Thursday, July 22, 2021
12:44 PM |
Going for Binisaya
Interesting to note: the people in this fight are scrambling to have their missives in English translated to Binisaya, which is amusing. But also makes me sad: why do we feel so inadequate in expressing ourselves, at least writing-wise, in our own language? [I know why actually.]
I sometimes feel the same way, because I really did grow up speaking and writing in English in Dumaguete. And we were really taught, even in the public schools, to consider Binisaya as inferior. [I have a whole TED Talks devoted to this, if you're interested! Click here.]
But when I do put my mind on writing in Binisaya for real, okay ra baya. True, sige ka og consult sa dictionary, but often just to make sure if the word in our head which we are familiar with is actually the right word to use. [It’s a result of us not being familiar with a Binisaya word on the page. Reading actually is just a matter of our brain recognizing the shape of words. And since we don’t usually read in Binisaya, at least for the burgis like me, wala na praktis atong brain sa hugis sa atong mga pulong.]
And Oriental Negrense Binisaya is very different, too, from Sugbuanon or Bol-anon or Kagayanon, so there’s that extra challenge. We call our own variety as Binisayang Binuglas [after Buglas]. And it deserves to be widely studied and used. Or else sige ra magpa-translate kay insecure ‘ta sa atong dila.
Labels: dumaguete, language, negros, writing
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, August 23, 2020
That’s what we have been saying, more and more, to each other in our missives to people we know. As we close out a text message.
Amping. As we end a chat over Facebook.
Amping. As we close out an email with a salutation.
Amping. As we turn off our cameras over Zoom or Facetime.
Amping. As we say goodbye to another six-feet away, mask and shields between us.
Amping.
It’s not that we have not used this version of goodbye before. We have. But in the ancient days, that time before February 2020, we have always just said, “Goodbye,” or even more hopefully, “See you!” as the closing notes to our varied interactions. And we tossed those around as if there was a future, and our freedom was infinite. Tossed around with such magnificent mindlessness we can only look back to all that with hopeless wonder, our hindsight tinged with nostalgia and regret.
“Amping” has a quiet admonition to the way it wears its farewell, also a note of concern. It tells the recipient: “Be careful, take care”—bidding him or her safe passage as they venture out to errand, or work, or home, out into a world that’s tacitly acknowledged as one bleeding with danger. It says there are monsters about out there,
be careful. It says we are concerned for your safety,
be careful. It says we care,
be careful.
There’s another word in Binisaya that approximates “amping,” or “pag-amping.” There’s “ayo-ayo,” but it’s a goodbye that flies into the regions of hope, of a general sense of being safe. “Ayo” is literally “good,” as in “maayo.” And also is our word for the unthreatening announcement of our arrival. We go to someone’s house, and we knock, and we bid its dwellers, “Ayooooo!” to indicate our visit, to say we mean well, to bid them goodness in our coming and in our presence.
“Amping” is not “ayo-ayo,” but they mean exactly the same thing, the yin and yang of the Binisaya goodbye.
The Tagalogs have a word of exactly the same import: “ingat.” As a word for goodbye, it is claimed that people started saying “Ingat” to each other in the deepening dark of the Martial Law years, when friends and family say it to acknowledge the hovering evil of those years, when people could disappear, just like that, never to be seen again. “
Ingat or careful out there,” the acclaimed novelist and activist Ninotchka Rosca once posted in Facebook, “became the word for goodbye, replacing the old
sige during the Martial Law years. It was the last word uttered between and among those meeting to discuss what had to be done, in ways big and small, to end the Marcos dictatorship. It was said with all the love and respect one was capable of. Because chances were, one would meet again only in a prison cell, or a torture house [called a ‘safe house’ by the military], or at a wake.”
I’m sure we say “amping” now in a different context—but also, alas, somehow the same: we have a government whirling with such sly intentions to curtail our freedoms sans calling for actual military rule. And then also we are swimming in the long lockdown days of pandemic uncertainty, death and frailty at every turn. Both threats are palpable like that feeling of a tight fist in your stomach.
There are monsters everywhere.
We know this for sure—even if mostly unseen, chronicled only in headlines that grow bloodier by the day. Another activist or journalist or lawyer or teacher killed. Another bunch in the hundreds dead from COVID-19, or thousands infected by it.
I know one such casualty of the latter kind, a friend.
His name was Em Mendez. He was a teacher and a prize-winning playwright. He was loved by many. He had a bright future ahead of him. He was only 38, celebrating that birthday milestone only days before COVID-19 took him.
I can’t remember what goodbye I’ve said to Em in the old days, before the scourge that took him had a name. I check my Facebook chat, and my last word to him was “Congrats!”—I think for a literary prize he had won then. It wasn’t even goodbye. We had no idea how the world would turn.
So I say this now to people I love, constantly:
Amping, amping, amping. It’s certainly a goodbye of wishful safe passage, but I also wield it as a talisman.
Amping to mean, “The Divine be with you.”
Amping to mean, “I care.”
Amping to mean, “No harm to you that I love.”
It’s just a word, yes—but words have power. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” I love those beginnings from the
Book of John. Our deeply felt utterances have meaning, and like prayer—which are really words spoken in incantation—they can move mountains.
Or at least, in our case now, just a simple beloved wish for safety.
Illustration by Ruth Basagoitia for Healthline
Labels: language, life
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, February 04, 2018
3:48 PM |
Language We Breathe In
When I was enrolled in Grade 3 at West City Elementary School here in Dumaguete, I found myself in a pool of pupils who were being divided into two groups—those who would be attending what they called “the regular class,” and those who would be ushered into a pilot program they called FL. How regular was the “regular” class? I had no idea. Perhaps they got regular recess food, I’m not sure. But FL meant “Fast Learners,” which had no meaning for me then, but all I knew was that it was under a bigger program of SPED, or special education, and we were part of an education experiment where grade school students were taught high school mathematics, high school science, high school humanities. We would have the same teachers from Grade 3 until Grade 6, and it was hoped that when we finally graduated, we would become exemplars of grade school teaching using secondary school materials.
But let me focus this trip down memory lane a bit to one school policy SPED was “notorious” for: its “English Only” policy. And my God we were indeed notorious. Not only did we get exhaustive lessons in the English language for four years running courtesy of a very capable teacher named Bennie Vic, but we were also taught to converse in the language exclusively. It was so immersive that most of us not only spoke English in the classroom, we spoke outside, on the streets, at home. And so, if my mother would ask me, in the local Binisaya, “Yan, adto sa tindahan, palit og bugas,” I’d reply in my perfect English: “How many kilos of rice do we need, mother?” which weirded her out at first—but she learned to accept that as part of my personality. Along the sidewalks that surrounded our school, there were also several stalls with various
manangs selling things like plastic balloon—remember those?—and Coke in a plastic bag and assorted candies, and every time my classmates and I would approach them, we’d ask in perfect English: “Ma’am, how much is this candy?” They were amused for the most part, but when they would reply with something like “Tulo piso ni, dong”—you could imagine the look of panic on our faces. Because what did she mean by that? What is “tulo piso”?
One way with which our teachers enforced the “English Only” policy is through a game that we later called “The Badge.” Most other schools enforce a specific monetary-based punishment, asking pupils who would speak in the local language to pay 50 centavos or one peso for every word in Binisaya they’d utter. We didn’t have that. We had a game. What is “the badge”? A badge could be anything. It could be a bracelet—usually a bracelet—or a necklace, and it was a thing that gets to be given to the first person in the class who’d speak in Binisaya during a school day. Let’s say you haven’t had breakfast because you had to rush to your flag ceremony, and you carelessly turn to your nearest classmate, and say something like, “Wala pa ko ka pamahaw. Gutom kaayo.” Oops! Your classmate, being a tattletale like everyone else, would immediately turn to the teacher, and say, “Teacher! Teacher! Ian said something in the dialect!” And I’d be given that bracelet, that badge, and I’d have to carry it for the rest of the day—until I’d find someone else in the class who’d speak a word in Binisaya, and I can then gleefully pass it on. The last pupil to hold the badge at the end of the school gets the ultimate punishment: he or she gets to pay the fine. Usually a peso, which was a huge sum those days. And so we became masters of spying. If I held the badge, I’d have my close friends report to me anyone who’d say something in the local language—and I’d run to the teacher, “Teacher! Teacher! Regal said a sentence in the dialect!” We also devised ways for forcing people to inadvertently say something in Binisaya. We’d pinch someone, and when that someone says, “ARAY!” That’s Binisaya—and the badge gets given to them.
For some reason, my classmates and I thought that the exclamation “Ouch” was also Binisaya—don’t ask me why. And so, when we pinched someone and they’d say “Ouch!”, the badge goes to them!
We had to find our way around “Aray!” or “Aguy!” or the much deadlier “Ouch!” But was what our English equivalent of “Ouch!” For some reason, we sort of agreed that the English equivalent of “Ouch!” … was “Owwch.”
And so, from Grade 3 until Grade 6, every time I’d hurt myself, I learned to say, “Owch!” I only started saying “Ouch” when I graduated, went to high school in Silliman University, and reclaimed the word for hurting.
It all seems funny to me now … but this was how I was introduced to the English language, and essentially how I learned to express myself, especially in writing.
There are many words for the likes of me, but one stands out: Inglesero. Meaning to say someone who speaks in English most of the time, not just for the ease in communication, but also for creative expression. I write. I have written about six collections of short stories, and truth to tell, I find it so much easier to express myself in the English language—I know its figurative uses, I know its idioms, I know its literary possibilities. If I were to asked to write in Binisaya right now, I’d probably be able to churn out a balak or two, even a sugilanon, but there will always be a feeling deep inside me that chides me that I don’t exactly have the appropriate tools to attempt writing in the local language. Which is quite ironic. Because this is the language I was born into, and yet we have been made to become estranged towards it, especially in the literary sense.
Our writing in English, of course, is an accident of history. In 1898, the Philippines found itself colonized anew by a new world power, the United States, which took as one of its task of colonization the teaching of American English. For many American administrators at that time, teaching the language was not just about education—it was a tool of pacification. They rightfully surmised that the more the native Filipino learned the language of its new colonial masters, the more they would be susceptible to American ideas. When the Americans first came to our shores, they were met with fierce resistance by Filipinos—and not just in terms of armed revolts, but also through the use of culture. We have poems and dramas from that particular period that vehemently decried American excursion to this country. My favorites would be the poem “Al Yankee” by Cecilio Apostol, and the drama “Hindi Aco Patay” by Juan Matapang Cruz, which considered the American adventure into the Philippines a tragedy for Filipinos that could only mean bloodshed. The Filipino American War that erupted, and lasted for at least a decade, was also a bloody affair, which killed millions of Filipinos. But after the first decade of American rule, resistance invariably went down—and much of that was partly because of the power of the new language, the lingua franca of American English. The link is easy enough to see: the more we learn this foreign language, the more we come to think in the cultural ideas that language came from.
There are of course many advantages gained in using English. To cite a couple of these, some scholars contend that it paved the way for a common ground for discourse in a country that has many native languages. Cebuanos learned to speak with Ilokanos, Bikolanos learned to speak to Ilonggos, all using English. This was prior to the popularity that the Filipino language now enjoys for most of the country.
According to Edna Zapanta-Manlapaz, English also leveled the playing field in terms of writing between men and women. Male writers, because of the privilege of their gender, dominated Spanish writing in the Philippines. But with the coming of the Americans, both sexes had to learn the English language at the same time. By 1905, among the first poets in English, we had Maria G. Romero, who wrote “Our Reasons in Study,” which was published in The Filipino Student Magazine. By the middle of the 1920s, we had our first acknowledged classic of the short story form—and that is Paz Marquez Benitez’s “Dead Stars,” a story in English written by a woman.
The early generations of writers in the Philippines labored understandably in this colonial language, and because of their privileged status, these writings in English came to be considered, if one believed such early literary critics like Fr. Miguel Bernad, as the meat of Philippine literature, no matter how “inchoate”—even though frankly it wasn’t the main meat at all. As an aside, the writings in Tagalog, in Cebuano, in Hiligaynon, in Bikolano, and in other regional languages were rich and generous—but they were for the most part of the 20th century marginalized, particularly by the academe. For example, it was only in 1964, when Mga Agos sa Disyerto came out and was published, that writings in Tagalog were finally considered as something serious enough for study.
Part of the second generation of writers in English are four writers from Silliman University—Ricaredo Demetillo, Rodrigo Feria, Edilberto K. Tiempo, and Edith Tiempo. Among many others, these four essentially laid the foundation of much of the literary culture we have come to enjoy in Dumaguete City, and they wrote almost exclusively in English, and gained vast renown for their efforts. In Edith Tiempo’s case, she was later proclaimed a National Artist for Literature.
[Strangely enough, Edilberto Tiempo had written intermittently in Binisaya during the Second World War, and Edith Tiempo is known to have loved performing songs in Binisaya, as well as her native Ilokano, having been born in Nueva Ecija. They knew the intricacies and the beauty of the local languages. Mom Edith once told me her writing in English was purely an accident of history. It was the language she was taught to express herself well in, and it was the literary language that she had come to master the most. And while she wished she could have written in Binisaya or Ilokano, she felt it was far too late in the game to master a new literary language. She was a master of the poem in English, and she had already learned to imbue it with a Filipino sensibility particular to her.]
What this meant, for the most part, is that literary expression in the local language—in Oriental Negrense Binisaya, which we call “Binisayang Binuglas”—was relegated to the margins, unfostered, unstudied. I’m going to focus more on Negros Oriental in this consideration. Do a quick survey of our schools, and you do not find a single Department of Binisaya Language and Literature, nor do we have academic subjects that aim to study its linguistics and its literariness. We speak the language in our every day lives, but we do not know its grammar, and we scarcely read in the prose or poetry. We do not have local anthologies compiling its best writings, although that does not mean we do not have practitioners, because there are, but they exist only in the shadows. And in many anthologies that compile Binisaya works that do exist—they make the point of including works from Binisaya writers in Cebu, Bohol, Siquijor, and even parts of Mindanao—but barely anyone from Negros Oriental.
Part of the reason for this absence of Binisaya writings in Negros Oriental is essentially because of the widespread influence of Silliman University, an American university and its vigorous campaigns, especially in the early decades, of championing works written in English. But that’s only part of the story.
What explains for the most part our resistance to expresses ourselves in our local language? Why do we not see a lot of
balaks, a lot of
sugilanons and
sugilambongs?
I stumbled on a possible answer in one of my Philippine literature classes a few years ago. Once I asked my students what was it about Philippine culture in general that prevented them from really appreciating it? To get to the heart of the matter, I asked them to give their descriptions of it in Binisaya, and little by little, I got their responses. Understandably, what came out was a slew of answers in the negative, and what amused me was the fact that a lot of the words they gave me started with the letter “b.”
Baduy. Bati. Barat. Bugo. Binutbot. Bisaya.
These are measures of standard, of course, which delineated for many what was good and what was bad. “Baduy,” most of all. “Kabaduy ani uy,” is the thing we say when we are displeased by something, irked by its lack of quality.
But that last word interested me. “Bisaya.” At face value, I got its context. For who among us here have not used this word to describe “baduy”? Let’s say a girlfriend shows off her new clothes for you, and you don’t like it—and then you say, “Bisaya kaayo uy. Pag-ilis didto.” Am I right?
But what is Bisaya? It is the word we give ourselves as a people, as a culture, as a language. Bisaya is us. Whatever happened along the way that a word we have used to describe ourselves as a people have come to be synonymous with the word “baduy”? How were we brainwashed to think of ourselves as the very synonym of something that’s bad?
And then I remember the badge system I had in grade school.
While on one hand I understand the good intentions of this policy—a policy still being enforced by many schools today—I cannot now help but think that it has also warped our own relationship with our native language, our native culture, and our local sense of self. When we were young, we learned to equate Binisaya with paying a fine, thus invariably molding us to think that Binisaya is bad—and hence baduy.
Paradoxically, an academic practice that taught us to be fluent in one language taught us to demean another one, a language closer to our heart, and molded Bisaya Filipinos with no appreciation at all for their culture.
But there’s also another paradox to this paradox, twisting our tale further. This immense immersion in English could also be the gateway for relearning an appreciation for the local. It could provide the spark, but only for the most discerning. The Tiempos founded the National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete in 1962, and also shaped the English Language Program and Creative Writing Program in Silliman University in the 1950s, immersing most of their students in the formal study of literature and creative writing, done almost exclusively in English. And yet many of the graduates of this program have later come to be experts and profound practitioners of writings in Binisaya. We have Merlie Alunan, Marjorie Evasco, Leoncio Derriada, Resil Mojares, Erlinda Alburo, Christine Godinez-Ortega, and Grace Monte de Ramos, among others, who not only have become champions of Binisaya literature, they have also become fervent practitioners of it. What gives? Did their immersion in the New Critical mode of literary writing give them a unique perspective that literary practice in the language of their homes was also something to be sharpened, to be considered seriously? I do not really know, but that feels right.
It took me a long time to find my way into literary writing in Binisaya. Of late, I have done some sugilanon, but it is the balak form that I most comfortable with. One thing I particularly love about Binisaya writings is the playfulness they often exhibit—an attitude you can call yaga-yaga, which limns humor even though the subject matter could be something serious, like in Cora Almerino’s “Unsaon Paggisa sa Bana Nga Nanghulga sa Asawa Nga Dili Kahibalong Moluto,” which talks about the darkness of domestic abuse, but foregrounds it with a funny take on cooking a human being, complete with a menu. This yaga-yaga attitude could very well be springing from the fact that most of our early balakeros were really men who, intoxicated with drinking too much tuba during a tagay session, would suddenly wax poetic about any subject under the merry sun.
That was exactly the reason how I came to write my first balak in Cebuano. I used to have a creative writing teacher from Canada, a woman by the name of Maya, who would take us to El Amigo, our favorite drinking place in Dumaguete, where she’d teach us the principles and practice of writing fiction and poetry over several bottles of beer. One time, while we prepared to do another writing exercise with her and just beginning to drink our first bottle of beer, Maya told us that she was going to ask us to do a particular writing exercise with us, to write a poem, during a free-writing session, in Binisaya. We protested vehemently, because we were suddenly made aware that our hold of the local language was so flimsy, we weren’t even sure if we had enough vocabulary to write an entire poem!
But she persisted, and so we grudgingly wrote—and at the end of the quick free-writing session, we found ourselves with the first balak we have ever written, much to our surprise. I didn’t know I actually knew some words that could constitute poetry, but there it was. I cannot put down that poem right now, but I’ve noticed that there were certain words there that absolutely defied the barest of interpretation to English. The word “lan-lan,” for example, which in Dumaguete Binisaya is a word you use when you take a spoon and you proceed to eat peanut butter or milk from a bottle with it. The closest English word for “lan-lan” is “lick,” but lick is “tilap”—and you can “tilap” the floor, but you can never “lan-lan” it. I realized that with just that word “lan-lan,” you have the action of licking combined with the element of pleasure, which does not have a direct translation in English.
This is Dumaguete's first ever TEDx, with writer Ian Rosales Casocot on "Language We Breathe In", sports psychologist Bing Valbuena on "The Ego is Most Challenged in Dragonboat," lawyer and LGBTQI activist Regal Oliva on "Quintessential and Queer," environmentalist and artist Ra'z Salvarita on "Artivism: Effecting Environmental Consciousness Through Art," diplomat Stacy Danika Alcantara on "Diplomacy and the City," and TV executive Oliver Amoroso on "Breaking Stereotypes: Promdi and Proud," all lecturing on "ideas worth spreading."
There’s also the word “uyog-uyog,” which means “shaking” or “bouncing,” which is good enough translation—but how unimaginative! If you take a look at the Binisaya word itself, “uyog-uyog” becomes something else. U-yog, u-yog. You pronounce it with gusto, and the word itself shakes and bounces.
And this is perhaps the greatest reason why I find there’s ultimate fulfillment in learning to write, to express yourself, in your own language: there’s no translation for the direct experience of living here, there can only be an approximation of it in English. Writing in Binisaya is writing that we can breathe in: it is our definition, it is our soul, it does not need translation to get to the heart of who we are.
Presented during TEDxSillimanU on 3 February 2018 at the Claire Isabel McGill Luce Auditorium.
Labels: binisaya, language, life, TEDx, writers, writing
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Tuesday, December 01, 2015
2:09 PM |
Can Dying Languages Be Saved?
“Our mythology is rich. Everything in our world—plants and animals, the sun and stars—has a voice. On our map of the universe, we called the East ‘the space without time.’ We had a Paleolithic skill set yet a boundless imagination. They both existed with a high degree of social conformity. Long after we dispersed, we preserved our beliefs. One precious thing, to me, about the language is its vocabulary of words for love. They change according to the age, sex, and kinship of the speakers and the nature of the emotion. There are things you can’t say in Spanish.”
~
Keyuk, the last speaker of the Selk’nam language
Read
"A Loss for Words"by Judith Thurman at
The New Yorker.
Labels: language, quotes
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
8:47 PM |
Stir, Steer.
I don't know why this suddenly came to me: a fragment of memory. High school. It must have been 1992. We were all members of the grammar police in my section. And we had one teacher -- a hapless young substitute teacher -- who kept pronouncing "stir" as "steer." It was grating in our ears. Late one afternoon, we all gathered together to make a plan. We were going to teach our substitute teacher a lesson. Every time she would say "steer," we would all say, together, "stir."
The next day:
Substitute Teacher: "Now, class this is how you 'steer' in the egg yolk..."
Us: (altogether) "Stir."
(Substitute Teacher suddenly has a confused look on her face.)
Substitute Teacher: "Umm. So now, do you know how to 'steer' in the ingredients?"
Us: (altogether) "Stir."
Substitute Teacher: (suddenly red-faced) "Eh. Umm. Do ... you ... now ... know how to ... 'stir' ... in ... the ingredients?"
High school is evil.
Labels: language, life, memories
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Monday, May 12, 2008
10:04 AM |
Dogberry Bites the House on a Hill
Have you ever begun reading a book, only to stop midway through the first chapter, and tell yourself, "I'm not mature enough to read this yet"? I have,
many times. What I do then is to put the book away, and wait ... and get a life. And then, in a month or a year, or two, I do go back -- and what usually happens next is something magical: the text suddenly becomes clear and intimate, and the book suddenly becomes a precious part of my reading life. (This sometimes happens with films, too.) What happened in the interim? Perhaps a case of simply growing up, and maturing. I know this to be true: appreciating things properly sometimes takes time and maturity, and when we bark too soon, it's really like being a dog barking at the wrong tree. Nobody wants to be a dog.
This is a good introduction to my rant below.
When I read professional blogger and
Manila Standard Today* columnist Connie Veneracion's
recent blog post on National Artist Amado Hernandez's
Mga Ibong Mandaragit a few days ago, I felt angry -- but I didn't exactly know then
how to articulate why I felt that way. Maybe because I liked the book, and found her put-down uncalled for? Maybe it was the smug way she wrote about it?
I've been teaching Philippine literature for
years now, and I have designed my [very demanding] curriculum to balance things out for my students. I take up popular (and easy-to-digest) texts such as the
ZsaZsa Zaturnnah and
Wasted comics and the poetry of Angelo Suarez. But I also take up more challenging fare like Dean Alfar's imagination-bending novel
Salamanca and the
what-the-? poetry of Paolo Manalo. I guess I am in a position to know first-hand the whole gamut of student reaction to a variety of texts. There are literary texts some students love, and there are texts they absolutely hate. None of these qualities stay fixed. Tastes change, and sometimes in the same term, too.
I have always believed that one important goal in teaching literature is to be able to take students out of their comfort zones, to push them to face new worlds and different realities. That's how you create thinkers. That's how you mould creatives. Why make them read "easy" stories that will simply reaffirm what they already know about the world? They may laugh and recognize the people in these stories, but what are you exactly teaching them? The point of art is to know new things or to see old things in a new light, to be moved or to be disturbed, to generate conversation, to make people think.
I do have students who have trouble with the written word, simply because they're not used to reading vigorously anymore. This is true in a world that's replete with television images and text messaging -- but that's an old complaint that has become stale with every repetition. (Which, of course, does not make it untrue.) A tragic majority of young people don't read books at all, and if you crawl through the thousands of Friendster profiles online, many of them even crow about being non-readers as if it was something to brag about. Crawl through these Friendster profiles again, and some would even list down, under the column of "Favorite Books," things like
Cosmopolitan magazine. Many times, asking my students to read a
short story can be a challenge. Asking them to imagine a different world in these stories -- with people whose lives don't exactly mirror their own -- is even more challenging. Asking them to read a
novel is asking for the moon.
Sometimes, they find reading stories and poems "boring" -- but in my years of teaching, I've since qualified that observation to one unacknowledged reality:
being bored over something is more often a reflection of who you are than of the quality of the text itself.There are "difficult" texts to digest, yes, but I've since found out that "digestion" is more often a matter of closely studying where students come from --
their backgrounds, their reading levels, their biases, etc. In a World Literature class, I remember once taking up the stories of Flannery O'Connor -- especially "Good Country People" and "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Many of my students
hated them. When I told them that critics actually consider these as being among the masterpieces of modern short stories, they cried,
"What?!" And
then I finally explained the stories, touching on the symbolism and the motifs and the use of language -- things that well-read people from O'Connor's time would already know. At the end, I could almost feel the palpable magic of the whole room responding to a sudden understanding. Many of them went back to reading the stories, and many of them came back to me saying they actually liked the stories this time around.
My point?
The art of appreciation is ultimately colored by where you come from, so don't judge anything -- books, paintings, music -- as being flawed, especially if you're the one who lack the tools to understand the nuances of the text at hand. Your ignorance and your personal incompetencies should not be the standard by which something should be judged with.
The same thing usually happens when I teach Manuel Arguilla's classic short story, "Midsummer." After assigning it for discussion in the next session, my students usually come back to me complaining that they hate it because "nothing happens," that the story is just about "a boy, a girl, and a carabao." I merely smile, because I know what usually happens after: in the next session, when we begin to peel the many layers of this "simple" story, they begin to see the nuances of the narrative, especially the complexities of Ading, who know more than we are led to believe, the ultimate spider spinning her web. "This is the most
igat story every written by a Filipino," I tell them. In the end, they all will nod with such smiles, having gained an ounce or more of appreciation for something they have never encountered before.
All of which explains my disgust over Connie's essay, which I won't even dignify by quoting.
And that is why I am happy with multi-Palanca awardee Exie Abola's rebuttal in his column in
Philippine Star. Read the entire thing
here, in his blog. Angela Stuart-Santiago also
calls Connie's post stupid.
* Then again, with a newspaper like this (it's also home to Malu Fernandez), why expect good columnists?
Labels: blogging, issues, language, philippine literature, writers
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Thursday, March 06, 2008
11:30 PM |
Borrowed Tongue
The Cebuano poet
Larry Ypil on his use of English amidst all this call for a return to the native: "A tongue only becomes alien when we keep it at the gate, at the door. The stranger is only as strange as when we do not know his name, and he does not know ours. Perhaps the job of the writer is not really to master his language, but to make it his own. Not just to study its syntax and shape but to invite it into his home."
Read more
here.
Labels: language, philippine literature, poetry, writers
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Thursday, February 07, 2008
9:46 PM |
The Lower House ... of Hell
Jackie Veloso-Antonio alerted me, through a curious text message, to the orgy in the pigsty last Monday: "Watch ANC, and see how our politicians are making a mockery of themselves," she wrote (and I paraphrase).
What else is new? I asked myself -- but quickly remembered, from the snatches I took from the day's headlines, that
Jose De Venecia's political career was about to go kaput in Congress sometime that day. And so I watched the televised proceedings, saw the slow motion bloodshed, and found I couldn't feel anything at all:
I've always said we deserve the politicians we keep voting into office, and this one is a perfect example of us reaping what we've sown. But it wasn't even De Venecia's fall that made my heart sink. (I mean, if you sleep with wolves, you're bound to get bitten,
eh?) It was the horribly tortured language that crept out of our con[gress]men's mouths that made me retch: every time someone went up the podium to air their reasons for their votes, they proceeded to murder the English language with such gusto, and some actually doing it thinking they were Cicero. I wanted to compile the grammatical pile-up, but I had no strength. Good think
Sir Butch (Dalisay) had the patience to do that himself. Here's
a sampling from his blog... quotable quotes from our bumbling legislators from the Lower House of Hell:
“We should vote to restore the damage which has been badly tarnished as far as the image of this house is concerned.”
“The fruits of our sacrifice is bearing fruit.”
“It is eminent that he will not be speaker in a few hour.”
And my favorite...
“Event has its own time, and time has its own events.” [The entire speech is actually worth the Arnel Salgado Purple Prose Award for Bad Writing.]
Oh, dear God. Who voted for these morons
ba?
Labels: language, life, politics
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Saturday, September 22, 2007
9:00 PM |
Good-bye, Goodbye
Reuters reports on the death of...
... the
hyphen.
The story goes: "About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.... The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books." Read more
here.
[via
philippine genre stories]
Labels: language
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Sunday, July 22, 2007
12:08 AM |
The French Has a Word for It
How come the French always has words for common strangeness?
Deja vu, for instance. Or
jolie laide, literally "ugly-pretty," which basically means an unconventional or off-key beauty. Or
esprit d'escalier, literally "the wit of the staircase," which means the the answer you cannot make till afterwards, when it suddenly comes to you but it is too late. I'm like this all the time. I have great retorts to bitchy statements and unsubtle put-downs, two hours too late.
Labels: language, life
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Thursday, June 14, 2007
12:18 PM |
Because We Understand Your Language, But You Don't Get Ours...
Bisdaks unite!
Brown Cup Coffee Shop, Asiatown I.T. Park, Lahug, Cebu City, 01 June 2007 12:53 P.M.
Guy 1: Bai, welcome to Cebu. Here to visit Daisy?
Guy 2: Ha ha! Shut up, pare. I was texting her kanina, teasing her about her Boracay pics sa friendster niya. Tapos she replied na amaw daw ako. Pare, what’s amaw?
Guy 1: It means you are cool, charming.
Guy 2: Ah okay.
Ahahaha![from
himantayon]
Labels: language
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