What’s next? Future kwoah

Before I proceed, I want to talk about Kwoah (pronounced quah). It’s Swardspeak for the word Ko which means My. When spoken aloud, you can’t help but be more musical and dramatic. Ko/Ako (I, Me, My) is one of the first words you learn. Making it gayer is a declaration of our existence.

I’m gay so I have to be different. If I am to be labeled like that, even as a child when I didn’t know what that meant, then it is only fitting for me to embrace it. My queering of poetry extends to forms. In fact, the form arrives first before the words. This is why it takes a considerable amount of time for me to produce poetry. I wait for the form and when the form doesn’t come, I cry. My queerness is suffused in everything. It has led me to question forms and breaking them. I’m not satisfied with the couplets anymore or the quatrains. I’m not saying I don’t use them or they’re not useful. I don’t feel excitement writing the words but in how the words become animals. What helps me in this is my engagement with literary theory and philosophy.

My latest preoccupation was with grammar software and grammar itself. I was a copywriter for a BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) company. BPO companies mainly partner with the US. With that comes the expectation of using correct English, so I was given a pro version of Grammarly. It does its job enough. I like that it corrects my spelling. What I find frustrating is that it suggests rewrites of sentences it deems break its rules of confidence and tone. Other times, it rewrites sentences that don’t correspond to the sentences before and after them. I wanted to write poetry that contends with the notion of correct English or perfect grammar. My addition of Hiligaynon and Swardspeak structures is the self’s assertion and refusal to settle into conformity.

My preoccupation became not a study of how the software works but its mythologising and queering. I thought of the future as a place to start my suite. The future is rife with potential, uncertainty, and disappointments¹. I imagined a new world where eons have passed after the extinction of humanity and only the animals are left to become a someone. Nothing recognisably human in the world except for the software we’ve left behind in the Cloud. In my vision, the Cloud is an ether, a spiritual realm where the software is both place and sentience. And because my preoccupation was about grammar and language, I wanted to explore what remains of language after all of its users are gone and what being ‘ungrammatical’ means. I began to think of queer futurity. In precolonial times, the bakla were shamans who were ‘more man than man, and more woman than woman².’ They were mystics who walked in between the lines. I wanted to re-mythologise and project this notion of the queer into the future. I wanted transcendent softness/healing factor as a contrast to the mechanisms of the software.

Grammar software in case of self

Writing one of these makes my head hurt. I go into a process of unlearning whatever notion I have of language, whether English or Hiligaynon, and to the extent of this poem, Swardspeak. These poems, the others are upcoming in the 17th issue of Likhaan: The Journal of Contemporary Philippine Literature, are my practice of languaging. I wanted to play with language itself, the thing we use to communicate, make sounds, and contain us.