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Volume 30, Number 5
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| The Voice of Hawai‘i |
Fishah man
Catch me one aku
As fast as you can
Cut um sashimi
Straight from da sea
Wit shoyu and rice
For kekei and me
Hawai‘i Creole, known on the islands as Pidgin, had its genesis in the 1840s as thousands of laborers from around the globe came to work the sugarcane plantations. Not sharing a common language, but needing to communicate with others and their employers, an amalgam of Hawaiian, English, Japanese, Chinese, and Portuguese developed. Today, Pidgin is heard in everyday conversations, advertising, and on school playgrounds. Yet attitudes toward the language have ranged from pride to contempt.
“In general, critics blame speakers of Pidgin for low test scores,” says Marlene Booth. “They caution that speaking Pidgin will impede getting good jobs and advancing in life. On the other hand, speakers of Pidgin call it the language of their hearts while at the same time, they often feel discriminated against for speaking it.”
Booth explores these varied attitudes in Pidgin: The Voice of Hawai‘i, a documentary she coproduced with the late Kanalu Young that airs nationally in September. The film includes subtitles written in Pidgin instead of standard English.
How Hawaiians speak has been a hot topic since the early twentieth century. By the 1920s, children born on Hawai‘i’s sugar plantations began entering school in large numbers, many hearing standard English for the first time. By this time, Hawai‘i Pidgin was spoken by more than half of Hawai‘i’s population.
Like other forms of nonstandard English in the United States—Gullah, Louisiana Creole, Appalachian English, and African American Vernacular English—those who spoke Pidgin were told they were speaking “bad” or “broken” English. The language was referred to as “slang” or “a dialect.”
Those negative attitudes toward the language persist today, resulting in self-censorship. “Time and again, we’d pre-interview someone for the film who speaks Pidgin,” Booth says. “We’d hear their stories and learn of their profound fondness for Pidgin, of their sense that Pidgin connects multiple generations and works as a language of the heat. But when we ask if we can film them telling a story in Pidgin, the answer is no. ‘Shame, brah.’”
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| —Courtesy Marlene Booth | ||
Booth found that even those proud of speaking Pidgin would switch to English as soon as they’d see the camera. Fortunately, the filmmakers were able to capture scenes of exchanges in Pidgin, some by filming someone who was so engaged in an activity they forgot the camera was on, and others who were so confident in their standard English abilities that they felt comfortable enough showing off their Pidgin.
“Language is not just the way we speak but a compendium of who we are. I don’t remember when I first heard Pidgin or became aware of it,” says Booth. “It seeped in without my being aware of it—a bit like bird song in Hawai‘i, or the sound of ukuleles—and soon it seemed to be everywhere. Like my own family’s home language of Yiddish, it’s a fusion language, made up of words and phrases that invoke a shared past. When people speak Pidgin, the language brings them home.”
| Pictures of the Floating World |
“Mount Fuji was an important pilgrimage site during the Edo period (1615–1868) in which Hokusai was active,” says Sawako Chang, project manager and Japanese art research assistant for the Honolulu Academy of Arts. “Miniature versions of the mountain were built around the country for those who were not able to climb its sacred slopes.”
Beginning September 23, an exhibition of Hokusai’s work, including his collection of block prints known as the Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji that includes his most famous print, The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, will be on display at the Honolulu Academy of Arts. For the first time in a decade, the Academy will display the complete set of forty-six prints (the series was extended with an additional ten prints), considered one of the most influential of the ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world” school of Japanese printmaking. Over the course of a career spanning more than seven decades, Hokusai is thought to have made at least 30,000 woodblock prints, paintings, and book illustrations.
“Of all the woodblock printing projects he completed, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji is one of the most ambitious, and it represents that pinnacle of his career as an artist,” says Chang, who curated the exhibition. “Hokusai’s Great Wave, together with the rest of the Thirty-six Views series, is arguably the most influential graphic design ever made. Not only did the series inspire younger contemporaries in Japan, including Utagawa Hiroshige, who later did his own Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji—examples of which will be included in the exhibition—but it also reached Europe in the nineteenth century, where it was immediately recognized as an important source of inspiration, suggesting new directions in Western art.”
Hokusai’s works were prized by Impressionist and post-Impressionist artists such as Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh. and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. French composer Claude Debussy was so inspired by The Great Wave Off Kanagawa that he created his work, La Mer (The Sea) in 1905. “By the early twentieth century, The Great Wave already was arguably the most immediately recognizable Japanese woodblock print design in the world, a distinction it holds to this day,” says Chang.
The majority of prints in the exhibition come from the collection of American novelist James A. Michener and his wife Mari, who donated over five thousand Japanese woodblock prints to the academy. Michener took up residence in Honolulu in 1949 and became involved in Hawaiian civic affairs. Ten years later, he finished writing his epic novel Hawaii on the day Congress voted Hawai‘i into the Union.
“Michener developed his woodblock print collection with the intent to illuminate the influence of East Asian culture in forming the distinctive culture of the Hawaiian Islands,” says Chang.
In his book Japanese Prints: From the Early Masters to the Modern, Michener wrote, “Hokusai holds a special place in my affection, and I carry the memory of his prints in my mind wherever I go.”
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