Satisfied with the Stones: Notes on Masculinity, Land, and Family in Alani Apio’s Kāmau

This essay focuses on Alani Apio’s 1994 play, Kāmau, and its protagonist, the young Hawaiian tour guide Alika. The play dramatizes several issues that are central to an understanding of contemporary Hawaiian activism and culture: land expropriation, tourism, economic exploitation, and the relation between a specific territory and a genealogy. While a primary importance is given to gender and male subjectivity in the Hawaiian political context, the essay simultaneously follows the lead of two crucial concepts in Hawaiian culture: the notion of ‘āina (land, earth) and the notion of ‘ohana (family, kin group). To some extent, the protagonist’s inner struggle, and the engine of the dramatic action, emerges primarily from a tragic conflict between a responsibility towards the land and a responsibility towards the family. This conflict, the essay argues, has to do with the impact of capitalism and colonialism on traditional native Hawaiian values – in which the notions of ‘āina and ‘ohana seem to be intricately connected to each other and overlapping