The Cebuano

Ang Tigbuhat started his “writing” day by reading Salins Hulbot, which is Gerard Pareja’s regular column for this paper. And he felt a tinge of envy for the writer’s ability to write beautifully in  Cebuano. Or is it better named Sugbuanon? He was once taught to call it simply Binisaya. But then he remembered how that term by now has become correctly too inexact. But coming by whatever name, the language has now shown itself to him for its beauty. He cannot of course help noting the irony of that statement. And so he must qualify and retell once again his own story with his own language.

And even as he thought this Ang Tigbuhat missed the writer’s group Bathalad. He had read in Radel Paredes’ regular Sunday column, “Hip Hop Pintado,” still of this paper, that Bathalad was still there and presenting public readings of the balak. The last one was at Handuraw. He felt extremely sorry for missing that chance though he swore to be there the next time around. Even if only to hear once again the Cebuano read for its beauty in the form of poetry.

There had been a time when Tigbuhat lost the use of his own language. He is only now regaining his fluency with it. This experience is not at all strange. There are many like him who were educated under a school system that banned the use of Cebuano inside the campus. By the time he was in high school, he was thinking in English and had lost the ability to read and write in his own native tongue. And while he could still speak the language, his own education had made him illiterate in the sense of the Cebuano. And of course, smart as he was, Prof. Tigbuhat saw immediately the tragedy of that fact. And he wondered how many others were like him, ranked at the professorial level by a university of good repute but technically and functionally illiterate in the language of his birth.

And he wished he could say to himself that this inability with his own language was a condition that harmed no one. He knew better. He was a teacher. And he knew he could not afford to tolerate this sordid if quaint sort of ignorance. And so for years now he had been engaged in translating for himself and for his class his lectures once delivered purely in English into Cebuano. And he saw in time how quickly he grew in his effectivity as an art teacher. Indeed, there were concepts in art that were next to impossible to teach properly in English to students who thought in Cebuano. He marveled how easily they understood when he found their translation in their own language.

Then finally came his chance to be adviser to a thesis class. His students already wrote their thesis. But they were written in English. He could not make sense of them. It was possible the students just used the cut-and-paste method for constructing what they had written. The sentences were too long to comprehend and he saw the students did not understand what they  wrote down. Worse, there was a clear disconnect between the art works and what was actually written. He decided he had no other recourse but to require them to rewrite their thesis in Cebuano. It was at the start only an experiment.

At first the students rebelled. They thought something as complicated as an undergraduate art-thesis could not possibly be written in Cebuano. And so Tigbuhat told them to stop writing a “thesis.” “Write instead about the story of your art as if you were writing to your own mother!” he admonished.

In due time, and after rounds of editing and instructing, the thesis finally began to form. And Tigbuhat saw how much more beautifully they read in Cebuano. His art students were clearly not English thinkers. They did their art using Cebuano as the language working in their heads even while they worked. For students like them, the language for describing their work would have to be the Cebuano. Otherwise, to write truthfully about their works would become difficult, pretentious, if not impossible. And this was the reason they had great difficulty writing anything down that made sense. Writing in Cebuano as it turned out was quicker. With their thesis in Cebuano done, Tigbuhat advised, they can always have it translated into English. Although he could not imagine why that should even become necessary. Even so, Tigbuhat advised that they can always have their girlfriends do the translation for them if it came to that. After all, such an option does not constitute plagiarism by the current ethics of the university.

Still, Prof. Ang Tigbuhat could not help but taste how beautifully the Cebuano art-thesis read in his eyes and mind. His students’ language was simple and concise. The words meant something. They intertwined into a meaningful whole. Most important of all, they were his students’ own thoughts. They owned their thesis. Their thesis became their voice just like their art. And all through life, he had been taught over and over again the importance of language fluency and how such an ability empowers its wielder. Only now did Prof. Tigbuhat come to realize just what that lesson really means.