Comps: One Down! (Kritika -Read it On Baka May Makuha Ka)
Friday, December 9th, 2005Graveh! So I had my first compre exam for Ph.D. Lit and pray, pray, pray that I made it. Ayooooko na umulit. Here it is on Lit. Criticism or Kritika:
Question: If you had to choose one major difference between theorizing about the nation done by non-Filipinos and that done by Filipinos, what would you say that difference is? Explain your answer by citing specific insights offered by non-Filipinos and by Filipinos.
This question immediately brings to my “mind’s eye” Isagani R. Cruz in his “The Other Other: Towards a Post-Colonial Poetics” (1989) where he declared that developments in Western literary and cultural criticism are impoverished because they have continued to neglect distant and recent discoveries of Asian ideas. He argues that “Filipino critics have read Aristotle and Jacques Derrida, but British critics have not read Jose Rizal nor Bienvenido Lumbera. Filipino critics have read everything American critics have read, but American critics have not read half of what Filipino critics have read” (52). But due to colonialist hegemony, Cruz continues that Philippine literary theory “has become the other Other of Western literary theory.” Bukod na bukod, he laments. But Cruz is far from being pessimistic. His decolozation project in volumes of essays on language, literature and popular culture underscore what he believes to be the key term: subversion. “Dapat maging subersibo ang kritiko’t kritikang Pinoy” (Bukod na Bukod, 2004).
Theorizing about the nation achieved popularity in the post World War II heightened by the publication of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities:Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983,1991) and is oftentimes contrapuntal to, if not synonymous, with postcolonial studies started by “diasporic” scholars or in the words of Kwame Anthony Appiah, “comprador intelligentsia” or those “relatively small, Western-style, Western-trained, group of writers and thinkers who mediate the trade in cultural commodities of world capitalism at the periphery” like its “Holy Trinity” named Edward Said (Orientalism, 1979), Homi Bhaba (The Location of Culture, 1994; Nation and Narration (ed.), 1990), and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (“Can the Subaltern Speak?” 1988)
In the Philippines, the concept of and the promise of the ‘nation’ preoccupied literary and cultural scholars since the last two decades of the 20th century after the likes of Cruz and Bienvenido Lumbera earned their postgraduate degrees in the halls of colonial master that is America. And this is where – I believe - their major difference with non-Filipino critics lie: Filipino critics are subversive. This subversion is embodied in their historical-materialist approach in theorizing the nation grounded in the knowledge - and recognition – of the multilingual, multigeneric, multisubcultural Philippine literature in both oral and printed forms (in the words of Cruz) and in what Epifanio San Juan, Jr. characterized as the uneven development caused by transnational neo-colonial/local oligarchic hegemony. Yes, the materiality of Philippine nation is in Philippine literature (supported/validated by Philippine studies in history, anthropology, archeology, among others) in its specificity and historicity.
In 1993, Cruz has proven this in “Ang Kasaysayan ng Literaturang Filipino” (Part 1 & 2).
In Part 1, Cruz anchors his argument in the geopolitical location of the Philippines in Asia and the world (particularly of Europe and Northern America) that enables him to assert that Philippine history, with its rich folk oral tradition, predates the birth of Jesus Christ and the “discovery” of the island of Ferdinand Magellan and that in fact, we have an older established ties with the Chinese and the Muslims. This led him in Part 2 to present and reveal the limitation/s of synchronic (according to medium, language, region, and form/genre) and diachronic (historical, ex. pre-colonial, Spanish Period, American Period, Contemporary Period) classifications of the multilingual, multigeneric, multisubcultural Philippine literature in oral and printed forms.
Now, in the theorizing of Filipino critics, what is the ‘Philippine nation?’
For Bienvenido Lumbera, it is a work-in-progress that comes in stages ushered not only by “print capitalism” heightened in the Philippines of 19th century (“The Nationalist Literary Traditon”) but – as also proven by Cruz and other scholars: Lucila Hosillos, for instance, in Hiligaynon Literature: Text and Context (1992 ); Damiana Eugenio in her voluminous compilations of folk oral literatures - goes back as far as the days of “communal authorship” (Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology co-edited with Cynthia Nograles Lumbera,1982, 1997; Filipinos Writings: Philippine Literature from the Regions, 2001) in different Philippine languages, to Philippine popular culture (Revaluation 1997,1997; Writing the Nation/Pag-aakda ng Bansa,2000), particularly cinema and theater.
A section devoted to the study of Lumbera’s scholarship, “The National Stages of Philippine Literature and Its History: Bienvenido L. Lumbera on Revaluation” by David Jonathan Bayot in his dissertation “The S/subjects of the Nation in Philippine Kritika: Dis-courses from Lucilla V. Hosillos, Bienvenido L. Lumbera, Gemino H. Abad, Soledad S. Reyes, Virgilio S. Almario, and E. San Juan, Jr.” (DLSU, 2004) reveals this synthesis: Lumbera conceives ‘the nation’ as “the process towards social change for the Filipino people through writing and rewriting (meant literally and in the participatory sense) in literature and history” (my emphasis). Furthermore, Bayot points out three imperatives found in Lumbera’s writing of the nation: “1) the assertion of the presence of a native culture before and after the advent of colonialism that is the basis of defiance against colonial impositions by obliterations; 2) challenge any measures of appropriation and containment on the definition of the national culture that, by implication, silences the native voice of assertion, and 3) foreground the element of struggle against, specifically, colonial impositions in the culture in order to highlight the agon with a persistent “status quo.”
Lumbera’s theory differs from Benedict Anderson’s widely-quoted “imagined community.” A noted South East Asian scholar who has been inspired and influenced by Jose Rizal to the point that he proclaimed him as “The First Filipino (The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World, 2004), Anderson in his monumental book Imagined Community: The Rise and Spread of Nationalism (1987, 1991) proclaims the nation as an “imagined political community—and imagined both inherently limited and sovereign.” This is because “even the smallest of nation never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” Clearly, Anderson’s nation is not as old as that of Filipinos.
The birth of Anderson’s nation is attributed to what he identifies as the role of “Creole pioneers”– they who had the same ancestries, languages and traditions who fought for national independence in the 18th and 19th century against European colonialism. It is constructed from and through popular processes, like the publication of books and newspapers brought by standardization of calendars, clocks (“homogeneous, empty time”), and language (English, in that sense) at the boom of “print capitalism” in what Walter Benjamin (whom Anderson is indebted to) calls as “the age of mechanical reproduction” - generated by mass communication and mass migration - that eventually replaced monarchies in Europe in eighteenth century.
Timothy Brennan in “The National Longing for Form”echoes Anderson and it is the novel that he privileges, alongside newspaper, which played a decisive role in the rise of European nationalism and nation. What Anderson suggests –and Brennan as well - is that a nation is (must be) conceived as a “deep, horizontal comradeship.” This, in effect, blurs - if not totally erases - differences embodied in class, language, gender, religion, ethnicity – which cannot be rendered true in the case of the Philippines because as the “demonized” Philippine-Left (declared as “terrorists” as well by Colin Powell) battles for the independent Philippines, Filipino-Muslim battles for its own separation. The Filipino-Chinese remains a minority despite of the fact that they control the country’s major economic enterprises; all of the communities of what are politically labeled as Indigenous People are disenfranchised, and the few rich clings to private property and hierarchy that they have proven themselves as collaborators that even if Rizal’s Noli and Fili (originally written in Spanish) became required readings in their English (big problem, Anderson says in The Spectre of Comparisons, referring to the translation of Leon Ma. Guerrero) and now Tagalog translations, ours remain to be “a sad republic” in its “embarassment of riches.”
What about in the case of Filipinos abroad? Do “print capitalism” and telecommunication engender what Anderson’s work suggests as “long-distance” nationalism? We have to note that not all Filipinos abroad are immigrants. Most of them are contract skilled workers and laborers who have narratives of oppressions and hardships to tell (therefore lack access to internet and newspaper and definitely have no time to read). San Juan in Racism and Cultural Studies (2002), names this as “forced diaspora of migrant workers” and “import of uneven and combined development globally.” Yes, newspaper and technology such as television and mobile phone – in its text messaging – sparked the staging of EDSA 2, but there was also the EDSA 3. If only our imagination is as linear and solid as that of Anderson and Brennan, one novel of F. Sionil Jose would have sufficed.
Moreover, Anderson’s nation that holds so much power in the imagination is limited because “even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations.” This implies that a nation is defined and constructed against (O) “other nations.” To be organic is impossible. Again, this differs from that of Filipino critics mentioned who assert that Philippine nation is founded in what has been there all along. Katutubong kaakuhan, names Tagalog poet-critic Virgilio Almario (Balagtasismo versus Modernismo:Panulaang Tagalog sa ika-20 Siglo, 1984) that debunks “anxiety of influence” and instead champions the production of native poetics in its inherent historicity.
Anderson was influenced by a French theorist Ernest Renan (1823-1892) who earned fame for his essay “What is a Nation” (1882). For Renan, it is “a soul, a spiritual principle” constituted of two thngs: the past that is composed of “possession in common of the rich legacy of memories” and of the present that is characterized by “the desire to live together, the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form.” The nation is a “large-scale solidarity.” Just like Anderson’s “imagined community,” it sounds good and heartwarming but only because it lacks specificity in its simplification and it is not only Cruz and Lumbera’s earlier arguments that would render this theory problematic but that of Resil Mojares, Caroline Hau, and San Juan, Jr.
It is because unlike the unitary and fixed soul of Renan, the Filipino soul is characterized by Mojares as haunted (“The Haunting of the Filipino Writer” in Waiting for Mariang Makiling:Essays in Philippine Cultural History, 2002) due to the “shock, seduction, sin” of colonialism. Mojares suggests healing and drawing from the way of babaylan, this involves the “act of divination” that includes “discernment, diagnosis, criticism.” He particularly underscores criticism because it is this hauntedness that “drives the vocation of writers and the practice of writing.” Mojares questions why the likes of Alfred Yuson’s novel Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café be seen as imitation of magic realism of Latin America and not as an invocation of the spirits of Tuwaang and Lam-ang. This questioning subverts Homi Bhabha’s claim that the magic realism of Latin America “becomes the literary language of the emergent postcolonial world” (Nation and Narration, 1990).
Mojares affirms the studies on the native poetics of Almario that though Almario’s project is lambasted by Neil Garcia in his Postcolonialism and Filipino Poetics (2004) as “nativist,” I would rather see it, similar to that of Zeus Salazar’s pantayong pananaw, as performance of subversion. Bayot, after all, sums Almario’s corpus as a “critical act of c/siting the native literary tradition as a weapon of engagement with colonial hegemony in the ground of Piedras Platas” (“S/Citing the National-Native Literature on a New Formalist Stand in Piedras Platas: Virgilio S. Almario in the Eventuality of Intertextual Machine”).
Almario’s exclusion of foreign influences in his conception of tradition as a product and production of native poetics that has its own historicity contradicts Gayatri Spivak in “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Spivak answered in the negative because for her the subaltern is only produced by inscriptions found in colonial historiography (ex. proletariat, mutineers, criminals), therefore, there is no subaltern voice that can be retrieved to speak. Spivak’s refusal to acknowledge historical subject, like our babaylan for instance who were dominated by women and effeminates, suggests that there is no discourse outside colonialism. Robert Young in White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990) speaks of her this way: “she is concerned less with the process of historical retrieval or reinterpretation of colonialism as such that with a critique of the forms of neocolonialism in the contemporary academy” (158).
Caroline Hau, on the other hand, busies herself with the task of critique that would eventually fuel the “promise of revolution” as she brings light to what she calls “excesses” – that which informs and generates the vision of ‘the nation’ but which cannot be fully grasped or encompassed like “the foreign,” “the error,” “the women.” Hence, in Necessary Fictions:Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946-1980 (2000), she declares that the nation is an unfinished revolution:
Our dream of nation – of its promise – is from its origin compromised by our colonial and neocolonial history and we see material evidence of this violence of that history in our everyday lives. But it is, paradoxically the compromised nature of our nationalist imagining and practice that keeps the promise of the nation alive and burning. Because our programs of action must always be open to contingency and risk, the act of struggling to transform society, to make and remake community, remains an ethical imperative we cannot afford to ignore, let alone dismiss (281).
In what follows as On the Subject of the Nation: Filipino Writings from the Margins, 1981 to 2004 (2004), Hau examines the following:1) Filipino-Chinese Bai Ren’s autobio-graphical Nanyang Piaoliuji that enables her - to use her word -“forces redefinition of basic conceptions of loyalty, belonging, labor, and love that underpin commonsensical as well as scholarly notions of nationalism” by positing that the nationalism of the Chinese communist immigrants was informed by their Philippine lived-experiences, contrary to what is perceived that it stands apart, and in antagonism to, Philippine nationalism; 2) Communist Party of the Philippines and New People’s Army activist and warrior Zelda Soriano’s collection of fiction and poetry, Kung Saan Ako Pupunta that engender the revolutionary body and presents “specificity of women’s activism and contributions to the theorizing and creation of new forms of sociopolitical and artistic intervention; 3) Filipino-American Peter Bacho’s novel Cebu (1991) that allows her to interrogate the “spatial dynamics of power” in Bacho’s traumatic shuttling between Philippines and America as his “homes” and “nations” characterized by anxieties brought by his sexual and cultural differences and national origins, and 4) Rey Ventura’s autobiographical and ethnographic Underground in Japan (1992) that tells “how OFWs are abstracted as labor power and exposes the complicity of labor-sending and labor-receiving nation states in transnational capitalism” by which Filipino labor is constructed as “illegal” and “foreign” and “unskilled” by the Japanese state, at the same time, of championing them by the Philippine state as “bagong bayani” that keeps the economy alive with its influx of remittances.
Again, this differs from Anderson and Renan’s nation that is fixed and immutable. Renan further instructs not to improvise as he proceeds that the nation, like the individual, “is a culmination of a long past of endeavors, sacrifice, and devotion.”
San Juan, on the other hand, time and again reminds us that the nationalism of Philippine Left differs from the U.S. nationalism articulated by George W. Bush in PATRIOTIC ACT. Bayot in “Mediating the S/subjects of Nation and History in the Belly of the Beast:Epifanio San Juan, Jr. and the Philippine Temptation” sums that for San Juan, one important site of knowledge mediation in the building of national-popular culture is in literature and its dissemination through the critical praxis of reading, writing, and teaching. Like language and theory, Bayot clarifies that San Juan argues that literature “can be a weapon for enslavement or liberation, for continuing subservience to former colonial masters and the internalized colonizer or for emancipation.” Thus, Bayot concludes that it is an imperative for San Juan to define the specificity of the Philippine historical experience and context against other “postcolonial” nations and to explain the absence of unitary sense of Filipino as people-nation and reinforce the historicity of form differentiating various formal articulations from the temptation of a unitary reading.
It is the subversion of Filipino critics in theorizing about the nation that pushed Lumbera to write his “revised Philippine literary history”; for the (re)engineering of Filipino as national language of our writers and scholars, and the resurgence of Philippine literatures in different languages (inclusion in 1997 of Iluko, Cebuano, Hiligaynon in the short story category of Palanca; anthologies in Bikol, Iluko, Waray, Hiligaynon, Cebuano – aside from Tagalog and English funded by CCP & NCCA; inclusion of regional literature in curriculum, etc.) and subculture (Philippine gay literature, women literature, children’s literature) that is taking shape in a way that has been informed by what Cruz describes as “mulat na laman at anyo” and embodies what Hau calls as “problem of consciousness.”
It is the subversion of Filipino critics that makes them our contemporary Pilandok and babaylan, and finds them in kinship with the rest of the world in the likes of Antonio Gramci, Fredric Jameson, and Thorstein Veblen; not as accomplice to what Canadian critic Stephen Slenon calls as “the modern theatre of neocolonialist international relations”characterized, among other things, by the relocation of factories of Western transnational companies to the zones of lowest-cost labor such as call centers sprouting in key cities of Philippines and India.
Thus, our “isang dipang langit”and “sunlight on broken stones” in this “great Philippine jungle energy café.”
Question: Can you say that Hiligaynon literature is national literature? Why or why not? Cite
opinions by critics to support you.
Yes, and here are the opinions of critics to support it:
Bienvenido Lumbera, when asked by Roger Bresnahan and Doreen Gamboa-Fernandez in an interview in1980, to speculate about the future of Philippine literature in terms of formal standards to evolve and if they will be different for each language (Tagalog, Iluko, Hiligaynon, Cebuano, Bikol, among others) –Lumbera replied that “the standards will be the same, regardless of the language because these languages belong in the same family, even traditions”(Revaluation 1997, p.288).
What family and traditions do Lumbera speak of?
Lucila Hosillos in Originality as Vengeance in Philippine Literature (1984) writes that 1) the largest body of literature is possibly unwritten and of ethnic or indigeneous sources and origins; 2) that Philippine literature is polylingual, and 3) there are literatures in the regional vernaculars which are widely read by the masses who constitute the largest population of the country (32). Isagani Cruz in “Ang Kasaysayan ng Literaturang Filipino Part 2” (The Alfredo E.Litiatco Lectures of Isagani R.Cruz, 1996) says: “Multilingual, multijeneric, at multi-sabcultural ang literatura nating pabigkas at pasulat” (243).
Utilizing Lumbera’s classification outlined in “Towards a Revised History of Philippine Literature,”here are some examples to illustrate the oneness of Hiligaynon literature in that family and tradition:
A) Folk Epics, Lyric Poetry and Folklore; Ritual and Dance as Drama. The Hinilawod of Sulod-Panay collected by F.Landa Jocano (Hinilawod: Adventures of Humadapnon (Tarangban 1, 2003), and Alicia Magos shares the same motifs (supernatural elements, travel and adventure) and conventions (chanted in verse form that lasts for several days, accompany rituals) with the Iluko Lam-ang; the Ifugao Hudhud, the Muslim Bantugan, the Bikol Ibalon. Iloko’s dung-aw is the Hiligaynon’s loa collected by Amorita Rabuco (Folk Poetry: The Loa, 2003). Lyric poetry are collected by Corazon Villareal in Siday: Mga Tulang Bayan ng Panay at Negros (1997); ritual and dance as drama is seen among the Panay babaylans in their binanog (imitative of the movements of the banog bird) dance, among others;
B) Hiligaynon writing under Spanish colonialism.The Hiligaynon enduring pasyon,
senakulo; daigon (Joseph & Mary’s search for an inn rendered in songs); korido (studies done by Tita Torio of UPV-Miag-ao and Dr. Cecilia Locsin-Nava, respectively); gozos on the occasion of Flores de Mayo; the moro-moro and the komedya performed throughout the region; the pananglet and ejemplo and other rules of conducts in kinship with Modesto de Castro’s Pagsusulatan ng Dalawang Binibini na si Urbana at Feliza (1864);
C)Hiligaynon writing under U.S. colonialism. The Balagtas and Rizal traditions are seen in the novels of Angel Magahum as studied by Erwin Sustento in “Sa Pagitan ng Teksto at ng Awtor:Paghihimay ng “Gugma Kag Kabuhi” ni Angel Magahum and Joefe Santarita’s “Angel Merle Magahum: Rebolusyonaryo at Manunulat.” Mojares on Benjamin (written in 1894, published in 1907), Magahum’s first novel and “first Visayan novel” as well, describes this is a work that combines the motives of the exemplum and the chronicle (Origin and Rise of the Filipino Novel, 1983). Doreen Gamboa-Fernandez’s The Iloilo Zarsuela:1903-1930 (1978) chronicles the patriotic theater. Tita Torio examines the male in supporting role as contrabida, suluguon (servant), and tarso (provider of comic relief) in the sarswela of Iloilo from 1900s to the 1930s with bulk of writings from Valentin Cristobal, Jose Ma. Ingalla, Jimeno Damaso, Jose Ma.Nava, and Miguela Montelibano. Ma. Cecilia Locsin-Nava in “Miguela Montelibano: Arch-nationalist” reveals how this lone female zarsuelista concerned herself with satire in what Alfred McCoy describes as “frustrated nationalism” by the Ilonggo writers after the American period whose “highest aspiration was the transformation of a colonized proletariat.” The rise of the novel is embodied in the legacy of Magdalena Jalandoni (36 novels). Her Sa Kapaang sang Inaway (1946) or In the Wrath of War, for example, narrativizes the experience of dislocation and terror during the Japanese occupation of Iloilo and connects one to the works of F. Sionil Jose, particularly the Poon. Ramon Muzones’s most popular novel, Margosatubig (1947), covers Sulu and Lanao of Mindanao in its narrative space. Its characters are both legendary Christians and Muslims. Lino Moles’s Kalayo sa Sidlangan (Fire in the East) serialized in Hiligaynon in 1970 exemplifies romanticism and realism as it champions the protest and uprising of Negros’s sacadas against the oppressive hacienda structure with a strong-willed heiress and proletariat boyfriend as protagonists. The short story form gave rise to the development of sugilanon and produce Lorenzo Dilag, Condrado Norada, Delfin Gumban, among others, and
D) Contemporary Hiligaynon writing which, according to Leoncio Deriada (“Literature Engineering in Western Visayas”) started from 1986 EDSA/Aquino administration brought by the reorientation of CCP that gave workshop and writing grants to regional writers, is characterized by the resurgence of writings not only in Hiligaynon but in Kinaray-a (the mother language) and Akeanon, as well as in English and Filipino (the WestVisayan laced-Filipino). Poetry is no longer attributed to Santiago Mulato and the Sumakwelan but also to the new breed of writers, mostly academe-based, such as John Iremil Teodoro and Alain Dimzon that set new directions both in form and in handling the language. Popular Hiligaynon literature is alive with the Hiligaynon magazine, the now defunct Yuhum, and the enduring Almanake Panayanhon that reaches as far as the Hiligaynon-speaking areas of Mindanao. Hiligaynon magazine gives us Ma. Luisa Defante-Gibraltar (being studied by John Iremil Teodoro). Her serialized novels are primarily in gothic and detective genres. The inclusion in 1997 of Hiligaynon category in the short story division of the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature witness the innovations in short fiction embodied in the works of Alice Tan-Gonzales (revival of myth and tradition to tell stories of women and the plight of environment in the age of industrialization); John Teodoro (supernatural and religious elements in discoursing gender and sexuality); Genevieve Asenjo (pop culture in 3-D; gender and diaspora). Kevin Piamonte of Iloilo champions experiments in contemporary theater. His recent directorial works include the multimedia sarzuela production of Magdalena Jalandoni’s Juanita Cruz (toured and staged at CCP). Likewise, there is Rudy Reveche and Tanya Lopez in Bacolod, and playwright Elsie Coscuella is starting to write in Hiligaynon.
John Iremil Teodoro in “The State of Literary Research in Western Visayas” argues that it is well and alive. He proves by utilizing the four aspects of literary scholarship outlined by Cruz in his essay, “The Spare-Time Scholar: Literaturwissenschaft in the Philippines”: 1) the use of Filipino language (papers done by Genevieve Asenjo, Alexander de Juan, Erwin Sustento), 2)translations (Mga Dulang Hiligaynon by Rosario Cruz Lucero and Ricardo Oebanda; Corazon Villareal’s Translating the Sugilanon:Re-framing the Sign; Edward Defensor in Magdalena Jalandoni’s Ang Dalaga sa Tindahan), 3)research infrastructure (Center for WestVisayan Studies and University of San Agustin’s Coordinating Center for Research and Publication), and influence of literary scholarship seen in the advocacy projects of NGOs like Paranubliun-Antique, and Grupong Sigmahanon in Capiz.
Hiligaynon literature is vigorous, now and then, and with the dynamic presence of literary scholarship, it brings us to what Rolando Tolentino in “Ang Kapangyarihan ng Vernakular sa Pambansa” (Sa loob at labas ng mall kong sawi/kaliluha’y siyang nangyayaring hari, 2001) advances:
Ang akdang vernacular ay isang sintomas ng pangkalahatang lagay ng panitikan, wika at kulturang vernacular, at ng diskurso ng pambansa. Ito ay nagpapahayag ng mas malalimang mga isyu at problema ng vernacular at pambansa. Ito rin ay mismong receptacle ng mga kondisyong kanyang binibigyang elaborasyon. Ang gamit ng mga sangkap at kumbensyong pampanitikan ay mismong mga isyu at problemang tinutukoy ng vernacular at pambansa (127).
Hiligaynon literature then offers a paradigm of new consciousness. It instructs us to “inhabit” it; to turn ourselves into it in the study of the complex “isyu at problema ng vernacular at pambansa” that Tolentino says. One is in our study of the profound impacts of Western language and culture vis-à-vis our complex response to that cross-fertilization. Tolentino’s thesis links us to Lumbera in “Towards a National Literature” where he claims that “authors are a conscious component of the Filipino nation and are willing, if not necessarily active, participants in the realization of the aspirations of the people who constitute the nation” (2).Tolentino and Lumbera’s points are best elucidated by Isidoro Cruz in his two studies: “Ang PLDT Ad, ang “Baboy” ni J.I.Teodoro sa Kinaray-a, at ang Wikang Vernakular/Rehiyonal/Pambansa” (in Cultural Fictions, 2004) and “The (De) Construction of Nation in John Iremil Teodoro’s Maybato, Iloilo, Taft Avenue, Baguio, Puerto.”
Cruz critiques the PLDT Ad (“Suportahan ta ka”) as superficial: it limited itself to the appropriation of the Hiligaynon diction; it failed to really use the vernacular, as Ilonggos would speak it, and even compromised to the gahum of the Tagalog, thus, the identification with the Ilonggo community simply to market its products and services to/in the region. Cruz proposes that in order for the Filipino language (the ad is considered as an attempt) to be the national language, it must bear the “multicentric” orientation inhabiting the vernacular by paying not only to similarities across languages but to the connotation/s it embodies. Only then and “maihahalintulad sa pira-pirasong karne na natuhog ng isang barbecue stick ang mga wikang bumubuo ng wikang pambansa” (96).
Likewise, in his study of Teodoro’s poetry collection, Maybato, Iloilo, Taft Avenue, Baguio, Puerto (2003), Cruz argues that “what is regional is national.” He points to Teodoro’s frequent use of “Visayan-laced Filipino” as one crucial indicator. He contends that Teodoro’s deliberate infusions of Hiligaynon and/or Kinaray-a words and affixes do away with italics conventionally used to signify linguistic borrowing and therefore works beyond the strategy of local color. This employment, Cruz elucidates, posits words of regional origin in the terrain of the national language and tries to blur the demarcation between margin and center in this supposedly all-inclusive nation that is bound to deconstruct itself. He says: “Teodoro has written about a nation that deconstructs itself, if only to reconstitute it. The nation begins at Maybato.”
Furthermore, works in “Visayan-laced Filipino” such as Teodoro make demand upon readers who do not understand Hiligaynon or Kinaray-a. This brings us, again, to Lumbera in “The Rugged Terrain of Vernacular Literature” with his proposal that any serious student of Philippine literature must develop proficiency in a vernacular tongue other than Pilipino. He argues: “Perhaps only after one has acquired reading skills in other Philippine languages will he begin to discover the oneness of all literatures written in the native languages (90).”
Long before that happens, same true to the “revised canon of Philippine Literature” and to its succeeding revisions, Hiligaynon literature has already proven itself to be a national literature.
Question: Is Benedict Anderson right? Why or why not? Cite opinions of critics both influenced by him and rejecting him.
Benedict Anderson is arguably the considered most cited scholar in the discourse of the ‘nation’ through his work Imagined Communities: Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983,1991) that has been translated in dozen of languages. Here, Anderson posits that the nation is an “imagined political community—and imagined both inherently limited and sovereign.” It is imagined because “even the smallest of nation never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion”; limited because “even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations;” sovereign because “the concept was born in an age in which Enlightenment and Revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained hierarchical dynastic realm,” and finally imagined as a community because “ regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship.”
Is Anderson right? Let me first cite critics both influenced by him and rejecting him:
One most vocal critic is Partha Chatterjee, one of the leading members of Subaltern Studies group. In his first book, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? (1986) Chatterjee asks why nation states in the third world failed to realize the promise of emancipation and argues that part of the problem is that while third worlds see nationalism as the opposite of colonialism, it in fact absorbs much of the value system of colonialism that in effect, favors the few ruling class instead of the majority working class. The solution Chatterjee provides is for the colonial middle class to differentiate itself from the West – to give rise to anticolonial nationalism.
Thus the problem of Anderson’s imagined political community that is limited and sovereign, for Chatterjee, is in its universalizing the history of the modern world when in fact, its nationalism is only limited to the parameters and realities of Europe who had freed itself and even turned into a major colonizer. Keywords: difference, specificity. Hence, Chatterjee asks: whose imagination? In his second book, The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), he protests:
“If nationalism in the rest of the world has to choose their imagined communities from certain “modular” forms readily available to them by Europe and Americas, what do they have left to imagine? History, it would seem, has decreed that we in the postcolonial world shall only be perpetual consumers of modernity. Europe and the Americas, the only true subjects of history, have thought out on our behalf not only the script of colonial enlightenment and exploitation, but also that of our anticolonial resistance and postcolonial misery. Even our imaginations must remain forever colonized!” (5) (My emphasis)
Tamar Mayer critiques Anderson’s construction of the nation as a “hetero-male project and imagined as a brotherhood.” In Gender Ironies of Nationalism: Sexing the Nation (1999) that includes case studies from Indonesia, Caribbean, China, India, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Australia, Liberia, Yugoslavia, the USA, among others, Mayer reveals that men hold prerogatives of building the nation yet for the most part, women shoulders the obligation of nation and nation building. Mayer challenges this as she exposes how the activities of World Bank and United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.) in countries like Indonesia and Sri Lanka interferes with women’s reproductive choices and in effect sets the discursive relationship among state, nation, and nation-building. She adds: “In Asia, Africa and Latin America biological reproduction is negotiated not only by husband and wife but also by the nation’s elites, whose interests frequently coincide with the interests of Western developers and politicians. Reproducing the nation has become in non-Western nations, then, paradoxically, in significant part the domain of the West and its white populations.”(8)
Don Mitchell in Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (2000) where he talks about “culture wars” fought daily around the world and who as a professor of geography, discusses “culture is spatial” because “it insinuates itself into our daily worlds as part of the spaces and spatial practices that define our lives” (63) embedded in spatial structures like suburbia where women are entrapped; ghettos where “others” are forced to live so the majority can go on with their lives undisturbed, etc. argues that as well as imagining communities, there must be attention to: “The practices and exercises of power through which these bonds are produced and reproduced. The questions this raises are ones about who defines the nation, how it is defined, how that definition is reproduced and contested, and, crucially, how the nation has developed and changed over time…The question is not what common imagination exists, but what common imagination is forged.” (269)
Homi K. Bhabha, on the other hand, in his Introduction to Nation and Narration (1990) opens with this statement: “Nation, like narratives, lose their origin in the myth of time and only fully realize their horizons in the mind’s eye.” He acknowledges Anderson’s Imagined Communities and proceeds to underscore the “nation’s ambivalent emergence” and “transgressive boundaries.” He quotes this ambivalence in Anderson’s statement: “…If nation states are widely considered to be ‘new’ and ‘historical’, the nations states to which they give political expression always loom out of an immemorial past and…glide into a limitless future. What I am proposing is that Nationalism has to be understood, by aligning it not with self-consciously held political ideologies, but with large cultural systems that preceded it, out of which – as well as against which – it came into being.”
Bhabha agrees and continues that because of this nature of the nation’s ‘coming into being’ as “a system of cultural signification” rather than the “discipline of social polity” that makes it construction and dissemination ambivalent. This ambivalence is brought by factors such as migration, colonial expansion, diaspora (The Location of Culture, 1990) to which Bhabha aligns himself and grounds his work. Thus, the location of culture is in ‘in-between’ spaces and therefore, offers new conception of self-identity and belonging – the hybrid who is prone to mimicry, a desire to be like the colonizer but only results into a camouflage thus, again, its ambivalence in its almost quite, but not the same status.
Timothy Brennan also takes off from Anderson for in “The National Longing for Form,” he asserts that nation “are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role” and he is talking about the novel that joined newspapers in accompanying the rise of the European nation hence called as “society of novel” and Europeans as “children of novel.” Likewise, Caroline Hau (Anderson’s student) manifests this in her “necessary fictions” (Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation 1946-1980, 2000) but aware of criticisms that challenged Imagined Communities, she improves by focusing on the “excesses” (the literatures of Filipino-Chinese, women and Philippine Left, migrants and overseas workers) that offer new ways of seeing and thinking in the production of the nation (On the Subject of the Nation:Filipino Writings from the Margins 1981 to 2004, 2004).
It is in within the context of Philippine historical and lived experiences and Southeast Asia, at large, as illustrated by the examples of Chatterjee and Mayer; the interrogation posed by Mitchell, and the “cultural” and “linguistic” turn in Philippine scholarship that celebrates different dimensions of history gleaned from the structures of everyday life and the “mass culture” that Hau sets that I answer NO. The nation as an “imagined political community” and “long-distance nationalism” work, so far, as a good excuse in sending graduates abroad as caregivers and domestic helpers; to affirm this theorizing on the nation is just like taking a stand that the “gang rape” of a 22-year old Filipina from Zamboanga by six American soldiers participating in the Visiting Armed Forces Agreement has no relation to and with our history of American colonialism. Chatterjee is right: whose imagination, what kind of imagining prevails?
Though the privileged status attributed by Anderson and Brennan on literature, particularly the novel- in the rise of the nation- is highly encouraging, I am reminded by narratives of war and terror, poverty and destruction in the aftermath of 9/11that not all “hybrids” and “multiculturals” enjoy the same privilege as Pico Iyer who considers himself as one “global soul” going in and out of airports and terminals in different time zones (The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home, 2000). Or of Jose Rizal, Anderson’s “First Filipino,” who had never been to Visayas and Bicol and whose Crisostomo Ibarra in Noli Me Tangere turned Simoun in El Filibusterismo is driven, above else, by his revenge for his father and love for Maria Clara. That claim on Rizal is even refuted by what Resil Mojares discovered in Origin and Rise of the Filipino Novel (1983):
The case of Rizal, a native who literally and intellectually inhabited the larger European world, shows the novelistic form “imported” full-grown into the Philippines. This is obviously an oversimplification. The history of the Filipino novel does not really start with Rizal, though he is a key figure in this history, and even in the case of Rizal, the novel has to acquire a local habitation for it to assume the kind of existence it had.
There is a complex background to the Filipino novel. While it reflects its indebtedness to the Western novel, it also has its roots in native soil, in a local tradition of narratives: on one hand, epics, ballads, tales and other folk narratives; on the other hand, the inchoate mass of narratives of “proto-novels” – metrical romances, lives of saints, moral and social tracts, and others – which, while inspired by foreign models, had in the course of time been naturalized on the home grounds (355).
If there is one thing that Rizal’s el demonio de las comparaciones – Anderson’s “the spectre of comparisons” instructs, that is to urgently and rigorously attend to the imperatives, modalities, subject/s-position/s of imagining/thinking/studying comparatively. And that, again, I believe, is found in the battle cry of Fredric Jameson - “always historicize!” Located in differences and specificities, it is championed through imaginative and dynamic power struggle. Only by struggle, and only when we have reached that “equal ground” that the spectre of comparisons be significant and meaningful for and to us.
