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Tang bilong bulmakau long aspik : talking about food in Tok Pisin

Sioko i rabis kaikai (Dutton 1973 : 197)

When Tom collected Jackie and me from Canberra Airport in September 1972 he immediately informed me that I was to do his intensive course in Tok Pisin for six weeks after which I was to commence fieldwork in PNG, an announcement whilst no doubt based on his longstanding experience as a successful supervisor, was received with some horror by a totally jetlagged Ph.D. scholar. I was rather underprepared for a rapid transition from the status of a theoretical or arse linguist to a functional field linguist. It speaks for Tom’s style that he had me in the field well before Christmas and that he had equipped me not only with a passable knowledge of Tok Pisin but with much good advice, including medical hints and the warning that my fieldwork would be devoted not just to collecting data but to more mundane matters such as finding a roof over one’s head and finding something to eat. Having previously lived in a hall of residence at Reading University whose food could be digested only with the help of a regular intake of Eno stomach salts almost any food seemed preferable at the time and I was in fact looking forward to an abundance of tropical culinary delights.

In retrospect I can see the attractions of studying the semantics of the French cuisine or the lexicon of wine tasting as some linguists have opted to do. Meanwhile Tom’s Tok Pisin course suggested a rather rosy picture of culinary delights expecting the fieldworker. His long lists of supplementary vocabulary implied not only the availability of fresh kulau (drinking nuts), pik ol i tanim long mumu (pig properly cooked in an earth oven) or sago pancakes (these subsequently turned out to consist primarily of sawdust) but a variety of fruit, fish and meat. Like other participants in the course I was intrigued by the notion of ‘navy biscuit’, which turned out to be a misprint for navy biscuit, one of my staple foods on long walkabouts.

One of my immediate tasks in PNG was to help Tom collect suitable stories for the printed edition of his course and texts about food featured prominently. Tom must have been aware of the discrepancy between the culinary desires of a fieldworker and the food supplies actually available. Indeed, one of his lessons features the grim tale of a European finding rubbishy choco rather than tomatoes on his plate.

My first personal experience with eating in the field were three weeks of navy biscuits, corned beef and warm SP ( whose taste in an expert publication on world beers in this condition is reminiscent of used bandaids), supplemented by the occasional banana. This experience was followed by three months in a haus kiap in the Torricelli mountains which was made available to me on the condition that I employed a mankimasta/cook. His favourite dish was hatwara (boiling water into which anything edible was thrown) . Attempts to spice up this rather bland product with local lombo (chilli pepper) were disastrous as the power of even a tiny amount of this spice was enough to make Montezuma weep. My mankimasta’s recipe for tea incidentally ended up on page 123 of Tom’s course:

2 heaped tablespoons of sugar
1 tablespoon of tea leaves
Add a bit of boiling water.
Makes one cup.

Under such conditions one’s body inevitably develops cravings, in my case initially for a box of chocolates. When the opportunity arose a box of chocolates was ordered and flown to a nearby good weather airstrip by the bishop of Wewak. What was delivered was an enormous cardboard carton containing 50 large bars of chocolate- much to the delight of my informants and their offspring. A second craving for Vienna almonds was more difficult to satisfy: I had to postpone gratification or five whole months. Then, on the occasion of an entirely unsuccessful search for batteries on Manus Island I accidentally ended up in a trade store which for undisclosed reasons contained shelves full of glass jars filled with this morsel. As for some of the other items listed in Tom’s course, honey, custard, fresh eggs, cheese, mutton and so forth I saw nothing in the places I worked. Rural trade stores apart from sugar, rice and smokes did not run to such luxuries, and seeing mumued pid at close range made me resort to the white lie of ‘ mi Sevende-mi tambu long pik’. The punishment was that I could not smoke my pipe in public. Added to all this, I was warned by a patrol officer’s wife that eating out of tins for prolonged periods made one’s kisses taste tinny- a warning well heeded by this newly married fieldworker accompanied by his wife. Apart from this, tins are heavy and travelling with two patrol boxes imposed a severe constraint as indeed did the available cooking facilities, particularly during the rainy season.

Complaints about the culinary standards encountered in PNG together with attempts to improve them have a long history in the discourses of fieldworkers, missionaries, long-term residents and travellers and it is to these I want to turn now. I shall refrain from following to closely my rather more scholarly analysis of ‘cookery terminology’ (Mühlhäusler 1985 : 652 ff) to which serious readers are referred. Whilst To Pisin was generally taken seriously my the German colonizers who ruled North East New Guinea until 1914, the British and Australian settlers who arrived after 1920 often exhibit little inclination to learn the language properly. Rather they treated it as a debased form of English, characterized through culinary metonyms such as ‘kitchen English’ or culinary metaphors such as " ‘a sort of silly chop-suey English, bereft of procedure and devoid of limitations"(Rabaul Times 8 November 1935 p5). A sizeable number of so called ‘tropicalities’ in expatriate publications such as Pacific Islands Monthly have as their main aim to ridicule the language and its speakers. In our politically correct days they appear distinctly puerile if not offensive. Let me present a couple of examples from my collection:

a recipe for making sponge cake (Pacific Islands Monthly, 18 Dec 1931 pg.6):

"You savvy egg? Savvy butter? Savvy corn flour? You catchim dish, catchim plenty egg; you fightim egg plenty too much.

A kanaka lament (Rabaul times, March 11 1927 p 2)

Rain he no come boy no got kai kai, no got water, no got sweet potato, no got yam, no got taro. Gott dam, he no good. All time go along Kong-kong buy’em rice, one bag 10 mark. Me no got mark no catchem rice, then me kaikai coconut all time. Me no like. Old fellow coconut tree he die too. Small fellow all same. Banan he too liklik. Pawpaw he fall down. Me can burn him. Why rain he no come? I tink byme bye me die finish. You got lik lik tobac? Tank you, you good feller master too much. Tree feller pig me sell’em kon kong. No can kai-kai. What for English he no make’em store along kanaka? I tink boy he no go along kon kong. You got massis? I tink me like go now.

What the pidgin words uttered by the blushing bride in the following scene (Rabaul Times July 21 1933 pg. 4) might have been is left to the imagination of its expatriate readers:

Scene: the verandah. Tea table laid. Guests waiting patiently for the arrival of the fluid which cheers but does not inebriate.
Enter from the kitchen Topowpow carrying the teapot gingerly.
Bride, raising hastily, rushes towards the ‘coon’ and breathlessly exclaims:
"Now don’t say the bottom of the teapot is dirty, or that the milk jug’s broken all to pieces, p

I suspect she must have uttered something like:

No can talk talk arse belong teapot he dirty or glass belong susu he bugger up altogether.

A latter day example of this genre can be found in Rushton’s (1983) Brush up your Pidgin, which among useful phrases for breakfast lists (pp 51 ff):

Rushton like Balint (see below) appears to be ignorant of the fact that milis or milik refers to coconut milk or semen only. But whilst Rushton’s intentions can hardly be called serious, Balint’s infamous English Pidgin and French Dictionary of Sports and Phrase Book (1969), designed for the use of visitors to the Pacific Games inadvertently produced howlers that puts it in the league of Pedro Carolino’s (1883) The New Guide to the Conversation in Portuguese and English better known by the title of the reissue edited by Mark Twain: English as she is spoke. Here we encounter phrases meant for Portuguese visitors to England sufficiently prone to misinterpretation to provoke an international incident, including:

Will you have than I bring the ham?

Yes, bring-him, we will cup a steak put a nappe cloth upon this table.

I have drinking. The small pies were very good.

The soup is bringed.

Gentilman, will you some bean?

Give us some beef and potatoes a beefsteak to the English.

Give us some Hollande cheese and some prunes.

I will take a glass of brandy at the cherries.

I shall take willingly a or-geat’s (sic!) glass or a sherbet.

But then, as Carolino reminds us:

Famished belly has no ears.

Balint’s sensitivity to the dietary needs of foreign visitors to PNG does not lag behind Carolino’s. For instance, examples of phrases of help to a supermarket shopper (few of which were in existence in the year this booklet appeared and no explanation was given why one needs verbal expressions in a self-serve situation) include:

One is happy to note that the practice of smoking sauerkraut has not taken a foothold in PNG though it would seem that Balint’s implicit aim was to confuse smokers and drinkers. How else is one to explain the following:

Such phrases help avoid confusion with cheap local brews produced on the Rai coast. Like others Balint does not realize , however, that konyak refers to kava rather than the French product.

One can sympathize, however, with his concern for the preservation of traditional family values which is also evidenced in the useful phrase:

do you have a family size?      yu gat wanpela famili sais?

Balint commendably not only caters for ingredients but also for kitchen utensils. A well equipped kitchen features:

This last item illustrates that Balint was far ahead of his times.

In sum, we are dealing with a buk save kamap strong tinktingk (sic!) ‘serious reading’. His question

Do you have any cook books?      Yu gat buk bilong kuk?

happily or unhappily can be answered in the positive. In fact Tok Pisin readers have the choice between two cook books, both written by missionary wives (Levi 1967 and Lilke 1972) with the dual aims of teaching newcomers to cook with local ingredients and to lift the performance of local housewives. That their place is indeed in the kitchen is evidenced in the frequent use of kuk to refer to one’s wife. These two cookbooks represent the Methodist and Lutheran approach to domestic science respectively. Whilst Levi at least appears to be aware of what ingredients and what implements are likely to be available to new Guinea villagers, Lilke shows no such cultural sensitivities, To be precise, Levi knows the objects but not the Tok Pisin names for many of them, resulting in embarrassing confusions such as mistaking the word salat to refer to salad rather than abortive or stinging nettle and to insist that one should bakim ‘fuck’ rather then bekim ‘bake’ one’s tarts would not seem to be in the spirit of a missionary publication. My own recipe for tang bilong bulmakau long aspik (composed with the help of our late mutual friend Don Laycock) would not have been out of place in either of the publications under discussion.

Em kaikai ol misinari save laikim tumas. Pastaim yu mas go long stua na askim long stuakipa I mas givim tang long yu. Orait, putim tang I go long milik inap em I malomalo liklik. Pinis, yu mas skinim gut. Pinis, kisim tangwara na pulimapim sospen bilong yu. Boilim tang bilong yu inap em I tan pinis. Orait, rediim aspik na putim tang bilong yu I go insait longen. Sampela masta I laikim aspik I malomalo tumas. Orait, taim aspik I pas, em nau, yu kuk pinis na yu sevim tang wantaim salat na baket (Baguette)

One of my Manus informants had bought Lilke’s booklet for his kuk and was rather annoyed that the unavailability of simple kitchen utensils such as a spätzle mashin (a tool for preparing Swabian dumplings) prevented her from preparing the dishes described here. Meanwhile fast convenience food such as pisfinga have made an appearance in the cities and towns of PNG reducing the need for meatgrinders and such like.

Let me wind up my discussion and draw a few lessons. It is well known to linguists that the organs used to articulate speech are the same ones used to eat, which incidentally is a good reason for not talking whilst eating. Wilson’s (1932 : 112) observation on the languages of Santa Cruz cannot be regarded as a serious counter example:

"The nose ring falling across their mouths, and the betel-nut mess inside, has probably so influenced their language that perhaps it cannot be spoken with an empty mouth and undecorated nose."

Whilst, as I have tried to show, this relationship between masticatory and verbal activity was intuitively grasped by a number of writers on Tok Pisin, their writings leave much to be desired. The expatriate unwillingness to learn about eating in New Guinea typically is matched by their unwillingness to understand Tok Pisin and it is one of many of Tom’s achievements to have raised the level of understanding of these matters. It was Tom who also pointed out to me that the name of another of his languages Torres Strait Pidgin is homophonous with that of one of the most delicious birds of the region. In the belief of many of my older informants Tok Pisin was given to them by the birds and we have anecdotal accounts that eating long pig can enhance the linguistic proficiency of the eater.

Pidgin languages such as Tok Pisin are complex phenomena which are best understood through metaphor and I am aware of several attempts to characterise them as a mix of cooking ingredients as in:

The recipe for the language is interesting: Take one sea full of British sailormen, hardy, daring, very British and profane, and leave it in a cool place for two days; extract their speech; then bring to boil and extract what speech remains. Add a coconut shell each of Chinese, Malay, German and Kanaka and bring to boil a hundred or so times, then season with a little war or two; add a few drops of Mission sauce and sprinkle with blackbirder pepper and recruiter salt. Strain through kanaka lips and serve with beer on boat days, or with undiluted Australian any other time. (Robertson 1971 : 13 -14)

It remains to be seen if this metaphor can be enhanced by adding creole sauce.

Em tasol. Mi toktok pinis. Nogut mi skruim longpela toktok tumas. Mobeta toktok bilong mi i mas sot. Yes, Tom, mi amamas long olgeta wok bilong yu na gutpela save yu bin givim mi longen. Em nau taim bilong malolo bilong yu na lukautim ol sipsip. Tenkyu tru wantok.

References

Balint, Andras (1969)    English Pidgin and French Dictionary of Sports and Phrase Book Rabaul:Trinity Press.

Carolino, Pedro (1969)    Fractured English as She is Spoke, (reprint), New York:Dover Publ.

Dutton, Thomas E. (1973)    Conversational New Guinea Pidgin, Canberra:Pacific Linguistics D-12

Levi, Laurel (1964)    Pidgin English kuk buk, Rabaul:Methodist Mission Press.

Lilke, Elenore (1972)    Buk bilong Kuk Bad Liebenzell:Liebenzell Mission Press.

Mühlhäusler, Peter (1985)    ‘Language Planning and the Tok Pisin Lexicon’ in Wurm & Mühlhäusler (eds) 595 - 646.

Robertson, Frank (1971)    ‘Comic Opera Talk Talk; English as she is broken is the New Guinea tongue that strangers love’, Asia Magazine, 22 August: 13-16.

Wurm, Stephen A. & Mühlhäusler, Peter (eds) (1985)    Handbook of Tok Pisin, Canberra:Pacific Linguistics C-70