Mahina Kaomea

What We Learned from the Coral

O ke au i kahuli wela ka honua
O ke au i kahuli lole ka lani
O ke au i kuka‘iaka ka la
E ho‘omalamalama i ka malama
O ke au o Makali‘i ka po
O ka walewale ho‘okumu honua ia
O ke kumu o ka lipo, i lipo ai
O ke kumu o ka Po, i po ai
O ka lipolipo, o ka lipolipo
O ka lipo o ka la, o ka lipo o ka po
Po wale ho‘i
Hanau ka po
Hanau Kumulipo i ka po, he kane
Hanau Po‘ele i ka po, he wahine
Hanau ka ‘Uku-ko‘ako‘a, hanau kana,
he ‘Ako‘ako‘a, puka

At the time when the earth became hot
At the time when the heavens turned about
At the time when the sun was darkened
To cause the moon to shine
The time of the rise of the Pleiades
The slime, this was the source of the earth
The source of the darkness that made darkness
The source of the night that made night
The intense darkness, the deep darkness
Darkness of the sun, darkness of the night
Nothing but night
The night gave birth
Born was Kumulipo in the night, a male
Born was Po‘ele in the night, a female
Born was the coral polyp, born was the coral,
came forth

the Kumulipo, lines 1-15

do you remember those days:
earth hot with the bright flames
of fighter planes, the bombs
drowning out our screams, jet fuel
leaking into the aquifer
like it’s all some kind of bad dream

all those generations ago our ancestors
closed their eyes and out of that night
the coral polyp was born, that one we grew
all our lives around, the one we look to
when we are lost

do you remember those days:
the way the marines sucked the water
out of the ocean but still they couldn’t
suck the salt out of the water
not with their forked tongues 

don’t you know that all snakes
are the same

do you remember those days
when the waters changed

do you remember

And this is how it came to be that, after the military-installed desalinization plant above Māʻeliʻeli failed and the lowland taro patches filled with brackish water, an entire community was formed beneath the ocean. Everyone living between what was once known as the valley of Hoi to the sandbar named Ahu o Laka found themselves submerged underwater, and life on the surface seemed precarious anyway, so they decided to stay and build what they could. The first thing they learned was how to breathe underwater, which was less of a lesson they learned and more accurately a gift they were given from the very beginning of their time beneath the ocean. This gift was given to them by photosynthetic cells, called zooxanthellae, who typically bond to corals through symbiotic relationships, producing oxygen from coral wastes and providing coral with the products of their photosynthetic processes. As all of these new humans suddenly found themselves underwater, each of them immediately bonded with a zooxanthella, who crawled into their bodies through their pinky toes and crawled back out through their piko (navels), weaving a new umbilical cord to keep them connected. The zooxanthellae helped their humans to breathe. They were the ʻaumākua (ancestral guardians) of this new generation.

Every descendant of those first ancestors who found themselves underwater all those years ago is still connected by tender umbilical cords to descendants of the very zooxanthellae who adopted their families and taught them to breathe underwater. This was not, however, the only thing that the zooxanthellae taught them. The zooxanthellae also taught the people with whom they were beginning to come into a deep and symbiotic relationship about another relationship that had sustained them for generations—that being the relationship between the zooxanthellae and the coral. The people learned that to love the zooxanthellae is also to love the coral who loved the zooxanthellae, that to love someone is to love everyone who’s ever taught them how to love. And while this kind of weaving of pilina (relationships) was new to the people at first, they eventually came to love the coral, too, and passed this teaching on to their children: that the coral had so much to teach them about love. As generation after generation went by, the people came to trust the coral’s lessons so fully that they modeled their entire society after the coral’s abundance.

On the surface, coral looks like a single organism, but it is actually a collective comprised of many genetically identical polyps, moving and functioning as a whole. Each polyp excretes an exoskeleton near its base, and so over generations and generations, the collection of polyps grows a beautiful skeleton, full of twists and turns and little knots, hardships and resilience.

what we learned from the coral:
a polyp is lonely and nothing
without an exoskeleton
the community that sustains them

when coral bleaches into dying
we sing her bones into a new weaving
the ropes that hold our homes
hale ʻai for eating, hālau for dancing
kauhale for all the other kinds of being
together

what we learned from the coral:
she would never consent to her body
being used to build prisons

how could you ever lock up
a piece (a polyp) of your fullness
it’d be like cutting our zooxanthellae
out from our own navels
like choosing not to breathe

In this world there were no prisons. There was no police either. Instead, with the coral’s consent, her bones were used to form the walls of new kinds of institutions. Community kitchens were built on the banks of tender fishpond walls; medicinal gardens next to the homes of healers. There were schools, yes, but they were not modeled after the kind of institutions that sacrifice learning for capital gain, the kind of institutions that in the old days surveilled their students instead of protecting them. Every school in this underwater world was called a Liberated Zone, named after the popular universities that sprung up around Turtle Island in the months and weeks and days before the flood, before everything changed. In these schools there were community libraries and dancing. In these schools there were elders. In these schools everyone was at once a teacher and a student, all at the same time.

The most beautiful tradition of this underwater world, though, was the strand ceremony. Every month on the night of the Māhealani moon, an elder gathered all of the young people who turned 21 in the last malama, since the last time the moon had been full. In the soft moonlight, they hiked together to the top of Māʻeliʻeli, stopping to rest only once they reached the barracks at the top, now rusted with age and ocean water. On top of the pillboxes, a coral clung to the aging concrete like some kind of barnacle, attaching, rooting. This was the coral of all corals, the very same coral that the first zooxanthella had led the ancestors to all those years ago. This coral had grown from the site of the old military desalinization plant, which aimed to provide the island with an alternative source of wai (water) after the jet fuel leaks at Kapūkakī nearly contaminated the entire water supply. For so many reasons, this coral should not have grown so bright and beautiful as it did. For one, when the desalinization plant failed, it not only unleashed the mightiest wave to pass through Heʻeia since before Heʻeia had a name, but it also released a second wave of highly toxic chemicals that collected around the old barracks. Māʻeliʻeli was also the single highest elevation point in this underwater world, which made it feel even more unlikely that a coral polyp would somehow find its way up and then settle on relatively uninhabitable substrate (not settle; it was called settling in the old days, but now the work of the coral is called putting down roots, learning responsibility).

Regardless, it came to pass that the coral at the peak of Māʻeliʻeli grew to be the largest in that underwater world, and certainly the most beautiful. The people called her Koʻakoʻa, a reminder of the broken-up reefs that Heʻeia was known for even before the flood, and a reminder of the fishing altars, called koʻa, that the old ancestors used to build. Koʻakoʻa continued to be an altar to this new world: it was in her shadow that the youth gathered every malama on the full moon to remember their genealogies, in what came to be known as the strand ceremony.

On this particular Māhealani night, those who had newly turned 21 hiked to the summit of Māʻeliʻeli, breathing heavy, filling their lungs with the air of their zooxanthellae. When they arrived, they looked at the beauty of Koʻakoʻa, marveling at her many colors, feeling gratitude for the genealogies that had woven them all together. Then, from the oldest to the youngest, they climbed one by one up the rusty ladder to stand next to the coral, nestled beneath her many knots, reciting their genealogy from the very beginning of the old world. They called out to all of the ancestors born to the land, the plant-people and the four-footed-people and the fish-people, each of them paired with an ancestor born to the sea. Then, they called out to the very first ancestor: she was born in the time called Laʻilaʻi, or calmness, and given the same name.

It was called Calmness then
Born was La‘ila‘i a woman
Born was Ki‘i a man
Born was Kane a god
Born was Kanaloa the hot-striking octopus
The wombs gave birth

the Kumulipo, lines 611-616

I kapaia La‘ila‘i ilaila
Hanau La‘ila‘i he wahine
Hanau Ki‘i he kane
Hanau Kane he akua
Hanau o Kanaloa, o ka he‘e-haunawela ia
Hanau ka pahu

After this point, each of the young people’s genealogies diverged, but they all ended the same way, with the recitation of “hānau ka pahu.” The wombs gave birth: a reminder that we come from the wombs of our ancestors, that the ocean is itself another kind of womb, holding us, birthing new genealogies.

what we learned from the coral:
if we are all polyps
woven into the same fragile skeleton
then we must be able to name
how we are connected

the heart names the veins
strands of blood down the body
the estuary names the rivers
strands of tears running free to the sea

every polyp names the bones
who have come before
choosing the strands of genealogy
that weave us into the future

the wombs: they give birth

The youngest person in the group, born on the first of the four full moons all those twenty-one years ago, was the last to climb the rickety ladder and recite her genealogy. Her name was Laʻilaʻi. Her friends knew her by her long reddish hair, which always went streaming out behind her in the ocean currents, and by her incisive humor, a secret to those who took the time to know her well. She was also a chanter and a poet, and although she rarely shared this fact about herself, this was not her first strand ceremony. She had been attending them with her father, who was sometimes the elder and hike leader, from the age of sixteen, opening the ceremony with a prayer or a song, or reading her hopes for the newly genealogized youth at the very end. However, this year was different; it was the first and last strand ceremony that would be hers. She knew, perhaps even more than most, how important it was that she remember every name in her genealogy, that not one ancestor was forgotten.

When it was finally her turn, Laʻilaʻi turned to face the coral, Koʻakoʻa, and stood very still, like a statue. It was the highest form of respect. She spoke the names of every single one of her ancestors, perfectly, deliberately, and then the places they were born, and as she got near to the recitation’s conclusion, with the names of her grandparents and her parents and finally herself, she stepped closer to Koʻakoʻa. She said those most sacred words, “hānau ka pahu,” an offering, a question, and she gently tugged the nearest polyp off from the coral ancestor’s body. She knew already where she wanted to plant it, where she wanted her future child’s zooxanthella to grow. In the old days, she had heard, a child’s placenta came from their mother’s stomach, and after the child was born from her womb, the placenta was planted beneath the earth, in something called soil.

Now that children were born in the mother of all wombs that is the ocean, the planting of the placenta happened in the opposite order, but it was no less sacred. That was another thing they had learned from the coral: that the ocean could be its own kind of womb. In the old days, only kāne (men) and wahine (women) could procreate, although of course there were people of all genders loving each other and there have been since the beginning of time. Laʻilaʻi had even heard that sometimes this fact was used to claim that queerness was unnatural, although it was hard for her to imagine. In this world of theirs underwater, anyone could give birth, simply by releasing their gametes together into the water surrounding their child’s placental polyp. The polyp caught the gametes, reweaving their genetic material to recode one of the eggs into sperm or vice versa if necessary, and swirling them together into an embryo that would one day become a child. Then, almost immediately, the child’s zooxanthella, also held in the same polyp, began weaving an umbilical cord to connect to the fetus and provide them with nutrients as they grew.

This is why Laʻi had been so serious about knowing the names of every single one of her ancestors, back and back and back. Everyone knew that the umbilical cords connecting them to their zooxanthella were braided from the names of their ancestors. Every name was a strand in the weaving between her someday child and their zooxanthella, strengthening the connection between them, making it possible for more and more ea (breath) to be passed from one organism to the next. And Laʻi wanted nothing more than for her child to know their ʻaumākua deeply, to be loved by them, to fill every breath of their ocean-loving lungs with ea, all the time.

She cradled the polyp that would one day grow into a baby between her fingers and said the final line of the recitation, that one she had heard hundreds, maybe thousands of times before, but this time it was different. Hānau ka pahu, and then she opened her eyes to see the polyp again and not just the dream, although of course the polyp was both the dreamer and the dream.

Laʻi gasped. The coral polyp, which had been a vibrant yellow-brown in her hands just moments before, had faded to a dull white. She looked up at the ancestor coral. As she suspected, Koʻakoa’s outermost polyps were already gleaming bright white under the moon; even the heart of the coral had lost its deep, reddish hue. Everything was so much worse than she had realized.

What Laʻilaʻi knew, that most people didn’t, was that they were not the only survivors of the flood that had inundated the land and birthed their underwater world all those years ago. She had known this for years: as part of her intense genealogical training as a chanter for these ceremonies, she had been taught the names of family lines that were too sacred for most to speak of, the ones who chose not to descend into the ocean’s watery arms and insisted on living upon the surface, holding tight to the land, despite the bombs and the jet fuel and the loneliness. Every genealogist, even the young ones, knew these names, but only four generations of each family line had survived in their ancestral memory. That was the last time anyone had found a way to the surface. No one, even the elders with the most beautifully graying hair, knew if those families were still alive. That is why the genealogists were instructed never to speak of them.

At least, not until such time that the mother coral began to die. To Laʻilaʻi’s untrained eyes, the bleaching was a sign that life on land was so precarious that the precarity was trickling down into the ocean, and so she made the decision, without asking anyone’s permission, to finally tell these stories she had been gifted. She climbed down into the darkness of the bunker, and under the cover of the pillbox that had once sheltered the military from the earth they feared, she told the others all that she knew. She told them that there were relatives of theirs who stayed behind on the surface, and they were almost certainly in trouble. She told them that the last time anyone had gone to the surface, the military was still dropping bombs, that the sound was deafening, that every time one fell the whole earth shook. That every time a bomb fell, people couldn’t hear the names of their ancestors over the chaos. That every time a bomb fell, a name in every genealogy was forgotten. That was the way of the military; they unleashed their violence to make the people forget.

Laʻilaʻi looked around, solemnly, and said that the bleaching of the mother coral was a sign they were needed to go to the surface. She was leaving, immediately. She asked her friends to remember her, to weave her into their genealogies somehow even if she never returned. And then she turned west and walked down the slightly descending ridgeline beyond Māʻeliʻeli, where everyone had been told there was no life. Wherever she went, she went singing.

Still, trembling stands earth
Hot, rumbling, split is the heaven
This woman ascends right up to heaven
Ascends up toward the forest
Tries to touch the earth and the earth splits up
Children of Ki‘i sprung from the brain
Came out, flew, flew also to the heavens
Showed the ruddy tint by which they were known
Showed the fine reddish hair at puberty
Showed on the chin a reddish beard
The offspring of that mysterious woman

the Kumulipo, lines 644-654

O La‘ila‘i, o Ola‘i-ku-honua
O Wela, o Owe, o owa ka lani
Oia wahine pi‘ilani a pi‘ilani no
Pi‘iaoa lani i ka nahelehele
Onehenehe lele kulani ka honu
O kama ho‘i a Ki‘i i ‘o‘ili ma ka lolo
Puka lele, lele pu i ka lani
Kau ka ‘omea ke aka ‘ula ha‘iha‘ilona
Kau i ka lae, he hua ulu ‘i‘i
Kau i ka ‘auwae, he huluhulu ‘a
Ka hanauna a ia wahine ho‘opaha‘oha‘o

Laʻilaʻi walked and walked towards the setting moon, then walked some more as the sun began to rise, casting a warm glow behind her back. She followed the ridgeline downhill for a bit, and then up again, smiling as she passed the brittle bones of hala trees. Their roots were exposed, but she had heard from the elders that this was the case even before the big flood, that even in the old days the hala trees were meant to be growing with their strands of roots above ground, and that they were meant to be growing in water also. Perhaps they were the creatures who were still most at home these days, although their bark seemed a little scorched. Maybe it was just Laʻilaʻi’s imagination, but she was feeling a little scorched too. Everything was just so warm, but she passed it off as simply the effort of walking up that steep incline, towards the summit she could just barely see in the distance. Then the earth began to tremble.

the bombs: they gave birth

loud
shrieking violence
splitting open
ocean mother
tearing
gentle Earth skin

sometimes the kohe rip
making ocean womb again

All the stories were true. There were still relatives of theirs who remained in the above world, in what remained of the earth. Laʻi’s instincts were right too: those relatives of theirs were living but so often gasping for air. Everything finally made sense: the heat of the bombs, and the fighter plane fires, and the military-industrial complex that sustained them, seeping through the soil and down into the ocean; the warm ocean water expelling the zooxanthellae from the polyps they had called home; the coral bleaching white, losing all its color; the way it was so hard for everyone to breathe. It was Kiʻi who first told her all this, before she even saw it with her own eyes.

Kiʻi was the first person Laʻilaʻi met from the above world, right after the bomb cracked through the concrete and birthed her into the earth. The first thing Laʻilaʻi noticed about Kiʻi was their beauty: the brown flecks in their eyes, the waves in the hair that they refused to tie back even in the chaos, the way her heart felt just a little too hopeful when she saw them. The second thing Laʻi noticed about Kiʻi was that they did not have an umbilical cord, or a zooxanthella.

“Where is your zooxanthella,” Laʻilaʻi asked, “and how can you breathe without it?” Kiʻi was confused, and so Laʻilaʻi pulled her shirt up just a little. She let Kiʻi see her piko (navel), the tightly woven umbilical cord connected to it, the glowing algae pushing air into her lungs. “This is a zooxanthella,” she said. “It is my ʻaumakua, and it helps me breathe.”

Kiʻi smiled. “On earth our umbilical cords fall off days after we are born,” they explained, “because the air is already in the right form. We have never needed any help breathing, at least not until the bombs started dropping. But it has been harder lately. It has been harder to breathe.”

maybe all those years
of breathing underwater
will mean something

maybe I can’t breathe
ea
without you

maybe my lungs
are strong enough to go without

And so when Kiʻi wasn’t looking, Laʻilaʻi whispered a prayer to the zooxanthella who had been her breath since she was an infant and then yanked hard on her umbilical cord, screaming as it pulled free from her piko, watching her blood as it pooled on the brown earth called soil instead of dissipating easily into the water. She was relieved. She had breath enough to scream; they were all going to be okay.

She tied a tight knot in the end of the umbilical cord and asked Kiʻi, who was already crying, if she could try to insert the cord into their navel. Kiʻi nodded, yes, yes. Their cheeks were wet with tears and they weren’t looking and Laʻi was fumbling and trying to slide the nae into their piko, trying, trying, but somehow it wasn’t holding, and finally Laʻilaʻi knew of only one last thing to try and it was to chant the genealogies she had sung so many times before. Hānau ka pahu, and finally the knot sealed up somehow into Kiʻi’s skin, and the zooxanthella glowed bright under the sun’s rays and finally, finally, they could both breathe easy.

on the next māhealani moon:
strand ceremony

again the long walk up from the ocean

elders cutting their cords finally
from their bodies, tying knots
perfectly to fit those little spaces
in the land bodies, their navels,
their stories

on the next māhealani moon:
every polyp a new womb

every song a genealogy

Author’s Bio

Mahina Kaomea was raised by the abundance of Heʻeia, where they first learned to love coral and how to tell if it was bleaching. Mahina wrote this piece in their final quarter of college, as they were organizing toward Palestinian liberation. They believe deeply that all of our liberations are interconnected and that creative writing is a powerful tool to exercise our collective ea. Mahina currently works as an ʻāina educator with Kauluakalana in Kūkanono, Kailua, Oʻahu.

Photo by staff