Which Tongue To Speak With? Philippine Poetry and the Nature of Language

Abstract

In attempting to examine and imagine the intertwined relationship between language, literature, and community, the Philippines provides an illuminating case because it is one of the few countries in the world where books are published in both an indigenous and a colonial language at comparable rates. This paper examines the work of one poet, Cirilo F. Bautista, because not only is he one of the leading figures in contemporary Philippine poetry, but he has established his reputation by writing in both his native Tagalog and borrowed English. The paper questions these oppositions of nativeness and foreignness along both linguistic and cultural lines. By focusing on two of Bautista's works, Boneyard Breaking and Sugat ng Salita (Wounds of Words), collections of lyric poems written at around the same time, the paper shows how language affects literary production and perceptions of community. Specifically, this paper demonstrates that a native language has the ability to imagine a community outside its own boundaries at both a thematic and a linguistic level, thereby questioning the opposition between native and foreign, as well as a metaphoric that places native language in close proximity to a biological function. For Bautista, it is precisely the combination of an appeal to the commonality of biological observation and strategic use of language that allows him to transcend the boundaries of a native/foreign dichotomy. However, this paper also argues that Bautista accomplishes this transcendence in more nuanced ways through Tagalog, and must thus also speculate on the conditions under which these nuances can become translatable to an English-speaking readership.