there’s a reason why *i* write in english, surely to communicate with “you,” as you’ve quoted from rich. then we can get historical, right, why filipinos speak english in the first place (i.e. war, compulsory american education, et al).

“You shouldn’t just use foreign language just because you can. There has to be a reason for it.”

I want to turn that around and say, you shouldn’t just use English just because you can. There has to be a reason for it. Sadly, there are a lot of monolinguals in the US due to “circumstance”, design or some combo of the two. But that doesn’t mean they should use English without thinking about the reason why.

For me, although I’m not monolingual, when I write in English it’s a case of “This is the oppressor’s language // yet I need it to talk to you” (Rich).

My initial reaction to the untranslated parts of Poeta (I didn’t know the word “baybayin” till I read it sometime later here in your blog) was that I found it a kind of useful quiet reminder that not everyone in the world chooses to speak English, or to speak it all the time. I think I said something about this when I wrote about Poeta in my blog. (I can read Spanish, more or less, sometimes a little haltingly, though have never spoken it well.)

To put it another way, and to state what should be obvious: English isn’t the “default” language, it’s not the language that all other languages are measured against. (Unless, perhaps, you’ve spent a little to much time insulated in English departments and similar places, though here we get to one of those “don’t get me started” things, but anyway.)

I grew up in a family where we spoke only English, though there was a faint presence of other languages, my parents who had studied (variously) French and Latin and Spanish in school, and my dad also had a bit of German that he picked up when he was in Europe at the end of the Second World War. (He was, for a little while, put in charge of a group of German prisoners of war.)

But apart from that, the life I lived growing up didn’t “force” me to learn any other languages — English was the only language we actually spoke in my family and my community — and it was a conscious political decision to start learning other languages, to the extent I’ve learned any.

Back when Didi Menendez was hosting the Cafe Cafe blog as an open group blog, I posted a couple of poems there that were partially or wholly written in Spanish, my first attempts at writing poems in a language other than English. It wasn’t just an experiment, as such — the poems (or parts of poems) “came” to me in Spanish, whatever that actually means (getting here into the mystery of where poems come from in one’s interior world, which I’m not prepared to articulate at the moment…)

In my most recent book of poems, The First Light Touches Me, I included two poems that I wrote entirely in Spanish (out of a total of 12 poems in the book). I eventually decided to include my own English translations as a kind of Appendix at the end of the book, though the translations feel to me only like translations, not-quite-adequate suggestions of what the poems say. The actual poems are in Spanish.

This raises a whole lot of questions, regarding cultural appropriation, assumptions we make (or don’t make) about what culture is and who decides that — the list is long, and I don’t pretend to have thought through all of the questions to clear conclusions. Essentially I decided just to trust that the poems would be able to speak for themselves, and that people would respond to them, or not, based on wherever they come from in life and history and the world.

In a broader sense, I suppose I make that kind of decision when I write and/or publish any poem, though I suppose I was a little more conscious of thinking about this with the poems in Spanish. Everything we do exists in the context of history.