Meditation: On Belonging

It starts in my head with a joke: "To be is to do" (Aristotle?); "To do is to be" (Nietzsche); "Shoo be do be do" (Frank Sinatra). It morphs to: To be is to long; to long is to be; to be is to long to belong.

Nowhere is belonging so longed for and being so suspect as in Hawai`i.

I was driving near Pearl City once, where I invariably get lost. I pulled into a church parking lot to look for someone to ask directions from. Opening the church door, I found a congregation of Pacific Islanders speaking a language I did not recognize, and realized this was a community I did not know. How often that kind of experience has repeated itself over the years, that sense of moving in and out of communities you might not see ever again. If one were to slice O`ahu like an onion, or like brain cells, you would see layers and layers of communities. Then you might see the Venn diagram that links them. Or you might not. It turns out that the move from layer to Venn diagram, from discrete communities to mixed ones, is a choice. And it's not always the choice you might suspect. Members of mixed families might choose to define themselves as parts of one layer; members of more mono-tone families might choose to see the diagram, the space (empty or not) that emerges between layers. Of course, when is "choice" really ever chosen in a place as fraught as this one?

Much of this negotiation of belonging has to do with names. Before you meet me, my last name marks me as Euro-American; before you meet me, my first name indicates I was almost certainly born in the 1950s or 1960s. After 1966, or thereabouts, the name "Susan" died out. There are complexities here, too, because our children bear first names from their places of origin, but our last names. You would not know that they are Asian-Americans if you only saw their last names, Webster Schultz. Their middle names link them to my father and to my husband's mother; like my name, they are old-fashioned Euro-American names. But their full names assert their entry into a mixed community created by adoption, migration, and, yes, love.

In her first documentary piece of writing, my honors student, whose family fled Vietnam in the 1970s, offers us her grandmother's Vietnamese name, but not the names of her other relatives. We have a hard time pronouncing grandmother's name, but she's patient with us. She tells us that the family experienced hardships, but not what they were. Name a hardship, I ask her. Her mother did not speak English well as a child, and was put in special education, says her daughter. And what is your mother's name? I ask. "Karen," she responds. My student's name is likewise "American." I ask if there is not a story in the move from a Vietnamese to an American name, and she nods.

Another local Vietnamese student in the class has a Vietnamese name. He does not communicate well with his family, he says. His father is a fisherman who leaves home for weeks, comes back only for short respites. He asks his father about the family's history by starting, "this is for a school project." The history is one of dislocation and work, further dislocation and more work. It's a hard story. I notice that the son, my student, also works hard, that what distinguishes him more in the honors class is his public school in a tough part of town, not his name.

Many of my students are the children of immigrants, others are native Hawaiian, sometimes with their own family history of migration out and back; the linguistic history of my English 100 class last semester was fascinating. At home, students heard Tagalog, Ilocano, Chinese, Vietnamese, Pidgin, Japanese, English with an English or a Canadian accent, Spanish. Hardly anyone had grown up in a family that spoke only English, even if that was their sole language. There were two Hawaiian students who spoke only English. One had fallen in love with Korean soap operas and wanted to study Korean. The other had been discouraged from learning Pidgin by her family, which had lived for a long time on the continent, and then moved back. Neither Hawaiian student spoke Hawaiian. Most of the students had some notion of judgment imbedded in them: either they hated the fact that they hadn't learned the other family language, or they hated that language. The choice of language seemed moral; students berated themselves rather than open up to the possibility that they had made choices as small children that they could not be held to account for.  Their narratives were narratives of choice--"at four years old I chose English"--not of larger historical or cultural or family issues.

That gets me to typos. Those of us who edit work in Hawai`i try very hard to avoid typos, not simply because they are mistakes, but because these mistakes contain meanings that are overdetermined. To get diacritical marks wrong in Hawaiian is considered an insult, though some Hawaiian writers (Sage Uilani Takehiro comes to mind) choose not to use diacriticals because there's more poetic ambiguity to be mined without them. Getting things wrong is what the missionaries did. They transcribed the Hawaiian language using letters whose sounds did not occur in Hawaiian. And much worse. So there's a history to orthography here that is incredibly complex--for Hawaiian especially. For the Hawaiian students in my English 100 class to speak only English reflected back on this history (though I've also had students from immersion schools who speak Hawaiian as well as they speak English).

The new Hawai`i Review came out this week. The design is beautiful. Many of the poems are deeply anti-colonial. (More on the content another time, perhaps.) There is also a typo. The poetry editor's name is No`u Revilla. Her full first name is No'ukahau'oli, but on the masthead of the new issue the name was spelled Noʻukahouʻoli. This changed the meaning from "the pleasure is mine" to "the joyous sweat is mine" (not so big a difference, if you read No`u's joyous sexually charged poems). The editor's reaction was one of despair: she declared that the typo made her "want to die." (The editor is not Hawaiian; she is also not Euro-American.) She writes: "I am a guest/outsider/settler in an illegally overthrown, occupied nation, and I have just participated in the callous misspelling of the name of a kanaka maoli friend whom I am fortunate enough to work alongside."

She is not alone in using this language; it's been in circulation for nearly two decades now. Candace Fujikane, whose book Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life helped to institutionalize the term named in the title, has said: "You can’t talk about alliances between local non-Hawaiians and Hawaiians. If you’re not Hawaiian, you’re a settler and part of the colonial problem. You have to look at in what ways Asians in Hawaii have engaged in practices that obstruct Hawaiians’ struggle for justice." (2009) Fujikane and her co-editor, Jonathan Okamura, are also not the original authors of this idea. I do not know that she is, but Haunani-Kay Trask was the strongest voice in asserting the non-belonging of Asians, as well as Euro-Americans, in Hawai`i. On the first page of the Fujikane/Okamura book, Trask is quoted as writing, "Hawai`i is a society in which the indigenous culture and people have been murdered, suppressed, or marginalized for the benefit of settlers who now dominate our islands" (2). The history is very bad, as Barrett Watten would say, but for the editor of a literary magazine to feel herself charged with a perpetuation of "murder" after noticing a typo is surely not a solution. It feels like another act of violence.

So the editor is hardly the first person to describe herself as "guest," as "outsider," as "settler"; she is hardly the first to do so with self-lacerating tones. She is not the first, nor will she be the last, to make an outright assertion that she does not belong here. That she is perpetuating a historical wound by way of the typo. I wonder why the self-laceration: she works hard, she publishes work from Hawai`i, she participates in communities on the island. She is a lovely, caring person. I want to hug her.

But I also want to suggest that these self-lacerating terms, these terms that mark people as outsiders no matter how long they live here, that these terms are paradoxically intended to mark those who use them as belonging. (I would like to thank my friend, Vera Lee, for helping me with this during a conversation some months back.) This is a difficult paradox to explain (to myself, let alone to anyone else). But to say one does not belong is to establish a stable identity position based on blood. To be "guest/settler/outsider" is to be somewhere, here but not of here. It's not to float, it is to be, and to be certain. To be [choose your term] is to belong in however difficult a way. But it also tells those of us who do not use the words "outsider" and "settler" to describe ourselves that we are that. It pre-judges our choices. It suggests that my students who are trying to deal with family stories of flight (including students from Vietnam, Cambodia) immigration, changes of language, that these students do not belong here either. That they inhabit that space of "not-belonging" that is not liberating, but which hurts, lacerates.

More difficult, perhaps, to let those titles go, to be here without longing to belong, without the judgment. It's appropriate that there are "slashes" between those words, for they are judgment words. To say: I am here, I do no intentional harm, I do good work. My life a gerund, not a noun. To put the emphasis on process rather than on static position. To think long and hard about these issues, and then to let oneself long--to let oneself be--that is my hope.

My contribution to the Asian American Literary Review

Last January I got the following invitation:

inquiry from The Asian American Literary Review

Dear Ms. Schultz:

Hello, my name is Lawrence-Minh Davis; I'm the editor of The Asian American Literary Review. For our upcoming third issue, we're putting together a forum based on the question below, and I'd really like it to include some perspective on writing by Pacific Islanders, Hawaiians, and Asian Americans in Hawaii, something I thought you'd be ideally positioned to provide, given your tenure with UH and Tinfish. The response could be relatively short, as short as 400 words, though longer would be fine as well, and you could feel free to stray from the prompt as you see fit. The deadline is late spring, maybe early summer 2011. I hope you'll be interested.

I look forward to hearing back from you. Happy new year!

Thanks, and best,

Lawrence
Editor, AALR


The issue is now out, so I'm putting on-line the contents of my response.  But really, buy one; there are a lot of fascinating responses, including one by my colleague, Gary Pak.


I've done tiny edits because I must, and added a few links to this and that.

Susan M. Schultz

[The opening quotation came with the invitation to participate.]

The notion of an “Asian American” literature emerged at the end of the 1960s and the start of the 1970s, when members of a generation just reaching their adulthood began to connect their commitment to left politics with creative expression. A few short decades later, we find ourselves witnessing a flowering of literature by Asian Americans that would have been hard to predict. Are there any continuities between the earlier generation of writers which first raised the banner of an Asian American literature and a later generation of writers which inherited it? Does it even make sense to talk about contemporary American writers of Asian ancestry as comprising a generation, and if so, what are some of their shared commitments?

—Min Hyoung Song, Associate Professor, Boston College, author of Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (Duke UP, 2005)

I am not an expert in Asian American literature. I am a publisher of “experimental poetry from the Pacific region,” as the mission statement for Tinfish Press, which I've edited since 1995, puts it. Tinfish does not publish Asian American poetry as such (or poetry by members of any other groups). But we do publish poetry by Asian Americans, which is why I've been asked to contribute to this round-table. Whether or not the poetry I publish can be considered “Asian American” may have to do with the hinge distinction Timothy Yu makes in writing about the critical reception of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee. According to Yu, in Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965, Dictee has been read as Asian American writing or as experimental writing. The poetry Tinfish publishes is experimental, but a good deal of the content of the work has to do with the experience of being Asian American. And so we swing on the hinge that Cha crafted.

Let me begin with a stark contrast, one I can quarrel with a bit later. Over the past eight months, Tinfish has been putting out one chapbook a month in our Retro Chapbook Series, which will end after one year. Three of our titles have been by Asian American writers, namely Mao's Pears, by Kenny Tanemura, yellow/ yellow, by Margaret Rhee, and ligature strain, by Kim Koga. These last two are both by women in their 20s, but the chapbooks could not seem more different from one another. Margaret Rhee's chapbook is about being Korean American (as well as about being queer). In the opening poem, “Nectarines,” she writes about the (unmarked) hyphen between Korean and American as being like a nectarine, half one organism and half another. As we find out in the poem, the nectarine was developed by two Korean brothers, the Kims. She then poses a racist statement by Jack London (who is always good for such insults) against the words of Terry Hong: “I consider myself Korean and American. A Korean American is a hybrid product of / both the U.S. And Korean countries and cultures.” According to her biography at the back, Rhee is a hybrid poet-scholar, as well. She “writes poetry in the morning, teaches ethnic lit in the afternoon, and researches race, gender, and sexuality at night.” Hence her “hybrid” might be said to encompass the categories of Asian American and experimental poet, bringing together the two halves of the reception of Dictee.

Kim Koga's bio note begins with her professional qualification, namely an MFA from Notre Dame. Nowhere in her note does she mention being Asian American. Instead, she lists publications and her curation of a reading series, as well as her work for Action Books. All we have to mark her as Asian American is her name. (As my children are Asian, but have my European last names—Webster Schultz—I know that names alone do not reveal one's ethnicity.) Her chapbook more resembles the work of the Korean poet Kim Hyesoon, who has written many poems in the voices of rats (including those in Tinfish Press's chapbook, When the Plug Gets Unplugged, translated by Don Mee Choi) than it does poems marked as “Asian American.” Koga writes about a beaver giving birth. The only people in these prose poems are referred to obliquely: “the beavers leave the gate open and hail away to cities and in habit your water. Fill cases of sewer detritus small pipelines of little bits of pink fleshes—come for teeth and shower nozzles—you bathe in squirming pink fleshes.” Where Kim Hyesoon's poems engage South Korean politics and historical events, Koga's poems engage contemporary ecopoetics.

Last year Tinfish published a chapbook by a 20-something Hawai`i writer, Gizelle Gajelonia, whose family came with her to Hawai`i from the Philippines when she was nine years old. Thirteen Ways ofLooking at TheBus takes several angles of approach. Gajelonia rewrites famous American poems, including Wallace Stevens's studies of the blackbird and Elizabeth Bishop's of the moose (here a mongoose), by moving them onto the bus system on the island of O`ahu. She often uses Pidgin, or Hawaii Creole English, instead of the standard. She also employs Tagalog, a language she has mostly forgotten but overhears on the TheBus. And she also engages issues of being Filipino in a place where many native Hawaiians feel that their land is occupied. Hawai`i is one place where Asian Americans are sometimes seen not as a struggling, or even model, minority, but as powerful interlopers. (The Asian Settler Colonialist model is not one I find compelling, but students in my English department have to reckon with it.) Her finest moment is a rewriting of The Waste Land to include the words of Hawai`i's last queen, Liliu`okalani. Finally, she writes a prayer for Ikaika, a boy on the high school football team that her speaker has a crush on.

Our one full-length book of this year is by Jai Arun Ravine, a Thai-American transgender poet (female to male), and then entwine. If Asian American poetry can be said often to be about issues of identity and family, then this book fits. But if racial identity is marked more as language—the book works a seam between Thai and American English, then moves into questions of documentation, like birth certificates and visas—then the book expands that category. As language and race are not inevitably joined (as the name issue elucidates, and Ravine has changed his name repeatedly), this book questions Asian Americanness as it goes. And, if Asian American literature of the 1970s was obsessed with food as a cultural marker, then Ravine's book, by presenting us with instructions on how to peel a mango, joins in and deviates from that tradition.

What the book and chapbooks I've been writing about so far have in common, oddly enough, is an emphasis on sexuality and gender, as well as engagements with language (Rhee's, Gajelonia's, and Ravine's, in particular). If 1970s literature came out of a liberation movement in part enabled by the Civil Rights Act of 1965, then the literature of the early 21^st century builds on that movement by linking it to others—feminism and gay rights foremost among them. 21^st poetry is highly synthetic, but its originality is in the ways in which ingredients are mixed, or mangoes and nectarines are created, and then peeled. It also grafts onto many strands of American poetry, by Asian and other writers, hybridizing, peeling, and consuming them as it goes.

One recent Tinfish book that deals directly with the Asian American experience is Kaia Sand's Remember to Wave, a long poem focused on a walk to the Expo Center in North Portland where Japanese Americans were first rounded up, before being interned in the interior of the continent. This book, down to its appreciative blurb by Lawson Fusao Inada, participates in an important tradition of Asian American writing about that awful, immoral period in American history. That it was written by a woman whose birth heritage is Norwegian only complicates the question. It complicates matters in ways that are typical, I hope, of Tinfish's publishing practice. We seek to explore history and culture, but we do not want overmuch to attach them to racial categories.

Juliana Spahr in/on Hawai`i: _well then there now_

Last Fall I taught an honors composition class, which focused on place-based writing. One of our texts was Juliana Spahr's "Dole Street," an essay she wrote in 2001 about the street on which she lived, which runs through the makai (ocean, south) side of the University of Hawai`i, where she taught. "It's amazing that someone who had lived here for such a brief time learned so much about this place," said one student who has lived here all her life. The essay is a marvel of observation, built from a question: what is the history of the street I live on? Out of that question came others: what is my place on this street that I live on? What is my place in the history of what this street means to Hawai`i's history? I begin to feel the force of Spahr's characteristic repetitions in my own syntax. This is her fourth book about Hawai`i, and the one I like best. The others are Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You (Wesleyan, 2001), This Connection of Everyone with Lungs (University of California Press, 2005), and The Transformation (Atelos, 2007). well then there now is published by Black Sparrow (2011). The book has been reviewed in the Honolulu Weekly by Shantel Grace.

Spahr's essay "Dole Street," collected in this volume, is built of narrative history, photographs, personal memories, stories told about place by Hawaiians, immigrants, settlers (more on that last word in a moment). There is a schematic map of the street that reminds me of the image puzzle in The Little Prince. Instead of a snake who has swallowed an elephant, however, this map shows a snake swallowing Honolulu, from St. Louis Heights on one end, to Maryknoll and Punahou Schools on the other. The elephant in the room is what it means to be a white schoolteacher in Hawai`i: "As the stereotypical continental schoolteacher, I need to think about how to respect the water that is there," she writes, "how not to suck it all up with my root system, how to make a syncretism that matters, how to allow fresh water to flow through it, how to acknowledge and how to change in various unpredictable ways" (49).

The best teaching often involves little more than pointing one's stereotypical teacher-finger and asking questions. Here, look at this place you think you know and find out its history, its ecology, its names. While tourism gets a bad name, and for good reason, there's something beautifully touristic about looking at the place you live in with fresh eyes--and then doing the non-touristic hard work of finding out what you've looked at. It's a move from looking to seeing, not one from looking to taking. That's what Spahr tells us throughout this essay and this book.

Asking what this means matters.
And the answer also matters.


But back to that word, "settler." Near the end of "Dole Street," Spahr takes issue with a syncretistic view of Hawai`i (the happy multi-culti view that everyone mixes and gets along, which the tourist bureau propagates): "It is that Dole Street mainly tells a certain history, a history of how the arrival of western education and its separations and refusals to mix came with and was propped up by settlers who came mainly from the continent and their powers" (49). And then the clincher: "It tells an old story, which is also a current story."

Yes and no. Let me historicize a bit. The power of the word "settler" (more powerful to me than to a reader unfamiliar with Hawai`i, no doubt) comes with a long story attached to it. Spahr lived in Hawai`i from 1997 through 2003, spending 2001 in New York City. The Acknowledgments to her book page tells us where her work from that time was published, but there are no dates, except for mention that "Some of We and the Land That Was Never Ours" was reprinted in Best American Poems of 2001 (ironic considering its content). It might bear saying that she wrote her Hawai`i pieces while she was living here. "Dole Street" was published for the Subpoetics collective (selfpublish or perish, it was called) in 2001. This would be five years after Haunani-Kay Trask's well known remarks to the MELUS conference, which was held in Honolulu in 1997. In that address, Trask shifted the operating paradigm in Hawai`i from one that privileged "locals" (for the most part non-white people born and raised in Hawai`i) to one that privileged native Hawaiians and declared that haole and Asians were all "settlers." The first concept was made current by the Bamboo Ridge group (founded, 1979), and the second by `oiwi journal (founded, 1998) and other publications. This speech inspired Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura to collect essays on Asian Settler Colonialism, a text that is used often in English department classes to this day. That text, with less rhetorical panache than Trask's speech, ordains that everyone who came to Hawai`i, whether to own a plantation or to work as contract labor (or as a refugee from the Khmer Rouge), is responsible for the ills that have befallen Hawai`i and for keeping Hawaiians from being sovereign in their own islands.

It's important to think about power, history, race, class. But the Asian settler colonialism argument would not be so powerful if it did not leave out so much out. While it has caused everyone I know here to think and rethink their lives, it paradoxically dehistoricizes Hawai`i and the literature of Hawai`i in ways that mask change. More significantly, it has worked against the creation of alliances across categories, especially racial ones, but also class differences. By making politics a question of blood quantum, it ignores our (inclusive) urgent need to come together in opposition to military build-up, environmental destruction, houselessness, the third-worldization of Hawai`i. And against globalization. The UHM campus displays a huge banner in front of the main administration building welcoming APEC to Honolulu. That is a problem for all of us to tackle.

Spahr's book replays many of these arguments, without explaining them for the reader outside of Hawai`i. Her arguments waver between extremes. Her sonnets on blood take both sides of the debate, showing how everything is interconnected, but also castigating "settlers" (including her and her partners) for "bunkering." "And because we could not figure it out bunkering was a way for us / to claim what wasn't really ours, what could never really be / ours and it gave us a power we otherwise would not have had / and and we believed that this made the place ours." This comes before the very end of this sequence, exquisite in its ambivalences: "this place was not ours until we

grew and flowed into something other than what we were we
continued to make things worse for this place of growing
and flowing into even while some of us came to love it and let
it grow in our own hearts, flow in our own blood. (29)

The enjambment is telling: "what we were we / continued to make things worse." Were the second "we" to fall to the next line, it would be easy: "we continued to make things worse," which is part of what she's writing. But "what we were we" is a crucial question, too, and a more surprising one. That's the question. Are we we because we belong to one or another group, or because we care about this place. So often one's desire to participate in group 2 gets blocked by one's perception that groups 1 matter more.

But I don't think that is the final view, or even the majority view, certainly not when I take my kids to soccer or baseball or hula practice and feel the pull of a larger community than that of the university or the anger in the voice of a father berating his kids, or people yelling insults at one another. All of these happen, but "we" are also welcomed into community, if we enter it on its terms. Which we will we be also provocatively shuts out the possibility of "I." The "I" is lyric, but it is also a bunker, I think I hear (want to hear) Juliana saying to me. Rewrite the lyric as a we and we're getting somewhere. Especially if "we" is that difficult thing, a hard-earned syncretism.

Another essay, "2199 Kalia Road," gets at the conflict between private ownership and beach access in Waikiki. There's an admirable playfulness here; Spahr writes that she liked to "indulge in the myths of Waikiki as much as possible" and to suggest visitors drink a mai tai at the Halekulani, otherwise the villain in this piece. (This reminds me of Charles Bernstein who, on catching sight of the old Tahitian Lanai bar in 1992, exclaimed, "now here's the real Hawai`i!") She gets at the many things missing from the Halekulani's presentation of itself to its temporary residents, including the seediness of its surround. She tells us that the beach has been renamed Gray's Beach from the original Kawehewehe, "which means the opening up." She tells us how nostalgia sells. But she also moralizes. The "fellow working class midwesterners [wander] around with fake smiles on their faces." How are we to know the authenticity of a midwestern smile? The midwest from which these tourists flee is full of "awful midwestern rust and environmental decay" (115), where one presumes the frowns are real. And so it's not surprising that the centerpiece of this essay is a fairy tale in reverse, one that begins in happiness and ends very badly indeed, with a dead haole, pushed into the Ala Wai canal by a man with "anti-caucasian psychosis" (120). In the fairy tale (and like a fairy tale), people are divided into neat binaries. Dillingham is "an evil man," while "now there are two sorts of people associated with Waikiki[,] those who sign deals in the spirit of the Kewalo and live the way of the dredge". . . and those who live the way of the watershed as much as they can" (120).

Yes, Hawai`i often seems to live according to fairy tales, whether those that govern the tourist industry's propaganda, or the one in which the wicked witch of Dillingham is thrown in the canal and destroyed in the very place he (or someone with his skin color) had dredged. I applaud Spahr for offering up these narratives about this place. Her observation and her reportage are wonderful. Less compelling to this reader are those moments when she falls into a previously charted narrative about the role of the "haole" in Hawai`i's history. That's a hard one to think your way out of, but I hope some of us can begin to do that work, make things rather than feed the binaries of inside and outside.

Last weekend I thought I detected a shift in the tectonic plates that compose Hawai`i's literary world. At a reading of "native voices," organized by Craig Santos Perez and Brandy Nalani MacDougall, there was no mention of settlers, no visceral bitterness. The anger there was (and is) folded into erotic narratives (by No`u Revilla, for one). The force of the literature and orature came from within. There were links being made between Pacific Islanders, if not others. There was power there, and it was not the power of division, but of making, joyful making. This is not to say that anger has been overcome, or that it has no role in changing this place. Everyone but everyone in Hawai`i is always already angry about something. But it is to say that things may be happening that push us past the colonial/post-colonial/neo-colonial moment and into a new place, where literatures--whether native or Asian or white--can operate without constant fault-finding.

__________

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Confrontations / Coalitions: The Value of Hawai`i Part One

Kuykendall 410, the room where English department faculty go to hear and deliver colloquia, like other rooms in the building, is confining. As Mari Matsuda said yesterday, you can't see the mountains (behind the back wall) and you can't feel the trade winds. It signifies public education as a proto-industrial activity, divorced from place or local purpose. This room, large and cold and capable of "holding" dozens of people, was the stage for two events in my professional life this week, events that signify to me where we are (actually, conceptually, metaphysically!) as writers and residents of this state.

On Tuesday evening, Adam Aitken's and my Foundations of Creative Writing course met in 410 to discuss readings that can be found in this previous blog post and on-line. The readings include a take-down of W.S. Merwin for rewriting Pi`ilani's narrative of the life of her husband, Ko`olau (also made internationally famous by Jack London, but that's another story, indeed); a back and forth between Ku`ualoha Ho`omanawanui and Dennis Kawaharada about whether or not his work (the publication of Hawaiian mo`olelo in English in books and on-line) amounts to an appropriation of Hawaiian culture; and an essay by Nandita Sharma and Cynthia Wright that argues (in part) against the Asian Settler Colonialism paradigm set forth in a book by that name co-edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Okamura. The readings were intended to provoke, but I envisioned the conversation as one between friends (the students are fond of one another), where we poked at sore spots, but then worked our way toward a place where we as creative writers can all be active, productive.

Needless to say, perhaps, the class did not work to plan, although it did prove productive. A palpable tension filled the air-conditioned room. I began by suggesting that there's something Platonic about considerations of literature in Hawai`i, that more emphasis is put on "truth" than on imagination. Many of our literary controversies have entailed arguments over the truths of representations (of Filipinos, Hawaiians) or language (did you get your Pidgin right, your Hawaiian?).

We had opinions across the spectrum, from "anything goes" to "what can I write about here, when everything seems sealed off culturally?" We talked about the act of framing; if you say you don't know exactly what you're talking about, one student surmised, you can forge ahead. If you let people know you are writing what you hear, then you can get languages wrong, another posited. On the other side, there was suspicion of the audience, the readers who may know nothing about Hawai`i. One woman said she had taught someone in NYC a phrase in Hawaiian, which she worries she butchered, and is scared that the woman might consider her to have been "authentic" in some way. Another student talked about being but not appearing Hawaiian, growing up immersed in pop culture, and experiencing the sting of being told she wasn't "Hawaiian enough." And then a white male student erupted into an angry confusing diatribe about being called an "f-ing haole" and how the local community does not spend all its time thinking about these academic issues. He walked out.

On a personal level, I was left feeling that the students did not trust me or each other, that the conversation had been warped by fears of saying something that would be judged ill by someone else in class, or reported on to others outside of class. There was a sense that most of what was most valuable to say didn't touch the air-conditioned air. But Adam spoke eloquently about migration and his own experience as a mixed race person in Australia who has circulated around the globe for love and work. And I launched into my notion of "positive critique." If something is missing in the literary community here, fill it in. Write it. Publish it. Make alliances with other people who live here over the big issues, like the economy, like tourism, like militarism.

The class ended. I got some impassioned emails and much silence. I hear through the grapevine that some students didn't want to have the conversation at all; others worry that they didn't explain themselves well enough. And so the conversation will go on, mostly internally in ways that can be destructive, but one hopes can branch out, move, form, not get stuck. Stuck is a place that Hawai`i, or at least academic Hawai`i, lives in too much of the time.

Fast forward to Thursday at noon. The first of several panel discussions of The Value of Hawai`i: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future, edited by Craig Howes and Jon Osorio, and published by the University of Hawai`i Press. A large audience showed up from all over campus and the local community. We sat facing the windows that run only at the top of the room, so all you see are some clouds, if you're lucky. We sat facing Jon Osorio, Carlos Andrade (and their guitars), Tom Coffman, and Craig Howes. It was one of the few days I didn't have my camera with me, so it will need to be an imagined past for my readers. The event was advertised as an overview; the more focused discussions--of the military, tourism, education--will follow in coming weeks.

In somewhat backwards chronology, Osorio led us through the 1970s in Hawai`i, when the Hawaiian sovereignty movement became strong. No one could have imagined how strong it would become, he said, nor how many small movements it would inspire: the Protect Kaho`olawe Ohana, the Waiahole/Waikane protests, which led to the state mandating against development in that area (very near where I live), and so on. Many of these movements were peopled by the poor, the uneducated, but they spoke truth to power. Coffman then filled in the backstory of the 1960s, just after statehood, when Hawai`i took off economically, when multi-ethnic Hawai`i was a model for the rest of the country. Howes spoke of the near-universal health care coverage Hawai`i had as recently as the mid-80s and early-90s. Andrade sang a mele he wrote about Hā`ena on Kaua`i, where real estate and property tax prices are driving Hawaiians off their land. Julia Roberts, it seems, is a heavy in this discussion, as she paid $15 for a piece of property.

What impressed me most was the way that Osorio, in particular, spoke of Hawai`i as a place where we live, a place we need to protect. While he aims to work toward an independent Hawai`i (a goal toward which I have yet to figure out my own feelings and thoughts), he also means to do so un-exclusively, by figuring a community of like-minded (rather than racially-marked) citizens. As he writes in his essay from the book, restoring the Hawaiian Kingdom has garnered support over the past decade "because it does not lead to the destruction of relationships among friends and families because of race" (18).

Without in any way thinking this was a panacea for what ails us, I left the room feeling lighter, more optimistic than I have in years about how we all live and think about our lives here. I felt at home, and that's a place I want to be.

As a digression that is not one: Carlos Andrade talked about the need for self-sufficiency in growing food and trying to avoid consuming resources. I'm proud to say that my husband, Bryant Webster Schultz, has taken upon himself the project of easing us, to whatever small extent we can, off the grid.


He abandoned the dryer months ago, and hangs our clothes outside. He bought solar panels, so that our living room lights in the evening run off solar. He got us a rain barrel, so we can water our plants without using the tap. And he's now built a garden box, with plans for more on the bottom lanai, along with a second rain barrel. To a large extent this is all symbolic. We still drive too much--to Sangha's school, to my workplace, to Radhika's soccer games in Waipahu--but we are at least experimenting with the notion that we do not need to spend the world's resources at so quick a rate.




In future, I'd like to blog about the effects of this fresh paradigm of Hawai`i on the literature of Hawai`i. What does this mean for our notions of form? Practice? Publishing? Content (something we who teach CW think too little about with our students, I fear). Until then . . .

[Editor's note, 10/2/10: At this morning's soccer game, I talked to Chris Cummins (about whom a bit more at the end of this post), who remarked on the irony that the self-sufficiency I describe at the end of the post depends on privilege--space in which to grow things, put up solar panels, and the money to do it. The guy in a tent in the park can't grow his own food, Chris pointed out. Nor can he, in his small apartment, which he compared to the windowless hole of Kuykendall 410, remembered vividly from his student days. He also talked again about the "many directions" Hawaiians can go with the issues raised earlier in this post, legally, culturally, politically. Complication is the coin of the realm.]

_KAILUA_ : The Book as Plural Pronoun

I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to un-link two intellectual and cultural movements now current at the University of Hawai`i. One involves the ongoing recovery of Hawaiian language, orature, literature, and culture, a project that has gained momentum since the 1970s. The other is a critique of Asian settler colonialism (by implication also White Settler Colonialism) set forth in Candace Fujikane's and Jonathan Okamura's recent anthology of essays, Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawai`i. University of Hawai`i Press). When these two ways of thinking are linked, this happens: "You can’t talk about alliances between local non-Hawaiians and Hawaiians. If you’re not Hawaiian, you’re a settler and part of the colonial problem." If we cannot make alliances, then how are we to oppose the scourges of militarism, over-development, and an economy almost exclusively dependent on tourism, to say nothing of education, the losses of social services, and so on? If we cannot make alliances, then how can we celebrate culture(s) rather than argue issues of who came first? If the settler/native divide is seen as a permanent condition, then how can we together deal with Hawai`i's tragic and often criminal history?

A new book published by the Kailua Historical Society provides some clues as to how to celebrate Hawaiian culture, while decoupling that celebration (and grieving) from the divisiveness of "settler colonialism." In her introduction to the beautiful and incisive volume, Davianna Pōmaika`i McGregor describes the book this way: "There are memoirs and documents which introduce the reader to a succession of resident families who are Hawaiian, Haole, Portuguese, Chinese, and Japanese, military, and multiethnic." She then discusses the mo`olelo retold by Kahikina de Silva, stories that are used to critique contemporary Kailua, describing "the underlying message of this work" as "those who live in and enjoy Kailua should work together to re-connect with and care for the land and water resources of their ahupua`a. This involves a respect for the indigenous spiritual knowledge of the land and the Native Hawaiian ancestors who provided stewardship for the `āina (land)."

There are myriad directions to go with this book, but the one that drew me in was linguistic. (Another worth taking is photographic; not only are the archival photographs amazing, but so are contemporary photographs by the team of Piliāmo`o, or Mark Hamasaki and Kapulani Landgraf.) While I'm accustomed to reading experimental poetry that uses several languages at once, while I sometimes listen to gypsy punk by Gogol Bordello delivered in American English and Ukrainian Russian, and while the linguistic field of my daughter's soccer team is mixed Pidgin and Standard English, most of the non-fiction books I read are in one language. This book is different. While most of the essays are in English, the mo`olelo are cited in Hawaiian (`oiwi) only, and vast stretches of de Silva's text exists in a between-language, one that assumes prior knowledge of Hawai`i. While some Hawaiian phrases are put in quotations, hence, "With our persistent endeavor to 'nānā i ke kumu,' we ensure that the ensuing ponds and tributaries run clear" (Kahikina de Silva), most are not. Gone are the italics of old, or the quotation marks. What remains are sentences in which many of the nouns (at least) are Hawaiian. In introducing the selections from a traditional epic, Makalei ka Laau Pii Ona a ka I`a o Moa-ula-Nui-Akea i Kaulana, or "the story of the sudden loss and slow restoration of pono to Kailua," de Silva writes sentences like this one:

"As a piko, then, Kawainui joined the people of Kailua with their gods, their neighboring ahupua`a, and their own ali`i and fellow po`e kānaka."

Non-translation goes both ways, of course, suggesting at once the inability of English to convey Hawaiian cultural markers, even as it invites the non-Hawaiian speaking reader to learn these markers by way of context, not via a rote exchange of words. (There are perhaps metaphors of economy to be found here, as translation-by-exchange more resembles capital, while translation-by-example is a less abstract condition.) These sections of the book, marked by their appearance on goldenrod colored paper, record problems in governance among Hawaiians who lived in the Kailua area. In her retelling of the mo`olelo, de Silva critiques contemporary capitalist practices--those that are transforming Kailua a generic town of adobe-colored store fronts and a Whole Foods-to-be, rather than essentializing them as belonging to Haole, or Asian, "outsiders." "'Makalei' reminds us that each boundary is in fact a point of connection as much as it is one of separation; that ahupua`a, though self-sustaining, are necessarily cooperative entities; and that simply living on the land does not make one a contributing, symbiotic part of the land." The boundaries that connect are the ones to hold close.

My in-laws live in Lanikai, a section of Kailua that has, over the past several decades, been "discovered" by the rich and famous and by tourists. Where the once wide beach could be walked in solitude even when I first moved to Hawai`i (1990), it is now covered with sun bathers at most hours. The beach has shrunk; sea walls have taken their toll. If you want to avoid the crowds, you have to get there early; my mother-in-law takes her hour long morning swim before 6 a.m. most days. While you can find out on-line that Lanikai means "royal sea," Kailua tells us that its original name was Ka`ōhao. Lanikai, it seems, is the "real estate name," rather like Hawaii Kai on the other side of Makapu`u. This word means "fishing ground," so much of what follows is about fishing, including an interview with Linda Mahoe, married for many years to Solomon Kalapawai Majoe, Jr. who fished the area for decades. (Kalapawai is a name familiar to anyone who buys wine, beer, sandwiches or coffee from the store just off Kailua Road and close to the beach.) Jiro Tanabe's oral history is called, tellingly, "Kailua: When I Knew Where Everybody Lived." The photographs from the early 1900s show us why; there are a few small houses next to the beach, and a road (still there), even a sign (LANIKAI), but little more than that. Now you would see a line of fenced off mansions along the shore, and older single-wall houses farther in, remnants of the pre-discovery days.

The book's last chapter (before the "Afterword") concludes de Silva's retelling of "Ka Makalei A Kawainui"; she acknowledges the "odd choice" of Ka`ōhao as a place to restore and perpetuate Hawaiian sensibilities. True to the history, the story ends before it concludes well; a mystery remains of how to find a missing boy, "reconcile him and his honorable lineage" so that "Kailua will be restored." While de Silva notes that Samuel Keko`owai, who published the mo`ōlelo in 1922, had a target audience of Hawaiians who still spoke Hawaiian and "who were still immersed in their identity and culture," this publication opens that audience up to those who now live in Hawai`i. De Silva makes the stories public to "promote an awareness of the history of this ahupua`a and our individual places in that history." I take the pronoun to be inclusive, her non-translations of Hawaiian word-concepts to be the very boundaries that hold us close. The pronoun "we" is inevitably fragile; that is why it is so worth defending.

Contributors to the book include John Culliney, Carol Silva, Paul Brennan, Maya Saffery, Jane Allen, Diane C. Drigot, Deborah F. Dunn, Sally-Jo Keala-o-Anuenue Bowman, Brett Uprichard, Kihe de Silva, Charles "Doc" Burrows, and others. They range from scholars of Hawaiian culture and language to scientists to linguists to long-time residents of the area. Design by Barbara Pope Book Design. You can order the book here, by following the "purchase information" link. I purchased my copy at Bookends, Kailua.

A side note that is not one: While reading the section on Maunawili by Paul Brennan, I came upon the story of Princess Lili`uokalani's 1881 accident in Maunawili. She was later taken back to Honolulu on the steamer owned by a Waimanalo friend. In 1893 that friend, along with her friends in Maunawili, opposed the overthrow of Queen Liliu`okalani. One friend (John Adams Aolani Kuakini Cummins) was tried for treason in 1895 and plead guilty. His great-great-grandson coaches my daughter's soccer team.





[my son and mother-in-law on Lanikai Beach; behind them are the Mokaluas]

Chin Music Press & Issues in Creative Writing

[Tom Gammarino, Todd Shimoda, Linda Shimoda; photo by Steve Canham]

What better way not to watch a game of the World Series sans Cardinals than to attend a reading by writers (and an artist) of Chin Music Press? And so on Thursday, I went to hear Todd and Linda Shimoda talk about their literary/artistic collaboration, OH! a mystery of mono no aware, and M. Thomas Gammarino (we call him Tom because he's a Ph.D. grad student here) reading from his first novel Big in Japan: A Ghost Story. The works were high and tight, as befits the press that published them.

Both books are as involved with ideas as with plot-lines; their subtitles tell us that. Todd Shimoda's book is the third of a "loose" trilogy: the first features woodblocks and robotics, the second calligraphy and neuroscience, and this third, poetry and social networking. OH! offers up Zack Hara, "emotional eunuch" tech writer in L.A. who goes to Japan, teaches English, gets caught up in an on-line suicide pact, and becomes a vehicle for notions of mono no aware, or "things of sadness." Thus, the mystery of the book (as I gather, having heard only bits of it at the reading) is as much what mono no aware is as how Zack resolves, or fails to resolve, his emotional vacuum. Linda Shimoda talked about the way in which she and her husband collaborate on projects. She is a visual artist, very much involved in Japanese calligraphy and art. The process sounded somewhat familiar to me from Tinfish, where our collaborations are less than concurrent conversations, more like parallel tracks on a related route. Todd and Linda talk about a shared concern, and then adjourn to separate work spaces for months. He writes a novel, she creates a series of images. When they've finished their solo projects, they come together and organize the two pieces in conversation. Thus, Linda's project on emotions entered into his project on the failure of emotion; then, a third eye entered in the person of the graphic designer for Chin Music. The result is a stunning artist's book (how can it be sold for $22.50?).

In his recent Ph.D. prospectus defense, Tom Gammarino had waved OH! around as an exemplar of what he believes will happen once trade paperbacks migrate into Kindle form. The book, as object, will then be freed up to be an art object, rather than a mere carrier of words. We shall see, but the premise sounds reasonable.

Tom began the reading with a story. When he first went to Japan, he had long hair. The summer was too hot. He went to get it cut. He only knew three phrases in Japanese, two of which were "hello" and "good-bye." He and the hair-cutter communicated through gestures and pre-linguistic noises, which he replicated for us. She cut a large swath of his hair, sounded a question, whereupon he uttered his only other phrase of Japanese, "mono no aware!"

Tom's protagonist is a white American who goes to Japan with his band, Agenbite (yes, Joyce fans, that one); Agenbite is to Tom's book what mono no aware is to Todd's. Like Zack Hara, his emotional life is not right. Brain (his name invokes Pynchon, as does a lot of the book, which hearkens back to V. to this reader) falls in love with a Japanese sex worker, cannot separate love and sex, gets involved with a student, breaks up with her (much to her failure to care), and so on. As you can tell already, Tom is ushering in every stereotype adhered to by stereotypical American white males in Asia, but he attempts at the same time to expose and demolish them. This is a dangerous course, to put it mildly. But he mostly does so. The book is flat-out funny; he plays with the stereotypes the way a cat does with its prey, like some latter-day Rabelais.

What I most appreciated about Tom's writing, aside from its go-for-broke humor, was the way in which he crafts sentences. The book is not written in the clumsy everything-for-the-plot manner of much fiction, but almost as a collection of tightly wrought sentences. Tom's attention to language finds its tightest focus, however, toward the end of the book, when Brain is high on mushrooms (he ate them in a sandwich) begins to think in Japanglish.

You speak Japanglish now. Japanglish speaking is by what you are. At least the dad was honest. Strict vew of life, was his truth, you were informed entirely, it was war. You take those, the wife while having sexual intercourse, the specialist and of substance you are polite mutually. That then a certain way.

__________


Who gets to speak, and for whom, is a huge issue in Hawai`i. Tom's book takes it on like Philippe Petit on his rope. The question loomed when I attended Craig Howes's English 620 (Introduction to the Profession of English) course this past week. I was there to introduce "issues in creative writing" to the entering M.A. students. I did so by asking them to read one issue of one of the journals published in Hawai`i now: Bamboo Ridge, Manoa, `oiwi, Tinfish. Given that all of these journals are published in Hawai`i, their sense of where they are and whom they speak for is crucial not just to the editors of these journals, but also to their readers. While all of these journals are now active, one gets the sense of a current narrative that posits Bamboo Ridge as an historical object, `oiwi as a current one, and Manoa and Tinfish as tangential to current stories told about Hawai`i's literature. While there's an inevitability to this narrative, I find it unfortunate, based more on ideas about Hawai`i than about what one actually finds in the journals. Local literature, as it is taught in my department now, is seen almost exclusively through the lens of Asian Settler Colonialism, which posits Asians as part of a problem (colonialism, cultural appropriation, and so on), not part of possible solutions. Such readings, while they aim to be ethical, often rely on binary moral paradigms to make a space for Hawaiian literature and culture by sweeping away the claims (or indeed the texts) made by Asian local writers. Sure, the stories about grandpa fishing and grandson later on eating the food placed on his grave, have lost their eclat (they probably lost that eclat in the 1980s), but Bamboo Ridge has published Lee Tonouchi and Hawaiian playwrights in recent years. That they published a book by Ian MacMillan was itself a fascinating, but not often commented upon, event. He was the first white writer to be included in their canon of single author texts.

I asked Craig's students to imagine journals that would fill literary holes. They tended toward strategies of representation (generation, gender) and genre (nonfiction came up more than once). Publishing, I suggested, should not be considered from the point of view of desire to be published, but from the need to create communities of writers by way of becoming publishers. I look forward to reading examples of the work that feels necessary to these students.

I talked a bit about how a book like Tinfish 18.5 , whose writers are all Hawai`i born and raised, tries to field a conversation between writers from Hawai`i that is not based on nationality or race. I don't mean this to be a collection of "local writers," either. The term "local" seems to have outworn its usefulness. Perhaps we can develop new terms for the literature that creates alliances between writers in Hawai`i, no matter their identity positions or even aesthetics (though Tinfish's aesthetics are pretty clear at this point). I hope Tinfish can provide one model for possible literary futures here.

"Dissention is Patriotic": Fat Ulu's and Kumu Kahua's _The Statehood Project_

"Commemorating."
"Celebrating or mourning?"
"Expounding upon."

***

"Paradox. Ambivalence. A dialogue looking from all angles."

--Janna Plant, "Dialogue Notes RE: Statehood 6Feb09 Land Use Commission Meeting"


To read responses to Hawai`i's recent 50th anniversary of statehood (August 21, 1959) is to encounter stark either-or positions. In Nancy Moss's The Statehood Project skit, "Debate," the student Kenji says, "Think what it will mean for business!" while Ah Quon responds, "More people to oppress. Stick out in the fields cutting sugar cane." While Moss's skit is set at McKinley High School in 1937, in some ways the debate has not changed an iota. Consider the Governor's press release about the 50th anniversary. "Key breakout workshops include: Hawai‘i’s Tourism Future; Military Partnerships – Part of Our ‘Ohana . . ." These first two items speak volumes as to why Hawai`i became a state in the first place, and to the precariousness of its current economy, based almost exclusively on tourism and the military. Another gem among the celebrations of this 50th year is this one: "July 23, 2009 – The state’s namesake submarine, the USS Hawaii (SSN 776), the first Virginia-class submarine to be home-ported in the Pacific, arrived in Hawai‘i." The official celebrations, then, are more about what comes in from the outside than for what the inside is, a rich group of cultures and conflicts, a "state" unto itself.

Then there's this, from a series of articles in the Honolulu Advertiser by Michael Tsai. The money quote comes in the second paragraph:

"Fifty years later, Hawaiian activists are calling for an end to the statehood era, not as a goal unto itself but as a necessary step in remediating a series of illegal acts through which, they say, the United States robbed Hawai'i of its rightful status as a sovereign nation."

_______________________

The "or" in Janna Plant's question (above) is crucial: "commemorating or mourning?" It's also what makes conversation on the subject of statehood so difficult, and the series of skits and monologues now at Kumu Kahua Theatre in downtown Honolulu so hard to pull off. Pull them off they have--Harry Wong and his troupe of seven actors and a participating stage manager.

While mourning is clearly foremost in the minds of the "spontaneous collaborators" of The Statehood Project (more on the project's origins here), contemporary hot button issues (Hawaiian sovereignty, Asian Settler Colonialism, tourism, the military presence, and on and on) are mostly presented satirically. There's a joy and a lightness to the presentation that does not cover over, but opens up, these issues to fruitful discussion. Or so it seems to this audience member. (My colleague Ruth Hsu, whose piece "`Ohana" is included, says a few people walked out of the theatre the first week; no one but an actor walked out last night, yelling as she went that she would cancel her subscription.) Much of the humor is physical--a young woman's unspoken anger comes to life as she pummels her Navy sailor date--and its physicality proposes an immediate release, or redirection, to the tensions built up in dialogue.

The "spontaneous collaboration" is necessarily uneven, poem ceding to skit ceding to monologue. What holds the pieces together is a series of performances of Wayne Westlake's poem, "Statehood" which goes:






The poem is performed several times, first by a single actor, later by all the actors. The poem is spoken and sung as lament, as cry, as fugue.

If the Westlake poem is the chord that resolves the piece, the project itself is quite diffuse. Ann Inoshita's skit on a young local Japanese girl who discovers Asian Settler Colonialism on her own and decides she needs to go back to Japan, ends when she finds a sympathetic ear in the psychiatrist her parents take her to. The shrink persuades her that she needs to speak standard English and ought to learn American history, if only to oppose it. Gavin McCall's "Detention," about kids picking up trash at school as punishment, also comes close to a breaking point when one character asks how mixed race people could go back to their "homelands": "Yeah, yeah, so what, spend half my time one place, the other half somewhere else? How that would work with half-Hawaiian people, then?" The irresolution of the piece comes when character #2 tells his friend (#1, who favors statehood) that "Maybe no can actually do anything. But bra, no try deny what happened, the go rip on Ms. Kanaka`ole for talking about it."

Other highlights of the production were Ryan Oishi's "Ballad of the Last Goat on Kaho`olawe," spoken by an actor wearing goat ears and occasionally braying a bit, surrounded as she is by her dead (bombed) peers; Sage Uilani Takehiro's potty-humored take down of ethnic stereotypes, "State Throne," in which actors are all pooping together on one small pot; and Jason K. Ellinwood's "The 1959 Joint-Ethnic Commission on Hawaiian Statehood," another take-down of stereotypes. Double take-down, actually, as actors assume non-blood roles. The skinny white woman actor becomes a large Samoan; another actor is sometimes Korean, sometimes Puerto Rican; another is Chinese and Filipino.

The writing is good throughout, though I found "Bringing Donna Home" tedious and badly placed at the end of the show. But what makes this production work is that Kumu Kahua's actors perform the roles assigned them so well. Yes, it's a play and so of necessity a performance. But what they get at with near perfect pitch is that Hawai`i is a place where people are assigned--or assign themselves--roles. The state is a performance, often a deadly serious one. No wonder so much art here is broadly performative, whether it's slam poetry or comedy or theater. It's no mistake that The Statehood Project works best when it is most satirical; it's through our (sometimes angry, always self-directed) laughter that we recognize our parts in the ambivalent, fraught, paradoxical dialogue.






For performance times, ticket prices, other details, see here.

Buy the book here.

"Dissention is patriotic" is a quote from Kimo Armitage's "Onelauena"

____________________

Now available in a second edition, Lee Tonouchi's Living Pidgin from Tinfish Press.

Contemplations on Contemplations on Pidgin Culture, or Re-publishing LIVING PIDGIN, by Lee Tonouchi (2002, 2009)

One evening during the nearly interminable Pony League baseball season this spring, my husband and I were engaged in a heated conversation about our nine year old son's baseball team, which practiced or played seven days a week--too much, in other words. I don't remember exactly what we were talking about that evening, but I do recall that we looked at each other and laughed, realizing that we were speaking in Pidgin (or Hawai`i Creole) English. Not "proper" Pidgin, mind you, but an approximate version, full of intonation and short sentence(s). "Pidgin short," goes a poem well known here, by Diane Kahanu; "just cuz we speak Pidgin no mean we dumb," it concludes. How had this conversation come to pass between a white man who had grown up in Hawai`i but does not speak da kine and a white woman who came here twenty years ago, publishes Pidgin literature yet cannot edit or speak it well?

The community of local children's baseball is one in which Pidgin is the coin of the realm, or diamond. It's largely a working class world; many dads come to practice and to games in the bright yellow and orange shirts of road construction crews, carrying dust on their boots, exchanging handshakes and howzits before the game. Most of the dads, and all of the moms, code switch; to me they speak standard English, and to each other they speak Pidgin. Sangha's primary coach, who had a field of dreams out back of his house (a batting cage, with a machine that worked so hard it would stink of burning rubber, a partial infield grass, a couple of hitting stations, and an "outfield"), did not code switch. A middle-aged man who had been star quarterback of the Castle High School football team in his youth, he speaks only Pidgin. He might slow down a bit for me, but not much.






One of Tinfish Press's most important publications has proved to be Lisa Linn Kanae's Sista Tongue, a mixed genre memoir / academic essay boldly collaged by the designer, Kristin Gonzales Lipman. After reprinting the first edition several times, Tinfish recently released a second edition of the book. Despite the striking format and innovative method, Sista Tongue sets Pidgin in an accepted historical context. Kanae details attacks on Pidgin, early middle and late, the history of Pidgin and standard schools in Hawai`i prior to statehood in 1959, and the emergence of a powerful Pidgin literature from the 1970s until the turn of this century. She amplifies her history with the story of her brother's struggles with language, making an analogy between assumptions that he was handicapped and assumptions that Pidgin speakers are socially and economically "disabled." Pidgin, for Kanae and most residents of Hawai`i, is a marker of working class life, restricted opportunities, and suppression by the state DOE. It is also (in reverse) a marker of who's an insider and who an outsider. You speak Pidgin, you're an insider. You speak standard, you one haole outsider. If you are the latter and you try to speak Pidgin, you violate a boundary that is more than merely linguistic. And that is why my husband and I had our Pidgin conversation in private. In public, we know to stick with standard, or an inflected standard that bears witness around its sonorous edges to our many years here but does not claim for its speakers the status of local or insider.

Baseball dads and moms speak Pidgin to each other; coaching on and off the field is done in Pidgin. But the kids speak differently from their parents, not simply to adults like me but also to one another. Their chatter owes more (as my husband points out) to the video games and television and music they're drenched in to their interactions with coaches and family elders. I won't go so far as to say that most of them do not speak Pidgin, but they do not speak it as often or as vividly as their parents. The intonation of their speech is flatter, their verbs more standard. I was surprised to hear my son say, "I like bat" one day, and he always uses the Pidgin "for" instead of "so" ("I'll get the water for you can boil it," for example). All children use the word "much" instead of "many": "I have too much pages to read" is typical banter. But otherwise he and his local friends do not speak full-on.

This is where the work of Lee Tonouchi seems at once valedictory and visionary. When Tonouchi was a grad student at UHM, he made a vow never to speak or write in standard English again. He wrote his essays in Pidgin, filled in job apps in Pidgin, became "da Pidgin guerrilla." He began agitating for a department of Pidgin at the university; later he put together a Pidgin dictionary. In a move fascinating to me (for obvious reasons), he also removed, at least rhetorically, the boundary between insider and outsider by suggesting that Pidgin be taught to non-Pidgin speakers. Where resistance to Pidgin is invariably described as the resistance of the dominant culture to speakers of a non-dominant language, Tonouchi turns the issue on its head. He describes a class in which the main resistance is to Pidgin interlopers. In "Da Death of Pidgin?" he quotes a girl who refers to speakers from the Mainland who are "soooo off." Tonouchi continues:

A lotta people I know make fun of "Try go no like stay come la'dat braw" [odd Pidgin with a midwestern accent]. But wot's wrong? If we can accept grandma-grandpa kine Pidgin, Korean Pidgin, Filipino Pidgin, Nanakuli Pidgin, Kaua`i Pidgin, Hawai`i Kai Pidgin (get you know), den why are we so quick to judge--why do we automatically rejeck haole Pidgin?" (31).

Tonouchi quotes the comedian, James Grant Benton, making the point in 1997 that the insider/outsider lines were blurring, and that "haole Pidgin" represents the collapse of binaries. "So you include, you include da guy. Das anoddah variety of Pidgin, haole Pidgin. And everybody happy" (31). I don't know that everyone is happy when they read this sentence, but Tonouchi has moved from the proposition that Pidgin may be dying to a possible solution. Let everyone speak their own version of Pidgin--throw open the categories--and Pidgin will come back to life. This is not, strictly speaking, analogous to arguments about Hawaiian, that students in immersion schools do not speak the Hawaiian of their elders. But it does promise a way to keep Pidgin alive. You need more Pidgin speakers? Admit everyone into the club! The potential dangers are obvious; if everything is Pidgin, then nothing might be.

Ultimately, Tonouchi is less interested in who speaks Pidgin and why than he is in the developing what he terms "Pidgin culture," or a constellation of arts and viewpoints beyond the usual consideration of sociological and grammatical features. He aims to join other such cultures (from Jamaica, for example) in a parallel revival of what Edward Kamau Brathwaite called "Nation Language." While this part of his book is less fleshed out than the essays and poems that precede it--essays and poems that involve a call to Pidgin arms/wings--it offers us a possible future. In the nine years since Tinfish first published Tonouchi's small book, UHM has not created a department of Pidgin, although there is a Charlene Sato Center for the study of creoles, founded in 2002 and now ably run by Kent Sakoda, co-producer of Pidgin Grammar with Jeff Siegel. And, while discussions of the relative merits and demerits of using Pidgin in the schools come up with alarming predictability and (often) ignorance in the local media, there is less talk of Pidgin in my department these days. Instead (is that the word?), the move to recognize that Hawaiian is already the official language of the state of Hawai`i, seems paramount. In the academy, if not in the local community I participate in as a parent, Asians are often construed as settlers, or more like haole than like Hawaiians. It's called Asian Settler Colonialism, which has its own take on "local culture" as more destructive than creative. Pidgin is seen more as a diversion than as a crucial element of Hawai`i's culture. Tonouchi addresses this: "My greatest fear is dat people going try posit Pidgin culture against Hawaiian culture and see dem as competing. I tink both can cooperate togeddahs as partners in resistance" (44).

While the subject of Pidgin attracts fewer decibels than there were only 10 years ago, I would argue that the conversation is still well worth having, in Hawai`i and elsewhere. See Barbara Jane Reyes's blog for more on how that last conversation might begin. Hawai`i surely does not need to be a monolingual, or a bi-lingual, state. There are at least three languages that signify Hawai`i to itself, languages that sometimes collide, sometimes overlap, often compete for attention, but each carries tremendous meaning. Pidgin's substrate, its grammar, is more like Hawaiian than like English, even if most of the words these days are American. It may seem frivolous for me to say that, insofar as I think Pidgin thoughts, they are mostly about baseball. But, as a lifelong baseball fan, that is not as trivial to me as it might be to someone else.

Re-publishing Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture at this juncture is a way both to point back and to look ahead. It's an odd book in many ways. As my former mail carrier told me (he was a great reader of Tinfish Press publications, which I passed on to him for Christmas), the Pidgin in Tonouchi's book is "long winded." "I could shorten his sentences for him," he told me. Perhaps this is because while the book is in Pidgin, it's also academic. Unlike Kanae's book, which separates out the personal (rendered in Pidgin) from the academic (in English), Tonouchi tells it all in Pidgin. And, while his plans for Pidgin's future may seem utopian, especially in an era when existing disciplines are being cut back, this book will help us remember that there such a future might yet be possible.

The new edition of Living Pidgin will be available later in the summer. The book will be redesigned slightly by Michael Y. Cueva to accommodate digital printing, and that means the cover by Ryan Higa will be in fuller color than before. Look to our website for details in a month or so: http://tinfishpress.com

[Editor's note, 6/27: I added an image of the color cover at the top.]

Asian Settler Colonialism

The recent AAAS conference in Honolulu, coupled with the publication of Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance To The Habits Of Everyday Life In Hawai'i, edited by Candace Fujikane and Jonathan Y. Okamura, has provoked recent conversation. Here are two sound bites, both from the Honolulu Weekly.

First, Candace Fujikane:


A response by Davianna McGregor, of Ethnic Studies, at UHM: