Maybe I'm copping out of dialoguing with some of the more challenging prompts Rob gave us this week, but I decided to follow my heart and write about my favorite poem in Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus -- "Dear God: A Prayer in Six Parts."
Nestled within a steady stream of reinterpreted American canonical poems, "Dear God" is one of the few pieces in this book that isn't attributed/directly connected to the lore of American poetry. In that respect, I thought it was a breath of fresh air and an excuse to not have to compare it to those (usually dry) canonical poems.
First off, her aggressive hybridization of pidgin and "texting" language (i.e. "lol," "plz") was initially bewildering. It took me several re-readings and speaking the text aloud to understand many of the phrases. While most of the other poems in her collection take on the heavy-handed task of writing back to those supposed American masters of the poetry form, I honestly found this poem to be a stronger exemplification of a uniquely Hawaiian identity. Her combative use of pidgin, the many references to specific Hawaiian chains (and the subtle nod to globalization with chains like McDonald's), and the reference to Filipino-Hawaiian relations all assert the poem's identity as a markedly Hawaiian text/voice.
The poem also operates as a dynamic glimpse into the lives of high school/middle school Hawaiian life. Whether or not Gajelonia developed this poem with an auto-biographical lens or not, it offers many of those heightened and/or hormonal responses to the plights of young Hawaiians, such as: "But I'm so pissed off! I no can believe she would do dat! Faking slut, I hope she get preggo and den John Boy dump her sorry ass..." I loved these moments, not simply for their humorous slant, but because they casually inserted a more deeply personal narrative into the book. Although other poems in TheBus also address personal views/voice, none came close to "Dear God" in intensity.
This weightiness of topic appears in the narrator's depiction of her parents. In part four of the poem, she writes, "Plz bless my faddah, I no like him but he my faddah so I guess bless him too...I no like him go jail again, God. I not gon' pray to u to make him stop doing drugs cuz I tink if I do dat I asking too much..." The speaker's slight naivete connotes the scene with a heavily sympathetic portrait -- one I couldn't help appreciating. Gajelonia's clever use of prayer as a poetic device to further penetrate the character's psyche is extremely effective. These casual yet emotionally piercing scenes deftly deliver tidbits of information about the narrative while also developing the struggles of the lead Hawaiian character.
The final part addresses Hawaiian-Filipino relations, saying, "I steh sorry I got into one fight wit da Filipino girlz dat hang out by da bench at sku." This part paints a convincing portrait of the embedded social dilemmas facing young Hawaiians while simultaneously addressing the continued problematics of Filipino-Hawaiian interactions. Maybe kids are simply cruel, but it's easier to vent those hormonal/developmental urges by translating them into a racialized power play. Gajelonia crafts this prayer to address those brimming racialized frustrations that linger between even the youngest on the island, pervading their preconceived notions of each other. I think it's a haunting yet realistic portrait of the difficulties facing the youth on the island. Furthermore, the fact that the narrator apologizes to God for her cruelty to the Filipino girls points to the ambivalences coursing through youthful society. In other words, it's not easy to choose between abstaining from racialized antagonism (which pervades the social hierarchies of Hawaii) and perpetuating the frayed relationship between Hawaiians and Filipinos.
If none of what I've previously said makes any sense (I'm feeling pretty exhausted/incoherent today), I mostly just want to convey how critically insightful this poem is. By placing it securely within an overt Hawaiian discourse, Gajelonia more deftly investigates the social/cultural problematics of Hawaii while offerring a more probing glimpse into the struggles of Hawaiian youths. Thus, "Dear God," more so than the other poems in TheBus, best exemplifies the emotional dynamics of Hawaii through a figure of hormonal yet keen perception.
-Jon Vorpe
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