Long Sentence
Pantranco_bus / Flickr
Long Sentence
People always tell me that Dominicans speak very fast but I don’t think that’s true because I can understand my whole family just fine, and yes, my whole family like my mamí y papí y mis tías y tíos y primos y primas y bisabuelos y bisabuelas y abuelos y abuelas, except Dominicans never call their abuela “abuela”: we call them “guela” because we have so much slang for everything; for example, you may think “bus” in Spanish is “autobús” because in your Spanish classes in high school, they sat you down in the wooden desks that were once very shiny but became covered in gum and curses words and you had some woman who had a Spanish-speaking husband or went to Spain one time when she was nineteen years old stand in front of the whiteboard and write down a-u-t-o-b-ú-s with that squeaky black Expo marker, but she had no idea that in the Dominican Republic, when we are talking about a bus, we say “gua-gua,” and that I also never in my life heard the word “biblioteca” until that white woman told me that “libreria” was not the grammatically correct word for library because it means “bookstore” but when I was young, my stay-at-home mamí—after sweeping the living room and feeding me arroz con juevo because papí will bring home the plantano from the international market off Hull Street when he comes home from work for dinner and we have to wait to eat the carne with the plantano, otherwise why would we even eat it at all without the plantano—would put down her broom and tell me to get ready because “vamos pa´ la libreria,” and she wanted me to check out a couple books with my blue library card that still had a 53 cent fine on it from last time I used it; mamí liked when I read and she made me read so I could grow up and apply to college and get in and then take a Spanish class not in high school but in a big university where the Spanish professors are still mostly white but at least now they’re from Spain and have a lot of degrees and know proper Spanish, and they make me very nervous and scared to speak Spanish and very suddenly I’m not speaking fast—in fact, I’m not speaking Spanish at all because I don’t know the proper words or how to spell the words or how to pronounce my S’s in Spanish words because us Dominicans don’t pronounce the S’s: we say “tamo” when we mean to say “estamos,” which translates to “we are” except in my Spanish classes, there is no ‘tamo’ or estamos because there is no “we”...just me, the only Dominican…quietly writing a-u-t-o-b-u-s around people who didn’t grow up with guelas and who did have shiny desks when they learned Spanish in high school and who remember to put the accent mark on the u and who speak Spanish very, very slowly because they never make a single mistake while speaking…they never make any mistakes.