Brownish Girl, White World (eBook)

Tracie Keolalani (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2024 | 1. Auflage
180 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
979-8-3509-7970-1 (ISBN)

Infos

'Brownish Girl, White World' is a loving memoir of Hawaiian culture and race from Tracie Keolalani. She is a true Tita ?, a girl raised in Hawai?i who embodies aloha, with warm regard from the islands. The memoir examines life as a 'brownish' local girl and is brimming with stories of racism, prejudice, and injustice. It is dedicated to inspiring awareness, action, and change.

Tracie Keolalani is a Hawaiian teacher, singer, songwriter, mom, and author. She is an entrepreneur who rose to the spotlight when she translated the Moana song, 'E Kahiki e,' into Hawaiian and made a music video. She has been singing since she was five and was born and raised in Hawaii.

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This personal memoir is brought to you by Tracie Keolalani, a true local girl tita e. Born and raised in Hawai?i, she takes us on her journey of discovering the truth behind her homeland and her people. As a "e;brownish"e; local girl, she weaves in personal experiences of systemic racism, prejudice, and struggle. Honestly and wholeheartedly, she lets us peek into the sorrow, beauty, and humor of her world as she struggles to find her own identity and voice. "e;Brownish Girl, White World"e; is a reflective and informational book encouraging us to be aware of how our behavior affects those around us. Her story exposes us to her people's pain in order to compel positive change through our actions and behavior.

Textauszug

Chapter 1 Pidgin, the Language not the Bird

 

FACTS

Howzit, * how you*? That is Pidgin for “Hi, how are you”? Pidgin,* spoken by some locals is formally known as Hawaiian Pidgin English (aka Hawaiian Creole English and Hawaiian Pidgin). It is used in everyday conversation and has its roots in the old plantation days of Hawaiʻi. I will use, “talk Pidgin” or “talking Pidgin” rather than “speak Pidgin” or “speaking Pidgin” because that’s the way I heard it growing up.

 

History says that Pidgin originated during the time of the sugarcane plantations. Sometime after 1841, sugarcane was grown and its demand made it a staple production crop for the Hawaiʻi economy. Large amounts of workers were needed for this labor-intensive crop. However, the Hawaiian population had been destroyed by diseases from foreigners before that time. So immigrants were brought in from all over the world, poor immigrants looking for a better quality of life. Most were Japanese, Chinese, Filipinos, and Portuguese.

 

These races did not mix but remained in camps separated by their ethnicity. Because they all spoke different languages, they needed a way to communicate with each other. The common language that was born out of that was Pidgin. It is influenced by the languages of the different races, like Japanese, Filipino, and Portuguese but has its foundation in Hawaiian.

 

The Hawaiian Language was the main language of these islands at that time and was the main way of communicating. So the structure of some Pidgin sentences is apparent. They follow the sentence structure of Hawaiian. For instance, sentence patterns in Pidgin are translated word for word into Hawaiian and vice versa. An example is, “Ugly dat guy (that guy is ugly)” which is “Pupuka kēlā kāne.”

 

Another example is the intonation. English questions end with an upward inflection, Pidgin ends with a downward one. As I listened over the years to mānaleo* (native Hawaiian speakers), the inflection goes high in the middle but goes down at the end of the question. I would laugh as I listened to mānaleo speak because it was funny to hear how the inflections were similar to Pidgin.

 

Pidgin has a stigma attached to it. “This stigmatization traces back to those sugarcane plantations: Pidgin as broken English for the uneducated immigrant.”1 Attitudes in Hawaiʻi about it are “it is unamerican, fragmentary, unintelligible.”2 The Hawaiʻi Board of Education said that it is “lazy, and promotes backward thinking.”3 The media portrays it as, “the language of the unemployed, fun-seeking, teenager, people who are believed to have no serious purpose… not a serious language.”4 Critics say “Pidgin-the local creole language that traces back to Hawaii’s plantation era-has no place in the professional world… students need to speak English to get by in life.”5

 

Advocate for Pidgin, Lee Tonouchi, who has a master’s in English says “that belief is nothing but a product of deep-seated discrimination. And the emphasis on so-called ‘standard English,’ they say, disregards Hawaii’s cultural diversity.”6 Ermile Hargrove, executive director of the Hawaiʻi Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development and Pidgin advocate explains, “to say you should only have one language is ʻrestrictive’. Standard English is ʻan artificiality that doesn’t even exist.’”7

 

MY LIFE EXPERIENCE

The stigma that surrounds Pidgin is similar to the stigma that surrounded the Hawaiian Language. I didn’t talk Pidgin much growing up, and I never talked Pidgin in high school. I wanted to fit in with my friends and even though no one told me, Pidgin was spoken at home but was looked down on if I spoke it elsewhere. Maybe that is why I don’t remember speaking it in school back from small kid time* (when I was a kid).

 

I knew that it was looked down upon, and I believed the lie that people who spoke it were supposedly less educated, less cultured, and low income. My family and friends and everyone I knew talked Pidgin. So, what did it say about me? I should not have believed it, but I did. I am a product of the public school system. The Hawaiʻi Department of Education was the institution that perpetuated that lie. The lies about Pidgin have been woven into the system, systemic racism.

 

My first experience having mixed feelings about Pidgin came when I was at my mom’s job. It involved my mom’s boss’ son, Greg. My mom worked for a prominent attorney, who later became a judge in my hometown. He was a big haole* (Caucasian) man with a very low voice (more explanation about haole in Chapter 3). His nickname was Bud, and I never called him by name. I hardly ever talked to him. I was kind of scared of him at first, but after a while, I started to like him because he would let me stay at work with my mom, and play on her computer. My mom worked from his house and had her office in his garage. I remember going to work with her the whole summer when I was nine years old and playing a typing game all summer long on her computer. Little did I know, it would help me in college to be able to quickly typee up my papers.

 

He had a wife named Mary, and we called her Aunty Mary. Our way in the islands is to call older people “uncle” or “aunty” as a sign of respect. She was a tall haole lady and reminded me of a lady-giant. I don’t know why she reminded me of a giant. She was tall but not huge. Maybe it was her hearty laugh. I liked her a lot, and I think she liked me too.

 

I often observed their two sons. When I met them, their oldest son Stuart was in the 11th or 12th grade in high school. Their younger son Greg was in the 9th grade. At that time, I never had many friends that were haole so I watched them closely. Stuart hardly talked to me. He was very polite, had short dirty blonde hair, but always was busy doing things around the house or going to the beach. He was a pretty tan haole kid, but that’s because he was a beach dude. He barely noticed me, but would always come down to my mom’s office to talk story* (make small talk) with her. I always wondered why he wanted to talk to my mom all the time, but never to me. It was probably because my mom had a way of showing interest in whatever he had to say, or maybe he had a crush on my attractive mother.

 

The younger son, Greg seemed peculiar. He was four years older than me and would occasionally let me upstairs into their house to watch TV with him. He gave me snacks, but never let me pick the show. I would look at his white face when he was not looking, and I would always stare at his bright orange hair and freckles. He would talk Pidgin. To me, it always sounded funny. It reminded me of somebody trying to speak a foreign language but never quite did it well enough. He never had the right accent, intonation, or pronunciation. He never stopped trying though.

 

I was surprised. Here was a haole kid trying to talk Pidgin. I thought that he did it because he wanted to fit in with the locals. But yet here I was, a local girl, who didn’t talk Pidgin because I didn’t want anyone to look down on me or judge me as dumb and uneducated. It made me feel guilty that Greg was proud to talk Pidgin but couldn’t, and I was ashamed to talk Pidgin but could.

 

As I got older, I didn’t see Uncle Bud dem* (them) much. I was a teenager doing my own thing and getting ready for college. My mom would tell me that he always asked how I was doing. He wrote me several letters of recommendation which helped me get scholarships to pay my college tuition. He was always proud that I went away for college to better my life. Looking back, I think I liked him because intuitively, he understood that local people were typically lower-income, and did not usually go for higher education. He always seemed to want to help me make it out of the local rut. The local rut was a trap. Usually, locals would get a job in the tourism industry making peanuts and become slaves to catering to tourists in minimum wage jobs busting their asses just to make ends meet.

 

Before I left for college I went to my mom’s office. Their office had moved to the business district up near Seaview Circle. My mom had her own space with a desk, phone, chair, and all the office stuff. More people were working for Uncle Bud. I sat down and was doing my homework after school near her desk one day. I watched as a local part-Hawaiian, maybe Filipino mixed older man came in. He needed an attorney and he sat near me in the waiting room. He looked uncomfortable. He sat quietly and waited for his name to be called. My mom brought Uncle Bud out and introduced him to the man. The man was still sitting down, and you could tell that he was nervous. He was kind of moving back and forth in his seat but stared straight ahead, no smile. They shook...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.12.2024
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-13: 979-8-3509-7970-1 / 9798350979701