First language

My first language is Hiligaynon, an Austronesian language in the Philippines concentrated in the Western Visayas region. It is marked by its song-like quality. When you hear a Hiligaynon speaker speak, their intonations go up and down like waves of the sea. People literally call the accent ‘wavy.’ The most common stereotype is that people don’t know when a Hiligaynon person is angry because the way we speak is gentle. Each word is lengthened into the inflection of a question. The vowels carry a lot of the singsong-ness. Below is how most people describe the Hiligaynon sound. They twirl their finger into a wavy shape and everyone nods.

Diin ka makadto?
(Where are you going?)

When I worked in Cebu, another region with a different language and sound pattern, my coworkers would compliment how my voice calms them down. There’s an inherent tenderness to Hiligaynon. Living in Metro Manila, I’ve lost my Hiligaynon accent when talking and would only get it back when I go home. Friends who have relocated to other countries like to reconnect just to talk in the mother tongue. Accents get washed away in time, especially when most companies operate within the English language and want neutral accents.

Like other Filipino languages, Hiligaynon is ordered into the verb-subject-object (VSO) structure. As a Filipino writer writing in English, I am used to writing with the SVO structure. Writing an English sentence verb first feels like a subversion but a natural one. I’m comfortable leading with the verb first because it glides more easily in my mind. Of course, it would sound clumsy and awkward in the English form. What I also value in my first language is that the future tense is separated into two words. The ‘will’ in Hiligaynon is simply attached as the prefix ‘ma.’ Makadto = will go, makaon = will eat, etc. One can also use the suffix -on: kadtoon, kan-on. This futurity is embedded in me. In my utterance, the future is already happening.

Complication of forms

In ‘Possibly Maybe’, Bjork sings, ‘Uncertainty excites me!’ Yes, I am future-forward. You can say I am future-anxious too. I don’t know what’s going to happen but I’m excited to find out. This uncertainty is hinged in hope. I want to feel the giddiness of what’s to come, not the dread of it. Never! The title of this essay is ‘Ambot sa Essay Kwoah’. Ambot means I don’t know. Writing academically/formally has never been my strong suit. My paragraphs jump from one thought to the other. I often segue or don’t finish a thought. The title, I don’t Know about my Essay (or It’s up to my Essay), seems defeatist when translated to English but in my mother tongue, it’s more of letting go of control and letting things fall where they’ll fall. For me, it’s a reminder to be playful. Not everything has to sound so serious. Like the protest chants, being funny doesn’t take away from the message. Camping it up strengthens it and breaks personal and societal expectations¹. It is a moment of discovery.

The first book I ever owned was the New Testament for Children, an illustrated and simplified version of the story of Jesus Christ, a gift from my family. But Animorphs was the one book series that stuck out to me. It’s about teenagers who stumbled into an alien crash site and given powers to transform into any animal to defeat the yeerks from enslaving the human race. I’ve always been fascinated by people transforming into other forms like Power Rangers and Sailor Moon. In the Animorphs books, you can flip the bottom corners to see the title character transform into its main animal for the book or back into their human form. I fixated on the characters’ mid-transformation. How they looked non-human and non-animal at the same time. A hybrid creature with potential from any angle: an article of clothing melting into fur, mandibles as big as an open mouth, limbs disappearing or multiple limbs sprouting out of the torso. Turning to something unrecognisable from yourself is probably a universal fantasy for young gay boys against the teasing and bullying.

In Lyn Hejinian’s essay, ‘The Rejection of Closure’, she said that language itself is never in a state of rest. Its syntax can be as complex as thought. And the experience of using it, which includes the experience of understanding it, either as speech or as writing, is inevitably active—both intellectually and emotionally. Movement, whether it’s exchange in information or a process of understanding is important to me as a writer. I want participation in my poetry, especially when I’m being experimental which is a lot of the time.

In ‘Fine Lines’, Conchitina Cruz discusses William Carlos Williams’s poem, ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’: ‘Whether the movement from line to line in ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ specifically corrects, alters, distorts, transforms, or completes the image, and why so much depends on it is up for speculation. Suffice it to say that these possibilities and nuances are brought to the fore because the poem engages in process rather than resolution.’ I love the transformative quality of the line – the tension it builds at that precipice before the reader can move on to the next line. I love that transitory image before it settles into a concrete image. The instability of the moment as it collapses into a false ending, the forever reaching towards a horizon.

I like to one-up myself when I write. I have to make something new and different than the poem I wrote before. This isn’t something I’m proud of. I have a compulsion to not stay in the same place. This is also why I can’t sustain a suite because my style and voice vary wildly. I go for more conceptualised pieces rather than correspondences of poems between each other. This might be my downfall soon enough. Below is my poem ‘Resumé for Good Employers Only’, published in Underblong, edited by Chen Chen & Sam Herschel Wein. This piece is possibly the mother to my obsession of one-upping myself. This poem appropriates the form of a resumé, criticising the state of labor under capitalism.