After-Lands

After-Lands is a hybrid genre collection of poetry and nonfiction. While primarily set in Hawaiʻi and the Pacific Northwest, After-Lands aims to reach across oceans and genre borders to tell stories of longing in the diaspora, of womanhood, trauma, and settler colonial anxieties in Hawaiʻi. The Hawaiian monarchy was illegally overthrown and their islands seized by American businessmen in 1893. Since then Hawaiʻi has become a site for military occupation and tourist escapist fantasies. Through poetry and hybrid text, this collection draws comparisons between these uglier shades of 'paradise' and the complex repercussions of sexual assault. This juxtaposition urges readers to reconsider the more complex iterations of violence imposed upon bodies, upon mountains, and upon the kanaka maoli of Hawaiʻi. As a collection, After-Lands is intended to continue the discourse surrounding survivance, sexual assault, and settler and haole responsibility in Hawai'i.