IN MEMORY OF MEMORIAL DAY: AN INTERMISSION

I woke up at 7:00 am, healthy and kicking, and hurriedly checked on my coordinates. Phone, no calls. Cellphone, no texts. Email, no messages. Blog, no comments. I guess people learned to give me a break and decided to leave me alone. How rood.

And so I called my brother, who's probably either asleep or banging the wife - or maybe both, he's talented, you know - and asked if he would like to hit some shots while breathing in this gorgeous holiday of a Monday morning. My brother said yes! yesss!! yesssss!!! (to me, not to the wife, as it turned out she's off to work) and asked if we could possibly check out the blue courts somewhere in Homestead right across the racetrack where they do the final leg of the Nascar circuit, Nextel Series, or whatever it's called. (No, I'm not into car racing. In fact I drive so slow that everytime I look at the side mirror and see a car swish past me and weave into traffic and out of my sight in no time - I laugh. Reckless drivers are hilarious. They're like confused cockroaches trying to find the way out of the squalid room and into the pages of Kafka, if not the gates of hell, and they are so funny, seriously funny, I tell you.)

After a couple of hours my brother and I were at the J. Redd Municipal Park in Homestead, Florida, and wondering aloud why not a single soul was playing in any of the six US-Open-blue hard courts in this gorgeous holiday morning.

After a couple more hours I was still wondering, wondering, wondering why my brother had my number (which is probably zero) if not my ass (which, they say, is one zero) as I delivered a sympathetic headshake while reflecting on the 6-1, 6-0, 6-2 score.

The game finished close to noontime and we were famished. I asked my brother if he wanted to go to the Keys and check out my favorite Keys restaurant, and 20 miles later we were in this quaint seafood place along US 1 in Key Largo called Fish House having beer and iced tea and oysters on a half shell and seafood fajitas and chargrilled grouper and fries and coleslaw and crackers and breadsticks and laughter over the last point of our game that went like this: he lobbed the ball when I tried to approach the net and I was quick enough to be in front of the ball when it bounced off the concrete, and as I posed to hit it in my best human highlight pose, the wind blew, the ball hit the frame, the ball flew far far away, so far away we didn't know where it landed. My brother couldn't have captured the moment better. Supot.

On the way home we took the faster (but longer) route known as Card Sound but midway through there was heavy traffic and we learned later why, there was a man lying on the pavement who must have been in an accident. We called 911 and the dispatcher said somebody already called in.

When we parted ways I went straight to Borders Bookstore and picked John Cheever's Oh What A Paradise It Seems, and 100 pages later I have fallen in love once more to my greatest American writer, and I thought it was simply great to read an American writer in this American holiday and it fit well to read a book that could have been about playing the blue courts, eating seafood, reading a favorite writer, and oh what a paradise this day seems, and it is.

It especially is, as right now I am watching this great reality show called On The Lot.

Till next time, see you all. Please leave me a message, moo, wah!

POLITICS AND TRANSCULTURE ON LANGUAGE - THE IRISH SETTING

In the final entry (dated 26 April) of what appear to be diary entries in the waning pages of James' Joyce spectacular book A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus says:

"Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."

A Portrait of the Artist is more than a coming of age book; it is not a young man's struggle to find his identity but rather a struggle to pursue that identity unrealized in the midst of home, country, religion, and language. Stephen Dedalus was actually James Joyce in disguise, and in his declaration to go away from home to forge the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race, Joyce was not simply (if simple!) referring to the physicality of his destination but further so, to its cosmic ruminations by fulfilling the ventriloquial version of his own voice translated into his own form of writing, his own form of language, and his own form of art - away from the "uncreated conscience of his race", the Irish.

What was so bad about the Irish that Joyce, through Dedalus, wanted so much to disentangle from its cultural and linguistic clout? Nothing, just big time historical. Gaelic, not English, is the original language in Ireland, but when Great Britain conquered Ireland, one of the biggest imperialist impositions occurred in history. Gaelic - the first European tongue after Latin to develop its own literature - was practically wiped out towards the end of the 18th century by the British ruling that English be the official language in Ireland, and this was further upheld by the British control of Irish schools in the 19th century.

It was through this imposition, added by the imposition from the religious side (Catholicism from Rome) that made Joyce believe the Irish oppression as not just created by the British and by the Vatican but, more harrowingly, by the Irish upon themselves through their cooperation with the oppressed.

A Portrait of the Artist, then, is Joyce's attempt to break away from family, race, and country - through this words:

"I shall express myself as I am."

The big irony is that A Portrait is written in English, and considered 3rd greatest in Modern Library's selection of the 20th century's 100 greatest novels in English (Ulysses, also by Joyce, happens to be number 1).

W.B. Yeats, GB Shaw, S. Beckett, and S. Heaney - all Irish who wrote in English - have won the Nobel.

The great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes once said that the world does not need another writer in English - as long as there is an Irish.

What would have happened then if the Irish, through today, spoke only in Gaelic? Will Ireland produce a Nobel winner in Literature? Would the world have heard of James Joyce? What kind of identity will a young man, as himself, struggle to achieve? What kind of portrait will he portray?

As for the rest of us who read them, where will we be?

POLITICS AND TRANSCULTURE...(continuation)

N.B. "Your language is changing" may, in certain settings, actually mean "I am changing your language". In the spirit of this discourse, and based on the little I know of the subject, I took the liberty in picking four settings across the globe that exemplify the power of politics and transculture in affecting somebody's language - in the exercise of sovereignty or not, in the destruction of sovereignty or not, or in the straightforward notion that this act of changing has nothing to do with sovereignty at all.

And so on this note, where in the end I will welcome opinions and corrections for my enlightenment and growth, I hereby begin this final episode.

First: The Chinese Setting

Years before ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and gentrification in America, a massive human displacement occurred in China as part of Mao Zedong and his Communist Party's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. During this period between 1966 through 1976, millions of Chinese intellectuals composed of high school and college students - referred to as the educated youth - were forcibly relocated to remote countrysides and villages across the country in the Party's desire for them to live the life of peasantry the rest of their lives.

While it is difficult enough - even in today's age of advanced emancipation - to be away from the comforts of home, the love of family, and the company of friends while being at the same time an adolescent or a young adult, it is almost incomprehensible to judge the tolerance of the hapless Chinese if, aside from all of those mentioned, he will have zero use of his own language.

China is a land of dialects and each dialect has its own distinctive nuances. If I were to judge the Party's intent in this massive displacement, it is to drown that transient youth into a new dialect and its nuances in order for him to totally leave his identity behind and embrace a new one. Man, after all, thinks and develops ideas in, and based on, his language. He is his language. And if his new language is the language of a peasant, all that needs to be done is to make his new peasant language his one and only.

This educated-youth-displacement is one of the Party's biggest tools in achieving the communist ideal of a classless society, where everyone thinks, acts, and behaves as a peasant - because he thinks and develops his ideas in the language of a peasant.

In his fabulous 1996 book called A Dictionary of Maqiao, Han Shaogong recalls his life as an educated youth relocated to the southern province of Hunan, and in a fictionalized account of his real experiences indexed in the same manner as a dictionary's, we get to learn the good, the bad, the noble, and the sad effects of human displacement - including the eradication of his language.

The translator Julia Lovell's preface, however, makes it clear from the start that the impression I may have given in a previous paragraph is incorrect: many of the educated youth welcomed the displacement "as a way of assuaging the long-standing Chinese intellectual guilt complex toward the People". As it turned out, the Chinese literati of that time had much difficulty in portraying the lives of the masses, and it was only through extreme assimilation that they would be able to "reform their filthy intellectual thoughts by practicing the clean laboring habits of peasants".

First questions: How do peasants think? What is their language?

In Maqiao (or so the book tells us; Maqiao may or may not be a real village although I am convinced that "Maqiao" dialect is a real dialect), everything that tastes good is described as "sweet". If sugar candy tastes good, it is sweet; if fish cooked in sour broth tastes good, it is sweet. This led me to think that vocabulary in Maqiao is so limited it becomes a perfect fit for an educated youth (re-educated youth?) whose only goal from then on is to till the soil, bring in the produce, assure the abundance for the cook to make up something that is, well, sweet.

In Maqiao, anybody's big sister is called "little big brother" - which goes to show that in this village, there is no distinction for female gender except to describe her as something small, diminutive.

Next question - did the educated youth pursue their enthusiasm on embracing the peasant's life?

History tells us that this is not so. Lovell chronicles -

"By the mid-1980s, (Shaogong) was at the forefront of one of the key liberating developments in post Mao-literature: the Root-Searching Movement (xungen pai). The Root-Searchers set about reopening fiction to influences from Chinese traditional culture, aesthetics, and language, rebelling against decades of stifling Communist controls."

Third question - what is the status of today's Chinese literature, or after years of strangulated literary expression? -

Not bad. In 2000, Gao Xingjian - a former Communist who relocated to France and acquired a French citizenship as protest to Tiananmen - became the first Chinese native to be recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

POLITICS AND TRANSCULTURE ON LANGUAGE & LITERATURE: RETROSPECT AND PROSPECTS (THE FINAL EPISODE)

There are disciplines other than philosophy and theology - ontology and epistemology among them - that have as much affected language and linguistical thought as to cut human experience into two realms of knowledge: primary/secondary, objective/subjective, real/illusionary. And so through these disciplines we have seen the clash and confusion among, and growth and upsurge in, literary concepts and movements through all these many years like idealism and romaticism, expressive thought and radical skepticism, and modernism, postmodernism, and new criticism.

The easy explanation is that we move from one orientation to the other because we want change, and that change, like water and air, is a basic human need. This is how it is in art. We indulge in art to break away from the habit of the real thing, and we welcome a new artistic form to find a new artistic attitude. The difficult part is that language is far more complex than art, and in the light of what Heidegger remarked that language speaks man and all man's thought is implicated in language, change in language and linguistic thought is almost equivalent to a change of life or of identity.

During the middle of this year's regular NBA season, Heat superstar Shaquille O'Neal mentioned that the game of professional basketball is changing. O'Neal is an intimidating presence who can easily change a particular play of a particular game, and so it all the more gave an exigent meaning to his discerning view to players who - for failure to see this and adapt - may end up being stuck in their era and continue to play in John Stockton shorts, Dave Regullano shoes, and the 80's Denver Nuggets' brand of one-dimensionality. That the remark "the game of basketball is changing" (7 footers shooting threes, 6 footers playing posts) already sounds so eerily alarming, imagine how it would be if a real person in real life, a real government in a real milieu, like a Shaquille O'Neal in the court of power politics and culture told you -

Your Language Is Changing.

(to be continued)