Picking guavas

 

(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

* First published in SunStar Cebu’s September 27, 2020 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

English in transit

ONLY in the presence of The Other do we spare a thought about how we communicate.

On the way to Yogyakarta, the capital of the Yogyakarta Special Region in Java, Indonesia, we stayed overnight at Changi. The airport in Singapore seems more like a city than a gateway.

Its website claim of being connected to “more than 300 destinations in 60 countries” is no boast. Arriving near midnight, we emerged from a flight where at least two infants were babbling and being babbled to in languages or accents my ear was unaccustomed to, and found the airport in Singapore as busy as a hive.

In an anthill, an ant may not probably comment about his companions if they were also from the same anthill.

More arresting than the number of people passing through Changi is the diversity of faces, the Babel of voices. How does one navigate in this disorder?

Even in the age of information, with fingertip-ability to summon data as needed, people still turn to other people. Perhaps an atavistic urge compels us to seek clarity first from the human than from the automaton.

For Bel, my fellow teacher, and I, it was a lady with a clipboard.

The authority implied by a clipboard was easy to decode; her English brought me to the mouth of other language tributaries. Was our accent as mystifying, too, for her ears?

Fortunately, a clipboard stood for efficiency with this worker. She answered all our concerns, sent us on our way, and attended to the next group of befuddled transients.

English may still be the universal language. But in a polyglot world, English undergoes transformations. The spoken word is a far cry from its printed relative, cosseted by the rules of grammar.

At Changi, where the major preoccupation is to wait in between connections, the common medium is not language but purpose. Where is the toilet? How will I confirm my final terminal? What is the wifi username and password?

The wings for communication are clipped when a bridge is needed to cross cultures, penetrate the personal borders of experiences and insights. Can one be really assisted by any of the many Englishes available in our increasingly porous world?

Even Changi sleeps.

In the blue hours of dawn, the workers with their cleaning automatons emerge. We leave the frigid laptop station, where people have long ceased to surf, as if a sleeping spell was cast, catching and casting in stone each one in the act of holding a smartphone or cradling a laptop, gateways and getaways.

We espy a nook but there is another Filipino, garrulous and still eager to unload, while we feel we are nearly running on empty.

A group of workers warns us away from some coaches, which they are about to shampoo and vacuum. We think they are Filipinos; they turn out to be Malaysians. We wonder about the army of worker ants streaming in to replace the duty-free shoppers: Vietnamese? Indians? Sri Lankans? Middle Easterners?

What gives Filipinos the confidence to cross portals is the English we wear like an old but reliable coat.

But at 3 a.m. in Changi, my English is of no use. The roar of the cleaners’ machines overpowers the snores and susurrus of other tongues.

I take refuge in a bookstore, empty and waiting. I think of the billion words of English inside all those pages, shrink-wrapped, inviolate, remote from all contact.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s October 31, 2016 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

The readers

ALL I could see of the girl was two lavender ribbon barrettes that kept her hair in place.

But I could hear her very well. In the crush of boarding the MRT train for women with children, the elderly, and disabled, I wasn’t immediately aware of her.

But as the train went through its stops, I gradually noticed the girl and her father. Early morning rides are often the quietest. Even if half of the planet seems to be squeezed inside the train, morning commuters are cocooned in private, silent preoccupations.

Not this girl. From the window, she had an unimpeded view of the surly, smog-blanketed metro. Her father, squatting, had his head close to her. I thought they were chatting until I realized the girl was reading road signs, billboards or anything he was pointing out to her.

Unlike other commuters, the man did not have a mobile phone in his hand. The blue of his shirt was like something glimpsed under the waves. The girl’s clothes, too, were leached of color from frequent washing. The ribbons, though, were new. In that grey morning, they were like butterflies flitting astray in a silent train full of people.

The girl could read very well: Pepsi, Penshoppe, Jesus is Lord. For the first time, I saw the billboards of Edsa used as flashcards by a man who was talking to his child, not to a phone in his hand. Holding on to the hand strap, I forgot about my heavy bags and the fear of losing my gadgets to a pickpocket so I could follow the girl with the butterflies in her hair read anything the world threw back at her.

Travelling by MRT above the poor and the rich mired in Edsa, I’ve often reflected how civilizations rose in the deltas surrounding bodies of water, which served as ancient highways. Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, also known as Edsa, is notorious for traffic, billboards and flash floods.

That morning, a girl changed my mind. Edsa public library?

At Boni station, the train paused due to some glitch. The girl saw a sign and quickly read the first line in Filipino: “Bawal kumain.” The second line, a translation in English, made her pause: “Ea-ting not a-LOW-wed. Ano ‘yun, ‘Tay (what does it mean, Father)?”

What quirk decided this combination of English words? “No eating” is shorter and easier than “Eating not allowed”. An editor will point out that the second phrase is twice as long as the first, actually eighteen characters with spaces compared to nine.

My concern, though, is not with the science of creating signs or even translating for the masses. What made the day turn bleaker was the power of the past tense form of an ordinary verb to stop the girl with the butterflies. How could anything as pedestrian, phlegmatic and replaceable as “allow” suddenly become despotic and omnipotent?

When I got off at my station, the girl and her father had stepped out a station earlier. They held hands as the crowd eddied around them. If the girl is as sharp as I think she is, a second language will open doors, not keep these shut against her.

Watching the man pull his daughter into a sea of bodies, I could still hear him responding to her question: “Galing mo, ‘Nak (very good, daughter)!”


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 19, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”

The good, ugly and dirty

DON’T be high blood.

There was a time when such an expression would have merited a sniff, the kindest snub Pinoys give to someone using “poor English”.

English may not be our mother tongue. Yet many Filipinos are obsessed about this second language, even more so than their own mother tongue or the national language, which many Visayans still refer to as Tagalog, not Filipino.

One only has to listen to the comments of those watching beauty contests. Whether it is a national tilt or a barangay pageant, audiences invariably gauge each candidate’s facility for pronouncing and stringing words of English as proof of “talent”. It does not even matter if the English-speaking candidate does not make sense. “Basta” proper English (sniff)!

Our pride as English speakers is understandable, given that many scrimp to put their children in the best private school (where English must be spoken even in the toilet or corridor) and hire an English-speaking yaya (“Bisaya-a aning bataa, uy” reproaches not just the nanny from Cebu or other parts of Visayas but also the parents hiring her for their Cebuano-fluent child).

Nurturing our love/hate affair with English is the recent recognition of “Philippine English,” meaning the “Filipino variety of English usage”.

Last June 26, the Philippine Daily Inquirer (PDI) reported the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)’s inclusion of 40 Filipino words in its June 2015 update. The OED includes words used for at least 10 years in newspapers and novels.

The PDI also reported that the OED cited “Philippine English” for the first time, a “legitimization” of English spoken not just by Filipinos in the Philippines but also in parts of the United States with large Filipino populations.

More significant than the elevation of Philippine English into scholarly study, at par with British and American English, is our acceptance of the way we have adopted and adapted English for our expression and communication.

Every time I’ve received a backhanded compliment from a Tagalog speaker that I speak “good English,” presumably for someone coming from the “provinces,” I’ve always wanted to retort that the choice of language is only secondary to the abilities to think and to articulate one’s thoughts.

But let’s not be high blood.

According to the OED, Philippine English, like other global varieties, shows how English accommodates “loan words” and “changes in the usage of common English words”.

For instance, Filipinos turn the noun “high blood” into an adjective meaning “angry, agitated”.

That’s what the Puerto Galera Council became when they recently declared Kees Koornstra persona non grata. The Dutch citizen, residing in the country for 14 years, posted in his Facebook group photos of uncollected garbage with the caption “Puerto Basura (Puerto Garbage)”.

According to the “mangled English” of the council resolution, Koornstra’s namecalling was an “insult” to the “dignity of Puerto Galerans”. Yet the foreigner’s photographs do not lie: the mounds of garbage bags look like commuters descending on Edsa on a Friday afternoon when malls are holding monster sales.

So when will “pikon (onion-skinned)” make it to the next edition of OED?


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)


*First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s July 5, 2015 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”