The exiled speak for themselves

"Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory," by Anewei Skinsnes Law (University of Hawai‘i Press, $28.99)

When a critic labels a book as "important," it’s the kiss of death for many readers, who assume the word is code for "something you should know about but will have to slog through."

This is emphatically not the case with Anewei Skinsnes Law’s "Kalaupapa:, A Collective Memory." If you are at all interested in Hawaii history in general or the Hansen’s disease colony at Kalawao and Kalaupapa on Molokai in particular, do not be put off by the book’s massive 576 pages.

It’s important, yes, but it reads smoothly. And if you’ve read any previous books on Kalaupapa — fiction or nonfiction — you’re in for some surprises.

This book, while conveying the facts and figures, is primarily what its subtitle implies: a collective memoir. Throughout, it’s the voices of patients that sing and murmur, shout and whisper from the pages.

And their words — from oral histories Law has been collecting for 40 years to letters, documents and poetic Hawaiian songs you’d hardly expect from the pens of people so badly mistreated — shatter many myths. Many patients express disgust at the way their lives have been sensationalized in books and newspapers.

Here their voices are heard.

You learn that Kalaupapa and Kalawao were not bare promontories, but occupied by kama­aina who welcomed the patients and helped them. Later, these kama­aina were forcibly removed from the peninsula.

You learn that even though some patients were allowed to have "kokua" (family members who volunteered to care for them), the Board of Health routinely turned down such requests without giving a reason.

You learn that for many Kalaupapa residents — especially in the early and mid-20th century — life was full of activity, friendship, laughter and love despite the dual pain of being separated from loved ones and of the effects of the disease itself.

Throughout the book, Law returns repeatedly to one theme: that the Hawaiian idea of how to treat Hansen’s disease sufferers was in direct opposition to that of the medical world. Hawaiians, who were the vast majority of Kalaupapa’s population, were not afraid of the ailment. But they could barely endure being separated from their families.

One informant reports that before she was diagnosed, she used to live down Puuhale Road from Kalihi Hospital, a holding station for patients, and she wondered why she would frequently hear wailing and loud cries from up the road. Later she realized she had been hearing departure day, when a shipload was leaving for Kalaupapa and family members were gathered outside the fence for a last glimpse of their loved ones.

The families who hid patients in their homes, or the famous case of those who fled to Kala­lau Valley, were not about shame, Law writes; they were about the importance to Hawaiians of having your family around you.

Other myths are that patients were simply dumped in the sea to find their own way to shore, but Law’s informants repeatedly praise the skill of the sailors who rowed them to shore in dinghies through treacherous currents, landing them as close in as possible. And the lawlessness that is so much a part of the early Kalaupapa story as it’s been told elsewhere appears never to have been as bad or as widespread as depicted.

Law is not painting a rosy picture. These people suffered. In the early years there was never enough food, never enough clothing or cloth to make it with, no nurse or doctor, inadequate housing. The residents begged in repeated letters, conversations and petitions for poi; they could not live on rice and sweet potatoes. The peninsula is notoriously windy and often wet and cold, and these conditions exacerbate Hansen’s disease symptoms.

The rules were exactly analogous to those that governed the Jim Crow South and, as many patients point out, just as senseless. They couldn’t use the kokua bathroom, they couldn’t enter one another’s homes, they couldn’t touch a visitor. But ungloved nuns and nurses and brothers and doctors spent hours dressing their wounds.

With aid from many sources — including the now sainted Father Damien de Veuster and Mother Marianne Cope, of course, but many others of whom you have never heard, many of them patients themselves — Kalaupapa gradually became a bustling village with sports teams, a ladies society, movie nights and music, music, music. Impromptu jam sessions popped up everywhere all the time; many songs were written.

After sulfa drugs became available to stop the progress of the disease, many residents who could have left never did; they had, in a sense, found new families in one another, and the stigma of their disfigurement on "the outside" was too painful.

This book, with its soul-searing black-and-white pictures and clean design by Julie Matsuo-Chun, belongs on the bookshelf of anyone who cares about Hawaii history.