Hawai’i

Critics, for the most part, are not a beloved cohort. As an independent book critic, I can tell you that I’m always looking for the next literary classic, but I don’t hold my breath. Any good critic will tell you it’s a lot more fun to find nuance in the flaws. I get it. If you’re a curator, you might want to invite the art critic to your gallery, but probably not to your home, where she might see your personal collection and have something to say about it. When the good food critic enters the restaurant, refined heads are likely to roll. Perhaps that’s why the Los Angeles food critic Jonathan Gold made it his mission to visit the out-of-the-way restaurants in strip malls and food trucks; it’s a lot easier to enjoy what you’re doing from the perch of anonymity and from the humble linen-free table. And yet, with the collapse of local newspapers and features departments, most cities, and especially smaller towns, like Honolulu, lost their regular art critics years ago, resulting in a loss for the arts and a loss for appreciators of art alike. Years later, the vacuum remains. While cities like Los Angeles and New York continue to enjoy the benefits of having a (smaller) cohort of art and literary critics, cities like Honolulu still turn to these big city writers to get their critiques. In the Star-Advertiser, day in and out, virtually all the book reviews arrive via the New York Times or through syndication from the Associated Press. Rare does a local writer review art or literature. In Hawai’i, film criticism is the only exception to this rule. But I’ll argue that the stakes are lower in film criticism. With movies, we are content to be merely entertained. We almost expect movies to be bad. With literature and art we ask for more. As Wick Allison wrote in D Magazine, “The temptation, of course, is to be satisfied by mere entertainment. Our measure of what is good has been affected by television and film, where the standard is whether or not we squirmed in our seats. But art calls for a higher standard: its purpose is transcendence.”

This means that when it comes to local criticism, appreciation, and understanding of art and literature, in most cities, there’s a vacuum, and in Hawai’i, this vacuum is real. This vacuum hurts the visual arts most of all, but all forms of art suffer when a city doesn’t have a small cohort of critics to inspire, stir things up, and yes, sometimes make people angry.

Here, I think it’s important to pause to make a distinction between arts reporters and critics.

A critic is always biased; the features writer shouldn’t be.

Where I live in Honolulu, we have arts reporters, but virtually no art critics. Our newspapers and magazines may feature artists and writers as human interest curiosities, but few writers offer real criticism of the work being produced.

We should take a moment to consider what is lost when we lose local critics.

In a small town, there’s always a little discomfort in speaking uncomfortable truths because unlike a big city, where you’ll probably never see the artist (or chef, or writer) again, in a small town, everyone is connected in some way, and the chances of encountering a given artist in a small arts scene is all but guaranteed. And so I see so many critiques infected by the illness of puffery. By which I mean, when writers do venture into critical territory, the criticism is often in the form of another puff piece, not at all dissimilar from the many positive restaurant reviews found in Crave of the Star-Advertiser.

This is where the critic must have great courage, more courage I think than a critic must have in a big city. The ArtForum writers can perhaps find flaw, and then retreat to their social islands surrounded by the seas of people in New York or L.A. But when you live on an island, there is only the island. Small towns need rigorous critics as much as large cities, perhaps more so.

And there is a greater standard of excellence and integrity that an art or books critic must uphold when writing locally in a small town. The personal stakes are thrillingly high. A good critic can only be trusted in so far as she is willing to offer the good along with the bad and the ugly, and in Hawai’i, one would think everything excellent from reading local features pieces. 

Let me tell you this. Everything is not excellent. The arts scene in Honolulu consists of one group show after another presented by local artisan guilds at Marks Garage and the Downtown Arts Center. Coffee shops and bookstores also present single-artist shows, but these are hardly spaces committed entirely to fostering a singular curatorial eye nor do they have the acumen for sales and marketing of fine art. These are fabulous places for young artists to be discovered (and I’m grateful they exist), but there is nowhere on the island for these artists to go once they have been found. We have our Hawai’i Contemporary (formerly known as the Biennial) and Pow! Wow! but these pop-up events elevate the bar, only to leave artists with no space to reap the benefits of their often unpaid arts labor. And by reap the benefits, I mean, sell one’s art. In Hawai’i, we don’t have our equivalent of the Miami Design District (Miami being another city with a heavy reliance on tourism, its share of local political corruption, and terrible infrastructure to match), where gallery spaces offer new work produced by those near and far. 

Yes, there are many galleries on the island, but they are committed to showing and selling the kind of art that appeals to Hawai’i tourists looking for beach scenes, ocean photos, prints, antiquities, or Hawai’i landscape paintings—art that is more décor than fine art, that often depicts or promotes problematic stereotypes of Hawai’i as untouched paradise or beach haven, and not much in the way of the contemporary, or avant-garde. The only gallery committed to showing and selling fine art and blockbuster artists, the Park West Gallery in Waikiki, (currently showing Salvador Dali), is the same chain gallery that became infamous for controversy that followed its cruise ship auctions.

And then there’s the literary scene. While we have open mic spaces to foster young talent and spark discovery, our one curated reading space Mixing Innovative Arts hasn’t returned since the pandemic.

Literature is an art form that seems to have been able to almost always transcend space, time and long distance, but in Hawai’i, you’d think we were still publishing things by mail, boat, and wire. That is to say, on the mainland, the New England Review may publish writers from New England, but also include a robust assortment of writers from across the nation. This has the effect of elevating regional writers while also exposing major writers to a new cohort of local talent. This has a democratizing effect and elevates what would be a regional publication into something of national interest. Yet, in Hawai’i, the most important information about any featured author I’ve read about in the papers seems to be how long she has lived in Hawai’i and what high school she attended. This is not to say that these publications are completely opposed to outsiders; it’s just that I don’t see them seeking them out. For a small press to thrive it should strive for national readership. I don’t see that kind of ambition.  

Contemporary art and literature in in Hawai’i is alive. We are home to incredible writers like Paul Theroux, Kaui Hart Hemmings, and the home state of the remarkable Kawai Strong Washburn. The late W.S. Merwin created a conservatory on Maui. We are also home to fabulous journalists and essayists, many of whom write for Flux magazine. And wonderful poets like Jamaica Osorio and Craig Santos Perez.

Perhaps there’s hope for the arts scene. Before the pandemic hit, ArtNews reported that gallery owner, art historian, and critic, Maika Pollack would become the chief curator at the John Young Museum and University Gallery at the University of Hawai’i, Manoa. This is no replacement for a curatorial eye independent of the university, but if she can inspire a new generation of curators and gallery owners on the island, there may be a future.

But all of this is pointless if we don’t have critics. I recently wrote about the late book critic Jenny Diski, and about the role a good critic can play in a culture. Jenny Diski wrote on a national level, but local critics are just as important. No gallery or small press can survive without a thriving critical scene to write about it. New media has enough room for independent bloggers and columnists alike. It would also be nice if the major media venues hired some full-time critics, and paid them for their work.

When the major media venues of a city don’t have critics, the arts die.

Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Sharks in the Time of Saviors by Kawai Strong Washburn at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski at Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski at Bookshop.org (affiliate link)

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Waikiki beach erosion, something the city has been dealing with for over a hundred years, has gotten worse in recent years due to climate change. The iconic stretch of sand known for its prismatic blue waters, world-class surfing waves, and dramatic views of Diamond Head was once a wetland whose sandy beach was described as being “seasonal.” Waikiki also encompassed some of O’ahu’s richest farmland, which enterprising industrialists condemned as a “health hazard” and filled in with limestone. I imagine pre-contact Waikiki as being very similar to the shores of the Florida Everglades, but with fewer mosquitos (mosquitoes, like syphilis and capitalism, were European imports). Human impacts over the past century include dredging channels in coral reef, the construction of sea walls, the collapse of sea walls, and climate change, which have all contributed to the loss of habitable coast and habitat for animals. In 2012 and more recently in 2021, the state’s solution to rising seas was to float a barge beyond the surf break known as Queens, suck up sand from the seafloor like a vacuum cleaner, and then deposit this sand on the beach. The solution (like any solution to address the impacts of climate change that doesn’t address the cause) has been largely futile, with the most recent efforts completed just at the start of May already eroded by high tides and high swells.

Could it get any worse? It can.

A new, Waikiki beach improvement plan proposes creating a beach where historically there has been none, constructing groins where prior groin construction appears to have failed, and dumping tons of sand (4,000 to 6,000 truckloads to be exact) on a significantly stressed coral reef habitat where endangered monk seals and sea turtles forage for food. In total, the project would require either the burial or relocation of 28 coral colonies. You can read all about it in a 1000-plus page environmental impact report prepared by Sea Engineering, Inc. (the same company that would complete the project if it were to be approved). While I think the past sand replenishment projects largely futile and Sisyphean, I can understand why the state might want to implement these measures as a temporary solution. What I can’t understand is the new and more expensive plan to construct groins in front of the Sheraton Hotel, creating a new beach where there has been no beach for over a hundred years, all of this to the detriment of a coral reef where endangered species forage for food.

Today Waikiki Beach is a large crescent shaped bay fronted by resorts and hotels. You cannot walk the entirety of Waikiki beach on the sand. Most iconic images of the beach conveniently crop out the sea wall that splits the crescent-shaped bay into two sections. Right in the middle of the crescent, where the Sheraton hotel stands, you’ll find no sandy beach, but a seawall, with a path that provides walkers with discontinuous beach access along the wall. The presence of no sandy beach means that the waters in this section of Waikiki are relatively free of humans (that is, swimmers, surfers, and people bobbing in inner tubes, floating lounge chairs, and other abominations). According to Sea Engineering, Inc.’s environmental impact report, “The proposed action in the Halekūlani beach sector [the section with the sea wall] will create approximately 3.8 acres of new dry beach area. Marine habitat in this area consists of a relatively barren reef flat.” I wouldn’t call an area where sea turtles actively graze and where monk seals have also been spotted a “relatively barren reef flat.” And while the report claims that “the groins will provide bare, stable surfaces for recruitment of corals, algae, and other invertebrates,” the creation of a beach where, potentially hundreds of swimmers will be in the water on a daily basis hardly makes this a marine sanctuary. At present, the seawall prevents most swimmers from accessing the water, allowing animals to freely forage in this section of the reef.

In order to understand why there’s a sea wall in the area in question, you need to go back to the early 1900s. In 1908, a hydraulic dredge cut a channel through the reef right in front of where the Halekulani now stands, and in 1913, this channel was deepened and widened. We know now that coral reefs are not only important for their ecological diversity, but because they also protect the shore from erosion. After the 1913 dredging operation, the beach in front of Fort DeRussy and the beaches in front of Halekulani began to erode. According to the environmental impact report, after the channel was created, property owners lost “ten to thirty feet of their ocean frontage. Seawalls were constructed to prevent the existing homes from being lost. The seawalls still exist today.” Other groins were constructed in the past, and these groins “are largely submerged and ineffective.” Why were these groins ineffective? The environmental impact statement doesn’t say. What could we learn from those failures, given that we want to do a similar project today? 

Waikiki beach erosion (along with hotter summers, stronger hurricanes, wildfires and droughts in the American west and elsewhere, as well as glacial melt, to name a few examples) offers a palpable testament and direct evidence of the ways we are changing and damaging our planet. It cannot be denied that the parts of Waikiki’s coast that have sandy beach suffer from erosion due to climate change, but it also cannot be denied that there wasn’t much beach to begin with. In 1927, the Royal Hawaiian groin was constructed to preserve an expanded beach, largely for the enjoyment of tourists and for economic benefit of developers.

Sea levels are rising, but coral reefs (which protect the shore from erosion) are also stressed and dying due to increased ocean temperatures and ocean acidification. The impact of these stresses can be seen dramatically on Waikiki beach. On days when the summer swells bring bigger waves to the south shore, combined with record high tide events known as “king tides,” you can literally watch the beach disappear before your eyes as the sheer energy of the water hitting the shore drags sand out into the sea. If you look down at the reef in the bay with a snorkel and goggles, the reef is obviously dying, struggling to do its job.

Heating oceans have stressed the nearshore coral of O’ahu. A recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that the main Hawaiian islands experienced “back-to-back severe coral bleaching in 2014 and 2015.” (I remember visiting O’ahu years ago and being mesmerized by the vibrant living reef I observed while snorkeling at Hanauma Bay. Today the reef is rotting, a necrotizing algae-covered corpse in reef-shaped form. But, it’s still a reef. Fish go there to eat. Monk seals have been spotted feeding there. And sea turtles use these reefs as foraging grounds). Some of the coral has died, but not all. It is also known that reefs can recover, and there are many excellent projects looking at ways that coral reefs might be restored if only we can stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere. NOAA reports that the coral reefs of O’ahu are in “fair” condition. By “fair” NOAA means that coral are “impaired,” fish have been “very” impacted with “reef fish populations…depleted.” NOAA reports that “temperature stress and ocean acidification are moderately impacting the islands.” The only upside of the entire report is the fact that direct human impact is not harming the reef. “Human connections are good, which means communities have awareness about the reefs and engage in behaviors that protect reef ecosystems.” Maybe. Until now. If Sea Engineering, Inc.’s proposed project buries the reef, it will be because the public and the government permitted it.

Last Thursday, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that the public has until July 23 to submit comments about Sea Engineering Inc.’s recently-released environmental impact statement. The report, by Sea Engineering, Inc. (the same company that will complete this project if it is approved to move forward) recommends a $12 million plan to construct a series of groins that would allow developers to create an artificial beach in front of the Sheraton Hotel, the Halekulani, and Outrigger hotels. Gone would be the seawall in front of the Sheraton that overlooks a reef where I’ve seen turtles and other sea creatures foraging for food. In fact, the plan seems to propose dumping tons of sand on that very reef.

An environmental impact statement completed by the very contractor that stands to benefit from the project if the project in question is approved sounds like an egregious conflict of interest (it’s like asking McDonald’s to write an impact statement on the restaurant’s effect on the well-being of cows). Why hasn’t the government hired an independent party to conduct the environmental impact statement? This seems to reflect deep irresponsibility on the part of our elected officials when it comes to offering the public a good understanding of the real effects a given project might have on sensitive cultural, ecological, environmental, and recreational areas.

I read the environmental impact statement with deep interest, and deep concern. Climate change affects us all, but I have a personal stake in this project because I consider the surf breaks of Waikiki beach to be my home surf spots, particularly the break known as Populars which directly fronts the proposed project site in front of the Sheraton hotel. I also have gotten to know some of the turtles and sea life that resides in these reefs, and feel personally responsible for their well-being. I understand that most people won’t have time to read the whole report, so below you’ll find some of my greatest concerns.

Waikiki Beach Improvement Plan: A Closer Reading of the Environmental Impact Statement

Bear with me here. The environmental impact statement completed by Sea Engineering, Inc. is a thousand-plus page-long document and I put it upon myself to read it in its entirety. It raises far more questions than answers. It also is a fascinating delve into the history of Waikiki beach. It’s hardly a casual read, but if you have grit and a little patience (you know, like the kind of grit required to read Chaucer in the Middle English), it really is a slow-moving train wreck kind of thriller of environmental devastation, human hubris, and example of the many ways in which we rationalize our own folly.

The opening sentence of the report took a defensive posture from the start, hardly the language of the unbiased: “Waikiki is a predominantly engineered shoreline.” (And yes, engineered it is, but as ProPublica recently reported, much of the “engineering” involves seawalls, which “are the primary cause of coastal erosion.”) Seawall construction in Waikiki beach dates back to 1890. But ProPublica notes that sea walls protect property “at the expense of the environment and public shoreline access.” In 1917, the construction of sea walls on Waikiki’s shore were outlawed. Some, but not all, of the sea walls in Waikiki date to before the construction moratorium. For example, sea walls were constructed on the site of the future Sheraton hotel in 1913, before they were outlawed. However, the writers of the report do not know why sea walls were permitted after the moratorium was passed, and why the authorities permitted the upkeep of the sea walls currently in place. ProPublica reports that the loss of beaches largely due to these sea walls means the loss of critical habitat for endangered animals, including monk seals.

Given that sea walls have existed on this beach for over a hundred years, why do this project now?

The most obvious reason to me seems to be that the sea wall in that area is in gross disrepair. The benefits of the project seem to be aesthetic and touristic: the creation of a continuous Waikiki beach that the hotels can then cover with rental chairs. The report doesn’t mention any commitment by the hotels to repair their own damaged sea walls, which the report notes, are private property.

So, what are the downsides of the project? The Star-Advertiser reports that “critics fear the project could degrade Waikiki’s legendary surf, harm reef habitat for fish and foraging areas for endangered monk seals and green sea turtles, and destroy the graceful, haunting ambiance at its heart, where ancient coconut trees mark the sites where Hawaiian chiefs once lived and freshwater streams and springs entered the sea.” So of course, I read the section of the environmental impact report outlining “Potential Adverse Impacts” with much interest.

My concerns only grew deeper as I read on. The negative impacts of the project are presented as being only temporary, with no permanent negative impacts suggested. Yet sand will literally be dumped on a reef currently used by sea turtles and other marine species for foraging. I have personally observed this reef and see turtles foraging there; during the pandemic I observed sting rays near it; I surf this beach nearly every single day. The report explicitly states that 28 coral colonies will be buried and that the placement of the boulders and sand will “result in some loss of benthic organisms, including corals.”

Not only will the creation of the groins result in sand being dumped on a highly stressed coral reef, creating a beach where there historically was none, but I also have deep doubts about whether these new and expensive “beaches” will last for long. A recent months-long Waikiki beach improvement plan involved dredging (using a submersible slurry pump, to be precise; a slurry pump being preferable to other sand retrieval options because the pump can be more accurately positioned around the hard coral reef in the area, preventing damage to the reef, I hope…) and pumping sand out between the surf breaks of Canoes and Queens break. For months, the sand was piled into a big pyramid on the easternmost side of Kuhio Beach. The sand was eventually spread out over Waikiki Beach, widening the beach temporarily. The project was loud, unsightly, and disrupted surfing at both Queens and Canoes, and limited access to the beach itself for days. My fin hit the big pipe channeling sand to the beach a few times when I surfed at Queens. The project’s unfolding is the stuff of tragicomedy as I watched weeks of human endeavor literally get washed away by the sea. Within a couple of weeks, a king tide, combined with a big south swell literally erased feet of the newly-widened beach. Just yesterday, water covered sections of the beach in its entirety. You could literally see a “cliff” of about one to two feet in the sand where the water had eaten away the shore.

Another concern expressed by critics is that the project will cause refraction of waves off the new beach, affecting Waikiki’s famous and beautiful surf breaks.

Will the proposed new project affect the waves and surf breaks of Waikiki Beach? The report initially says the work will not impact surf breaks, but I didn’t believe it, and was right to distrust the initial claim. Buried in the 1000-page report is a more nuanced analysis of the impact of the project to surf breaks, one that deeply concerns me. The environmental impact report presents models of current wave formation in Waikiki, but doesn’t show the visual results for the models showing how the waves will break should the engineering project be approved. And you have to read deeper into the 1000-page report (page 188 to be exact) to read that Sea Engineering, Inc. admits that pumping sand from the seafloor does have an impact on the wave heights at Canoes, Queens, Courts, Bowls, and Kaisers. To be fair, the report suggests that the impacts in wave heights are in inches (sometimes making the waves a little bigger, sometimes a little smaller), but bathymetry and wave formation is incredibly complex, and the impact on wave height doesn’t tell us about the potential impact on wave shape, something which is of more concern to surfers. Recent projects have affected the way waves break at Canoes.

For example, regarding the Royal Hawaiian Groin Replacement project, which was completed recently, the report notably doesn’t mention any adverse effects from that project, but the Star-Advertiser reports that critics have complained that “sand from past nourishment projects has drifted into the surf zone and settled in and around Canoes, so that its former fast, steep, right-breaking wave ‘no longer breaks the same,’ and ‘now the left is more like a windward O’ahu beach break’ rather than the clean, long, peeling waves Waikiki is prized for.” I have seen these impacts myself. I agree.

So what is it? In the section on waves, the environmental impact report says there will be no impact on surf breaks, but deeper in the report, we learn that the work will indeed have an impact. This kind of contradictory messaging does not inspire trust.

I have deep concerns that this project will further affect the offshore reefs that create Waikiki’s prized surf breaks, and I’m deeply concerned about how this project will affect the reefs directly in front of the Sheraton hotel, especially Populars, the surf break I frequent.

The good news is that this project cannot move further without federal approval, particularly approval under the Clean Water Act. Other federal acts may also be affected, including the Endangered Species Act, the Archeological and Historic Preservation Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, among others. These approvals may be required on top of local state approvals.

Improving Tourist Beaches at What Cost?

When the state plans to take action that could potentially destroy natural resources critical to endangered animals, we need to ask ourselves who stands to benefit. Whom does this project primarily serve? Does it serve the people of Hawai’i and protect our natural resources, or does it protect a few coastal hotels and the tourist economy, an economy which has proven to be fragile in the era of COVID-19, and an economy that the local people have expressed that they want to rely on less? Notably, the beaches which are more heavily used by locals will not be served at all by the project.

While it is true that Waikiki Beach has been largely engineered in the past, this doesn’t mean that this is the right course of action going forward. In fact, engineering of the past doesn’t seem to have served the beach well at all (if you consider the beach loss resulting from the dredging of the coral reef in the Halekulani channel alone). Military blasted the coral at Hanauma Bay to lay a communications cable that connected Hawai’i to the mainland, but we wouldn’t advocate for the blasting of reefs today, and I don’t think we should advocate for the burying of reefs under tons of imported sand, potentially destroying foraging sites for endangered animals. And for what? So the Sheraton can put out more lounge chairs for its patrons?  

What are the alternatives to this project? Of course, the only real alternative is for us to stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere and to find effective carbon sequestration. I don’t see that happening any time soon on a large scale. The current solutions are risky, myopic, and unsightly. Sea Engineering, Inc’s report itself admits that its own extreme engineering solutions (involving a total of 2,400 days of construction over a 50-year period) will only protect the beach for a mere 50 years. Worse, we don’t even know how much this project will cost: “The estimated costs for construction for the proposed beach improvement and maintenance actions has yet to be confirmed.”

The obvious alternative is to stop pumping carbon into the air.

Sea Engineering, Inc’s report suggests alternative courses of action given our situation. These alternatives include no action, managed retreat, or beach maintenance without stabilizing structures.

Our Denial of the Inevitable Loss of Waikiki Beach

Of course, sea levels will continue to rise, threatening Waikiki’s beaches, hotels, and other structures unless we find a way to stop and reverse carbon atmospheric levels. According to Sea Engineering, Inc’s environmental impact report, we stand to lose as much as 49.5% of the world’s beaches by the end of this century if the sea levels rise 3.2 feet under NOAA’s intermediate scenario projections for 2060 in Hawai’I (if we continue pumping carbon into the air “business as usual” the sea level rise is projected to be over 8 feet), we could lose $12.9 billion in land and buildings, including 3,800 structures flooded, resulting in the displacement of 13,000 residents.

My opinion is that no new beach should be created where there currently is none—period.

We don’t want to face the painful and difficult facts. Even if we manage to reverse course on climate change, we will likely see sea level rise in Waikiki for centuries. Even Sea Engineering, Inc’s report notes the following: “managed retreat should be part of the community development process.” What is managed retreat? It means relocating the resorts inland. It means abandoning buildings and covering their foundations with sand, forming a new beach. It means giving up on our idea of Waikiki beach as it exists now, which will be lost anyway by the end of the century, even with this multi-million dollar project. It means tearing down the resorts, and putting sand in their foundations, sand where the new beach will be. Rather than starting that difficult process, we’re choosing to bury reefs and build groins that won’t last the century.

This is frightening, but it is our reality. Like the start of COVID-19, we didn’t want to face reality, and hundreds of thousands died. Are we likewise in the same situation here in Hawai’i? Are we building groins and dredging sand in denial of the reality that the sea will rise and the beach will be lost? The hotels have a vested interest in constant sand replenishment. Under the law, everything under the high water mark during high tide belongs to the state. Without these projects, the hotels risk losing their titles. I can’t help but feel like cosmic justice is being served. Nature will eventually reclaim land where humans once dumped land on wetland and farmland to destroy nature.

Perhaps we need to face the reality that the coastline as we know it will never be the same again. And as long as climate change continues, the water will get hotter, the coral will continue to die. We need to face the reality that we may not be able to enjoy the protective effects of our coral reefs forever.

I lean towards solutions that involve the least permanent environmental impact, including small scale beach restoration and beach nourishment that doesn’t involve the construction of added structures and that doesn’t involve dumping sand in places where there traditionally hasn’t been sand to begin with, especially on coral reefs. These temporary and costly solutions can preserve the beach, while we plan for managed retreat, the only real long-term solution. A project involving public money to ultimately protect a private sea wall, while potentially putting surf breaks, reefs, and marine animals at risk sounds wrong-minded to me.

Finally, I am also sure that conflicts of interest make it impossible for Sea Engineering, Inc’s report to adequately or honestly convey to the public the real cost of the project in terms of environmental costs, recreational costs, and more. Until a truly independent analysis is performed (by universities, researchers, and truly independent stakeholders) that takes into account the risk to endangered species, the risk to bathymetry (surf breaks), and the risk to the nearshore coral reefs, this project should not be approved.

The public has until July 23 to comment. The Star-Advertiser notes that comments should be e-mailed to: [email protected]

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

Trial by Fire is a self-described “arts community” that recently put on one of its regular fire dance performances in Kapiolani Park in Honolulu one Sunday mid-June. Police with riot sirens broke up the gathering. The next week, the fire dancers were there again, but this time, a man in the fire circle with a megaphone gave everyone a friendly reminder that open containers were illegal and that police would break up the gathering if all present didn’t observe social distancing. The Honolulu Police Department didn’t need to break up the crowd the following week. A rain storm did that job just as well.

Grace can sometimes feel accidental, arriving when you least expect it. You go for a walk in the park, and suddenly find yourself surrounded by fire dancers and music. Yes, the fire dancers asked for donations, but to give a gift for something freely given is quite different than purchasing a ticket to the Hilton Luau. In the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri ended each section of his tryptich poem with a reference to the “love that moves the sun and other stars,” and indeed the love that burns the sun and other stars sometimes can touch us closer or further, depending on where we are and how closely we are paying attention. Art that isn’t created for monetary gain or capitalistic pursuit can feel a little like grace in that way, a little like undeserved attention, the miracle that arrives without asking. Dante, in exile, wrote the Divine Comedy, not sure if it would be read widely. More likely he might have been more concerned it would get him burned by the pope (he puts popes in hell, after all). He wrote it while living on the hospitality of friends in Ravenna (a literal backwater swamp in Italy) after his exile from Florence, where he had been quite the life of the party and the city. Dante’s cosmic poem is centered around fire. There are fires in hell, around which the shades swarm, and there are fires in heaven that inflame each soul with divine light. Fire is a metaphor for the spirit, for the soul, for God itself.

It is quite possible that humans have been drawn together by fire ever since we discovered that we could control it. Trial by Fire doesn’t need to try very hard to draw a crowd. To be mesmerized by fire is to be human. The sun set. The fire keeper lit the fire. The music began. The dancers danced. People drew close to one another, not in defiance of social distancing, but because we were doing what fire has always done for us.

Not far from where the fire dancers danced, you’ll find a pyramid of stones capped by a single flame that burns at night. The cairn is gated, and there’s a sign that warns trespassers that deadly force is permitted beyond the gate. No explanation is given. The fire burns. Small offerings can be seen nestled between the imperfections of the rocks. The place is not to be violated. That is all.

The fire dance performance was permitted to go on for about an hour before the police arrived with their riot sirens, managing to frighten dogs and children alike. Blue and red lights snuffed out the fires, sending the spinning flames scattering, the dancers running. Dogs and families dispersed.

As my partner and I biked away, the scene felt like a rained-out baseball game. By the time we left, there were so many cop cars in the park, a passing driver might have assumed there had been a shooting or some other atrocity.

Joy, like a flame, is a fragile thing. A strong wind, rain shower, strong word, or show of force can quickly disturb it.

There was joy in Kapiolani Park for a brief moment, palpable, like the heat of a passing flame. After so many months locked away from people, there was a triumph as the fire dancers spun in circles, performed their acrobatics, and families watched on in awe and wonder. We almost were a community. I felt hope.

There weren’t more people in the park than there had been gathered during the day, and certainly no more people were gathered in the park than there had been tourists gathering at the local hotels or on the beach of Waikiki during the day. There was no riot. Nor were the fire dancers promoting drunkenness or drug abuse. In fact, on their Instagram (@trialbyfire808), their mission is to “nurture the fine arts, community, original music, dance, and the arts in an alcohol free and substance conscious environment.” The Trial by Fire Community Website seems to offer the promise of future events in nature and in the community. I hope they succeed.

I can accept that the police would want to break up a gathering in our pandemic times, but something tells me that the police will always be a lurking presence at Trial by Fire. The state cannot tolerate people gathering without capitalistic purpose. We tolerate a crowd at a bar because money is being spent and tax revenue generated.

We live in a perverse culture that privileges capital and its attending addictions and obsessions over community, creativity, connection, and certainly over nurturing the spirit of life that burns within each of us. Tech billionaires who don’t pay taxes have tried to sell us community through social media, and it has left us more disconnected than ever (Jaron Lanier writes beautifully about this in his book, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now). We sit over the digital flames of our phone, alone night after night, engaging in a perverse show of connection that generates revenue from advertisements. As an aside, Instagram seems to have finally “cracked” me. After years of being inscutable to Instagram’s advertisement algorithm, the program finally understands what I’m seeking. It’s selling me a lot of community-forming talk apps, talk therapy, and neurodivergent planning apps. For the first time, I almost want the things being sold. I don’t see this as progress.

The pyramid of stones not far from Kapiolani Park is indeed a sacred space. I did a little research. Beneath the flame lie the bones of the Kanaka Maoli displaced when developers dug holes to build the foundations of hotels that line the waterfront of Waikiki and beyond. Indigenous people believe that the bones hold the “mana,” or power, of a deceased person. A newspaper report dating back to 1898 tells about what happened to workers digging holes in the Helumoa coconut grove (where the kings of Hawai’i kept their royal residences and where the Royal Hawaiian hotel now stands). As a result of the digging, one of the coconut trees toppled. “Flung high in the air by the catapultic motion of the roots was a mass of human bones–entire skulls, femurs, vertebra, ribs, everything.” One of the skeletons landed “in a sitting posture with arms extended over the head, as if the subject had been warding off a blow when struck down to his ultimate tomb.” (Source: Hawaii Digital Newspaper Project (University of Hawai’i at Manoa Liberary with Library of Congress cited as original source.) Could the signs have been any clearer? Back at the cairn of stones, the monument feels vulnerable. We like to say the violations of the past could never happen again, but I’m not sure at all.

That the state forced the general public to leave land set aside for the recreation of the public (land which historically belonged to the kings of Hawai’i) on an island with such a deep legacy of violation of displacement is a deep commentary on where we stand today. We live in a country where police violence has become routine, where men of color cannot walk through a park at night without the fear of being shot in the back. We live on an island where the government still owes a debt of land to Kanaka Maoli of native ancestry, and where it continues to drag its feet in paying that debt (ProPublica & the Honolulu Star-Advertiser recently did an excellent investigative report, and on June 15^th the Star-Advertiser reported that Deb Haaland spoke with deep emotion as she announced the transfer of 80 acres to the Department of Hawaiian Homelands; “reducing by just a fraction a wait-list of 11,000 Hawaiians seeking residential homesteads on O’ahu”). 

I often wonder why the police move more swiftly to remove fire dancers from the park than they move to stop domestic violence, faster than they move to help people suffering from mental health crises. As we left the park, a woman who seemed to be high or coming down from meth screamed under a tree. Nobody came to help her, even as the park swarmed with police.

As far as I’m concerned, what happened last week was a civil rights violation of everyone involved, a First Amendment violation, and I’d go as far as to say it violates the right to practice religion. Art touches the spirit. The police did something to my spirit when they broke up the fire dancers.

Either way, we need more fire keepers. Maybe the performance was a call to action. We are all keepers of the flame. If we scatter when the sirens or rains come, the fires will all go out.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

If you want to forage for food in Honolulu, Hawai’i, you don’t have to go far. Just take a walk through the Diamond Head neighborhood, bring a bag, and knock on people’s doors. A short stroll will reveal fruit rotting on the ground.

I moved to Hawaii from Brooklyn because I wanted to feed myself. I had this image that I’d move to Waikiki, learn to spearfish, and maybe join a community garden on Diamond Head. The reality of living in Hawai’i was far more complex. Food is expensive. Waikiki is far noisier than my old Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. Most of the food is shipped in from the mainland, meaning that much of the food I ate on the island had a far higher carbon footprint than anything I would have ever purchased back in Brooklyn. In fact, Hawai’i tops all the states for food insecurity. The community gardens are grandfathered in and it’s likely you’ll be on the waiting list for years before you get one. I’m still trying to learn how to spearfish; when it comes to diving, the holding-your-breath-under-water part is very important if you want to be able to stay down there long enough to catch anything. I also don’t like killing animals, so a spearfishing career seems unlikely. It’s a great irony that a land that could potentially be among the most fertile in the country doesn’t have a market for local growers. The reasons for this are complex and have to do with monoculture, supply chain logistics (you know, the same supply chain that sends wild salmon caught near Seattle to China for packaging and then back again to Seattle) the rise of cheaper places to produce pineapples, and colonialism. You can also read about the problem more in-depth in Mark Bittman’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk.

One of the reasons I moved to O’ahu, Hawai’i stemmed from a desire to gain a closer connection to the food I ate. Living in Brooklyn, where the food I purchased came from a grocery store or from the overpriced Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, I longed to eat food I had gathered, grown, or caught myself. As a freelance writer, I was fortunate to be able to choose where I wanted to live (this was before the era of COVID-19’s work-from-home revolution).

I chose to move to Hawai’i. My reasons for this choice are at once mysterious to me (I felt called to the islands), and also practical.

My parents lived in Portland, Oregon, and Hawai’i would put me (relatively) closer to family, or at least no further than I already was. I loved surfing and sunshine. I loved being outside. I surfed in the winters in New York, but I’d gotten frostbite several times and knew that wearing a five-millimeter wetsuit wasn’t going to be sustainable in the long-run. And I believed that Hawai’i would be the perfect place to lower my carbon footprint, a place where I could buy local food and eat food produced closer to home.

When I moved to Hawai’i from Brooklyn, the romantic notion that I’d find local food in every grocery store and farmer’s market was quickly squashed. I’d inadvertently and somewhat ironically moved to the least “green” place I could move. The U.S. Department of Agriculture notes that Hawai’i imports approximately 92% of its food. Take Part notes that this costs Hawai’i $3 billion each year. The environmental and financial costs of shipping more than 90% of your food thousands of miles to the most remote island chain on earth are immense. Before moving to Hawai’i I thought my food costs in Manhattan and Brooklyn immense. Food costs almost double in Hawai’i. The average cost of a quart of milk is close to $4.00 and sometimes more. Spam has to be put in special lock boxes as if it were an electronic device; it gets the same security treatment that iPhones and video games get in other parts of the world.

The farmer’s markets around Honolulu seemed designed mostly to cater to tourists. The largest one closest one to my home, the KCC Farmer’s Market, was a bustling delight, where the aroma of fresh-cooked fish and pork filled the air. But the prices were high, and tailored to the tourist economy. I could buy lemonade produced from local lemons for almost $10 a glass. I could buy a locally produced bar of chocolate for about the same price. There were a few local farmers selling produce here and there, but most of the wares available were prepared foods and jars of honey. When I talked to the farmers, they told me it was almost not even worth it to make the drive to the market. When I went to Whole Foods to find alternatives, there weren’t many affordable local options on the shelves. A local mango cost me $10. I was told to check out the Chinatown market. The food was definitely more affordable in that gritty neighborhood of Honolulu, but there wasn’t a great deal of clarity about which vegetables and fruits were produced locally and which had come in on the latest shipping container from the mainland.

Over time, I found solutions that allowed me to eat locally at a (somewhat) sustainable cost, but it required some gymnastics, and a whole lot of driving. In order to eat a locally-produced lunch and breakfast (I’d given up on dinner), I purchased local bananas and eggs at the farmer’s market, and froze the bananas for a week. (The best buy at the KCC Farmer’s Market was the local eggs (the woman who sold them was my hero).) Sadly, since the pandemic, I haven’t seen the egg lady return to the farmers’ market, though the eggs can be bought at the Eggs Hawaii store. Times, a local grocery store, stocked local coconut milk, and I loaded up on cans. If I went to Costco, I could buy local granola in bulk. (I think I should note that it wasn’t clear from the packaging of the local granola whether the nuts were all local or whether the granola was made on island, but I figured the macadamia nuts in the mix had to be local, so it counted). With these ingredients supplemented by fresh fruit I found at the farmer’s market, I could make a nice breakfast bowl. Fortunately, fresh poke was available in abundance if I was willing to pay the “fresh” premium for ahi (in O’ahu, you can buy fresh or pre-frozen, and fresh poke costs double pre-frozen).

Still, the whole process was unsatisfying. Instead of buying local food from farmers, I found myself driving around town just to get the best deal on food to cut costs. I also found myself shopping at Costco for the first time in my life. Since moving to Hawai’i, I had to double my food budget from what I’d spent in New York. Instead of feeling connected to the planet, I felt more disconnected and alarmed to think that many of the staples I consumed had been brought in on shipping containers.

My boyfriend and I visited Hilo for the first-time last year. The Hilo’s farmers market was a carnival of abundance. For $20, we could buy enough fresh and local food to last us a week. Later our Hilo grocery bill increased to $30 because I splurged on some local goat cheese. I’ve since made friends who are deeply involved in local agriculture in Hawai’i. The truth is that in Hawai’i eating local isn’t just a trend, it is part of a government plan to keep Hawai’i sustainable and food secure in the coming years. Relying on a barge to bring in 90% of your food is not a viable long-term plan. The global supply chain disruptions that took place due to COVID-19, highlighted critically how dependent Honolulu is on those barges, and the empty shelves in our grocery stores at the height of the pandemic attest to this.

Ancient Hawaiians were able to feed their entire populations for hundreds of years without reliance on imports. When the Polynesians traveled to Hawai’i in their canoes, they brought several staple plants with them. Some of these staple plants include foods like breadfruit, a beautiful tree that can grow in food forests. Hawaiian farmers captured water from the mountains using a rock irrigation system called lo’i. If you go to the Hawai’i Nature Center in O’ahu you can see a model for how ancient Hawaiians farmed the land and see remnants of the old irrigation system.

As I learned more about how ancient Hawaiians harvested from the forest, I started to see other possibilities for how I might connect with the land, and find local, and inexpensive (read, free)—food. I started foraging for food in Hawai’i because I was fed up with being fed crap. I was fed up with paying double the price for food with a high carbon footprint, when there was food literally rotting on the trees and on the ground in virtually every neighborhood in Honolulu. My boyfriend and I started taking longer hikes in the woods near areas known to be ancient food forests. We have since discovered an entire avocado forest. Just last weekend we harvested 15 avocados with hundreds more waiting on the mountains to be picked. While hiking, we also found a fallen bee hive and were able to harvest the wax. We found guava trees.

Urban foraging isn’t going to solve our food problem, but I found it a wonderful way to connect with the land, to think more rigorously about my food, and to begin to learn more about local plants.

Since the pandemic, the government and local people have seen how vulnerable Hawai’i is. We live at the whim of the global supply chain. As a result, farmers, government, and interested citizens have joined forces to try to find solutions to make Hawai’i more food secure and resilient. There is hope. And when I feel hopeless, I go hiking and look for avocados and guavas.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

It’s been more than two weeks since my second Pfizer vaccine, and I figured my immunity was finally strong enough to survive a full day out in Honolulu’s Chinatown neighborhood. In some ways, nothing much has changed. The vegetable stands are as abundant as they ever were, offering local produce sold at reasonable prices (if you don’t want to spend $10 on a Whole Foods mango, Chinatown is the place to be). I don’t think you can get a better deal on a pineapple in all of O’ahu. Pass the open vegetable stands of the Kekaulike Market, and the air smells sweet of fruit, decomposition, and urine. The hot Honolulu sun wilts the kale even as you buy it. I don’t know how the Chinatown vegetable ladies keep the flies away.

There aren’t many places in Honolulu where you can be a real flaneur, but Chinatown is one of them. Of course, the flaneur is always male, maleness being something of an invisibility cloak. (My experience has been this: within a half hour of walking alone down Chinatown’s streets as a solitary female, a strange man in an SUV drove slowly by, cat calling, or worse.) To be a flaneur is to observe city life from a perspective of relative invisibility, and from this perch of invisibility to have the capacity to comment on capitalism, commerce, and modernity. To be a woman in Honolulu’s Chinatown is to be hardly invisible at all.

At least in contemporary literature, we don’t need to look far to find the male flaneur (I can’t think of any women flaneurs, right off the top of my head, though perhaps Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway comes close). Take the Paris Review’s comment on Teju Cole’s Open City as the modern flaneur novel, or Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. Lacking maleness myself, I strolled beside my boyfriend for the day, and felt invisible enough. Being a relatively recent transplant to Hawai’i also helps (by recent, I mean I’ve lived here close to three years, but in Hawai’i, where everything is so far away, time is measured in decades).

Walk through Chinatown long enough and you’ll pass the best lei shops in the city smelling of plumeria and tuberose, but you’ll still need to keep your eyes on the sidewalk lest you step on the smeared human feces and occasional drug paraphernalia. The good news is that most business owners will hose down the sidewalk regularly, but it’s always a good idea to keep an eye on your feet. The city and some local businesses like to blame the River of Life Mission that feeds the homeless in the heart of Chinatown, but the real problem is the lack of meaningful mental health and addiction services, and the lack of affordable housing. It’s easy to spend $200,000 to power wash and disinfect the sidewalks, and plant new trees, and call that a “makeover,” as was Kirk Caldwell’s plan reported by the Star Advertiser in July. It’s much harder to actually implement a progressive tax system that will support the homeless, provide them with needed housing, medical care, and mental health services, and to properly regulate property speculators who profit more from keeping buildings empty rather than occupied. It’s easy to blame the River of Life by shutting it down, hoping the homeless will just go away with a little “compassionate disruption.” But without permanent beds or mental health services, the police sweeps are just disruption; compassionate they are not.

Walk along River Street and you’ll pass those barefoot souls who will not be disrupted, sleeping on the sidewalk, or loitering outside the consignment shop. Walk further along into the heart of Chinatown, past the fenced in Dr. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Park, and you’ll find those who have made a set of interlocking umbrellas their tents.

The city likes to focus on aesthetic solutions, but the real problems derive from a legacy of colonialism and war. Since the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, locals have suffered from a range of issues including a silent epidemic of mental health and substance abuse, homelessness, and domestic violence. The veterans of America’s great industrialized wars still struggle to adjust to everyday life with PTSD when they come home. And the children and women refugees of domestic violence still have no place to go. When all seems lost, Chinatown is an option.

The dialogue about broken windows in abandoned buildings continues, while people sleep on the streets.

For a part of town that bills itself as Honolulu’s “Arts District” there’s shockingly little art, unless you count the many pieces of graffiti on the boarded-up businesses. The ARTS at Mark’s Garage, the Manifest, Downtown Art Center, and Arts & Letters Nu’uanu, offer rotating shows featuring local artists, but I don’t expect Artforum to publish reviews anytime soon. Honolulu isn’t even on Artforum’s drop down list of art cities in its directory of “must see” shows. No one flies to Hawai’i for the art, anyway, but people might come for a tattoo or two. Chinatown is the neighborhood where Sailor Jerry, one of the “old school” tattoo masters tatted the sailors and soldiers passing through Honolulu during World War II. He launched a whole new genre of art. Fortunately, the historic tattoo shops are open for business. I passed the Black Cat Tattoo and glimpsed Sue Kidder at work on her latest human canvas. Kidder works in a wide range of tattoo styles and if I was going to get a tattoo from anyone here it would be her. I’m not planning on getting a new tattoo, though. The vaccines were enough needles for this year, at least.

As I walked, I tried to make sense of what remained, what is gone, and what the future might bring. The Star Advertiser reports that 30% of Chinatown businesses shut down because of the pandemic. Some of the strongest cultural mainstays have remained, some have closed, and others have just moved shop. Roberta Oaks Hawai’i sells her vibrant locally-sewn Hawaiian shirts on a sunny corner store located at the intersection of Pauahi Street and Nu’uanu Avenue; the store no longer tucked away on Pauahi. If you’re a local, her shop is the place to get your Aloha Shirt. The Pegge Hopper Gallery is gone, closed during the pandemic, and replaced by Arts & Letters Nu’uanu which features a small bookstore specializing in native Hawaiian books, and rotating art shows. The space offers promise, and it’s thrilling to see books in Chinatown. During the deep days of the pandemic, I visited the shop for its grand opening and the curators had on display a fascinating show featuring vintage Hawaiian photos. The images were haunting, and familiar at the same time. I hope the curators keep making these kinds of discoveries. 

Hound & Quail next door is a cabinet of curiosities. I’d never bothered entering the store before the pandemic, but on this particular Saturday, I felt life stirring within the previously-quiet shop. Hipsters loitered about, hovering over the tables of leather goods. I studied the preserved insects, the titles of the antique books (nothing to write home about), the taxidermized deer head, and rummaged through the vintage photographs. I imagine Joseph Cornell might have loved a store like this, but in New York City, such stores were once a dime a dozen, and you didn’t pay the hipster tax on purchases.

Down the street, at ARTS at Mark’s Garage, a new coffee shop, Cool Beans, has opened its doors. I wish there were couches, but the baristas are nice, and the smell of the used books in the small Friends of the Library bookstore is comforting. Most of the shows at Mark’s Garage have the feel of a youth fair art show and I approach the shows at Mark’s Garage like a thrift store shopper. If you look closely, with an open eye, you’ll find treasures, every now and then. I wasn’t disappointed.

For lunch, we had burgers at The Other Side, the diner formerly known as Downbeat. The diner has been lightly redecorated. Gone are the booths featuring cartoon sketches of local heroes. I remember the vegetarian wings being a transcendent experience, something I wish I could give to my formerly vegan self. But that was before the pandemic. These days I eat burgers for strength.

During the height of quarantine, my boyfriend shared an art space with a friend. Driving through the neighborhood in those days was eerie, all boarded up windows and the desire to hold one’s breath while walking. Friends warned me against walking around alone even by day because people were being bludgeoned in the street in broad daylight. I don’t imagine much has changed, though everything has changed. I still half expect to be bludgeoned when walking alone.

We returned to the studio after our walk, a walk-up art space tucked away behind a blue door advertising tax services. You wouldn’t know that several artists work upstairs. Though several female artists work in the space, the woman’s bathroom was locked mid-pandemic and I couldn’t find the right key. The struggle is real. (Since writing this, the key has mysteriously materialized.)

After a day of work (I spent the day reading the books I’d picked up at Arts & Letters Nu’uanu, I like the idea of having a book about foraging for mushrooms, but in practice, it’s all pretty useless), we had drinks at the Manifest, the best bar in Chinatown by far (coffee shop by morning), where you’ll be most likely to meet the city’s artists and writers; sometimes they’re behind the bar, sometimes they’re drinking at it. For dinner, we picked up a pizza at J. Dolan’s (a little soggy, but as close as you’ll get to a Brooklyn slice in the Pacific). On the way back to the studio from our pizza run, we passed the Hawai’i Theatre, the walls of its gallery, white and bare—the promise of things to come, but what? The marquee promises a grand opening, but when?

Chinatown is a strange neighborhood. It’s so gritty, you’d think the rent would be affordable, but it’s not. Landlords seem happy to keep buildings empty for the purpose of speculation rather than rent the space to tenants and businesses at an affordable price. This is not just a problem in Honolulu’s Chinatown. It’s a problem everywhere. If rent goes down, the property value of a building goes down, and there’s no tax penalty for leaving a space vacant, or for owning a property in one city and living somewhere else.

In Hawai’i gentrification doesn’t happen slowly. It superpositions itself over the creative spaces, supplanting them before they even have a chance to grow, flourish. What will come of all the boarded up spaces of Chinatown? Will they open new vibrant possibilities or remain vacant? My guess is the latter unless progressive policy makes it more costly to leave a building empty than occupied. But this isn’t a problem specific to Hawai’i.

As the sun set, the party busses from Waikiki rolled in, bringing tourists ready to get drunk at the bars. Barbaric yawls filled the streets, and my boyfriend and I decided it was time to head home.

I want to be a part of the idea of Chinatown—the idea of a vibrant arts district, a fertile ground for the exchange of ideas, a crossroads of people where the ladies buying fish heads and celery for their fish head soup can rub shoulders with the tattoo kids and writers nursing their Ernest Hemingway dreams of the ocean. Werner Herzog once said that money was “stupid and cowardly, slow and unimaginative…” but “if your project has real substance ultimately money will follow you like a common cur in the street with its tail between its legs.” I believe the stupid and cowardly part about money. It’s going to take a lot more substance than washing the streets to revitalize Chinatown.

There was something honest and tomb-like about Honolulu’s Chinatown during quarantine. It was quiet. The homeless, for once, were just trying to survive and not get sick like the rest of us. Now, there are places to go, windows to look into, and shoeless and shirtless men to look away from. People dress up to go out to eat, while people sleep on cardboard boxes just feet away. The same was true when I lived in Brooklyn, but in O’ahu, an island just 44 miles long, where everyone and everything is truly connected, there is a special kind of obscenity to the scene, at least to me.

Do I want to be a part of Honolulu’s Chinatown? Maybe it’s more a question of whether I’m in a Dostoevsky or Wordsworth kind of mood. Do I want a coffee-intoxicated ramble over shit-smeared sidewalks in search of the idea of other people (because in these days of Instagram-ready socialization, it’s the idea of other people I see everywhere, and not the people themselves), or do I want to wander lonely as a cloud into the Pacific in search of swells?

Chinatown these days makes for great Instagram posts, if you have the right angle and cropping. I didn’t take any photos, though. 

We returned home to our parking garage at our place in Waikiki—which has the same issues as Chinatown, just one glossed over for the tourists (in just the last week there have been two stabbings). Our neighbor was there—filming herself rolling skating. Her skate wheels lit up blue like firecrackers. She had matching shoulder and knee pads. She was Instagram-ready. It was the first time I’ve ever seen her smile.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.

POW! WOW! the international street art festival, celebrates 10 years with a stunning installation at the Bishop Museum’s Castle Memorial Building (the show is on view from May 15 to September 19). Bishop Museum’s decision to feature street art in its galleries puts the museum on the global map, and on the cutting edge of embracing a new genre of art. Establishment critics, curators, and museums are finally taking street art more seriously. The few museums that have curated street art shows have found overwhelming positive public reception. According to Artnet, Banksy’s retrospective at the Bristol museum drew 300,000 visitors in just a 12-week timeframe, making it one of the most popular shows at the time. LA MOCA’s show “Art in the Streets” “broke attendance records” according to Artnet. And at the Bishop Museum, POW! WOW! saw a sold out opening night with lines going out into the parking lot.

While serious critics continue to hesitate in taking street art seriously (Jerry Saltz, and Vulture, I’m looking at you), Artnet reports that the street artist, KAWS just made $14.7 million on a piece. And while I don’t want to equate sales for quality, there’s an uncomfortable transformation happening in the street art world, one that more readily lends itself to the museum, to galleries, and to commerce. I think we’ve moved far past street art’s illicit origins. Street artists are now designers, often producing work for major real estate corporations, businesses, and even cities. While the work remains free to observe and photograph, the art isn’t necessarily free to make, and is no longer divorced from the art world’s ethos of consumerism, sales, museum prestige, marketing, and moneymaking. Street art can turn an industrial district into a city’s most sought-after real estate literally overnight. And while commerce and street art have become strange bedfellows, the roots of street art, as free art, performed illegally, under the cover of night, has become the province of graffiti-makers, while the more design-heavy murals of popular street artists have become quite mainstream in the art world. Whether this work is fine art is another question entirely, but it certainly fits in the spectrum of art-making, and fits easily into curatorial spaces that now embrace everything from fashion to furniture.

I attended the opening of POW! WOW! on Saturday with my partner who has painted murals for POW! WOW! and whose piece is on exhibit among the dozens of others on display in the show. So please put my conflict of interest aside when I tell you that, of course Sergio Garzon’s palate knife wax painting of R2-D2 is the best in the room. R2-D2 seems to glow like a deity in a reliquary, but sits fragile in its delicate medium. If the piece were put outside in Honolulu’s summer sun, it would melt away like a plastic toy thrown in a landfill, or boil to nothing like a coral reef bleaching in the summer sea. It’s a commentary on climate change, plastic waste, and also a commentary on the difficulty of producing technically demanding and academic artwork in an artistic climate that favors design and populistic imagery.

Graffiti art has its origins in illicit activity, and it’s only right that this writing be a little illicit as well. So that’s my bias. Here’s my spray can, criticism and journalism . What are you gonna do?

I write about POW! WOW! because in Hawai’i everyone knows everyone by some degree removed, and so it’s fairly difficult to approach anything without some disclosed or undisclosed conflict of interest. It’s the challenge and joy of living on an island where everyone and everything is truly connected, and where people happen to live richly varied lives. Your doctor might very well surf your break in the morning, your friend from life drawing may also moonlight as a Sunday meditation instructor at the Korean Buddhist Temple, and, if you were here 8 years ago, your friend from acro-yoga might happen to be Edward Snowden’s girlfriend. It’s literally a small world when you live on an island with a circumference of 112 miles.

POW! WOW! is an international festival, but it has the feel of a tight-knit community. Founded by Jasper Wong, who told Hawai’i Public Radio that he put the cost of the first festival on his credit card back in 2010, the festival is an example of what can happen when people come together and lift one another up; when established artists work alongside lesser-known names, and when a community takes a chance on art. Today the festival is one of the most anticipated events in Hawaii’s arts scene (and is currently heavily backed by corporate sponsors), but it wasn’t an easy sell back in 2010. I can only imagine how difficult it must have been to convince local business owners that they should let the kids who did the illegal throw-ups in the industrial areas turn the sides of their stores into mural canvases. It worked out. But the success and logic of things that work only looks right in hindsight.

Cities and communities have found a value in the illicit artists who used to do their work under the cover of night. These artists have now become professional designers, revitalizing industrial areas and transforming them into trendy arts districts. POW! WOW! travels the world bringing mural artists to Israel, Korea, Long Beach, San Jose, and more. I saw a similar movement in my hometown of Miami, where the Wynwood neighborhood underwent a slow transformation from the untouchable warehouse district of my childhood (where you were most likely to be stabbed), to a culturally rich outdoor gallery of murals nestled between bars, clubs, coffee shops, million dollar condos, and stores selling Prada and Coach. I look at Kaka’ako today, and see a neighborhood undergoing a similar transformation, and Jasper Wong’s POW! WOW! is no small part of the increase in property values, influx of local business, and increased tourist traffic. He should get a medal from the state of Hawai’i.

The very artists who would have been thrown in jail for writing their names on the walls, now create art that often raises property values and revitalizes communities. The best street artists often make a living by selling prints, through their own private commissions (think big real estate and business), and through social media, which connects these artists to collectors. Cities, property owners, and businesses will often pay these artists good money to revitalize their neighborhoods, buildings, and businesses—seeing a real value in what this art can do. 

Amid all the glamor of a gala museum event at the Bishop Museum, complete with timed wristbands, food trucks, sound systems, and museum officials lingering about, it’s easy to forget that street art has its origins in graffiti. This is where the Bishop Museum’s curated show truly shines.

The first thing you see when you enter the Castle Memorial Building is a colossal woman, covered in graffiti, being pulled up to the sky, painted directly onto an immense column. The work is a collaboration between Kamea Hadar (one of the founders of POW! WOW!) and Hula, who is known internationally for painting murals in places where the sea level will rise and cover them up. I believe Hadar is one of Honolulu’s best street artists. Throughout the city, his portraits of indigenous women and men stand as tall as the buildings themselves. These youthful faces reflect contemporary Hawai’i and its energy, but they ripple with deeper power that comes from a rich past. A father and son embrace, surrounded by kalo, a sacred plant here; a regal woman, two-stories tall, stares out at the highway cars that rush past her like a swiftly moving river, her head crowned with a lei Po’o (flower crown lei). She looks almost like she could be a diety.

In the Bishop Museum, the main entryway has been transformed into a mock Chinatown street scene, complete with bodega, newspaper stand, noodle shop, and bathroom. Everything is covered in graffiti, and the tags would be recognizable to those in the know in Honolulu’s street art scene. The work of the late street artist Beak was prominent in the room, a moving tribute. In the bodega, a woman stood behind the cash register, bored, surfing Instagram, perfectly in character. She assured us that nothing was for sale, though I wanted to buy the POW! WOW! book on display at the counter. An arcade machine turned out to feature a game designed specifically for the exhibition. It was styled like an early 90s Nintendo gem, featuring graffiti artists tagging city walls.

The POW! WOW! exhibit is intelligently executed, and feels a little like a Banksy installation I went to see back in 2008 in New York City, where the artist set up a mock pet shop in the middle of Greenwich Village. Chicken McNuggets pecked around at feed like real chicks, and fish sticks swam around in a fish tank.

There was even a bathroom installation. The tagged bathroom was not quite dirty and smelly enough to be convincing, but I liked the gesture. Walls of the museum had been turned into large-scale murals by some of the most popular artists from POW! WOW!’s 10 years. The rest of the museum read like a traditional gallery, where artists got a chance to display their work in more traditional canvas, paper, and frame. Sometimes the work translated well to this format, sometimes not so much.

It had been 14 months since my partner had been to any social event. We’d mostly been locked away since the pandemic started. It was impossible to forget that we’re still living through a global pandemic, as we shuffled past the masked faces in the crowd. The exhibition was timed. We had about 45 minutes in the gallery for the sake of everyone’s safety. It wasn’t quite enough time, but I’m not complaining. Just being in a real museum was a relief.

YOU HAVE THE REST OF YOUR LIFE TO FIGURE OUT THE CONSEQUENCES BUT RIGHT NOW IS NOT THE TIME by Edwin Ushiro is the piece I would buy if it were for sale and if I could afford it. It’s a relatively large piece, about 50 inches long, and it depicts children jumping into a river in the depths of the forest. It’s not entirely clear whether the children are disappearing or whether the forest is. One boy seems to fall out of the sky (reminding me a little of “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Peter Bruegel the Elder, a painting memorialized in a W.H. Auden poem), other children slip away into the rocks. Looking at the piece is a little like looking at the cell of an animated film (and Ushiro’s influences include Japanese anime), but there’s also something uncanny about the scene. Figures seem to appear where they don’t belong. Life is happening here, but ghosts are happening too.

The loudspeaker told us we had to leave. We walked toward the party on the lawn and then away from it, a little overwhelmed by all the people. Tucked to the side of the action was a little green house surrounded by native Hawaiian plants, and Hawaiian canoe plants. The house was empty, and probably would have been a meeting room or place for schoolchildren to gather in pre-pandemic times. Two chairs sat empty on the patio and my partner and I took the invitation to sit. We watched the crowd mull about on the lawn, pretended the house was ours, and that the people in the lawn were our guests. Music drifted over the crowd.

This was everything we wanted. A little house with a patio on a hill. A breadfruit tree. Plants. Friends laughing nearby. An art community. It was ours, for a moment.

We talked about the meaning of graffiti. When I visited St. Peter’s church in Rome, I was allowed to go beneath it, to the catacombs (the story of how I managed to talk my way down there is too long to tell here), to see the original shrine to St. Peter. The original shrine, the original church, was once just a wall—a wall covered in initials and names–graffiti. The pilgrims came, and tagged the prayer wall. Down below St. Peter’s church in Rome is a wall covered in ancient graffiti left by the first Christian pilgrims. Below the wall lie the bones of St. Peter, and above it, St. Peter’s baldachin by Bernini, Michelangelo on the duomo above, and the grand architecture of the basilica itself.

Always, always, since the beginning of time, we have witnessed the ancient human need to be seen. The urge to write your name on something, even if it isn’t yours, goes deep in the human psyche. We all want to be remembered. “The Friends of Khufu Gang” is another piece of graffiti left by the workers of the pyramids of Giza in the king’s burial chamber. The living would not see it, but the dead certainly would.

We wandered further away from the crowd, away from the music and pomp, toward the highway, where a large banyan stood. It was as wide as an apartment building. It might have been several trees that had somehow been colonized by one, fused uncomfortably together to form a single entity. We wandered into its labyrinth of roots and hanging vines, touched its columns of branches that had dropped down to earth from the sky, fused with the ground. The place smelled of stale beer and piss. The setting sun shone through the branches like gold leaf. The cars hummed by on the H1, a machine river, relentless. Coca-Cola cans from the 90s littered the ground, crushed Blue Ribbon beers, a box of stale rice, swarming with ants. And then, the tree itself, its branches completely covered, tattooed really, with graffiti. Lover’s names, hearts, names covered in scar tissue, names crawling up the banyan’s columns, names oozing sap, names ambered in piss, names, names, names on an ancient tree covered in graffiti in the employee parking lot of the Bishop Museum.

About the Writer

Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.