12/21/2024
A few random songs, of a particular torchy, whiny variety, repeatedly surfaced night and day as we avoided, revisited, and digested the election results last month.
One was "The End of the World" by Skeeter Davis (she/her), which debuted in January 1963, just after the world emerged from the Cuban Missile Crisis (October 1962).
By then, Hawaiʻi Review of Books editor Don Wallace's basement rec room/music studio doubled as a bomb shelter stacked with tinned sardines (terrible for the acoustics). There was a bullseye map of Long Beach on the wall showing blast radius rings from prime targets for Soviet ICBMs. They were toast.
The song's full refrain—"Don’t They Know It’s the End of the World"—invokes the indifference of others to the singer's heartbreak. But back then it also doubled as a commentary of the people going on about our lives as the seconds clicked off the Doomsday Clock.
Now, today, we know objectively that the world won't end January 20. For people in Gaza, yes, the world has been ending. As it has been in Ukraine, in Chad and the Sudan, in China if you're Uyghur. In Somalia and Congo it's been ending off and on for 30 years.
Instead, here we have our community, we have our families, assigned and chosen, we have our poetry. We have grassroots politics and city and state politics that require reform and our attention. We can count ourselves safe, lucky we live Hawai‘i, if we are among those able to do so, and then we can get back to work making Hawai‘i and the world a better place.
To that end, here at THROB we'll start by celebrating a poet, Kai Gaspar, who kind of grew up at the end of the world—in a village off the grid in South Kona—and whose life and work embody the kind of freedoms that are under direct attack these days. The occasion is the one-year anniversary of the publication of his poetic memoir, ULU, the debut volume from Hoʻolana Publishing.
Read "Long Kine Lei" now at hawaiireviewofbooks.com/stories/long-kine-lei.
And bon courage, as they say.
