The republic of one hundred languages (1/2)

Dr. Vim Nadera of the UP Institute Of Creative Writing has an excellent and thought-provoking report on vernacular literature in the Philippines. The report is part of the Philippine Center For Investigative Journalism’s special series of articles on literature and literacy in the Philippines. (We blogged about Juan Miguel Luz’s article “A Nation Of Non-Readers” here.)

I find that I am continuously re-adjusting my–sorry–paradigm for conceptualizing the twin issues of literature and literacy in the Philippines and how one might go about formulating some sort of intelligent program for action. As I said earlier, this seems to be a particularly fruitful year for embarking on a collective response to the omnipresent problem of our country’s reading habits (or lack thereof), but articles and commentaries such as those sponsored by the PCIJ bring texture to what seems like a pretty straightforward endeavor. For instance, the June 14 event at the Filipinas Heritage Library was a whole-day forum on the sustainability of reading programs in the Philippines, with insights and presentations from various groups and literacy advocates about their projects and agendas and how we could all work together to further push the envelope. Metrics were discussed, task forces, schedules, workflows. But discourse, I am beginning to discover, is important too.

While Juan Luz’s article portrays ‘a nation of non-readers’ through elucidating the connection between literacy, learning, language and citizenship, Vim Nadera complicates this picture by presenting a thriving landscape of literary activity in the regions outside ‘imperialistic Manila,’ where writers produce and disseminate works in the vernacular and conduct regular exchanges with fellow writers, where literature continues to endure as an important basis for other forms of cultural exchange. However, Nadera contends that vernacular literature remains ‘marginalized,’ unable to cross ‘linguistic boundaries.’

What does this imply for our literature as a nation? Where Luz locates the root of our illiteracy in our beleaguered educational system, Nadera implies that as long as the vitality of our ‘cultural identity’ is impaired because of our failure to communicate with each other–in this country with (approximately) one hundred languages–we will always remain illiterate as a people.

In his speech “Nagbabasa Ka Ba?” National Artist Virgilio Almario describes the decline of our local publishing industry and relates it to our lack of literacy in Filipino. English is the chosen medium of literature by the educated minority who can afford to buy books, and as long as the market is skewed towards this preference for English (even as regards Filipino-authored books), the rest of us will remain illiterate, for the simple reason that we do not have books that we can read in the language we best understand but for some tragic irony cannot communicate in.

Language therefore seems to be a very contentious factor in any serious consideration of the problem of literacy (or illiteracy) in the Philippines, perhaps more so than in any other less linguistically diverse country. Vim Nadera goes one step further and links language, literacy, and literature to the still trickier notion of national identity. He points to the richness of our vernacular literatures and affirms how important they are in sustaining the cultural life of the country–but for the fact that without a unifying language–Filipino–we can never share in them on equal terms, that is, together.