On Native Grounds: The Significance of Regional Literature
By Resil B. Mojares
Over the past decade there has been a widening effort at revaluing the concept of a “national” literature in the Philippines. While the image of a national literature has preoccupied writers and scholars at various turns in Philippine history — during the first flush of nationalism with Rizal and the propagandists, during the Japanese Occupation with its cultivated mystique of a “Malayan” past — it can perhaps be said that at no other time has the concept been subjected to as rigorous a scrutiny as today.
In the current investigation of national literature, as well as in its formation, regional literatures have assumed importance. By regional literature is meant the literary traditions, written or oral, of the various ethno-linguistic groups in the country, communities that, despite much internal migration, can still be said to have distinct geographical settings or identities. Often, and legitimately so, the concept of regional literature is opposed to that of the literature of court and capital, the ruling literatures in English, Spanish, and, to an extent, Tagalog. This is a reflex of our literary history where regional literatures have often been consigned to the level of subliteratures. In practice, therefore, the concept of regional literature in the Philippines is often subsumed under the wider concept of vernacular literature, encompassing both creative and folk traditions. In view of the facts of Philippine literary history, particularly the imbalances caused by the colonial experience, regional analysis is necessarily involved in a study of the opposition between center and periphery, between dominant and minority literatures.
Various critics have asserted that today we cannot as yet speak of a national literature. Constantino and Sikat, referring to our literature as fragmented (watak-watak), argue that we cannot as yet formally claim that we have a ‘national literature’ in the Philippines (Sa Pilipinas ay hindi pa rin natin pormal na masasabi na mayroon nang pambansang literature). They cite the fact that in view of the lack of sustained or systematic regional or cross-regional studies we still have to define the total body of literary traditions in the country as well as bring these traditions to the level of popular, interrogational appreciation. The need for a broadly-based, systematic investigation of vernacular and regional literatures is then high in the agenda of today’s literary scholars. Rolando S. Tinio comments: “At the moment, it is difficult to characterize the national literary sensibility because the great bulk of vernacular literature has remained uncollected. Hence, it seems imperative that massive basic research in vernacular literature be undertaken.” The importance of such a study is underscored by Bienvenido Lumbera: “Herein lies the importance of research in the history of regional literatures — as it attains thoroughness and accuracy, it is bound to assist in revising the existing literary history of the Philippines.”
Such interest derives from the recognition of the importance of regional literature as a component of national literature. In many cases in the past, the national literature has been uncritically equated with the ruling literatures, the literature of ‘court and capital,’ one largely produced and patronized by a small cultural elite and externally defined by its use of a foreign medium (Spanish and English), and, to a certain extent, the literature of the primate region of the country though this may be written in a native language (i.e., Tagalog) as well as popular in character. Because of such uncritical equations, judgments on Philippine literature have often been distorted by deducing from a limited area truths which are then made to generally apply to the total field of ‘Philippine literature.’
Such lapses are serious when we consider that the greater bulk of the population is in the outlying regions, and that the literary experience of the people of these regions largely operates within the limits of their respective traditions as expressed or transmitted in their own languages. Even readership figures, though imprecise, will tell us something of what is missed. The prestigious English-language magazine of the 1930s, Philippine Magazine, edited by A.V.H. Hartendorp, had a registered monthly circulation of 6,500. This easily pales in comparison with such locally circulated regional vernacular magazines of the same period as the Cebuano Bag-ong Kusog with a weekly circulation of 10,975 and Babaye with a weekly circulation of 8,000, or the Ilonggo Ylang-Ylang with 7,793, and Banaag with 10,560, both of weekly circulation. Yet, while Philippine Magazine is well-mined by researchers, as important as a ‘high point’ in Philippine letters memorialized, the regional vernacular magazines just mentioned have remained in the bin of literary scholarship and of the cultural consciousness of today’s writers.
Something of what is missed is also seen as we consider the tremendous volume of literary productions to be found in the books, pamphlets, and periodicals which have been published in the various regional languages. The massive work of collecting, cataloguing, and indexing these widely scattered materials has just begun. Undoubtedly the bulk of works to be recovered and studied is large. One only has to note that as against 64 Filipino novels in English produced in 1921–1966, some 1,000 Tagalog novels were published in the first quarter of the present century alone.
Furthermore, there is the matter of the rich oral traditions in the provinces, a field which literary scholars, to their loss, have largely left for the ethnologists and folklorists to mine. Interest in folkloristic studies has in recent years intensified as it has also adopted and developed more sophisticated instrument analysis. This has resulted in, among other things, the recovery of many oral texts and of such surrounding data as would be necessary for the full appreciation of such folk creations. The importance of these efforts cannot be overemphasized for we have in traditional or folk works the necessary foundation on which a national literature must stand and a source from which writers can draw sustenance in the form of subjects, insights, and styles. In the light of the fact that much contemporary Philippine literature is pallid for having been nourished on the thin surface soil of borrowed literary ideas, this digging into the depths of traditional literature should augur well for the future of Philippine writing as it situates writers more firmly in a more richly defined and better understood native cultural tradition.
The neglect of vernacular and folk literature may be due, in large part, to a critical orientation fastidiously cultivated in the academies since the end of the Pacific War which focuses interest on a historically static order of “great works” and the analyses of formal qualities, and to literature programs which accord only the most minimal share to the study of the native literatures. One consequence of the situation has been a bias against sociological studies of literature; or, where such studies are undertaken, an incapacity to probe deeply into the structure and meaning of the native literary experience.
The study of the country’s ‘subliteratures’ should result in a number of consequential readjustments in our understanding of Philippine literature. For one thing, it will uncover the importance of a great mass of work often derisively dismissed as ‘popular’ or ‘hack’ writing — the fiction, verse, and other works published in commercial vernacular periodicals. Much of this work is undoubtedly subliterary. Yet, an understanding of Philippine literature in its totality will be incomplete and flawed if due consideration is not accorded such works as have been called ‘the undergrowth of literature.’
There is another value to the study of regional and vernacular literatures. Philippine literature in English is a literature distinctly bourgeois in the character of its producers, consumers, styles, and preoccupations. Because of this, the reality it unfolds has its peculiar refractions, limitations, and biases. On the other hand, vernacular literature, associated with as it is with a different and lower social class, lies close to the soil, as it were, and provides us with insights into a different order of reality, with its own characteristic patterns of thinking and feeling and modes of expression.
A study of regional and vernacular literature, therefore, should lead us to a fuller understanding of the Philippine cultural landscape as we cut across social classes and geographical regions. Regional analysis should lead us to an understanding of the cultural concomitants of “the areal differentiations caused by the gradual variations in the spatial interaction of physical and human elements.” At the same time, a more democratic approach to literature will enable us to see more fully not only a people’s experience as it is revealed in art but also the genesis and growth of ideas and forms in literature. What will emerge from all this is a more accurate estimation of Philippine literary tradition. What need to be pursued assiduously today are scientific regional and cross-regional literary studies. Such studies, insofar as they relate to the existing as well as emerging lineaments of Philippine literature or literary history, will be important insofar as they reveal similarities or continuities among various Philippine literary traditions, as well as variations among these traditions.
Constantino and Sikat believe that a basis for a common tradition can be found in the similarity of the linguistic structures of Philippine languages, of historical experience, literary development, motifs and conventions. “In general, it can be said that it is only in language that our literatures vary” (Sa pangkalahatan, halos sa wika nga lamang nagkakaiba-iba ang ating mga literatura). Thorough going regional and cross-regional studies should deepen our understanding of the overall continuity of the Philippine literary tradition.
On the other hand, a more dynamic kind of continuity can be appreciated if we delve into the variations that diversify our common literary experiences as a people. In this respect, one can quote Fr. H. de la Costa’s observation on an important aspect of Philippine culture:
… acculturation varied horizontally, from region to region, and vertically, from class to class, resulting in significant differences within a recognizably common culture…. The piecemeal process by which these islands were peopled, the varying patterns of our trade with neighboring lands, and the greater or lesser degree of penetration effected by the Spanish and American colonial systems — all these aspects of our history suggest that while it is possible to speak of a national culture common to the Philippines as a whole, we must expect significant horizontal and vertical variations.
The study of regional literatures — and, more important, their entry into our shared cultural consciousness as a nation — should both define and strengthen tradition. For one, it should lead us to a juster estimation of our cultural history. In fact, a few themes in the current reevaluation of our literary history have already been offered. Tinio says: “The tradition of Philippine literature must be seen as vernacular, with writings in Spanish and English by Filipino as minor phases within the historical continuum.” In the same vein, Lumbera remarks: “English writing and Spanish writing, for that matter, ought to be treated as they should, as minor branches grafted into onto our literature by Western colonialism.” More detailed research should show the degree to which such claims can be made.
For another, by enlarging and enriching tradition, the study of regional literature should enhance the value of tradition for us today. In this respect, one can paraphrase T.S. Eliot on the nature and value of tradition for the contemporary writer.
What we know of our literature today forms an ideal order which shall be modified with the introduction into our consciousness of the works of our dimly explored regional literatures. What will happen as a consequence is the alteration of the existing order, the adjustment and readjustment of the relations, proportions, and values of each idea and each work to the whole. We shall, in the process, define the frontiers of tradition, the limits of this order, more accurately. On this basis we shall then know the points beyond which we should go.
