No special occasion. It’s just late in the day, the shadows are getting long, light streams in low from the West. The girl looks distracted, as if she had forgotten something; the pedicab driver looks empty, blank as a wall.
Where they came from, where they’re going, remains unknown.
They just caught my eye, isolated in the late light, surrounded by all these advertising signs- Signs urging, commanding, promising- and all of them in a kind of English, with an occasional native word thrown in the middle. The result is almost a new language. Call it “Broken English”.
Consider the Coca-Cola sign above the roof of “Judith’s Eatery”:
“Ice cold ang happiness dito” means nothing in standard English, and it also means nothing in pure Cebuano. But the combination is clear enough to the average person here- the advertising agency must think so, or they wouldn’t have produced it.
The other signs, mostly hawking internet services, are all closer to straight English- but they’re not sentences or even phrases, just strings of English words and numbers giving minimal information; but those who made them clearly expect them to be understood. And finally, the sign mysteriously promising, in English, access to “Any Concert, Anywhere in the World”.
Well, Dumaguete is somewhere in the world, and this is the world it belongs to: the world of web sites, cell phones, jeans and t-shirts; of “virtual” concerts and Facebook “friends”. It’s a world of loosely connected nodes with no real center, where the prevailing wind is always from the West, from New York, London, L.A; where information and conversations blow in a steady breeze- of English.
Nationalists object; they write tracts, they create dances and pictures to celebrate their native cultures, their native languages and ancient ways. These protests then go on You-tube and Facebook, along with “Teenage Combats” and “Celebrity Secrets”-and become just a few more paper airplanes in the wind.
This is the way things are now. It’s so all-pervading in the world that those who live in the present are hardly aware of it as they go about their lives- here in Dumaguete, or in Surabaya, or somewhere in Ohio.
It’s late in the afternoon, and this girl and the pedicab driver have somewhere else to go. They will leave behind them an empty street and all these signs: the flags of their world, written out in broken English.
