Rolling the Rs: pronunciation and articulation techniques

Rolling Rs

Linmark's Rolling the R's: Reinventing Language and Personality

The realm of post-colonial literature often focuses on the immigrant experience, and the juxtaposition of increased national freedom and globalization on one hand with the challenges of cultural divisions and prejudices on the other. It is rarer to find a novel that accurately and fully explores other implications of the post-colonial (and even the colonial) era: the manner in which immigrant's children and those with mixed-race or multicultural identities must navigate the vicissitudes of living in a post-colonial West. For many of these individuals and the few literary characters that exist that can be seen as exemplifying this position, finding a place in society means carving out this place, and this can also involve carving out an identity for the self. This is exactly what the adolescent characters of Zamora Linmark's novel Rolling the R's accomplish through their use of language and their identification with pop-culture icons, creating their own sense of identity that rejects the cultural restraints both of the Western culture they are ostensibly a part of and of the own traditional culture of their ancestors.

English is a fluid thing in the mouths of Edgar Ramirez, Katrina Cruz, and Florante Sanchez, three Filipino-descended fifth graders in Honolulu in the 1970s. They use words in a rather pidgin fashion, melding the white culture of which Hawaii is officially a part, the Hawaiian culture that was even more prominent throughout the islands at the time of the novel's action, and their own Filipino culture which is itself a melding of European and indigenous traditions and languages. The highly independent and varied use of English exhibited by the characters is at once indicative of their lack of a distinct cultural location and their creativity in creating such a space.

It is not only in the specific words used that language becomes a source or perhaps a material for the creation of identity and cultural space. The different selections of text that the author uses to tell the story, blending different characters and voices in a sometime-difficult-to-follow yet always-rewarding manner also illustrates the fluidity and adaptability of language as it is perceived and used by the characters. From poems to letters to less conventional means of conveying narrative, it is explicitly the interactions with language and the printing of the word that these characters go through by which these characters become known to the reader. In a very concrete sense, then, these characters are defined by the fragmented yet cohesive nature of the different linguistic elements that record the events of their lives, their emotions, and all of the other elements that create character.

The mechanics of language creation are of course just as important as the language created in terms of defining cultural space and determining where one can or would want to fit into a larger, very diverse yet constantly changing society and culture. The rolling of the r's referenced in the title of the novel is significant as a sign of mechanical mastery, and of being able to claim (or not claim) at will any of the specific aspects of the various cultural identities that these children must contend with in terms of conformity. In other words, the greater skill there is in the mechanical manipulation of language, the less others will be able to use language to define the students and the more the students will be able to define their own cultural space and identity. Language is a marker of culture, so greater scope means greater fluidity.