I'M HERE!
(Who Am I?)
"It's not magic, it's knowing."
Anon.
One of the first and most thought-provoking things I learned in Hawaii was the idea of the 'translated self'. In theory, it is the notion that we as indigenous people exist in colonial spaces as 'Caucasian-friendly', 'understandable', 'presentable' versions of ourselves. This - how we speak English everyday and wear 'appropriate' professional attire to corporate jobs, is not us. We are other, and so we are striving, generation upon generation, to Anglicize, Romanize, Westernize, Christianize and basically completely revise who we are. As our languages get translated and lose their mana to become mere shell caricatures of the original oratory, so we become, as Albert Wendt once wrote, "caricatures of ourselves."
I've had a very interesting time trying to deconstruct this whole concept. It's deeply important to my worldview now, but I've had to contextualize it (as one must- there is no homogeneous 'Pasifika' identity!) so that I can fully appreciate the ways in which it applies to me. For one thing, I am linguistically NOT, in fact, a translated 'version' of me. The 'English me' is the original me 😬. Adding an emoji there because, WOW, identities are super complex! Let me explain this, though: my first language is English. My initial consciousness and its first sprouts of comprehension were all based in the English language. Mentally, I have always had a very consistent, coherent, fast-running dialogue via which my thoughts flow. My internal voice is, and always has been, me hearing my speaking voice talk in English or (once I learned to write), me seeing myself writing or typing in English. The fact that I've had to face up to is, my Gagana Samoa self is a translated self. My acquisition of Samoan came in short leaps and great but disconnected bounds throughout the first seventeen years of my life. I initially learned to speak colloquial Samoan from my peers at school and my extended Samoan aiga. On its own, informal Samoan is very unlike 'common English'. Informal Samoan cannot, for example, be spoken up the front in church or at village gatherings. If you spoke simple, understandable English at a church service, on the other hand, you'd definitely be appreciated and maybe even thanked. Gagana Samoa is as complex to navigate as a very bony fish is to eat (that's a translated saying! See how strange it looks out of its proper context?).
I have another translated self. My Melanesian self is also a caricature. It is very different from my 'Samoan' translation of me, but I hold it close nonetheless. Only in my twenties have I really been able to think in Pidgin English, and build daily narratives in both a Melanesia language and context. My mother always spoke to my brother and I in Pidgin when we were growing up, but in the way that some people don't fully identify with things such as religion until they're old enough to reason with it on their own terms, I was unable to be me in a Pidgin 'headspace' until very recently. I have spent incomparably longer in Samoa than P.N.G, so I give myself a small bit of grace for my slower progress on this particular translation. But. It's something I work hard on. I attend and participate in P.N.G community gatherings. Until the busyness of recent months, I was a senior executive member of the registered association incorporated which represents P.N.G citizens in Samoa. It was a high honor to serve in that capacity, and it gave to that part of my 'self' a fluency, agency and self-assurance that I have never claimed before. I've had to bring into my everyday world the music, movies and even social media channels of P.N.G in order to really immerse myself in the sense of 'being' that constitutes who I want to 'be' as a Papua New Guinean. I know that I will always be more Samoan than Papua New Guinean in my manner, in my thinking, in my linguistic capacity, and most definitely in my cultural practice. In the same vein, I have accepted that I will also always be more 'English-y' than Samoan or Papua New Guinean. I am part of this 'somewhere in the middle' crust of Oceania. We know who we are culturally and historically, but we also understand that our first thoughts of the day and even most of our immediate subconscious reasoning happens by default in a language that many of our great-grandparents learned late, if at all.
I've come to this conclusion: there is nothing inherently wrong with translation, or translated selves. In a globalized world, they allow us to interact with our fellow human beings in important and beautiful ways. My parents were of two very different cultures. Each committed to putting forth, daily, a translated self so as to live in harmony and most of all, love, with the other. My father's internal monologue, I know, was always in Gagana Samoa. He only just learned proper English in his late teens. Looking back, I am now able to appreciate how greatly he strove to hold together our multicultural family. He presented and lived as his translated self not only during his relationship with our mother, but also for the final twenty-one years of his life during which he was a father. His choice to live as a caricature allowed us to access and therefore love as well as cherish the brilliant person he was.
Some days, when I sit in my classroom reading or at my study table drinking coffee, I wonder. How many wonderful people have I met whilst in translated mode? How many people have come into my life and met only the Samoan me, or the P.N.G me? Are they out there remembering me in a way that is vastly different from what my inner person knows me to be?
Other days, when I miss my parents, I wonder who they were. They were the most lyrical translations I have ever seen. And as with all translations ever, that is of course only a fraction of the original's power.
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