Ho Hawaii Kneubuhl Analysis

Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl’s short story “Ho‘oulu Lahui” imagines a not so distant Hawaiian future. The story centers on the aftermath of the New Hawaiian Nation’s seemingly innocuous goal of providing couples unable to have children with children they can love and raise. Kahikina chooses to participate in this program because her doctor describes the program as “a true act of aloha” (Kneubuhl). What the state does in the end, which they do without Kahikina’s consent, is representative of the exploitation and policing of women’s bodies, especially the bodies of women of color and indigenous women, that has continued for centuries. To achieve a perfect postcolonial state, the state in Kneubuhl’s story just perpetuates the same harmful practices. Kneubuhl’s story shows that decolonization must also include an examination of other forms of oppression and exploitation, specifically patriarchy.
This story also involves a reimagining of history and of ancient stories, but instead of reimagining for the benefit of providing a
Decolonizing literature involves first stepping away from the literature of the imperial powers and reimagining what a literature born and cultivated in Hawaii would look like. Many of the stories we read use language as a step towards decolonizing literature. The stories intersperse native Hawaiian words within their stories written in English. What makes this technique an act of decolonization is that these words are given few, if any, explicit definitions in English. The reader, if unfamiliar with the language, must glean the definition from context clues or look the definition up themselves. This allows the writer to use the language of the colonizer, in this case English, thus entering a specific canon of literature, one with more reach and recognition, while still including a language which is so important to the