‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land by Brandy Nālani McDougall, reviewed by Cody Stetzel


Brandy Nālani McDougall’s ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land is an exceptional collection which balances rage against attempted cultural dissolution by the hands of imperial conquest with a thorough and complicated devotion to one’s community. Currently serving as Hawaii’s poet laureate through 2025, McDougall encapsulates the boundary of rage and devotion in the poem “Resist,” stating, “but we make ourselves / strong enough to carry all of our dead / engrave their names in the clouds.” Dedicated to Palestine, in solidarity, such a rich and evocative lyric carries with it the theme of grief over mass loss, strength in togetherness and community, and belief in honoring the dead through perseverance. However, even in just the image of the word ‘clouds’ one could ask — clouds brought in naturally through trade winds or clouds reminiscent of the trace of explosions as a U.S. war machine plows through the Pacific? ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land takes readers on a journey of climate, maternal, cultural, and exploration of a landscape in the aftermath of imperial devastation. One of the central questions this work implicitly asks is how can we be strong in the face of so much meant to weaken us? and McDougall answers with an evocative flourish of how can we be anything but strong with so much to find support from?

The poems of ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land make available the referent to the everyday scenarios of individuals going through a life where the structures deployed try to minimize the vital history of the Hawaiian people. The poem “Character Development,” for instance, depicts the constrained balance of encouraging a child’s effort to learn and adapt to present circumstances while also acknowledging the necessity both to learn and feel a form of ancestral knowledge as well as the desire to rebel against the education system in place. The poem ends with these lines which dig to the heart of McDougall’s drive for strength, 

“But if it was in my character

to be more courageous,

I would tell you honestly

that a part of me must believe

words can save us if we open

ourselves fully, if we can name

the ones who spoke before us,

and we, unbroken, still

have the breath to speak them.” 

To write ‘if it was in my character / to be more courageous,’ is a touching and vulnerable sentiment highlighting where the work of this book began: to start with the conditional lack of courage and find the strength necessary to adopt the necessary condition for this courage. 

Yet, strength is not so easy to locate. If it were, I would hope so many more would be protesting the evils of this world, actively dismantling that which enables violence and jeopardizes survival. Strength-finding becomes a common theme among the creative work of those resisting imperial-colonial regimes. For instance, the Tongan and Fijian scholar and organizer Epeli Hau‘ofa wrote in the book, We Are the Ocean, a series of demands that creatives of the pacific in a newfound center must demand for the integrity of their creative and spiritual practices. One in particular stood out to me as resonant with McDougall’s work of embodying strength with  ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land:

“Fifth, we aim to harness creativity to our practical struggle for survival. In Oceania all forms of creativity were integral to the daily and ceremonial life of the community; there was no such thing as art for its own sake. In the world today, the best way for the Oceania Centre to do this is to tie the arts to the most urgent need for protecting our oceanic environment: the sea and the islands. This should enable us to remain true to the tenets of our communities and to contribute significantly to the most important global environmental agenda: the protection of the ozone layer, the forests, and the oceans, for the continuity of life on earth.” 

Each of Hau’ofa’s sentences here drive home the equally paramount realms at-risk within McDougall’s poetry: daily survival, ceremonial life, the island-as-home, and global environmentalism. The lens here seems to de-magnify with each sentence, enlarging the view of what’s at stake in the struggle to find strength in such acidic imperialism. 

But McDougall is authoritative in her ability to develop stakes. In her poem “The Second Gift,” she writes, 

“Violence is more than lodging

bullets into Brown or Black

bodies, but also burning

sacred valleys, stabbing tunnels

into mountains, damming streams,

building telescopes on our mauna,

dumping poisons into oceans,

overdeveloping ‘aina, bombing 

and buying islands. Violence is

Arizona jail cells, GMOs, 

and unearthed iwi waiting

under a walmart ramp, in boxes

in museums, in a church basement.”

In a world with so much access to information and visibility in the suffering of others, it becomes a survival mechanism for many to abstract violence and pain — for example, a drone strike killing thousands is significantly ‘easier’ for some to digest than a list of all of their names individualized. Yet, pointing at the exact crimes and describing how they accomplish violence and the jeopardization of survival is a pivotal step as described in the aforementioned “Character Development,” “that a part of me must believe / words can save us ... / and we, unbroken, still / have the breath to speak them.” McDougall’s building the framework for bravery and strength through the questions she asks and seems to answer herself. For example, the poem “Last Coral Standing,” in which she writes, “Who / will still be here to remember that / we, temporary in such temperatures, / too, were beautiful once?” The larger context of the poem offers brilliant insight into the idea of the spiritual-natural reclaiming oneself so long as they can take care of this home,

“You show us there is a kind

of beauty in their dying, in the way

their vessels constellate

in branches to echo the blood

in our veins, before

the salt water dissipates every

memory of their being.

But you urge us to remember

there is a brighter beauty in living:

Hanau ka po

Hanau Kumulipo i ka po, he kane

Hanau Po’ele i ka po, he wahine

Hanau ka uku ko’aka’a,

hanau kana, he ‘ako;aji;a, puka

We know coral polyps, living

in their perforated skeletal branches, 

are our eldest kupuna—What family

do we lose when the turning heat

reclaims them? What salt water 

will rise in us, in that moment, 

expelling blood from bone? Who

will still be here to remember that

we, temporary in such temperatures,

too, were beautiful once?” 

This poem acknowledges the suffering associated with survival and even offers this suffering as a form of beauty. Then the poem turns the melancholy of slow death at the hands of colonizers into a rallying cry that life must remain and be fought for. This theme that the spiritual can be found in nature, that nature can be a mirror for the self, and that nature’s perseverance is one’s own strength cycles throughout the book as the flourish-song above how can we be anything but strong? 

As if in response, the poem, “Na Pu’u One O Waihe’e” offers another representation of this cycle of ancestral strength through the answer, “What is sand / but a return to life, / the brittle bones of before / breathing (birthing) again?” So much of what McDougall proffers is the idea that history is in fact working in the favor of those in the struggle for survival. In looking at the landscape, at the natural world and the embodiment of ancestral histories, one can find infinite storylines of rebirth and beautiful life. Cheekily, Claude Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (La Pensée Sauvage) writes to this effect that history, in its abstract and imperial-colonial sense, is not definitive representation of erasure or conquest, but rather the first point which one must depart from in order to truly know this world of ours: “It is therefore far from being the case that the search for intelligibility comes to an end in history as though this were its terminus. Rather, it is history that serves as the point of departure in any quest for intelligibility.” Throughout the work of ‘Āina Hānau / Birth Land McDougall plays with this idea that history is a referent to advocate for the self’s expansion and capacity for strength and resilience. That natural histories like coral’s death-rebirth cycles, the effect of bone crushing to sand, or even the un-damming of streams show that change can and will happen even in brutalizing regimes. But McDougall, of course, doesn’t end her work purely looking at the past and what’s happened already. 

In a series of pages-long poems ending the book, McDougall documents the parallels between motherhood, mothering, and ‘Āina Hānau, birth land, mother land. The eleventh-sectioned poem in “Āina Hānau,” capstones this sentiment with the lyric, ““And I found, when you / were born, our bodies were / strong—we were always / enough.” As a millennial conflicted about bringing children into a world so coated with grief and suffering, reading these poems have had an existentially affirming effect on me — that one can inscribe hope for the future on their environment, whether that’s through the direct affect of having a child or the indirect of continuing ecologically restorative behaviors. That within any knowledgeable, conscious, communally-oriented mind, one can be thoroughly aware of both the amount of weight on survival for any individual, as well as the strength and resilience found in the simplest acts like ‘having the breath to speak,’ and existing in such a beautiful and profoundly powerful world.