Dr. Carmen Nolte-Odhiambo, Associate Professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i–West O‘ahu, recently published an article exploring Hawaiian young adult (YA) fiction in an international journal.
Nolte-Odhiambo’s article, “Hawaiian Mo‘olelo as Sites of Resistance,” appears in “Folia Linguistica et Litteraria (Journal of Language and Literary Studies),” an international, peer-reviewed journal founded in 2010 by the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Montenegro. Her article appears in issue 52, which focuses on connections between children’s literature and music.
“In many ways, this article was inspired by conversations in ENG 386: Adolescent Literature, which I teach at UH West O‘ahu every fall semester,” Nolte-Odhiambo said. “Some of the culturally diverse YA fiction we discuss in that class does not conform to traditional conventions of the adolescent literature genre.”
She continued, “My article interrogates why this is the case. It asks, ‘How do stories from Indigenous contexts present us with alternative understandings of storytelling and of adolescence?’ Native Hawaiian mo‘olelo (stories), for instance, can affirm a distinctly Indigenous sense of what it means to be a teenager and to grow into an adult.”
“Hawaiian Mo‘olelo as Sites of Resistance” contends that adolescent literature renders Indigenous timespaces invisible as the genre is centered on stories of individuation, growth, and maturation that are in sync with age-segregated Western temporality. Focusing on Indigenous narratives for young people in Hawai‘i, Nolte-Odhiambo’s paper suggests that Hawaiian mo‘olelo can serve as sites of resistance to settler time as they employ traditional modes of storytelling — such as mele oli — that foreground Native tempos, rhythms, and genealogies.
To illustrate the important function mo‘olelo can serve in affirming distinctly Indigenous sensations of time, Nolte-Odhiambo discusses Native Hawaiian author Kimo Armitage’s adolescent novel “The Healers” (2016) as a text that transcends Euro-American genre conventions. By integrating mele oli, Hawaiian mo‘olelo such as “The Healers” articulate the intergenerational expanse of Native temporality, defined by stories and genealogies that are carried in but exceed individual bodies and that link the ancient past with possible futures.
This temporal vastness cannot fit within the much more confined timespace of Western individuation that serves as a defining factor of the adolescent literature genre. Hence, Nolte-Odhiambo posits, Native Hawaiian literary works for young readers, such as Armitage’s novel, can productively “unsettle” the dominant conventions of writing for adolescents and challenge us to imagine the rhythms and tonalities of becoming otherwise.