Spirit of Aloha | Features | November/December 2007

Observations
By: Joseph Theroux

CHASING RAINBOWS

PHOTO: ALLAN SEIDEN / PACIFIC STOCK PHOTO: HAWAI‘I VISITORS AND CONVENTION BUREAU PHOTO: DARRELL ISHII

When Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole’s “Some­where Over the Rainbow” was included as part of the score in the film Meet Joe Black (1998), his haunting tenor voice was a revelation to movie­goers around the world. In addition to When Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole’s “Some­where Over the Rainbow” was included as part of the score in the film Meet Joe Black (1998), his haunting tenor voice was a revelation to moviegoers around the world. In addition to recalling Judy Garland’s voyage from black and white to the Technicolor land of Oz, it reminded viewers of the land of rainbows, the Hawaiian Islands. It has since been used in other films and ad­vertisements, and has also become a pop­ular wedding song.

A profusion of the heavenly prisms grace Hawai‘i’s skies, arcing over the clouds, inspiring joy and awe at their pur­poseless beauty. We rejoice with Wordsworth, who exclaimed, “My heart leaps up when I behold / A rainbow in the sky.”

There are full, glorious rainbows, partial arcs, even double rainbows. They are caused by the reflection and refraction of the sun’s rays through water droplets, most often after rain. When people complain of the rain in Hilo, a local is sure to reply with the proverbial “Eh—no rain, no rainbows!”

Once, flying over Savai‘i, Western Samoa, I witnessed a rarity: a circular rainbow. It’s a memory apart, like re­membering my daughter Nina, as a toddler, singing the Muppets’ “Rain­bow Connection.”

For his Weather Words of Polynesia (1907), the linguist William Churchill, onetime consul general to Samoa, collected a Pacific vocabulary of wind, rain, storms and rainbows. Hawaiians and Tahitians called the rainbow änuenue; in Samoan, ‘Uvean and Futunan it’s nuanua; in Mangarevan and Mar­quesan it’s anuanua; in the Paumotus they call it fanuanua; and in Rapanui hanuanua. Hawaiians describe an even­ly arched rainbow as hualala, while the upward-bending is lihi. Samoans identify the end of the rainbow as sila. Pacific peoples also describe rainbow fragments as tihae or tohu‘ura (Tahi­tians), lo­cotan (Marshallese) and mudu (Fijian). Maoris recognize a vanishing rainbow as aheahea, an omen of battle. They iden­tify a spirit (haere) living in the rainbow. The Maori rainbow god is To­haereroa, while the Samoan is La‘a­maomao. The Marshallese called a complete rainbow jemaliwut, a quarter of a rainbow a lemmaru and a rainbow in the west ajulobarinwa.

Despite its beauty, it has sometimes been an icon of war. In Samoa, if it arched before or behind a war party, the battle was abandoned. Only if it arched along­side was it considered marching with them, La‘amaomao encouraging the attack.

Hawaiians tell of the great chief Ka­ha‘i who went in search of his father, held captive across the ocean. He traveled on the path of a rainbow, while some interpretations of the legend in­sist that it was, in fact, the name of Kaha‘i’s canoe.

Kahalaopuna is a well-known Ha­wai­ian goddess, also known as Kai­ka­mahine Änuenue (“the Rainbow Maiden”) for the rainbow that followed her wherever she went. The Kaua‘i goddess Änu­enue once saved the life of Ua (“Rain”) who fell, using her colored arch to break his fall. In Hilo the name of the road to Rain­bow Falls is Waiänuenue, “the water of the rainbow.”

Because of climate and topography, some areas get more rainbows than others. In his Hawai‘i, A Natural History (1980), Sherwin Carlquist states that “[i]n the Mänoa Valley, showers often occur in the afternoon, and the afternoon sun, shining into the valley, makes rainbows an almost daily occurrence.”

In 1866, on his only visit to Hawai‘i, Mark Twain noted the beautiful rainbows “present to you at every turn … barred with all bright and beautiful colors … like stained cathedral windows,” and bemoaned the name “Sandwich Islands,” saying, “Why did not Capt. Cook have taste enough to call his great discovery the Rainbow Islands?”

During Twain’s visit, Capt. Josiah Mitchell of Maine had been adrift for 42 days—after his clippership Hornet had burned at sea—when a rainbow was sighted by his starving men. The captain shouted, “Cheer up, boys, it’s a prophecy, it’s the bow of promise!” In­deed, the following day, they washed ashore at Laupähoehoe on the Big Island, and were saved.

Mitchell was recalling the promise of God to Noah after the flood, in Genesis 9:13: “I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant be­tween me and the earth.”

Rainbows gave D.H. Lawrence a title for a 1915 novel in which he described “… a band of faint iridescence coloring in faint colors … [a] great architecture of light and color … a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.”

For years American schoolchildren have recalled the colors of the rain- bow in the mnemonic Roy G. Biv (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet). The very subtlety of those seven colors, and the way in which they flow into one another, defy all but the most accomplished painters to depict them. Most do not attempt the challenge, but leave it to photographers to capture the luminous spectrum. Sir Walter Scott addressed this very idea in Marmion (1808, Canto VI, Stanza 5): on it.

What skilful limner e’er would choose
To paint the rainbow’s varying hues,
Unless to mortal it were given
To dip his brush in dyes of heaven.


Of course, the rainbow is a heavenly feature and gateway to heaven among peoples everywhere, a motif of legends in Asia, Africa, Europe and ancient America. Unlike the sun and the moon and the stars, it was always a surprise, making a magical and unannounced appearance, granting grace and the promise, “if not of gold,” then certainly of a new day.

JOSEPH THEROUX is a public-school administrator on the Big Island and writes on aspects of Hawai‘i and Pacific history.

Features Archives