Allow for my column this week to share excerpts from my lecture delivered before the Council of Deans and Department Chairs of Colleges of Arts and Sciences (CODDCCAS) which was held at Seminar Hall of the Madrigal Center for Social Entrepreneurship, Ateneo de Naga University, Naga City, last Aug. 17, 2007.
Ted C. Lewellen in his book Anthropology of Globalization states that in a globalized world, things are deterritorialized. As Lewellen puts it: the fixed and predictable walls of our lives are dissolving, giving way to heterogeneity, fragmentation, and contingency.”
Even before globalization, the cultures in the Philippines have already been threatened by certain processes, like colonialism, imperialism, etc. Before globalization, Bikol cultures have also reeled from the forces of nationalism. There is certainly a crisis when a central government puts a premium in being a Filipino because the enterprises geared at articulating the “Bikolanoness” of a place or an individual becomes peripheralized.
This brings us to the problem of identity. Who is the Bikolano? The researchers in the 50s and back really never had this problem. Communities then had boundaries and were delimited by language and culture. With globalization came the explosion in communication. Boundaries start to lose their significance. Identities are slowly diminishing because they depend on ethnolinguistic boundaries the markers of which are diminishing.
But what is an identity? There is the so-called primordialist theory about identity. Lewellen explains the concept as “viewing identity as a collective true self buried beneath layers of superficial and artificial selve.” We are familiar with this approach for this is the approach that commands us to always look back to the past. Stuart Hall rejects this approach saying: the creation of a people…is not a matter of archaeologically unearthing layer after layer until the original layer is revealed’ rather, it is a matter of imaginative and creative rediscovery, in which contemporary interpretations and needs fill in the gaps, re-create the past, and bridge the discontinuities with new mythologies.”
Imaginative and creative rediscovery bring us to the function of Bikol literature, in the creation and formation of identity. Imagination, creation, and creativity are the domain of writers and artists we have good writers, damn good writers in the region in the many languages available. What language shall it be? Will English still work? Is there a Bikolano sensitivity to using English or Tagalog/Pilipino? Can our languages save us from globalization given that linguistic diversity is akin to biological diversity?
Literature is ourselves talking with others, engaging with the community and the world around us. Literature is an engagement of many selves. It is a site of knowledge and therefore like any site, it is a site of “contestation and negotiation as well as self-fashioning and refashioning,” according to Gates H.L in Beyond the Culture Wars. Identities in Dialogue.
There is a book by John L. Locke, Why We Don’t Talk To Each Other Anymore. The De-Voicing of Society. The book argues that e-mail, the Internet, and the technomania are making us into a society of strangers. The technologies of globalization devoice us.
Bikol Literature gives us the voices. It connects us to certain things in the past and articulates many things in the present. A Maya Indian poster from Guatemala says it all: Only when a people learns from its history and affirms its identity does it have the right to define its future.
The writers and their writings are historians and histories. I have often criticized or even derided our pride in the epic, Handiong/Ibalon. My issue is really more about our misplaced concern about the “authenticity” of the epic and therefore our own authenticity deriving from it. At this point, I am not interested anymore if the epic is a sham. It certainly is an extant voice. I am interested in what the epic says. I am interested in what we say and feel about the epic. I am even more interested in what we can do with the unsaid in the epic.
The writer can even go further than the historian or the anthropologist. The writer can imagine his own response to the epic. He can compose a different trajectory of the epic. Shall we take Oriol as a woman? Shall we continue reproducing the Friar’s discourse of Woman as the Fall of Man?
The colonizers have imagined us. It is about time that we re-imagine ourselves back and tell them how we think of ourselves. Then we can create what Clifford Geerts called an identify that is publicly stated and collectively ratified. Then we can engage the Bikolano universes following Neruda’s las comunicaciones de la sangre, an pag-urulay kan dugo.