| Bisayan Biz |
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The morning is greeted with blaring loudspeaker music to drown out the jeepneys and roosters. House wakes, momma boiling water over an open fire in the back garden. My motto here has been “pusos not pesos.” Puso is the word for heart in Bisayan, the local dialect of the southern Philippines, spoken by even more citizens than the national language, Pilipino. I wasn’t made to learn too easily new lessons, at least at this age. Only under duress and having no choice will the reptilian part of my brain slither forth with an unfamiliar forked tongue, Americans being of course notorious for our English-speaking chauvinism—in schools we are only sometimes required to wrap our lips around French, Spanish or another babbling brook, and the thirst is quickly quenched. Overseas travel for unwinding Yank working stiffs comes during a hurried two weeks a year, not enough time to be reacquainted with more than bonjour or ciao. A crisis in the imperial provinces, like the misunderstanding in Iraq, shoves our Huck Finns up the river, trying to figure out what those strange noises coming from around the next bend can possibly mean. Are the natives restless or ready for Love, American style? “Ah yes, Pinoy education has lost it since the 60’s,” the man explains to me. He is the closest to an intellectual I’ve found in my small village. A faded tattoo on his biceps reads “Mindanao Guardian,” relic of rowdy youth. I don’t expect what comes next from the old nationalist. “Ever since we stopped teaching classes in English, it’s been a disaster.” No man is an island but we all live on one, or in the case of the Philippines more than seven thousand. And there’s no forgetting it, from the barangay (village) “captains” to the ubiquitous fish markets and ferry explosions in the headlines. There are eighty-seven dialects, only a suite in the tower of Babel compared to Indonesia, which has five hundred and eighty-six. Both countries have turned the language of the capital city into the official one, and in the Philippines that’s what comes over the television and radio, or at least a messy stew called “Taglish,” Tagalog (Pilipino) and English combined. In the Beginning was the Word. The fight to define it hasn’t ended. Natives of California, New Mexico and other states were forced to speak like their conquerors or be beaten. The great island of the Americas once had more languages than Indonesia too. Even now some of those dead cultures are receiving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, reviving themselves as the Israelis did when they took Hebrew, used only for prayers, and taught it to a nation. While politicians and patriots have used such tactics to unite countries, holy people have everywhere recommended speaking in tongues, trying out different and at first meaningless sounds to break through to the other side—where dreams are born. The Filipino National Hero, Jose Rizal, wrote in Spanish at the tail end of their rule and their greatest modern writer, Nick Joaquin, sung his lyrics in poetic English. Like the Polish Joseph Conrad, setting sail from his landlocked country and then creating masterpieces using words foreign to his boyhood, these writers ride fences to bring us the real news. “Do you have anything to declare?” a customs man once asked Oscar Wilde as he came to tour the U.S. “Only my genius,” he said. And the genius of this land and these people is of the same border crossing kind. It filters down to the poorest son of a fisherman, at the end of the longest, dustiest road, on the farthest island, dreaming of going to Manila, or even America. It makes great mimics out of their pop singers. It blesses them with great hospitality, welcoming the stranger to their shores, even giving them for a while the intoxicating idea that everything is permitted to visitors. That this is a mistaken must have occurred to Magellan as an island chief named Lapu-Lapu canceled his globetrotting passport permanently, and to every other would-be conqueror stranded on these shores before or since. So learning English cannot destroy a Filipino culture with the ability to absorb the foreign, and remain stubbornly itself. In the mountains, children in private schools are still beaten with bamboo for speaking Bisayan. “There’s one of my batchmates,” a young girl told me in good English, “who doesn’t talk anymore at all.” That English proficiency has gone down over the last few decades, though, is more a symptom of the national institutions, including education, decaying since the Marcos’s and martial law. Families are large to fill the vacuum. The Philippines has the fastest-growing population in the world. They can’t all stay here either. The Philippines is also one of the poorest countries. Despite that, they are magicians of survival, adapting, changing their colors without losing spirit. Born travelers, sailors over treacherous waters still. |
| Bisayan Biz |
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