The Black, Ulcerated Bowel of America

I come from Hamburg, New York, a town fifteen miles south of Buffalo. Buffalo, an All America city, was once the beating heart of American industry. It once sustained the northeast’s entire economy, it gave birth to Ford Automobiles and nurtured Mark Twain. Hamburg, on the other hand, settled unsurprisingly by dour Germans in the 19th century after driving out Erie Indians, has heretofore nurtured only the delusion that it invented the hamburger, a delusion still causing misplaced pride in the Hamburg citizenry today. As I grew older and more restless, too brown to continue bumping up against the borders of Western New York, I saw Buffalo fall into ruin, its once-great buildings one by one razed “for progress.” But progress never came, only dilapidation and suddenly empty lots. I left for an even worse city for college, chose an exponentially better one for study abroad, and when I graduated I aimed to leave Buffalo for years at a time by joining the Peace Corps. And on my first day in my official capacity as a TEFL education volunteer at Hilongos National Vocational School on the island of Leyte in the Philippines, I led my first year high school students in a pronunciation drill: “The lady passenger’s anger toward the proud stranger decreased her hunger for a hamburger.”

Holy Zeus it was like a nasal nightmare. A wing sauce and Chiavetta’s horrorshow. Every godforsaken vowel emphasized and elongated, every syllable a reminder that I come from possibly the most mockable and unfortunate city in the fifty United States.

When those unsuspecting students said “hamburger” as if they were from Hamburg, I felt a strange mixture of pride and shame. I’ve long defended the hard hit vowels of my pirate accent from the scorn of downstaters, Long Islanders, and other such aurally offensive vermin, but I found myself introspective on the subject of accents and “proper” pronunciation when given the rather staggering task of teaching students to speak like me.

The perpetual feeling of being an underdog is inherent in the Buffalonian; we are a race accustomed to losing Stanley Cups and Super Bowls, getting buried under seven feet of snow overnight and still having to go to work in the morning, watching our city sink ever further into dereliction, neglect and economic despair. So we foam at the mouth when questioned about the propriety of “pop” over “soda,” “wings” over the ever-reviled “buffalo wings,” just to salvage a little dignity in the face of our crippled way of life. At home I can feel oppressed by soft vowels not pronounced through the sinus cavity, get my hackles up over every errant “soda,” but here I introduce myself and hear only the grating “a” in my first name, the legacy of Western New York something I can’t eradicate from my speech.

So when, in the course of my first day in the classroom in Hilongos, two hundred and forty rapt Filipino students dutifully parroted back that same harsh “a” sound as prompted, I felt I should apologize for the displeasing sounds coming out of my face. That old inferiority complex was manifesting itself suddenly in actual feelings of inferiority rather than the usual Napolean-esque posturing of the threatened 716er. I began to doubt the “correctness” of my speech patterns. Despite certain personal elitist leanings, the way I speak is no more valid than any other regional accent in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, the Caribbean. Why should I take the soft Filipino vowels and transform them into bitter, acrid shadows of themselves just because I can say with fair confidence that I’m a native speaker of English?

“We want your accent,” my Filipino colleagues say. “We want the students to speak just like you.” So that is their wish. Not just that I help with the monumental task of fluency, but that by osmosis I pass along these vowels, this vernacular, this dogged sense of industrial and spiritual decay.

I imagine these clear-faced children down in a bar with an Irish name on the southside of Buffalo, tipping back Labatts with the old boys, who haven’t been to work since the steel plant closed a few decades back. They complain about the ball and chain and the Bills, but the Bills still manage to keep their loyalty. They eat whatever’s come out of the deep fryer in the back, they narrowly avoid a DWI on the way home, and when they wake up in the morning there’s frost on the ground and they don’t notice the very deep blue of Lake Erie and the sunbeams shining along that unending horizon.

All creatures on this earth are narrow things, defined by the places they’ve been, the sins they’ve committed, the others they’ve known, loved, crossed. I can get as far from home as it is possible to get, but Buffalo’s hard steel cityscape still looms grey as the backdrop of my life. It’s best, of course, in the summer and fall, when colors haven’t yet withered under the influence of lake-effect weather, but it’s never summer for very long and I don’t last there much longer myself. It’s home because somehow we landed there a century ago and made it familiar, it’s home because I was born there, and so was my father and his father, it’s home because when I speak, Buffalo still asserts itself like a patient but persistent suitor. Maybe it’s a dying city and the rest of Western New York should blow away with it, but there are too many of us whose tongues remember the sharp seams of words, living there on the border. In the end is it not the worst fate to be from Buffalo, and it’s not the worst fate to be taught to speak by one of Buffalo’s far-flung daughters.