out in a published article on…I think it’s called “The Hero” or “The Anti-Hero in Hawaiian Literature”4—I found that the main characters were much more fallible in a way or less infallible than the heroes that we find in European and perhaps especially American folktales.  That they were not perfect.  They had many weaknesses.  And for example, the character of the father of the girl in “Laukiamanuikahiki” for me was the type of that fallible hero.  When he’s young, he says goodbye to the girl that is going to give him that child.  And she asks him—and that is in the tale, it’s not my invention—in very human terms, she said, “When the girl grows up and she looks for you, she should have some object, something to show you.  Then you would recognize her.”  She mentions, for example, a neck piece, perhaps, or some feather work, or something that will really show that she is the daughter of the chief.  But the chief at the time—he is perhaps in a hurry to go back to his kingdom—he is proud—he himself later on says that—says, “Well, don’t worry.  The gods will provide.”  That is the key, that is the key phrase, for the whole story.  And the mother, the woman, who is very human, very humane, is rather desperate about it all.  And it’s the next generation, the girl, when she grows up and, as the mother had looked ahead, wants to go and meet her father, that takes in a way the side of the father when she tells her mother, “Well as long as he said the gods will provide, the gods will provide.”  The rest of the story is how—even though the marks that she had to show, showing that she was the daughter of the chief, were nearly impossible to get them, to gather together: feather cloaks and the red man, that is the chief with the red cloak, and so on and so forth—those things, indeed, the gods will provide.  So that the girl is protected by those gods that remain invisible.  An interesting thing is that that faith in the gods is not accompanied by any of the prayers to the gods that we would expect in a European culture.  For example, if you lose something and you want to find it, you call St. Anthony and ask him to find it for you.  There is no such thing at all, but there is that faith that the gods within their own circle up there, without asking specific things, will give them if their name has been mentioned.  It’s a very different thing from the reward of the good in European folktales.  So at the end, the girl wins.  And one of the signs that she had to give was that of that man, that red man in the Hawaiian, that is, chiefly man with the red cloak.  Of course, she falls in love with him.  And the father, the last moment, the climax of the play, is something you wouldn’t find either in European not only folktale but play, because he has at last a glimpse of his daughter, but she is not giving a damn about her father anymore because she’s going away with the red man, who is a young chief. She’s young, and the two young people go away.  And the old man, who for years and years has repented from having been so proud as to say that the gods would provide and had refused the sign by which he could recognize his daughter, has, of course, remorse.  And the last lines are lines of remorse at his youthful pride and understanding that this is his punishment: he sees the girl, but he sees her going away from him.  That is the end of the play.  It’s interesting that I haven’t made those things up, that they are strictly built up on Hawaiian lines that are in themselves very different from the storytelling of European countries.  The suffering man, suffering through his own limitations, becomes in a way the main character, the hero of the book, and his unhappiness becomes the climax of the story and the climax of the play.

The theme of the father and his daughter is one that you’ve explored in some of your other plays, for instance, Kawelo fights with the father and the father doesn’t want to give up the daughter.  And you expand the theme quite a bit in your English, long version of Laukiamanuikahiki.  This seems to be a theme that touches you very closely.

Well, I don’t think we have to get into psychoanalysis, but I’m a father, and I’ve seen my children as often in back view going away from me as the other way around.  And perhaps you are quite right about the fact that an author, an author of a dramatic play puts a little bit of himself in the plot and the situations.

I’d like to ask you about the class again.  I’m kind of interested in how you chose to do this in dramatic form rather than in, say, the form of a short story.  Do you think that the use of conversations in class and drama in class was the thing that gave you the idea to put this expression into dramatic form rather than into another form?

Well, as I said, our class was a verbal class, in fact it was also, at least when I was with the Reverend Kahale,5 it was a musical class in which we chanted to the best of our abilities.  And there was no reading in the old Hawaiian times.  There were bards, I think, in the proper sense of the word, who talked the stories, chanted the stories.  And even passing the language to the Latin alphabet has been a tremendous blow to Hawaiian and to the concept of Hawaiian.  It, of course, allows people to study Hawaiian as you study another language.  But it brought limitations that did not exist before.  I think the older texts that we have in Hawaiian, or at least those that have been passed eventually in Latin alphabet and printed by early missionaries and so on and so forth, have a very different way of telling things that obviously has to do with verbal communication.  It’s rather interesting that in our days, we are more and more leaving the old concept of reading history and reading a text.  And with our machinery, for example, the one I’m using now, we are coming much more to verbal forms.  To speak of something that was in the air a while ago, the Nixon tapes for example are very bad literature, but they certainly bring in a freedom, the oral form of presenting things that we hadn’t had for centuries.  So because the old Hawaiians had the verbal and chanted communication, a play comes to mind very naturally, because even though we can find it in the book, after it had been memorized by the actors, it goes back to verbal form, which is the ancient form of the Hawaiian.  And I had a very important personal experience when we were rehearsing Laukiamanuikahiki, and I had my cast of Hawaiian-speaking people, who were not, like me, just academic speakers of Hawaiian, but all of them people who either spoke naturally the language or had learned it from their mother or grandmother and so on and so forth.  Those people started from my text, which I had printed in a few copies, and changed it rather thoroughly to change the written form to the verbal form.  Then we took a tape eventually of the thing when it was played at Punahou and it was on the stage.  And all the changes—they are worth analyzing—between the written form that I had used and the verbal form that was used in playing by the actors are all betterments to the original text and come closer to what I understand is the rhythm, the music, and so on of ancient Hawaiian.  It was quite an experiment.  To have to go through the Latin alphabet and the written word, but to come back eventually to what I felt was the ideal form for the Hawaiian language, the verbal form and, of course, in Laukiamanuikahiki in many ways, the chanted form.

This interest in non-Latin and oral literature has been kind of a preoccupation of yours even before Hawai‘i, hasn’t it?

Well, I don’t have very good eyes really, and my eyes do not focus; it’s a purely physical thing.  And from the age of seven years old when I had quite a big operation that moved one of my eyeballs because I was totally cross-eyed, I never read with both eyes.  There is no concordancy between the eyes.  So that I always feel an artificiality in reading a book.  First there is the length of the lines, which doesn’t correspond to the rhythm of the phrases or even of the words.  There is this extraordinary impediment of cutting a word in two for example at the end of a line.  I feel more at ease maybe when I look at a scroll, even though I don’t understand the oriental writing, be it Chinese or Japanese.  I have a feeling of passing from one thing to the other much more easily in that side-wise way without having each line cut at the format of a page, which is purely an artificial thing.  I’ve been unhappy with book reading, even though I read many books.  And I’ve been interested for example in the fact that an intermediate form, which was the manuscript form before the invention of printing, gave many more ways of presenting a text and much closer to verbalism, we could say, than the strict typesetting of our days.  And of course, my study of languages like, for example, Náhuatl, the Mexican language, was done with verbal informants.  And nothing can be more against the lyrical, expansive form of Náhuatl than those short lines that you find in a book, for example.  So maybe if I became a playwright, it was an escape from the mechanics of book printing into what I consider a more ancient and noble way, which is the verbal way.  And also in the Náhuatl, like in Hawaiian, that spills into chanting.

Allied with this is a theme that’s very important in the play Laukiamanuikahiki, but which I didn’t find in the Fornander version.  And that’s the theme of names.  I’d like to ask two questions: what decided you to introduce that theme so strongly into the play and also were there any particular things that got you interested in the theme of names?

Well, my own experience with Hawaiians is that even among themselves, even with somebody that they trust, like me for example, there is no doubt that the name is tied totally to the fate of the person.  From the beginning, I found that desire of friends and close friends to tell me something about their name—of course, I don’t mean just the baptismal name that most of them have, but their Hawaiian name—but never quite to present the whole name.  That would be in a way—I don’t think it is analyzed in that way—but put themselves in my hands.  It’s a little bit, if you think of it, that care that the ancient chiefs had not to let their nail filings, for example, or their hair get into the hands of a person because magic could be made on those things that could be bad for them if it fell in the hands of somebody with bad intent.  Now that name thing is one of the first things that I experienced with my Hawaiian friends.  One of them, who was in my play, for example, gave me her name, but it is only at her death and just in the obituary that the full name came out.  She had given me part of her name—it was a long one—but not all of her name.  And people that have become experts at even linguistic things and so on, if they have a Hawaiian name, are rather careful not to give me the whole name.  And in that list of the cast, for example, I found that I should correct and complete, but I do not do it because I know that, shall we say, the spirit of the friends who were nice enough to play in that play and who are not alive anymore would be against it.  So I just respect their wish.  I had just now, I mean a week ago or less, I had a curious experience with a very, very good friend who came here to really make an homage to myself with special hulas and name chants.  And we have known each other for twenty-five years, and she had on her wrist a bracelet, and the name went all around the bracelet, and there were so many letters that I certainly got interested and said to myself, of course I don’t quite think that I know her full name.  So I took the wrist and the bracelet and started to turn it around reading what it said, and even though she was such an intimate friend and trusted me thoroughly, she had a reaction, muscular reaction you could say, and twisted the arm around, so I couldn’t read all around the name, even though it was on the bracelet.  It’s something very natural; it’s something in fact that I do, I do feel myself.  I don’t know what part of my ancestors make me understand that thing, but I have experienced with all of my Hawaiian friends the fact that there is something indiscreet, you can’t say something obscene, but something indiscreet in knowing the fullness of a name.  And because I had that experience, I suppose that it comes out in my plays as a theme which is still in our days very much a live thing, not just something you read in the books about old Hawai‘i.

I didn’t even find really in the play a kind of an analysis of her name or the use of her name to connect her with her husband.  So all of that is really your analysis of her name down into parts and then working from that towards a new conception of the play.

Well, there is certainly some of myself, some of my experience that went into that little play.  The advantage of starting from somebody else’s plot, we could say, even though as I said the plot is not an orthodox plot, is, of course, that you can hang on it things that are part of your own experience.  I think there is a lot in Laukiamanuikahiki that is not intended in Fornander, and has to do directly with my own experience and contact with Hawaiians, and specifically with Hawaiian friends.

You were saying that the Fornander selections you read really impressed you a lot.  Were there any others besides “Laukiamanuikahiki” that you can remember now as being particularly interesting to you then?

Well, there are many others.  In fact, Fornander was my opening wedge you could say into Hawaiian.  And there is an anonymity, we could say, in the Fornander Hawaiian texts, that is, you don’t know who did the thing.  And even though they are older in many ways than the text on which there is a name of an author, you cannot really appreciate what they call the style of a writer.  And I’d been very interested in the individual styles of the writers in Hawaiian.  For me, the greatest one as a writer, in the same sense that you speak of the style of writing of an English author for example, is Kepelino.6  Now, Kepelino is also somebody we had as one of our textbooks in Sam Elbert’s class and is much harder to translate than Fornander, for example—the Hawaiian text in Fornander—because he has a tremendous originality in his style as independent of his content.  The translation of Kepelino is correct as to content, but I don’t think that anybody, unless he was an equally great writer, could translate in another language his style.  So that I learned a lot from him in the use of Hawaiian.  Not that I can write like him, but how much personality one can put in stringing word after word in Hawaiian, his marvelous freedom in using the Hawaiian freedom of having words or units, if you want, that are neither nouns nor verbs nor anything, adjectives, and mixing them together was a tremendous experience for me.  I like him also for a very curious reason, and that is that in the journal of Bishop Maigret7—which I’m working on now from an entirely different point of view, the one of the Catholic missionaries in the Pacific—he was very close to Maigret for a long time; he was the second generation.  I think his mama was a laundress for Maigret though they came from a high chiefly family.  And he was brought up by Maigret, by the bishop himself, in Catholic faith.  He was lent by Maigret for political purposes to Queen Emma when she was fighting Kalākaua to become herself elected queen.  But he is an artist; he is a fellow who not only put down facts, but the manner in which he puts them down may be even more important than what they say about things.  So, I’m an artist myself, and I enjoyed his art.  However, there’s another kind of Hawaiian text that I love very much, and that is the texts of people who by European standards were not lettered.  There is quite a number of those.  Of course, all the first generation, which starts perhaps not with Kamehameha the First but Kamehameha the Second, Liholiho, were people who could be tremendously lettered in their own culture and in their own language, but when it came to put those things on paper, they were children, we could say, they were babies.  Letters we have of Kamehameha the Second, for example, are letters in which he had to start the thing on the paper with pencil, then when he formed all his letters one after the other, he retraced them in ink, which of course, is something that maybe a child would do in our days.  And the mixture of childishness in approaching European ways or Occidental ways, whatever you want to call them, cannot mask the fact that the man is cultured to the utmost in his own Polynesian culture.  The mixture of being both a child and a very sophisticated grown-up appeals to me very much.  All those early texts are like that.  They are a mixture of what is called childishness and the sophistication of the person coming through.  Now, that hasn’t been analyzed at all, because the letters of kings and queens were translated by people who were, I would say, not exactly in good faith.  For example, the letters we have of Queen Pomare, most of them trying to defend herself against the inroads of the French, were translated in French by people who could very easily make those letters look ridiculous by insisting and underlining the childishness of the words and eliminating the sophistication of the thoughts.  We have the same thing with the letters in Hawaiian of the kings.  Even as far as Kamehameha the Third, we have translations that on purpose make something look ridiculous where there is no ridicule whatsoever involved.  So to read those things in the original texts and knowing who the people were…we should really have sometime an anthology of Hawaiian texts with a translation in good faith.  It would be of the utmost importance.  It should be done sometime.  So there is that where we have childishness mixed with sophistication.  There’s another thing which is beautiful, and that is really unsophisticated people who put down in writing their thoughts and have absolute innocence.  I found that in trying to find out what the Hawaiians thought of Father Damien, for example.  We have a book I think by Gavan Daws on Father Damien,8 and he gave a talk at the Historical Society about Damien, where he said proudly he had read every line that Damien wrote.  So he felt very strong about it.  He knew everything.  Then somebody asked the question, “But do you know what the Hawaiians thought about Father Damien?”  Well, he answered very forthright.  He said, “No, we do not know.”  He should have said, “I do not know.”  But he said, “We do not know what the Hawaiians thought about Father Damien.”  Why doesn’t he know?  Because he hasn’t looked at the texts that exist that have been even published in Hawaiian.  And some of those texts are letters of the readers, we would say now, to newspapers, The Polynesian and so on, or whatever the Hawaiian paper was, in which the Protestant people, lepers, with their very small churches, felt that they were being pressed a little too much by Father Damien to be converted to what, of course, was for him the one and the true religion.  As far as letters are tremendously innocent, both in thought and in content, I can speak here of a letter from the parishioners of the church of Siloama, which maybe had a dozen or twenty or so parishioners, if you can call them that, and one of them wrote to the papers and complained and said there is only one place when we die where we can be buried here in the leper settlement, and now that Father Damien has blessed it in the Catholic faith, when the Last Judgement and the Resurrection come, I’m afraid that we will be taken for Catholics.  He was very much afraid of going to Hell.  Now, there is a style to those popular letters which also has not been appreciated, not been analyzed.  And maybe some of those things have also gone into my plays, both the sophisticated and what we could call the extremely simple from people where good faith is greater than their literary achievements.

I was just about to ask you that.  Did you make a conscious effort for instance, in Laukiamanu to make the guards speak a lower-type Hawaiian and then in Two Lonos to have the different sociological levels speak a language that was appropriate to the styles, different styles, as you saw them?

Well, as far as I could, I think I did so.  In fact, in both plays, now that you mention it, there is an obvious difference of rank and style: in the Laukia between the guards, that are lowbrows or, we could say just…perhaps not lowbrows, but the regular non-commissioned something, be it police or military; Laukia, who has her own ways that she has learned in rustic surroundings with her mother; and of course, the chief, who is rather elaborate.  Both chiefs, in fact, are rather elaborate in their courtly ways.  I had an interesting reaction to that, well, by Newell Tarrant.9  I gave him to read the English of the long text of Laukiamanu, and when he comes to the speeches of the high chief, of the king, he just has put something in his own writing on the side; it says, “But he cannot say those things.  Remember, those people were savages.”  Of course, I don’t agree with that, and I think he sort of missed a little bit the point of those different classes that were perhaps so much more, so much more defined in Hawaiian culture than they ever were in American culture.  One of the things that Kepelino says, for example, is that he would like Hawai‘i to get under the protection of the English because the English, like the Hawaiians, have a rather complicated set of classes and are class conscious, while the Americans—he doesn’t use the word savage—but he says that they are savage in that sense of not being…[not] having classes, a scale of values, and….  Not everybody is for American democracy, and in those plays, I suppose, there is a presentation of the Hawaiian ways as they existed.  And it’s nice that a true American like Newell Tarrant reacts immediately against that.  It’s correct for him, but it’s not correct when you try to realize what was happening in those days before Cook.

I’d like to get back to Kepelino.  Do you remember specific passages that struck you as stylistically interesting?

Well, I can’t quote from those things, but there is something about a dawn, for example, in which dawn is used as an adjective together with sky.  There is so many appreciations of nature, and perhaps for dawn, as long as we speak of that—I don’t know why he was interested in the dawn so much—there are five, six different words from the first aura of light on the horizon to the beginning of the day.  And those things are presented in such a way that you cannot take a phrase and analyze it in saying that this is a verb, this is an adjective, this is a noun, and that is the way it should be.  A most interesting experience, and that was after twenty years or so or more of studying Hawaiian, was with Dorothy Kahananui,10 when she looked for a last time to the last version that I had of the Two Lonos.  And there are some very simple rules that you read in all the books about, for example, ka and ke, words beginning with such a letter will be ke, ke one, for example, ‘the beach.’  And words beginning with other letters will be ka.  And she completely destroyed that thing in my text where I had followed the rules.  She had something—I had ka mele, which was nice—she thought a longish time, a few minutes on it, and put ke mele.  And I was so angry at her, I nearly beat her up.  I said, “Why do you do that? Don’t you know that those words begin with an m, and so it is ka.”  “I say, but in this case, it has to do with the action, with the fact of chanting, and so it is a verb, or we could say that it is a verb in English, and I shall put ke.”  And I learned a lot from that.  I learned that we are a little impertinent when we try to make a grammar, which, I think, will be published shortly, of the Hawaiian language as if it was a language born of Latin, for example.

One place in your play that reminded me of Kepelino was in the description of the voyages of the people from a distant land to Hawai‘i.  And you kind of build up, there was no sky, there was no sea, there was no land.  It seemed to me that that was a passage that reminded me of Kepelino: that kind of building and building by repetition.

Well, I have borrowed from so many people in my play that I cannot pinpoint that thing.  But it is literally a borrowing, it is a borrowing from an early text.  It may even be Mr. Dibble,11 I think, who had an informant, and it has to do with the same period of the beginnings of, not of the world like the Kumulipo,12 but of the Hawaiian world, that is the great, you can call it a trek, but anyhow from other islands to here.  There are chants on that thing.  And the most beautiful passages, of course, in the Hawaiian text of my plays are direct borrowings—artful ones.  I think my personality in there comes in the artfulness with which I can bridge from one quote to the other with a minimum of words, because I don’t trust myself as much as those authors that were informants in the early thirties, for example, and whose fathers had known things of the eighteenth century or they themselves—like the boy who had eaten the heart of Captain Cook, thinking it was the heart of a dog—had themselves lived in the eighteenth century.  There’s a tremendous respect for the ancient forms of language.  Now you were speaking of the Two Lonos, and in the Two Lonos, we have… the first act is really countryfied people, even the priests that is mentioned in the third act are country priests.  In the second part, we have the chief, that is, people who speak a language that has to do with the polity, we could say, of the nation and have political terms and military terms, which were their own interests.  In the third part, I tried to gather in some of the most ancient things that the priests would use, which would correspond nearly to Latin in the Catholic church, for example, or the Catholic church I knew before Vatican II.  So there are many levels.  I always remember that when we invited here Aunt Jennie Wilson,13 who spoke very good Kalākaua court language anyhow—she had been trained there—and the girl who was so useful in my play, who came from Ni‘ihau.  It was instant dislike on the part of Aunt Jennie, and the only way the girl could excuse herself for speaking such peasant Hawaiian was to kneel at her feet and stay kneeling at her feet all through the evening.  So that is again one experience that I experienced and that will come out certainly in my plays here or there.

I think probably French has something to do with it, because I mention in the foreword to the plays we are publishing now that there are gallicisms in my Hawaiian.  I wasn’t joking.  French, of course, will come out even in such exotic conditions.  Kepelino heard French, if nothing else, and probably thought French also.  And so there is something in his Hawaiian which is perhaps pleasant to me, but the Catholic part is, I wouldn’t say even a mask, but he is a polite Hawaiian.  He’s a polite Hawaiian and, from time to time, puts in something that is so obviously to please his, shall we say, benefactor, Bishop Maigret, that it is not harmful in any way.  For example, he speaks of the time where people were surfing and the surf is good, and he says, “and they all went, men and women, and sinned all day on their surfing boards.”  Well, that was nice because the Bishop could say he knew that was a very wicked thing to be on the surfing board, but it was for him, I’m quite sure, as comical as it is for us.

One passage in Kepelino that I remember your speaking to me about years and years ago was the passage in which the kauā is taken off to be drowned, and he sticks his head above water, and the man, the ilāmuku, kind of calms him down and explains that he should, you know, go back under.  And I was reading that passage the other day, and it’s a real dialogue, first between the kauā father and his little children and then the kauā and the ilāmuku.  Was that a passage that struck you?

Well, there is a gentleness about things in Hawaiian that go all the way to human sacrifice and so on.  We have a tendency to illustrate and put titles that are not correct on things.  For example, when we mention the kauā as a slave, we think of perhaps negro slaves in the South of the States with people whipping them and so on.  Those people had lands.  They cultivated their lands.  They lived nearly an ideal life.  Nobody could make them work for them.  They worked for themselves.  There was only that drawback that when somebody was needed—there were no war prisoners or nothing of the kind, but somebody was needed for a human sacrifice—they had to furnish—it was sort of a taxation if you want—furnish somebody for the human sacrifice.  So they had a little game, which Kepelino presents, which is a very simple game like long straws–short straws, something like that, or just where’s the weasel?—whatever those little things are.  Then somebody became it; they become the guy that went then.  And he wasn’t killed as a rule, could call that an assassination, but what Kepelino mentioned is—so the body would be whole, which was considered a better body to offer than one that was not whole—was drowning.  And the whole point was that the man should drown himself rather than be drowned by force.  Those things don’t bother me too much because the Mexicans had many more and many more bloody ways, I would say, of sacrificing humans to the gods.  But even there, the sacrificed man was free, so to speak, to be sacrificed.  For example, he would go up the steps of the temple where he knew that he was going to be killed, chanting and playing the flute and dressed up in his best robes.  We have a way of sacrificing people which is rather horrible.  Let us say that a bomb, for example, that doesn’t allow a chance of respect for the victim, while both in Hawai‘i and in Mexico, the person to be sacrificed had to collaborate, otherwise it would not be in a true offering.  It’s a rather complicated thought for people who think purely in practical terms of American life.  But it’s something that both Mexico and Hawai‘i have in common, that willingness of the victim to be sacrificed.  I think that in a sense, it represents a belief in the gods and in afterlife.  Maybe with the Hawaiian, it is simply or more so an obeisance paid to a chief.  It was something that you didn’t go against.  If it was the will of the chief, then it wasn’t bad.  It had to be done.  It was a rather good thing to do.

There’s a passage in Kepelino where he says all these problems of the kauā, they’re right there in the name kauā.  And Kepelino arranges a lot of his book according to names.  Did that interest you or was that one of the reasons you got into names?

Well, you don’t know if the name came first or the social thing came first.  But names are something already that filters the person into a plane that we could call art, at least the literary art.  So that the writer, the playwright, whatever it is, will use names: first, I would say, because they are on the plane in which he is thinking his work of art, and go from the name down to the individual.  I don’t know if in purely realistic theatre, that is done that way—I don’t have the least idea—but I’ve rarely seen plays where it’s the other way around, and you start from somebody real and eventually put a name on him.  I think it always begins with the label and then the picture is filled in according to the label.

Do you remember some of your gallicisms that were cleaned up?  I’d be interested to know.

No.  I think I’m like the Hawaiians with their name.  Anything French I prefer to shut up on the subject.

Thank you, Papa.  End of interview.