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.
Today, the Filipino writer in English seems to be facing the same fate of the Filipino writer in Spanish a hundred years ago. With ever increasing nationalism in the Philippines, the Tagalog-based national language, Filipino, is gaining more ground as the official medium of education and government communications. Increasingly, too, mass media uses Filipino. The death of Philippine literature in English had been predicted since the 1960s. In a symposium conducted by the US Information Service in 1954, writer Gregorio Brillantes said that "the outlook for Philippine writing in the 1960s was less bright than it had been in the 1940s."
But in the same symposium poet and novelist Nick Joaquin gave a less pessimistic prediction. "There are many young writers, he said, and they are doing something to the English language: it is no longer simple English; not the English of America or England, but their English. These young writers, said Mr. Joaquin, will continue to write."17
Why then do Filipinos continue to write in English? In the 60s and 70s English was a burning political issue, and many writers were compelled to do some soul searching. Can English truly express what I think and feel? Am I a traitor to my country for writing in English?
A poet and former pensionado, Francisco Arcellana, wrote: "There is something uncommon in the not enviable situation of the Filipino writer in English and this is the insuperable problems of language. The life from which he draws substance is lived in a language different from the language he uses. He is therefore twice removed: by the language and by the work of art. But the writer doesn't choose his language -- no more than he chooses to write. It is surely an accident that the Filipino writer in English writes in English, a historical mistake."18
A curious mutation of this "historical mistake" was the increasing popularity, beginning in the late 50s, of Taglish, the urban-centered, media-fueled, hip young lingo that merged Tagalog and English. Poet Rolando Tinio was perhaps the first to use the language in poetry, creating poems like "Valediction sa Hillcrest," written in Iowa in 1958:
Pagkacollect ng Railway Express sa aking things
(Deretso na iyon sa barko while I take the plane),
Inakyat kong muli ang N-311 at dahil dead of winter,
Nakatopcoat at galoshes akong
Nag-right turn sa N wing ng mahabang dilimÉ19
After the Railway Express collected my things
(They're heading straight to the boat while I take the plane)
I took the N-311 once more and since it was dead of winter,
I was wearing my topcoat and galoshes
As I made a right turn to the N wing in the lengthy darkness..20
Although Tinio disavowed Taglish poetry after a while, he still maintained the freedom of the poet to write in any language he wanted:
"There seems very little in our national literatures which can be solved in terms of programs. The Tagalog writer will write in Tagalog for those who wish to read in Tagalog. The Spanish writer will write in Spanish for those who wish to read in Spanish. And, for as long as there are readers in English, the best thing for the Filipino writer in English is to write in English. If tomorrow, I suddenly recide to read nothing but Tagalog poems, perhaps even to write Tagalog poems -- well, isn't that nice? Perhaps I will, and perhaps I won't, but whatever I choose to do is certainly nobody else's business."21
Even today the issue of language and identity continues to be discussed in the Philippines. In an issue of the Asian Pacific American Journal in 1998, novelist and poet Jose Dalisay said: "Among the writers I know here in Manila, the issue of whether to write in English has ceased to be an issue -- if it ever truly was; you write in the language you know, and through which you can do more knowing; otherwise, quite simply, you can't and you don't."22
Clearly, one legacy of the imposition of English in the Philippines is a continuing identity crisis among Filipino writers, a crisis that was not even present during the Spanish era. If the dire predictions do come true, however, and Philippine literature in English dies a natural death, there is evidently another center in which this literature will continue. A new generation of Filipinos and Filipino Americans are being published in the United States, a trend that seemed to have hit its stride shortly after Filipinos overthrew Ferdinand Marcos in 1986.
It has been noted that political interest fueled interest in Philippine literature at the beginning of this century, and it still does today.
Whether the United States will accept the literature of its former pupil is a different matter altogether. In a seminar on British literature in Cambridge, U.K., in 1989, the critic George Steiner said that the most exciting British literature was coming from its former colonies. Will America look to its former colony and give its literature the same honor? Possibly, but in doing so the United States will also eventually have to confront the truth about 1899: even today, there is no official acknowledgement that the Philippine-American War was a war of aggression. The economic relationship that motivated the United States to colonize is still largely in place. Filipinos, by virtue of their unceasing poverty and political instability, are still seen as the backward children that they were a hundred years ago, the infantiles who could not produce literature, in Spanish, English or their native languages, because of what Arthur Riggs, in an essay called "Filipino Literature and Drama" published in Overland Monthly in 1905, blamed on "a lack of hard, common sense, analytic powers, power of synthesis or grasp of principles."23 By using these same constructs applied a hundred years ago, it is easy to justify why such a people still need to be continually uplifted and civilized.
And Filipino literature in English -- will it suffer the same fate as Filipino Hispanic literature? A decade ago this seemed likely. But today, when the centers of literature are no longer geographically predictable, and the Internet continues to create new readerships throughout the world, it may just be possible that this literature will survive for a while. But one thing is certain. At the close of the first century of the American Empire, it is obvious that the United States has achieved its goal: to transform Filipinos, or at least a great majority of them, into an English speaking nation.
Eric Gamalinda was born in Manila, where he worked as an editor and journalist, and where he previously published three novels, a collection of stories and poetry. His work has appeared in Harper's Magazine and in various international journals, as well as several anthologies. He received the Centennial Literary Prize in 1998 for his novel, My Sad Republic. A resident of New York since 1994, he currently teaches at New York University.
1George Dewey, The Autobiography of George Dewey. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913, 156.
2Ronald P. Gleason, ed., The Log of the Thomas. Publisher not specified, 1901, 11.
3Lucila Hosillos, Philippine American Literary Relations 1898-1941. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1969, 27.
4Thomas J. McCormick, "Insular Possessions for the China Market," American Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1973, 64.
5The Autobiography of George Dewey , 219
6Christopher Lasch, "The Anti-Imperialist as Racist," American Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1973, 117.
7Philippine American Literary Relations 1898-1941 , 107.
8Theodore Roosevelt, Colonial Policies of the United States. New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc., 1937, 134.
9Philippine American Literary Relations 1898-1941, 40.10Ibid, 44.
11Renato Constantino, The Filipino in the Philippines and Other Essays. Quezon City: Malaya Books, 1966.
12Richard E. Welch, Jr., Response to Imperialism. University of North Carolina Press, 1979.
13Excerpts of Tarrosa Subido and Zulueta y da Costa from Gemino H. Abad, ed., Man of Earth. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1989.
14Translation by B. Lumbera in Antonio Manuud, ed., Brown Heritage. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1967, 357.
15Jose Garcia Villa, Selected Poems and New. New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958.
16Man of Earth.
7Brown Heritage, 794.
18Ibid, 607.
19Bienvenido Lumbera, Cynthia Nograles Lumbera, eds., Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology. Manila: National Bookstore, 1982, 368.
20Translation by Gamalinda.
21Brown Heritage, 619.
22Asian Pacific American Journal. New York: Asian American Writers Workshop, 1998
23Philippine American Literary Relations 1898-1941,107.
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