The Illiterate (And Literate) Mango

My dad and I last Tuesday, March 11, decided to go on a road trip to visit a small piece of land in Taytay, Rizal. I was quite hesitant at first knowing that with my dad my back will surely break driving the whole day. He is the type that would get any person to circumnavigate the entire Philippines, if possible, in a day, armed with a historical for every road turn here in my mango. Actually I really think of it as his mango more than mine. He will always tell me “You can’t imagine how much this has changed over the years Gimo” as he would look at all the small housing and business establishments marked by little internet café’s on the road to Taytay. He continued that everything were just blades of grass, crops, and trees before and that now it’s just plain ugly, save for antipolo and the towns surrounding it like angono which still maintain much of it’s rustic beauty complimented by the new villages being developed around it. He also meant that the people seemed to have changed in a way due to the Americanization of the Philippines since the first Republic (Yes, our conversations do go that far everytime! Sometimes I wonder if he was born in the right century). Like they’ve lost more of their natural common sense now more than ever by dyeing their hair blond simultaneously trying to look like black rappers from South central. Our topics seemed to simultaneously shift with each passing turn of the road. There were moments of silence too on the way so I decided to turn on my car stereo. My dad hated my western music and as I was about to pop in one of my latin jazz CD’s to quell the matter I remembered that at 10 am that day there was supposed to be a senate hearing on my mango. I figured that AM radio would cover it so I went to look for 666 on my AM band frequency. 666 Is my favorite AM frequency as this is DZRH, the most listened to radio station in the country. I normally like to listen to FM but as I got older I would tune in to AM to change my boring driving world a bit (yes it’s either I’m getting more “bakya” or I really have no one to talk too). But local news of course is nothing to be taken seriously unless my mango grew balls overnight and decided to be like the Zapatista revolution or Chavez, which is, really, highly unlikely with the current national character!..But who knows? Just waiting for that day.
Anyway, as we rode through the comfort of our small little vehicle we were surprised when DZRH suddenly played an excerpt interview question of a Binibining Pilipinas candidate answering in carabao english. And, good grief , it wasn’t even near carabao english! In fact it wasn’t english at all! I was waiting for what my dad was going to say about it as it so timely hit our topic of language being a hindrance to discovering our national identity as a mango. And all my dad said was “Bein hecho, Bravo!” (Well done, Bravo!). My Dad listened first to the commentary of Deo Macalma, the announcer who played the audio excerpt and ridiculed the highlighted candidate, Janina San Miguel. Then agreed that it was really a shame. But only a shame to the Filipinos who so bravely adopted English from the Americans to so make it our national language up to this day. I went to youtube after hearing all this from AM and saw Ruffa Gutierrez (a former Miss world runner up back in 1993) commenting on Miss San Miguel’s proud and embarrassing answer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEycjHCQFXc). I couldn’t help but check Ruffa’s quip on the subject as she seemed to just blurt it out that 98% of Filipinos could speak English. With doubt, I did some digging and ended up double-checking with my dad. What I found out was that roughly only 35,000 Filipinos actually live and breathe english as their language from birth coming from a population of 88 million! This is less than 1/10 tenth of 1 percent!! I knew Ruffa’s answer was an arrogant contrarist “blurt” so to speak but I never imagined the figures to be this low! I was so surprised because what got stuck in my head was the 1983 Marcos census of Filipino literacy, which was pegged at 86%. Meaning that 86% of Filipinos can actually read and speak english in Marcos time. This statistic left an image of an igorot in a “bahag” reading people’s tonight in my head beside the rice terraces. I was so proud of this statistic being the only counry in Asia to have such a high literacy rate even when compared to Singapore! But, apparently this was only true in Marcos time and LASTLY at that time!hehehe... And now, all of a sudden it felt tremulous to know that not even 1% can actually be known to read,write, or much less speak english as their primary language as their constitution declares it so! Thus a Janina San Miguel…
I say abolish the idiotic constitution that says so. Please do it for the sake of Janina San Miguel! Come to think of it Tagalog hasn’t even be ratified as a national language! No wonder we’re so screwed up. I even double-backed on my dad about the statistics. We dug out the article from a mountain of newspapers he read it from (that’s why our house is being eaten by termites). Accordingly, in 2007, only 7% percent of Filipinos use English as a second language. Meaning they don’t use it at home but they use it in offices, the courts, and businesses. Here, they actually read, speak, and write English but still doesn’t necessarily mean that it is there language of choice upon setting out of the office after 5 pm.
With all these statistics in mind I began to understand my father why, for all these years since 1986, hated the Cory and her Constitution so much for abolishing Spanish and now was so happy that English failed as a language in this country. He had reason. I mean, if we follow simple logic, our heroes, notably Rizal and the Illustrados wrote everything for our revolution in tooth and nail with Spanish. Then here comes an idiotic housewife that pretends that she doesn’t even know who killed her husband and abolishes it and institutes Arabic, and Chinese. Our heroes did not even speak these languages! More so English!
And where is tagalog in all this? Apparently, the host of the Binibining Pilipinas pageant, Paolo Bediones, was already signaling to the famous Ms. San Miguel to use tagalog if she had a hard time with English. But noooooo! She had to go for english. Why? Is she ashamed of tagalog? Yes, of course she is...Also she could have sounded much better in tagalog. But still, And still…
Lets analyze “And still..” Why did her psyche insist on English and ultimately cause her this traumatic embarrassment. Answer: Because we are brainwashed! It’s worse than the CIA or the NSA planting a bug in your head just like in Denzel Washington’s movie: The Manchurian Candidate. This is a result of a hundred years of brainwashing since the Filipino-American war where 1/3 to 1/6 of our population was erased along with the Spanish speaking population. Count in the bombing of Intramuros and manila in 1944 to 1945 by the gringos which killed ¾ of the Spanish speaking population there and barely any of the Japanese which was proven in the block-by-block fighting that followed soon after. That’s what they’re good at Carpet Bombing everything. Anything and everything they do not understand and that does not belong to them. Like hollywood does to your psyche too. As a result we have again: Janina San Miguel. No spanish, no tagalog, and no english! Very sad for a country that used to advertise all three as their principal languages. I include the loss of spanish as significant because it leads to the loss of english, another foriegn language much farther from the filipino psyche as evidenced by Janina. Who does not even understand Hollywood movies probably. And while our so very brave politicians are fighting over the measly scraps before they are all handed of to the IMF/World bank in this Lozada fiasco we still remain an invisible colony of the USA with no language, no identity. Just the way they want it.

“Ang hindi marunong magmahal sa sariling wika ay higit pa sa hayop at malansang Isda”

I always thought of him as a prophet.