Like all things Living Hyphen, much of our work is deeply rooted in my own personal experiences, and so I wanted to share a personal story with you here today to preface an important new milestone in our community’s journey.
When I lived in the Philippines for the first four years of my life, my parents insisted that we speak English at home. They wanted me to learn the lingua franca and knew it would be essential for my success in a globalized and westernized world.
Then when we moved to Canada, my parents insisted that we only speak Tagalog at home. They would refuse to speak to me if I spoke or replied to them in English. My parents were wise and knew that I would easily lose my native language in the face of an almost exclusively English-speaking environment.
I grew up in Markham, a suburb just outside of the Greater Toronto Area in Canada that is often hailed as Canada’s most diverse community with visible minorities representing 77.9% of the population. I grew up in a culturally rich community where the “visible minorities” were, in fact, the majority of my daily life.
There was a sizeable population of Filipinos in my high school, many of whom were newcomers to the country. They stuck together and often congregated on a small bridge on the second floor of our high school. And because of that, the bridge was dubbed “The F.O.B. Bridge”, meaning the “Fresh Off the Boat Bridge”.
The students in my high school looked down on those Filipino newcomers, criticizing them for only hanging out with each other and for always speaking Tagalog. “Don’t they know they’re in Canada now?” “How are they going to learn English if they only talk to each other?” I can still hear the murmurs. I can still see the eye rolls.
This one is painful and shameful for me to write, but I was one of many who looked at my newcomer Filipino classmates with derision. I intentionally distanced myself from them and extended no kindness despite our shared roots.
I cringe when I think about how I behaved. I didn’t speak ill of these classmates and I was never specifically mean. I just pretended they didn’t exist, which is honestly just as bad. I made sure our paths crossed as little as possible, if at all.
I wanted to minimize all the possible associations that could have been made between us. I did so to make sure everyone knew that I wasn’t that kind of Filipino. I wasn’t a “F.O.B.” I’m Filipino, yes. But mostly, I’m Canadian. And my perfect English proves it.
English As A Tool of White Supremacy and Colonialism
My reflex to distance myself from my newcomer Filipino classmates was an ugly manifestation of my own internalized racism. I judged my kababayan through the lens of whiteness. And, as much as I am ashamed to say it, I saw myself as better than them because of my proximity to that whiteness, because of my ability to codeswitch to “perfect” unaccented English without a trace of my Tagalog tongue. I used my privilege as a weapon, as a way to elevate myself and put others down.
The standard to speak English and to speak it “perfectly” without any accent — that is to say, without any trace of a European accent — is a colonial standard that seeks to assimilate everyone, removing any traces of our origins. A colonial standard that seeks, as all things colonial do, to dominate.
My classmates and I looked down on our Filipino newcomer classmates because the educational system that we were all a part of pounded the superiority of the English language into our brains from our earliest days. Our English classes taught us our manner of speaking and the rigid rules of grammar. The mainstream media that we all consumed did that work for us too. The only difference was that the media didn’t directly grade us on our performance or train us into submission in such an obvious way.
That this could happen even in such a diverse and multicultural school shows just how deep and insidious white supremacist and colonial thinking is. How systemic it is.
The truth is that we live in a country under a colonial government that claims to celebrate multiculturalism but that has a history of systematically erasing the many rich and diverse languages of the Indigenous nations who were the original inhabitants of this land, and that has a current reality of shaming and discriminating against the many immigrants who speak many beautiful languages of our vast world.
The supremacy of the English language is an extension of white supremacy in this colonial land.
Decolonizing Our Tongues and Supporting Diversity in Language
Younger Justine couldn’t comprehend all of this in high school, but knowing this now has led to much of the work that Living Hyphen does every day. We strive to move beyond the limitations of language — more specifically, we strive to move beyond the colonial standard of “excellence” that is English.
We always encourage our storytellers — contributors to the magazine, guests on our podcast, and/or those who attend our programming — to use words in their mother tongue within their stories, if they are called to and able.
As an editor of this magazine that tells many stories of the diaspora as well as those of Indigenous communities, I am acutely aware of my role and responsibility not to replicate colonial standards of excellence that emphasize “proper” sentence structure or grammar. As I’ve written about previously, what matters to me the most is that the stories themselves demand telling, that they reveal something that goes untalked about, that they fundamentally shift one’s perspective in some way, big or small.
As bell hooks teaches us in Teaching to Transgress:
…I suggest that we do not necessarily need to hear and know what is stated in its entirely, that we do not need to “master” or conquer the narrative as a whole, that we may know in fragments. I suggest that we may learn from spaces of silence as well as spaces of speech, that in the patient act of listening to another tongue we may subvert that culture of capitalist frenzy and consumption that demands all desire must be satisfied immediately, or we may disrupt that cultural imperialism that suggests one is worthy of being heard only if one speaks in standard English…
This is also the primary reason why we’ve partnered with the Department of Imaginary Affairs on The Stories of Us, a publication entirely dedicated to featuring and uplifting newcomer voices in their own languages.
Photo by Trevor Haldenby.
Supporting Newcomers in Learning English Through Their Own Languages
For those of us from across the diaspora, the preservation of our mother tongue is so important in staying true to ourselves. But we also need to adapt to the language of our adopted homeland for our survival and success. How do we do both?
The Stories of Us is a multilingual collection that strives to honour and preserve the first languages of newcomers to this country, while also serving as a tool to learn English.
The goal of the project is three-fold:
Empower newcomers by giving them a platform to share their stories and feel that they have a voice as a citizen of Canada and contributing to the overall social fabric of the country;
Create books out of the stories with side-by-side English and native language translations; and
Educate established Canadians about the journey of newcomers to Canada through first-person stories
Photo by Trevor Haldenby. Rana Shah, one of The Stories of Us newcomer writers.
By doing this, we are hoping to create a more positive experience for newcomers upon arrival and settlement, as well as to complicate the narrative of the newcomer journey that is so narrowly defined by mainstream media. We are hoping to make a change on a systemic level and disrupt white supremacy and colonialism’s insidious ways of “educating” us.
By sharing stories by newcomers in their own language side-by-side with English, we hope that this can serve as a radical new way of language learning.
Language As Resistance
My parents knew I would need to speak English to survive and to thrive before we even landed in “Canada”. They understood our “globalized” world (though I’d call it our Western imperialized world) and what was necessary to succeed. But they were also subversive in their own way, resisting assimilation upon our arrival in Canada as they challenged me to speak Tagalog and hold fast to my native language. They knew the importance of this inherently and intuitively. They took pride in our roots long before I knew how.
At my younger age, I found it incredibly frustrating and annoying having to toggle between these two languages. Today, I am immensely grateful for their foresight, their pride in our language, and their resistance to assimilate completely. It is a gift to be able to communicate with my elders and go home to the Philippines speaking our own language. I liken it now to a super power.
I am ashamed for having weaponized this gift of language — both our own and that of our colonizer’s — that they passed down to me.
I hold compassion for my younger self for wanting to erase that in the face of a mean and oppressive world that devalues language, heritage, and culture.
I am grateful for knowing better now and for the opportunity to rectify this thinking through our work with Living Hyphen.
At Living Hyphen, we aim to truly cultivate diverse voices, in the true sense of that word — by creating an inclusive and nutrient-rich environment full of the tools, resources, mentorship, and community to encourage the practice of storytelling.
“Perfect” English or not.