I Am Bisaya, Hear Me Roar!!

When I was a college freshman, I had this heavy Visayan accent whenever I spoke Tagalog. Adding to that is my atrocious memory for remembering grammatical constructions such as umalis is past tense and aalis is future tense. As my room mate (a girl from Zamboanga who spoke impeccable Tagalog) once told me, “Namumutaktak ka ng ‘mag.” (You’re full of ‘mag.’) Every sentence I uttered was, “Mag-alis muna ako ha? (To me this meant, ‘I’m going now.’) O ba’t nandito ka pa? Di ba magnood kayo ng TV? (In Kristina-speak this was, ‘Why are you still here? I thought you were watching TV?’)” It was embarrassing not because the Tagalog speakers were mocking us (actually, only a few of them were doing that), but because they said we sounded cute and from that point on they would continually ask us to speak Tagalog just so they could coo and gush.
‘Andito si Kristina. C’mon, say ‘Are you going now?’ in Tagalog.’
‘Um, mag-alis na kayo?’
Laughter.
Eventually I and the other Bisaya people got tired of being unpaid, impromptu stand-up comics for out dorm mates. Although we continued to speak Bisaya with each other, we knew we couldn’t do the same to the Tagalog people. So we spoke English. It seemed that we just couldn’t get things right. When we started speaking English, they called us coño (which actually means a bad word in Spanish, but in UP context it means a person who speaks English with a certain accent and is usually rich). We weren’t by any means rich, but because we spoke English with a lot more confidence that they did (those P1-per-Bisaya-word sanction we experienced from elementary to high school paid off) we were coños.
It wasn’t all oppression and cruelty. As Bisayas are known for their charm and friendliness (I and my friends come from the City of Friendship, Tagbilaran no less), we won the Tagalogs over. No more mocking of accents – they actually genuinely found it charming. Our dorm mates constantly hound us into translating various phrases.
“How do you say ‘I Love You’?”
“Gihigugma ko ikaw.”
“How about ‘You’re ugly’?”
“Bati ka ug nawng.”
Pretty soon, the Bisaya people became the most popular in the dorm. We were also the dominant pack. Approximately 75% of the residents in my freshman dorm were from the Visayas-Mindanao area. We were no longer the brunt of jokes; we were the BPIH (Big People in the Hall – as in Kalayaan Residence Hall) which was great, although it was kind of strange since we felt that we were becoming walking phrasebooks. We were also the prime source of those wonderfully appropriate curses the people were hurling at the opposing team during the sports fest. It didn’t matter that they had no idea what they meant, but they had a grand time yelling those words until they were hoarse.
Being Bisaya in Manila certainly has its advantages. We always lord over the fact that while most of the Tagalogs spoke only dialect, we spoke at least two. Then there is also one pertinent information: we have the best beaches anywhere in the country. And we’ve also traveled farther than they have – well, except those who constantly go out of the country for vacation. For the people who came from the far-flung provinces of Visayas and Mindanao, we arrived in UP either by ship or by plane.
We were far from being the Masters and Commanders of Our Side of the University, but we held our own. From being the runts of the bunch, we emerged to become a force to be reckoned with. Of course, it helped that during our freshman year the advertising congress was held in Cebu. So everyone – the non-Bisaya most specially – kept on asking each other, “Donat, bay?” It was as if that was our answer to Budweiser’s “Wassup?”
As I reminisce on what it was like to be a Bisaya in Manila, I can say this: stand tall, stand proud. BISDAK kami!