Tag Archives: language

Qwertyman No. 132: A False Horizon

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Qwertyman for Monday, February 10, 2025

I DON’T know why, but like the proverbial bad penny that keeps turning up (English teachers: note the British idiom), every few years, some Filipino school announces its adoption of an “English-only” language policy on its campus, ostensibly in the service of a sublime objective such as “global competitiveness” or “global competence.”

This time around, it’s the Pamantasan ng Cabuyao that’s enforcing the rule. PNC president Librado Dimaunahan has issued a memo declaring that “In line with our vision of developing globally competitive and world class students, the Pamantasan ng Cabuyao (University of Cabuyao) is now an English-speaking campus starting Feb. 03, 2025…. All transactions and engagements with officers, students, employees, and workers should be communicated in English, whether written or otherwise. For strict compliance.” What he wanted to create was no less than “a strong English-speaking environment.” 

A few years ago, it was Cavite State University which required its students, teachers and staff to speak exclusively in English or face punishments like getting your ID confiscated and having to sing the CvSU hymn (in English, of course). Filipino could be used only by maintenance workers—and by others, but only in the restrooms and cafeteria.

I’m not going to add to the brickbats that these ideas have already received, not unreasonably. But I will add my two cents’ worth (my, where do these “brickbats” and “two cents” come from?) to the conversation, as a lifelong user and teacher of the language.

I have a PhD in English—something I don’t often bring up because it sounds so pompous and presumptuous—earned in America where, to my smug satisfaction and my classmates’ consternation, my professor would single out my prose for, among others, its perfect punctuation. I was the only one in our graduate literature class who could explain the difference between parataxis and hypotaxis (no, nothing to do with Yellow Cabs and Uber). Was that global competitiveness? I guess so. Was I proud of my English language skills? Of course. Did it make me or the Philippines any richer? Not a dollar more. Is this what a national language policy should be about? Heck, no.

I’ve done well in English not because I was forced to, but because I love the language, and languages in general. I should have loved Spanish—discovering its beauty too late, when I had to read and translate Federico Garcia Lorca for a grad-school exam—but I didn’t, because we had been forced by our curriculum to take so many units of it (24, in my mother’s time). I started on German and French in high school and college and am picking German up again on Duolingo, in preparation for the forthcoming Frankfurt Book Fair. (I write plays and screenplays in Filipino, despite being born in Romblon.)

What I’ve realized from studying these languages and from a lifetime of writing, speaking, and using English is that in our country of over a hundred languages, English can’t be taught and learned well by exclusively using English. I’m learning German on Duolingo using English.

I don’t mind saying that when I teach creative writing or literature in English, I pause when my students can’t seem to understand what the text is saying—and then we pursue the same line of inquiry in Filipino, and everybody goes “Ah!” It makes simple teaching sense. You can’t get more out of a student—in English—if he or she can’t understand or even recognize the problem, in English. 

And just to be clear, these are questions of comprehension and interpretation that even native speakers of English would have a hard time with. (How do I know? I taught the American short story to American undergraduates in Wisconsin.) These are questions like “So what’s John Updike saying about the position of the rebel or nonconformist in society at the end of his story ‘A&P’?” That’s best answerable if you also discuss as we do what America was like in the 1960s, with Vietnam, Woodstock, the civil rights movement, and the moon landing in the background. (I always tell my students that we’re not studying American literature and history to become Americans, but to become better and wiser Filipinos.) 

Boomers like me like to recall that in many private schools of our time, students were fined five centavos for every instance they were caught using Filipino. Some may find that quaint or even charming, but if you think anyone learned and loved English because of these stupid rules, think again. Students learn good English from good teachers who don’t teach English as a grammar rulebook but as a road map or even a cheat sheet to an adventure.

English is best learned along the way of learning something else—like how the world works, in science and literature—as a key to unlocking knowledge and meaning. English proficiency all by itself is a non-goal, a false horizon that can delude people into believing that they’ve arrived. Arrived where? What for?

All the English in the world isn’t going to turn the Philippines into an economic powerhouse—which Japan, China, Russia, and Germany managed to become without a mandatory word of English in their curricula from decades back. Better English could make us become more employable as waiters, domestic helpers, and seamen—and I’m not downplaying this, because the language does give us an advantage in those markets—but these jobs, noble as they are, aren’t what universities were made for.

All the English in the world isn’t going to drive a moral spine up the backs of our leaders. Intolerable as it was, one president’s foul mouth and boorish manners may not be far worse than a General Appropriations Act legitimizing the wholesale thievery of people’s money in perfectly edited English. 

We can speak all we want with an American accent—only to realize that, in Trump’s America, where one of his appointees has declared pointblank that “It takes a competent white man to get things done right,” the color of your skin still matters more than whether you can pronounce “Adirondack” or “tortoise” correctly. Trump’s maniacal edicts and pronouncements—cutting foreign aid, expelling Palestinians so he can turn Gaza into an American beach resort, and turning the FBI and the DOJ into his personal security force and loyalty police—have all been made in his lazy, slurring English, each word delivering chaos and disaster with as much consequence as Hitler’s Nuremberg rants.

More shameful than lack of proficiency in English is lack of proficiency in one’s own language, which I see in the children of parents anxious to “globalize” their kids without mooring them first in their own culture. Those children will be maimed for life, insulated from and unable to communicate with or relate to their common countrymen. We need our own languages to understand ourselves.

Teach good values and good citizenship. Even if that student’s English turns out less than stellar, our country can’t be worse off.

Qwertyman No. 66: Beyond Reportage

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 6, 2023

IT WAS probably fitting that I finished reading Patricia Evangelista’s highly acclaimed account of “murder in my country,” Some People Need Killing (Random House, 2023), over a holiday devoted to remembering the souls of the departed. I had received a pre-publication review copy from the publisher months ago under a strict embargo not to talk about it until its formal launch. As it happened, it lay under a pile of other books to be read until a flurry of posts and reviews reminded me that it was out in the open, and that the secret—not just the book, but also what it contained—could now be shared.

I can still recall the day—May 15, 2004—while we were celebrating Pahiyas in Lucban when I got the news on my phone that our representative to the English Speaking Union’s annual public speaking competition in London—a bright and pretty wisp of a teenager named Patricia Evangelista—had won the top prize. We were new to the ESU—subsequently we would produce two more global champions—and it was a grand way to announce to the world that we Filipinos could produce more than boxing heroes and beauty queens. Here was 18-year-old Patricia who could think on her feet and speak to issues of international importance, the poster child of Filipino intelligence and audacity, whose command of the English language led her to meeting no less than Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, in what amounted to a mini-coronation in recognition of her talent.

As magical as that moment was, I can only imagine how, in the months and years following, it must have begun to grate on the young Patricia to be asked to deliver her prizewinning speech in public forums over and over again, like a wind-up doll, and suffer the fate of prodigies who peak too soon. Surely that was just a beginning; surely there was more she could do—had to do—to outlive her Cinderella-like debut in London. 

I would see some of that when she enrolled in my undergraduate Fiction Writing class in UP. I knew who she was and made sure to give her no special treatment—indeed to lean even a little harder on her, knowing she had what it took—but she got a “1.0” all the same, one of the few I ever gave. I can’t claim to have taught her much how to write imaginatively—her own reading had likely primed her for that—but I can’t pretend not to be proud of what she turned out to be, my pride tempered only by fatherly concern.

Today, almost 20 years later, the sometime ingénue returns to the global stage as a hard-bitten, chain-smoking investigative reporter—a “trauma journalist,” in her own words, very possibly one of the world’s best yet again. But there is no real prize, no princely reward, for this kind of distinction, only pain and sorrow which—subdued too many times as a matter of professional discipline—exact their toll on the body and spirit. Patricia has had to suffer that to be able to tell her story as clearly as she could, unimpeded by the hand-wringing and the preachiness that often accompany such exposés of grave misconduct. 

This is not a review of the book’s explosive investigation into the thousands of extrajudicial killings that happened under the Duterte regime—that’s been done very capably by others, and is already the subject of international inquiry. The book will deserve all the journalistic accolades coming its way as an exemplar of excellent reportage. 

I will not even quote from the book, as there are simply too many quotable paragraphs to choose from. Rather, I want to note, from my privileged perspective and for the benefit of younger writers, how Patricia works with language to best serve the truth. Quite apart from its journalistic merits, Some People Need Killing is one of the best textbooks out there for what we now call “creative nonfiction,” a compound of reportage, memoir, history, and fictional technique. Indeed, beyond reportage, the book is a long personal essay in which the author is inextricably part of the story, a significant step away from the impersonal and largely mythic “objectivity” that we associate with traditional journalism.

Probing murder after ghastly murder—sometimes even coming on-scene to prevent one—Patricia is both chronicler and agent, witness perhaps not to the killing itself but to the larger crime of its planning and the exoneration of its perpetrators. Handling the most sensitive and dangerous of material, she draws on more than skill to tell her story; she demonstrates raw courage, an increasingly rare quality among journalists easily seduced and silenced by pragmatism. She names names, which surely will bear consequences both ways. 

I’ve often remarked in my lectures that the most endangered writers in this country are neither the poets nor the novelists, but the journalists who cannot hide behind metaphor and simile to tell the truth. We fictionists make artful lies which governments rarely have the intelligence or the patience to grapple with. Journalists live in the literal world inhabited as well by cops and crooks; what’s interesting is how the flimsy but oft-repeated fictions of “killed while resisting arrest,” so pervasive in this book, emerge from that reality.

Evangelista’s overarching technique is one of narrative restraint, informed by an English major’s awareness of how language and reality shape each other. She constantly parses the perversions of language—how words like disappear, salvage, encounter, verification, and even her own name assume different uses and meanings over time, in specific contexts. She knows—as I remind my students—that for dramatic effect, less is often more, that short sentences and blunt, single-syllable Anglo-Saxon words rather than the long, Latinate ones favored by lawyers hit closer to the gut and heart.

She is keenly aware of the power of irony—of professed liberals supporting EJK, of a morally ascendant Noynoy Aquino showing little empathy for ordinary folk, of her own journalist-grandfather affixing his signature to a petition supporting the older Marcos, and of communal complicity in the reign of terror. She uses people’s own words against them, quoting from the record. She avoids direct editorializing, or speaking in lofty generalizations like “justice” and “civil liberties,” and instead, in the best noir tradition, sees “sagging two-story tenement buildings (that) opened into dirt roads layered with garbage and last week’s rotten Happy Meal.”

After I had finished the book, I woke up at 4 am from a nightmare about running shirtless down a wet, earthen road. I was lucky. Patricia Evangelista lived through it, and I don’t even know if she’s woken up yet. Have we?

(Image from Rappler.com)

Penman No. 366: A Little Learning

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Penman for Monday, August 12, 2019

 

I KNOW and can appreciate the effort (and maybe even the talent) that it takes to add two or three little letters to your name, which are supposed to suddenly make you look ten times more learned than you were before. For the record, I picked up my PhD in English back in 1991 when I was 37, a few years after I got my MFA (or Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing).

Why am I parading these academic credentials? Because it’s something I hardly ever do, or need to do—except when… but I’ll get to that in a minute. Let me just say, before anyone gets the wrong idea, that among the real, practicing writers I know (even those with PhDs), a PhD is worth about as much as a flyleaf or an empty page in a book. You can get a PhD in English or Literature or Creative Writing after a lot of patient study and writing a ton of intelligent-sounding papers, but the degree won’t guarantee that you can or will write an outstanding novel or book of poems.

Some of us spend an extra five to six years after the master’s anyway to go after the PhD, basically because nearly every university today requires it if you plan on teaching in college as a career besides writing, and because, well, some of us just want to study and write some more under pressure. You could call it the love of learning, which has become strangely irrelevant to many people in this age of tunnel-vision efficiency. At least that’s how I remember my own time in graduate school in Michigan and Wisconsin, when I would madly read two books in one day, exhilarated more by the obscure and bloody excesses of Elizabethan revenge tragedy than by any kind of practical expectation.

I recalled those heady moments when, a few weeks ago, I stumbled on a post in a forum I belong to, one devoted to collecting vintage typewriters, from a fellow we’ll call Dickie. Dickie shared an interesting note about his icon—the famously abrasive science fiction writer Harlan Ellison (1934-2018; that’s him in the pic, c/o Variety)—who used typewriters well into the age of laptops, and who supposedly asserted, as some typewriter folk are wont to do, that using computers to write was BS, because computers produced bad, lazy writing. Dickie presented himself as a writer—a claim I’m happy to accept and respect, until proven otherwise—and took Ellison’s word as proof positive that, well, people like him who used typewriters were therefore better writers than the rest of mankind (I’m using a bit of hyperbole here, but you get the point).

Maybe I should’ve known better, but I submitted a gentle rejoinder to say that, with all due respect to Mr. Ellison, that was BS, too—good writers adjust to the tools at hand, and I was willing to bet the house that 99% of all the best novels of the past 20 years, going by anyone’s list, were written on computers. I myself had gone through the whole gamut from handwritten manuscripts to typescripts to computer printouts, and while each technique had its advantages, nothing allowed revision—so essential to good writing—as easily as the computer. Tut, tut, Dickie messaged back: I had better rethink what I just said, because “I’m better educated about literature than you.”

That was kinder than what he told another forum member who queried him about the precarious quality of his own prose, which he promptly withdrew from public viewing, remarking instead on his critic’s mammaries. Still, it set off a little explosion in my head—not because it couldn’t possibly be true (I’d be the first to say that I know zilch about literary theory, for example, which went in one ear and out the other, and that I’ll take Maugham over Murakami anytime), but because he could make statements like that with absolutely no idea whom he was talking to. I was on the forum using a pseudonym (to avoid having to deal with “friends”), and even if I had used my real name, I doubt that it would have rung a bell in his insular brain. I could’ve been TS Eliot, Chinua Achebe, or Susan Sontag, and he would’ve said the same thing.

Again, I have an extremely modest estimate of my own erudition, and I’m not given to flame wars, but in this case I just had to let fly a salvo of demurrers to put a presumptuous, uhm, Dickie in his place: “If,” I said, “you took your PhD in Literature before 1991, published more than 35 books, and taught literature and creative writing for more than 35 years, then indeed, sir, you are very likely better educated about literature than I am. Back to typewriters, shall we?” After a pregnant pause, he huffed: “English is NOT my second language.” I imagined a worm retreating into its burrow, but before it could vanish completely, I posted: “Ah, yes, it’s only my second language—but there’s a third, and a fourth.”

I was tempted to ask, “Pray tell, and please correct this second-language learner if he’s wrong, but would ‘puerile asininity’ best describe your attitude?” But I let it go at that—the moderators kicked him off the forum shortly afterward, for more egregious misbehavior.

Once, as an exchange professor in an American liberal-arts college, I attended a welcome party where a kind-looking lady walked up to the obvious foreigner to make him feel at home. “So what are you teaching?” she asked sweetly. “The American Short Story,” I said. Her eyes widened in utter disbelief. I smiled and excused myself.

It really doesn’t mean much, but maybe I should trot out that PhD more often.

 

Penman No. 229: Our Waking Dream—Why We Need Language and Literature

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Penman for Monday, December 12, 2016

(This is the full version of a Powerpoint presentation I summarized for my Penman column, and I’m reproducing it here to share the visuals as well, culled from various sources on the Internet; if any of these images are copyrighted, I will be glad to take them down on request, thanks!) 

THANK YOU all for this kind invitation to share some of my thoughts with you today on “The Crucial Role of Language and Literature in the New GE Program.”

I could stand here for the next 20 minutes and deliver the standard academic lecture on why we need to put literature on the GE curriculum. But it would be the kind of lecture you would have heard dozens of times before, filled with the kind of platitudes you could recite in your sleep.

To give you an idea of what this talk could have sounded like, let me quote from what one of my alma maters, the University of Wisconsin, says about the need for literary study:

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“Because literary study involves the four processes of reading, thinking, discussing, and writing, its practical pedagogical value lies in its tendency to stimulate these activities and thereby improve the student’s ability to perform them. Careful reading increases one’s vocabulary and general verbal sensitivity and sophistication. In the classroom, the teacher can lead the student to think critically about what has been read. Classroom discussions sharpen reading and thinking skills and increase the student’s ability to express thoughts orally. The teacher can then use these processes to stimulate in students the desire to organize and record thoughts in writing. Thus the study of literature can be seen as practical intellectual discipline. It directly involves the student in the analysis of difficult literary texts, and in doing so it develops verbal skills which are transferable to other contexts. In other words, a person trained in the study of literature will be better equipped than most to read, comprehend, and analyze other kinds of texts (newspapers, reports, briefs, etc.). This is why, for example, English majors make such highly qualified candidates for law school.” (http://www.uwstout.edu/english/lit_study.cfm)

I’m sure this all makes perfect sense—indeed, that’s this whole session in a nutshell. Just to belabor the point, of course we need literature, because our students can’t live by math or physics alone. Besides, teachers of literature need jobs.

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But humor me for a minute and allow me to move away from the ridiculously obvious and the brain-deadeningly pedantic reasons, and return to the roots of why literature is important in the first place—in or out of the classroom, in or out of the GE program.

This will be a very short talk, and if you miss anything, don’t worry—at the end of my presentation, I’ll give a copy to the organizers to share with you. So you don’t even need to take notes; just listen.  I won’t be quoting from Shakespeare, or citing any eminent scholars with hyphenated European names. Begging your indulgence, I will simply construct the argument as I would teach it in my own class, on the topic of “Why are we studying literature?”

To begin with, we’re often told that like the other arts, “Literature is what makes us human.” But what exactly does that mean? How does literature humanize us?

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Literature relies on language, and other animals possess and command a form of language, too. Whales, monkeys, elephants, and birds communicate, presumably for the most basic things—food, sex, danger. We might even call their most basic utterances words and phrases of a kind, performing a clear and practical function. They form sequences of meaning, like saying, “There is food down there” or “I want to make a little baby with you.”

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This is language, but it’s not literature as we know literature. Why not? Because literature requires imagination—dreaming of things beyond the immediate and the practical—and furthermore, a medium of transmission and preservation of the products of that imagination. We’re told that animals can dream, but they can’t record and communicate these dreams like we do.

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Literature is our waking dream, a dream we describe and share through words. These dreams—these stories we make up in our minds—can teach, can delight, can disturb, can enrage, can exalt. They can remember and can therefore preserve our memories—our thoughts and feelings—as individuals and as a race.

As far as I know, no other species—nothing and no one else—can do this. Literature makes us human, because it allows us to tell stories that make sense of our lives, even stories that never happened, except in our imaginations, which also makes belief in things like Paradise possible.

Without literature, we cannot acknowledge and even talk about our inner selves, our inner lives. That’s something math or physics can’t do—at least not in the way of a poet or a novelist. The appreciation of beauty belongs to this realm of the imaginary, the recognition of pleasing and meaningful patterns in the seemingly abstract.

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The magic of literature lies in how it deals with reality and reason through fantasy and the imagination, and approaches the truth through make-believe, or what we might call the artistic lie. Literature can make use of use of things that don’t exist or things that never happened to talk about things that do—because reality is often too painful to confront directly. As one of my own teachers put it, art (or literature) is “the mirror of Perseus.”

That’s because—if you recall the story of the Gorgons—Perseus could kill Medusa, whose fatal gaze would have turned him to stone, only by using his shield as a mirror. Literature is that shield. By deflecting our gaze and seeming to look at other people, we are able to see the truth about ourselves, in all its harshness and unpleasantness.

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At this point, I’m going to backtrack a bit so I can go deeper into another basic argument why we need literature in any curriculum. The point is no longer just to say that literature makes us human; rather, literature makes us better humans, by teaching us discernment and critical judgment.

Literature is a history of the words that have made sense of our lives. Like the Bible or the Iliad or the Noli and Fili, it shows us at our best and worst, so we can choose how we want to live—whether as individuals or as citizens or as a society.

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To do that—to help us use both our reason and imagination—literature uses language, and language uses words.

Through carefully crafted stories, poems, and essays, literature shows young readers that words are supremely important in becoming a better person. This is especially true at a time when words like “friend” have been devalued by Facebook,

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and “hero” by those to whom history, and honor and honesty, especially in public service, no longer mean anything.

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Every entry and every post our students make on Facebook and on Twitter is a test of how well they have learned their language and literature. I’m not talking about their grammar. I’m talking about their sensibility—the way they think and express themselves, the way they deal with other people, especially people holding an adversarial opinion. How careful are they with their ideas, with their choice of words?

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And it isn’t so much they as we who are being tested. How well have we taught them? How deeply have we drawn on the wealth of human experience in literature to impress upon them that life is full of difficult choices and decisions, of hard struggles to be fought and won? To a generation of millennials weaned on instant gratification and on tweeting before thinking, the complexity of life can be a profound discovery.

This is the first and the most important lesson of all literature:

Words have meaning.

And because they have meaning, words have power, and words have consequences.

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Words can hurt.

Words can kill.

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But words can also heal.

Words can save.

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Words make law.

Words make war.

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Words make money.

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Words make peace.

Words make nations.

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Words are the songs we sing to our loved and lost ones.

Words are the prayers we lift up to the skies.

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Words are the deepest secrets we confess.

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Words are what we tell our children the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night.

Words are all that some of us—especially those whom we call writers—will leave behind.

Speaking of writers, seven hundred years ago, a Persian poet named Hafez wrote a short but wonderful poem:

Even

After

All this time

The Sun never says

To the Earth

“You owe me.”

Look

What happens

With a love like that.

It lights up

The whole

Sky.

This, my friends, is what we teachers—whether of literature or science—do with our students, with every class and every lesson we teach. We light up the sky of their minds with love—the love of ideas, of engagement with the world.

And that is why we need language and literature—not just in our GE programs, but in our lives.

Thank you all for your attention.

Penman No. 183: Why I Choose to Italicize

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Penman for Monday, January 18, 2016

 

ONE OF the more interesting sidelights in our discussions at the NVM Gonzalez Centennial Workshop in Mindoro a couple of weeks ago had to do with the seemingly small issue of whether or not to italicize Filipino and other non-English words in an English text.

The conventional practice, of course, has been to italicize words like utang na loob, bagoong, kaibigan, and so on. That’s explicitly embodied in editorial stylebooks employed by such publications as The Economist, which hews to the policy that “FOREIGN WORDS AND PHRASES, such as cabinet (French type), dalits, de rigueur, jihad, glasnost, Hindutva, in camera, intifada, loya jirga, Mitbestimmung, pace, papabile, perestroika, sarariman, Schadenfreude, ujamaa, should be set in italics unless they are so familiar that they have become anglicised and so should be in roman. For example: ad hoc
 apartheid
 a priori
 a propos
 avant-garde, etc.”

Not everyone, however, feels bound by this rule. Increasingly, over the past couple of decades, writers of color in both the US and the Commonwealth (and, yes, the Philippines) have chosen to resist and reject italicization, believing that doing so represents a form of acquiescence to the dominance of English, and of exoticizing one’s own language, making it appear quainter and therefore more artificially attractive than it should. It’s a political rather than a mere technical decision, a declaration of independence, as it were, from the strictures of style laid down by the old regime.

One of the most quoted sources for this position is the New York-based novelist Daniel Jose Older, who demonstrates in a YouTube video why italicizing Spanish words and phrases in an English text would sound silly in the real, spoken world.

This was brought up again at the recent NVM Gonzalez workshop, where half of the participants were Filipino-Americans who came over from the US. The workshop leader—the very capable fictionist Dr. Evelina Galang, who directs the creative writing program at the University of Miami—discussed the use of Filipino words in a mainly English text, and why glossaries (and, not incidentally, italics) are better dispensed with, leaving the writer with the responsibility of establishing or at least hinting at their meaning in context.

(Evelina has an essay devoted to this concern, and let me quote an eloquent passage from that piece: “As a girl who grew up hanging upside down on easy chairs with a book in her hand, I often read words—English and other words—that I did not understand. I rarely stopped to define them. Sometimes I wrote them down and looked them up later. (I was a geek, after all.) But more often than not, having stepped into a fiction John Gardner called ‘that vivid and continuous dream,’ and driven to know what happened next, I kept reading. Like Angel, I let the words wash right over me, I watched them working next to other words. I listened to them. I tasted them and felt the weight of them in my mouth. I imagined them surrounded by nothing at all. I followed them as they floated down the page, bumping into semicolons, swimming through parentheses, slapping up against em-dashes, evading italics, and falling right off the page. I read the words in context and, right or wrong, I gave the words their meaning.”

I agree perfectly with Evelina as far as contextualization goes. I’ve always taken it as a technical challenge to show what Filipino words like bucayo and manananggal mean without defining them in that direct but clumsy way that glossaries or footnotes provide. Importantly, Evelina went on to emphasize that these choices are, ultimately, for each author to make for his or her own good reasons, and that those choices deserve to be respected by other writers and readers.

As it happens, I’m one of the holdouts in the matter of italicization, and I premise my position on both technical and political grounds. First, in terms of readability, italics may seem intrusive—and if there’s too many of them in the text, that will certainly be true—but my pet theory is that it’s actually easier on the reader’s eye and mind to spot a non-English word coming up in the text and to prepare for it, rather than be surprised by something “foreign”, even if it’s one of our own. (Just imagine the confusion that words like “ate” (older sister), “pain” (bait), and “noon” (then) would make.) Personally, I don’t want my readers—especially in my fiction—stopping to wonder what specific words mean, which is why the older I get, the simpler my vocabulary becomes; I want the reader to grasp whole sentences, paragraphs, and scenes, and not to trip on individual words.

Politically, when I italicize Filipino words in an English text, I also mean to say that these words are special to me and to my culture, and I don’t want them to be diluted by a dominant foreign language, which is English. As far as I’m concerned, the whole book in English is already a translation of Filipino experience; most of the dialogue there was never spoken in English, in the first place.

I suppose it’s different when you’re writing in English as a minority in America, and you feel bound (as I would, in that situation) to claim and establish a parity between your mother tongue and English. And let’s face it—for many hyphenated minorities, especially second- and third-generation writers, English has become their mother tongue. When they write fiction about themselves, their characters will speak in English, and the odd Filipino word will be just that.

Indeed the issue goes beyond italicization; the question of when and how to use Filipino or other non-English words in an English text should be seriously pondered by every Filipino or Filipino-American (and Filipino-Canadian, etc.) writing in English, mindful that there are words and concepts in Filipino without exact translations in English, which might be better used as is. (And as Salman Rushdie once put it, “To unlock a language, look at its untranslatable words.”) However, one also needs to resist the urge to exoticize one’s writing by peppering it needlessly with native words and expressions just to add more “local color,” especially when ready translations are available.

I’ll go at greater length into matters of translation in another column-piece, but I’ll rest my case on this issue of italics for now, hoping that it adds a bit more asim to the global sinigang of language.

Penman No. 154: Teaching English to Filipinos

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NEU

Penman for Monday, June 22, 2015

I HAD a great time last week with the English faculty of New Era University in Quezon City, who had invited me to speak at their three-day workshop on “Enhancing English Teaching Practices.” For three days, I met with a very lively group of about 30 to 40 college and high school teachers of English, talking about writing, reading, and teaching the language in today’s Filipino classroom.

I was backstopped in these discussions by the young and very sharp Ms. Cyndriel “CY” Meimban, who had taken her high school at New Era before doing an English degree with us at the University of the Philippines and then a master’s in Education at Arizona State U. CY—who also just happens to be the daughter of an old friend and fellow Fulbrighter, Dr. Adriel Meimban—took a break from her teaching duties at Northern Arizona University to help out her fellow teachers at NEU.

It was my first visit to the NEU campus near Commonwealth Avenue, which was rather ironic because we’ve lived on the UP campus just across that avenue for the past ten years. The NEU is part of the Iglesia ni Cristo complex and is run by the church, although I was pleasantly surprised to find that it’s open to all faiths. There’s a substantial Muslim population in that very area, for example, and many students from that community attend New Era.

We held our workshop in the new Professional Schools building, which housed NEU’s colleges of Law and Medicine, among others; more prominently, along Commonwealth Avenue, the College of Evangelical Ministry which Dr. Meimban (a former president of NEU) now heads trains young INC ministers, including about a hundred students from overseas—Filipino-Americans and Filipino-Europeans, among many others; I was surprised to be addressed by a young black man from South Africa in perfect Filipino. I was, in other words, in a very rich cultural and linguistic environment, in which language is used not just to express oneself or get jobs but to propagate the faith.

Otherwise, the workshop attendees voiced the same problems I’ve heard elsewhere: a clear decline in English proficiency not just among students but teachers as well; the lack of new materials in the syllabi, particularly in literature classes, as well as teaching guides for these materials; and the persistence of outdated approaches to the reading and teaching of literature and of English itself.

I began my presentation with something I always emphasize when I teach English in UP, especially in my American Literature class: we study and teach English not because we want to be Americans, British, or some other Anglophone people, but to become better Filipinos. We learn English and study other literatures in English to gain insights into and understand how these other societies operate and how certain human values and truths transcend national and social boundaries. Thereby, we should lose our unfamiliarity with and our awe of the foreign, empowering ourselves as citizens of the world.

I did a module on creative writing—focusing on fiction and nonfiction—as a way of showing teachers how writers think and work, so they can themselves become writers or at least understand what writers do and how they do it. In reading and teaching literature, I went over several poems and stories, and asked my audience to draw up a list of questions that could or should be raised about the text beyond “What’s the moral lesson?”

I emphasized the importance of considering and discussing form and technique as much as content and meaning as a way of seeing how language works, on the level of the sentence or even the word. I argued for the enjoyment of language for its own sake—in effect, for the study of literature as an exercise in pleasure as much as in education.

The problem with too many literature classes is that they’re taught as anything but literature—as philosophy, as religion, as politics—rather than as the imaginative play on words that lies at the heart of literature. When teachers march into class and declare, “Class, this is what this poem means, and believe me because I’m the absolute authority on it,” students and even teachers miss out on the fun of discovery, of teasing out sense from seeming chaos.

Inevitably, the question of a “language policy” came up. Would students benefit from the imposition of an “English-only” policy? Was it all right (or was it criminal) for a teacher of English to resort to Filipino when teaching English, or literature in English?

I went out on a limb here—and I’m sure that what I’ll say here will turn many a reader livid with consternation and disgust—but I said that, even as a former chair of the UP English Department, I’ve always been opposed to an English-only policy, because it’s silly and it simply doesn’t work.

We study English—and try to master it—because it serves us well in communication and in business, especially in a global sense, but to deliberately throttle our use of other languages (of which we have an enormous wealth) in the notion that it will somehow make us better users and speakers of English is downright stupid. I’ve yet to meet someone who now speaks and writes perfect English by having paid 5 centavos for every Filipino word he or she used. Most writers of my generation are happily bilingual or even trilingual, and we don’t get our languages or linguistic registers mixed up; what’s key is appropriateness—which language and which register is best for which occasion?

I would even argue that code-switching from English to Filipino can work in the teaching of English, and especially of literature in English, if it relaxes the non-Anglophone student and allows him or her to speak—and even to make a mistake, which should also be encouraged (and gently corrected) without too heavy a penalty. Patience and understanding, rather than force and sheer authority, have always gotten me better results in the classroom. I hope my colleagues in New Era University got a taste of that treatment, and that they enjoyed the experience.