A review of “Hānau ka ua: Hawaiian rain names”

It's something of a journalistic cliché that Inuit languages have a very large number of words for snow (at least compared to English). The question of many words exactly isn't very meaningful, however, because in a sense it's comparing apples to oranges. Ultimately, reconstructed Proto-Inuit-Yupik has just three unique root words for types of snow, but Inuit languages, due to being more on the synthetic side of the analytic-synthetic spectrum than English is, can produce a practically unlimited number of words describing snow (or any other topic) in increasing detail. But these wouldn't be analogous to words as we'd think of them in English, but more like descriptive phrases.

While the Inuit may not actually have that many root words for snow, the indigenous Hawaiian people did have many different names for rain. Anyone who's lived in the Hawaiian islands for a while will be familiar with how the varied geography creates microclimates, and will understand how the rain can be very different from place to place, or even in the same place at different times or under different conditions. No surprise, then, that people who depended on the rain for water noticed those patterns and came up with names for different kinds of rain.

Last month I picked up the book Hānau ka ua: Hawaiian rain names, by Collette Leimomi Akana and Kiele Gonzalez. It contains over four hundred painstakingly-compiled names for different rains found in the islands, based on written accounts from the 19th and 20th centuries (including newspapers and letters). It's a pretty hefty book, as you can see below.

At 327 pages, this is not a small book.

The title “hānau ka ua” comes from a birth chant for Queen Emma that goes, “Hānau ke aliʻi, hānau ka ua me ka makani” (“The chiefess was born, the rain and wind, too, were born”). The introduction explains how important reading the weather was to ancient Hawaiians; some rains would be associated with particular seasons, which in turn might let people know that a particular kind of fish was available to catch. Some rains share the same name across islands, while other are tied to a specific location. A place might be known for a single type of rain found there, or it might have multiple rains associated with it; my favorite quote from the introduction is:

One place can have several rains. Hilo is home to at least fifty rains.

(Which, if you're keeping track, means around one-in-eight named rains are associated with Hilo.) The book is fantastic for someone like me with a grounding in (but not a mastery of) Hawaiian language, as it reproduces for each rain the original Hawaiian text where it was mentioned along with an English translation. This combination makes it fantastic for practicing one's Hawaiian reading comprehension, and I keep surprising myself with how much I remember from my year in undergrad.

When I bought this book, I had envisaged it something like a birding guide, a way to identify the many rains of Hilo and start checking them off some mental checklist. In this I have been disappointed, but I want to be very clear that that is not the fault of the book or the authors. It's a bit more depressing than that; you see, most of the references to rain names comes from 19th century writings, and many of them (at least as far as I've gotten in the book, though I see no reason to expect otherwise) are from popular sayings, mele (songs/chants), or other poetic utterances. They're not descriptions of what the rain is like, because the speaker/writer could be confident that the listener/reader would know what they were referring to; they didn't bother describing the rains because people already knew what they meant.

And that's a huge cache of cultural knowledge that has probably been lost to time! I'm not suggesting that everyone in the islands knew every name in the book; probably people knew the rains relevant to where they lived, plus probably some famous ones by reputation from other islands or places around their island. But such knowledge was primarily passed on orally, and with things like the suppression of the Hawaiian language in the late 19th and early 20th century, probably a lot of that knowledge was lost. Which is a real shame.

It's made even worse by the few descriptions of rains that do survive in the book, from things like letters or newspaper reports. I'm going to quote the English translation of one such description here, to give an idea of the specificity and detail that was involved. This is for the Alanilehua rain, which was associated with Hilo, Panaʻewa, and Puna:

Alanilehua Rain. This rain is sometimes called Wailehua. It is associated with the nectar of lehua blossoms. When this rain starts to come from the water's edge at Hāʻena and from above the upper heavens of that place, it will travel to the west, sprinkling the buds of Puna's hīnano blossoms and pouring down over the clusters of Panaʻewa's lehua trees. It won't ever come close to town, but these raindrops will appear outside of the western border of Panaʻewa. Then it turns and circles to the south, ascending the uplands of Pāʻieʻie, and disappearing within the watery mists of the forest. It has a delicate nature, is rarely seen, and is visible only between the hours of 10 and 12 in the morning.

From a description of rains by Lilia H. Richards and company, who traveled to the uplands of Puna in 1876. Hawaiian source: Richards et al. English trans. by author.

I adore this description for how much it says about the observation skills of the people who named it. The last sentence, in particular, really contextualizes it: it is “rarely seen,” and is only visible in a two-hour span, yet people noted it recurring enough times to sense a pattern and give it a name. I love the details of where it comes from, how it doesn't rain within the town but just outside it, and eventually turns and disappears up the slopes of Mauna Loa. It's a sheer delight to read about (especially in the original Hawaiian), and I can only imagine the similar descriptions that people must have shared in centuries past for all the other rains which are now no more than a memory of a name.

Still, I'm still less than halfway through the book at this point, and there are still many names to discover, and hopefully more descriptions that might start letting me put a name to the many rains I encounter here in Hilo (and elsewhere). Hānau ka ua won't necessarily serve as a birder's guide to rain, but it is still precious as a repository of what cultural knowledge remains about rain names, much of it poetic and beautiful in nature. If all that's piqued your interest, you can get a copy from Kamehameha Publishing here. And from an interview with the authors that I read, I'm looking forward to their next project, tentatively titled Hānau ka makani, a book of wind names; apparently they've already collected over six hundred of them. A hui hou!