A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

celebrates the Local everyday by mocking and scrutinizing it with Pidgin’s immediacy,
resulting in lists such as “You know you’re a malihini starting to turn local when…” or
instructions on how to generate surf song lyrics. 511 Another writer who creatively explores
the position of Pidgin in Local society is college teacher Lisa Linn Kanae. Her 2002
chapbook Sista Tongue produces surprising convergences through a collage-like
combination of personal history, i.e., the memories of a late-talking younger brother
growing up with the stigma of a speech disorder, and the sociolinguistic history of HCE,
highlighting the effects of prejudice and segregation by juxtaposing diverse texts. Kanae’s
goal is to engage the reader and open up a space for communication and interpretation.
Sista Tongue is published by Susan Schultz, editor of the innovative journal Tinfish and
of works by Balaz, Hamasaki, and other experimental Local writers. 512
Language is even more foregrounded in the fictional and essayistic/journalistic
work of Lee A. Tonouchi, the so-called ‘Pidgin Guerilla.’ 513 Probably his most ambitious
project is the compilation of a Pidgin dictionary that is supposed to reflect both the range
as well as the non-standardized quality of the language. In Local papers and all his public
appearances he calls for the submission of words, expressions, and their multiple
meanings and spellings. Although some, including writers such as Kanae, are concerned
that a dictionary will entail standardization, thus an unwanted fixing of “a free-flowing
vernacular such as Pidgin,” such a rather popular project might resound with the work of
university linguists who have been describing and classifying Pidgin in its various stages
to ultimately enhance its acceptance as a language in its own right. Tonouchi says the
dual purpose of the community project is to preserve as well as perpetuate: “Dat’s why I
collecting words cause Pidgin belongs to everybody, so I like get as much people in da
dictionary as can.” 514 He also approached UH officials with the idea of establishing a
Pidgin major: “Dat person tole me, you have to submit da proposal in English, or else
who would take it seriously. So dat really turned me off, brah. Was like wow, dey no get
511 See Honolulu Advertiser, 03/22/02 and 05/05/2002. Malihini is Hawaiian for newcomer, stranger.
512 For a positioning of Tinfish in the Local literary scene, see Wilson in boundary 2 28 No. 1 (2001): 121-
51.
513 The writer gladly adopted the label given to him by Rob Wilson, cultural theorist and former UH creative
writing professor.
514 From an interview with Ryan Senaga in Honolulu Weekly, 11/13-19/2002. The dictionary will be
published by Bess Press, a small Local company. In her 1975 dissertation, linguist Carol Odo had already
developed a phonemic orthography for HCE, which however did not gain wider recognition (see Carol Odo,
Phonological Processes in the English Dialect of Hawaii, Ph.D. Dissertation in Linguistics: University of
Hawai’i 1975).
194