Book Review: Kaui Hart Hemmings’ House of Thieves Unlocks Trouble in Hawaii
House of Thieves
By Kaui Hart Hemmings
Penguin Press, 256 pages, $22.95
ISBN 1594200483
The title of Kaui Hart Hemmings’ intriguing collection of short stories is the translation of the Hawaiian town of Haleiwa. The twelve year old narrator of the title-bearing tale says, “In third grade Hawaiiana I learned that ‘hale’ means ‘house’ and ‘iwa’ means ‘handsome person’ or ‘thief.’ ” To this pre-teen, Haleiwa “is the cool capital of the world” because it embraces everything she is in awe of : surfers, slackers, shirkers and shysters.
In this pivotal story and the eight other haunting pieces that make up this collection, Hemmings shows us that the state sport of Hawaii is plundering. In “House of Thieves,” all families are splintered, relationships are fractured and possessions are up for grabs. The victim of such pillaging is the emerging generation. Kids are robbed of parents through divorce, death or coma. They are clueless as to their ancestry and heritage. As a result, they are in danger of becoming a disconnected, cynical lot.
Hemmings does a wonderful job of speaking as them, to them and for them in her narratives. She skillfully switches point of view from story to story as fluidly as some of us change clothers. By setting these tales against the rich backdrop of Hawaii, Hemmings dramatically contrasts the abundant with the bereft. To be dispossessed in Hawaii is to be deprived of a great deal – a language, an ethnicity, a culture, a spirituality. Her protagonist punk says, with perhaps a bit too much self-awareness, “If we get caught for fighting or vandalism I will simply say that we’re just kids growing up on an island, doing bad things in pretty places.”
One of the “bad things” this character does is help her equally corrupted friends steal valuables from an absent parents’ comfortable home in the upscale Kahala district to hand over to an errant drug addict at a beach shack in Haleiwa. Amid the swag is a pair of ‘ahu’ula, the feathered capes of the ali’i, or royals. We are not told how such artifacts got into a private home. More plunder, perhaps.
The point to be made is that this tweener accomplice, with her paltry third grade Hawaiiana, does not even know the name for these items, but she is aware of their beauty. “We place two capes of red and yellow feathers over the heap in the trunk. They’re beautiful. Hundreds of small feathers. Wendy tells us that they once belonged to a king and queen. She says they’re priceless but I think they’re worth a lot.” This is the best sentence in “House of Thieves.” It demonstrates such a multi-dimensional misunderstanding on the part of the narrator, that the reader must stop to admire the technique.
Competing with the title story for strength of craft is a tale called “Final Girl.” It is told by a single mother coming to terms with her son’s puberty. The Tahitian father of her son accepted a pay-off from her land wealthy parents and took a powder years ago. The story takes place on Halloween, which can be a rather blatant literary device to serve in the search for identity, but Hemmings makes it work well here.
The son can’t decide if he wants to don a costume. “I can’t think of anything to be. This one girl thinks I should be a pirate – like Captain Cook or something.” This is the next best sentence in the book. Hemmings is such a capable writer that she slips this in almost as an aside. Indeed, she puts the mother in motion pursuing the identity of this “one girl” in her son’s life. But it is imperative to see the boy’s inability to distinguish between the maritime explorer Captain Cook, a crucial historical visitor to Hawaii, and the fictional character Captain Hook, a mere pirate plunderer.
In “Ancient Weapons,” the anger between a father and his 16-year-old daughter escalates from grappling with Hawaiian words to grappling with boxing gloves. The conflict arises from the wife and mother who has abandoned the family. The daughter considers her to be some kind of feminist heroine. The husband has a differing opinion but does not want to disillusion his daughter. The husband privately thinks his wife “was hardly a heroine. She fell in love with an activist from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, an activist/yoga instructor who had bought a ‘healing studio’ in Mill Valley. Kind of hard to be a Hawaiian activist in Marin, ya think?”
Not only are all of Hemmings’ kids caught between childhood and adulthood, they are caught between languages, ethnicities, cultures and histories. They don’t know any of them very well and they give no indication, through no fault of their own, of being trustworthy caretakers of any of it. Bad things in pretty places, indeed. Hemmings has a way with plunderers.
