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I offer a question not for the imperialists, the neocolonizer, or the foreign powers of today. I ask the whisper that remains for as long as we are under the influence of empires, the punctuative point that ends our critical desire for freedom, the inferiority complex embedded into us, the one that looks down on the native and the ethnic for the western and the foreign, the biases for the white over the brown. I ask you, should we wait to mourn our silence?

“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

― Frantz Fanon 

Who mourns today the silence in our homes when the language from the mother’s breast is left starved with the passing of our elders? It is the youth who are starved as well, sustained only by the colonizer. Colonization in tableau! To have your legs cut below the knees, caught by the foreigner, and being asked to thank them for being so kind to hold you.

The colonizer silenced the language of the colonized for they spoke ideas which empire could not conceive. It heard bayanihan and could not understand, heard kapwa and could not understand, heard kalayaan and would never have understood.

Though our nation calls itself independent, our peoples have not yet broken from the colonial idea that we must need a monoculture of unitary governance and speaking. A supposed necessity of national unity. The strikethrough which attempts cohesion by erasure, speaking the colonizer’s language on the one hand and an imposition of the Tagalogs on the other. A paternal instinct, passed from foreigner to native.

I write in the colonizer’s language because I am one such victim of the slow death, the stumbling from the cutting. Try as I might to uproot the colonizer in my mind, it finds leverage in leaving me silent without it. That is the insidiousness of the neocolonial spectre. A looming figure, not a ghost from something that’s died, but a spirit bringing death, and it gave us the knife to keep cutting ourselves into pieces.

Will we cut our own throats to silence?
An entire nation and its many voices, cut short. Fullstop.
Yet we persist…

“While a people preserves its language; it preserves the marks of liberty.”

― Jose Rizal

Prefiguration, the building of tomorrow today, is a radical act. Decolonization is not just an economic force nor violent revolt, it is the refinement of a people’s voice so loud that the colonizer is left speechless. It is the banishing of the spectre because we already have all we need, the autonomy of knowing we are alive. Like a punctuative imploration to continue.

Many call our languages impractical, as if it was not the foreigner and our very own governance which pushes them aside. The faux democracy that prefers the pretty words and good money from an English bank rather than the investment of native land, the interest of capital preceding the liberation our revolutionaries have long fought for. Independence only insofar as the native has become able to silence their own people rather than a colonizer. We label ourselves failures when we are unable to answer exams in a foreigner’s language. We shame ourselves when we find ourselves unable to speak our mother tongue, but leave it to die as if from a past world of elders, tribes, and idealists.

Language is the medium of a people, an affirmation of the Self to the Other, a linking hyphenation to our relations as a people. A definition without prescription, a collective never without the individual.

Alas,”change starts with you” has become an empty platitude, so let’s rephrase it: build the new within the shell of the old. A call where we instead envision a tomorrow that makes space for everyone, building materially and concretely, and grows past the decaying status quo. In the here and now, what can we do with our abundance? What systems demand challenge? What do we say to each other?

Beyond rhetoric, this is not a mere conversation, but a struggle in commas between the native and the colonizer, the oppressor and the oppressed. I hope that with this stern letter, we take a step and emerge with agitation not for an abstract value of language as a mere cultural unit—a novelty, a unique snowflake—but a medium through which we and our ancestors have fought for to be seen as another beautiful facet of humanity. When we hold our own, we let no one cut our feet or cut our own throats, we destroy the colonizer in our minds. When we speak English to connect with a wider world, not because of mere “practical” crab-bucketing. Then, and only then, can we guarantee that there is no mourning the voices of tomorrow. Because…

There’s more for us to say; mayroon pa tayong sasabihin; atin tamu pang sabyan;

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by Pocholo Tolentino