An allegory on learned and imposed cultural denigration in Ilocoslavakia

BAYANGGUDAW NOTES. 31 AUGUST 2016. WED. N2.
An allegory on learned and imposed cultural denigration in Ilocoslavakia.

[For Mestro Leo Tejano and soon-to-be human rights lawyer of the Ilokano people, Eugene Carmelo Cabanilla-Pedro]

CULTURAL denigration, in critical practice, is that learned hatred of one's sense of self, community, and homeland.

It is that 'look' that tells the one looking inside herself that there is nothing that is worth her.

Nothing, as in nada, zilch.

In Ilokano, ibbung.

That includes, therefore, her language, her culture, her history, and her system of understanding who is she and who are her people.

Now, I have a story to tell.

Once upon a time, there was this Division of City Schools in Ilocoslavakia.

[The tense shifts to the present].

That division is run by a kiss-ass of a superintendent that made it sure that his boss in another government agency known for cultural and linguistic hegemony would be appeased.

That boss has this wild fantasy--a fantasy a la J. Edgar Hoover who hated the communists and the activists and the radicals--of becoming the first-ever Nobel Prize winner from da kawntri for writing hegemonic things the way a hegemon writes about hegemonic things.

That superintendent of a kiss-as has decreed the following--and his rule is a covenant coming from his slice of non-blue heavens--for the satiation of his attention-seeking boss who wants to standardize everything Philippine according to his hegemonic fantasy:

1. All those vassals in the division will have to speak English from Monday to Tuesday.

2. All those vassals in the division will have to speak Tagalog from Wednesday to Thursday.

3. All those vassals in the division will have to speak Ilokano (what kind of Ilokano is this, I do not know!) on Friday.

So here is a division run like a classrom by a superintendent who thinks that his division is a classroom and the office of the superintendent is the president of the classroom.

And so, in that once-upon-a-time thing in Ilocoslavakia-land, that decree was made widespread and all the teachers in the division could not do anything but follow the superintendent who thinks that his division is a classroom.

Of course, they lived happily ever after.

Or they pretended they did.

End of allegory.