Hairy English

“A semiotician as subtle as Roland Barthes was disappointed in later years that his interviews needed to be cleaned up of hesitations, raspings, small coughs. These sub-verbal or intra-verbal materials claim a locality connected not just to breathing, but rather to the breathing within speaking. This awareness of the pauses in language can be apprehended as the key to new forms of knowledge and new forms of revolt. One uses the openings of one’s actual and allegorised body to localise and energise the political significance of sound utterance.” (Caroline Bergvall, “Cat in the Throat: On Bilingual Occupants.”)

Several weeks ago, something annoyed me. It was an article making a definitive statement about why putting two spaces after a period is wrong. I know very well that it’s “wrong;” indeed that it’s “ugly,” that it “impedes flow.” Or, at least, that many people—many readers, writers—seem to think this, and said so, with great conviction, following the article’s circulation.

For me, typographic idiosyncrasies are often like accents in speech. I stopped writing by hand when I was nine years old; my maternal grandfather had just emigrated from the Philippines to live with us in California, and he brought with him an old Brother electronic typewriter, coddled in heavy cloth like a holy amulet. Upon discovering that I was a writer, he gave the typewriter to me. Thereafter, with great gallant humility, he would ask permission to “borrow” it whenever he needed to type up what he called “unimportant things.” Things like: immigration documents, petitions, official forms of any kind. We had priorities.

Years of staying up all night typing, driving my mother insane because the machine was so loud. (Not my father, who was an even worse sleeper than I still am, and therefore nearly always worked the grave-shift.) Years of fidding with the correcting-tape ribbon because it never quite erased ink perfectly. Years of leaving a trace of all my mistakes on every page; having all my mistaken and unmistakable pasts show through, just beneath their corrected futures. Some people say that the two-space custom originates from the people who are used to writing on a typewriter.

*

Accents in speech, accents in writing. What can and can’t be put into language; how it can, and how it can’t. In my immediate family there is no concept of a mother tongue, and the tongues that everyone speaks are mostly suffused in practicality and pain; pain of practicality.

My parents spoke Tagalog to each other; Tagalog being the artificially imposed national language of the Philippines, a country of somewhere between 120 and 175 languages. Officially, Tagalog is referred to as “Filipino,” previously “Pilipino,” with “Filipino” designating the “prestige register” of the Tagalog language. Linguistically they are “interchangeable,” which is to say, impossible: they are two separate things and hurt in two separate ways. I don’t think I will ever be able to call Tagalog by the name Filipino. For reasons also mostly suffused in practicality and pain.

My mother comes from and speaks Pangasinan (language, province), a language distinct from Tagalog and notoriously difficult to learn. Apparently linguists are uncertain as to where to place it in terms of language branches; it’s closest to Ibaloi, the language of the Ibaloi indigenous ethnic group. So difficult that my father, who largely made his surgical career there, and who at other points in his life had no trouble learning Dutch or Indonesian, was never able to speak Pangasinan. Or perhaps he spoke it, but only badly.

It is hilarious—and by hilarious, I mean outrageous—to me when people talk about French and Italian, for example, being separate languages; but then talk about the various “dialects” of the Philippines, or other similar nations in the global south. What is that thing Chomsky said about the only difference between a language and a dialect is an army? Pangasinan itself having, I think, four or five dialects.

My mother’s family was poor, and therefore nearly all of her eight brothers and sisters, and both of her parents, immigrated to the United States, following my mother, who arrived when she was twenty. Which is to say, my mother was able to live in the States surrounded by her Pangasinan-speaking family, and thus was able to speak it regularly. Even her gay childhood best friend came over to the States after her; became my godfather; worked alongside her in the same hospital for years. Apparently the first language I spoke was some Pangasinan-English creature, but I don’t really remember much of that.

To this day, I am told that my (extremely poor and gaping) Tagalog has a Pangasinan accent. And like my poor Tagalog, I can understand more Pangasinan than I can speak. The exchange rate is bad. I have extreme trouble understanding mainstream Tagalog, the Tagalog of Filipino news, of Filipino telenovelas. I can only really understand my mother’s Tagalog, and the Tagalog spoken between her and other people. And I can only read Tagalog if I read it aloud to myself. I have to hear it, hear her voice in it. I can really only understand Tagalog through her; through her accent, her intonations, her vocabulary.

So perhaps I was wrong about not having any concept of a mother tongue. But mine has nothing of the natural or effortless in it: whatever mother tongue I have is naïve, sentimental, compulsive, convulsive.

My father, on the other hand, spoke Ilokano, distinct from Pangasinan, a little closer to Tagalog. His family has always been wealthy and well-connected (in the Philippines, this does not typically indicate good things), and therefore none of my father’s brothers or sisters ever needed to immigrate to the States. But this meant that my father never had anyone with whom he could speak Ilokano on a regular basis.

(Actually, that’s not true; my mother spoke and understood Ilokano very well. In fact, this was a source of some teasing between them: my father the bibliomaniac and globetrotter, unable to speak Pangasinan; my mother the country girl non-reader who spoke Ilokano with ease.)

But for my father, Ilokano wasn’t just a language he wanted to speak—but an entire space, a time. More specifically: an estranged space, an estranged time. And because none of the people who had lived in that space and time were with him, he refused to speak it, to produce it, either to my mother, or to me. The only time I heard him speak Ilokano was with one co-worker, a fellow security guard (and then, only reluctantly and sparingly); or on the phone with his siblings; or the one time when the two of us were in the Philippines together, during the second kidnapping of my life. (He was the one who kidnapped me. Not in an evil way. Well, not evil to me.)

But more than that, he refused, almost categorically, to speak Tagalog with my younger brother and me. He would not enter into the space of Tagalog with us. “It’s not my language,” he said firmly. Naturally, he thought of English as his own; it’s the second national language of the Philippines, after all. Colonial history survives well in the mouth; it’s warm there. Tropical.

I can only surmise that for him, it was acceptable to speak Tagalog to my mother: they were both from the Philippines, they both already spoke it, they already knew what it meant to be obliged to speak Tagalog, he couldn’t speak Pangasinan anyway, and my mother’s English is not as good her Tagalog, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The same went for his three first children, with whom he spoke a mixture of Tagalog and English, perhaps even Ilokano occasionally, I don’t really know.

His wife, his eldest children—they were all part of his other, earlier life, and so with them, he could tolerate speaking the intermediary of Tagalog. They were all from that space. That climate. That hemisphere. Not like my brother and me: two American chimeras with troubling romantic attachments to high fructose corn syrup, and a habit of being possessed by ghosts.

I think it also had to do with what my father was refusing to either reproduce or naturalize: he didn’t want to make the prosthetic of Tagalog feel like flesh. Which is what it would have felt like for me, if we had spoken it together. If I had grown up learning it this way. It would have become a natural language—a native language. I think the idea of that was unbearable to him. Unbearable to him, the former orthpedic surgeon who specialized in rehabilitation and prosthetics for children with polio. He had to saw the limbs off a lot of children. I’m not saying he sawed off one of my limbs; Tagalog was never one of my limbs. I’m saying he didn’t want us to buy the illusion of seamless organic wholeness; not when the real wholeness, the wholeness we needed, was always the kind you could see for its parts.

But speaking Ilokano to us was never really an option for him, either. Ilokano made my father suffer. I think he longed to speak it; badly missed its sounds, textures, jokes, tendernesses. But for him, that language was so bound up in his past, in other people far away, disappeared, or dead—in an entire fabric of remorse and horror that he had come to the States to escape (which he failed to do, ultimately). His language was an heirloom, the way hereditary disease is an heirloom: but he wouldn’t teach it to us. Couldn’t bear to pass it down.

Thinking about language not only as a tool, a skill, or a fact; but as a place. Not only a place like a space, a place to live, a place to navigate, but: a place like a chest. A place to put things. To hide things in language and then hide the language: this can be done. Like Tony Leung’s character whispering his sorrow into the ruin at the end of In the Mood for Love, a movie I have problems with, but which still affects me. Hide things in language, then hide the language. Put words in a hole. Then plug it up with soil and walk away.

(But as 2046 shows, you can never really walk away.)

*

(A wound, but no words for it: Ferdinand Marcos spoke Ilokano.)

*

So my father spoke English to me. And my mother spoke a mixture of English and Tagalog. She’s less of a sufferer in language, she doesn’t really have any problems in a moral sense with switching between Tagalog, English or Pangasinan. She’s much more elastic, an adapter, a survivor: a success story. If anything, she’s more intimidated by literacy or clarity; in her daily emails to me, she’s always fretting about her grammar and word choice. And now I live with a French/German alien whose childhood sounded like this: “Kann ich la pomme essen?” and who speaks yet another weirdo fluent transatlantic English. Less and less am I able to tell which words are the “correct” English ones, and which ones are recent immigrants. Nothing sounds wrong to me anymore. This is why I dislike the latent xenophobia and lack of imagination of so many typography and orthography pedants: thinking about what is lost or rejected or disdained when a specific type of native perfection is dictated, normative. À bas, l’Académie Française.

*

“In the bilingual context here described one learns to move from one language to the next while being released from this kind of unquestioned psychosomatic attachment. It is not about having a ‘voice’ (another difficult naturalising concept), it is about siting ‘voice’, locating the spaces and actions through which it becomes possible to be in one’s languages, to stay with languages, to effect one’s speech and work at a point of traffic between them, like a constant transport that takes place in the exchange between one’s body, the air, and the world. Language circulates in this conduit of air and shapes its articulated vibrations into both verbal and non-verbal sounds, semantic and somatic events, that can all be made manifest as language. The act of writing becomes less permanent, more acutely in flux. It manifests transit and spitting out. The spittle can be resistant, unpleasant, potentially as well-aimed as a thrown shoe. Beckett’s traffic from English to French, and back into English by way of a translated French is an expectoration of the English language’s occupation on the colonised Irish body. His leitmotifs of speech loss, language stutter, assisted memory, gestural language all point to the dislocation experienced in the move, and to the feeling of liberation it also opened up. Fighting off one language with another language, transforming in the process both the spat-out source language and the adoptive language.” (Bergvall)

*

An accent in speech; an accent in writing. I don’t write on a typewriter anymore, but the two-space practice has remained with me. Not that one would be able to tell, here; nowadays, blog editing sites like WordPress or Tumblr regularly strip out the extra spaces. I am automatically corrected. As if with a speech impediment; my writing impediment.

An accent in writing; an accent in speech. Having, myself, always been good at imitating the accents of other languages. Having been told that I have a good ear. Meaning: an easily-invaded one. Colonizing, auto-colonized. Among my friends and family I am somewhat notorious for my promiscuous voice (the only promiscuous thing about me). For picking up any and all accents around me and absorbing them into my speech. Because my father spoke a weird flowery English (when I first heard the film director Satyajit Ray speak, his voice reminded me of my father’s), I spoke that way when I spoke with him. Because he pronounced “Kant” a certain way, in a high school philosophy class, I pronounced it that way, too. Thus making my (male) teacher very, very uncomfortable.

My new horror: realizing how swiftly the English accent is starting to creep into my speech after nearly two years of making my life here. Madonna gets a lot of shit for this accent. Cary Grant had a similar one. The transatlantic monstrosity. Transatlantic fraud. During the 2009 broadcast of Channel 4’s Big Fat Quiz of the Year, the comedian David Mitchell mocked Christian Bale’s nouveau Anglo-American accent (which is not really an accurate description; Bale does genuinely have a British accent inflected with Welsh; however, like many actors he remains in character—and therefore in voice—while on a film set or during promotion), as it was heard during that infamous recording of Bale losing his shit on set:

“He hasn’t got an accent anymore! He hasn’t got an accent that any other human has. He’s been so destroyed by transatlantic travel and success he can’t speak like a normal human.”

Sounds familiar, I thought. Migrants are often destroyed by transoceanic travel. By success. By normal humans and their speech.

*

“As people are finding themselves with much increased frequency living in countries in which they were not born, or where they are first or second generation citizens, they have an interrupted sense of the past, whether they do or don’t experience themselves as diasporic. My practice is part of this growing number of writers and artists that are using a mixed language or mixed cultural experience to inform their writing politics; writers and artists who question what linguistic belonging means to them, and who might not be monolingual themselves and need to create their allegiance to their own mixed culture across different markers and biographical circumstances, or who are forced to justify their cultural development as bicultural citizens. These could be seen as instances of cultural practice that speak or work with a cat in the throat. Practices that are of here, and of there. Practices that are hairy.” (Bergvall)

*

These ghosts of other languages, these ghosts in other languages. Ghosts like accents, and accents like ghosts. The ghost of Pangasinan in my mom’s Tagalog. The ghost or tumor of Ilokano in my father’s English.

Their Englishes were so different from each other; despite my mother having lived in the States for much longer, my father’s English was always far better. Not just better, but ridiculously, flamboyantly fluent. By flamboyant fluency, I mean a particular way of being fluent by people who speak languages other than English but in the shadow of English, a way of speaking kindred to boastfulness, posturing, melodrama, even the pseudo-intellectual. Affected use of certain “complex” words, or turns of phrase. The cliché, the wise Occidental aphorism. Hegemony like a blood infection.

Over-fluency, too much fluency; it gushes, splits open or makes soggy its container. The florid over-compensating English. English heavy with cologne to cover up the paranoia about the smell of your non-English skin. Your flesh speaks. Outs you.

When I hear it, when I recognize it in people—and even when I stubbornly practice it myself, in solidarity—I still always cringe a little. It never fails to make me feel embarrassed, naked, tender, protective, hopelessly in love. That cheesy, gushy way of speaking. Way of charming. Even in his keening melancholy and guilt, my father was always extremely cheesy.

“He had a way of speaking,” is one of the things my mother says when she describes why she, like so many men and women, fell in love with a playboy twenty-two years older than her. Classes and worlds away.

It’s similar to what Eileen Myles is referring to in the essay “Iceland,” in the collection The Importance of Being Iceland, when she describes working class speech and “pomposity.”

“It’s an embarrassing condition of being unsophisticated and not knowing what is truly smart which is simplicity and modernism; certainly it was twenty years ago when I learned to write. But the working class person is above all afraid to seem dumb so in acting ‘smart’ and footnoting everything they betray the insecurity and weightiness of the unexperienced conclusion, which is an imitation of what writers are like. In general I think writers are not smart. They are something else and each writer can fill in a word here, but smart is not what that word is.”

There are ways of being smart and simple and modern that really wound me. A certain kind of gatekeeping formalism. Good language. What does that have to do with me. With what writing can really do. With how things are said and unsaid between the people I love. Sometimes I’d rather be embarrassed, and embarrassing, than a certain kind of smart.

That something else other than smart, which Eileen Myles says writers are; that place she leaves for each writer to fill in a word for herself—sometimes I think the extra space I can’t help but leave after every period has always been meant for that secret word. That extra space like a hiccup, a stutter, but also: a lacuna. What’s waiting there instead of my intelligence. What’s missing every time I think I’ve ended a sentence. Every time I think I’ve managed to make something with words. The boulder that blocks the path of fluency, the hole I keep falling through, the haunted corner in my rented home. That excess bit of hair never fully stripped away, shaved off. Hair as alive as grass.

Hairy hole, hairy mouth. Hairy practice of speaking and writing, in my hairy, cheesy English. The place where I can hide things. Hide my sorrow. Plug it up with soil. But I can never really walk away. And it never really gets plugged up. Grass, still green with life, hangs out of it.