Niugini i bekim Tok: creolizing global English in Papua New Guinean literature.(Critical Essay)

Papua New Guinean languages and literatures unsettle the English dominance that both proponents and opponents of global English claim. That world language takes new shapes in Oceania, as seen when John Kasaipwalova structures his fiction so that colloquial English carries the grammar, syntax, and semantics of Tok Pisin.

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The powerful presence of the English language in today's world is a matter of hot debate among linguistics scholars. English is deemed the leading language: worldwide, English is the language of more than two-thirds of all science writing, three-quarters of all mail, and 80 percent of all information stored electronically. These facts, documented in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, raise a question for scholars who study language. Is English serving as a powerful force to unite people in a democratic way, so that people around the world can share ideas and information, or is English a language of imperialism that people learn not freely but because they must in order to survive?

Prominent linguists line up on both sides of the issue, arguing either that English is liberating or that English is imprisoning. One of the most articulate scholars to celebrate the spread of English is David Crystal, perhaps the best-known linguist in the world and the author of several bestsellers on this question. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language and English as a Global Language, Crystal announces, English is a "world language," a "global language," a "natural choice for progress." A leading scholar with a very different view is Robert Phillipson, who suggests that English threatens other languages. Phillipson cautions against English "linguistic imperialism" (Linguistic 47) and denounces the "globalization of English" that helps create "catastrophic ecological and cultural effects" ("Voice" 265). What is most surprising about the debate these two scholars represent is that neither side examines the way people around the world use English. Neither response takes into account the people who must, according to these models, surf on or drown in the rising tide of English.

To take one important example, a short story by Papua New Guinean writer John Kasaipwalova suggests that English is not dominant in the ways that scholars of global English propose. Set in the remaining days of the Australian-administered trusteeship in Papua New Guinea, "Betel Nut is Bad Magic for Airplanes" portrays three university students who chew betel nut while they meet arriving friends at the airport and endure the wait for luggage, only to be told by governing Australian authorities that chewing betel nut is against the law. Since no such law exists, the students must defend their rights, wielding the same weapons as the authorities, namely language. Kasaipwalova presents the serious battle over language in a mock-heroic, comic style. The story portrays a vibrant linguistic medley, using all three official national languages of Papua New Guinea: English, and the two creole languages Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu. The story presents new linguistic forms and new models of global English, suggesting that Eng lish does not stamp out, but is itself stamped by, other languages.

Linguists debate about whether the term pidgin or creole is most appropriate for Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu. In Pidgin and Creole Linguistics, Peter Muhlhausler examines Tok Pisin according to the life-cycle model of languages, as an expanded pidgin and as a creolized pidgin (176-205, 213-36). One of the difficulties of classification is that some people speak Tok Pisin or Hiri Motu as a first language, while others speak it as a second or third language. I use the term creole because Tok Pisin and Hiri Motu fit the classic definition of a creole language, one that began as a pidgin language but is now spoken as a first language by a group of people. Scholars suggest that more than one million people speak Tok Pisin in Papua New Guinea, which has a population of about four million. Ninety-thousand people, especially in urban areas, speak Tok Pisin as a first language (Sumbuk 310; Muhlhausler, "Tok" 441). Hiri Motu, formerly used prominently in Papua, the south of the country, is being spoken by fewer people as T ok Pisin becomes more the lingua franca (Lynch 234).

Niugini i bekim tok! This phrase, from the Tok Pisin language of Papua New Guinea, announces that Papua New Guinea talks back. Niugini answers back in languages and in literatures that unsettle the English dominance that both proponents and opponents of global English claim. Kasaipwalova's story illuminates not only the vibrant languages and literatures of the South Pacific but also the wider debates--among linguists and literary and cultural scholars--about the possibilities and liabilities of English. Kasaipwalova uses the syntax and lexis of the Papua New Guinean language Tok Pisin to shape the English he uses in his narrative. The ways Kasaipwalova's Niugini characters creolize language gives them a privileged, if volatile, position in local and global communities. His story explores the linguistic and cultural contact zones that differing peoples encounter and exploit in voluntary and involuntary meetings with one another. Language is power in his works, a power wielded in imperial situations by foreign administrations and by native daughters and sons. This mutual and active intervention by all parties revises approaches to both world English and imperialism.

Tok Pisin, one of the official languages of Niugini, shapes "Betel Nut is Bad Magic for Airplanes." Kasaipwalova depicts the prominence of Tok Pisin, a feature that is well documented by linguists. It is of course necessary to be cautious about extrapolating from a group of fictional university students to the general population, but the linguistic features that Kasaipwalova presents are vital in Papua New Guinea. In 1973, the year following the story's publication, 95 percent of transactions in the House of Assembly occurred in Tok Pisin (Romaine 54). Tok Pisin predominates in government-sponsored radio broadcasts and printed media, recreational broadcasts, and printed materials (Muhlllhausler, "Code" 169). And people use Tok Pisin to talk and write about everything from internal combustion engines and information technology to the laws of the country and the hymns and gospels of the church. Accordingly, English is used much less prominently throughout Papua New Guinea and the Pacific than its official statu s would suggest.

Pacific forms of Christianity like Pacific forms of English, are quite distinctive. In post-independence Oceania, the constitutions of many Pacific Islands nations are founded explicitly upon Christianity. Papua New Guinea's Constitution, for instance, declares, "[We] pay homage to the memory of our ancestors--the source of our strength and origin of our combined heritage; acknowledge the worthy customs and traditional wisdoms of our people--which have come down to us from generation to generation; pledge ourselves to guard and pass on to those who come after us our noble traditions and the Christian principles that are ours now" (qtd. in Levine 480-81). Throughout the Pacific, "Christianity and its practice' Vilsoni Hereniko notes, "are regarded as traditional. Most important ceremonies therefore include Christian prayers and hymns in the native languages ("Representations" 156), [...] highlight[ing] the co-optation and indigenization of Christianity by Pacific Islanders" (157). From that perspective, includ ing Christian principles in the opening lines of a nation's constitution means declaring for specific Islands beliefs and practices, much as making English an official language can mean acknowledging a particular, Pacific, form of the language.

Kasaipwalova portrays Tok Pisin as the primary, or native, language. He bends the narrator's colloquial English, the foreign language, to the structures of Tok Pisin. First identifying some of the particular linguistic forms that this creolization takes allows us to then examine the ways in which creolization defines changing relationships among the various communities depicted. To take two parts of speech as examples, Tok Pisin shapes the pronouns and the verb forms of the narrator's colloquial English. The first-person collective pronoun is especially important to the story. The word we not only appears with great frequency, but it also exhibits grammatical principles of Tok Pisin.

For one thing, Tok Pisin uses the same word, mipela, for we and us. Em i lukim mipela means 'He sees us' and Mipela i lukim em means 'We see him' (or 'We see her'). In the first case, the plural pronoun …