Saturday, August 19
INFIX What happens when fantastic becomes fan-fucking-tastic was not something I considered until I tried to learn Tagalog, the f-bomb in this case an infix, element that sounds vaguely criminal but is old as fuck itself. Motherfucker on the other hand’s much younger — you low-down mother- fuckers Sidney Wilson wrote to the Tennessee Draft Board in 1918 can put a gun in our hands but who can take it out? Black soldiers like Pvt. Wilson fought in the Philippines twenty years earlier & before that saved Roosevelt’s skin at San Juan Hill. Before the Spaniards they fought Indians: Kiowa. Comanche: whose children were forced to forget numutekwapu —the Comanche for Comanche — in English-only schools. Tagalog agglutinates. Stems glom tense & tone like coconut flakes on rice balls. Kain / eat becomes kumain / will eat by subsuming um (in English a sound of uncertainty). Mamatay / perish fibrillates to mamamatay — one day you will die. The infix marks the shift: ma, as though to go from death the infinitive to death as future tense one need only bury their mother. (Chris Santiago)