Can FPJ and Noli de Castro argue in English?

If they can’t then they have no business running for president. It is sheer hypocrisy to say that Tagalog is the national language – it is not, not for as long as the language of government, of business, of cultural intercourse is English – not Tagalog. This is the fact of Filipino life – the language of instruction in the universities is English, the major newspapers are in English, the scientific and intellectual discourse is English. Therefore the well trained and educated Filipino is an English speaker.

Why English?

We have been using it for a hundred years. We have made it our own and only the staunchest chauvinist will deny this. Some five decades ago, I was visiting one of the villages in Ifugao close to Banaue. A couple of tourists were with us. It was early evening when we reached the village. There was a wake in one of the houses, and the deceased, an old patriarch, was propped up, seated on a chair below the house. The tourists wondered aloud if they could take pictures of the corpse. To which the oldest daughter of the dead man – bare breasted, her arms tattooed – replied in perfect English. "You may take pictures, sir, but please send us copies."

My mother, the single most important influence in my life, looked like any ordinary peasant woman. She wore handwoven skirts and rough cotton kimonas. She never wore shoes, but those thick-soled slippers we called cochos – they don’t make them anymore. But she finished grade seven and in the early part of the last century, those who finished primary school could teach. When my kids were growing up, she often amazed them with her excellent command of the language.

In those 300 years that we were a Spanish colony, we never really got to know Spanish so that our landmark literature in that language, Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo were read not by the masa, but by the Spanish hierarchs themselves and the few ilustrados who knew Spanish. It was they whom Rizal targeted as his audience – he had also made Spanish his own and couldn’t write as well in his native Tagalog which he tried to do with his third unfinished novel.

The American Experience

The Americans who came in 1898 had a different policy – they established a public school system and the language of instruction was English. There were several advantages of this policy – they helped unite a very diverse people with so many languages – about 70 of them, with seven major ones.

It was inevitable therefore that my generation and even those before me were taught English.

Our first literary models were the standard fare of American public schools, Longfellow, O Henry. It was much later, in college and on our own, that we read the real icons of American letters, authors like Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Hemingway, Steinbeck and from England, Shakespeare, Joseph Conrad and Dickens, and English translations of Western classics, the Homeric poems, Flaubert, Victor Hugo and all the others.

By the ’30s we already had a body of literature in English that was robust, readable and brilliant. Short story writers like Paz Latorena, Paz Marquez Benitez and Manuel Arguilla had made their mark. In the essay, Salvador P. Lopez, Francisco B. Icasiano, Alfredo Efren Litiatco, and Federico Mangahas were at their best. Jose Garcia Villa had elicited a ruckus at the University of the Philippines and had gone into exile in the United States.

And after World War II: NVM Gonzalez, Ben Santos and Nick Joaquin led the new generation of writers in English.

The English Connection

In the late Sixties, the British Council invited my wife and I to visit Britain for a month and some images of that visit still linger in the mind. I recall how we were met at Heathrow in a limo as big as a truck, the Vanden Plas Princess. I was introduced to kidney pie about which I have read and found it an abomination. Yorkshire pudding was so ordinary, it was no pudding at all, but I found the roast beef better than anywhere, and kippers for breakfast most interesting – it could have been Filipino if it was served with fried rice. And most invigorating walks along Russell Square where so many of the antiquarian bookshops were, among them, my favorite, Probstain’s – I hope it is still there. My. Probstain, the owner, gave me a flashlight when I went to the basement to look at those cobwebbed shelves, and when I went up, he gave me a cake of soap to wash my hands with.

I read with great fondness Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley and it helped me pattern my novel about boyhood, Tree, so I asked to see Wales, where the novel was set. We visited Cardiff, the hometown of one my favorite singers, Shirley Bassey, and Tenby. For the first time, I saw the moors and the images in Wuthering Heights come alive. Then Oxford – my most memorable stay was in the oldest hotel ever that I visited, the Mitre, so old that the wooden stairs listed. The best bookshop – Blackwell’s. We were taken to the Bodleian Library which the librarian said had the best collection on literature anywhere. I asked to see Nick’s books and mine but he couldn’t locate them. There were no computers then. Then he asked in what language we wrote and I said, English. He took us to the English shelves and sure enough, we were there, together with James Joyce and Henry James.

This is most instructive for it means all of us who write in English are part of the English tradition, from Beowulf, to Shakespeare, to Emerson, Hemingway and Rabindranath Tagore. It is easy to accept this, but I must continually remind myself that my tradition is also my village, the Ilokano nation, Rizal who wrote in Spanish and Arguilla who wrote in English.

Social Criticism

Reading me, one of our foremost literary critics, Bien Lumbera, also said I belong to the Filipino vernacular tradition because of the "searing social criticism" in my work, one of the defining characteristics of vernacular writing.

A young writer asked if I was insulted by being lumped together with Tagalog, Ilokano and Bisaya writers. I said I would be if I belonged to the artsy fartsy group of writers in English, some of them in academe, influenced as they are by the latest literary fads abroad. A real gulf exists between them and we vernacular writers for their concern for craft and craft alone has isolated them from society itself. The vernacular writers are very close to the land; to the masa for which reason they cannot avoid being social critics as well. I am very happy and proud to have joined them.

Much of the contemporary writing in English abroad leaves me cold. American writers like John Updike, John Cheever – to my mind, what they produced is the trivia of suburbia. This is not to say that I have not found something in American lit that I can identify with – Toni Morrison, for instance, or Bernard Malamud and James Baldwin.

Even Indian writing in English such as Ved Mehta’s or Vikram Seth’s – they write about those Indian middle class dilemmas, very entertaining and enlightening, no doubt but they barely touch on the grave social issues that afflict the subcontinent. I am so eager to read the new literature of the lower castes which, I have heard is troubling but also filled with passion.

I can say the same of some contemporary English writers like Julian Barnes; Kazuo Ishiguro is terribly over rated but Ben Okri is fabulous. I couldn’t finish The English Patient. I look behind the excellent prose and find nothing I can really sink my teeth in. There is one English writer, far better than William Boyd and I wish he were here now, James Hamilton Paterson who writes in the tradition of Lawrence Durrell.

In fact, it is these writers of more than a generation ago who speak to me loudly and clearly, DH Lawrence and farther back, Charles Dickens and Joseph Conrad who wrote of the pith of life in their time.

A caveat to our own writers who, if they are Filipinos, rooted in this country and in the travails and experiences of our people, must always be contextual bearing in mind that they are writing for Filipinos, not the world at large.

I consider it our duty as writers to read not just our literature but the literature of other countries. But in doing so, we must not be waylaid into imitating them, into taking them as our role models, into aping their themes. They belong to societies whose problems are so different from ours. They are rich, we are poor.

I know for a fact that political novels, or novels with a heavy underpinning of social criticism are passe in the United States and Britain, and verbal pyrotechnics are what attract so many Western readers today, to wit Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

But my generation went through the novels of William Faulkner and it is for this reason that I couldn’t finish a Hundred Years of Solitude or The English Patient. I waded through that prolix prose 40 years ago.

English will remain our mainstream literature for generations to come.

But back to our truncated politics and the ambitions of some pretentious characters.

I don’t want my president to be one of us: I want him above most of us in intelligence, in virtue, in his capacity and determination to act. I want to be proud of my president, not to be ashamed of him, particularly when foreigners ask about him. And most of all, I want him to be able to express himself in English, not because I write in English, but because English is the lingua franca of the world.