On March 25, 1990, a review of Jessica Hagedorn's novel Dogeaters appeared on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. While the review was generally favorable, the reviewer offered this critique of the use of different languages in the book:
There are times when, reading "Dogeaters," one wishes for not
only an intimate knowledge of contemporary Manila society, but also
of Spanish and Tagalog. Filipino English [Taglish] will be an
unfamiliar dialect to most readers. Conveying its nuances to an
English-speaking readership is a task Ms. Hagedorn has set herself
but one in which she has not quite succeeded. [...] It's amusing to
interbreed the languages and the music like that. But I'd like to
know what it means.
Maybe because there is no equivalent, there is no colloquial way
of talking about merienda in English ("a light meal in the late
afternoon or evening"), let alone kundiman and halo-halo. Or no
equivalent for any of the hundreds of other non-English expressions
that pepper Ms. Hagedorn's pages. [...] The exoticisms become
tiresome, more a nervous tic than a desire to make connection across
the gulf of culture. (D'Alpuget 38)
In remarking that "conveying [Taglish's] nuances to an English-speaking readership is a task Ms. Hagedorn has set herself but one in which she has not quite succeeded," the reviewer reveals her misapprehensions about Hagedorn's use of Taglish in the novel, assuming that failure stems from Hagedorn's unwillingness to translate and make indigenous culture easy to understand for Anglophone consumers. Indeed, the remark assumes that the author is supposed to cater to this particular English-speaking American audience and inadvertently points to a hierarchization of languages that reflects the global division of labor in the political economy of the United States, where English is privileged over both Tagalog, a language of a former American colony, and Spanish, the language of many of America's underclass immigrants. (1)
Despite what this New York Times book review suggests, Hagedorn uses a rather superficial form of Taglish, an almost inaccurate depiction of the Taglish used in Manila, which comprises much more Tagalog than English. Rather, the sprinkling of Tagalog and Spanish words and phrases among the English words in the novel stimulates a dynamic among the various languages quite different from the way Standard English is deployed in the United States. The novel, set in the Philippine martial law period, depicts Manila society and politics in the 1970s, focusing on the experiences of characters that are considered marginal by the society in which they lived: the daughters, wives, and sisters of powerful male senators and generals as well as working-class Filipinas and impoverished male sex workers. The moments in the novel where Taglish is present amid the predominantly English text present us with a cultural sensibility that evokes the author's perception of Manila during Martial Law (1972-1986).
More specifically than in Dogeaters, R. Zamora Linmark's novel Rolling the R's dramatizes this opposition between English and a creole language. Rolling the R's depicts a culture where Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) or Pidgin, the language regularly used by the local, poor, working-class Filipino American residents in the novel, is considered far inferior to "standard" English and is regulated by the education system. Here, Pidgin is linked to marginalized identities, particularly sexualized and racialized identities: for example, Edgar Ramirez, as a young gay Filipino boy, is deemed sexually and racially unacceptable to the traditional values of Hawai'i's Filipino communities. The novel follows the lives of a cast of ten-year-old fifth-graders who are considered outcasts in the economically depressed community of Kalihi in 1970s Hawai'i. This cast includes not only Edgar, but Katrina, a sexually promiscuous girl; Florante, a recent immigrant from the Philippines who is fluent in several languages and is a brilliant poet; and Vicente, a sexually repressed boy who allows himself to soar only when he performs Donna Summer songs.
But imagine how different these two novels would be without the so-called "exoticisms." The worlds that Hagedorn and Linmark create through language are created mostly through their use of these creole languages, and we find that the use of Taglish in Dogeaters and of Pidgin in Rolling the R's deploys third spaces (2) that mimic the real social relations and physical realities of many Filipinos in the Philippines and the diaspora (Lefebvre 80-83). (3) In the case of Dogeaters, rather than reaching across that mental gulf from the shores of the Philippines to those of the United States in order to educate Americans about Philippine culture per se, the novel is already functioning and working in a third and specifically transnational space apart from both national abstractions. Because it is created through the use of Taglish, this third space is characterized by the creole, or mestizo, sensibility of media and consumption in the imagined Philippine market. Meanwhile, the languages used in Rolling the R's--primarily Hawai'i Pidgin, Taglish, as well as other types of speech including disco lingo and gossip--portray young Filipino American characters living at the fringes of both the American mainstream and the Filipino community of Kalihi, an impoverished area of an island state that is itself at the periphery of the US nation-state.
This essay considers Taglish and Hawai'i Pidgin as creole languages in Edouard Glissant's sense and examines their relationships to mass consumerism and popular culture with regard to the workings of transnational capitalism in the Philippines and Hawai'i, respectively. In my readings of the novels, Taglish and Pidgin are determined not only by the history of American colonialism in the Philippines and Hawai'i but also by class, race, gender, and sexuality. Both languages, at this particular historical moment, effectively expose the logic and effects of global capitalism: neocolonialism, cultural hegemony, center-periphery relationships, and a global division of labor where migrant laborers from economically disadvantaged countries are heavily exploited and abused by host countries. I argue that the use of the creole languages in the novels sustains an effective critique of both American cultural hegemony in former US colonies and the "common culture" as articulated by the related discourses of American multiculturalism and nationalism in the actual political and cultural economy in which the novels circulate as commodities.
Taglish, Pidgin, and the Theory of Relation
Glissant privileges creolization as a site of resistance in a certain kind of center-periphery relationship: a nation's colonial or neocolonial relationship with its (former) colonizers. According to his theory, "creolization approximates the idea of Relation," which is global, multilingual, open, and always changing (34). Creole language, then, as connected to creole culture, evinces the logic of Relation, constantly changing as a result of influxes of different languages and new practices, …
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