Mother tongue

Ang Tigbuhat has been a teacher for over 25 years. After that many years teaching it is not unusual for a teacher to worry about fundamental issues like “quality of thinking.” How well do his students think? Because he is an art professor Tigbuhat realizes there are at least two ways by which he might know. One is by the quality of art his students do. The other is by how they are able to describe their art in words.

This past semester was an eye-opener for him. It was the first time he ever had to handle a thesis class. And this experience led him to a few insights that might be of general interest. The thesis class for the fine arts is a year-long course series that leads finally to what is called a thesis exhibit by the student. This exhibit is predicated by a formal paper that the student writes and defends to a panel consisting of members of the faculty and art professionals. It is always a difficult class. The art students are not writers and yet they are required to write a lengthy paper that would describe their work along a prescribed academic format.

When Tigbuhat read their paper for the first time, he felt the palpable disconnect between what the students had written down and the samples of art they actually showed him. There was an obvious problem with the English language itself. The sentences were too long and it seemed almost as if they were designed to be difficult to understand. He felt his students were going by the notion that if their sentences were long and complex, they would therefore be “academic” and therefore appropriate for an academic paper.

Tigbuhat felt immediately there were at least two directions into which he might go with the class. The first was to confront was their inherent problems with the English language. He went by his second option: Ask them instead to write in the mother tongue, Cebuano.

There was an immediate resistance to this of course. The students felt at first that it was difficult to write in Cebuano. They had never done it before. They felt they would not succeed. And yet Tigbuhat knew that if they stuck with the English, the resulting product would present the quality of their thoughts in a poor light, as poor as what he could read from their papers so far. And so Tiguhat knew his first step would be to dispel his students’ bias against their own language. He required them to write a one-page concept paper of their thesis in Cebuano. “Try not to write an academic paper. Write as if you were writing to your own mother,” he urged.

His theory was that they were trying to write in English even if they were thinking in Cebuano. This is always a bad method of writing. And it might be the main reason only few Cebuanos ever become writers. Being a writer himself, Tigbuhat knew that writing is an automatic process. The writer practically “captures” his or her thoughts as quickly as he or she can think them. In a manner of speaking, one should ideally “think” only in between sentences. One might realize what problems a writer must have to surmount if he or she is translating thoughts into another language even as he or she writes. And it is possible this difficult process of translation and retranslation might have something to do with impoverishing the quality of his students’ thoughts.

Tigbuhat knew that the thinking process needs to be an easy, comfortable and enjoyable process for his students if they are ever going to be intelligent artists. He knew from experience that the process of translation and retranslation is almost always not an enjoyable process unless applied to the specialized task of translating text. And in the end, he felt it was good cause for him not to inflict the English language on his students unless they were already good in it and used the language for thinking and doing their art. The latter was most especially critical.

Cebuano art would grow so much faster if students could be motivated to talk more or be more comfortable when talking about their art; in other words, if they themselves could participate more actively in the discourse. This means talking about their art with each other while they eat lunch in barrio Camputhaw or elsewhere, or wherever they hang out. Tigbuhat knew that they never spoke in English at these places. So if their art was in English or written that way, it is almost a certainty they will never talk meaningfully about it.  Tigbuhat explained this was the most important reason of all why they should confront the problem of writing their thesis in Cebuano even if this was unprecedented in their school.

In the end, the students were thankful they decided to do this. The end result was truly something to be proud of if only because everyone learned so much from it. The panel defense was especially telling. It was expectedly a bit emotional but everyone was happy, including the panel members themselves: Profs. Lilia Tio, Ligaya Rabago and Palmy Pe-Tudtud; cartoonist/artist Joshua Cabrera and artist/writer/ Prof. Radel Paredes. The discussion was spirited and thought provoking. Tigbuhat was sure his students Ebenezer Morrok and Julius Sagrado were proud of their achievement. They set the precedent for other thesis classes coming after them.