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Sacrament, Living on Stilts, & Oh my god your voice sounds so haole by Melissa Llanes Brownlee

Image is a color photograph of a landline next to a couch; title card for the microfiction stories "Sacrament", "Living on Stilts" & "Oh my god your voice sounds so haole" by Melissa Llanes Brownlee.

In her three microfiction pieces “Sacrament,” “Living on Stilts,” and “Oh my god your voice sounds so haole,” native Hawai’ian writer Melissa Llanes Brownlee invites the reader into “moments of my life that have, could have, may have been.” We witness her characters as they taste the body and blood of Jesus Christ. We learn why Hawai’ian houses hover above the earth on stilts, then we gleefully eavesdrop on the private jokes and accusations shared between cousins. Each microstory, written in a mix of Hawai’ian Pidgin Creole and English, is intimate, charming, and feels so welcoming that we do not hesitate when Brownlee warns us in her author’s note that we have just been dropped “into the middle of the Pacific Ocean with only my words to guide you.” We are happy to follow, as we are entranced by the interplay of both languages, touched by each story, and grateful for our guide.  —CRAFT

 

Sacrament

Pua shifts in the pew as the water and bread are passed out by the chosen boys, her mu’umu’u scratchy and stiff against her skin. She wonders if it will be white or wheat bread. Her mother pinches her on the back of her arm so no one can see as the bishop drones on about stuff she should be paying attention to but doesn’t want to, a whispered warning, hot in her ears no shame me nails digging, pulling tears from her eyes no make me take you to da car. She sits still, her mother’s fingers releasing with a last no make me do dat again, girl, her mother’s eyes fire, a smile wide across her face as she checks to make sure no one heard her. Pua knows no one cares. She’s sure all the other kids’ arms are scratched black and blue too, their brown skin hiding all sins. The bread and water come to her row, her brother so proud in his aloha shirt and slacks, holding the tray and walking down the row. She hopes he drops it before he gets to her so he’s the one who gets it and not her. He stops in front of their mother, her smile reaching her eyes. Carefully she lifts the piece of wheat bread and places it in her wide mouth, her lips close as she chews and swallows. Her fingers curve around one of the tiny little cups filled with water, her nails flashing red, lifting it slowly to her lips, sipping it, savoring the moment, before placing the empty cup back. Her brother moves to her, his smile matching their mother’s and Pua prays as she chooses her piece of brown bread, her mother’s eyes hard on her.

 

Living on Stilts

Our houses stay on stilts but we no live near the ocean. Our daddies they wen tell us the lava rock no like foundations, so it stay better to build with the land. Wen Pele stay angry we barely feel it, her ami barely circling to our little volcano. She like Kilauea better anyway, probably get one boyfriend over there. Our mommies laugh wen we tell them. Mommies know the truth. Pele going go where she like and it’s never about the boyfriends, that’s just daddies being stupid. Our houses stay on stilts and one day Pele going knock em all down.

 

Oh my god your voice sounds so haole

my cousin yells over the phone line as I call them up to see if they want to go drinking at our favorite bar when I come home to visit how else am I supposed to sound I live on the mainland I grumble at them you think anyone going understand me if I stay talking like dis they laugh yeah yeah you still sound haole I breathe and ask again you like go Teru’s for sing karaoke they giggle and I know they just can’t stop thinking about me living so far away and speaking as if I were better than everyone else I bet you stay white as one ghost up dea they just won’t lay off well stay hard for tan when it stay snowing and I no like turn into one orange if I go in one tanning bed I’m tired you like cruise or what they finish their fit sure sure cuz no worries we going cruise I worry I’m making a mistake jus make sure you leave your haole high maka maka shit up dea, or else the threat ringing in my ear as I hang up

 

MELISSA LLANES BROWNLEE (she/her) is a native Hawai’ian writer living in Japan. She has work published and forthcoming in The Rumpus, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, Gigantic Sequins, Cream City Review, The Cincinnati Review’s miCRo series, Indiana Review, swamp pink, and Moon City Review. Her work has also been honored by inclusion in The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin: Stories from Juventud Press and Kahi and Lua: Tales of the First and the Second from Alien Buddha. Melissa tweets @lumchanmfa.

 

Featured image by Annie Spratt, courtesy of Unsplash.

 

By | Flash Fiction, Fiction | November 17, 2023

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Author’s Note

I drop you into the middle of the Pacific Ocean with only my words to guide you. You might think I’m not a reliable guide, but I’m the only one you can trust. I offer you words that sound a lot like English but are not. You grab onto my images, my characters, my languages, my history, my myths. Your grip is, hopefully, steady and firm as you land amongst lava rocks and churches, family and fear. Breathe in my mother tongue. Breathe out English. The choices I make guide you through an unfamiliar landscape shaded in familiarity—the church service, the proud mother, the preening son, the love lives of adults, the phone call to family—capturing for me, and for you, moments of my life that have, could have, may have been.

Recently, I was asked when I most often use my mother tongue, Hawai’ian Pidgin Creole (Hawai’ian Creole English), and my answer has always been when I’m angry or drunk or both, because it takes something extreme for me to code-switch back to it. Hawai’i is the only state in the union that has two official languages, English and Hawai’ian. Pidgin is not even considered an official language by the state, but it is used by almost every person born and raised in Hawai’i. At one time, I believed Pidgin was just a dialect of English, but it’s not. It is its own language with its own rules.

I rarely speak Pidgin as I have been away from Hawai’i for almost twenty-four years. I mainly use it when I write. The first time I ever experimented with using Pidgin was in my first short story workshop with Anthony Doerr at Boise State University. I wanted to capture the feel of growing up in Hawai’i and I thought maybe writing the dialogue in Pidgin would add to the narrative, a way to mark the differences in social and cultural interactions, how this place, this setting, was different from the standard baseline setting of most literary fiction, especially anything set in Hawai’i. I wanted to reveal through this narrative voice the truth behind the “paradise” everyone outside of Hawai’i has believed for so long, the truth of colonialism, religious indoctrination, systemic racism, poverty, existing behind the tourist fiction written about or set in Hawai’i. These three micros continue that tradition I started then, expanding the dual narrative threads I have created throughout my writing career—growing up in Hawai’i as well as not living there anymore.

In “Sacrament,” I wanted to capture a moment filled with family, class, and gender dynamics in the setting of a Mormon church service in the islands. I was raised Mormon and it is a widespread religion throughout the Pacific Islands, not just Hawai’i. When the first missionaries came to our shores, including Protestants and Mormons, they converted our spoken language into a written one through their translations of the Bible. There are two LDS temples in Hawai’i, one on Oahu and the other on Hawai’i in my hometown of Kona. This fact is important to know in order to understand how embedded the LDS belief system is in Hawai’i, as temples are not cheap and still there are enough people paying tithings to build one in my little fishing village. In this piece, I delve into religious acculturation and the prioritization of gender based upon it.

In “Living on Stilts,” I also explore familial relationships but instead of the church I am unpacking the chthonic/animus belief system embedded in modern-day Hawai’ian culture. The belief in Pele, the Hawai’ian fire goddess, is still as strong today as it was for my ancestors. We might not literally worship her and offer her tribute, but we understand the nature of living on an active volcano. Her stories offer warnings but also illustrate the subsumption of the feminine in the past with the strength of the feminine in the present through familial as well as sexual relationships.

Finally, the last micro is a breathless nonsentence with a more personal connection as it’s on the line between fiction and creative nonfiction for me. There are moments when I talk to someone back home or when I visit that I have to consciously switch to Pidgin to fit in, to not make the other person feel uncomfortable, reminding me of a childhood wrought with the perils of not speaking the right way at the right time, in Pidgin or in English. The underlying threat in this piece was a constant growing up. Sounding too haole would get you beaten up. Sounding too local would get you dirty lickins. It was a game you had to learn to play, a skill you had to master, which I guess is why it makes sense that I became a writer, because here I am code-switching in my writing and living my mother tongue on the page, even though I don’t live it in my everyday life anymore.

 

MELISSA LLANES BROWNLEE (she/her) is a native Hawai’ian writer living in Japan. She has work published and forthcoming in The Rumpus, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, Gigantic Sequins, Cream City Review, The Cincinnati Review’s miCRo series, Indiana Review, swamp pink, and Moon City Review. Her work has also been honored by inclusion in The Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, and the Wigleaf Top 50. Read Hard Skin: Stories from Juventud Press and Kahi and Lua: Tales of the First and the Second from Alien Buddha. Melissa tweets @lumchanmfa.