Dejan Ann Kahilina’i Perez | Issue 6, Summer 2025

The word for “word” in Hawaiian is the same word we have for “fruit”— Hua. 

Hoooo– like the first whisper of dusk from the forest outward– to that ahhhhh– the sigh of relief once gentleness reaches you. To speak our language is to literally engage in the fruits of our ancestors labor. Hua, fruit, words. 

Most histories in american textbooks start with Pacific histories at the beginning of the first time a white manʻs boot hit the sand. When in all fullness, the peoples have surpassed open water sailing long before the white man challenged his fear of the ocean. Our peoples have fear of the ocean as well, but in reverence. Most cultures in the Pacific have names, gods, a creation story that begins in the depths to the shore, to the forest, to the mountain peak, to the sky. Pacific worlds have always transcended what was documented of us. 

My present day privilege of Queerness will always be tied to Hawaiʻi’s history, because both my awareness of my Queerness and Hawaiʻi’s moʻolelo saved my life. 

The fact that same-sex partners are in our moʻolelo, that there were words to describe us: aikāne. That there was always a third-gender- māhū. This all happened pre-contamination, pre-colonial disease, and will continue as there is an infallible survivance in our cultures as evidence through the robust amount of folks identifying as māhū, as using the old moʻolelo of ʻaikāne to describe their love current love stories, as the Hawaiian language continues to be taken up by another kanaka, grown or keiki alike. 

“Colonialism will not be the final moʻolelo of our people, so long as we know that our culture and language are beautiful parts of who we are,” Hawaiʻi Poet laureate Brandy Nālani McDouggal provided in a TedxMānoa talk almost 12 years ago, and this statement still feeds. Colonialism threatened to take our stories away, and at one point, was nearly successful. Following the illegal overthrow of our Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1896, the white businessmen began pushing erasure after erasure: no language, no dance, no culture. Schools began to mandate the physical torture and humiliation of Hawaiian students using Hawaiian language. If you ask our elders today of those days, though, you can hear them remember how the language still thrived and where: at home over the table, in the whispers into their grandbabies hairs, in their dances in backyards for birthdays and graduation.

They thought they had forced fruit to spoil and rot when they forced my ancestors the flesh out of our mouths, but all along, they were hiding the seeds in their cheeks, under their tongues, waiting for the right moment to plant again into trees that their grandchildren could nestle under the roots once again. 

Hua, it means fruit, it also means word, in Hawaiian. It also refers to the reproductive organs of each body– the kūleana, responsibility, to think of the next generation. Biological reproduction and procreation is not all that matters, as the poem “Sons” by the late activist Haunani-Kay Trask makes clear. She forged a pathway beyond offering biological children to her nation, slyly reproducing as Haumea did: through the forehead, through thoughts, through thoughts passed on and on and on and on. It is under Haunani and so many other groves I stroll through when I am lost, it is the hua I reach for, and it is the seeds I save. 

Kūleana- the word for responsibility and privilege– holds the most promising seeds. I am still only learning my language after three generations of not having it spoken fluently in my family. I am still learning to teach in the way that is through a forest and not a fire, savoring the stories of the needs of new roots. I am still learning what love means. Yet, I do not fear. I am in the forest, and fruits are speaking.