Meet Our New Intern: Zie Madayag

In the Philippines, though not enshrined in the official constitution, you are required to pay your class treasurer—for whatever amount agreed upon—if you speak a sliver of Filipino. Slipping out even the smallest word of a particular thing you forgot to translate was unforgivable, even by accident. I can guarantee, maybe eighty-five percent, that most Filipinos who studied in either public or private schools had this odd and stifling rule of an “English only policy” in classrooms historically adapted from the legacy of American colonial education in the nation. It doesn’t begin in classrooms, of course. Often, I hear young children and my cousins speak perfect English—both in vocabulary and accent—yet fail to understand basic Filipino words. I wish I could say that it was the parents’ fault, but as the history of languages goes, it somehow always points toward colonization and its lingering afterlife in cultural and educational spaces.

When I told people I would be taking Comparative Literature in college, it was not a surprise to them. I sounded American and had no trace of a Filipino accent, I knew how to write creatively and academically in English and won awards for it, and I could converse seamlessly with anyone if need be. Sometimes, my friends and I would talk to each other in fake British and Irish accents, because it was fun and because it was practice. We even spoke English with botched French and Italian accents to see if we could pass as natives. When I decided to major in European Literature instead of Asian or Philippine, I was given nods of approval, leaving my decisions unquestioned.

Perhaps to them, Europe held a certain prestige that they didn’t see in the Philippines, that it could open doors for me to migrate abroad and become a permanent resident there. I wish I could say that it wasn’t for selfish reasons but parts of it were. I saw Europe as wider than where I was, that there was something deeper and richer to dig for. I was attracted to their literature more than I was to the books published in the Philippines. I knew many colleagues and professors who did their Masters and PhDs in the Americas or Europe and believed in the sophistication that foreign institutions could bring. I believed it through the decisions I made in college.

From the poems, plays, and fiction I write, English came easier. Forms felt looser, synonyms were instinctive, and creative imaginations seemed natural. In Filipino, writing is laborious, maybe even desire-laden. Words feel thicker, almost viscous, and fluid in a way that asks you to hold it solemnly. I am not twice divorced from the language when it’s Filipino I write and speak in. It’s intimate, private, something I return to when English exhausts or fails me. This was why, sometimes, when I was in class studying classical antiquities of Greece or Rome or modernism in Europe, shame and guilt would inevitably creep in. It would slither in the back of my head and ask me, “you know so much about the other side of the world. What about the one you’re currently in?” I reckon some of my friends felt the same feelings because when our thesis writing began, we would be asked: what is the relevance of your study to the Philippines? And we would answer with something else entirely in Polish, French, Irish, Norwegian, Spanish or Italian. Alienation, I learned, was sometimes self-inflicted.

Now, after graduating from college and continuing to hold tension between two languages, I open myself to the world I know and the world I study. English was a way to become-center, to meld with the majority. However, the margins, the minority, and the peripheral from which I come from is just as important, if not more. I admire the difficulty it takes for craft to take shape in Filipino, the sensibility and humor that rarely translates to English, and the porousness and permeability of language to sink, be swallowed, and bend, and still remain as potent as who speaks it. What emerges when you peel back the rinds are fragments of transition and mutability. In Sundress where marginalized voices are celebrated, I am honored to be part of these very fluctuations that metamorphose the sense beneath and beyond the text.

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