A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

poetry than the original: “What country, friends, is this?” 493 becomes “Eh, brada, wea we
stay?” 494 Shakespeare’s duke says of a woman’s love:
Alas! their love may be call’d appetite,
No motion of the liver, but the palate,
That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;
But mine is all as hungry as the sea,
And can digest as much, 495
Benton’s prince makes a Local comparison instead: “Dea love is like one pupu platter,
and mine is like a luau!” 496 Benton, Ed Kaahea, and Rap Reiplinger were to become
famous shortly afterwards as the Pidgin comedy group Booga Booga, focusing on tall tale
sketches as well as satirizing everyday island life.
Pidgin short.
Fast.
Match.
Pidgin safe.
Like Refuge, Pu’uhonua,
From the City.
Diane Kahanu – “Ho. Just Cause I Speak Pidgin No Mean I Dumb” 497
5.3.3 “Da Pidgin Guerilla” and Other Contemporary Hawaiian Creole English
Writers
While Chock and Lum still act as motors of Local literature, writing, publishing,
teaching, as well as organizing readings, conferences, and workshops, they also have to
be seen as predecessors of a host of younger writers who continue to stir up the writing
scene by their bold explorations of where Pidgin can take them and their readers. The
most famous and controversial of them is Yamanaka, whose youthful characters express
493 William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night or What You Will, in L.L. Schücking (ed.), William Shakespeare:
Complete Edition, English and German, Vol. 4, Augsburg 1995: 4-74, here 7.
494 Carroll 1983: 189.
495 Schücking 1995: 32.
496 Carroll 1983: 205. Pupu are Hawaiian appetizers, while a luau is a feast, usually including a whole pig
baked in an underground oven.
497 In Chock/Lum 1986: 43. Pu’uhonua means refuge.
189