Alternative Canons
Artificial Nationhood?: National Literature in the Philippines
The case of Philippine literature is one such example of a fragmented and embattled realm. The Philippine linguistic situation reflects what Charles Ferguson calls a diglossic divide, wherein languages exist within a hierarchy, i.e., the mother tongue (Filipino) is considered a “low” language (L) while English is the “superposed” or “high” language (H) of education, business, government, literature, and the intellectual elite. This dichotomization creates a situation wherein 1) texts written in high, idiomatic, “literary” English are usually considered too bourgeois and are not read by the Filipino masses (e.g., works by diasporic writers such as Jessica Hagedorn, Ninotchka Rosca, or Miguel Syjuco; or even local-based writers such as Jessica Zafra, F. Sionil Jose, or Krip Yuson); 2) texts written in the low language are primarily seen as being formal or stilted (an L2 language as it were) that is unpalatable for everyday taste (e.g., works by Virgilio Almario or Pete Lacaba), and 3) texts written in simple, conversational, or creolized Filipino are either only read by the Tagalog-speaking population or are considered pedestrian by the intellectual elite (e.g., komiks; Tagalog romance novels).
As it stands, we can submit that current standards of problematizing national identities in postcolonial literature are inadequate and myopic because such standards assume that 1) national literatures can be viewed as pure and essential literatures, when in fact (and especially in the case of postcolonial literatures), they are not; 2) that the language of the intellectual elite transmit postcolonial literature to an international audience, when it is in reality less able to transmit cultural identity than creole or hybridized languages, and 3) that canonical texts authentically represent sociocultural milieus, when in fact they only represent the narrow ideals of a dominant intellectual elite. Because canonical texts are primarily texts written in the H language by the intellectual elite and only represent an institutionalized view of national identity, there must exist a divergent notion of nation that is extrinsic to this tradition.
