A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

making you more and more exasperated
until I hit the right word and inflection
or at least I think you imagined I did. 533
In addition to the works of single writers, there are also more organized efforts at keeping
ancestral tongues alive and valid. Hawai’i has Japanese language haiku and tanka clubs,
and there are examples of classical Chinese drama or O-Bon festival folk songs being
adapted to the Local experience. 534
An interesting project that could possibly have thrived only in the Islands is the
GUMIL, the “Association of Ilokano Writers in Hawaii,” which exists since 1971,
organizing workshops, contests, and readings that are performed at all kinds of
community gatherings. An anthology called Voices of the Youth that was spurred by
GUMIL activity is a telling example of the validity of promoting all of Hawaii’s
languages: Consisting of pieces by Hawaiian Filipino Ilocano elementary and
intermediate grade-schoolers written in English, “it is noteworthy that many of them
attempted to represent the Hawaiian-Ilokano-English pidgin of their immigrant and
working-class parents and deploy it in often astonishing ways.” 535 Relating the sensitive
issue of translating Ilokano writing into English, Campomanes states that “Ilokano is such
a preternaturally (I use this word advisedly) poetic language that even its more ordinary
and quotidian forms of usage possess a tremendous metaphorical charge.” 536 This echoes
the perception of the Hawaiian language. The two are, in fact, related, for Ilokano belongs
to “the Indonesian division of the 500-strong Austronesian/Malayo-Polynesian family.” 537
It is ironic that in contemporary Hawai’i, Filipinos share the lowest social strata with
native Hawaiians and Samoans while the Proto-Polynesians, the first voyagers in the
Pacific, might have come from what today are the Philippine Islands.
533 Lum 1987: 58-9.
534 See Stephen Sumida, “Waiting for the Big Fish: Recent Research in the Asian American Literature of
Hawaii,” in Chock/Lum 1986: 302-21, esp. 306-7.
535 Campomanes in Cheung 1997: 109. Ilokano is the term used for the language, Ilocano for its speakers.
More than 90% of Hawaii’s Filipinos are Ilokano speakers; their origin is the arid Northwest of Luzon
Island which supplied the bulk of immigrants to California, Alaska and Hawai’i. In the Philippines, Ilokano
has become something like a transregional lingua franca due to its speakers’ forced mobility into more
arable or otherwise profitable parts.
536 Campomanes in Cheung 1997: 111.
537 Ibid.: 110.
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