Pidgin English

There was a little discussion about pidgin English over in our Educational Foundations class. Not sure how we got to such a topic, especially when the class was supposed to be about the Historical perspective of Education... But when I made my comment, I tried to make it relevent. Here's what I said (in effect): There's this one local author who insists that, for literature to be authentically Hawaiian, it MUST be written in pidgin. I soundly object to this. While I am not denying said author's works as valid literature, I do object to his assertion that Hawaiian literature MUST be written in pidgin. Myself, I grew up in an entirely different context from Palolo Valley, such that pidgin is awkward and clumsy and, most importantly, inauthentic for me to speak. I am much more comfortable with formal (at least my version of formal) English. Am I denied the right to speak my stories simply because I can't clothe them in a "pidgin's" clothes???

Well, like I said, I tried to make this statement relevent to the discussion on history. So I started talking about how this author was simply trying to justify his "language," keep it, perhaps, from dying, because language is the voice of a culture, and the quickest way to make a culture die is to kill its language. Taken from this perspective, the author's views seem sympathetic; he's only trying to "keep alive" a perspective that is dying out, due to modernization and the Haole's plague...

BUT... Literature is a mirror to the society that it came from. But it isn't a static mirror. Society changes. The voice of society changes. So again, sympathetic as I am to the underdog, I can only speak in the voice I have inherited, which is middle class haole English...

BESIDES (and this will make me seem a traitor to the "local" perspective): Pidgin is more than a "language," it is an attitude, and that attitude is one that is "in your face", "casual." Much as I'd like to, I can't embody that attitude. I approach life from a distance, a polite distance, an irreducible distance, like the gap of an asymptotic curve... Again, just because I can't be "in your face," does that mean that I don't have a valid and relevant voice???