The lowdown on writing in English

It’s hard to overlook the fact of our longstanding, love-hate relationship with the English language.

On the one hand you have staunch nationalists, advocates of nativism, some fiction writers and students of literature, nobly (or naively) clamoring for a return to our language roots, despite the fact that more often than not, they speak English better than the rest of us.

Meanwhile, you have housewives code-switching to English when wanting to inflict the full force of their superiority over helpless household help or unwitting street vendors  even when their use of the language barely reaches the thresholds of comprehension. Go figure.

To be sure, in a country where almost everyone can speak and understand the tiniest fragments of English, and where almost everyone actually uses said language, it’s hard to imagine ever drawing the line on our continued usage of it in the near future. In fact, as we go further along the path of globalization, modernization, and all those other words usually equated with progress; English, as our country’s second language, can only be pushed to the fore.

Supposedly, one glaring issue that arises is the matter of national identity being crushed in the wake of our mass adoption of English (if it hasn’t already been crushed by the weight of our decidedly Western-oriented consumer culture, that is). After all, when a language dies, so does its civilization. I’ve come to realize, however, that while this issue is completely valid, it’s also completely paranoid.

Breaking news: Herald the first batch of Engish newspapers. Photo credits: Missosology Kelakitchen.wordpress

I’m one of the many (or is it few?) kids of this generation who regret not being able to speak or write properly in the local language (in my case, Tagalog), and who has questioned the Filipino-ness of her identity in light of this many times. The culmination of this angst can be seen from an article I wrote a while back during Linggo ng Wika  an article I had to write in Taglish, if you get what I’m saying.

Indeed, it used to be one huge guilt-trip for me, blown into existentialist proportions precisely because of the fact that I do love my country  even if its leaders leave much to be desired at this point. But one learns a lot in a year, and the awesome thing about having studied under a few of the country’s great literary writers in English (one of whom also writes for this paper), is that you know you aren’t alone.

After all, can you condemn someone as “un-nationalistic” for writing in English, when the topics they write about are the very social ills plaguing the country? And on that note, what is national identity anyway? Is there really any pure Filipino culture that can be salvaged from the colonial and neo-colonial wreckage? Also, we have more than 120 languages in the country, not to mention the vast array of regional dialects found throughout our archipelago. Is speaking and writing in English really that big an affront to being Filipino, when Tagalog in itself already implies marginalization for the other languages?

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It was during the era of the 1920s when the writing scene in English first started to flourish; understandable enough since US presence in the country had more or less settled by then. You had the founding of English-language newspapers and magazines like the Philippine Herald, Philippine Magazine, and later the Manila Tribune and Graphic, among others. You had Paz Marquez Benitez and her seminal piece “Dead Stars,” regarded as the first modern short story written by a Filipino writer in English; and you also had Jose Garcia Villa, with his mellifluous poems, art for art’s sake mantra, and his almost-bid for the Pultizer Prize, losing only to American poet Robert Frost.

Fast-forward to the ‘50s and ‘60s  without a doubt the golden age of our country’s literature in English. You can forget all else about your history of Philippine literature, but it would be a travesty to forget the four giants of our literary history in English. There was Nick Joaquin, probably the most famous of them all, a conservative whose English had a unique Spanish ring to it, and who began a whole new school of creative non-fiction in the country  even before Truman Capote started breaking ground in the US. There was NVM Gonzalez, the country boy from Romblon whose short story “Bread of Salt” you’ve probably read in more than one collection of anthologies; Francisco Arcellana, a liberal who wrote cutting-edge prose for his time; and Bienvenido Santos, the “Smiling Buddha,” who eventually moved to the US where he became one of the pioneers of Asian-American writing there.

This boom lasted for two glorious decades, until the second propaganda movement of the ‘70s, where the surge of nationalistic fervor turned English into a medium that was frowned upon. English was the colonial language, and therefore, pushed to the side. And it is this kind of thinking, which remains up to the present, is precisely what I’ve been trying to debunk here.

The use of English may continue to haunt us… but identity is a malleable thing. By now, we’ve appropriated it in such a way that it has actually become an underlying part of our culture, and not just the property of Britain or the US anymore. Sure, the words and rules of grammar and syntax that we practice are decidedly no different from that of the West. However, the English we use here is not the same as the English used there, in the same way that the English used in India is not the English used in England. It’s confusing, I know, but it makes sense when one considers the special kind of accent Pinoys inevitably flaunt when speaking in English, as well as the way in which we’ve managed to invent a whole new lexicon through our use of Taglish and all other local combinations in between. Of course, let’s not forget the vibrant scene of our literature in English, arguably one of the more elegant  not to mention brilliant  manifestations of the way we’ve appropriated the language throughout history.

Indeed, after the no-English mentality of the ‘70s and the lull in literary production during the Marcos-era, the age of the Internet  the ‘90s and beyond  has shown itself to be another kind of Renaissance; a period of re-Americanization, perhaps, but one that turned drastically away from the colonial gaze, allowing our writers to come into their own. With the return of English as the vogue, stories have relaxed in a way, with more diverse themes and a willingness to experiment.

This in itself poses a whole new dilemma for young writers, who, being out of the turbulent era of social change and revolution, have been criticized as being out of touch with the problems of Philippine society today. But that’s a topic for another time.

Let’s forget English as a language of oppression and all that jazz. We own it now, for all intents and purposes, and the burden is on us to use it as a tool for our country, not against it.