“No One Is Ever Really Just One Thing”: Laurel Nakanishi’s “Ashore”

“What stands out in Nakanishi is that she possesses an acute awareness of the root poetic traditions of her native islands and brings them forward with respect while also being influenced, as she herself professes, by poets such as Californian Gary Snyder—whose verse, like hers, is thoroughly immersed in the natural world.”

In a nuanced first full-length collection of poetry, Hawaiian-born Laurel Nakanishi unapologetically gauges the perceived complication of ethnic multiplicity in the poem “Mixed.”

“I will not hide the hollow bodies of my prairie ancestors, those wrapped up in gun-smoke out where it is never really blue or cloudless.” Then again, “And the Japanese blood? They never quite made it to America…From them: my dark hair, slim neck, but no certain turn of the eyes…In Montana, I’m not-quite-white, but white-enough.”

As for her being or not Hawaiian “enough,” she has this to say: “Although I am not Kanaka Maoli [blood Native Hawaiian] I have still been shaped by many Hawaiian teachers and values, in addition to the ecological abundance of these islands. Along with Kanaka Maoli influences, the poems have also been inspired by Hawai‘i’s multicultural heritage and my own background as a poet of multiple ethnicities.”

What a refreshing thought! That identity is not so much a “what” but a concatenation of “where’s.” The good news for extended family and larger communal lineages that get broken off, intermarried, and reformed is, “wherever you go, that’s who you are.” In an ideal world, one would also belong there and be accepted, as each generation gets reshaped around new “blood” realities blending with the old reality. And those new beings play a part, if they wish, in this syncretistic realignment, helping to preserve what may undergo significant cultural change, but does not have to get lost.