Imperial-Sleazy Manila

I was shocked about Nick Joaquin’s words, quoted indirectly by Manolo Quezon in his column today, claiming (or ‘pointing out’) that Manila had ceased being a Tagalog city after the war, because of – of all justifications – the influx of Visayan migrants, and because it elected a Visayan as mayor, Arsenio Lacson himself. Today, Manila is, if we were to follow Nick J’s logic, a ‘multiethnic’ city. Manolo Q goes on to say that Nick J wrote this to reproach us – who say, and say consistently, that Manila is ‘alien in its interests and values to other regions of the country’, as Manolo Q puts it. I do not know if Manolo Q shares this same view, but it is (given his provenance) expected that he should be.

To Nick J’s credit, he really is one of the old-school poets and writers of the phantom realm called Filipinoland. The realm that they claim to inhabit, the realm they claim to ‘improve’. Well, not insofar as the real Philippines is concerned. He is irreproachable as an artist, as a writer, but his views of the Philippines are clouded by his narrow worldview.

First of all: Just because you packed Manila with Visayans doesn’t mean it stopped being a Tagalog city. Manila was, is, and will be a Tagalog city, no matter if it is the capital of the Philippines or how many of each ethnic group you cram into its isthmus. Migrants to it change their ways of thinking and doing in deference to the mindset of the original people of the city. That’s why Visayans are being laughed at for speaking Tagalog with an accent, as someone put it, ‘like nails scratching a blackboard’.

Gosh, Nick J does not know anything about ethnic interactions in cities, now does he?

So, people who migrate to Manila culturally defer to Manila. If you migrate to Cebu or Cagayan de Oro, you’d naturally culturally defer as well to the custom of the city. This is what my mother did, what Arsenio Lacson did, and what everyone else did who came to Manila to work. They had to.

Let me be clear about one thing. In our railing against Imperial Manila, we are not protesting the continued Tagalog-ness of Manila, or saying that Tagalog-ness is bad. Manila has developed its own oppressive culture of false, hypocritical cosmopolitanism. People, Tagalog or not, have been oppressing each other. There is the problem of social inequalities. There is the problem of overcrowding and of squatting. And we have our kids reduced to utter worthlessness and petty pursuits such as sex and fraternities/gangs, all because they have nothing to do.

Manila has morphed into a supermonster which doesn’t resemble the city of old. It is crazed, it is false, it is oppressive. People in the provinces marvel at Manila and the glitz that Manila brings to people. But in the capital we have government officials who don’t even think before they speak. Aquilino Pimentel is one horrid example. Even a Federalist advocate and Mindanaoan, even he should talk about marital ‘insertions’? Common people? Let’s also talk of the Bisaya man on the Manila street who pays prostitutes and even has a concubine even if he takes only odd jobs and doesn’t even put up with them for long (I’ve met such a person).

No, forget the fact that Manila is still a Tagalog city. What’s more important to point out is that Manila has lost itself. In a way, Manila is emblematic of the entire Philippines, except of course that it arrogates to itself most of the budget. Manila has become a thing unclean. Other Tagalog realms (Laguna, Batangas, etc.) simply borrow their culture from Manila, and look how they go already! Gang rapes in Bulacan, prostitution in Laguna – where do you think these ideas come from?

So what if Manila is packed with Visayans? It has had a culture of crassness and moral degradation for so long. The Visayans there became one of the major operators of this moral degradation, and then there were also Tagalogs, Ilokanos, Pangasinans, Kapampangans, and Bikols. Manileños of whatever ethnicity became absorbed in immorality and impunity of every kind, and turned therefore away from the regions. Not to say that the regions were pure in thought, but Manila is like a Playboy magazine: it aggravates whatever bad thoughts we have in our minds. It brings out the evil in all of us.

So, where did our worst instances of environmental neglect happen? Manila.

Where did our President blatantly lie to the nation? Manila.

Where did we find homosexual perverts and their partners making hanky-panky in an X-rated cinema? Manila.

Where are most call centers, where there is a disturbing unprotected casual-sex trend and HIV spread trend, located? Manila.

Where did people manufacture shabu? Manila.

Manila has been the capital of sleaze of the entire Philippines. And yet – and yet – some of its people pretend that it is the capital of the Philippines culturally, politically, and socially.

Give us decent Philippine peoples a break, will you? Ayusin n’yo muna ang Maynila bago kayo magmayabang sa inyong s’yudad. Manileños need to be concerned about their city, not parade it as the center of the Philippines while it’s clear to everyone that it’s 85% muck already.

What It Means To ‘Tagalog-ize’ (5)

Anyway, let me continue quoting Dr. Agcaoili.

We go the route of Manuel Luis Quezon and his flawed preference for the ‘Philippines run like hell by Filipinos than  run like heaven,[say], 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.

The mismanagement of our national identities is a result of circumstances. The Philippines is archipelagic, and its peoples are not that coordinated with each other. If the Philippine peoples were in a continental land mass, such as Africa, things might have happened differently. We developed self-determination early on as peoples – the rebellions against the Spaniards occurred in so many different places from 1580 to 1890, and there was the relentless Moro campaign all along. We would have ended up being separate nation-states, as the European nation-states were, and we would have developed our own identities while allying with each other. Then each of us would have gone by this nation-state route without oppressing each other in a single nation – or at least, with only less drastic moves such as expulsions or territorial demands.

But as it was, the Philippines was treated as a single country by the powers-that-were. It was governed by Spain as a single set. It was exploited by Spain as a single set. It was bought from Spain as a complete set. Today, we cannot imagine being, say, Bisaya or Ilonggo or Ilokano without associating ourselves with the Philippine Archipelago and relating ourselves to it.

Note that I do not say the Philippine government in Manila, because the Americans did not establish their headquarters in Manila until 1900. Before that, there were five centers of Spanish rule, of which Manila was the biggest because it housed the Governor-General of the Philippine Colony. But Sugbu, Nueva Caceres, Nueva Segovia, Zamboanga and Kagayan were also important – and were distant from Manila .

He further writes,

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 [ruled] 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 [applied] governing 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.

In fact, the Philippine government from 1935 on have made a laughable, if stupid, mistake. If they were out to decimate the cultures that are non-Tagalog, they’re botching it – I mean, they shouldn’t have dared. The Czechs tried to suppress the Slovaks – they failed. The Russians, the majority in the Soviet Union, tried to suppress the cultures of the Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, and others – they failed and paid for this with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. And now – it is not even the Tagalog people who are doing the suppressing – the government of the Philippines are trying to suppress 170 other cultures, languages, and peoples. They will not succeed in forming a homogeneous Tagalog state. But they will succeed in bastardizing and cretinizing our people, promoting a language that finds its ultimate use in – of all things – Kris Aquino’s pronounciamentos!

I have said, once I saw the light, that Filipino is just ‘show-off Tagalog’. A Tagalog variant that you can use to show that you are ‘patriotic’ and that you ‘care for the poor’. Of course, this won’t work with the common Bisaya or the common Ilokano, so the government decrees: Let them learn our show-off Tagalog! So now the people are reduced to rote memorization of show-off Tagalog, to be able to show off their ‘patriotism’ to people. But then they lose their love for the Islands, and for them language and culture have lost all meaning, these being relegated to certain events where we show off our ‘culture’, like the Sinulog (Cebu) and the Dinagyang (Iloilo) festivals.

These two festivals are promoted nationwide as “Filipino culture”, but that term means nothing to people. Who among the tourists would feel a certain Ilonggo or Bisaya culture in watching those festivals? None, except the keenest of the keen among the Ilonggo or Bisaya people. And these festivals generate income, revenue, and tourists who will say, Wow, the Philippines is great. But they didn’t feel the distinctiveness of Ilonggo or Bisaya culture – they would wonder if these festivals were only about native people dressed in primitive clothes reenacting the reception of the statue of the Christ Child, and not the introduction to Christianity of the Bisaya people or the Ilonggo people. And they would not see the difference with the other festivals in Manila and elsewhere. Culture gets trumped over by revenue and profit. And by show-offiness.

The adoption of a national language is a symptom of our choosing to show-off rather than to be real to ourselves.
But to progress, we must be real to ourselves.
But to be real to ourselves, we must know ourselves first.

Tagalogization is not about Tagalog people or their language or their cultural development vis-a-vis Bisaya cultural development and others. It is covering ourselves (Tagalog or non-Tagalog) in false identities – and inducing others to do so – by showing that we are better than others just because we speak Tagalog, because we think that as a country, as peoples, we have not really achieved anything on our own. Whether Tagalog is replaced by Binisaya or Yogad or Kankana-ey, our lack of confidence still eats us within, and we just continue to show off.

Bob Ong, in his writings, decries the show-off attitude Philippine people have when they pretend to be Americans. He believes it is because we do not love our own selves, and suggests being proud of ‘Filipino culture’ and the ‘Filipino language’, and stop fighting over all these ‘regionalist’ sentiments and unite as Filipinos to achieve prosperity.

But isn’t the show-off attitude of Americanized Philippine people (which is true) just an offshoot of the much bigger show-off attitude of people who, when faced with the reality of lack of self-confidence, prefers to enthrone one language and culture over others as their ‘own’ and looks down on those who don’t do as they do?

It’s time to end this madness and push for who we really are. Bisaya ako. Tagalog ako. Ilonggo ako. Siak ti Ilokano. Bikolnon ako. Waraywaraynon ako. Et cetera. No more posturing as ‘Filipino’. We are all cousins by blood and friends by shared experiences. We are many but one.
That we are many – our languages and cultures tell us so, we can do nothing about it.
That we are one – our history tells us so, we can’t reverse it even if we wanted to.
No need for a ‘unifier’ show-off language or its ‘culture’ of garbage.
We are ourselves. And we are comfortable with ourselves.
We are many. We are one.

What It Means to ‘Tagalog-ize’ (4)

These serve as my comments on Dr. Agcaoili’s article “Our redemptive response to the temptations of Tagalogism and to the tyranny of Tagalogization” which was reproduced in three parts in the past three posts. Again, it is on www.solfedphil.org and you can see it there in its unedited form. That was not my work, but what follows is.

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It’s good that Dr. Agcaoili mentioned this:

As a mental disposition, Tagalogism is not about the Tagalog people, and many of them have nothing to do with [it], 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.

It must be obvious to people, Tagalogs or not, that 1) it was not the Tagalog people who pushed for this Tagalista movement and 2) the declaration of Tagalog as the national language did not serve the Tagalogs any good because they lost ‘their own language and culture’ when that happened.

I am against the loud recriminations of certain non-Tagalogs (my fellow Bisaya among them) that Tagalogs are oppressive. It’s not a systematic Nazi-type thing. Certain Tagalogs I know do lambast Bisaya people as people of low cultural level – I’m not unaware of that phenomenon – but it’s not as if the entirety of Katagalugan were locked in a cultural war with the Bisaya people. As I understand it, the Bisaya people are in a cultural war, not with the Tagalog people, but with the government! And the Bisaya people I know are up in arms – some of them have taken to lambast Tagalog people learning Binisaya – like me – when we try to speak Binisaya in Manila, as ‘funny speakers’ – then they just switch back to Tagalog to spare their ears and brain the unsavory prospect of hearing broken Binisaya.I happen to have Bisaya blood, and so what more if it were a pure Tagalog in my stead?

Is this a subliminal reaction to the Manila Imperialism they (and most of us, actually) so hate? And are we collateral damage only?

This is the only part of ‘regionalism’ I so hate. Of course, people like the Waray-Waray writer Voltaire Oyzon might justify this reaction as ‘understandable’ since this is ‘the natural reaction of a people whose culture is dying’. It is understandable, all right – but it is primal and not enlightened.

Will you be able to sustain a linguistic revolt then, if Malacanang gives you small concessions designed to mollify you while depriving you of your real demands? And there is no reason, even from that point of view, to lambast someone speaking (or trying to speak) your own language as ‘funny’ or ‘weird’ or ‘comical’, even if that person happens to be Tagalog or Tagalog-raised. That is like what the Tagalog comics do to the Bisaya, Waray, Ilokano, and other peoples, and it’s bullshit!

If you do that, that will lose supporters for you among the vast number of well-meaning Tagalogs, and that betrays your intolerance for all Tagalogs, even those who are trying to learn your language, however ‘survivalist’ and ‘natural’ this reaction may seem. More disturbingly – it seems that you really want war or secession no matter what the cost.

I am just saying that there is absolutely no justification in any place for a Bisaya to treat a Tagalog trying to speak Bisaya haltingly in Manila as a ‘clown’ or a ‘funny-accent’ person. That applies to all languages in all places. To treat someone like that is a tit-for-tat with the current policy of the Philippine Government which hurts people trying to speak your language. It’s like going to war – and raining bullets and bombs on the enemy’s unarmed civilians.

Anyway, setting the ruinous tit-for-tat that some linguistic Federalists have vowed against the Philippine Government aside, the point Dr. Agcaoili is making is that this government policy is strangling everyone – Tagalogs and non-Tagalogs – by imposing a political, linguistic, cultural, and social artifice (in the Philippine worldview) which is the concept of a ‘nation’.

We have never been a nation even if we have pretended to be one. And not just because we have had selfish policies. We really don’t know how to manage ourselves, and we don’t know who we are. Ah, that’s hard – not knowing who you are in substance. What you represent. What you like or dislike. You just adopt and adopt without thinking. Today, the culture of the Philippines is a mishmash of everything vile in the world. We promote prostitution and pornography, even if covertly, and we hide behind our Christian smiles and churches and pretend to be striving for ‘holiness’ while doing that. All because we really do not know what we want, or not want.

And we ourselves are to blame because we did not care: we thought that the mishmash of culture would all work out somehow. And it’s not only a problem here. In the overseas communities of Philippine peoples, they have begun to shy away from being called Filipinos or Philippine people because they don’t really know what to think about themselves as Filipinos. Now Dr. Agcaoili says:

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

No – it is not just the issue of any particular language for the whole country, it is the issue of only one language for the whole country. Even if Yogad (the language of the Yogad people in parts of Isabela) were the national language, the problem would still not be solved. We still have a warped view of ourselves.

to be continued – itutuloy – padayonon – maituloyto

What It Means To ‘Tagalog-ize’ (3)

The third installment of Dr. Aurelio Agcaoili’s “Our redemptive response to the temptations of Tagalogism and to the tyranny of Tagalogization”. Please go to www.solfedphil.org for the entire thing.

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In May 2008, delegates of [the] 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, has [been] handed over personally to Rep. Gunigundo in July 2008, at a consultative assembly participated in by [the] 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 [a] once-and-for-all claim for the peoples of the [Amianan (North)] 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 [present] 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, [because of] Constitutional reasons, some would like to read it [as] 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, until they all become cultural 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 [the] 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 [a] national language, a concept that valorizes, privileges, and gives entitlements to one and only one language.

We can grant here, tentatively, the virtue of [a] 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 Constitution of the Philippines provides for the translation into the major languages of the State. We do not know if, apart from [into] Tagalog, that Constitution has ever been translated into the languages of all the peoples of the Philippines so that, [according to] the claim [of] the Philippines as some kind of 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 [the] 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[, anyway].

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 [with] 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 [ruled] 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 [applied] governing 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.



What It Means To ‘Tagalog-ize’ (2)

This is the continuation of Dr. Aurelio Agcaoili’s article “Our redemptive response to the temptations of Tagalogism and to the tyranny of Tagalogization”.

Go to www.solfedphil.org for the entire version, please.

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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 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  run like heaven,[say], 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 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 <emphasis mine> – other legitimate languages and thus cultures of their territories, thus creating the questionable semblance [of] – a dubious verisimilitude – [being that] these countries had only one – only one <emphasis mine> “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 Filipino, or if one were from the more esteemed universities in Imperial Manila, this Pilipino is [for them] 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 <emphasis mine> 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 [culturally] 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. [For instance,] in the North (in the Amianan) was the Candon Republic.

With the center of power – the axis of all [the] power that remained undistributed until today – unable to communicate with those beyond that center, 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 [language at the] center of power thus served as [akin to] the French of France, the Madrid Spanish of Spain, the English of London, and the German of Bonn and elsewhere. Thus [was] 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 [and] 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 [liberating] power of the language of our souls released a statement supporting literacy education in its multicultural form. We applaud the LSP for doing that.

to be continued – itutuloy – padayonon – maituloyto

What It Means To ‘Tagalog-ize’ (1)

I take a break from Elections ’10 and spread this article round in my own little way. If we are really serious about reforming our country, we should stop thinking of one nation and one nation-state. This article by Dr. Agcaoili was copied from the SOLFED website, and I would like you to go to that website and debate with the Federalists there, and with me. I give my comments in a following article, and I have arranged the text so that it is more readable. This is the first of three parts. I didn’t delete any big part of it, but only the small bits that were disorganized.

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Our Redemptive Response

to the Temptations of Tagalogism

and to the Tyranny of Tagalogization

By Dr. Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

University of Hawaii Manoa

(from www.solfedphil.org)

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 [that] 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 [it], 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 [by] the powers-that-were, was an occasion of falling from grace, a grace that could be given only by respecting 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 national 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 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 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 become 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 [in] their sleeves and pockets, they are more boisterous now, their loud noises [as] their bluff to make us cower in fear and accept their illogicalities and [the] 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 [as] 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 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 Tagalogism – 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.

(to be continued – itutuloy – padayonon – maituloyto)