Tale of tales

BOOK-READING friends protested when I cited last week that Ferdinand Marcos never bothered to close down libraries and book stores, as he did the mass media when he declared martial law in 1972 because, in his view, “Filipinos are not book readers”.

Added professor Francisco Nemenzo in his foreword to the “Philippine Radical Papers” (University of the Philippines [UP] Press, 1998), “In the Philippines books do not pose a threat to power, as in other countries.”

If that judgment grates, what do you think of this observation?

“The ‘komiks’… would be described at one point as the ‘national book’ of the Philippines, a label not altogether inaccurate given the massive readership and the influence on national culture that the form achieved.”

Cheap and disposable, the “komiks” were illustrated novels sold as serials. Cinema and “komiks” lorded over the entertainment market in the Golden Age of the 1950s and the 1960s.

Culling information that refracts into many insights of Filipinos as a nation of readers, Patricia May B. Jurilla traces in the “Bibliography of Filipino Novels 1901-2000” (UP Press, 2010) that market survival conspired with war and martial law to stunt “Tagalog (Filipino) novels” and Filipino “novels in English”.

In the 1990s, Filipino-penned novels suffered again setbacks from TV romances and “telenovelas” with their “fanatical” following.

Jurilla observes that knowing the apathy of masses to English as a medium and the predilection of educated Filipinos to read imported books, the Filipinos persisting to write novels in English are driven by interests other than profit: “fulfilling artistic, cultural, nationalistic, or personal objectives”.

That line opened another window to introspection, a pleasure handily passed on by this reference, described by its author as “a book made up of lists of books.”

Does our fraught relationship with Tagalog or Filipino hobble our reading as a nation?

In an endnote in her introduction, Jurilla recites the facts that captures the arc of our polarization: In 1959, the national language known as Tagalog was officially renamed to “Pilipino”. In 1973, it was changed into “Filipino” and affirmed in 1986. “Filipino” is still in use.

When I recently recoiled from writing a paper abstract in Filipino, my hesitation stemmed from the same reflex pushing a Cebuano, placed in a situation where Bisaya cannot be used, to choose English over Filipino.

Tagalog is the alien and alienating tongue.

It is worth one’s time to get lost among books. Not all encounters lead to a confrontation with the stranger inside our heads.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 0917 3226131)


* First published in SunStar Cebu’s October 22, 2017 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”