Poetry in a Second Language: Why I Can't Fully Decolonize My Life

Somewhere in a cardboard box in our basement lies a cassette tape of me at three years old being coaxed by my mother to sing into a tape recorder.

“Canta,” she says.”

I must be fascinated by the turning cassette reels, because I ignore her request and say, “Está andando.”

“Sí, está andando. Canta.” A few seconds pass during which I am either reaching for buttons or fiddling with the tape case, because my mother starts to get mildly frustrated. “Canta, lo vas a estropear.”

Finally I relent. “Que voy a cantar?”

She suggests a couple of things, and I wind up singing a song in English about three little ducks, then a lackluster rendition of “O Come All Ye Faithful,” after which, disenchanted with the whole enterprise, I whine, “Termináo!”

My parents spoke to me only in Spanish throughout my early childhood, but once I started kindergarten, where English was the medium of instruction, I would reply in English. I also learned Tagalog simply from living in the Manila metro area and being exposed to it through daily conversation, school, and television. Three languages swirled around me when I was growing up, and I absorbed them, as children do, with speedy inferences and subsequent extrapolations about the underlying rules. When, as an adult, I was learning from my father’s cook how to make our favorite cake, called Sans Rival, and I almost took the sugar syrup off the stove too soon, I didn’t even notice when she instructed me in all three, “Hindi pa – you have to wait till punto de hilo.”

On the occasion of his death my late father was noted by some to have been among the last native speakers of Filipino Spanish. He came from an old family with the privilege of a good education, and his own parents spoke to him in Spanish at home. My father could write and give talks in Spanish without having to translate from English in his head. My mother, though equally intellectually gifted and educated, came from a humbler background and learned Spanish as a second language in school, but by adulthood she spoke it as fluently as he, and behind closed doors they spoke to each other with equal ease in English or Spanish, as did many of their relatives and close friends. My mother’s mother and her siblings spoke Tagalog among themselves. My other grandmother came from the island of Cuyo and spoke Cuyonon, English, and Spanish.

My parents hired a Spanish tutor for me, a Basque woman named Señora Ladi, when I was very young. What I remember from her lessons were not grammar rules or vocabulary lists but poems, crafts, and songs. When she showed me how to make paper roses, she sang, “Madrecita del alma querida, en mi pecho yo tengo una flor.” I still get an earworm sometimes of “Tengo una muñeca vestida de azul,” and I can’t look at roast chicken without reciting in my head, “Micifuz y Zapirón se comieron un capon en un asador metido.”

It’s fair to say that it was my generation that “lost” Spanish. Though I remember hearing it frequently growing up in the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s, and then again when friends from this distant past gathered at my mother’s funeral in 2015 to pay their respects, as a younger person I only spoke it when I had no other choice and thus often had to do significant mental labor to find satisfactory words or turns of phrase. My sparse vocabulary and fumbling grammar perpetuated a vicious cycle of language loss when my embarrassment about speaking Spanish imperfectly made my Spanish even worse. Our move to the U.S. when I was nine cemented English as the dominant language in my life for years.

My father would still speak to me in Spanish from time to time. When I would talk about a pop singer or some other celebrity my friends were into that was completely unknown to him, he would mutter to himself, to tease me, “Muy conocido en su casa a las horas de comer,” to which I would have to protest, “No, Dad, everybody knows this guy; he’s super famous.” We would go back to the Philippines for vacation throughout my adolescence, where my godfather would take me out to lunch and speak to me in Spanish, and my other relatives would prop up my disintegrating Tagalog. It was not until high school and college that my interest in Spanish would be rekindled, though I opted to take French in school. During my medical training the utility of at least passable conversational ability in Spanish became abundantly clear, and I put some effort into learning a few ground rules, consciously conjugating verbs where I would previously attempt to rely on childhood memories for the right word endings. I learned names for body parts that never came up in conversation when I was little, like vesícula biliar and bazo. Slowly my competence improved, and with it my desire to speak better Spanish.

But speaking Spanish as a Filipina can be marginalizing – in the Philippines, because Spanish is no longer widely spoken and was historically the language of oppressors and the privileged who collaborated with them, and in the United States, because Filipinos are not considered Latino or Hispanic and are thus shut out of most Spanish-culture identities, acitivities, and publications. Embracing the code-switching and multicultural identity that were legacies of my childhood means being a minority in more ways than one, in a wider variety of contexts. I could boast playfully to other Spanish speakers at a party about my culture having the best empanadas, but I think some of them would be puzzled as to why I felt I had a claim on empanadas at all.

The Manila galleon trade made the Philippines an international crossroads for two hundred and fifty years, from 1565 to 1815. From Mexico we learned about chocolate; we took champurrado and made it our own, using sticky rice instead of cornmeal; we adopted Our Lady of Guadalupe as our patroness; we may have even learned a dance or two from each other, as the similarity between Veracruz’s “La Bruja” and Mindoro’s “Pandanggo sa Ilaw” might suggest. I’m convinced that ceviche, like squid ink sauce, was our gift to the world, garnered from our precolonial, probably thousand-year-old technique of curing fish with vinegar; a Mexican diplomat once acknowledge as much to my father by saying, “El ceviche viene de vosotros.” The slices of red and green chilis we now put on our citrus-and-vinegar-cured tanguige, however – those are a gift from Mexico.

Like our cuisine, in which spring rolls and noodles from the cuisines of Asia are offered side by side with callos, fabada, and paella from Spain, Philippine languages are a mix of “Eastern” and “Western” influences, containing loan words from cultures met through maritime trade –Malay, Sanskrit, Arabic, Hokkien, Nahuatl, and of course, Spanish. I sit on a silya at a lamesa and use a tinidor and kutsara to eat, usually around alas siyete in the evening. We have barrio fiestas and celebrate noche buena at Christmas, and one of our favorite things to do is make kuwento – exchange stories. There’s no question that colonization, Spanish and American, meant centuries of oppression, exploitation, and abuse for Filipinos, but there was also some enrichment for us in ways that can’t be measured in economic terms, much of it linguistic. I hate that the United States purchased my country from Spain for a pittance, as if it were disposable goods, but I love the English language and the ability to write and speak it fluently. I cherish Tagalog and Spanish too, and all three are part of my identity. I was trilingual as a child and am multilingual, albeit unevenly, now.

Now that I’m trying to sustain more of a writing life and make creative writing a daily activity, I’m trying to write some poems in Spanish. I’ve published several poems in English in various literary journals, but I wanted to try to write in Spanish to make up for how disappointed I believe my father was in my poor retention of the first language I learned at home. I may never have the kinds of university-level conversations he was capable of having in Spanish, but I can at least try to honor his memory by making this effort while doing something I enjoy.

First I had to fill in the gaps in my reading. I had to do a lot better than Micifuz y Zapirón. So I read Neruda, Borges, Benedetti, Lorca. They made me want to write about love – grand, passionate, undying love. Epic stuff. I turned to an epic from my school days, the Odyssey, and tried to write about Penelope longing for Ulysses to come home. “Mi amor lejano,” sings my Penelope,

... estoy segura
que ya has olvidado el sonido
de mi voz, la presión de mis dedos
en tu hombro, las respiraciones
suspendidas entre nosotros
cuando me miraste sin hablar.

I wanted to write about matters of faith, too – because the Spanish language and the imagery of Catholicism are forever intertwined in my memory. I wrote about an apparition of the Virgin Mary at the EDSA revolution in 1986, in which some soldiers allegedly saw her dressed in blue – vestida de azul – above the crowd:

la vieron, claramente; claramente oyeron
la voz suave (¿pero de donde?)
Huwag ninyong sasaktan ang aking mga anak –
No lastimen a mis hijos y hijas –

I wrote about the neighborhood of Quiapo in Manila, trying to capture the local color around its centerpiece, Quiapo Church:

...El humo de maíz asado
y de carne ensartada sobre brasas
mezcla con incienso subiendo con rezos
de labios murmurando por favor, por favor

And I wanted to write about the power of women, about female identity. I started a poem about
being Filipina, and code-switching, and straddling multiple worlds:

Soy una mujer de las islas
llena del calor del sol
y de la sal del mar.
Soy un tipo del barrio
buscando bodegas donde puedo
celebrar mis últimos triunfos.
Soy la perla negra en su concha,
tesoro escondido, aberración.

...Soy la jungla y las voces en la jungla,
el calor sofocante y la lluvia torrencial.

These are all works in progress needing much work, and I will continue to chip away at them bit by bit. While we should never be content with mediocrity, I am learning to be less afraid of it, to think of it as something I can overcome and move beyond. Craft, I’m discovering, is in many ways the same in any language, yet also different from writer to writer depending on cultural context. It’s the same in the sense that crafting a piece still comes down to “best words, best order,” as Stephen Dobyns writes. This means being very intentional with diction. It means paying attention to voice, pacing, concision. Craft can differ from culture to culture, however, in what elements of a literary work are given priority, or valued at all; in perceptions of what details are relevant or superfluous, pleasing or displeasing; in the linearity of time or fluidity of point of view in a given work; and in the relative importance of “showing” over “telling.”

Where am I now, then, in my journey to reacquiring my first language? I am perhaps less prideful than I was in my youth. I ask for more help and actively solicit corrections, especially for my writing. I have gotten more comfortable speaking to Spanish-speaking patients at work about their medical problems, but I still go through an official interpreter for legal and safety reasons. I appreciate the look of relief in their eyes when I introduce myself in the language most comfortable for them: “Hola. Me llamo Dra. Legarda. Soy anestesióloga.” A tiny part of me buried inside still has not forgiven myself for letting my fluency slide years ago; there’s a seed of shame in there, a small vibration that hurts a little even under layers of life experience, education, and work. I can manage in Spanish or Tagalog, but I don’t speak them well. Part of me feels that I’ve failed my own heritage, my parents. My father often repeated a story about his grandmother, who once took a stroll with our national hero, writer José Rizal. She said of his speech, “Hablaba Español con tal perfección que daba envidia oírle hablar.” His writing was beautiful too; his novels should be counted among the nineteenth-century’s great literary works in Spanish. I dream of having this skill in any language.

This means a lifetime of work awaits me. I have to commit to listening well – to speakers better than I, to discussions that challenge me, to people with needs that they can only express in their native tongue. I have to read widely and closely. I must be brave enough and humble enough to keep speaking – despite errors, embarrassment, imperfection, and fear. Most intimidating of all, I have to write, if only because writing is part of who I am, and, like all my languages, always has been. “Canta,” my mother said all those years ago. Today I comply: I keep writing and trying to write, hoping to find my voice.

-Isabel Cristina Legarda

Isabel Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to the U.S. She is currently a practicing physician in Boston. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cleaver, America, Ruminate, The New York Quarterly, Smartish Pace, FOLIO, Qu, ­West Trestle Review, and others. She can be found on Instagram: @poetintheOR.