Grrl Fo' Realz

My favorite poem in Thirteen Ways of Looking at TheBus is “DearGod: A Prayer in Six Parts.” The language used is a combination of pidgin and textspeak, resulting in a playful and comical tone--and when the content gets heavy, the language results in something honest. I absolutely love this idea of a Hawaiian girl texting God; a girl’s innermost wishes being sent to God in a way that’s intimate to her. It’s as if the speaker could be texting her best friend and telling her the news about Carissa--”I faking hate / her! God, I thought she wuz my fren. I saw / her yesterday making out wit John Boy”--and it’s very exciting (to me) to think of her relationship with God as such (13). Is she texting God as she rides on TheBus? To me, most definitely. I don’t see this poem being a critique on the young, technology driven generation, but rather an honest portrait of a teenaged girl. A simple reading could criticize the speaker as being shallow and vapid, pointing to her trivial concerns--and I would attribute that to the cultural attempts of the dominant patriarchal western culture to trivialize anything that a teenage girl likes/wants/desires. Whether or not Gizelle Gajelonia agrees with me, I feel like this poem is (or could be used as) a celebration of The Teenage Girl, and not a condemnation of it.

This poem is very much reminiscent of Saturday Night at the Palhala Theater, especially in the scenes of daily life it portrays; young Hawaiians of different races fighting, abusive men, and peers bullying their friends. And the fact that it is one of the few poems that does not reference a canonical poem further distances it from the dominant tropes and aligns itself with the Hawaiian, woman author of Saturday Night. In parts IV and V, we learn the speaker’s father is an abusive drug addict who beat her mother, and that her mother is dead. It’s honest, and tragic, and it gives me all the more reason to root for her in part I when she prays, “Oh yeah, / plz bless Ikaika he steh numba 52, God. / Ho he soooo sexy fo’ realz. But he get / girlfriend u know soooo uglee her! . . . I hope dey break up and den / I hope Ikaika numba 52 gon ask me out / fo’ go eat Jack in the Crack one day” (12).