Obenieta: Neither here nor there

LEND an ear to someone who sounds astray, if not being literally lost in the twilight zone of translation, and you’d likely wonder: What on earth is that all about?

Howling at the moon might be easier than eliciting answers, if you happened to be one of the migrants from Latin America now teaching in the school districts of Arizona.

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That’s where they’re better off learning to grow fangs, if not to grope in the dark for the whereabouts of hope.

In the shadow of the Grand Canyon State’s recent controversy on immigration law, their future is now up to their facility with the so-called King’s language. As far as going against dire straits, what direction do they need to take to stay above water in economic stability?

Alas, it’s not just a question concerning geography or aptitude for the atlas. It also depends on how dainty they could steer beyond their trouble with enunciation, and on not ending up intractable from where their speech had swerved off and turned turtle at the blind curve of communication.

Or, they may run the risk of losing their jobs if their words would still go wayward, failing to tackle or hang on to the state’s new fluency standard. When that happens, they might as well speak like a Sphinx or decipher its deadly riddle.

Take, for instance, this bit of Cebuano humor about an accident due to reckless accent. To a teacher’s question—“Where is Egypt?”—one of her students answered, “Egypt is parked across the street.”

Safety, relies on a tongue’s smooth sailing on the two-way traffic of sense and sensibility. Talk about the high road to success, and it’s as good as gone to the dogs when we sound no better than barking up the wrong tree of pronunciation.

Where the English language is unleashed, our colonially conforming mindsets have also gone rabid about drool-slick definition of prestige. To most of us, the future can only be fruitful if we would not be soft in the head. And that means not sounding hard between our teeth.

As if we had better bury our faces in the sand if we, after striving to invest in a bang-for-a-buck education, could not appear intelligent without aping the American twang. Never mind the grammatical and factual gaffes in our textbooks.

That’s why our candidates to international beauty pageants have all avoided the “major major mistake” of being labeled déclassé or devoid of status. Look, ma, no interpreter necessary. Or so they dare to be proud, prattling while trying to grin and bear the burden of mother tongue that tastes like mossy pebbles crumbling in their mouths. Ah, the crunchy sound of it, utterly slippery with rage and regret!

So much so that nobody seems willing to listen to Gloria Diaz, the first Filipino to win Miss Universe, as she aired her clarification. About her controversial statement on the need for our candidates to share the spotlight with interpreters in the face of our Carabao English, she said she was quoted out of context. She only succeeded in endearing herself to the inner cannibals of Cebuanos who are licking at the prospect of pouncing on her for her alleged slur.

Maybe we can do better than get noisy and gang up on her. How about asking the secret of her beauty and longevity, or about the next pageants? That, according to New York-based Pinoy poet/novelist Eric Gamalinda, is “a metaphor for our lingering dysfunction and our indelible infatuation with our stepmother tongue, it is, and once again I say this at the risk of inciting hatred from my own people, a sign that we have not grown up.”

Maybe the next Philippine candidate would do well to memorize and parrot it pretty at the next Miss Universe Q-and-A portion. She may succeed on stage in making us cringe and rage again, yes, but it would be a relief if she’d do it using sign language.

(geemyko@gmail.com)