Citation
Cruz, Conchitina. “The (Mis)Education of the Filipino Writer.” Kritika Kultura, no. 28, Mar. 2017, pp. 3–34. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.13185/KK2017.02802.
Quotes
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Collations
Edith Tiempo’s preference for a monolingual English writing practice
Fluency in English uninflected by its postcolonial and multilingual context is what Tiempo holds up as an ideal when she describes teaching at Western Michigan University in 1963 as “more rewarding,” since “[the students] didn’t have second language devices, patterns and so forth” (Alegre and Fernandez 415-16, 449).
What Rafael calls “translation,” which had no place in colonial education, Tiempo refers to as “compartmentalization,” which works against the craft of the postcolonial poet.
Anti-vernacular
According to Vicente Rafael, the 1925 Survey of the Educational System in the Philippines identified the vernacular languages as the greatest impediment to fluency in American English of both Filipino teachers and students, who were perpetually engaged in translation.
Fluency, and the new colonial subject it promised, could only be achieved if translation ceased, or was at least significantly reduced; consequently, it was necessary to exclude the mother tongue from the classroom and treat it as subservient to the foreign tongue to both conquer the vernacular and master the English language
The prestige of English as the language of intellect and imagination is so entrenched that its superiority over the local languages is also received as inherent rather than constructed. Thus, in the same interview, Torrevillas regards reductive thinking as the outcome of writing in Filipino: “I have found, without being overly pejorative, that the concerns of many of the nationalistic writers tend to be simplistic or oversimplified once they’re written in the native language” (Nazareth).
Anti-vernacular perspective favors institutionalized creative writing
This outlook underpins Edilberto Tiempo’s remarks in an interview from the 1990s, when he deems Anglophone Filipino writing of the last fifty years far better than writing in the vernaculars: “to begin with, those writing in English … are graduates of universities in the Philippines as well as those who have studied in the US and elsewhere” (Nazareth).
English monolingualism
Neutralized as an aesthetic value, monolingualism in English, the key to linguistic fluency, enables mastery in creative writing. In turn, creative writing as a discipline is most fully realized by those trained in the academy, the home base of writing in English.
As a pedagogical tool prone to fostering prejudicial thinking, monolingualism in English is colonialist and outdated. In the multilingual field of creative writing in the Philippines, it is also simply inadequate.
Siliman and other workshops perpetuate the notion that writing is the domain of college-educated writers
By requiring applicants to submit manuscripts accompanied by a recommendation letter from “a literature professor or an established writer,” the Silliman Workshop also perpetuates the notion that literary production in English is the domain of college-educated writers, who would most likely be in contact with recognized experts in the field of creative writing (“Call for Manuscripts”). This is confirmed by the annual announcement of successful workshop applicants, which lists not only the fellows’ names but also their university affiliations.
Edith Tiempo on poetry as concerned only by the individual
Owning up to a common charge against the tradition built largely under her supervision, she notes that Filipino poetry in English “seems to feel safer dealing with the ‘inner man’ … when it does not require the definition of specific pain that is felt in the national marrow and seared into the national flesh” (269); hence, “the poet evades the responsibility of asserting for others, and speaks only of his own esoteric insights” (270).
It is not the lack of a social conscience, however, that drives a poet to lyric privacy, which makes no claims about national identity or collectivity; rather, Tiempo surmises, it is the recognition that “if he adopts the language he must also try to assimilate the way of thinking that has begotten it” (269). Political reticence, in this light, becomes a sound, albeit unsatisfactory, recourse for the poet in English, whose tongue can neither completely undo nor convincingly deny its complicity in colonization: “the poetry has to pay dearly … it may probably become more ivory-tower than it should be” (272).
Filipino writing in English is an outsider to national literature
For being written in the language not only of the colonizer but also the ruling and middle classes, Anglophone literature by Filipinos is an outsider to the domain of national literature, which literatures in the local languages occupy without question.
Our demand in the use of English has been nothing less than the English of writers born into the language” (188).
Edith Tiempo recognized that English was problematic but misses an opportunity
She may have called English “a happy accident” in a 1991 interview, but in an essay published in 1965, Tiempo also refers to it as “an uneasy endowment” (“Philippine Poetry” 273).
In the 1954 essay, “The Use of English in Philippine Creative Writing,” Tiempo recognizes the inherently translational character of Philippine writing in English, and, by extension, the Filipino author’s burden to produce what might be called a “divided text,” one written in English yet evocative of the “ideal version” that has “defied projection of its peculiar ‘feel’ or ‘taste’ in English,” which Filipino readers nevertheless might glean (8).
By thinking of English as modifiable by its contact with other languages, she undermines the given-ness of standard English as the language of Anglophone literary production, and begins to shed light on the relations of power that make English the language of postcolonial authors.
When made more visible, English as a nexus of colonial and class relations is a potent springboard from which to confront its operations as the language of privilege and to disrupt the detachment from politics that she observed in the work of Filipino writers in English. Tiempo, however, misses this opportunity when she says, “[t]he problem is not the more superficial one of translating a vernacular version into English; it is not a problem between one language and another, but between a language and a material foreign to each other” (7). On the verge of unpacking the vexed relationship of English with its postcolonial multilingual context, Tiempo reverts to the binary of form and content that regards English as a purely aesthetic tool and local content as everything but language.
The reliance on this dichotomy, which isolates English from the heteroglossia that engenders its modification, explains why Tiempo’s implicit invitation for the Filipino poet in English to exhibit social consciousness in her work “does not include an adjustment in the style or mode of writing” (Barretto-Chow 395).
It reinforces the notion that English is already a fully formed language that the Filipino writer must learn rather than a work in progress she can co-author.
Edith Tiempo recommends that a Filipino poet in English aspire monolingualism and political neutrality
Combined with Tiempo’s New Critical loyalties, it prompts her to suppose that “the only procedure under the present circumstances” available to the Filipino poet in English is to be “carefully universal and neutral” or not “too indigenous”; this leads to congruity of language and content, and by extension, to “good poetry,” in which human situations illuminate truths about the human condition (“Philippine Poetry” 270-72).
By favoring the universal, Tiempo forecloses the proliferation of divided texts, in which Anglophone Filipino writers formally contend with the colonialist and classist baggage of English-language use.
Fluency in English or monolingualism de-politicizes English
Technical fluency in English, or English without an accent, is once again de-politicized and held up as an objective component of good writing.
Edith Tiempo rejects tampering with English now and looking for an audience elsewhere
Although Tiempo wonders if the Filipino poet will ever transform English to “make it wholly and naturally flexible to his purpose,” she relinquishes the possibility to the far future; in the meantime, rather than tamper with existing methods of writing in English, in the attempt to forge a connection with the local audience, “[t]he serious poet’s resort is to look for an audience elsewhere that would understand and listen” (“Philippine Poetry” 272).
The ruse of literary excellence, which normalizes the dominant standards of Anglo-American tradition, turns the alienation of local readers into a necessary sacrifice in the name of good poetry, the trade-off for potential access to an international audience.
Philippine poetry in English is universalist
Universalism, in this sense, imagines a distant rather than proximate addressee; the universal subsumes the local in theory, yet alienates it in practice.
The potentially emancipatory function that J. Neil Garcia assigns to the “predominantly universalist character” of Philippine poetry in English, described as “couched in Standard-sounding English” that “cannot be so easily ethnographically ‘placed,’” seems legible primarily in relation to this distant addressee
Less “colonially suspect” than explicitly ethnopoetic work, which defers to the West’s conception of its postcolonies by fetishizing its Otherness, the universal is an arguably compelling alternative to the trite and mercenary path of local color
Both universalizer and ethnopoeticizers rely on their elite status in the local literary scene
Though oppositional, however, the camps of the “universalizers” and “ethnopoeticizers” are homogeneously populated by poets fluent in English, who either bask in or bastardize their fluency as spokespersons for the postcolony in the international arena. Their peripheral position in the global literary scene is largely derived from and dependent on their elite status in relation to the local literary scene. The prestige that enables Filipino writers in English to be “literarily” mobile and representative of the Filipino outside the Philippines, also maintains their local residence in an ivory tower.
Siliman Workshop’s positioning in the local literary landscape
This dynamic is evident in the way the Tiempo school positions itself in the local literary landscape and selects its participants. Located in the Visayas, the Silliman Workshop contributes to decentralizing the hold of “imperial Manila” on Filipino artistic practice; its cosmopolitanism even bypasses Manila altogether via its direct link to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.15 Its use of English resists the language of the capital, Tagalog-based Filipino, and its hegemony over local languages.
Still, as a private enclave for Filipino writers in English, the Silliman Workshop is inaccessible even to writers in the Visayan languages in its immediate area.
It has also in recent years included international fellows and invited international authors to be on its panel of writers, which suggests a greater interest in interaction with players in the international rather than the local literary scene.
The universalism that Tiempo values, whether applied to the literary text or to the operations of the Silliman Workshop, is tacitly equated with a global literary community whose lingua franca is English. Filipinos, let alone Filipinos without fluency in English, are hardly part of this scene, whether as consumers or producers.
See the universal as always provisional
The universal becomes an exclusionary and imperialist apparatus when regarded as always already formed rather than perpetually in construction; the former requires deference to existing terms for inclusion, while the latter thrives on the proliferation of new terms to include.
To reject the universal altogether at times results in “a too-protectionist approach to assertions of identity”; recuperating it, however, entails attentiveness to the universal “as a horizon rather than a foundation” (Anderson 266, 281).
Translation is necessary for dynamic universality
Judith Butler notes that this dynamic universality is realized through “the difficult labor of translation, one in which the terms made to stand for one another are transformed in the process.”
The universal has to be persistently multilingual
Rethinking the universal in linguistic terms, she imagines it to be persistently multilingual.
As the outcome of ceaseless translation across multiple languages, the universal becomes “that which is yet to be achieved” and “may never be fully or finally achievable” (130-31).
This not only indexes the unquestionable place of (postcolonial) particularity in the pursuit of the universal, but also situates the transformation of the universal in the realm of language in itself
Lumbera advocates for using institutional creative writing as avenue for the proliferation of “divided texts”
Lumbera recasts Butler’s logic in pedagogical terms when he urges creative writing academia to become an avenue for the proliferation of “divided texts” by moderating the weight of proficiency in Standard English as a value in the writing classroom.
Recounting a short story that he found moving when it was discussed at the UP National Workshop, where he served on the panel of writers, he observes that the story would be considered “unacceptable,” whether in the creative writing classroom or the literary pages of magazines “because of its grammatical lapses and the looseness of its construction” (“Young Writing” 187). In the academy, he notes, “all too often, we have repressed a young writer’s expressive freedom and authentic voice by insisting on the same kind of correct English that one finds in the writings of American and British writers.
Universalism in teaching English
The disciplinary power of the classroom creates, for the Filipino writer, a relationship with English defined exclusively by “universal” standards of proficiency, at the expense of other potentially meaningful kinds of relations and the creative possibilities that they can inspire.
Self-reflexivity
Self-reflexivity on the institutional level also invites reconsideration of what it means to be a Filipino writer in English, whose education has been the Silliman Workshop’s primary concern for over half a century.
Rewrite English
It prompts a more thoughtful negotiation of the local multilingual context of Filipino writing in English, which challenges practitioners to not only write in but also rewrite English, in ways that subvert its elite, imperial, and universal status.
As a mentor to young Filipino writers and an outsider to colonizer-colonized relations (Moore was Australian), he exhibited prescience in asserting that the Filipino writer “has to learn not only to write with English but also to write against it… He can use the language correctly, and should use it correctly. But he has to write English without becoming an Englishman or American… a Filipino literature must remain Filipino if it intends to be literature” (qtd. in Hosillos 69).
The Silliman Workshop is a literary gatekeeper
The Silliman Workshop is, without question, a literary gatekeeper many times over, as evident in the degree-granting programs, award- giving bodies, university and mainstream presses, and creative writing classrooms that privilege and replicate the aesthetics and politics it systematized.
Tom Inglis-Moore
Creative writing was officially institutionalized by the Iowa-trained Tiempos in the 1950s, but Tom Inglis Moore, an Oxford-educated professor of English, could have also brought Iowa-influenced creative writing instruction to the Philippines. Moore had spent time as an instructor at the University of Iowa, where creative writing courses were already being offered, prior to teaching young writers at the University of the Philippines from 1928-31.