POST-SABBATICAL NOTES. 29 AUG 2014. FRIDAY. N2.Possible burning of 'Dangadang'.YESTERDAY, one of the better Ilokano writers who also write in Tagalog, came up with a list of books he cannot live without. That is your Sir Roy Vadil Aragon for you, that young person who consistently reaps those Palanca awards as if there is no tomorrow. I guess his career, this Sir Aragon guy, has turned into getting all those Palancas since the Palanca Awards started to recognize that yes, in the Philippines, there are other languages other than English (and Tagalog too!) for those who had colonized the language like 'em spokening dollah-dollah from the elitist schools with their spokening dollah-dollah starting when they set foot on their high-fallutin kindergarten when they did not have to learn their ABC because Sesame Street has done its wonderful job of transforming these kiddos of the rich into spokening dollah-dollah since the day they were thrown into the world, per Heidegger (that Nazi philosopher problematized this existential condition of all men and women and children of this human life). [Ooops, preceding this is a looooong sentence and I am not sure if it is a sentence at all! Sorry!]
Anyways, the point of the story is this: this Sir Aragon guy has placed in his list 'Dangadang,' the novel about our wretched life that I had the accident of authoring when moi was still younger and did not know anything about the world and social justice and democracy.
I commented on his list right off the bat: 'Sir Aragon: you included Dangadang in your list?' [Of course, I was surprised. I did not know that there is at least one Ilokano person apart from another I know that has taken the pains to read that novel I do not want to re-read any longer except the fact that I am trying--trying, that is the buzzword--to translate it into English.]
One critic from the Areneowwwww said the novel is too thick, and why is it that I did not bother to cut it into something like smaller pieces so that its 'materiality' would be something some people would not be afraid of.
I did not answer that critic. Writers are closeted critics of their own word, and I did not want to publicly admit that that novel could have been three novels, and I just made them into one, following the energy of the three persons of the Holy Trinity of my faith.
Sir Aragon came up with a kind response: 'Of course, manong,' he said. And this independent-clause-of-sentence that really made my day: 'Ul-ulsak pay.' [I do not know how to translate that Ilokano phrase except to attempt to put its context into English: 'I keep it with me all the time.' Or, whatever is its commensurate equivalent. Well, I do not know.
But Sir Aragon is also a critic, and one must caution oneself when dealing with writers-cum-critics: Do not fall into their argumentum ad populum. They could be pulling your left leg especially if your mind is a bit of the leftist side. Or, if you are left-handed person.
This leads me to another critic, one of our best in our Ilokano world.
The problem with this critic is that he knows a lot, and you cannot afford to display your ignorance because he can read your work from many perspectives, including the sociologico-historical.
He is a sociologist too, and do not ever say you are ignorant because he certainly will unmask you. Pretend that you know something about Marx, that you have read his Communist Manifesto, that you are reading Boudrillard and Badiou and all those names that my Ilokano tongue cannot pronounce.
I am referring to Dr Derick Galam.
We had an exchange this morning, and we talked about the problems of Ilokano life, and the problems extending to the Philippines, Martial Law, the memory of a life unforetold, and the continuing deceptions of the Philippine elite.
We talked about writers selling their soul to the cheats and the devil and the political elites.
And then he told me: 'The moment you cross to the other side, I shall burn your Dangadang!'
I told him: 'I want a Bacarra mansion overlooking the West Philippine Sea. A mansion perched on a cliff so I can smell the salty water.'
I hear him repeating his threat.
Of course, he did not repeat it, but I read his mind: 'I shall burn your Dangadang the moment I see you selling your soul to the Devil!'
Dear Namarsua of the miraculous!
POST-SABBATICAL NOTES. 27 AUG 2014. WEDNESDAY. My stepmother language is the dubious 'national language.' LET US SAY THIS and unmask this lie: One of the scholars of the University of the Philippines in Diliman has concocted a lie about his brand of 'Filipino' as native to or indigenous to the Philippines. Let us name him, and since he has passed on to the beyond, he can no longer talk back.
But even when he was still alive, I have expressed ambivalence to the kind of ideology he promoted in the name of his nation and his brand of nationalism. That is Virgilio Enriquez for you, a topnotch scholar who brandished what he called 'liberation psychology' for the peoples of the Philippines.
From a philosophical sense, his was a big mistake. Leonard Mercado's attempt to use metalinguistics to get into the 'indigenous' philosophy of three huge ethnolinguistic groups (Visayan-Cebuano, Ilokano, and Tagalog) is flawed but it is far better than Enriquez's idealization of his Tagalog Bulacan as his own sense of 'Filipino' qua 'indigenous national language'.
Now, let us see the mistakes of Enriquez:
1. He says, in reaction to his colleague at the Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies: 'I must confess that I was touched and perhaps even aggrieved when told by a well-meaning colleague' that 'there is no Philippines.' [Virgilio Enriquez, Indigenous Psychology and National Consciousness, Tokyo: ILCAA-TUFS, 1989, xi.]
The colleague's sense of the phrase 'there is no Philippines' celebrated not a homogenous Philippines but a diverse one, and that, therefore, Enriquez's formulation of 'Philippine liberation linguistics' does not make sense.
His colleague was right. One cannot say that one swallow makes a summer, that his notion of Tagalog Bulacan as basis for the formulation of the conceptual grounds of 'Philippine liberation psychology' applies to all 185 indigenous ethnolinguistic groups in the Philippines. There is such a thing as an intricate connection between culture and psychology and Enriquez conveniently forgot that.
But Enriquez responds to the charge of that ILCAA colleague: 'the statement (there is no Philippines) was meant to be interpreted from the anthropological point of view which emphasizes the 'cultural heterogeneity' of the Philippines and objectively characterizes the Filipino sense of nationhood or alleged absence thereof.' [xi]
And then his lifework, the one that constitutes his 'Philippine liberation psychology': 'part of the task ahead' is therefore 'to demonstrate that there is a Philippines'.
Enriquez's big mistake, the same big mistake of that associate professor of De La Salle who continues to treat advocates of multiculturalism as his vassals, is to imagine the Philippines as North Korea that speaks only one and only one language, thinks through one and only one language, and bow to one and only one liberating monster of a leader who does not know any better.
2. He say of the dubious national language: 'The article on language in the Philippine Constitution of 1986 definitely gives Filipino, the Philippine indigenous language, its rightful place vis a vis the colonial language.' [81]
Here we see clearly that Enriquez is wrong, and is passing off this wrong thing as the truth: Filipino as 'the Philippine indigenous language.'
This we must say: this is one big fat lie.
The truth of the matter is that this 'Filipino language' is not at all indigenous to the whole Philippines, but, when we are honest enough to admit that it is Tagalog, it is indigenous perhaps to Metro Manila the hegemonic center, and more indigenous to the Tagalog-speaking areas.
What we have got, ergo, is that this schizophrenic Filipino language is a stepmother language, and not a mother language of all peoples of the country but only to some of them.
Let us keep on unmasking many of the lies peddled to us by scholars, academics, and well-meaning members of the hegemonic intelligentsia.
