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18In conversation: Cebuano writers on Philippine literature and English Simeon Dumdum, Timothy Mo, and Resil Mojares Foreword In early 2002, Simeon Dumdum, Timothy Mo, and Resil Mojares came together in Cebu to discuss the Cebuano tradition of English-language creative writing, the legacy of Spanish and American colonialism, English in the Philippines and much else. Simeon Dumdum was born in the town of Balamban, Cebu island. He went to Ireland as a teenage seminarian before pursuing a legal career and is regarded as one of the best poets the Visayas has ever produced. He currently sits in Cebu City as a Regional Trial Court judge. Timothy Mo is a novelist and a regular visitor to the Philippines. Dr. Resil Mojares was born in Dipolog, Mindanao. He has been Director of the Center of Cebuano Studies at the University of San Carlos and taught and lectured at universities in America, Europe, Japan, and Australia. Timothy Mo: Jun, Resil, we’re going to talk about language, specifically as it pertains to the creative writer, whether he/she be poet, novelist, or I guess, even polemicist since you both have newspaper columns as well. What all three of us have in common is that we came to English as a second language and learned to love it more, perhaps, than the mother tongue. You remain bilingual, trilingual even if we remember you’re at the very least proficient in Tagalog as well as being native speakers of Visayan. We part company at this point since I forgot my childhood Cantonese at the Suez Canal when I was seven and all but the ideograms for one, two, three, and China! Nevertheless, we all found English not so much a wicked as a benevolent stepmother. As we speak we find ourselves in a city of almost a million people, half of them aged under 25, which was essentially a forlorn provincial outpost for much of the twentieth century but is increasingly linked to the rest of the globe by the revolution in electronic communications, with budding Chekhovs at the keyboard of every Internet café … 358 Simeon Dumdum, Timothy Mo, and Resil Mojares Simeon Dumdum: Yes, let’s not forget Chekhov was a provincial doctor. It’s fitting I got his short stories from the discount pile at National Bookstore across the way from here. Timothy Mo: Chekhov can be pleased by that. They don’t have my books. Look, you two are actually very privileged when you look at your antecedents, your tradition. When we look at the post-colonial literatures virtually all the best stuff is in two languages, Spanish or English. Filipinos uniquely had access to not one but both these languages, right? Not concurrently but consecutively, if it was a jail sentence, or to put it better, it’s like Philippine intellectuals had tickets to both the matinee and the evening performance of the best show in town. Yet one can’t help feeling they didn’t make the most of this admission ticket, or that they remained in the position of audience and never became performers. Resil, you’re the expert on local history. How many Filipinos were truly integrated into Spanish culture, could read Calderon and Lope de Vega? Resil Mojares: At the end of the colonial period, something like ten per cent of the population was literate in Spanish. There was never really a large Spanish speaking population in the Philippines, other than the elite of ilustrados. It was a skill very largely confined to the urban centers. At the start of the twentieth century you had people like Claro M. Recto, but history had passed them by: it was too late. He never had what you could call a full-blown literary career writing in Spanish. Spanish was only important to the extent that it had seeped into the Philippine languages, been incorporated into it. Timothy Mo: The Spaniards arrived first in Cebu. I mean, Cebu was a great trading entrepot when Manila was a marsh. When Magellan arrived, he found three Siamese ships doing a brisk trade in Cebu. Just because the Spanish presence here was longer, are there more Spanish loanwords in Cebuano than Tagalog? Resil Mojares: I would say very little difference. Timothy Mo: Are there Cebuano novelists writing at the time of Rizal? Resil Mojares: No one very celebrated, but later one of the foremost Cebuano novelists was Antonio Abad, Jimmy’s father. He was a professor of Spanish at the University of the...

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