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How Baldwins ideas on language relate to the ideas presented in Trasks essay.
Baldwins essay If Black English Isnt a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is ?, analogous to
the Trasks essay From a Native Daughter , is a detailed and complete analysis that illustrates
how the power of language transcends the limits of just mere communication, to become a
powerful tool of identification. Built upon similar scenarios, the oppression of a culture and
community by the domination and disfiguring practices of another culture, both the writings of
Baldwin and Trask show the values of language beyond the usual prism of perception of
language as a simple tool of communication between people. The correlations that the audience
can build within these two essays are numerous and are strongly related to what is a point of
gravity for both the essays, language as a means of cultural and identity survival of people
through years.
Just as Baldwin analyzes the status and the hardship of the integration and validation of black
English into white America, so does the Trasks essay reveal the misconfiguration of the
Hawaiian culture by the repressive practices of haole(white) which distorted the Hawaiian rich
historical past by investing a false feudal past to justify their claims. Such process of
deculturation originates with an attitude of superiority and lack of consideration that both white
Americans and haole (white) exhibited towards the black and Hawaiian community. Both
Baldwin and Trask are repressed and their experience is dismissed. Quoting from the text: A
child cannot be taught by anyone who despises him, and a whose demand, essentially is that the
child repudiate his experience, and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he
will no longer be black, and in which he knows he can never become white (Baldwin, pg. 265);
Which history do Western historians desire to know? Is it to be a tale of writings by their own
countrymen, individuals convinced of their unique capacity for analysis, looking at us with
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Western eyes, thinking about us with Western eyes, thinking about us within Western
philosophical contexts, categorizing us by Western indices, judging us by Judeo-Christian
morals, exhorting us to capitalist achievements, and finally, leaving us an authoritative-because-
Western record of their complete misunderstanding? (Trask, pg. 400). In the above quotations,
the audience notices how both Baldwin and Trask are victims of a distorted identity, how their
real experience is dismissed and misused in the hands of another predominant culture. So intense
is the tendency of one culture to dominate the other that Baldwin openly accentuates how it
transforms the individual and forces him to comfort to an extraneous reality which he doesnt
belong to.
From this standpoint, on one side we have Baldwin whose identity is lost under the power of the
talon of the white American influence, whose experience as a black man is despised, while on
the other side we have Trask, who resides among a feeling divided in two: one haole (white),
distorted and misleading and the other, kanaka (native), based on the factual experience of the
people of Hawaii. Having stated this, the question that normally comes up is: What correlations
can the audience build that show the increasing role of language in a society suffering from a
crisis in identity and culture?
To contextualize the question even more in terms of what Baldwin and Trask try to illustrate, I
would first like to focus on what is the foundation of both the essays, language as a key element
of identity. Language as Baldwin points out, is an instrumental tool which one can utilize to
form an identity, while simultaneously separating oneself from a communal identity. To
Baldwin, language reveals the speaker in a full panorama of thoughts and feelings. Because
black English comprises a separate linguistic branch of white American English, possessing
unique features that provide essence to English in total, Baldwin acknowledges the increasing
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significance that language attains to a nation that is culturally repressed and that would be even
more diminished without it. .Quoting from the text: Language is the most vivid and critical key
to identity: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger,
public, or communal identity (Baldwin pg.263). To Baldwin, being member of a culturally
repressed community such as the black community, language is the only glimpse of reality
through which he can express himself, articulate the thoughts without being refrained or even
more enslaved. Baldwin specifically articulates this idea Now, no one can eat his cake, and
have it, too, and it is late in the day to attempt to penalize black people for having created a
language that permits the nation its only glimpse of reality, a language without which the nation
would be ever more whipped than it is (Baldwin, pg. 264).
Analogous to Baldwin, Trasks reveals the role of language as an important tool of identity by
highlighting that none of the historians, who had profoundly disfigured the history of the Hawaii
people, knew their language or had ever lived among the natives. Quoting from the text: Did
there historians (all haole) know the language? Did they understand the chants? How long had
they lived among our people? Whose stories had they heard? (Trask, pg.394). To provide even
more support to the claim that language reveals identity, Trask also provides her own experience
of how she determined which of the two presented interpretations was the true one regarding the
history of the Hawaiians. Stating that to know her history she had to put away the books and
return to the land, had to begin speaking her language with her elders as well as learn it like a
lover, Trask ends up making these claims more plausible to the audience. Trask specifically
articulates: Only my parents voices, over and over spoke, me to a Hawaiian world. While the
books spoke from a different world, a Western world (Trask, pg. 398). Connecting this to how
Baldwin addresses the issue of language revealing a private identity, which may connect to or
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divorce from the larger public identity, what we notice is that Trask openly condemns the
deformation and the prevailing malevolent misinterpretations of haole (white), aiming to build a
false identity in which Western ways predominated over the Hawaiians primitive ways. Quoting
from the text: And yet, Hawaiians are not of the West. We are of Hawaii Nei, this world where
I live, this place, this culture, this aina (Trask, pg. 398).
To further expand my analysis on how Baldwins ideas are interchangeably related to the ones
presented by Trasks, another aspect I would like to focus is the utilization of language as a
powerful political instrument and proof of power. Baldwin specifically addresses: It goes
without saying, then, that language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power
(Baldwin, pg.263). To illustrate these ideas, Baldwin highlights the existing tension in the
Basque countries and in Wales, due to their determination to prevent their language from being
eradicated. We encounter a similar conflict of existence also in the efforts of Hawaiians to
preserve their rich historical past from becoming ignorant due to malevolent misinterpretation of
reality from the Western historians, aiming to justify the power and predominance over the
native people of Hawaii. Conflict in the Trasks essay is founded on two separate identities
presented, regarding the truth about the past of Hawaiians, one haole (white) and the other
kanaka (native). Utilizing language as a political instrument, western historians invested in
writing a range of books that depicted Hawaiian as inferior to the white as well as invested in a
non-existing feudal past. During the entire essay, we notice how the rich past of the native was
distorted by what Trask identifies as intellectual colonization, or colonization of mind. Quoting
from text: By a kind of perverted logic, [colonialism] turns to the past of the oppressed people,
and distorts, disfigures, and destroys it (Trask, pg.395)
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What testifies more to the power of language is that both Baldwin and Trask utilize language as a
powerful weapon to preserve their identity from the misleading practices of other cultures.
Baldwin illustrates the power of language by trying to justify the claims that black English, as a
creation of black diaspora, has its own contribution in the present English and its enrichment. To
make this claim more evident, Baldwin concretely states: Now, I do not know what white
Americans would sound like if there had never been any black people in the United States, but
they would not sound the way they sound (Baldwin, pg. 263).
Analogous to Baldwin, proof of linguistic power in the Trasks essay can be identified in the
sources that Trasks brings up to illustrate that the past of Hawaii as depicted from the western
perspective is misleading. The sayings of the native people, the words they wrote more than a
century ago, the way how they spoke revealed that land was inherent to them all testify to how
language is a vivid proof of the power and determination of the Hawaii people to preserve their
history. Quoting from the text: If it is truly our history Western historians desire to know, they
must put down their books, and take up our practices. First, of course the language. (Trask,
pg.400).
To conclude, both Baldwins and Trasks thoughts emerge from a repressed identity and
neglected experience, and illustrate how language becomes the only key of salvation to societies
that would be totally diminished without it. As both Baldwin and Trask accentuate: Language is
a means of knowing. That is why Baldwin and Trask not only reveal their experience from their
standpoint, but invite the audience to understand their history and identity by first approaching to
their language as the most solid bridge of connection to their communities.


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Works Cited
Baldwin, James, If Black English Isnt a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?, Writing
Conventions, Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner, NY: Pearson, 2008, pg.262-265.
Trask, Haunani-Kay, From a Native Daughter, Writing Conventions, Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce
Horner, NY: Pearson, 2008, pg. 393-401.