{"id":5125,"date":"2012-02-13T07:00:38","date_gmt":"2012-02-13T12:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=5125"},"modified":"2013-02-25T15:40:10","modified_gmt":"2013-02-25T20:40:10","slug":"panax-ginseng-barbarize-the-rules-pt-1-of-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/13\/panax-ginseng-barbarize-the-rules-pt-1-of-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Panax Ginseng: Barbarize the Rules (pt. 1 of 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Panax Ginseng is a monthly column by Henry W. Leung exploring the transgressions of linguistic and geographic borders in Asian American literature, especially those which result in hybrid genres, forms, vernaculars, and visions. The column title suggests the congenital borrowings of the English language, deriving from the Greek <\/em>panax, meaning \u201call-heal,\u201d and the Cantonese <\/em>jansam, meaning \u201cman-root.\u201d The troubling image of one\u2019s roots as a panacea will inform the column\u2019s readings of new texts.<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

First, let’s give pause to these lines from Richard Hamasaki\u2019s \u201cGuerrilla Writers,\u201d from which I take the title of this post:<\/p>\n

golden rules of english?
\nconspiracies of languages?<\/p>\n

memories unwanted
\nworks are left unknown<\/p>\n

if what\u2019s to be spoken
\nneeds to be written<\/p>\n

sabotage the language
\nignore the golden rules<\/p>\n

guerrilla writer
\nbarbarize the rules<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Keep in mind that the capitalization of lines and proper nouns is endemic to the English language’s hierarchical structure, and keep in mind Hamasaki’s argument as I discuss the politics, the rhetoric, and the aesthetic of Hawaiian Pidgin as a metonym for \u201cAsian American\u201d literature and letters.<\/p>\n

Here’s a passage from the New Testament, translated in 2000 by Wycliffe Bible Translators. This translation is from Da Jesus Book<\/em><\/a> and the passage is from Matthew Tell Bout Jesus 14:29-31:<\/p>\n

Peter climb outa da boat, an walk on top da water fo go by Jesus. But when he see how da wind was, he come scared, an start fo go down inside da water. Den he yell, \u201cEh, Boss! Get me outa dis!\u201d<\/p>\n

Right den an dea Jesus put out his hand an grab him, an say, \u201cHow come you trus me ony litto bit? How come you tink you no can do um?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s a heavily accented Hawaiian Pidgin, or Hawaiian Creole English (HCE). New translations or modernizations of the Christian Bible are not infrequent, but there is something unsettling about having the cultural disguise of language so blatantly unveiled. We are not used to so vernacular a Jesus Christ. Amazon.com reviews of this translation are adamant in their reassurance that this use of Pidgin is not a joke or mockery. The University of Hawai\u2019i\u2019s production of Shakespeare\u2019s Twelf\u2019 Night o\u2019 Whateva<\/em> some years ago comes to mind: I wondered then about the politics of responses to such a performance: were there worries of Pidgin being used as kitsch or as a dumbing-down? Is “translation” inherently an imperial process, the imposition of one culture\u2019s narratives upon the linguistic framework of another? It can sound like the dramatic donning of a persona. The Wycliffe translators seem at least to recognize Hawaiian Pidgin as a language system on a level with Standard English: in their introduction, they note that their translation works from the Greek (though whether Masoretic or Septuagint they don\u2019t say) rather than from other derivative English translations.<\/p>\n

My sister and I grew up in Honolulu surrounded by varieties and degrees of Pidgin. When we moved to California, I was ten and she was fourteen. We both quickly learned to \u201cclean up\u201d our speech, but because she was older at the time, she still has more traces of the accent than I do. For instance, she pronounces \u201cpull\u201d as \u201cpoo.\u201d But to \u201cclean up\u201d implies that Pidgin is messy, or dirty, English. This is untrue, and the notion of a \u201cstandard\u201d English or English pronunciation is a social construct.<\/p>\n

In that passage above, for instance, compare the first and last sentences of verse 31: \u201cRight den an dea . . . How come you tink . . .\u201d Here they are again, in slightly more standard English: \u201cRight then and there . . . How come you think . . .\u201d There are three th<\/em> words in the latter version\u2014then<\/em>, there<\/em>, and think<\/em>\u2014but in Pidgin they sometimes become d<\/em> and sometimes t<\/em>. This is a subtle but consistent distinction: then <\/em>and there <\/em>use a soft th<\/em> with the tip of the tongue floating quickly across the teeth, hence the d<\/em>, while think <\/em>is aspirated and more forcefully consonantal, hence the t<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Moreover, notice that there are no tense or singular-plural distinctions: the verbs in this passage are closer to the infinitive than the present (\u201cPeter climb,\u201d not \u201cPeter climbs\u201d). There is one state change, \u201ccome scared,\u201d in which the \u201cscared\u201d is adjectival. Note also the lack of prepositions such as \u201cof\u201d or \u201cto,\u201d and the use of \u201cno\u201d as a preemptive negation (also valid would be \u201cyou not can do,\u201d but Standard English demands \u201cyou can not do\u201d). All this indicates an East Asian grammar, of which Chinese is one example as I mentioned in this column\u2019s introductory post<\/a>. Hawaiian Pidgin is therefore a uniquely fluid Asian American dialect. It comes from a range of immigrant grammars\u2014Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese\u2014and host vocabularies\u2014Hawaiian, English.<\/p>\n

But Hawaiian Pidgin is not acknowledged in Hawaiian schools, and grammatical propriety prevails. In Eric Chock\u2019s introduction to the 1986 Best of Bamboo Ridge<\/em><\/a>, he notes: \u201cIt\u2019s no secret that our own government, through its various organs, has attempted to suppress varying forms of languages in favor of one common language. And that ain\u2019t Pidgin they talking about.\u201d This is troubling because it is assimilation all over again; Wing Tek Lum writes in his poem \u201cTaking Her to the Open Market:\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSanitation,\u201d
\nI mutter, \u201chas killed off
\nmore than germs.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Standard English is Mainland English or \u201cproper English.\u201d The tense irony of growing up in Honolulu\u2014for myself when I was there, and for my friends who are still there\u2014lies between wanting to stay in a uniquely polyglot home where immigration communities constitute the majority, and wanting to move to the mainland where money and power reside in a dominant discourse and a \u201cproper English.\u201d Yet the last few decades have seen a transformation in Pidgin through literary representations. Any spoken language is a social and ephemeral one, subject to the proprieties of a formal written language, but to set such a language to paper is necessarily to preserve and disseminate it.<\/p>\n

In fact, as Anne Kennedy<\/a> writes, \u201cPoetry and fiction are arguably the only written territories to be gained by Pidgin,\u201d which is to say that literature is the only space in which unofficial diglossia can thrive with a legitimate voice. In fiction, characters are allowed to speak in their own rhythms, though the dialogue is often delegated to the space within quotation marks. Darrell H. Y. Lum\u2019s play, Oranges are Lucky<\/em>, has all the characters speaking in Pidgin except when the lights dim on the grandmother, who soliloquizes in Standard\u2014suggesting that the eloquence of her consciousness requires translation beyond a localized speech. Wayne Kaumualii Westlake, the Ferlinghetti of Hawai\u2019i, does the opposite in his translation of a Chinese classic, titled in his version \u201cA Joke\u2014To Tu Fu,\u201d by Li Po. He begins narrating: \u201cOn top Puff-Rice Mountain I meet Tu Fu!\u201d Then he provides speech in indirect discourse: \u201cI ask, since parting, how come so thin?\u201d Here, the localization of the speaker\u2019s consciousness gives an intimate eloquence.<\/p>\n

Poetry has been a game-changer for Pidgin on paper. It is voice-driven and lyrical without the boundaries of quotation marks. Lois-Ann Yamanaka, who writes novels in Standard but poetry exclusively in Pidgin, gives her characters a speech which seems loud but not foreign. Eric Chock\u2019s prose poem \u201cThe Mango Tree\u201d has a light Pidgin inflection, and because the gerunds and Latinates common to English are excised, his sentences have an end-stopped vitality, often ending with strong single syllables:<\/p>\n

My feet get the tingles cause sometimes the thing slip when I try for grip the bark with my toes. How long I never go up the tree! I stay scared the branch going broke cause too small for hold me, and when the wind blow, just like being on one see-saw.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Juliana Spahr\u2019s poetry collection Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You<\/em><\/a> riffs on the keystone word of Pidgin, \u201cda kine,\u201d a catch-all that can refer to anything and is therefore potent in a poetry trying to get at the\u00a0\u201cthing itself.\u201d Here are samplings from the first few pages:<\/p>\n

There are these things and they
\nare da kine to me. They are the tear.
\nThe torn circle.
\n.\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .
\nDa kine for me is the moment when
\nthings extend beyond you and me
\nand into the rest of the world. It is
\nthe thing.
\n.\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .
\nThere are these things and they are
\nda kine, they are the world seen from
\nspace as whole yet complex.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The title of her collection is quoted from the mosh pit of a concert, and that aloha<\/em>, which also has a plethora of meanings, is situated as a pivot for the range of complexity in a spoken language. Let\u2019s remember three of the basic tenets of linguistic theory: every language is flexible and changes, language change is not language decay, and, according to Rosina Lippi-Green in English with an Accent<\/em><\/a>, language \u201cis the most salient way we have of establishing and advertising our social identities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Written Pidgin is always new because it has no standardized spelling system. Every writer of Pidgin transcribes neologisms onto the page. Why did the Wycliffe translators choose to write \u201can start fo go down\u201d when that second word is probably pronounced \u201cstaht\u201d? Why does Eric Chock write \u201cthe thing\u201d instead of \u201cda ting\u201d and \u201cgoing\u201d instead of \u201cgoin\u201d? Richard Hamasaki\u2019s poem, \u201cDa Mento Hospito,\u201d begins:<\/p>\n

Eh, somebudi lik make one
\nbig freeway tru my vallee
\ndey lik bill \u2018em reel beeg<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is rendered on the next page of his collection, From the Spider Bone Diaries<\/em><\/a>, into \u201cHawai\u2019i Pidgin [Odo] orthography by Charlene Sato, circa 1983,\u201d thus:<\/p>\n

E, sambadi laik meik wan
\nbig friew chru mai vaeli
\nde laik bil om ril big<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These are instances of printed text as artifacts of handwriting. Every voice in its material engagement with the English alphabet is idiosyncratic. It is a record of affirmation, an inscription of self into written history. Anne Kennedy writes:<\/p>\n

The connection of landscape, myth and destruction also occupies the thematic territory of younger Hawai\u2019ian poets. . . . The destruction is still going on. . . . The reason, perhaps, that the lyric is not, as Ferlinghetti states about the mainland, dead, is that the battle against destruction is not over.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Since at least as far back as King Lear<\/em>, we\u2019ve been reminded in English: \u201cThe weight of this sad time we must obey; \/ Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.\u201d There is so much more to say, on Pidgin as well as on the larger context of polyglossic nature of Asian American writing, but I\u2019m saving that for part two of this post. It will come after AWP in Chicago, where I encourage you to attend the panel \u201cSpeaking in Tongues<\/a>\u201d about writing within multiple linguistic and cultural traditions on Saturday, March 3rd<\/sup> at 9am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Panax Ginseng is a monthly column by Henry W. Leung exploring the transgressions of linguistic and geographic borders in Asian American literature, especially those which result in hybrid genres, forms, vernaculars, and visions. The column title suggests the congenital borrowings of the English language, deriving from the Greek panax, meaning \u201call-heal,\u201d and the Cantonese jansam, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[705],"tags":[805,803,801,806,802,800,591,808,809,807,804],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5125"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5125"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6412,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5125\/revisions\/6412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}