Jan.-Feb. 2001
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Editor Tony P. Fernandez at:
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English major and minor
By Butch Dalisay
(Editor’s note: The following piece is a column written by Butch Dalisay which appeared in the Philippine Star, (November 20, 2000). Mr. Dalisay brings us up to date about the role of English in Philippine society. Dalisay is a writer of stories, plays, and essays and teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines. He writes a column, “PenMan,” for the Philippine Star (www.philstar) appearing every Monday in the Arts & Culture section).
The second semester began last Monday, but not before the people in our department – some 40 of us – had a chance to sneak out of the office and hold a curricular review workshop over the weekend in Tagaytay. That sounds like a fancy excuse for a snooze under the palms – which some of us, I’m sure, were praying for – but the workshop-cum-outing (or “excursion,” as they used to be called in my grade school days) turned out to be an honest-to-goodness evaluation of what we were doing as teachers of English and literature. Our venue was the old Villa Adelaida, now wonderfully refurbished as the Soka Gakkai Cultural Center (and many thanks to Mr. Yasunaki Niitsu of Soka Gakkai for the use of the place).
There was plenty to talk about: how useful and relevant our course offerings were, and what kind of changes we were expected to make to keep our programs attractive and competitive. I daresay, however, that the real concern being addressed by these questions was the role of English in Philippine society during these, er, Erapeutic times.
(My favorite Erap text message goes something like this: “Erap is monitoring all text messages and he will punish everyone saying bad things about him. For security’s sake, send all your messages in English.” But just to get this clear, I don’t think that Erap became what he is because he was staring out the Ateneo window in the direction of Maryknoll when the teacher was explaining subject-verb agreement; he actually uses and speaks English better than most of us, if truth be told, albeit with a signature slur. His problem was that he didn’t read literature deeply enough, or just didn’t read enough literature, period – especially all those Greek plays having to do with hubris. And then again, Erap may yet get the last laugh on all of us persnickety PhDs.)
It wasn’t too long ago, after all, that people were tolling the death knell for English and writing in English in the Philippines. Typical of this dirge was a pronouncement by the late novelist Celso Carunungan who, in a lecture he gave at the Philippine Futuristics Society in 1985, saw nothing but imminent extinction for Filipino fiction writers in English: “It’s a vicious circle,” Celso said. “The writer today doesn’t want to write because there’s no market, and the market cannot publish anything because there’s nothing to publish.” (Thanks to Montreal-based Tony P. Fernandez for this tidbit.)
That may have been true 15 years ago (although I myself suspect that Mr. Carunungan was being too pessimistic even then), but it certainly isn’t the case now, when writers right and left are publishing dozens of new books in English every year, when the annual Palanca awards regularly accepts more than a hundred entries each in the short story and poetry categories, and when we in UP Diliman can count hundreds of English majors on our roster, with many thousands more taking basic undergraduate classes in English. It’s gotten so that much of my time in the office last week went to finding slots for students begging to enlist in oversubscribed classes, and to sadly turning down the rest. We’re under no illusion, however, that those hordes of English majors all want to become writers, scholars, or teachers of English. Many of them take English as a pre-law degree; many others will move on to publishing, advertising, and public relations – jobs which actually pay, and pay quite well. Some will linger on for their MAs and PhDs and eventually teach, and an even sparser few will take vows of poverty (but not, I think, of chastity, and neither obedience) and become creative writers.
Time was when being an English major meant membership in a distinct cultural and intellectual elite. It meant that you knew about and read books that no one else was reading; that you saw yourself in a direct line of descent from Shakespeare and Eliot, and could and did quote blithely and shamelessly from Dylan Thomas, J. D. Salinger, Sylvia Plath, and such iconic figures. Heck, even Joma Sison was an English major.
These days, there’s still a lot of excitement among the kids about the new writers they’ve been stumbling on – you’d have to ask them who their new Hemingways are – but I have the feeling that the romance of language has largely yielded to a more hard-nosed pragmatism, a sense of language as a sword rather than, well, a bouquet. Creative writing never quite went away, but other disciplines such as literary theory and criticism and socio-linguistics have attracted a new breed of young scholars eager to figure out the world in ways other than a poem.
Our department is also more aware than ever of the fact that we inherited English as a colonial tongue and must now use it as 21st-century Filipinos still trying to define who we are and what we want to be. In other words, we’re caught in the crossfire of people who champion English as the language of global business and of the Internet and those – like Dr. Zeus Salazar – who see it as a major obstacle to our achievement of a true sense of nationhood. (I reconcile these viewpoints by arguing that we Pinoys, for better or for worse, are already and perhaps indelibly part-Westernized, and so had best learn to use English for our own purposes.)
One of the minor highlights of our workshop was an effort to define what we imagined our ideal English major to be, and it fell on poet Jimmy Abad to come up with “someone who strives to achieve a mastery of English as the language evolves, to explore, express, and create the Filipino experience.” Well said!
But a lot more work needs to be done to develop majors like that, beginning with our teachers themselves. A few weeks ago, I was able to meet with a group of nearly 300 teachers of English from all over the country at a conference at the Philippine Normal University. We were meeting as the College English Teachers Association – a 50-year-old institution – and the topic of the day was “English teaching in a technology-based environment.” A brave and worthy notion, but many if not most of those teachers either had no access to or had never learned to use computers, and were in dire need of some form of retraining. Would that we could all hie off to Tagaytay for some cobweb-clearing!
If anyone should doubt that English has a future in this country, here’s something sent in by an understandably proud mother, Crisma C. Mina, about her 12-year-old son Nexus, who isn’t even in high school: “Last Sunday, approaching the UP Shopping Center’s parking area, which was strewn with leaves and debris following the typhoon’s wake, my husband suddenly asked Nexus if he could be inspired to make a simple poem on the sight and listen to what he came up with.” It didn’t take Nexus more than a few seconds to come up with this: We stand in the battlefield of the clean and unclean… in our eyes; In the eyes of Nature, it is only her wet broom picking up some dirt. Nice work, Nexus. I hope to see you in my class one of these days – or better yet, at the Palancas a few years hence.
And speaking of the Palancas, our good friend A. B. Battung, Carlos Palanca Foundation executive director, wrote to remind me that the foundation recently released a “Roster of Winners” booklet listing all the Palanca prizewinners, their works, and the years in which they won. If you ever dreamt of winning a Palanca to get into the record books, well, folks, this is the record book, and you can claim your free copy at the Palanca Foundation Library, ground floor, CPJ Bldg., 105 C. Palanca St., Legaspi Village, Makati City. Winners only, I gather – but you can call AB or Babes at 818-36-81 to 85 to see if they can spare you a copy.
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Reader John Tan sent in this query: “Dear Mr. Dalisay: I’m not a serious stylophile (yet), but I do have a number of fountain pens. I also find Pelikan ink to be smooth for writing, but it’s hard to find here in Manila. Even in Hong Kong, it’s kind of scarce. Hope you can advise me where I might find a good source of Pelikan ink. Do you also know where I can have a Waterman pen’s nib repaired? Star Paper, the local distributor of Waterman, isn’t very helpful.”
Well, John, you’d be surprised, but I’ve found Pelikan ink on the shelf at National Book Store not under the glass counters where all the expensive pens and inks are – but next to the cheap drawing-pen and stamp-pad inks. Get them while they last.
As for pen repairs, try Luis Store on Escolta (241-34-84 and 243-24-36), near or in the Security Bank Bldg., I think (I haven’t visited them in a couple of years). They’ve been around since 1943, and it’s where Supreme Court justices send their leaking Parkers and Sheaffers to be fixed. A bit pricey, but well worth it. Otherwise, any number of pen repair shops in the US can do the job – I’ll post a list of pen resources in a forthcoming column. Send me a message at penmanila@yahoo.com
