Dear English, Mahal Kita
English is my first and only language. It is the breakfast tea I sip on every morning in preparation to navigate my whirlwind world; it is the numbing ointment I swish every night to make my teeth and lips forget the ache of not knowing the shapes of my ancestral mother tongues.
My Lolo and Lola migrated to the US from the Philippines in the early 1970s. Their five sons — my father and four Titos — can understand Tagalog, but not speak it fluently. None of the grandchildren, us Fil-Am cousins, know more than a few words (as far as I’m aware). All of our mothers are white, American English speakers. I don’t know why that feels so important to mention but it does. It is not a critique but an acknowledgement of circumstance and impact.
It is silently agreed upon in our family that English is the sound of practicality, of security, of safety, of freedom. But Tagalog sounds like home. And it seems to me that there is less of it every year, every family function, every death, every new birth. My grandparent’s “eff” sounds are softening where they used to be sopt. My lola often tells me now that she is going to do something, no longer that she will gonna. And as I learn what it is to take root in myself and in adulthood — as I step into the big American life of privileges and opportunities my ancestors (past and living) made possible — I also feel myself edging an entire world further and further, bit by bit, into extinction.
When a language dies, so does its culture.
There has to be a better way to say thank you.
English itself is not the problem. The problem is its capacity to become a weapon — its historical and ongoing use as a vehicle for genocide. It is its lack of self awareness, its voraciousness for domination, its overpowering presence in nearly every corner and crevice of our planet. It is the refusal of its most privileged purveyors to acknowledge the far-reaching, deadly impacts of negligence and entitlement in its use. It is the erasure of its most marginalized and vulnerable speakers from a narrative that should be centered around them, from conversations they should be able to choose to lead. (Can we please stop with the tone policing and gatekeeping and grammar snobbery?)
I speak English because a whole other modality of being was ripped from me before I could comprehend what I’d be missing all my life.
I do not write or think or speak without the feeling that I am playing the perilous and impossible game of trying to appease whiteness. Proficiency in English is a safety blanket I feel suffocated by.
I am also aware of the privileges I hold as a white proximal “model minority” English speaker, and I intend to use those privileges to dissect and destroy the structures that gave them to me in the first place.
White supremacy plants within many of us the idea that we are worthless without English — and when there are no English words to define us, what then? For how forcefully and thoroughly English has been stuffed into the mouths and minds of people just about everywhere in the world, it still fails the vast majority of us — namely disabled/queer and trans/BIPOC individuals — by giving us excessive labels and insufficient room to explore them any further. We are left alone to try on a spare collection of (usually derogatory, or at best, careless) words riddled with fallacious, racist, rigidly gendered and heteronormative thought— by which I mean we are left alone with a fucking nightmare to either transcend, reject, reclaim, or reinvent. Our continual extrapolation of self-meaning is miraculous. We are miraculous.
I hope, I believe, that English can hold much more than it currently does. I envision it being spun and knit into infinite shapes and stirred into endless forms of well seasoned nourishment. I imagine it fostering a sense of belonging; I imagine it warm and pliant in our hands. I imagine it being rejected by people who want nothing to do with it, and this being celebrated instead of shamed. I imagine us healing our colonial traumas, and outgrowing those we perpetuate, and relishing deeply and unabashedly in our capacity to worldbuild how we please. I imagine English as a vessel through which we take back and fully embody the agency and vibrancy it tries to scrub from our tongues.
If we are to reclaim this language, how can we metabolize the pain and loss and disorientation it continues to impose upon us? How can we redefine what constitutes beautiful and “proper” English? Is it possible to turn the language of genocide back in on itself?
How are we to mold into a gentler, more generous shape a language built and sustained on violence and theft? If English is something we are stuck with— if our world and the people in it are too deeply and fastidiously intertwined with it by now — what can we do to make it truly belong to us?
“To conquer English may be to complete the process of making ourselves free.” — Salman Rushdie
