Triangle / The Natives Are Restless
Books That Belong On Paper Issue No. 29
Books That Belong On Paper first appeared on the web as Wink Books and was edited by Carla Sinclair. Sign up here to get the issues a week early in your inbox.
TRIANGLE — A NEW BOOK ABOUT SOME VERY SNEAKY SHAPES
Triangle
by Mac Barnett, Jon Klassen (Illustrator)
Candlewick
2017, 48 pages, 9.0 x 0.5 x 9.0 inches, Hardcover
Triangle is a rascally shape with a trick up his sleeve. Well, it would be, if he had any arms. Mac Barnett’s wily story and Jon Klassen’s eyes-tell-all illustrations make Triangle a really fun read-aloud for preschoolers, early elementary kids, and their adults.
Both the grown-ups and the kid in my house were eagerly awaiting this book — the latest collaboration between Barnett and Klassen. Both are crazy talented picture book makers who have consistently put out silly, thoughtful, beautiful books over the past few years, together and apart. This is the third book they’ve done as a duo (the previous two are Sam and Dave Dig a Hole, 2014, and Extra Yarn, 2012) and it feels a little different.
Aesthetically, in the tone of the text and the images, Triangle is much more reminiscent of Klassen’s Hat books than of Extra Yarn and Sam and Dave Dig a Hole. The main characters are shapes (keeping with Klassen’s typical non-human subjects) and the setting ranges from sparse snapshots to a simple yet stunning landscape of “shapes with no names.” (The brief traipse and chase through this land that lies between the neat, pointed places made of triangles and squares adds something magical to the book. That feeling is made even nicer when realizing that the magical place is the one most like our own.)
Amidst Klassen’s illustrations, Barnett’s voice is still quite present, especially in the dialogue. The reader can’t help but deliver Triangle’s lines with a mischievous sneer and Square’s with a tight-throated hand wringing, and that despite the characters’ lack of mouths or hands. This book clearly could have only been made by this particular author/illustrator team, and it makes me wonder if the story itself reflects some of the playfulness of their own relationship.
– Marykate Smith Despres
THE NATIVES ARE RESTLESS: A SAN FRANCISCO DANCE MASTER TAKES HULA INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
The Natives Are Restless: A San Francisco dance master takes hula into the twenty-first century
by Constance Hale
SparkPress
2016, 244 pages, 9.3 x 0.8 x 11.5 inches, Hardcover
If the word “hula” makes you think of dark-haired maidens wearing little more than matching pairs of coconuts, strings of fragrant flowers, and loose grass skirts rustling beneath their rhythmically undulating hips, then you need to read The Natives Are Restless by Constance Hale. Lavishly illustrated, the book is not so much a rebuke to the stereotypes of the form as it is a window on new traditions that have sprung up around the old.
Born in Hawai’i and a student of hula since she was seven, Hale took classes as an adult with San Francisco hula teacher and choreographer Patrick Makuakāne, who founded the Nā Lei Hulu i ka Wēkiu dance company in 1985.The Natives Are Restless spends most of its 244 pages on Kumu Patrick, as Hale calls her teacher throughout the book, as well as his troupe, so Hale’s book is not a strictly objective work, as the author readily admits. But Hale’s personal passion for her subject works, as we learn how and why Kumu Patrick modernized the traditional form of hula to help his audiences better understand Hawaiian history and culture.
Take the chapter on the series of dances for which the book is named. In “The Natives Are Restless,” which premiered at San Francisco’s Cowell Theatre in 1996, Kumu Patrick took a pejorative and flipped it to expose the turmoil introduced into Hawaiian society by 19th-century missionary Hiram Bingham, who dismissed the native Hawaiians he encountered as “savages” and believed hula promoted promiscuity.
“We let another culture from thousands of miles away teach us to be ashamed,” Kumu Patrick tells Hale in an interview conducted for the book. In The Natives Are Restless, the resulting clash of cultures played out against a contemporary soundtrack that included electronic dance music and a song called “Salva Mea” by the British band Faithless. In one sequence, Kumu Patrick himself strode across the stage in the role of a black-robed priest, his wooden crucifix whipping the “natives” into a “restless” frenzy, as the tenets of the new faith foisted upon them tore at their identity as a people. Such ostensibly unlikely hula stories fill Hale’s book. For teacher and student alike, when hula goes beyond the coconuts, it has the power to heal.
– Ben Marks
08/27/24
