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Under the Sun Cynthia Oi |
Caught in the ifs, ands
and buts of being ‘local’A REPORTER in the features section came back from an interview shaking his head in bewilderment. He'd interviewed a guy for a story and asked the man his opinion on some matter or another.
The question drew this answer: "I no t'ink so, but."
The first four words, the reporter understood, but the "but" at the end of the remark drove him crazy. Unfamiliar with the nuances of pidgin, he asked what I thought the guy was saying. I said that it seemed that the guy disagreed.
And the "but?"
The "but" was an outlet, a gap left open to allow disagreement with his views, to say he could be wrong. It was a non-confrontational way to dissent, a kind of a local thing where you don't draw hard lines unnecessarily.
This incident happened years ago, but I've held it in my mind as an example of a reluctance among local people to adopt an in-your-face attitude. Except that lately, the texture of the local thing has roughened somewhat.
Localism is a force that swings positive and negative, depending on its application. Sometimes it's used as a weapon of mass distraction, to blur focus on the facts of an issue. In other cases, a call on local pride can work wonders.
No doubt that pride was wounded when the University of Hawaii chose a Maryland company to come up with a logo for the UH system's "branding" project. The reaction probably wouldn't have been so harsh if the two designs presented were any good. But the real hurt was that a local company or artist didn't get the job. It kicked in the feeling of being disrespected that's almost genetic in Hawaii, an accumulation of differences between plantation worker and boss, between brown-yellow-ochre-black and haole-white-pink leaching through generations. The implication was that local wasn't good enough.
In the current battle of the banks, the issue has taken a different form, developing into a contest about who is more local. The struggle on the broad front has been about Central Pacific trying to take over City Bank, but a secondary skirmish unfolded when Central Pacific's honcho took a shot at another bank uninvolved in the matter, questioning its local credentials because of its ties to a French company.
Big mistake, because French links aside, the chief of that bank is Hawaii-born and took great offense. The miscalculation by the recent transplant from the mainland also opened the door for local-claiming to City Bank, allowing its officials to characterize Central Pacific's actions as too pushy, "not how we do business in Hawaii."
This argument is silliness. Like with many businesses in the islands, owners and shareholders are spread globally. There's no way to determine which one is more local when defining the term itself is elusive. A company labeling itself "kamaaina" doesn't make it one. That's simply a matter of tailoring their pitches to consumers.
Localism has become diffused over the years as Hawaii-born people shift to the mainland and others move here. But it is still fixed into island culture, and that's good if the practice recognizes that being local means treating people respectfully and with human acknowledgment -- birth place, years of residence, skin color aside.
Being local shouldn't be used as an excuse to disengage, as in "you're not local so you can never understand." While individual and collective experiences shape our perspectives, the basic capacity for sympathy and compassion gets thrown out when matters are framed only in that context.
In announcing that he was dumping the logo designs, UH president Evan Dobelle, nettled by demands that local artists and companies be consulted, too, remarked that "the local thing" doesn't happen elsewhere. "We don't have these conversations in California or Massachusetts or in Florida," he said.
I don't think that's true, but if it is, the question is, why not? There should be discussion, exploration and appreciation of local character, even in Bakersfield, Boston and Boca Raton.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin since 1976.
She can be reached at: coi@starbulletin.com.