The Question of the Plural, and
the Question of the Philippine State: RIZAL AND THE VIRTUES OF DIVERSITY AND CULTURAL
PLURALISM
· Aurelio Solver Agcaoili
University of Hawaii at Manoa
(Talk delivered at the 2012 Knights of Rizal Regional Conference, Ala
Moana Hotel, Honolulu, Hawaii, September 2, 2012)
The paper
reinterprets the ideal of a Philippine state in the context of the plurality of
cultures and languages in the Philippines. Teasing out from the pronouncements
and practices of revolutionaries before and after Rizal, the paper proposes to
reread the energy of diversity and pluralism today, and argues that while this
was wasted by both the rabid nationalists and the rabid leftist groups, such an
energy remains one of the pillars in today's quest for a Philippine state that
is sensitive to the legitimate claims of the various Philippine nations. Today,
one of the proofs is the return of the mother language in Philippine basic education.
O. Preliminaries
My topic is borne of a continuing
reflection on what I call the Philippine condition.
I look at the Philippines with
fondness and nostalgia. Always.
I look at our people with delight
and surprise and their capacity to endure and persevere despite the failure of
government to deliver the goods of public life.
People like us who have somehow
left the country, and have stayed away for a long period of time perhaps no
longer understand what our compatriots go through even as they try to make
sense of their everyday life.
There is much courage and boldness
and daring among our people.
There is much virtue in their clinging
on to dear life despite the odds they witness everyday.
No, life has not become better for
many of our people.
The government statistics of the
incidence of poverty has not improved much during the last ten years despite
claims to the contrary.
The last time I went to the
Philippines, at the height of a flood this August, people were using empty
plastic containers as floats and lifesaving devices.
Think of ingenuity here.
But think as well of the failure
of the state to provide even the basic necessities so that while prime lands in
the central parts of our bigger cities are filled with skyscrapers, other people
still live in riverbanks and at the belly of bridges.
Disparity is on the rise, and it
is not going south.
It continues to become the rule of
the day.
I am not going to paint a grim
picture that you already know.
I am not going to deliver the
message that somehow, our country has failed us.
I am going to deliver the message
that somehow, the political instrument of that country, the state, has failed
to deliver the common good, that fiction and reality with which we are a
country after all.
The social contract is clear: that
the country, through the state, should provide for the good of public life, and
in return, the people should become good citizens.
So many of our people have
become—and continue to become—good citizens despite the failure of good
governance.
So many of our people have not
abandoned their part of the contract by remaining decent and self-respecting
despite the failure of the state to govern.
But how can we hold on this
arrangement is something that we must wonder.
When a people have reached the
limit of its tolerance, what do we expect?
1.0 Invitation to a Journey
I would like you to journey with
me in revisiting this Philippine state and what it means to us.
I would you to journey with me in
revisiting this Philippine nation, and the conception of this Philippine nation
relation to the issue of diversity and pluralism.
At best, this I can say: we have a
political fiction here not backed up by empirical facts.
In our attempt to get away from
our colonizers, we have abandoned our contract with diversity and pluralism.
For this is what we are, indeed.
The country is made up of diverse
peoples.
The country is made up of diverse
languages.
The country is made up of diverse
cultures.
The language count from the
Ethnologue (2005) and the Central Intelligence Agency World Fact Book tells us
of the kind of diversity that we are: 180 languages, and therefore, 180
cultural communities.
Before this, the Summer Institute
of Linguistics reported 175 languages of the Philippines, four of these having
gone extinct, thus leaving 171 others still alive and kicking, but some about
to go extinct as well.
The context of the number count is
clear: it gives us a measure of the richness of a country in terms of
linguistic diversity, so that while some countries and continents are
economically rich, these countries and continents are at the same time very poor—very
poor—in linguistic diversity.
The first candidate in the list of
continents poor in linguistic and cultural diversity, of course, is Europe.
While the rest of the world from
Africa to Asia knows so much about what is happening to the world, some other
continents so enamored by its own monolingual world just do not know what is
happening elsewhere.
The phrase ‘what is happening
elsewhere’ is not an innocent phrase, and it is not about news that comes to us
by Tweet, or by Instagram.
It is about the substance of other
people’s lives, and the concerns of communities, including their hopes for a
better life.
An event of the world reduced in
Twee terms is a non-event: it is just information that clutters our day.
In our quest for the diverse and
the plural, that is not what we mean here.
Of the first twelve countries
considered linguistically diverse, Papua New Guinea stands as number 1, with
800 languages. (The count is this: Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Nigeria, India,
USA, Mexico, Cameroon, Australia, China, Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil,
the Philippines).
The United States ranks 5th
in linguistic diversity, at 311 languages, while Brazil, at 200 languages, tops
the Philippines.
The Philippines, at 180 languages,
ranks as the 12th linguistically diverse country.
Now, what has this linguistic
diversity get to do with your conference?
What has this get to do with
Rizal?
What has this get to with the
Philippine condition?
2. The Story of the Philippine State
The story of the Philippine State
draws its narrative energy from so many sources.
One of these sources is the quest
for statehood of at least four European kingdoms such as England, France,
Germany, and Spain.
It is a classic story of kings,
queens, and monarchs lording it over the public lives of people.
It is a classic story of people
coming together and putting an end to the excesses of these rulers claiming
‘authority from God’ even getting mandate from the god of their own making.
Once the people realized that this
kind of a life could not go on forever, the people revolted, called for a new
of life, and eventually put an end to the fairy tales of queens and princesses.
This is the 19th
century that gave rise to the state, away from the kingdom.
This is the same 19th
century that we were drawing our initial idea of what a state is all about.
Rizal, in his education in Europe,
got the last glimpse of the medieval world that produced these excesses.
But Rizal also came to see the
beginnings of a new political reality—the beginning of the state.
In light of this reality, we now
come to understand that the state, as the political instrument of public
governance, as a political apparatus, is a new invention.
As a new invention, it must answer
the questions of people, questions that are old, and questions that are new.
With the coming of the Americans,
we inaugurate another energy from which we draw the conception of a Philippine
state.
It is the energy of American
independence, declaring a separation from Mother England, the energy of the
fourth of July.
It is energy from a revolution, from
the loss of lives and limbs in order to reclaim liberty for an oppressed
people.
That is the classic American story
that would go to the Philippines, exported by well-meaning conquerors that were
once oppressed by English masters an ocean away.
The exportation of that idea of a
democracy gave rise to the Philippine state.
We see here therefore that long
road to the Philippine state, from the visions of a free Philippines at the
Malolos Congress of 1898 to the Commonwealth of 1936, with Quezon giving what
could be regarded as the State of the Nation report to the United States.
It could have been good, with the
Philippine Independence finally happening in 1946.
But we need to ask for more.
3. There is Problem
The seal of the United States
contains a phrase, not codified, but stands as one of the fundamental
principles of a federated country: “E pluribus unum.”
The phrase is simple: “Out of the
many, one.”
There is also a motto by one of
the cultural advocates of diversity in the United States, the American Council
on the Teaching of Foreign Languages that says about “many languages, one
voice.”
For those who knew what President
Ferdinand Marcos wanted done with his experiment about a New Society for all, we
have his “one country, one thought, one language”—of what purports to be his
Utopia for a new Philippines: “isang bansa, isang wika, isang diwa” (“one
nation, one language, one thought”).
Somewhere in time, when Ricardo
Nolasco was chair of the Commission on the Filipino Language, he pursued what
he called “maraming wika, isang bansa”—or many languages, one country.
And here comes Jose Rizal, with
his declaration, each time misused by rabid nationalists and equally rabid and
narrow-minded leftists: “And taong di magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit pa sa
hayop at malansang isda.” (“Those who do not love their own language are
likened to a rotten fish.”)
That declaration, coming purportedly from his poem written when he young, “Sa Aking mga Kababata” (“To
My Peers”), translates freely as “The person who does not love his own language
is worse than an animal, or a rotten fish.”
There are two problems here: one,
a misuse of this phrase when it refers to Tagalog/Pilipino/Filipino as the
national language, and two, an attribution of the same poem to Rizal as the
author when internal and external evidences point another as a possible author
and cannot be Rizal. In either way, we are using a wrong evidence to prop up an
idea that justifies the turning into the Philippines as a single-language
speaking country.
If we look at these examples, the
uncodified motto of the US clearly establishes a precedent for the American
conception of diversity and pluralism.
Clearly, we see: we are many, and
sure we are, but we are one too.
Of course, our American history
teaches us that somewhere along the way, between 1776 and today, we have substantially
failed to pursue this motto to its end.
The inequities—and there are a lot
of them—continues to haunt us in the United States of America.
But the haunting is a result of
not fulfilling and pursuing an ideal, or not having one.
There is an ideal—and the ideal
has remained as the force that drives the US into a continuing reassessment of
itself vis-à-vis its goal to achieve diversity and pluralism.
In the Philippines, with the
inauguration of the Marcosian idea of a New Society, as if that society being
flaunted was really new, with more promise than pursuit, with more rhetoric
than result, the statist notion of a ‘national language’ came about, a notion
carried over from a Commonwealth conception of an idealized ‘national
language’.
If we read the complete
proceedings of the 1934-1935 Constitutional Assembly, we see clearly the
machinations of leaders, the conspiracy of those in power in order to bring
about not a state marked by diversity and plurality but a state marked by
hegemony.
This hegemony is plain and simple
the handiwork of a cabal of impostors purporting to act in the name of a people
in order to unite them.
We might as well call the puppetry
of the grievous kind, with one hand swearing allegiance to everything American and
English, and the other declaring Tagalog as the basis of a national language,
even if the spirit of the 1935 Constitution had another thing in mind.
And the formula for that unity is
not the delivery of the public goods and services, but the delivery of a false
panacea of all the social ills of a country.
That panacea was simple—and meant
for those with the simple mind: if we had but one and only one language, we
would develop, we would go the route of progress, and we would be united.
That panacea is the concoction of
a ‘national language’ from a brew of formulas that are both passé,
unproductive, and ahistorically grounded.
Include here that that panacea is
at best culturally callous and insensitive, as it overlooked the fact that the
Philippines is a country of many nations, many peoples, many languages, and
many cultures.
So here we go.
The 1935 Constitution gave birth
to Tagalog as a national language.
The Marcos Constitution of 1974
gave birth to Pilipino.
And the Cory Aquino 1987 Constitution
gave birth to Filipino.
We have here three layers of
Constitutional deception that is codified, making us believe that indeed, the
way to progress is in the speaking of single language, making us believe that
Rizal was right in telling us that we need to love our own native language
otherwise, otherwise…
We have constitutional guarantees
that inaugurated monolingualism, monoculturalism, and homogenization.
We have constitutional guarantees
that paved the way to Tagalogization under the guise of one nation, one state, and
one country.
Of course, we are misquoting
Rizal.
Of course, we are interpreting his
intentions and his meaning out of context.
Rizal, we must remember, was
speaking in Spanish.
His thought was from Spanish.
His conception of the world was
from Spanish.
He was telling this thing to
himself, even as he was giving the same admonition to what he called his
“kababata” or his peers. Or so we think, if we continue to believe in the lie
that he wrote those lines in that poem wrongly attributed to him.
But we must remember that he was
Tagalog.
He should have spoken in Tagalog.
He should have thought from
Tagalog.
But he did not—or most of the
time, he did not.
Part of the proof is that when he
began writing his third novel, the Makamisa, he could only start it, with a
handful of pages, with a handful of chapters, but was practically left
unfinished.
Part of the reason was that he
realized he was incompetent in deploying his very own Tagalog language.
If his poem’s admonition is a
premonition to what he would become, that failure in finishing Makamisa is a
proof that indeed, we need to love our native language, the language in which
we are born into.
The rabid nationalists, many of
those reacting to the excesses of Marcos and the consequences of having the
Philippines at the beck-and-call of the United States through what scholars
call the imperialistic agendum of the US, called for a ‘national language’ that
would unify the people.
Here we go again, with the same panacea—with
the same mistake, repeating all over again the same errors of the past,
mistaking the national language as the formula for freedom, for economic
justice, and independence from imperial aggressors.
We have forgotten that in the
formation of the Spanish state of the 19th century, the Catalans,
the Basque, and the Andalucians had to be vanquished in the name of single
language.
We have forgotten that in the
formation of the French state, so many of the diverse peoples, languages, and
cultures of France had to be vanquished in the name of the French language.
In 2001, the French Minister of
Education, Jack Lang, admitted 200 years of repression of the regional
languages of France in the name of a monolingual education. As a consequence,
bilingual education was never the norm of French education, but the new
exception to the rule.
We have forgotten that in the UK,
where we locate England, we have other languages apart from English (such as
Cornish, Irish, Welsh, Scottish, Gaelic, and Lowland Scots).
We have forgotten that in Germany,
we have other languages, also repressed for so many years, in the name of the
German national language: Low Rhenish, Limburgish, Luxembourgish, Alemannic,
Bavarian, Danish, Upper Sorbian, Lowe Sorbian, North Frisian, Saterland
Frisian, Romani, Low German.
We have it on record, from the
proceedings of the 1934-1935 Constitutional Assembly that these are the very
four countries that Manuel Quezon, then president of the Commonwealth, was
looking at for the models of what he dreamed of as “the Philippine national
language.”
We forgot that prior to these wild
dreams of politicians like him, our peoples, in the plural, were never
concerned about a national language that was a product of these people’s
imagination.
We forgot that it was natural—it
was part of our estilo de vida—to be multilingual, to learn the language of the
other, to be multicultural, to understand another community.
We forgot that it was natural to
pick up another community’s language when one is that community.
We forgot that many Visayans
learned other Visayan languages apart from Sebuano.
We forgot that many Waray people
could speak Sebuano apart from Waray even before Quezon put forward a national
language that provided an abracadabra to the evils of our social life.
We forgot that Quezon, at a
political rally in Vigan in the Ilocos, he was so incensed in not being able to
talk to the Ilokano people directly because (1) he did not know Ilokano and he
was president and (2) he could not speak to the Ilokano people directly and
therefore had to resort to an Ilokano interpreter.
We forget that when Quezon when to
the Visayas, he had to use an interpreter because he could speak Visaya, and he
was pissed that he could talk to the Visayan people.
To be a president and not knowing
Ilokano is not the Ilokanos’ problem.
It is the presidents’ problem,
personal and presidential, professional and political.
To be a president and not knowing
Visayan is not the Visayans’ problem.
It is, by default, suggestive of a
person’s multilingual incompetence that should not be blamed on others but on
oneself.
If you want to talk to your
constituents, learn their language, and not vice versa.
But that was what happened, and
that would inaugurate the whole scale Tagalogization of all peoples of the
Republic of the Philippines.
The vision was simple enough: to
speak a common language for common understanding.
But the solution was sinister: one
language, the Tagalog language, was used to fight the incorrigible Ilokanos,
Bikolanos, Kapampangans, Bikolanos, Warays, and Ilonggos.
We forget that before there ever
was Tagalog revolution under the guise of the Katipunan, there were revolutions
outside the Tagalog areas, and these revolutions provided the impetus for a
wider revolution that became whole scale.
Those of us who understand
Philippine history from the margins, not the Philippine history sanctioned by
the hegemonic center of cultural life, including the apparatus of education,
would understand the contribution of people away from that hegemonic center in
the conception of a revolution that would pave the way to a real and
honest-to-goodness freedom for all peoples of the Philippines.
From the Commonwealth until today,
this deception of the state-sanctioned ‘national language’ continues.
Rizal, for all he cares, did not
talk about a ‘national language’ now misused even by educational leaders and
the Commission on the Filipino Language, the salary of its staff and officers
being paid for by the taxes of the peoples of the Philippines.
Think of the language, culture,
and educational policy of the Philippines: it a policy that reflects in a naïve
way the hazy conceptions of a state by the leaders before us.
That notion of a Philippine state,
we must remember, is notion grounded on the repression of diversity, on the
systematic act of dismissing the plurality of the languages and cultures of the
Philippines.
With the imposition of a “national
language”, the measure of citizenship becomes just that: the national language
measure.
With the imposition of a “national
language”, the measure of one’s brilliance becomes just that: the national
language measure.
With the imposition of a “national
language”, the measure of one’s civic abilities and citizenship is just like:
the national language measure.
The symptoms of this new social
disease are all over the place: when an Ilokano speaks Tagalog, we laugh and
say, “Ey, you, your Tagalog sounds like your guttural Ilokano, brah!”
When a Visayan speaks Tagalog, we
laugh all the more and say, “Ey, you, your Tagalog sounds like Binisaya.”
We laugh because we do not know
any better.
We laugh because we have been
conditioned by more than 80 years of thought-programming, that thought making
us believe that in the “Tagalog” as national language lies the redeeming power
of our state, the redeeming power of our lives, the redeeming power that lifts
us away from this conditioned and state-sanctioned wretchedness.
We laugh because for generations
from Quezon, every one of us has only to learn Tagalog and English in order to
become Filipino.
There was never any policy that
tells that you can become Filipino by knowing full well that you are Tausug,
Maguindanaw, or Ilonggo.
There was never any policy that
tells us that you can be education by educated in the ways and language and
culture of your own people.
There was never any policy that
valued the native language—in the way Rizal understood what native language
was—of a Filipino person.
Instead, what we have got as an
official policy is to declare to all and sundry that from hereon, we all should
become Filipinos, and that to become Filipinos, we all should speak, and think,
and love and curse each other in Tagalog, also known as Pilipino, also known as
Filipino.
And since the systematic
programming is complete, who can say that this is all wrong?
Practically, no one.
For we have come to believe in
Goebbels: Lies repeated make them true.
We repeated these lies all
over—again and again, again and again—and they all have become true.
Now, the Ilokano is ashamed of
himself as Ilokano.
In Hawaii, either you speak a bad
English, or speak a fake Tagalog, one in imitation of the brainless television
shows.
That is the measure of nationalism
over here.
Back in the Philippines, each
student now is speaking in bad English, or a fake Tagalog too, in imitation of
brainless television shows, and some brainless senators who plagiarize their
speeches.
4. Responses from the Public Intellectuals and the
Left
The symptoms of these ills are
very clear we could have an easy diagnosis without having to go through a
CT-scan or an MRI of the brain of each of our students.
Our students in our Philippine
schools are of two kinds: one, those who make sense, and thus, question the
official truths the government passes on as absolute; and two, those who
swallow hook, line, and sinker what is being rammed into their throat.
Some of them are the brilliant
ones.
Some of them are the radical, or
radicalized ones. Okey, call them the activists.
Many of the brilliant are mentored
by brilliant professors who believe in one holy crap: that “the national
language” is the solution to our national problem, that the moment we speak a
single language, we will all become rich, very rich for that matter.
Some quote Japan as an example.
Some quote other places.
But these professors are lying, of
course.
Japan and some other developed
countries they quote have never been in the top 12 of the diverse countries of
the world, that these countries are poor in linguistic and cultural diversity.
The message being given is that we
have to let go of this diversity and plurality to adopt a common culture, a
common language, and a common way of life.
That life, of course, is the life
of the center, the life in Manila, the life about Manila, so that when everyone
acts like a Manileño are problems are over.
We forget about the social
institutions propping up all these problems.
We forget about the educational
institutions that are so rotten—rotten to the core—that it is easier to say
that the problem is that we do not speak the same language.
And so have a merry-go-round:
brilliant professors teaching brilliant students to become monolingual.
And so for three generations, we
have had the same narrative, the story of producing and reproducing the same
intellectuals that mouth the same slogans about monolingualism, monolingualism,
Englishism and the like.
No one ever remembers any more
that one is Ilonggo, Waray, Bikol, Pangasinan, or Igorot.
Today, it is bad business to
become Bisaya.
Today, it is regionalistic—and
therefore anti-national—to speak Ilokano.
Today, when we speak T’boli or
Tausug, we are terrorists, as if speaking one’s own language is equal to an act
of terrorism.
But what about the Leftist
movement?
In broad strokes, we do not get
any insight from them. The official pronouncement coming from the work of
Monico Atienza speaks of a statist notion of language, and a national language
for that matter in the pursuit of what he called ‘national democracy.’
The position, of course,
duplicates—is, in fact, a xerox copy—of the same imagined ‘national language’
as propped up by the Marcos and the Cory Aquino regimes.
The Left speaks as well of an
imagined Filipino language, but that language is based on Tagalog, the
deception coming from the very nature of
‘base’.
What is the meaning of having a
national language based on another regional language?
Scholars and philologists all
agree on the nature of another, or a new language when it meets the following:
(1)
that there is
a new syntax, or a new structure of a purported new language, which is the case
of Tagalog rammed into our throats as Filipino, and
(2)
that the new
language, in this case Filipino, can no longer comprehend another language,
which is Tagalog.
Either way, the lies are clear.
Either way, the deception is
complete.
Either way, the deception
continues to be reproduced in our minds as truths.
5. The Virtues of Diversity and Cultural Pluralism
We cannot continue with this
deception forever.
Somewhere along the way to this
long road to fooling our people is the a rupture that results from generations
of repression.
People get tired of being
deceived.
People get tired of being robbed
of their fundamental rights to their own languages and cultures.
People get tired of being bullied
by the state into believing that their languages and cultures are not
legitimate, that their languages and cultures are never good enough to educate
their own people.
The results of educational
achievement of our young people—the very people who are supposed to be our
hope—have indicated that
for so long we have not been just
and democratic.
Our young people are becoming less
and less competent in many areas of knowledge such as math and science, because
these people have to deal with this subject matter in a language that is
strange to them, and tested as well in this strange language.
In the testing of achievement, those
who are taught and tested in their own native language came out always on top
for reasons that are obvious: You are taught in your own language, you
understand better; you understand better, you register a better achievement
test.
Part of the hard work of so many
people and groups is this continuing fight to make the Philippine state
understand that the country is made up of diverse peoples that the country is a
multinational country that the country is made up of nations.
Understanding those—in those
terms—means a realignment of educational and cultural policies so that about
four years ago, the Philippine government, through then Secretary of Education
Jesli Lapus, signed a department order mandating the return of that native
language into the classroom in what is called now as the Mother Tongue-Based
Multilingual Education.
This is the third year that the
MTB-MLE is being implemented.
There are, of course, problems.
All innovations go through those challenges.
But the educational philosophy
behind it is sound.
And it is sound because it is
based on the very virtues of diversity and pluralism.
Today, we can say: the fight for
our basic freedoms has begun.
Dios ti agngina kadakayo amin.
Mahalo nui loa.
References
Agcaoili, A. 2007. “The Lies of
the 1934-1935 Constitutional Convention,” Tawid
News Magazine. Dec 15.
Atienza, M. 1992. Kilusang Pambansang-Demokratiko sa Wika.
(Lunsod Quezon: Sentro ng Wikang Filipino).
Fishman, J. 1973. Language and Nationalism: Two Integrative
Essays (Rowley: Newbury).
Gonzalez, A. 1992. Language and Nationalism: The Philippine
Experience Thus Far (Quezon City: Ateneo).
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