Paying Tribute to Henry Opukaha'ia

As we walked around the tide pools and inlets to the right of Punalu'u Beach, I noticed a building set atop a nearby hill.  It looked as if a steeple rose from its roof.  I thought this strange, as the Sea Mountain Golf Club had incorporated part of that hill into its 18 hole course.  Had the Club converted an old church into a bunker?

Returning to the road, we found a path up the hill, and decided to follow it.  At the summit, we saw a sign for the chapel.  The weekly service times had been taped over.  Yet flowers decorated the graves in the chapel cemetery, and a bell still hung in the adjacent bell tower.

The left side of the building featured a plate glass window, as well as small horizontal windows that could be opened to allow air through.  The right side and the back (where the front door should have been) were open to the elements.  The backless concrete benches announced that this was a BYOC (Bring Your Own Cushion) chapel.

More flowers had been placed on the altar, along with a card with a photo and a few paragraphs about someone who had recently died.

A plaque inside the chapel commemorates Henry Opukaha'ia, who was born here in 1792.  During a period of civil war, a battle swept up the residents of Ninole, and young Henry, only around ten or twelve years old at this time, watched his parents and brother die.  Henry made his way to the west side of the Big Island, where he lived for a time with his uncle, a kahuna (or leader in the Hawaiian religion).  But he found life there not to his liking, and in 1807, hoping for something better, he swam out into Kealakekua Bay, climbed aboard a merchant ship, and convinced the captain to take him on as a cabin boy.  

Two years later, Henry ended up at the captain's home in New Haven, Connecticut.  Wishing to learn to read and write, he applied to Yale, but was denied admission.  A student named Edwin took pity on him, and used his connections to help Henry out.  The young Hawaiian went to live for awhile with a relation of Edwin's, who also happened to be the president of Yale.  Then he was taken in by a preacher.  He served in the U. S. Marine Corps. during the War of 1812.  Then he returned to Connecticut, where in 1817, at the age of 25, he was finally accepted as a student at a foreign mission school.  

At that time, Hawaiian was not a written language.  Henry threw himself into his studies, working hard to compile a Hawaiian dictionary, grammar, and spelling book.  He completed a Hawaiian version of the Biblical Book of Genesis, working not from an English translation, but directly from Hebrew sources.  He started learning Latin.  And he made plans with his fellow Hawaiian students to return to his homeland.

Sadly, Henry Opukaha'ia (who also went by the name Henry Obookiah) was not destined to return to the Big Island of Hawaii, or to visit his former hometown set on the hill overlooking Punalu'u Beach.  Instead, he died while still a student at the foreign mission school, in February of 1818.

Henry spent only a short time in school.  Yet he made the most of his time there, and is credited with bringing missionaries of his adopted religion to Hawaii.  He is commemorated with this small chapel set on the site of his hometown.  Those who worship there, and pay tribute to departed family and friends, learn about him.  His memoirs have been published, as have books describing his life and work.  And his name was immortalized by perhaps the most famous of all American authors, Mark Twain.  In his book Roughing It, Twain writes: 

"Obookia was a young native of fine mind, who together with three other native boys, was taken to New England by the captain of a whaleship during the reign of Kamehameha I, and they were the means of attracting the religious world to their country.  This resulted in the sending of missionaries there.  And this Obookia was the very same sensitive savage who sat down on the church steps and wept because his people did not have the Bible."

When your past and present are filled with disappointments and failures, it's easy to tell yourself that, because no one seems to notice your efforts, they have little value to others.  Yet Henry Opukaha'ia serves as an example of the type of impact you can make on the world, if only you refuse to give up on yourself, and continue pursuing your dreams.

Dragon Dave

Related Internet Links
The Henry Obookiah Collection
Wikipedia: Henry Opukaha'ia
Mark Twain: Roughing It

Roald Dahl and the Bringer of Dreams

In The BFG by Roald Dahl, Sophie lays awake one night in the orphanage.  All the other children are asleep.  If only the moonlight were not shining on her, perhaps she might drift off!  So, even though she risks getting punished, she leaves her bed to draw the curtains. 

“In the silvery moonlight, the village street she knew so well seemed completely different.  The houses looked bent and crooked, like houses in a fairy tale.  Everything was pale and ghostly and milky-white.”  

Then she sees a figure four times as tall as a human.  It is heading her way.

The giant peers into the upstairs windows of each house he passes.  He stops across the street, outside the Goochey family’s greengrocer shop.  He pours something from a jar into a long trumpet thing, pokes the instrument through the upstairs window (where the Goochey children are sleeping), and blows.

Then he turns, and she sees an “enormous long pale wrinkly face with the most enormous ears.  The nose was as sharp as a knife, and above the nose there were two bright flashing eyes, and the eyes were staring straight at Sophie.”

As she runs back to her bed, the giant reaches into her window, grabs her up in her blanket, and runs out of the village.  She peers through the edges of the blanket as the giant races across an unfamiliar landscape.  When the giant reaches a cave, he sets her down on a kitchen table, stares at her, and announces, “I is hungry.”

Sophie and the Giant
 by Quentin Blake

Thankfully, this giant is The BFG--the Big Friendly Giant--and he doesn't eat little girls.  Through talking with him, she gains his trust, and he tells her that he was blowing dreams into the Goochey’s bedroom.  Every day he goes out with his dream-net, and when he captures a dream, he stores it inside a jar.  But he makes sure that it’s a nice dream, one sure to delight children, before he returns at night to deliver it.

While most of my dreams seem mundane, my wife’s dreams often defy explanation.  For example, lately I’ve been musing about superheroes, and last night I dreamed about superheroes.  My wife, on the other hand, dreamed about attending a Gaelic church service.  We’ve never visited Ireland.  We’ve never studied the country's history or culture.  We’ve certainly never been interested in learning Gaelic, let alone attending a service conducted in that language! 

The dreams that flit through my subconscious mind sometimes mystify me, but what matters is that I translate my conscious dreams into reality.  Lately, I’ve been developing a guidebook to my fictional world.  In cataloguing all the ideas and concepts I invented during the creation stage, I can weigh the compatibility of each with all the rest.  For some reason, distractions afflict me more powerfully during this phase.  Nor do I feel as if I’m making progress, unlike during the writing of the rough draft, when I can compare the pages I’ve written with the novel’s completed length.  

An awe-inspiring sketch
from Dragon Dave

For some reason, I’ve also put off drawing pictures my major characters, which in this case are dragons.  These drawings are nowhere as good as Quentin Blake’s, and will never be published.  Yet making these drawings helps me better envision the characters’ shape, size, how they walk, what they eat, how they view the world, and how they interact with others.  Some day I’d like to take up Mike Bocianowski’s challenge, and draw something every day.  But at least (Finally!) I’m doing what I need to do, and visually defining (setting in stone) the appearance of my major characters.

Dreams can be wonderfully entertaining.  They can inspire you to create, or offer potential solutions to problems that have been troubling you.  But to translate a dream into tangible form--one that others can see, interact with, and derive benefit from—takes work.  Otherwise, no wonder how strange or mystifying or potentially awe-inspiring, dreams fade with time, until they’re forgotten.

Dragon Dave

Related Dragon Cache entries

Mike Bocianowski’s Passion

The Sun, the Moon, & the Stars

So often, I get through reading a novel, and I’m not sure what to say about it.  I know that it took me on a journey, but how to condense that journey into a blog entry (or a series of entries) that will resonate with the reader eludes me.  I cannot claim superior wisdom upon having finished The Sun, the Moon, & the Stars by Steven Brust, but the novel resonated with me so powerfully that I feel I must share some of what I experienced with you, before those initial impressions fade away.

In the story, we experience life from the point of view of Greg, a struggling painter who values artistic accomplishment over fame and financial success.  This is not to say that he does not want the latter, only that, with each of his paintings, he attempts to capture a human moment, a person in transition, and draw the viewer into the subject’s world.  Up to this point, he has sold one painting, and with the proceeds of the sale, he purchased a six-by-nine foot stretched canvas.  For a year it has rested against a wall while he summoned the courage to tackle it.  But now, for no particular reason, he feels ready to tackle this canvas he calls The Monster.  So he and his friend pull it out, stack it on two easels, and he begins to paint.

Greg approaches each project differently, and for The Monster, he has no preconceived notion of the important human moment he wants to capture.  Thus, he draws upon his past, while incorporating his present circumstances into every stroke of the brush.  By utilizing such an unfettered approach, he knows he must always keep in mind basics like structure, form, and perspective.  But these constraints also guide him, as he strives to impart substance upon the empty canvas. 

As with any Steven Brust novel, there’s more going on than seems immediately apparent.  Each chapter adheres to a six-part structure, and each part represents a separate storytelling strand with its own nature and purpose.  One part seems to home in on Greg’s past: all the important incidents that led him to become an artist.  Others represent his interactions with the other members of his studio, what he views as important in art, and what he tries to capture with each project.  Through these we learn of the differing approaches that his fellow artists employ on their art projects, and each method is as unique as the storyteller.  I say storyteller because Greg approaches each painting in a similar manner to an author, and also because one of the six parts is a Hungarian fairy tale about three brothers who contract with a king to hang the sun, the moon, and the stars in the sky in return for half the kingdom, and the hand of the princess in marriage.  While each of the six strands inform each other and form a complete narrative, I also think it would be interesting to reread the novel, this time concentrating on only one strand at a time.

I don’t know how this novel would speak to the average reader, but as an aspiring author, I found it fulfilling because it addressed so many of my own feelings, dilemmas, insecurities, and aspirations.  While reviews for the novel are generally positive, some readers have complained that the novel is lacking in plot.  To a certain extent they have a point.  While Greg is painting, he doesn’t stumble across a corpse and have to solve a murder.  He’s not pressed into service by a secret government agency to catch terrorists trading in forgeries of old masters to fund their schemes of hatred and violence.  Nor does he learn that his parents were wizards, and get whisked off to a magical university.  This is a very different kind of novel, one for anyone who has ever tried to channel all their passion for life into something as formless as a piece of paper or canvas, and in the process hoped to make a positive impact on others.  It’s a novel for those who paint, write, draw, make music, film, sculpt, photograph, cross-stitch, quilt, or pursue any other art or craft (No matter how highly or lowly critics assess that particular medium) with the intention of making the recipients of their work think, feel, or see the world a little more completely as a result of their efforts.  This isn’t a novel for realists, skeptics, or pessimists, but one for optimists, and those who dream about transforming their world. 

I’m glad I met Greg.  I know I’m not alone, that I’ve never been alone, but having traveled on this journey with him, I feel less alone.  I only wish I did not identify with Greg so completely.  For now I'm not only determined to continue writing, but I also want to seek out and read more Hungarian fairy tales, and oh, if only I could paint like Greg!

Dragon Dave