SHEILA
BARE Engages
Four
books by R. Zamora Linmark:
Playing
with Tongues: The Use of Language in the Works of R. Zamora Linmark
Born in Manila, raised
in Hawai’i; lives in Hawai’i or Manila or San Francisco; citizen of two
countries; speaker of many languages and dialects, R. Zamora Linmark is the
quintessential transnational. Faye
Kicknosway calls “Zack,” as he is known to his friends, “a trickster” (Prime Time Apparitions). His works, Rolling the R’s[i]
(1995); Prime Time Apparitions[ii]
(2005); The Evolution of a Sigh[iii]
(2008); and Leche (2011), like the
writer himself, defy categorization. Leche, for instance, is at once
historical fiction, satire, hyperrealism; it contains a play, vintage postcards,
dream sequels, tourist tips, and excerpts from a fictional textbook entitled Decolonization for Beginners: A Filipino
Glossary by Bonifacio Dumpit, a fictional professor from the University of
Hawai’i. The many tongues he speaks find
utterance in all his works. But despite
the dizzying complexity of his works, Linmark, the writer, tends to return to
recurring themes throughout his oeuvre. Here,
I will touch very briefly on his use of language to de-center and dis-locate.
The epigraph in Linmark’s
first poetry collection, Prime,
reads, “Fluft drin Yalerick Dwuldum prasrad mirplush,” a nonsense sentence from
Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels,
aptly welcoming—or I should say confounding—readers into the pages of his text
where we see, in Linmark’s deft hands, the malleability of language. But seasoned readers of Linmark’s work know
how deftly he can slip in and out of different tongues. His first novel, Rolling, is colored not only with pidgin and Tagalog, but also the
cadences and patois of the 1970s disco generation. When Edgar speaks to Katrina-Trina about the
price of books and magazines, for example, he tells her, “Expensive, you know,
especially now cuz of in-fel-lay-tion” (Rolling,
7). The hyphenation in the word
“inflation” slows down its elocution and adds the double entendre by which many
of the characters in this novel are preoccupied and makes Edgar’s point about
the off-color book he is about to lend. In
Prime, even before it’s middle section, “Slippery When English,” indeed
from its epigraph through its entirety, we see Linmark’s playfulness with
language. In “Screening Desire,”
Linmark’s speaker speaks cyberspeak:
Friday
cybersexing all night Saturday
with
Hot&Horny35 from Denmark blond
blue-eyed
swimmer’s body in search of Asian
or
Latin American bottom it must’ve been
his
lucky night found both continents
in
you as Pablo Sanchez PuertoRican
Pinoy
22 str8acting gay son of
Cultural
Attaché stationed in Manila
Posh
bungalow brokenglasscapped subdivision
MadMax
security guards indoorpool
(Prime, 18)
Here it is apparent that the titillation comes not from a movie but
rather the “screen” of a computer screen and desire is what the participants of
cybersex are experiencing or seeking: they are looking for love in front of
their computer. The transfer of desire
from celluloid to hard drive makes the process even more participatory in that,
aside from onanistic activities, participants also splash their own images onto
the screen. Participants are much like
actors on screen, pretending and creating a persona, a desirable alter ego. Above, the speaker is Pablo Sanchez, a Puerto
Rican Pinoy, son of a cultural attaché; later,
you
christen yourself not Mark
that
was earlier this week
not
John that was last week what’s left?
two
options Luke17 cute
afterschooldaddy
bicurious cyber
phone
okay or Matthew37 6’1 brwnhair
hazeleyes
Italian FilAm from Big Aple
will
be visiting in two weeks you
compromise
and enter the chatroom as
Paul26
into 69 top please no fems or
drags
a macho ritual you picked up along
with
lying
(Prime 17-18)
To be desirable in language necessitates not just a masquerade, but also
the need to sell oneself. Hence, the
tone of advertising. The use of
enjambment here only increases the reader’s experience of bombardment of
technology but also advertisement.
And when it comes to
advertisement, or adspeak, there Linmark is fluent also. The poem “ESL, or English as a Sign
Language,” is a list poem where “ESL” does not mean the sign language the deaf
and mute use to communicate but rather is a list of signs—ads—where English is
used creatively or as malapropism and where the speaker gives readers her/his
“interpretation” of said sign.
“ALLOWANCE 70,” begins the poem; but “allowance” here does not mean the
income one receives but rather “Airline regulation for maximum weight of a / balikbayan box” (Prime, 19; original emphasis).
“PETAL ATTRACTION” is the name of the “florist right next to Edgar
Scissorhands Hair & Beauty Salon” (19) and “LOOKING FOR SEWERS” hangs on
the glass door of “Elizabeth Tailoring” (19).
A line in “Doris Day & Night Eatery,” also a list poem, reads:
“BLOCK & WHITE, best-selling skin-whitening cream. ‘IT BLOCKS / THE SUN AND WHITENS THE SKIN” (Evolution, 20). Even Linmark’s novel, Leche, is not immune to this wordplay, as another list poem, “Signs
of the Times,” makes an appearance: where “CULTURE
SHACK specializes in native handicrafts” and “MANG DONALD’S makes the best PRINCE
FRIES” or “DEAR HUNTER helps you
find rich, old, white husbands” and “WALTER
MART carries designer labels like CHRISTINE
DIOR jeans and GEORGIO NOMANI T-shirts”
(Leche, 267; original emphasis). Perhaps some of these “signs” are from what
the writer observes around him when he is in the Philippines, perhaps some are
the writer’s own invention. And while
they may be humorous, what they demonstrate are the ways in which the colonial
tongue, that monolithic, dominating, and oppressive language, is malleable; it
can be bastardized and disavowed, whether purposefully or by accident or
ignorance. What we have, then, is an
admixture of culture in language and where the authority of English sits
side-by-side with the colors of the local patois.
But, lest we forget our
history—an amnesiac act as Oscar Campomanes calls it—Linmark reminds us quite
often of the violent incursions of a colonial language, and, more importantly,
of the ways in which language can shape, define, and (dis)locate the self. In “Rhapsody,” we see the speaker’s
classmates from high school who had “2-4-1 double-eye operations that came with
color contacts” (Prime, 25); and in
“Surviving the Post-American Tropics,” the speaker tells us of
A
now-extinct word among Americans
but
alive and making lots of money
in
the spa and skin-whitening enterprise
is
‘avail,’ usually tagged to ‘promo’
and
‘special,’ as in: ‘Sir, have you availed
already
of the 2-4-1 skin-bleaching promo
special?’ Last night, inside the arctic
dome
of Starbucks, while waiting for
my
espresso and blood pressure pills
to
kick in after a run-in with a meteor-sized
hole
on the sidewalk, I heard a blond-
dyed
Filipina use ‘avail’ in the same sentence
as
the 16th-century Latin ocularis.
(Evolution, 14)
In both poems, the speaker discloses the ways in which bodies of color
are defined as other in two languages: the colonial English tongue, and the
neo-colonial language of capitalism. The
“double-eye operations,” “color contacts,” “skin-bleaching,” and the “blond- /
dyed Filipina” are all attempts, most of which are quite invasive, towards a
particular standard of beauty, a normalization of the “othered” body. At the same time, the use of pidgin in
“Rhapsody,” and the use of what the speaker is calling an “extinct word among
Americans” but makes, for the colonized native, “lots of money,” in the latter
poem tells us that there are ways to profit from the use of these languages.
Language, in the hands
of that trickster, Linmark, is thus at once limiting—it defines bodies as
others—and liberatory—in that it empowers by the ways in which it can be
manipulated by colonized natives; thus, language allows for self-expressions.
Faye Kicknosway tells us that because of the “many tongues in [Linmark’s] mouth,”
it becomes very “difficult to be a fixed anything in the kind of locating of
the self that language is supposed to be when there are several of them doing
the locating.” Linmark’s works show the
irony and disavowal present in the use of these languages.
*****
Sheila Bare is an independent scholar and a life-long student. Lately, she has been studying Buddhism. When her nose is not in a book or in a cooking pan, you may find her on a yoga mat or out for a run. And there are those days when she tries to write. Best to stay away from her during those times. Unless, of, course you bring with you a good bottle of wine and talk about books. She was raised by two parents and now lives somewhere on planet earth.
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