That's
my hand grasping for my identity. I personally scanned it at the office I
just left, in front of a very surprised computer analyst. He stared at my
arm resting between the lid and the glass of the flatbed scanner as my left
hand awkwardly fiddled with the mouse so I could save my right hand as an
electronic file. I didn't tell him what it was for, he might not understand.
I've been wanting to change the graphic into something less cliché,
but I'm still groping for a way to define my ethnicity. And since this personal
exploration is for life, the graphic will have to stay up there for a long
time. Or until someone gives me a good reason why I shouldn't be trying to
grab something so impalpable and elusive.
MORE THAN LANGUAGE
"Bayang magiliw,
perlas ng silanganan,
alab ng puso
sa dibdib mo'y buhay..."
I sang the words every morning of each school day for years. Ironically,
it's not my native tongue. The first language I ever learned was Cebuano.
It's the language from which my thoughts are built and in which the idea of
home takes full meaning. Not Pilipino, not Tagalog.
I learned English next, Pilipino last. I was four when I read my first Pilipino book. It's amazing how I still remember the title: "Si Ruben At Si Belen". A Filipino version of the Dick and Jane books I'd read before it. In my ignorance, I thought the words were an older form of Cebuano. The prose sounded and felt so familiar, yet it seemed cryptic. "Aso" means smoke, so why does it say here it means dog? I asked myself.
It was only much later when I realized I was tri-lingual. Even during those years before the boom, when Cebuanos were looked down upon as Filipino hicks, and Pilipino was the only recognized language while all other tongues were "dialects", I'd already considered Cebuano a language -- my language.
The only time I spoke Pilipino was in the classroom during Pilipino period. We had to speak Pilipino and nothing else during that block of academic time, the way we couldn't speak any other language but English during English class. Pilipino made me very uncomfortable. We spoke "Ceblish" at home. No one in my family spoke Pilipino.
My husband hails from Quezon City, and when we first met, it was very difficult for me to communicate with him in his native Tagalog or Pilipino. (Is there really a difference?) So we spoke English. The whole thing was comfortable before it became awkward. It was ridiculous how we were communicating in a totally foreign tongue when we both came from the same country.
I willed myself to speak Tagalog, always consciously translating the Cebuano words so real to me I could almost see them rise out of my skull and hang in the air. At the same token, I tried teaching my husband Cebuano, but I ended up lecturing him as it slowly dawned on me how conversational Cebuano can be so figurative.
Take for example, the expression "Usapa na!" Literally, it means "Chew that." It's actually a slang expression akin to "Eat my shorts." But then it could also mean "Wow," or "Eat shit," or "I don't give a rat's ass", depending on the topic of conversation and how the phrase is expressed.
It got to the point where I'd translate every word, then every phrase, then every sentence, then come up with all the possible connotations of said words, phrases and sentences. That was especially the case with slang terms. It drove me crazy, I stopped our informal lessons.
Tagalog became more and more natural to me, while my husband didn't learn much aside from the dirty words and curses, which are always inexplicably easy to pick up and remember in any language.
I think about all this now as the Philippine national anthem is playing in
my head. I know it has an English version, and I remember only the first few
lines:
"Land of the morning,
child of the sun returning,
with fervor burning,
thee do our souls adore..."
It doesn't even come close to what is actually being said. The translation
was apparently made to fit the number of notes in one line, and match the
rise and fall of the anthem's marching rythm with the intonation of the English
words used. It doesn't capture what "bayang magiliw" really
means -- the land my ancestors shed so much blood for, the land that lost
its identity even before it had the chance to establish one.
I think about all these tongues in my system as I read about different computer platforms. I'm a Macintosh lover dreading the thought of using the PC my husband and I just bought. It's the same dread I had when I knew I had to speak Tagalog.
And I think about the usual question posed to me whenever I tell Americans I'm Filipino. "So you speak Tagalog?" they ask, making the word sound like a phrase: tag-a-log, emphasis on tag. "Uhm..." I say, then roll my eyes at the idea of having to explain that yes, I speak the language, but no, that's not my native tongue, but yes, I'm still Filipino, and I hope I'm not confusing you.
Because sometimes I'm confused myself. It's like having this dual personality. It's hard to put a natural, inherent identity together with one shaped by academia and the push of propagandized nationalism. I'm Cebuano, first and foremost. The Filipino identity is like Pacific Islander on all those forms that ask for my ethnicity -- a label that attempts to compartmentalize people with the same skin color and eye slants.
But when I share a good laugh with my husband, or have a margarita with a
close Tagalog friend, descriptions, labels, categories, and personal identities
stemming from regionalism and clannishness slowly merge, dissolve, then are
finally lost.
October 1997