Lost ground

I will never be able to write seriously in the Bikol language. I tried, five years ago, and came up with three poems, already published, one of them even anthologized (see Kasama sa Paroy). And then there was nothing more. I have used up my entire Bikol vocabulary in roughly sixty short lines.

I did try again a couple of years ago, with a short story, but nothing had come out of it. Not only did I not have the vocabulary for it, but the images and scenes and details I kept seeing in my mind were in English, and after struggling for some time with the translations, I threw up my hands and gave up. I wasn’t writing in Bikol; I was translating myself into writing in Bikol. I kept crossing between two languages like the poor farmer who had to take a fox, a chicken, and a sack of grain in a boat across a river one by one, and in the process, only succeeded in distorting the Bikol language into what it was not. I fell off the boat and almost drowned. Bikol deserves better than a writer who could not make a distinction between one river bank and the other, much less swim in its verbose richness without drowning.

I grew up in a barrio deep in the heart of Camarines Sur, in the Partido area, where the Bikol was old and deep and rich with double meanings and multi-layered metaphors. I never read in Bikol, but the spoken Bikol that wafted around me when I was in a crowd was fascinating. It was brisk, loud, and had an intonation distinct to residents of the area. The best speakers of Bikol were the older common folk. To punctuate the sentences or stress certain words, they would raise their voices, already rendered gravelly by decades of smoking, several notches higher upon the last syllable of the word, and would sometimes clack broken, tobacco-colored teeth after a sibilant to express either indignation or awe. My own elders, however, spoke a different kind of Bikol. Their voices were louder but somehow their tones were softer, their consonants blended smoothly into the vowels – b’s would sometimes sound like m’s and sh’s would sound like th’s -- a habit borne out of a Spanish ancestry. Their vocabulary was also a bit different, and our houses would reverberate with words like periodico, calzeten, descalzo, empieza, este, saludar, bien, porque, otra vez, cuidado, dormido, comedo, sentences like vamos a comer, de donde a vienes, que hora es, vaya con dios, quiero mas, and interjections like dios mio, madre mia, jesus maria y jose (not susmaryosep). This kind of Bikol was uttered in rich and robust tones that sounded so smooth to the ears, and they were spoken by tall, large-boned people with sandy-colored hair and pale, freckled skin, the women in brocade dresses and the men in their daily wear -- impeccably-pressed khaki outfits and leather shoes with matching belts and a hat, like in this photograph of my great-grandfather, Sebastian Moll. Its sound and effect was quite the opposite of the rougher Bikol of the smaller, darker, barefoot and unperfumed farmers, which is a Bikol seemingly rife with hard and abrupt consonants. Yet both kinds of spoken Bikol held a magic for me that had grown to the level of myth.

Strangely enough, I never thought about the possibility of writing in Bikol. My earliest attempts at writing were in English, and I upped and left Bicolandia, literally dropped the life that I used to have, and transferred to Metro Manila to study and practice writing in English together with people who write in English. It felt like the most natural thing for me to do, and the only thing that remained for me to do. It was not that the Bikol language was not in my heart. I just felt that my relationship with the language was too deep and ancient to ever be deconstructed, not like my relationship with English, which is a language I can deconstruct and rework and reinvent all I want, bending it to the rules that I want, taking it wherever I want. Perhaps it was a kind of fear. After all, Bikol is the language of my forefathers, of my childhood, and of my earliest instincts, now bathed in the color sepia, and these things are sacrosanct. And like all things sacrosanct, the language and all that it entails has embedded itself into my soul so perfectly, so impeccably, so dogmatically, that it has disappeared into the deep and murky waters of my being, never to surface again.

Bikol writer Zaldy Manrique once told me that perhaps my sensibility was naturally in English. Perhaps it’s true, since I even dream in English most of the time. Award-winning Bikol writer Frank Penones said I should not be bothered with issues of language as it is not really the writer who chooses her language but the language that chooses the writer. Perhaps this is true, too, since I don’t feel as if I have any more choice in the matter. In an attempt to make sense of this, I could just say that the Bikol language has lived on in my writings as their psyche, in the form of Bikol metaphors, symbols, legends, and myths, but even in this indirect form, I cannot grapple with the nitty-gritties of taking them apart and making conclusions from there.

Yes, it is fear. I have no power over this fear, as I have no power over the Bikol language. I have taken Bikol with me all this time, but only as a remnant of my origins, a reminder of my birthright, a faint and dying throbbing of what I can never handle. Now I am no more a Bicolana than Exie Abola is a non-Atenean, non-English-speaking Muslim. I have left a vast, deep, fearsome richness behind in order to freely roam another language that I can have power over. I am a prodigal Bicolana, a wayward daughter of Bikol. I am not ready to go back. I might never go back.