At the crossroads of myth, memory and resistance, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is part of a new generation of writers reshaping contemporary literature from the inside. Born and raised in Hawaiʻi, the author writes stories where bodies remember what history attempts to erase, where anger and desire coexist, and where land itself breathes, listens and sometimes strikes back.

Her debut collection, Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare, now published in French as Chaque goutte est un cauchemar pour l’homme, moves between myth and the present, the intimate and the political. Through a constellation of women’s voices, she explores the long shadows of colonization, the persistence of Indigenous knowledge, and the power of storytelling as both survival and defiance. In this conversation with CITY, Megan Kamalei Kakimoto reflects on reclaiming mythology as an act of resistance, writing the body as a site of memory, and protecting complexity in a literary landscape that often prefers clarity over truth.

I wholeheartedly believe writing is, and always has been, a political act, so yes, reclaiming myth in the process of writing is deeply political for me. I’m engaging in this interview at the close of Mahina ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Language Month) and have been thinking a lot lately about the de facto ban on the Hawaiian language following the illegal 1893 overthrow, and the motivations behind this ban. The aim was to punish and shame generations of Hawaiians for speaking their native tongue. It was to foster a lineage of forgetting, and not just our language, but who we are as Kānaka ʻŌiwi. Language is the vital entry point to mele (song), to ʻoli (chant), and to our vibrant and abundant mythology. I think of writing into our myths as a meaningful act of resistance.

I absolutely do. The corporeal inheritance of trauma continually preoccupies my writing because it preoccupies my life. I think about how trauma has manifested in the health and physicality of my family’s bodies, in my body, because such manifestations will not allow us to look away. This history, too, is ongoing. Militarism as an engine of the US colonial project continues to devastate public health, as evidenced by the navy’s poisoning of Red Hill/Kapukākī, contaminating the drinking water of nearly 100,000 residents. The body grasps and comprehends in a way that often eludes the mind. By staying close to the body in my writing process, I hope to access both the wounds and the wisdom that are foundational to persisting and resisting as an Indigenous woman.

I approached this differently in different stories, but one strategy I engaged across the collection was to think very intentionally about sacredness. To what extent do I include the nebulous and capacious “Reader”? What of the material I am writing feels sacred, and therefore meant only for me, my ancestors, my community?  In line with negotiating the question of what to reveal and what to withhold, I have also prioritized Kānaka joy on the page. I don’t believe that giving my characters room to experience joy, pleasure, passion, and desire in any way reduces the violent impact of colonization; rather, Indigenous joy actively disrupts colonialism, and underscores the beauty of our shared humanity. 

Anger and joy exist together, I truly believe this! I credit writer, scholar, and activist Haunani-Kay Trask, unwavering in her passion and her rage, with empowering generations of ʻŌiwi writers like myself to embrace our anger—there is nothing wrong with being angry. Neither can we stop at anger. We must channel our rage into revolution, and for me, I try to do so in my fiction. 

Writing it is certainly a form of resistance. I think, too, that I only arrived at a place of writing about desire so unabashedly by reading the work of writers like Toni Morrison, like Haunani-Kay Trask, writers whose brave, nuanced, impassioned, hungry characters invited me to write into my own. They opened my eyes to the safety of the page, and to the act of writing as one of imagining possibilities and desires that felt foreclosed to me in my personal life. Of course, such safety looks very different when the question of publication is thrown into the mix. 

Absolutely. As a Kanaka ʻŌiwi writer, my entire existence is deeply informed by aloha ʻāina: love of and care for our land. Land includes our ocean and our wai (waters), it includes the moon and stars, it encompasses weather and winds. ʻĀina and desire live together, as do ʻāina and anger, and ʻāina and deep, deep aloha. The only way I can ever write Hawaiʻi is by giving land its place to be dynamic, responsive, and alive on the page.

Complexity, to me, is a reflection of abundance. In Hawaiʻi, we have our Hawaiian language of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, along with Pidgin, English, and so many other languages—our linguistic inheritance is plentiful. Linguistics is only one facet of complexity I seek to retain and reflect in my fiction. In order to do so, I know I must write both carefully and precisely (this means I spent a lot of time living in sentences), and also bring clear intentions to my work. This does not mean I write from any place of wisdom or clarity, for more often than not, I am writing into questions irresolvable. I let myself ask, express, and wander throughout the writing, rewriting, and revising process. It’s only when the topic of publishing surfaces that I work to articulate intentions for both myself as well as for the work. 

A final note: I also try to practice observation in all parts of my life. I hold close Mary Oliver’s words, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” What draws my attention, what do I notice and observe as I move through the world? Here is where I locate complexity. 

I have felt that pressure explicitly, constantly, and I’m not sure I’ve ever moved beyond it. That said, I’ve also grasped that the only way to acquiesce to such pressure is to not write. A part of me certainly appreciates this pressure, which helps to set a certain standard for my work. But I also recognize it for what it is: a reflection of the scarcity mindset in which so few Native Hawaiian authors have been traditionally published, so those who have must do so “perfectly.” When I think about the pitfalls of such thinking, and the real risk of being made into a symbol, I return to the fact that our moʻolelo, the stories and narratives which comprise our cultural, historical, and political identity as Kānaka ʻŌiwi, arose from an oral tradition. And oral traditions actively resist ownership—they resist a very western way of thinking that a particular story “belongs” to a single voice, a single writer. Our culture is more nuanced, and far too abundant to be reduced in such a way. 

The first that comes to mind is any suggestion of a monolithic experience of Hawaiian womanhood. The very nature of a story collection allowed me to challenge this, giving breath and voice to a company of girls and women who love, desire, fight, think, feel, and move in different ways. Our stories are so plentiful! And all the more interesting because of it.