A testimonial to alienation

I don’t particularly relish taking on vexatious subjects in a Monday-morning column that’s supposed to leave people smiling instead of frowning, but I’ve been asked once again for my opinion about an essay on language that’s been burning a hole in our corner of the Internet.

The media-savvy will know what I’m talking about—it’s that piece by a young Filipino named James Soriano titled “Language, Learning, Identity, Privilege” that was published on another newspaper’s website. It drew many responses, quite a number of them negative, and the controversy was such that the entry was reportedly taken down but later reinstated. (A little Googling should bring up a copy easily.)

So what did James say that got people all worked up? Let me go over the essay and comment on it as I might had it been submitted to my class. (Just to make this clear, I don’t know James Soriano or what his circumstances are, although I gather from internal clues in the essay that he studies or studied at the Ateneo.) I hope James doesn’t mind if I quote from his essay.

He begins by laying out his thesis — “English is the language of learning” — and by acknowledging English as the language he grew up with, with the active encouragement of his mother:

“My mother made home conducive to learning English: all my storybooks and coloring books were in English, and so were the cartoons I watched and the music I listened to. She required me to speak English at home. She even hired tutors to help me learn to read and write in English.”

This, he went on to say, was reinforced in school:

“In school I learned to think in English. We used English to learn about numbers, equations and variables. With it we learned about observation and inference, the moon and the stars, monsoons and photosynthesis. With it we learned about shapes and colors, about meter and rhythm. I learned about God in English, and I prayed to Him in English.”

So far, he’s describing a fairly common Filipino middle- and upper-class phenomenon — perhaps troubling to me as an academic, but common: the urge to push kids to study English (and sometimes only English) because it’s supposedly one’s ticket to success in this globalized world and globalized century. I’ll have more to say about this in a while.

James then switches to a discussion of Filipino, which he describes as the “language of the world outside the classroom, the language of the streets,” the other language, the other subject. He admits to finding it difficult to study in school, but also says that he’s proud to be able to speak it well enough to communicate not only with the househelp, but also with provincial relatives.

Here, James pushes an emotional hot button, and has many of his readers sputtering “Elitist!” and “Snob!” But again, James is only describing the social truth: we are bringing up and training many of our kids to join the social, economic, and political elite, which has spoken English as its language for the past century, and wears English proficiency as its badge of honor.

In what to me is the essay’s most insightful paragraph, James says that “Only recently have I begun to grasp Filipino as the language of identity: the language of emotion, experience, and even of learning. And with this comes the realization that I do, in fact, smell worse than a malansang isda. My own language is foreign to me: I speak, think, read and write primarily in English. To borrow the terminology of Fr. Bulatao, I am a split-level Filipino.”

Had the essay ended here, or very shortly after, it would have been perfect as a confession of sorts, as the testimony of a self-aware Filipino alienated within his own society by his family’s and even by the educational system’s single-minded insistence on English as the key to success and happiness. Those who’ve heaped scorn on James for raising himself above the common lot are glossing over this key point: James realizes and acknowledges his alienation, which is frankly more than what many Filipinos in his situation seem to be capable of.

Unfortunately, the essay cops out in the end, with the author heaving a sigh of relief that, in effect, he was born into the English-speaking side of things, with all its pluses. James closes by writing that Filipino “might have the capacity to be the language of learning, but it is not the language of the learned…. I may be disconnected from my being Filipino, but with a tongue of privilege I will always have my connections. So I have my education to thank for making English my mother language.”

It’s an awful and perplexing turn in the argument. Up to that point the essay had promised at least some form of reconciliation, but James inexplicably retreats into his basic premise, the rather plain if annoying statement that “I’m lucky to be privileged.” I read a comment somewhere that perhaps James was being satirical or even sardonic here, but that tone isn’t set up, and runs against the bare-all earnestness with which he has been writing all along. The lyrical eloquence of some of the earlier paragraphs is squandered by the ending’s pedestrian sentiment.

My conclusion? The essay needs more thinking-through — if I were his professor, I’d sit James down to ask “So what is it you really want to say, and what’s the most important point your readers should get from this experience?” — but so do the commentaries, which mainly dwell on Filipino’s being put down as “the language of the streets” and not being “the language of the learned.” That sounds like an insult, but if so, it isn’t James’ fault but our society and its priorities, which have made it the truth for the most part. (Of course, Filipino is the language of many of my learned friends and colleagues at university, but they’d be the first to say that their numbers could be better.)

The real tragedy of the James Soriano episode for me is that despite both the academic and anecdotal evidence, many Filipinos keep clinging to the illusion that only English will save us, and that any proposal to promote Filipino and other Philippine languages in the classroom alongside English is a step back into the jungle.

I’m a professor of English and a former chairman of our English department, but like many Filipino educators, I believe in a bilingual — indeed, a multilingual — policy, not only because it’s nationalistic, but because it works, and is kinder to the child in the long term. I’ve seen how raising children solely in English in the hope of turning them into “globalized” Filipinos can result in producing alienated, socially maimed individuals who can’t relate to their own people and who don’t feel a stake in their own country’s future. When I teach English or such subjects as American Literature, I remind my students that we’re taking up the subject not to try and become Americans, but to become better Filipinos.

I have no problem valuing and promoting English as the language of global business, as something we need to master if we want to make it out there (in this century, we might even be better off studying Chinese); indeed we should master English so it doesn’t master us.

As a creative writer in English, I love the language as a craftsman values his materials. In my own twist on the aesthetic value of writing in another language, I find working with English both challenging and interesting precisely because it can’t possibly fully capture the realities I’m representing — and in that breach lie possibilities for artmaking. When I write in Filipino, I relax, feeling no need to pretend to be anything but myself. (Yes, after half a century of using it, I’m still aware that I’m creating a persona, a social mask, every time I write and speak English.)

James was right when he called himself a “split-level Filipino.” Many of us are, and the sooner we acknowledge it the sooner we can deal with it and even turn it to our advantage. Unfortunately, some of us don’t know it, don’t know what to do about it, or just plain don’t care. That’s far sorrier than an essay gone astray.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.