lend me your ear, move that mouth
early this summer i met an uncle of mine for the first time. he stopped in LA on the way back to chicago from the philippines. this very learned, rather mayabang uncle said at one point, ‘my kids regret not learning tagalog when they were little. and they should. language is culture.’
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it’s frustrating to come across folks who can’t pronounce ‘ethnic’ names (like my own), because from one angle it appears that the mispronunciations are almost purposeful or done out of spite. surely, people must hear that their iterations of my name place the accent in the wrong place, or that the ‘A’ is short and not long, or — at the very least — that the last two syllables aren’t to be run into each other in an ugly car weck.
before this scorn reaches its peak, though, it’s reined in by an understanding that perhaps people don’t hear it, or maybe their mouths just don’t move that way. it’s the same understanding i have for people who can’t reproduce musical pitches, even along with the pitch as it plays. it’s the same slack i cut myself for not being able to move my body parts the way i’d like when i ‘dance.’
[still, for the sake of life-long learning, one would hope that with enough practice and attentiveness, pitches can be reached, body-parts can gain flexibility and rhythm, mouths and tongues can do the necessary gymnastics.]
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in tagalog class and when i practice with my parents (who provide rather explicit, ungentle criticism), i’m surprised by my inability to move my mouth and reproduce sounds that i very clearly hear. i can reproduce musical pitches, so why shouldn’t i be able to make those glottal stops? the rhythm of speech isn’t there either; instead the sound is an ugly stop-and-go, in part from a frantic search for words but also from an uncertainty of where to put those filler particles that would make the words move more like a steady stream than a bout of sideways rain. that the language isn’t completely foreign to me, and that i can acknowledge where my speech doesn’t sound right, makes this state a little more pathetic. the block, i suppose, is also psychological.
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i know, i know. kailangan ko magsanay. i need to practice.
it’s changed
because white is right, and i’m tired of my words being in the dark.
summer’s ends, loose and otherwise
in the laziness and semi-malaise of the precious last week before the start of the quarter, i offer some bullets, to be exchanged for whole posts if time and my mind grapes permit.
- the most prominent emergence out of this summer’s work: rationality — its valuation, stylization, separation from style and experience, how it even relates to experience, its intertwining with but disavowal of emotion.
- debt — social, political, personal — and how it’s not so great, especially when enfolded with other emotions.
- style or discourse. a theoretical fork i’ll resolve this quarter — habermas (and his discontented children) or foucault (and his smug self-righteous children).
- the alignment of: rational/modern/depersonal versus emotional/personal/non-modern.
- and still, a frustrating failure to know the philippines.
the onward trudge.