Exilo, Exilo
Ngayon ay alam ko na: Na tunay na merong heograpiya ang kalungkutan at pasakit—at dito sa dayo, ang heograpiyang ito ay permanenteng residente sa nangungulilang dibdib, sa kaluluwang nagkakallautang, at sa pusong palagiang nangingibang-bayan. Ganun din na ang heograpiyang ito ay isang pasang-pasang krus na lumalampas sa mapanligtas na basbas ng panahon o ng angkin nitong galing na magpahilom ng mga sugat, sariwa man o mga peklat sa isip.
Tuwing umaga ng paglilingkod sa ibang bansa, ang silangan ang aking tungo: doon sa Diamond Head, ang panandang burol sa balikat ng islang ito na tumatanod sa malawak na karagatang Pasifiko, na, sa aking naglalayag na imahinasyon, ay karugtong ng di masukat-sukat na katawan ng katubigan sa isang bahagi ng bayang iniwan. May pagpapakahulugan ang pook ng aking pinaglilingkurang unibersidad: dito ipinapanganak ang araw. Gusto kong isipin ito—gustong kong panghawakang ito bilang isang susing pagpapakahulugan ng lahat ng pagpapakahulugan ng aking pagiging exilo.
Sa kanluran ang aking inuuwian kung kaya ang siklo ng aking pang-araw-araw na buhay sa dayo ay nakaangkla sa ikot ng aking maliit na mundo, sa inog ng araw, sa rebolusyon ng mga planeta ng kada dalawampu’t apat na oras na buhay at karanasan at paghahanap ng katubusan sa ibang bayan. Hindi sa lugar na ito una akong napadpad sa paglalagalag kundi sa kabila pa ng malawak na karagatang ito, doon sa Mainland ng Estados Unidos ng lahat ng mga alalahanin at pagkikipagsapalaran, mga pagdurusang ayaw ko nang balikan, mga pagpapakasakit na ang tanging nakakaalam ay ang kuwadernong tangan, isa kada mahalagang muhon ng pakikibaka, mga kuwadernong magtatatlumpo na at ngayon ay pawang mga eksibit ng aking pagtalunton sa ganun ding daan ng mga nagsipunta sa Amerika isang daang tao na ang nakararaan: mga sakada sa Ilocos, Tagalog, at Visaya na nagsilikas sa mga mumunting baryo upang makipagbuno sa mga karahasan ng kapital, ng plantasyon, at mga lunang amo, halimbawa; mga pansamantalang obrero sa mga taniman at pagawaan ng delata tulad nina Manuel Buaken at Carlos Bulosan; at mga tago-ng-tagong tagaalaga ng mga mayayamang matatanda sa Nueva York at Nueva Jersey.
Litanya ng mga komplikadong karanasan ang tatlumpong kuwaderno, at tulad ng sa Luma at Bagong Tipan, tila isa itong personal na talaan ng paglalakbay paglayo sa bayan at pag-uwi sa sarili, upang sa sulok ng mga dilim at lungkot, sa isip at sa mga parkeng ramdam ang matinding pag-iisa, doon, doon ko sinasariwa ang aral tungkol sa hakbangin ng pagtutubos sa sariling nandarayuhan, sa sariling naging exilo sa mga lungkot at kontradiksyon ng bayang sinilangan upang mula sa malayo ay malirip ang mga mumunting liwanag sa mga siwang ng mga dingding ng pagdanas.
Nakatala sa aking mga kuwaderno ang mga daan-daang pahina ng mga pangamba, ng mga pagdadalawang-isip, ng mga pagbabaka-baka, ng mga pananakot sa sarili na hindi ang Amerika—at ngayon ay ang Hawai`i—ang lupaing laan para sa akin, ang Lupang Pangako, na ang solusyon ng pagbabaha ng luha sa aking unan, ng tuwi-tuwinang pagdagundong ng aking dibdib, at ng di mabilang sa daliring pagyugyog ng aking balikat sa dilim ay ang pag-eempake sa dalawang maletang dala-dalahan at sumakay sa unang eroplanong pabalik sa bayan. Pero hindi ganoon kadali ang mga bagay-bagay sa dayo kung ang bayang iniwan ay isa ring heograpiya ng pagpapakasakit at kalungkutan, kung ang bayan ay isang republika rin ng mga anomalya sa lumbay at kawalan ng panlipunang katarungan.
Sa hapon, uuwi ako sa tahanan sa kanluran, doon sa laot, doon sa mga kabit-kabit na bundok na rumururok sa payapang kalangitan upang sa kabila nito na lingid sa akin tanaw ay manganganak ng nagyayabang na talampas na kumakanlong ng mga taniman, kabahayan, mga lugar na pinagpapasyalan at pinagpipiknikan, ng mga makikipot na daan paakyat sa mga balikat ng mga burol at gubat, at ang walang katapusang katubigang ang alon ay tila mga baylarinang nagsasayaw sa tugtog ng hangin o sa saliw ng mga ibong nagsisikantahan pagdating ng takip-silim. May magkahalong pagkamangha at pagkatakot sa aking dibdib kapag nakikita ko ang lampas-lampasang karagatan. Pakaiisipin ko ang hintuturong sumusunod sa guhit sa langit na iniiwan ng eroplano noong panahong wala pa akong kamuwang-muwang sa ibig sabihin ng paglisan at matagal na hindi pagbabalik.
Sa pagitan ng umaga at hapon—sa pagitan ng pagpasok sa trabaho sa silangan at pag-uwi sa kanluran ng araw sa malungkot at malamig na higaan sa gabi ay ang walang katapusang pag-iimbento ng kahulugan ng mga panahong inagaw sa amin, kaming mag-anak, habang nagkakasya kami sa email at paminsan-minsang webcam. Aaliwin ko ang sarili sa pagbabagtas ng kahabaan ng malulungkot na freeway ng bayang ito ng mga nakapinid na mga silid, mga bahay na kuta ng mga taong-kuwago at pinipipi ng garang panlabas, mga pintuang di halos nagbubukas, mga bintanang wala man lamang dumudungaw, at mga kalyeng walang tao kundi mga sasakyan at sasakyan pa na palagiang naghahabol sa palagiang tumatakas na oras.
Peregrino, sabi ko sa sarili, at naaalala ko ang panahon ng paghahanap ng kahulugan sa seminaryo: mga panahon ito ng pagkatali sa mga oras, sa mga gawain, sa awtoridad, sa rehimentadong pagwawaldas ng isip at kabataan, sa dasal, isang libo at isang dasal, taimtim at mapagkumbaba, dasal na humihingi ng kaliwanagan kung ang piniling landas ng paglalakbay sa buhay ay siya ngang landas na laan, takda ng panahon at pook, takda ng uniberso, takda ng mortal na buhay. Sa pinaderang buhay sa seminaryo, nangabubuhay kami noon sa kapangyarihan ng batingting: umaga, tanghali, at gabi ay pinaghaharian kami ng batingting, ang makapangyayaring batingting, ang batingting ng aming bawat hininga, ang batingting ng aming kakayahang sumunod sa mga may poder at sa tinig ng Espiritung tumatawag sa amin sa ganoong uri ng buhay.
Sa pagtulog ay ang batingting.
Sa paggising ay ang batingting.
Sa paglibog—na madalas ay palihim at lingid sa mga awtoridad—ay ang mahiwaga at makapangyarihang batingting.
Ang batingting ang kumakalampag sa amin tuwing madaling araw na kasarapan ng pagtulog pagkatapos ng maghapong rehimen ng pag-aaral at pagdarasal. Ang batingting din ang kontrabida sa aming makukulay na panaginip na di kayang sagkaan o harangin o angkinin ng paring pinagkukumpisalan.
Gugulantangin ka ng batingting habang sa panaginip ay ang naratibo ng paglaya—ikaw sa isang tuktok ng matayog na bundok na tumatanaw sa isang malawak na karagatan na walang haggan, naabot ng tanaw at hindi rin, sa bundok na iyon na doon mo wiwikain ang pormularyo ng paglalakbay tungo sa pansariling kalayaan: “Ako ay nangangako mula ngayon na hinding-hindi na ako pasisiil sa mga manupakturadong katotohanan ng buhay sa loob ng mga makakapal na pader.”
Pipilitin mong balikan ang panaginip, pipiliting malaman ang katapusan nito, pipiliting alamin kung sa huling kabanata nito ay magtatanggal ka ng sotana at mangangako sa Poon ng buhay na maglalakbay pa rin ayon sa kahingian ng tunay na kalayaan at kabutihan. Hahanapin ang karugtong ng panaginip sa mga dasal na mekanikal na sasambitin, mga pormuladong dasal ng Aman Namin at Ave Maria.
Subalit hindi ganoon ang landas ng panaginip—hindi tumatalunton sa nais ng nanaginip kapag ito ay nakarating na sa lebel ng ibang ulirat. Pipilitin mong ibalik ang himbing ng tulog sa pag-upo at pagdinig sa walang utak na sermon ng pari subalit kinakailangang sumagot ng “Amen,” magkurus sa tamang panahon, lumuhod sa tamang sandali, umawit na wala sa puso.
Ang batingting ang hudyat ng lahat: ng pagkilala na ang mortal mong buhay ay di iyo, na ikaw, seminarista, ay isang exilo sa buhay na ito, na ikaw at lahat ng mga nilalang, ay pawang mga exilo, at ang buhay na ito ay isang naratibo ng pagiging exilo—mga talinghagang kayhirap isadiwa subalit ang katotohanang taglay ay singtotoo ng mortalidad at hangganan ng hininga.
Sa sulok ng aking isip na nagliliwaliw, isang permanenteng residente doon ang walang ngalang lumbay na ang ugat ay ang di pagkawari kung kailan nga ba mauulinigan muli ang harutan ng mga anak sa isang tahanang malaya kaming magpalitan ng mga talinghaga na hindi sinasagkaan ng binabayarang oras mula sa mga mandorobong phone card o ng binabantayang mga minuto sa bawat long distance.
Sadyang buntis na pangako ng pagsasama-sama muli ng pamilya para sa isang katulad kong naglagalag.
Taon ang bubunuin bago maaprubahan ang petisyon ng pagiging migrante ng kaanak, taong walang simula sa mga buwan at araw at linggo. At habang wala pa sa ganoong kalagayang makakapiling ang kaanak, magdadamot sa sarili ng lumbay, luha, at ligalig. Magbabantay ng uubusing pag-iisa, lungkot, pangarap. Patatagin ang sarili sa pamamagitan ng paalalang nakaugat sa pag-asang buhay, ang ugat ay may dugo, ang mukha ay sa isinisilang na araw sa umagang papasok ako ng trabaho sa silangan: May pagbubuo pagkatapos ng mahabang panahon ng pagkakahiwa-hiwalay.
Alam ko ang pag-asang iyon, minemorya na ng lahat ng selula ng aking aking utak, bawat himaymay nga king kalamnan, ngunit kapag dumapo ang kakaibang lungkot, hahayaan kong lumaya ang luha, aalon sa aking mga mata, dadaluyong sa aking pisngi, at mapapakinggan ko ang aking piping hikbi: walang salita ito ngunit punum-puno ng wika.
Alam ko ang ibig sabihin ng pag-asang eternal.
Subalit magkaiba ang alam sa nararamdaman, at ang damdamin ay singtingkad ng araw sa katanghaliang tapat na ang anino ay sa tao mismong nangangarap—hindi lumalampas kundi sinasakop mismo ang hugis ng pagkatao, ng isip, ng malay, ng lahat ng halagahing pinanghahawakan at napanghahawakang tunay.
Titigan ko ang araw at hindi ako kumukurap: sa kabilugan nito, doon, sa sentro ng mga apoy, doon ko madalas hinahanap ang katuparan ng isang pangarap na makahabol pa ako sa mga harutan ng mga anak, na noong iwan ang panganay ay katutuntong pa lamang sa kolehiyo at ngayon ay ipinaglalaban na ang sariling karapatan at buhay; ang pangalawa ay patapos na noon ng hayskul at ngayon ay magtatapos na ng kanyang karera at ibig nang pasukin ang pagiging potograpo upang madokumento ang aming maraming taong paglayo; at ang bunso ay nag-aaral pa lamang humakbang noon at ngayon ay siya nang tagasagot sa telepono tuwing nagkakaroon ako ng panahon at pera na idayal ang telepono sa tahanang iniwan upang sa binabayarang sandali ay mapaglapit naming ang distansiya sa aming pagitan.
Naaalala ko ang unang uwi: di ako makilala ng bunso, ayaw lumapit sa akin, kinikilala ng mabuti kung sino ang dumating, basta lamang tinititigan ako, di siguro mawari kung ano ang dapat gawin—kung tama ba na ang bagontaong dumating ay yakapin, halikan, kausapin, kumustahin, sabihan ng “Itay, itay!”
May sugat sa isip ang ganitong mga eksena subalit kinakailangang magpakatatag ang exilo—subalit kinakailangang magiging matatag ang naglagalag na nagsusumikap bumalik sa mga pook na iniwan, sa mga panahong iniwan, sa mga pusong iniwan. Sa ganitong pagkakataon ko ring inuusisa ang sarili: Tunay nga bang nakakabalik ang umaalis sa poon, panahon, at pusong iniwan? Naaareglo ba ang mga lamat ng utak, ang mga sugat na bunga ng mga distansiya at paglayo, ang mga araw at gabing nangawala?
Hindi ko noon alam kung saan sulok ng puso ko apuhapin ang galak sa pagkakita sa bunso na noong iwan ay di pa ako halos matatandaan, di memoryado ang hugis ng aking mukha, di kabisado ang timbre ng aking tinig. Tuwing dumadapo sa akin ang damdaming kayhirap pangalanan habang kaniig ang pag-iisa sa dayo, makikipagpaligsahan ako sa mga sandali upang takasan ang depresyon. Normal na siguro ang ganito sa katulad naming nagbibilang ng araw sa kalendaryong binudburan ng mga marka ng anibersaryo at kaarawang di naman naming nadadaluhan subalit minamarkahan pa rin sakaling may milagrong magaganap at sa isang kisapmata’y makakalipad papauwi sa Filipinas. Subalit hanggang sa guni-guni lang madalas ang ganoong pag-iilusyon sa dikta ng mga numero at araw ng kalendaryong dinidisimula ng mga magagandang tanawin sa bayang iniwan.
Sa dayo, sa pag-uwi sa gabi sa tentatibong tahanan ay kaniig ang lamig ng higaan, kaisa ang katahimikan ng mga nauumid na upuan, kaharap ang mesang di halos nadadapuan ng pagkain sapagkat mas maiging kumain sa labas sa pag-aakalang ang mga taong katulad na estranghero sa iyong paligid ay mga tao pa ring naghahanap ng pakikiisa, mga markado rin ng heograpiya ng lumbay at pasakit. Sa pagkilala sa kanilang lumbay at lungkot ay nakakalikha ka ng isang uri ng komunyon ng mga peregrino ng mga pangungulilang ang pangalan ay di makikita sa litanya ng mga emosyon ng mga nangingibang-bayan kundi nasa molde ng mga kuwentong walang may kakayahang magsadiwa sapagkat lumalampas ito sa wika ng pagbagabundo sa buhay. Habang kinakagat ang pagkain sa fastfood sa gitna ng mga ingay at kalembang ng kahon ng kahera at mga dolyar na pamatid-uhaw sa lahat ng uri ng kasaganaan at kabutihan, ramdam ang pag-iisa, tumitingkad ang pag-iisa, at ang pag-iisa ay walang kaparis. Pipiliting alalahanin ang kapangyarihan ng pagsipol sa dilim kapag dinadapuan ng takot—subalit hindi takot ang kalaban ng pusong nag-iisa kundi ang salita ng ibang nagbibigay buhay, naglalarawan ng hugis at anyo at kulay ng katubusang magbibigay ng kagampan sa lahat ng mga alalahanin ng manlalakbay sa buhay, sa bayan mang iniwan o sa bayang kinapuntahan.
Kapag dinadapuan ako ng ganitong uri ng kalbaryong walang ngalan, kakausapin ko ang sarili at papangalan, tuwi-tuwina, ang tunay na kalagayan. “Exilo, exilo,” sasambitin ko, paulit-ulit na pagsambit, paulit-ulit tulad ng “Om” ng Sadhanang aking natutuhan sa seminaryo noong matagal nang panahon.
“Exilo, exilo” sasabihin ko muli, kasabay ng aking paghinga, kasabay ng pagkilala sa prana ng kapaligiran, sa chi ng uniberso, sa anito ng mga alaala ng mga ninuno. “Exilo, exilo,” sasambitin ko muli at naroroon ako sa isang panahon, sa baryo ng aking tatang, sa paligid ng mga kagubatan, mga burol, mga ilog, mga palayan, mga umaga na malamig at ang kaanak ay magsisiga, nagsusunog ng mga dahon at sanga ng kahoy, magsisiga, at ang kaanak ay nangagsipapalibot sa apoy at nangagsisikukuha ng darang sa apoy upang labanan ang lamig hanggang sa sandaling bubulaga ang araw, at magreregalo ito ng darang. Subalit habang nakatago pa ang araw sa mga bundok sa silangan, ang siga ang magsisilbing balon ng darang, at mula sa liwanag nito ay magbibinhi ng pagkukuwento.
Una muna ang pinakamatanda sa angkan, ang paulit-ulit na kuwento ng kanyang paglalakbay, ng kanyang paglisan, ng kanyang pagtungo sa mga plantasyon sa Hawai`i, ang pagpapatatag sa sarili sa gitna ng mga dagok, ng kaapihan, ng kalupitan, ng kawalan ng hustisya. Ang pagpapanatili sa pananampalataya. Ang pagpapangako na magbabalik sa bayan, paghuhusayin ang buhay, itataguyod ang pamilya. Ikakabesa ko ito—at lahat na mga kuwentong aking maririnig, nanamnamin ang mga piling salitang ginagamit upang maisawika ang karanasan, pakakaisipin sa aking utak kung bakit ganito ang pagsisiwalat at hindi ganoon—at sasagutin din ang mga tanong na higit sa lahat, ang pagbabalik ay isang uri ng pagtutubos sa sarili.
Tahimik lang kaming mga bata, subalit may ingay sa aking utak.
Gusto kong lumayo.
Gusto kong maglayag.
Gusto kong makarating sa mga malalayong lupain at makita doon ang pagsilang at paglubog nga raw.
Gusto kong maging saksi sa mga walang katapusang pagbubuntis ng mga pag-asa at pagpakahulugan ng buhay sa dayo, sa mga kuwento ng mga exilo, mga nandarayuhan sa sariling bayan, mga nandarayuhan sa ibang bayan, mga peregrino sa sariling kalooban, sa sariling isip, sa sariling pagkakatiintindi ng katotohanan at kabutihan at kagandahan.
Gusto kong maglagalag tulad ng ibig sabihin ng ‘pag-agkawili’ ng mga Ilokano noong panahon.
Gusto kong maglakbay tulad ng paglalakbay ng mga bayani sa mga epiko ng mga pamayanang grupo ng bayan—at sa paglalakbay ay makakasagupa ang lahat ng mga balakid, at tatalunin lahat ng mga ito upang makauwi sa sariling isip, sa sariling loob, sa sariling nakem, sa sariling buot.
Makikinig kami sa kuwento ng nakatatanda at susunod ang iba pang nagsilayo upang magbalik din sa pook ng aking tatang at isawika ang sariling karanasan.
“Exilo, exilo,” sasabihin ko—at ang aking sarili ang aking sasabihan.
Pakakaisipin ko ang panahon na naririto na ang kaanak: ang kanilang pag-alis sa tahanang nagtago at nagkanlong sa kanilang pagkatao at kabataan, ang mga halakhak na nakatago sa mga dingding, ang mga luhang nakasuksok sa mga pansariling taguan, ang mga sulat ng mga anak na nangangako ng pagpapakabuti, ng pagsasaayos ng ugali, ng hindi pag-uulit sa mga nagawang kalabisan na siyang sanhi ng pagratsada ng sermon mula sa kanilang ina.
Pakakaisipin ko ang pagkawala ng mga supling ng ugat sa bayang sinilangan.
Pakakaisipin ko ang kanilang pag-aalumpihit na umalis sa bayan, at sa dayo, sa mga pook na iba ang takbo ng simoy ng hangin at iba ang ikot ng mundo, dito, dito sila magsusumikap magka-ugat, mabuhay tulad ng lahat ng exilo, magbago ng wika, magbago ng dila, magbago ng utak, magbago ng panlasa. Minsan, naiisip ko ang katarungang taglay ng ganitong hinaharap—at naiisip ko, ako mismo ang nagiging ahente ng pagiging exilo ng aking kaanak.
Magdududa ako sa aking mga pasya, magbabaka-baka sa mga posibilidad.
Pakaiingatan natin ang bahay natin, sabi ng panganay. Paaayos natin, palalakihin. Magbabalik tayo.
Mag-aaral akong maging potograpo, sabi ng pangalawa.
Magreretiro ako dito, sabi ng kabiyak sa telepono.
Tatakbo ang bunso sa bintana at pagmamasdan ang mabining pagpatak ng ulan sa aming lugar sa gilid ng Kamaynilaan. “Umuulan din ba sa bahay mo, itay? Dito sa bahay namin, hala, lumalakas ang ulan!” Iba ang bahay ng bunsong iniwan.
Nangingilid ang aking luha. Iba ang aking bahay, iba ang bahay ng aking mga anak. Tunay ngang iba ang bahay ng kaanak na iniwan.
Exilo, sasabihin ko sa aking sarili. Exilo.
Magpapakawala ako ng malalim na malalim na buntong-hininga, pakakawalan ko sa dagat, sa hangin mula sa Diamond Head, sa gabi sa mga tugatog ng mga bundok sa kanluran, sa umaga sa mga freeway na aking lalakbayin.
Exilo, exilo, sasabihin ko.
Walang salitang nabubuo sa aking mga bibig.
Lumalampas sa wika ang pagiging exilo.
-30-
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Abr 29/07
Ilokano as a National Language, 7
(Note: This is a copy of my email to Mr. Manuel Faelnar, Vice President for Metro Manila of SOLFED (Saving Our Languages Through Federalism), and who kindly found a way to hook me up with Dr. Jose V. Abueva, former President of the University of the Philippines and now President of Kalayaan College in Marikina City, the Philippines. Dr. Abueva, through Mr. Faelnar, sent a copy of his “Kapunongang Bisaya in the Global Filipino Nation: A Proposal” to which I am reacting and commenting. I share these comments I emailed to Mr. Faelnar.)
Dear Manuel,
I read with openness of heart and soul Dr Abueva's proposal for the KB. I must say the whole concept is laudable except for the following flaws:
1. It is not critical enough of the manipulations by law and history and by political and cultural leaders in the 'officialization' of Tagalog as P/Filipino. I dare say it does not unmask the lies and ruses of Tagalog being passed off as 'the national language'. This, to me, is a disservice and it results in the next point, ie.,
2. the notion of 'incorporation' of Binisaya terms (Dr. Abueva's term). The very notion of incorporation itself needs revisiting because of the fact that P/Filipino as a national language has remained structurally the same as Tagalog (ie., grammar, syntax, semantic configuration, etc.) and thus, in reality, this P/Filipino is in reality, a DIALECT of Tagalog and NOT a national language. When two 'languages' can perfectly understand each other, one is NOT a language but a DIALECT. The historical and linguistic primacy of Tagalog would then logically render this presumptuous 'P/Filipino' as a dialect of Tagalog and is not therefore in keeping with the spirit and intent of the 1987 Constitution. Ask a Linguistics 101 student and he tells you this simple fact of language and how it is different from a dialect. So the national language 'P/Filipino' is a dialect? My good guess is that we have been hoodwinked by policymakers including language teachers and educators, not to mention the ignorant political leaders who do not know any better but nevertheless have the power to ram into our throats their own brand of skewed truth on how to build a nation based, among others, on one and only one national language. This is a Marcosian tactic and it is ideologically grounded on thought control and Gulagization.
This leads me to point three:
3. How did it ever happen that we gave 'citizenship' to the Tagalog language when in reality, the Marcos and Cory Constitutions are conceptually clear about what the 'national language' is supposed to be?
Which brings me to point four:
4. How is it that to form a nation, there should only be one and only one national language? Who decreed that? Are we not learning from the flaws of Western history that gas-chambered their other languages in an Aryanist streak and fit for purity so that the Western nations can become nations? Is this not the wrong model to follow?
Which brings me to point 5:
5. Federalization--your Solfed's position--is one way to go and we must fight it out that: 1. Filipino as a national language ought to end up masquerading as Tagalog; and 2. we must opt for more than one national language. Fair is fair. Justice must be served. We have done a lot of linguistic and cultural injustices to our people. It is high time that we realized that we have all been a party to this continued serving of injustice.
Lastly, I buy your Solfed's position--and we must push for that one.
I have no problems with the 1987 Constitution mandate on Filipino as a national language. I guess that Dr. Abueva had a hand in that. My worry is that the Constitution has to be good with what it clearly provides. We need to account those who are passing off the lies and ruses--and we need to be real with the spirit and intent of the Constitution otherwise we all go haywire. Or we ask for amendment if need be to serve the ends of justice, fairness and linguistic and cultural democracy. Linguistic tyranny and cultural dictatorship must be recognized even if these are in guises--and effectively so.
Hats off--the anitos will bless you and Solfed,
Aurelio Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Apri 29-07
Dear Manuel,
I read with openness of heart and soul Dr Abueva's proposal for the KB. I must say the whole concept is laudable except for the following flaws:
1. It is not critical enough of the manipulations by law and history and by political and cultural leaders in the 'officialization' of Tagalog as P/Filipino. I dare say it does not unmask the lies and ruses of Tagalog being passed off as 'the national language'. This, to me, is a disservice and it results in the next point, ie.,
2. the notion of 'incorporation' of Binisaya terms (Dr. Abueva's term). The very notion of incorporation itself needs revisiting because of the fact that P/Filipino as a national language has remained structurally the same as Tagalog (ie., grammar, syntax, semantic configuration, etc.) and thus, in reality, this P/Filipino is in reality, a DIALECT of Tagalog and NOT a national language. When two 'languages' can perfectly understand each other, one is NOT a language but a DIALECT. The historical and linguistic primacy of Tagalog would then logically render this presumptuous 'P/Filipino' as a dialect of Tagalog and is not therefore in keeping with the spirit and intent of the 1987 Constitution. Ask a Linguistics 101 student and he tells you this simple fact of language and how it is different from a dialect. So the national language 'P/Filipino' is a dialect? My good guess is that we have been hoodwinked by policymakers including language teachers and educators, not to mention the ignorant political leaders who do not know any better but nevertheless have the power to ram into our throats their own brand of skewed truth on how to build a nation based, among others, on one and only one national language. This is a Marcosian tactic and it is ideologically grounded on thought control and Gulagization.
This leads me to point three:
3. How did it ever happen that we gave 'citizenship' to the Tagalog language when in reality, the Marcos and Cory Constitutions are conceptually clear about what the 'national language' is supposed to be?
Which brings me to point four:
4. How is it that to form a nation, there should only be one and only one national language? Who decreed that? Are we not learning from the flaws of Western history that gas-chambered their other languages in an Aryanist streak and fit for purity so that the Western nations can become nations? Is this not the wrong model to follow?
Which brings me to point 5:
5. Federalization--your Solfed's position--is one way to go and we must fight it out that: 1. Filipino as a national language ought to end up masquerading as Tagalog; and 2. we must opt for more than one national language. Fair is fair. Justice must be served. We have done a lot of linguistic and cultural injustices to our people. It is high time that we realized that we have all been a party to this continued serving of injustice.
Lastly, I buy your Solfed's position--and we must push for that one.
I have no problems with the 1987 Constitution mandate on Filipino as a national language. I guess that Dr. Abueva had a hand in that. My worry is that the Constitution has to be good with what it clearly provides. We need to account those who are passing off the lies and ruses--and we need to be real with the spirit and intent of the Constitution otherwise we all go haywire. Or we ask for amendment if need be to serve the ends of justice, fairness and linguistic and cultural democracy. Linguistic tyranny and cultural dictatorship must be recognized even if these are in guises--and effectively so.
Hats off--the anitos will bless you and Solfed,
Aurelio Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Apri 29-07
A Gospel According to GK
An Everyday Gospel According to GK:
A Reading of “Paradise: Three Stories of Hope”
By Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, Ph.D.
University of Hawai`i at Manoa
On Saturday, April 21, 2007, I watched Gawad Kalinga’s “Paradise: Three Stories of Hope.” It was one of those film showings we go to once in while, and this time around, it was at the Filipino Community Center in Waipahu. Several days before, the retired Rep. Jun Abinsay called me up to say that I would be his guest, and that if I could find time to join the community and watch the film. I said, yes, and then I was hooked. I saw friends, I saw the business and community leaders, I saw the smiles of people, and I saw sorrow in the flesh. In the silence, that sorrow was palpable: I allowed the tears to flow freely on my cheeks, feeling the flow, feeling it with the humanity I could muster, the scenes of wretchedness overwhelming me, the hope in those stories giving me hope for the people and the homeland as well. My initial reaction was personal, subjective, perhaps within the ambit of crude intelligence that can only come from recognizing your feelings, your emotions, and your realization that life, indeed, is a difficult text. In all these mixed reactions as the reel showed the real in the country I know best, I had the darkness of the Filcom Center ballroom for cover. No one knew I shed tears. I had the white hanky for help.
All art is propaganda, I know. All films are, for certain. Being a teacher of film—and art, for that matter, this I have known. And so I just simply sat back and relaxed and enjoyed the GK propaganda in the three stories in the film, knowing and knowing full well that what I would see is the GK gospel that talks about how we can find heaven in this rotting and rotten hell that the country we left behind has become. The cynical in me had to go away as well, and I allowed the three stories to sink in my head, with Ryan Cayabyab’s music of the same title giving the soothing for the bruised soul even as I came to terms with what the stories were trying to suggest. “Even if Heaven Cries” talks of the despair that comes with grief and destruction and havoc such as the case of the wiping out of an entire village in Liloan. There the living were buried alive and they died poor, covered by the mud of the mountains desecrated by the loggers. “My Brother Elvis,” reveals what love can do to a bubbly but homeless boy, Elvis. “Marie” reminds us of the epic story of 9/11, that literal and symbolic destruction of lives and hopes only to allow life and hope to come back again from the ruins. If we look for realism in these short films, you have enough of them, although Elvis’ journey from being homeless to having a loving home might present some oddities that are more like tropes than realities such as that almost comical pushing-and-shoving of the doghouse from one place to another, only to disappear in an instant. But the acting, the emotionally-charged scenes, and the narrative structure that is fluid in each story, are more than enough to compensate for the technical flow that we sense when we compare the film with the standards of high budget film conceived in millions of dollars complete with millions of ad exposures in glossy covers of magazine and talk show spots.
We are told of the miracle in the production of the film: how the topnotch actors on Philippine silver screen waived their ‘normal’ millions of fees, the actors including Maricel Soriano, Cesar Montano, Robert Arevalo, Ricky Davao, Carmi Martin, Michael V, and Lilia Dizon; how the producers Buth Jimenez, Tony Gloria, Bobby Barreiro found the absurd pieces come together in a jigsaw solved with clarity of purposes; and how Ryan Cayabyab the music artist willingly allowed his music to be used as the score to salve the suffering soul in the story and in the spectator.
Early on, there are no pretensions, no high handed techniques known only to the usual “Hollywoodization” of even the inane Philippine film trying to imitate the blockbuster and dollar-raking film from the commercialized mindsets of the world’s viewers.
Even before I saw the film, I have committed to the GK committee in Honolulu headed by Jun Abinsay that we are going to incorporate into our syllabi at the Ilokano and Philippine Drama Program of the University of Hawai`i the film which we will show on August 21. I knew that this film would make a difference to our students majority of whom are of Filipino heritage.
My rating for this film: five stars for telling exactly what we need to know and to hear: that we cannot allow to continue to happen what Juvenal has said a long time ago—Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se, quam quod ridiculos hominess facit—what is hardest to bear in dire poverty is that it makes a man a laughingstock.
The stories are simple, a bit soapy, those melodramatic types whose plot structures we could have read in the comics form, heard from the radio soap operas, or watched on the boob tube. Yet the honesty of hoping, the sheer honesty of igniting hope where hope is none to be found, where hope has wished to be absent forever—this, I think, is the gem in the trilogy. It is this sense of the gospel—the sense of the good news—in the everyday. We see in this the kernel of redemption that we all need as a people, whether we are in the Philippines or abroad.
This sense of the redemptive leads me to my meditations on the gospel according to GK.
My relationship with GK, the movement and non-profit organization whose unquestionable good deeds are sweeping across the Philippine archipelago and now in some Third World countries, is more conceptual than practical. I have had friends in Los Angeles who were into GK’s causes of eradicating homelessness and of bringing back decency and self-respect to the poor and the wretched of the homeland. These friends talked of how, with just a thousand dollars, a home could be built and a living hope could spring back into the hearts of the homeless. There is a pro-active dynamic in this idea and I was sold to it.
Back in the Philippines many years ago, GK, to my mind, was just like many other organizations who put a premium more on the results than on the rah-rah-rah. From afar, as a researcher, I had read up on the homes they built, the lives they rebuilt, and the families they gifted with grace.
As a teacher in a state-owned university, I could only look in amazement at this miracle happening before my very eyes. I took note of what GK wanted to do and in my mind, I remember most the organization’s desire to eradicate the spectacle of poverty and misery that many presidents and political leaders of the country have vowed to do, but nonetheless lost the heart to keep their vow once the power to rule was in their hands.
Such is the lot of the home country that the many who have left its earth and soil and daily barrage of atrocities to find and found a home some place else have grown cynical of this show of systematic violence against those who have no access to the country’s resources.
Up close, I remember what I wrote in a monograph, “The Poverty of the Philippine Poor,” published several years after People Power I.
To write that monograph, I went on a fieldwork among the mushrooming slums and squatter colonies of Metro Manila.
In those times, the yellow revolution was on its full swing, and we had high hopes for the better. But later on, Cory Aquino’s leadership began to show the challenges of reforming and reshaping a country whose oligarchs have had their heyday and who had no intention of giving up the perks and pelf of power. Dispersal of rallies became common; farmers who massed up in Mendiola demanding ‘land for the landless’ were massacred and a writer and teacher like me could only gather his thoughts in prayer and on paper. The sense of betrayal was palpable.
I joined a group doing fact finding missions in areas where the poor with their shanties were displaced, their pots and pans and faith in disarray, on the streets for the full view of the gawking public, with children unkempt and hungry, with mothers and old women clutching at their Santo Ninos and their Mothers of Perpetual Help to invoke the mercies of the muffled heavens. I invested on wrenching emotions writing that monograph. Anger became a logical reaction—anger because of this wastage of hope and blessings and people’s trust in their leaders. The betrayal is systemic, I knew then, and that knowledge has not changed. The new leaders who were supposed to be giving the people a new lease on life after more than two decades of suffering and political repression were not simply present for and in the name of the people.
I left the country with a heavy heart after years and years of university teaching, with this spectacle of poverty growing heavier each day. You simply are reminded of the inutility of it all, this wastage of dreams, aspirations, opportunities for changes, and leadership that could have spelled the difference between making social justice work and sliding back into the way things had been. The either/or situation was too much to bear.
A couple of months ago, the retired Rep. Jun Abinsay called me up to ask if I could join the core group to discuss about ways in which we can bring in people to get educated into what our various communities in the United States could do to help GK in its work of providing homes for the wretched of the Philippines. The State of Hawai`i, certainly, has its worries related to homelessness, with families living in parks and beaches because the cause of rent has skyrocketed and that home ownership has become some kind of a ‘good luck’, a buenas for those who can afford to pay the monthly mortgage by doing double jobs and running away from all the social gatherings that seem to be endless.
In that gathering were Abinsay, Sonny Perez, Tony Boquer, JP Orias, and myself. We talked of premier showings, of how to make it known to the community of the good deeds of GK, of building men and women and communities by rebuilding in them the sense of decency and self-respect. It was a gathering of minds, and the work began, and indeed, Abinsay, Perez, and Boquer pushed the idea to its fruition. They are giving back to the homeland of the Filipino people who have come to Hawai`i, even if Perez is from Guam and Boquer has nothing to do with the Philippines. Despite these differing circumstances of who they are, we have warriors in the three, and in these warriors is their basic humanity.
Paradise, indeed, can be revisited, rethought, reinvented, redefined.
And hope? It springs eternal in the hearts of man and women who know what it takes to be truly and fully human by permitting and coaxing others to become full and truly human.
(Published at the Fil-Am Observer, May 2007)
A Reading of “Paradise: Three Stories of Hope”
By Aurelio Solver Agcaoili, Ph.D.
University of Hawai`i at Manoa
On Saturday, April 21, 2007, I watched Gawad Kalinga’s “Paradise: Three Stories of Hope.” It was one of those film showings we go to once in while, and this time around, it was at the Filipino Community Center in Waipahu. Several days before, the retired Rep. Jun Abinsay called me up to say that I would be his guest, and that if I could find time to join the community and watch the film. I said, yes, and then I was hooked. I saw friends, I saw the business and community leaders, I saw the smiles of people, and I saw sorrow in the flesh. In the silence, that sorrow was palpable: I allowed the tears to flow freely on my cheeks, feeling the flow, feeling it with the humanity I could muster, the scenes of wretchedness overwhelming me, the hope in those stories giving me hope for the people and the homeland as well. My initial reaction was personal, subjective, perhaps within the ambit of crude intelligence that can only come from recognizing your feelings, your emotions, and your realization that life, indeed, is a difficult text. In all these mixed reactions as the reel showed the real in the country I know best, I had the darkness of the Filcom Center ballroom for cover. No one knew I shed tears. I had the white hanky for help.
All art is propaganda, I know. All films are, for certain. Being a teacher of film—and art, for that matter, this I have known. And so I just simply sat back and relaxed and enjoyed the GK propaganda in the three stories in the film, knowing and knowing full well that what I would see is the GK gospel that talks about how we can find heaven in this rotting and rotten hell that the country we left behind has become. The cynical in me had to go away as well, and I allowed the three stories to sink in my head, with Ryan Cayabyab’s music of the same title giving the soothing for the bruised soul even as I came to terms with what the stories were trying to suggest. “Even if Heaven Cries” talks of the despair that comes with grief and destruction and havoc such as the case of the wiping out of an entire village in Liloan. There the living were buried alive and they died poor, covered by the mud of the mountains desecrated by the loggers. “My Brother Elvis,” reveals what love can do to a bubbly but homeless boy, Elvis. “Marie” reminds us of the epic story of 9/11, that literal and symbolic destruction of lives and hopes only to allow life and hope to come back again from the ruins. If we look for realism in these short films, you have enough of them, although Elvis’ journey from being homeless to having a loving home might present some oddities that are more like tropes than realities such as that almost comical pushing-and-shoving of the doghouse from one place to another, only to disappear in an instant. But the acting, the emotionally-charged scenes, and the narrative structure that is fluid in each story, are more than enough to compensate for the technical flow that we sense when we compare the film with the standards of high budget film conceived in millions of dollars complete with millions of ad exposures in glossy covers of magazine and talk show spots.
We are told of the miracle in the production of the film: how the topnotch actors on Philippine silver screen waived their ‘normal’ millions of fees, the actors including Maricel Soriano, Cesar Montano, Robert Arevalo, Ricky Davao, Carmi Martin, Michael V, and Lilia Dizon; how the producers Buth Jimenez, Tony Gloria, Bobby Barreiro found the absurd pieces come together in a jigsaw solved with clarity of purposes; and how Ryan Cayabyab the music artist willingly allowed his music to be used as the score to salve the suffering soul in the story and in the spectator.
Early on, there are no pretensions, no high handed techniques known only to the usual “Hollywoodization” of even the inane Philippine film trying to imitate the blockbuster and dollar-raking film from the commercialized mindsets of the world’s viewers.
Even before I saw the film, I have committed to the GK committee in Honolulu headed by Jun Abinsay that we are going to incorporate into our syllabi at the Ilokano and Philippine Drama Program of the University of Hawai`i the film which we will show on August 21. I knew that this film would make a difference to our students majority of whom are of Filipino heritage.
My rating for this film: five stars for telling exactly what we need to know and to hear: that we cannot allow to continue to happen what Juvenal has said a long time ago—Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se, quam quod ridiculos hominess facit—what is hardest to bear in dire poverty is that it makes a man a laughingstock.
The stories are simple, a bit soapy, those melodramatic types whose plot structures we could have read in the comics form, heard from the radio soap operas, or watched on the boob tube. Yet the honesty of hoping, the sheer honesty of igniting hope where hope is none to be found, where hope has wished to be absent forever—this, I think, is the gem in the trilogy. It is this sense of the gospel—the sense of the good news—in the everyday. We see in this the kernel of redemption that we all need as a people, whether we are in the Philippines or abroad.
This sense of the redemptive leads me to my meditations on the gospel according to GK.
My relationship with GK, the movement and non-profit organization whose unquestionable good deeds are sweeping across the Philippine archipelago and now in some Third World countries, is more conceptual than practical. I have had friends in Los Angeles who were into GK’s causes of eradicating homelessness and of bringing back decency and self-respect to the poor and the wretched of the homeland. These friends talked of how, with just a thousand dollars, a home could be built and a living hope could spring back into the hearts of the homeless. There is a pro-active dynamic in this idea and I was sold to it.
Back in the Philippines many years ago, GK, to my mind, was just like many other organizations who put a premium more on the results than on the rah-rah-rah. From afar, as a researcher, I had read up on the homes they built, the lives they rebuilt, and the families they gifted with grace.
As a teacher in a state-owned university, I could only look in amazement at this miracle happening before my very eyes. I took note of what GK wanted to do and in my mind, I remember most the organization’s desire to eradicate the spectacle of poverty and misery that many presidents and political leaders of the country have vowed to do, but nonetheless lost the heart to keep their vow once the power to rule was in their hands.
Such is the lot of the home country that the many who have left its earth and soil and daily barrage of atrocities to find and found a home some place else have grown cynical of this show of systematic violence against those who have no access to the country’s resources.
Up close, I remember what I wrote in a monograph, “The Poverty of the Philippine Poor,” published several years after People Power I.
To write that monograph, I went on a fieldwork among the mushrooming slums and squatter colonies of Metro Manila.
In those times, the yellow revolution was on its full swing, and we had high hopes for the better. But later on, Cory Aquino’s leadership began to show the challenges of reforming and reshaping a country whose oligarchs have had their heyday and who had no intention of giving up the perks and pelf of power. Dispersal of rallies became common; farmers who massed up in Mendiola demanding ‘land for the landless’ were massacred and a writer and teacher like me could only gather his thoughts in prayer and on paper. The sense of betrayal was palpable.
I joined a group doing fact finding missions in areas where the poor with their shanties were displaced, their pots and pans and faith in disarray, on the streets for the full view of the gawking public, with children unkempt and hungry, with mothers and old women clutching at their Santo Ninos and their Mothers of Perpetual Help to invoke the mercies of the muffled heavens. I invested on wrenching emotions writing that monograph. Anger became a logical reaction—anger because of this wastage of hope and blessings and people’s trust in their leaders. The betrayal is systemic, I knew then, and that knowledge has not changed. The new leaders who were supposed to be giving the people a new lease on life after more than two decades of suffering and political repression were not simply present for and in the name of the people.
I left the country with a heavy heart after years and years of university teaching, with this spectacle of poverty growing heavier each day. You simply are reminded of the inutility of it all, this wastage of dreams, aspirations, opportunities for changes, and leadership that could have spelled the difference between making social justice work and sliding back into the way things had been. The either/or situation was too much to bear.
A couple of months ago, the retired Rep. Jun Abinsay called me up to ask if I could join the core group to discuss about ways in which we can bring in people to get educated into what our various communities in the United States could do to help GK in its work of providing homes for the wretched of the Philippines. The State of Hawai`i, certainly, has its worries related to homelessness, with families living in parks and beaches because the cause of rent has skyrocketed and that home ownership has become some kind of a ‘good luck’, a buenas for those who can afford to pay the monthly mortgage by doing double jobs and running away from all the social gatherings that seem to be endless.
In that gathering were Abinsay, Sonny Perez, Tony Boquer, JP Orias, and myself. We talked of premier showings, of how to make it known to the community of the good deeds of GK, of building men and women and communities by rebuilding in them the sense of decency and self-respect. It was a gathering of minds, and the work began, and indeed, Abinsay, Perez, and Boquer pushed the idea to its fruition. They are giving back to the homeland of the Filipino people who have come to Hawai`i, even if Perez is from Guam and Boquer has nothing to do with the Philippines. Despite these differing circumstances of who they are, we have warriors in the three, and in these warriors is their basic humanity.
Paradise, indeed, can be revisited, rethought, reinvented, redefined.
And hope? It springs eternal in the hearts of man and women who know what it takes to be truly and fully human by permitting and coaxing others to become full and truly human.
(Published at the Fil-Am Observer, May 2007)
Ilokano as a Heritage Language in Hawaii
(Speech delivered at the Timpuyog Scholarship Banquet and the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Program Retirement Testimonial for Prof. Precy Espiritu and Prof. Josie Clausen, UH Manoa's HIPLL, Pacific Beach Hotel, April 27, 2007, Honolulu, HI).
Ladies and gentlemen:
Even as I stand before you this evening, I am awed by your coming to celebrate with us at this Timpuyog Scholarship Banquet of the Timpuyog and the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program of the University of Hawaii.
Tonight, we will honor two of our program scholars and two of our retiring faculty members. Tonight, we also honor ourselves, we Ilokanos, we Filipinos, we Filipino Americans, we immigrants, and we who understand the meaning of diversity in this land.
In less than a year that I assumed the position of program coordinator, I have become a witness to two retirements of two former full-time faculty members when the number of fulltime positions is only three.
These two retirements translate to 67% of the fulltime faculty retiring in less than a year, with a total of 64 years of teaching between them. I look for some meanings of this event somewhere, and before me is a symbolic struggle, a surprising challenge, and a living hope. This whole exercise reminds me of the Latin proposition: vivas ut possis quando nec quis ut velis—he plants trees to be useful for another generation.
Agmula isuna iti kayo tapno pakairanudan ti sumaruno a kaputotan. Magtatanim ng puno upang pakinabangan ng susunod na salinlahi. Vivas ut possis quando quis ut velis. Nagmulada, apo, iti kayo, ket datayo ti nagapit.
These days, I think of the challenges ahead: the kind of cultural and language struggle the Ilokano Program has to go through in this University, in the heritage community of Ilokanos in Hawai`i, in the community of language and culture scholars.
For the 34 years that the Ilokano program has existed in this University, I have come to understand the meaning of such a challenge, and in the aloneness and solitude of an academic and scholar, I see this urgency to keep the ember alive in order for us to be constantly reminded of our duties to ourselves, to our communities, and to the world.
One such duty is to survive.
Another such duty is to thrive. To survive, to thrive—to survive and thrive: these, I think, are to serve as the mantra for pushing the Ilokano Program to grow in spite of all the difficulties. With 9 of every 10 Filipinos in Hawaii tracing their heritage in Ilokano, and with Ilokano as the historical language of the Filipino diaspora in the entire United States, with 4,500 Ilokanos—90 percent of the annual total of Filipino immigrants—migrating to Hawaii each year, the challenges are enormous.
We have opened up the Ilokano program for public service in Hawai`i and in the Philippines. Today, we have inked up a consortium program with other 13 universities and colleges in four regions in the Philippines where Ilokano language and culture is of interest to academics, to the community, and to the students.
There are a number of obstacles that we are faced with in this consortium agreement aimed to assure us that Ilokano language and culture will not only survive but also thrive.
One of them is the skewed, unjust, and culturally tyrannical and dictatorial national language policy of the Philippine government that entitles and privileges one regional language at the expense of other lingua francas.
Number 2, the continuing manipulation by academic, cultural, and language leaders of that obsolete concept of ‘one national language, one nation’ dictum—an imperialist, obsolete, and triumphalist linguistic and epistemological position.
And number 3, the need to understand, again and again, that the Philippine nation, like the United States of America, is a veritable ‘nation among nations’ and thus, in keeping with the premises of the social contract to do good, justice and fairness must be served.
For all these obstacles, we offer these:
One, the need to put an end to the tyrannical and dictatorial consequences of a monolingual national language policy that favors only one regional language against other lingua francas in order to arrest the linguistic and cultural genocide of the Filipino people.
Two, the unmasking of the 70 years of manipulation by academic, cultural and linguistic leaders of their political agendum to lobotomize the minds and consciousness of the Filipino people in order for them to easily invade and colonize these minds and consciousness of our people.
Three, the recognition that the Philippines has not only one or two lingua francas but at least three: Ilokano, Sebuano, and Tagalog—and to assure our people the growth, nurturing, sustenance, and promotion of all three and not giving entitlements and privileges to only one.
These proposals, to me, provide the context of our celebration today, because even as we formally say goodbye to Prof. Precy Llague Espiritu and to Prof. Josie Paz Clausen for giving almost all of their academic life to the cause of the Ilokano program, even as we witness the awarding of scholarship to two of our rising scholars, Abe Flores Jr. and Valerie Sandi, and even as we honor the sacrifices of our Timpuyog officers and members, we have a struggle to pursue and this struggle is as legitimate as the struggle of all peoples for authentic and genuine freedom.
For if there is one heritage language and culture left to die its own death and uncared for, our work is not done.
Our work as a part of the Ilokano heritage begins with our commitment to the Ilokano language and culture. Yet, we assure ourselves that our work does not stop there but moves on to link up arms with other heritage languages and cultures.
It is the work of our two colleagues, Manang Precy and Manang Josie, that we have all come to celebrate for this evening; it is the work of our Ilokano and Philippine heritage students that serve as the raison d’etre of our gathering; it is the resistance against all forms of social and cultural injustice, all forms of neo-colonizing and imprisoning actions; it is that insistence that all forms of democracy and justice and fairness are forms of recognizing the basic oneness and humanity in each of us.
It is on this note of insisting that we remember and that we commit ourselves to not to forget that I welcome you all to this banquet.
You have honored us by your presence.
Your presence has given us the energy we all need to push for a rethinking of an ancestral homeland that is not only territorial and physical but spiritual as well. That homeland could be in our heritages languages, in our heritage cultures, and in our commitment to diversity in this country.
Ditoy ken idiay Filipinas, nabukelen ti tignayan a manggutigot iti gobierno ti Filipinas a mangbigbig a ti Ilokano ket maysa nga opisial ken nailian a lengguahe.
A consortium and a movement of scholars, schools, colleges, and cultural workers have been formed to push for the Philippine government to declare Ilokano as an official and a national language.
We will see how far we can go with this movement but we will not stop.
Ang pagkilala sa higit na malaking Filipinas na lampas sa makitid na lente ng iisa o dadalawang wika ang siyang ideyal na naghahanap ng katuparan. Ang ideyal na ito ang siya ring susing pangarap ng sino mang nakakaintindi ng higit na malawak na kahulugan ng bansa ng mga ninuno.
Even as we speak of a Filipino nation, in this country and elsewhere, we speak of our indebtedness to the sacrifices and dedication of those whose fruits of labor we reap today. We thus dedicate this gathering to Professor Prescila Llague Espiritu for steering the program for 33 years. We dedicate this gathering as well to Professor Josie Paz Clausen for helping out in making the Ilokano program grow.
Dumanonkayo amin, apo, lumaemkayo, ket makipagragragsakkayo kadakami. Welcome and Good evening to all of you.
Ladies and gentlemen:
Even as I stand before you this evening, I am awed by your coming to celebrate with us at this Timpuyog Scholarship Banquet of the Timpuyog and the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program of the University of Hawaii.
Tonight, we will honor two of our program scholars and two of our retiring faculty members. Tonight, we also honor ourselves, we Ilokanos, we Filipinos, we Filipino Americans, we immigrants, and we who understand the meaning of diversity in this land.
In less than a year that I assumed the position of program coordinator, I have become a witness to two retirements of two former full-time faculty members when the number of fulltime positions is only three.
These two retirements translate to 67% of the fulltime faculty retiring in less than a year, with a total of 64 years of teaching between them. I look for some meanings of this event somewhere, and before me is a symbolic struggle, a surprising challenge, and a living hope. This whole exercise reminds me of the Latin proposition: vivas ut possis quando nec quis ut velis—he plants trees to be useful for another generation.
Agmula isuna iti kayo tapno pakairanudan ti sumaruno a kaputotan. Magtatanim ng puno upang pakinabangan ng susunod na salinlahi. Vivas ut possis quando quis ut velis. Nagmulada, apo, iti kayo, ket datayo ti nagapit.
These days, I think of the challenges ahead: the kind of cultural and language struggle the Ilokano Program has to go through in this University, in the heritage community of Ilokanos in Hawai`i, in the community of language and culture scholars.
For the 34 years that the Ilokano program has existed in this University, I have come to understand the meaning of such a challenge, and in the aloneness and solitude of an academic and scholar, I see this urgency to keep the ember alive in order for us to be constantly reminded of our duties to ourselves, to our communities, and to the world.
One such duty is to survive.
Another such duty is to thrive. To survive, to thrive—to survive and thrive: these, I think, are to serve as the mantra for pushing the Ilokano Program to grow in spite of all the difficulties. With 9 of every 10 Filipinos in Hawaii tracing their heritage in Ilokano, and with Ilokano as the historical language of the Filipino diaspora in the entire United States, with 4,500 Ilokanos—90 percent of the annual total of Filipino immigrants—migrating to Hawaii each year, the challenges are enormous.
We have opened up the Ilokano program for public service in Hawai`i and in the Philippines. Today, we have inked up a consortium program with other 13 universities and colleges in four regions in the Philippines where Ilokano language and culture is of interest to academics, to the community, and to the students.
There are a number of obstacles that we are faced with in this consortium agreement aimed to assure us that Ilokano language and culture will not only survive but also thrive.
One of them is the skewed, unjust, and culturally tyrannical and dictatorial national language policy of the Philippine government that entitles and privileges one regional language at the expense of other lingua francas.
Number 2, the continuing manipulation by academic, cultural, and language leaders of that obsolete concept of ‘one national language, one nation’ dictum—an imperialist, obsolete, and triumphalist linguistic and epistemological position.
And number 3, the need to understand, again and again, that the Philippine nation, like the United States of America, is a veritable ‘nation among nations’ and thus, in keeping with the premises of the social contract to do good, justice and fairness must be served.
For all these obstacles, we offer these:
One, the need to put an end to the tyrannical and dictatorial consequences of a monolingual national language policy that favors only one regional language against other lingua francas in order to arrest the linguistic and cultural genocide of the Filipino people.
Two, the unmasking of the 70 years of manipulation by academic, cultural and linguistic leaders of their political agendum to lobotomize the minds and consciousness of the Filipino people in order for them to easily invade and colonize these minds and consciousness of our people.
Three, the recognition that the Philippines has not only one or two lingua francas but at least three: Ilokano, Sebuano, and Tagalog—and to assure our people the growth, nurturing, sustenance, and promotion of all three and not giving entitlements and privileges to only one.
These proposals, to me, provide the context of our celebration today, because even as we formally say goodbye to Prof. Precy Llague Espiritu and to Prof. Josie Paz Clausen for giving almost all of their academic life to the cause of the Ilokano program, even as we witness the awarding of scholarship to two of our rising scholars, Abe Flores Jr. and Valerie Sandi, and even as we honor the sacrifices of our Timpuyog officers and members, we have a struggle to pursue and this struggle is as legitimate as the struggle of all peoples for authentic and genuine freedom.
For if there is one heritage language and culture left to die its own death and uncared for, our work is not done.
Our work as a part of the Ilokano heritage begins with our commitment to the Ilokano language and culture. Yet, we assure ourselves that our work does not stop there but moves on to link up arms with other heritage languages and cultures.
It is the work of our two colleagues, Manang Precy and Manang Josie, that we have all come to celebrate for this evening; it is the work of our Ilokano and Philippine heritage students that serve as the raison d’etre of our gathering; it is the resistance against all forms of social and cultural injustice, all forms of neo-colonizing and imprisoning actions; it is that insistence that all forms of democracy and justice and fairness are forms of recognizing the basic oneness and humanity in each of us.
It is on this note of insisting that we remember and that we commit ourselves to not to forget that I welcome you all to this banquet.
You have honored us by your presence.
Your presence has given us the energy we all need to push for a rethinking of an ancestral homeland that is not only territorial and physical but spiritual as well. That homeland could be in our heritages languages, in our heritage cultures, and in our commitment to diversity in this country.
Ditoy ken idiay Filipinas, nabukelen ti tignayan a manggutigot iti gobierno ti Filipinas a mangbigbig a ti Ilokano ket maysa nga opisial ken nailian a lengguahe.
A consortium and a movement of scholars, schools, colleges, and cultural workers have been formed to push for the Philippine government to declare Ilokano as an official and a national language.
We will see how far we can go with this movement but we will not stop.
Ang pagkilala sa higit na malaking Filipinas na lampas sa makitid na lente ng iisa o dadalawang wika ang siyang ideyal na naghahanap ng katuparan. Ang ideyal na ito ang siya ring susing pangarap ng sino mang nakakaintindi ng higit na malawak na kahulugan ng bansa ng mga ninuno.
Even as we speak of a Filipino nation, in this country and elsewhere, we speak of our indebtedness to the sacrifices and dedication of those whose fruits of labor we reap today. We thus dedicate this gathering to Professor Prescila Llague Espiritu for steering the program for 33 years. We dedicate this gathering as well to Professor Josie Paz Clausen for helping out in making the Ilokano program grow.
Dumanonkayo amin, apo, lumaemkayo, ket makipagragragsakkayo kadakami. Welcome and Good evening to all of you.
Ilokano as a National Language, 6
I argue for one thing: that we have to put an end to the hegemon--and this hegemon is the lie so pervasive that no one is able to think clearly anymore: the hegemon that Tagalog is isomorphically 'the national language' as this is the basis of Pilipino, which, by abracadabra, became the 'Filipino.'
With so much of intellectual resources in the academe and in the country, only a handful of scholars and language teachers have been able to see the sleight of hand here--the magicians of 'national language' so busy in the last 70 years trying to prop up that idea that the Philippines has now 'a national language' and it is P/Filipino.
I say: this is a linguistic lie--and this has been going on for so long we need to exorcize our minds, call the anitos and heal ourselves from this systematic/systemic forgetting inflicted upon us by so many to whom we have entrusted our cultural and linguistic resources as a people.
We have been hoodwinked.
The interim solution to this issue is this: let us agree to a normalization of the linguistic terror and trouble we have inflicted upon our people.
The road to 'normalization' has to be blazed, and the blazing demands a declaration that (a) the government made a mistake in declaring Tagalog as the basis of the national language, (b) that the current P/Filipino is none but Tagalog in another guise and therefore it is not another language but a dialect of the same language, as it is the case, and (c) that other major non-Tagalog languages existing as lingua francas must be declared as national languages now.
One tactical strategy we ought to consider and soon is this revisiting of this phenomenon of Tagalogization of all things Philippine. We will all end up parroting the same, and in this systemic forgetting that we have become a party too, we will all look at the world with the single lens Tagalog provides until one day we cannot anymore find the road back into our hearts and souls and minds because we have mortgaged all these in the name of a national languages that is not national but only made national by the edict of people who did not regard the meaning and substance of diversity.
There is this slow genocide happening in the Philippines and in the immigrant communities abroad, and with the commercial cooptation of the media by way of the cable channels, forgetting has become a passion. It has become the very logic of making people remember the imaginary nation but not their own dreams in their own language, not their hopes in the own language, not their passions in their own language.
This has a name--and the name is peril in Philippine paradise, a peril indeed as no other peril of another name.
This imposition of a mind over other minds is one Gulag we have made for ourselves, and the more sinister issue is that we are not saying that we are hurting, that we have been pained, that we have been bleeding, and the hurting and the paining and the bleeding are costing us our cultural and linguistic lives.
Certainly, language and culture are not rice.
Certainly, they do not count in terms of minimum wages.
But language and culture are food for the soul, for the mind that remembers, for the spirit that yearns and longs for community, for membership, for association, for a regathering.
But language and culture are the wages of being human, and as wages, they are to be there to make speak the unspeakable, say the unsayable, dream the undreamable, express the ineffable, language that which resists language so we can all speak again, say again what we want to say, dream again what we want to dream, express what we want to put into words, and verbalize that is beyond alphabets, and sounds, and words.
All these, I think, are those that matter.
Without them, we are nothing. No-thing.
So let the Ilokano language speak again for us, mediate our world, and hit right into our soul as a people.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Apr 26/07
With so much of intellectual resources in the academe and in the country, only a handful of scholars and language teachers have been able to see the sleight of hand here--the magicians of 'national language' so busy in the last 70 years trying to prop up that idea that the Philippines has now 'a national language' and it is P/Filipino.
I say: this is a linguistic lie--and this has been going on for so long we need to exorcize our minds, call the anitos and heal ourselves from this systematic/systemic forgetting inflicted upon us by so many to whom we have entrusted our cultural and linguistic resources as a people.
We have been hoodwinked.
The interim solution to this issue is this: let us agree to a normalization of the linguistic terror and trouble we have inflicted upon our people.
The road to 'normalization' has to be blazed, and the blazing demands a declaration that (a) the government made a mistake in declaring Tagalog as the basis of the national language, (b) that the current P/Filipino is none but Tagalog in another guise and therefore it is not another language but a dialect of the same language, as it is the case, and (c) that other major non-Tagalog languages existing as lingua francas must be declared as national languages now.
One tactical strategy we ought to consider and soon is this revisiting of this phenomenon of Tagalogization of all things Philippine. We will all end up parroting the same, and in this systemic forgetting that we have become a party too, we will all look at the world with the single lens Tagalog provides until one day we cannot anymore find the road back into our hearts and souls and minds because we have mortgaged all these in the name of a national languages that is not national but only made national by the edict of people who did not regard the meaning and substance of diversity.
There is this slow genocide happening in the Philippines and in the immigrant communities abroad, and with the commercial cooptation of the media by way of the cable channels, forgetting has become a passion. It has become the very logic of making people remember the imaginary nation but not their own dreams in their own language, not their hopes in the own language, not their passions in their own language.
This has a name--and the name is peril in Philippine paradise, a peril indeed as no other peril of another name.
This imposition of a mind over other minds is one Gulag we have made for ourselves, and the more sinister issue is that we are not saying that we are hurting, that we have been pained, that we have been bleeding, and the hurting and the paining and the bleeding are costing us our cultural and linguistic lives.
Certainly, language and culture are not rice.
Certainly, they do not count in terms of minimum wages.
But language and culture are food for the soul, for the mind that remembers, for the spirit that yearns and longs for community, for membership, for association, for a regathering.
But language and culture are the wages of being human, and as wages, they are to be there to make speak the unspeakable, say the unsayable, dream the undreamable, express the ineffable, language that which resists language so we can all speak again, say again what we want to say, dream again what we want to dream, express what we want to put into words, and verbalize that is beyond alphabets, and sounds, and words.
All these, I think, are those that matter.
Without them, we are nothing. No-thing.
So let the Ilokano language speak again for us, mediate our world, and hit right into our soul as a people.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Apr 26/07
Ilokano as a National Language, 5
On April 23, I got a call from Cornelio J. Ancheta, publisher of Fil-Am Observer, one of the more respectable newspapers circulated in the State of Hawai`i. It is also with the FO that I write a host of issues concerning culture, human rights, and Ilokano language and culture, the very cause of my candor and passion, and the elan vital of my willingness to join the struggle to free our people from centuries of linguistic tyranny and cultural injustice.
For years and years, we have been made to swallow hook, line, and sinker the myopic idea that holds onto to the feudal and medieval belief that to be build a nation, all people must speak one and the same language, which is the premise, for instance, of the monolingual emphasis of the United States in its own understanding of what contitutes a nation, patriotism, and human understanding, forgetting that the human understanding of what is just and good is the backbone of what a nation is and ought to be. Somewhere, John Rawls has sketched out for us of the non-negotiable premise for doing social justice: the good life for the most people. And now this call from my publisher, CJ Ancheta, saying, among others, "I am publishing your piece on Ilokano as a national language. You have the right to your opinion, that is your opinion, and I will respect that in full."
Earlier, Tawid Magazine, through editor Jaime Agpalo, has picked up the concept of pushing for Ilokano as a national language of the Philippines in order to put an end to the schizophrenic iatrogenesis pandemia that has afflicted the people of the Philippines, a pandemic that has been caused by the linguistic and cultural policymakers who never understand what a culture and language is to a people different from those in the center of their own vortex of power and whose solution, this pandemic, it seems now, are the very people who had caused this social disease, including their linguistic and cultural apparatuses and appendages: the media, Malacanang, the shameless and unthinking school system, both private and public, the popular cultural forms including the abominable noontime shows carried over here by The Filipino Channel that can only make a sorrowful spectacle of our lot as a people. You name all of these, and we have a conspiracy to subtly effect a cultural and linguistic genocide on all the rest of the cultures and languages of the Philippines excpet Tagalog and English.
Let me make myself clear here: that I am not against the Tagalog people and the people who think of English as our economic salvation and our passport to domestic help and caregiving work in Palestine, Israel, Canada, Japan, Iraq, Italy, and Germany. Let me make myself clear: that the cause of our linguistic and cultural troubles is the mistaken notion that in a multicultural and multilingual nation-state like the Philippines, only one national language is sufficient to 'language' all the dreams and aspirations of a people who are, in fact, various peoples, with their own sets of world view, customs, traditions.
The 'isang bansa, isang diwa' bluff was good propaganda to cow people into believing that their past has nothing to do with the building up of a country from the ruins of erros and more errors.
Here is not a case of one ethnolinguistic group against another--a case of Ilokanos crying foul against the Tagalogs.
Here is a case of saying, with conviction, that the government's linguistic policy on the national language is all flawed, and the cracks and defects are showing and are swallowing us up, all of us, Tagalogs and non-Tagalogs alike, because, for another round of cultural and linguistic injustice, we are being made to believe that a single language is all that matters to finally pursue the good life for all of us.
The sad and sorrowful history of the Philippine nation has taught us a good lesson: that in all the wars that Filipinos waged against the colonizers and the neocolonizers including dictatorship and abusers of power--the revolutions that include the many revolutions whose gains were snatched from us by the opportunists--these revolutions had to be 'languaged' in the language of the people who were taking part. It was only when these revolutions were translated into their own view of the world that they gained the strength to commit themselves and to offer their own lives.To speak, thus, of the Katipunan, as some myopic social scholars tend to dangle before us as 'languaged' by and only by, Tagalog, is to become amnesiac.
To speak of Tagalog as Pilipino, and then to speak of Pilipino as Filipino, is running counter to what history has demonstration: a history of linguistic and cultural manipulation that began in 1937 with the presidential prejudice of Manuel Luis Quezon and still prevailing today. For 70 years we people from the non-Tagalog speaking areas have to contend with this lazy and irrational and abnormal idea about our lives and minds and art and literature being measured against the standards set by English and Tagalog, and now more with Tagalog being passed off as Filipino.
There are a thousand and one lies somewhere in this long history of lies and it is high time that we unmasked these lies. We cannot wait for 70 more years to realize that soon, if we did not act now, we are going to lose the linguistic resources of our multilingual nation with the insistence of that myopic and self-serving view that Tagalog is basis of the national language, now called Filipino. That formulation, I dare say, is even running counter to the requisites of the 1987 Philippines Constitution. Any idiot can read the provision in that Constituion to realize that we have been hoodwinked all along.
No, I will tell CJ Ancheta that my position is not only a matter of opinion, in response to his generosity of spirit of asking people to accept my opinion and listen to what I have to say. I insist that facts have been distorted and many language teachers, scholars, and government policymakers including the Surian ng Wikang Pilipino have been shortchanging us for so long.
For 70 years, we endured, we acquiesced, we did not say anything, afraid that some powerful people might get mad at us.
For 70 years, we kept mum, we kept our corner, we accepted that we are not from Manila.
For 70 years, we allowed our voices to be automatically stiffled, or if not, translated to the language of the powerful.
For 70 years, we believed in the 'nationalist' ruses and guises and pretensions, believing that if we spoke our mind in the language we know best, we end up not being nationalist enough.
But I read the Ilokano Katipuneros signing the Katipunan documents in their own blood in Ilokano.
What I am to do with this supreme sacrifice? Should I wait for another 70 years before speaking up?
In sum, it is high time that we rally behind this cause: to federalize the major languages of the country and as a consequence, declare, among others, that Ilokano has every right to be a national language in much the same way that Tagalog, a regional language, has every right to become the lingua franca of Southern Tagalog.
If we are not going to do it now, there is no other time we can ever do it. And if we are not going to do it, nobody will ever do it for us.
Oh well, we will end up the vanquished before we realize it is too late.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Apr 26-07
For years and years, we have been made to swallow hook, line, and sinker the myopic idea that holds onto to the feudal and medieval belief that to be build a nation, all people must speak one and the same language, which is the premise, for instance, of the monolingual emphasis of the United States in its own understanding of what contitutes a nation, patriotism, and human understanding, forgetting that the human understanding of what is just and good is the backbone of what a nation is and ought to be. Somewhere, John Rawls has sketched out for us of the non-negotiable premise for doing social justice: the good life for the most people. And now this call from my publisher, CJ Ancheta, saying, among others, "I am publishing your piece on Ilokano as a national language. You have the right to your opinion, that is your opinion, and I will respect that in full."
Earlier, Tawid Magazine, through editor Jaime Agpalo, has picked up the concept of pushing for Ilokano as a national language of the Philippines in order to put an end to the schizophrenic iatrogenesis pandemia that has afflicted the people of the Philippines, a pandemic that has been caused by the linguistic and cultural policymakers who never understand what a culture and language is to a people different from those in the center of their own vortex of power and whose solution, this pandemic, it seems now, are the very people who had caused this social disease, including their linguistic and cultural apparatuses and appendages: the media, Malacanang, the shameless and unthinking school system, both private and public, the popular cultural forms including the abominable noontime shows carried over here by The Filipino Channel that can only make a sorrowful spectacle of our lot as a people. You name all of these, and we have a conspiracy to subtly effect a cultural and linguistic genocide on all the rest of the cultures and languages of the Philippines excpet Tagalog and English.
Let me make myself clear here: that I am not against the Tagalog people and the people who think of English as our economic salvation and our passport to domestic help and caregiving work in Palestine, Israel, Canada, Japan, Iraq, Italy, and Germany. Let me make myself clear: that the cause of our linguistic and cultural troubles is the mistaken notion that in a multicultural and multilingual nation-state like the Philippines, only one national language is sufficient to 'language' all the dreams and aspirations of a people who are, in fact, various peoples, with their own sets of world view, customs, traditions.
The 'isang bansa, isang diwa' bluff was good propaganda to cow people into believing that their past has nothing to do with the building up of a country from the ruins of erros and more errors.
Here is not a case of one ethnolinguistic group against another--a case of Ilokanos crying foul against the Tagalogs.
Here is a case of saying, with conviction, that the government's linguistic policy on the national language is all flawed, and the cracks and defects are showing and are swallowing us up, all of us, Tagalogs and non-Tagalogs alike, because, for another round of cultural and linguistic injustice, we are being made to believe that a single language is all that matters to finally pursue the good life for all of us.
The sad and sorrowful history of the Philippine nation has taught us a good lesson: that in all the wars that Filipinos waged against the colonizers and the neocolonizers including dictatorship and abusers of power--the revolutions that include the many revolutions whose gains were snatched from us by the opportunists--these revolutions had to be 'languaged' in the language of the people who were taking part. It was only when these revolutions were translated into their own view of the world that they gained the strength to commit themselves and to offer their own lives.To speak, thus, of the Katipunan, as some myopic social scholars tend to dangle before us as 'languaged' by and only by, Tagalog, is to become amnesiac.
To speak of Tagalog as Pilipino, and then to speak of Pilipino as Filipino, is running counter to what history has demonstration: a history of linguistic and cultural manipulation that began in 1937 with the presidential prejudice of Manuel Luis Quezon and still prevailing today. For 70 years we people from the non-Tagalog speaking areas have to contend with this lazy and irrational and abnormal idea about our lives and minds and art and literature being measured against the standards set by English and Tagalog, and now more with Tagalog being passed off as Filipino.
There are a thousand and one lies somewhere in this long history of lies and it is high time that we unmasked these lies. We cannot wait for 70 more years to realize that soon, if we did not act now, we are going to lose the linguistic resources of our multilingual nation with the insistence of that myopic and self-serving view that Tagalog is basis of the national language, now called Filipino. That formulation, I dare say, is even running counter to the requisites of the 1987 Philippines Constitution. Any idiot can read the provision in that Constituion to realize that we have been hoodwinked all along.
No, I will tell CJ Ancheta that my position is not only a matter of opinion, in response to his generosity of spirit of asking people to accept my opinion and listen to what I have to say. I insist that facts have been distorted and many language teachers, scholars, and government policymakers including the Surian ng Wikang Pilipino have been shortchanging us for so long.
For 70 years, we endured, we acquiesced, we did not say anything, afraid that some powerful people might get mad at us.
For 70 years, we kept mum, we kept our corner, we accepted that we are not from Manila.
For 70 years, we allowed our voices to be automatically stiffled, or if not, translated to the language of the powerful.
For 70 years, we believed in the 'nationalist' ruses and guises and pretensions, believing that if we spoke our mind in the language we know best, we end up not being nationalist enough.
But I read the Ilokano Katipuneros signing the Katipunan documents in their own blood in Ilokano.
What I am to do with this supreme sacrifice? Should I wait for another 70 years before speaking up?
In sum, it is high time that we rally behind this cause: to federalize the major languages of the country and as a consequence, declare, among others, that Ilokano has every right to be a national language in much the same way that Tagalog, a regional language, has every right to become the lingua franca of Southern Tagalog.
If we are not going to do it now, there is no other time we can ever do it. And if we are not going to do it, nobody will ever do it for us.
Oh well, we will end up the vanquished before we realize it is too late.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Apr 26-07
MAESTRA A MANANG/MANANG A MAESTRA
(Ken Dr. Josie Paz Clausen, iti panagretirona)
Daytoyen ti aldaw ti umuna a pakada, manangmi a maestra
Ing-ingungotenmi a pagwadan ti puli, dakami nga agsaksi ita
Ngayed daytoy a punsion, panagrarambak dagiti adu a lagip
Pannakiengkuentro iti agnanayon, pannakitinnulag iti isip.
Mano kadi nga arinunos dagiti bulan, tawen, amin a panawen
Ti maruros tapno iti panagrurusing dagiti sabong, agbalinen
A maris daytoy ti ita a masakbayan nga iti nakem bilangen,
Mano a panagraray-a, mano a panagayat ti inkam salaysayen?
Ta dakami dagiti nakautang riwriw a kaasi nga awanan nagan,
Saan a mabunniagan dagiti bannuar iti nagrupsan a kalman.
Ta ngamin, maestrami, ibatim ti pateg dagiti kaasi ti puso
Ta ngamin, maestrami, iti barukongmi nga agindeg ti rag-o.
Iti pakasaritaankami nga agtaklin, agkamang, agsurnad
Kadagiti pinanid a linabag, idiay kami a di agtukiad,
Sadiay nga agbirok kadagiti balikas a mangted agas
Pangsandi iti kawaw iti panagtaltalawataw ti imnas.
Ta kasta amin ti pakabuklan ti pannakaisadsadtayo,
Sika a maestrami, dakami, datayo amin nga immadayo
Iti wasnay ti dalan a panagbibinnulig dagiti addang
Sadiaymi met laeng a biroken anag panangiwanwan.
Sika ngamin, maestra, ti isem kadagiti aldaw a nalulem
Ti silnag ti bulan iti rabii a dagiti bituen sapsapulen
Sika ngamin ti pagpangalan iti panagaddang ti nakem
Ti sadiri dagiti mautoyan met a regta iti samiweng.
Ammomi itan ti kansion kadagiti panagirugi
Ta insurom ti ritual ti panagitukit kadagiti bin-i
Winaknitam ti uma a sadiay ti umok ti kakaasi
Ket insublim iti ili ti nagtalappuagaw a pannagibi.
Agdios-ti-agnginakami ngarud ita, manang a maestrami
Agyamanankami iti adu nga anus ken panangaklili
Iti pammakadami ti duayya ti nakautang a barukongmi
Agsubad ti biag kenka iti pannarabay ken bendisionmi.
A Solver Agcaoili/UH Manoa/Abril 22, 2007
Daytoyen ti aldaw ti umuna a pakada, manangmi a maestra
Ing-ingungotenmi a pagwadan ti puli, dakami nga agsaksi ita
Ngayed daytoy a punsion, panagrarambak dagiti adu a lagip
Pannakiengkuentro iti agnanayon, pannakitinnulag iti isip.
Mano kadi nga arinunos dagiti bulan, tawen, amin a panawen
Ti maruros tapno iti panagrurusing dagiti sabong, agbalinen
A maris daytoy ti ita a masakbayan nga iti nakem bilangen,
Mano a panagraray-a, mano a panagayat ti inkam salaysayen?
Ta dakami dagiti nakautang riwriw a kaasi nga awanan nagan,
Saan a mabunniagan dagiti bannuar iti nagrupsan a kalman.
Ta ngamin, maestrami, ibatim ti pateg dagiti kaasi ti puso
Ta ngamin, maestrami, iti barukongmi nga agindeg ti rag-o.
Iti pakasaritaankami nga agtaklin, agkamang, agsurnad
Kadagiti pinanid a linabag, idiay kami a di agtukiad,
Sadiay nga agbirok kadagiti balikas a mangted agas
Pangsandi iti kawaw iti panagtaltalawataw ti imnas.
Ta kasta amin ti pakabuklan ti pannakaisadsadtayo,
Sika a maestrami, dakami, datayo amin nga immadayo
Iti wasnay ti dalan a panagbibinnulig dagiti addang
Sadiaymi met laeng a biroken anag panangiwanwan.
Sika ngamin, maestra, ti isem kadagiti aldaw a nalulem
Ti silnag ti bulan iti rabii a dagiti bituen sapsapulen
Sika ngamin ti pagpangalan iti panagaddang ti nakem
Ti sadiri dagiti mautoyan met a regta iti samiweng.
Ammomi itan ti kansion kadagiti panagirugi
Ta insurom ti ritual ti panagitukit kadagiti bin-i
Winaknitam ti uma a sadiay ti umok ti kakaasi
Ket insublim iti ili ti nagtalappuagaw a pannagibi.
Agdios-ti-agnginakami ngarud ita, manang a maestrami
Agyamanankami iti adu nga anus ken panangaklili
Iti pammakadami ti duayya ti nakautang a barukongmi
Agsubad ti biag kenka iti pannarabay ken bendisionmi.
A Solver Agcaoili/UH Manoa/Abril 22, 2007
Diskurso ni Ducat
Ti bomba ti mangibaga. Adda desperasion iti angin a malang-ab,
iti man aldaw wenno ti nagabay nga agpatnag. Ta kasano kadi, aya
ti manglemmes iti bain no awan maisubo sagpaminsan?
Iti eksena, adda dagiti kalaban: ti pulitiko a ninong ti gayaman
wenno ti apges ti tian. Naktidiablo la ketdin a biag ta no adda
man laeng waragawag, agar-arakattotda piman a manglangan!
Salaysayen ti henesis ti dagensen iti barukong:
ubbing a mammigat iti kari ti pangngaldaw
ket iti dulang awan mata ti bisin kadagiti maulaw
iti bisin. Planuen ni Ducat ti panagsuplongna iti tangatang,
wenno iti langit dagiti karkararag a di mangmangngegan:
awanan lapayag ti santo sepulkro, awanan mata ti dakes
iti labes dagiti taeng a ti pinggan ken mabisbisinan.
Bay-am ngarud a ti bomba ti agbalikas, agsao iti dakes
amin a kinadakes, kas iti kanibusanan dagiti palangguad
dagiti pabunar dagiti babaknang nga idiay, aguraytay
iti mangabngaban a tulang, wenno ti maregmeg a kasla
mukat wenno ti nabangles a katay iti titilmonan.
Palibbuongek, kuna ni Ducat, bettakek amin a mabettak,
ti bangabanga, kas pagarigan dagiti agdudungsa nga antukab,
nabsog a nagtulakak kas kadagiti buaya nga agan-anak
di makarikna iti rugi ti tigab wenno panagangtab
kas iti padi, ti pimpiman nga anak ti dios nga agsuysuyaab
makaturog piman kaadu't nakaparintumeng nga agsurnad.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Abr 17-07
iti man aldaw wenno ti nagabay nga agpatnag. Ta kasano kadi, aya
ti manglemmes iti bain no awan maisubo sagpaminsan?
Iti eksena, adda dagiti kalaban: ti pulitiko a ninong ti gayaman
wenno ti apges ti tian. Naktidiablo la ketdin a biag ta no adda
man laeng waragawag, agar-arakattotda piman a manglangan!
Salaysayen ti henesis ti dagensen iti barukong:
ubbing a mammigat iti kari ti pangngaldaw
ket iti dulang awan mata ti bisin kadagiti maulaw
iti bisin. Planuen ni Ducat ti panagsuplongna iti tangatang,
wenno iti langit dagiti karkararag a di mangmangngegan:
awanan lapayag ti santo sepulkro, awanan mata ti dakes
iti labes dagiti taeng a ti pinggan ken mabisbisinan.
Bay-am ngarud a ti bomba ti agbalikas, agsao iti dakes
amin a kinadakes, kas iti kanibusanan dagiti palangguad
dagiti pabunar dagiti babaknang nga idiay, aguraytay
iti mangabngaban a tulang, wenno ti maregmeg a kasla
mukat wenno ti nabangles a katay iti titilmonan.
Palibbuongek, kuna ni Ducat, bettakek amin a mabettak,
ti bangabanga, kas pagarigan dagiti agdudungsa nga antukab,
nabsog a nagtulakak kas kadagiti buaya nga agan-anak
di makarikna iti rugi ti tigab wenno panagangtab
kas iti padi, ti pimpiman nga anak ti dios nga agsuysuyaab
makaturog piman kaadu't nakaparintumeng nga agsurnad.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Abr 17-07
The Case of Ilokano as National Language, 4
With more than 20 million people speaking Ilokano all over the world, what do you with this continuing rendering of a people into one of systemic and programmatic invisibility?
While other nations, countries, and peoples take pride in what they have got in their hearts and soul, we have a people that have, in sum, an agendum for smallness.
This agendum for smallness has afflicted so many, and has invaded the internet and has used it as if this were their fiefdom, some form of a absolute license that they think, they have the absolute use even at the cost of the honor and pride of other people.
Small minds, I call this, and it is the same smallness that we see in that cowering stance we have been doing before the lord of the nation's poweful languages, Tagalog and English.
No, these Ilokano writers who have in them this affliction of smallness cannot see that there are at least two forms of struggle that we have to wage at this time, and in this order of priority:
One, the struggle to have Ilokano declared as a national language and
Two, the struggle to modernize the Ilokano language in order to serve as the mediating instrument for the contemporary experiences of the Ilokano.
These twin stuggles, of course, are not easily discernible to many of the Ilokano language's pretending writers with their pretense for greatness even if what they have are hardly earned accolades.
Some even have the temerity to decapitate other people so that these bunch of pretenders can rise on the decapitated heads of other Ilokano cultural workers.
We can only cry in pain even as we watch how small we have become because we have believed in this magic in this agendum for smallness as if this were some sort of an oracion, an abracadabra that has gone pfffffft.
This agendum for smallness afflicts many writers in Ilokano whether these are in Oahu or Obando, Hapon or Hawai`i.
Perhaps they do not know that some writers are not afflicted with smallness but greatness of heart and soul, those writers who take in all the pain, believing that so much can be gained along the way as long as they are mindful of what is happening.
To be small is comforting and comfortable--and it is twin to choosing to be nameless and faceless, like that act of using an alias when dishonoring another writer. This is the best shortcut to the impossibility of being and becoming, an abomination of the highest order, because here, decency and self-respect are not any longer one of the premises for the good life, for the good relationship, for a humane understanding of the world.
You talk of courage here, or boldness, or daring.
The wrtier who decapitates others cannot see the connection between what he does and the neocolonial strategy for divide et tempera, which he probably does not understand either.
Even as other writers look at the greater things that concern us all, the small-time writer with the small mind can only come up with some vague threats about the 'rippuog' and some such destructions, perhaps alluding to the power of the divine who can wreak a temple and on the third day build it up again.
The logicians have a name for this: presumptuous presumption. It is a fallacy that perhaps the writer with the small mind does not understand because he simply cannot fathom what this is.
And to think that he is an Ilokano writer makes you sad, so darn sad. Idiocy has never been this bad, not among writers who should know more than the man on the street. But then, times change. And they do, in the Ilocos as in exile, in Dagupan as in the diaspora.
Because you are reminded of this writer's boast, his boast as empty as his head, as empty as his words. Oh, the magic in the smallness comes crawling in the crevices and cranies of the mind now less human because the writer has put his small successes in his head.
The problem with Ilokano language and literature is not within the purview of this writer, pretending as he always is, that he has known all that has to be known, semantics and all, syntax and all, semiotic possibilities and all.
He is no different from many other Ilokanos in the academe who hold on to the view that they did not have to learn Ilokano because they are born into the language, and with that birth comes the full knowledge of the language of his birth.
We cannot blame the country's language policy makers: if we have a significant portion of the millions of speakers of Ilokano in this ignorance mode, there is no way we can win in the struggle. There is no way the struggle to make Ilokano a national language gains cultural, moral, and political ascendancy.
The solution: we need to weed out the writers who do not know their language, their literature, their history, the politics of their ethnic identity, the righteousness of the cause of declaring Ilokano as a national language. There are so many of them in our midst.
Only if we know the releve of our causes can we have the power to empower ourselves. Socrates is right: we have got to examine our literary and linguistic practices.
Then and only then can be become language and culture revolutionaries for and in the name of the Ilokano people everywhere.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Apr 17-07
While other nations, countries, and peoples take pride in what they have got in their hearts and soul, we have a people that have, in sum, an agendum for smallness.
This agendum for smallness has afflicted so many, and has invaded the internet and has used it as if this were their fiefdom, some form of a absolute license that they think, they have the absolute use even at the cost of the honor and pride of other people.
Small minds, I call this, and it is the same smallness that we see in that cowering stance we have been doing before the lord of the nation's poweful languages, Tagalog and English.
No, these Ilokano writers who have in them this affliction of smallness cannot see that there are at least two forms of struggle that we have to wage at this time, and in this order of priority:
One, the struggle to have Ilokano declared as a national language and
Two, the struggle to modernize the Ilokano language in order to serve as the mediating instrument for the contemporary experiences of the Ilokano.
These twin stuggles, of course, are not easily discernible to many of the Ilokano language's pretending writers with their pretense for greatness even if what they have are hardly earned accolades.
Some even have the temerity to decapitate other people so that these bunch of pretenders can rise on the decapitated heads of other Ilokano cultural workers.
We can only cry in pain even as we watch how small we have become because we have believed in this magic in this agendum for smallness as if this were some sort of an oracion, an abracadabra that has gone pfffffft.
This agendum for smallness afflicts many writers in Ilokano whether these are in Oahu or Obando, Hapon or Hawai`i.
Perhaps they do not know that some writers are not afflicted with smallness but greatness of heart and soul, those writers who take in all the pain, believing that so much can be gained along the way as long as they are mindful of what is happening.
To be small is comforting and comfortable--and it is twin to choosing to be nameless and faceless, like that act of using an alias when dishonoring another writer. This is the best shortcut to the impossibility of being and becoming, an abomination of the highest order, because here, decency and self-respect are not any longer one of the premises for the good life, for the good relationship, for a humane understanding of the world.
You talk of courage here, or boldness, or daring.
The wrtier who decapitates others cannot see the connection between what he does and the neocolonial strategy for divide et tempera, which he probably does not understand either.
Even as other writers look at the greater things that concern us all, the small-time writer with the small mind can only come up with some vague threats about the 'rippuog' and some such destructions, perhaps alluding to the power of the divine who can wreak a temple and on the third day build it up again.
The logicians have a name for this: presumptuous presumption. It is a fallacy that perhaps the writer with the small mind does not understand because he simply cannot fathom what this is.
And to think that he is an Ilokano writer makes you sad, so darn sad. Idiocy has never been this bad, not among writers who should know more than the man on the street. But then, times change. And they do, in the Ilocos as in exile, in Dagupan as in the diaspora.
Because you are reminded of this writer's boast, his boast as empty as his head, as empty as his words. Oh, the magic in the smallness comes crawling in the crevices and cranies of the mind now less human because the writer has put his small successes in his head.
The problem with Ilokano language and literature is not within the purview of this writer, pretending as he always is, that he has known all that has to be known, semantics and all, syntax and all, semiotic possibilities and all.
He is no different from many other Ilokanos in the academe who hold on to the view that they did not have to learn Ilokano because they are born into the language, and with that birth comes the full knowledge of the language of his birth.
We cannot blame the country's language policy makers: if we have a significant portion of the millions of speakers of Ilokano in this ignorance mode, there is no way we can win in the struggle. There is no way the struggle to make Ilokano a national language gains cultural, moral, and political ascendancy.
The solution: we need to weed out the writers who do not know their language, their literature, their history, the politics of their ethnic identity, the righteousness of the cause of declaring Ilokano as a national language. There are so many of them in our midst.
Only if we know the releve of our causes can we have the power to empower ourselves. Socrates is right: we have got to examine our literary and linguistic practices.
Then and only then can be become language and culture revolutionaries for and in the name of the Ilokano people everywhere.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Apr 17-07
Masaker ti Darepdep
1.
Ammom ti Virginia iti uppat nga aldaw ken rabii
a panagtalawataw, kadua ti daranudor ti Greyhound
ken ti ragrag-o dagiti nakaul-ulimek a kabakiran.
Manipud iti Los Angeles, sinurotmo ti dana
ngem dimo ammo dagiti lemma wenno piglat
ti isip a pimpiman, kas ti agay-ayat a no tumira
iti anges kapada ket kasla busi a kellaat ken pannakapnek
idi ubing a ngem itan ket sabali met ti nakapay-an.
Tallopulo ket tallo a biag ti naipatli iti dua-tallo laeng nga oras
iti unget ti bala ni Cho Seung-Hui a diak nakaabrasa
wenno nasabat kadagiti agpampanurnor a kalsada
iti Blacksburg, wenno iti apagapaman a sipnget
iti Jamestown. Kasano ti namaris a panangiladawan
ti napintas a buya iti Williamsburg, ti kolonial a siudad
dagiti kolonial a gagem, dagiti pinanid a panagibtur
dagiti adipen, panangiginggina kadagiti saplit
a makiinnagek iti kudil, tulang, lasag, lua
ken iti araraw ti wayawaya kadagiti rabii a di makaidna?
Sa man itan, daytoy a trahedia, ay, mairukit manen
dagiti pannakitinnaya dagiti aglibas kadagiti matmaturog
nga alad, kadagiti agkikidem a disierto, dagiti imigrante
a rabrabak wenno pannakaideport dagiti amin a kita
ti buteng kadagiti rabii nga aramiden nga aldaw
dagiti makigasanggasat nga agkalay-at kadagiti pader
iti daga wenno iti isip wenno kadagiti beddeng ti linteg.
Agdigos dagiti pasilio iti dara, wenno ti lamisaan ti propesor,
wenno ti pisara a mangikaskassaba iti sagpaminsan a babawi
gapu ta itan, ita nga aldaw, ti tallopulo ket tallo a lib-at
a tallopulo ket tallo met laeng a biag, dardarepdep iti agnanayon
kas kadagiti freeway a di mamingga iti panagdaliasat
a mangungpot iti punganay ti aldaw a kas iti uppat nga aldaw
a panagsubli ti kararua iti naggapuan a kalgaw, iti napalabes
a tawen nga isusurnad iti siudad dagiti di met idi nakaam-ames
a pasamak, agalinggetak itan nga agkamang iti lagip
tapno nanamek ti buya ti James River a nagsangladan
dagiti nagsangpet tapno kadagiti pusek ti natangig a bakir
kadagiti sipnget ti pammati ken aminen nga an-anek-ek
iti lugar a nakayanakan, sadiay, iti nalawa a danum a kaing-ingas
ti baybay, sadiay, iti silaw dagiti milion a kulalanti kadagiti muyong
sadiay a lagipek ti signos dagiti bangungot iti daytoy nga aldaw.
Abril 16, kuna ti kalendario iti sango, ngem sabali ti petsa
ti liday iti aganikki a barukong ta ti dagensen ket addaan bulan,
panawen, oras, minuto. Uppat nga aldaw daydi panangun-unor
kadagiti di mabigatan a dalan ken dagiti din sa met agdungsa a rabii
ngem itan, allangonek ti bagik, iti sirmatak, kitaek ti Virginia
nga am-ammo dagiti kuadernok a nagisuratan kadagiti linglingay.
Uray ti lapis a saksi dagiti estranghero a ragragsak iti pannangan
iti buffet a panagtulakak ken panagikari a dinton maulit ti rabrabak
saanda a maturog ita a rabii, saanda nga aginana, urayenda
dagiti kontro ti kanalbuong, ti kontra signos dagitoy a dara,
ginalon no ar-arigen, maitibnok iti tinta ti panagestoria.
Maysa a tawen a panaglangan iti Virginia ket daytoy itan buribor ti ulo:
iti pannakamasaker ti tallupulo ket tallo a darepdep ken karayo
adda kadi pay laeng mangpadanon kadatao iti ili ti an-anug-ogtayo?
2.
Personal itan ti pananglaglagip ket ti masaker ti darepdep
inringpas ti bala nga agbusi sa ti daraan nga ibit nga agsayasay
kadagiti diding wenno iti sulsuli ti pakpakaasi a saan
nga itodo ti panagtodas kadagiti tagtagainep no diket
bay-an dagitoy a makariing, maigamer kadagiti bigat
a tantannawagan ti init kadagiti agur-uray a siled.
Mabati dagiti katkatawa dagiti pimmusay kadagiti pasilio
kadagiti kisame kadagiti maipilkat nga ib-ibit iti diding
kas tropeo ti naisungani a laing, sirib iti barengbareng.
Lagipem ti dua a lawas a pannakilantip iti siudad ita
ken dagiti kabangibang a pannakaiyaw-awan
iti panagbirbirok iti akademia dagiti dumadangadang.
Agsublikanto ngata pay kas iti dati, ti karayo kas idi?
Karawaem ti sungbat kadagiti sulinek ti panunot
ket ikur-itmo dagiti nailasin a paspasugnod.
A S Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Abril 17-07
Ammom ti Virginia iti uppat nga aldaw ken rabii
a panagtalawataw, kadua ti daranudor ti Greyhound
ken ti ragrag-o dagiti nakaul-ulimek a kabakiran.
Manipud iti Los Angeles, sinurotmo ti dana
ngem dimo ammo dagiti lemma wenno piglat
ti isip a pimpiman, kas ti agay-ayat a no tumira
iti anges kapada ket kasla busi a kellaat ken pannakapnek
idi ubing a ngem itan ket sabali met ti nakapay-an.
Tallopulo ket tallo a biag ti naipatli iti dua-tallo laeng nga oras
iti unget ti bala ni Cho Seung-Hui a diak nakaabrasa
wenno nasabat kadagiti agpampanurnor a kalsada
iti Blacksburg, wenno iti apagapaman a sipnget
iti Jamestown. Kasano ti namaris a panangiladawan
ti napintas a buya iti Williamsburg, ti kolonial a siudad
dagiti kolonial a gagem, dagiti pinanid a panagibtur
dagiti adipen, panangiginggina kadagiti saplit
a makiinnagek iti kudil, tulang, lasag, lua
ken iti araraw ti wayawaya kadagiti rabii a di makaidna?
Sa man itan, daytoy a trahedia, ay, mairukit manen
dagiti pannakitinnaya dagiti aglibas kadagiti matmaturog
nga alad, kadagiti agkikidem a disierto, dagiti imigrante
a rabrabak wenno pannakaideport dagiti amin a kita
ti buteng kadagiti rabii nga aramiden nga aldaw
dagiti makigasanggasat nga agkalay-at kadagiti pader
iti daga wenno iti isip wenno kadagiti beddeng ti linteg.
Agdigos dagiti pasilio iti dara, wenno ti lamisaan ti propesor,
wenno ti pisara a mangikaskassaba iti sagpaminsan a babawi
gapu ta itan, ita nga aldaw, ti tallopulo ket tallo a lib-at
a tallopulo ket tallo met laeng a biag, dardarepdep iti agnanayon
kas kadagiti freeway a di mamingga iti panagdaliasat
a mangungpot iti punganay ti aldaw a kas iti uppat nga aldaw
a panagsubli ti kararua iti naggapuan a kalgaw, iti napalabes
a tawen nga isusurnad iti siudad dagiti di met idi nakaam-ames
a pasamak, agalinggetak itan nga agkamang iti lagip
tapno nanamek ti buya ti James River a nagsangladan
dagiti nagsangpet tapno kadagiti pusek ti natangig a bakir
kadagiti sipnget ti pammati ken aminen nga an-anek-ek
iti lugar a nakayanakan, sadiay, iti nalawa a danum a kaing-ingas
ti baybay, sadiay, iti silaw dagiti milion a kulalanti kadagiti muyong
sadiay a lagipek ti signos dagiti bangungot iti daytoy nga aldaw.
Abril 16, kuna ti kalendario iti sango, ngem sabali ti petsa
ti liday iti aganikki a barukong ta ti dagensen ket addaan bulan,
panawen, oras, minuto. Uppat nga aldaw daydi panangun-unor
kadagiti di mabigatan a dalan ken dagiti din sa met agdungsa a rabii
ngem itan, allangonek ti bagik, iti sirmatak, kitaek ti Virginia
nga am-ammo dagiti kuadernok a nagisuratan kadagiti linglingay.
Uray ti lapis a saksi dagiti estranghero a ragragsak iti pannangan
iti buffet a panagtulakak ken panagikari a dinton maulit ti rabrabak
saanda a maturog ita a rabii, saanda nga aginana, urayenda
dagiti kontro ti kanalbuong, ti kontra signos dagitoy a dara,
ginalon no ar-arigen, maitibnok iti tinta ti panagestoria.
Maysa a tawen a panaglangan iti Virginia ket daytoy itan buribor ti ulo:
iti pannakamasaker ti tallupulo ket tallo a darepdep ken karayo
adda kadi pay laeng mangpadanon kadatao iti ili ti an-anug-ogtayo?
2.
Personal itan ti pananglaglagip ket ti masaker ti darepdep
inringpas ti bala nga agbusi sa ti daraan nga ibit nga agsayasay
kadagiti diding wenno iti sulsuli ti pakpakaasi a saan
nga itodo ti panagtodas kadagiti tagtagainep no diket
bay-an dagitoy a makariing, maigamer kadagiti bigat
a tantannawagan ti init kadagiti agur-uray a siled.
Mabati dagiti katkatawa dagiti pimmusay kadagiti pasilio
kadagiti kisame kadagiti maipilkat nga ib-ibit iti diding
kas tropeo ti naisungani a laing, sirib iti barengbareng.
Lagipem ti dua a lawas a pannakilantip iti siudad ita
ken dagiti kabangibang a pannakaiyaw-awan
iti panagbirbirok iti akademia dagiti dumadangadang.
Agsublikanto ngata pay kas iti dati, ti karayo kas idi?
Karawaem ti sungbat kadagiti sulinek ti panunot
ket ikur-itmo dagiti nailasin a paspasugnod.
A S Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Abril 17-07
The Case of Ilokano as National Language, 3
The rage among informed Ilokano writers, cultural activists, and scholars is palpable.
Even in the silence, I can sense the storm brewing, and the storm is going to be a deluge, and this deluge will test the premises of the cultural idiocy that we see in the governmental policies relative to the national language, national literature, and national culture. I can name some now, with their rage against the systemic and programmatic wiping out of the other lingua francas of the homeland because of the unfair advantage being given to Tagalog as Pilipino as Filipino (say, what is the difference, pray tell!) in all aspects of our national life.
At the very least, this unfair advantage given to Tagalog is an anomaly because it is based on entitlement and on privileges. Leoncio Deriada's position, for instance, to distinguish, in one literary contest sponsored by a government agency, between Tagalog writing and Filipino writing is laudable, and was appropriate, but at the same time, it masks the reality that indeed, Tagalog writing is not distinct from Filipino writing.
In effect, that proposal came in early because the distinction cannot be found, is, in fact, unfounded, unless we accept that a Tagalog writing becomes Filipino writing when we use, in a Tagalog work, some words from Aparri to Zamboanga City, such as 'mafato/napudot'--or 'okinnam'--, and 'este,' 'bien,' or other Chavacano words pidginized from the Spanish.
But this is tokenism, and no amount of language engineering based on tokenism will ever correct the cultural and lingustic injustices inflicted upon millions and millions of peoples--in the plural--in the Philippines, with Sebuano still lording it over as the 'national lingua franca' in the Visayan and Mindanoa, and Ilokano, as the 'national lingua franca' in Northern Luzon, and for history's sake, in the diaspora. For the historical language of the diaspora is none other but Ilokano, but the muffling of the enemy has been so effective, the muffling making it appear that the Ilokano in the diaspora has no voice of his own, has to find that voice in other languages not his own but those of others, such as Tagalog and his pidgin/Hawaiian English that you cannot even recognize as English at all, if the basis is the one you hear from television--from the CNN headquarters.
This tokenism is the culplit--and this is the cause of this sytemic masking off that is making it appear that we have, in fact, already a P/Filipino.
The other culprits to these are well-meaning academics, who, operating from a particular linguistic base, comes up with a totalizing strategy to account everything. Virgilio Enriqueze's "sikolohiyang Filipino" is one prime example, when, in his exuberance to found something called "native psychology" or the more stylish term "indigenous psychology", called the Tagalog experience of "psyche" the "sikolohiyang Filipino." There are other academics of this mold, such as Prospero Covar's "araling Pilipino" and Zeus Salazar's "p/filipinolohiya". Include here the philosopher Leonardo Mercado and we have a quartet that pushed for a totalizing view of the national experience based on one linguistic experience.
Mercado, for instance, in his metalinguistic approach, tried hard to put together the possibilities of loob-nakem-buot coming together but did not succeed, or so I think. The premises are never the same for arriving at that forced conclusion in order to account what, in abstraction, is called "Filipino philosophy', which had nothing to do with the nation but only with some select ethnolinguistic groups representing themselves but never the nation as a whole.
The big intellectual problem--and a huge one at that--in the Philippines is that logical equation being done to account the nation: Tagalog is equal to Pilipino; Pilipino is equal to Filipino.
There has been this shorthand way to make things 'national' for political reasons, part of which is that almost fanatic view that says that when the center has spoken, the whole thing is finished. There is a formula for this in the medieval church, which medievalism still pervades to justify religous moral standards: "Roma locuta est--Rome has spoken." And because Rome has spoken, no one has the right to make a speech again. The word Rome has uttered about anything at all is final and there are no ifs and buts.
The linguistic arrogance in Tagalog began when it did not recognize--it did not have any intention to recognize in the beginning--the other sounds of the other languages only to find out that this linguistic position to account the alphabets of the national language is ultimately wrong.
The sense here is this: that if the equation--this isomorphism--continues, then we have sold our souls to the neocolonizers.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Apr 17-07
Even in the silence, I can sense the storm brewing, and the storm is going to be a deluge, and this deluge will test the premises of the cultural idiocy that we see in the governmental policies relative to the national language, national literature, and national culture. I can name some now, with their rage against the systemic and programmatic wiping out of the other lingua francas of the homeland because of the unfair advantage being given to Tagalog as Pilipino as Filipino (say, what is the difference, pray tell!) in all aspects of our national life.
At the very least, this unfair advantage given to Tagalog is an anomaly because it is based on entitlement and on privileges. Leoncio Deriada's position, for instance, to distinguish, in one literary contest sponsored by a government agency, between Tagalog writing and Filipino writing is laudable, and was appropriate, but at the same time, it masks the reality that indeed, Tagalog writing is not distinct from Filipino writing.
In effect, that proposal came in early because the distinction cannot be found, is, in fact, unfounded, unless we accept that a Tagalog writing becomes Filipino writing when we use, in a Tagalog work, some words from Aparri to Zamboanga City, such as 'mafato/napudot'--or 'okinnam'--, and 'este,' 'bien,' or other Chavacano words pidginized from the Spanish.
But this is tokenism, and no amount of language engineering based on tokenism will ever correct the cultural and lingustic injustices inflicted upon millions and millions of peoples--in the plural--in the Philippines, with Sebuano still lording it over as the 'national lingua franca' in the Visayan and Mindanoa, and Ilokano, as the 'national lingua franca' in Northern Luzon, and for history's sake, in the diaspora. For the historical language of the diaspora is none other but Ilokano, but the muffling of the enemy has been so effective, the muffling making it appear that the Ilokano in the diaspora has no voice of his own, has to find that voice in other languages not his own but those of others, such as Tagalog and his pidgin/Hawaiian English that you cannot even recognize as English at all, if the basis is the one you hear from television--from the CNN headquarters.
This tokenism is the culplit--and this is the cause of this sytemic masking off that is making it appear that we have, in fact, already a P/Filipino.
The other culprits to these are well-meaning academics, who, operating from a particular linguistic base, comes up with a totalizing strategy to account everything. Virgilio Enriqueze's "sikolohiyang Filipino" is one prime example, when, in his exuberance to found something called "native psychology" or the more stylish term "indigenous psychology", called the Tagalog experience of "psyche" the "sikolohiyang Filipino." There are other academics of this mold, such as Prospero Covar's "araling Pilipino" and Zeus Salazar's "p/filipinolohiya". Include here the philosopher Leonardo Mercado and we have a quartet that pushed for a totalizing view of the national experience based on one linguistic experience.
Mercado, for instance, in his metalinguistic approach, tried hard to put together the possibilities of loob-nakem-buot coming together but did not succeed, or so I think. The premises are never the same for arriving at that forced conclusion in order to account what, in abstraction, is called "Filipino philosophy', which had nothing to do with the nation but only with some select ethnolinguistic groups representing themselves but never the nation as a whole.
The big intellectual problem--and a huge one at that--in the Philippines is that logical equation being done to account the nation: Tagalog is equal to Pilipino; Pilipino is equal to Filipino.
There has been this shorthand way to make things 'national' for political reasons, part of which is that almost fanatic view that says that when the center has spoken, the whole thing is finished. There is a formula for this in the medieval church, which medievalism still pervades to justify religous moral standards: "Roma locuta est--Rome has spoken." And because Rome has spoken, no one has the right to make a speech again. The word Rome has uttered about anything at all is final and there are no ifs and buts.
The linguistic arrogance in Tagalog began when it did not recognize--it did not have any intention to recognize in the beginning--the other sounds of the other languages only to find out that this linguistic position to account the alphabets of the national language is ultimately wrong.
The sense here is this: that if the equation--this isomorphism--continues, then we have sold our souls to the neocolonizers.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manoa/Apr 17-07
The Case of Ilokano as a National Language, 2
The ideological consequences of the sloganeering gimmicks of the New Society gave rise to an ideologically impotent understanding of what constitutes a 'nation' and a 'new society.'
The framers of the concept 'new society', those bright boys from the academe, failed miserably to understand that in the building up of a transformed and new society, only one and only one language is not the requirement. Thus, the 'isang bansa, isang diwa' slogan that schoolchildren mouthed from 1972 and onwards propagandized a mentality that was not only serf-serving to those in the center of power, with Manila-centrism providing the flawed backgrey. That slogan simply short-changed us into understanding that democracy, the backbone of that new order, did not require one and only one language and did not intend to stifle and muffle the voices and dreams and hopes of those outside Metro Manila, the humonguous city with its claim to the proverbial and equally ad populum kind of a phrase, 'the true, the good, and the beautiful.' In short, we could have had a 'new society' without the imposed Tagalogization of all that concerns our national life, from awareness of the injustices around us to the zest and vitality that is required to lived the good life in that new society. The myopia is palpable--and the leaders are guilty of this lobotomization of the minds of our people, such that, in the end, the standard of national life became either an Anglicized-Englishicized one or a Tagalogized one, or both depending on whose presidential era one is speaking about.
This failure of the bright boys of Malacanang to see beyond the imprisoning 'one nation, one thought/language' mindset gave rise to the failiure of our collective imagination to build up a county, nation, and society that has multiple national languages.
If we did have the vision, if we had that imagination, we could have set a political philosophy of language that was able to respond to the requisites of democracy. Somewhere, we know of this truth: that the solution to the problems of democracy is more and more democracy.
The solution to the problems of democracy is not dictatorship: political, cultural, economic.
The solution to the problems of democracy is not the oligarchy of those walled within walls--those who take residence in palaces, in the hallowed halls of Congress, in posh villages that do not of the hardship of those who cannot speak Tagalog and neitther English.
The solution to the problems of linguistic and cultural democracy is not the imposition of two colonial and neocolonial languages: English and Tagalog.
For English is the proof of how divided we have become, with the chasm of that division a symbol and a social sin, with the Englicized leaders only talking to themselves and among themselves, and never with and to us.
For Tagalog has become a internal-neocolonial tool of the unknown enemy, well, we know them too, the enemy who has received an email from the gods, a fax message from the goddesses, or a text message from the anitos--the email, the fax, the text all telling them that from hereon, they are the new lords and masters, those who know Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino because they speak the message of the poetically phrased but empty boast of an empty rhetoric, 'isang bansa, isang diwa.'
These are the sins of the fathers, and we urge them to confess of their sins before the Filipino public, telling us, and telling in frankness and courage and daring, that, well, they have been imprisoned by the myopic thoughts of the myopic past and that today, they have realized where their mistakes and sins and failures lie.
Democracy seen in its lights gives us the options, the gift of vision, the freedom of thought. I wonder how we have been imprisoned to this singular national language idea, not challenging it, not rejecting it, not resisting it in a systematic way, excpet in the 'reactionary' theatrics of some legislators who probably did not know how to distinguish the semantic difference between 'a language from the region' and 'a regional language.'
The lesson learned is this: that we can build up a country, we can build up a nation, we can build up a decent and self-respect society by giving decency and respect to the languages and cultures of those in the periphery, of those in the margins, of those outside the center of power, of those outside the academe whose members have become tools to this widespread illusion about the Tagalogization and Englishization of the homeland.
The lesson learned is this: We are not going to allow Ilokano and the other lingua francas of the country, say Sebuano, to go the wastebin of cultural and linguistic history. We have given so much entitlement and privilege to English and Tagalog. Now is that time for us to ask for an accounting of our cultural and linguistic obligations.
At the very least then, Ilokano needs to be declared as a national language. So all the other lingua francas of the country.
A Solver Agcaoili
April 16, 2007/UH Manoa
The framers of the concept 'new society', those bright boys from the academe, failed miserably to understand that in the building up of a transformed and new society, only one and only one language is not the requirement. Thus, the 'isang bansa, isang diwa' slogan that schoolchildren mouthed from 1972 and onwards propagandized a mentality that was not only serf-serving to those in the center of power, with Manila-centrism providing the flawed backgrey. That slogan simply short-changed us into understanding that democracy, the backbone of that new order, did not require one and only one language and did not intend to stifle and muffle the voices and dreams and hopes of those outside Metro Manila, the humonguous city with its claim to the proverbial and equally ad populum kind of a phrase, 'the true, the good, and the beautiful.' In short, we could have had a 'new society' without the imposed Tagalogization of all that concerns our national life, from awareness of the injustices around us to the zest and vitality that is required to lived the good life in that new society. The myopia is palpable--and the leaders are guilty of this lobotomization of the minds of our people, such that, in the end, the standard of national life became either an Anglicized-Englishicized one or a Tagalogized one, or both depending on whose presidential era one is speaking about.
This failure of the bright boys of Malacanang to see beyond the imprisoning 'one nation, one thought/language' mindset gave rise to the failiure of our collective imagination to build up a county, nation, and society that has multiple national languages.
If we did have the vision, if we had that imagination, we could have set a political philosophy of language that was able to respond to the requisites of democracy. Somewhere, we know of this truth: that the solution to the problems of democracy is more and more democracy.
The solution to the problems of democracy is not dictatorship: political, cultural, economic.
The solution to the problems of democracy is not the oligarchy of those walled within walls--those who take residence in palaces, in the hallowed halls of Congress, in posh villages that do not of the hardship of those who cannot speak Tagalog and neitther English.
The solution to the problems of linguistic and cultural democracy is not the imposition of two colonial and neocolonial languages: English and Tagalog.
For English is the proof of how divided we have become, with the chasm of that division a symbol and a social sin, with the Englicized leaders only talking to themselves and among themselves, and never with and to us.
For Tagalog has become a internal-neocolonial tool of the unknown enemy, well, we know them too, the enemy who has received an email from the gods, a fax message from the goddesses, or a text message from the anitos--the email, the fax, the text all telling them that from hereon, they are the new lords and masters, those who know Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino because they speak the message of the poetically phrased but empty boast of an empty rhetoric, 'isang bansa, isang diwa.'
These are the sins of the fathers, and we urge them to confess of their sins before the Filipino public, telling us, and telling in frankness and courage and daring, that, well, they have been imprisoned by the myopic thoughts of the myopic past and that today, they have realized where their mistakes and sins and failures lie.
Democracy seen in its lights gives us the options, the gift of vision, the freedom of thought. I wonder how we have been imprisoned to this singular national language idea, not challenging it, not rejecting it, not resisting it in a systematic way, excpet in the 'reactionary' theatrics of some legislators who probably did not know how to distinguish the semantic difference between 'a language from the region' and 'a regional language.'
The lesson learned is this: that we can build up a country, we can build up a nation, we can build up a decent and self-respect society by giving decency and respect to the languages and cultures of those in the periphery, of those in the margins, of those outside the center of power, of those outside the academe whose members have become tools to this widespread illusion about the Tagalogization and Englishization of the homeland.
The lesson learned is this: We are not going to allow Ilokano and the other lingua francas of the country, say Sebuano, to go the wastebin of cultural and linguistic history. We have given so much entitlement and privilege to English and Tagalog. Now is that time for us to ask for an accounting of our cultural and linguistic obligations.
At the very least then, Ilokano needs to be declared as a national language. So all the other lingua francas of the country.
A Solver Agcaoili
April 16, 2007/UH Manoa
Ilokano Language and Literature and the Issue of Invisibility
(Note: On April 12, I had the opportunity--or I was given the opportunity--to take part in the Philippine Literature Festival put together by the UH Manoa's Tagalog Program, with the festival showcasing the pride of Philippine letters in the Philippines and abroad, one writing in Tagalog, Joi Barrios, and the rest writing in English: Ninotchka Rosca, R. Zamora Linmark, Michelle Cruz Skinner, Francis Tanglao-Aguas, and Marianne Villanueva, with all of them based in the U.S. Mainland, although Linmark shares his time between teaching in UH Manoa and residency in New York. The topics presented by the panelists were well prepared, with all of them zeroing on the duty of the writer to be faithful to the human experience, to the human condition. Aguas was passionate about his call to keep on with the struggle to make a space for the Filipinos writing in America; Linmark talked about the need to support the small publishing houses, Rosca lamented the negligible percentage of immigrants who read (about 3 percent, she said); Villanueva said she would email me on publishers wanting to publish translations; and Skinner, ever the silent type, talked of her need to be left alone most of the time. In many ways, one theme that cropped up is the issue of invisibility in Filipino-American Writing in America.
I listened intently, taking down notes in my head. I would be asked to give my sharing after the six panelists were done with their presentation, me as a member of that category, 'local writer.'
Below is what I said, my short spiel creating various reactions from some groups. I spoke from the heart--I did not read from any notes but spoke directly to the audience. Here is how I would remember what I said--although I know I would not remember exactly how I parsed them. The issues and meanings I wanted to drive at are reconstructed here. The provocation created by my extemporaneous talk is most welcome to open up the floodgates for a discussion on the mistakes--and prevailing mistakes--related to the concept of 'Philippine Literature', which, in reality, is an anomaly since it is plain and simple Tagalog literature and 'Filipino as National Language', which is, in reality, another anomaly, since it is Tagalog language with a token of 'manang' and 'manong' and a hodge-podge of other words the uninformed proponents pick up along the way. These are two anomalies that need to be addressed now and soon, with urgency, immediacy, and expediency.
I would like to speak from the heart. I am a writer, and I write in three languages: Ilokano, English, Tagalog (mark that I did not say Filipino, initially, because I believe that somewhere along the way, the whole nation, the whole Filipino people have been deceived by this idea that we now have Filipino, although the only proof that claimants can say is that they have a 'Tagalog-like/Tagalog-based language' that is called Pilipino, and now, because this is what is demanded by the opportunity to keep on with the opportunity to Tagalogize the Filipino mind, is now called, unfortunately, Filipino.)
When we speak about invisibility, I am wondering: What could be the invisibility of the Ilokano writer like?
What is that invisibility that is being experienced by the Fillipino American writer writing in English in America and who has been able to create a space for himself, or the opportunity has created a space for him?
What is that invisibility that is being experienced by the Tagalog writer in the Philippines and the abroad, with that writer having all the privileges and entitlements the Ilokano writer does not have?
I do not know. If we have a problem with these languages--or the literatures from these languages--the problem on the shoulder of the Ilokano writer in Hawai`i is far more than the one on the shoulders of these writers.
For the Ilokano writer to be affirmed, he has to write in Tagalog.
For the Ilokano writer to be affirmed, he has to write in English.
Now we have a triple problem for the Ilokano writer: for him to write, for him to write in Tagalog, and for him to write in English to be affirmed, to be accepted.
Considering that in the State of Hawai`i, from the census data of the Philippine Consulate, we have about 9 of 10 Filipinos here who trace their heritage from the Ilokos, from the Amianan. In short, we have here Ilokanos and Ilokano-speaking people whose voices have never been heard. We cannot hear them because they are made invisible, they are rendered invisible by so many social, linguistic, and cultural forces.
The playing field in Philippine American writing has never been level, has never been even, has never been equal.
When I was in California, I edited an Asian Pacific American newspaper. I decided to publish works in Ilokano and Tagalog by poets and essayists. Some liked the idea, as it showed the position of the newspaper in terms of affirming diversity and ethnic pride. But many did not like the idea as this made the paper 'too ethnic.' I held on to the celebration of diversity, and at the cost of losing readers and subscribers, I contintued to pubish ethnic materials, in Ilokano, in Tagalog, and in English, in a variety of topics and issues concerning the Asian Pacific American immigrants, with columnists from New Jersey, San Diego, Salt Lake, Hawaii, Manila, and Los Angeles. I wanted to zero in on the immigrant experience and celebrate that experience using the lens of diversity.
It is this diversity that concerns me now even as we speak of Filipino Literature and Philippine American Writing.
My concern stems from the invisibility of the Ilokano writer and other ethnic writers except Tagalog and English, with all the entitlements and privileges of these two forms of writing.
We do not have these entitlements and privileges in Ilokano writing, not even in this State with the majority of the population tracing their heritage in Ilokano , with a ratio of 9 of 10 Filipinos over here. In all of Philippine history in this State, the writing that we talk of is English writing by Filipinos and it is Tagalog writing by Filipinos sometimes called P/Filipino, ambivalence and ambiguities intact.
I dare say that the Ilokano writer writing in Ilokano has no voice in this State even if he is more than anyone else among the ehtnolinguistic groups coming from the Philippines.
No, his voice has been silent, has been silenced. And he has no space to speak except that space he creates for himself.
He can only talk to another Ilokano writer, and both he and the other are the only readers, are the only listeners. It is the same in the country where we come from; it is the same in this State, our destination State, and no better. How do we deny the voice of the majority of the Filipinos over here? What morals can we resort to to justify this continuing systemic rendering of the Ilokano writer and the Ilokano writer to that category which is not seen, not heard, not allowed to exist in the same way that the Tagalog writer and the English writer and Tagalog writing and English writing are allowed to exist?
I do not know, but like Ninotchka's phrase, the Ilokano writer will certainly continue to be a warrior on the road. He will continue to resist, claim and fight for his rights, and will continue to fight it out till kingdom come.
The prospects are not bright, but an enduring spirit is what is needed here, and a space reserved for the Ilokano writer so he can be permiited to language his pain, his struggle--so that he can learn again to speak, to have his own speech.
We have started this speech--and this will continue from hereon.
(Note: This extemporaneous talk provoked reactions from predictable sectors and individuals. It probably is going around town now, but I will continue to stand my ground. Some ugly truths must be said, verbalized, and worded in an effort to transform this ugly reality that is killing all Ilokanos in the Philippines and in the diaspora. Two languages continue to kill our sensitivities and senbilities, and unless we did something creatively and with understanding, we will end up mouthing our understanding of ourselves in the language of our neocolonizers. That, I think, will inaugurate our death as an ethnolinguistic group.)
I listened intently, taking down notes in my head. I would be asked to give my sharing after the six panelists were done with their presentation, me as a member of that category, 'local writer.'
Below is what I said, my short spiel creating various reactions from some groups. I spoke from the heart--I did not read from any notes but spoke directly to the audience. Here is how I would remember what I said--although I know I would not remember exactly how I parsed them. The issues and meanings I wanted to drive at are reconstructed here. The provocation created by my extemporaneous talk is most welcome to open up the floodgates for a discussion on the mistakes--and prevailing mistakes--related to the concept of 'Philippine Literature', which, in reality, is an anomaly since it is plain and simple Tagalog literature and 'Filipino as National Language', which is, in reality, another anomaly, since it is Tagalog language with a token of 'manang' and 'manong' and a hodge-podge of other words the uninformed proponents pick up along the way. These are two anomalies that need to be addressed now and soon, with urgency, immediacy, and expediency.
I would like to speak from the heart. I am a writer, and I write in three languages: Ilokano, English, Tagalog (mark that I did not say Filipino, initially, because I believe that somewhere along the way, the whole nation, the whole Filipino people have been deceived by this idea that we now have Filipino, although the only proof that claimants can say is that they have a 'Tagalog-like/Tagalog-based language' that is called Pilipino, and now, because this is what is demanded by the opportunity to keep on with the opportunity to Tagalogize the Filipino mind, is now called, unfortunately, Filipino.)
When we speak about invisibility, I am wondering: What could be the invisibility of the Ilokano writer like?
What is that invisibility that is being experienced by the Fillipino American writer writing in English in America and who has been able to create a space for himself, or the opportunity has created a space for him?
What is that invisibility that is being experienced by the Tagalog writer in the Philippines and the abroad, with that writer having all the privileges and entitlements the Ilokano writer does not have?
I do not know. If we have a problem with these languages--or the literatures from these languages--the problem on the shoulder of the Ilokano writer in Hawai`i is far more than the one on the shoulders of these writers.
For the Ilokano writer to be affirmed, he has to write in Tagalog.
For the Ilokano writer to be affirmed, he has to write in English.
Now we have a triple problem for the Ilokano writer: for him to write, for him to write in Tagalog, and for him to write in English to be affirmed, to be accepted.
Considering that in the State of Hawai`i, from the census data of the Philippine Consulate, we have about 9 of 10 Filipinos here who trace their heritage from the Ilokos, from the Amianan. In short, we have here Ilokanos and Ilokano-speaking people whose voices have never been heard. We cannot hear them because they are made invisible, they are rendered invisible by so many social, linguistic, and cultural forces.
The playing field in Philippine American writing has never been level, has never been even, has never been equal.
When I was in California, I edited an Asian Pacific American newspaper. I decided to publish works in Ilokano and Tagalog by poets and essayists. Some liked the idea, as it showed the position of the newspaper in terms of affirming diversity and ethnic pride. But many did not like the idea as this made the paper 'too ethnic.' I held on to the celebration of diversity, and at the cost of losing readers and subscribers, I contintued to pubish ethnic materials, in Ilokano, in Tagalog, and in English, in a variety of topics and issues concerning the Asian Pacific American immigrants, with columnists from New Jersey, San Diego, Salt Lake, Hawaii, Manila, and Los Angeles. I wanted to zero in on the immigrant experience and celebrate that experience using the lens of diversity.
It is this diversity that concerns me now even as we speak of Filipino Literature and Philippine American Writing.
My concern stems from the invisibility of the Ilokano writer and other ethnic writers except Tagalog and English, with all the entitlements and privileges of these two forms of writing.
We do not have these entitlements and privileges in Ilokano writing, not even in this State with the majority of the population tracing their heritage in Ilokano , with a ratio of 9 of 10 Filipinos over here. In all of Philippine history in this State, the writing that we talk of is English writing by Filipinos and it is Tagalog writing by Filipinos sometimes called P/Filipino, ambivalence and ambiguities intact.
I dare say that the Ilokano writer writing in Ilokano has no voice in this State even if he is more than anyone else among the ehtnolinguistic groups coming from the Philippines.
No, his voice has been silent, has been silenced. And he has no space to speak except that space he creates for himself.
He can only talk to another Ilokano writer, and both he and the other are the only readers, are the only listeners. It is the same in the country where we come from; it is the same in this State, our destination State, and no better. How do we deny the voice of the majority of the Filipinos over here? What morals can we resort to to justify this continuing systemic rendering of the Ilokano writer and the Ilokano writer to that category which is not seen, not heard, not allowed to exist in the same way that the Tagalog writer and the English writer and Tagalog writing and English writing are allowed to exist?
I do not know, but like Ninotchka's phrase, the Ilokano writer will certainly continue to be a warrior on the road. He will continue to resist, claim and fight for his rights, and will continue to fight it out till kingdom come.
The prospects are not bright, but an enduring spirit is what is needed here, and a space reserved for the Ilokano writer so he can be permiited to language his pain, his struggle--so that he can learn again to speak, to have his own speech.
We have started this speech--and this will continue from hereon.
(Note: This extemporaneous talk provoked reactions from predictable sectors and individuals. It probably is going around town now, but I will continue to stand my ground. Some ugly truths must be said, verbalized, and worded in an effort to transform this ugly reality that is killing all Ilokanos in the Philippines and in the diaspora. Two languages continue to kill our sensitivities and senbilities, and unless we did something creatively and with understanding, we will end up mouthing our understanding of ourselves in the language of our neocolonizers. That, I think, will inaugurate our death as an ethnolinguistic group.)
Oneing With the Community
(Opening Remarks of A. S. Agcaoili at the 2007 Festival of Drama, Songs, and Short Video, Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program, U of Hawa`i at Manoa, Art Auditorium, April 14, 2007)
In the name of the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program of the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, in the name of all our students who are about to showcase their talents and gifts this morning, and in the name of all the members of the faculty of this program, please allow me to greet and welcome you all.
In this gathering, we are truly proud to walk hand in hand with our students in this program so that they will be able to confidently show their abilities that demonstrate their love for the heritage they come from. Many of them, we know well, have been born here; many others grew up here and have their minds molded and formed here. But despite these accidents of their birth and growth, they are ever-ready and prepared to go back and trace and retrace their roots and learn as much as they can the ethos, the ways, and mindsets of their ancestors. This readiness and openness in their hearts and soul is, to me, a virtue, and it is a virtue for all of us in the program as well. This is a virtue that is at the same time the wellspring of the pride that is ours, and with you becoming witnesses as well, together we shall all be proud of them.
Please allow me to offer in oblation this program—this Festival of Songs, Drama, and Short Videos—to the two professors of the program who are both retiring this school year, Professors Prescilla Llague Espiritu and Dr. Josie Paz Clausen. Between Profs. Espiritu and Dr. Clausen are 63 years of nurturing our program, long years, indeed, of caring for the culture and the language of the Ilokano who has come here as an exile in the State of Hawai`i, the Ilokano who has come one hundred years ago. It is not pure accident that it is in this centennial of the celebration of the coming of the first sakadas that we are also celebrating our remembering of our debt of indebtedness to Prof. Espiritu and Dr. Clausen. Brothers and sisters and guests, join me then in honoring Manang Precy and Manang Josie and through our festival this morning, we give them our gratitude and thanks because of their patience, industry, and goodness. We bless them as well so that in the years of their retirement, they are blessed with health, strength, joy, and well-being.
Today is indeed extraordinary because we witness a gathering and re-gathering of the members of our community. The joy in me is particular and palpable in witnessing that the parents are here, that the relatives are here, that the Ilokano heritage community is here, and that all those who have come to our assistance and help and aid are all here to be with us. With your presence, you are telling us that we need to continue to develop the Ilokano program in this University because this program is not only for our students who are your children but also for the entire community of Ilokanos and the peoples of Amianan.
Please join me, therefore, in greeting and congratulating the officers and members of Timpuyog: Ilokano Student Organization because of their tireless and endless effort to make this festival happen this morning. Good morning to all of you and long live!
In the name of the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program of the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, in the name of all our students who are about to showcase their talents and gifts this morning, and in the name of all the members of the faculty of this program, please allow me to greet and welcome you all.
In this gathering, we are truly proud to walk hand in hand with our students in this program so that they will be able to confidently show their abilities that demonstrate their love for the heritage they come from. Many of them, we know well, have been born here; many others grew up here and have their minds molded and formed here. But despite these accidents of their birth and growth, they are ever-ready and prepared to go back and trace and retrace their roots and learn as much as they can the ethos, the ways, and mindsets of their ancestors. This readiness and openness in their hearts and soul is, to me, a virtue, and it is a virtue for all of us in the program as well. This is a virtue that is at the same time the wellspring of the pride that is ours, and with you becoming witnesses as well, together we shall all be proud of them.
Please allow me to offer in oblation this program—this Festival of Songs, Drama, and Short Videos—to the two professors of the program who are both retiring this school year, Professors Prescilla Llague Espiritu and Dr. Josie Paz Clausen. Between Profs. Espiritu and Dr. Clausen are 63 years of nurturing our program, long years, indeed, of caring for the culture and the language of the Ilokano who has come here as an exile in the State of Hawai`i, the Ilokano who has come one hundred years ago. It is not pure accident that it is in this centennial of the celebration of the coming of the first sakadas that we are also celebrating our remembering of our debt of indebtedness to Prof. Espiritu and Dr. Clausen. Brothers and sisters and guests, join me then in honoring Manang Precy and Manang Josie and through our festival this morning, we give them our gratitude and thanks because of their patience, industry, and goodness. We bless them as well so that in the years of their retirement, they are blessed with health, strength, joy, and well-being.
Today is indeed extraordinary because we witness a gathering and re-gathering of the members of our community. The joy in me is particular and palpable in witnessing that the parents are here, that the relatives are here, that the Ilokano heritage community is here, and that all those who have come to our assistance and help and aid are all here to be with us. With your presence, you are telling us that we need to continue to develop the Ilokano program in this University because this program is not only for our students who are your children but also for the entire community of Ilokanos and the peoples of Amianan.
Please join me, therefore, in greeting and congratulating the officers and members of Timpuyog: Ilokano Student Organization because of their tireless and endless effort to make this festival happen this morning. Good morning to all of you and long live!
Kammayet ti Programa ti Unibersidad ken ti Komunidad
(Panglukat a Bitla ni A. S. Agcaoili iti 2007 Pabuya ti Drama, Kinnantaan, ken Ababa a Video, Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program, U of Hawai`i at Manoa, Art Auditorium, Abril 14, 2007)
Iti nagan ti Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program ti Unibersidad ti Hawai`i iti Manoa, iti nagan dagiti adalanmi a mangipabuya kadagiti talugadingda ita a bigat, ken kasta met nga iti nagan dagiti mangisursuro iti daytoy a programa, palugodandak koma a mangkablaaw ken mangpadanon kadakayo.
Iti daytoy a tallaong, sidadayawkami a mangkibin kadagiti adalanmi iti daytoy a programa tapno iti kasta ket sipapannakkelda a mangiparang kadatayo amin dagiti iduldulinda a kinasaririt a mangipakita iti panagayatda iti puli a nagtaudanda, a numan pay kaaduanna kadakuada ti nayanak ditoy wenno ditoyen ti nakatubayan dagiti kananakem ken kapampanunotanda, sindadaan dagitoy nga adalan a sublian dagiti kannawid, kaugalian, ken kultura ti puli a naggapuanda. Daytoy a kinasindadaan iti puso ken kararua ket maysa a birtud para kadakami amin iti daytoy a programa, birtud a bubon met laeng ti panangipasindayagmi kadagiti kabaelanda tapno iti kasta, kaduadakayo a kas saksi, maipagpannakkeltayo amin ida.
Palugodandak met koma a mangidaton iti daytoy a program—ti Fiesta ti Kinnantaan, Drama, ken Ababa a Video—kadagiti dua a propesora ti programa nga agpada a nagretiro iti daytoy a tawen ti panagseserrek, da Propesora Prescilla Llague Espiritu ken Dr. Josie Paz Clausen. Iti nagbaetan da Propesora Espiritu ken Dr Clausen ket innem a pulo ket tallo a tawen a panangtagtagibi iti programa, naunday a panawen a panangilala iti kultural ken pagsasao dagiti Ilokano a naitawataw ditoy Estado ti Hawai`i iti las-ud ti sangagasuten a tawen. Saan nga aksidente nga iti sentenario ti selebrasion ti yuumay dagiti immuna a sakada ket ita met a selebrararantayo ti pananglagiptayo iti utang a naimbag a nakem kada Propesora Espiritu ken Dr. Clausen. Ngarud, kakabsat, kaduaendak iti panaglugaytayo kada Manang Prescy ken Manang Josie ket babaen iti daytoy a panagpipiestatayo ita, itedtayo kadakuada ti panagyaman kadakuada gapu iti anus, saldet, ken kinaimbag. Kasta met itedtayo kadakuada ti bendision tapno iti panawen ti panagretiroda ket umagapay kadakuada ti salun-at, pia, ragsak, ken karadkad.
Naisangsangayan daytoy nga aldaw ta maimatangantay manen ti maysa a buya ti panagkakammayet. Partikular ti ragsak kaniak gapu iti pannakaimatangko ti kaadda dagiti nagannak, kabagian, komunidad, ken dagiti aminen a tumultulong kadatayo tapno maparang-aytayo daytoy a programa a saan laeng a programa ti Unibersidad no di ket programa ti intero a komunidad dagiti in-inabo ni Ilokano ken dagiti taga-Amianan a naisadsad ditoy a lugar.
Ngarud, buyogandak iti panangkablaawko kadagtii opisial ken kamkameng ti Timpuyog: Ilokano Students Organization iti awan ressat a panaggamuloda tapno maisayangkat daytoy a fiesta ita a bigat. Naimbag a bigatyo amin a sangapada ken agbiagkayo!
(Panglukat a Bitla ni A. S. Agcaoili iti 2007 Pabuya ti Drama, Kinnantaan, ken Ababa a Video, Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program, U of Hawai`i at Manoa, Art Auditorium, Abril 14, 2007)
Iti nagan ti Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program ti Unibersidad ti Hawai`i iti Manoa, iti nagan dagiti adalanmi a mangipabuya kadagiti talugadingda ita a bigat, ken kasta met nga iti nagan dagiti mangisursuro iti daytoy a programa, palugodandak koma a mangkablaaw ken mangpadanon kadakayo.
Iti daytoy a tallaong, sidadayawkami a mangkibin kadagiti adalanmi iti daytoy a programa tapno iti kasta ket sipapannakkelda a mangiparang kadatayo amin dagiti iduldulinda a kinasaririt a mangipakita iti panagayatda iti puli a nagtaudanda, a numan pay kaaduanna kadakuada ti nayanak ditoy wenno ditoyen ti nakatubayan dagiti kananakem ken kapampanunotanda, sindadaan dagitoy nga adalan a sublian dagiti kannawid, kaugalian, ken kultura ti puli a naggapuanda. Daytoy a kinasindadaan iti puso ken kararua ket maysa a birtud para kadakami amin iti daytoy a programa, birtud a bubon met laeng ti panangipasindayagmi kadagiti kabaelanda tapno iti kasta, kaduadakayo a kas saksi, maipagpannakkeltayo amin ida.
Palugodandak met koma a mangidaton iti daytoy a program—ti Fiesta ti Kinnantaan, Drama, ken Ababa a Video—kadagiti dua a propesora ti programa nga agpada a nagretiro iti daytoy a tawen ti panagseserrek, da Propesora Prescilla Llague Espiritu ken Dr. Josie Paz Clausen. Iti nagbaetan da Propesora Espiritu ken Dr Clausen ket innem a pulo ket tallo a tawen a panangtagtagibi iti programa, naunday a panawen a panangilala iti kultural ken pagsasao dagiti Ilokano a naitawataw ditoy Estado ti Hawai`i iti las-ud ti sangagasuten a tawen. Saan nga aksidente nga iti sentenario ti selebrasion ti yuumay dagiti immuna a sakada ket ita met a selebrararantayo ti pananglagiptayo iti utang a naimbag a nakem kada Propesora Espiritu ken Dr. Clausen. Ngarud, kakabsat, kaduaendak iti panaglugaytayo kada Manang Prescy ken Manang Josie ket babaen iti daytoy a panagpipiestatayo ita, itedtayo kadakuada ti panagyaman kadakuada gapu iti anus, saldet, ken kinaimbag. Kasta met itedtayo kadakuada ti bendision tapno iti panawen ti panagretiroda ket umagapay kadakuada ti salun-at, pia, ragsak, ken karadkad.
Naisangsangayan daytoy nga aldaw ta maimatangantay manen ti maysa a buya ti panagkakammayet. Partikular ti ragsak kaniak gapu iti pannakaimatangko ti kaadda dagiti nagannak, kabagian, komunidad, ken dagiti aminen a tumultulong kadatayo tapno maparang-aytayo daytoy a programa a saan laeng a programa ti Unibersidad no di ket programa ti intero a komunidad dagiti in-inabo ni Ilokano ken dagiti taga-Amianan a naisadsad ditoy a lugar.
Ngarud, buyogandak iti panangkablaawko kadagtii opisial ken kamkameng ti Timpuyog: Ilokano Students Organization iti awan ressat a panaggamuloda tapno maisayangkat daytoy a fiesta ita a bigat. Naimbag a bigatyo amin a sangapada ken agbiagkayo!
The Case of Ilokano as a National Language, 1
The argument I am putting forward is this: the insistence that the Philippines now have a national language in the form of that chameleon which is Tagalog masquerading as Pilipino and then as Filipino is one of the heavy-handed manipulations that many of the ethnolinguistic groups have had to go through in our history of nation-building. The arrogance that goes with this claim is one that is doubly manipulative, with the entitlement and privilege that has been given Tagalog in the past that continues up to today. The argement could sound like a broken record--some kind of a water under the bridge, but I see that linguistic and cultural injustice here that must be addressed if the county is really serious in doing justice to the rest of the people of the Philippines.
These manipulations, one that have served that narrow interest of those who think only in terms of one ethnolinguistic group and presume that this same ethnolinguistic group can serve as a cover term for all the experiences of the country, have had its heydey of 'fabricated truth' and that it is high time that we have it unmasked in order to transform Philippine reality--especially that reality that has something to do with the national language, the national culture, and the national literature.
The big trouble in the conception of these three concepts--a culture that is national, a language that is national, and a literature that is national--is that all these refer largely to the culture, language, and literature created, produced, performed in the everyday in the Tagalog area and in Manila, clearly indicative of a form of an ethnocentrism passed off as nationalism.
Something is wrong here and there seem to have evolved that complacency in resisting this continuing onslaught on the sensibilities of the other peoples of the country.
One of the key reasons why we have arrived at this terrible situation is the notion that for a country to be truly national, that country should have only one and only language, and one and only one culture. The second one we have achieved: the culture of corruption that is rampant among those who can wield power over the rest of the population, a culture that is slowly creating a seepage in the way we affirm ourselves with dignity and self-respect--and this culture of silence we have adopted in the face of this unwanted onslaught of the Tagalogization of anything belonging to the nation, of the mind of the peoples of all the ethnolinguistic groups, of the Tagalogization of consciousness, of the Tagalogization of all the apparatuses of culture, the media, the economic and political life of the peoples. The problem is the myopia of the framers of the 'national language,' forgetting tha it is possible for a country to have more than one national language because, let us accept it, the myopia is based on the notion, not empirically correct as it is, that the country is divided along linguistic line. The cause of our division has never been along linguistic line: the cause of our division has always been along the terms of domination and oppression, with the dominator against the dominated, the oppressor against the oppressed.
Today, we think different. It would be a service to the country if those who are in the know would understand that a country may opt to have many national languages--and that in opting such, we are more attuned to the realities of our people and not to the expectation of a powerful elite who speak the language of the colonizers and the language that they use to speak or command their domestic helps in Manila, Tagalog.
The making of Ilokano as a national language is long overdue in much the same way that the making of Sebuano as a national language is as expedient as the declaration of ceasefire between the warring factions.
I argue for a rethinking of the national policy on the national language, a policy based on irrationality, on the fear of the unknown, on the disregard and disrespect for the democratic and cultural and linguistic rights of other peoples--in short, a policy that is dictatorial, tyrannical, and neocolonial.
For today, we have a new colonizer in sheep's clothing--and this neocolonizer is the proponent of Tagalog as the vessel and the only vessel of our self-knowledge and self-reflection as a nation. I say: this position can never be correct if measured against the requisites of social justice and fairness. I say: this position is untenable when measured against the demands of linguistic and cultural democracy.
The only way to correct these injustices is declare multiple national languages for the country with multiple respectable lingua francas.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manao, Apr 14/07
These manipulations, one that have served that narrow interest of those who think only in terms of one ethnolinguistic group and presume that this same ethnolinguistic group can serve as a cover term for all the experiences of the country, have had its heydey of 'fabricated truth' and that it is high time that we have it unmasked in order to transform Philippine reality--especially that reality that has something to do with the national language, the national culture, and the national literature.
The big trouble in the conception of these three concepts--a culture that is national, a language that is national, and a literature that is national--is that all these refer largely to the culture, language, and literature created, produced, performed in the everyday in the Tagalog area and in Manila, clearly indicative of a form of an ethnocentrism passed off as nationalism.
Something is wrong here and there seem to have evolved that complacency in resisting this continuing onslaught on the sensibilities of the other peoples of the country.
One of the key reasons why we have arrived at this terrible situation is the notion that for a country to be truly national, that country should have only one and only language, and one and only one culture. The second one we have achieved: the culture of corruption that is rampant among those who can wield power over the rest of the population, a culture that is slowly creating a seepage in the way we affirm ourselves with dignity and self-respect--and this culture of silence we have adopted in the face of this unwanted onslaught of the Tagalogization of anything belonging to the nation, of the mind of the peoples of all the ethnolinguistic groups, of the Tagalogization of consciousness, of the Tagalogization of all the apparatuses of culture, the media, the economic and political life of the peoples. The problem is the myopia of the framers of the 'national language,' forgetting tha it is possible for a country to have more than one national language because, let us accept it, the myopia is based on the notion, not empirically correct as it is, that the country is divided along linguistic line. The cause of our division has never been along linguistic line: the cause of our division has always been along the terms of domination and oppression, with the dominator against the dominated, the oppressor against the oppressed.
Today, we think different. It would be a service to the country if those who are in the know would understand that a country may opt to have many national languages--and that in opting such, we are more attuned to the realities of our people and not to the expectation of a powerful elite who speak the language of the colonizers and the language that they use to speak or command their domestic helps in Manila, Tagalog.
The making of Ilokano as a national language is long overdue in much the same way that the making of Sebuano as a national language is as expedient as the declaration of ceasefire between the warring factions.
I argue for a rethinking of the national policy on the national language, a policy based on irrationality, on the fear of the unknown, on the disregard and disrespect for the democratic and cultural and linguistic rights of other peoples--in short, a policy that is dictatorial, tyrannical, and neocolonial.
For today, we have a new colonizer in sheep's clothing--and this neocolonizer is the proponent of Tagalog as the vessel and the only vessel of our self-knowledge and self-reflection as a nation. I say: this position can never be correct if measured against the requisites of social justice and fairness. I say: this position is untenable when measured against the demands of linguistic and cultural democracy.
The only way to correct these injustices is declare multiple national languages for the country with multiple respectable lingua francas.
A Solver Agcaoili
UH Manao, Apr 14/07
CHED Endorses Nakem
CHED endorses Nakem Conference
The Commission on Higher Education of the Republic of the Philippines, the government agency tasked to supervise higher education institutions in the country, has endorsed the 2007 Nakem International Conference.
The endorsement assures teachers in the HEIs of claiming credits for professional development and may avail of official business time while attending the four-day conference to be held May 22-25 in Mariano Marcos State University in Batac, Ilocos Norte, the Philippines.
The Nakem Secretariat has also asked the endorsement of the Department of Education and Culture.
Dr. Carlito S. Puno, D.P.A, chairs the CHED.
The 2007 Nakem International Conference has for its theme “Panagpanaw ken Panagindeg—Exile and Settling in Ilokano and Amianan History and Culture.” It is expected that a number of leading scholars, academics, and cultural workers on Ilokano and Amianan life will troop to Batac to take part in the exchange and diffusion of ideas on the various concerns, studies, and issues to be raised.
The 2007 Nakem is convened by Alegria Tan Visaya of the Mariano Marcos State University in the Philippines and Aurelio Solver Agcaoili of the University of Hawai`i at Manoa in the United States.
The chairman of the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino/ Commission on the Filipino Language, Dr. Ricardo Ma. Duran Nolasco, Mr. Juan SP Hidalgo, Dr. Lilia Quindoza Santiago, Dr. Alegria Tan Visaya, and Dr. Aurelio S. Agcaoili will deliver the keynote addresses.
For more information, contact the Office of the President of MMSU Dr. Miriam E. Pascua or Dr. Visaya, Secretary of the Board of Regents and chair, Nakem 2007 Philippine panel.
The Commission on Higher Education of the Republic of the Philippines, the government agency tasked to supervise higher education institutions in the country, has endorsed the 2007 Nakem International Conference.
The endorsement assures teachers in the HEIs of claiming credits for professional development and may avail of official business time while attending the four-day conference to be held May 22-25 in Mariano Marcos State University in Batac, Ilocos Norte, the Philippines.
The Nakem Secretariat has also asked the endorsement of the Department of Education and Culture.
Dr. Carlito S. Puno, D.P.A, chairs the CHED.
The 2007 Nakem International Conference has for its theme “Panagpanaw ken Panagindeg—Exile and Settling in Ilokano and Amianan History and Culture.” It is expected that a number of leading scholars, academics, and cultural workers on Ilokano and Amianan life will troop to Batac to take part in the exchange and diffusion of ideas on the various concerns, studies, and issues to be raised.
The 2007 Nakem is convened by Alegria Tan Visaya of the Mariano Marcos State University in the Philippines and Aurelio Solver Agcaoili of the University of Hawai`i at Manoa in the United States.
The chairman of the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino/ Commission on the Filipino Language, Dr. Ricardo Ma. Duran Nolasco, Mr. Juan SP Hidalgo, Dr. Lilia Quindoza Santiago, Dr. Alegria Tan Visaya, and Dr. Aurelio S. Agcaoili will deliver the keynote addresses.
For more information, contact the Office of the President of MMSU Dr. Miriam E. Pascua or Dr. Visaya, Secretary of the Board of Regents and chair, Nakem 2007 Philippine panel.
Nakem Book Intro
Nakem as Imagination and Critical Consciousness,
Nakem as Our Gift: An Introduction
Aurelio S. Agcaoili, Ph.D.
i.
With this volume, a twin of Saritaan ken Sukisok: Discourse and Research in Ilokano Language, Culture, and Politics (2006), the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program of the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, in collaboration with Nakem Conferences Inc. and the International Academy for Ilokano and Amianan Studies, offers the atang for the anito, the offertory for and in the name of the peoples of Amianan. The atang is this book.
This offering of this book as the atang is done with reverence and respect for all the peoples who trace their heritage from Amianan. It is also done with humility—with humility rooted in the humus, that consciousness of the ground, with the feet firmly planted in the soil, the head close to the earth, bowed because the bowing is an act of recognition of the sacredness of space, of time, of space-time. The ground here is concrete: it is the Amianan ground, territorial and psychic, and material and memorial: the earth of the Kailokuan, Kordiliera, and the valley of Kagayan—the KKK of Ilokano and Amianan Studies; this earth includes the place beyond the boundaries, beyond the beddeng to open up to new territories, new spaces, new places, new sites, new ground, new kaingin—new clearings in order to commence settling, homing, rooting, re-rooting. We thus include here the earth that even if it is not lived in the everyday, it has remained remembered everyday—the act of remembering one of ‘becoming a member again’: ‘re’ and ‘membering’. For it is in the remembering that the distance is bridged, and the exploring begins, again and again, the exploring always tentative, always a play, always a to-and-fro, always an act of approximating the vast possibilities of the lay of the land before us, the land promising some sense and meaning in life. For it is in the remembering that we get to experience the richness of our stories as peoples, the stories of our departures and arrivals, of our exploration and returning to share with the others the lessons we learned along the way, with our stories getting more and more a part of the ‘big story’, complex but not complicated because we have learned to unspool the thread of the beautiful weave of our many stories becoming one because we have learned the ways to, and the virtues of, synthesis and creation.
Let this book take on its role as a humble repository of some form of knowledge that the 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference has so far produced, a form of knowledge that invites discourse and discussion, conversation and clarification, and dissent and debate. In many ways, it plays up on the power of symbols, with its four parts coming into a fusion, the fusion necessary and urgent.
ii.
Part I situates Nakem Conference as an intellectual and academic exercise through the remarks of the leaders of the University where Nakem was held for the first time: Dr. Linda K. Johnsrud, Dr. Neal Smatresk, Dr. Joseph O’Mealy, and Dr. Amefil Agbayani; Part II gives us directions that will guide us on what road we are to take in pushing for a Nakem Conference that is committed and dedicated to a cause, hence, the need to go back to the ideas and propositions of the three keynote speakers: Dr. Bienvenido L. Lumbera, Dr. Lilia Quindoza Santiago, and Dr. Ma. Crisanta Nelmida Flores; Part III sets the tenor for discourse, with papers drawn from those presented at the conference: Dr. Aurelio S. Agcaoili, Prof. Elizabeth Calinawagan, Dr. Josie P. Clausen, Abraham Flores Jr., Ms. Ana Marcelo, Dr. Vincent K. Pollard, Mr. Julius Soria, Dr. Alegria Tan Visaya, and the testimonies of our students of the Ilokano program: Jeremy Sabugo, Rod Antalan, James Ramos, and Rachel Aurellano; and Part IV, the dedication part, sets the tenor, temper, and tone of the gratitude Nakem has for Prof. Precy Espiritu, one of the many who made it possible for Nakem to come about, with the papers of Dr. Aurelio S. Agcaoili and Mr. Virgil J. Mayor Apostol.
We are dedicating this book to Professor Prescila Llague Espiritu for the 33 years that she put in to give birth, nurture, and sustain the Ilokano Program—its name that I inherited as coordinator is ‘Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program.’ It is our way of saying the panagyaman even if we know we can never thank her enough for her act of seizing the opportunity to let the program grow from a single course, and then two, and then allowing it to bloom and then nurturing it further and with dedication to become the only bachelor’s program of its kind anywhere else in the world. We are aware of the humus in Prof. Espiritu—of her being rooted to the ground. I asked her many times why did she put up with the Ilokano Program, and always, there was one consistent answer: it was a job ‘I had to do.’
That could have been true.
But there are at least two ways of doing a job we have to do.
One, we can do it without the heart and soul and mind, in a neither-here-nor-there way, in that kind of a bahala na understood improperly, the summoning of the gods in the cry of ‘Bahala na!’ not sincere but a lip service.
Or two, we can do it with full heart and soul and mind. This, I think, is what makes the ‘doing’ different; it is what separates it from an ordinary way of doing a job that we have to do. What makes the act of ‘doing’ extraordinary is the heart in the doing, the mind in the doing, the soul in the doing.
As an ‘inheritor’ of this program, I can only be thankful; I can only be grateful. I allow myself to be awed by the symbols and meanings behind this gift of person, this gift of self, this gift of life—for in this program is the present presence of these three: person, self, and life.
iii.
In the coming years, we will continue to gather into books the conference papers presented at the inaugural 2006 Nakem Conference and in the succeeding conferences in the hope that the peoples of Amianan will be able to draw from these researches some inspiration to help critically produce relevant knowledge/s for our peoples in the North and for the country as a whole. In invoking the country, we are not limiting the concept of country as a territory but we are opening it up for exiles, immigrants, and migrant laborers to explore and to ‘talk story’ about the homeland that they remember, the homeland that no matter what, would always have a place in their hearts.
iv.
In naming this movement ‘nakem’, we are plumbing the core concept of Ilokanohood and extending the same concept to the other peoples of Amianan even if we are certain that there are many languages and cultures in this part of the country.
We acknowledge with humility—not with a foolish pride—that in the Amianan, Ilokano has become the lingua franca. This phenomenon is a result of many factors, and one of them is the ‘inherent’ and ‘logical’ interaction and commingling—the nexus—of cultures among the peoples of KKK. We admit a certain privileging here, this we acknowledge as well, and the privileging is a prejudice, knowledge before judgment, a prea+judicium in the way hermeneutics proposes this concept as a keyword to human understanding and communication. Gadamer talks of two kinds of prejudices: one that is negative and thus, infertile, and hence to be rejected; and two, positive, because these prejudices lead one to productive knowledge. It is this second sense of prejudice that we invoke the prejudicial in the privileging of Ilokano as a lingua franca of Amianan.
The privileging of Ilokano in the Nakem Conferences and in the issues raised in this volume is a consequence of the historical circumstances that gestated what is now being proposed as ‘Ilokano and Amianan Studies.’ In light of this, we hope to go beyond what the lingua franca offers in order to plumb the wisdom of the ages from the other ethnolinguistic groups of Amianan.
Honolulu, Hawai`i
April 2007
Nakem as Our Gift: An Introduction
Aurelio S. Agcaoili, Ph.D.
i.
With this volume, a twin of Saritaan ken Sukisok: Discourse and Research in Ilokano Language, Culture, and Politics (2006), the Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program of the University of Hawai`i at Manoa, in collaboration with Nakem Conferences Inc. and the International Academy for Ilokano and Amianan Studies, offers the atang for the anito, the offertory for and in the name of the peoples of Amianan. The atang is this book.
This offering of this book as the atang is done with reverence and respect for all the peoples who trace their heritage from Amianan. It is also done with humility—with humility rooted in the humus, that consciousness of the ground, with the feet firmly planted in the soil, the head close to the earth, bowed because the bowing is an act of recognition of the sacredness of space, of time, of space-time. The ground here is concrete: it is the Amianan ground, territorial and psychic, and material and memorial: the earth of the Kailokuan, Kordiliera, and the valley of Kagayan—the KKK of Ilokano and Amianan Studies; this earth includes the place beyond the boundaries, beyond the beddeng to open up to new territories, new spaces, new places, new sites, new ground, new kaingin—new clearings in order to commence settling, homing, rooting, re-rooting. We thus include here the earth that even if it is not lived in the everyday, it has remained remembered everyday—the act of remembering one of ‘becoming a member again’: ‘re’ and ‘membering’. For it is in the remembering that the distance is bridged, and the exploring begins, again and again, the exploring always tentative, always a play, always a to-and-fro, always an act of approximating the vast possibilities of the lay of the land before us, the land promising some sense and meaning in life. For it is in the remembering that we get to experience the richness of our stories as peoples, the stories of our departures and arrivals, of our exploration and returning to share with the others the lessons we learned along the way, with our stories getting more and more a part of the ‘big story’, complex but not complicated because we have learned to unspool the thread of the beautiful weave of our many stories becoming one because we have learned the ways to, and the virtues of, synthesis and creation.
Let this book take on its role as a humble repository of some form of knowledge that the 2006 Nakem Centennial Conference has so far produced, a form of knowledge that invites discourse and discussion, conversation and clarification, and dissent and debate. In many ways, it plays up on the power of symbols, with its four parts coming into a fusion, the fusion necessary and urgent.
ii.
Part I situates Nakem Conference as an intellectual and academic exercise through the remarks of the leaders of the University where Nakem was held for the first time: Dr. Linda K. Johnsrud, Dr. Neal Smatresk, Dr. Joseph O’Mealy, and Dr. Amefil Agbayani; Part II gives us directions that will guide us on what road we are to take in pushing for a Nakem Conference that is committed and dedicated to a cause, hence, the need to go back to the ideas and propositions of the three keynote speakers: Dr. Bienvenido L. Lumbera, Dr. Lilia Quindoza Santiago, and Dr. Ma. Crisanta Nelmida Flores; Part III sets the tenor for discourse, with papers drawn from those presented at the conference: Dr. Aurelio S. Agcaoili, Prof. Elizabeth Calinawagan, Dr. Josie P. Clausen, Abraham Flores Jr., Ms. Ana Marcelo, Dr. Vincent K. Pollard, Mr. Julius Soria, Dr. Alegria Tan Visaya, and the testimonies of our students of the Ilokano program: Jeremy Sabugo, Rod Antalan, James Ramos, and Rachel Aurellano; and Part IV, the dedication part, sets the tenor, temper, and tone of the gratitude Nakem has for Prof. Precy Espiritu, one of the many who made it possible for Nakem to come about, with the papers of Dr. Aurelio S. Agcaoili and Mr. Virgil J. Mayor Apostol.
We are dedicating this book to Professor Prescila Llague Espiritu for the 33 years that she put in to give birth, nurture, and sustain the Ilokano Program—its name that I inherited as coordinator is ‘Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program.’ It is our way of saying the panagyaman even if we know we can never thank her enough for her act of seizing the opportunity to let the program grow from a single course, and then two, and then allowing it to bloom and then nurturing it further and with dedication to become the only bachelor’s program of its kind anywhere else in the world. We are aware of the humus in Prof. Espiritu—of her being rooted to the ground. I asked her many times why did she put up with the Ilokano Program, and always, there was one consistent answer: it was a job ‘I had to do.’
That could have been true.
But there are at least two ways of doing a job we have to do.
One, we can do it without the heart and soul and mind, in a neither-here-nor-there way, in that kind of a bahala na understood improperly, the summoning of the gods in the cry of ‘Bahala na!’ not sincere but a lip service.
Or two, we can do it with full heart and soul and mind. This, I think, is what makes the ‘doing’ different; it is what separates it from an ordinary way of doing a job that we have to do. What makes the act of ‘doing’ extraordinary is the heart in the doing, the mind in the doing, the soul in the doing.
As an ‘inheritor’ of this program, I can only be thankful; I can only be grateful. I allow myself to be awed by the symbols and meanings behind this gift of person, this gift of self, this gift of life—for in this program is the present presence of these three: person, self, and life.
iii.
In the coming years, we will continue to gather into books the conference papers presented at the inaugural 2006 Nakem Conference and in the succeeding conferences in the hope that the peoples of Amianan will be able to draw from these researches some inspiration to help critically produce relevant knowledge/s for our peoples in the North and for the country as a whole. In invoking the country, we are not limiting the concept of country as a territory but we are opening it up for exiles, immigrants, and migrant laborers to explore and to ‘talk story’ about the homeland that they remember, the homeland that no matter what, would always have a place in their hearts.
iv.
In naming this movement ‘nakem’, we are plumbing the core concept of Ilokanohood and extending the same concept to the other peoples of Amianan even if we are certain that there are many languages and cultures in this part of the country.
We acknowledge with humility—not with a foolish pride—that in the Amianan, Ilokano has become the lingua franca. This phenomenon is a result of many factors, and one of them is the ‘inherent’ and ‘logical’ interaction and commingling—the nexus—of cultures among the peoples of KKK. We admit a certain privileging here, this we acknowledge as well, and the privileging is a prejudice, knowledge before judgment, a prea+judicium in the way hermeneutics proposes this concept as a keyword to human understanding and communication. Gadamer talks of two kinds of prejudices: one that is negative and thus, infertile, and hence to be rejected; and two, positive, because these prejudices lead one to productive knowledge. It is this second sense of prejudice that we invoke the prejudicial in the privileging of Ilokano as a lingua franca of Amianan.
The privileging of Ilokano in the Nakem Conferences and in the issues raised in this volume is a consequence of the historical circumstances that gestated what is now being proposed as ‘Ilokano and Amianan Studies.’ In light of this, we hope to go beyond what the lingua franca offers in order to plumb the wisdom of the ages from the other ethnolinguistic groups of Amianan.
Honolulu, Hawai`i
April 2007
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