The purpose of dismantling the notion of inferiority is not to supplant it with
a true status as equal or superior, but to acknowledge its proliferations and
condition, as with all speech, as tactical. If pidgin arises out of incomprehension
and imposition, can it signal not only a process of acclimatization,
but also one of subversion? The artist Steve Ouditt, a ‘post-independence
American/English-educated Christian Indian Trinidadian West Indian male
artist’ (Tawadros, 1998: unpaginated), speaks of ‘creole insite’; perhaps we
can also speak of ‘pidgin insite’. Ouditt’s condensation of ‘insight’ and ‘site’
alerts us to the historical and geographical specificity and boundedness of
creole experience, insight and site made intimate and inextricable, yet also
unstable. ‘Creole’ shifts the classificatory practice of naming onto similarly
unsteady territory with uneasily determined borders, intimating not only
nation and ethnicity but also language and generation, an attempt to resist
the summary inclusion and erasure of such differences as ‘Amerindian
Caribbean’ or ‘Indo Caribbean’ under a privileged, normalizing, allembracing
term, ‘Afro-Caribbean’ – ‘the blanket term for any ‘Caribbean’ in
England’ (Ouditt, in Tawadros, 1998: 8).
If ‘creole insite’ may come with processes of ‘recreolization’, not the
assimilation and elaboration of the pidgin of a previous generation into a
native tongue (Pinker, 1994: 33) but a purposefully acquired learnt
language, mobilized with English in code-switching practices that reinvent
and inscribe the specificities and ambiguities of social, cultural and linguistic
spaces claimed by certain young ‘Black British’ subjects, then perhaps ‘pidgin
insite’ may speak of the ‘repidginization’ tactically deployed or performed by
certain ‘British Chinese’: insights into and sitings of the ambiguous, uneven,
inevitable and infinite collisions and transmutations perpetuating along ‘the
lateral axes of diaspora’. Signalling some of the prosaic, makeshift strategies
and experiences of mutual acculturation generated by colonialisms and
migrations in the shift from the national to the international to the global;
indicative of the experiences, practices and processes of not-quite-same-not-quite-
otherness that disregard and dismantle ‘appropriate’ frameworks; [31]
cautioning against the habitual flattening of historical, geographical, cultural
and generational differences in such dominant, competitive, sweeping
linguistic and ethno-national categories as ‘English’ and ‘Chinese’. [32] Can we
speak of ‘pidgin English cultures’? What, then, of ‘pidgin Chinese cultures’?
Pidgin cultures and pidgin aesthetics?
*
Native speakers may not know this, but English is a scabrous mouthful
. . . I always hear myself displacing the two languages, conflating them
– maybe conflagrating them – for there’s so much rubbing and friction,
a fire always threatens to blow up between the tongues. Friction,
affliction. (Lee, 1995: 217–8)
A screen goes dark – a broken transmission, a lapse into silence and the
unspoken, unwritten. Barthes’ evocation of language recalls the body and
flesh, the muscle and cord that g/rasps, rasps and speaks, locating its
irrefutable materiality beside its impalpability. Embodied, embedded as
possibility, it is intimate, curious, sexually charged and sensuous, activating a
frisson, a tension, a ‘rub’. There is a sense of language as a fraught and
sexualized territory, inflections of ethnicity adding a hint of miscegenation to
the notion of ‘corruption’, though this is underplayed. Words are glimpsed
and glanced, tender and awkward touches ventured like the determined yet
slightly embarrassed fumblings of a new lover. ‘Do you translate by eye or by
ear?’ asks Trinh, elsewhere (1992: 80). By eye, by ear, by touch. In the
recurring motif of ‘Chinese Whispers’, a ‘scene of translations’, lips
repeatedly approach the ear of another . . .
. . . frequencies, fibrillations, somatic vibrations and shivers, acoustic
perturbation, hand–face movements, flapping arms–wrists, lip suction,
mouth-pump action, darting eyes, frowns, voice tone, tremor, pitch . . .
(Maharaj, 2000: 40)
This is ‘the space of orality’ (p. 40), a space which coincides here with pidgin,
the not-one, not-other, the none and several in motion. Silences accumulate,
culminating in an anti-climatic, bemused and bemusing utterance, the ‘final’
translation revealing something strange, confused and unresolved. Words are
dropped, displaced and invented, compensating for the misheard and
unknown, conjuring a peculiar sense out of nonsense, and nonsense out of
sense, as language is given ‘legs’ in the pursuit of play, its meanings spiralling
out of the circle. Who dares to hazard a word and be (mis)heard – admit to
a not-knowing, not-quite placing? Pleasure in the corruption, the subversion
and invention; pleasure in mistranslation.
Notes
1. This article is developed from an exhibition review and conference paper (2002a,
2002b). The title refers to ‘The Translator’s Notes’, an exhibition curated by
Irene Amore for Café Gallery Projects, London (26 March–20 April 2003), which
took as a point of departure an essay by José Ortega y Gasset (2000[1937]:
49–63). Commissioned to make a new video/audio work, my Notes On Return
(2003) referenced in turn a bilingual text by the poet Bei Dao (1994: 72–3).
These doublings intimate the non-originary ‘where from’ and ‘how’ of my
speaking, intimate and distanced, ‘outside in, inside out’ in relation to the
disciplinary, discursive, cultural and conceptual frames across which many of us
‘shuttle’ (Trinh, 1991: 65–78); in this instance literally – my image and voice
appear both in the work and documentation of PIDGIN.
2. The erroneous transcription is mine; Tan’s own transcription reads, ‘Language
is a skill that legs to toys.’ The ‘original’ (translated) quotation (Barthes,
1990[1977]: 73), appears in the exhibition catalogue (Willmoth, 2002:
unpaginated).
3. Erika Tan’s PIDGIN: interrupted transmission, a Film and Video Umbrella
commission, toured from Norwich Gallery (28 November–20 December 2001)
to Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth (9 March–20 April 2002).
4. ‘Contact zone’ is a phrase used by Mary Louise Pratt to characterize the space of
encounter between China and the West, which Arif Dirlik elaborates as a ‘zone
of domination’ as well as ‘mediation’; cited by Yeh, (2000: 251–80). Contact
languages are ‘so called because they come about through contact between two
or more existing languages’ (Sebba, 1997: 2).
5. A ‘“corruption” or “distortion” of English’, ‘a “jargon” of some sort’, (Sebba,
1997: 1) or ‘a medium sized bird with a stocky body and short legs . . . often
trained for racing and carrying messages’ (Thompson, 1998: 667).
6. ‘Pidgin’ and ‘pigeon’ share the same IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet)
pronunciation (Thompson, 1998).
7. One speaker is from Athens and another is from the south, so the sounds
of two different Greek languages are spoken between the two (unpublished
correspondence with the artist). Sebba (1997) offers a broad definition of
creole as ‘pidgins which have become native languages for their speakers’
(p. 16).
8. As in ‘stool-pigeon’ – originally a decoy of a pigeon fixed to a stool – it can
signify ‘somebody who is easily swindled or deceived’ (Thompson, 1998: 898).
9. Welsh describes pidgin as a lingua franca, which Sebba (1997) notes is derived
from ‘Lingua Franca’, ‘a Medieval trading pidgin used in the Mediterranean – an
important marine trading zone where traders’ native languages included many
very different languages such as Portuguese, Greek, Arabic and Turkish’; also ‘a
language of wider communication . . . native only to some’, for example
Swahili, and internationally, English (pp. 16–17).
10. Hall (1966) cited in Sebba (1997: 66–7). Sebba argues that because pidgin is
‘no-one’s native language, “all speakers are equal” – there are no native speakers
with a “superior” knowledge of the language. Pidgins may therefore be seen as
socially neutral, even though they may also have a low status’ (pp. 16–17).
11. Welsh (1997) offers the following examples of words that have passed into
‘common usage’: ‘“shroff ”, originally assayer and money changer, “chop”, seal
or permit, and “godown”, warehouse, “amah”, nurse, are Portuguese; “hong”,
factory or firm, “taipan”, “junk” and “chow” are Chinese’ (p. 46).
12. ‘Beijing Clamps Down on Chinglish’, 14 August 2001, BBC NEWS, URL
(consulted October 2003): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/1491288.stm
13. ‘According to McArthur (1993), “Standard English” as a term was first used
during the Industrial Revolution in Britain, when having “standard” parts
became important for mass-production’ (Sebba, 1997: 6).
14. Cited in Sebba (1997: 7). Sebba summarizes the spread of standard languages
as having
a functional role in nation and empire building during the era when large
nation-states like Spain and France were being established in Europe and
creating empires abroad through trade and colonisation; . . . reinforced and
consolidated by the advent of printed books. . . and, later, by
industrialisation and the introduction of mass media.
15. Established for diplomatic, official and media uses, introduced in 1959 and
adopted by the PRC in 1979.
16. When one ‘other’ attempts to speak in relation to another ‘other’, those who
subscribe to the ‘insider/outsider’ paradigm are liable to get confused or
affronted; Vietnamese-born-academic-theorist-filmmaker-hybrid Trinh T. Minhha,
based in the States via Paris and Senegal, neither ‘authentic Chinese’ nor an
‘authoritative Chinese scholar’, has been challenged over her work ‘on China’.
Trinh’s response (which is also a response to assumptions that her films should
be in and about Vietnam) is simply, ‘Why Vietnam?’ (Trinh, 1999: 219).
17. As Abe (1999) notes, its names have varied from Fenxi Shijie de Shu (A Book
that Analyses the World), to Tian Shu (A Book from the Sky or Nonsense
Writing), to Xishu Jian or Xishu Jian: Shijimo Yuan (variously translated as An
Analysed Reflection of the World, A Mirror that Analyses the World, and
Analytical Mirrors of the World: The Final Volumes of the Century or Fin de
Siècle Volumes). Wu Hung adds Heavenly Book to the litany (pp. 30–4).
18. Tsang claims this is recorded in a family ancestral book from his home village of
Liantang in Guangdong province (Lau, 1997: 8–10).
19. Lau invited artist Lee Ka-Sing to respond to Tsang’s work for the exhibition,
Cultural Chop Shui 1, Fringe Gallery, Hong Kong (4–18 October 1995). Lau
later curated The Street Calligraphy of Tsang Tsou Choi for the AGFA Gallery,
Goethe Institute, Hong Kong (24 April–17 May 1997) and Hong Kong Arts
Centre (24 April–6 May 1997).
20. Oscar Ho, Stories Around Town (1991–), ink on paper. Ho featured in
Exhibition 6.30, Hanart TZ Gallery, curated by Chang Tsong Zung (20–30 June
1997), as did Kith Tsang and Warren Leung.
21. Antonio Mak, Bible from Happy Valley (1992), bronze and lead.
22. Kith Tsang Tak-Ping, Hello! Hong Kong series, 1996–7, mixed media
installations.
23.
CPE is strongly influenced by Cantonese in phonology and syntax . . . there
is a lack of consonant clusters in Cantonese syllable structure, so when
there is a consonant cluster, each consonant is represented by a character –
but in Cantonese each character is a syllable i.e. it has a vowel inserted after
the consonant. For example ‘small’ if represented phonologically is written
in 3 characters i.e.: simala or change = cheenchee, count = conta. . . . (Shi,
1993: 459, cited in Willmoth, 2002).
24. Warren Leung Chi-Wo, Dream of a Path (1996), site-specific engravings; Vis(i)ta
(1996–7), wood, zinc plate, mirror, iron, liquid light.
25. Tan for example, born in Singapore and based in Britain, was trained in Britain
and Beijing. Her identity card states Hokkien as a mother tongue yet she speaks
English and what she refers to as her own pidgin Mandarin Chinese, a result of
mixed parentage and schooling.
26. See for instance Lesley Sanderson’s drawings, He Took Fabulous Trips (1990),
Can’t See the Wood for the Trees (1992), and the later mixed media installation
project with Neil Conroy, Here We Are (2005); Yeu-Lai Mo’s video, Service,
Licking, Kissing(1997); Mayling To’s soft sculptures, A Cute Puncture (1998)
and Repertoire Dog (1999), and videos Living (2001) and Being (2001).
27. For an introduction to nüshu, see McLaren (1998: unpaginated).
28. The notion was suggested to me upon hearing the jet-lagged delivery of a
conference paper (Ford, 2002).
29. Interestingly, ‘pigeon’ can signify ‘a person easily swindled’ (Thompson, 1998:
668).
30.
It is assumed that translation means a movement from the ‘original’ to the
language of ‘translation’ but not vice versa: it is assumed that the value of
translation is derived solely from the ‘original,’ which is the authenticator of
itself and of its subsequent versions. Of the ‘translation,’ a tyrannical
demand is made: the translation must perform its task of conveying the
‘original’ without leaving its own traces; the ‘originality of the translation’
must lie ‘in self-effacement, a vanishing act’. (Chow, 1995: 184)
31. Ouditt avoids the term diaspora; perhaps, as a noun it suggests too coherent an
entity. Even when qualified by Ang as a ‘loose paradigm’, a perspective
‘motivated . . . by notions of dispersal, mobility and disappearance’ which
‘[work] against its consolidation as a paradigm proper’, in which ‘the seeds of
its own deconstruction’ are contained, grammatical convention competes
against conceptual will. As with creole, pidgin may be said to name a practice
or practices, processes and experiences in which no ‘settling’ is possible for, as
Ouditt puts it, ‘To settle is to flatten . . .’
32. Echoing Ouditt, how does ‘British Chinese’ even begin to locate, for example,
the linguistic and experiential differences of first, second, third generations
from mainland China, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Caribbean or South Africa, in
England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales?
References
Abe, S.K. (2000) ‘No Questions, No Answers: China and A Book from the Sky’, in R.
Chow (ed.) Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of Theory:
Reimagining A Field, pp.227–50. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism, rev. edn. London: Verso.
Ang, I. (2000[1998]) ‘Can One Say No to Chineseness? Pushing the Limits of the
Diasporic Paradigm’, in R. Chow (ed.) Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural
Studies in the Age of Theory: Reimagining A Field, pp.281–300. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Barthes, R. (1990[1977]) A Lovers Discourse: Fragments, trans. R. Howard. London:
Penguin.
Bei, D. (1994) Forms of Distance, trans. David Hinton. London: Anvil Press.
Chang, T-Z (1997) ‘Temples of Mass Power’, in Wenda Gu: The Mythos of Lost
Dynasties, 1984–1997, unpaginated. Hong Kong: Hanart T Z Gallery.
Chow, R. (1995) Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography, and
Contemporary Chinese Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press.
Chow, R. (ed.) (2000) Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in the Age of
Theory: Reimagining A Field. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Clarke, D. (2001) Hong Kong Art: Culture and Decolonization. London: Reaktion.
Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
DeFrancis, J. (1984) The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. Honolulu: Hawaii
University Press.
Ford, N.J. (ed.) (2001) Traversals. Hong Kong: Mapbook.
Ford, N.J. (2002) ‘On Traversals: Negotiating “Crossings” between Hong Kong and
Vienna’, paper presented at Contemporary Chinese Art in the International Arena,
British Museum, London, April.
Fusco, C. (2001) The Bodies That Were Not Ours. London: inIVA.
Hall, R.A. (1966) Pidgin and Creole Languages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Hodge, B. and Kam, L. (1998) The Politics of Chinese Language and Culture. London:
Routledge.
Kember, P. (2000[1997]) ‘A Battle with Existence Itself: The Work of Gu Wenda’, in J.
Clark (ed.) Chinese Art at the End of the Millennium: Chinese-art.com 1998–1999,
pp. 197–203. Hong Kong: New Art Media.
Lau, K.W. (1997) ‘Steets [sic] Calligrapher – Tsang Tsou Choi’, in K.W. Lau (ed.) The
Street Calligraphy of Tsang Tsou Cho, trans. M. Lui., pp. 8–10. Hong Kong: Kin
Wai’s Workshop.
Lee, C-R. (1995) Native Speaker. London: Granta.
Lo, K-C. (2000) ‘Look Who’s Talking: The Politics of Orality in Transitional Hong Kong
Mass Culture’, in R. Chow (ed.) Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies in
the Age of Theory: Reimagining A Field, pp.185–6. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
lok, s.p.s. (2002a) ‘Erika Tan – PIDGIN: interrupted transmission’, Third Text 16(2):
208–11.
lok, s.p.s. (2002b) ‘Translators’ Notes’, paper presented at Contemporary Chinese Art
in the International Arena, British Museum, London, April.
Lui, D. (1995) ‘Beware of Artificial “Pidgin Scholarship”(‘Xiaoxin renwei de
“yangjingbang xueshu”’)’, Twenty-First Century 28: 7–11.
Maharaj, S. (2000) ‘Dislocutions: Interim Entries for a Dictionnaire Elementaire on
Cultural Translation’, in Jean Fisher (ed.) Reverberations: Tactics of Resistance,
Forms of Agency in Trans/cultural Practices, pp.32–48. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck
Akademie.
McLaren, A.E. (1998) ‘Crossing Gender Boundaries in China: Nüshu Narratives’,
Intersections 1. URL (consulted May 2000): http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/
intersections/back_issues/nushu2.html
Ortega y Gasset, J. (2000[1937]) ‘The Misery and Splendor of Translation’, in L. Venuti
(ed.) The Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge.
Papastergiadis, N. (2002) ‘Catch that Pidgin’, in S. Willmoth (ed.) PIDGIN: interrupted
transmission/ERIKA TAN, unpaginated. London: Film and Video Umbrella.
Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct. London: Penguin.
Postiglione, G.A. (1996) ‘The Decolonization of Hong Kong Education’, in M.K. Chan
and G.A. Postiglione (eds) The Hong Kong Reader, pp. 98–123. London: M.E. Sharpe.
Rushdie, S. (1992) The Wizard of Oz. London: BFI Publishing.
Sebba, M. (1997) Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Shi, D. (1993) ‘Learning Pidgin English through Chinese Characters’, in F. Byrne and
J. Holm (eds) Atlantic Meets Pacific – A Global View of Pidginization and
Creolization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Silverman, G. (1996) ‘Long Live the King’, reprinted in K.W. Lau (ed.) The Street
Calligraphy of Tsang Tsou Cho, pp. 67–9. Hong Kong: Kin Wai’s Workshop.
Steiner, G. (1975) After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. London: Oxford
University Press.
Tan, E. and Willmoth, S. (2002) ‘Speaking in the Intervals: Erika Tan in conversation
with Simon Willmoth’, in S. Willmoth (ed.) PIDGIN: interrupted transmission/
ERIKA TAN, unpaginated. London: Film and Video Umbrella.
Tawadros, G. (ed.) (1998) inIVA Annotations 4: Steve Ouditt: Creole In-site. London:
inIVA.
Thompson, D. (ed.) (1998) The Concise Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Trinh, T.M. (dir.) (1989) Surname Viet Given Name Nam. 108 mins. Distributed by
WMM, MOMA, Cinenova, Idera, Image Forum, National Library of Australia.
Trinh, T.M. (1991) When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural
Politics. New York: Routledge.
Trinh, T.M. (1992) Framer Framed. London: Routledge.
Trinh, T.M. (1999) Cinema Interval. New York: Routledge.
Turim, M. (1990) ‘The Cultural Logic of Video’, in D. Hall and S. Fifer (eds)
Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, pp. 331–42. New York:
Aperture, in association with Bay Area Video Coalition.
Wark, M. (1999) ‘All That Is Solid Melts into Airwaves,’ Angelaki: Journal of the
Theoretical Humanities 4(2): 19–24.
Welsh, F. (1997) A History of Hong Kong. London: HarperCollins.
Willmoth, S. (ed.) (2002) PIDGIN: interrupted transmission/ERIKA TAN. London:
Film and Video Umbrella.
Wu, H. (1999) Transience: Chinese Experimental Art at the End of the Twentieth
Century. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Yeh, M. (2000) ‘International Theory and the Transnational Critic: China in the Age of
Multiculturalism’, in R. Chow (ed.) Modern Chinese Literary and Cultural Studies
in the Age of Theory: Reimagining a Field, pp. 251–80. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
susan pui san lok is an artist and writer based in London, working with
installation, video, sound and text. She has exhibited internationally,
including at Hong Kong Arts Centre, Shanghai Duolun MoMA, Beijing 798
Space, Gallery 4A, Australia and the Hayward Gallery, London. Recent
projects include solo shows in 2006 at the Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester
and Beaconsfield (London) and two artists’ books: NEWS (SPSL, 2005) and
Golden (Notes) (SPSL, 2007). She is currently Research Associate in Visual
Culture at Middlesex University.
Address: Department of Visual Culture and Media, School of Arts and
Education, Middlesex University, Cat Hill, Barnet, Herts EN4 8HT, UK.
[s.lok@mdx.ac.uk]
