Da decolonizing real: Liberating humour in Joe Balaz’s Pidgin Eye

Abstract

Joe Balaz’s Pidgin Eye (2019), which collects 35 years of poetry written in Creole English, referred to in Hawai’i as Pidgin, uses liberating humour to claim decolonizing realities, unsettling colonial myths that indigenous sovereignty has been subsumed or destroyed. The collection vaunts ways of knowing and being embodied by a language that has often been dismissed, like other creoles, as “corrupt and bastardized”. “History of Pigeon”, the opening poem, unveils contemporary English as itself a long-time mixture of languages in its vocabulary and syntax. Challenging the very premise of monolingualism and colonial sovereignty, the poem suggests there is no such thing as a pure language unmixed with other languages, or free from violence and trauma. The Pidgin eye reveals that the colonial homogenous is an impossibility; throughout the collection Balaz establishes Pidgin as an epistemic, aesthetic, and activist decolonizing resource.