Liliuokalani

Liliuokalani was educated at the Royal School in Honolulu, run by American Congregational missionaries, and the musical form she learned there shaped almost everything she wrote. Protestant missionaries had introduced four part harmony and the hymn, himeni in Hawaiian, and Hawaiian composers took the form and filled it with their own language, imagery and turns of phrase. She composed well over a hundred songs and chants in that idiom.

The best known outside Hawaii is Aloha Oe, written years before her reign, a farewell song whose melody has travelled far from any sense of who wrote it or why. The one that matters inside the Hawaiian churches is Ke Aloha o ka Haku, the Queen's Prayer, written in 1895 while she was confined in an upstairs room of Iolani Palace after the failed counter revolution. It asks for mercy on the one who is bound and offers forgiveness, and it is sung in Hawaiian congregations still.

Her hymnody sits inside a pattern that recurs wherever missions took root and were then outlived: the imported form is kept, the imported language is not, and within a generation the form is doing work its bringers did not intend. A prisoner of a Christian republic writing a Christian prayer in Hawaiian is a sharp instance of it, and the song's continued use in worship is the reason her name is heard weekly in places where the political history is not discussed at all.

The Kumulipo is a genealogical chant of over two thousand lines that carries the origin of the world and the descent of a chiefly line. It opens in darkness and works upward through paired sea and land forms, coral and its companion plant, and only later reaches human generations, so that the chant is at once a cosmogony and a title deed: to recite it is to state who a chief is and by what line.

Liliuokalani worked on an English translation during her imprisonment and afterwards, and published it in Boston in 1897. Her stated reason was preservation. Missionary teaching had treated the chants as heathen and Hawaiian literacy had been turned almost entirely toward scripture and newspapers, and a chant of that length survives only while people can still recite and explain it.

The choice is not a small one for a Christian queen. The Kumulipo is not a folk tale but the framework of a religious and political order the mission had worked to displace, and putting it into English placed it where scholars and courts could read it. Martha Warren Beckwith produced a second scholarly translation in 1951 and worked from Liliuokalani's text as well as from the printed Hawaiian, and later Hawaiian language revival has returned to the chant repeatedly. That a deposed monarch spent her confinement on it says as much about what she thought was at stake as any of her political writing does.