English is your mother tongue/Ang Ingles ay tongue ng ina mo
By ERIC GAMALINDA
January 2003
Editor's Note: This essay also appears in "The Vestiges of War," published by the New York University Press.
"The Philippines were to us a terra incognita. No ship of our service had been there for years. When, after my appointment as commander of the Asiatic Squadron, I sought information on the subject in Washington, I found that the latest official report relative to the Philippines on file in the office of naval intelligence bore the date of 1876."1
That was what Commodore George Dewey, the hero of the Battle of Manila Bay, had to say about the Philippines. More than a century later, the age of the Internet may have made information on the Philippines more readily available, but it remains a fact that most Americans know no more about their former colony than Dewey did in 1898. Few Americans are aware of the history of the United States in the Philippines, a history that was kept secret from their own people for many reasons.
This history was also largely unknown to many Filipinos who grew up during and after the Second World War -- grew up, that is, with the belief that the Unites States was a savior twice over, saving them first from the Spanish and later from the Japanese.
The image of savior and redeemer was something the United States exploited with the precision and efficiency of a professional publicity agent since 1899, when it invaded the archipelago. Since then, there have been two major deities in the pantheon of the Filipino psyche: God and America.
Those of us who grew up in Manila in the 60s and 70s know this only too well. We learned English the moment we were ready for school -- around the age of five, if not earlier, when we learned it at home. We were taught that A was for Apple and we learned to sing America the Beautiful and we were aware that in December there was snow and Santa Claus came down our chimneys, even if we had none. We watched I Love Lucy and Flash Gordon and listened to Top 40 radio and watched Hollywood movies and read all the great Anglo-Saxon authors and knew all the 50 states (well, some of us did). And most important, most of us had some next of kin in the States, whose balikbayan boxes regularly arrived like manna from heaven.
How strange to discover that in the United States, people would ask questions like Where did you learn to speak English and Do Filipinos live in trees. How disappointing to learn that while we knew everything about America -- knew possibly more about America than the average American did -- the average American knew next to nothing about us. The effect may be something like praying for a hundred years to God, and finding out that God never really knew we existed.
But that's the way it is, and that is indicative of the one-way traffic of commerce and information that has existed between the United States and the Philippines since 1899.
And this relationship applies to the way we use the English language, and the way English is used upon us.
To understand that we have to go back to 1901, three years after the wakening American Empire had just defeated Spain. The United States was about to embark on one of its most ambitious missions: to transform the inhabitants of the 7,100 islands of the Philippines into an English-speaking people. That year, a shipload of teachers on the SS Thomas sailed from San Francisco to the Philippines. These "Thomasites," as they called themselves, were selected from the best universities in the United States. Their task was to give basic education to as many Filipinos as possible, and to teach them to speak in the language of the civilized world, meaning English.
The 1901 log of the Thomas, a souvenir publication printed on board by the Thomasites, said: "Our nation has found herself confronted by a great problem dealing with a people who neither know nor understand the underlying principles of our civilization, yet who, for our mutual happiness and liberty, must be brought into accord with us. Between them and us is a chasm which must be bridged by a common knowledge and sympathy; fellowship must be made possible."2
The chasm they spoke of meant many things. They were coming into a territory in an era in which the balance of power in Asia had just tilted in favor of the United States. But this power did not come peacefully. Two years earlier, the race to exploit the Orient, in particular the great market that was China, intensified political and economic rivalries among Great Britain on one hand, and France, Germany, Russia and Japan on the other. Russian and German competition was jeopardizing Great Britain's trade centers in Asia. France was no help: Britain was disputing its control over African territories.
Germany was becoming more blatant about its ambition to dominate the region. Only the United States remained as Britain's possible ally, and for a now evident reason: the United States, only a generation after the Civil War and the last Indian Wars, was becoming aware of its future role as the world's next great power.
In Philippine American Literary Relations 1898-1941, (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1969) Lucila Hosillos wrote, "Since the Civil War and the Reconstruction, national developments in the United States had been directed by the industrial revolution in the capitalistic economy. Technology and economic progress had complicated the democratic ideals of independence, equality, individual rights, and social welfare. By the end of the nineteenth century, capitalistic development had engendered the feeling of power and its philosophy of force and political recognition of racial superiority on one hand and the spirit of humanitarianism and the concept of 'manifest destiny' on the other."3
Manila was a strategic base from which to conduct America's commerce with China. This motive becomes clear when we recall that as soon as the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, the United States sent Commodore George Dewey to the Philippines, purportedly to aid the Filipinos who were then fighting a war of independence against the Spanish government there. After it defeated Spain, the United States decided to colonize the archipelago, "largely in an eclectic effort to construct a system of coaling, cable, and naval stations for an integrated trade route which could help realize America's overriding ambition in the Pacific -- the penetration and ultimate domination of the fabled China market."4
Commodore Dewey recalled: "Hitherto the United States had been considered a second-class power, whose foreign policy was an unimportant factor beyond the three-mile limit of the American hemisphere."5
Although the United States anticipated some recalcitrance from Filipinos, it never imagined the acrimony of the independence movement that the Filipinos would carry over from their war with Spain. The Philippine-American War was one of the bloodiest and costliest wars in American history. But because of the temper of the times, the invasion of the Philippines would initially find overwhelming support among the American public.
"The fact is that the atmosphere of the late nineteenth century was so thoroughly permeated with racist thought (reinforced by Darwinism) that few men managed to escape it," wrote Christopher Lasch in The Anti-Imperialist as Racist.
"The idea that certain cultures and races were naturally inferior to others was almost universally held by educated, middle-class, respectable Americans -- in other words, by the dominant majority."6
Why did the Filipinos continue to oppose an obviously unbeatable enemy?
In a letter written on August 31, 1900 to General J.F. Bell of the American cavalry, Apolinario Mabini, reputed to be the theorist of the Philippine revolution, wrote: "The Filipinos know only too well that by force, they can expect nothing from the United States. They fight to show the United States that they possess sufficient culture to know their rights even when there is a pretense to hide them by means of clever sophisms."
American victory over the Philippine Republic -- just over three months old when the war began -- was all that the United States needed to become a global empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Later, the United States strengthened colonial ties to make sure the Philippines remained dependent in many ways. In 1946, the United States would finally grant independence, but would also make sure the colonial ties would be tightened with the passage of several acts that guaranteed economic subservience. The United States passed the Philippine Rehabilitation Act only on the condition that the Philippines would accept the Bell Trade Act, which ensured the unrestricted flow of American goods to the Philippines and granted "parity" rights allowing U.S. citizens equal rights to exploit Philippine natural resources. Manila, being the second most devastated city in the world after the Second World War, had no choice but to accept the terms. The Military Assistance Pact gave the U.S., through military aid, control over the military forces of the Philippines. Furthermore, the Military Bases Act allowed the United States free use of 23 base sites. This act expired in 1992 and today has been replaced by the Visiting Forces Agreement. Signed in February 1998, the VFA was opposed by many individuals and organizations, among them the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines, which said that "the VFA was signed without public consultation." Among the VFA's provisions include: "Philippine authorities' waiver of primary right to exercise jurisdiction when requested by US authorities," and "unhampered and unrestricted movement of (American) vessels and aircrafts."
The United States also strengthened colonial ties through the idea of tutelage. Ignoring the fact that the constitution of the Philippine Republic of 1898 was patterned after those of France and America, the United States had to convince its public -- and the Filipinos themselves -- that Filipinos were inept in the art of self-government. In order to justify its invasion of an independent republic, the United States had to create not only its own image as redeemer, but of the Filipinos as a people in need of redemption.
That redemption came in the form of public education, and education was to be conducted in English. Philippine Governor General of 1932 Theodore Roosevelt, the son of the President, reported in Colonial Policies of the United States: "English was adopted as the basic language, and rightly so, for the Philippines were not like Puerto Rico, which had already a single language that had been used for years.
What was necessary in the Philippines, if there were to be a united people, was a single language, at least for official use. Spanish was reasonably widely spoken when we took them, but it had not reached the back country or the smaller towns to any great extent. Probably because of the logic of this action there never has been the resistance to English encountered in Puerto Rico."
The imposition of English was not as simple as that. It involved a calculated program to discredit Spanish and the existing native languages, to convince the Filipinos of their inferiority and therefore their need for upliftment, and to glorify the material and intellectual progress the English language promised.
One proof of the Filipinos' inferiority was the alleged fact that they had not been able to produce a national literature. "The languages have produced little or nothing which can claim to be literature in the sense of elegant and artistic writing," wrote Frank R. Blake, in American Anthropologist in 1911. "The literature of the Philippine languages is literature only in the broader sense of written speech."7
This wasn't entirely true, as Governor General Roosevelt would assert in later, less unenlightened times. He would say: "The average individual has an entirely wrong impression of the Filipinos. He thinks of them as savages. They are not savages any more than the citizens of the United States are savages. Even before the Spaniards came they had their own civilization. They in no fashion resembled the Indians of America. They had a literature and a written language. What is more, this was recognized by the people who came in contact with them. La Perouse, the French explorer, said in 1787 that the Filipinos were Ôin no way inferior' to the people of Europe."8
La Perouse was not the only one to make that observation. As early as the seventeenth century, missionary grammarians already recognized the maturity of Filipino (Tagalog) poetics. In 1744, the friar Juan Francisco de San Antonio wrote in his Cronicas: "The natives are fond of verses and representations. They are indefatigable where verses are concerned, and will act them out as they read them. When they write, they heighten their style with so many rhetorical phrases, metaphors, and pictures, that many who think themselves poets would be glad to do as much; and yet this is only in prose. For when it comes to poesy, he who would understand it must be very learned in their language even among his compatriots."
Moreover, many epics were written in the native languages, some of which were already translated into Spanish by the late nineteenth century. Among these were the Ilokano epic Lam-ang, first recorded in 1889; the Bicolano Ibalon, first recorded in W.R. Retana's Archivo del Bibliofilo in Madrid in 1895; the Bagobo Tuwaang, discovered by E. Arsenio Manuel in 1956; the Ifugao Hudhud and Alim; Hinilawod, the epic of the Sulod people of Panay; the Maguindanao Indarapatra and Sulayman; the Tausug Parang Sabil; the Bantugan of the Maranaw, and the Baybayan of Bukidnon. In a study in 1962, Manuel found 13 epics from pagan Filipinos, two from Christians, and four from Moslems.
But there would be more proofs of the Filipinos' supposed intellectual inferiority. One was the fact that after three centuries under Spain, Filipinos allegedly never produced any significant literature in Spanish. Again this wasn't true. It ignored the reality of censorship, the fact that Spanish friars deliberately withheld the language from the Filipinos, believing that knowledge of the language would incite Filipinos to rebel against ecclesiastical control.
Harley Harris Bartlett, in a study called "Vernacular Literature in the Philippines," published in Michigan Alumnus Quarterly Review in 1936, wrote: "Nothing could be printed without permission, and permission was seldom granted, except for a religious book of which it could be certified by the censor aparece que nada contiene contrario a la fe.
All too prevalent among the clerics was the attitude of the Franciscan friar, Miguel Lucio Bustamante, who, writing in Tagalog, told Filipinos that they ought not to understand Spanish, for the moment they could speak Spanish they would become enemies of the King and God. They ought to learn only to say their prayers and to spend the rest of their time on their carabaos."
The clergy's paranoia was not unfounded. By the late nineteenth century, the Philippines was opened to international trade, creating a new Filipino middle class who sent their children to be educated in Europe. This new generation of Filipinos brought home radical ideas and created what is now referred to as El Siglo Oro, the golden age of Hispanic Filipino literature. Among the writers of this age were Jose Rizal, Jose Burgos, Marcelo del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena, and other intellectuals of the Reform Movement.
Only later would the American regime take advantage of Rizal's anti-clerical works to cut Filipinos from their Spanish past. But to curtail the infestation of nationalist ideas, and because most anti-colonial literature was still being written in Spanish, the United States passed the Sedition Law on November 4, 1901, limiting writing in that language and imposing the death penalty or prolonged imprisonment for anyone who spoke, wrote or published "scurrilous libels" against the American colonial government. The unintended effect here was it stimulated writing in the Philippine languages, led by the growing lingua franca that was Tagalog, which were not understood by the censors, and which they had already decided was not worthy of producing "artistic writing." But by censoring the use of Spanish, the U.S. made sure anything written in it would remain inaccessible, and therefore non-existent.
"The ability to read means little in a society where people had nothing to read worthy of being called a literature," wrote James Le Roy in The Americans in the Philippines in 1914. "It was felt that the Philippines had not produced a body of writings which would serve to either acquaint its people with world movements and thought or to bring to them a rich native culture."9
It was all very clear: The fact that Spanish never became the common language despite three centuries of Spanish rule, that no significant literature in Spanish was ever produced by the Filipinos, and their native languages were not sophisticated enough to produce art, were all proofs that the Filipinos were backward and incapable of self-rule, and that colonization was justified, and necessary. By having them go through the pains of learning a new language, the United States reinforced the mentor-pupil relationship, reinforced also its superiority over what Rudyard Kipling described in his famous poem as America's "new-caught sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child."
Filipino author Nick Joaquin, writing in The Sunday Times Magazine in 1957, described it this way: "A people that had got as far as Baudelaire in one language was being returned to the ABC's of another and taught to read 'Humpty-Dumpty' and 'The Little Red Hen' instead of Cervantes, Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, and Ruben Dario."10
The terms used to refer to Filipinos in several reports and letters from that period reveal what the current attitude was: they were "savages," "injuns," "niggers," and "gooks." By proving beyond doubt that Filipinos were inferior, President McKinley's divine mission to carry out the United States' "manifest destiny" in the Pacific was now justified.
"The political and economic background of Philippine American relations colored the Filipino image in the United States," wrote Hosillos. "Biased reportage and partisan writing, playing up the defects of the Filipino character and ignoring Filipino achievements, distorted the Filipino image. Organized business interests, both in the United States and in the Philippines, lauded works distorting the Filipino image as part of the campaign for racial prejudice and anti-independence."
English, naturally, would pluck the Filipinos out of their backwardness, and would keep them attuned to the progress made possible by Anglo-Saxon knowledge and traditions. Popular education was something the Filipinos never had under Spain, and was therefore an effective way to further demonize the vanquished colonizers. In 1900 the Director of Education made English the official language "with the intention of making it the common language of the people, the medium of expression on the street and in the home, as well as in the classroom, in the school shop, and on the school playground."
Bienvenido and Cynthia Nograles Lumbera, editors of Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology, wrote: "Through English, the flow of cultural influence was facilitated and an immediate gain for the colonizers as the progressive deterioration of resistance to American colonial control. English opened the floodgates of colonial values through the conduits of textbooks originally intended for American children; books and magazines beamed at an American audience that familiarized Filipinos with the blessings of economic affluence in a capitalist country; phonograph records that infected young Filipinos with the same concerns and priorities as American teenagers; and films that vividly recreated for the Filipino audiences life in the U.S., feeding the minds of the young with bogus images of a just and altruistic government and its wondrously happy and contented citizens."
Historian Renato Constantino, in an essay called The Mis-Education of the Filipino, said: "The Filipinos became avid consumers of American products and the Philippines, a fertile ground for American investment." But there was something else that English achieved in the Philippines. He wrote: "English became the wedge that separated the Filipinos from their past at the same time that it helped to further separate educated Filipinos from the masses."11
In other words, English became a mark of social standing. The more proficient one was in it, the more education one was presumed to have had. This perception was important in controlling the islands. When the United States organized the Philippine Assembly shortly after the Philippine American War, it restricted voting to Filipinos who were above a certain income and who had had considerable American education.
Historically, this is nothing new. The policy is similar to the one adopted when the original thirteen United States were integrated, whereby only people of property were allowed to participate in democracy.
By doing this the United States ensured that members of the native law-making body would come from wealthy Filipinos who would protect their own businesses as well as those of the United States. These native lawmakers would be kept under the tutelage of the United States, a relationship that ensured that only the United States would decide if and when the Filipinos were smart enough for self-rule.
Richard E. Welch, Jr. wrote in Response to Imperialism: "If American administrators sought to promote 'progress' in the islands, they often fell victim to the occupational disease of the pedagogue who would dominate as well as instruct and who remains reluctant to declare his pupil equipped for the freedom of graduation. Tutelage can have a crippling effect, and apprenticeship too long continued can promote a sense of psychological as well as economic dependence."12
Today in the Philippines, English is the official language of media, government, business, and higher education. English is a status symbol: an indication of being civilized. The perception that English is a sign of progress and education and the native languages a sign of backwardness has been so successfully instilled in Filipinos that even today, many Filipinos are ashamed to be caught speaking their language.
In everyday life, from shopping to government and business transactions, a Filipino must speak English if he or she is to be taken seriously. This bias is reinforced even in the U.S., with accent discrimination. In American mass media, for instance, a person with an accent is often portrayed as stupid, no matter how articulate he may be in another language. An interesting exception has been pointed out to me, however: this form of discrimination does not generally apply to people with British or French accents.
"Colonial subjugation for more than three hundred years during which the Filipinos were kept ignorant and made to believe that they belonged to an inferior race produced a cultural neurosis which admitted the superiority of the conqueror," observed Hosillos. "The trend toward growth and progress attainable only through Westernization and the American outlook encouraged imitation in almost all phases of life. The ability to speak, read, and write in English became an enviable achievement of the "modern" Filipino; it became the key to one's success in life."
This idea of success became more apparent to students during the first two decades of the American regime. They were modern young people who witnessed the gradual demise of Filipino literature in Spanish, a demise occasioned by dwindling audiences. At the same time, American education created an increasing English readership. From this milieu -- the transition of the Philippines from one language to another -- a new branch of Philippine literature would emerge: the literature of the American colonial people.
Philippine literature in English began as an extension of the tutelage relationship between the United States and the Philippines. In literature's case, it was literally so : In the first decade the United States established the University of the Philippines, and patterned it after Harvard. Training here was rigorous and graduating from it would soon rival the distinction of graduating from the universities founded by the Spaniards in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1910 the University of the Philippines published its College Folio, the first scholarly journal in English to be published in the country. It was a landmark of sorts, because through the efforts of Dean and Harriet Fansler of the English Department, Filipinos for the first time were encouraged to write beyond imitations of the standard reading texts of Longfellow, Irving, Holmes, Arnold, Eliot, and even Shakespeare.
By 1915, the American-owned Philippines Free Press, which had only published Americans, was receiving so many poetry submissions from Filipinos that it gave in, but not without first commenting: "The Free Press is not much in favor of encouraging the young Filipino to verse, for he seems to take to it like a duck to water, and with much less reason."
It can be said that Philippine literature in English began when Filipinos writing in English began writing about themselves. Teachers like T. Inglis Moore were responsible for weaning Filipino writers from the early Romantic models. In 1930 he wrote: "The FilipinoÉhas to learn not only to write with English but to write against it. He has to write English without becoming an Englishman or American. This difficult task is necessary not because Filipino English is better than English, but because a Filipino literature must remain Filipino if it intends to be literature."
Many Filipino poets followed his advice. The nationalism created by the literature of the Reform Movement would still echo under the new colonial regime, and not surprisingly, once Filipino poets began writing "Filipino English," many of them wrote about their dual identity.
A poem by Trinidad Tarrosa Subido, written in 1940, summed up the angst of the age:
They took away the language of my blood,
Giving me one "more widely understood."
Now Lips can never
Never with the Soul-of-Me commune:
Alas, how can I interpret my Mood?
They took away the language of my blood.
Similarly, Rafael Zulueta y da Costa, in his famous poem "Like the Molave" (1940), questioned the alleged paucity of Filipino culture, and took inspiration from an American literary rebel, Walt Whitman:
My American friend says:
Show me one great Filipino speech to make your people listen through centuries;
Show me one great Filipino song rich with the soul of your seven thousand isles;
Show me one great Filipino dream, forever sword and shield --
Friend, our silences are long but we also have our speeches...Speeches short before the firing squad, and yet of love.13
The issue of language and identity would become more prominent in the 1960s, during the period of renewed nationalism in the Philippines. The sentiment would become stronger among Tagalog writers, who continued to write in the dialect despite the disadvantage posed by English media and education. Alejandro Abadilla, in his book Tanagabadilla (1965) wrote:
Ang poesyang Ingles
Pilipino'y huwad,
Lagi nang maisip
Paintelektuwad!
(English poetry
By Filipinos is a fakery,
Always in deep thought,
In intellectoilet pose!)14
Whether it was fake intellectualism or not, soon a number of Filipinos would eventually study in the United States, or settle there. In 1905, Philippine American government scholars, known as pensionados, published The Filipino Students' Magazine in Berkeley, which carried poems in English and Spanish. We can also say this is the beginning of Filipino American literature; later, after several waves of immigration from the Philippines to the United States, these two branches of Filipino literature in English would develop their own literary histories, with sometimes interweaving and sometimes conflicting intersections.
Two Filipinos who received considerable recognition during the early years of Filipino American literature were Jose Garcia Villa and Carlos Bulosan. No two writers could be more different from one another.
In the Philippines, Villa was lionized because he represented the break from morality and tradition that Filipino poets had long wanted to achieve. The combination of Hispanic Catholicism and American Protestanism left no room for the moral and artistic experiments of Villa, who was suspended from the University of the Philippines for using sexually graphic language in his poetry.
Settling in New York City's Greenwich Village at age 21, he was lauded by poets like Marianne Moore, Mark van Doren, e.e. cummings, and Edith Sitwell, who wrote, in her introduction to Villa's Selected Poems and New, "The best of these poems are amongst the most beautiful written in our time." He received several of the country's major national awards and fellowships, and loved to portray himself as a global artiste:
The country that is my country
Is not of this hemisphere, nor any
Other: is neither west nor east:
Nor is it on the north or south:
I reject the littleness of the compass.
Is not the Philippines:
Nor America: nor SpainÉ
I disclaim
Nations, tribes, peoples, flags:
I disclaim the Filipino.15
Bulosan, an icon of Filipino American literature, was born in 1911 and immigrated at age 18. A self-taught writer, he worked in farms on the West Coast and helped organize farm labor. While he is more remembered for his fiction, particularly his classic America is in the Heart, he also wrote poetry and became a champion of Filipino immigrant workers living in harsh conditions in the United States. Interestingly enough, his works never really caught on in the Philippines, where his portrayal of farm life and racial prejudice ran against the still commonly held image of America as a wealthy, happy utopia:
You did not give America to me, and never will.
America is in the hearts of people that live in it.
But it is worth the coming, the sacrifice, the idealism.16
Both these writers broke ground, because after them it became clear that the United States offered unlimited opportunities for publication. In 1958 Filipino writer NVM Gonzales wrote in the Free Press that "some geniusÉmight make a name for himself in the United States." This obsession still pervades Philippine letters to this day. While opportunities for publication and prizes and professorships have grown in the Philippines, publication in the United States is still the desirable goal. A writer in the Philippines is not "made" until he has been published in the U.S. At the same time, a more international readership seems to be the only alternative for a writer with a dwindling audience in his own home.
(See Part 2) |
