Going to the mat with lua teacher Michelle Manu
Story by Beau Flemister. Photos by Adam Amengual.
“Hit me,” she says. I hesitate. “Come at me and try to hit me!” she insists. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t want to hit a woman, let alone a grandma. But Michelle Manu, a tenth-degree black belt in the Hawaiian martial art of lua and a Knight Commander of the Order of King Kamehameha I, is no ordinary tūtū.
“Wait, you danced hula while doing martial arts?” I ask, as though the grace of the former would conflict with the violence of the latter. “Absolutely,” she says. “One is contact, the other is not. Lua and hula are intimately intertwined.” She uses hula movements to illustrate lua maneuvers that a student might have trouble learning, she says, and claims that lua was preserved in hula. Both practices were banned after the arrival of Western missionaries, but as hula re-emerged, lua maneuvers were hidden in plain sight within the hula moves.
With the little time I’ve got before I’m crumpled into the mat again, I ask Michelle about how she discovered lua and became a tenth-degree black belt in the art. “Well, the belts were actually ‘Ōlohe’s idea to make lua more ‘legit’ among the wider martial arts community,” she says. “‘Ōlohe made it very clear that lua was never meant to be a sport.”
Michelle can barely speak of her ‘ōlohe (master) Solomon Kaihewalu without pausing. A mentor and master she credits with changing her life, Kaihewalu passed away at age 83 a week before I met Michelle. At age 22, Michelle discovered Kaihewalu and his Lua Hālau o Kaihewalu in the Orange County Yellow Pages while searching for a martial art that was closer to home, genealogically speaking. She remembers calling the number and getting Kaihewalu’s wife on the line. Michelle introduced herself—and was quickly hung up on. She called back, thinking it had been a mistake, and the woman snapped, “He doesn’t teach women!” Click. Not one to back down, Michelle called yet again and said she wouldn’t quit calling until she got the boss on the line. So he answered, and after a brief conversation Kaihewalu invited her to a class.
“When I practice lua, I feel like I’m cleaning my bloodline for the sins of my father, who may have had a negative perception of our identity,” she says. “I feel like a conduit. The knowingness is so much deeper for me, like I’m led by something within my blood, a deeper muscle memory.… The movements are so organic.”
It took Michelle two years from that first class to prove to Kaihewalu that she belonged there. She’d go on to become the first female kumu lua (lua teacher) in modern times.
she says, walking over to the board bag and picking up the lei o manō, a wooden hand paddle edged with razor-sharp shark teeth. Then she picks up a hoe, a canoe paddle, and swings it through the air, using her whole body with an efficiency born of long practice.
Michelle says while today lua is largely aimed at dislocating joints, traditionally it was more brutal. It involved biting flesh and tearing muscle. It sought to break bones, with or without a weapon, to “bundle up” the opponent. In Kaihewalu’s tradition of lua, an opponent is disabled joint by joint and forced to the ground, putting pressure on their bodies to break their bones. At the same time, lua warriors were also master healers adept in practices like lomilomi, which developed to restore the wounded, especially on the battlefield.
Her instructor, ‘ōlohe (master) Solomon Kaihewalu didn’t teach women until Manu persisted and persuaded him to allow her into his class.
martial arts in general have mostly been a man’s world. I ask Michelle what that’s been like, navigating through it, having dealt with sexism as she’s fought her way into the halls of fame. “It’s mostly from the toxic keyboard warriors, but they’re exactly why I post a lot of videos showing lua, not just typing about it,” she says. “I want men to see how powerful women can be so they think twice if they come up against a woman in a match or on the street. I also want women to see these videos so they can know how powerful they can be.”
It’s a desire Michelle translated into her popular SHE (Super Hero Experience) workshops over the past few years. With self-defense courses that blend lua techniques with hula movements, Michelle has taught women across the nation to defend themselves when on the ground or thrown up against a wall. She teaches them to handle assaults with crowbars, hammers, zip ties, guns, knives and more. “SHE is my way to empower women to own their space,” she says. “Beyond the self-defense part of it, I teach women how to take control over their choices and opportunities and become whole—mentally, spiritually, emotionally, relationally and financially.”
Has she taught her own daughter or her two grandsons Kaihewalu lua? “The boys are young, still, but yes, she’s learned some. I’d love to see her train more, though. She’s got a wicked straight punch and a front thrust-kick that you’d never see coming!” she laughs, then picks up the ka‘ane, a garrote made of wood and rope and says—for the last time, I hope—“OK, try to hit me!”
