My Mother Tongue, Tagalog

 

    I put my vanity aside and post this picture of me from March 2023, when my beautiful Serrano-Laktaw arrived from New Delhi, because I want you to see how HUGE it is.

    I was born to an Ilocano father and a Cebuana mother in Kamuning, Quezon City, seventy years ago.

    My adoptive cebuana grandmother, Andrea Seno of Mandaue, took care of me when I grew out of infancy.  Before that, I had a cebuana nanny.

    I learned Tagalog from the maids in the house and from the radio plays and news that were always playing.  

    I learned Cebuano from three summers that I spent in Mandaue, at ages 5, 7 and 8.  I remember that I picked up bisaya very quickly, and when I would return to Quezon City, I was fluent in it and would switch to Tagalog as if I merely changed clothes.

    At age 5, I began my schooling in St. Joseph's College, Quezon City.  I don't remember having any Pilipino classes until I started high school (aged 13) in St. Theresa's College, San Marcelino, Manila.

    I don't remember how often we had Pilipino class, maybe three times per week.  We learned grammar, reading and writing, but we did not read any Tagalog literature.  However, I paid attention and got a good basic knowledge of Tagalog. 

    My education from kindergarten until college was in English.

    So I did not receive any real emotional or psychological bonding with Tagalog past babyhood.  The mother tongue is passed on to the child from the mother during earliest infancy. My mother did breastfeed me but I have no memory of her taking care of me.  I do of my lola Andrea.

    When I became a mother myself, I spoke to my babies in English and a few Tagalog words when I gave them a bath in the tub and played with them with their rubber duck and such stuff (kili-kili, aray!, pating).  I didn't teach them more Tagalog, I realize it now, because my own bonding with it was imperfect.

    However, it was there.  I discovered this when I had my Proustian moment with my Serrano-Laktaw.

    It was when I found the word "mumog".  I did not recognize it at first.  The definition in Spanish is 

Magmumog: Lavarse, enjuagarse r. (la boca).

    Suddenly I remembered how, as a child, my grandmother would have me gargle over the bathroom sink, probably when she had me brush my teeth.

    It was a magical moment.  I relived it.  I was a five-year-old tagala again.  (As I was called in Cebú by my lola's friends.)

    Ever since then, as I have labored lovingly, reconstructing my Serrano-Laktaw, I have experienced the encounter with my 65-year-old memories, up to my 51-year-old memories (I was 19 when I left Filipinas in 1973).

    I've reencountered my past through the Serrano-Laktaw, which is in Spanish.  In 19th-century Spanish, with the words then used by Hispanic Filipinos.  For example, "terneza" instead of the modern "ternura".  But also, Spanish words that are used in Chile and recognized as not-quite-correct, because they are used by the common people, in common language, such as "malear" (turn something bad, as when a good person's character turns bad from being around gangsta types).

    Well, malear is in the Serrano-Laktaw, and actually it is also in the RAE.

    After living in Chile for 41 years though, there are definitely a lot of Spanish words in the Serrano-Laktaw that I am meeting for the very first time.  Even after having read quite a few materials in Spanish documentation on Filipinas from the 16th, 17th and 19th centuries.

    But to return to the Tagalog that I have now bonded with and that I am recovering and learning, thanks to don Pedro Serrano-Laktaw, I have these few realizations that I would like to share with you, my compatriotas:

• Tagalog and Espanyol share a lingüístic soul.  They are married.  To an extent that we Filipinos today are completely ignorant of.  
• The Tagalog taught in school is taught pragmatically and nationalistically, but it is not taught culturally, i.e., with emotional and psychological depth.
• The way to do this is through Spanish, not through English.
• It would be through courses based on the Serrano-Laktaw.

Why do I say the above?

Because quite frankly, the Serrano-Laktaw is MUCH, MUCH MORE than a mere dictionary.

It is a Cultural Artifact.  For us, it is a Sacred Book.

You cannot seriously study its contents without gaining some very basic realizations that are no longer being impressed on the minds of the post-war generations of Filipinos.

1.  The moral and ethical worldview of the Hispanic Filipino people, which was rooted in the pre-Hispanic, pre-colonial past.

There are a plethora of terms in the S-L that refer to the moral sense of Filipinos and the need to practice and protect purity, honor, respect, sincerity, honesty, the importance of training oneself in virtue from a young age.

2.  The Kasabihán are maxims, philosophical principles, popular wisdom, observations regarding profound human nature.  In them there is humor, wit, delicacy of feeling and understanding, irony, and Biblical amonestación - admonishment ( warning · reprimand · caution · admonishment · admonition · cautioning · rebuke · reproof ...).

3.  This is a Tagalog that is characterized by poetic expression, richness of synonyms, meanings, description, lingüístic transmutations (verbs to nouns, nouns to verbs, words like "kuán" which have so many different nuances that to me replicate the many meanings of the chilenismo "huevón / weón").

I am not a linguist or a philologist so I cannot be precise in describing what an amazingly chameleonic language Tagalog is, but you'll just have to take my word for it.

4.  Most of all, the Serrano-Laktaw contains the most profound and moving keys to our Filipino Self, our secret world of Being.

No wonder, my friends, my family, my brothers and sisters, that the Filipino began to have serious problems of identity beginning in the American regime.

I did have an experience with Tagalog-English in 2002, when I returned to California and studied court interpreting.

I had not used my Tagalog for 29 years (I left Filipinas in 1973).

Because I needed to work as an interpreter, and I couldn't get work in Spanish and English --- the native Spanish-speaking interpreters monopolized those jobs --- I had to learn the judicial semantic field in modern Tagalog.  

So I had to study, study very hard, and try and learn judicial terminology and the U.S. court procedures as quickly as I could.  I watched a lot of the news programs in Manila on cable TV

I worked as an interpreter for a domestic violence case, interpreting for the victim in court proceedings.  It impressed on me the fact that I had this language, Tagalog, and that it was a privilege, a gift, an honor to be able to render an important communicational service.

However, this did not touch me at a deep level.  It was an   exercise in professional survival, a utilitarian exercise.

When I returned to Chile in 2003, my most active period of research and documentation in 19th-century Spanish began, which was my preparation for writing essays on our history for publication in Revista Filipina.  My reencounter with Tagalog began when I read Reynaldo Ileto's Pasyon and Revolution (back in 1997 when I visited Manila looking for a publisher for Rizal According to Retana, and I acquired Pasyon), and it continued when I found the two volumes of Correspondencia rizalina in the bookstore annexed to Café Ilustrado in 2000 (don Guillermo Gómez Rivera took me there).

The period of writing academic articles in Spanish was long and extremely difficult.  It lasted from 1997 to 2020.  Of course, I also began writing fiction in English and Spanish, and poetry occasionally.  I had written poems for myself for many years, as a válvula de escape, and gradually it became a bilingual effort.

In the course of those years, I gradually realized that I had a pending problem to resolve:  I needed to learn to speak and write in Tagalog.  

The last time I was in the Manila Metropolitan Area was 2005, when my mother died and was interred in Manila Memorial Park.  I reunited with my brothers and sister, except for my youngest brother Enrico, who did not join us.  My sister Elvira's best friend Cynthia N. told me about a New Age seminar in Banahaw and I decided I wanted to go.  

It was thanks to all I had read in Reynaldo Ileto's book.

Mt. Banahaw is home to around 80 millennial Christian groups preparing for the Apocalypse and the Last Judgment.  

It was a Katipunan stronghold.

I escaped from the seminar (it went from Friday to Sunday, back to Manila Monday) at noon on Sunday.  I just couldn't bear to dance to Barbara Streisand while reconnecting to my inner child.  As it turned out, she wasn't in the encounter group, she was two blocks away.  (My inner child, not BS, valga la sigla).

I found a feria, a street lined with townsfolk selling all kinds of things, from vegetables to rocks to amulets, etc.  And this old man with long white hair began talking to me. He introduced himself as a healer, and as I listened to him I calculated that he was probably in his 80s.  Tata Soro.

He invited me to his home, I met his beautiful wife, his daughter (a teacher and Rizalista, she had an altar to Rizal in her modest bungalow), his granddaughters.  A neighbor lady came over, said her great-grandfather was a Spaniard who had "discovered" Mt. Banahaw.  Tata Soro's grandfather was from Catalunya.  I also met a mountain guide who was a disciple of Tata Soro's.

I realized that I could not speak Tagalog coherently, even before that conversation.  In the compound where we seminar attendees and our instructors were housed (a lovely place), I met our mountain guide, a young man, who had accompanied us on a trek down in the river with sweet healing waters.  I slipped and banged my left shin against the rocks.  He kindly offered to help with a traditional remedy, placing large leaves and rubbing a natural oil over my shin to alleviate the pain and swelling.  We had quite a lengthy conversation that evening, about the social and economic situation.  That was when I realized I was a lingüistic cripple in Tagalog.

Just the same, we were able to communicate, Jun and I.

Fast forward to Chile, years later.  Yes, I realized that one day I might find myself miraculously back in my lupang tinubuang minamahal, sa harap nang aking ginagalang na kababayan.

At some point as well, it came to me that what I was about, was not the promotion of Spanish, the return of Spanish to the educational canon, to the Constitution.

Actually, I was about the recovery of our lost culture, our lost identity, our lost memory. Our lost soul.

The best of ourselves that had been immolated in the chaos, perdition and wreckage of our world, and that merely began 124 years ago --- it was repeated in many stages of internal strife, world wars, diasporas, and the slow, inexorable stripping away of all our spiritual bonds, our invisible moorings ... leaving us as we are today:  a plastic simulation, a succedaneum, an ersatz, cobbled-together at-the-last-minute Frankenfilipino.   

A being that is quite curious, really, but I am not a good-enough writer to describe it in a fictional creation.

I suppose I tried, in the short story "The Time of No-Change".

I'll post it in my next blog entry for those who haven't seen it.

And maybe someone reading this will feel insulted by "Frankenfilipino", but I hasten to add that I include myself in the category, absolutely.

I was born into the same world as you, my contemporary.

However, in all sincerity, the Filipino landscape that is modern-day Philippines (what is it today?  Just Makati and the former Bonifacio Village turned into condominium palace paradise?), is, to me, an aberration.

"BCG", I think it's called.

Truly.  It's so FAKE, so PLASTIC, it's got nothing but $$$$$ plastered all over it.  

The Ugly American created the Ugly Filipino.  Or rather, the Ugly Pinoy.

And by some weird inner movement in my psyche, I don't remember what tripped the switch, I decided to buy the Diccionario Tagalog-Hispano Serrano Laktaw.

A reprint, leather-bound, single gigantic volume with over a thousand pages.  Considered by the cognoscenti a lexicographic jewel.

Naturally, invisible to the Frankenfilipino Nation.

Me included, until then.

It's a copy, i.e., reprint, the paper is gorgeous, thick, I forget the name... vellum. Parchment.  Maybe it's not made from calfskin, but it's that old printing paper, and the type is big.

But in many pages, the letters are faded or the reprint lost a lot of definition.

I immediately got to work restoring by completing the faded lines with fine-tipped marker pens.

In the course of which, I began to have my Proustian experience of The Past Regained.

I have discovered my true Mother Tongue, introduced to me by my Other, historical Mother Tongue, and it could not have been any other way.

Take my word for it.

I am learning to read Tagalog as it is meant to be taught.  It is an archaic Tagalog, hand-in-hand with archaic Spanish (but not really archaic, simply 120 years old, not medieval at all).

One day, I shall find myself back in my lupang hinirang, cuna nang magiting, and I will speak in my native tongue, which is a beautiful, captivating, irridescent, poetic language, taught to me by the magnum opus of don Pedro Serrano-Laktaw.

  

This image of don Pedro is from an iconic group photograph taken in Madrid but that I can't find at the moment.  He was sitting on a step at the bottom of the photo, while Rizal and several more stood at the top of the steps.  They seemed to be in a huge park, maybe El Retiro.

All the flowers have been thrown at Rizal, the Propagandists, Andrés Bonifacio, Antonio Luna, Emilio Aguinaldo, Macario Sakay, Mabini... well deserved, there will never be enough flowers for them.  Especially not for gat Macario and the last katipuneros.

But this unassuming, gentle, erudite, lover of our languages kept toiling away alone, watching the decades roll past, losing his sight, fading into abandonment... but he fought his fight without caring that the entire country was chasing after a false shiny new religion.  He kept on working away quietly to preserve our CULTURE,  keep the votive candles lit in homage to our SPIRIT.  Because he was powered by LOVE, and with love he left us this amazing heritage, this HEIRLOOM.

Time to lay wreaths at his grave, to declare his birthdate a national holiday, to train our teachers and historians in the bedrock of the treasures of our real past.

No more ---please, God, Jesus and the Virgin!--- the fancy fake golden embellishments that have borne the imprimatur of and received innumerable rounds of deafening applause in tribute ----TRIBUTE!!!-- for the American era, a FAIRY TALE turned burden, a dead weight, a rotting corpse we are still carrying on our backs, an impoverishment, a LIE that has been perpetuated for far too long.

Enough.  126 years is enough sliding into decadence.

 

Dig them up now.  The real gold, the real diamonds.  Bring them down from Heaven.

We have so much wonderful work to do!