Aloha Betrayed

Words by Chad Shomura, Video by Lorenzo Rinelli




Last year, more than 200 protesters gathered downstairs at the Hawai‘i Convention Center hosting the “New Horizons for the Next 50 Years” conference.


Refusing to look to the future while the past remains unaddressed, the protestors brandished a cardboard model of Uncle “Scam” and Hawaiian flags raised upside-down, and wore shirts with messages like “Grand Theft ‘Ainā” (“‘ainā” means “land” in Hawaiian) and “Made in Occupied Hawai‘i.” One protester, Jean Stavrue, cut out the fiftieth star of the American flag before burning it.
A short documentary film entitled Aloha Betrayed by Lorenzo Rinelli with the collaboration of Rohan Kalyan connects parts of the protest to vacation capitalism and the simple life ignorant of a variety of sufferings under slow death (such as homelessness). The song “Hell Fire” by the reggae band Ooklah the Moc, based in Hawai‘i, voice part of the soundtrack with hard-hitting lyrics like: “Oh, I see what you've done to me / The way you kill me and the way you rape me / But I can't wait forever for someone to come help me / As I can see us together, that's why I purge thee.”

The interface of the montage of images and the “Hell Fire” lyrics might trigger what Sontag describes as “a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as [the suffering of others], and may – in ways we might prefer not to imagine – be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.” In this way, Aloha Betrayed critically weaves together aesthetics, biopolitics, settler colonialism, and scenes of slow death along with the incendiary feelings of protest disruptive of the calm of cool commemoration.

Aloha Betrayed offers another valuable insight into the politics of celebration. Toward its conclusion, the film silences the Ooklah track and displays two speakers leading protestors at the Convention Center in the singing of “Hawai‘i Pono‘ī,” the former national anthem of Hawai‘i. When the singing ends, one of the speakers very spiritedly exclaims, to the cheers of the crowd, “Remember, our nation is never dead unless its national memory dies, so keep the memory of our Hawaiian nation, keep the struggle going!” Curiously, the mood in the air, not afire with the anger or rage anticipated by the State, is filled with the warm spirit of a people celebrating their survival and cultural legacy.

Counter to the predominant collective memory (or collective instruction) archived by the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin, protesters enact experiences of sense memory, which Jill Bennett suggests invigorates “a process experienced not as a remembering of the past but as a continuous negotiation of a present with indeterminable links to the past.” All aesthetic forms, despite the utilization of different media, styles, and points of involvement, fuel sense memory experiences.

The affective force of political art derives not from “arousing sympathy in predefined characters” but from “its propensity to impact on us in spite of who we are.” Against the State's attempts to emotively chill the anniversary of statehood, we discover a complex plurality of aesthetic performances and forms celebrating the survival and heritage of Native Hawai‘i despite aesthetics of elimination effected by settler colonialism concealing the living legacy of a vibrant nation under feelings of the simple life.