Aina Hanau / Birth Land Volume 92

Brandy Nālani McDougall (Kanaka ‘Ōiwi) is a poet, scholar, mother, and aloha ‘āina from Aʻapueo, Maui, and now living with her ʻohana in Kalaepōhaku, Oʻahu. She is the author of Finding Meaning: Kaona and Contemporary Hawaiian Literature, and the collection of poetry The Salt-Wind: Ka Makani Paʻakai. This is her second book of poetry.

“Saturated in rare immersive allure, this mesmerizing, transformational poetic delivers tremendous visceral impact. ‘Āina Hānau brilliantly entangles every aspect of kinship to birth land (water, air) integral to generations with succinct critical challenge and complete belonging embrace. Each entry deepens the experience in the pathway to an essential case laid out for justice for the peoples of the place, with matriarchal coragem guiding the way. The aunties definitely prophesied this songway. A prizewinner all the way, taking no prisoners, suffering no fools, this book makes manifest ground zero resplendent truth. What an awakening!”—Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, author of Look at This Blue“In the tradition of poets singing, since the earliest of times, to assemble their communities in the most stirring public manner, Brandy Nālani McDougall beautifully calls forth the gathering of a people, encouraging their embrace and relearning of Kanaka ʻ Ōiwi culture, doing the work, in its sophisticated yet hectoring strophes, of necessary transmission and glorious praise. Yet, in the manner of late twentieth-century African, Arabic, and Caribbean poets of global consciousness, her work includes the incisive critique of political and economic hegemony, the ongoing American geographic and cultural occupation of Hawaiʻi, while at the same time providing social and personal pathways for individual decolonizations of mind. She writes as a mother, a granddaughter, a poet of politics, and a poet of elegy, ignoring no responsibility, fully aware of the range of her familial, social, and political identities. There is grandeur here, great hope, a true voice of aloha ʻāina gifted with plaintive lyricism in lament and, in critique, an heroic righteousness.”—Garrett Hongo, author of Coral Road“Brandy Nālani McDougall’s second collection of poetry ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a poetry that sings healing down to the realms of the occupied and to the people enduring the ruinous ‘gifts of Western civilization.’ Through intimate address to the poet’s own people and to her daughters, we behold a retelling of a creation story where birth is synonymous with ‘āina, where responsibility to land and community winds form and stanza into a ‘rope of resistance.’ Watching McDougall’s intimate act of reclamation and proud assertion of a sovereign heart, I am left in wakeful wonder of the connections of spirit to place, and of the poet’s kuleana to a practice of radical freedom that more than resists colonization—it dismantles it line by aloha ‘āina line.”—Rajiv Mohabir, author of Antiman: A Hybrid Memoir“‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a collection of poems that could only be written by an Indigenous Hawaiian mother; they fight to create space for Indigenous life. These are poems that speak to and for a community that contests the colonization of everything Hawaiian today—from language to bodies to homelands.”—Dan Taulapapa McMullin, author of Coconut Milk“There is a great and meticulous care with which the poet immerses herself and her reader in the love language of her people, the heart language that speaks its own truth in its inimitable ability to represent the histories, present desires, and future hope for a resilient nation.”—Lehua M. Taitano, author of Inside Me an Island