May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage month, but often, Pacific Islander and Filipino books and authors are less acknowledged in publishing, articles and displays. Here are some Pacific Islander and Filipino voices to discover in May and beyond.
“Kapaemahu,” a picture book by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson, illustrated by Daniel Sousa, resurrects a story suppressed for over a century.
Based on the short animated film of the same name released in 2020, the book tells the journey of four Māhū healers from Tahiti to O’ahu. Each visitor — Kapaemahu, Kapuni, Kinohi and Kahaloa — brings their gentle ways and unique healing gifts to share with the people of Hawaii. In gratitude, four large stones were erected in their honor at Waikīkī. Buried under a bowling alley for two decades, the stones and their story have now been restored.
The text, in English and ʻōlelo Niʻihau (the only surviving form of Hawaiian that was spoken prior to European contact), is accompanied by beautiful, warm-toned illustrations. For pronunciation help, download the audiobook narrated by Wong-Kalu to listen as you read along.
The book is a collection of Hawaiian proverbs and poetical sayings in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) compiled by Mary Kawena Pukui, the late historian, teacher, composer, researcher and hula expert, between 1910 and 1960. Importantly, Pukui also co-authored a Hawaiian-English dictionary that has become an important primer for the Hawaiian language.
Hawaiian music and art are often filled with hidden meanings (or “kaona”). This beautiful undertaking to collect Hawaiian proverbs and poetical sayings provides a literal translation to English and, in some instances, insight into the kaona. For most, though, it is left up to the reader to glean those hidden meanings for themselves.
Julian Aguon, a Guamanian Indigenous Chamorro poet, lawyer and activist, gathers poems, essays and speeches in the slim, evocative collection “No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies.”
In singing the splendor of Guam, juxtaposed against the barbarism of the U.S. military and colonial rule, Aguon also pays homage to the artists who fuel and inspire his writing and activism, from Arundhati Roy (who penned the sweet introduction of the book) to Toni Morrison and Alice Walker.
Like his favorite writers, Aguon ends a speech to a University of Guam graduating class with these stirring words, “May you find not only your fighting words but your fighting spirit, too.”
In “The Son of Good Fortune” by Filipino American writer Lysley Tenorio, 19-year-old Excel returns to his mother Maxima’s apartment in California after an attempt to start anew goes horribly wrong.
Maxima is a former B-movie action star who fled the Philippines while pregnant to give her son a better life. But his birth, while en route on a plane, made them both undocumented exiles who hide in the shadows.
Excel’s aimlessness is borne of belonging to neither the Philippines nor America. He has returned after spending most of a year in an off-the-grid desert community with more secrets weighing on his conscience. This is a bittersweet, character-driven debut novel about a mother and son doing their messy best in shaky and tenuous circumstances.
Elaine Castillo is also a Filipino American writer and critic whose first two books really made a splash. “America Is Not the Heart” is Castillo’s impressive debut novel about a queer Filipina, Hero De Vera, who is navigating a new life in America following imprisonment for political dissidence in the Philippines.
As Hero tries to settle in with her aunt Paz, uncle Pol and her cousin Roni, in Milpitas, Calif., her path forward echoes the past. Hero is a bold and compelling main character. The book, which was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR and other publications, also delves into the lives of other women in her family, their struggles and hard-won triumphs.
Castillo’s “How to Read Now,” published in 2022, is an essay collection that explores the complexity around white dominant culture in America, how it is treated as a cultural default and how it historically and currently shapes publishing and readership.
Castillo asks probing and provocative questions about the literary canon in chapters like “Reading Teaches Empathy, and Other Fictions.” She confronts the responsibility we have as readers to question what and how we consume in order to dismantle the systems that vault, tokenize and silence in the first place.
– Mahina Oshie, Special Collections librarian, and Misha Stone, Reader Services librarian
Originally published in the Seattle Times and reprinted here with permission, this column is a space to share reading and book trends from a librarian’s perspective. You can find these titles at the library by visiting spl.org and searching the catalog.
Leave a Comment