"I don't talk like that": R. Zamora Linmark tackles the UHM football coach's homophobia

The boy was about my son's age, maybe a year or two older. He was watching my son's team play, but he was also performing for the other spectators. His back to the field, he began to talk loudly about "fags," some kid who was one. One of the players' dads laughed loudly, so the kid said "fag" again. I was sitting off to the side, unsure of how to react. The kid came toward me, was about to walk by, when I reached out and grabbed his arm. "Many of my friends are gay, and I don't want to hear you say that again," I said to him. He smirked. He pulled at his arm; for a moment, I didn't release him. I never heard my son's baseball coach say anything of the kind, but he did punctuate his coaching with yells of "don't throw like a girl" and "don't hit like girl," even though his daughter played varsity for Kamehameha Schools softball team and one of his former charges was a star for the UH softball team (and in my Creative Writing & Literature class). Years ago, when I coached t-ball, one of the dads asked me to tell his son "not to act like a girl." Homophobia, misogyny: a not-so-odd couple trotted out at sports events where manhood is on the line, even if the players are 10 and under.

The UH football coach, Greg McMackin, has been suspended for 30 days, docked 7% of his pay, and required to do community service with LGBT organizations for a recent press conference in which he referred to the Notre Dame football team's "little faggot dance" (discreetly written as "f----t" on the kitv.com website). The UH haka dance is masculine and bold, of course. After his suspension and pay cut, he gave another public statement during which he shed tears and said the following (you can listen there):

"I would sincerely like to apologize for the inappropriate verbage, words I used. You know, couple things, cause I have nothing against the University of Notre Dame. I have... I don't talk like that and I'm really ticked off at myself for saying that. And uh, I don't know what to tell you. I don't have any prejudices and it really makes me mad that I said that, and I'm disappointed in myself. I know that there are a couple of you who know me. I'm a very competitive person. I think I told you guys that was the worst loss in my 40-year career in the game and that it ticks me off, that you know, that I said that cause Notre Dame played a great ball game. What I was trying to do was be funny and it wasn't funny and it's not funny and even more, it isn't funny, too. I was trying to make a joke and it was a bad choice of words and it really, I really, really feel bad about it, and I wanted to apologize. I'm going to apologize to my team and apologize to the people in Hawaii."

He moves from saying he might have offended Notre Dame to talking about his lack of prejudice, to saying he's very competitive, to claiming he was trying to be funny, to an apology to his team and the people of Hawai`i. Unpack that paratactical morass and the purported origins and evident cover for hatred become clear. You're hurt, you attack a marginalized group, it's just in good humor, and now you apologize. You apologize to the same group that laughed with you, namely the press. In a poem addressed to the coach, which will appear soon in the Honolulu Weekly, R. Zamora Linmark refers to the "joke" as "beyond boring to me" and expresses his ironic pleasure that the coach does "not have a problem with either" his being "a faggot or a homosexual," noting that "there really is very little difference between the two, / except to discern the discreet from the closeted." Zack follows that with his own enjambed joke about "your tight ends / and receivers."

As Zack notes, McMackin is hardly the first person in Hawai`i sports to find homosexuality threatening. Almost ten years ago, well before McMackin became the coach, the football team changed its name from "Rainbows" to "Warriors," got rid of the light green uniforms with rainbows on them, and changed to black uniforms with a forbidding H stenciled on. The Thursday, July 27, 2000 article by Dave Reardon in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin bears some close-reading; in "Ushering in Hawaii's new brand," Reardon alludes but once to "the gay movement" in his reporting on the change of name and logo. Reardon does quote a Hawaiian activist on problems with the new Warrior mascot and logo: "The issue," says Pi`ilani Smith, "is no longer about the mascot, the issue is no longer about this hideous logo. The issue is about misappropriating identity and racist slurs." Hugh Yoshida, then Athletic Director, responds that the "designs were thoroughly researched for cultural sensitivity, and experts at the university's Center for Hawaiian Studies were consulted." So there. No mention of "experts" on LGBT issues, of course.


The euphemistic haze gets denser. Former UH receiver Kyle Mosley is quoted as saying, "Being called the Rainbows, especially for men's teams, left them open to ridicule . . . Warriors has a much stronger connotation." Charlie Wade, the assistant women's volleyball coach, added that the word "rainbow," "is a loaded one, especially on the Mainland." "Once you get away from Hawaii, (Rainbow) can mean a lot of different things," said Wade, alluding to "Jeff Gordon's pit crew known as the Rainbow Warriors, Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, and the gay movement." Now which of these three items is most "loaded," do you think? Again, Zack takes the euphemisms and raises them, almost literally, into the sky:

I was not ticked off nor even offended
ten years ago, when the team refused to kick-
off until the name and mascot were changed
from "Rainbows" to "Warriors," for fear
of affiliating with Newton's palette or anything
to do with meteorological phenomenon [sic] . . .

__________

"Throw like a girl . . . hit like a girl": surely what follows these insults is the phrase, "cries like a girl." So in a private email, my Dean (a happily married gay man) writes, "But even more (much more) interesting than my being offended (Zack is right to call that 'beyond boring') was McMackin's total collapse into girly-man tears at his press conference. Now what was behind that?" Good question. Of course McMackin was not the first coach to break into tears over a football matter. When the last coach, June Jones (what's with that first name?), resigned as head coach, the Honolulu Advertiser's Stephen Tsai quoted a friend of the coach's as saying: "He cried like a baby . . . he doesn't want to leave. . . This breaks his heart." The language of manliness gives way, with seeming naturalness, to the language of sentiment--babies, women, what's the diff?

Stephen Tsai's work for the Advertiser and for espn.com is worth a closer look, for Tsai's rhetoric brought together, sometimes sublimely, the mix of masculinity, fundamentalist Christianity, and heroism that hovered about Jones's tenure as coach. At the same time, Tsai aided in the cover-up of Jones's affairs, his purported love child with a volleyball player, and the greed that sent him packing to SMU in 2008. Tsai was not the only writer to romanticize Jones's tenure as coach, but more than most he elevated Jones's position in the community by lauding his character. Crucial to the Junes Jones myth (one that lasted roughly the length of the George W. Bush administration) was the car accident that nearly took his life in 2001. Tsai began his article, "Jones became symbol of optimism for Aloha State" with the stark words, "Paradise froze." What follows in the article about Jones's accident are myriad mentions of prayer: the governor is praying, the mayor reports that the citizens of Hawai`i are praying, there was a moment of prayer before a game with Texas Christian (do I really need the italics?). Jones, who presided over the shift from Rainbows to Warriors, is described by friends and colleagues as "a people's coach," an agent of optimism in the face of economic recession, an Island Son. My favorite quotation comes from Larry Beil, a UH grad and former ESPN anchor: "Right next to the Duke Kahanamoku state [that means "statue"], they should make one for June Jones."






Ah, but this mythical character is also a good and a humble man, according to Stephen Tsai: "Jones does not have a secretary, keeps his own appointment book and answers his own calls, usually on his cellular, which is as much a part of his everyday wear as socks are not." He drives his own car!!! (Your blogger knows this is true, because June Jones drove himself in his fancy SUV through her picket line in 2000, when the faculty struck for better pay.) Tsai ends his encomium by using the two worst words in contemporary journalism. The accident, he writes, was "so ironic and tragic." Need I add that the ironies were unspoken, and the tragedy incomplete, since the flawless hero survived.

Tsai updated this article six years later, after the Warriors' undefeated season, but before Jones left for other pastures. The update fills out the language of religion and heroic recovery from the accident. The very headline alludes to the coach's "new life," at once actual and spiritual, and reads like a saint's life. What fascinates me about Tsai's article is that so much space is devoted to love. As quoted in the article, June Jones sets forth a philosophy of familial (his mother cooked him breakfast every morning; his dad attended all his games) and divine love ("It is that love--God's love--that seized his soul when he was a teenager"). Reminded of saint's lives, I did some traveling on the internet this morning and found a site that features the "Saint of the Day" on Catholic Online. Turn to today's Saint of the Day on-line at the "Saints and Angels" section of the Catholic on-line site, and you find this on St. Cajetan:

"Cajetan took a different route. Just as concerned as Luther was about what he observed in the Church, he went to Rome in 1523 -- not to talk to the pope or the hierarchy but to consult with members of a confraternity called the Oratory of the Divine Love. When he had first come to Rome many years before, he had felt called to some unknown great work there. A few years later he returned to his hometown of Vicenza -- his great work seemingly unrealized. He had however studied for the priesthood and been ordained and helped re-establish a faded confraternity whose aims were promoting God's glory and the welfare of souls."

Let me now quote Coach Jones's spiritual guide, Pastor Norm, as quoted by Stephen Tsai. Listen for the echoes of St. Cajetan's life, the fraternity of "Divine Love," the promotion of "God's glory and the welfare of souls." "The crash woke him to to why he's on Earth . . . It brought him back to realizing his purpose. He's here to change young people's lives, which he can do better at the college level than pro level. It recalibrated his life and his priorities. He understood that 'this is why God put me here and why God made me like this'." Following the Lives of the Saints model, Tsai goes on to list Jones's good deeds, which included offering a scholarship to a homeless player, creating a charitable foundation, giving another scholarship to a football fan with cerebral palsy, and so on. Tsai is proleptically channeling the good pastor Norman Nakanishi's sermon on June Jones; Nakanishi's recent Twitter feed indicates he's praying for Coach McMackin: "Called & emailed UH Coach Mac. May God reveal himself. Pray w/me.12:26 PM Jul 31st from mobile web."

Far be it from me to mock the Catholic saints, but I do feel an upsurge of skepticism about the saintly coach, as I would confess to the nearest priest, or to you, fond reader. I might take a rhetorical question from Tsai's article out of context and ask, "What's wrong with this picture?" and point back to the language of hatred with which I began this post. Coach Jones was never quoted as using the word "faggot," but then there were (enamored) writers like Stephen Tsai to cover for him. Coach McMackin, a less charismatic coach, alluded to reporters covering for him after he used the word "faggot" at the press conference. This coach got caught by the out of town press.

The haters on the internet can now hate the Coach for crying, for apologizing (mostly to Notre Dame, it should be said). Homophobic language, along with its close relatives sexist and racist (and even anti-semitic) language (see here for an especially vile example), are alive and well. So it's good to have the homophobic language of public officials dragged out of the closet. It's good to see that there are consequences to the use of such language, even for the coach of the football team. It's good that the Coach will be working directly with the LGBT community. While the phrase "policing the language" has a bad name (what? I thought we weren't supposed to speak ill of the police!), let's try to keep policing this dance of saying and not saying words that can--on the field of play--break some bones.

Let's save the language of love and sentiment and spirituality for other fields of play. Like poetry.

Here's Linmark's entire poem in response to Coach McMackin.



That Little Faggot Dance, Said the Coach
R. Zamora Linmark

McMackin apparently pleaded with the press not to report on the slur. “I want to officially, officially apologize…Please don’t write that statement I said as far as Notre Dame. The reason is, I don’t care about Notre Dame. But I’m not a – I don’t want to come out and have every homosexual ticked off at me. from Towleroad

Coach,
I am a faggot and a homosexual and I know and am glad
that you do not have a problem with either,
because there really is very little difference between the two,
except to discern the discreet from the closeted,
and when the issue extends beyond the grassy field
where preference of position is played out to the tee,
almost identical, but not quite, to your tight ends
and wide receivers.
And although you
were only trying to make a joke that ended up
not being funny to you and beyond boring to me,
the joke being about “that little faggot dance”
the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame did before
you sent your boys to slap their heads and beat
their chests then go into a Polynesian trance
that your Hawaii fans now suspect was the reason
for the 20-point loss, which is almost equivalent
to three touchdowns.
But why did you use “faggot”
three times at the press conference then try
to retract by calling it a “bad term”, which,
whether you and I and the rest of the Emperor
penguins like it or not, is almost similar
to you calling me a bad person.
For
I am that bad choice of word, when
you could’ve consulted Roget’s
or me via Facebook for more engaging, if not
better get-creative-with synonyms, like “Aero-splitting
fudgepackers” or “Powwow fairies”, almost alike
and at least oxymoronic.
That said, I am not
ticked off and am far from offended, just as
I was not ticked off nor even offended
ten years ago, when the team refused to kick-
off until the name and mascot were changed
from “Rainbows” to “Warriors”, for fear
of affiliating with Newton’s palette or anything
to do with meteorological phenomenon,
like the time I sided with the rain on one side
of the street and you were glinting with the sun
on the other.

Contemplations on Contemplations on Pidgin Culture, or Re-publishing LIVING PIDGIN, by Lee Tonouchi (2002, 2009)

One evening during the nearly interminable Pony League baseball season this spring, my husband and I were engaged in a heated conversation about our nine year old son's baseball team, which practiced or played seven days a week--too much, in other words. I don't remember exactly what we were talking about that evening, but I do recall that we looked at each other and laughed, realizing that we were speaking in Pidgin (or Hawai`i Creole) English. Not "proper" Pidgin, mind you, but an approximate version, full of intonation and short sentence(s). "Pidgin short," goes a poem well known here, by Diane Kahanu; "just cuz we speak Pidgin no mean we dumb," it concludes. How had this conversation come to pass between a white man who had grown up in Hawai`i but does not speak da kine and a white woman who came here twenty years ago, publishes Pidgin literature yet cannot edit or speak it well?

The community of local children's baseball is one in which Pidgin is the coin of the realm, or diamond. It's largely a working class world; many dads come to practice and to games in the bright yellow and orange shirts of road construction crews, carrying dust on their boots, exchanging handshakes and howzits before the game. Most of the dads, and all of the moms, code switch; to me they speak standard English, and to each other they speak Pidgin. Sangha's primary coach, who had a field of dreams out back of his house (a batting cage, with a machine that worked so hard it would stink of burning rubber, a partial infield grass, a couple of hitting stations, and an "outfield"), did not code switch. A middle-aged man who had been star quarterback of the Castle High School football team in his youth, he speaks only Pidgin. He might slow down a bit for me, but not much.






One of Tinfish Press's most important publications has proved to be Lisa Linn Kanae's Sista Tongue, a mixed genre memoir / academic essay boldly collaged by the designer, Kristin Gonzales Lipman. After reprinting the first edition several times, Tinfish recently released a second edition of the book. Despite the striking format and innovative method, Sista Tongue sets Pidgin in an accepted historical context. Kanae details attacks on Pidgin, early middle and late, the history of Pidgin and standard schools in Hawai`i prior to statehood in 1959, and the emergence of a powerful Pidgin literature from the 1970s until the turn of this century. She amplifies her history with the story of her brother's struggles with language, making an analogy between assumptions that he was handicapped and assumptions that Pidgin speakers are socially and economically "disabled." Pidgin, for Kanae and most residents of Hawai`i, is a marker of working class life, restricted opportunities, and suppression by the state DOE. It is also (in reverse) a marker of who's an insider and who an outsider. You speak Pidgin, you're an insider. You speak standard, you one haole outsider. If you are the latter and you try to speak Pidgin, you violate a boundary that is more than merely linguistic. And that is why my husband and I had our Pidgin conversation in private. In public, we know to stick with standard, or an inflected standard that bears witness around its sonorous edges to our many years here but does not claim for its speakers the status of local or insider.

Baseball dads and moms speak Pidgin to each other; coaching on and off the field is done in Pidgin. But the kids speak differently from their parents, not simply to adults like me but also to one another. Their chatter owes more (as my husband points out) to the video games and television and music they're drenched in to their interactions with coaches and family elders. I won't go so far as to say that most of them do not speak Pidgin, but they do not speak it as often or as vividly as their parents. The intonation of their speech is flatter, their verbs more standard. I was surprised to hear my son say, "I like bat" one day, and he always uses the Pidgin "for" instead of "so" ("I'll get the water for you can boil it," for example). All children use the word "much" instead of "many": "I have too much pages to read" is typical banter. But otherwise he and his local friends do not speak full-on.

This is where the work of Lee Tonouchi seems at once valedictory and visionary. When Tonouchi was a grad student at UHM, he made a vow never to speak or write in standard English again. He wrote his essays in Pidgin, filled in job apps in Pidgin, became "da Pidgin guerrilla." He began agitating for a department of Pidgin at the university; later he put together a Pidgin dictionary. In a move fascinating to me (for obvious reasons), he also removed, at least rhetorically, the boundary between insider and outsider by suggesting that Pidgin be taught to non-Pidgin speakers. Where resistance to Pidgin is invariably described as the resistance of the dominant culture to speakers of a non-dominant language, Tonouchi turns the issue on its head. He describes a class in which the main resistance is to Pidgin interlopers. In "Da Death of Pidgin?" he quotes a girl who refers to speakers from the Mainland who are "soooo off." Tonouchi continues:

A lotta people I know make fun of "Try go no like stay come la'dat braw" [odd Pidgin with a midwestern accent]. But wot's wrong? If we can accept grandma-grandpa kine Pidgin, Korean Pidgin, Filipino Pidgin, Nanakuli Pidgin, Kaua`i Pidgin, Hawai`i Kai Pidgin (get you know), den why are we so quick to judge--why do we automatically rejeck haole Pidgin?" (31).

Tonouchi quotes the comedian, James Grant Benton, making the point in 1997 that the insider/outsider lines were blurring, and that "haole Pidgin" represents the collapse of binaries. "So you include, you include da guy. Das anoddah variety of Pidgin, haole Pidgin. And everybody happy" (31). I don't know that everyone is happy when they read this sentence, but Tonouchi has moved from the proposition that Pidgin may be dying to a possible solution. Let everyone speak their own version of Pidgin--throw open the categories--and Pidgin will come back to life. This is not, strictly speaking, analogous to arguments about Hawaiian, that students in immersion schools do not speak the Hawaiian of their elders. But it does promise a way to keep Pidgin alive. You need more Pidgin speakers? Admit everyone into the club! The potential dangers are obvious; if everything is Pidgin, then nothing might be.

Ultimately, Tonouchi is less interested in who speaks Pidgin and why than he is in the developing what he terms "Pidgin culture," or a constellation of arts and viewpoints beyond the usual consideration of sociological and grammatical features. He aims to join other such cultures (from Jamaica, for example) in a parallel revival of what Edward Kamau Brathwaite called "Nation Language." While this part of his book is less fleshed out than the essays and poems that precede it--essays and poems that involve a call to Pidgin arms/wings--it offers us a possible future. In the nine years since Tinfish first published Tonouchi's small book, UHM has not created a department of Pidgin, although there is a Charlene Sato Center for the study of creoles, founded in 2002 and now ably run by Kent Sakoda, co-producer of Pidgin Grammar with Jeff Siegel. And, while discussions of the relative merits and demerits of using Pidgin in the schools come up with alarming predictability and (often) ignorance in the local media, there is less talk of Pidgin in my department these days. Instead (is that the word?), the move to recognize that Hawaiian is already the official language of the state of Hawai`i, seems paramount. In the academy, if not in the local community I participate in as a parent, Asians are often construed as settlers, or more like haole than like Hawaiians. It's called Asian Settler Colonialism, which has its own take on "local culture" as more destructive than creative. Pidgin is seen more as a diversion than as a crucial element of Hawai`i's culture. Tonouchi addresses this: "My greatest fear is dat people going try posit Pidgin culture against Hawaiian culture and see dem as competing. I tink both can cooperate togeddahs as partners in resistance" (44).

While the subject of Pidgin attracts fewer decibels than there were only 10 years ago, I would argue that the conversation is still well worth having, in Hawai`i and elsewhere. See Barbara Jane Reyes's blog for more on how that last conversation might begin. Hawai`i surely does not need to be a monolingual, or a bi-lingual, state. There are at least three languages that signify Hawai`i to itself, languages that sometimes collide, sometimes overlap, often compete for attention, but each carries tremendous meaning. Pidgin's substrate, its grammar, is more like Hawaiian than like English, even if most of the words these days are American. It may seem frivolous for me to say that, insofar as I think Pidgin thoughts, they are mostly about baseball. But, as a lifelong baseball fan, that is not as trivial to me as it might be to someone else.

Re-publishing Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture at this juncture is a way both to point back and to look ahead. It's an odd book in many ways. As my former mail carrier told me (he was a great reader of Tinfish Press publications, which I passed on to him for Christmas), the Pidgin in Tonouchi's book is "long winded." "I could shorten his sentences for him," he told me. Perhaps this is because while the book is in Pidgin, it's also academic. Unlike Kanae's book, which separates out the personal (rendered in Pidgin) from the academic (in English), Tonouchi tells it all in Pidgin. And, while his plans for Pidgin's future may seem utopian, especially in an era when existing disciplines are being cut back, this book will help us remember that there such a future might yet be possible.

The new edition of Living Pidgin will be available later in the summer. The book will be redesigned slightly by Michael Y. Cueva to accommodate digital printing, and that means the cover by Ryan Higa will be in fuller color than before. Look to our website for details in a month or so: http://tinfishpress.com

[Editor's note, 6/27: I added an image of the color cover at the top.]

The Stories of Hawaiian Men: Ty P. Kawika Tengan

"Are you real?" This was the central question posed to Ty Kawika Tengan by his mentor/ethnographic subject, Sam Ka`ai, as Tengan did research toward his book, Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai`i, published by Duke University Press in 2008. Tengan, a member of the Ethnic Studies and Anthropology Departments at UHM, spoke at the Biography Center today about his "second family," the Hale Mua (or Men's House) group on Maui. Tengan has been a member of the group since 1997.

"Are you real?" is a question that presupposes the sense that you are not. Lacking a material and ritual culture, the Hawaiian men of Hale Mua formed in order to adopt and reshape a culture rendered fragmentary. They responded to a Hawai`i they considered over-feminized (especially by the tourist industry). Tengan showed us a cartoon from the Honolulu Advertiser, 1959, which showed American (a man), welcoming Hawai`i (a woman) onto the "ship of state." Typically, Hawaiian men are represented in the media either as prisoners or as warriors (in sports and in the US military). Hence the name of the UH football team since the June Jones era.

While men like Sam Ka`ai work with material culture--carving, farming taro--Tengan works with mo`olelo, or the stories they have shared with him, clips of which we saw on video. He also has a fine ear for language, pointing out that his friend/subject Kyle speaks of his life in the language associated with taro ("oha" is baby taro, and "ohana" a word for family that comes from that plant). Kyle spoke of feeling "grounded," even as we watched him in his lo`i (though Tengan confessed to having performed a voice-over).

A couple of ideas struck me:

--the "search" for Hawaiian culture, which in many ways resembles an adoptee's search for disconnected origins, is a luxury that depends on steady employment, and in Kyle's case, on there being family lands.

--"masculinity" was figured as warriorship, though Tengan says that their notion of being a warrior is not tied up with violence. That Hawaiians with warrior genealogies become Hawaiians who fight and die in Iraq is a complicated problem, indeed. Warrior for whom? It struck me that the masculinity Sangha is being taught at baseball by the local Japanese/haole/Filipino/Hawaiian/mixed race dads is related to this notion of warrior, but also tied up with violence. Is this due to the uneasy union of traditions, Hawaiian/local and American, or to something else? Might there be a way to convey the beautiful masculinity of ritual without the disturbing undertone of violence I hear in lines like "you gotta take a gun to the war" or "I feel fucking humiliATed")?

--the emphasis on material culture and on farming also serves as possible model for non-Hawaiians in considering what I was writing about earlier, namely the possible future of Hawai`i as a place where food, oil and water are scarce, the economy in deep recession, and existence less an intellectual than a material question. That this notion of material culture has a firm basis in spirituality and community is crucial. That it is figured here as "masculine" might be seen as a problem, but I suspect there are probably other researchers finding powerful models of female culture to complement Tengan's work on the men.

A note to my son's baseball coach

Baseball and poetry are one, to mangle Stevens. I sent this to the head coach, who does love the game and concentrates on skills, not in making "warriors" of the boys.

Aloha--

I've been thinking a lot about kids' baseball lately, as both Sangha and Radhika are playing. And I'm a teacher, so I'm fascinated by coaching. I like the coaching I'm seeing; Sangha's skills have improved immensely, and he's focusing in ways I haven't seen, except when he gets a new Lego set. So clearly, the experience has been very valuable for him. But it does bother me that some of the coaches seem to think the goal of playing baseball at 10 years of age is to get to the majors, or be a national champion, or be the very best. Not that I don't like to see people perform well (Ichiro slapping a hit to win the game; Pujols scoring from third on a grounder to the pitcher; Edmonds circus catching in the outfield, all these make me very happy), but it seems to me that there's more to this game than future exploits. There's also THIS moment to enjoy.No one has told the boys that baseball is a beautiful sport, one that teaches you to focus, to move your body in ways that make you and the spectator feel good, one that makes you think better, and that baseball is an art. That's what I would like to hear. Enjoy the moment, live inside of it, and baseball will become something you can enjoy the rest of your lives, no matter when or how your "career" playing it ends. The benefits of baseball are now.

I teach students to write and read poetry. Many of them are scared to death of it. So I have to show them how not to be scared at the same time I teach them to make something new. Very few of them are going to be poets or professors or anything related to my field. But I want them to learn how to think like a poet, how to play with the world in ways that are meaningful and enjoyable to othem and to others. So I have them play a lot (even though I give them grades at the end . . . ). I find that their responses tend to be very positive. So my suggestion would be to tell the kids to _play_ more. It's a game. It can be a very serious one, but you get to the serious stuff by being creative.

Thanks for listening!

aloha, Susan

Prepositions and masculinities

My Poetry & Politics class lingered yesterday over the preface to Craig Santos Perez's from Unincorporated Territory (Tinfish, 2008). I'm struck, on teaching the book, at the very different way I'm reading it--not as a manuscript to decide for or against, or at a book to proofread for "errors," but as a coherent text. This time the experience feels profounder (and reminds me of trying to get Radhika to pronounce "Federer" correctly: the player who is more than simply "Feder"). How appropriate that a poet who gleans one of his headnotes from Gertrude Stein (more on these marvelous epigraphs in a bit), stops to consider how crucial is the preposition "from."

"I" am "from UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY." From indicates a particular time or place as a starting point; from refers to a specific location as the first of two limits; from imagines a source, a cause, an agent, or an instrument; from marks separation, removal, or exclusion; from differentiates borders. (p. 12)

It is the discovery of a prospective "from" that preoccupies Perez (in the face of his country's occupation by the Spanish, the Japanese, the American military). It is the way in which his "from" includes both an oral Chamorro tradition (by way of his grandparents) and an avant-garde western tradition (by way of the mother of us all and other writers) that pre-occupies me, his publisher. If Guam, according to one of the schematic maps drawn by designer Sumet (Ben) Viwatmanitsakul, is the center of a Pacific airport hub, then this book is the hub from which many traditions radiate. One of my students described the book as "inoffensive," which caused us to wonder what charge to put on that word: does it indicate a calm that is itself an act of poetry-politics, or is it a word that means "ineffective"? (The student who said this quite liked the book, but was wondering about it as political praxis.) We will keep this question alive for at least two weeks, as we'll be skyping with Craig on April 17.

I would, for now, point to Perez's own language maps, such as the one on the first page of the poetry section of the book, "from LISIENSAN GA`LAGO" (these were ID tags the Japanese forced Guamanians to wear during the Japanese occupation of the early 1940s, before the U.S. retook the island). Each word for Guam on this page is presented as an island on a larger map (page as ocean). None of these words is erased or rejected (as Chamorro was outlawed by the U.S. educational system), but presented as a map including history (to modify Pound). Over the course of the book, through more than one form of translation, Perez introduces the non-Guamanian reader to crucial words in Chamorro; he tries, as he says at the end of his Preface, "to being re-territorializing the Chamorro language in relation to my own body, by way of the page." That "territory" and the Chamorro word for "heart" are close sonic cousins (79) points to a place "beyond territory," or at least beyond territories that "belong" to colonial powers.

But Perez's use of the western avant-garde is an acknowledgment that this tradition, however problematic in its own right, also tries to de- or re-territorialize the languages we speak. Re-territorializing differs from de-territorializing in its creation of allegiances across cultures. That is certainly why Perez's book fits so well in the Tinfish catalogue. More than that, the book offers a positive critique of any attempt to fence off traditions from each other. Fences don't work well on islands, which may be why so much work along these lines comes from islands--the Caribbean, Hawai`i, Guam, and elsewhere.

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My life is consumed these days with Sangha's and Radhika's baseball practices and games. Sangha's coach has a baseball event every day of the week, while Radhika's more moderate coach only has them practicing three or four days a week for their weekend game. (As Radhika would say, "mom, you're being sarcastic!").

The culture of kids' baseball is perhaps not different here from anywhere (aside from the omnipresence of Pidgin among the coaches). But this is what I know, and so I'd like to think more about it, in particular about the models of masculinity that are being offered to my children, especially my nine-year old son. On the one hand, there's a loving-doing-bonding among boys and men, with only the coach's barking of instructions to bring in the linguistic world, which I find very attractive. On the other--there is the governing idea that masculinity involves physical and mental toughness (if the taboo on tears is toughness . . . ) only. That you gotta suck it up, gotta be tough, gotta battle, gotta believe, gotta find yourself, gotta tink baseball, gotta be strong. So many "gotta's." So that learning the rules of the game, which are one thing, bleeds over into the rules of that larger game, which is another thing entirely. On some level playing the game teaches you the game, but you learn other lessons at your peril. (Coach was quoted as saying, don't cheat yourself, cuz you're only cheating yourself.) Yes, and yet.

When I coached t-ball years ago, one father approached me and said, please tell my son not to act like a girl.

That's what I want to think about. Like a girl.