About me. About Filipino

For the most part of my life, I have been living out a casual love affair with words. I forget when it started—probably in third grade when I started keeping a journal after reading “Harriet the Spy.” It was that novel and not “Pepe and Pilar” that I consider my first conquest in reading, earliest motivation into writing.

The reason I learned to love reading, and consequently writing, is because I have so been amazed at the amount of words these authors can use, master, and abuse. Thousands upon thousands, each with unique but pliable meanings. As a child, I liked saying and using words like “loathsome,” “trustworthy,” “bliss,” “aware,” in my assignments. In high school, I was totally fixated with “defiant,” “infringe,” “undermine,” and at times used my understanding of them to talk back to my parents.

I tried to imagine the store of meanings that can be derived from combinations of these words into coherent phrases, sentences, paragraphs, stories. It is as complex as the universe. Then I began to understand literature as worlds—a story or poem as a world wherein the only probable meanings are those that you can perceive from your standpoint.

So far, that is all I wish to tell you about myself. And no, I’m not at all a geek. Just preoccupied.

On the other hand, I have not been as preoccupied with being Filipino than I was with understanding words. I felt that the meaning of “Filipino” has been rammed down my throat ever since my earliest AP/Filipino classes in grade school. It seemed that the answers to “What is Filipino?” and “Who is Filipino?” have always been handed to me on a platter. All I had to do was to repeat after them, dress in a terno during Linggo ng Wika, sing national anthems at assemblies, memorize all dates, names and facts in those dreadful, dreadful history classes. A poor memory prevented me from appreciating—much less learning from—those AP history classes.

At this point in the essay you might conclude that I suffered from a bad dose of “colonized” mentality. Upon shallow reading you might conclude that if all you could see are the facts that, at an early age I already preferred reading western literature and detested subjects related to my heritage. What many people might not understand is that the conditions of the time have led to this “crisis” in many of my generation and the younger ones. English is the lingua franca, and there is something wrong about the way our history and the Filipino identity are taught in primary and even perhaps secondary levels.

But yes, the question does concern me. At times I think about it, especially when its all quiet and empty enough to contemplate on the crucial matter: what is the point in figuring out the difference about being Filipino? I look into literature, I look into what I know of history, and so far it seems to me that the Filipino identity becomes crucial in the face of adversary. When colonization, despotic rule, large-scale migration and racial discrimination become threats, the idea of Filipino extends to define the enemies’ limits. I think that lately the enemy has become wiser, though, dressed as globalization and free trade, and we don’t generally see it as a threat at all. “It’s all for the best” we say.

I hope so, I hope so.

I hope that through studying local literature at the crossroads, that is Filipino literature written in English (where native sensibilities coincide with a somewhat foreign medium), we could gain substantial insights about the modern Filipino condition.