I’m going to leave current events alone for a week. Not for lack of news, but because the smaller things in life need our attention, too.

This week, let’s take a lighthearted look at a few expressions that make Bislama such a delightful language. Before we do, though, I must apologise to native Bislama speakers: I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t already know. Nonetheless, it’s sometimes useful to record such trifles for posterity.

Because of its impoverished vocabulary, Bislama relies heavily on metaphor, imagery and euphemism. The pictures it paints are remarkably vivid and often frankly indecent, generating wild laughter among the interlocutors. Propriety dictates that I leave out the most scandalous of them….

Faea I Ded – The full expression is ‘Faea blong yu i ded,’ though it’s often reduced to a single exclamation: ‘Faea!’ It means, literally, ‘Your fire is dead.’ It’s used as a capping statement, gleefully punctuating the fact your interlocutor has been left speechless, unable to respond to a winning argument or repartee.

Many statements are overtly positive, but have extremely sarcastic connotations:

Yu laf gud ia? – Literally, ‘Are you laughing enough?’ A friend translates it thusly: ‘What the heck are you laughing at? If I hear another sound coming out of your hyena mouth, I will pummel you!’

Some of the most amusing expressions refer to, er, social activities, including kava drinking and other after-hours shenanigans:

Wire i taj – Literally, ‘The wires have touched.’ Used to suggest that someone’s neural circuitry is positively sparking from the effects of strong kava. It’s not entirely a positive thing, connoting a circuit that’s been shorted out more than a properly functioning one. Contrast with ‘feeling a buzz’ in English.

Rod I Smol – Literally, ‘The path is [too] small.’ In Bislama, any human-navigable pathway is a ‘rod’. A particularly narrow hillside trail, for example, might be called ‘rod blong nani’ – a goat track. This expression usually refers to someone so intoxicated that they cannot keep to the path. The road, therefore, is too narrow for their staggering gait.

Fo Wheel I Fas – Literally, ‘[All] four wheels are stuck.’ This term refers to someone so inebriated that they can’t even crawl on hands and knees (hence four wheels). Note the archaic use of ‘fast’, meaning ‘bound up’, not ‘speedy’.

Danis Rap – Literally, ‘Rap Dancing.’ Someone who’s overdosed on kava will often fall prey to violent muscular convulsions alarmingly similar to a rap dancer ‘popping’, that is, jerking their limbs about in a robotic fashion.

Karen Blong Hem – Literally, ‘His/Her garden.’ It’s used as a euphemistic reference to someone’s boyfriend/girlfriend, usually because they’re not formally associated to one another. In that sense, it implies a slightly risqué – or at least casual – relationship. (This is only the first part of an extended metaphor that becomes far too explicit for present company.)

Hem I Pas Bihaen – Literally ‘S/He has gone behind [someone else].’ A euphemistic way for saying that someone has been cheating on their partner.

… Blong Rod – Literally, ‘[Someone/thing] from the street.’ In the possessive form (shown here), it alludes to refuse lying at the side of the road. So a ‘pikinini blong rod’ is a worthless person, essentially ‘born in the gutter’. Likewise, ‘toktok blong rod’ is baseless rumour. If we say of a woman, ‘Hemi stap wokbaot long rod’ (‘She’s walking about on the road’), we’re using a term identical to ‘steet walker’ in English.

Mi Holem Taet Yu – Literally, ‘I hold you tight.’ Quite suggestive in English, this expression is actually perfectly innocuous. It’s the equivalent of saying, ‘Wait a minute.’ It’s usually spoken in an apologetic tone.

There are many more such vivid turns of phrase, but alas, most of them aren’t fit for these pages.
Commonplace nuisances also give rise to remarkably apt metaphor:

Rat I Kaekae… – Literally, ‘Rats have eaten [something].’ Used to describe the pilfering and petty theft endemic throughout Vanuatu. See also:

… I Grow Leg – Literally ‘[Something] has grown legs.’ Again, this refers to petty theft, describing the propensity of all things in Vanuatu to mysteriously grow legs and walk away of their own volition.

Reading this, you already have formed the impression that Bislama consists of nothing but scandalous language. That’s not true. When used in formal circumstances, Bislama can take on a cadence and oratorical power similar to the classical Latin of Cicero’s senatorial speeches.

But in its most common usage, the laughing, chaffing exchanges that punctuate our daily exchanges, it’s good-natured, inventive and cheeky, strikingly similar to the bawdy discourse in a Dublin pub on any given Friday.

Perhaps the most enjoyable linguistic trope is the verbal ellipses, wherein one begins an ostensibly innocuous statement and trails off just before it declines to outright scandal. As in so many other languages, timing is the essence of comedy.

My point – and I do have one – is that visitors ignore the nuance and linguistic flair inherent in Vanuatu discourse at their peril. No one can truly say they understand Bislama until they’ve grasped its vividly metaphorical, highly contextual fluidity and made it their own.

I have a terrible confession to make: When I was young, working towards a degree in English Literature, I not only studied poetry, I wrote it too.

Now that I’ve got that dirty little secret out of the way, I can talk a little about one of the enduring delights of living in Vanuatu: The poetry of the language.

In literature and linguistics, pidgin tongues usually come across as the simple country cousin of ‘proper’ languages. That may be, but too many people seem to think that ‘simple’ and ‘stupid’ are synonymous. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Bislama is simple, even impoverished in vocabulary. But what non-native speakers forget is that what matters in language is expression. The mechanics of Bislama are deceptively easy to master, leading people to feel that it’s enough to drop the ‘h’ after the ‘s’ and the ‘t’ and to suffix every verb with ‘em’. That doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Bislama has come a long way from its origins as hand-waving baby talk employed to negotiate the price of a bush knife or a bag of copra. As mobility became possible with the cessation of most inter-tribal conflict, Bislama became the language not only of trade, but of the much more subtle and nuanced negotiation of alliance and arbitration between chiefs, between shipmates, between travelers and labourers from all over our little patch of the Pacific.

Only a smattering of native words found their way into the language, but the island ethos is its very essence. Just as they do in countless island tongues, metaphor, natural imagery, obliqueness and inference lie at the heart of self-expression in Bislama.

Every poet knows that simplicity need not lack subtlety. Anyone with an ear for it quickly finds that, in the hands of an adept practitioner, Bislama is an ideal tool for open-ended, allusive expression. Conversely, it can be a remarkably crude instrument if not handled gently.

Where English writes the road map, Bislama only gestures. This means that ambiguity has to be managed carefully. In a milieu with a nearly complete lack of privacy, circumspection and euphemism were applied to all aspects of daily life. All aspects. Especially the ones that Victorians once kept carefully locked away indoors.

This is English, so I’ll have to state things plainly: In a world of thatched roofs and bamboo walls, gossiping about so-and-so’s personal habits or sexual escapades requires deliberate vagueness. There is, in other words, no such thing as benign euphemism in Bislama.

When a native English speaker, fresh from his third language lesson, tosses out a phrase like ‘samting blong yu’ (literally, ‘something of yours’), it’s enough to make everybody in the room cringe. The speaker has unintentionally referred to his interlocutor’s private parts.

I remember hearing about a young doctor in Papua New Guinea. He enthusiastically encouraged his first patient, a woman in labour, by repeatedly shouting, “Pusum!” (“Push!”) Even in her agony, the young lady was nonplussed. The doctor was telling her to do the very thing that had got her pregnant in the first place. Surely now was not the time.

Making mistakes is an integral part of all learning, and I confess that I’ve been guilty of a few howlers myself. Once, in the course of complimenting a friend’s mother’s cooking, I mistakenly accused her of having sex with the chicken. Happily, the family knew me well enough that they simply collapsed in laughter. As did I, once my faux-pas became clear.

But this is more than just a homily against silly mistakes. Once you’re done chuckling, I want you to remember this: Bislama is not nearly as simple as it sounds. There is a poetry to it that can delight, even enlighten, if you listen for it.

Yes, there’s no such thing as ‘no’ in Vanuatu. We all know that. But when you’re sitting in the nakamal, chatting with the village bigman, are you sure he’s really talking about his crops? When the chief remarks as he wipes his feet that one should not track dirt into a household, he’s talking about more than domestic hygiene.

Bislama is more than the sum of its words. People ignore this lesson at their peril. A poor Bislama speaker may be forgiven, but a poor listener suffers more than they know.

More than once, I’ve had to pull some well-meaning soul aside and explain that they can’t get another meeting with some functionary because they didn’t pay any attention to what they were told at the last one. Often enough, they’ll angrily retort that nothing important was said.

As I learned to my dismay back in university, poetry – like all art – can’t really be taught. Asked to define rhythm, jazz great Fats Waller famously retorted, “If you got to ask, you ain’t got it!” Bislama lessons are fine and good, but remember this:

A proper understanding of Bislama comes only with time, an open ear and a willingness to listen beyond the words, until the English falls away and only the poetry remains. And when you finally hear it, you’ll be glad you did.

GOODNIGHT TAWI SORRY
TO DISTURB I WANT
TO TELL YOU ONLY
THAT EVERYTHING IS
STRAIGHT

With apologies to Elizabeth Barrett Browning