The republic of one hundred languages (2/2)

A commenter to the PCIJ blog post linking to Vim Nadera’s article derides his ‘aboriginal sentimentality’ and questions why Filipino advocates like Nadera insist on rejecting the ‘foreign’ parts of our cultural heritage in favor of the ‘native’ parts which are deemed ‘more authentic.’ Well, I don’t know, can it be because we are–Malay?

I do not know where the commenter got the idea that attempting to integrate vernacular languages into Filipino means eviscerating its Spanish or English components (furthermore I am sure that Vim Nadera is cognizant of the finer points of semiotics–the evolution of languages, indeed) but I am struck by how any effort to pay serious heed to Filipino ultimately gets reduced to a form of cultural war-mongering. Filipinos who actually like Filipino better than English are not tribal reactionaries, yo. I think that Bhex in her own comment to this entry is spot on when she talks about ‘fostering a deeper regard’ for Filipino first before trying to push for anything else. I’ve also seen it elsewhere–there’s so much knee-jerk antagonism. If this goes on we’ll have the shameful distinction of being the only country in the world to have declared war on our own national language. Which just goes to show.

In fact, what is often overlooked in the midst of all this utilitarian rhetoric about multi-culturalism and globalization and economic competitiveness is how Filipino as a language is less a primitive state of nature that we must all reject in favor of prattling some generalized lingua franca than a redemptive enterprise. The ‘borderlessness’ of English is never in question. The ‘artificiality’ of Filipino is totally beside the point as well. It’s not some academic language game. And comparing Filipino to English on the basis of what would contribute more to our economic advancement is rather degrading, wouldn’t you say?

I understand what Vim Nadera means when he talks about the national language as a ‘repository of beauty.’ It’s the last frontier. As a people, we have already lost so much. Four hundred years of colonization and betrayal by our own have deprived us of so many things. And what we have not lost, we have forgotten, which is infinitely worse.

Is this corny? Am I to be accused of being unprogressive? A typical reactionary? Or just overly sensitive? After all, going by my last name, my family is certainly as aboriginal as they come, so perhaps that’s why I feel the loss acutely. I’ve never phrased it, even to myself, probably because I did not know how to. This is the first time.

I had a chat the other day with Professor George Fabros of the UP Folklorists about a historical reconstruction project that he is planning to mount with the National Historical Institute and the UP Department of Philippine Studies for the centennial celebrations of the hero General Macario Sakay. Sakay fought alongside Bonifacio in the Katipunan and during the early years of the American occupation fought a guerilla war and founded a Tagalog republic. He surrendered after being promised an amnesty by the American governor-general but was nonetheless executed. According to Professor Fabros, Sakay did not trust the Americans but was convinced by the words of the Filipino emissary sent to negotiate with him and this emissary was versed in the diplomatic vocabulary of the Katipunan.

It all goes back to discourse, said Professor Fabros. I looked behind his shoulder and saw that his computer monitor was dominated by an enlarged studio photograph of Macario Sakay with his generals. I asked when it was taken and Professor Fabros said they might have smuggled a photographer into their mountain hideout to take the picture or they might even have sneaked clandestinely into town (bumaba) to meet the photographer. I then asked why Sakay and his men (except for his adjutant) had long hair. This is a usual detail in photographs featuring male revolutionaries, but even though I had taken several history electives in university, I’d never thought to ask about it.

“Does it symbolize virility?” I hazarded.

“No, it symbolizes ferocity,” Professor Fabros replied. “But that’s not the only reason why they did not cut their hair. The length of their hair also symbolized the length of the revolutionary struggle. Not that it has ended.”

He explained that he kept Sakay’s photograph in his computer so he would not ‘forget.’ The entire project is in fact an exercise in restitution since Sakay–like most national heroes with the exception of Rizal, Bonifacio and Mabini–is forgotten, his grave unmarked. Though to call it ‘restitution’ does not even begin to cover it. Fabros refers to the sequence of events as pagtutuwid, paggunita and pasundayag. Pagtutuwid in the specific sense that the Katipuneros used it means something like rectification, to restore the proper order of things. Paggunita means remembrance but also the recovery of what has been thought irretrievably lost. Pasundayag is to give honor, to celebrate.

What does this all have to do with Filipino? Well, for one, I did not know what pasundayag meant since it was not ‘Tagalog.’ Professor Fabros replied gently that it was Cebuano. I asked why he could not have used a word like pagpupugay which was easily understandable because it was Filipino… and here I stopped myself. Fabros went on to explain that etymologically pasundayag contained within itself both the concept of celebration and the concept of reverence. When Macario Sakay has been rectified, remembered, restored and celebrated, we must also–to close the circle–pay him the respect due to an honorable man who fought and died for his country.

I’ve read the old debates about why Tagalog should form the backbone of Filipino as opposed to other languages like Cebuano or Ilocano or Hiligaynon or Bikol and at that time thought that it was silly to even wonder. Of course Tagalog should be the basis of Filipino. The seat of the national government is in Manila, not Cebu or Laoag. Tagalogs are the majority in the country. And everyone knows Tagalog. Why should you expect a generation of schoolchildren to learn Cebuano just so we could preserve some sort of abstract integrity for the national language? Let them learn–aha!–English instead.

I still think they should learn English (and French and Chinese and Arabic, just to be on the safe side), but today I am speaking of loss. George Fabros calls it pinaglahuan–what has disappeared, what one has let go. It’s not language, exactly, but what is connected to that language. An entire wealth–hundreds of years worth–of emotion, feeling and memory. Naglahong parang bula.

I helped organize a balagtasan in our town last year. We invited the Barasoain Kalinangan to perform in the one and only restaurant–aside from Jollibee and McDo–in the poblacion. Barasoain Kalinangan presented several pieces from the canonical balagtasan texts, one of which was the first ever balagtasan between Jose Corazon de Jesus and Florentino Collantes. The audience was a mixed one of factory workers on the way home from work who’d stopped by out of curiosity and schoolchildren. And for some reason, while listening to the poetry, we all cried. Not the sort of crying you do in a darkened cinema while watching a Nora Aunor film though it probably came pretty close. Staring fixedly at the makeshift stage, listening to the words, and something inside you just sliding into place. Perhaps a memory, isang gunita. I think that a certain Kalinga word–which Professor Fabros also told me about and which ironically I cannot remember (teach Kalinga to schoolchildren too)–could explain the experience better. The word is characteristic of the terse verbal ideographs which constitute the Kalinga language. It’s related to pinaglahuan but it’s more kinetic. Instead of loss and disappearance, according to Professor Fabros, it speaks of the trauma of what happens after, when one wanders around blindly and aimlessly, mourning for something they have lost but cannot remember.

Maybe that’s why we cried, factory workers and all.

It all goes back to discourse. This is why I do believe–though I can’t speak for the rest of Read or Die–that Filipino is important. In itself, it is an act of restitution, of restoring what is lost, forgotten and marginalized, of preserving and celebrating what remains, of giving honor where honor is due–to our artists, singers, heroes, martyrs, poets, to the speakers of our tongues. Literature is ultimately a language of beauty and a beautiful language is a work of art. To listen to and absorb the sonorities of Filipino–all one hundred languages of it–might teach young people more about art and literature than a dozen reading programs.

Of course it probably won’t turn them into dollar earners. Another commenter to the blog post in question notes with some romantic wistfulness that we should concentrate above all on being globally competitive before turning to the question of our national language. But by then, what else would we have lost, and what would remain? A workforce of tin-eared, leaden-tongued technocrats, maybe. But I should talk.

June 18, 2007 | Filed Under Latest, Reviews, PCIJ:Special Series | 1 Comment

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.

June 18, 2007 | Filed Under Latest, Reviews, PCIJ:Special Series | Leave a Comment

Re: A Nation Of Non-Readers

Thanks to Bhex of Philippine Speculative Fiction for giving me the heads up. The Philippine Center For Investigative Journalism (PCIJ) is posting a series of articles on literature and literacy in the Philippines in iReport.

A Nation Of Non-Readers by former Department of Education undersecretary Juan Miguel Luz starts off with establishing the usual correlation between literacy and reading and goes on to apply this to the ever tricky issue of how Filipinos could be–statistically speaking, at least–a highly literate people while continuing to remain a nation of ’storytellers’ rather than of ‘readers.’ However, the article proceeds to question conventionally held notions of literacy and points out that Filipinos might not even be as literate as we thought. Luz turns to functional literacy instead of the considerably less abstracted–and therefore less informative–measure of simple literacy and comes to the troubling conclusion that while adults as an age group showed ‘functional literacy rates close to 90%,’ the same is no longer true for children. More and more schoolchildren below the age of fifteen are dropping out of school, and the percentage seems to be highest at the precise critical level where children are expected to have attained complete facility in reading, writing and arithmetic. The lack of competence among Filipino schoolchildren in these essential areas of education, according to Luz, is the index of poor literacy, and with poor literacy inevitably comes poor reading skills. If a child can barely grasp the meaning of words–whether they are in English or in Filipino–how can he or she be expected to read a story?

Luz doesn’t stop there. He goes on to extrapolate a devastating series of consequences arising from the low literacy levels of Filipino schoolchildren. Their ability to read is not only impaired, so is their linguistic proficiency, and, since grasp of language is an important component of learning, their ability to learn also suffers. Poor readers are poor learners, says Luz. And poor learners are poor citizens, in those things that matter–that is, with regard to opportunities to acquire higher education, economic competitiveness, social productivity. Students are not the sole victims of this abysmal situation. Public school teachers are as much the purveyors of poor education as its unwitting target for backlash.

Luz believes that “the key to learning is better reading skills.” And as an educator, he also believes that learning–life-long learning, the sort which cannot be confined to the classroom–is the key to survival. We are endangered, this nation of non-readers. If we don’t read, then we might as well… die.

We are in dire straits, undoubtedly, going by this estimation. However Luz thinks that we aren’t completely un-salvageable. In the midst of this massive struggle which most of our fellow Filipinos blink indifferently at (if they are even aware of it at all), there are people and groups who wade into the breach and try to pick off the flotsam of illiteracy, cultural poverty and apathy which has settled and hardened on the national psyche and toss it aside to uncover–how to put it?–the treasure within. To call them diamonds in the rough, as Luz does, is perhaps to overestimate the dross and to underestimate the hardness one would have to contain in oneself to pull off something like dragging the nation kicking and screaming from–as Virgilio Almario put it–a fate of certain death by not reading.

The work these people do is of great practical value. Luz describes the MOE (Models Of Excellence) schools which are the outgrowth of the famous Books For The Barrios program initiated by a Filipino-American couple. There’s also ESKWAN (Eskwelahan sang Katawhan Negros) which sets up ‘district-level reading programs to improve on the achievement of pupils’ in Negros schools. Sa Aklat Sisikat Foundation, of course, does excellent work (I’ll talk about them in another entry). They concentrate on cultivating a reading habit instead of actually teaching reading and they do it through a sort of precise honing in system–they focus on a specific age group (Grade 4 students) and fine-tune a specific skill set among teachers which will help them foster classrooms for literature.

Aside from educational reform undertakings and reading programs, Luz stresses the importance of libraries. Without books, he claims, children cannot develop a reading habit. However, the problem is precisely that we do not nearly have enough books, let alone libraries. Luz mentions a mediated solution of sorts, at least in the context of school libraries–the Department of Education’s Library Hub program in which books circulate between schools for a period of time in the form of pre-packed book bins. Luz notes the hesitation of ‘traditional school administrators’ to adopt this model, preferring instead actual library buildings. As long as the government doesn’t set aside a budget to extensively overhaul–not to mention ensure the sustainability–of the public school library system in the country, however, public schools from Manila to Basilan will have to subsist on what they can get, and the pickings are always, always slim.

This is where the private sector comes in. The PCIJ appends a short report to Luz’s article on the excellent work AHON Foundation–a private non-profit–has been doing to mitigate this problem by refurbishing libraries in public elementary schools in Manila with TIME Life Books. Read or Die was privileged to have AHON Foundation as our beneficiary in RodCon. The Filipino Librarian rightly points to the difference between AHON Foundation and other book donation programs in the country, which are usually ad-hoc and conducted on the level of an absentminded garage sale. I won’t at this point comment on the actual nature of book donations (my backlog is growing longer) but I do agree that the process deserves thoughtful consideration at the very least, though it’s not always obvious hereabouts since books are disposed in this country like used bottles for the neighborhood magbobote.

I really have nothing substantial to add to Juan Miguel Luz’s article, which is systematically written and just as carefully presented. His biases as an educator are obvious, faultless, and are the basis for the scenario he paints of a nation of non-readers. The link between learning, literacy and reading has not always been clearly elucidated in arguments for or against greater support for literacy programs and Luz’s article does a great job of redressing the gap. I look forward to the forthcoming articles by PCIJ.

Next: Alecks Pabico’s article on Muslim classrooms.

June 13, 2007 | Filed Under Read or Die, PCIJ:Special Series | 3 Comments

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