Our Redemptive Response to
the Timeless Temptations of
Tagalogism and
to the Tyranny of
Tagalogization
Aurelio Solver Agcaoili
We pray we are not going to fall into the same trap of
Tagalogism and Tagalogization again, not when we were made to believe—tempted
and fooled—by the powers-that-were.
Tagalogism is an attitude—a mindset that has trapped us into
a belief of a Philippine nation-state as revolving around a center and only
this center is important.
As a mental disposition, Tagalogism is not about the Tagalog
people, and many of them have nothing to do with, as many of them have been
deprived of their own language and culture when, with a stroke of a pen,
Tagalog as a language suddenly became something else.
The counter-discourse to Tagalogism is about how we revisit
the definitions of ourselves, and how we express those definitions in light of
our basic need for emancipatory knowledge of who we are as a Philippine nation
made up of many nations, where we are, and where we are going.
Tagalogization, on the other hand, is that long juridical,
linguistic, political, economic, and cultural process that has made it certain
that this trap, this temptation relative to the entitlement, privileging, and
valorization of Tagalog, is going to continue to have its stranglehold over all
of us, Tagalog and non-Tagalog peoples alike.
The enlightened Tagalog people are not the problem here;
those who continue to have that triumphal attitude with the lording of Tagalog
over all other Philippine languages are the problems.
For even among the non-Tagalog people, there lies among them
poets and writers and academics and scholars and linguists who do not know that
the entitlement of one language over another may lead to an exclusion that
could be irredeemably damaging to the excluded languages and cultures.
The enemy is in every individual of the Philippines, in the
homeland as well as in the diaspora.
And this individual is lurking—or hiding behind some
abstractions we call ‘nationalism’ and ‘education’ and ‘literacy’, abstractions
that, when devoid of the proper context, are there only to make superiority
pronouncements and thus legitimize the exclusionary tactics of the center.
The beginnings of our linguistic and cultural Gethsemane can
be traced to that Constitutional Convention that began in 1934 and ended in
February 1935. That Con-Con could have taught us peoples of the Philippines and
other peoples of the world the virtues of cultural pluralism and respect for
language rights, this last one veritably an expression of unconditional respect
for basic human rights.
But the 1935 Constitution that came out of that convention
of the supposedly most capable and most astute political leaders of the land
co-opted with the powers-that-were was an occasion of falling from grace, a
grace that could be given only to us by respecting our cultural diversity and
by pursuing language pluralism as a way of life of a nation made up of many
nations such as the Philippines.
The proceedings of the Con-Con bear witness to this fall
that we are trying to rise from today, an act of courage on the part of all
peripheralized ethnolinguistic communities of the Philippines, with the House
Bill 3719 that hopes to remake the template of an oppressive educational system
in the Philippines that makes everyone in basic education—and even in tertiary
education—as cultural and linguistic zombies and robots of the Tagalog and
English languages.
These ethnolinguistic communities have been peripheralized
because we have come to believe that our salvation as a people is the
glamorizing of a single speech, and the allowing of ourselves to be continually
hoodwinked by the Marcosian dictum of ‘isang
bansa, isang diwa’—one language, one
nation—a dictum that worked like an incantation to the dictator and his speech
writers, including some academics from the University of the Philippines
serving as his think-tank and book writers and who passed on to him the French
model of that abominable phrase, clearly not an original formula for state-crafting
and nation-building.
The failure of many of us to understand the spirit of
cultural pluralism as the spirit that could have shaped our collective life is
the same failure that we continue to commit until today, seventy-three years
after.
And those people who are in the know—the very people who
could help us free ourselves from the enchantment of Tagalogism and
Tagalogization are sometimes the very people that tell us that we have no
business fighting for our linguistic and cultural rights and that our only
business is to speak the language of the center, act in that language, and
dream in that language.
The powers-that-were that continue to incarnate and
reincarnate as the powers-that-are and the powers-that-be in our midst and
wearing many hats, entrenched as they are in the academia and in the corridors
of power are to be judged by our ethnolinguistic communities as Pharisees and
Sadducees of Philippine culture. Here come the conquered becoming conquerors,
the colonized becoming the new colonial masters.
These people come to us saying the same things against our
languages and cultures—and even against our sense of selves. And these people
have no new argument to offer against our claim to the language of our own
selves, identities, and particular lives.
The discourse of these same people is the same discourse we
have heard more than seven decades ago except that now, with the lobotomized
agents of uniculturalism and monolingualism in Philippine education by their
sleeves and pockets, they are more boisterous now, their loud noises their
bluff to make us cower in fear and accept their illogicalities and bad because
unproductive gospel of monolingualism in favor of the language of the center.
If we looked at their discourses, we can see the same
rehashed arguments, some of them empty of content as they are self-serving: (a)
the valuing of regional languages is ‘impractical’ and that (b) we have to give
‘Tagalog’ language—the basis, they say, of the national language—a chance. We
gave Tagalog one fat chance for seven decades and it did not deliver the goods
except to destroy millions and millions of us.
These arguments come from people who know no other
Philippine languages, even if some of them, as one has said, that they can
curse in other languages.
Even this admission of cursing in a language not really your
own is an admission of guilt: that you have no respect for languages other than
your own because you cannot see these languages as the dwelling place of a
people’s soul owning these languages except as your language for cursing. This
admission is itself an admission of failure in the unqualified respect that we
all have to give to language and cultural rights as an expression of our
respect for fundamental human rights. What we have therefore are culturally
entrenched practitioners of Tagalogism and Tagalogization—cultural agents of
injustice—who can only afford to tell us that Manila is the center of the
Philippine world and that whatever Manila does is the truth.
The call for a ‘national’ language did not come as a pure
and pristine call for nation building.
The motives, as history would tell us, are a mixed bag of
personal defense against the charge of multilingual incompetence to the
outright internal neo-colonization agendum by the same people who
were—are—announcing liberation to our people.
We go the route of Manuel Luis Quezon and his flawed
preference for the Philippines ‘run like hell by Filipinos’ than by, say, ‘run
like heaven by Americans.’ Using that and other language claims, he would argue
for the process of decolonization by following the route of the nation-state
model imported from Spain, Germany, England, and France. That was his template
for the Philippine nation-state speaking a single language. In his own words, he
went to Vigan, had the ‘misfortune’ of using an Ilokano interpreter so he could
talk with the Ilokano people, and which experience humbled him so, and which,
in many ways, prodded him to push for a ‘national’ language that he understood
and he could use, to speak with the Filipino, who, in his imagination, would
now be all parroting Tagalog words and phrases learned unimaginatively in many
unimaginative Tagalog language classrooms. Read the subtext here—which subtext
he also said in that speech in Letran College: imagine me a President speaking
to my people using an Ilokano interpreter because I do not speak Ilokano. And
so his imperial solution: let everyone speak Tagalog, the Tagalog of the
President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines.
Quezon, of course, conveniently forgot that for Spain and
Germany and England and France to have become examples of modern-day European
nation-states, they all had to suppress—and the operative word here is
‘suppress’—other legitimate languages and thus cultures of their territories,
thus creating the questionable semblance—a dubious verisimilitude—that these
countries had only one and only one ‘national’ language.
The history of the oppressive power of the French Academy, a
powerful cabal of Francophiles that cannot see that there are other languages
of France beside French, is a proof of the oppressive power of Tagalog,
sometimes passed off as Pilipino, or if one were from the more esteemed
universities in Imperial Manila, this Pilipino is now Filipino, in accord with
the dictate—read: dictate—of the 1987 Constitution.
Quezon admitted this presidential dilemma—a classic dilemma
of a ‘Tagalogistic’ mind, a mind that is content with the Tagalog view of the
universe and that never tries harder to see other Philippine realities and
Philippine worldviews afforded by other Philippine languages and cultures.
The Tagalogistic mindset, therefore, is ‘the’ implausible
Philippine mindset.
With the illogical isomorphism in that equation
Tagalog=Pilipino/Filipino—a curious thing that many knowledgeable linguists
would reject for its flawed claims in a bioculturally diverse country like the
Philippines—Tagalogism and Tagalogization have become the official path to
creating the ‘new’ Philippine nation-state, a political dream that was
valorized when the center of power came to Imperial Manila with the blessings
of all the colonizers and their allies and collaborators, a political dream
nevertheless that was also dreamed of by many ‘nations’ of the Philippines in
the Visayas, especially when they declared their own republic that antedated
any claims to an imagined Tagalog republic. In the North—in the Amianan—was the
Candon Republic.
With the center of power—the axis of all power that remained
undistributed until today—unable to communicate with those beyond that center
for either because of lack of motivation as in the case of Quezon and all those
other Quezons that came after him or because of linguistic and cultural
incompetence, the center of power thus served as the French of France, the
Madrid Spanish of Spain, the English of London, and the German of Berlin and
elsewhere. Thus inaugurated the Tagalogization of all peoples of the
Philippines, at least from the perspective of the sitting president of the
Commonwealth of the Philippines at that time. Read through the proceedings of
the 1934-1935 Constitutional Convention—but read the Jose P. Laurel version
published by Lyceum of the Philippines, a version with only one copy at the
Laurel Foundation Library. The other version published by the House of
Representatives more than 30 years after the ratification of the 1935
Constitution is not as complete as the Laurel version.
The sentiments against what some people term ‘chauvinism in
regional languages’ or ‘regionalism’ and that fossilized call for a ‘national’
language that is in league with other things ‘national’ such as a ‘national’
animal and a ‘national bird’ and a ‘national’ flower and a ‘national dress’
come to view when we look at the intents and purpose of the 2008 Multilingual
Education and Literacy Act of the Philippines and the House Bill 3719 of
Representative Magtanggol Gunigundo.
No, a people’s language does not operate the way a carabao,
the national animal, would. Nor does it operate the way a national flower would
like the sampaguita that is now
missing, except in lurid streets in Manila where it is vended as a garland for
the Child Jesus and the Mother of Perpetual Help.
A language is the abode of a people’s soul, the dwelling
place of his sense of self, his sense of the world, and the sense of his dreams
for both the present and future, for that present that is also a future.
Deprive a people of that language and you have murdered them. Advocates of
linguistic rights call this linguicide, or the killing of a language.
Lately, the Linguistic Society of the Philippines, an august
body of well-meaning academics and professionals who are in the know about
human cognition and its relation to the mother language, human knowledge and
its relation to human and societal liberation, and the liberatory power of the
language of our souls released a statement supporting literacy education in its
multicultural form. We applaud the LSP for doing that.
In May 2008, delegates of 2008 Nakem Conferences held at St.
Mary’s University in Bayombong, Nueva Vizcaya, passed a resolution totally
supporting HB 3719. That resolution, published in a scanned form at the Nakem
Conferences website, was handed over personally to Rep. Gunigundo in July 2008,
at a consultative assembly participated in by Nakem Conferences.
The participants of the 2008 Nakem Conferences understood
where multicultural education should begin: in their classrooms. That was their
rationale for the endorsement of the Gunigundo legislative initiative.
With the abominable cultural denigration that is happening
in the Philippines—with many Filipinos (except the Tagalogs and Tagalogized)
being made to behave and think and view the world as Tagalogs and these same
people looking down upon their own mother languages and their own cultures and
the peoples who do not behave and think and view the world like Tagalogs—the
teachers and academics and cultural workers of Nakem Conferences saw that HB
3719 is the only way to go to once-and-for-all claim for the peoples of the Amianan
and all other peoples of the Philippines the fruits of linguistic democracy and
cultural justice.
In sum, HB 3719 argues for a multicultural education for the
Philippines, a template for education that values the basic human experiences
of peoples, experiences that are mediated by their own languages and not by
other people’s languages, and grow from that experience in keeping with the
duty to relate to and with other people to form a community.
The educational template of the Philippines is one that does
exactly the opposite: students are schooled in the language of other people’s
languages, with their schooling basically a rote memorization afforded by
Tagalog (well, for Constitutional reasons that some would like to read:
P/Filipino) and English. Thus we have students who never learned who they are
and yet are expected to learn other people’s sense of who they are through the
second or third languages, Tagalog and English, languages that are constantly
rammed into their throat as soon as they get into their classrooms, the ramming
consistent and legal but never moral and culturally just, until they all become
cultural and linguistic parrots.
It is something curious, thus, that while many of the
nation-states of the world that followed the route of the fossilized view of
‘national’ language are revisiting the linguistic injustice and cultural
tyranny that they systematically effected in order to glorify their
nation-state a la Napoleon who had to deny his being Corsican in the name of
the glorious French language, the Philippines is still going the route to
‘national’ language, a concept that valorizes, privileges, and gives
entitlements to one and only one language.
We can grant here, tentatively, the virtue of ‘national’
language as defined by well-meaning scholars of Philippine languages as the
imagined medium of communication among the peoples of the Philippines.
But we cannot close our eyes to the fact that in an effort
to do so, taxpayers’ money and the scarce resources of the country have been
used to promote, sustain, develop, and teach Tagalog (well, now, they call it
with another name). Except for token support from some government agencies for
token awards or grants for some token cultural programs, no support of the
magnitude given to Tagalog has ever been given to other Philippine languages,
major or minor. The 1987 Constitution of the Philippines provides for the its
translation into the major languages. We do not know if, apart from Tagalog,
that Constitution has ever been translated into the languages of all the
peoples of the Philippines so that, like the claim to the Philippines as some
kind of a working democracy, people could say, in their own language, that
their basic human right to their own language is guaranteed by their own
Constitution. This means that this failure is itself a proof of
unconstitutional acts of the Philippine Government, its pertinent language and
culture agencies included.
There is nothing wrong with regionalism in the Philippines.
The territorial basis of Tagalogism and Tagalogization as
unruly phenomena of Philippine collective life is a region as well.
The fact that at this time only a handful of urban centers
are developed is a clear proof of the underdevelopment of the Philippines—or
that more sinister fact of uneven development. This underdevelopment/uneven
development is entwined in how we continue our political, economic, and
cultural life—with Imperial Manila as the center of the Philippine universe,
and thus with Tagalog as ‘the’ language of power.
When a country talks of democracy but has only one language
to claim as a developed language, when it has only a few city centers as
developed centers, and when it has only one place from which all political
powers come from, then, that country has no business calling itself a
democracy. Truth is: it is not. That country is a cultural tyrant; that country
is a linguistic despot.
The genesis of our misery is that we believed in the lies of
the past and we permitted these lies to frame and structure our political,
cultural, and economic life. The currency of these lies is that this
nation-state that we have built is made up of only one nation (one read from
Imperial Manila) and that it is impossible to speak of various states that
could make up that nation among nations. What goes with that currency is the
dubious position we have accorded to Tagalog, a position that has made many our
people fall into the trap that Tagalogism is the governing applied philosophy
of all peoples of the Philippines and that Tagalogization is the only one true
process we have to go through in the pursuit of the ends of the Philippine
nation-state.
With HB 3719, we are going to put an end to the systemic and
systematic miseducation of our people. And soon.
Our peoples of the Philippines have decided—and this
decision is wrought in the language of their souls. And that language is their
language.
No comments:
Post a Comment