2007 November Archive at Joseph Scalice

Archive for November, 2007

Ang mga cazadores

Published on November 30, 2007 in tagalog and poetry. 0 Comments

ni Andres Bonifacio
Sa ika-isa daang apat na pu’t apat na pagdiriwang ng kaniyang kaarawan.

Mga kasadores dito ay padala
Sanhi daw sa gulo’y lilipulin nila
Ngunit hindi laban yaong kinikita
Kundi ang mang-umit ng manok at baka.

Yaong mga bayang sa tahimik kanlong
Sa mga Kastila’y siyang hinahayon,
Ang bawat makita nilang nilalamon
Pinag-aagawan dahilan sa gutom.

Buong kabahayan ay sinasaliksik,
Pilak na makita sa bulsa ang silid;
Gayon ang alahas at piniling damit
Katulad ay sisiw sa limbas dinagit.

Sa mga babae na matatagpuan
Mga unang bati’y ang gawang mahalay;
Kamuntikan man lamang di nagpipitagan
Sa puring malinis na iniingatan.

At ang mga lakong kamatis [at] pakwan,
Milon, at iba pang pinamuhunanan
Walang nalabi sa pag-aagawan
Ng mga Kastila kung matatagpuan.

Lahat ng makita nilang maggagatas
Agad haharangin, dada’nin sa bulas,
Tuloy lalaklakin ng mga dulingas
Anupa nga’t wala nang pinalalampas.

Ngalang “cazadores” hindi nararapat
Kundi “sacadores” ang ukol itawag;
Bakit sa [tagaa’y] malayo at agwat
Mandi’y halataing matakaw at duwag.

galing Virgilio Almario, Panitikan ng Rebolusyon (G 1896), (Manila: Sentrong Pangkultura ng Pilipinas, 1993), 140.

the grammar of colonialism

Published on November 29, 2007 in colonialism, tagalog, translation, History and Philippines. 1 Comment

The aging binding cracks audibly whenever you turn a page. Fray Totanes’ one hundred fifty seven year old instructional grammar of the Tagalog language is bound in a soft, flexible and yellowed vellum. In fading calligraphic script, Lengua Tagala is branded onto the spine.

A colonial dictionary or grammar is always, at least in part, a technology of rule. The Tagalog language is divided into discrete Spanish units of meaning; its fibres are parsed into Romance syntax. Totanes’ one hundred forty page grammar was not created to promote mutual understanding; it was written to enable the linguistic competencies of inculcation, exploitation and domination.

We do not have to read in this manner, however. A lexicon can be read with an eye to other ends. Used with caution the colonial word book allows us to reconstruct the linguistic evolution of the language that has been parsed, to suture and poultice the vivisected speech of a dominated people.

This is not all. The grammar opens a window onto the collective colonial psyche. Every example, every demonstration of the subjunctive mode or the passive infinitive, allows us access to the speech patterns and daily routine of the colonial friar.

Flipping through Arte de la Lengua Tagala, I find page after page bearing silent witness to the terror of the quotidian.

Continue reading ‘the grammar of colonialism’

Multatuli’s Max Havelaar: a review.

Published on November 28, 2007 in colonialism, Indonesia, Book review and Southeast Asia. 0 Comments

Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, trans. Roy Edwards, (London: Penguin, 1987).

[This is a somewhat imitative, tongue-in-cheek review of Max Havelaar which I originally addressed to fellow seminar participants upon our completion of Multatuli’s work.]

Max Havelaar is an angry bitter indictment of the colonial project in toto and not, as has been claimed, a reformist depiction of the evils of misguided colonial officials. Lies and tomfoolery!

Max Havelaar must be read in its entirety – in its ironic, bitter entirety – without privileging one of the many narrative voices over the others. To take Havelaar/Scarfman and identify him with Dekker/Multatuli would be a tremendous mistake. While it may be granted that Havelaar represents the past experiences of Multatuli, his naivete and his compassionate, paternalistic colonial project no longer represent Dekker’s own beliefs.

The book is deliberately nested in the writings of Droogstoppel, then Stern, then Scarfman and finally Havelaar. The tone of the work is bitingly sardonic. The colonial project, from its capitalist origins – here the merchant ‘Change – to its representative officials – from Verbrugge to Slymering – to its deliberate manipulation of existing elite exploitation, stands up to savage indictment. Havelaar is well-intentioned, yes, but utterly ineffectual.

Is the reader truly left with the hope that William the Third will respond any differently than Slymering? The ethical indictment of the text, like Havelaar’s letter, is reinforced by the silence with which those in power greet it.

Further, are we truly to believe all of the ideas of that ‘half-baked dreamer’ Havelaar? Havelaar, like Droogstoppel or Slymering, is a character type rather than the protagonist with whom we are to identify. He represents the idealist, to their capitalist and colonial official. Witness, Multatuli urges, the ineffectuality of even the best intentioned. If a Havelaar cannot save the colonial venture, no one can.

Continue reading ‘Multatuli’s Max Havelaar: a review.’

notes on the etymology of layaw

Published on November 27, 2007 in etymology and tagalog. 0 Comments

I worked through two microfilmed seventeenth century Tagalog-Spanish lexicons today. These are the entries defining layao/layaw. I have preserved the spellings precisely as I found them.

Pedro de San Buenaventura. Vocabulario de lengua Tagala. Pila, T. Pinpin y D.L. Tagalos, 1613.

S.v. Regalar

Layao (pp) como Padre a hijo o Marido a mujer 5 ac regalar. 1. pinalalayao. 7. P imp. magpalayao ca fa afava mo, regala a tu merido. 1. palayavyn mo ang afava mo.

Domingo de los Santos. Vocabulario de la lengua Tagala. Compuesto por nuestro harmano fray Domingo de los Santos, d. 1695. Reimpreso en la imprenta nueva de D. J. M. Dayot, por T. Oliva, 1835.

S.v. caricias

Layao (pp) de marido a muger ante contra dejandole hacer su voluntad. Nagpapalayao sa akin ang asava co. 9 act. mi marido me hace mil caricias, pinalalayao niya ng caniyang anac 7. P le hace caricias á su hijo. Lung-malayao ang bata sa Yna. 1 activ. el niño se hace regalon con la madre; por las caricias que le hace, Y de aqui houag cang lungmayao sa catauan mo, no cuides tanto de tu cuerpo.

Clearly the examples are more indicative of the mentality of a Spanish cleric than of a seventeenth century Tagalog speaker, especially the last: “houag cang lungmayao sa catauan mo.”

What I am interested in is Reynaldo Ileto’s assertion that layaw was the root of kalayaan. Laya did not occur in either of the dictionaries. Libertad was defined as maharlika, the act of being freed from kaalipnan. Independencia was nowhere to be found. Independence, however, was a concept that could not yet be found in Spanish so its absence in these dictionaries demonstrates very little.

Ileto dismisses the negative connotation of ‘laki sa layaw.’ (”Critical Issues in ‘Understanding Philippine Revolutionary Mentality,’” Philippine Studies 30 [1982], 112). His discussion unfortunately overlooks Mike Hanopol. Jeproks!

What is at stake is Balagtas’ work of 1861, Florante at Laura:

Ang lakí sa láyaw karaníwa’y hubád
sa baít at múni’t sa hátol ay salát;
masakláp na búnga ng malîng paglíngap,
habág ng magúlang sa írog na anák.

Francisco Balagtas, Florante at Laura, Virgilio Almario, ed., Quezon City: Adarna House, 2003, (202: 1-4).

Ileto dismisses this, stating “Of course we all know these familiar lines from Florante at Laura. In fact, they have become so domesticated that their position in the awit has all but been forgotten.” (Ileto, 112-3) “‘Ang laqui sa layaw,’ in the awit, refers to the consequence of failing to move on to the next stage of life …” (Ibid)

Virgilio Almario in his glossary to Florante at Laura would indicate otherwise, however. He defines layaw as “nasusunod ang lahat ng hiling o nais dahil sa labis na pagmamahal.” (148)

A more appropriate translation of laki sa layaw might be: “spoiled.”

jenny and laura

Published on November 26, 2007 in Marx. 0 Comments

The voluminous correspondence of Karl Marx gives us a glimpse into his personal life and allows us to see him as a human being and not merely as a stick figure of villainy, heroism or revolution.

Here are selections from two letters which provide us precisely such insight. The first was written to Karl’s wife Jenny von Westphalen [picture taken in 1850] on the occasion of his absence while visiting Engels in Manchester; the second letter was addressed to Paul Lafargue on the subject of Lafargue’s courtship of Marx’s daughter, Laura.

Manchester, June 21, 1865

My heart’s beloved:

I am writing you again, because I am alone and because it troubles me always to have a dialogue with you in my head, without your knowing anything about it or hearing it or being able to answer …

Momentary absence is good, for in constant presence things seem too much alike to be differentiated. Proximity dwarfs even towers, while the petty and the commonplace, at close view, grow too big. Small habits, which may physically irritate and take on emotional form, disappear when the immediate object is removed from the eye. Great passions, which through proximity assume the form of petty routine, grow and again take on their natural dimension on account of the magic of distance. So it is with my love. You have only to be snatched away from me even in a mere dream, and I know immediately that the time has only served, as do sun and rain for plants, for growth. The moment you are absent, my love for you shows itself to be what it is, a giant, in which are crowded together all the energy of my spirit and all the character of my heart. It makes me feel like a man again, because I feel a great passion; and the multifariousness, in which study and modern education entangle us, and the skepticism which necessarily makes us find fault with all subjective and objective impressions, all of the these are entirely designed to make us all small and weak and whining. But love - not love for the Feuerbach-type of man, not for the metabolism, not for the proletariat - but the love for the beloved and particularly for you, makes a man again a man …

There are many females in the world, and some among them are beautiful. But where could I find again a face, whose every feature, even every wrinkle, is a reminder of the greatest and sweetest memories of my life? Even my endless pains, my irreplaceable losses I read in your sweet countenance, and I kiss away the pain when I kiss your sweet face …

Good-bye, my sweet heart. I kiss you and the children many thousand times.

Yours, Karl

I find it touching really; not at all the bluster of the angry Marx who wrote, upon completing the first volume of Capital standing up - he could not sit down because of the carbuncles on his butt - “I hope that the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles all the rest of their lives.”

That was Marx the husband, here then is Marx the father, addressing the fiancé of his daughter Laura [picture taken in 1860].

Letter to Paul Lafargue [in French]
London, August 13, 1866.

My dear Lafargue:

Permit me the following observations:

1. If you want to continue contact with my daughter, you must give up your manner of “paying court” to her. You know well that there is as yet no promise of marriage, that it is still up in the air. And even if you were formally her betrothed, you must not forget that a lengthy business is involved here. The habits of all too intimate relationship are even more inappropriate here in that both lovers will have to live in chastity in the same place for a necessarily prolonged period under strong temptations. In the course of a geologic era of a single week, I have observed with shock the change in your conduct. In my opinion, true love is expressed in reserve, modesty, and even shyness of the lover toward his idol, and never in temperamental excesses or too premature intimacy. When you show your Creole temperament, then I consider it my duty to step in between your temperament and my daughter with my healthy common sense. If you are unable to show your love for her in the form consonant with the London latitude, then it is advisable that you love her from a distance. I don’t have to elaborate further …

Entirely yours, Karl Marx

Hugh MacDiarmid’s In the Caledonian Forest,
first stanza, annotated.

Published on November 23, 2007 in poetry. 0 Comments

The geo-selenic gimbal that moving makes

[geo-selenic: earth and moon in compound;
gimbal: a pair of rings moving on pivots in such a way as to have a free motion in two directions at right angles.]

A gerbe now of this tree, now of that

[gerbe: resembling a sheath of wheat, or the combined jets of an ornamental fountain.]

Or glomerates the whole earth in a galanty-show

Against the full moon caught

[glomerate: to gather into a rounded mass;
galanty-show: a shadow pantomime produced by throwing shadows of miniature figures on a wall or screen.]

Suddenly threw a fuscous halation round a druxy dryad

Lying among the fumet in this dwale wood.

[fuscous: of brownish-gray or dusky color;
halation: a blurring or spreading of light around bright areas in an image;
druxy: having decayed spots concealed by healthy wood; fumet: deer excrement;
dwale: in heraldry, occasionally used for sable, or black.]

of knowledge and sympathy

Published on November 22, 2007 in quotation. 0 Comments

There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

George Elliot. Middlemarch. New York: Signet Classics, 194.

spectacles

Published on November 21, 2007 in personal and family. 0 Comments

We took Christian to the optometrist yesterday. He has mild astigmatism and may need glasses. Elizabeth and I sat and waited in chairs by the wall of the cramped examination room.

The doctor handed Christian a card with very fine print on it.

“Can you read this?” she asked. She seemed less concerned about his vision than she was the difficulty of reading the card which was designed for adults.

Christian glanced at the card and looked up with a broad smile.

“Hey! It’s the Autobiography of Ben Franklin.”

Christian continued with his exam; I surreptitiously took the card and looked at it. I was hunting for the attribution. I wanted to know how Christian recognized the text instantly. This was all I saw.

Then I walked up the street, gazing about till near the market-house I met a boy with bread. I had made many a meal on bread, and, inquiring where he got it, I went immediately to the baker’s he directed me to, in Secondstreet, and ask’d for biscuit, intending such as we had in Boston; but they, it seems, were

not made in Philadelphia. Then I asked for a three-penny loaf, and was told they had none such. So not considering or knowing the difference of money, and the greater cheapness nor the names of his bread, I made him give me three-penny worth of any sort. He gave me, accordingly, three great puffy rolls. I was surpriz’d at the quantity, but took it, and, having no room in my pockets, walk’d off with a roll under each arm, and eating the other. Thus I went up Market-street as far as Fourth-street, passing by the door of Mr. Read, my future

There was no way of identifying the source of the text. My son knew Franklin’s autobiography at a glance.

I mentioned the card casually as we walked to the car to leave. “That was pretty cool about the Franklin quote.”

“Yeah,” he responded. “It makes sense though - that they would quote Franklin. He invented bifocals, right?”

I chuckled. “Let’s go home, ‘kay?”

bifocals

Notes on Trawick’s Notes on Love in a Tamil Family

Published on November 20, 2007 in anthropology, south asia and Book review. 1 Comment

Margaret Trawick. Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

This post will unmask me as an unrepentant, curmudgeonly modernist. I was annoyed by much of Notes on Love in a Tamil Family.

Notes on Love in a Tamil Family My annoyance had nothing to do with the subject of the research. Love, and its familial and cultural embodiments, is a worthy topic. I also had to admire the years of commitment which Trawick put into her research. Clearly she respected her subjects and she treated her work seriously.

My annoyance, rather, had to do with Trawick’s methodology and was thus a thorough-going and unstinting irritation.

My objection, I suppose, began with my unhesitating answer to a question posed by a classmate of mine: “Is Trawick too present in this book?” – Yes. Beyond a doubt, yes.

There may be some clever, self-consciously awkward ‘twinning’ in Trawick’s narrative, wherein her relationship to her (former) husband Keith is vital to our understanding of anpu. I am unconvinced. Surely there is a way in which our scholarship can avoid falling into the old trap of disguising the existence of the investigator and yet can also avoid slipping into a postmodern solipsistic swamp. Even in very well-intentioned work – and Trawick’s account is clearly well-intentioned – the result still teeters uneasily on the brink of narcissism.

“Abe seems a little more American than Dans a little less androgynous.” (260) There were quite a few short statements in the book like this: grammatically unintelligible. We intuitively understand the gist of the statement, but it does not parse as it should. Was this deliberate? Or was further editing needed?

It was not merely the self-referentiality of the book which bothered me, however. It was playing at language. Trawick playfully attempted to evoke an indissolubly complex fabric of truths. I would rather see a conciseness of language; I would rather “struggle through complexity to simplicity” than evoke an essentialised complexity.

Trawick wrote, on page 242:

These three threads are tightly woven together: the sacred is an ideal manifested ambiguously in experience; it is born in the thought that arises between two separate consciousnesses—male and female, East and West, wild and cultured, human and divine. No one being may hold it within himself. Another name for this exceedingly complex reality may be love.

Human and divine consciousness? Not a consciousness of the divine, but divine consciousness? I will not, in the name of post-secularity or post-enlightenment, relinquish my cherished methodological atheism. It was an epistemic gain, a profound human advance, and, I argue, should be applied universally in our research.

Notes on Ileto’s “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History”

Published on November 19, 2007 in Book review, Southeast Asia, History and Philippines. 2 Comments

Reynaldo Ileto. “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History.” In Reynaldo Ileto. Filipinos and their Revolution: event, discourse and historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998.

I am working on my thesis; it is a critical re-examination of Rey Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution. Looking through my old notes, I found the following ideas. My critique is now much more sharply focused than these criticisms were.

Filipinos and Their Revolution This work left me feeling unsettled and critical.

A sentence in Ileto’s concluding paragraph clarified for me the unease that I had felt throughout the article: “These leaders [Lantayug, et. al.] have, until recently at least, always belonged to the ‘dark underside’ of the struggle for independence dominated by such ilustrado notables as Quezon, Roxas and Osmena.” It seems clear to me that the division between an ilustrado led resistance and a ‘dark underside’ is a false dichotomy.

There are a multitude of underside resistances, many of them with a very different self-concept from the one put forward by Ileto. It would appear that in a attempting to ‘retrieve’ history from below, Ileto has manufactured a monolith: a Filipino ‘underclass’ that conceives of power and loób in terms that sound remarkably like those used by Benedict Anderson in his “Idea of Power in Javanese Culture.”

Where in this underside would Ileto fit the Union Obrera Democratica, the first Filipino labor movement, which was forming at this time, was composed entirely of working class Filipinos and whose perceptions were sharply different from that of Ileto’s underclass? Where to put Isabelo de los Reyes’ and Gregorio Aglipay’s Iglesia Filipina Independiente? Do Macario Sakay and the Republika ng Katagalugan really fit Ileto’s description?

It would involve an extensive investigation of sources, but it seems likely that Ileto’s ‘underside to Philippine history’ was actually a minority of lower class resistance movements.

Continue reading ‘Notes on Ileto’s “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History”’