When I was a teenager, the choices for the foreign language requirement at Hilo High School were Latin, Spanish and French. My mother told me to choose French so I could be like Jacqueline Kennedy.
She sewed me a shift and bought a pillbox hat so I could look like Jackie. But fancy-dressed with the pillbox plopped on my head every Sunday at church, I couldn’t pull off svelte and soft-spoken. And even though I majored in French at the university and went to Paris, I could never be like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, much to my mother’s eternal chagrin.
But the first lady and I shared a love of languages, and when I visited Switzerland, the crossroads of Europe, I admired how residents switched effortlessly between French, German and Italian and wished I could do the same.
It was only after I retired and moved back home that it hit me. I can ask for drinks and directions in several languages but not in Hawaiian. Of course in Hawaii, we know about ‘okolehao and use mauka and makai for direction. We sprinkle into our conversations useful words such as pilikea and kolohe, and yet, my Hawaiian is very limited.
So I decided to go back to school. But not so fast, because if I wanted to study another language, I had to excavate my old brain and revive all those student behaviors from long ago: (1) finding a course that fits my time and place; (2) coughing up tuition; (3) buying a second-hand textbook; (4) showing up for class on time; (5) sitting in front looking attentive; (6) asking thoughtful questions; (7) taking copious (illegible) notes; (8) studying with electronics muted; (9) mimicking in front of the mirror to see if my mouth is behaving: (10) practicing last minute on the way to class; (11) repeating Nos. 4-10; and finally, (12) taking occasional tests, oral, written and bluffed.
I subjected myself to this torture a few times, but even after my best efforts, I still hardly know Hawaiian because it is a language heavily dependent on context, deeply metaphorical and difficult to learn. And to think that it could have been my first language without all that hard work!
All of us who grew up here should be native speakers, fluent in ‘olelo Hawaii. My full-blooded Portuguese grandmother — born in 1890 at Haina, makai of Honoka‘a — spoke Hawaiian. Why not us? It should have been the language we lived, worked and played in. I get nuha when I think about the island history I don’t know, the songs I don’t understand, and the kaona I don’t catch.
I know some of you are already arguing that I’m better off with English, to which I say: Sssaaah.
If we grew up speaking Hawaiian, we still would have learned English because it is the language of commerce in these islands. So we would have been bilingual, all native speakers of Hawaiian AND English, maybe even trilingual, if we throw in pidgin.
As for my friends who went to Japanese and Chinese class after their regular school day, they would have been quadri-, multi-lingual. These islands would have been the Switzerland of the Pacific! I can picture us all suave like the Swiss, moving smoothly between Hawaiian, English, pidgin, Chinese, Japanese and more. Fun to dream about, eh? But sorry to slap myself awake.
By the middle of the
last century, the Hawaiian language was on the brink
of extinction, its native speakers dying off. In case you don’t know the story, it happened like this: After annexation in 1898, following the illegal overthrow of Queen Lili‘uokalani in 1893, the U.S. mandated that English be spoken in public schools and government offices.
Discuss among yourselves the reason for native language suppression and why speakers took it underground, so that the generations growing up during the 20th century didn’t speak much Hawaiian. How poho is that? If not for linguistic interference, who knows what I might have learned from my grandmother and her brothers when they joked in Hawaiian and reminisced about the good old days in Haina.
Aue noho‘i e.
Rochelle delaCruz was born in Hilo, graduated from Hilo High School, then left to go to college. After teaching for 30 years in Seattle, Wash., she retired and returned home to Hawaii. She welcomes your comments at rainysideview@gmail.com. Her column appears twice a month on Mondays.
