In this mo nth devo ted to ho noring language and culture, we should bask in the gift of this nation blessed with so much diversity, and forget that thing defined by the Palestinian scholar Said as the “symm etry of redemption.”

FOR those who are in the world of the English language, including a significant chunk in media, it must be strange to hear that this month has been set aside as the Month of/for Culture and Language. Note the singular aspect of the concept. What do we do in this month to culture and language? What happened to the other languages, and other cultures? You may, in fact, ask: What do we do the rest of the year with what is purportedly the Pinoy culture and the Filipino language?

Language, like karaoke, is always a site of battles and competitions in this nation. It is a site of misunderstanding, where passion reaches its utmost passion. But just like in cultural analysis, one begins really with the artifacts: the things one apprehends with the senses. The conceptualization and intellectualization come later.

The artifacts that we see around begins with this celebration, which is reminding us that we are, in terms of languages, in transit. A strong, dominant language—English—appears in dominant instruments—broadsheets, magazines and other publications. The currency of the language in those materials suggests and underscores one thing: English is still the language to deliver the discourses of who we are as people. And, yet, for every news delivered in the English language, there must be communities of readers out there who discuss and debate about them in languages that will never be the national language.

Depending on where your sense of humor and urgent desire for identity bring you, the problem of languages is always an opportunity for us to look at ourselves. We are a nation of many languages and many cultures. There is no sense now in forcing an identity when it cannot be tenable. To do so, to insist that all of us see our stories written in one language, that which has been developed from Tagalog—and is now known as Pilipino/Filipino (you see even in that “P” or “F”, a siege is a great possibility)—or English, that which has uncannily embedded itself in our consciousness, is dreaming for the moment.

I am a lover of Kundiman and all those lachrymose songs of the ’50s. My editor knows this. I can sing all night the songs of Larry Miranda, Cenon Lagman and Ruben Tagalog, or at least hum them till kingdom come. But I know when we start celebrating our culture and language by looking back at those songs about infidelity and false promises and unrealistic love set in melodies that remind us of pinipig-scented afternoons when the wind blew strong across homes with open windows, we are searching our identities through the mist of nostalgia. That search is, at best, lovely and easy and will not work when our memory of culture and language is still not one and the same. We should instead bask in the gift of this nation blessed with so much diversity, and forget that thing defined by the Palestinian scholar Said as the “symmetry of redemption.”

If we are going to be saved, it has to begin through an acknowledgment that we speak several languages and dwell in and live varied cultures.

Speaking of variety and identities, a cult following behind these two performers called Moymoy Palaboy is already developing. They, for the uninitiated, are the two brothers who gained fame and/or notoriety through the new technologies of mobile phones and YouTube. Their act is hysterical. It shows them lipsynching through many popular songs. What separates them, though, from the regular impersonators or comedians born with huge mouths is that, outside of those mouths, and lips that appear to be singing the songs, they are able to create a new universe of meanings for a common piece through gestures that are as wild as they are creative. Look at their version of “Staying Alive,” which has become for them an anthem of physically surviving something that only they can ever imagine.

For the student of popular culture, you may want to examine Moymoy Palaboy when you are not anymore laughing. Can you see anything familiar? Actually, the two are making the songs funny for us. These songs are, however, the same pieces covered by our local entertainers who imitate the original unknowingly. While these two irreverent and funny brothers have found something hilarious in being copycats, our noontime and Sunday performers still take themselves much too seriously in covering foreign songs. I do not know which of the two now is more hysterical.

Still on YouTube, a friend asks: Who is Eydie Gorme? Apparently, she had seen on YouTube this singer belting out the classic torch song “If He Walked Into My Life Today.” The song is not originally torch; it is lifted from the musical Mame. But in the style of the singers of yore, the song has become an over-the-top cabaret piece: part oratory, part opera and all-out musical heartbreak. Soon, she was also ransacking the YouTube for other versions and coming in contact with performers like Leslie Uggams, she with the range of a melodious nervous breakdown. Suddenly, this lover of pop songs has realized that there is a world outside the dramatic readings of Barbra Streisand and Liza Minnelli.

As I was writing this column, this friend was going through a scene of a Bette Davis movie, with Bette demanding from her managers an accounting of her money, driving them away and shutting the doors so forcefully that you could feel Bette’s arm getting unhinged, and, finally, driving down through Hollywood, with a cigarette and a whisky and an Oscar statuette in hand. I am afraid that when I see her, she--y friend, not Bette Davis—would have memorized those lines. “C’mon, Oscar, let’s you and me get drunk!” 

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