Ang hindi magmahal sa kanyang salita / mahigit sa hayop at malansang isda.

Sa Aking Mga Kabata, 1868

The famous quote, often attributed to Jose Rizal, recently washed back up on the shore of my thoughts like a floundering aquatic creature. It’s a memorable line, and frankly not a good one – though, as a schoolchild, criticizing the national hero’s pen (even at age 8!) was never something you did.

Yet Rizal probably never wrote that poem, and likely would never have agreed with its sentiment either. In 2011, Ambeth Ocampo pointed out Sa Aking Mga Kabata‘s dubious provenance – there is no evidence in Rizal’s handwriting and it contains a Tagalog word that Rizal did not know until he was 21, thirteen years after the poem was supposedly written. Plus, all of Rizal’s documented poems are in Spanish, and Rizal did struggle (and ultimately fail) to write his novels in Tagalog ^{[1] [2]} – far from the self-righteous champion of his native language that whoever wrote that poem would have us believe. 

Knowing this, were we being shamed during Agosto: Buwan ng Wika with this puerile half-stanza written by, historically speaking, a rando? (Ambeth reckons it was Herminigildo Cruz or Gabriel Beato Francisco.) I hope these days, no schoolchild needs to suffer being told that the ghost of the supposedly greatest Filipino who ever lived would call them worse than an animal or a reeking fish (as if these were lesser beings and there’s any sense to that analogy, but I digress). 

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I didn’t expect to find out that me and Dr. Rizal are in the same boat in this sense. But I feel like I share in his struggle, in his aspiration, and in his maybe tiny bit of shame: writing in our native language, Tagalog, is hard.

I’m a Filipino, born in Manila from a Bulaceño father and Manileña mother with roots in Quezon. I lived all my first 25 years in Quezon City. Both my parents are Tagalog speakers with just a bit of English, and my uncles and aunts are the same. No one in my preceding generation (as far as I know) was particularly literary, but they were 100% Tagalogs. So why did my literary tendencies end up manifesting in English, my second language that I didn’t have any learning exposure to until I was 5 years old? 

Tagalog had, and still has, its meaning for me as a language of small talk, of practical daily matters and of household affairs, of all my most heart- and gut-felt emotions. It was my first language at home. When I began my formal education, though, English took over as the language for technical concepts and creative expression. In nearly three decades of life, I’ve written hundreds of pages in English and read thousands more (some through compulsion, a lot for fun). But I’ve maybe only wrote a couple dozen pages in Tagalog ever. With a high school diploma and one and a half university degrees from the Philippines, I was tragically able to get away with that.

There is one direct cause that occurs to me, from my borderline millennial / Gen Z perspective: there was hardly any popular literature for young adults in Tagalog when I was growing up. There seemed to be barren literary wasteland stretching between Lola Basyang storybooks and the occasional raunchy Bob Ong novel in the 2000s. I suppose what few options we had, that you could sometimes find in the bookstore though never in the library, were a handful of republished Wattpad romances. (Extremely unfamiliar territory for me, by the way.)

As there are so few accessible options to read in Tagalog for fun, to read and write in Tagalog for serious analysis feels like an overcomplicated drag that involves too much disruptive reaching for the dictionary. To me, it is a gut-language that love songs or heartbreak poetry or incendiary political raps can be written in. But to be able to think analytically in Tagalog, or to write beautiful long-form works in it, is such a rare skill. It’s so singular and seemingly so impractical in the life I lead now, that I don’t know if I could develop it or if I’d even want to. 

There’s something in me that still wants to try. Watch this space, and let’s see what we fishy fishes can cook up.

love, your aling isda

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References

[1] Ocampo, Ambeth. “Did young Rizal really write a poem for children?” Philippine Daily Inquirer. August 22, 2011. https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/45479/did-young-rizal-really-write-poem-for-children

[2] Morrow, Paul. “The poem that Rizal did not write.” Pilipino Express. August 16, 2015. https://www.pilipino-express.com/history-a-culture/in-other-words/3050-the-poem-that-rizal-did-not-write.html