Lee A. Tonouchi-Guerrilla Poet

Lee A. Tonouchi's Significant Moments in da Life of Oriental Faddah

and Son: One Hawai'i Okinawan Journal is a first-of-its-kind poetry

collection that uniquely features a Pidgin, Local Hawai'i, Okinawan

American narrator. Tonouchi's work is an honest exploration of a

range of powerful themes. Some of the themes deal with specific

inter-personal relationships like: father-son, especially between

Asian Americans males; a child growing up dealing with the

death of a parent; and the interaction between a child and his immigrant grandparents. Some themes have resonance with a

broader scope such as the generational memories of migration

and diaspora for Okinawans who landed in Hawai'i, and identity

formation for the post-migration generations who straddle multiple

cultural boundaries and who experienced successive layers of

marginalization. Other themes explore the dynamics of power

relations between kids and adults, between men and women,

between Local Okinawans and Local Japanese, and between Locals

and outsiders.

What this collection has in common with all of Tonouchi's

works is the author's unwavering commitment to the goals of his

mission to change the deep-seated negative misconception about

Hawai'i Creole (or HC, locally known as Pidgin with a capital P, as opposed to the linguistic term pidgin with a lower case p) that it is a

deformed, bastardized version of English that arose because Locals

are too stupid and too lazy to learn English.

The origins of Pidgin date back to the mid-1800s when as a

result of Hawai'i's socio-economic history of capitalist colonization

via the sugarcane and pineapple industries that led to the use of

imported labor from among diverse linguistic areas such as China,

Portugal, Japan, Okinawa, Puerto Rico, Korea, and the Philippines,

Pidain emerged as a language of expedience for commerce. The word pidgin itself is said to have been derived from a pronunciation

of a Cantonese word for 'business. Contrary to the widely held

misperception that Pidgin is a defective or bastardized version of

English, or to the larger misconception that it even is an English,

it is in fact an intertwined language resulting from years of contact

between Hawaiian and English, with English serving as the

superstrate language shaping the external features of Pidgin and

Hawaiian serving as the substrate language underlying Pidgin's

grammatical base. Each in its time and each in its way, contributing

languages such as English, Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese,

Cantonese and others have added vocabulary, idioms, and other

grammatical features to what was already a unique hybrid. The first

speakers of Hawai'i's pidgin were native speakers of their own mother tongues, all the while creating the newly emerging pidgin language

as a second language for communication with peoples across cultures

in the same adopted island chain. As a living language, Pidgin has

moved beyond its initial stage as a linguistic pidgin (arising from

three or more mutually exclusive languages) to a subsequent-

descendant creole whereby a generation of children end up speaking

Pidgin as their first or native language: hence the current more

linguistically accurate label of Hawai'i Creole. At present there are

probably no surviving speakers of that original first Hawai'i born

pidgin-today all speakers of Pidgin are actually speakers of Hawai'i

Creole, a true endemic language.

Tonouchi considers his greatest challenge to be changing

the way people perceive HC-not only people in positions of

institutional power, but surprisingly, the Local Hawai'i speakers of

HC themselves as well. These are the very people who have been conditioned to believe the negative stereotypes about HC and its

speakers. Tonouchi wants the world to acknowledge that HC is a

living language capable of conveying serious and complex thought

and that it possesses its own linguistic and literary history which

deserves to be embraced, valued, documented, and celebrated. With

his campaign to raise awareness and pride in being an HC speaker,

Tonouchi is consciously striving to break others free from this process of internalized discrimination, with Locals seeing themselves

and their own culture through the negative lens of their colonizers.

This is exactly what Kenyan academic and activist Ngügi wa Thiong'o

argues in Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African

Literature (1986), a pivotal work laying the groundwork for post-

colonial theory.

Although dubbed "Da Pidgin Guerrilla," Tonouchi takes a

very different approach from Ngũgi wa Thiong'o. Tonouchi's tactics

have a distinctly Local sensibility, an implicit understanding that

overly direct, aggressive campaigns are doomed to fail in Hawai'i.

His most effective weapon in his arsenal is polished, economical

style laced with humor. Humor functions as a conflict-diffuser, an

equalizer, and the lubricant with which to very stealthily slide in his

ideological arguments about power relations embedded in language.

His method is simple. He bombards the public with high-quality,

highly visible projects that demonstrate over and over again the way HC can multi-task: it can be funny, serious, and smart at the same

time. He sneakily wins his audiences over not by the blunt force of

dogma, but disarmingly through buss-laugh or gut-busting humor.

He reveals the incongruities created by linguistic power imbalances

between Pidgin and English in everyday situations, and skillfully

elicits from his audiences a willingness to see a totally different

perspective they may not have previously considered.

Oriental, Local Okinawan, and Proud of It

Two key words-Oriental and Okinawan-in Tonouchi's Significant

Moments in da Life of Oriental Faddah and Son: One Hawai'i

Okinawan Journal, provide an historical and sociological context

for the collection. The use of the term 'Oriental' denotes that this

work, reflecting the Local Asian experience in Hawai'i, is unique

from the usual trajectory of Asian American identity formation

in the continental United States. In the eake of Edward Said's groundbreaking post-colonial theories published in Orientalism

(1978), it was finally articulated that the imperialist agenda of Occidental studies of the Orient is to deem that all things different

from the status quo is by default inferior and subordinate. The term

'Oriental' thereafter has been marked as a derogatory racial term.

U. S. continental Asian Americans are dutifully instructed to never

identify themselves as an 'Oriental' as it would signify acquiescence

and collusion with an inherently racist, imperialist value system.

However, given Hawai'i's specific racial history resulting in a

majority population of non-white Americans, the term 'Oriental'

was appropriated by the various assimilated Asian immigrant groups

themselves to refer to themselves. As an act of self-naming and re-

appropriation of an identity, the use of the term 'Oriental' has a very

different connotation in Hawai'i than it does on the North American

continent. For many Locals in Hawai'i, 'Oriental' is an identity that

is embraced. Taken at face value, 'Oriental' appears to objectively and neutrally describe the region of the Asian continent where some

Local people emigrated from.

That said, the use of 'Oriental' in Hawai'i does not mean that

racial discrimination against Local, non-white Americans did not

exist. It occurred and continues to surface in numerous ways both

overt and subtle, as Tonouchi's characters of the narrator, Oriental

Faddah and Maui Grandma and Grandpa both encounter and come

to terms with it in the following poems: all five title poems under the

heading "Significant Moments in the Life of Oriental Faddah and

Son": "Birth,""Puberty," "College," "Marriage," and "Death"; "Maui

Grandma's Regret," "Apart of History," "Getting One Date for Prom,"

"Da Secret Origin of Oriental Faddah," "Diff'rent Stations," "All Mix

Up," and "Grandpa's Ancient Medicine." As an example, in "Maui

Grandma's Regret," Maui Grandma speaks of her only regret that she succumbed to the pressure to rely on Western medical doctors

to treat her son's polio through surgery. She wonders what might

of happened had her son continued with the Local Japanese yaito

(moxibustion) treatment. In "Apart of History," the narrator's uncle

reveals how his fellow soldiers forced him to pose as a dead body of a

defeated Viet Cong for souvenir photographs to send home.

The second key term-Okinawan-in the collection's title provides insight into another unique perspective. The American

reading audience is familiar with the stories of immigrants arriving in

the United States from China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and the

Philippines; but the trajectory of Okinawan immigrants is less widely

known because their stories have been subsumed by the more widely

known Japanese American experience of war and internment and

reintegration into American society. Although Okinawan immigrants

to America were often mistaken for Japanese and shared the same

fate as Japanese immigrants in the U.S. during WWII, Okinawans

have their own culture and history, distinct from Japan's. Tonouchi's

collection, by the same token, offers a narrative perspective that is

divergent from those of the Local Japanese experience in Hawai'i.

While Tonouchi expresses a Local Okinawan perspective, it is

important to distinguish the identity that his poems represent with

the larger historical context of what it means to be Okinawan.

To clarify, three terms are used to describe this group of people: Ryukyuan, Uchinānchu, and Okinawan. Ryūkyū is the name

for the geographic group of islands between Kyūshü island of Japan

and Taiwan; it also describes the indigenous peoples who inhabit

this island group (people from each of the following islands or

island regions: Amami, Okinawa, Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni);

and finally, it is the name used to describe the independent

sovereign kingdom that governed the indigenous peoples of this

region between 1429 and 1879. The Ryūkyu Kingdom maintained

a tributary relationship to China and Japan until it was invaded

and annexed by Japan in 1879. It was occupied by the U.S. in the

aftermath of WWII in 1945 and eventually remanded back to Japan

in 1972.

Uchinänchu is the indigenous name of the Okinawan

culture, island, and people that is used by Okinawans to refer to

themselves to distinguish themselves from the Naichi (mainland)

Japanese. Uchinäguchi is the term used for one of the languages in the Ryukyuan language group that is spoken on Okinawa and is a

distinct and separate language from Japanese. It is not to be confused

with Okinawan Japanese (Uchinā yamatoguchi), which is Japanese spoken with an Okinawan accent. The increase in the use of the term

Uchinanchu represents a growing self-determination as evidenced by

the proliferation of Okinawan studies by Okinawans themselves.

Okinawa is the name of the language and culture of a specific

island in the Ryūkyu Island group, and it is also the name of the

Japanese prefecture that covers all of the Ryūkyu Islands. It is this last

fact that accounts for why most of the specificity of the Ryukyuan

diverse cultures, languages, and history is not so widely known

outside of the Ryūkyus and Japan, such as in the United States, due

to the fact that all of that area is identified under a single prefecture

name-Okinawa.

When most American readers encounter Okinawan, the word

actually refers to the Ryukyuans who emigrated away from their

archipelago, even though not all immigrants from this region come

from the island of Okinawa. Influenced by the American Civil Rights

movement of the 1960s-1970s, subsequent generations descended

from Ryukyuan immigrats to America (known as Okinawan Americans) began to assert their own identity separate from that of

the Japanese Americans.

The Okinawan experience that Tonouchi's collection seeks

to articulate is specifically fourth-generation Okinawan American,

growing up in Hawai'i in the 1970s and beyond. So the Local Hawa

Okinawans are to be distinguished from Ryukyuan Okinawans and

the Local Japanese in Hawai'i. The poems that address the Local

Hawai'i Okinawan identity are: "Why I Hate Teachers Who Nevah

Seen Star Wars," "Whole Pig We Eat," "Culture Day, " 'Wot Village

You From?'""Wot Village I From," "All Mix Up," "Wot is Banzai?"

"Wot School You Went," "Obaban's Hands," "Hajichi: Tattoos and

Diamonds is Forevah," "Palms Face Up," "Brainstorm: How Fo' Be

Mo' Okinawan," "Kaimukī Grandma On Being Uchinānchu," "How

Post to Know?" "Naming One Okinawan Baby," "Okinawan Proverb

"Da Fort Street Musician," "Chiburu Journal," and "Grandma's

Boxes."

So What's It About?

A Boy and His Life of Multiple Marginalizations

What makes this collection of poems compelling is the surprising

multi-dimensional depth that belies its understated simplicity. On

the surface, it is the story of a young man coming to terms with his

mother's death when he was a child; and of the evolving relationship

with his father and grandparents in the aftermath of that inexplicable

tragedy.

What complicates this exploration of personal identity is the

multiple layers of marginalization that the narrator experiences.

He grows up as a Pidgin speaker in a place where English is the

dominant language of ostensible economic, social and political power

("Hod Work"). He grows up marginalized as Local in Hawai'i when

all of the mainstream portrayals of adolescence are white continental

Americans ("Diff'rent Stations," "Apart of History"),