At the 1993 reading for Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s book, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, written almost exclusively in Hawaiian Creole English (usually called pidgin), I sat quietly while an audience of upward of three hundred people actively and warmly participated in her reading.1 I had moved to Hawai‘i from the mainland only three years before to take a job in the University of Hawai’i-Manoa’s English department. When Yamanaka referred to details such as the “Japan pencil cases” used in school, the crowd roared its response. I felt puzzled. Every one of her details sparked astonishment and pleasure in her listeners; there was joy in simply naming these objects that had never found their way into poems before. The audience was participating to an extent that approaches performance theorist Richard Schechner’s description of “social” drama, where spectators are performers. He opposes social drama to “aesthetic” dramas that separate audience from performer.2 In this case, I was attending an aesthetic drama and almost everyone else was participating in a social one. Never had I felt such a sense of other people’s community at a poetry reading; rarely had I felt so foreign in an American place.
To write in pidgin is to write in a language that has no standardized orthography; reading pidgin can be difficult even for native speakers who are unaccustomed to seeing pidgin words on the page and who sometimes remark with surprise on the spelling of words like “so-wa” (for “sore”). Linguist Suzanne Romaine writes: “Alterations to standard orthography of whatever kind are visual signals to the reader that something is significant. However, it isn’t always obvious that each non-standard spelling represents some significant phonetic feature.”3 Much of what may look like standard English in a book sounds like pidgin only when it’s read aloud by a native speaker. This is, I think, a crucial point; while the standard English reader is able easily to assimilate written pidgin in the silence and privacy of her own reading, she cannot easily do so when she hears pidgin spoken by a native speaker.
In their 1987 essay, “What Is a Minor Literature?,” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari argue that in minor literatures, which they define as those created by minorities within major languages, “[l]anguage stops being representative in order to now move toward its extremities or limits.”4 Minor writers are those who “hate all languages of masters,” and who assert that “what can be said in one language cannot be said in another.” Minor writers produce work that is inevitably political and that takes on collective value. Pidgin is such a nonrepresentative language, loud, extreme, and in this ironic manner, minor. For the pidgin writer the English language does not stop being representative so much as it stops being “universal,” a dangerous word that is too often used to denote “dominant” rather than truly multicultural. The moment of strongest resistance by the pidgin writer to the dominant language and its “major” literature comes, to my mind, when that writer performs his or her text, either in public or on tape. It is the sound of pidgin, the resonance of its shared cultural references rather than its presence on the page, which is most different from standard English. The audience’s reaction to Yamanaka was due not to the fact that they were finally hearing her speak her own words, the operative dynamic at almost every poetry reading I’ve ever attended, but because they were hearing their own words in a language more often spoken than written: “This is the authority,” writes Deleuze, “the autonomy of the stammerer, of him who has conquered the right to stammer, in opposition to the ‘well-spoken’ major.”5 This phrase, “the autonomy of the stammerer,” puts me in mind of Susan Howe’s eloquent quotation of Charles Olson, who wrote that in Billy Budd, “the stutter is the plot.”6 Yet Yamanaka’s stutter is different from Howe’s, not because they aren’t both steeped in culture and history, which they are, but because Yamanaka’s pidgin is a shared language, nonstandard because it has a separate syntax and vocabulary from the English that most Americans speak and especially because pidgin is mainly spoken, not written down. Where Susan Howe’s voice (for example) rises from the written page, Yamanaka’s seems to be transcribed on the page, as if it were an edited record of a previously composed text, or the score for a musical performance. Unlike David Antin, Yamanaka does not compose in concert, yet her language emerges out of an oral tradition that his work can only imitate.7 Deleuze is most interested in the ways in which minor languages transform major ones; he sees “the minoritarian as a potential, creative and created, becoming.”8 While Yamanaka and other pidgin writers will likely have that effect—her recent appearance on the television series The United States of Poetry hints at the power of her words for an audience of nonpidgin speakers—I am most interested in the ways in which the performance of pidgin poetry, in public and on tape, has transformed Hawai‘i’s literature and to some extent its culture more generally.
There is only one poem in Yamanaka’s book that contains more than a short phrase of standard English, namely “Tita: On Boyfriends.”9 What the brash pidgin speaker, Tita, does is to shift into what might be called standard American California Valley Girl English at a strategic point in her conversation with her friend (the much berated listener in/to this series of Tita poems). The rest of the book, made up of a series of dramatic monologues by young female speakers talking about their lives, is in flat-out pidgin. On the page, the poem is readily accessible to readers who are not native speakers of Hawaiian Creole English; Yamanaka’s spelling of pidgin words often overlaps with standard English spelling. The drama of the language switch is far clearer when Yamanaka reads the poem out loud, shifting from pidgin to standard English and back again. The question I will pose is, why does Tita change languages? And, more importantly, what does this shift tell us about the relationship of pidgin speakers to the dominant language and culture that so briefly makes its appearance in this poem? Finally, why is it that Yamanaka’s performance of the poem is so crucial to our understanding of it—and to the very different understanding of native pidgin speakers in Hawai’i?
The word “Tita” refers to a large woman with a loud voice, who is brash and often funny; she is a stock character in routines by such comedians as the late Rap Replinger and more recently by Frank DeLima.10 Titas gain their authority through their voices; Yamanaka’s Tita, who is a preteen, is all voice. But she also feels profoundly insecure about her Japanese-American identity in a culture saturated with the signs of mainland American dominance. She takes on the assumptions of the dominant culture even as she cloaks them in local talk, constructing a highly ambivalent identity for herself. Tita is, above all, a performer, and her sense of herself is highly performative. As Judith Butler defines performativity, “the ‘I’ only comes into being through being called, named, interpellated, to use the Althusserian term, and this discursive constitution takes place prior to the ‘I’; it is the transitive invocation of the ‘I.’”11 In this poem Tita instructs her quiet (because, we imagine, silenced) audience in the wiles needed to ensnare a boyfriend. As I hope to show, she thus mimics the dominant culture’s silencing of pidgin speakers. The following passage is crucial:
Richard wen’ call me around 9:05 last night.
Nah, I talk real nice to him.
Tink I talk to him the way I talk to you?
You cannot let boys know your true self.
Here, this how I talk.
Hello, Richard. How are you?
Oh, I’m just fine. How’s school?
My classes are just greeaat.
Oh, really. Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Oh, you’re so funny.
Yes, me too, I love C and K. Kalapana? Uh-huh, uh-huh.12
Tita’s switch of languages is significant for many more reasons than that of explaining to her friend the way to get a date. Rather, it opens up a problem with historical, cultural, and economic ramifications to pidgin and standard English speakers since at least the end of the last century, through Hawai‘i’s admission to statehood in 1959 (it was the last state admitted to the union), and on to the present moment. As a scholar and teacher of American poetry in Hawai’i, these are issues that I face every semester. Tita’s conscious change of language as she asks her friend about school reveals her to be a savvy sociologist; the shift from pidgin to standard is equally a shift from a “lower class” to a “higher class” language, and from what my students tell me is considered a less to a more feminine way of speaking. She is also switching from the local language to that of the “haole,” or white outsider. It is thus a “speech act,” rather than an act of unconscious speech, like that, say, of a native standard speaker who knows no pidgin. The speaker is acting up. At the moment that Tita makes this move, she causes standard English—even for the standard English speaker/listener—to become “nonabsorptive” (Charles Bernstein’s term for language that is not easily assimilated to meaning),13 just as pidgin is the “absorptive” speech of all the characters in Yamanaka’s book, and in the milieu that she describes. Or, as the Martiniquan writer Edouard Glissant argues in a related context, she causes the dominant and creole languages to seem opaque to each other.14 That this reversal of positions, pidgin becoming the dominant language, standard becoming downright unstandard, is painful (if liberating) for the pidgin writer is clearest in the last poem of the book, “Name Me Is,” where a girl and her friend Willyjoe tattoo their names on each other: his on his back, hers on hers, as they literally bleed language. Here is Yamanaka’s speaker’s pidgin misprision of Rimbaud: “I is. / Ain’t nobody / tell me / otherwise” (140)—the last words of the poem and the book.15 “I is” is for these speakers every bit as revolutionary as Rimbaud’s bit of proleptic postmodernism, “I is another.” And every bit as self-estranging, in the way that self-knowledge so often is.
Yamanaka’s discussion of dating in “Tita: Boyfriends” is hardly egregious or unique. In a 1960 article, “Communication: A Problem of Island Youth,” published in Social Process in Hawaii, Andrew W. Lind writes (remember that this was a year after statehood): “The widely recognized reticence of Island youth, particularly of Oriental ancestry, in speaking their minds in the presence of Haoles is in large part, so they themselves confess, a consequence of an unfounded fear that their expression may reflect a flavor of pidgin and hence of lower-class status.”16 He then quotes an unidentified “Japanese male” as saying “Youths have hesitated to date because of the lack of social confidence. I have been asked many times as to how to act, how to ask for a date, and even as to what to do or where they should go on a date, by my friends.”17
This young Japanese male also tells Lind, “Oriental youths are afraid to speak up. These youths lack social ease, in that they feel that they will be laughed at every time they open their mouths. They feel that people will not accept them, and that a mistake will show their intelligence.” Later, he adds that he has “seen youths actually perspire, while speaking.”18 (And which of us has not?) Stephen Sumida, whose And the View from the Shore: Literary, Traditions of Hawai’i (1991) is the first important study of Hawai’i literature, writes: “Hawaii’s local people have been stereotyped as being silent or quiet, not merely reticent but deficient in verbal skills and therefore incapable of creating literature of any merit, much less a literary tradition.” 19 In 1994 Suzanne Romaine quoted a writer who reported that her university writing teacher told her to write in her pidgin voice (an unusual event, mind you). Her response: “I cannot do it because I will be showing my ignorance to the whole class. I don’t want them to think of me as stupid because of the way we talk everyone thought we were stupid … And then what happened is I found this kind of artistic freedom because I saw the history.”20
Some historical background, of necessity streamlined and simplified. Pidgin developed as a “language of command” that allowed lunas, or foremen on the sugar and pineapple plantations of Hawai‘i around the turn of the last century, to give orders to their workers.21 Plantations, which were developed in the middle of the nineteenth century and owned by “mainland haoles,” brought foreign labor to work the fields, much of it from Asian countries: Japan, China, Korea, and the Philippines. The language that developed was a mix of Hawaiian, English, and the workers’ native languages; these days, the vocabulary is recognizable as English, but the sentence structure more resembles that of the Hawaiian language. This morning a woman said to me, “Cold the weather, ya?” The multiculturalism of Hawai‘i’s society, as well as its language, thus originated as part of a strategy of “divide and conquer” on the part of plantation owners. According to historian Ronald Takaki, “Though they imported workers as supplies, planters were conscious of the nationalities of their laborers. The employers were systematically developing an ethnically diverse labor force in order to create division among their workers and reinforce management control.”22 The extent to which the plantation system was stratified according to race and power structures is made comically clear by Milton Murayama in his novel, All I Asking for Is My Body, which was written in the late 1950s and published in the 1970s. The manager’s house in the novel was located at the top of the hill, the Portuguese and Japanese luna’s lived slightly below the managers, and below them were the run-down houses of Filipinos. “Shit too was organized according to the plantation pyramid,” the narrator comments, as those at the bottom of the pyramid lived closer to the sewage ditches than those at the top.23
Shit may not be so well organized in schools as it was on the plantations, but the linguist Charlene Sato writes that with the demise of the plantation system in Hawai’i, “the locus of language contact and change … has moved from the plantation to the schoolyard.”24 In 1924 an English standard school system was installed; children attended either a standard school or a nonstandard one. “Paradoxically,” Sato writes, “the English Standard schools played a crucial role in the development of Hawaiian Creole English, simply because they helped maintain the distance between HCE speakers and English speakers for another twenty years.”25 The child, Lei, in Marie Hara’s short story “Fourth Grade Ukus,” fails to get into Lincoln English Standard School (ironic name, that, since Abraham Lincoln is such an emblem of equality), because she pronounces “the volcano” “Da BO-LO-CA-NO.”26 Ukus, or lice, which stigmatize the student who has them, are also metaphorically words, pidgin words.
A scene of instruction from Yamanaka’s new novel, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (1996): Mr. Harvey, the English teacher, “says for the fiftieth time [is this number fifty significant, I wonder, since Hawai‘i was the fiftieth state?] this year: ‘No one will want to give you a job. you sound uneducated. You will be looked down upon. You’re speaking a low-class form of good Standard English. Continue, and you’ll go nowhere in life … Speak Standard English. DO NOT speak pidgin. you will only be hurting yourselves.’“27 Public expressions mirror private ones; the father in Yamanaka’s novel tells his daughter, shifting registers as he does: ‘And you, you wanna be this, you wanna be that, you better learn how for talk like one haole like me. ‘Yes, sir, I would really appreciate this job. What a spell of nice weather we’re having here. Oh yes, sir, I am a hardworking individual … Yes, sir, uh-huh, I am quite capable of speaking the haole vernacular.’”28 These are fictionalized examples of what might be termed a pidgin speaker’s primal scene, that of being silenced by a standard English speaker and his ideology, invariably based on economics (as was, ironically enough, the very creation of pidgin). Many not-so-fictional characters have spouted the same line, however; in 1960, for example, Elizabeth Carr wrote, in Social Process in Hawaii: “This group [of pidgin speakers] rightly deserves our concern, pedagogically, for, with the changing face of the landscape under statehood [in 1959] … these dialectspeaking citizens will find jobs to their liking increasingly hard to obtain and hold.”29 Twenty-seven years later, during one of the periodic language wars in Hawai‘i, a woman named Yoshie Bell wrote to the editor of the Honolulu Advertiser: “Pidgin English is as useless as weeds in the flower garden. Speaking English well is an essential part of finding a good job for any kids and making it in the future.”30 Hawai‘i is hardly the only place where this ideology is spelled out so neatly. Glissant, writing about another kind of plantation system in the Caribbean, which engendered another creole, argues that, “According to traditional textbooks [and note that these are books] creole is a patois that is incapable of abstract thought and therefore unable to convey ‘knowledge.’”31 But Glissant quarrels with the kind of knowledge represented by this argument: “We should state that, taken in this sense … abstraction is a presumption of Western thought, a presumption based on technological expertise and the means of dominating nature.”32
Diane Kahanu has a short poem that is quicker to the point, called “Ho. Just Cause I Speak Pidgin No Mean I Dumb.”33
Along with the repressive scene of instruction, there is also a revenge narrative. In the 1981 Hawai’i number of Mana, a journal published by the South Pacific Creative Arts Society, Leialoha Apo Perkins’s “Manifesto for Pidgin English” tells the story of an English composition class taught by a Mr. Holmes, who “treat[s] a paper with a fury that looked like a literary orgasm” and who insists on “correct usage” of English.34 We all know what that means. He meets his match, however, in a pidgin speaking student from the Big Island town of Miloli’i, which is contrasted to the “important” cities where Mr. Holmes has taught previously. When Holmes (whose name is an ironic pun on “home,” I suspect) challenges this student’s essay, the student—for once—talks back. What the student asserts is that he knows more than Mr. Holmes, by virtue of his having been forced to learn about a history that has nothing to do with him. “Dass w’at I mean. Dass yo’ history, man, not mine. So I know moah, an’ you less; but all da time, you tellin’ me I know not’in’ when w’at you mean iss I no can never know w’at you know because yo’ stuff is all yo’ own an’ you no can learn mine—mine no count for you, but yo’s have to count fo’ me. Dass bull, Mistah Holmes. Dass real bull.”35 Among themselves, once the smoke has cleared, the local students agree that this was their best composition class ever.36
When Lois-Ann Yamanaka came to my class on island poets from the Caribbean and Hawai’i a couple of years ago, she spoke at length about instructors she’d had at the University of Hawai’i from the mainland who told her not to write in pidgin. One recent Visiting Distinguished Writer, for example, had told her that his English was better than hers. She was angry at these outsiders who told her how to write “well”; she was also angry when she told an interviewer on National Public Radio recently that James Michener’s novel, Hawaii, portrayed Asians as “Asiatic beasts.” The week after Yamanaka visited my class I noticed that the atmosphere was more highly charged than usual, and it had been charged almost from day one. After a moment of confusion, I realized that I was “the haole instructor.” Because I perceived then—and at other times—that my voice was suspect, I discovered that the best way to run the class was to set up discussions that would run largely without my direct input. Silencing myself became my mechanism of defense against the strong emotions that circulated that semester. From that point forward, I better understood the dynamics of a sometimes angry silence.
But thirty years ago, the lack of a literature in pidgin seemed to many a valid argument against the language. In his 1960 Social Process in Hawaii piece, Andrew Lind asserts that pidgin’s “limited vocabulary and modes of expression, as well as the virtual lack of any literature, give to this language a restricted sphere of usefulness.”37 A couple of sentences further on he ascribes the following characteristics to pidgin speakers: “Servility, illiteracy, and slovenliness are of its essence and Hawaii’s claims to maturity appear to be controverted by its widespread use.” Going back a few decades, Lind’s language of maturity finds its echo in John Reinecke’s important study of pidgin, written in the 1930s and republished by the University of Hawaii Press in 1969: “In some places the local dialect, under the influence of past or present nationalist or regionalist traditions, has come to be a cherished semi-literary form of speech to be used beside the standard speech.” Its use in literature is unlikely, however, writes Reinecke, because “the local dialect wholly lacks prestige. Its only appearance has been in farce such as ‘Confessions of Joe Manuel of the Raddio Patrol,’ which appeared in the Saturday editions of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin between 1932 and 1933 … there will be no reason to use the dialect in writing, except for local color in fiction, in advertising [and] in foolery.”38
“If there is no such thing as a Hawaii writer,” asks the poet, Eric Chock, “how can you teach a Hawaii kid to write?”39
More recently (1993) Chock has said: “We in Hawaii are expected to believe that we are subordinate to the mainland. At best we are expected to believe that we are really no different here and can even be like the mainland if we try hard enough. We are asked to reject the feeling that Hawaii is special. And when we become numbed and lose the feeling, it then becomes possible to accept mainland history and mainland culture as our own.”40 His poem, “Tutu on da Curb,” is an elegy for island culture, disappearing like a traditional Hawaiian woman behind a cloud of smoke from a passing bus:
She squint and wiggle her nose
at da heat
and da thick stink fumes
da bus driver just futted all over her.
You can see her shrivel up
and shrink little bit more.
Bum bye, she going disappear
from da curb
foreva.41
In 1993 Darrell Lum, one of Hawai‘i’s best fiction writers in pidgin, told an interviewer: “We continue to deny the value of our language. Local literature is about validating a people. When you acknowledge a language, you acknowledge a people.”42 Marie Hara, Arnold Hiura, and Stephen Sumida organized the Talk Story conference in 1978 which, along with the founding of Bamboo Ridge Press, launched a renaissance in local Asian American writing. According to Chock and Marie Hara, the talk story tradition began when plantation workers gathered in the fields for meals and talked about political, social, and cultural issues.43 People talking story squatted on their haunches, low to the ground, and spoke softly, without moving, so that the authorities couldn’t see them. The founding of unions early in the century, which brought together workers from different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, came out of such moments of talking story—in pidgin. Chock thinks that Hawaii’s local literature is in “the high period of the talk story form,” a form that is necessarily oral in its origins. He himself didn’t think of writing poems in pidgin until he began talking (and I think it important that it’s talking) about writing not with professors at the University of Hawai’i, where he was a master’s student in the late 1970s, but with friends in the Talk Story group and the Bamboo Ridge Study Group, which was founded in the early 1980s. Talking about pidgin literature, at that point, still took place beyond the purview of the “authorities” who taught literature. Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers, published in 1978, contained no poems in pidgin, although some stories and plays contain pidgin dialogue.44
The young writer, R. Zamora Linmark, organized the reading for his novel, Rolling the R’s, as a performance—complete with drag queens and other costumed characters—because he wanted to “pay homage” to the voices he grew up with.45 As my colleague, Craig Howes, noted at a Local Literature Conference in 1994, most people first encounter local literature through performances, whether of Darrell Lum’s plays or dramatized short stories, the popular rendering of fairy tales into pidgin by Lisa Matsumoto (including Once upon One Nodda Time, a translation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and the recent Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr).46 The creation of Hawaii’s literature in pidgin is, above all, a collective effort.
“We say that a national literature emerges when a community whose collective existence is called into question tries to put together the reasons for its existence,” writes Glissant, who also (unfortunately) comments that “Martinique is not a Polynesian island. This is, however, the belief of so many people who, given its reputation, would love to go there for pleasure.”47 He claims that the movement from orality to literature is coming full circle, that creoles will develop an oraliture, as Haitian writers call it. Where better to represent this than in performance or on tape, in a “secondary orality” (Walter J. Ong’s phrase) that is truer to the oral discourse of pidgin than are words on a page?48
Edward Kamau Brathwaite famously advocates a “nation language,” or one that leaves behind the pentameter for a rhythm closer to that actually used by Caribbean people. It is also a public language: “Reading is an isolated, individualistic expression. The oral tradition on the other hand demands not only the griot but the audience to complete the community: the noise and sounds that the maker makes are responded to by the audience and are returned to him.”49
But when asked if he composes differently in pidgin than he does in standard English, Darrell Lum, however, said that no, when he is composing a story, he thinks of pidgin as a written language.50
Lois-Ann Yamanaka insisted on recording her tape twice. The first time, according to the writer, Rodney Morales, who was technical director for the recording, she said it didn’t go well because she didn’t move her hands.51 “The oral … is inseparable from the movement of the body … Utterance depends on posture, and perhaps is limited by it.”52 Yamanaka’s performances are remarkable for their physical and emotional intensity; as the performer/director Keith Kashiwada said to me, it’s as if she were born not so much to write as to perform.
The oral poet, according to Paul Zumthor, unifies his or her community.53 This is easy to see in work by Darrell Lum or Eric Chock, work that evokes a community united by values like family and Asian traditions carried on in the new world. Strange then that Yamanaka’s construction of unity comes out of poems so occupied with violence; it is as if community is being formed around the sounds of community falling apart. Yamanaka’s (and Linmark’s) characters are people under siege, threatened by domestic violence, by self-hatred, by mainstream American pop culture.
“Late in the summer of 1987,” wrote Charlene Sato in 1991, “Hawaii’s Board of Education (BOE) formulated a policy on ‘Standard English and Oral Communication,’ a preliminary version of which mandated that ‘Standard English’ [would] be the mode of oral communication for students and staff in the classroom setting and all other school related settings except when the objectives cover[ed] native Hawaiian or foreign language instruction and practice.”54 Opposition to the policy was, for once, loud, and the policy was not passed. But pidgin is still censored, in practice if not by law. Yamanaka has been asked to give schools lists of the poems she wants to read to students; sometimes she’s asked not to perform certain poems. I would argue that such censorship has at least as much to do with the poems’ being in pidgin as it does with their containing four-letter words. The poems are profane, but Yamanaka has taken this language from the world the students know, not from outside of it. The poems’ speakers are often racist, but the author distances herself from them. Yamanaka’s characters use violent language to talk about violence: in her poem “Parts,” which begins with a flourish of language so intense and seemingly innocuous that members of the audience start laughing (I’ve witnessed this at two public readings and in the classroom, when I’ve played the tape), a mother yells at her child:
What I told you
about digging your nose?
Who taught you that?
You going get
two slaps
I ever see you
doing that
in public again.
Good for you
your nose bleed
and I hope you get
so-wa stomach too
for eating that shit.55
The laughing always stops suddenly in the middle of the poem, as audience members realize that they are laughing at child abuse. The effect, again, is much greater when Yamanaka reads to a large audience than when her work is read off the page. Walter Ong asserts that “violence in oral art forms is also connected with the structure of orality itself. When all verbal communication must be by direct word of mouth, involved in the give-and-take dynamics of sound, interpersonal relations are kept high—both attractions and, even more, antagonisms.”56 Glissant certainly helps us again in this instance: “the traditional Creole text, folktale or song is striking in the graphic nature of its images.”57 More specifically, according to Rob Wilson, “Yamanaka’s local Japanese identity is hardly one of purity or ethnic wholeness, but one of self-division, self-hatred even, which includes a longing to be othered into haole (white) pop cultural styles.”58 To say this out loud, however, brings shame upon the community at large. And it must be said out loud in pidgin. As Darrell Lum, now working toward a doctorate in education, remarks, educators still intensely resist pidgin.59
Many of Yamanaka’s poems are about acts of censorship within a pidgin-speaking community against its own language practices, including the potent use of profanity. In “Lickens” we hear:
Ho boy, one time my small sista wen’ say fut
which we no could say ‘cause the word
us had for use was poot
and she got lickens with the green brush
which was mo so-wa than the fly swatter
but both was less so-wa than the iron hanger.60
In the next poem in the book, “Dead Dogs RIP,” the family’s dog, Wiki, participates in the censorship:
Wiki wen’ bite my friend Claude
on his ass ‘cause he said fuck
in our house. My sista told him
no say f-word around Wiki
but Claude start screaming fuckfuckfuck
in my sista’s face for fun
and Wiki wen’ rush his ass, for real.
But now Wiki dead.61
Glissant comments on standard French bumper stickers in Martinique that are creolized by adding or subtracting letters. In Hawai’i you see bumper stickers that read: “no blame me: I voted for Bu.” Bu (full moniker, Bula’ia, fake Hawaiian for “bull liar”), who sports a chaotic yarn wig and blacked out front tooth, ran for governor in the last election as a protest candidate, although he didn’t appear on the ballot. (My seventy-eight-year-old landlord voted for him.) He can now be seen on TV advertising for Pacific Nissan, which shows that there can be a fine line indeed between a language spoken as protest and that same language used as an advertising tool. The connection between pidgin and humor is doubtless older than Bu or even Rap Replinger, who became a local hero in the 1970s, but few are as acute at social commentary as was Replinger. In his “Room Service” skit, Replinger does the voices of a tourist asking for his meal and of the Tita who rather purposefully misunderstands, speaking in pidgin and substituting local food for the hamburger that he wants.62 As Schechner argues, “Western thinkers have too often split ritual from entertainment privileging ritual over entertainment.”63 If Hawai‘i’s readings and tapes represent a kind of communal ritual of self-affirmation, they do so often through sheer laughter, even when that laughter turns quickly to pain.
Glissant writes, in his “Cross-Cultural Poetics”: “One could imagine—this is, moreover, a movement that is emerging almost everywhere—a kind of revenge by oral languages over written ones, in the context of a global civilization of the nonwritten. Writing seems linked to the transcendental notion of the individual, which today is threatened by and giving way to a cross-cultural process.”64 Is Hawai’i’s literature on tape an “oraliture,” as Glissant terms the return of the oral to literature? Are Hawai‘i’s literary artists more like griots than like writers? Yes and no. Certainly, the act of writing in pidgin is an assertion of a kind of “nation language,” albeit in a place where most people speak the standard national language, American English. Reading that writing onto a tape recovers the sense of pidgin as a spoken language, though at quite some remove. This is oral language that has been written and then reread to an audience that is either actual (at a reading) or abstract (if the listener is alone) or a bit of both (as in classroom use of the tapes). To record a speaking voice is to fix it as firmly in time as it is to transcribe that voice in writing. Yet this paradox, this image of voice (like the performance poet David Antin’s “image of talking”), is strikingly appropriate.65 For pidgin is, among other things, a language of resistance, of anger (in Yamanaka’s case), of active nostalgia (in Chock’s case), a language that resists the absorptive talons of a dominant language and culture. As Glissant writes: “the role of Creole in the world of the [Caribbean] plantations was that of defiance.”66 It is at once a language of colonialism and postcoloniality, a language by which plantation workers were branded by plantation owners and lunas, and at the same time the language through which these workers resisted the world outside of their “talk story” culture. At a time when American culture is only getting stronger in Hawai’i as it enters through radio and television waves, cable, and the new outlet malls that are springing up all over the island of Oahu, these taped voices alert their listeners to the dangers—and the curious pleasures—of assimilation. But the spokenness of local literature also inspires nonpidgin speakers in Hawai‘i to learn the language. According to Keith Kashiwada, his friend, John Wat, learned pidgin in order to present the work of Eric Chock and other local writers in performance.
If Chock’s and Yamanaka’s poems are written in something like a “nation language” (though they lack any vision of a political “nation” separate from the United States), the poems themselves are hardly pure instances of talk story unmediated by literary notions disseminated by members of the dominant culture. For these are carefully crafted workshop poems; for example, Chock bases his poems on images, his use of images on T. S. Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative,” and he keys his use of pidgin to the particular image at hand. Yamanaka creates ironic written distances between herself and her narrators, playing Mark Twain to Tita’s Huck, foreshadows images and ideas, brings the poems’ elements to neat (en)closures. They are not just the poets of Talk Story; they are also poets who’ve studied with mainland writers teaching at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa. These twin influences are responsible for hybrid works, at once radical and conservative in the context of the Talk Story culture and in that of the university culture.
Work in pidgin, therefore, is almost inevitably in dialogue with the language and ideology of the dominant culture. In “Tita: User,” Tita argues that she hasn’t stolen her friend’s tapes:
Eh—no act. I no mo your Donny Osmond 8-track.
I hate Down by the Lazy Riva.
And I no mo your Captain and Tenille tape either,
so get off it. I so piss off right now
I like buss all the tapes
I did borrow from you.67
She then distinguishes between “stealing” and “borrowing”:
No get wise. No ac-cuse.
’Cause when you ac-cuse,
you act like I use,
and I no use, I borrow.
In any meeting of dominant and nondominant cultures the question of “using” and “borrowing” is crucial; the characters in Yamanaka’s world “borrow” American pop culture and standard American English even as they are “used” by it. Their modes of resistance are often seen as selfdestructive; as we have heard, the very act of speaking pidgin is still considered by many to be self-destructive in the face of a national job market and a school system that reflects—and enacts—mainland values. And yet there are now countertapes: contemporary Titas have not only the current avatars of Captain and Tennille and Percy Faith to borrow or use, but also the tapes of Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Eric Chock, and others. Now that there are Hawai‘i’ writers and performers, to return to Chock’s point, Hawai‘i’s children are becoming writers.
With the recent publication of Lois-Ann Yamanaka’s first novel, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, on the mainland United States by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Hawai‘i’s local literature has entered the mainstream, something that seemed impossible merely a decade ago. According to the poet Eric Chock, another major New York house told Darrell Lum about a decade ago that his work was “too provincial.”68 Signs of a mainland audience do predate the 1996 novel, however. Yamanaka’s Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre was the first book published by Honolulu’s Bamboo Ridge Press, which was founded in 1978, to have blurbs on the back cover; none of these blurbs is by a local writer. They assert, by turns, that the poems are “universal” and that they “transcend place” (Faye Kicknosway); that Yamanaka “refuels the English language” (Jessica Hagedorn); that her writing is “raw and elegant” (Kimiko Hahn). Howard Junker, editor of the California-based journal ZYZZYVA, goes so far as to say that “Lois-Ann Yamanaka speaks a language we all know in our heart of hearts, but never see on the page.” Do we all know this language? If we do, have we then denuded language of its immediate value as a carrier of culture (as Ngugi wa Thiongo would insist) and supplanted it with a metaphorical meaning that erases that function? How many of us can speak it? How many of us understand references like “Japan pencil cases” and “li hing mui”? The tapes that Bamboo Ridge Press has made of its authors since 1990 embody this paradox, that local literature is at once resistant to the dominant culture and is being rapidly assimilated into the multicultural lit biz. According to Darrell Lum, one of the founding editors of Bamboo Ridge, the audience for the tapes originally was thought to consist of mainland teachers who wanted to teach the texts in their classrooms but couldn’t read the literature out loud. But the reception by local listeners is, as you may imagine, quite different.69 Now, according to Eric Chock, another of Bamboo Ridge’s founding editors, the tapes sell mainly in Hawai‘i, and the best-selling tapes are those by Lum and Yamanaka, namely those with the most pidgin on them.70 For Hawai‘i listeners, the tapes reinforce a sense of community centered around the person of the writer/reader. They assert the importance of community (a central tenet of Lum’s and Chock’s definitions of “local”) over that of individualism (or the eminently written American tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau). But the fact that the tapes carry voices that are reading texts—even if those texts are written in a language that is almost always spoken—suggests that Hawai‘i’s literature is created out of a strategic reconstruction of the oral out of the written. Speakers of standard English, and almost all members of the University of Hawai’i English department, including myself, do not speak Yamanaka’s language; I think that is precisely one of her points in writing pidgin. That I have been speaking about—if not for—her, is ironic, and in some manner troubling to me. And yet, if I do not speak Yamanaka’s language, I certainly recognize its importance. It is out of a double sense of that recognition and that lack of it that I have talked out this essay.
1. Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1993).
2. Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 171.
3. Suzanne Romaine, “Hawaii Creole English as a Literary Language,” Language and Society, vol. 23 (1994), p. 541.
4. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “What Is a Minor Literature?” in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, ed. Russell Ferguson et al. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990): pp. 59-70.
5. “One Manifesto Less,” in The Deleuze Reader, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p. 220.
6. Susan Howe, “Talisman Interview,” in The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), pp. 180–81.
7. In “durations,” David Antin talks/writes that he is interested in “that kind of performance in which the moment directs me which way to go.” He speaks because spoken language is spontaneous, resembles the movement of thinking; Yamanaka speaks because her language belongs more to an oral culture than to a literate one. The irony is that Antin speaks first and transcribes second, while Yamanaka writes her work first and then performs it. See Antin, “durations,” in what it means to be avant-garde (New York: New Directions, 1993), p. 65.
8. Deleuze, 150.
9. Yamanaka, Saturday Night, 41–43.
10. Rap Replinger, Poi Dog with Crabs (Mountain Apple Company, 1992).
11. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 225.
12. Yamanaka, Saturday Night, 41.
13. Charles Bernstein, “Artifice of Absorption,” in A Poetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
14. Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, ed. and tr. J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989), p. 133.
15. Yamanaka, Saturday Night, 140.
16. Andrew Lind, “Communication: A Problem of Island Youth,” in Social Process in Hawaii, vol. 24 (1960), pp. 44-53.
17. Lind, 48.
18. Lind, 48.
19. Stephen Sumida, And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai‘i (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), p. 227.
20. Romaine, 544.
21. Lind, 44.
22. Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993): p. 252.
23. Milton Murayama, All I Asking for Is My Body (1977; Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1988), pp. 28–29.
24. Charlene Sato, “Linguistic Inequality in Hawaii: The Post-Creole Dilemma,” in Language of Inequality, ed. N. Wolfson and J. Manes (Berlin: Mouton, 1985), pp. 255–72. I used a manuscript copy with different pagination.
25. Sato, 255–72.
26. Marie Hara, Bananaheart (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1995), p. 48.
27. Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), p. 9.
28. Yamanaka, Wild Meat, 148.
29. Elizabeth Carr, “A Recent Chapter in the Story of the English Language in Hawaii,” in Social Process in Hawaii, vol. 24 (1960), pp. 54-62.
30. Yoshie Bell, “Letter to the Editor,” Honolulu Advertiser, 28 September 1987.
31. Glissant, 182.
32. Glissant, 182.
33. Diane Kahanu, “Ho. Just Cause I Speak Pidgin No Mean I Dumb,” in The Best of Bamboo Ridge, ed. Eric Chock and Darrell H. Y. Lum (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1986), p. 43.
34. Leialoha Apo Perkins, “Manifesto for Pidgin English,” in Mana: A South Pacific Journal of Language and Literature: Hawaii Edition, ed. Richard Hamasaki and Wayne Westlake, vol. 6, no. 1 (1981).
35. Perkins, 5, 8.
36. Perkins, 12.
37. Lind, 45
38. John Reinecke, Language and Dialect in Hawaii: A Sociolinguistic History to 1935 (1934; Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1969), pp. 180–89.
39. Eric Chock, “On Local Literature,” in The Best of Bamboo Ridge, 8.
40. Romaine, 534.
41. Eric Chock, Last Days Here (Honolulu: Bamboo Ridge Press, 1989), p. 63. Bamboo Ridge also published a tape of Chock reading from the book.
42. Romaine, 533.
43. Telephone interviews, April 1996.
44. Eric Chock et al., eds., Talk Story: An Anthology of Hawaii’s Local Writers (Honolulu: Petronium Press/Talk Story, 1978).
45. From Linmark’s M.A. exam.
46. Howes’s “Fact One” about Hawai’i writing is that “the audience for Hawaii writing will continue to grow at a faster rate than the number of its readers” (54). Craig Howes, “Tradition, Literary History, and the Local Talent,” in Hawai‘i Literature Conference: Reader’s Guide (Honolulu: privately distributed, March 12, 1994), p. 53.
47. Glissant, 104, 1.
48. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London: Routledge, 1982), p. 136.
49. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Nation Language,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 312.
50. Interview with Darnell Lum, April 1996.
51. Interview with Rodney Morales, April 1996.
52. Glissant, 122.
53. Paul Zumthor, Oral Poetry: An Introduction, tr. Kathryn Murphy-Judy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 13—31.
54. Sato, 653.
55. Yamanaka, Saturday Night, 68.
56. Ong, 45.
57. Glissant, 125.
58. Rob Wilson, “Bloody Mary Meets Lois-Ann Yamanaka: Imagining Hawaiian Locality from South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge,” Public Culture, vol. 8 (1995), p. 146.
59. Interview with Darnell Lum, April 1996.
60. Yamanaka, Saturday Night, 88.
61. Yamanaka, Saturday Night, 88.
62. Replinger, “Room Service,” on Poi Dog. Replinger’s appeal is not exclusive to Hawai’i audiences. Australian audiences laughed when I presented an earlier version of this essay—and played the tape—in Hobart and Melbourne.
63. Schechner, 155.
64. Glissant, 126.
65. Antin: “what i want to do is bring an image of talking out of the air and onto the page.” “the river,” in what it means to be avant-garde, p. 124.
66. Glissant, 127.
67. Yamanaka, Saturday Night, 35.
68. Telephone interview with Eric Chock, April 1996.
69. Interview with Darrell Lum, April 1996.
70. Telephone interview with Chock, April 1996.