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Issues of "Bamboo Ridge" often make me hungry. That's what I expected when I picked up the Spring 2000 issue of "Bamboo Ridge: Journal of Hawai'i Literature and Arts," which will be celebrated at a 7:30 p.m. Thursday reading in the University of Hawai'i Campus Center Ballroom. A more modern
‘Bamboo Ridge’By Treena Shapiro
Star-BulletinRight on the cover of the new journal is a photo of three women sitting in front of an old-time diner.
But this issue was different. Yes, food is attached to the usual tales of comfort and childhood, but food in this edition is also connected to prejudice, divorce and borderline incest.
"Balut," a poem by Elmer Omar Bascos Pizo, comes with a definition: "Balut: 18-day-old duck's embryo boiled and sucked out of its shell. It is tastier when still warm. Some Filipinos consider it an aphrodisiac."
This collection of short stories and poems is more modern than nostalgic. The more discomforting, the better, it seems.
Some of the poems made me squirm (William S. Chillingsworth's clinical analysis of boat rash) or titter (Lisa Linn Kanae's hilarious "A Day in the Life of a Java Junkie").
The Zen poems by Albert Saijo, Nanao Sakaki and Gary Snyder that begin the collection evoke images of environmental destruction, disease and commercialism. I was struck by Saijo's "Turkey Vulture," in which he observes, "aren't they higher up on the food chain than we are since we won't eat them but they'll eat us -- we are turkeys to them."
Franco Salmoiraghi's photo essay "Waialua: A Sugar Town Portfolio" follows, with photos of Waialua from 1970 to 2000. The photos were engaging, but I found myself wanting more information to put them into context, even as Salmoiraghi writes: "Sometimes the photographer doesn't have the opportunity to engage with people, to talk, ask questions: we see something interesting, photograph that moment, and move on."
The most interesting piece was Lee A. Tonouchi's "Da Death of Pidgin," an adaptation of a talk he gave at last year's Fall Celebration of Writers. In this essay, Tonouchi struggles to define pidgin, legitimize its use, and even attempts "fo' debunk dis ting that we call standard english, ees one very outmoded way of looking at language."
Tonouchi, who used pidgin to apply for (and obtain) a position teaching English in Kapiolani Community College, advocates its use in the curriculum. "Pidgin is very accepting," he writes. "In Pidgin no mo' correck/incorreck, so we can go beyond the surface levels so dat the childrens can move on to mo' advance critical levels of contemplations wea we no longer focus on how you say 'em, but wot you actually saying."
Like many of the pieces in this anthology, his self-proclaimed "radical idea" challenged me to revisit ideas I tend to take for granted.
Reading
What: Bamboo Ridge reception, reading and book signing
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