Finding My Bearings

Finding My Bearings

            When I was little, intelligence used to be measured by how well a child can speak English at an early age. Neighborhood moms, especially those who were teachers, used to teach their little kids to introduce themselves in English or count from one to ten, all for the benefit of the visitors’ entertainment and the familial pride it brought. Mastering the first ten positive integers and the introduction phrase usually meant that the child was intelligent, and seemed to ensure his success in the future.

            Because of this, my generation of children also didn’t grow up in the kitchen as I imagine the previous generation did. The advent of television in our backwoods neighborhood pushed us out of the kitchen table into the sofa. We were lured by the television shows and were thus robbed of the pleasures of everyday gossip whispered by our yayas to each other. We preferred the sofa to the kitchen stool because that’s where we could learn more English, more foreignness.

Even our outdoor plays were colored by the things we saw in television. We wanted so much to be like the characters we loved on TV; we wanted to eat the same food they ate, to go to the places they went to, to experience the things they did, to look the way they did – we wanted to be them. I, for one, would memorize their dialogues and re-enact the scenes with my sisters in the language of the television: either in English, or in Filipino (as in the Tagalized version of some cartoons), but certainly not in our very own language, Waray. I wanted spaghetti, I wanted to see beautiful places outside my hometown, I wanted my life to be patterned according to how theirs turned out, I wanted to be whiter and to speak English better, because that was how good people were judged.

Looking back, I realize I was disoriented as a child. Filipino-speaking characters in Western sceneries do that to you. I would drift in between languages whenever I didn’t know the equivalent term in a certain tongue. I would have drifted to places too, had my mother not drummed the value of identity into me. I’m a Waraynon, and I’m a Filipino; I know that much. There’s just one thing I lack: the language mastery to prove it.

There are thousands like me, suffering from this same disorientation, although some of them may have not realized it yet. A theory in linguistics says that the idiom of a people, the way they use language, reflects not only the most fundamental views they hold of themselves and the world but their very conception of reality. I, and others like me, have been using a different language most of the time, and there is no doubt that this affects how I view things. I am a Filipino, a Waraynon, looking from the outside, barred by a wall I didn’t intentionally create.

MTBMLE presents an opportunity for us to break down that wall. It gives us a chance to confront our reality through our own eyes. Our teachers expect our students to read, when really they cannot. Our students are experts at parroting dialogues and memorizing words, but come short in reasoning and analytical skills. We are the ones who know are own tongue, yet we do not study it, we do not write in the language. These are the things that we are facing, and it’s a long way ahead.

But thanks to the people who work so hard and so well at what they do, we are now seeing tangible results. Just recently, researchers, experts, educators, and students gathered in a second colloquium on the Waray language to discuss the recent developments in our region. We have now launched the new orthography of the Waray language. We have identified the 500 most common words in the language based on a 123,000-word corpus. We are already distinguishing our grammatical categories. We are conducting researches regarding the use of mother tongue in the field. We are working on a text readability instrument that will help standardize and produce our instructional materials. We have come this far, and we shall make it, given more time, especially now when we have our own people willing to help. What we need are funds.

The success of this program provides us great opportunities, not only in the classroom. Relearning a native language gives us a chance to understand ourselves better, but it doesn’t necessarily mean an abandonment of the other languages we have learned. It’s about going back first to who you are, so you can understand where you stand in the scheme of things. It’s about building a solid core, so that when you learn other languages and other cultures, you will not be confused. It’s about understanding yourself better, so you can understand others better too.

Intelligence or success, I’ve realized, is not measured by how well one speaks the global lingua franca. As our university president, Dr. Evelyn C. Cruzada, in her welcome speech during the colloquium, said, “As if kun nagwi-Winaray kita, diri kita makakadto ha Amerika.” As if we won’t be able to go to America if we speak Waray. Gone are the days when, “The mother-tongue was relegated to the kitchen—it was a debased currency which was legal tender only for the exchanges one had with the servant, the dhobi, the rickshaw-wallah and the vegetable hawker,” as Varinda Tarzie Vittachi writes. Today, the mother tongue will be elevated to the classroom, where our children will be taught to read, write, and even speak in the native language, because it is the only way they can do well in other areas too.

Frantz Fanon said, “To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” With the help of recent developments introduced during the colloquium, we Waraynons are taking on our world, our culture now. I grew up disoriented as a child; with the help of my mother tongue, I hope to find my bearings.