Analysis Of Sister By Haunani Kay Trask

Haunani-Kay Trask is a Native Hawaiian poet, scholar, and activist known in the United States and abroad for her leadership in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, as an activist, the poet Haunani Kay Trask, incorporates her philosophy into her poetry. Trask’s philosophy argues that indigenous Hawaiian people are entitled to enjoy political and economic separation from all the non-indigenous inhabitants of their islands. In Trask’s “Sisters”, a poem about the destruction of Hawaii and its culture, Trask expresses her strong emotional feelings toward outside influence within Hawaii. She provides beautiful imagery from her past adventures in Hawaii in order to juxtapose this memory with the current image of pollution and destruction of her home

In the first stanza she describes a memory in Kane’ohe bay, utilizing words and phrases like stillness and rhythmic currents in order to create a tone of peacefulness and purity. Her tone quickly transitions into something much darker in the next stanza. Trask’s memory is soon tainted with adjectives like, clouding, dark, and dead. This shift in tone helps the reader understand the serious change the author witnessed, from a peaceful pure sensory into a marred almost opposite image of what it was. The tone was dark, aggressive and more adult, as if there was a loss of innocence and purity from the previous stanza. The overall tone provokes the reader to imagine Hawaii has gone through a “fall of grace” due to the the demolishing and development on an island. There is once more tone shift in the last stanza and that is one of hope. Trask describes a world where a pair of sisters, like her own sister and herself, are also defending their native land acknowledging that she is not along and that there is hope in defense. Trask’s poem leads us on an adventure of happiness, anger, defensiveness and finally faith as she accepts that her home is not lost to the hands of tourism but still has a opportunity to be

Trask’s first stanza is beautifully written, it includes an image of purity with the use of the dove, a common symbol of pureness, and a description of the still undisturbed waters. She then goes on to retell memories of collecting shells and hunting jellyfish creating an image of childhood fun for the reader to connect with. All in all the first stanza is pleasant to image of happiness and innocence, while the next stanza takes a turn for the worse. In stanza two the environment darkness as a storm rolls into the previously calm bay, all light is clouded and the smell of decaying life is detected. This dark image is a crucial turning point in the poem. It’s this stanza that is used to shift the poem from something positive to something more dark. This description of depression represents Trask’s feeling towards the over population, newly created townhomes and greedy tourist that plague her island. In the third stanza Trask provides utilizes specific numbers to help the reader understand the extent of people taking over Coconut island, the invasion of town houses on the hill and how much the tourists have actually taken