http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanOct06.html The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Bulovas, and desktop lint. Thu, 07 Dec 2006 17:17:58 -0600 60 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanOct06.html#lqb183831855

A NEW anthology of plays has just been published by the University of the Philippines Press. Edited by playwright and Palanca Hall of Famer Rene Villanueva and performance poet Vim Nadera for the UP Institute of Creative Writing, Ang Aklat Likhaan ng Dula 1997-2003: Kapangahasan bilang Kaligtasan is the ICW’s second collection of recent and outstanding Filipino plays. Both established and new playwrights are represented in the book, including Teo Antonio, Nicolas Pichay, Chris Martinez, Jun Lana, and Allan Lopez.

The book’s title—which translates to “Daring as Deliverance”—hints at a crisis in Philippine drama: its slide into obscurity these past few decades, beset by dwindling audiences, rising production costs, and the competition from all sorts of alternative media for the Filipino’s attention and entertainment peso.

When I began writing plays for the stage in the 1970s, Philippine theater—particularly theater in Filipino—was undergoing a welcome resurgence; the Philippine Educational Theater Association was at the peak of its powers, the Cultural Center of the Philippines was showcasing the best of world and local drama through Teatro Pilipino and Bulwagang Gantimpala, and a new generation of playwrights was emerging, including Bienvenido Noriega, Rene Villanueva, Tony Perez, Bonifacio Ilagan, Malou Jacob, Edgardo Maranan, Reuel Aguila, and Isagani Cruz. School-based theater was also very much alive in such places as UP, UST, Ateneo, and St. Paul’s College.

It felt good to be writing plays, not only because of the prestige that went with winning a Palanca or CCP Award—how hungry we were for these distinctions in those days!—but also because we could expect our work to be produced almost as soon as they were written, such was the demand for new material and the willingness and ability of various theater groups to stage them, anywhere from the plush Little Theater of the CCP to a flyblown corner of Sta. Mesa Market.

As I’ve often remarked, playwriting can be the most taxing of the literary arts because of the many levels of anxiety the playwright has to endure: the rush to finish the play, the search for its producer and the wait for its production, and the high (or the crushing letdown) of watching its performance.

This new anthology revives those anxieties, as well as the hopes that come with them for the revival of Philippine theater itself, pinning those hopes on the audacity of these new playwrights. (That audacity can be extremely funny or extremely disturbing, as recent plays by Chris Martinez and Allan Lopez have shown.)

The book is available at Aeon Books on Katipunan, Popular Bookstore on T. Morato, Solidaridad, Powerbooks, National Book Store, Bound Bookstore, Fully Booked, and the University of the Philippines Press bookstores in UP Diliman, Baguio, Iloilo, and Davao.


I'VE BEEN having interesting exchanges with some readers following my recent piece on language issues, where I argued against the growing mode of thinking that English can only or best be promoted in this country by eschewing Filipino and Taglish. Taglish in particular seems like an easy target, as it appears to mangle both English and Filipino, impairing the learning of both languages and producing masters of neither language.

I don’t know if the linguistic evidence will bear that out; I’m inclined to believe that, like many seemingly obvious things, it’s actually false, and I’d be glad to hear from serious scholars what the truth of the matter is, and how a language is really learned and mastered. (I’m asking for academic proof, not for more opinions probably just as faulty as mine.)

A reader named Peter observed that “In all the countries where English was used to conquer, there has always been some resultant form of mish-mashed English that results, and we know this as pidgin English. The Bahamas has it, the Philippines has Taglish, Puerto Rico has Nuyorican. And I’ve noticed that Vietnamese English speakers in America also use some form of Viet-English combination. How about the French Canadian spoken in Quebec, which the mainland French scoffs at when they hear it? And pity the fool who tries to interpret French Haitian. I am sure there are other derivations such as Dutch-Indo, Viet-Chinese, etc. But Taglish should not be used as an excuse for the lack of English speaking in the Philippines. Remember, it is the media that the public mimics, and we are so guilty of it.”

As I wrote Peter in response, he was right about these spin-offs of English; they're inevitable, and they're how languages grow. Old English itself, or Anglo-Saxon, began as a form of German in the 5th century, and then took in a massive dose of French (and its Latin pedigree) after the Norman invasion of 1066. You can imagine the horror of both Anglo-Saxon and French purists, if there were any, at the emergence of this hybrid language in the markets and the military camps. And what would it have been called—“Franglish”? (Many modern Frenchmen deplore and yet can’t help speaking what in the ‘60s became Franglais.)

That’s how I see Taglish; as a language or a variety of it, it’s objectively neither good nor bad, neither better nor worse—it just is, and will be. And it is, because it’s useful and often easier on the tongue and on the mind. Some people make fun of it by trotting out the oft-quoted “Let’s make tusok-tusok the fishballs,” but that’s just as ridiculous and pointless an example as the old salumbola and salumpuwit straw dummies that anti-Filipinists have used to malign the language. In other words, whom do you know really speaks that way? Most of us—yes, including many who might otherwise compose their papers and messages in letter-perfect English—will more likely say, “Hindi ako maka-relate sa topic ng lecture niya” or “Paki-fax na lang ng estimate mo sa akin bukas.”

I dare anyone to tell me those same things in unadulterated Filipino (whatever that means; as far as I’m concerned, Filipino is already, necessarily, and wonderfully enriched by its borrowings).

Can I say these things in “pure” English? Sure: “I can’t relate to his lecture topic” and “Please fax me your estimate tomorrow.” But then again, why should I, if the social or speaking situation doesn’t demand it? How many among us—including we Filipino PhDs in English—speak in straight, complete, and impeccably composed sentences in English, anyway? And again, why should we, if we’re not in Cambridge, in Geneva, or even in South Dakota? If you’ve tried lecturing two full hours a day in English, four days a week, as I’m doing now in northeastern Wisconsin, you’ll know how that can lead to lockjaw, and what a relief and how natural it is to meet a fellow Pinoy and say, “O, pare! Tapos ka na bang mag-grade ng midterms mo? Mag-relax naman tayo mamaya, may replay daw n’ung championship game kagabi diyan sa Faculty Lounge.”

Anyone who has nightmares about Taglish replacing English in our newspapers and schoolbooks anytime soon needn’t worry. People often forget that Taglish works best as a spoken language; it’s a pain to read over more than a few sentences, no matter how easy it may be on the ear. Someone thought otherwise and paid dearly for it in the early 1970s, when the country’s first (and, to my knowledge, only) avowedly Taglish tabloid newspaper, the Sun, opened and failed with a deafening thud. As for TV, well, that's another matter, since it's more of a verbal medium, and class considerations take over in terms of the language used by particular programs (e.g., no Taglish in English newscasts, Filipino/Tagalog or Taglish for sitcoms).

To sum things up, as I told Peter, I like Taglish; it's useful and speakable, and a whole lot friendlier than English. At the same time, we should promote English as an international language and a smart option for the 21st-century filipino—and there are ways of doing it, too, but cutting down on Taglish isn't one of them. Taglish isn’t the enemy; underfunded, unimaginative, and sloppy teaching is. The best thing you can do for your children’s English is not to threaten them with a P50 slash in their cellphone load allowance for every Tagalog word they utter, but to buy them good English-language books and magazines suitable for their ages and interests—something that says “Read me, I’m interesting!” instead of “I’m a lesson in English.”

As it turned out, Peter and I were on the same side of the issue, and he had a startling insight to share. He was, in said, also very much in support of improving English instruction in the Philippines, but “…. Speaking English, in my opinion, has been detrimental to us Filipinos who moved to the States. Because we can speak English, we can easily assimilate (ourselves in American) society, get good jobs, go to school, and be even better. But the poor non-English-speaking immigrants are out of the running for those good jobs.

“And what do they do? They are the ones who open up businesses, and they flourish. They are the Korean grocery and deli owners in Manhattan. They are the Bangladeshi clothing vendors on Broadway. The Greeks are the pizza shop owners in Boston, the Lebanese the gasoline station owners, the Vietnamese the Laundromat operators. They are the ones who are actually supporting the majority population with their small businesses, and who are making a good living because of it—while we Filipinos are happy to work side by side with the Americans or the other English-speaking immigrants, and settle for our just reward—the paycheck— and we are stuck in this mode!”

Amen, Peter, amen!

]]> Sun, 29 Oct 2006 10:24:14 -0600 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanOct06.html#rlv183226096

So sorry for the late upload, folks--am on the road on the way back to De Pere from San Diego, and just found my first wi-fi hotspot in days here in Minneapolis!


I HAD an interesting after-dinner conversation the other evening with a friend and colleague here at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin—Dr. John Holder, who’s been to the Philippines many times (he’s married to a Filipina, Gertie) and who teaches Buddhist and American philosophy, aside from administering my weekly whipping in badminton. Like me, John’s been teaching for over 20 years, and has seen all kinds of academic situations, the good as well the bad—but more lately, it seems, more the bad than the good.

We had just gotten done with midterm exams, and—in a mood made more expansive by a few bottles of Canadian beer—were wondering half-idly where higher education was, and where it was going, in light of what we were seeing in our classrooms.

Now, it’s easy to imagine a posse of sophomores getting together in a bar swilling whatever they can get at their age (or despite it; the legal drinking age in Wisconsin remains 21) and moaning and yelping away at perceived injustices suffered at the hands of their sadistic, abusive, mean-spirited professors. Less familiar to most imaginations is the opposite scenario: those professors (no longer demonic, but wise and all-too-merciful) lamenting the decline of undergraduate civilization—manifest in the absence of manners and the overflow of vacuous thought in some of these young citizens—as the symptom of a larger cultural malaise (pass the pale ale, please).

John and I had fended off some rather nasty slings and arrows in our time in front of the blackboard, and appreciated the opportunity to trade professional gripes. John recalled, for example, how one student had dismissed his professorship by saying that “You’re just my intellectual chauffeur.” Yet another student complained in his evaluation form that “This teacher forced me to think!” (Ironically, that comment would help secure John’s tenure at the college.) I told John about how one of my department colleagues had a student complaining about how “the exam she gave us was too difficult.” Just that morning, one of my own students—having been inexplicably absent the previous day—had come up to me and blithely asked, “So, did we do anything yesterday?” (I looked at him with the thinnest of smiles and said, “Yes, we do something everyday.”)

But never mind the insults—for, more often than not, they know not what they say. John and I were speculating where higher education was headed, and the outlook seemed bleak.

Fresh on my mind was the growing chorus back home for “English! English! English!” as though learning it quickly was some kind of panacea that would cure our economic and social ailments in a fortnight, courtesy of the booming call-center industry and other English-using service industries. (More on this next week.) “There’ll be a greater demand for skills,” I said. “ Faced with an academic smorgasbord, students—and universities and colleges—will identify which specific courses they need to meet the minimum requirements for certain jobs, and will find the shortest and straightest route to a diploma.”

“That’ll be the end of liberal education,” John said, and I could only agree.

As we saw it, the problem is that we often mistake the acquisition of skills—as important and indispensable as they are, especially in societies in desperate need of employment—with a well-rounded college education, or the idea itself of “education.” Skills allow you to perform tasks; education, well, forces you to think—not just about which buttons to press, but which judgments to make for the greater social good.

Education involves values, and these values are learned in less direct ways than through flow charts and pronunciation guides; they concern right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and the lack of it, justice and injustice.

Not everyone can have or can afford a college education that rounds the person out; most of our countrymen (and many Americans, for that matter) will just have to get by on their driving, typing, tailoring, plumbing, and janitorial skills. They’re nothing to scoff at; they keep the rest of us alive and our economy afloat, and we have these workers to thank for our relative leisure—including the leisure to sit back and gripe. But what a sorry waste it would be if our colleges and universities that can do something more and something else for our best-prepared citizens reduced themselves to technical schools—and if our students and their professors rode on this well-greased slide to mediocrity.

Ah, ale, more pale ale, please!


THE MORNING after that chat, I picked up a copy of the New York Times and stumbled on an article that indirectly offered one explanation for why we Filipinos have the hardest time becoming leaders and innovators rather than followers and imitators in the 21st century economy we all seem to be intent on crashing.

The Times reported that “For nine months of the year, Dr. (Shing-Tung) Yau is a Harvard math professor, best known for inventing the mathematical structures known as Calabi-Yau spaces that underlie string theory, the supposed ‘theory of everything.’ In 1982 he won a Fields medal, the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize.”

For the other three months, however, Dr. Yau—born in 1949 in a poor village outside Hong Kong—returns to China to help produce new PhDs and push China’s science agenda forward.

The Times continued: “’In China he is a movie star,’ said Ronald Chan, a Hong Kong real estate developer and an old friend.... And last summer Dr. Yau played the part, dashing in black cars from television studios to VIP receptions in forbidden gardens in the Forbidden City. He ushered Stephen Hawking into the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square to kick off a meeting of some of the world’s leading physicists on string theory, and beamed as a poem he had written was performed by a music professor on the conference stage. It reads in part: “Beautiful indeed / is the source of truth. / To measure the changes of time and space / the smartest are nothing.'”

A world-class math professor recognized and lionized in his own country who goes out of his way to replicate himself: does that speak to anything Filipino? Many of our best minds go abroad—and stay there. If and when they come home to offer help, no one knows them; if anything, they’re looked upon as meddlers and interlopers, with nothing to contribute to their local counterparts and juniors.

And did I say math? We’d rather sing and dance—that’s what all the lunchtime shows suggest we do, if our poorest people want to get anywhere in life and in this world. I have nothing against entertainers and movie stars, many of whom are indeed exceptionally talented professional artists who work very hard, and who deserve every accolade they get. But even they know and understand the need to broaden their horizons—and some of them are doing something about it. Former film star and Playboy model Tetchie Agbayani is completing a master’s degree in Psychology at the Ateneo; Sharon Cuneta (of whom I must admit to being a longtime fan) has quietly been taking distance courses with UP’s Open University.

It’s a long hop from intellectual chauffeur to movie star, but if our students were just as willing to think a few things through with us, I’m sure that John and I wouldn’t mind driving them around this maze we call an education—at the end of which neither would we mind a VIP reception or two.


MOST PEOPLE know my home province of Romblon only for its milky marble; but many years ago, on October 24, 1944, its waters played host to one of the most important naval encounters of that war: the Battle of Sibuyan Sea, a phase of the larger Battle of Leyte Gulf which led to the collapse of the Imperial Japanese Navy. In Sibuyan, the Japanese lost its super-battleship Musashi.

To commemorate that event, Romblon officials and their guests will converge today in my hometown of Alcantara, thanks to the efforts of the Romblon Cultural Heritage Association, Inc. headed by Gen. Dominador Resos, in cooperation with the office of Cong. Eduardo C. Firmalo, the Philippine Navy (particularly Rear Adm. George Uy, commander of the Philippine Fleet), the US Military Retired Activities Office in Manila led by its director, Virgilio A. Medina, and the local government units of Romblon.

I can only hope that beyond marking such military milestones, that cultural heritage association will soon embark on significant cultural projects for Romblon’s present and its future. The real battle, gentlemen, is no longer on the ocean, but in the mind.


TO SPARE many readers the trouble of copying and typing in my kilometric blog address (http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html), I’ve found a way—thanks to a special deal from Yahoo offering domain names at cut-rate prices—to reduce all of that to this: www.penmanila.net.

It’s done by something called “masked forwarding”—in other words, you click on the “penmanila” shortcut but you’ll actually be delivered to my longer “homepage” address. That means, though, that I had to buy “penmanila.net” from Yahoo for around P500 a year—not too bad a price, I think, for the convenience. Even if you don’t have a blog, and just want a simple webpage to put your personal or professional shingle on (say, to advertise your expertise, as you’ll see by checking out www.acesinfo.info), buying a domain name (as in yourname.com) could well be worth it. Depending on what’s available, you can even choose from .com, .org, .net, .info, .biz, etc.

To learn more or to sign up, go to http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/domains. (Now, can’t they shorten that to something easier on the fingers?)

]]> Sun, 22 Oct 2006 09:08:16 -0700 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanOct06.html#gjr182611825

A COUPLE of months ago, I lamented the decline of penmanship skills among Filipinos—myself included—because of the way the computer keyboard has taken over the pen in our daily lives. A whole week can go by without us writing more than our signatures in longhand—much less an entire letter, or a speech, or a short story.

I never had much of a penmanship, but like any schoolboy and schoolgirl of my generation, I trained for long, laborious hours writing letters (I don’t even mean amorous missives, but As, Bs, and Cs) in that loopy style we call cursive. Back then, these letters had little cowlicks and tails. They rode a straight line and leaned rightward, like a row of ducks boldly bucking a stiff current.

Somewhere along the way, we—or our kids—lost all those tiny squiggles and the visual idiosyncrasies that make your penmanship yours and yours alone, replaced by squarish, indistinctive block letters that could just as well have been written by the person next to you. When computers arrived, we didn’t just write badly by hand—we wrote a lot less, and cursive took a deeper dive. Except for a few private schools which still insist on their students writing in a particular way (great for discipline, but no leap forward for individuality, either), Penmanship the subject has gone the way of Spanish for Filipinos.

As it turns out—and as you might have expected—we are not alone. Comes now a report from the Washington Post declaring that “The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it's threatening to finish off longhand. When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.”

Apparently, they just don’t teach penmanship anymore, given the demands of other, presumably more important, subjects on class time. “Until the 1970s, penmanship was a separate daily lesson through sixth grade, said Dennis Williams, national product manager for Zaner-Bloser Handwriting, the most widely used penmanship curriculum,” says the Post. “At its peak in the 1940s and '50s, most teachers insisted on as much as two hours a week, but a 2003 Vanderbilt University survey of primary-grade teachers found that most now spend 10 minutes a day or less on the subject. To adapt to this new reality, the Zaner-Bloser method has been changed to a 15-minute daily plan.”

While the loss seems to be a largely sentimental one—a case of old fogeys like me wishing the world had remained the familiar playground that we knew as kids—there’s some scientific basis for believing that better penmanship means better thinking. As the Post reports:

“The loss of handwriting also may be a cognitive opportunity missed. The neurological process that directs thought, through fingers, into written symbols is a highly sophisticated one. Several academic studies have found that good handwriting skills at a young age can help children express their thoughts better—a lifelong benefit…. In one of the studies, Vanderbilt University professor Steve Graham, who studies the acquisition of writing, experimented with a group of first-graders in Prince George's County who could write only 10 to 12 letters per minute. The kids were given 15 minutes of handwriting instruction three times a week. After nine weeks, they had doubled their writing speed and their expressed thoughts were more complex. He also found corresponding increases in their sentence construction skills.”

The problem is—with our own fingers having atrophied and feeling just about as flexible as firewood when clutching a pen—who’s going to teach the kids? How are we going to revive the joy that comes with looking at an emotion emerge from a sentence, wet but also as indelible as ink, the thought and feeling shaped as much by the stretch, the leap, and the hesitation of the letters as by the words themselves?

I wonder if the time will come when some of us will once again, as in truly olden days, require the professional services of an escribiente—a scrivener, a scribe—to write our personal letters for us, just as calligraphers draw place cards for the parties of the very rich. I suspect not. As nostalgic as I may get about pens and penmanship, I’ll take a laser-printed paper—double-spaced and set in 12 pts. New York or Times Roman—over the barely legible, chicken-scratch scrawl that passes for my students’ handwriting, any old time.


INCIDENTALLY, THAT Washington Post heads-up was sent to me by Romy Aquino who, along with his gracious wife Necie, hosted Beng and me in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I gave a lecture a couple of weeks ago. Romy got his PhD in Environmental Science from the University of Michigan and stayed on—just one in a long line of Filipino scholars who went to Michigan (U-M or “the U of M,” to its alumni) for their graduate degrees. It’s a list that’s included, among others, Estefania Aldaba-Lim, Emerenciana Arcellana, Jose Abueva, Edgardo Angara, Miriam Defensor-Santiago, Rene Cayetano, and Raphael “Popo” Lotilla—and, many rungs lower on the food chain—yours truly (MFA Creative Writing, 1988). (The controversial Dean C. Worcester, colonial Secretary of the Interior, also studied in Michigan, which now houses his papers.)

It was a good visit that allowed me to reconnect with old friends and haunts, and with an unusually productive if unsettling time in my life—perhaps the last time I might’ve thought myself young. I hadn’t stepped into Angell Hall in almost 20 years, and I just sat in its lobby, amid all that marble and bronze, while I waited for my writing mentor, the amazingly prolific and gifted Nick Delbanco, to arrive. (Another teacher was Charles Baxter, who’s gone over to Minnesota.) Over tea at the Hopwood Room, we had a quick chat in a vain effort to cover the missing years, and I ended up blabbering like a student hard put to explain a twist in the plot.



Later that day, at the end of my lecture, I read lines from a work I’d begun in Ann Arbor: “I come from a country without snow and raspberries. Instead we have pounding rain and coconuts. When the typhoons come the coconuts fall in a rain of their own….” And the thrill of creation swarmed back to me, particularly that odd sharpening of the senses that you get when you’re thousands of miles away from the object you’re describing, because it isn’t just your eyes or even your memory but your imagination at work.

I wasn’t the first Filipino writer to study in Michigan—Aida Rivera-Ford and Lilia Amansec proudly waved the flag there long before I did—and I certainly wasn’t the last, with Peter Mayshle recently graduating with an MFA and Gad Lim now doing a PhD in Education (both, incidentally, are Ateneans).



I met up with the Ann Arbor oldtimers, and was privileged to be hosted for dinner by Dr. Paz “Pat” Buenaventura Naylor and her husband Barney. Pat was a teenager when the Second World War broke out, and she retains many vivid memories of a colorful youth that included early widowhood, from a marriage to a soldier who became a Korean war hero, and then a prestigious Barbour scholarship to Michigan.

According to Dr. Naylor, there was a time when Philippine Studies at U-M was the best such program on the mainland, and second only to that of Hawaii. It covered many areas including anthropology, archaeology, history, and political science. But it lacked a Filipino language component, until a Luce Foundation grant enabled the establishment of the Tagalog program in the Department of Linguistics and the hiring of Pat Naylor as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics with the mandate to set up the program.

Today, with Pat retired, Adelwisa “Deling” Agas Weller—a UP Political Science alumna who has long been based in Ann Arbor and who has played godmother to generations of Pinoy grad students—teaches Filipino to a class composed mainly of young Filipino-Americans eager to reclaim an important part of their heritage. For Deling, it’s just one more connection between Michigan and the Philippines—an association that goes all the way back to the 1920s, when the Philippine Michigan Club was organized.

Along with Romy Aquino, Deling Weller is leading a valiant though often lonely effort to raise funds for the Philippine Studies Initiative at U-M, to keep alive a program severely threatened by budget cuts. There are dozens if not hundreds of potential donors even within the Fil-Am community in Michigan itself, many of them prominent achievers in their fields, and I can only imagine—or at least hope—that it will not take too much out of each of their pockets to raise the $10,000 minimum that it will take to keep Filipino afloat in one of America’s most distinguished universities.

Our visit ended with an early-morning jaunt through Ann Arbor’s weekend Farmer’s Market, looking for Oriental vegetables in the chill of an early fall with Romy, Necie, and a jolly former dried-fish dealer-turned-Ford engineer named Juanito Co. I was never much for veggies, and thankfully we found none; but that day I could taste the bitterness of ampalaya on my dreaming tongue, and I didn’t much mind.

]]> Sun, 15 Oct 2006 08:30:25 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanOct06.html#qat182070088

THESE PAST couple of weeks, I’ve had two opportunities to give lectures on a pet topic of mine, “English in the Philippines”, at St. Norbert College and at the University of Michigan.

In presentations like these, I always get asked one question in the open forum afterwards: “Is Taglish or Filipino itself the cause of the deterioration of our people’s skills in English? Shouldn’t we ban the use of Taglish and Filipino in schools to improve those skills?”

The question frankly makes me cringe, but I understand where it comes from—a sense of frustration over what many people perceive to be the loss of one of our comparative advantages as an economy, especially in a globalizing world that speaks English more than any other language.

As a professor of English, I witness these degraded skills every day—not just in my students’ work, but, sad to say, also in my professional environment, in the media, and in general usage. It isn’t just a matter of subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, and wrong prepositions; what I’m finding is a basic inability to express oneself clearly—in complete, fluid clauses and sentences, using precisely chosen words—in English.

So this much, I will agree with: we need to work on our English, to make ourselves better understood by each other and by the world at large. But as for what we need to do to improve our skills in English, the worst thing we can do is to throw Filipino out the window and pretend like we were little Thomasite schoolkids all over again.

The situation’s far from hopeless, but it will take a lot of sustained and substantial effort to promote English and use it to our economic advantage without losing or perverting our Filipino-ness, as devalued as a trifle like “identity” now seems to be to many.

It’s very tempting to use Filipino as the scapegoat for our ailing English, most easily by associating it with a narrow and self-destructive nationalism, especially at a time when many people embrace “globalization” as if it were God’s gift to humanity and when “nationalism” sounds like a bad word we should never bring up in polite conversation.

The other usual suspect is Taglish, that eminently speakable mongrel tongue, which allegedly results in the speaker knowing neither English nor Tagalog well enough to pass the UPCAT.

But if these factors are to blame, then why do I find almost exactly the same problems in the written exams of my American students, who of course can speak English as fluently as they should, but a good number of whom have the hardest time articulating their ideas on paper with clarity and precision?

I could go on all day proposing possible remedies, but let me tell you right now about one option I won’t be rooting for. Banning Filipino or Taglish from the school or workplace may sound bold and daring, as though somebody with guts—looking suspiciously like a politician in need of an easy target or a pet cause to inflame the middle class—were finally taking action.

But it’s stupid, because it won’t work; it never has, and it never will, beyond small, short-term, and tightly controlled situations. Prohibiting people from speaking a language that makes sense and feels comfortable to them will have as much chance for success as King Canute ordering back the ocean waves. For all his powers of less than subtle persuasion, the redoubtable Lee Kuan Yew has so far failed miserably in his desire to root Singlish out of the Singaporean as one more way to make Singapore more First World than it already is. Singlish continues to be spoken with much energy and enthusiasm on the street, in the malls, and in the local plays and TV shows that could very well be the best and the most interesting effusions of a truly Singaporean culture. (Senior Minister Lee was reported to be particularly horrified by a comedian’s Singlish admonition that went “Quick, quick. Late already. You eat yourself, we eat ourself!”—meaning, “Hurry, we’re late. Let's eat separately.” OK, so it sounds silly, but as far as I’m concerned, if it makes perfect sense to two Singaporeans, they can happily eat themselves as much as they want.)

What policymakers forget is that language isn’t a zero-sum game: that you can learn one without unlearning another. Standard, “grammatically correct” English can very well coexist with Filipino and Taglish in the same brain and on the same tongue. Instead of focusing on the negatives and on the “don’ts”, we could be promoting Standard English as a positive option that anyone who wants or needs to communicate with the world should learn and master. The important thing is for the user to know and to understand when to switch from one language and one register to another, depending on what the specific situation requires. Appropriateness is key. Real life is full of situations when Filipino or Taglish could save your skin—rather than letter-perfect English.

The real problem, I think, is that our teaching of English has deteriorated sharply, as well as the learning environment you need to provide around the language.

If we’re serious about improving our English—and beyond easy legislative declarations of English as the language of instruction—we should improve the English language training of our teachers, provide interesting and up-to-date learning materials on CDs and DVDs to schoolchildren, expand access to computers and the Internet, and beef up our public libraries. That sounds like a lot of money (do I hear more for education, and less for discretionary “intelligence” funds?), but since when did precious knowledge come free?

This should also mean, for example, ensuring the quality and correctness of teaching materials by weeding out corruption in the Department of Education, particularly in the selection and procurement of textbooks.

As you can see, repairing our fractured English is far more complicated than simply punishing students for splitting infinitives (incidentally, a rule that never really was) and for saying “Ay naku!” instead of “Jiminy cricket!”


AND NOW a couple of quick plugs for good causes.

The Society of Children's Book Writers & Illustrators (SCBWI) will be hosting a writing workshop with author Alice McLerran on November 11 from 9 am to 5 pm at the Filipinas Heritage Library on Ayala corner Makati Avenue in Makati City.

The workshop is a chance for budding authors to have their manuscripts critiqued while spending a day with the New York-based McLerran, says SCBWI head Beulah Pedregosa Taguiwalo. “The workshop is for adults who write or want to write for children and young people—amateurs and professionals, published and unpublished authors, freelance writers, college students, teachers, parents, educators, and others who have a keen interest in children's literature. The workshop is also helpful for illustrator-writers, visual artists who are interested in the writing process, and those who are eager to know more about the kind of creative collaborations that can take place between authors and illustrators. We hope to give all the participants an intimate glimpse into what Alice describes as ‘the kind of rewriting that is such an important part of the writing process for me.’”

It’s interesting to note that, before she turned to writing for children, Alice McLerran earned a PhD in anthropology from the University of California in Berkeley, and later an MPH from the Harvard School of Public Health. Registration will cost P1,750 until October 16, and P2,000 until Friday November 3. For more information, contact Beaulah Pedregosa Taguiwalo at beaulah.taguiwalo@yahoo.com or 0917-787-4956, or Nikki Garde Torres at nikkigarde@yahoo.com or 0917-667-1267.

Quiz Bee Foundation vice president Pettizou Tayag also wrote in to report brisk sales for their Official Quiz Bee Reviewer Book titled “Answerboards Up!” Launched at the Manila International Book Fair last month, the book has proved to be a hit, selling 1,500 copies to date.

“Surprisingly, 20% of our book sales come from yuppies and business professionals. We initially thought that it would only be parents, students and teachers who would show interest in the book. We are also a recommended reference book for libraries at public and private schools, universities and colleges,” Pettizou says.

You can get the book in all Goodwill Bookstores nationwide for only P170, or order it online through www.quizbee.org. To know more about the book or about the Quiz Bee itself and its upcoming events, you can also call the Quiz Bee Secretariat at 712-0682 or mobile 0917-892-2560 or send an email to pettizoutayag@yahoo.com.

]]> Mon, 09 Oct 2006 02:01:27 -0500 http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/PenmanOct06.html#mfh181486685

WALKING HOME from my class in the American Short Story—where we’ll be dealing this semester with about 50 stories from Washington Irving to Jhumpa Lahiri—I had one of those “aha!” moments that Oprah keeps talking about.

I’d been mulling over something I’d heard at a party for local Pinoys over the weekend—a remark from an American friend, John Holder, who’s married to a Filipina, has been to the Philippines many times, speaks Filipino, and knows the country better than many of us do. John observed how we seem to have a penchant for lacing our prose with big words. “I’ve even come across words I hadn’t heard in years, words like ‘pertinacious’,” John said.

That wouldn’t be too surprising, of course, if you’re Jimmy Abad, who occasionally peppers his papers (hmm, that’s a tongue-twister) with jawbreakers like “discombobulate” and “embrangle.” But then Jimmy’s a poet and a PhD, so he probably has a right more than most others to use words that your average Pepe or Pilar will never meet in a lifetime of reading, much less use in a sentence. His learning and passion for exotic words like “aposiopesis” notwithstanding, Jimmy has been very careful to employ them sparingly and precisely, knowing that the longer words get, the more likely you are to misuse them.

(Before anyone else points it out, let me hasten to admit to one such lapse in my column last week, when I wrote about having a “predilection” for hurting the people I loved the most. I knew the second I sent off the piece that there was something not quite right about that word, but it was too late to fix the problem. The problem is that “predilection” means “a preference or special liking for something,” as in “a predilection for chocolates” or “a predilection for wide-brimmed hats”—in other words, for generally positive things. The word I should’ve used was “propensity”, “an inclination or natural tendency to behave in a particular way,” such as “a propensity to miss crucial shots.” This example demonstrates that while two words might look alike and suggest generally similar things, they can have subtle shadings that could change or even subvert what you mean.)

But education—or the lack of it—hasn’t stopped many of us Pinoys from throwing words around the size of sumo wrestlers. Sometimes it’s to show off, other times it’s to intimidate; once in a while, it’s plain exuberance, such as when our old village in San Mateo finally got electricity after wallowing in sooty darkness for many months, prompting the barangay captain to sign his letters with a glowing “Electrifically yours.”

Indeed, I’ve always believed that politicians and our tradition of political bombast have a lot to do with the way we think about words and what passes for good (meaning grandiloquent) language. I parodied this in my 1992 novel Killing Time in a Warm Place, where I had the Governor introduce Ferdinand Marcos as “a man of indescribable genius, of multifarious talents, of boundless enthusiasm, the culmination, the epitome, the peerless paragon of our achievements as a race!” Elsewhere in that novel I had a character named Mandoy Imoy speak of the narrator’s father (whom you’ll recognize from last week’s piece) as a man of many and mysterious words: “Your tatay,” Mandoy Imoy said as I staggered to the gate on his arm that night in Kangleong, “he was a bright boy, what a brain the guy had! We went to the same school, did he ever tell you that? He memorized the whole multiplication table when he was five, and he knew English words nobody had ever heard of, things like, uh, fagelistic or runcimian, you ever hear words like that? What a brain. But he didn't know money. You're okay, you have a nice job, you go abroad, I think your brains are all right. But your father—ay, he should've made real money, maybe he's not so smart after all, eh? Maybe he was, uh, fagelistic, ha-ha-ha!”

This week’s “aha” moment came after I’d taught two stories: “Europe” by Henry James and “The Caballero’s Way” by O. Henry. If you’ve never read James, here’s a typical example of the prose produced by that Harvard-educated cosmopolite: “Though wasted and shrunken she still occupied her high-backed chair with a visible theory of erectness, and her intensely aged face—combined with something dauntless that belonged to her very presence and that was effective even in this extremity—might have been that of some immemorial sovereign, of indistinguishable sex, brought forth to be shown to the people in disproof of the rumour of extinction.”

Did you get that? I certainly didn’t, not until I’d looked at it twice or thrice, stumble as I did over the thicket of those polysyllabic words. But Henry James defined—for his generation and for long afterwards—the standard of literary suavity and composure, encouraging hordes of wannabe Jameses to ape the same Latinate style without achieving quite the same polish and roundness of effect in the end. Now here’s O. Henry, describing the Cisco Kid’s muchacha:

“As for Tonia, though she sends description to the poorhouse, let her make a millionaire of your fancy. Her blue-black hair, smoothly divided in the middle and bound close to her head, and her large eyes full of the Latin melancholy, gave her the Madonna touch. Her motions and air spoke of the concealed fire and the desire to charm that she had inherited from the gitanas of the Basque province. As for the humming-bird part of her, that dwelt in her heart; you could not perceive it unless her bright red skirt and dark blue blouse gave you a symbolic hint of the vagarious bird.”

There’s a verbal flourish here and there, a touch of the exotic: he uses the word “vagarious” and strange phrases (to his insular audience) like “gitanas of the Basque province” but pulls it off by draping the whole production with the mantle of theater. He chooses and uses words more for dramatic than scholarly effect, and I can almost imagine him chuckling with excitement as he wrote these sentences for his public’s delectation. In other words, O. Henry—however his later critics may have deplored his unabashed sentimentality and outrageously contrived plots—was fun, and had fun. He knew exactly what he was doing, and did it to shameless excess.

I can show nothing to prove this now except my own high-school education, but I suspect that we Filipinos read O. Henry more than we did Henry James, if we even got to the latter at all. And as sacrilegious as this may sound, I don’t think we lost much in the bargain, in terms of appreciating stories that feel like they were written by a circus magician rather than by a taxidermist.

The only—the big—trouble is, we often don’t seem to know the difference, trying to sound like one Henry and coming out the other. Myself, I’ve found that as I get older, my vocabulary tends to get simpler—most of the time. Like a sign in a local car dealership reminded me the other day, “Don’t use a big word where a diminutive one will do!”


SPEAKING OF big words, I usually delete e-mail messages preceded by a “FWD” without even looking at what they contain, especially when they’re addressed to a hundred people, most of whom probably do exactly as I do. But I couldn’t resist peeking into a message forwarded me by an old friend from Ann Arbor, Deling Weller, who had received it from some other Fil-Am. Just in case this skipped your mailbox, here’s the latest edition of the outrageously funny “English-Tagalog Dictionary”:

1) Contemplate - kulang ang mga pinggan
2) Punctuation - pera para maka-enrol
3) Ice Buko - nagtatanong kung ayos na ang buhok
4) Tenacious - sapatos na pang tennis
5) Calculator - tawagan kita mamaya
6) Devastation - sakayan ng bus
7) Protestant - Tindahan ng prutas
8) Statue - Ikaw ba yan?
9) Tissue - Ikaw nga!
10) Predicate - Pakawalan mo ang pusa
11) Dedicate - Pinatay ang pusa
12) Aspect - Pantusok o pandurog ng yelo
13) Deduct - Ang pato
14) Defeat - Ang paa (ng pato)
15) Detail - Ang buntot (ng pato)
16) Deposit - Ang Gripo (Call DIPLOMA if DEPOSIT is leaking)
17) City - Bago mag-utso; a number to follow 6
18) Cattle - Doon nakatila ang Hali at Leyna
19) Persuading - Unang Kasal
20) Depress - Ang nagkasal sa PERSUADING
22) Defense - Ginamit ng mga pangsulat sa kontrata sa PERSUADING
23) It Depends - Kainin mo ang bakod
24) Shampoo - Bago mag-labing-isha (11)
25) Delusion - Maluwang (kapag maluwang ang damit, eh DELUSION)
26) Delivery - Walang bayad. Kapag working lunch, eh DELIVERY na ang tanghalian
27) Profit - Patunayan mo
28) Balance Sheet - What comes out after eating a balance diet
29) Backlog - bacon saka egg
30) Beehive - magpakatino ka
31) CD-ROM - tingnan mo ang kwarto
32) Debug - ang ipis
33) Defrag - ang palaka
34) Defense - ang bakod
35) Defer - ang balahibo
36) Deflate - ang plato
37) Detest - ang eksamin
38) Devalue - 'yon ang susunod sa letrang V
39) Devote - ang boto
40) Dilemma - brownout, a!
41) Effort - 'dun nagla-land ang efflane
42) Forums - apat na kwarto
43) July - nagsinungaling ka ba?
44) Liturgy - what comes after litur F
45) Thesis - ito ay...

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