Sunday, August 31, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: A reading dream By Erma M. Cuizon
IN A Siquijor town in the ‘70s, I came across some books in a nook in the office of the mayor and wondered how old volumes of English literature found their way into the rural life of an island province. The story was that they were given by a former American teacher who came in the early 1900s to stay (she probably married someone in town) and started to build a small library for the place. But no one else supported her, she didn’t outlive the dream.
Still, I saw the books in a trip there, books you can’t find in local bookstores. I wondered who read them.
If we’re not a reading nation, we can help do something about it in our small ways, like start a library of used books for friends or the community. It’s when we read that we learn. There certainly was a time when we did best in the use of English as a second language among Asians, are we missing out on English now because we’re not reading?
Somewhere along the way, the quality fell short.
But it would be natural for us to lose the quality in the use of the language now since we were never a reading nation. The story of Lady Chatterley could never quite attract the guys who’d rather do the videoke until day break.
In most English-speaking countries in the early years, books were the first and only form of media. Perhaps people could talk about any one of Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” to a neighbor like in a chitchat.
On the other hand, we are a nation of storytellers. Our forefathers loved drama performed during fiestas, or oftener, in the church yard. In those days, the women gossiped or talked about family, the tittle-tattle hearty, shoving on to the next door neighbor who’d, in her turn, pass the gossip on to the relatives on the other side of the road. The guys talked about cocks and card games and more cocks.
It never happened that when you asked to see a neighbor, the Nanay would say, “She’s upstairs, reading.”
There were a few who read and it proved that facility in language could be had if we just keep on reading. It works, it’s a matter of intent, take it from the early Filipino author of “America is in the Heart,” Carlos Bulosan, the Filipino writer to whom Nov. 2 in Queens, New York called Carlos S. Bulosan Day, is dedicated to his achievements.
Born in Pangasinan, Bulosan went to the US in early 1900s barely knowing how to speak English and became a migrant farm worker. But he kept reading almost a book a day, to learn to communicate with people, not only personally but later, in his writings.
Bulosan has left us with an inspiration in literacy, a very personal example. For literacy isn’t just plainly and simply language but having the ability to understand life and move in life’s situations, or know what’s wrong, through effective interaction.
This man, who found reading the way to learn, wrote novels, short stories, articles, even poetry---all published---which narrated to others and to his countrymen the Filipino’s sacrifice in that era in that land far away from home. Working under harsh labor conditions, the Filipinos, inspired by men like radical Bulosan, hung on to a dream.
The secret, after all, is just to read.
Today, the reading problems include the fact that books can be expensive, there are certainly more important things you can buy with your money. And there are no public libraries in the towns.
Of course, the government must do something so that the next crop of graduates in school can qualify for better, higher-paying jobs. But what helps one to learn to fall into the habit of reading begins at home.
There is hope, say publishers of children’s books who put faith in the next generations. The government must act while the private sector could help in little ways to develop the reading habit in children. Groups of OFWs could, say, organize to send home used books for their towns. It could make any Pinoy visit memorable.
