Volume 53, Number 5 · March 23, 2006
Dishonor in Hawaii
By W.S. Merwin
Honor Killing: How the Infamous "Massie Affair" Transformed Hawai'i
by David E. Stannard
Viking, 466 pp., $25.95
On January 10, 1932, in Honolulu, at the funeral of a young Hawaiian man—or 'boy,' as some still referred to him, though he was twenty-two at the time he was killed—thousands of Hawaiians turned out to mourn his death in the greatest public display of grief that had been seen in the Hawaiian islands since the burial of Hawai'i's last queen, Lili'uokalani, in 1917. The young man was Joseph Kahahawai, familiarly known as 'Joe.' He had been born on the island of Maui, in what we can assume were extremely humble circumstances, on Christmas Day, 1909. His parents were Catholics, but after moving to Honolulu, to the poor district of Kauluwela, when Joe was a small child, they divorced. He remained close to them both, but the divorce would have added to the displacement of the move, making it a rough transition from one world to another.
Review, 4719 words
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