Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

Dominiko-Kai

Shibuya, June 29, 1972

Many years back, a group of Ilokano writers from central and northern Luzon invited me to talk at a workshop they had set up in my hometown, Rosales, Pangasinan. They wanted me, with my background as literary editor and novelist, to clarify some of the problems of craft that had been bedeviling them. I did not think it was a difficult assignment; I had done some writing in my own language several years back but had stopped and devoted myself to English, as demanded by my job.

A few words about Ilokano: it is spoken today by some fifteen million Filipinos in northern Luzon and in Mindanao. In Hawaii, the majority of the citizens of Philippine ancestry are Ilokanos, which is perhaps why Marcos elected Honolulu as his place of exile. We are an adventurous people, hardy and given to thrift and perseverance. We are supposedly endowed with carabao patience and cast-iron stomachs, but more than these ethnic idiosyncracies, our language is very precise and sensual, and in the back of my mind I had hoped that I could enrich my writing in English by extracting from my native Ilokano the same nuances and musicality that Richard Llewelyn drew from his native Welsh or, on a much more magnificent scale, James Joyce, from Irish. In fact, one Filipino writer with an Ilokano background had done this successfully: the late Manuel Arguilla. He flavored his stories with the earthiness, the vivid color, and the vitality of Ilokano. Had the Japanese not killed him, his work would have fully flowered and would have brought about — at least for our writers — a deeper appreciation of their native languages — all ninety of them — and the richness they could have imparted to English.

But this is digression; I had meant to say that I was going back to my hometown after many years of living in Manila and elsewhere in Asia. I relished going home; all the remembered words came alive again. I could understand everything that was said in Ilokano, including the archaic expressions and the poetry bubbling all over the place. Slowly I came to realize that I had missed a lot.

Then it was my turn to speak. I started in my own language, but after the first phrases of elaborate greeting, I found myself fumbling, groping for words. The ideas were crystal-clear, but I could not express them and I strained with an expression that had become alien to me. In the end, I had to give up Ilokano and speak in English. I had never felt as I felt then, the terrible sense of inadequacy and helplessness.

They all understood me, of course, for English is one of our three official languages, but the experience humbled me and impinged upon me the fact that, perhaps, I cannot go home again.

I am sure that this experience can be duplicated easily in any part of the world by those individuals like myself who have become urbanized. I am sure that many of us in Asia have raised questions that probe deep into the very core of our personalities and even into the very purpose of our inconsequential lives.

This is not just the result of our history but the complexity of the Philippines itself. Although Tagalog, the national language, can be understood in almost every part of the country now, the language of science and culture, of government and the elite, continues to be English. With a population of seventy million, a third of our people is capable of communication of sorts in English, a fact that has been embroidered into the dubious statistic that we are the third-largest English-speaking country in the world.

Theoretically, the Philippines is ripe for the media revolution, and as a publisher, I should now be printing thousands of books for this mass market. But we do not read, and most of our people are more comfortable with comic books and TV. Moreover, our low per capita income seems to indicate that a Filipino will take care of his stomach first before he attends to food for the mind. And who can blame him?

What, then, is the future for English? As the lingua franca of the region, it will continue well into the future. But to modernize, we have to develop our own language even, perhaps, at the cost of ignoring altogether our other languages. In promoting this national language, we will also give a genuine cultural base for nationalism. This is no longer an option; it has become a compulsion.

It is perhaps too premature to say that our literature in English may probably decline. This is what happened to the prose and poetry in Spanish written in the 1880s and up to the early 1920s. Even the novels of José Rizal, our national hero, are now seldom read in their original Spanish, although they are required reading in English translation in our schools. Our Spanish poets Fernando Ma. Guerrero and José Corazon de Jesus are unappreciated except by scholars in search of footnotes. Indeed, the literary hiatus between our Spanish past and the American era is wide and final, and Spanish as a literary language in the Philippines is dead. This may well be the price we have to pay so that a national literature will evolve, one that will be read by all our people.

The shift to Tagalog, however, is slow. It could be hastened, but there is continuing opposition by Tagalog chauvinists who refuse to accept the first verity of language, that of communication. Some of these oppositionists wield influence in government and have vested interests as teachers or as bureaucrats; some still insist on the use of archaic Tagalog, on a complicated grammar that favors coinage of words when there are equivalents in popular use. They use aklat (“book”) when everybody uses the Spanish libro .

Perhaps it is time that the Institute of National Language be led and staffed by non-Tagalogs so that the grafting to the national lexicon of non-Tagalog words that are widely used could be hastened. By provoking non-Tagalogs to opt for their own languages in opposition to Tagalog, by making language a vehicle for Tagalog chauvinism, the issue of language, which is central to Philippine development, has been derailed, and what is worse, instead of unifying Filipinos, it has sorely divided us. The worst enemies of Filipino nationalism, therefore, may be found in the Institute of National Language, among them the late Lope K. Santos, who forced upon the school system his balarilà (“grammar,” in Tagalog).

The past has created attitudes embedded deep in our cultural matrix that are just as pernicious. No less than a cultural revolution can exorcise us of such attitudes and their stigma. We may have survived three hundred years of Spanish tyranny, forty years of grudging American benevolence, and three brutal years of Japanese occupation, but we continue to languish in the prison created by this past. How many times have we been awed by our neighbors, by their granite monuments and fabulous ruins, by their classical arts and dances? Go find us a temple, we often tell our archaeologists — half in fun but in our heart of hearts with wishful longing — but we know these monuments are not there, that we may have to build them ourselves. We do console ourselves with the thought that these monuments of past grandeur could be — and are — anchors to poverty that cannot be lifted. What, then, is the Filipino artist? Is he a helmsman beholden to no celestial guide, to no route to his past as Asia knows this past? We have no moorings to break away from and we hope to God that we are not drifting, that we can, perhaps, be light-bringers, although it is a feeble light that we are holding up to our own benighted people.

We cannot but accept the history that has shaped us. When Spain came to us with Catholicism, she destroyed the beginnings of an indigenous culture. Spain also imposed a social structure that afflicts us to this day. It is a structure of power and privilege wherein the social elite is also the political and economic elite whose power and privilege were not earned but mandated, as evidenced in the land grants or encomiendas , in the bulk space of the galleons that sailed to Acapulco. It was a system of exploitation and forced labor that enabled the chosen few, mostly Spanish mestizos, to amass fortunes without lifting a finger at honest toil, and it was from such beginnings that the obnoxious attitudes and values of colonialism were ingrained later into the very culture of our people.