Ono Ono Girl's Hula

By Carolyn Lei-Lanilau

Book Overview

Seventeen years after she married, Judith Strasser escaped her emotionally and physically abusive husband and sought a better way to live. In the process, Strasser rediscovered what she had suppressed through that long span of time: exceptional strength and a passion for writing.
Black Eye includes excerpts from a journal Strasser kept from 1985 to1986, the year she made the decision to leave her marriage, and present-day commentary on the journal passages and her family history. Strasser works like a detective investigating her own life, drawing clarity and power from journal passages, dreams, and memories that originally emerged from confusion and despair. With language that is both insightful and poetic, she reveals the psychological and social circumstances that led a "strong" woman, an intelligent and politically active feminist, to become an emotionally dependent, abused wife.
Not coincidentally, the same year that Strasser finally found the courage to leave her husband, she also reclaimed her creative voice. Newly empowered and energized by this enormous life change, Strasser began writing again after twenty-five silent years dominated by her mother s illness and death, her own cancer, and her painful, fearful marriage. Black Eye is one of the fruits of this creative reawakening. Strasser s writing is refreshingly honest and instantly engrossing. Not shy of wretchedness or beauty, Strasser s story is bitterly personal, ultimately triumphant, and inspiring to all who deal with the adversity that is part of human life."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299156346
• ISBN13: 9780299156343
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 196 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

A loco moco brew of mongrel identity politics, more or less.

Ono Ono Girl's Hula ia a "loco moc" brew of mongrel identity politics, more or less, emanating as much from the grounds of cultural political struggle in contemporary Hawai'i as much as from the verbal flux of the diasporic Pacific Rim and the ethnic opportunism of California. I like it a lot, at times crazed and infuriated as I read the schizo-text of herstory; Carolyn Lau (who was a great Chinese poet in days past) is not Haunani Kay Trask and moments in the text when she aspires towards primordial ideological bullying are way off the mark. But when she lets the language flow and mix, she becomes one shameless hussy of mongrel postcolonialty, and it is worth it, dear reader, to go along for the poetic and sexual ride into the ono ono girl's blissy blessed hula.