Bamboo Ridge: Journal of Hawai‘i Literature and Arts No. 108

Various authors

Bamboo Ridge Press, $18

The new anthology Bamboo Ridge: Journal of Hawai‘i Literature and Arts No. 108 shows not only numerically, but content-wise that independent publishing in Hawaii is alive and well.

Bamboo Ridge was founded by Eric Chock and Darrell Lum in the late ’70s as an alternative, nonprofit press with the mission of publishing stories and poems written in the voices and vernacular in which local people spoke. Publishing first works by writers such as Lois-Ann Yamanaka and Sylvia Watanabe, they brought pidgin English/Hawaiian Creole into the literary canon of regional dialects.

There’s not much pidgin in the journal’s 108th issue: Most of its offerings are narrated in what our plantation-born kupuna would call the King’s English. Yet a subtext of being local, or not, unites the work in this collection. And pidgin survives here and there, in dialogue and in poetry that is simple and rich in persona and voice.

Pidgin zings in Joe Balaz’s “Fish Fight”:

“All da fishermen stay fighting / cause no moah fish. If you from ‘da gathering place’/ no cross da Molokai channel / to ‘da friendly isle’ / cause dey going whack / you in da head wit wun bat.”

It rants in Tamara Wong-Morrison’s “Shopping for One Sovereign Nation,” in which the Hawaiian speaker disses the models that have been proposed and suggests another:

“And what about the nation that going get one monarch, / one princess or one queen for subjugate us again? / I no think so /… Me, I like sign up for the nation / that going give whatever get to the Hawaiians / with the most Hawaiian blood first.”

Other works are localized by place and perspective.

Nature and mortality become personas in Cathy Song’s “Collected Works,” in which, sorting old photos, she finds one taken after the birth of her first child:

“I stand on the rocky cliffs at Wai‘anapanapa. / Aging has yet to fulfill its promise. / All that I know up to that moment of midmorning light, / I will be asked to surrender.”

The perspective of a nonlocal haole is offered in Mark Panek’s rollicking story, “An Island in Waikiki,” winner of the editors’ choice award for prose. Set in 1993, it follows two off-duty hotel waiters as they charm their way, or so the narrator desperately hopes, into an all-local bar, where “our harmless appearance is greeted with a kind of … confusion … as in, you seem like a couple of decent haoles, but Moose McGillycuddy’s is right across the street.”

The crowd worships Uncle, a massive Hawaiian “one-man wall of sound” who can play anything, including Hendrix, on his “white 472-string guitar.” Tension builds as the narrator’s clueless friend keeps calling for Talking Heads. The tone shifts to elegiac when Uncle plays the 19th-century mele “Makee Ailana,” about a small, lost island. (The island was man-made during the draining of Waikiki’s marshland and later buried under sediment from the dredging of the Ala Wai Canal.)

The theme of this issue is making connections in literature, according to the note from guest editors Ann Inoshita, Juliet S. Kono, Christy Passion and Jean Yamasaki Toyama, who write linked poetry as a group and call themselves the Renshi poets.

Indeed, as one reads, all kinds of connections emerge. Images of a girl with a raised skirt — from different times and places but both evoking pity and less savory, involuntary feelings — appear in a photograph discussed in an essay by poet Wing Tek Lum, author of “The Rape of Shanghai,” and in a poem by John Simonds about a possible bike accident glimpsed in traffic.

The unachieved dreams of dead fathers challenge their teenage sons in Kapena M. Landgraf’s “Hoe Uli,” winner of the editors’ choice award for a new writer, and Stuart Ching’s “Music of My Father.” Landgraf’s angry hero, impoverished by his father’s suicide, inherits a chipped canoe paddle; Ching’s narrator wants to work in the fish market like his father, but his grandfather restores his father’s old koa ukulele “for when you go college.”

A Japanese Zero attacks civilians in a scene being filmed on a Wahiawa street in Balaz’s “Hollywood Wuz in Town” and for real in Derek N. Otsuji’s “A Japanese-American Recalls Pearl Harbor Day When He and His Teammates Headed to a Football Game in Town Were Fired on by a Zero Pilot.” Both poems are about memory, as well.

Race and ethnicity, favorite Bamboo Ridge themes, flow through this issue. Dawn Morais’ “Dark Chocolate” recounts being treated as less pretty and smart than her lighter-skinned sister. In Kenny Tanemura’s “Portrait de Lucille,” the poet imagines what his mother thought when viewing the statue of a Roman emperor’s daughter in postwar Tokyo: “She must have seen in the white woman’s large eyes the image of what Tokyo was becoming.”

And race, emotion and food, inextricably connected, feed an outburst in the poem “No Sugar in My Poi,” by Moriso Teraoka.

“Sometimes it’s good to be simple and direct,” the editors note, but it should also be noted that there is such a thing as too much of both. The expository dialogue in some of these pieces could have been cut back; something must be left for the reader to discover.

And while it’s great that Bamboo Ridge does workshops with high school students, their writing, while accomplished, belongs in school journals rather than this anthology. Critical rigor, not all-inclusiveness, is needed at a time of growing amateurism in the arts.

Which is why, although Russell Sunabe’s oil paintings from his “Atomic Series” speak for themselves in a portfolio in this issue, it is a pleasure to read his thoughts about them and the artists who have influenced him in the accompanying interview.

But enough said. Overall, this is a lovely, stirring anthology whose connections and surprises will reward the reader who spends time with it.