My Hatred for the English Language knows no bounds.
This language can burn to the ground for all I care.
In my Writing Fiction class last year, I wrote a story titled Stilted, a story about a migrant working a nursing home. I even got it published on an Australian literary journal called Overland months later after various terrifying back and forth emails:
The air-con. It buzz. Hum. Someone typing. Click. Click. Clack. They won’t let me use the computer. They never taught me. I am new. I come here. From another country. I remember learning and speaking at school. Sounds like rocks in mouth. My mother. She was proud. Real proud. Skype call screech happy. She is home. Oceans away. A passport away. A visa away. A tongue away.
The writing style is awkward and experimental, like a newcomer learning how to string sentences together in English. It’s a milestone in my writing career because it’s the first piece of writing that I got paid for. I toiled on Stilted on endless weekday nights, my eyes growing heavy as it struck midnight. I wrote additional sentences in between work breaks on my phone, my too-big fingers accidentally pressing g and h. I went into workshopping sessions in class and bore open the vulnerable parts of myself to my peers, waiting for any criticisms and amendments.
I cringe looking back on Stilted. It lacks research, finesse and specificity, too caught up in ambiguity, too heavily inspired by Dictée by Therea Hak Kyung Cha. I first stumbled on Dictée through Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong, a collection of nonfiction essays focusing on the Asian-American experience and it’s proximity to marginalisation, trauma and whiteness. Hong describes Dictée’s writing to her students like “putty in their mouths… [a] high school girl dictating her story back in her broken English”. Here’s an excerpt:
First Friday. One hour before mass. Mass every first Friday. Dictee first. Before mass. Dictee before. Every Friday. Before mass. Dictee before. Back in the study hall. It is time. Snaps once. One step right from the desk. Single file.
Last year in 2023, I was attempting to reconstruct myself in various ways through various books and literature. I read Her Body And Other Parties by Carmen Maria and And Then I Woke Up by Malcolm Delvin. I consumed bodies of experimental and strange works. I studied them like an exam, making mental notes before attempting to create my own, quasi-experiments. They were terrible. Perhaps it’s because I was drawn to push the boundaries of punctuation and grammar rules of the English language so much that the invisible elastic bands broke apart, leaving the prose to falter and drag on too far or too awkwardly. These stories sit in random files on my laptop, brimming with spelling mistakes which may or may not be intentional.
I sometimes repeat words in writing or in speaking. It comes from the rules of my own language, Tagalog. We can make nouns turn into verbs at a simple snap of a finger. Turning the noun toothbrush to brushing teeth by repeating the first part of the word: toot-toothbrush1. I do it unknowingly that even my coworkers start to pick up on it. I feel utter shame and embarrassment, despite English being my most spoken language outside the comforts of my own home, leaving my native tongue of Tagalog to fall on the wayside. I stumble and contort words in my head, mixing up past and present adverbs, resulting in an awkwardly uttered sentence to my mum: si Jobeth binigian kami ng biko with si Jobeth binigian tayo ng biko2.
I left the Phillipines when I was around nine or ten. There are words and phrases that I didn’t learn or consolidate, leaving huge gaps within my knowledge that only widened into colossal bridges as I spoke less and less of Tagalog. I read English books and plays in English class and wrote English essays about them where they talked about English concerns and themes that resonated with the English author. I hate this language that I’m writing in. I feel constricted and tight, pushing and prodding around commas and synonyms, fighting and going with the flow of sentences. I wish I could write everything in Tagalog, string together bountiful sentences. But even my writing capability has been robbed of me.
My tongue is shapen in the words of my colonisers, from the harsh English words of the Americans during the late 19th century to the utterings of the Spanish during the late 16th century. It permeates and haunts every part of myself. It’s exhausting, knowing all of this history bears down on my vocal chords as I ask someone for the directions of the nearest toilets in Melbourne Central or whenever I’m ordering a zinger box at KFC in Box Hill, I am speaking in English, leaving behind the world of Tagalog
I try to make up for it in some sort of way. I watch too many many Filipino movies and telenovelas to consolidate Tagalog that I start to feel like a mechanic fixing a worn, too-far down engine of a car, reading the English subtitles and hearing the spoken Tagalog, knowing that the two sentences, verbal or spoken, are always different, leaving behind context, history, slang and humour.
Babel by R.F. Kuang puts it better than I can: “Translation means doing violence upon the original…warping and distorting it for foreign, unintended eyes… an act of betrayal.”
Every incorrect English sentence I publish online feels like a pathetic push back against the horrors and atrocities of the English language. I stress over the colonisers words while faltering my native tongue. It’s beyond tiring and exhausting. I long to hear Tagalog again in the streets of Manila, the humidity sticking to my brown skin, the cacophony of vendors calling out to everyone to try their goods. I will not let this language bury me like it has done to my ancestors’ literature and history.
The proper way to say brushing teeth in Tagalog is ‘mag-toothbrush’, but formality is a scam.
The 2nd sentence is correct when it comes to the context and translates to ‘Jobeth gave us biko’. I mixed up ‘tayo’ and ‘kami’. They both roughly translates to us or we. But using ‘kami’ in a conversation with someone leaves the person you’re speaking with out of the activity. Jobeth is a good family friend and gave our family biko, a Filipino rice desert, thus somewhat disrespecting Jobeth and my mum. Whoops.