Spiking English

"May I please have the shopper?" I asked the red-nosed, lanky-haired Anglo pharmacy cashier, pointing helpfully to the color-picture flyer containing the week's specials, lying right next to the cash register.

Instead of handing that over, she looked at me quizzically and picked up a black magic marker that was next to the shopper in question. "This isn't a Sharpie," she informed me, unhelpfully.

My Anglo husband says I'm too sensitive about these things, and perhaps he's right. But since I know I can properly enunciate the difference between shopper and Sharpie, I have to ask myself: What is it about my speech pattern that makes some Anglos confuse what I actually say with something I not only didn't say but couldn't possibly have said if I was actually trying to communicate?

Personally, I think it's my Spikness. My husband suggests that it may be because of my different word choices and my lack of a regional accent. He's a dear, isn't he? But I think it's my Spikness.

It happened most recently at the neighborhood cafe of the college where I currently teach. The cafe is known for making creatively tasty quesadillas practically every Thursday and I went to order takeout. "Can I have a quesadilla order to go, please?" I asked the young lanky-haired Anglo woman at the cash register. "I'm sorry, what?" she asked, as if I'd murmured my order or spoken to her in a Martian dialect. Granted, I pronounced quesadilla in Spanish so I guess I should have intoned: "QUEY-said-ylla" for her to understand. But, silly me, since the Spanish pronunciation hadn't stumped anyone before and since I thought the word would be recognizable to someone who works there, I went the Spik English route.

But no matter what I said, she wasn't understanding me. She asked for my name. I pronounced it slowly. She asked me to repeat it. I asked for the sweet potato quesadillas (after she'd figured out I didn't want the lunch ham sandwich special). She added an order of sweet potato fries (which I didn't even know they had!) to my bill. I was getting crankier by the slowly ticking minutos and had to exert superhero self-control not to demand a translator who understood Spik English so I could finally order my food and escape what began to feel like some forgotten level of hell.

This apparent mis-communication, I've noticed, also happens each time I come across a lanky-haired Anglo university colleague, who's as formally educated as I am. Every time I'm around her, without fail, and regardless of what I say, she turns to her Anglo friends and asks: "Did she just say [insert some really ridiculous, unintelligible thing]? I'm convinced that this is her passive-aggressive attempt to remind me and everyone else that I'm not one of them, that I'm a Spik, that I don't "speak" English because I actually only barely Spik English.

And, truth be told, I haven't always been proud of Spiking English. When I was a little girl, I remember how proudly I beamed when, after hearing me speak English, people cooed: "Why, you have no accent! How wonderful!" I remember flinching in shame when I heard the Puerto Rico Miss Universe contestant request a translator or mangle some simple phrase in English. I remember how smug I was when I got to college in the States and Anglos said: "You don't have an accent." An accent, I knew well, made you invisible and made people believe you were stupid and dismissable. Having no accent meant I would be understood, I would be taken seriously, even if I was a Spik.

How quickly did life here change that colonized attitude! I found out that with or without an accent, I was still a Spik. Soon, I began to cherish my "Other-Languageness," my Caribbean, Spanish-speaking Spikness. In latter years, when Anglos thought they were commending me by stating, "You speak English so well," I responded with almost venomous sweetness: "And I also speak Spanish, do you?"

My Spikness does get me into sometimes mortifying but always funny situations in the classroom, especially because I teach English. Yes, my native language is Spanish, and I teach English. Yes, I am a Puerto Rican and I teach American literature. No, I don't fit that preconceived notion that only native Anglo speakers get to teach the language in the native Anglo country. English stopped being the property of the British and the Anglo Americans when they colonized most of the world and spread their language to the rest of us. Spanish is a gorgeous language, as important as English for educated people to know in this increasingly globalized word, but I find English beautiful, too.

And while I've been Spiking English since I was four years old, I do mangle it now and then, sometimes unintentionally. I remember one of my first classes of English composition when I pointed to an image and said: "As you can see, such-and-such is in his horse." Now, I know the difference between in and on. But my bilingual brain likes to play games with me and will take away the right word in whatever language I'm speaking and want to use the one in the other language instead. My brain also likes to play musical chairs with my prepositions, calling up in when I need on, or playing hide-and-seek with the correct pronunciation of certain words.

After I had said "in his horse," I grimaced inwardly, dreading the summons from the President's office: "The parents called, they complained that you're teaching their kids English composition but you don't even know the difference between in and on?!" The students laughed and one student, the bravest, said: "He's on his horse." "Well," I said, recovering quickly. "He could be in his horse, spiritually..." And the students laughed hard and long and all was well and no parents complained and no President has summoned me, yet.

Years later, I still occasionally mispronounce words but I no longer mind and now it's just part of my teaching persona. The other day I mangled "synonym" so badly that the students laughed and I laughed with them. "You wait," I said, "keep a tally and by the end of the semester we'll see how many words I've destroyed or invented." One student made my day, saying: "That's cool. I don't know any Spanish myself."

Still, don't ask me to say "decolonization" unless you feel like guffawing. The most mortifying incident lately was when, after I had presented a paper at my discipline's most important conference, my advisor kindly mentioned: "We need to work on your pronunciation." Throughout the entire 20-minute talk I had mispronounced the word "epistle" as if I was saying: "EP-piss-sol." Blame it on second-language problems.

Spik and all, I am a hardass teacher who gets her students to see how we present ourselves rhetorically through our writing and that to be persuasive and effective the academic writing has to be as flawless and as purposeful as possible.

Although I can write English more than proficiently (sometimes better than some natives), the likelihood is that I will always Spik English. So I guess I'll always have to explain myself to some Anglo, even when I'm actually speaking English.