When you moved
to the U.S. in 2002,
your parents first introduced you to English
piece by piece, little airplanes of words, then phrases, then sentences
fed to you by the spoonful until one meal turned
to tens, turned
to hundreds by the time
you naturalized into the elementary school
classrooms with white teachers and white friends and other friends of color
who experienced the same test for belonging. Then,
the accumulating absence of Tagalog
until it became as good
as nothing.
What was this lack
if not a sacrifice made to hustle with the cool
kids in grade school who were rich or religious or radiant with personality,
to hang with the gleeful infection of them
and their American sayings that had no room for the few Tagalog words
you barely recollected like bukás and búkas. To which
they said the first syllable sounds like poo,
like your native language
is shit,
is sorrowful,
is a slang that is unwelcome
here. Hear the strong English that could vouch
for your skin because the vocabulary
is valuable,
is vindicated,
is revolutionary. This, you learned,
was the harness, the holler for affinity. Just you, them,
and all this lingo. All the jargon
of your parents’ American
dream.
[A]n American requires a brief period of training before his ear can interpret these strange utterances as a version of his mother tongue. “A Little Brown Language” by Jerome Barry
Sound Bites from the Language of Silence
by JP Legarte
In the Philippines,
how easy it is for you to trick your silent tongue,
to convince it that
staying mute is better than trying to articulate flawed
Tagalog as a rite of passage
to family.
To strangers.
To the neighbors who look
at you like you’re the American sore spot
on this block. Tally the rhetoric
stretched in anguish
over slow syllables. The lexicon
ensconced in disharmonic cadence. What
expression should supplement
the fundamental
Salamat po
for Lolo, who woke from a dream hours before the wailing
roosters, perused the few open bakeries nearby, purchased excess pandesal at four a.m.
the day you were to leave Batangas, fly back to America,
because he remembered the pandesal
here is your favorite,
incomparable to the white
bread in the U.S.? Answer: the sad hum
in your stomach
succumbed to this smell of fresh yeast. This spare utterance
you give with your mouth
primed to devour manners, unfit to speak any sentence
except Salamat po.
Except this basic thanks
that shows how little
you know of Tagalog when isolated
from the safety of English. Did you already forget
just how fast a language can dissolve
if not practiced outside
your quiet
thoughts?
[A]n American requires a brief period of training before his ear can interpret these strange utterances as a version of his mother tongue. “A Little Brown Language” by Jerome Barry
Sound Bites from the Language of Silence
by JP Legarte
During Rosetta Stone
Tagalog lessons in high school, you got used
to every voice in the computer lab
repeating each unfamiliar
word, phrase, and sentence enunciated by the program
as if a long-lost song of Babel.
Every voice
except yours. Your voice
sounding more like undecipherable
noise. Like the choice
to be quieter.
Like when you spoke the predictable
Salamat po
to Lolo. How wrong
the application’s descending tritone felt
when the error of your pronunciation proved enough. When the difference between
Ano ang bukás? and Ano ang búkas? is the difference between
What is open? and What is tomorrow?
And the correct response to those questions is not your lips
because you don’t question how
you got to this point, why
it was not your speech tutoring them, how
you wanted teachers to comment, I think your English is stunning. I think.
Your English is stunning. I think your English—it’s stunning—until you heard it said too much. Until you refused
to be better. To be expert—which is to mean family and friend and fellow Filipino
to those back in the Philippines—
and not expat. Not battlefield of languages. Not object of your peers’
confused glares as if your face were a copy
of each red x on the screen. If only
you could barter this hurt,
exchange a sentence of English in the belly for even
a fragment of Tagalog. If only
communication worked
as simply
as that.
[A]n American requires a brief period of training before his ear can interpret these strange utterances as a version of his mother tongue. “A Little Brown Language” by Jerome Barry
Sound Bites from the Language of Silence
by JP Legarte
[A]n American requires a brief period of training before his ear can interpret these strange utterances as a version of his mother tongue. “A Little Brown Language” by Jerome Barry
You know better
than anyone
how the lack of communication contains
its own inevitable
consequence. Before you ever managed
a full conversation in Tagalog with him, Lolo succumbed to lung
cancer, frail in the frame of that final
Facetime. Despite all those Rosetta Stone Tagalog lessons. Despite the extra practice and study
you knew deep down was never enough to turn back the time
from that moment. His body a solid lump
of shadowed, sharp
bone under white blanket. His mouth
opened to a thinned zero
as if to say, You are too late.
As if to interrogate with Why
didn’t you open your mouth to Tagalog sooner? How
did “I’ll practice it more tomorrow” become years of hesitation, become me on this death-
bed and you miles and miles away across oceans?
How to tell him
you don’t know, you have no answer,
except to convey the usual silence through closed lips as the sunlight
split his mouth into a dying
bloom. The tongue a curdled, pink petal, the last attached to the stem of his breath
before Lola adjusted his skinny pillow, a shrill wheeze besieging
the tempo of his chest. After the missing dialogue,
the next time you saw him
was not tomorrow
but the wide confines of the cemetery, the mossy
headstones sobered by the return of sunlight. Haunting, isn’t it? This
cursed memory of how your unopened mouth held a better conversation with him dead at his grave
than when he was alive. How no fundamental
Salamat po
or knowing the difference between bukás and búkas will save you now. All because
you found more fluency in a vocabulary not named
English or Tagalog—the dialect
of the dead, this language
of silence.
Sound Bites from the Language of Silence
by JP Legarte