Homeward bound: settler Aesthetics in Hawai'i's literature.

Publication: Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Publication Date: 22-MAR-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)

You and I are Home. Not in a house full of bed and chairs, dishes and



toothbrushes, but in undeniable covenant. Home is the possibility of return. (Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Father of the Four Passages)

Introduction: Where to Go From Here?

Three years have elapsed since the publication of "Whose Vision: Asian Settler Colonialism in Hawai'i," the special edition of Amerasia that brought national attention to the fact that all was not well in the Islands. That little critical attention has been directed at Hawai'i's local Asian-American canon since this issue shows how decolonization can reinforce the painful divisions between the indigenous and the nonindigenous. The primary purpose of this paper is to reexamine this divide, a dangerous proposition given that the Islands have seemingly reached the same point Franz Fanon witnessed in Africa when many "perceive that race feeling in its most exacerbated form is triumphing" (158). And so while the fight goes on for indigenous rights and for the dismantling of colonialism underlying the socioeconomic ascendancy of local Asians, the "local" remains a suspicious and troubling basis for a collective identity and literary studies.

In many ways, the settler/Native binary is emblematic of the current situation in the Pacific, where conflicts between native populations and immigrant communities have erupted in Indonesia, the Solomon Islands, and Fiji. Such troubles provoked the Indo-Fijian writer, Vijay Mishra, to revise his optimistic Girmit (settler) theory in light of multiple coups and how the "diaspora, often unawares (since it hankers after the totality left behind), has become a splinter in the side of the indigenous culture itself" (8). Similar reassessments are occurring in Hawai'i. Responding to the lack of distinction between indigenous and nonindigenous claims to the Hawaiian Islands, Haunani-Kay Trask argues, "For our Native people, Asian success proves to be but the latest elaboration of foreign hegemony. The history of colonization becomes a twice-told tale, first of our discovery and settlement by European and American businessmen and missionaries, then the domination of the plantation Japanese, Chinese, and eventually Filipino rise to dominance" ("Settlers," 2-3). Candace Fujikane further observes that literature focusing on the immigrant experience ignores a larger issue--that such texts are symbolic of "the erasure of a Native Hawaiian presence in settler literature [which] enacts a depopulation that renders Hawai'i an 'emptied' space open to settler claims of 'belonging'" ("Sweeping Racism," 164).

The following analysis of a poem from a local newspaper demonstrates how settler claims of belonging are seen to operate. Mark Labarre's "No talk stink" (1994) was written in response to a letter to The Honolulu Advertiser about the inappropriateness of Pidgin in the classroom and how "Hawaiian public schools will only improve when the language problem is fixed and the curriculum stops being centered on the Hawaiian sovereignty movement" (Hall, A13). Labarre's humorous response relies on a sense of local belonging by constructing a culturally/ethnically idealized "safe space":

I one Punahou grad haole boy Who grew up on akule an' poi; Shoots, can talk fancy kine But pidgin uku-pile mo' fine An' no soun' so stockup an' maha 'oi. See, all us kanaka o'heah Know da pidgin not goin' broke you eeah, So eef ouah pranunciashon Stay cause you too much frushtrasion Wow, laulau--das jus' youah pilikia. Assammaddafo' you anyway Fo' "Y-AWL" to creetasize da stuffs we say? Eh, you Mainlan' buggas' talk Geeves us one culchah shock; You tink DAS English? Shee! and Auwe! But when we talkin' li' dees wit' each oddah, Ei nei! Ja' like seestah and braddah! Ennykine--Japanee, Pilipino, Portagee-- Can all onnastan' one anoddah. Eh! Pidgin not born een da slums, An' us folks dat talk 'um ain't bums, Da Crips an' Bloods in L.A. Nevah talk dees kine way; What, no like? Den go back wheah you come! Get one word, "Ha'aheo," das "pride" An' it comes from ouah hott, deep eenside, We stoddy hod fo' talk nice, Weelin' pay enny price, An' ouah teachahs no like youah boo lies. [...................................] So, Jon, take som' adwise from dees blala: No talk stink and call pidgin "opala"; Min' you' own P's and Q's You pupule babooze, Or you nevah gonna join ouah 'ohana! (1)

Flippant and irreverent, Labarre's lines conjure a secure home that shelters a family, ethnically constructed like the ideal plantation--a harmonious intermingling of the Japanese, Filipinos, Portugueses, and Haole (whites), who choose to be a part of this group. For Labarre, who continually makes reference to growing up locally, the local represents a native authority that takes its power from the speaker's inclusion among the Kanakae (a term that has traditionally signified Native Hawaiians) and his use of Hawaiian words. By implication, the affirmation of self for such a writer relies on a carefully construed nativist sense of place, a sentiment made legitimate for its refusal to adopt outsider conventions that are often heralded as symbols of an imperialist colonial West.

Labarre fuses together a paradoxical image of ethnic difference and unity in an attempt to displace white hegemony, a move that Asian-American critic Viet Thahn Nguyen interprets as "an act of cultural validation in the face of continental marginalization or dismissal of local culture, [and] imposed continental standards of cultural worthiness [...]" (160). Nevertheless, the problem with such idyllic images of multiculturalism lies in the neocolonizing tactics they embody. Specifically, writers like Garrett Hongo and Eric Chock are mistrusted by Haunani-Kay Trask, who maintains that nonnative writers' reverence for the local culture engages in

a false nostalgia [...]. The authenticity of lived experience is replaced by an often humorous romanticization, which substitutes for developed characters and serious engagement. A celebration of Pidgin English becomes a gloss for the absence of authentic sounds and authentic voices. The politics of this kind of theft through falsification is the competition, by Asian writers, for hegemony with Haole writers attempting to distinguish themselves from Americans on the continent. ("Decolonizing," 169-70)

Ironically, Labarre's poem and Trask's essay both reaffirm the joining of white and Asian in what Rob Wilson identifies as "Geopolitical dislocation" (128). For better or for worse, the need to adopt new homes brings localized Anglo-Americans and Asian-Americans into the common pool of "settlers," an identity that has been either romantically celebrated or routinely demonized but has not yet been historically investigated or theoretically deconstructed.

This quandary brings me to the crux of this essay--how does one speak of or address a history of nonindigenous, namely Asian-American local writing, now that is has been censured for glorifying an inauthentic Pidgin/local heritage? Like Labarre, Asian-American writers who wish to exert a local cultural familiarity often cite Hawaiian concepts and vocabulary. A prime example can be found in Garrett Hongo's semiautobiography Volcano, within which he invokes the term kahiko (ancient or traditional) as a means of identifying the primal, more powerful status of Hawai'i's Pidgin in comparison to Standard English--perhaps this explains why he was identified as part of an "Immigrant/settler consciousness [that] is attempting to dispossess [...] Native people through the back door of identity theft" (Trask, "Decolonizing," 169). Criticism of this nature erupted in the exceptionally painful exchange among local scholars, who leveled the word "neocolonial" against each other; this dispute spilled over into Asian-American studies, a situation that enticed Asian-Americans to join in the criticism of other Asian-Americans. (2) At the onset of the emerging fracas, Pamela Kido commented on the refusal of some to engage in "reflexive self-interrogation" while others engaged in "Excessive remorse [...] much like white guilt" (23). Indeed, if the conflict over racial identity and privilege only exacerbates separatism and ethnocentric exclusivity, where can we go from here? This paper will attempt to answer this question by first analyzing the problems surrounding the contextualization of a local Asian-American canon. In many ways, this paper is in agreement with scholars like Fujikane and Trask, who have reiterated how local identity and its reliance on an Americanized understanding of race is problematic. But I would further argue that simply identifying and enunciating the boundaries surrounding "settler" may not necessarily achieve a "de-colonizing" of Hawai'i's literature. Resisting the urge to construct settler literature as a monolithic authority, this paper historically traces ambivalent desires for a particular "home" and sense of belonging as they morph into "Asian-American" texts. This perspective allows us to investigate the broader sociopolitical context of colonialism, the enactment and policing of the status quo vis-a-vis definitions of foreignness. As this essay will reveal, succumbing to the siren's call of ethnic empowerment leads to contradictory expressions of racial identity on the part of Hawai'i's local Asian communities--the celebration of the foreigner's success in claiming residency, the protest against any outside threat to that success, and the establishment of a legitimate place of belonging. Recognizing these claims as a condition of the immigrant's entry into the colonial framework allows us to investigate why colonialism actually requires an unstable racial status quo via a perpetuation of crisis that easily leads to melancholic nostalgia and sociopolitical impotency.

China Blues/Going Native: Paradoxical Aesthetics in Early Local Asian-American Literature

Perhaps the best place to begin lies in understanding the reasons behind nativist claims of refuge that so many nonindigenous locals have sought in terms of literary themes of ethnic success and/or difference. It is no secret that the much needed arrival of Asian laborers in Hawai'i provoked intense discussions concerning the foreignness of these newcomers. In 1884 the English-language newspaper The Hawaiian Monthly published an essay called "Chinese Immigration," within which the editors speak alarmingly of the swelling numbers of this introduced community:

What good purpose would be served by any number of Chinamen uniting with native women, if thereby an equal number...

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