She does not know it, but she is an amazona: woman warrior, the stress on both words. She is a visionary too like Manang Precy Espiritu who, for 33 years, made it sure that the Ilokano language and the culture that goes with that language would be taught at the University of Hawai`i.
When I was a bit younger, I heard her say about the national language--the P/Filipino as the national language--as schizophrenic because it cannot even admit that it is, in fact, Tagalog, and that it is only masquerading as P/Filipino.
Of course, she was then a more senior colleague at the same department where we both taught the cultural and intellectual skills needed to love the homeland, more senior than my sophomoric view of what the national language was. But I had learned philosophy of language earlier, and so many things began to bother me, things that had something to do with arrogating a language with that singular honor that, from hereon, based on the e-mail of the higher ups and the gods from the mountains, from hereon, Tagalog now Pilipino now Filipino should be the national language.
There was abracadabra here. I do not know if in the name-changing, some saliva was used to create some kind of an enchanting moment where all those with brains simply forgot that they had.
So part of my self-questioning about the national language was provoked by statements like the one of Manang Lilia.
I dabbled a bit with those 'schizophrenic' and other psychoanalytic terms when in the walled life, we were taught about the human project, a.k.a. human development and the 'clinical' life of the religious soul.
I like those terms we import from therapy to account the abnormal character and condition of the culture and language situation of the homeland.
For indeed, when a Hiligaynon becomes so busy becoming Tagalog by mimicking the way Tagalog is spoken on TV and in Manila, there is something clinically wrong here.
In our more recent telephone conversation, she told me of the sad fact that our language and culture struggle was being misunderstood by the big shots of the University of the Philippines Diliman.
I have anticipated that our struggle would come to this: that it would come to a misunderstanding and that it would come to a confrontation of the issues that we would like to settle. But I have not anticipated that so many of the brilliant minds of the best university in the country would not see the raison d'etre of this struggle by non-
Tagalog speaking peoples of this land.
Sayang. Sayang.
A S Agcaoili
Narita, Japan
July 31/07
Departures, Arrivals
The son beat me to the draw. His post says it all, this perpetual rigodon we all go into, we families of exiles and contract workers abroad. The ritual for all exilic familiies is the same: first name, sadness; last name, sorrow. One is a cognate of the other, a synonym of ugliness.
Seventy days of being in town, as the American idiom would say, is not seventy. A large chunk of this 'small time' in a warm and hot place like the homeland, in summer as in the calendared beginnings of the rainy season, had been spent doing errands for that language and culture struggle many of us have been involved with in a long while.
Meetings took me to familiar and strange places, with the lowly and with the mighty, and with the co-warriors on the road, nameless now, but their names are etched in the history of peoples deprived of the only thing that has meaning: freedom.
For in the homeland, freedom has become a franchise of the few, the entitled, the privileged. Many of these are culture brokers and powerful academics, powerful because they have the right connections to effect culture and language change in accord with their political aims.
For the many, freedom is something you sell your soul for, something you trade with your ethnolinguistic identiy.
You go through a daily barrage of Tagalogism if your are poor.
You go through a daily appointment with either Wowowee or Eat Bulaga if you are not moneyed.
You go through a daily rendezvous with a nation that has forgotten that it is duty-bound to look after the exiles and overseas contract workers.
Sometimes I think of the absurdity of taking part in a struggle in the homeland when I am here, far away, and in so many ways being made busy by the professional and personal circumstances of my life. An American English with the faux accent would be just fine. You can earn your minimum wage with it by ending up as a per-hour worker in a grocery for the rich. So I can always, 'No can, no can fight the struggle for multilingualism and multiculturalism.'
Then again, there are things that simply do not get settled.
They come to torment you even in your sleep, even in the very moment of escape, like my own escape each time I leave the country for months and months of absence.
Like this struggle for the Amianan languages and cultures--the struggle for recognition and affirmation, the struggle for freedom from internal domination, from internal colonization.
The big trouble in the homeland is this: that the new oppressors of the homeland come from the ranks of the oppressed.
They have won, with their idea of 'nation' and 'national language' lording it over our 'national life.' Now the victors have forgotten the roots of their victory.
Now, we the vanquished have no options but to be believe in the victors' unruly definition of nationhood premissed on the singularity of language and the world-view that attends to that language.
Ah, the victors. They write history. Their history.
I was thinking of all these things even as I was saying goodbye to my family.
It was three o'clock in the morning. Darkness ruled the foothills and mountain slopes of that part of Marikina where we live.
I heard the agitated barking of dogs as if saying, 'someone is fleeing the homeland.'
I held my tear by stroking the head of the older daughter, then the son, then the sleeping youngest, whose childhood is forever marked by my absence.
There was guilt somewhere and the hurt--the hurt--oh, well, how does one ever get to commence a healing for that?
I sat in the back of the car motionless, the silence of my heart my only language.
Soon, I would arrive in another land and there, there in that land, the struggle would take on a new life.
I prayed--and hard: this struggle must be won.
A S Agcaoili
Narita, Japan
Jul 31/07
Seventy days of being in town, as the American idiom would say, is not seventy. A large chunk of this 'small time' in a warm and hot place like the homeland, in summer as in the calendared beginnings of the rainy season, had been spent doing errands for that language and culture struggle many of us have been involved with in a long while.
Meetings took me to familiar and strange places, with the lowly and with the mighty, and with the co-warriors on the road, nameless now, but their names are etched in the history of peoples deprived of the only thing that has meaning: freedom.
For in the homeland, freedom has become a franchise of the few, the entitled, the privileged. Many of these are culture brokers and powerful academics, powerful because they have the right connections to effect culture and language change in accord with their political aims.
For the many, freedom is something you sell your soul for, something you trade with your ethnolinguistic identiy.
You go through a daily barrage of Tagalogism if your are poor.
You go through a daily appointment with either Wowowee or Eat Bulaga if you are not moneyed.
You go through a daily rendezvous with a nation that has forgotten that it is duty-bound to look after the exiles and overseas contract workers.
Sometimes I think of the absurdity of taking part in a struggle in the homeland when I am here, far away, and in so many ways being made busy by the professional and personal circumstances of my life. An American English with the faux accent would be just fine. You can earn your minimum wage with it by ending up as a per-hour worker in a grocery for the rich. So I can always, 'No can, no can fight the struggle for multilingualism and multiculturalism.'
Then again, there are things that simply do not get settled.
They come to torment you even in your sleep, even in the very moment of escape, like my own escape each time I leave the country for months and months of absence.
Like this struggle for the Amianan languages and cultures--the struggle for recognition and affirmation, the struggle for freedom from internal domination, from internal colonization.
The big trouble in the homeland is this: that the new oppressors of the homeland come from the ranks of the oppressed.
They have won, with their idea of 'nation' and 'national language' lording it over our 'national life.' Now the victors have forgotten the roots of their victory.
Now, we the vanquished have no options but to be believe in the victors' unruly definition of nationhood premissed on the singularity of language and the world-view that attends to that language.
Ah, the victors. They write history. Their history.
I was thinking of all these things even as I was saying goodbye to my family.
It was three o'clock in the morning. Darkness ruled the foothills and mountain slopes of that part of Marikina where we live.
I heard the agitated barking of dogs as if saying, 'someone is fleeing the homeland.'
I held my tear by stroking the head of the older daughter, then the son, then the sleeping youngest, whose childhood is forever marked by my absence.
There was guilt somewhere and the hurt--the hurt--oh, well, how does one ever get to commence a healing for that?
I sat in the back of the car motionless, the silence of my heart my only language.
Soon, I would arrive in another land and there, there in that land, the struggle would take on a new life.
I prayed--and hard: this struggle must be won.
A S Agcaoili
Narita, Japan
Jul 31/07
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