I just returned from Kaua’i, the farthest west of the major Hawaiian Islands and, some would say, the most beautiful of the lot. (Don’t ask me, Kaua’i is my only experience of our 50th state.)

On the first night there, I had a disturbing dream, a nightmare vision of sorts, which seemed all out of sync with the idyllic languor of the place. I fell asleep with the smell of salt‑sea breezes in my nostrils and the glow of strange gold and vermillion flowers in my memory. So, why did I dream of angry Hawaiian warriors rushing toward me in a kind of hypnotic trance? In the vision, they pushed passed me violently, and I felt their power as I fell downward into some empty place beneath them. I don’t usually remember my dreams. This one woke me up. And I remembered it.

As I discussed my nocturnal encounter the next day over lunch with my wife, our waiter felt it apt to interrupt.

“The Night Marchers,” he said.

The what?

“You saw the Night Marchers, the spirits of Hawaiian warriors killed in battle. They died too quickly to know they are dead, so they keep marching.”

Apparently, they are all over the Hawaiian Islands, a place that has seen as much violence as any other less paradisiacal place–and not just after the white man came. There, where fruit drops freely from the trees and fish fill the warm ocean waters, where year‑round tropical mildness means shelter and clothing may be minimal, and therefore cheaply provided, tribes battled bloodily against each other for centuries. Over what? Never underestimate man’s ability to find excuses for war.

So, what does this have to do with the arts? Nothing, by itself, but it made me wonder just what we are doing when we talk of a country’s “culture,” and by that mean its food, its crafts, and maybe some of its more pleasant music. You know: Japan is sushi, bonsai and some strains on the koto; Ireland is corned beef, step dancing, and maybe a crocheted leprechaun. Hawaii, of course, is all flower leis, kahlua pork and the ukulele (which, incidentally, is Portuguese).

We do it to ourselves, too. America is hamburgers, cool cars and rock ‘n’ roll, right? We reduce culture to things we can consume, and in doing so, we gloss over the purpose the arts have to connect us to the realities of human love, human joy and human failing. I don’t know if the Hawaiian people ever developed a theatrical or poetic form into which they might pour the saga of the Night Marchers, but if that were done, it would go far to dispel the Hallmark image of the luau and the hula.

Every time a people looks at itself plainly and honestly in the mirror of art, great art happens. In the 19th century, a group of Italian composers, Verdi chief among them, stared down the violence and the intrigue of the Europe around them and put those elements into the music they wrote for the operatic stage. Long before that, the ancient Greeks found the rhythm of tragedy and composed dramas that live to this day as embodiments of human feeling at its most profound.

When one people oppresses another, it invariably makes the oppressed culture look cute through cheap art. While England beat up the Irish with one hand, they created silly music‑hall ditties like “My Wild Irish Rose” with the other, songs that no more resemble real Irish music than Playboy pinups look like real women. Notoriously, the American South created blackface entertainment to keep the slaves looking less than dangerous.

The oppressed eventually get theirs back, and when they do, it’s through art. The Irish produced Joyce and Yeats, a literature that beat the English at their own game. The African‑American experience compressed suffering into blues and jazz, still the most distinctive forms of American art. Some people would call this art’s “political” function, but it’s not that, really. Rather, it’s artists breaking through political (and economic and social) restraint to get to what politics and economics and society always try to guard us from: reality, in the form of human experience. If anything, it’s anti‑political.

Is there an American art today that looks past distractions to embrace the real world of feeling? We seem to have left behind the age of our great tragedians: O’Neill, Miller, Williams. Some would say hip hop fills in the gap, but I disagree. Hip hop doesn’t seem to elevate violence and other human failings into meditations on our existential condition, so much as it boasts of its protagonists’ abilities to thrive amid those things. But I’ve been wrong before.

By the way, something called the Arizona Aloha Festival comes to the Rosson House Museum at Heritage and Science Park in downtown Phoenix March 17 and 18. Admission is free, and the event promises “cultural activities, entertainment, a food island, a marketplace and more!”

Just watch out for your dreams.