Incommunicado

 INCOMMUNICADO, 1979

 

Iti final a pammadso nga agsarak iti kararua ni Bannuar ken ti amana, ni Padre Ili. Agpadada a sumuko iti balikas, ti anak iti bartolina, ti ama iti pannakaisina ti ulona iti bagina tapno salaan dagiti nangkautibo iti lengguahe ti wayawaya. Mapukawda ti engkanto ken poder dagiti sao kadagiti bibigda—ti ama ken ti anak–agingga nga agbanag ti panagungar ti bagi manipud iti tapok ti ngatangata.

                                                       

                                                            Manipud iti estoria ti Dangadang. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Iti maysa a rabii a naimut ti littugaw kadagiti bakras ti Bantay Didaya a nagsarakanta manen kalpasan ti adu bulan a dagiti laeng maar-arakattot a balikas kadagiti bungon ti Marlboro a nalabaga a paggaayatmo nga ammalan no kasta nga engkantaduennaka ti poetika ti rebolusion ket apirasem, iti lulonam kas iti pispismo, dagiti pakabuklan ti wayawaya iti aginaldaw a biag ti ili, daytoy ti kinunam kaniak, tatang: “Maulit-ulit nga awan labas ti pakasaritaan a di mangikankano iti kaaduan.”

            Iti adalem ti kinasipnget iti dayta a rabii a ti riaw laeng dagiti mangrabrabii a billit ti kaduata, inladawak dagiti tawen a dita nagkita, siak iti panagbirbirokko kadagiti umno a saludsod, sika iti panagbirbirokmo kadagiti makasair a sungbat kadagiti an-anek-eken ti ili.

            Nagubingak iti panaglanganmo iti inaldaw-aldaw ket ni laeng nanang ti adda kadagiti kanito nga agpangpangaduaak.

Ket ita, iti dayta a rabii, binallaagannak: “Ti korona nga itangtanggaya dagiti bayoneta kas kadagiti napipigsa nga igam itatta, saan nga agbayag daytoy ta ti daga a mangsapsappuyot iti daytoy a korona ket alisto laeng nga agrugnay.”

Nangngegko ti kinunam, ket inkabesak ti kada aweng ti sirib a naggapu kenka.

Saan a para kaniak dagitoy, ammok.

Ket iti adalem a sipnget, miniram ti panagreggaay ti daga a mangsapsappuyot kadagiti bayoneta nakaiparabawan ti korona.

            Mangrugiak idin nga agsaludsod kadagiti nakain-inaka a bambanag.

            Mangrugi metten nga agdanag ni nanang, agdanag para kaniak.  Iti maysa nga aldaw, kinunana nga awan iti panunotna, “Bannuar, Bannuar, diakon kayat ti agikali kadagiti libro, kadagiti balikas, kadagiti makadunggiar a testamento dagiti amin nga inhustisia itatta.”

            Kinitak laeng ni nanang, minalangaak.

            Yaw-awatna idi ti tasa ti kape a tinimplana para kaniak.

            Addaak idin iti seminario, ket saan a mailimed kadakami dagiti pasamak.

            Maysa a padi ti pinugotanda iti ulo idiay Bakun. Inubonda ti agdardara pay laeng nga ulona iti maysa a natiradan a kayo sada sinalsalaan, kas ritual ti balligi ti kinaranggas ken kinadamsak. Intanemda ti bagina iti narabaw a tanem kalpasan ti panangipabpabuyada iti munisipio.

            Maysa a madre ti niramesda nga immuna sada inkali iti narabaw a tanem iti maysa a kabakiran a mangtantannawag kadagiti kataltalonan iti laud.

            Maysa pay a seminarista ti inkipasda, dinukotda manipud iti maysa a paggigimongan. Inyadayoda iti ka-Manilaan ket iti nalawa a kabambantayan iti daya, sadiayda nga inkali a sibibiag.

            Maysa pay a padi ti sinibbarut dagiti ahente ti rehimen. Nagpukaw a kasla asuk ket agingga ita, di pay nabirokan.

            Nakabutbuteng dagidi a panawen.

Adda mata dagiti diding.

Adda lapayag dagiti balay dagiti kaarruba.

Adda bibig dagiti impato a gagayyem.

Ken adda di matawaran a poder dagiti kalsada.

Iti man warnakan wenno iti pagadalan wenno iti telebision, adda sippayot kadagiti sao a maisawang. Maysa nga artista ti nangabalbalay iti sagrado a sao ti Baro a Gimong ket idinto a kunaenna a ti masapul iti panagdur-as ket disiplina, imbagana a bisikleta. Iti karsel a nagapon, nagdalus kadagiti naaangseg nga inidoro dagiti soldado a no uminom dagitoy ket kalsa sarangusong.

Naturay ti armada dagiti anniniwan a no agiwaras iti kinaranggas ket kas kadagiti dudon a dimmarup kadagiti nalawa a kapagayan idiay Nueva Ecija, a kalpasan ti idadarupda ket nabati laengen dagiti rurog dagiti nakabugbugi

a pagay ken dagiti saning-i dagiti agtagibalay.  

            Iti naminsan nga isasar-ongmi ken nanang idiay Laoag, daytoy ti nasaksiak: Nagdara dagiti puraw a pader ti kapitolio a kunam la no kinautibo dagiti agip-igup iti dara sada intupra kadagiti semento tapno iti itutupar ti ubing nga init ket maikassaba ti sabali nga ebanghelio.

            Imperialista! Imperialista! kuna ti pader.

          Ibagsak ang tuta ng Kano! kuna pay ti abayna.

          Presidente, tuta, tuta! kuna pay ti sabali.

            Komunismo ti agari!

            Agkabannuag, mapankayo iti away!

            Berdugo ti ari, berdugo, berdugo!

          Makitam dagiti agkarkaranting nga ima kadagiti pader, dagiti arutang a naaramat a pangpinturada iti nakalburuan a pader. Ngem nabuddak ti kolor ti rebolusion, kas iti dara nga agsayasay kadagiti duogan a semento a nanglikmot iti duogan met laeng a kapitolio.

            Ditoy, ditoy met laengen a kapitolio ti nakasaksiak ti umuna a kinasuitik ti Baro a Gimong.

            Addaak idin iti Kabataang Barangay.

            Nalpasen ti minimini ti baro a konstitusion ket maidiayan daytoy iti maysa a referendum.

            Di pay nalpas ti butos, siento porsienton ti resulta iti Ilokos!

            Adu a salamangka dagiti lapis ken dagiti buteng ti babai a lider. Karatista, no agkibaltangka iti isungbatmo iti diayana a panangallilaw iti ili iti nagan ti baro a konstitusion ken adu a killo a paglintegan, agsalakanka laengen iti ospital dagiti nablo. Wenno iti ospital dagiti agmauyong.

Disiotsok idin, timmapugakon iti kolehio, ket uray no sikikidemak ket memoriadokon dagiti checkpoint dagiti militar a kanayon a nakasirip no ababa ti buokmo segun iti ‘clean cut look’ ti Baro a Gimong.

Panawen idin dagiti saragisag a pagan-anay, ket ni Daria Ramirez, iti pagsinean a Life iti asideg ti tiendaan ti Laoag, sadiay, sadiay idi nga agkarkarag ni Daria Ramirez, ti umuna a babai nga innak inayat ngem dinak met inay-ayat, ti umuna a babai a gargari ti pusok iti panawen ti gerra, ti babai nga agkarkararag a kasla siak ti ibagbagana iti kararagna, siak ti ur-urayenna, siak ti itudtudona, siak ti pangpangngeganna,  “Lord, Lord, give me a lover.”

Anian!

Ket iti agsarsaragisag a naingpis a wetlook ni Daria Ramirez, ket iti disiotso nga edadmo a kas kaniak, dimo mapagdasig ti reggetmo a makirinnapukrapok kadagiti aktibista dagiti arutang ken kadagiti agaktibista met laeng a rikna gapu iti mariing nga ayat kadagiti dakulap, sa kadagiti luppo, sa iti teltel, santo iti agbegbeggang a barukong.

Lord, Lord, give me a lover, kuna ti diosa a diwata a mutia a  Daria Ramirez ket malipatak nga insegida ti rebolusion iti nagan ti isu amin nga umili. Isu nga iti agsipnget, kas panagkumpable, kas panangdawat iti pammakawan, iti sakaanan ti nakabitin a Jesukristo, isuna a nailansa iti krus, iti naulimek a malem iti rebolusionario a simbaan dagiti Aglipayano iti abay ti rebolusionario a pader ti puraw a kapitolio iti Laoag, sadiay, sadiay nga inkarkararagko, “Lord, Lord, give me a lover.”

Saan nga immay kaniak ni Daria Ramirez. Nungka, saan, saan a pulos, uray no kadagiti rabii a malpas ti teach-in maipapan iti rebolusion ket umay kaniak ti ladawanna, umagibas isuna iti panunotko, agampayag kadagiti pader ket kas iti anghel dela guardia ket iwaragawagna ti madagdagullit a rebolusion iti pusok, Lord, Lord, Lord, give me a lover.

Ngem simmangpet ni Wayawaya kaniak.

Diak mamati idi a Wayawaya ti naganna. Kunak idi nga ang-angawennak ti naumbi a rupana, ti naamo nga isemna, ti managpabus-oy a kallid iti makannigid a pingpingna.

Ngem ta isuna, ni Wayawaya!

Kitaek ti class cardmo, kinunak.

Dika mamati a Wayawaya ti naganko?

Pinerrengko, ngem ti timekna a kasla agkankanta ti simmalikepkep iti bagik. Nariknak idin ti gutad ti engkanto ti umuna nga ayat a kunada, ti ayat a namagbalinsuek iti kinataok.

Atiddog a buok a nalanaan iti Johnson’s, dayta ti malagipko iti umuna a panagkitami ken Wayawaya, panagkita a di inggagara no di ket pinagtakkub dagiti pasamak. Gumilap dayta a buok iti ubing a bigat idiay Diliman nga immuna nagsarakanmi nupay dikami met nagsinsinnarak, kas nakunakon itay.

Addakami iti maysa a teach-in iti maysa kadagiti nakalemmeng nga opisina ti maysa met a kunsintidor a propesor,  maysa a napeklan a buyot ti rebolusion a mamagbalbaliw iti balabala ti gimong ket kontra-partido ti abusado a rehimen.

Addakami iti suli iti nailet nga opisina a nairanta a para laeng iti lima a tao ngem sangapulo ket tallokami amin.

“Nireydda ti nobisiado ti San Jose idiay Novaliches,” kuna ti maysa seminarista nga agig-iggem iti gitara. “Itay kano laeng bigat. Kumarkaro ti dida panangikankano iti simbaan.”

Kinitak ni Wayawaya ket sadiay a nariknak ti maysa a panagdanag.

Ita pay ket ammokon: diak ipalubos a mapukaw kaniak ni Wayawaya. Diak ipalubos a yadayoda kaniak, iti imatangko, iti sibayko, iti pusok.

            “Masapul ti panagsagana,” kinuna manen ti seminarista. “Adu kano pay dagiti isarunoda a seminario ken simbaan. Atiddog ti listaanda.”

            “Kitaek man ti ID-m,” indawatko ken Wayawaya, iti wagas a kasla arasaas. Nariknak ti panagbangag ti bosesko, ken ti panagari ti nerbios iti karabukobko. Kasla adda naigangal a bukel ti santol iti lilidduokak. Agbaybayo ti barukongko, a di masansan a mapaspasamak. Seminaristaak, Apo Dios a manangngaasi, kunak. Ngem apayaunayen ti umagibas dagitoy a rikna a diak man mapengdan. Kasla adda sariwawek a kobra ti naipupok iti sellangko ket agpaisalakan daytoy iti pus-ongko.

            “Dika mamati?” Adda di inggagara a gargari iti bosesna. Ket ti lung-ayna ket lung-ay ti sukaw iti maysa a danaw idiay Suba, ti sukaw nga ay-ayamen ti littugaw nga aggapu iti Sabangan santo agpaarayat kadagiti bambantay a kimmurdon iti daya. Idi pay ket kayatkon a tagikuaenen dayta a timek, idulinko iti lakasa ti pusok tapno iti bigat, kadagiti disoras ti pannakairidep, riingek dayta a boses, wenno riingennak, tapno kadagiti di mabugbugiaw a kanito ket pagsaritaanmi ti daniw ti rebolusion ken ti aweng ti panagwaywayas ti ili.

            Ken dagiti putot ti rebolusion nga inawenmi, dakami, siak nga agnagan iti Bannuar, isuna nga agnagan iti Wayawaya.

            “Nakakaskasdaaw. Diak pay nakakita iti kasta a nagan. Wenno nakangngeg. Malaksid iti arapaap,” kinunak. Immisemak, iti mababain nga isem, iti kasla isem ti ubing a naduktalan ti inangna  a nagisakibot daytoy iti dolse.

            “Come on, Bannuar. This is the twentieth century.”

            “Agpayso,” kinunak. Ngem diak nangngeg ti insungbatko. Pagammuan adda nanalpaak iti teltelko, sa ti agsasaganad a kugtar kadagiti takiagko, sa kadagiti luppok, sa ti pang-or ti putan ti kuarentaisingko iti ulok.

            “Matayakon, Wayawaya,” kinunak.

            Awanen ti ammok pay kalpasanna.     

            Iti Bartlino 28, sadiay ti nagsublian ti puotko.

            Malaksid iti dua dangan a kuadrado a tawa a pagilusotanda iti ania man a kayatda nga ilusot, sangagasut ket dua nga aldaw ti napalabas sakbay a nasirayak ti init.

            Diak ammo no kasano a nalasatak daytoy.

            Binilangko dagiti aldaw iti ramayko, sa iti ramay dagiti sakak.

            Idi maibus dagitoy, inramanko dagiti kukok, sa dagiti lapayagko, sa dagiti abut dagiti agongko. Amin, amin a pagilasinan no manon nga aldaw a diak nasirayan ti init.

            Iti kada aldaw ket ti awan patinggana a ritual ti pannakaaradas ti balikas manipud iti bibigko.

            Diak maisawang ti kinaasinnok: a siak ti bannuar, a siak ni Bannuar, a siak, iti kadagupan dagiti amin a panagsagaba, siak, siak, siak ti saksi iti kamaudiananna nga aldaw.

            Naganmo? nagubsang a saludsod ti soldado. Ubing a soldado a no agtagalog ket kasla latta agil-ilokano.

            Bannuar, isungbatko.

            Tangina nito at niloloko pa yata ako!

            Pangalan mo sabi? Nabangag ti bosesna. Adda suron nga umip-ipus iti timekna. Wenno dagensen iti panagmanso iti kapada nga agkabannuag, kapada nga agtagtagainep para iti ili.

            Bannuar.

            Diak salsaludsoden no ania ti pagbalinam iti sumuno nga aldaw, gago!

            Mariknak dagiti nabantot a gemgem nga agdisso iti rupak, iti pispisko, iti teltelko, iti barukongko.

            Manalpaak ti rupak ket mabariwengwengak.

            Tagikukuaennak ti bariwangwang, idiayak iti bariwangwang, idiayak nga aglansad, iti kaunggan ti nangisit nga abut, iti lansad dagiti amin a panagtutuok, iti sipnget dagiti amin a kasipngetan.           

            Maminsan pay a panalpaakennak ti soldado a no ar-arigen ket kakaek, manongek, ti soldado a di agaddayo dagiti tawenmi, ti soldado a no nagkurus koma dagiti dalanmi ket nalabit a kinainnay-ayamko iti kudisi wenno ullaw wenno gubgubat kadagiti rabii a naslag ti bulan wenno panagtaliw iti arrarawan kadagiti aldaw a kaar-arado dagiti kataltalonan. Alaenmi ti alat, ket kadagiti nabalinsuek a talon a dinalanan ti arado, birokenmi sadiay ti maisakmol nga arrarawan, yawidmi kadagiti balbalaymi tapno maikirog tapno iti sardam, iti ubing a sardam dagiti sarsarita dagiti ugma ken estoria dagiti ar-aria a pagbutbutngan, ket pagraranudanmi, maysa nga arrarawan iti kada sakmol a mangted iti sustansia iti mabisbisinan a bagi.

            Kayatko ti agsalakan, ti mangibaga a “Saan, saan kadi, manong!” ngem kasla tudo dagiti gemgemna iti pispisko ket mabtak dagiti bibigko ket agsayasay ti dara iti ngiwatko. Iti kasta, agbuteng dagiti balikas iti dilak, agsanudda amin, aglemmengda kadagiti kueba iti barukongko ket uray no agpaarayatak kadagiti agsaksaksi a diding, iti agsaksaksi a sipnget, uray no agkamangak iti appupo ti bartolina, uray no agpaisalakanak iti saklot dagiti nalamiis a datar, awan, awan sumngaw a balikas kadagiti bibigko. Mamedmedan ti dilak, ibartolina daytoy ti sabali a klase ti buteng.

            Tanginang tibak na ito. Di niya pinipili ang kinakalaban. Uray ti presidente, dina ketdin ikankano. Kasla saan ketdin nga Ilokano. ‘Bag koma no sabali a tao. Ti ubing a soldado daytoy, iti panangikanawa iti Ilokano a presidente.            

            Mangngegko dagitoy, ngem kadagiti lapayagko laeng, sadiayda a mangmangted iti kuriro, iti buong ti ulo. Agpulpuligos ti lubong, agwerwerret nga agud-uddog, wenno agud-uddog  nga agwerwerret. Ket aguddogak a maiwerret, wenno maiwerretak nga aguddog iti madagdagullit a pannusa dagiti soldado ti Baro a Gimong.

            Ita, diak makasao.

            Nagsanudek ti dilak, napanen iti kibungkibongko.

            Wenno addan iti kibungkibongko ti dilak.

            Kitaenta man ti laing daytoy a tibak, kuna ti kakaek a soldado.

            Nangngegko ti karasakas ti danum, sa ti timba a naikkan iti danum.

            Kitaenta man ti laingmo, adi a manangngaasi iti ili ngem di met manangngaasi iti bukodna a bagi, inlaawna iti boses a naturay, kasla boses nga aggapu iti kanion, iti ngudo ti paltog, wenno iti wangawangan ti tanem.

            Insayyona ti sangatimba a danum kaniak.

            Nagkintayegak iti lamiis iti dayta a kanito a di pay nakariing ti bigat.

            Diakon mabilang babaen kadagiti ramay dagiti ima ken sakak no mano nga aldawkon ditoy, iti daytoy nasipnget a bartolina a nangipupokanda iti kinaasinnok.

            Immukuok ti panaas kadagiti sugatko.

            Kinagatko ti bibigko, ket nariknak ti nagbassisawen a ngiwngiwko.

            Kastoy gayam ti matay, kunak iti bagik, kastoy gayam ti patpatayenda, ti in-inut a dusdusaenda tapno agpullo, tapno mapadso, tapno matukkol ti durina, tapno agkanta, tapno agibaga iti uray ania laengen ditan.

            Komunistaka?

            Saan.

            Ania’t grupom?

            Awan ammok.

            Balangkantiska.

            Awan ammok, apo.

            Kasta, kayatko dayta. Apo, kunam kaniak.

            Awan ammok, apo.

            Apay nga addaka iti teach-in iti Universidad?

            Kayatko a maammuan ti pudno.

            Ania a pudno ti kunkunam, gago? Maysa a gemgem ti nanglittaak iti pispisko.

            Manen, nagsanud ti dilak ket pinanawannak manen dagiti balikas.

            Addada kadagiti imak, kadagiti murdong dagiti ramayko, iti barukongko, iti pispisko, iti pusok, iti barukong, iti sellangko.

            Adda dagiti balikas kadagiti pader a nangikarsel iti sipnget tapno iti adu nga aldaw ket maipaidam kaniak ti lawag dagiti aldaw.

            Adda dagiti balikasko, tatang, kadagiti altar a pinanawak, isu met laeng nga altar a pinanawam.

            Adda kadagiti sulinek iti sakaanan ti matmatayen a dios, iti nakamassayagen a dios, iti dios a nangisit, iti dios a binubuot, iti dios a lumlumoten, iti man simbaan wenno iti bodega dagiti rebulto iti parokia a nagserserbiam sakbay nga insagmaknaka ti rebolusion nga ita, itatta a pannakamanso, ket isu met laeng ti nangisagmak kaniak.

            Alawek dagiti balikas iti angin, ngem iti bartolina, naimut dagiti angin, tatang, naimutda ket diak makaanges, adda dagiti batibat kadagiti barukongko ket pampandadaganda ti kulay-ongak, ket iti maysa manen nga arrabis, iti maysa manen a panagdisso ti putan ti paltog iti lasag, marba, tatang, marba dagiti amin a templo ti kinakired, sumuko ti lasag, ket agaruyot ti dara iti malkab a kudil, agsayasay manipud iti dunggiar, ket agayus iti semento.

            Mapukawko ti simbeng ti panunotko, tatang.

            Makitak ti krusmo, ti ulom a naitudok iti kayo, ti ulom a salsalaan dagiti soldado.

            Malpengak iti ariangga dagiti kabusor.

            Malmesak iti ikkis ket agariangga ti riknak, agragut nga agtalakiaw ket birokek ti bagik kadagiti katurturodan, kadagiti kabakbakiran, kadagiti kabambantayan, kadagiti kalsada a sadiay ket sabtennakami dagiti igam dagiti soldado, dagiti kumilaw a mata dagiti polis, dagiti manutsutil a bangbangir nga isem dagiti barbed wire.

            Saanak a matay, tatang, kunak, ket kantaek ti umuna a lualo iti disoras a bigat kalpasan ti napuyatan nga agpatnag: Miserere nobis, Miserere nobis.

            Danggayannak, tatang, ket agallangogan ti kantata, kas iti maudi a panagkitata.

            Dagiti turod ti tallaong, dagiti kayo ti tallaong, dagiti mangrabrabii ti tallaong. Agbuya dagiti beggang kadagiti sigariliota a masindian tapno mabugiaw dagiti lamok.

            Dios ti agngina kadagiti suratmo kaniak, tatang.

            Dispensarem ti diak pannakakita iti panagdakkelmo, Bannuar, anak, kunam iti suratmo, kadagiti suratmo.

            Nasakit ti nakemko kenka idi diak pay maawatan. Immulak dayta a sakit ti nakem iti panunot. Impudnok kenka daytay ta kasla maysa a bulkan nga agbettak.

            Ammok, ammok, kinunam kaniak.

            Isallabaymo ti imam, tatang, ket amin nga inim-impenko a sakit ti nakemko kenka ket timmalakiasda, simmurotda iti dakes nga angin ti mannamay, ket kadagiti pantok dagiti bantay a di pay naadak ti tao, sadiayda a nagturong tapno didanton agsubli iti barukongko.

            Ammok, paggaammok, barok, anakko, kinunam, tatang. Nagbanarbar ti timekmo ket ammok, ammok, adda nagayus a lua iti pingpingmo iti dayta a nasipnget a kalapaw a nagsarakanta.

            Manalpaak ti arrabis ti soldado kaniak. Dumteng manen kaniak ti baro a panagbariwengweng.

            Manalpaak ti gemgem ti soldado iti nadudogen a lasagko ket mangngegko ti timekmo sakbay ti maudi a pannusada kenka, tatang.

            Adu pay ti sagabaen ti ili, Bannuar, kunam iti timek a nalimbong, iti timek a tinenneb ti altar ken ti kabakiran iti altar.

            Wenno altar iti kabakiran.

            Adu pay, Bannuar, ket adu pay a sakit ti nakem ti maidaton iti wayawaya, iti nagan ti wayawaya, kinunam.

            Ket iti sangok ket ni Wayawaya iti makaabbukay nga isemna, ti buokna nga agsilengsileng iti kuridepdep a lampara iti kalapaw a nagkitaanta.

            Siak ni Wayawaya, kinunana, kas panangiyam-ammo iti bagina. Ngem kas pangsutsutil met kaniak gapu ta idi damomi nga agkita ket diak namati a Wayawaya ti naganna.

            Siak met ni Bannuar, kunak, ket agkulibagtong ti rugso iti pusok.

            Ibaludko ni Wayawaya kadagiti imak ket bay-ak a sairuennakami ti agpatnag.

            Kurientienyo ti buto ti langgong, kunaen ti soldado.

Isemannak ni Wayawaya.

Sayuanyo ti pus-ongna iti nalamiis a danum, imandar ti soldado.

Arakupennak ni Wayawaya. Bisongenna dagiti dunorko.

Diyo inggaan agingga nga agpudno, kuna ti soldado.

Idulinmo dagiti daniwko kenka, kunam kaniak, tatang.

Ket isungbatko kenka, Amin dagitoy ket idulinko iti pusok. Sadiay, kadagiti sulinek ti silalagip a pusok, didanto kaano man maagaw kaniak dagiti balikasmo.

Ket makitaka, tatang, makitaka iti sipnget ti bartolina.

Ket makitak ni nanang nga awananen iti rupa.

Ket makitak ni Wayawaya a mangar-arakup iti mapadso a kararuak.

Amin dagitoy ket makitak, ngem naglibasen dagiti balikas iti bibigko.

Siertuenyo a dinton makasao pay, imandar ti soldado nga addaan kadagiti darepdep a kasadar met laeng dagiti darepdepko.

Iti kasipngetan, tallikudannak ti balikas, libasannak tapno mapan kadagiti sabali pay a bartolina.

 

Prayer for the Warsi or Waris

Baribari, apo, baribari, apo. 

To drive away entities that disturb you, you can get a bowl, put rice and salt, mix the two in the bowl, and start throwing it around and inside the house if need be while saying this orasion solemnly and repeatedly.

Among the Ilokanos, this is called warsi or waris. 

Umadayokayo, umadayokayo

Awan makasapul kadakayo.

Awan masapulmi kadakayo.

Didakam ringringgoren, apo

Disakam singsingaen, apo

Umadayokayo, umadayokayo

Awan masapulmi kadakayo. 

Revaluating Regionalism, Revaluing our Languages

Revaluating Regionalism, Revaluing Our Languages—

Or Why We Need to Advance Linguistic Democracy

And Cultural Pluralism Education in the Philippines

 

Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

 

This is written with so much hope—a hope that multicultural and linguistic justice education will soon see the light of day in the form of an enabling law in the 2008 Multicultural and Literacy Education Act of the Republic of the Philippines, or House Bill 3719.

 

Hope is summoned here, as this piece narrates as well of the disappointments of many advocates for cultural pluralism in the Philippines, their disappointments from people who are in the struggle to fight for our right as a nation-state, a struggle that taps into what we have been fighting for centuries and centuries and yet there seems to be no let-up in this struggle for justice and fairness and cultural democracy what with the latest challenges on the HB 3719 initiative. That initiative puts together the work of many enlightened and visionary cultural and political workers of the Philippines—an initiative that attempts to give a framework for an honest-to-goodness literacy education for all peoples of the Philippines.

 

The framework calls for a multicultural education philosophy that requires the reintroduction of the mother languages of educands into the classroom, prior to the expansion of their world through their knowledge of second or third languages such as Tagalog (or Filipino) and English.

 

That initiative, seen in the 2008 Multicultural Education and Literacy Act, is a bold admission of a very simple fact of human understanding of the world and life, of cognition, and of knowledge—a simple but an emancipatory principle of education: that each educand learns better and more productively if what he is supposed to learn learns it in his own language, and thus, in accord with the tools of his own culture.

 

Translated: we productively and effectively come to know the unknown by starting off from the known—from the knowledge you know because it is mediated by the language you know to the knowledge that you have yet to know, and still mediated by the language you know precisely because it is your language.

 

Why nostalgic writers and activists and educators who cannot come to terms with the demands of liberatory education—or cannot understand our own mothers who taught us their stories in their own language and their stories are forever stored in our living memory—baffles me. While nostalgia may offer some soothing to the tired nerves, it does not lead us to the road to liberation when in that nostalgia, we dream of a nation-state with a center, and that center is the absolute, and that center holds everything true, good, and beautiful.

   

This reflection hopes to offer a way out as well, as it tries to face squarely with the vicious causes of these twin disappointments—a way out followed by two institutions that have shown us the courageous way to get out of this cultural and linguistic and educational quagmire: the Commission on the Filipino Language and the Linguistic Society of the Philippines. 

 

While it is written with a hopeful note, it also unravels the poverty and the evils of the despotic philosophy of a supremacist claim to any language, whether national or official or auxiliary, as in the case of the Philippines, and whether that language is called forth in the name of the nation, in the homeland or in the diaspora, or in the name of nationalism, especially when that nationalism vending only the statist kind and does not, in any way, look into multicultural nationalism as a more productive philosophy of national development in a country that is linguistically and culturally diverse such as the Philippines.  

 

The hope is that those who are well-entrenched in the cultural life of our peoples of the Philippines shall have the courage to own up our diversity and find ways to articulate that diversity in the everyday life of our peoples in the homeland, and in the everyday life of those in exilic communities that are, because they have become cultural and linguistic zombies courtesy of the statist notions of national language and national culture that they get from ‘unthinking’ popular cultural forms such as The Filipino Channel, have become advocates of unilingualism in the Philippines.

 

The disappointments are coming from two events.

 

First, the continuing and calculated—even calculating—failure of those in the struggle in the name of our people to see that one-language-one-nation policy does not work as this self-serving policy has not resulted in the dreamed-of, even fantasized, ‘unity’ of all the peoples of the Philippines, a unity they defined as one speaking, not in glossalalia, but unison, with only one kind and form of speech coming from the lips of every person from Aparri to Zamboanga—and now also, as the argument goes, in exile, or in all exilic communities of the peoples of the Philippines.

 

Never mind that these peoples, while they are also peoples of the Philippines, are also Ilonggos, Sebuanos, Bikolanos, or Ilokanos—peoples with their own nation before that Philippines nation was ever invented or dreamed of.

 

The inutile argument—as is the case of many language groups in the United States of America that recognize only ‘national’ languages as legitimate members of their groups even if these groups summon the energies of exilic communities in this country by their come-on about languages as ‘heritage’ and ‘least commonly taught’—about speaking in one and only one language is counter-productive to contemporary nation building, with our multiple, diverse, and potentially powerful experiences becoming a firm foundation for that kind of a nation, nation-state, or polis. The errors of history, indeed, are not the monopoly of one country. Afraid to dispel our ignorance because of the comfort and convenience it gives us, we go the route to oppression and injustice and despotism in the name of a glorious nation, nation-state, country, or polis.

 

I have spoken with some people in the nationalist movement of the Philippines—people who advocate whole-scale reforms for and in the name of all peoples of the country—and from their lips spring ideas about language and culture that follow the same route to the ‘Mandarinization’ of all Chinese peoples, the ‘Niponggoization’ of all peoples of Japan, the ‘Bahasa Malaysiaization’ of all peoples of Malaysia, the ‘Bahasa Indonesiaization of all peoples of Indonesia, and the Englicization of all peoples of New Zealand and Australia and all other territories of the English-speaking peoples, as is the case of all French-speaking peoples declaring ‘liberte’ and  ‘fraternite’ and ‘egalite’, among other abstractions, to themselves and to the peoples they colonized.

 

Some uninformed language planners, speaking from a Third World, even a Philippine perspective, call this the road to decolonization, and thus nationalization, and thus, the speaking not in tongues but in the language of the center of power, which center, by the way, is deemed the source of all that is good for the nation.

 

I call this route a glamorized vision of oneness, unable to see that Babel has its own virtues even if it has its own vices, but the virtues are more because they speak more of the diversity of peoples, the diversity of their experiences, the diversity of their dreams, and the diversity of their gifts and potentials to draw up a blueprint for a homeland of justice and fairness. And linguistic and cultural democracy.

 

Second, the position and disposition of blindness adopted by those who are supposed to be in the know about the requisites of a liberating form of education, culture, arts, and literature—a liberating because critical and committed consciousness—for and in the name of all ‘peoples’ of the Philippines.

 

Here, I am refusing to call the people of the Philippines with no ‘s’.

 

I am particularly cognizant of the fact that the Philippines, as a political product of history and collective action, is an artificial ‘name’ that we seized from the colonizer in an effort to make a name for ourselves, but that name, unfortunately, was initially the name of the enemy until we have come to appropriate it as our own.

 

The enemy’s name becoming ours is something curious, and that is what is not too clear to people who are writing about out pains as  ‘a people’ but the big trouble with their writings is this ‘a people’ is a sterile collective, good for its nominalist and centrist historical worth, but does not capture the diversity that is us as ‘peoples’ of the Philippines.

 

Not a long time ago, an individual from originally from the Philippines but not now working as a paralegal writing legal briefs for some lawyers in New York reminded me of the ungrammatical sense of the phrase ‘peoples of the Philippines’.

 

I wrote back: the grammar of our life as a nation-state is in the acknowledgement—unconditionally an active and proactive recognition—that we are not simply a ‘nation’ understood in its 19^th century European sense, but we are a nation among nations:

the Ilokanos had their nation before we ever had the Filipino nation,  the Bisayan peoples had theirs, and the list goes on and on.

 

This failure in literature, in all other forms of consciousness-production related forms of our life such as education, the media, religion, and the arts are all guilty of permitting themselves to be used as instruments of this continuing linguistic injustice and cultural tyranny befalling us as peoples of the Philippines, Tagalog and non-Tagalog alike.

 

The problem with all ‘peoples of the Philippines’ is that we have developed a kind of a partnership of pain-inflicting and pain-enduring, one side of us the sadist, the other side the masochist—and through the blessings of the continuing ignorance about how to build a just and fair, and honestly democratic country, we have come to enjoy this partnership, and now, it has become us, and all those who wish to see our collective experiences using another lens are deemed needing redeeming because they are lost, and thus, like the Good Shepherd in that other part of us, we have to call them back into the fold, rain or shine, in good or bad weather, and if still they do not want to hear our voice, we call them—as I have been called many times by people with the Tagalogistic bent—reactionary.

 

Curiously, one of the aims of the “Filipino as a Global Language” conference held at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa in 2008 and attended by two national artists of literature and a top-brass government administrator of historical knowledge and historical knowledge production is “to avoid regionalism”—a goal that to me, is not only insulting as it is insensitive, but is also hopelessly ignorant of the realities of Philippine life in its complexities.

 

One good guess for the faddish popularity of that immoral phrase—‘to avoid regionalism’—that denies as it deprives the rest of the peoples of the Philippines the public space they deserve is the kind of sociological and anthropological inquiry in the 1960s that was fueled by an attempt to rush the ‘Filipinization’ of everything and anything Philippine, including the ‘Philippine’ language—declared the ‘national’ language—that was to be the embodiment of our collective life, as this collective life demanded to be expressed in a national conversation that required one and only one language, as this one and only one language is the only that is capable of doing so.

 

With the imposition—that is the key word here: imposition, by law, and by the navy and the army that attended that law—of the ‘national’ language, academic scholarship went on a roll and then, lo and behold, someone talked about the ‘patterns of culture’ of the peoples of the Philippines, and these patterns evolved into stereotypes and profiles that until now, are still being used to explain who we are and our defects, and the possibilities for these defects to be corrected, if at all.

 

Thus evolved what we call the ‘hiya’ school of thought—one that included, among others, issues about smooth interpersonal relationships, and why corruption from the higher-highest echelon of government to the lowest-ranking barangay tanod or barangay paramilitary force continues to hound and haunt us until today.

 

The ‘hiya’ in the ‘hiya school of thought’ became so powerful that most academics believed in it, and because the whole exercise of knowledge production was reinforced by repetition especially in the popular media and in the school system that was held hostage by a cabal of educationists who did not know any alternative to explain who we are according to the framework of the essentialist concept of ‘hiya’ and other characteristics of all peoples of the Philippines. 

 

Other key institutions of Philippine society and the churches caught this produced Philippine-produced ‘knowledge of the Philippines and its people’, and albeit tacitly, also believed and promoted it. Think of songs and rites and rubrics and ceremonies in churches in the Tagalog language in Ilokano churches in the Ilokano-land. Think of the Laoag International Airport with that banner, huge in the blue Ilocos skies and constantly made to dance gracefully by the Ilocos breeze, announcing that here, here in this Ilokano-land, you are to be permitted to speak only in Tagalog (well, Filipino is written in that banner) and English. And in Ilokano schools, young educands in the grades are prohibited from speaking in Ilokano, at the cost of their snack or lunch money or both.

 

The education sector produced a metaphor for all this systematic act of valorizing the experience from the center, with scholars and artists and social scientists giving their blessings to this reclaiming of ‘brownness’—indeed, a reclaiming devoid of historical correctness but uselessly repeats the mistake of Gat Jose Rizal the national hero about a ‘Malayan’ heritage—with the production of a thick book supposedly about ‘Filipinoness’, thick at 885 pages, but with the culture of the center at its center, with only a sprinkling of what passes for the diversity of peoples in the Philippines as a token recognition that there is that other Philippines that has been historically, culturally, educationally ‘othered’. And yet, that book, Brown Heritage, adopted a totalizing strategy to account everything Philippine—or Filipino. 

 

That fantastic claim to a “brown heritage”—something that would creep into the pronouncements of Ferdinand Edralin Marcos in his delusion of grandeur about a New Society would continue, and today it continues to creep into our understanding of what is the ‘nation’ in the national language, the ‘nation’ in the national culture, the ‘nation’ in the national literature, and the ‘nation’ in national education.

 

We are not going to include here the two other social structures of the Philippine homeland, as these are utterly devoid of redemption unless we go the route of a federalized way of life minus the political warlords and kingpins and henchmen: our economic and politic life.

 

This means that we have to re-view and re-visit Manila as the center of everything and plan ahead with the idea of a decentralized, federalized economic and political development for all the regions and univocally declare that for four centuries we have given Manila the chance to dictate everything to us, and that today is the time for this Manila to go to the regions, because the regions have the resources Manila does not have; the regions have the diversity of peoples and their talents that Manila does not have; and that the regions have fed and nurtured and propped up Manila for so long at the expense of their own peoples.

 

This leads us to education, and the advocacy of two of our institutions, their advocacy a cause for celebration. With them, we who believe that we deserve something better, that a multicultural education will propel us into something more redeeming, needs to be known to all those who have not seen this view. 

 

These institutions could have come from two opposite ends but they are not—not today—as their positions of support for a new vision for all of us are imbued with the wideness of vision no one ever had in the past.

 

One of these institutions is a government institution mandated to make good with the promise of the three Philippine Constitutions we have had since the Commonwealth Period under the Americans (1935, 1974, and 1987) to have a national language.

 

In the last three years, the Commission on the Filipino Language evolved from an institution of linguistic and cultural fossilization—and linguistic and cultural hegemony—into an institution that we can truly claim as having finally come to its senses of recognizing that you cannot develop the Filipino language without developing all the other Philippine languages.

 

Why it took seventy years for well-meaning scholars, top-notch academics, and cultural leaders to realize this simple truth and fact of life is beyond me. They say the nose is the most difficult part to see. And yet it is so close to the eyes.

 

And seeing and re-seeing we must, because this is the challenge of historical truth, the challenge of the dynamism of our collective life, the challenge of responding to the issues that matter most to us: that challenge, for instance, of an education that is emancipatory because you are giving back the educand her own voice—her own language—the tools through which she gets to mediate her own world, her own life, her own visions, her own dreams, her own sense of self and community.

 

Even before it became a fad, the Commission on the Filipino Language dared to re-think of its position on the languages of the peoples of the Philippines, while at the same time guarding—and guarding well—its role of making it certain that the seeds of what could be termed a true Philippine national language could be sown.

 

We cannot hold—and the Commission’s chair, Dr. Ricardo Nolasco, has gone on record to say this—that when two languages are mutually intelligible, one is another language, a different one.  This dilemma is what afflicts Tagalog, in principle as in practice turning into ‘the national language’ by a stroke of a pen, even if there is a qualification somewhere that it serves only as the ‘basis of the national language.’

 

In ontological philosophy, this dilemma is solved by the rule of quiddity: a thing is what it is.

 

In saying that, we have yet to do a lot to evolve an honest-to-goodness national language that reflects us as peoples of the Philipppines, with our gifts and blessings of diversity and uniqueness—our offerings to the homeland.

 

The computational linguist Carl Rubino wrote that unless Tagalog goes though a linguistic re-structuring, the stigma that Tagalog is equal to P/Filipino remains and the isomorphism, Tagalog=P/Filipino, inutile as it is, continues to be suspect. The job of the Commission, thus, hews on these challenges.

 

Ask an Ilokano writer writing in ‘Filipino’ in what language he is writing when he writes in ‘Filipino’ and he will tell you he is writing, not exactly in Filipino, but in reality in Tagalog. Even with the kind of language engineering that I consciously employed and deployed in my Tagalog novel, Dangadang, with the Ilokanisms everywhere that critic Roderick Galam has observed, that novel remains a Tagalog novel.

 

But the key point that we wish to see resolved is the continuing struggle of the educands in all Philippine classrooms with second and third languages that they have to grapple with in order to understand the basic concepts of life, concepts behind the skills that they to be equipped with, and concepts about their need to understand more creatively and productively about their world.

 

When an Ilokano child of seven is brought to a Philippine classroom, he learns his ABC in Tagalog and English, and learns the shapes of the land around him in Tagalog, and the numbers in Tagalog and English, but never knowing how these things are in the language of his home, his community, and the people around him.

 

Ilokanos who do not know any better—in the Philippines as in Hawai’i, and perhaps in other Ilokano exilic communities, as in Southern California where Ilokanos do not want to be caught speaking in Ilokano except when they talk about the scandals of Philippine politics at the parking lot of Seafood City in Carson City—argue that their children know how to speak Ilokano already and that they are not supposed to be learning that in their schools. Ilokano students or Ilokano-descended students who are taking other language courses argue the same way: they do not need to study Ilokano because they already know their and their parents’ language because they use it at home. Make a leap of that argument and you have Ilokano and Ilokano-descended students choosing Tagalog over Ilokano because Tagalog is the national language. That, to me, is an educational choice—and it is the right of every student to decide in accord with what she thinks is best for her. But in that statement is a subtext of entitlement, and a faint sense of cultural denigration. And if there is an example of cultural denigration, this is it.

 

Our definition of cultural denigration, prima facie made sufficient by these examples replicated everywhere where internal colonization by Tagalogism and Tagalogization has taken roots, stops here. I am certain that the exemplification of the Ilokano experience is exhibited in all internally colonized countries, the colonization of one of the entitled languages with an army and a navy no less benevolent than the external colonizer. Colonization in all its forms is evil and cannot be morally justified. And all forms of colonization are all the same in their evilness. 

 

The cultural denigration that has become rampant in all of the Philippines and in the diaspora —that hatred of peoples of the Philippines of their own languages and cultures, a hatred born of the constant conditioning that the language of the periphery, their own language, is not any better and would only do them any good—has turned into a cultural and linguistic bomb. No one ever voluntarily wills for a linguicide, much less for culturicide. Countries have split because of language and culture issues; countries have been formed because of mutual respect for their peoples’ languages and cultures. The Philippines can try ways either for unity or division. This choice is not only political, but is moral as well, as this spells the death of languages, and thus, the peoples whose lives are mediated by these languages.

 

If we look at the rationale of the Linguistic Society of the Philippines for their support for the intents and purposes of House Bill 3719, we ought to believe again in the healing capacities of our minds when our minds are open to the vast possibilities of our hope, not only for the future but also for the present.

 

Here is a position that takes in all the virtues of what a culturally plural society is all about.

 

Here is a position that helps to finally formulate a liberating education for all our peoples of the homeland.

 

We can only hope that, with the constant triumphalism of all teachers of Tagalog in the diaspora for and in the name of the national language some call justly Tagalog, as in the University of California at Los Angeles and as in a Tagalog language program in a university in Russia—an honest acknowledgement of linguistic facts and not being beholden to a nation-state’s hegemonic project that resulted in cultural and linguistic marginalization—this revisiting of cultural diversity will become an honest educational act of educationists open to the truths of diversity and pluralism, and not beholden only to the Fascistic notion of a statist idea of nation and nationalism and  ‘national’ language.

 

In May, the participants of the 2008 Nakem Conference endorsed the Gunigundo proposal for a multicultural education that will bring back the glory of the mother languages, the various lingua franca of the country, the first and native languages, and the second and third languages of the Philippines, Tagalog and English included.

 

We can no longer act like Manuel Luis Quezon now. Or should we pray that his mistake takes on a new form of linguicide?

 

 

Hon, Hi

Oct 26/08

Time to Say Goodbye, Ilokano Translation

Time to Say Goodbye

 A. Bocelli/Trans. into Ilokano by Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

 

Quando sono solo

Sogno all’orizzonte

E mancan le parole

Si lo so che non c’? luce

In una stanza

Quando manca il sole

Se non ci sei tu con me, con me.

Su le finestre

Mostra a tutti il mio cuore

Che hai acceso

Chiudi dentro me

La luce che

Hai incontrato per strada

 

Time to say goodbye

Paesi che non ho mai

Veduto e vissuto con te

Adesso si li vivro.

Con te partiro

Su navi per mari

Che io lo so

No no non esistono piu

It’s time to say goodbye.

 

Quando sei lontana

Sogno all’orizzonte

E mancan le parole

E io si lo so

Che sei con me con me

Tu mia luna tu sei qui con me

Mio sole tu sei qui con me

Con me con me con me

 

Time to say goodbye

Paesi che non ho mai

Veduto e vissuto con te

Adesso si li vivro.

Con te partiro

Su navi per mari

Che io lo so

No no non esistono piu

Con te io li rivivro.

Con te partiro

Su navi per mari

Che io lo so

No no non esistono piu

Con te io li rivivro.

Con te partiro

Io con te.

 

 

Time to say goodbye

 

When I’m alone

I dream on the horizon

And words fail;

Yes, I know there is no light

In a room

Where the sun is not there

If you are not with me.

At the windows

Show everyone my heart

Which you set alight;

Enclose within me

The light you

Encountered on the street.

 

Time to say goodbye,

To countries I never

Saw and shared with you,

Now, yes, I shall experience them,

I’ll go with you

On ships across seas

Which, I know,

No, no, exist no longer;

With you I shall experience them.

 

When you are far away

I dream on the horizon

And words fail,

And yes, I know

That you are with me;

You, my moon, are here with me,

My sun, you are here with me.

With me, with me, with me,

 

Time to say goodbye,

To countries I never

Saw and shared with you,

Now, yes, I shall experience them,

I’ll go with you

On ships across seas

Which, I know,

No, no, exist no longer;

With you I shall re-experience them.

I’ll go with you

On ships across seas

Which, I know,

No, no, exist no longer;

With you I shall re-experience them.

I’ll go with you,

I with you.

 

 

Ilokano Translation by Aurelio Solver Agcaoili

 

No agmaymaysaak

Darepdepek wanawanan

Balikas matellay;

Wen, ammok awan lawag

Iti siled

Nga idiay awan init

No kaniak awanka.

Kadagiti tawa

Iti amin ipakitam pusok

Nga inikkam lawag;

Kaniak ipalibotmo

Lawag nakitam dalan

 

Kanito’t pakada

Il-ili diak pay nakita

Ken diak imburay kenka,

Itan, wen, mapadasak ida,

Mapanak a kaduaka

Aglayag iti taaw

A diak ammo,

Saan, saan no adda pay;

No kaduaka mapadasak ida.

 

No addaka’t adayo

Darepdepek wanawanan

Balikas matellay,

Ken wen, ammok

A kaniak addaka;

Sika, bulanko, addaka,

Initko, kaniak addaka.

Kaniak, kaniak, kaniak.

 

Kanito’t pakada,

Il-ili diak pay nakita

Diak imburay kenka,

Ita, wen, mapadasak ida,

Kumuyogak kenka

Aglayag tataaw

Nga ammok,

Saan, saan, awanen;

Kaduaka, manen mapadasak ida.

Kumyogak kenka

Aglayag tataaw

Nga ammok,

Saan, saan, awanen;

Kaduaka, manen mapadasak ida.

Kumuyogak kenka,

Kaduaka.

 

Naridam nga ayat, daniw

NARIDAM NGA AYAT,

NARIDAM A RIKNA

 

Maidaton ken Vangie Somera iti panagkasangayna

 

Daytoy ti paggaammo dagiti aldaw kenka,

Agkasangay a mutia dagiti rag-omi:

Naridam ti ayatmo kadagiti basbas

Naridam ti riknam kas iti maila nga arasaas

 

Anansata iti panaguyas dagiti oras

Ket ti kankanayon a pammatim:

Kadakami ti bendision dagiti katawa

A kaduadaka nga aggarakgak

 

Iti laurel kas iti palma a kenka idaton

Ket ti ayug iti pusomi inna kabulon:

Sika nga agkasangay kadagiti sardam

Kas ita, sika ti mataginayon

 

Kabsat a kakaen dagiti ararawmi:

Yawatmi dagiti kannag, kas kadagiti bigat

Malukag dagitoy amin iti panagriing

Ti rabii nga iti ikotmi inkam iparanud

 

Iti tallaong dagiti amin a namnama

Para kenka, kararag iti biag iti sabong

Nga iti busel daytoy ket ti agmatuon

Manayon a testigo ti kansion a taginayon.

 

 

A Solver Agcaoili

Hon, HI/Oktubre 24, 2008

Countering Tagalism and Tagalogization

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 by respecting 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. 

 

 

Ilokano Plus on Picasa: announcement

We have started uploading certain Ilokano Plus lessons on picasa. The modules, made up of a handful of the materials I developed for the Ilokano Plus program at Maui Community College, is available at:

http://www.picasaweb.google.com/uhtimpuyog

Another site that may be of help to those interested in Ilokano language is 

 

http://www.hawaii.edu/~antalanr

Araraw

The Prayer

 (Trans. into Ilokano by Aurelio Solver Agcaoili/Sept. 2008)

Ararawmi’t pannakamati

Papananmi tarabaymi

Itdem kadakam laing

Panawan a makuriro

 

Daytoy ararawmi

Panagdaliasatmi

Itundanakam lugar

Grasiam mangigiya

Lugar a natalimengmeng

La luce che tu dai

 

Ararawmi’t silawmo

Nel cuore restera

Iti pusomi agtalinaed

A ricordaci che

No bitbituen rummuarda

L’eterna stella sei

Nella mia preghiera

Daytoy ti ararawmi

Quanta fede c’e

Anniniwan mangkullaapda

Itundanakam mangigiya

 

Pammatimi mangikanawa

Sogniamo un mondo senza piu violenza

Un mondo di giustizia e di speranza

Ognuno dia la mano al suo vicino

 Simbolo di pace e di fraternita

 

La forza che ci dai

Dawatenmi’t asit biag

E’li desiderio che

Tarabayennakami

A Letter to Jed

A LETTER TO JED ABOUT OUR MOVEMENT TO FREE US FROM THE CLUTCHES OF THE TAGALOG-FILIPINO NATIONAL LANGUAGE

 

Jed, we must first address the ambiguous regard and mindless apathy by which issues pertaining to our ethnicity, language, and culture are looked upon by our people.   We ask ourselves, why does such unconcern persist among our people?  Why don’t they instead possess an unequivocal, firm, strong, and determined regard for our ethnicity, language, and culture?  Our people show an unconcern that is pestilent to an already damaged culture like ours.  We will have to address them first, for if not, our fight for linguistic freedom will be jeopardized by the very traits our people possess.  As we try to fathom the causes of a complex social behavior and understand why it lingers in our culture, we see factors prevailing in the whole system cultivating the continuance of such traits.  The first one, our fragmentation and disunity, antecedes the establishment of the Tagalog Filipino national language.  It is a social phenomenon that sustains and spawns an ambiguous regard and mindless apathy.  Let us remind ourselves that from our fragmentation and a lack of unity sprang forth an ugly outgrowth – the failure of past Cebuano leaders to survive the political skirmish that occurred over the consideration of a national language. 

 

The second determinant factor is the establishment of the “Filipino” national language itself.  By a sly, clever wording in the Philippine constitution that “Filipino is the national language,” the Tagalista framers avoided an unyielding opposition to Tagalog while anointing it a national sounding name, “Filipino”.   Its protagonists are armed with a constitutional mandate and by enforcing it, also forcefully inculcate on other ethno linguistic groups a Tagalog-Filipino nationalism. 

 

A dominating national language endows great benefits and advantages on those whose mother tongue it is but places a discriminatory burden on the unfavored ethno linguistic groups.  As Tagalog-Filipino gained ground through our educational system it gave rise to another reality.  Some of our people are gradually losing pride of ethno linguistic identity in favor of the Tagalog Filipino nationalism.   To those who have accepted the forced Tagalog-Filipino ascription, their original identity is something of an ambiguous meaning, it having been confiscated or forcefully distanced from them.  You will find that some of them are affecting an air of superiority when speaking in Tagalog Filipino.  The forced patronage of a Tagalog-based national language subordinates ethno linguistic pride and diminishes it.  What once was a strong ethno linguistic identity among Visayans is becoming a subordinate sociopolitical entity when pitted against the push of a Tagalog Filipino national identity. To the Tagalistas, this is national coherence.

 

The burden is more than just a matter of psychological resentment.  The forced ascendancy of Tagalog Filipino coupled by disallowing the teaching of native languages in our schools put a grip of restrictiveness into the development and propagation of our native languages.  When Tagalog-Filipino dominates in our educational system and seizes initiatives for the promotion of local languages, there is not only a restrictiveness; there is a repression of our basic right to propagate our language. The prestige of our language and identity takes an ill-favored plunge and gradually, our fervor for our own language and identity is weakened.  All these assaults have flung us to a path where we don’t want to be –  a path of abortive appreciation of our language and culture.  It is a process that goes unnoticed while it forces in us a nebulous recognition of our true identity and  encourages a  malign neglect of our language and culture.  We are now realizing what this means to us – cultural and emotional ties to our true ethnicity grown denser by the decade as  the Tagalista assault tends the fire of detachment from our original ethnicity.  Indeed, it is a fertile political environment that shores up our people’s ambiguous regard and mindless apathy toward our own language, ethnicity, and culture.   To us, this predicament is linguistically undemocratic and culturally unjust.

 

A situation can turn out from bad to worst.  Economic realities exacerbate the language plight we’re in.  We are embroiled in the discussion and the fight for linguistic freedom but to the common people on the street, it is the gut issues that really concern him or her.  I mean to say that when the demands of the belly assert themselves, the finer things in life, like language, culture, and the arts are consigned to the lowest rung in the list of priorities.  We can not expect our people to be on our side fighting for a linguistically democratic and culturally just country.  You will find Jed that there are only a few who are vocal about a vision for our own language and culture.  The sporadic initiatives and wavering, private endeavors of those interested few are not enough.  Among our people, there is very little awareness, if not nil, that the development of our language and culture lies fallow while Tagalog-Filipino advances.  Political and economic realities melted our people’s awareness about the sad plight of our language and taxed them to yield to an onerous demand by the Tagalistas – that our people accept and internalize the Tagalistas’ forced ascription on us as Tagalog-Filipinos.  To us, this is an oppression.

 

Our raw confrontations with political and economic realities make it hard for us to untangle that grip of restrictiveness that suffocates the development and propagation of our native languages.  But as a people, we must first struggle to renew from within each of us in order to break free from our own apathy and fragmentation.  Issues that haze our approach to our own ethnicity and befog our movement need to be dug out from their unfathomable obscurity, untangled, understood, and addressed before we can even start a movement resisting the Tagalista oppression.  Our people need to know how these two traits are pestilent to an already damaged culture like ours.  We should educate them so that they will develop a keen sense of social responsibility toward our own language and culture.  When we’ve changed our people’s unconcern and impassivity, we can count on each one to care to do something within the limit of each one’s capacity.  But first, how do we acquire a will power that is so strong as to enable us to overcome all opposition, especially that which arises from our own?  That would be our first challenge.

 

Jed, we must remember that character shapes destiny.  A part of the fight is that it is character that will arrange our destination.   Possessing the desired character and the persistence is power that will equip our inner selves to carry on the fight.

 

For the longest time, our ethno linguistic rights and interests have been under assault and in the absence of an effective counterforce that assault can only grow more brutal.  The coercive political power that Tagalistas use to attract followers to a Tagalog Filipino nationalism can partly be attacked by a soft power, a power that comes from within each of us.  The power to find a positive foothold of imagination for our ethnicity, language, and culture starts from within each of us.  We first have to manifest outwardly our pride of ourselves as Cebuanos, Warays, Capampangans, Ilocanos, Bicolanos, Karay-a, Ilonggos, Sambals, etc. before we can imagine ourselves as Filipinos.  A love for our language that is not anemic but is charged and forceful will supply the motive force for the continued propagation of our language.  Coupled by our people’s solidarity, this will be our saving grace and the Tagalista’s nightmare.  We must recast ourselves and before we know it, the metamorphosis will seep into every sector of our society and the change becomes exponential.  This is the way we can move into position. 

 

Our second challenge would be to assert our rights.  We must confront those who have a monopoly over the label “nationalist” or “patriot” or “Filipino heritage” and those who have the monopoly of writing and teaching our history thru Tagalog lenses.  Those are the Tagalistas, the manufacturers of knowledge, with their importunate demands for the Tagalog-Filipino national language to be viewed or recognized as a “Filipino heritage.”  They tout it as an  integration or a hybridization of our varied languages and cultures when in essence it is 99% Tagalog.   These are the same Tagalistas who, at every opportunity, display their manifest intent of wrongfully labeling people with strong ethno linguistic feelings as regionalist while promoting Tagalog Filipino not as ethno centric as it is, but as nationalistic. 

 

Jed, the Tagalista academics will challenge native speakers of any language if they choose to abandon their language or if they choose to propagate it.  They’ll say, “If you lose your identity, it’s all up to you.”  Tagalistas would want us to believe that factors internal to the speech community decide whether our various languages get marginalized or if they die, as if it were possible to separate internal and external factors and thereby assess the blame.  Certainly, in the final analysis, speakers make language choices themselves.  But there comes a point when multilingual parents no longer consider it necessary or worthwhile for the future of their children to communicate with them in a low-prestige language variety.  Children, in the long run, are no longer motivated to acquire active competence in a language that is lacking in positive connotations such as youth, modernity, technical skills, material success or education.  The languages at the lower end of the prestige scale retreat from ever increasing areas of their functional domains, displaced by higher prestige languages, until there is nothing left for them to be appropriately used about.  In any particular speech community that is suppressed and threatened by a dominating language, this scenario can happen.  We know that this can happen slowly without us noticing it. 

 

While it is true that the speakers themselves have a responsibility to nurture their language and culture, the whole picture of a language being suppressed and marginalized involves factors that are both internal and external to the speech community.  The social forces underlying the native speakers’ choices that may result in languages dying or becoming marginalized are not only composed of factors that are internal to the speech community itself.  The process always reflects external forces beyond its speakers’ control: repression, discrimination, or exploitation, in this case, the Tagalista onslaught.  Already, a Manila-centric culture dominated by Tagalog cultural influences in media, schools, and institutions cultivates intolerance and sustains an atmosphere of ethnic snobbery and cultural supremacy.  Stoked by Tagalog cultural domination, you could hear ethnic slurs against Visayans in Tagalog television programs, Tagalog movies, and even in personal jokes among the Tagalogs.  What else could you call these?  They are certainly insults to ethno linguistic identity and in plain view, Tagalog ethno centric prejudice in action. 

 

While the speech community itself has a role in deciding what to speak and what language to impart to their young, changes in attitudes and values that discourage the teaching of its vernacular to children and encourage loyalty to the dominant tongue are brought about by the uneven terrain in Philippine linguistic reality.  That terrain is of course, favorable to Tagalog than to any other language.  There are varying degrees by which any of our varied languages are marginalized and while not all are dying, some are just hemorrhaging too fast. 

 

Jed, what the Tagalistas actually want  us to believe is that changes in attitudes and values that lead  to a shifting of loyalty to the dominant tongue won’t happen without complicity on the part of the losing speech community itself, them being the ones who will decide whether to shift to the dominant tongue or not. 

 

But let us expose the truth: It is also true that external forces are responsible for this predicament and in this case, it is the preferential constitutional mandate on Tagalog-Filipino.  Deliberately not allowing our native languages to be taught in schools and deliberately not providing a wide political avenue for it to flourish and develop will enfeeble its development and impact on its prestige.  The Tagalista explanation that the speakers themselves are responsible if they lose their language is overly simplistic.  That argument lends support to justifying their  prerogative to coerce assimilation or blame the losing speech community for acquiescing and eventually, losing their language. 

 

The crafty Tagalistas knew that a calculated renaming of Tagalog was necessary in order for us to embrace Tagalog-Filipino nationalism.  Thus, a name which beguiles the population into thinking that language and citizenship are the same was chosen.  “Filipino,” is nothing but a national sounding word concept that effectively blunts the ideal of multiculturalism.  It buttresses the Tagalista position that having the national “Filipino” language is an absolving excuse to forego of our linguistic rights.  But it cannot be hidden that government-sanctioned censure of local languages in schools, institutions, and media while allowing a state sponsored national language monopoly of these avenues has a negative impact on our native languages.  The forced ascendancy of Tagalog Filipino subordinates, seizes, and paralyzes the development of our varied languages.  People in academe recognize that our native languages are stuck in baneful circumstances and are aware of a language predicament that needs to be fixed.  We should advocate for and defend our linguistic rights.

 

The 1987 Constitution states that, “The national language of the Philippines is Filipino. As it evolves, it shall be further developed and enriched on the basis of existing Philippine and other languages.”    A “Filipino” national language, propagandized and forcefully taught as a fascinating hybridization of all our languages and cultures, is essentially Tagalog.  All cultures are hybrids, as the Tagalistas will claim, but the few Visayan words included in “Filipino” are an emotional consideration to the Visayans.  “Filipino” is valid only to those in government and in the Tagalista academe, whereas people recognize that Manila Tagalog and “Filipino” are more or less the same languages with different labels.  Ethnic tensions fester, not totally unnoticed, behind the emergence of a Tagalog national language and the reality of an unequal playing field in the Philippines’ linguistic situation.   People in the provinces recognize that the emergence of a Tagalog-based national language results into a great political, economic, and educational hegemony by the Tagalog ethnic group over the other ethnic groups.  Pointing to a higher Tagalog hegemonic power becoming the standard, regional communities come to realize that a national language ideology does not allow non-Tagalogs to retain linguistic diversities.  This creates a sense of feeling that non-Tagalogs are second class citizens and other ethno linguistic groups gave severe critics to this phenomenon as a fourth colonization by the Tagalogs (after the Spaniards, Americans and Japanese, in that order).  Thus, the national language policy is a crisis not only to the Binisaya speaking ethnic group, but to all ethnic groups in the Philippines.  It is a torment that wrings the heart of every proud Bisaya, knowing that our mother culture and language plus one intellectualized language like English are abundantly adequate for us.  The question that springs out of our hearts is: Why should we, Visayans accept a forced ascription of a Tagalog Filipino national identity?   Why should we accept a Tagalog-Filipino national language when that, too, is foreign to us?  To pay our dues as nationalistic Tagalog Filipinos is difficult to extract because it is based on a language and culture that is foreign to us.  This paradigm does not fit the landscape of linguistic equality that Visayans silently envision. 

 

The 1987 constitution further elaborates that, “The regional languages are the auxiliary official languages in the regions and shall serve as auxiliary medium of instruction therein.”   These are statements intended for emotional considerations to non-Tagalog ethnic groups. This constitution is defective because it does not provide for the constitutional protection of an ethnic group’s right to propagate and develop its language.  Nowhere is protection for our varied languages and cultures expressly enshrined, nowhere is any specific provision that we have the right to propagate our language and culture and teach them in our schools.

 

This brings us to a greater truth occurring in most colonial societies, once the struggle for self rule is over and independence is achieved:  The most widespread genre of injustice in the world today is the hidden internal colonialism, justified as “nationalism” or some other convenient word-concept, that goes on unabated in former European colonies; and which has resulted in staggering poverty, destroyed ecosystems, monstrous primate cities, languages and ethno-linguistic peoples held captive and extinguished.   This is a picture of the current Tagalog-Filipino Philippines.

 

This is the Dark Age for a country that is now called the Philippines. Each one of us is coerced to put pride of our original identity in the backseat in favor of a forced ascription as Tagalog-Filipinos. It creates a sore feeling of dispossession from one’s true identity that is not outwardly manifested.   The Tagalog people would never have to experience the same because the “Filipino” national language and identity is steeped on the milieu of their very own language and culture.  There is no need to cross over ethnic lines.  For non-Tagalogs, we are witnessing that a dichotomy of loyalties, one for a forcefully imposed Tagalog-Filipino nationalism and one for our own ethnicity is not possible without subjugating one to the other.   We are subordinated to the ascription as Tagalog Filipinos and as the remaking of our identity into Tagalog Filipino surreptitiously continues, the more that the Tagalista establishment will demand from our people to possess, love and show, first and foremost, a Tagalog-Filipino identity.  Insisting on that guidepost is a sore point because it is hard to extract and express a Tagalog-Filipino nationalism from us.  We need a constitution that is not preferential to one ethno linguistic group and that is not restrictive to the others.  Let us remind the Tagalistas that the torment of being forcibly ascribed a Tagalog-Filipino identity cannot remain latently manifested.  We will carry a resistance movement so that this inner conflict inside our hearts will be outwardly manifested and prod us to action.   Let us remind the Tagalistas that when a minority mother tongue and identity comes under attack, its users feel uncomfortable and experience an inner conflict.  When people aren’t at peace with themselves, they can’t be at peace with others.  The armed conflict in Sri Lanka between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils had as a major cause the imposition of Sinhalese as the sole national language over the objections of the Tamils.  In 1956, passage of the Sinhala Only Act in parliament made Sinhala the sole official language, and the Tamils resisted by armed conflict.  Over the years, the violence associated with the introduction of the Sinhala Only Act forced an explicit reversion to parity of status to the two languages, Sinhala and Tamil, which came in 1987 and 1988 as part of a political settlement brokered by the Indian government.  Violence is an effective way of communicating sensitivity of an issue that unfavored ethnic groups are passionate to another ethnic group with higher hegemonic power in the political, cultural, educational, and economic arena but is not sensitive to the issues felt strongly by the unfavored ethnic groups.  In an ethno linguistically diverse Philippines, we will avoid  resorting to violence to achieve linguistic and cultural equality as well as political and economic parity, areas presently dominated by the Tagalogs.  But if all peaceful efforts fail, we shall not fail to count that as the last option.  Thus, if a million Tagalogs need to be killed to get rid of that stupid national language, RISE! RISE! RISE! RISE! RISE!

 

What we seek is a Philippines in an enlightened age.  Knowing that we are an ethno linguistically diverse country, we ask ourselves, what constitutional moorings must this country begin with?   Forcing the language of one ethnic group such as Tagalog, under the guise of “Filipino” upon other ethnic groups is divisive and disruptive of the national fabric.  We need a constitution that explicitly recognizes and sets provisions for the protection, development, and promotion of our varied languages and cultures.   It must provide that every group has the right to use its own language in every domain, to preserve it as a cultural resource and to teach it in our schools.  Let our Tagalog brothers know that the constitutional  moorings of an ethno linguistically diverse country must begin with parity of status between ethno linguistic peoples.  Mutual respect blossoms in a land of different ethno linguistic groups who are coherent in their recognition – of the truth.  It is our birthright, it is our inalienable right that our languages are free to be used not only in the marketplace but  in every domain – in government, schools, and media. The reality of a multi-ethnic nation should not be suppressed in favor of Tagalog masquerading as the “Filipino” national language.  Without constitutional protection, the promotion of our various languages will continue to endure a grip of  restrictiveness while the legalized ascendancy of Tagalog grants it the impetus to grow and develop as the national “Filipino” language.   Our varied languages and cultures must become  integral parts in the fabric of our national life.  Legal protection for them must be enshrined in the constitution in order to give each language the impetus to be dynamic and robust.  Our native language must be the official language in the areas where it is dominant – it is not an auxiliary official language as the present constitution provides.  All Bisaya people must be made aware of Tagalista thinking about the national identity of a multi-ethnic Philippines because behind those concerns always  lurks a conspiracy against ethno linguistic freedoms.  We will reawaken every Bisaya to these truths.   No Tagalog-Filipino national language must be allowed to lord over our birthright and inalienable right to teach our languages in our schools.  Our way is the truth and it is only the truth that aims at preserving knowledge of who we are, knowledge of the best way we have found to relate each to each, each to all, ourselves to other peoples, and all to our surroundings.  We hope not to go the way Sri Lanka has gone – armed conflict.   The way should be parity of status and reciprocity and by it we mean that if we are to study Tagalog language and culture, the Tagalog ethnic group must be required to study at least one major language and culture in equally the same breadth and depth as we learn the Tagalog language and culture.  All Filipinos, including Tagalogs, must be obliged to learn as many languages spoken from end to end of our archipelago.  Knowing as much of the Philippines as possible, without prejudice would make us proud of our rich cultural heritage and help us understand each other.   We could still be united while staying true to our original identity and flaunting it.  An enlightened course would be to follow a pluralist rather than an assimilationist language policy and devise ways for including regional languages in the educational curricula.  This pluralist perspective presupposes broad legislative support for the maintenance and development of any ethnic group’s language and culture.

 

Establishing and recognizing the truth is one thing.  The way legislation is written to express and protect the truth is another; but provided legislation comes  up to the same fundamental sense of meaning as the truth it intends to recognize and protect.  When it is, there is not an iniquitous language situation.  There is wholeness. Our way, the way, is wholeness.   A paradigm that creates a landscape of ethno linguistic freedoms must be achieved.  Therefore, there must be no Tagalog Filipino national language, but in its place, all major languages must be declared as national languages and an effort to study each other’s culture and language must be instituted.  It is the truth:  It is not through domination by one ethno linguistic group over the others but through mutual  respect and reciprocity that cross-cultural understanding and unity will blossom.  Disunity results when there is no respect for each other’s cultures and languages.  As the experience of  Switzerland shows, assimilation into a larger nation-state does not necessitate monolingualism. 

 

 A movement of a culturally and linguistically subjugated Philippines carried out by Tagalista rhetorical ghouls cannot hold through time.  A nation with cultural and linguistic diversities such as ours should be built with mutual respect and parity of status between ethno linguistic peoples as the bedrock.  For now, the paradigm of a Tagalog-Filipino nation is accepted only in sufferance.  Unity does not come from a choice of the expedient, which is the Tagalog-Filipino national language.

 

When these truths are not in our hearts and minds, we will fail to act on them and the Tagalistas will continue to propagandize and forcefully teach to a credulous population that the “Filipino” national language is a fascinating hybridization of our varied languages and cultures.  Jed, you will find it in our history how easy it is, just like slipping on a river stone, when our people fell into the agendas of those who are in power.  Having the constitutional power and resources, the Tagalistas will propagandize that it will bridge the differences of the various ethnic groups.  We will slip to the Tagalista drumbeat that for the sake of national unity we should be willing to sacrifice our ethno linguistic rights.  A semblance of unity, there seems to be, when some of our people have already been subjugated  to an assimilationist Tagalog-Filipino nationalism  and don’t care about a pluralist policy.  But underneath that fragile Tagalog-Filipino unity are cultural cleavages that fester.  This assimilationist policy is working only for the Tagalog ethnic group whose language and culture a “Filipino” national language and identity are anchored on.  A social division exists between the Tagalogs and the unfavored ethno linguistic groups.   What is called for is much more equitable and productive paradigm of language use.

 

Languages should be dynamic.   For our Binisaya language to be robust and dynamic, it must flood into the educational and government institutions as well as the media.  But when our own government forces it out of these domains and degrades it as an “auxiliary language,” as the present constitution provides, we could see that grip of restrictiveness that suffocates its propagation.   Meanwhile, a Tagalog Filipino language that is preferentially treated by the constitution ensures its dominance in the domains of education, government, and media and provides the impetus for its development.  By relegating the other languages to the home and market place only, they languish and are regarded lowly.   As this is happening, promoters of Tagalog Filipino will merrily point out that a quick trip to any community market will confirm that the population speaks their native languages freely and thus these languages are alive and do not need to be taught in schools.   We could not expect our people to appreciate and cultivate a high regard for our native language  if it is not taught in our schools.

 

Because it is their language and culture that Tagalog-Filipino nationalism is based on, the Tagalog people will continue to demonize regionalism while not looking at their own ethno centrism.  Our regionalism is not an attempt to go back to a pure pre colonial past.  It is an attempt to reclaim our pride and our true identity and repudiate the subjugation to a Tagalog-Filipino identity.  It is an attempt to preserve our language as a cultural resource, to develop, propagate, and teach it in our schools.  It is our response to a Tagalog Filipino nationalism that is bent on subjugating our varied ethnicities into a larger nation-state with a Tagalog-Filipino identity and unity.

 

Other than force feeding  “Filipino” as an integration of our varied languages and cultures which is a blatant lie, other than cleverly tying language and citizenship into one name, “Filipino”, what are the truths  surrounding  the  establishment of the “Filipino” national language?   

 

When they say it can be fascinating to unravel all the sources and processes involved in the hybridization of “Filipino,” the Tagalistas  are actually creating a positive spin on a national language that is 99 %  Tagalog.  The few Visayan words included into “Filipino” are an emotional consideration to Visayans.  That fascinating hybridization  is nowhere to happen and will remain a figment of the Tagalista’s overwrought ultra nationalistic imagination – that the Philippines become more and more linguistically and culturally homogeneous under Tagalog Filipino. “Filipino” somehow succeeded to establish political control over all other  ethno linguistic groups.  Had Tagalog been the name of the national language, it would not have succeeded.  

 

The Tagalistas’ espousal of an  ideology of resentment to anything that is American  is often used to justify the ascendance of Tagalog Filipino and discourage the use of English as an extension of American domination.   Such sentiments are used to reject and treat English as foreign when in fact, to us Visayans, Tagalog Filipino is foreign as well.  

 

For something which was an outcome of political opportunism, the Tagalistas will argue that the establishment of the Tagalog-Filipino national language was decided upon by history.  The Tagalistas could not face the stealth issue of the beginnings of the national language.  History respects no secrets and the truth will come out eventually.   According to official records and documents, the language provision approved by the Constitutional Convention of 1934-1935 was as follows:

 

The National Assembly shall take steps towards the development and adoption of a common national language based on existing languages (Constitutional Convention Record, Vol. IX, pp 470-471). 

 

There was a sabotage of the Convention’s approved resolution on the national language when it was incorporated as part of the 1935 Constitution.   Between the time the provision was approved and the time it was printed in the official copies of the 1935 Constitution, it was tampered with.  The words “one of the” were inserted between the words “on existing” in order to read “on one of the existing.”  When the constitution was printed, this provision read, “based on one of the existing languages” (1935 Philippine Constitution, Article XIV, Sec. 3).  Then President Quezon created a commission to select the one language to serves as basis.  To the commission, he appointed various experts on the principal vernaculars and made Jaime de Veyra of Leyte, a former resident commissioner in Washington, its chairman.   After twiddling their thumbs for a while to earn their pay, they chose Tagalog, knowing that Quezon wanted Tagalog to be chosen.  The altered provision pointed to Tagalog as the sole basis of the national language without mentioning it.  Quezon was a Tagalog and was about the first to urge a common national language.  We have to expose this Tagalista stealth, this knavery.

 

The Tagalistas will tell us that “Filipino” reigns supreme from Aparri to Jolo.  The truth is the language in the broadsheets, television, and the language spoken on the streets is Tagalog.  We should have an international team of linguists arbitrate  if indeed “Filipino” is a  separate language or a  dialect of the Tagalog language.   At the present time, a “Filipino” dialect of Tagalog overloaded with English loan words spelled or altered  “Filipino” dialect style is being concocted by Tagalista academics.   The effect is “Filipino” is so stilted, so difficult to read and understand, that one is  given a  reading experience  of a laboratory  “Filipino.”   A laboratory  dialect that could not excite or inspire but instead confounds and bewilders readers as reading all those English words spelled “Filipino” style impede comprehension and reading appreciation.   Nevertheless, the Tagalistas’ minds are warped with Tagalog-Filipino ultra nationalism and are keeping themselves busy concocting a prescriptive, laboratory kind of Tagalog aka “Filipino.”

 

Jed, all these Tagalista untruths were meant to justify Tagalog-Filipino nationalism and create a positive spin around that political movement, could we fight it with the truth?   The ultimate weakness of the “Filipino” national language is that it started on a deception and continued with a crafty contrivance of  a national language renamed  “Filipino,” a calculating way that has  beguiled our people into thinking that language and citizenship are the same.   We should not be afraid to expose Tagalista guile and craftiness such as claiming “Filipino” to be an integration of our varied languages and cultures, or their loathing of  English as foreign and promoting Tagalog Filipino which to us is foreign as well. Should we continue writing in order to assert our rights?  We should.   To the rabid Tagalistas this idea might seem outlandish but if we fight the untruths they’re espousing with every fiber of our being, we can turn the tide.  Any additional writing is not isolated and unconnected from all the others, but is rather an extension, a continuum of all efforts that has come before.   Don’t worry Jed, all those years’ writings plus one more, this one added to the others, will surely turn the tide.  If our efforts and luck in previous years have not been quite sufficient, never fear because we are capable of  resurrecting sensitivity to language rights among  the old and new generation.  This inner anger in our hearts cannot remain latent. We will carry a resistance movement so that this inner anger in our  hearts will be outwardly manifested and push us to action.   Ethnic upsurge is happening everywhere in the world and the tenacity of regional identity and the attachment to language are evident.   We have to expose our people to these Tagalista stealth and knavery and prod our people to advocate for and defend our language rights.  It is by challenging Tagalista untruths and exposing disturbing, bitter truths that we can reawaken our people’s pride and elevate once again sensibility to language and cultural issues. The truths we expose can be amplified in its resonance when bound so well in an artful rendering that appeals to the silent anger in our peoples’ hearts.  Jed, believe in the convincingness of truth when expressed like a work of art, that it has a vast potential of being irrefutable and powerful enough to take out the inner anger in our hearts.  It will become an irresistible call to everyone to be proud of one’s original ethnicity.  It is a call to our lawmakers that they ought to act on an iniquitous language situation.  Truth has the capacity to change lives, sometimes by the sheer force of ideas communicated with felicity and grace.  We will find that as long as that sense of ethno linguistic pride and liberty burns in the hearts of our people, we can reawaken it.  When it dies there, no one can save it.

 

The truest tribute to a language is not in the regimented classroom settings imposed by the Tagalista institution; rather, it is in peoples’ hearts and it can be seen or felt through their silent aspirations to promote their own language and culture.  It can be felt from their silent yearnings to get rid of a colonizing Tagalog Filipino national language.  It can be seen by their spontaneous collaboration in literary contests.  We cannot remain strangely silent in advocating for our linguistic rights, nor can we continually be overwhelmed by decades of negative evaluation and subordination to a  Tagalog Filipino national language and identity.  The national language debate is not closed.  It  merely started.  We are going to compete freely for the hearts and minds of our people.  Let us be aware that if the Tagalistas succeed on suppressing regionalist aspirations and on instituting a nationalism based on Tagalog-Filipino, it will skew tribute towards the Tagalog-Filipino national language.   We need to reawaken our people about advocating for and defending our language rights and unleash a vast reservoir of ethno linguistic pride.  The “soul” of the nation called the Philippines does not reside in a Tagalog-Filipino nationalism. 

 

And how could we ask our people to pay tribute to our language, culture, and identity the way it should be due?  How could we release an unbridled ferment of local language defense and promotion?  How could we prevent this Tagalog Filipino nationalism from confiscating our true identity?

 

 As a way of rejuvenating our lost fervor, a cultural battle for hearts and minds must be waged.  We need a Binisaya Language Month and fill it out with cultural activities.  Let it be filled with persistent, traditional, and creative ways of language maintenance for our people to acquire a strong attachment and be empowered with a greater ethnic pride.  We can utilize the Binisaya language as a centripetal force to unite Visayan speakers and strengthen a sense of ethnic solidarity.  Let us inculcate discipline, propagate our people’s values using our own language and attract followers by the strength of those discipline, values, and culture.  Nothing is more important than reawakening the spirit of ethno linguistic liberty that lies quiescent in our people’s hearts.  Nothing is more effective in confronting an intense enroachment of Tagalism in our areas than by putting that ethno linguistic fervor back.  A renewed interest that is charged with pride for our ethnicity will nurture a fierce love for our language.  Daghan nga mga isla, apan usa ka katilingban, usa ka tinguha.

 

By writing about the  truth we could strengthen the tenacity of regional identity and the attachment of an individual to his language.   We need effective evangelizers to bring our people to realize the importance of advocating for and defending  our  language and culture.  We should confront head-on this unflinching unilateralism about language by fighting for parity of status and reciprocity and defending our inalienable right to teach our language in our schools. Jed, let us remember that there is no place else to put the onus on reaching the ideal of  an organizationally mature resistance movement but on ourselves.  But how could we overcome our organizational immaturity when our people themselves show an ambiguous regard and mindless apathy toward our own ethnicity, language, and culture?  By struggling to renew from within each of us!  It is easy to say that but each one of us needs to possess an indomitable will in order to advocate for and defend our language and culture.   That indomitable will is evasive.  We must repair our damaged psyche.  There must be an internal unraveling within our ethno linguistic communities that will make each one be aware of our linguistic and cultural rights and empower each one to advocate for and defend them.   As soon as our struggle to renew from within each of us seeps into the mass sector,  expedient and coerced symbols of unity like the Tagalog-Filipino national language, harnessed as a patriotic guidepost – even with its mighty apparatus of a constitutional mandate – will diminish in meaning.  The strength of each one’s personal commitment becomes our triumph and our people will be ready to adamantly pursue linguistic and cultural equality, political parity and economic opportunity.  There will be a shifting paradigm on language policy.  Collectively, we will pressure lawmakers for a change in the language policy.

 

We also need to understand who we are by looking into our past.  What happened to us as an ethno linguistic group, we did not create nor design ourselves but nevertheless, we were willing collaborators to it.  Our past reveals to us how easy it is, just like slipping on a river stone, when we as a  people mindlessly fell into the agendas of those who are  in power.   Silently aspiring for a landscape of ethno linguistic freedoms is not enough.  We should acquire a forceful vision for our language and culture.   Without a sense of what’s honorable, right, and true, what buoys up in our culture is our habit of throwing up our lot with those who are in power.  It is time to correct ourselves.  To reverse this, our people must possess the indomitable will and the persistence to advocate for and defend our language and culture.  

 

Let us create a forceful vision and seize the shaping of our own destiny.  After we’ve struggled to renew from within each of us, all of us will be a vigilant steward of our language and culture.  An old Maori proverb will remind us:

 

Uia mai koe ki ahau

He aha te mea nui o te ao

Maku e kii atu

He tangata, he tangata, he tangata

 

 

which means,

 

 

You ask of me

What is the most important thing in the world?

My reply must be

It is the people, it is the people, it is the people …

 

 

Once again, Jed … possessing the indomitable will and the persistence is very important to carry on the fight.  It is the people, it is the people, it is the people …when they possess the desired character and the persistence…who are going to help us succeed in our fight.  We owe it to ourselves to struggle to renew from within each  of us.  Our government owes it to us to amend this iniquitous language situation.  Ethnicity matters here.  Our cultural-linguistic pride matters.

 

 

 

 

Yours sincerely,

 

 

 

 

Ronald  Llanos

6 Poems from Lingka (1994)

1. Afternoon Talk on Solitaries

The solitaries in the brown of an afternoon

Speak again in whispers.

Their interred godlings

Return from our worldling’s world,

This word, crimsoned at love’s end,

The memory of self-escape

Johnsoned at a navel’s edge.

This is the boundary of the holy.

This is the incarnate

Fashioned again into naught

As we recome into ourselves, we,

Habited spectators of the play of flesh,

Our suns in our loins rising again

In each piercing of our first fears.

We are afterwards resurrectees

From the anger of our child within

Our penile trials, the child our child,

The hawked upbeat of canticled, walled lies.

No, the solitaries do not know speech.

No, the solitaries no longer talk.

We do not remember the curses from delight.

First night conquests and surrenders

Have been worded in wilted wishes,

Them fathered ecstasies

Advertently privatized,

The common just the rays of insulated

Imaginings in the pawned perspectives

Of betrayed twilights.

There are the working gods here.

They divine the stars the sweat

Of childless arms

Figuring our the sums in their late

Evening chants, matins for more mornings

That will again fail us.

But we think: we think of scythes and sickles

And anvils and hammers and bannered loves

For the least of the last.

We think of the lives

Lost into alien words,

The consolation these of solitaries

For Padre Centina’s elect, Dom Roque’s too

At his abbeys in mud

And Ophelia’s musings of wilting flowers

At a priory in her stricken heart.

Do they ever talk, these solitaries,

Of the dying destinies of traitorous leaves

Greening faked altars

In this only nullity

Of lonely nights?

We think again of veined truths

Dimensioned in caresses

For our patented self-absence and self-abuse.

And they mouth litanies about us.

We are wordsmiths from psalm’s moons

Taking their seats in our numbered sobs.

There, here, there is no rice, Comrade Christ!

There is no agua bendita, Comrade Jesus!

There is no roof over our dreams, Ka Mesias!

Sir Holy, there are testicles in falsities we prize!

There are contours of torture in truth, Father Christ!

And dear, our dearest, Comrade Mary,

There is a bleeding magnificat

In the feminine nonsense of our pink cardinals!

So: the solitaries at love’s end

Lie to us.

They talk about bloodied truths as they troop

Into the naught of the night

As night’s sorrows eat us up.

And then again, once again,

Our children ask of us morsels of loves undefined,

Our wives request for lonely fucks.

They continue to speak to us in whispers,

These solitaries from our own lies.

Emptied of self-love, man-for-others they are,

These solitaries lust after lost loves,

Run after morning shadows trucked in priories and abbeys

And abandoned altars in ours minds,

Flirt finally with their inherited sums

From the legacies of fucking friars

Retire for the midnight with their cloaked gods,

Masturbate with their masks,

Envy our fears

And together we spill the seeds

Of first morning delights.

The solitaries speak now

Of the brown of a feigned afternoon

Indwelling in our raped minds.

The solitaries whisper of repeated self-abuse

And their agonies at least.

2.  A Kulambo Hawker Has Been Felled By Firepower In Makati

Death’s wish zings through a dead man’s dried wound,

Stokes up the Dasma brook’s silence within

As Ayala wakes up to prey on its last.

Death pays for the sniper’s orchids for the wake,

This nightfall as the kulambo hawker

Calls out for the lunch coin.

The dead man doubly falls, face flat on a pool

Of revolutionary promises, poems, and pesos

Ejected from a greened grave

Now red with the major’s greed.

Death vudus lamentations now.

It abolishes even a dirge,

Exorcises the murdered song

And declaims the lost kindness of lost whispers.

The dead man kneels now,

Comes alive in the estranged approaches

Of Makati’s night life,

Resides in the absence of that darkness

In this one last glow of this one last fight.

The night bullets drive our sins away.

They sear off the clouds from the F-4’s tale,

This verbiage of a sudden hand

Becoming soothsayer of brown brotherhood

And blest benevolence only the traitors know,

Them heroes from camote pies and banana cue

And piety too.  The soothsayer is parold now,

Becomes offerer of pawned basi and tuba,

Sacrificer of some forgiven pandesal.

Too, he evolves into a Saviour of babes

She murdered before their navels

Could worm their way to the embassy on the boulevard

And turn white and dream of snow and Baby Ruth.

It is enough to discourse about

The failed calling out to the man,

The blankets he sells becoming a bonus

For the mortician of the nation’s dreams.

There are always a demon for every season,

You know, the demon the reaper in the harvest

Of tears and deaths and fears.

The first casualty falls.

He falls flat on a brown land,

The last casualty rises up

To announce a ceasefire with life,

Breathholders we are, boozers of browned blood.

We lift the dead to the altar of our fallen gods,

Christen him our king and redeemer and mesias

And wish him another wake at the Paseo de Roxas

As the APC rolls its tiered head,

Spits truth from the anteroom of a forced farce,

Calendar the grief

Of the dead man’s god, cross-lover, gone,

Done, unloved.

3. The Wayland In Makati

   Comes To Marikina

   (For The Unknown, Salvaged, Burned Young

     Man At The Back Of St. Camillus)

The innocence of the blade

Put an end to your adolescent daydreams and cheers.

The pain that came after

I could only imagine, child, brother, cousin,

As you welcomed the depths of alones defined

By your celebrating executioners on that moonlit night

That was also theirs by might

Speak now to me in aggrieved silence,

You, nameless son of a betrayed land, also

Now nameless in the silences of false springs

And April rains and fallowed fields and tilled gardens.

Stand up, rise up, rise again for us the living,

We who will still have to see the fruitfulness of sins.

Tell us of an M-16 on a captain’s drawer

Rusted by song

A 29 in a neighbor’s attic shines

And goads white-robed men to preach,

Talk about the loving, ever-giving act of bees

As you lay ther my son, my friend, my cousin,

Your body fed to the wild dogs of seminaries and convents

And churchmen singing lauds and vespers

And filling up their tummies with the sweat

Of your father, your mother, your sister, your cousin.

Did the churchmen ever hear you wail

And tell of the glories of dying for stories

Grander than ourselves?

Did they ever peep from their screened windows

And watch you die together with the tallest grasses

As the fire erasing your name from your lips

Sealed you narratives of liberating dreams?

No. I tell you they never did.

The seminaries and convents are refuge of vampires

Making definitions about life out of thin air.

They read the bible, the vampires, and other doing so

They eventually become midwives of afterhopes.

See it now, my nameless cousin, my names friend:

They genuflect before you in your penultimate scream.

Also, they resuscitate your voice,

Fish it finally into their cruets and chalices

And label your deathclothes to make of them

Relics they will cut up and sell for some believers.

In the meantime, they pocket the proceeds

To bankroll democracy for the clerics and their elites.

But until such things happen

Plainclothersmen will come and will cry rivers

With your mother and sisters and father and brothers

And friends.

Don’t forget this now:

It is the ripper of hearts and memories

Who will suck the lie of your death.

The witnesses will not fail to come

The witnesses will not fail to stare

At your scorched body, the smile in your face

Drowned by your long long agony.

The witnesses will come and they will comment

About the weather.

They will hear the seminary and convent bells

And the vespers recited by pretenders.

Me, my friend, I will steal your smile,

I will also steal your death.

4. Yacat’s Thanks To The Red Cross

Yacat’s thanks to the Red Cross

Does it matter now, the braving of bullets,

Can its spring the dying city stream back to life?

Hear, soldier, listen to the gun that sasses

The song of our common deathless embalmer,

Economist is he of numberless breaths,

Storyteller too of subterfuges and ruses

Only fallen angels ever know.

Look at it now, soldier:

Wage against the sun abirthing.

It spewts fire from the blushes of dawns

We will never ever possess.

Think of control towers bowed down by the weight

Of a palace’s logic, the tumult of wicked palm

And psalm run we go, away

From the ghosts on the walls of avenues

Peering into the doors of our secret recollections

Of presidents and first ladies and housewives and brown

Cardinals and bishops afflicted with white wisdom

And English and guns.

We light, we try to, at least, the yellow candles,

Place them on the balusters of our only hope

To welcome the night star to be reborn

In the dawning dusk.

5. Three Middleclassmen Monitor The RH Report On The Year-End Coup

To welcome the years of our bourgeois bravery

Fecundating the real fearers in us

We sip the substance of this poem about to be made,

The one about the coup’s currents, its blow-by-blow

Drama a Valium for a heavy, tight, deep sleep,

One good for the dying and the dead.

The next we turn in to our graveyard sleep,

Talk about peace from the saplings of strayed bullets

Dipped in the salt of buried common angers now muted

By the silence in nunneries as per

The word of the prince his highness.

But the silence is estranged, betrayed, is now also

Aguinaldo’s ball of fire

Fertilizing the bloodletters dreamfields.

We confuse the Tora-tora for the housewife’s honey

We spoon into the mouths of babes

T9o make them regain courage and vicious strengths.

This could also be bravery to the despot

Despairing, defecting sides again.

Our noon breakfast becomes lunch untouched,

Supper snatched from children’s cups,

Frozen coffee served for the first hoarder of life,

Phantom-like, jetting to the warehouses of plasticized love.

The silver god skylarks the double meanings of funerals,

Sings of endless swan songs, of godlings too taking a fall,

Falling in a master stroke for the last death rite,

Counter-offensive for a dying sob

The meadows we figure out from the strange sounds

Flash bloodied blades of carpet grass,

Buds too declaring dust

The industrial valley magics from the river of

            ambulance trucks

Negotiating the lonely reaches of an amputee’s touch

The sighting of black-banded warriors, carnival princes

Gnawing our freedoms within gobble up

The widow’s might, the rhetorician safely perched in

            another land

Dreams of the preybird’s ark, his customary elegance

Singeing falconry in a sikorsky goggling the ramboys’ suns.

They gloze this go-getting gob that hawks the truth of

Of a doggish fight, orthopedic, sterilized, paralyzed,

The same brotherless, sisterless, motherless, fatherless

Grab as the riffle sings, stages a dive, featheredges

The power of the fathering night, illegitimate diner

In the only peace table on the run.

We eagle-eye the sore of a race’s mental wound,

Think of the game of the wild, fabricate another smile

Four our souling lives.

6. The Coup While They Sell Democratic Lies

David sashays before Alvarez

And the putschists

Laugh the numbness of the prophets.

These are the doomsdayers of smoke,

The harvester’s final act,

He who makes burial plots out of planed furrows.

This is also the gift of life

To the harbingers of apocalypse at Libis.

I have seen the plate of the poor man

Filled with leveled sunsets,

The episode, the passion of an old testament song,

Infant blood drips.

A father’s head rotates in its protent,

The son capturing the father’s body’s spasmic jerks.

A civilian scampers to the crevices of intruding nozzles,

Runs after the shadows of the earth, endless, parturient

The Nagtahan stakes out its widow’s incense.

Here is a peso for the duped gunmen

Invoking sanity is marbled earth.

The price of a prize has been unpegged.

The waylaid becomes another

Number filling out the voids

Of drugged bullets unspent as yet.

The rhetoric of peace comes as droplets, rains come

From the embrace of failed heavens.

Death fills up the basketb of the marketer,

Surpriser, host, deciver.

Meanwhile the canned applause

In the fighter archaic tales

Overfloods Masaysay.

They reach out to the national embalmer.

I raise a half-staff for holed-out men

In white strips, now red, now pink

Now green, now dim.

The men dream of a cup of unwelled tears

From mothers, comrades, and sisters

There are the recesses of youthful games

For dead children, orphaned

Sometimes by the redundance of drunk dances

Encircling the deep, the deep

Loving just the same quick embraces.

(Note: all these were first published in Lingka (1994))