Inter-cultural

IT was a funny, if embarrassing, month. I’ve been told to have a Latin Mass in our school. Of course, I immediately knew the reason and the reasonability of it, in spite of the fact that the students are mostly coming from the province.

I’ve been saying Mass there in English, and there was no problem at all. Now with this move to have a Latin Mass, I thought it would be strange if we don’t have Mass in the vernacular also.
So, as a compromise, I scheduled one Latin Mass a week, and also a Bisaya Mass once a week, the rest in English. This was where my embarrassment began.

Though a certified Bisaya (“Bisdak” we fondly call ourselves, meaning Bisaya through and through, from hair tip to toenail), I grew up with English as my working language. I think in English, and if possible, I speak in English. I am more at ease with it than with the dialect.

There are reasons for that, er, “anomaly.” I don’t remember deciding or choosing to have it that way. It was just given to me. It was what my school, from kindergarten up to college, taught me and I just found myself warming up to it. I liked it right from the start.

I don’t know why I felt that way. Maybe, I thought it was “cooler” to speak in English than in Bisaya. I must confess that I many times would laugh or make fun at some of the Bisayan peculiarities, as when the i’s and the e’s, the o’s and the u’s are inverted. In fact, I would deliberately do that to remind my friends I’m Bisaya.

Now, of course, my attitude is much different, and my ardent prayer is that I be able to speak Bisaya like there’s no other language I know. I realized this when I started saying the Mass in the dialect. I was stumbling from start to finish, and my homily was like my Calvary.

I was groping for the right Bisayan word, since the ones that automatically appeared in my mind were all in English. I realized that through the years my Bisaya did not grow to mature and formal levels. It was kept in the domestic and puerile level, even so vulgar and raw you would not want to show them in public.

That’s really shameful, because I feel like I’m a traitor. I believe one’s language plays a major role in defining one’s identity. I don’t like to lose my Bisayan identity, even if I like to have a very universal outlook. But it should be a rich, solid Bisayan identity, not a flimsy one.

I remember that when I was studying abroad and was forced to learn Spanish and Italian, it became clear to me that a language cannot be spoken properly unless one immerses also into the culture that language sprung from and developed.

In my case, I marveled at the richness of the cultures these languages embodied and expressed, and I tried hard to plunge deep into them. One time, I could not help but feel inferior, because I was comparing their cultures with ours, and I found ours poor.

Yet, in spite of that, I also saw that no matter how poor, there is something in our ours that is so distinctive of us that it cannot be captured by the other cultures, no matter how rich or superior they are to ours.

This reinforced my belief, as taught to us by the Church, that we should respect the different cultures of different people, preserving their distinctiveness. We should avoid having one culture dominating the others as to obliterate them.

In short, we should avoid homogeneizing culture, forming a rigid one meant for all. This simply goes against our human nature and human condition. Yes, we need to have unity, but a unity that does not suppress the natural diversity that we have.

I think what we have to do is to develop the skill to be open to all cultures, but to always retain the one that is native to us, enriching it with what we can get and learn from the others along the way.

We need to have an inter-cultural lifestyle, but one with clear foundations on one’s native culture. This way, we will not get lost and confused, we will avoid being disloyal to what is originally ours.

Now I have to really learn my Bisayan culture and help it grow.