Left Handed Words (2007)

Friday, October 31, 2008

A SAD, SAD DAY FOR THE SAD REPUBLIC

STATEMENT FROM FORMER ACTING

KWF CHAIR RICARDO MA. DURAN NOLASCO

(October 31, 2008) 

           

Yesterday, October 30, at around 6:06 pm,  I received a faxed copy of an order signed by the President relieving me as acting chair of the Komisyon sa Wikang Filipino and appointing someone else as OIC.  The order was dated October 28, 2008.  A few minutes before that, I was able to talk to Secretary Jake Lagonera by mobile phone who confirmed the existence of such a directive from the President.  Upon receipt thereof, I tendered my resignation as acting commissioner representing the Bicol language.  As of today, October 31, I no longer hold any position with the KWF.  I thank the President for allowing me to serve as acting chair for the last two and a half years. But I salute the brave men, women and children who continue to struggle against linguistic and cultural inequities in this country and would like to see the day when our own languages and the languages of wider communication are equally accepted, valued, promoted and protected. 

 

 

(SIGNED)

RICARDO MA. DURAN NOLASCO, Ph.D.

 

Labels: , , ,

Thursday, October 30, 2008

Incommunicado, 1979

INCOMMUNICADO

  

Iti final a pammadso nga agsarak iti kararua ni Bannuar ken ti amana, ni Padre Ili. Agpadada a sumuko iti balikas, ti anak iti bartolina, ti ama iti pannakaisina ti ulona iti bagina tapno salaan dagiti nangkautibo iti lengguahe ti wayawaya. Mapukawda ti engkanto ken poder dagiti sao kadagiti bibigda—ti ama ken ti anak--agingga nga agbanag ti panagungar ti bagi manipud iti tapok ti ngatangata.

                                                       

                                                            Manipud iti estoria ti Dangadang. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Iti maysa a rabii a naimut ti littugaw kadagiti bakras ti Bantay Didaya a nagsarakanta manen kalpasan ti adu bulan a dagiti laeng maar-arakattot a balikas kadagiti bungon ti Marlboro a nalabaga a paggaayatmo nga ammalan no kasta nga engkantaduennaka ti poetika ti rebolusion ket apirasem, iti lulonam kas iti pispismo, dagiti pakabuklan ti wayawaya iti aginaldaw a biag ti ili, daytoy ti kinunam kaniak, tatang: “Maulit-ulit nga awan labas ti pakasaritaan a di mangikankano iti kaaduan.”

            Iti adalem ti kinasipnget iti dayta a rabii a ti riaw laeng dagiti mangrabrabii a billit ti kaduata, inladawak dagiti tawen a dita nagkita, siak iti panagbirbirokko kadagiti umno a saludsod, sika iti panagbirbirokmo kadagiti makasair a sungbat kadagiti an-anek-eken ti ili.

            Nagubingak iti panaglanganmo iti inaldaw-aldaw ket ni laeng nanang ti adda kadagiti kanito nga agpangpangaduaak.

Ket ita, iti dayta a rabii, binallaagannak: “Ti korona nga itangtanggaya dagiti bayoneta kas kadagiti napipigsa nga igam itatta, saan nga agbayag daytoy ta ti daga a mangsapsappuyot iti daytoy a korona ket alisto laeng nga agrugnay.”

Nangngegko ti kinunam, ket inkabesak ti kada aweng ti sirib a naggapu kenka.

Saan a para kaniak dagitoy, ammok.

Ket iti adalem a sipnget, miniram ti panagreggaay ti daga a mangsapsappuyot kadagiti bayoneta nakaiparabawan ti korona.

            Mangrugiak idin nga agsaludsod kadagiti nakain-inaka a bambanag.

            Mangrugi metten nga agdanag ni nanang, agdanag para kaniak.  Iti maysa nga aldaw, kinunana nga awan iti panunotna, “Bannuar, Bannuar, diakon kayat ti agikali kadagiti libro, kadagiti balikas, kadagiti makadunggiar a testamento dagiti amin nga inhustisia itatta.”

            Kinitak laeng ni nanang, minalangaak.

            Yaw-awatna idi ti tasa ti kape a tinimplana para kaniak.

            Addaak idin iti seminario, ket saan a mailimed kadakami dagiti pasamak.

            Maysa a padi ti pinugotanda iti ulo idiay Bakun. Inubonda ti agdardara pay laeng nga ulona iti maysa a natiradan a kayo sada sinalsalaan, kas ritual ti balligi ti kinaranggas ken kinadamsak. Intanemda ti bagina iti narabaw a tanem kalpasan ti panangipabpabuyada iti munisipio.

            Maysa a madre ti niramesda nga immuna sada inkali iti narabaw a tanem iti maysa a kabakiran a mangtantannawag kadagiti kataltalonan iti laud.

            Maysa pay a seminarista ti inkipasda, dinukotda manipud iti maysa a paggigimongan. Inyadayoda iti ka-Manilaan ket iti nalawa a kabambantayan iti daya, sadiayda nga inkali a sibibiag.

            Maysa pay a padi ti sinibbarut dagiti ahente ti rehimen. Nagpukaw a kasla asuk ket agingga ita, di pay nabirokan.

            Nakabutbuteng dagidi a panawen.

Adda mata dagiti diding.

Adda lapayag dagiti balay dagiti kaarruba.

Adda bibig dagiti impato a gagayyem.

Ken adda di matawaran a poder dagiti kalsada.

Iti man warnakan wenno iti pagadalan wenno iti telebision, adda sippayot kadagiti sao a maisawang. Maysa nga artista ti nangabalbalay iti sagrado a sao ti Baro a Gimong ket idinto a kunaenna a ti masapul iti panagdur-as ket disiplina, imbagana a bisikleta. Iti karsel a nagapon, nagdalus kadagiti naaangseg nga inidoro dagiti soldado a no uminom dagitoy ket kalsa sarangusong.

Naturay ti armada dagiti anniniwan a no agiwaras iti kinaranggas ket kas kadagiti dudon a dimmarup kadagiti nalawa a kapagayan idiay Nueva Ecija, a kalpasan ti idadarupda ket nabati laengen dagiti rurog dagiti nakabugbugi

a pagay ken dagiti saning-i dagiti agtagibalay.  

            Iti naminsan nga isasar-ongmi ken nanang idiay Laoag, daytoy ti nasaksiak: Nagdara dagiti puraw a pader ti kapitolio a kunam la no kinautibo dagiti agip-igup iti dara sada intupra kadagiti semento tapno iti itutupar ti ubing nga init ket maikassaba ti sabali nga ebanghelio.

            Imperialista! Imperialista! kuna ti pader.

          Ibagsak ang tuta ng Kano! kuna pay ti abayna.

          Presidente, tuta, tuta! kuna pay ti sabali.

            Komunismo ti agari!

            Agkabannuag, mapankayo iti away!

            Berdugo ti ari, berdugo, berdugo!

          Makitam dagiti agkarkaranting nga ima kadagiti pader, dagiti arutang a naaramat a pangpinturada iti nakalburuan a pader. Ngem nabuddak ti kolor ti rebolusion, kas iti dara nga agsayasay kadagiti duogan a semento a nanglikmot iti duogan met laeng a kapitolio.

            Ditoy, ditoy met laengen a kapitolio ti nakasaksiak ti umuna a kinasuitik ti Baro a Gimong.

            Addaak idin iti Kabataang Barangay.

            Nalpasen ti minimini ti baro a konstitusion ket maidiayan daytoy iti maysa a referendum.

            Di pay nalpas ti butos, siento porsienton ti resulta iti Ilokos!

            Adu a salamangka dagiti lapis ken dagiti buteng ti babai a lider. Karatista, no agkibaltangka iti isungbatmo iti diayana a panangallilaw iti ili iti nagan ti baro a konstitusion ken adu a killo a paglintegan, agsalakanka laengen iti ospital dagiti nablo. Wenno iti ospital dagiti agmauyong.

Disiotsok idin, timmapugakon iti kolehio, ket uray no sikikidemak ket memoriadokon dagiti checkpoint dagiti militar a kanayon a nakasirip no ababa ti buokmo segun iti ‘clean cut look’ ti Baro a Gimong.

Panawen idin dagiti saragisag a pagan-anay, ket ni Daria Ramirez, iti pagsinean a Life iti asideg ti tiendaan ti Laoag, sadiay, sadiay idi nga agkarkarag ni Daria Ramirez, ti umuna a babai nga innak inayat ngem dinak met inay-ayat, ti umuna a babai a gargari ti pusok iti panawen ti gerra, ti babai nga agkarkararag a kasla siak ti ibagbagana iti kararagna, siak ti ur-urayenna, siak ti itudtudona, siak ti pangpangngeganna,  “Lord, Lord, give me a lover.”

Anian!

Ket iti agsarsaragisag a naingpis a wetlook ni Daria Ramirez, ket iti disiotso nga edadmo a kas kaniak, dimo mapagdasig ti reggetmo a makirinnapukrapok kadagiti aktibista dagiti arutang ken kadagiti agaktibista met laeng a rikna gapu iti mariing nga ayat kadagiti dakulap, sa kadagiti luppo, sa iti teltel, santo iti agbegbeggang a barukong.

Lord, Lord, give me a lover, kuna ti diosa a diwata a mutia a  Daria Ramirez ket malipatak nga insegida ti rebolusion iti nagan ti isu amin nga umili. Isu nga iti agsipnget, kas panagkumpable, kas panangdawat iti pammakawan, iti sakaanan ti nakabitin a Jesukristo, isuna a nailansa iti krus, iti naulimek a malem iti rebolusionario a simbaan dagiti Aglipayano iti abay ti rebolusionario a pader ti puraw a kapitolio iti Laoag, sadiay, sadiay nga inkarkararagko, “Lord, Lord, give me a lover.”

Saan nga immay kaniak ni Daria Ramirez. Nungka, saan, saan a pulos, uray no kadagiti rabii a malpas ti teach-in maipapan iti rebolusion ket umay kaniak ti ladawanna, umagibas isuna iti panunotko, agampayag kadagiti pader ket kas iti anghel dela guardia ket iwaragawagna ti madagdagullit a rebolusion iti pusok, Lord, Lord, Lord, give me a lover.

Ngem simmangpet ni Wayawaya kaniak.

Diak mamati idi a Wayawaya ti naganna. Kunak idi nga ang-angawennak ti naumbi a rupana, ti naamo nga isemna, ti managpabus-oy a kallid iti makannigid a pingpingna.

Ngem ta isuna, ni Wayawaya!

Kitaek ti class cardmo, kinunak.

Dika mamati a Wayawaya ti naganko?

Pinerrengko, ngem ti timekna a kasla agkankanta ti simmalikepkep iti bagik. Nariknak idin ti gutad ti engkanto ti umuna nga ayat a kunada, ti ayat a namagbalinsuek iti kinataok.

Atiddog a buok a nalanaan iti Johnson’s, dayta ti malagipko iti umuna a panagkitami ken Wayawaya, panagkita a di inggagara no di ket pinagtakkub dagiti pasamak. Gumilap dayta a buok iti ubing a bigat idiay Diliman nga immuna nagsarakanmi nupay dikami met nagsinsinnarak, kas nakunakon itay.

Addakami iti maysa a teach-in iti maysa kadagiti nakalemmeng nga opisina ti maysa met a kunsintidor a propesor,  maysa a napeklan a buyot ti rebolusion a mamagbalbaliw iti balabala ti gimong ket kontra-partido ti abusado a rehimen.

Addakami iti suli iti nailet nga opisina a nairanta a para laeng iti lima a tao ngem sangapulo ket tallokami amin.

“Nireydda ti nobisiado ti San Jose idiay Novaliches,” kuna ti maysa seminarista nga agig-iggem iti gitara. “Itay kano laeng bigat. Kumarkaro ti dida panangikankano iti simbaan.”

Kinitak ni Wayawaya ket sadiay a nariknak ti maysa a panagdanag.

Ita pay ket ammokon: diak ipalubos a mapukaw kaniak ni Wayawaya. Diak ipalubos a yadayoda kaniak, iti imatangko, iti sibayko, iti pusok.

            “Masapul ti panagsagana,” kinuna manen ti seminarista. “Adu kano pay dagiti isarunoda a seminario ken simbaan. Atiddog ti listaanda.”

            “Kitaek man ti ID-m,” indawatko ken Wayawaya, iti wagas a kasla arasaas. Nariknak ti panagbangag ti bosesko, ken ti panagari ti nerbios iti karabukobko. Kasla adda naigangal a bukel ti santol iti lilidduokak. Agbaybayo ti barukongko, a di masansan a mapaspasamak. Seminaristaak, Apo Dios a manangngaasi, kunak. Ngem apayaunayen ti umagibas dagitoy a rikna a diak man mapengdan. Kasla adda sariwawek a kobra ti naipupok iti sellangko ket agpaisalakan daytoy iti pus-ongko.

            “Dika mamati?” Adda di inggagara a gargari iti bosesna. Ket ti lung-ayna ket lung-ay ti sukaw iti maysa a danaw idiay Suba, ti sukaw nga ay-ayamen ti littugaw nga aggapu iti Sabangan santo agpaarayat kadagiti bambantay a kimmurdon iti daya. Idi pay ket kayatkon a tagikuaenen dayta a timek, idulinko iti lakasa ti pusok tapno iti bigat, kadagiti disoras ti pannakairidep, riingek dayta a boses, wenno riingennak, tapno kadagiti di mabugbugiaw a kanito ket pagsaritaanmi ti daniw ti rebolusion ken ti aweng ti panagwaywayas ti ili.

            Ken dagiti putot ti rebolusion nga inawenmi, dakami, siak nga agnagan iti Bannuar, isuna nga agnagan iti Wayawaya.

            “Nakakaskasdaaw. Diak pay nakakita iti kasta a nagan. Wenno nakangngeg. Malaksid iti arapaap,” kinunak. Immisemak, iti mababain nga isem, iti kasla isem ti ubing a naduktalan ti inangna  a nagisakibot daytoy iti dolse.

            “Come on, Bannuar. This is the twentieth century.”

            “Agpayso,” kinunak. Ngem diak nangngeg ti insungbatko. Pagammuan adda nanalpaak iti teltelko, sa ti agsasaganad a kugtar kadagiti takiagko, sa kadagiti luppok, sa ti pang-or ti putan ti kuarentaisingko iti ulok.

            “Matayakon, Wayawaya,” kinunak.

            Awanen ti ammok pay kalpasanna.     

            Iti Bartlino 28, sadiay ti nagsublian ti puotko.

            Malaksid iti dua dangan a kuadrado a tawa a pagilusotanda iti ania man a kayatda nga ilusot, sangagasut ket dua nga aldaw ti napalabas sakbay a nasirayak ti init.

            Diak ammo no kasano a nalasatak daytoy.

            Binilangko dagiti aldaw iti ramayko, sa iti ramay dagiti sakak.

            Idi maibus dagitoy, inramanko dagiti kukok, sa dagiti lapayagko, sa dagiti abut dagiti agongko. Amin, amin a pagilasinan no manon nga aldaw a diak nasirayan ti init.

            Iti kada aldaw ket ti awan patinggana a ritual ti pannakaaradas ti balikas manipud iti bibigko.

            Diak maisawang ti kinaasinnok: a siak ti bannuar, a siak ni Bannuar, a siak, iti kadagupan dagiti amin a panagsagaba, siak, siak, siak ti saksi iti kamaudiananna nga aldaw.

            Naganmo? nagubsang a saludsod ti soldado. Ubing a soldado a no agtagalog ket kasla latta agil-ilokano.

            Bannuar, isungbatko.

            Tangina nito at niloloko pa yata ako!

            Pangalan mo sabi? Nabangag ti bosesna. Adda suron nga umip-ipus iti timekna. Wenno dagensen iti panagmanso iti kapada nga agkabannuag, kapada nga agtagtagainep para iti ili.

            Bannuar.

            Diak salsaludsoden no ania ti pagbalinam iti sumuno nga aldaw, gago!

            Mariknak dagiti nabantot a gemgem nga agdisso iti rupak, iti pispisko, iti teltelko, iti barukongko.

            Manalpaak ti rupak ket mabariwengwengak.

            Tagikukuaennak ti bariwangwang, idiayak iti bariwangwang, idiayak nga aglansad, iti kaunggan ti nangisit nga abut, iti lansad dagiti amin a panagtutuok, iti sipnget dagiti amin a kasipngetan.           

            Maminsan pay a panalpaakennak ti soldado a no ar-arigen ket kakaek, manongek, ti soldado a di agaddayo dagiti tawenmi, ti soldado a no nagkurus koma dagiti dalanmi ket nalabit a kinainnay-ayamko iti kudisi wenno ullaw wenno gubgubat kadagiti rabii a naslag ti bulan wenno panagtaliw iti arrarawan kadagiti aldaw a kaar-arado dagiti kataltalonan. Alaenmi ti alat, ket kadagiti nabalinsuek a talon a dinalanan ti arado, birokenmi sadiay ti maisakmol nga arrarawan, yawidmi kadagiti balbalaymi tapno maikirog tapno iti sardam, iti ubing a sardam dagiti sarsarita dagiti ugma ken estoria dagiti ar-aria a pagbutbutngan, ket pagraranudanmi, maysa nga arrarawan iti kada sakmol a mangted iti sustansia iti mabisbisinan a bagi.

            Kayatko ti agsalakan, ti mangibaga a “Saan, saan kadi, manong!” ngem kasla tudo dagiti gemgemna iti pispisko ket mabtak dagiti bibigko ket agsayasay ti dara iti ngiwatko. Iti kasta, agbuteng dagiti balikas iti dilak, agsanudda amin, aglemmengda kadagiti kueba iti barukongko ket uray no agpaarayatak kadagiti agsaksaksi a diding, iti agsaksaksi a sipnget, uray no agkamangak iti appupo ti bartolina, uray no agpaisalakanak iti saklot dagiti nalamiis a datar, awan, awan sumngaw a balikas kadagiti bibigko. Mamedmedan ti dilak, ibartolina daytoy ti sabali a klase ti buteng.

            Tanginang tibak na ito. Di niya pinipili ang kinakalaban. Uray ti presidente, dina ketdin ikankano. Kasla saan ketdin nga Ilokano. ‘Bag koma no sabali a tao. Ti ubing a soldado daytoy, iti panangikanawa iti Ilokano a presidente.            

            Mangngegko dagitoy, ngem kadagiti lapayagko laeng, sadiayda a mangmangted iti kuriro, iti buong ti ulo. Agpulpuligos ti lubong, agwerwerret nga agud-uddog, wenno agud-uddog  nga agwerwerret. Ket aguddogak a maiwerret, wenno maiwerretak nga aguddog iti madagdagullit a pannusa dagiti soldado ti Baro a Gimong.

            Ita, diak makasao.

            Nagsanudek ti dilak, napanen iti kibungkibongko.

            Wenno addan iti kibungkibongko ti dilak.

            Kitaenta man ti laing daytoy a tibak, kuna ti kakaek a soldado.

            Nangngegko ti karasakas ti danum, sa ti timba a naikkan iti danum.

            Kitaenta man ti laingmo, adi a manangngaasi iti ili ngem di met manangngaasi iti bukodna a bagi, inlaawna iti boses a naturay, kasla boses nga aggapu iti kanion, iti ngudo ti paltog, wenno iti wangawangan ti tanem.

            Insayyona ti sangatimba a danum kaniak.

            Nagkintayegak iti lamiis iti dayta a kanito a di pay nakariing ti bigat.

            Diakon mabilang babaen kadagiti ramay dagiti ima ken sakak no mano nga aldawkon ditoy, iti daytoy nasipnget a bartolina a nangipupokanda iti kinaasinnok.

            Immukuok ti panaas kadagiti sugatko.

            Kinagatko ti bibigko, ket nariknak ti nagbassisawen a ngiwngiwko.

            Kastoy gayam ti matay, kunak iti bagik, kastoy gayam ti patpatayenda, ti in-inut a dusdusaenda tapno agpullo, tapno mapadso, tapno matukkol ti durina, tapno agkanta, tapno agibaga iti uray ania laengen ditan.

            Komunistaka?

            Saan.

            Ania’t grupom?

            Awan ammok.

            Balangkantiska.

            Awan ammok, apo.

            Kasta, kayatko dayta. Apo, kunam kaniak.

            Awan ammok, apo.

            Apay nga addaka iti teach-in iti Universidad?

            Kayatko a maammuan ti pudno.

            Ania a pudno ti kunkunam, gago? Maysa a gemgem ti nanglittaak iti pispisko.

            Manen, nagsanud ti dilak ket pinanawannak manen dagiti balikas.

            Addada kadagiti imak, kadagiti murdong dagiti ramayko, iti barukongko, iti pispisko, iti pusok, iti barukong, iti sellangko.

            Adda dagiti balikas kadagiti pader a nangikarsel iti sipnget tapno iti adu nga aldaw ket maipaidam kaniak ti lawag dagiti aldaw.

            Adda dagiti balikasko, tatang, kadagiti altar a pinanawak, isu met laeng nga altar a pinanawam.

            Adda kadagiti sulinek iti sakaanan ti matmatayen a dios, iti nakamassayagen a dios, iti dios a nangisit, iti dios a binubuot, iti dios a lumlumoten, iti man simbaan wenno iti bodega dagiti rebulto iti parokia a nagserserbiam sakbay nga insagmaknaka ti rebolusion nga ita, itatta a pannakamanso, ket isu met laeng ti nangisagmak kaniak.

            Alawek dagiti balikas iti angin, ngem iti bartolina, naimut dagiti angin, tatang, naimutda ket diak makaanges, adda dagiti batibat kadagiti barukongko ket pampandadaganda ti kulay-ongak, ket iti maysa manen nga arrabis, iti maysa manen a panagdisso ti putan ti paltog iti lasag, marba, tatang, marba dagiti amin a templo ti kinakired, sumuko ti lasag, ket agaruyot ti dara iti malkab a kudil, agsayasay manipud iti dunggiar, ket agayus iti semento.

            Mapukawko ti simbeng ti panunotko, tatang.

            Makitak ti krusmo, ti ulom a naitudok iti kayo, ti ulom a salsalaan dagiti soldado.

            Malpengak iti ariangga dagiti kabusor.

            Malmesak iti ikkis ket agariangga ti riknak, agragut nga agtalakiaw ket birokek ti bagik kadagiti katurturodan, kadagiti kabakbakiran, kadagiti kabambantayan, kadagiti kalsada a sadiay ket sabtennakami dagiti igam dagiti soldado, dagiti kumilaw a mata dagiti polis, dagiti manutsutil a bangbangir nga isem dagiti barbed wire.

            Saanak a matay, tatang, kunak, ket kantaek ti umuna a lualo iti disoras a bigat kalpasan ti napuyatan nga agpatnag: Miserere nobis, Miserere nobis.

            Danggayannak, tatang, ket agallangogan ti kantata, kas iti maudi a panagkitata.

            Dagiti turod ti tallaong, dagiti kayo ti tallaong, dagiti mangrabrabii ti tallaong. Agbuya dagiti beggang kadagiti sigariliota a masindian tapno mabugiaw dagiti lamok.

            Dios ti agngina kadagiti suratmo kaniak, tatang.

            Dispensarem ti diak pannakakita iti panagdakkelmo, Bannuar, anak, kunam iti suratmo, kadagiti suratmo.

            Nasakit ti nakemko kenka idi diak pay maawatan. Immulak dayta a sakit ti nakem iti panunot. Impudnok kenka daytay ta kasla maysa a bulkan nga agbettak.

            Ammok, ammok, kinunam kaniak.

            Isallabaymo ti imam, tatang, ket amin nga inim-impenko a sakit ti nakemko kenka ket timmalakiasda, simmurotda iti dakes nga angin ti mannamay, ket kadagiti pantok dagiti bantay a di pay naadak ti tao, sadiayda a nagturong tapno didanton agsubli iti barukongko.

            Ammok, paggaammok, barok, anakko, kinunam, tatang. Nagbanarbar ti timekmo ket ammok, ammok, adda nagayus a lua iti pingpingmo iti dayta a nasipnget a kalapaw a nagsarakanta.

            Manalpaak ti arrabis ti soldado kaniak. Dumteng manen kaniak ti baro a panagbariwengweng.

            Manalpaak ti gemgem ti soldado iti nadudogen a lasagko ket mangngegko ti timekmo sakbay ti maudi a pannusada kenka, tatang.

            Adu pay ti sagabaen ti ili, Bannuar, kunam iti timek a nalimbong, iti timek a tinenneb ti altar ken ti kabakiran iti altar.

            Wenno altar iti kabakiran.

            Adu pay, Bannuar, ket adu pay a sakit ti nakem ti maidaton iti wayawaya, iti nagan ti wayawaya, kinunam.

            Ket iti sangok ket ni Wayawaya iti makaabbukay nga isemna, ti buokna nga agsilengsileng iti kuridepdep a lampara iti kalapaw a nagkitaanta.

            Siak ni Wayawaya, kinunana, kas panangiyam-ammo iti bagina. Ngem kas pangsutsutil met kaniak gapu ta idi damomi nga agkita ket diak namati a Wayawaya ti naganna.

            Siak met ni Bannuar, kunak, ket agkulibagtong ti rugso iti pusok.

            Ibaludko ni Wayawaya kadagiti imak ket bay-ak a sairuennakami ti agpatnag.

            Kurientienyo ti buto ti langgong, kunaen ti soldado.

Isemannak ni Wayawaya.

Sayuanyo ti pus-ongna iti nalamiis a danum, imandar ti soldado.

Arakupennak ni Wayawaya. Bisongenna dagiti dunorko.

Diyo inggaan agingga nga agpudno, kuna ti soldado.

Idulinmo dagiti daniwko kenka, kunam kaniak, tatang.

Ket isungbatko kenka, Amin dagitoy ket idulinko iti pusok. Sadiay, kadagiti sulinek ti silalagip a pusok, didanto kaano man maagaw kaniak dagiti balikasmo.

Ket makitaka, tatang, makitaka iti sipnget ti bartolina.

Ket makitak ni nanang nga awananen iti rupa.

Ket makitak ni Wayawaya a mangar-arakup iti mapadso a kararuak.

Amin dagitoy ket makitak, ngem naglibasen dagiti balikas iti bibigko.

Siertuenyo a dinton makasao pay, imandar ti soldado nga addaan kadagiti darepdep a kasadar met laeng dagiti darepdepko.

Iti kasipngetan, tallikudannak ti balikas, libasannak tapno mapan kadagiti sabali pay a bartolina.

 

Labels: , ,

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Revaluating Regionalism

Revaluating Regionalism, Revaluing Our Languages—

Or Why We Need to Advance Linguistic Democracy

And Cultural Pluralism Education in the Philippines

 

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

 

This is written with so much hope—a hope that multicultural and linguistic justice education will soon see the light of day in the form of an enabling law in the 2008 Multicultural and Literacy Education Act of the Republic of the Philippines, or House Bill 3719.

 

Hope is summoned here, as this piece narrates as well of the disappointments of many advocates for cultural pluralism in the Philippines, their disappointments from people who are in the struggle to fight for our right as a nation-state, a struggle that taps into what we have been fighting for centuries and centuries and yet there seems to be no let-up in this struggle for justice and fairness and cultural democracy what with the latest challenges to the HB 3719 initiative. That initiative puts together the work of many enlightened and visionary cultural and political workers of the Philippines—an initiative that attempts to give a framework for an honest-to-goodness literacy education for all peoples of the Philippines.

 

The framework calls for a multicultural education philosophy that requires the reintroduction of the mother languages of educands into the classroom, prior to the expansion of their world through their knowledge of second or third languages such as Tagalog (or Filipino) and English.

 

That initiative, seen in the 2008 Multicultural Education and Literacy Act, is a bold admission of a very simple fact of human understanding of the world and life, of cognition, and of knowledge—a simple but an emancipatory principle of education: that each educand learns better and more productively if what he is supposed to learn learns it in his own language, and thus, in accord with the tools of his own culture.

 

Translated: we productively and effectively come to know the unknown by starting off from the known—from the knowledge you know because it is mediated by the language you know to the knowledge that you have yet to know, and still mediated by the language you know precisely because it is your language.

 

Why nostalgic writers and activists and educators who cannot come to terms with the demands of liberatory education—or cannot understand our own mothers who taught us their stories in their own language and their stories are forever stored in our living memory—baffles me. While nostalgia may offer some soothing to the tired nerves, it does not lead us to the road to liberation when in that nostalgia, we dream of a nation-state with a center, and that center is the absolute, and that center holds everything true, good, and beautiful.

   

This reflection hopes to offer a way out as well, as it tries to face squarely with the vicious causes of these twin disappointments—a way out followed by two institutions that have shown us the courageous way to get out of this cultural and linguistic and educational quagmire: the Commission on the Filipino Language and the Linguistic Society of the Philippines. 

 

While it is written with a hopeful note, it also unravels the poverty and the evils of the despotic philosophy of a supremacist claim to any language, whether national or official or auxiliary, as in the case of the Philippines, and whether that language is called forth in the name of the nation, in the homeland or in the diaspora, or in the name of nationalism, especially when that nationalism is vending only the statist kind and does not, in any way, look into multicultural nationalism as a more productive philosophy of national development in a country that is linguistically and culturally diverse such as the Philippines.  

 

The hope is that those who are well-entrenched in the cultural life of our peoples of the Philippines shall have the courage to own up our diversity and find ways to articulate that diversity in the everyday life of our peoples in the homeland, and in the everyday life of those in exilic communities that are, because they have become cultural and linguistic zombies courtesy of the statist notions of national language and national culture that they get from ‘unthinking’ popular cultural forms such as The Filipino Channel, now advocates of unilingualism, in the Philippines and in the various exilic Philippine communities abroad.

 

The disappointments are coming from two events.

 

First, the continuing and calculated—even calculating—failure of those in the struggle in the name of our people to see that the one-language-one-nation policy does not work as this self-serving policy has not resulted in the dreamed-of, even fantasized, ‘unity’ of all the peoples of the Philippines, a unity they defined as one speaking, not in glossalalia, but unison, with only one kind and form of speech coming from the lips of every person from Aparri to Zamboanga—and now also, as the argument goes, in exile, or in all exilic communities of the peoples of the Philippines.

 

Never mind that these peoples, while they are also peoples of the Philippines, are also Ilonggos, Sebuanos, Bikolanos, or Ilokanos—peoples with their own nation before the Philippine nation was ever invented or dreamed of.

 

The inutile argument—as is the case of many language groups in the United States of America that recognize only ‘national’ languages as legitimate members of their groups even if these groups summon the energies of exilic communities in this country by their come-on about languages as ‘heritage’ and ‘least commonly taught’—about speaking in one and only one language is counter-productive to contemporary nation building, with our multiple, diverse, and potentially powerful experiences becoming a firm foundation for that kind of a nation, nation-state, or polis. The errors of history, indeed, are not the monopoly of one country. Afraid to dispel our ignorance because of the comfort and convenience it gives us, we go the route to oppression and injustice and despotism in the name of a glorious nation, nation-state, country, or polis.

 

I have spoken with some people in the nationalist movement of the Philippines—people who advocate whole-scale reforms for and in the name of all peoples of the country—and from their lips spring ideas about language and culture that follow the same route to the ‘Mandarinization’ of all Chinese peoples, the ‘Niponggoization’ of all peoples of Japan, the ‘Bahasa Malaysiaization’ of all peoples of Malaysia, the ‘Bahasa Indonesiaization of all peoples of Indonesia, and the Englicization of all peoples of New Zealand and Australia and all other territories of the English-speaking peoples, as is the case of all French-speaking peoples declaring ‘liberte’ and  ‘fraternite’ and ‘egalite’, among other abstractions, to themselves and to the peoples they colonized.

 

Some uninformed language planners, speaking from a Third World, even a Philippine perspective, call this the road to decolonization, and thus nationalization, and thus, the speaking not in tongues but in the language of the center of power, which center, by the way, is deemed the source of all that is good for the nation.

 

I call this route a glamorized vision of oneness, unable to see that Babel has its own virtues even if it has its own vices, but the virtues are more because they speak more of the diversity of peoples, the diversity of their experiences, the diversity of their dreams, and the diversity of their gifts and potentials to draw up a blueprint for a homeland of justice and fairness. And linguistic and cultural democracy.

 

Second, the position and disposition of blindness adopted by those who are supposed to be in the know about the requisites of a liberating form of education, culture, arts, and literature—a liberating because critical and committed consciousness—for and in the name of all ‘peoples’ of the Philippines.

 

Here, I am refusing to call the people of the Philippines with no ‘s’.

 

I am particularly cognizant of the fact that the Philippines, as a political product of history and collective action, is an artificial ‘name’ that we seized from the colonizer in an effort to make a name for ourselves, but that name, unfortunately, was initially the name of the enemy until we have come to appropriate it as our own.

 

The enemy’s name becoming ours is something curious, and that is what is not too clear to people who are writing about out pains as  ‘a people’ but the big trouble with their writings is that this ‘a people’ is a sterile collective, good for its nominalist and centrist historical worth, but does not capture the diversity that is us as ‘peoples’ of the Philippines.

 

Not a long time ago, an individual originally from the Philippines but now working as a paralegal writing legal briefs for some lawyers in New York reminded me of the ungrammatical sense of the phrase ‘peoples of the Philippines’.

 

I wrote back: the grammar of our life as a nation-state is in the acknowledgement—unconditionally an active and proactive recognition—that we are not simply a ‘nation’ understood in its 19th century European sense, but we are a nation among nations:

the Ilokanos had their nation before we ever had the Filipino nation, the Bisayan peoples had theirs, and the list goes on and on.

 

This failure in literature, in all other forms of consciousness-production related forms of our life such as education, the media, religion, and the arts are all guilty of permitting themselves to be used as instruments of this continuing linguistic injustice and cultural tyranny befalling us as peoples of the Philippines, Tagalog and non-Tagalog alike.

 

The problem with all ‘peoples of the Philippines’ is that we have developed a kind of a partnership of pain-inflicting and pain-enduring, one side of us the sadist, the other side the masochist—and through the blessings of our continuing ignorance about how to build a just and fair, and honestly democratic country, we have come to enjoy this partnership, and now, it has become us, and all those who wish to see our collective experiences using another lens are deemed needing redeeming because they are lost, and thus, like the Good Shepherd in that other part of us, we have to call them back into the fold, rain or shine, in good or bad weather, and if still they do not want to hear our voice, we call them—as I have been called many times by people with the Tagalogistic bent—reactionary.

 

Curiously, one of the aims of the “Filipino as a Global Language” conference held at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 2008 and attended by two national artists of literature and a top-brass government administrator of historical knowledge and historical knowledge production is “to avoid regionalism”—a goal that to me, is not only insulting as it is insensitive, but is also hopelessly ignorant of the realities of Philippine life and its complexities.

 

One good guess for the faddish popularity of that immoral phrase—‘to avoid regionalism’—that denies as it deprives the rest of the peoples of the Philippines the public space they deserve is the kind of sociological and anthropological inquiry in the 1960s that was fueled by an attempt to rush the ‘Filipinization’ of everything and anything Philippine, including the ‘Philippine’ language—declared the ‘national’ language—that was to be the embodiment of our collective life, as this collective life demanded to be expressed in a national conversation that required one and only one language, as this one and only one language is the only that is capable of doing so.

 

With the imposition—that is the key word here: imposition, by law, and by the navy and the army that attended that law—of the ‘national’ language, academic scholarship went on a roll and then, lo and behold, someone talked about the ‘patterns of culture’ of the peoples of the Philippines, and these patterns evolved into stereotypes and profiles that until now, are still being used to explain who we are and our defects, and the possibilities for these defects to be corrected, if at all.

 

Thus evolved what we call the ‘hiya’ school of thought—one that included, among others, issues about smooth interpersonal relationships, and why corruption from the highest echelon of government to the lowest-ranking barangay tanod or barangay paramilitary force continues to hound and haunt us until today.

 

The ‘hiya’ in the ‘hiya school of thought’ became so powerful that most academics believed in it, and because the whole exercise of knowledge production was reinforced by repetition especially in the popular media and in the school system that was held hostage by a cabal of educationists who did not know any alternative to explain who we are according to the framework of the essentialist concept of ‘hiya’ and other characteristics of all peoples of the Philippines. 

 

Other key institutions of Philippine society and the churches caught this Philippine-produced ‘knowledge of the Philippines and its people’, and albeit tacitly, also believed and promoted it. Think of songs and rites and rubrics and ceremonies in churches in the Tagalog language in Ilokano churches in the Ilokano-land. Think of the Laoag International Airport with that banner, huge in the blue Ilocos skies and constantly made to dance gracefully by the Ilocos breeze, announcing that here, here in this Ilokano-land, you are to be permitted to speak only in Tagalog (well, Filipino is written in that banner) and English. And in Ilokano schools, young educands in the grades are prohibited from speaking in Ilokano, at the cost of their snack or lunch money or both.

 

The education sector produced a metaphor for all this systematic act of valorizing the experience from the center, with scholars and artists and social scientists giving their blessings to this reclaiming of ‘brownness’—indeed, a reclaiming devoid of historical correctness but uselessly repeats the mistake of Gat Jose Rizal the national hero about a ‘Malayan’ heritage—with the production of a thick book supposedly about ‘Filipinoness’, thick at 885 pages, but with the culture of the center at its center, with only a sprinkling of what passes for the diversity of peoples in the Philippines as a token recognition that there is that other Philippines that has been historically, culturally, educationally ‘othered’. And yet, that book, Brown Heritage, adopted a totalizing strategy to account everything Philippine—or Filipino. 

 

That fantastic claim to a “brown heritage”—something that would creep into the pronouncements of Ferdinand Edralin Marcos in his delusion of grandeur about a New Society would continue, and today it continues to creep into our understanding of what is the ‘nation’ in the national language, the ‘nation’ in the national culture, the ‘nation’ in the national literature, and the ‘nation’ in national education.

 

We are not going to include here the two other social structures of the Philippine homeland, as these are utterly devoid of redemption unless we go the route of a federalized way of life minus the political warlords and kingpins and henchmen: our economic and politic life.

 

This means that we have to re-view and re-visit Imperial Manila as the center of everything and plan ahead with the idea of a decentralized, federalized economic and political development for all the regions and univocally declare that for four centuries we have given Manila the chance to dictate everything to us, and that today is the time for this Imperial Manila to go to the regions, because the regions have the resources Imperial Manila does not have; the regions have the diversity of peoples and their talents that Imperial Manila does not have; and that the regions have fed and nurtured and propped up Imperial Manila for so long at the expense of their own peoples.

 

This leads us to education, and the advocacy of two of our institutions, their advocacy a cause for celebration. With them, we who believe that we deserve something better, that a multicultural education will propel us into something more redeeming, needs to be known to all those who have not seen this view. 

 

These institutions could have come from two opposite ends but they are not—not today—as their positions of support for a new vision for all of us are imbued with the wideness of vision no one ever had in the past.

 

One of these institutions is a government institution mandated to make good with the promise of the three Philippine Constitutions we have had since the Commonwealth Period under the Americans (1935, 1974, and 1987) to have a national language.

 

In the last three years, the Commission on the Filipino Language evolved from an institution of linguistic and cultural fossilization—and linguistic and cultural hegemony—into an institution that we can truly claim as having finally come to its senses of recognizing that you cannot develop the Filipino language without developing all the other Philippine languages.

 

Why it took seventy years for well-meaning scholars, top-notch academics, and cultural leaders to realize this simple truth and fact of life is beyond me. They say the nose is the most difficult part to see. And yet it is so close to the eyes.

 

And seeing and re-seeing we must, because this is the challenge of historical truth, the challenge of the dynamism of our collective life, the challenge of responding to the issues that matter most to us: that challenge, for instance, of an education that is emancipatory because you are giving back the educand her own voice—her own language—the tools through which she gets to mediate her own world, her own life, her own visions, her own dreams, her own sense of self and community.

 

Even before it became a fad, the Commission on the Filipino Language dared to re-think of its position on the languages of the peoples of the Philippines, while at the same time guarding—and guarding well—its role of making it certain that the seeds of what could be termed a true Philippine national language could be sown.

 

We cannot hold—and the Commission’s chair, Dr. Ricardo Nolasco, has gone on record to say this—that when two languages are mutually intelligible, one is another language, a different one.  This dilemma is what afflicts Tagalog, in principle as in practice, and its turning into ‘the national language’ by a stroke of a pen, even if there is a qualification somewhere that it serves only as the ‘basis of the national language.’

 

In ontological philosophy, this dilemma is solved by the rule of quiddity: a thing is what it is.

 

In saying that, we have yet to do a lot to evolve an honest-to-goodness national language that reflects us as peoples of the Philipppines, with our gifts and blessings of diversity and uniqueness—our offerings to the homeland.

 

The computational linguist Carl Rubino wrote that unless Tagalog goes though a linguistic re-structuring, the stigma that Tagalog is equal to P/Filipino remains and the isomorphism, Tagalog=P/Filipino, inutile as it is, continues to be suspect. The job of the Commission, thus, hews on these challenges.

 

Ask an Ilokano writer writing in ‘Filipino’ in what language he is writing when he writes in ‘Filipino’ and he will tell you he is writing, not exactly in Filipino, but in reality in Tagalog. Even with the kind of language engineering that I consciously employed and deployed in my Tagalog novel, Dangadang, with the Ilokanisms everywhere that critic Roderick Galam has observed, that novel remains a Tagalog novel.

 

But the key point that we wish to see resolved is the continuing struggle of the educands in all Philippine classrooms with second and third languages that they have to grapple with in order to understand the basic concepts of life, concepts behind the skills that they are to be equipped with, and concepts about their need to understand more creatively and productively about their world.

 

When an Ilokano child of seven is brought to a Philippine classroom, he learns his ABC in Tagalog and English, and learns the shapes of the land around him in Tagalog, and the numbers in Tagalog and English, but never knowing how these things are in the language of his home, his community, and the people around him.

 

Ilokanos who do not know any better—in the Philippines as in Hawai’i, and perhaps in other Ilokano exilic communities, as in Southern California where Ilokanos do not want to be caught speaking in Ilokano except when they talk about the scandals of Philippine politics at the parking lot of Seafood City in Carson City—argue that their children know how to speak Ilokano already and that they are not supposed to be learning that in their schools. Ilokano students or Ilokano-descended students who are taking other language courses argue the same way: they do not need to study Ilokano because they already know their and their parents’ language because they use it at home. Make a leap of that argument and you have Ilokano and Ilokano-descended students choosing Tagalog over Ilokano because Tagalog is the national language. That, to me, is an educational choice—and it is the right of every student to decide in accord with what she thinks is best for her. But in that statement is a subtext of entitlement, and a faint sense of cultural denigration. And if there is an example of cultural denigration, this is it.

 

Our definition of cultural denigration, prima facie made sufficient by these examples replicated everywhere where internal colonization by Tagalogism and Tagalogization has taken roots, stops here. I am certain that the exemplification of the Ilokano experience is exhibited in all internally colonized countries, the colonization of one of the entitled languages with an army and a navy no less benevolent than the external colonizer. Colonization in all its forms is evil and cannot be morally justified. And all forms of colonization are all the same in their evilness. 

 

The cultural denigration that has become rampant in all of the Philippines and in the diaspora —that hatred of peoples of the Philippines have of their own languages and cultures, a hatred born of the constant conditioning that the language of the periphery, their own language, is not any better and would only do them any good—has turned into a cultural and linguistic bomb. No one ever voluntarily wills for a linguicide, much less for culturicide. Countries have split because of language and culture issues; countries have been formed because of mutual respect for their peoples’ languages and cultures. The Philippines can try ways either for unity or division. This choice is not only political, but is moral as well, as this spells the death of languages, and thus, the peoples whose lives are mediated by these languages.

 

If we look at the rationale of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines for their support for the intents and purposes of House Bill 3719, we ought to believe again in the healing capacities of our minds when our minds are open to the vast possibilities of our hope, not only for the future but also for the present.

 

Here is a position that takes in all the virtues of what a culturally plural society is all about.

 

Here is a position that helps to finally formulate a liberating education for all our peoples of the homeland.

 

We can only hope that, with the constant triumphalism of all teachers of Tagalog in the diaspora for and in the name of the national language some call justly Tagalog, as in the University of California at Los Angeles and as in a Tagalog language program in a university in Russia—an honest acknowledgement of linguistic facts and not being beholden to a nation-state’s hegemonic project that resulted in cultural and linguistic marginalization—this revisiting of cultural diversity will become an honest educational act of educationists who are open to the truths of diversity and pluralism, and not beholden only to the Fascistic notion of a statist idea of nation and nationalism and  ‘national’ language.

 

In May, the participants of the 2008 Nakem Conference endorsed the Gunigundo proposal for a multicultural education that will bring back the glory of the mother languages, the various lingua franca of the country, the first and native languages, and the second and third languages of the Philippines, Tagalog and English included.

 

We can no longer act like Manuel Luis Quezon now. Or should we pray that his mistake takes on a new form of linguicide?

 

 

Hon, Hi

Oct 26/08

 

Labels: , , , ,

Friday, October 24, 2008

Countering Tagalogization

Our Redemptive Response to

the Timeless Temptations of Tagalogism and 

to the Tyranny of Tagalogization

 

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

 

 

We pray we are not going to fall into the same trap of Tagalogism and Tagalogization again, not when we were made to believe—tempted and fooled—by the powers-that-were.

 

Tagalogism is an attitude—a mindset that has trapped us into a belief of a Philippine nation-state as revolving around a center and only this center is important.

 

As a mental disposition, Tagalogism is not about the Tagalog people, and many of them have nothing to do with, as many of them have been deprived of their own language and culture when, with a stroke of a pen, Tagalog as a language suddenly became something else.

 

The counter-discourse to Tagalogism is about how we revisit the definitions of ourselves, and how we express those definitions in light of our basic need for emancipatory knowledge of who we are as a Philippine nation made up of many nations, where we are, and where we are going.

 

Tagalogization, on the other hand, is that long juridical, linguistic, political, economic, and cultural process that has made it certain that this trap, this temptation relative to the entitlement, privileging, and valorization of Tagalog, is going to continue to have its stranglehold over all of us, Tagalog and non-Tagalog peoples alike.

 

The enlightened Tagalog people are not the problem here; those who continue to have that triumphal attitude with the lording of Tagalog over all other Philippine languages are the problems.

 

For even among the non-Tagalog people, there lies among them poets and writers and academics and scholars and linguists who do not know that the entitlement of one language over another may lead to an exclusion that could be irredeemably damaging to the excluded languages and cultures.

 

The enemy is in every individual of the Philippines, in the homeland as well as in the diaspora.

 

And this individual is lurking—or hiding behind some abstractions we call ‘nationalism’ and ‘education’ and ‘literacy’, abstractions that, when devoid of the proper context, are there only to make superiority pronouncements and thus legitimize the exclusionary tactics of the center.

 

 

The beginnings of our linguistic and cultural Gethsemane can be traced to that Constitutional Convention that began in 1934 and ended in February 1935. That Con-Con could have taught us peoples of the Philippines and other peoples of the world the virtues of cultural pluralism and respect for language rights, this last one veritably an expression of unconditional respect for basic human rights. 

 

But the 1935 Constitution that came out of that convention of the supposedly most capable and most astute political leaders of the land co-opted with the powers-that-were was an occasion of falling from grace, a grace that could be given only to us by respecting our cultural diversity and by pursuing language pluralism as a way of life of a nation made up of many nations such as the Philippines.

 

The proceedings of the Con-Con bear witness to this fall that we are trying to rise from today, an act of courage on the part of all peripheralized ethnolinguistic communities of the Philippines, with the House Bill 3719 that hopes to remake the template of an oppressive educational system in the Philippines that makes everyone in basic education—and even in tertiary education—as cultural and linguistic zombies and robots of the Tagalog and English languages.

 

These ethnolinguistic communities have been peripheralized because we have come to believe that our salvation as a people is the glamorizing of a single speech, and the allowing of ourselves to be continually hoodwinked by the Marcosian dictum of ‘isang bansa, isang diwa’—one language, one nation—a dictum that worked like an incantation to the dictator and his speech writers, including some academics from the University of the Philippines serving as his think-tank and book writers and who passed on to him the French model of that abominable phrase, clearly not an original formula for state-crafting and nation-building. 

 

The failure of many of us to understand the spirit of cultural pluralism as the spirit that could have shaped our collective life is the same failure that we continue to commit until today, seventy-three years after.

 

And those people who are in the know—the very people who could help us free ourselves from the enchantment of Tagalogism and Tagalogization are sometimes the very people that tell us that we have no business fighting for our linguistic and cultural rights and that our only business is to speak the language of the center, act in that language, and dream in that language.

 

The powers-that-were that continue to incarnate and reincarnate as the powers-that-are and the powers-that-be in our midst and wearing many hats, entrenched as they are in the academia and in the corridors of power are to be judged by our ethnolinguistic communities as Pharisees and Sadducees of Philippine culture. Here come the conquered becoming conquerors, the colonized becoming the new colonial masters.

 

These people come to us saying the same things against our languages and cultures—and even against our sense of selves. And these people have no new argument to offer against our claim to the language of our own selves, identities, and particular lives.

 

The discourse of these same people is the same discourse we have heard more than seven decades ago except that now, with the lobotomized agents of uniculturalism and monolingualism in Philippine education by their sleeves and pockets, they are more boisterous now, their loud noises their bluff to make us cower in fear and accept their illogicalities and bad because unproductive gospel of monolingualism in favor of the language of the center.

 

If we looked at their discourses, we can see the same rehashed arguments, some of them empty of content as they are self-serving: (a) the valuing of regional languages is ‘impractical’ and that (b) we have to give ‘Tagalog’ language—the basis, they say, of the national language—a chance. We gave Tagalog one fat chance for seven decades and it did not deliver the goods except to destroy millions and millions of us.

 

These arguments come from people who know no other Philippine languages, even if some of them, as one has said, that they can curse in other languages.

 

Even this admission of cursing in a language not really your own is an admission of guilt: that you have no respect for languages other than your own because you cannot see these languages as the dwelling place of a people’s soul owning these languages except as your language for cursing. This admission is itself an admission of failure in the unqualified respect that we all have to give to language and cultural rights as an expression of our respect for fundamental human rights. What we have therefore are culturally entrenched practitioners of Tagalogism and Tagalogization—cultural agents of injustice—who can only afford to tell us that Manila is the center of the Philippine world and that whatever Manila does is the truth.

 

The call for a ‘national’ language did not come as a pure and pristine call for nation building.

 

The motives, as history would tell us, are a mixed bag of personal defense against the charge of multilingual incompetence to the outright internal neo-colonization agendum by the same people who were—are—announcing liberation to our people.

 

We go the route of Manuel Luis Quezon and his flawed preference for the Philippines ‘run like hell by Filipinos’ than by, say, ‘run like heaven by Americans.’ Using that and other language claims, he would argue for the process of decolonization by following the route of the nation-state model imported from Spain, Germany, England, and France. That was his template for the Philippine nation-state speaking a single language. In his own words, he went to Vigan, had the ‘misfortune’ of using an Ilokano interpreter so he could talk with the Ilokano people, and which experience humbled him so, and which, in many ways, prodded him to push for a ‘national’ language that he understood and he could use, to speak with the Filipino, who, in his imagination, would now be all parroting Tagalog words and phrases learned unimaginatively in many unimaginative Tagalog language classrooms. Read the subtext here—which subtext he also said in that speech in Letran College: imagine me a President speaking to my people using an Ilokano interpreter because I do not speak Ilokano. And so his imperial solution: let everyone speak Tagalog, the Tagalog of the President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines.

 

Quezon, of course, conveniently forgot that for Spain and Germany and England and France to have become examples of modern-day European nation-states, they all had to suppress—and the operative word here is ‘suppress’—other legitimate languages and thus cultures of their territories, thus creating the questionable semblance—a dubious verisimilitude—that these countries had only one and only one ‘national’ language.

 

The history of the oppressive power of the French Academy, a powerful cabal of Francophiles that cannot see that there are other languages of France beside French, is a proof of the oppressive power of Tagalog, sometimes passed off as Pilipino, or if one were from the more esteemed universities in Imperial Manila, this Pilipino is now Filipino, in accord with the dictate—read: dictate—of the 1987 Constitution. 

 

Quezon admitted this presidential dilemma—a classic dilemma of a ‘Tagalogistic’ mind, a mind that is content with the Tagalog view of the universe and that never tries harder to see other Philippine realities and Philippine worldviews afforded by other Philippine languages and cultures.

 

The Tagalogistic mindset, therefore, is ‘the’ implausible Philippine mindset.

 

With the illogical isomorphism in that equation Tagalog=Pilipino/Filipino—a curious thing that many knowledgeable linguists would reject for its flawed claims in a bioculturally diverse country like the Philippines—Tagalogism and Tagalogization have become the official path to creating the ‘new’ Philippine nation-state, a political dream that was valorized when the center of power came to Imperial Manila with the blessings of all the colonizers and their allies and collaborators, a political dream nevertheless that was also dreamed of by many ‘nations’ of the Philippines in the Visayas, especially when they declared their own republic that antedated any claims to an imagined Tagalog republic. In the North—in the Amianan—was the Candon Republic.

 

With the center of power—the axis of all power that remained undistributed until today—unable to communicate with those beyond that center for either because of lack of motivation as in the case of Quezon and all those other Quezons that came after him or because of linguistic and cultural incompetence, the center of power thus served as the French of France, the Madrid Spanish of Spain, the English of London, and the German of Berlin and elsewhere. Thus inaugurated the Tagalogization of all peoples of the Philippines, at least from the perspective of the sitting president of the Commonwealth of the Philippines at that time. Read through the proceedings of the 1934-1935 Constitutional Convention—but read the Jose P. Laurel version published by Lyceum of the Philippines, a version with only one copy at the Laurel Foundation Library. The other version published by the House of Representatives more than 30 years after the ratification of the 1935 Constitution is not as complete as the Laurel version.

 

The sentiments against what some people term ‘chauvinism in regional languages’ or ‘regionalism’ and that fossilized call for a ‘national’ language that is in league with other things ‘national’ such as a ‘national’ animal and a ‘national bird’ and a ‘national’ flower and a ‘national dress’ come to view when we look at the intents and purpose of the 2008 Literacy Education Act of the Philippines and the House Bill 3719 of Representative Magtanggol Gunigundo.

 

No, a people’s language does not operate the way a carabao, the national animal, would. Nor does it operate the way a national flower would like the sampaguita that is now missing, except in lurid streets in Manila where it is vended as a garland for the Child Jesus and the Mother of Perpetual Help.

 

A language is the abode of a people’s soul, the dwelling place of his sense of self, his sense of the world, and the sense of his dreams for both the present and future, for that present that is also a future. Deprive a people of that language and you have murdered them. Advocates of linguistic rights call this linguicide, or the killing of a language.

 

Lately, the Linguistic Society of the Philippines, an august body of well-meaning academics and professionals who are in the know about human cognition and its relation to the mother language, human knowledge and its relation to human and societal liberation, and the liberatory power of the language of our souls released a statement supporting literacy education in its multicultural form. We applaud the LSP for doing that.

 

In May 2008, delegates of 2008 Nakem Conferences held at St. Mary’s University in Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya, passed a resolution totally supporting HB 3719. That resolution, published in a scanned form at the Nakem Conferences website, was handed over personally to Rep. Gunigundo in July 2008, at a consultative assembly participated in by Nakem Conferences.

 

The participants of the 2008 Nakem Conferences understood where multicultural education should begin: in their classrooms. That was their rationale for the endorsement of the Gunigundo legislative initiative.

 

With the abominable cultural denigration that is happening in the Philippines—with many Filipinos (except the Tagalogs and Tagalogized) being made to behave and think and view the world as Tagalogs and these same people looking down upon their own mother languages and their own cultures and the peoples who do not behave and think and view the world like Tagalogs—the teachers and academics and cultural workers of Nakem Conferences saw that HB 3719 is the only way to go to once-and-for-all claim for the peoples of the Amianan and all other peoples of the Philippines the fruits of linguistic democracy and cultural justice.

 

In sum, HB 3719 argues for a multicultural education for the Philippines, a template for education that values the basic human experiences of peoples, experiences that are mediated by their own languages and not by other people’s languages, and grow from that experience in keeping with the duty to relate to and with other people to form a community.

 

The educational template of the Philippines is one that does exactly the opposite: students are schooled in the language of other people’s languages, with their schooling basically a rote memorization afforded by Tagalog (well, for Constitutional reasons that some would like to read: P/Filipino) and English. Thus we have students who never learned who they are and yet are expected to learn other people’s sense of who they are through the second or third languages, Tagalog and English, languages that are constantly rammed into their throat as soon as they get into their classrooms, the ramming consistent and legal but never moral and culturally just, until they all become cultural and linguistic parrots.

 

It is something curious, thus, that while many of the nation-states of the world that followed the route of the fossilized view of ‘national’ language are revisiting the linguistic injustice and cultural tyranny that they systematically effected in order to glorify their nation-state a la Napoleon who had to deny his being Corsican in the name of the glorious French language, the Philippines is still going the route to ‘national’ language, a concept that valorizes, privileges, and gives entitlements to one and only one language.

 

We can grant here, tentatively, the virtue of ‘national’ language as defined by well-meaning scholars of Philippine languages as the imagined medium of communication among the peoples of the Philippines.

 

But we cannot close our eyes to the fact that in an effort to do so, taxpayers’ money and the scarce resources of the country have been used to promote, sustain, develop, and teach Tagalog (well, now, they call it with another name). Except for token support from some government agencies for token awards or grants for some token cultural programs, no support of the magnitude given to Tagalog has ever been given to other Philippine languages, major or minor. The 1987 Constitution of the Philippines provides for its translation into the major languages. We do not know if, apart from Tagalog, that Constitution has ever been translated into the languages of all the peoples of the Philippines so that, like the claim to the Philippines as some kind of a working democracy, people could say, in their own language, that their basic human right to their own language is guaranteed by their own Constitution. This means that this failure is itself a proof of unconstitutional acts of the Philippine Government, its pertinent language and culture agencies included.  

 

There is nothing wrong with regionalism in the Philippines.

 

The territorial basis of Tagalogism and Tagalogization as unruly phenomena of Philippine collective life is a region as well.

 

The fact that at this time only a handful of urban centers are developed is a clear proof of the underdevelopment of the Philippines—or that more sinister fact of uneven development. This underdevelopment/uneven development is entwined in how we continue our political, economic, and cultural life—with Imperial Manila as the center of the Philippine universe, and thus with Tagalog as ‘the’ language of power.

 

When a country talks of democracy but has only one language to claim as a developed language, when it has only a few city centers as developed centers, and when it has only one place from which all political powers come from, then, that country has no business calling itself a democracy. Truth is: it is not. That country is a cultural tyrant; that country is a linguistic despot.

 

The genesis of our misery is that we believed in the lies of the past and we permitted these lies to frame and structure our political, cultural, and economic life. The currency of these lies is that this nation-state that we have built is made up of only one nation (one read from Imperial Manila) and that it is impossible to speak of various states that could make up that nation among nations. What goes with that currency is the dubious position we have accorded to Tagalog, a position that has made many our people fall into the trap that Tagalogism is the governing applied philosophy of all peoples of the Philippines and that Tagalogization is the only one true process we have to go through in the pursuit of the ends of the Philippine nation-state.

 

With HB 3719, we are going to put an end to the systemic and systematic miseducation of our people. And soon.

 

Our peoples of the Philippines have decided—and this decision is wrought in the language of their souls. And that language is their language. 

 

Hon, HI

Oct 23/08

 

Labels: , ,

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Redemption-5

REDEMPTION

“Redemption” tackles the life of five daughters and a mother. Two of the daughters are in the United States; the three are left in the home country trying as much as they could to live life in earnest and in the raw. All the five daughters carry with them the wounds that precede redemption: the wounds of life, the wounds of memory, the wounds of family, the wounds of relationships, the wound of discovering the rugged path to self-discovery and healing.

“Redemption” is an allegory of the Filipino condition, with the mother going nuts and out of her senses, losing sight of the time, losing sight of the healing power of forgiveness, and leaving the daughters to trek through life’s rough roads without her, without her blessing, without her word that ought to have soothed and salved them. The daughters, after forgiving each other, discover their common pains. They learn to forgive themselves and all the people who have wronged them. In the end, they conquer their own private purgatories.


Chapter 5

I am Ditas. I hope to be the next voluntary exile. Or the next overseas Filipino worker, the bagong bayani. To the US of A. No more, no less. To scoop all the dollars I could scoop and keep them for myself. Ha!

I am trying to become a nurse and leave this country as soon as I have the chance.

There is not a life here, not a sign.

I try to learn my English very well despite the tongue that sometimes tricks me into making the sounds of Ilocano or Pangasinense as if they are German or some such other languages that create more vowel and consonant sounds apart from what is there in the Webster’s.

With my nurse’s cap on, I try to look at my composure on a life-size mirror I bought from the Bombay making all offers of anything on a five-six arrangement.

It is common here, in these parts, in an area in Manila where living from hand-to-mouth is the rule rather than the exception.

Believe me, you forget the claims of the President of the land or all of the leaders of the country who do not know how to count the monies coming in and the monies coming out.

I told my economics teacher one time. The claim on the growth target for the third quarter of the year is one by witches and with their brew as their evidence.

I did not know why I used the simile of the witches. Or was that an allusion?

Mother, when she went cranky, looked to me like she was a witch.
The first time she talked about millions of monies, no she said thousands and thousands and thousands in Ilocano, coming soon and getting into her palm as if these monies have a mind of their own, I knew the truth.

By then, mother must have felt the pang of guilt. She would wash her hands repeatedly and would talk about the thousands and thousands of monies coming, arriving, as if they are brought by the wild winds.

She would lose her mind for abandoning her children would cry, cry out, stand before father and beg him to not hurt mother.

For running away many times.

For many years, she was that: battered, abandoned, oppressed.

Many times, we children would cry, cry out, stand before father and beg him to not hurt mother.

Our begging would not make a dent to father who would always tell her: You leave me and you are a goner.

You leave me and your children will all die with you.

You leave me and your children with that other man will die with you as well.

Mark my word, you harlot, you prostitute, you daughter of a bitch. Ha!

I can kill you with my bare hands.

You leave but you better be sure that I will never find you out.

We are in this together.

We are in this together forever.

This sin. This grave sin. This mortal sin.

We liked it both the.

We have to continue liking it now.

And I do not care what the people say.

Let them talk.

Let even the priest down on the hill where you go to church talk.

Let even the madre, your aunt, talk about your salvation.

She can always pray for you.

She can always pray for us.

She can recite all the novenas she knows.

She can always ask for your redemption.

But I promise you, you harlot.

We will be in this together forever and we will both be doomed.

It is better this way.

You severe our ties and we are like American and the Philippines.

Whatever it is you say, our lives are intertwined now and there is no turning back.

Our date with the doomsday has been set and so we let go. Believe.

And then I would here the sounds of slapping, the hands hitting on flesh, the cries.

Mother would fight back in the beginning.

She would curse father with all the might of her useless words.

You will be hit by a lightning.

The earth will crack open and swallow you.

You will suffer.

You will have that sickness that will tie you to your bed for a long, tong time.

You will remember how you hurt me.

You will remember all the sufferings that I had to go through just to live with you.

You will remember the love that I had for you.

You will remember that I made that ultimate sacrifice of abandoning my children because of that live that I have for you.

You will remember that we had dreams together and the dreams did not include older children.

You will remember that I had loved you with all my heart and that I followed that love wherever it took me, whatever it took believing that I had you forever.

Now, you leech, you hurt me.

Now, you son of a bitch, you punish me.

Damn you.

Callous.

You die now and I will not cry a bit.

No tears will flow from my eyes when you hit the dust.

And I will not even bother to bury you.

You will get sick.

You will lie in bed for a long, long time. Crawl like a snake, humiliated.

You hands will lose their strength.

You heart will be useless as well.

And the bad air will get into your lungs.

And I will watch you die. Slowly you will die. Bit by bit.

Never mind if I will suffer as I watch.

I will get back my self-respect that way.

I will get back my redemption that way. I will watch you as you will waste away.

I will watch you as you die of consumption.

So there, there, hit me hard.

You will have, these punishments that you deserve, you ingrate.

We would all cry, we the children. We would wail and lament, we the children born of this unruly game of love that we knew early on for what it was.

The neighbors talked about the other children who just lived close by: the three brothers and the other daughter, all very young, who had to fend for themselves in order to live.

We were five children when the beating began—or that was what I thought. Lagrimas, who is now in Hawaii, Rosario in Florida, me here still and trying go away, Lorena in the Pine City trying to make every woman vain as vain can be by pampering them in her beauty parlor, Junior in his ministry in the Kalingas, he who has chosen to go where salvation is, where redemption amounts to something relevant.

With Rosario, Manang Lagrimas left for Hawaii in 1985 and did not come back until mother had all what it takes for carrying so much weight on her shoulder and so much guilt in her soul and hear: she said she had become Mother Philippines.

I do not know how this happened but she told one story that I have not forgotten: that in the grades, she was the fairest of the school children. She was also the smartest: she could read English at Grade Two and could memorize the long lines in a declamation for the Independence Day celebration. She still remembered the lines: “Mother Philippines, beloved parents, teachers…”

She was the Mother Philippines, she in her terno of the tri-colors.

She tried teaching me that one time for the independence celebration. I recited that in the school program and mother was there watching, she who had to go around town to barter the cane wine in order for me to have the terno sewn by the town’s dressmaker.

Mother had a way of loving. She had to give all. All or nothing.

Even now, she is like, now that she does not have a mind of her own.

Like the Philippines, the Mother Philippines, this country that does not make sense to us anymore.

They have hurt this country so.

They have harmed this country so.

They have battered it, made it sure that it would go down the drain.

The leaders are the culprit, the agents of the evil.

That is what mother would say when she is sober and alert, when she is not depressed, when she is in her right senses.

The leaders. What can they tell me now? I am raring to go.

To get out of this country for good, go away, run away, run to where there is life, run and never come back.

I put on my cap and I practice my English. I learn to curve my lips and let the schwa sound come off. The short a is difficult for me, the short a in the apple that I like best. The red Washington kind that I will not get tired biting to my heart’s content once I get to the US of A. Ha!

Labels: , , ,

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Redemption-1

REDEMPTION



“Redemption” tackles the life of five daughters and a mother. Two of the daughters are in the United States; the three are left in the home country trying as much as they could to live life in earnest and in the raw. All the five daughters carry with them the wounds that precede redemption: the wounds of life, the wounds of memory, the wounds of family, the wounds of relationships, the wound of discovering the rugged path to self-discovery and healing.

“Redemption” is an allegory of the Filipino condition, with the mother going nuts and out of her senses, losing sight of the time, losing sight of the healing power of forgiveness, and leaving the daughters to trek through life’s rough roads without her, without her blessing, without her word that ought to have soothed and salved them. The daughters, after forgiving each other, discover their common pains. They learn to forgive themselves and all the people who have wronged them. In the end, they conquer their own private purgatories.


Chapter 1



November 1, 2005
Waipio, Hawaii


Manang Ria,

I could not have said it in words.

I could have forgotten the right words even before I could utter any rational sound if I said this on the phone. This is why I have chosen to write to you. It is the time of the Internet but I have chosen to write to you the old-fashioned way. I want our daughters to have a handle of what we have gone through and so I am leaving this letter as some kind of a trace, a palimpsest by which they will be able to begin to form their idea of our sad story. With this story, I hope that all our daughters will find grace and relief, that redeeming grace and redeeming relief.

It is evening here and as I light a candle in front of my house down here on Waipio that looks out on the lonely Pearl Harbor, I can sense the pain you are going through. Darkness envelopes the valley now and I could hardly imagine the silent vastness around me. Only the flickering lights come with their flimsy radiance, subdued as they are by the sadness young night offers.

I think of myself now more often, me as an exile—an exile in so many ways, an exile through and through. I cry each time I realize I have run away from our common memories and from the land of our sufferings.

There is much pain in me as well. This pain has no name and if you can help christen it, I would owe you my deepest gratitude. I owe you my redemption too.

I do not know either if I can ever forgive you for a past that we both do not have full control of anyway.

Perhaps, I miss so much the distinction between what you were capable of doing and that which the events in our lives simply pushed us into doing.

We were young, Manang.

We were so young—and unknowing.

And hungry.

And famished.

And unloved.

And impoverished.

There we were in that remote past of our lives fighting it out with the morsel of love that our parents were not capable of giving in the first place.

Things are not clear to me as of yet.

But I am beginning to see the bigger picture however faint the seeing is.
Many questions do come to haunt me.

Like, am I really your sister? Do I belong to you despite that fact that we do not share memories together?

Even as I ask these questions, other questions come cropping up like some kind of a ghost that does not know finitude but the eternity of lurking in shadows, in bad dreams, in phantasms.

Indeed, it is true. I have lived through all these and even from afar, I can say, I can say from my heart that I do not know you.

Well, I do not know myself either.

At a distance, I can see the hatred you have for Nanang.

I see this hatred transforming into some kind of matter, solid and hard as if it were hardwood.

Or cement, able to withstand all the storm and the quake and the typhoon in the ravaged country, in the Ilocos as elsewhere in all of the islands where to go through the vagaries of the seasons is as quotidian as our own pains, our tears, our fears.

Manang, I had been so afraid of going hungry again.

Or going through the motions of everyday life without seeing any hint of that which is salvific.

I know—and deep in my heart I understand now—of your hatred for Nanang like earthen tile that walled the convents of friars in our town in order for our ancestors to be shielded from the evil that they did, the abuses they seemed to have a natural fondness for.

O the friar!

We came from them, Manang. We came from them, from their sis and excesses and their promise of heaven.

On our mother’s side are the Martinezes of San Carlos.

They came from the illicit relationship of one Dominican friar with one of our own and the affair, consummated in the dark chambers of the convento down towards the river, bore the first ever of the Solvers that gave us our mother’s father.

The Solvers, ha! They were land-grabbers and manipulators.

Like all those mestizos who learned to live close to the municipio and close to the church and close to hearing the bells each time the angelus was recited, the Solvers took center stage in the affairs of the local government.

With the blessings of the friars that seemed to be as avaricious and greedy as the Solvers whose skin had now turned to something lighter than light, something that resembled the Castilas, they gained entry to the civic affairs of the locality.
One of the Solvers became a factotum of the gobernadorcillo. That was the beginning of more land-grabbing—and the beginning as well of the Solvers going outside San Carlos and moving to Dagupan and then eventually to the Ilocos and Isabela.

There, they had the land grants courtesy of the conniving friars, the Spanish rulers using the Solvers for ends that had something to do with their occupational and colonial motives.

The Solvers women played their role to the hilt as well with two of them bearing illicit sons from the illicit affairs of two more Castilas. The sons, bless them, did not live long to tell of their stories of being bastards as we all were—are.

This is going to be a long story, Manang.

I am taking the last light of the young evening to reclaim myself.

I have been running away from our memories.

I have been running away from the terrors and torments of Nanang as well even if at times I would have wanted to end it all, this striving to make ourselves saved, redeemed, forgiven.

I tell you it has not been easy, this constant running away.

Even from afar, from the islands that speak volumes of what possibilities there are for us over here, I am running away from our shadows.

And from our sad, sad lives.

Our sad, sad life story.

And now I say: I do not want to go through this sadness again. No, not ever.

Even as I face the darkness of the night, I think of you there, all of you. This time, I am particularly thinking of you and our three other sisters.

I am not so certain if we are linked in a way with a biological father.

I am certain of one fact though: That we come from the same mother.

That we were nourished by the same body, our mother’s wild, wild body, with her wild, wild craving for anything that could challenge the sacred and the moral, the true and the beautiful, the good and the virtuous.

For mother did not know any of those, I suppose.

In these last lights, I can see what fragile stuff she was—is—made of.

Her imagination romped wild, went away with the many men that came after her, ran away with them to some far away places only to return to Tatang one more time.

That was a ritual, a given.

That going away and running away with her men happened many times.

Tatang was the father I did not know.

Tatang is the same father I now know.

Well, I never got to call him father.

I never even had the chance to hold his hands, feel the roughness of the calluses in those hands, feel the terror that hid in those hands, feel the sorrows hidden in between his tired fingers.

What a sad tale, this idea that I could have had the chance to get to know my biological father but the circumstances did not permit me to even say hello to him, not in a single instance that I could remember despite the fact that the little village we lived in all knew that which I should have known.

I only heard the knowledge in whispers. Do not blame me.

Now that father is gone, I do not know if I can ever forgive myself.

This business about us, five daughters of our mother of perpetual parody, what tough luck! Five daughters of three different fathers, well, that is something we can never run away from now.

We have to face this now with courage.

We have to face this now with daring.

How I wish I had that courage to tell Nanang what I have in my mind.

I cannot talk to Ditas about this.

I cannot give a hint to Lorena about what we all had to go through to destroy ourselves.

I cannot open up to Rosario about what evil visited us.

I look at the evening darkness now. There is this soft wind on my face. I feel the elements oneing with me, joining me this sorrow, joining me in this hope for the morrow.

I close this note now, fold it three times the way Nanang taught me when I was six. In her rare moment of sanity when she was not running away, she would sit down with me and tell me stories about the hacienda of his father in Angadan.

She told me about the letters she would send to her Bai Regina in Dagupan.

The matriarch of the clan, Bai Regina had all the lands to her name. Her two other sisters gave up their right to the land.

One of them was in the convent as mistress of novices in Baguio and who would forever dedicate her life to the cause of redeeming her family from sin.

The other sister was in Manila renting out her apartment rows to callboys and prostitutes and drug pushers aside from the regular and decent families who would come in for some time but leave right after discerning that they were in bad company. This other sister did not need much. She had sent her children to good schools and one ended up serving a president in Malacanang while her husband served as one of the president’s close-in security.

Nanang wrote those letters as if there were no tomorrow, in a penmanship she learned in convent school in Baguio before the demons got into her head and eloped with Tatang to run away form the hard life of starting it out in the vast and rugged land of her father.

Nanang hated the land. She wanted the glamorous life of the vaudeville, the superficial laughter, the paid smile, the noise for a fee. She wanted all the dancing and the teasing on stage and so she dreamed of ending up like Atang dela Rama.

On hilltops, Nanang imagined life in Manila, in the cities, in movie houses, in theaters.

Nanang recited from memory the story of how her family had to leave Dagupan.

Her father ran over two school boys. They died on the spot. The families of the boys asked her father to leave Dagupan or else his whole family would be killed. And so they had to run away or the whole family would be killed.

And so they had to run away, the whole family, run to where to vast lands were, rugged and needing coaxing and care and concern.

Three folds, neat and nifty for the letters. The same holds for this letter to you.

Three folds, as if in the trinity of our solemn wish to be able to forgive ourselves, to forgive mother, and to forgive each other.

Bye-bye for now, Manang.


With all my love,

Lagrimas

Labels: , ,

Dangadang-Chapter 1

(Note: This is a first attempt at translation into English the novel Dangadang which I wrote as a contest piece for the Centennial Literary Prize of the Republic of the Philippines. The published version, in Tagalog, can be bought at all those e-bay outlets for those in the diaspora. In the Philippines, the UP Press, the publisher, carries it; other major bookstores, to my knowledge, carry it as well.

The novel is made up of 72 chapters, excluding the prologue and the epilogue. In this novel, essentially a dissertation on the history of the peoples of the Philippines for more than one hundred years beginning with the execution of the three priests Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora and ending during the first years of the Aquino regime when the staging of coup d'etats was like cottage-industry manufacturing of the fantastic in freedom, democracy, and justice, is my own interpretive articulation of the persistent social problems of the Philippines. I used Ilokano characters, generally, because they are the prototype of people whose habits I am more or less comfortable with but my reading of the 'national' situation is not confined to the Ilokano families whose lives I am dissecting in this novel. 

In this novel as well is my interpretation of what is supposed to be a national language--one that speaks well of the nation-state, one in which this nation is made up of many nations, and thus many languages and cultures. If one were to look at the language engineering that I did in this novel, one would realize that, with the prologue and epilogue in plain Ilokano to the consternation of critics because I refused to translate these two parts into Tagalog, the 'national' because national language, I was leaving behind the message that there is linguistic injustice in the state of affairs of the country and this injustice must be addressed by creative writers as well.

I thought that I might as well experiment translating the whole thing into English, now that I can look at it from afar, and now that this novel, since it was finally written, is celebrating its 10th year! By no means is the translation polished, as is based largely on my (oral) interpretation practice. I know: it sounded more spoken than written. But let it be, in the meantime.) 


DANGADADANG
Chapter 1

Generation, 1996, 2002

Darkness had enveloped the land when Bannuar Agtarap, the fifth of the generation of the Agtarap, saw the familiar image. The young man wore a t-shirt, a wound ripping through it. There are the now-familiar spurts of blood that stained it so that what was written on it could hardly be read: Reelect Marcos, the pride of the North. The image of the young man with the t-shirt wears a smile, the smile of a father who is contented, his contentment from the sorrow of leaving with high hopes of returning. And soon. There is the freshness of a breeze from the fallow fields, the freshness wafting through with the north-wind in that early darkness. It is the same freshness that comes from a father's melodious singing of a lullaby to his child.

"My war is your own--my struggle is your struggle," Bannuar Agtarap tells the ghost of his father. The ghost was disappearing. This is the ghost of a life, his father's, a life that is Sinamar's offering to the revolution, to the altar of change. His father died fighting, felled by the paid murderers of the enemy one dark night like this one. "I vow and I promise, Tatang."

"Our life is for the land. This life is not only for ourselves," the ghost reminds Bannuar. The early darkness had spread in the east, blanketing the towering mountains of Sinamar. There, in the east,  in that place of hope, there the bright morning light would appear again. 

Bannuar now feels the chill of the north-wind. It is this chill from the cold evening breeze that always awakens in him a certain fear, the fear of death. "I do not want to die, Tatang," he would say, each time the chill gets into his bones.  

To be continued...



Labels: , ,

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Dangadang-Prologue

(Note: This is a first attempt at translation into English the novel Dangadang which I wrote as a contest piece for the Centennial Literary Prize of the Republic of the Philippines. The published version, in Tagalog, can be bought at all those e-bay outlets for those in the diaspora. In the Philippines, the UP Press, the publisher, carries it; other major bookstores, to my knowledge, carry it as well.

The novel is made up of 72 chapters, excluding the prologue and the epilogue. In this novel, essentially a dissertation on the history of the peoples of the Philippines for more than one hundred years beginning with the execution of the three priests Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora and ending during the first years of the Aquino regime when the staging of coup d'etats was like cottage-industry manufacturing of the fantastic in freedom, democracy, and justice, is my own interpretive articulation of the persistent social problems of the Philippines. I used Ilokano characters, generally, because they are the prototype of people whose habits I am more or less comfortable with but my reading of the 'national' situation is not confined to the Ilokano families whose lives I am dissecting in this novel. 

In this novel as well is my interpretation of what is supposed to be a national language--one that speaks well of the nation-state, one in which this nation is made up of many nations, and thus many languages and cultures. If one were to look at the language engineering that I did in this novel, one would realize that, with the prologue and epilogue in plain Ilokano to the consternation of critics because I refused to translate these two parts into Tagalog, the 'national' because national language, I was leaving behind the message that there is linguistic injustice in the state of affairs of the country and this injustice must be addressed by creative writers as well.

I thought that I might as well experiment translating the whole thing into English, now that I can look at it from afar, and now that this novel, since it was finally written, is celebrating its 10th year! By no means is the translation polished, as is based largely on my (oral) interpretation practice. I know: it sounded more spoken than written. But let it be, in the meantime.) 





PROLOGUE

And in war the serpents that cry would rise, the serpents in soldiers' uniforms, the serpents that have turned to white. And in war the spirit of Ina Wayawaya would return. She would possess the soul of each generation, and would conquer the poisoned mind of the white dawn and white afternoon and alien wind, and would own once again the thoughts and breath and dream of the sons and daughters of the homeland and country. And in war too the Bannuar, many of them, would return, all of them would go through this Ilokano act of renaming, all of them would redeem their loves from the pawnshop of the future so that redeemed, all these loves would be sown in the chest and loin and in those acts of gasping-for-breath-gasping-with-the-beloved and in those ultimate experience of desires-coming-into-peaking in noontime and in midnight, in the midst of hunger and fullness so that the bloodletting of the young sun and full moon would happen once again. Young blood would drip on primeval fields of dreams of freedom and all those who are awakened, those who have risen from their slumber, they would all sharpen their weapons, test them against the alien wind. The sharpened weapons would replace all the prayers of the people to the mossy gods of justice. And in war would the butterfly come back, the one that would own the memory of the people, the one butterfly that would own the early evening and the wee hours of the night. The butterfly would accost these moments so that victory would be born, so that the dream would be fulfilled, so that again and again we would hear the lullabies and incantations that announce our freedom,  that tell of the fulfillment of the good news at the edge of a bloodied weapon. 


Trans. A S Agcaoili/Oct 21/08
Hon, HI

Labels: , ,

Saturday, October 18, 2008

Redemption-9

REDEMPTION


Chapter 9


“Redemption” tackles the life of five daughters and a mother. Two of the daughters are in the United States; the three are left in the home country trying as much as they could to live life in earnest and in the raw. All the five daughters carry with them the wounds that precede redemption: the wounds of life, the wounds of memory, the wounds of family, the wounds of relationships, the wound of discovering the rugged path to self-discovery and healing.


“Redemption” is an allegory of the Filipino condition, with the mother going nuts and out of her senses, losing sight of the time, losing sight of the healing power of forgiveness, and leaving the daughters to trek through life’s rough roads without her, without her blessing, without her word that ought to have soothed and salved them. The daughters, after forgiving each other, discover their common pains. They learn to forgive themselves and all the people who have wronged them. In the end, they conquer their own private purgatories.


December 30, 2000

Liwanag,
Baguio City


Dear Manang Lagrimas,

I am not too sure if this is the right time for you to know. It is the end of the year and we are about to shake off the bad and evil thoughts in order to welcome the New Year.

We are far from Manila yet here, here in the upland city, we are affected by the political turmoil created by the boisterous crowds demanding that the bang-bang actor acting like President of the Land resign, leave the presidency, and enroll in a course conducted by Alcoholic Anonymous or by Kleptocrats Incorporated.

The stories rile you so.

The President of Land conducts his midnight Cabinet meetings by gulping flasks and flasks of some kind of a blue label the cost of which is sixty thousand pesos or so, enough to feed a poor family for two years.

Of course, the President of land, that same President who promised that a new dawn awaits the Filipino people and that his relatives and spouses and queridas and illegitimate children will never take money from the government coffers, always has his hangover each morning that he misses his appointments with visiting dignitaries and investors. Just watch him droop during courtesy calls and you see the spirit of the drunken night still on the collar of his crisp barong.

Then there is this story of the carpet with the President of the Land’s name stitched underneath, His Excellency embroidered with a shining red of a thread.

The President of the Land, of course, denied that the carpet was his.

Did he deny that the house with the fine sands of Boracay and the imported waves from Waikiki are ever his?

I bring Nanang to the faith healer in the Miracle Hill where the foreigners congregate to ask for healing from the lowland bombastic healer from Pangasinan, he with his booming voice and his approval of the President of the Land holding on to his post for the sake of his promise of redemption for our people.

The faith healer said so when I brought Nanang to his house.

The President of the Land is the best choice we have, he said, this faith healer who was dirty, his smile the one of a sleek lion, his body smell that of a rotten earth and a rotten cow dung.
He knows the heart of the people, he said.

He knows how to promise, he said. He put his outstretched arms on the head of Nanang who was now as calm as the sea but who was as unruly as the storm winds a while back.

He does not know how to steal from us, he said. He is already rich, he added.

But on my mind is an evil thought that assumed the form of goodness.

I had covered this up from you for a long time. But this sad truth has its way of getting into my chest and it becomes so heavy I cannot breathe.

For a year, I thought that I could find a way for Nanang’s cure.

For a year, I went from one faith healer to another.

For a year, I went from one doctor to another.

It has been an agony, Manang.

I have to tell you now the sad and ugly truth. Nanang has received her punishment and now she cannot see the light.

She can only see the shadows in the same way she saw only the shadows when she left us one more time to go with the free winds and the free spirits and the force and power of a love that knew no bound.

For she was a carefree spirit, Nanang.

For she was wind, fire, water, earth.

For she was all the elements that make up the imagination roaming freely in the hills and valleys and seas of the mind.

Now she tells me, Ditas, Ditas, you are my eyes to the would I have never known. I am afraid, I am afraid. Give me back my eyes. Why, why did you ever get my eyes?

Silence, Manang. Shhhhhhs, I say soothingly to remind her that she did not have to be hysterical when it came to her eyes.

I saw in those eyes the meaning of fear without knowing fear itself.

Her eyes where those of almonds. And they shone as well, suggesting to me the possibilities of survival in a new land.

I have thousands and thousands of pesos, she said.

That again, I told her to warn her that the numbing drugs that I gave her seemed not work for her.
They stole everything from me, she said. Thousands and thousand of pesos and they stole them from me.

Nanang, quiet now. The night is still.

How can I be quiet if they stole y money?

Calm down, calm down.

Thousands and thousand of pesos and they stole from me!

I looked at her hands and they are jittery. There was panic in those hands, there was anguish and torment.

I looked at her face and I see the trace of pain on her sunburned face. Her hair curled to a wave that spoke both freedom and faith in that which is freeing.

I looked at that face and I see you, Manang, you and Manong Ili.

You must be mistaken, I said.

You cannot doubt me. I do not allow it. Give me my medicine, muchacha.

There is no monkeying around with looks in this place.

Even if they stole my thousands and thousands of pesos and used them for something else instead of buying real jewelry?

No one stole from you anything.

Where are my lands, then? Where are my horses?

Where are the roosters? Where am I?

Who am I?

You did not own anything, not even your soul. You sold your soul a long time ago.

You shut up, daughter of a whore.

You are the daughter of whore! I trembled, my knees becoming wobbly I could not move. I was a volcano raging and I wanted to hit her, hit her with all my might, hit her to tell her that I have long suffered because of her, that my future had been compromised because she duped me into marrying the good-for-nothing husband I have learned to detest and love, love and detest.
He is some artista, she said. She probably meant Eddie Rodriguez, her favorite.

Come on, Nanang, I protested.

Like your father. The swagger, the bearing, the way he carries himself. Oh, I like him for you. You will be a beautiful couple.

Nanang!

Shut up you whore! As if you are not a woman already. What do you mean? That you did not need any man in your life?

I closed my eyes. Her words stabbed me at the back. I felt I was betrayed by Nanang.
I went to close to her and told her, I stole your thousands and thousands of pesos and your hacienda and your hills and your valleys and your sorrows and your joys. Come quick, I stole again your hopes for me.

And I am not happy.

I am not happy because there will be another revolution by the people.

They are marching now at the Senate where the senadora seemed to be the prima donna of wit and wisdom and intelligence.

I am not happy because Nanang said she lost her thousands and thousands of pesos.
I am not happy because somebody might have gotten from her the mind that she deserves.
I have prayed for her healing. Many times I prayed for her healing. But things are getting worse each day.

Nanang seems to be marching to the beating of the drums to her own poetic death.

All the love now, I will write again.

Ditas

First published, Inquirer, Los Angeles, Special Issue 2006

Labels: , ,

Thursday, October 16, 2008

The Waylaid in Makati Comes to Marikina

(For The Unknown, Salvaged, Burned Young  Man At The Back Of St. Camillus)


The innocence of the blade

Put an end to your adolescent daydreams and cheers.

The pain that came after

I could only imagine, child, brother, cousin,

As you welcomed the depths of alones defined

By your celebrating executioners on that moonlit night

That was also theirs by might

 

Speak now to me in aggrieved silence,

You, nameless son of a betrayed land, also

Now nameless in the silences of false springs

And April rains and fallowed fields and tilled gardens.

 

Stand up, rise up, rise again for us the living,

We who will still have to see the fruitfulness of sins.

Tell us of an M-16 on a captain’s drawer

Rusted by song

A 29 in a neighbor’s attic shines

And goads white-robed men to preach,

Talk about the loving, ever-giving act of bees

As you lay there my son, my friend, my cousin,

Your body fed to the wild dogs of seminaries and convents

And churchmen singing lauds and vespers

And filling up their tummies with the sweat

Of your father, your mother, your sister, your cousin.


Did the churchmen ever hear you wail

And tell of the glories of dying for stories

Grander than ourselves?


Did they ever peep from their screened windows

And watch you die together with the tallest grasses

As the fire erasing your name from your lips

Sealed you narratives of liberating dreams?

 

No. I tell you they never did.


The seminaries and convents are a refuge of vampires

Making definitions about life out of thin air.

They read the bible, the vampires, and after doing so

They eventually become midwives of afterhopes.


See it now, my nameless cousin, my nameless friend:

They genuflect before you in your penultimate scream.

Also, they resuscitate your voice,

Fish it finally into their cruets and chalices

And label your deathclothes to make of them

Relics they will cut up and sell for some believers.

In the meantime, they pocket the proceeds

To bankroll democracy for the clerics and their elites.

 

But until such things happen

Plainclothesmen will come and will cry rivers

With your mother and sisters and father and brothers

And friends.

Don’t forget this now:

It is the ripper of hearts and memories

Who will suck the lie of your death.

The witnesses will not fail to come

The witnesses will not fail to stare

At your scorched body, the smile on your face

Drowned by your long long agony.

The witnesses will come and they will comment

About the weather.

They will hear the seminary and convent bells

And the vespers recited by pretenders.

 

Me, my friend, I will steal your smile,

I will also steal your death.


First published in Lingka, 1994.

Labels: , , ,

Redemption-Chapter 4

REDEMPTION


Chapter 4

“Redemption” tackles the life of five daughters and a mother. Two of the daughters are in the United States; the three are left in the home country trying as much as they could to live life in earnest and in the raw. All the five daughters carry with them the wounds that precede redemption: the wounds of life, the wounds of memory, the wounds of family, the wounds of relationships, the wound of discovering the rugged path to self-discovery and healing.


“Redemption” is an allegory of the Filipino condition, with the mother going nuts and out of her senses, losing sight of the time, losing sight of the healing power of forgiveness, and leaving the daughters to trek through life’s rough roads without her, without her blessing, without her word that ought to have soothed and salved them. The daughters, after forgiving each other, discover their common pains. They learn to forgive themselves and all the people who have wronged them. In the end, they conquer their own private purgatories.



August 8, 2004

Orlando, Florida


Mother,

It is now August as I finish this letter. I started this many years ago but I never had the chance to complete it.


It is the season of the storms and wild days as I sit down to collect my thoughts and gather my hopes.


I hear the howling of the winds and the roaring of the waves as if we are here for that end-of-days thing that I had always heard from you when you curse Father for hitting you hard in the face, the arms, the legs, the chest.


I watched them, the blows.


And I could never forget the suffering you went through and I never understood you.


One day, you simply went away, you and Lorena.


Anywhere, so father said.


I could have told Father: Mother needed to go anywhere to get away from your in humanity.

I was bitter but did not know I was bitter.


I hated Father but I did not know I hated him.


I see now the connections, Mother, the interconnectedness of things.


Each time I felt hatred raging inside me when I was still in Honolulu with that useless husband, I could imagine the scene, get that energy of Father.


I would hit my husband hard, hit him with all my might, hit with anything I could lay my hands on, it him in places where I felt the raging urge to do so.


And I would curse him the way Father would curse you.


And I would threaten him the way Father threatened you.


Father said to you oftentimes, You cannot run away from me now.


I told my husband, You cannot run away from me now.


Father told you, You run away and I will look for you anywhere and then when I find you, I will bring you back here, your hair tied on the rear of the cart drawn by a carabao. I would let people know that you ran away, ran away to where your freedom led, ran away to your man, to your useless husband whose only right to you was that he owned your young heart in the beginning. But now you are mine and no one can ever lay his hand on you anymore.


I told my husband, You run away and I will call the police and tell them you deserted us, you useless bastard and son of a bitch. I will ask for that child support so that you will never be able to get back on your feet as a family man again. You will be financially distressed and I want that to happen to you so no woman can ever be tempted to get near you because you will have no way to support another son.


I had all the scenes when I was young.

Perhaps I was five when I realized Father hit you hard and I knew that Father loved you so.


I could not make two and tow together but the days were heady and hard and our life was miserable.


I remember the many typhoons and storms and floods that would visit us in the barrio of Father, the barrio down the foothills, its small brook from the eastern mountains winding down towards the sea in the west.

The brook would tempt the hills announcing the seminary of celibates or those who were trying to find God in the strange faith of clerics and missionaries, those habited who had to intone the sacred word every four hours in order to calm their nerves.


On many days, we did not have rice in the bin. But I would dream of angels in the seminary church that you would go to when Josefa died.


Or so I heard from some people’s stories.


As soon as Josefa died, you would wake up early in the morning, put on your best dress, put on the black veil of mourning, and then, with the light of stars giving you direction, go to the dawn mass officiated by the celibates in the hills.

You had your rosary, a black one, and a heirloom form Lola Madre.


I remembered that detail most.

I would look for that rosary with the angel in flight as if you were that angel, Mother.


As if I was that angel as well.


For many Easter Sundays, I wanted to be an angel.


We do not have money for the white Rosario , you would say.

We do not have money for the white crepe paper for your wings.


We do not have money for the white shoes that would match your wings.


I would sulk in the corner.

I would cry in the dark.


I would talk to the angels of the night.


In my dreams, too, I would ask the guardian angel for the angel’s white gown, the angel’s white veil, the angel’s white socks, and the angel’s white shoes.

My guardian angel failed me.


If we had some scoops of rice, you would make a miracle.


You would put all the pearly grains in the bin onto boiling earthen pot and make gruel out of our hope for a good gracious meal.


That was neat, Mother.


If we were lucky, there would be the ginger to taste, some salt to taste, some vetsin to taste.


Ay, I would imagine the breast of a chicken on my bowl.


Or a solitary egg.


Or that fleshy leg of a wild chicken Father would bring home sometimes from the hills where he would gather dried twigs for the earthen stove.


There were days when the stove would be silent and I knew what that meant.


If we had something to partake of, I would see the stove coming alive.


I would watch the fire getting bigger and bigger from a small ember.


I would watch the firewood crackle, as if telling me, Rosario, Rosario , gather your wits.


Those were the days, Mother.


Some days I want to talk to you.


Some days I do not want to talk to you.


But most of the time, I do not want to be bothered by anyone.


That was why I ran away, away from you all, away from the sad memories, away from all that which reminded me of our days of misery and want.


I cannot bear the thought, Mother.


I die soon if I entertained that thought.


I do not want to have anything to do with the past that is why I am here in Orlando .


I am thousand of miles away from Manang Lagrimas and I want that.


I want that distance.


She cannot touch me.


She cannot remind me of anything.


She cannot be another mother to me.


Here I am with my only son trying to live life the best way I can by not having anything to do with anyone of you.


Holler, this is America .


Here, you be your own man.


Here, you cannot be somebody else’s keeper.


I like that idea because it gives me the freedom to run my life the way I want.


No sisters and brothers from own view of things.


I do not even know if it is my responsibility to send you some money for your medicine.


Lagrimas has been calling me about my share of the expenses for your medical treatment for your depression.


What a sickness. It is all a symbol, this sickness of the soul.


You could have been a rich woman who has to have her own psychiatrist or psychotherapist to cure her.


It has been years and years that I didn’t see you, Mother.


It was in 1985 when I last saw you.