Da decolonizing real: Liberating humour in Joe Balaz’s Pidgin Eye

Joe Balaz’s Pidgin Eye (2019) uses liberating humour to reveal decolonizing realities, thereby unsettling colonial myths that indigenous sovereignty has been subsumed or destroyed. Pidgin Eye collects 35 years of poetry written in Hawai’i Creole English, called Pidgin in Hawai’i. Featured in April 2019 by NBC News for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, the book vaunts ways of knowing and being embodied by a language that has often been dismissed, like other creoles, as “corrupt and bastardized” (Romaine, 1994: 527). Balaz’s irrepressible Pidgin carries indigenous ways of knowing Hawai’i as a mainland, Pidgin as a world language, and a past that is still here because it never departed.

Balaz is of Hawaiian, Slovakian, and Irish ancestry and has published writing, visual poetry, a spoken word CD, and artwork. In keeping with Hawaiian understandings of genealogy, which overturn the fractionalizing and deracinating effects of settler colonialism’s emphasis on blood quantum — the definition of identity by percentages — he strategically emphasizes his Hawaiian ancestry. ¹ He helps make visible a multilingual Hawaiian resurgence, as is evident in the collection he edited, Ho’omānoa: An Anthology of Contemporary Hawaiian Literature (1989), the first anthology composed entirely by Hawaiian writers “regardless of blood quantum” (Balaz, 1989: xiv). In his preface, Balaz notes the urgency and significance of collecting such writings at a time when fewer than 2000 speakers of Hawaiian remained (1989: xiv). Literature by people of the land, whether in Hawaiian, English, Pidgin, or mixtures of these languages, represents a vital means of and step toward increase, literally “thickening” or Ho’omānoa. In Balaz’s hands, Pidgin is more than a pan-ethnic non-elite “local” language spoken by settlers. Ho’omānoa acknowledges the power of Hawaiian language and claims English and Pidgin as conduits for indigenous epistemologies. In 1998 Balaz issued Electric Laulau, a CD containing eleven tracks of spoken word Pidgin poetry with musical backing composed and performed by the artist, and voice and sound effects that intensify the poetry’s humour and satire. The CD is a significant contribution to Kanaka Maoli (Hawaiian) literature, and like a chant establishes connections with listeners, ancestors, and oral traditions (Joe Balaz, 2020).

For more than three decades, Balaz has explored Pidgin’s indigenous play and proliferation of words, meanings, and critical sovereignty. He emphasizes the Hawaiian roots of Pidgin, a linguistic feature acknowledged by Hawaiian language instructor Kimura in a 1983 report: “Pidgin was originally a form of Hawaiian” (Kimura, 1983: 199). Pidgin originates in the need to communicate with outsiders and “serves well the primary role of any language in the base culture: the identification of a people as a unique and cohesive identity” (1983: 198). Balaz’s humour laughs not at Pidgin or its non-elite speakers, but at attempts to deride both. He overturns social and scholarly assumptions about Pidgin, such as the assessment that “The only time that pidgin is used consciously in print or on stage is for a comical effect; otherwise listeners interpret it as speaking down to them” (1983: 200).

“History of Pigeon”, Pidgin Eye’s opening poem, upends such assessments by offering a mock-scholarly unveiling of contemporary English as itself a long-time mixture of languages in its vocabulary and syntax, including “terms in Norman-French” that “wen blend wit Old English sentence structure” thanks to French-speaking Normans who “wen conquer England in da year 1066” (Balaz, 2019: 11). ² Challenging English, linguistic dominance, and colonial sovereignty, the poem suggests there is no such thing as a pure language or one free from violence and trauma. Jacques Derrida, reflecting on growing up amid multiple languages in Algeria, declares, “Monolingualism imposed by the other” relies upon “a sovereignty whose essence is always colonial, which tends, repressively and irrepressively, to reduce language to the One, that is, to the hegemony of the homogenous” (1988: 39–40). The Pidgin perspective, the Pidgin eye, reveals that reducing language to the homogenous is an impossibility.

“History of Pigeon” traces the way the word “pigeon” travelled via conquest from French into English, a language that was considered culturally inferior at the time (Baugh and Cable, 2013: 163). In Balaz’s hands the comically painstaking etymology contrasts with the way pigeons, and by extension pidgins, are already everywhere, and free: “So nowadays get pigeon by da zoo, | get pigeon on da beach, | get pigeon in town, | get pigeon in coups” (12). Reading the four lines aloud emphasizes the playful and yet insistent percussive accent on “pigeon”. The rhythm, intensification, and reduplication of the phrase “get pigeon” reveals that like the birds, Pidgin is a natural phenomenon, already present everywhere, sounding a world beat along with French and English.

Moreover, the poem’s avians are not contained by “da zoo” or coops but revealed in coups, yielding a fait accompli as Balaz wields another French-origin word to celebrate revolution and achievement. The definite article “da” points to the particular, the power and ability to name decolonizing realities that are already present but unaccounted for in local, national, and international models that deride or overlook the Pidgin eye. Linda Tuhiwai Smith declares in Decolonizing Methodologies, “By ‘naming the world’ people name their realities. For communities there are realities which can only be found, as self-evident concepts, in the indigenous language” (2012: 159). Congruent with her insight, Balaz presents Pidgin as an indigenous language, an epistemic, aesthetic, and activist decolonizing resource.

Vicente Diaz, considering resistance to colonization in Guam, declares, “Indigenous discursive flourish is also political for its potential to disrupt efforts to institutionalize or promulgate semantic tyranny of all sorts” (2016: 120). Not only in Guam but, as Pidgin Eye reveals, also in Hawai’i, “Colonial officials and their auxiliaries, missionaries, for instance, feared the Native’s penchant for edgy, open-ended word play and meaning multiplication because such systems subverted colonial efforts to establish and retain exclusive control over meanings” (2016: 121). In Pidgin Eye, Pidgin rather than English or another European language is the reference language, a dramatic shift that also resonates with insights into Caribbean creole languages offered in “In Praise of Creoleness” by Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant. “Creoleness is not monolingual,” they declare, “Its field is language. Its appetite: all the languages of the world. The interaction of many languages (the points where they meet and relate) is a polysonic vertigo. There, a single word is worth many” (Bernabé et al., 1990: 901). In Pidgin as in what Edward Kamau Brathwaite terms “nation language” in the Caribbean, audience and community participate in the “total expression” created by a writer or speaker, embodying “the power within themselves” (1984: 18, 19; emphasis in original).

“History of Pigeon” demonstrates empowered orality, sovereignty, and total expression. Active punning on pigeon coops/coups also references the written and insists that Pidgin is a literary language. The poem closes in a crescendo that proclaims,

and no mattah wat anybody try do

dey kannot get rid of pigeon.

I guess wit such wun wide blue sky

everyting deserves to fly. (12)

Comically, it is now impossible to get rid of the term “pigeon” or the bird. In Pidgin the word “pigeon” includes singular and plural, establishing a homonymic proliferation of pigeon and Pidgin, both of which fly and multiply, challenging language-based discrimination.

Even in its home territory, Pidgin is not necessarily included in main scholarly models or even its main scholarly buildings; at the University of Hawai’i Manoa the group Da Pidgin Coup, which advocates research in and expanded understanding of Pidgin, enjoys grand headquarters in a temporary portable trailer, behind the Center for Korean Studies. By 1920 Pidgin became “the dominant language in Hawai’i” (Ho’omanawanui, 2005: 51). It is a mother tongue spoken by about half of Hawai’i’s population (Romaine, 1994: 527) and in 2015 was recognized by the United States Census Bureau as a language. Yet Pidgin speakers may still be stigmatized as “intellectually and socially inferior to speakers of Standard English” (Kanae, 2003: n.p.). From 1896, English served as the language of instruction in classrooms in Hawai’i (Hughes, 1993: 66; Silva, 2004: 3); the Hawaiian language has been increasingly included in classroom curricula beginning with the 1978 amendment to the State Constitution to acknowledge Hawaiian as an official language. But Pidgin speakers are often asked to leave their language at the door as they enter formal university, corporate, and political settings.

Pidgin, which draws from English as a lexifier language, as well as from languages including Hawaiian, Japanese, Cantonese, Korean, Filipino (Tagalog, Ilocano), and Portuguese, historically created connection and strength for the working classes: “The first generation of immigrant plantation laborers used Hawai’i Pidgin English to foster solidarity among themselves even when HPE was used to oppress them” (Kanae, 2003: n.p.). A pidgin becomes a creole when it is spoken as a mother tongue or first language. Linguistic and educational models that dismiss successive generations of Pidgin speakers were used to establish segregation in schools: children who spoke Hawai’i Pidgin English and later Hawai’i Creole English were separated from native English-speaking children in the English Standard School System beginning in 1924 and in some places lasting until the 1960s (Kanae, 2003: n.p.; Hughes, 1993: 72). Dismissing a mother tongue and making proficiency in English a test for admittance into a separate public school system uses language to mask race and class discrimination.

Against such a backdrop, choosing to speak or write Pidgin declaims sovereignty and self-definition. As Lisa Linn Kanae notes in Sista Tongue, “Resistance is an intrinsic element of Pidgin” (2003: n.p.). As recently as 2017, after a one-day summit on ways to include Pidgin in education sponsored by Pidgin Coup, news headlines presented the possibility as still hypothetical, declaring, for instance, “Pidgin English Could Be Used Someday in the Classroom” (Pidgin English, 2017). Refusing to acknowledge its status as a language and referring to Hawai’i Creole English or Pidgin as “Pidgin English” rather than as an independent language is incorrect and continues to subsume the language under English. As Georganne Nordstrom notes, “consideration of Pidgin as an Indigenous linguistic resource remains underexamined” (2015: 318).

Pidgin Eye claims Pidgin for indigenous strength and removes segregative scaffolds that have been placed around Pidgin. In the play Da Mayah, first produced in Honolulu in 1998, for instance, Lee Cataluna (2003) offers a comic send-up of a self-interested mayor unconcerned with helping the community; she writes the dialogue in Pidgin and stage directions in standard English, with standard English thereby serving to introduce or contain Pidgin. Balaz dispenses with such frames. Without standard English commentary or interpretation, Pidgin is the standard. In his spoken-word poem, “Pidlit 101”, from Electric Laulau, he presents in Pidgin an introductory lecture to an over-enrolled course on Pidgin literature that has displaced an under-enrolled course on Anglican history. Pidlit replaces not only an academic history of an imported religion but also an association with Englishness. The entire collection Pidgin Eye extends this joke, making it book-length: dominant models of language and epistemology have already been displaced. Moreover, the humour intensifies, as the book also declines to standardize Pidgin.

The collection thus dissolves what Victor Li has critiqued in much postcolonial thought as “a stubbornly persistent binary opposition between the theoretical and the demotic” (1995: 172). The theories or epistemologies in Pidgin Eye are carried by the language itself. Balaz critiques privileged metropolitan theories using the direct voice of the demotic, establishing the long-standing presence of networks of complex indigenous Pidgin theories and geographies. Collecting poems that he began writing around the same time as some foundational postcolonial theories were collated, his book eschews the definition of postcolonial offered by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, which remains defined by its relation to the centre: “post-colonial literature defines itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place” (Ashcroft et al., 2002: 37). To help unsettle “colonialism [that] itself represents the most widespread form of oppression in human history” (Young, 2015: 149), Balaz instead establishes Pidgin itself as a moving base or frame, a flexible standard providing its own specific and expansive locations, part of a field of world languages that includes potentially all words.

Like poetry from the wider region of Oceania, Pidgin is located in and claims specific landscapes, both geographic and linguistic. Craig Santos Perez, introducing “New Pacific Islander Poetry” in Poetry magazine in 2016, places the poetry’s origins in a fluid reciprocity with the landscape of Oceania, natural, human, cultural, and lexical. Perez’s opening statement declares, “We belong to Oceania. We belong to a diverse sea of moving islands, peoples, cultures, languages, and ecologies” (Santos Perez, 2016: 373). The selection of poems in Poetry do not include any in Pidgin, but the third poem in Balaz’s volume “In Da Same Place” makes it clear that Pidgin poetry shares with other new poetry from Oceania a sense of urgency about acknowledging and taking responsibility for Pacific landscapes.

“In Da Same Place” presents a conversational free verse frame placed around a rhyming poem within a poem. The frame and poem within a poem are presented in different registers of Pidgin. A subtle but direct interrogative opens the poem: “Eh, wats da mattah wit you, brah? | You no can see I get da same kine eyes as you?” (15). Here, the humour is structural and ontological: the Pidgin eye sees its own perspective and has already recognized and moved beyond deficiencies in others’ vision. The base is Pidgin, and relatedness. Even the ignorant interlocutor is “brah”, a brother.

The poem makes clear the book-length homonymic relationship proposed between the Pidgin I, the Pidgin Eye, the Pidgin Ay — ways of being, seeing, and hailing the listener or reader expressed by Pidgin. The “I” sound in “I”, “kine”, and “eyes” lingers and lengthens the poem’s second line and challenges the listener and reader: “can you really not see I have the same kind of eyes as you?”. The poem suggests that if the listener or reader cannot, “wats da mattah” is the onlooker’s lack of understanding. The poem continues, “I see da same tings, | my mouth talk da same, | my heart in da same place” (15). The “A” sound in “same” rings in and slows each line, elongating the stanza’s final line as it calls attention to “same” and “place”, establishing and emphasizing a potential shared ability to speak and name reality. And yet, the interlocutor who is limited by monovision, “tinking you bettah den anybody else”, seems initially dismissive. The speaker declares, “So wat if I no like use good English — | Baddah you?” (15). Using Pidgin is a choice that demonstrates freedom and dignity. The language insists upon connection with others, and with indigenous natural and linguistic worlds. The question extends beyond the page to interrogate readers and scholars: are you bothered by the poet’s choice to use Pidgin? Can you “try listen to dis poem dat I wen write”?

The challenge to “try listen” launches the poem within a poem, which focuses on the natural world in Hawai’i Nei. Balaz lets the phrase stand untranslated. Here, Hawai’i Nei may reference Hawaii here, near, close, immediate, intimately connected, an implicit demand to honour connection. The beauty of sea, sky, sun, and land is so mesmerizing that it is “like waves of taught | on wun dreamah’s dream” (15). Listeners or readers are invited to attend to Hawaiian ways of seeing and knowing, punning on what is “thought” and what is “taught”, and emphasizing what is missed in the absence of the Pidgin eye. The thought and dream help bring the sea into view and existence. In waves of responsiveness, the land calls to the speaker as the speaker calls to the land. The poem’s epistemology is also articulated by Manulani Aluli Meyer, who proposes that scholars account for ways of knowing indigenous to Hawai’i. Aluli Meyer asserts, “Land is our mother. This is not a metaphor” (2008: 219; emphasis in original). She continues, “Land is more than a physical place. It is an idea that engages knowledge and contextualizes knowing” (2008: 219). For Balaz, experiential knowing of the land is part of “da magic” of Hawai’i Nei; it also leads to his speaker’s insistence, “so no let da beauty | just pass away” (16), demanding balance and reciprocity with the natural world and its languages. In the Pidgin eye, land is not primarily private property, but grounds for relatedness and resolute non-exploitation.

Making Pidgin a linguistic standard, even a flexible one, is a radical shift; Pidgin has not only been considered non-standard in relation to English or Hawaiian, it also does not have a standardized orthography. It has not been, as the telling phrase has it, “reduced to writing” in an official way: for every writer, it thus carries freedom to render the spoken in a fresh literary form. While Romaine suggests that such an orthographic lack presents technical difficulties and limits writers, this situation can instead be viewed as offering an orthographic plenitude that Balaz and other writers capitalize upon. Recall the ways in which Balaz uses humour and etymology to establish that Pidgin is already a literary and even world language. Pidgin Eye thus offers a book-length challenge to such assertions as, “Because HCE [Hawai’i Creole English] has no writing system of its own, it is represented as if it were a deviant or non-standard variety of English. In other words, it is forced to be a literary dialect rather than a literary language” (Romaine, 1994: 528). Romaine concludes that “HCE’s lack of what Kloss 1967 calls Abstand ‘autonomy, distance’ presents certain technical problems for writers, and acts as a barrier to further Ausbau (also Kloss’s term, ‘elaboration’) in the literary domain” (1994: 528). Whereas lexicography and orthography in many colonial contexts were spearheaded by missionaries who had a primarily evangelical intent (one that often carried subtle or overt distortions of indigenous concepts), here Pidgin speakers have a free field to create Pidgin lexicography and orthography. Balaz’s humour subverts a standard Pidgin, making clear that when and if a standardized orthography is created for Pidgin, writers will continue to deepen and extend literary potentials of Pidgin.

On the other hand, Balaz urges that scholarly and literary models expand to account for what Pidgin has been accomplishing in literature. “In Da Same Place” challenges those who displace or denounce others on the basis of language. A disjuncture looms between the Pidgin eye and what is seen and recognized by “da snobs at da university” and “da guys | in dose fancy poetry clubs” (16, 17). The phrases come in the closing portion of the poem, when the conversational free verse resumes. “I hope you like ’um” (16), the speaker says, about the poem within a poem. Along with the interlocutor within the poem, scholars and poets who are already at the university or in the club are invited to examine their ways of knowing for linguistic or epistemic arrogance. The poem and collection suggest that every listener or reader chooses between acknowledging and condemning Pidgin thought/taught. Darrell Lum, who helped establish Bamboo Ridge: The Hawaii Writers’ Quarterly in 1978, declares: “‘Local literature is about validating a people. When you acknowledge a language, you acknowledge a people’”(qtd. in Choo, 1993: 8). Balaz also makes clear that deriding a language derides a people.

Balaz uses humour, such as the pun on Pidgin thought/taught, which helps call into view a new geographic and epistemic landscape to make visible the presence and energy of indigenous discursive and activist flourish. Dominant discourses are stripped of pretence to absolute power. This strategy is consonant with one articulated by Scott Richard Lyons, who considers a long history of Ojibwe and other Native thinkers who “highlight through irony, humor, and explicit subversion the invisible presence of the dominant discourse” (2010: 30). Such a tactic claims space for indigenous peoples on their own lands and a national or world stage. Lyons identifies a long history of writers and speakers who were allowed or invited to comment only on Native matters, but “resisted and appropriated the dominant discourses of their times and uttered the universal anyway as a means of forcibly entering the public sphere” (2010: 30).

For Balaz, too, Pidgin spaces and times challenge and expand the public sphere, especially in his focus upon the way land and conceptual maps of land carry identity. “Da Mainland to Me” pivots upon a poetic and epistemological turn, with a dialogue that opens, “Eh, howzit brah, | I heard you going mainland, aah?” (156; emphasis in original). These lines emphasize the untranslatable poetry of Pidgin; the rhyme relies upon brah and aah, highlighting what disappears or would be missed if a listener or reader translated the lines into English: Hey, how are you brother, | I heard you’re going to the mainland, huh? offers more prosody than poetry. The Pidgin diction contains a subtle joke, as well. “Going mainland”, which elides the directional preposition “going to the mainland” in English, makes it clear that for the poem’s primary speaker going mainland is a counterpart to going bush — going to the back of the beyond or off the map. That subtext or kaona, hidden or layered meaning, sets up the insistent answer, repeated throughout, “No, I going to da continent” (156). ³ Balaz thus constructs a poem-long joke that denies the colonialist framework underlying the question, and reframes geography. The speaker is going to California, and insists, “Eh, like I told you, | dats da continent — || Hawai’i | is da mainland to me” (156). That climactic poetic turn of understanding and perspective precipitates a Pidgin moment: listeners or readers recognize the already present existence of a Pidgin map of the world, an insight that connects with other indigenous and decolonizing frameworks.

As Nordstrom argues in considering Noelle Kahanu’s use of Pidgin in poetry, “Recasting speaking Pidgin as an act of Hawaiian cultural perseverance frames the language as an assertion of Indigenous identity that is part of a cultural continuum predating Western contact and continuing through the present” (2015: 322). Kahanu, Balaz, and others who deploy Pidgin as an anticolonial resource help establish colonial history as a relatively brief and recent intervention into an ongoing and vital indigenous longue durée. ⁴ Such a long history and presence unsettle the putative erasure of a sovereign people, who are still here to testify to and heal the wounds of history.

In Balaz’s framework, space, time, and ongoing colonial frameworks are felt and known in the body. Thus, a history of colonial betrayal is tasted even in food, as the title of the poem “Why Da Poi Stay Stale” makes clear. The listener or reader is invited to contemplate poi, made from the underground plant stem of kalo or taro. Kalo is a food staple and is also considered a sacred ancestor, first-born child of earth mother and sky father, and thus potentially a revered elder brother to all Hawaiians. As Haunani-Kay Trask declares, “We are the children of Papa — earth mother — and Wakea — sky father — who created the sacred lands of Hawai’i Nei. From these lands came the taro, and from the taro, the Hawaiian people” (1999: vi; emphasis in original).

In Balaz’s poem, the poi stays stale due to the ongoing history and presence of violence. The audience is invited to “just listen”, and the speaker will tell the truth, starting “wit boots on da ground || and wun warship | wit its guns aimed at Iolani Palace” (157). The US role in overthrowing Queen Liliokalani and the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 was acknowledged 100 years later in a US Congressional Apology Resolution. Now the microphone has been passed to a Pidgin speaker, who observes that thanks to such instances of manifest destiny, the result has been not stars and stripes forever but “scars and slights forevah” (157). The pun here is painful; people who have lost lands and now fight for sovereignty carry in their bodies wounds of history. Confronting those scars is a necessary part of honouring the living body of Pidgin culture, which Balaz here connects specifically with Shawnee, Oglala Lakota, and Apache as well as Hawaiian history. The Pidgin speaker wields truth as did “Tecumseh, Crazy Horse, | and Geronimo” (157). Such leaders of armed resistance form part of a spectrum of decolonizing action, as does the poem.

In a Nishnaabeg context on the North American continent, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson avers, “the present, then, is a colliding of the past and the future. Everyday embodiment is therefore a mechanism for ancient beginnings” (2017: 193). Recall the embodied injuries of history, which must be accounted for to make possible new beginnings. In Balaz’s poem, past and future also collide and are carried in the voice of the speaker and in the poem: the language itself becomes part of that collision, attesting to the truth of what happened and calling for a new future. The poem closes, “As long as da faithful | know dere history || you kannot kill da truth | of wat is wrong and wat is right” (158). Pidgin becomes a standard-bearer, a living body of language and people moving toward sovereignty.

In presenting Pidgin speech and literature as an overt form of decolonizing action, Balaz’s work demonstrates an observation offered by attorney and activist Puka Laenui in a talk given in 1996. Laenui identifies five stages of decolonization: 1) rediscovery and recovery, 2) mourning, 3) dreaming, 4) commitment, and 5) action (2000: 152). As Laenui acknowledges, these stages overlap and may occur in the same time and space. Balaz’s book suggests that all of the stages are themselves part of decolonizing action, which does not come only at the end of a linear sequence, but is simultaneous with and included in all the preceding stages. Recognizing that the poi tastes stale amounts to mourning and also represents a step toward rediscovering and renewing ancestral uses of land — for instance, potentially planting kalo rather than plantation crops of sugarcane, coffee, and pineapple. Acknowledging the beauty of Hawai’i Nei is presented as a form of dreaming, and also as a step toward commitment to and active responsibility for preserving the beauty of sun, sea, land, and sky.

The poems themselves, in other words, articulate and make way for decolonizing action, on and beyond the spoken word or printed page. Much as Laenui acknowledges, “the action phase today must include considerations beyond what has been historically undertaken. […] The fax machine, computer, television, radio, and newspaper are perhaps more effective [than the rifle] in executing the long battle plan” (2000: 158). With poems written during the period spanning 1984 to 2019, Pidgin Eye examines expressions and experiences of decolonizing realities that already exist. Shifting the focus to decolonizing realities offers a subtle but powerful action. Whereas Salman Rushdie writes that “redescribing a world is the necessary first step toward changing it” (1991: 14), Balaz’s poems subtly shift perspective to reveal that powerful decolonized and never-colonized realities are already present, not so much changing an old imperial world as bringing another world into view.

The poems share a commitment to unmasking colonial myths, models, and institutions and do not presume to offer a single voice or version of the decolonized. “No Insult My Antennas” counters departures from truth, with the unnamed first-person speaker calling out an unnamed addressee: “Da way you see it || if it looks like wun coconut | smells like one coconut | and tastes like wun coconut || den it could have been wun lychee” (202). Lychees were imported to Hawai’i in the late nineteenth century, while Polynesians brought coconuts to Hawaii when they arrived in 400 CE. The humour is devastating; substituting a much smaller, redder, and non-native-to-Hawai’i lychee for a much larger, browner, and deeply ancestral coconut is not creative cooking but a denial of reality and an insult to the speaker’s intelligence. With understatement, the speaker rather politely describes this process of replacing the local with the imported as “editing”. But rather than countering one edited myth with another, the speaker concludes by declaring, “I no moa time | foa your altering agenda — || I got wun appointment wit da real” (203). The definite article conveys this speaker’s sense of certainty and suggests that there may be a singular real, in this case one that opposes any local-overwriting agenda. The second-person address reaches beyond the poem to ask listeners or readers what agendas they themselves might have that deny “da real”, which in this case honours the non-mythicized local.

The decolonizing real proposed by the book as a whole is non-singular, formed in dialogue, motion, and freedom, and pivots upon humour even in the midst of struggle: meaningful self-determination and sovereignty include honouring the power of indigenous language inseparable from embodied presence, indigenous practices of agriculture, and indigenous determination of how land, sea, and air are used. As Kauanui declares, Hawaiian sovereignty is “widely understood as embodied — grounded within complex relations among and between myriad deities, humans, ancestral beings, the land, and all of the natural world ties” (2018: 27).

Balaz’s Pidgin comprises a key aspect of championing a specifically indigenous and non-elite local. Pidgin is associated with an ethnically mixed “local” culture, as well as with the indigenous culture Balaz emphasizes. Parallel to the way Balaz challenges the racist blood quantum measure of indigeneity in favour of Hawaiian models of identity, he also offers a Hawaiian understanding of Pidgin. Teaching and learning in the Hawaiian language was banned in 1896; for the next four generations, Hawaiian was not allowed in schools. In 1978, the State Constitution recognized Hawaiian as an official language (Silva, 2004: 3; History of the Hawaiian Education Program, 2019). Moreover, linguists speculate that Hawaii has been home to more than one Pidgin: Hawaiian Maritime Pidgin (from about 1820 to the 1870s), and Hawaiian Plantation Pidgin (from the mid- to late-1800s), the latter of which served as a donor language to Hawai’i Creole English (Day, 1987: 163). Ho’omanawanui makes clear in her study of Hawaiian poetry, “Stripped of our ancestral language, most contemporary Hawaiian poets have preferred to use Hawai’i Creole English over ‘standard’ English as another form of resistance to haole colonization, as well as a way of exerting a stronger identification with ‘local’ (non-haole and elitist) culture” (2005: 69). The term haole means someone who is not Hawaiian or Polynesian, often a white person; in the context of institutions and models that have dismissed Pidgin and those who speak the language, the choice to write in Pidgin defines a resurgent freedom.

Consider Balaz’s poem, “Uncle Kaulana Gives Wun Speech”, which makes clear the connection between Pidgin and sovereignty expressed through both language and land use. Even with such a key subject, Balaz uses humour. The uncle proclaims, “Sovereignty is wun good ting | if we can just figure out wat it is” (148). The poem suggests that sovereignty is determined by those who step forward together: “we talking about wun movement | and dat movement is moving!” (149). The phrasing offers an insight into the ongoing and ancestral call of sovereignty. Similar to Simpson’s articulation discussed above, sovereignty is active and alive in the collision of the past and future that is the present — and makes possible and urges further new beginnings.

As part of reclaiming the local, Uncle Kaulana revises President John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s famous line, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Here, the uncle declares to his audience, “Da question is not wat I going do foa you | da question is wat you going do foa yourself!” (148). With good humour, he admonishes listeners to not “just sit on your okole | waiting foa everyone else | foa do someting” (148). Get off your okole, and “[w]e going grow taro instead of pineapples | and Hawaiian and Pidgin going be | da official languages of da land” (152). The choice to grow ancestral crops on the land, displacing other crops central to colonial economies, is allied with the choice to speak Hawaiian and Pidgin.

Choices flourish under sovereignty: the speaker does not present a single model of Hawaiian sovereignty, instead suggesting that everyone create their own models and let them fly: “just like dat model airplane | you going patiently put | all of da pieces togettah” (151). Doing so creates a future based on and emerging from the collective. Making one model inspires others, the speaker promises: “And den you going make anadah one. | And your friend going make one. || And his friend going make one. | And his friend’s friend going make one” (151). Creating one model of sovereignty calls forth other models, helping make possible a Hawai’i guided by Hawaiians. When Balaz detonates the extended metaphor, all those sovereignty models/model airplanes form “wun Hawaiian air force || foa support da ground troops!” (151). This revolution comes with laughter, but also makes clear the need for Hawaiian determination of the ways in which air and earth are used.

The Hawai’i created by the collective looks different: “da guys you love most, | da military, | going pay substantial rent,| and dey going follow our rules”, including “aloha print going be mandatory | and incorporated into all of der uniforms”(152, 153). As Trask makes clear, from the perspective of Hawaiian sovereignty the United States may be viewed as a foreign power, with the military serving as an uninvited guest that uses Pacific land, sea, and sky without consulting the people of the land: “American military dominance in the Pacific has meant that enormous amounts of land, water, and other resources are diverted to satisfy American military needs” (1999: 105). The islands of Hawai’i host 11 military bases, with a full 21% of the land area of O’ahu controlled by the military (Kelly, 1998: 255). As with Uncle Kaulana’s presentation of language and agriculture, the aloha print uniforms and the substantial rent set forth a different economy, one that reverses national or foreign expropriation of the local and instead allows people of the land to make the rules. The humour is playful but also charged; here the second-person address presupposes agreement rather than dissent, and the collective “our” in the phrase “dey going follow our rules” descries a unity even amidst diverse models of sovereignty.

In his discussion of Native American sovereignties, Lyons notes, following Vine Deloria, that sovereignty is not given by the dominant power; it is claimed and recognized first by decolonizing collectives and then by others (2000: 457). Sovereignty, he declares, is not about separatism, but “is the ability to assert oneself renewed — in the presence of others. It is a people’s right to rebuild, its demand to exist and present its gifts to the world”; it is, moreover, “an adamant refusal to separate culture, identity, and power from the land” (2000: 457; emphasis in original). Balaz accentuates a similar connectedness to land: recall the way Pidgin flies in the wide open sky, and is by da zoo, da beach, and in town, too. Recall the way Hawai’i is the mainland. Naming connectedness with land using Pidgin is freeing. Trask declares, “Language, in particular, can aid in decolonizing the mind. Thinking in one’s own cultural referents leads to conceptualizing in one’s own world view, which, in turn, leads to disagreement with and eventual opposition to the dominant ideology” (1999: 43). Balaz’s decolonizing realities are dialogical, and filled with kaona, hidden or layered meanings. Like the other French loan words that Balaz merrily traces and detonates as they travel into English, the word “sovereignty” also arrives thanks to those Norman invaders; conquest of land brings into view the need to seize loan words for various anticolonial purposes. Proliferation of and play with meaning can help move a language and people toward resurgence: scars and slights are not forever.

Pidgin Eye considers indigenous Hawaiian realities from the inside out, exemplifying what James Clifford in his study of twenty-first century indigeneity terms both “pragmatic, entangled, contemporary forms of indigenous cultural politics” and “long histories of indigenous resistance and transformative links with roots prior to and outside the world system” (2013: 54). The demotic carries powerful theories here, offering a call analogous to what Simpson terms a “radical resurgent present” (2017: 10), a “manifesto to create networks of reciprocal resurgent movements with other humans and nonhumans radically imagining their ways out of domination, who are not afraid to let those imaginings destroy the pillars of settler colonialism” (2017: 10). The demotic here stands on a world stage, celebrating Pidgin’s literary and epistemic coups, and insisting upon not only the colliding but also the simultaneity of past and future. It is not possible to return to the past because the past did not go anywhere; it is still here ringing through his Pidgin speakers’ call to the land, and the land’s call to the speakers. The Pidgin shift brings into view a new mapping of reality, already present. Balaz’s call is filled with humour and hidden layers of meaning that dissolve monolingual myths and ostensible control of meanings. In his collection, Pidgin epistemologies offer decolonizing realities, establishing reciprocity with and responsibility toward land, sea, and sky, and confronting relatedness with all humans, both people of the land and those who remain unaware of indigenous ways of knowing.