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In the late 1930s, a young Filipino woman named Trinidad Tarrosa Subido (1912-93) wrote the following lines in a poem entitled "Muted Cry":
No listener can miss the contradiction embodied in the poem. Despite her lament, the poet is able to express herself in the "more widely understood" language that is not "the language of [her] blood." Is the lament of loss, then, real or merely rhetorical? What is the status of what one might call Subido's doubly colonized voice?
Recent feminist scholarship has recognized the heterogeneity of postcolonial experiences and the diversity of women's lives within them 2 Chandra Talpade Mohanty warns against mistaking the discursively consensual homogeneity of "women" as a category for the historically specific material reality of particular groups of women.3 To understand Trinidad Subido's position, then, one must review the complex relationship between Filipino women writers and the English language as it responds to the shifting phases of Philippine history in the twentieth century.
Philippine literature in English began in 1898 when the Treaty of Paris, ending the Spanish-American War, transferred sovereignty over the Philippines from Spain to the United States. To facilitate its administration of the archipelago's 7,100 islands, the colonial government established a nationwide system of public schools in which English became the official medium of instruction. To justify the instructional budget that would immediately teach English to 7.6 million speakers of some eighty-six languages, General Arthur MacArthur told Washington that the project would serve "primarily and exclusively as an adjunct to military operations calculated to pacify the people and to procure and expedite the restoration of tranquility throughout the archipelago."4 In plain English, the propagation of English was to be an instrument of colonial control.
The investment in education paid off. The Philippine literacy rate, lamentable under Spanish governance, jumped from 5 percent in 1903 to 49.2 percent in 1918 and reached 65 percent by 1935.5 This dramatic increase can in part be credited to the arrival in 1901 of 600 American teachers who fanned out all over the islands, teaching thousands of Filipino schoolchildren their ABCs. But the larger share of credit belongs to the Filipinos themselves, children and adults alike, who embraced English as the new language of power in the Philippine archipelago.6 And in...