Hawaiian Musicians Sing the Soft, Sweet Songs of Sovereignty

Abstract

Nahenahe is the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) term for “soft, sweet, melodious” and is the term most often used to describe the aesthetic ideal for Hawaiian music. In this essay, I challenge the stereotyping of softness as acquiescence or worse, cowardice, sweetness as weakness or naivete, and melodiousness as the sound of the tritely familiar or perfunctorily conventional. Hawaiian music’s central nahenahe aesthetic is often overdetermined as “merely” soft and gentle, incapable of expressing force or registering gravitas. How might Hawaiian musicians be heard as offering alternatives to conventional notions of the ways in which music signifies action, agency, and authority or, more pointedly, protest, opposition, and resistance to settler-colonialism? My central argument is that Hawaiian music is “not” the soft, sweet inviting sounds meant for tourist consumption but, rather, the expression of a people whose cosmological, ontological, and epistemological dispositions bend toward a fluid and flexible orientation to the world. In this light, Kanaka Maoli opposition to U.S. encroachment as articulated in their music has been consistently misheard and misunderstood. I assert that Hawaiian musicians’ mana (supernatural or divine power) and their music’s affective resonance and social effectiveness comes from its fundamental nahenahe aesthetic.