Power of Multilingual Literature for Avant-Garde Pacific Movements

“Maori loan words although most have

Ceased italicizing them

To give a sense of inclusion

In one context” –Robert Sullivan (Spahr 94)

            Spahr begins her essay by explaining her history with the Pacific, through her job opportunity at the University of Hawai’i in order to depict what she has learned of her own thinking by “reading works that are rooted in anticolonial identity and resistance,” (Spahr 80) something that she argues comes through most prominently in poems or plays, since “both genres have ties to oral traditions” (80)—this shows the intense, “conjunction” between literature and Hawaiian sovereignty struggles.

            Spahr argues that Pacific literature is also the meeting place of two postmodernisms: one which includes “writerly expectations” and “textual play” and one with the concerns that of a specific “model of identity, affiliated voice, sentiments of nationhood, and (post)colonial heritage” (Spahr 79). To me, this means that literature of the Pacific Islands is a meeting place of not only postcolonial structure and forms but also postcolonial content and sentiments of a search for sovereignty through their outward literature. Spahr focuses on the orally-represented genres, (plays and poetry) for they come straight from the folklore of the Native and local peoples. By the use of HCE or pidgin, as well as the Native Hawaiian language embedded within an English-based literature, Spahr argues that local Hawaiian literature can break through the restraints of American colonialism in their own Avant-Garde way, as described above.

            Spahr argues that the use of multiple languages in literature forces not only the reader but the writer as well (for she is one!) to highlight the “intercultural, weblike nature of all knowledge systems…[the reader and writer alike are] forced to form new communities of reading” (82).  These communities of reading form a linguistically-based group of locals based in keeping “the local in the global” or portraying their anticolonial stand through their specific plights in their own word form. In using their HCE next to, yet against the English, the Hawaiians take their stand with their own conjunction of language in their post-colonial literature.