Translation and the limits of minority discourse in the Philippines

Abstract

For many decades now, minority discourse in the Philippines has been trapped in a nativistic framework that essentializes the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity, canonizing one language, Tagalog, and euphemizing it as Filipino. This then has been institutionally imposed as the official medium for postcolonial resistance, routinely invoked in a binary opposition against a colonially endowed English—a dualism that obfuscates the neglect of all the other local languages, effectively minoritizing them as well as their corresponding oratures and literatures. While the ongoing overhaul of national education—that entails its restructuring into the Kindergarten to 12 System and the adoption of mother-tongue instruction in the first few years of primary school—does promise a rectification, as envisioned (and thus far implemented) this reform is tokenist at best, and will in fact pursue the same bilingual policy that has seen the privileging and intellectualization of Tagalog and English across the past half-century. Rethinking the relevant Deleuzian concept, this paper argues that it is by translating and therefore pluralizing texts of the country’s de jure national myths—the founding father Jose Rizal’s anarchist novels, required to be read by all Filipino students—that a new kind historically grounded, non-defeatist, and complex “minority politics” can emerge.

Acknowledgements

I delivered an early version of this paper as a keynote at Minor Culture: Conference of the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, 2 December 2015, University of Melbourne, Australia. My heartfelt thanks go to Aldrin Lee, chair of the Linguistics Department of the University of the Philippines Diliman, for helping me track down certain important references.

Notes

1. This is the latest language count coming from the Summer Institute of Linguistics. See Lewis, Simons, and Fenning (2015).

2. For a recent discussion of the fraught history of the bilingual education program of the Philippines – as well as a timeline of its important ‘linguistic’ events – see Tupas and Lorente (2014).

3. Instrumental in governmentalizing this understanding of ‘minority’ is the formation of the agency called PANAMIN (Presidential Assistance on National Minorities) in the late 1960s. See Woods (2006, 8).

4. These forces include environmentally destructive ‘extraction’ activities and state-sponsored militarization of ancestral domains, especially on the island of Mindanao. Resistance in these communities has come from the grassroots schools, in which reports of numerous human rights violations have been made over the past decade Manlupig (2015, 14). In the face of increasing immiseration, what are rendered disposable by the differentials of nationhood and globalization are the very lives of the indigenous peoples. In the southern Philippines, they are collectively referred to as lumad, and according to the latest estimates, their languages are all critically endangered Tan (ibid.).

5. A particularly cogent account of how the question of one ‘national language’ came to be central in the Philippines’ decolonizing project may be found in Gonzalez (1980).

6. The imposition of Tagalog, repackaged as ‘Pilipino’ (and later on, ‘Filipino’), has of course met with resistance from intellectuals in the regions, who belong to the other major ethnolinguistic groups (foremost of which are Cebuano and Ilocano). For a genealogy and critique of Filipino as a merely ‘repackaged’ form of Tagalog, see Agcaoili (2010).

7. On Tagalog as a verbal medium for anticolonial thought see Enriquez (1989).

8. For an example of the national/regional distinction in operation, see Lumbera and Lumbera (1997).

9. See Tupas and Sercombe (2014, 2).

10. For an account of the emergence of Filipino as ‘non-exclusivist and multilingual,’ from Tagalog and Pilipino, as well as its use as a medium of instruction (as mandated in the Department of Education’s Order No. 52), see Nolasco (2010).

11. See Ramazani (2001) on the salience of metaphorical logic in the various questions of cross-cultural interfacing posed by postcolonial anglophone poetry.