This video made on a shoestring is currently pulling viewers on YouTube. The kids from Amesbury Prep School perform (with the head and the geography teacher) a brilliant cover of Pixie Lott's Boys and Girls.
Well, yes. English is one of two official languages in the Philippines - the other one being Filipino, a language based on the majority dialect Tagalog, one of 171 native languages spoken in the country. With so many languages, Filipino educators have long sought a single, unifying language and Filipino was created to do just that.
So us Pinoys have a love-hate relationship with English - on the one hand, it seems an advantage to speak an international language, on the other hand, it's the language of our colonizers, the United States, who came in 1898 purportedly to Christianize the Filipinos (not realizing that we'd been Catholics under Spain for 300 years).
When I'm visiting my family in the Philippines, I slip easily into the combined English-Tagalog patois spoken in Manila. But when friends in England ask me to demonstrate, I find it incredibly difficult to perform on demand.
For some strange psychological reason, when in the UK, I maintain an American accent with some British vowels.
There's a an online speech accent archive at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia where they're collecting accents. To join, all you have to do is record yourself reading from a text that is claimed to contain most of the consonants, vowels and clusters of Standard American English.
Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese, and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags, and we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station
In the Philippines, as it is here in England, accents carry status connotations that heavily influence how one may be perceived by others - with one's perceived poshness relative to how Hollywood neutral your accent might be. My father, an artistic, creative soul, spoke four languages and though his English was complex, he couldn't quite shake off that heavy Visayan accent. My mother, an English teacher, has a clean, " received Hollywood" accent and no matter the state of her purse, she commands instant obsequiousness amongst the less linguistically adept.
In an article in today's Guardian, Steven H Weinberger, who runs the accents archive, insists that accents have nothing to do with ability or intelligence, they are "systematic rather than mistaken speech".
Crucial to an understanding of accents is that they are "systematic rather than merely mistaken speech", Weinberger says. This can counter what he describes as "biased social judgments" based on people's accents. "When we understand that accents are not due to 'errors' or faulty learning, we may be more sympathetic to the speakers. But biases are hard to unlearn."
Accent can be something of a tragedy for some people. A good friend of mine who speaks with an accent thick enough to slice is constantly made to suffer for it in the form of GPs ignoring her and various petty officials dismissing her as a crank. But if I pick up the phone on her behalf, she is amazed by the speed and courtesy with which people respond to my perceived-to-be less offensive accent.
In Tall Story, I have a Filipino character who, once he arrives in London, finds himself at a linguistic disadvantage when he tries to express himself in English - with hilarious results. But I make sure that the reader is party to his complex thoughts and feelings.
I hope it goes a little way towards demonstrating that you really can't judge a human being by his or her dodgy accent.
Yay! I've just signed up to join the Victoria Park Bookshop tent at the Paradise Gardens Festival in Victoria Park E3! The Paradise Gardens Festival website looked so fabulous I was inspired into making this picture:
The Tall Story book trailer is going to be finished within the next few days and I'm trying to get a whole bunch of my blogging friends (and relatives) to post it at the same time - our very own WORLD PREMIERE!
The idea is we all post the trailer on our blogs and facebook/or other profiles at the same time! Simple!
In abject gratitude, I am offering world premiere people an advance viewing of the trailer on a password protected site - AND a chance to win a freshly minted copy of TALL STORY before it's in the shops!
If you would like to join us - and you don't have to live in England to join - please send me an email on mumatwork AT blueyonder.co.uk with the subject header 'World Premiere'!
Watching this, I remembered when I first arrived in London back in 1989. It seemed to me at the time that I couldn't strike up a conversation without anyone mentioning Imelda Marcos - specifically her shoes. It sucked so much that I wrote a poem about it:
Small Talk
"How is Imelda Marcos?
Are her shoes still on the go?"
When I first came to London
It was all they wished to know
I tried to say that there was more
To me than meets the eye
That a flat brown nose and straight black hair
Does not mean I can’t ask why
They don’t try to get to know me
Or find out what I do
Or say Fine Weather Isn’t It?
Or ask me How Are You?
I tried to talk of normal things
Like Politics and Fashion,
Burglaries, Movie Stars,
Sport and Television
I wanted them to talk to me
The way they talked to each other
But all that seemed to interest them
Was Imelda’s collection of shoe leather.
Now David Byrne's spending time in the Philippines making a musical about Imelda with Fatboy Slim.
It fascinates me to read in a Times article that the one thing Byrne has ommitted is the magic cupboard with the 3000 shoes.
... there are no references whatsoever to her infamous collection of 3,000 pairs of designer shoes, stored in a wing of the so-called Manila White House, the Malacanang Palace. “The shoes were a very big problem,” Byrne concedes. “For me it became, how do you get beyond the shoes? But the shoes weren’t discovered, along with the house full of Heinz Sandwich Spread, until after the Marcoses were airlifted out of the palace in 1986, and for me the story ends right there.”
These many years later, I've mellowed. I forgive people for mentioning Imelda's shoes.
In fact, I would actively encourage it.
Imelda's shoes are a weighty metaphor that continues to remind us of Imelda's dark side as she reinvents herself again and again with more imagination and energy than Madonna herself. It reminds us of the huge inequalities that continue to exist in Philippine society.
So, David Byrne, please mention the shoes.
Imelda's shoes would have more relevance to Filipinos than a fat album of photographs of her posing with other dictators.
If you're on Facebook and can't see this, view it here
Another blog, you say? But aren't I all blogged out? What about my blog Notes from the Slushpile?
Clearly, I am insane.
Well, maybe only slightly.
The thing is, you see, it used to be that my blog readers were fellow writers.
We discussed stuff to do with getting published like craft, the publishing industry, literary agents, editors, marketing, endurance, what rejection feels like, how rejection hurts, how horrible rejection can be, how rejection gets you down ... okay, I admit it, sometimes we went a little stir crazy from rejection.
When I finally got a book contract, people kept asking me, what are you going to do now? You aren't on the slushpile any more, you can't keep pretending you're on the slushpile.
Well, I think I'm still on the slushpile, really. Publication is never guaranteed. And I like whining blogging about trying to get published. So I'm not junking Notes from the Slushpile just yet.
But finally getting published means I've got to pay some attention to those lovely, astonishingly gorgeous and intelligent folks out there who will be buying and reading my books.
All this time, I'd been blogging for writers. Now that my book Tall Story is coming out (Pre-order! NOW! On Amazon! Just saying), I have to think about blogging for READERS.
If you like reading, if you like reading my books (of which someday there will be hundreds! HAHAHAHA ... oops, sorry. Must curb tendency towards maniacal laughter) ... follow my new blog, join in the conversation, have a laugh. Who knows, famous people might want to hang out with us.
Watching this, I remembered when I first arrived in London back in 1989. It seemed to me at the time that I couldn't strike up a conversation without anyone mentioning Imelda Marcos - specifically her shoes. It sucked so much that I wrote a poem about it:
