This module serves as a supplement in developing the skill in reading and writing argumentative essays by starting with the most basic parts of an argument.
WHY STUDY ARGUMENTATIVE WRITING?
One of the interesting forms of speech and writing is argument. All of us are assumed to have engaged in an argument at some point in our lives, either with our selves when making a decision or with other people over a topic or an issue. Arguments can be found in newspaper editorials or opinion articles, in the homily of priests, in television talk shows, and virtually in any oral or written communication that asserts a claim or a stand. It is therefore important for anybody to be aware of how an argument works or how it takes shape to be conscious of how we should formulate our own. As fourth year high school students, you should be already exposed to the basic principles on argumentation like its parts to be able to develop a level of critical thinking, logic, and coherence, elements which should frame formal speech and writing.
The Toulmin model will be the framework used for this module. Said model is a very natural and practical model because it follows normal human thought processes. It has six parts; the claim, support or data, warrant, rebuttal, backing, and qualifier. The first three parts are considered essential while the last three are optional. Although rebuttal, backing, and qualifier are also vital in a sound argument, this module will be limited to the first three parts. The rest will be discussed in a separate module.
After completing the activities here, you are expected to be able to write an argumentative essay with the three essential parts present; the claim, the support, and the warrant.
Tip 1:
Argument is defined as a statement or group of statements that offer support for a claim. (Rottenberg, 1985) It is a process of reasoning and advancing proof. They do not necessarily have to take the form of a dialogue but may be implied dialogues as the speaker or writer always takes his audience into consideration when composing arguments.
ACTIVITY ONE
q This activity will help you develop a keen eye in discerning the issue surrounding a claim. Arguments start off from an issue.
Directions: Choose the issue from the box below that corresponds to the claim stated.
Political appointees Poverty
Catholic Faith Drug trafficking
Terrorism Election Tactics
Environment Morality
Racism Education
___________________ 1. The advocacy of the Catholic Bishops conference of the
Philippines for transparency, accountability, and going to the roots of the problem underlying the sex scandal issue faced by clergymen is laudable.
___________________ 2. We should all work together in increasing the budget for
education and allocate more funds for classroom creation, purchase of new equipment, and teacher training to boost the Philippine economy.
___________________ 3. The president should not let her influence determine who
gets appointed in the government especially the Supreme Sourt.
___________________ 4. Macapagal is running for presidency and this is her motive
for appointing Bonifacio to the San Miguel Board of Directors.
___________________ 5. The government should intensify its efforts to gather
evidences against the drug barons in order to place these people behind bars.
___________________ 6. People are not born with racist attitudes, they have to be
taught them.
___________________ 7. Professional squatting should be considered a criminal
offense, decriminalization of squatting should be lifted.
___________________ 8. The Philippine military must capture the armed rebels now
and not wait for foreign help to come.
___________________ 9. The environment is the single most serious problem the
world faces today.
___________________ 10. Legalizing abortion will kill not just thousands of infants
but also thousands of soul.
ACTIVITY TWO
q This activity zeroes in on the different kinds of claims. It is important to be able to identify the kind of claim one makes or reads to be able to determine the terrain of argument that the author or speaker develops.
Tip 2:
Claim organizes the entire argument and everything else related to it. It answers the question “What is the author/ speaker trying to prove?” (Wood, 1998)
TYPES OF CLAIMS (Wood, 1998)
Claim of fact - What happened? Is it true? Does it exist? Is it a fact?
Claim of cause - What caused it? Where did it come from? Why did it
happen? What are the effects? What probably will be the results on a short-term and long-term basis?
Claim of
Definition- What is it? What is it like? How should it be classified?
How does its usual meaning change in a particular context?
Claim of value- Is it good or bad? How good? How bad? Of what worth is it? Is it moral or immoral? Who thinks so? What do those people value?
Claim of policy- What should we do? How should we act? What should future policy be? How can we solve this problem? What course of action should we pursue?
Directions: Identify the type of claim. There are five kinds of claims; fact, value, policy, cause, and definition.
___________________ 1. The government must be prepared to combat with the
armed rebels anytime.
___________________ 2. Television content promotes violence.
___________________ 3. Two people joined by God in marriage must never be
separated by man.
___________________ 4. The decline in good teachers is a result of bad education.
___________________ 5. We need to define what constitutes a family before we
discuss family values.
___________________ 6. Men in general die young.
___________________ 7. Euthanasia may be wrong but it certainly relieves a person
from too much suffering.
___________________ 8. The government should place top priority in modernizing
military weaponry to increase efficiency of the Philippine soldiers.
___________________ 9. A lot of infrastructure improvements are going on because
the elections are coming up.
___________________ 10. Love does not mean breaking your back to feed a man fit to
carry a cow.
ACTIVITY THREE
q This activity aims to draw logical connection between the data given and the claim.
Tip 4
Support comprises all the explicitly stated explanations, information, facts, opinions, personal narratives, and examples that authors use to make their claims and subclaims convincing and believable. It may be true (facts, real examples) or probable (opinions, made-up stories).
Directions: Choose from the box below the appropriate support/ data for the given claims. Add one more support for each claim following the required data indicated.
§ As of last month, only 565,375 of an estimated 5.623 million new voters had registered and validated their registration
§ Current budget appropriation in education is not enough to cover the needs of the students
§ FPJ did not finish his studies
§ The police and their anti-crime units usually show up at the crime scene after establishments have been robbed or after victims have already been shot
§ The present English literature curriculum for college includes more works from regional Filipino writers than before.
1. The Philippine National Police is not performing its functions well.
Supports: A:____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
B(Cite an example) _______________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
2. FPJ should not run for presidency
Supports:
A:____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
B. (Cite an experience in Philippine government history)
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
3. Migration of students from private to public schools poses a problem to the public education system.
Supports:
A:____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
B: (Statistics/ Facts)
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
4. The teaching of English literature in the Philippines has ceased to be Western-centered.
Supports:
A:____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
B: (Compare and contrast by citing specifics)
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
5. Few Filipinos are eager to participate in the coming elections because of the Presidential candidates.
Supports:
A:____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
B: (Cite names of presidential candidates and briefly describe each of them)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
ACTIVITY FOUR
q This activity aims to enhance your ability to read an argumentative essay critically by identifying the claim and support(s) given in the passage.
Tip 5:
“To locate the claim, what should you look for? The claim may be explicitly stated at the beginning of an argument, at the end, or even somewhere in the middle. Or it may be stated anywhere. It may sometimes be implied, in which case you will be expected to infer it.” (Wood 1998)
“Locating and identifying the claim as soon as possible helps you focus on what the argument is all about.” (Wood 1998)
“Discover the support in an argument by asking, What additional information does the author supply to convince me of this claim?” (Wood 1998)
“To locate support, what should you look for? One bit of good news: support is always explicitly stated, so you will not have to infer it as you sometimes have to infer a claim. Among the common types of support are facts, opinions, and examples (real or made-up).” (Wood 1998)
Directions: Identify the claim and support(s) in the given passage. Please also indicate the kind of claim given.
Passage One
(Letter to the Editor: PDI, Dec. 03, 2003)
Traffic rules notobeyed nor enforced
LAST Oct. 30 at around 7:30 in the evening, I had to brave the strong rains to get to the airport to fetch my wife. As I stopped at the intersection near the Airport Road, a PNP Traffic Management Patrol Car No. 055 also stopped beside me and we waited for the red light to change. The driver of the car on my other side decided that he couldn't wait, so he drove off to beat the red light. The patrol car did not do anything. Then the motorcycle beside me decided to do the same. Still, the police car just stayed there doing nothing. Then an airport van from across the street crossed the intersection, beating the red light on his side and still, the patrol car did nothing.
A few vehicles from our side decided they too couldn't wait, so about three vehicles crossed the intersection on a red light. Still, Patrol Car No. 055 didn't budge. The government spends millions to provide our traffic enforcers the equipment to do their job effectively. Unfortunately, many of our traffic enforcers are deaf and blind on the streets. If this is what we get from the PNP Traffic Management force, then the country would be better off if they sell all these expensive cars and spend the money to build more public school classrooms. With non-discipline such as in the above incident, is it a wonder that we are where we are? --NOEL CARPIO, 1 Molave St., Ramax Subdivision, Diliman, Quezon City
CLAIM: (Kind of Claim) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________
SUPPORT(S):
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Passage Two
http://www.inq7.net/opi/2003/dec/04/letter_3-1.htm
Guns as insurance policies
WITH THE RECENT killings because of more kidnappings and robbery in the metropolis, it may be safe to say that Juan dela Cruz can no longer count on anybody else for protection, except for his own self. The police and their other anti-crime units usually show up at the crime scene after establishments have been robbed or after victims have already been shot. But at the very moment that danger looms, no law enforcement personnel is around to serve one's need or protect one's life. It is with this unfortunate reality in mind that I appeal to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo to lift the ban on the issuance of permits to carry firearms outside the residence for responsible and law-abiding gun owners. The gun ban has in no way prevented criminals and outlaws from doing their business. It has only added to their confidence that the danger to themselves is lessened since their would-be victims are helpless and unarmed.
Guns do not kill people; it is the person who pulls the trigger who does. I suggest that stiffer disciplinary action be meted out to violators of the gun ownership law, and that stricter screening measures be administered to gun owners and bearers. This stand may call for rebuttal from the other side, but one thing is very clear--guns are like insurance policies. You may not need a gun, but it is far better to have one when the need arises. --EGAY F. CARRASCO, San Jose City, Nueva Ecija (PDI, December 4, 2003)
CLAIM: (Kind of Claim) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________
SUPPORT(S):
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
ACTIVITY FIVE
q This activity will help you draw the connection between a warrant and a claim.
Tip 6:
“Warrants are the assumptions, general principles, the conventions of specific disciplines, widely held values, commonly accepted beliefs, and appeals to human motives that are an important part of any argument.” (Wood 1998)
Here’s an example (Wood 1998):
Claim : The president of the United States is doing a poor job.
Support : The unemployment rate is the highest it has been in ten years.
Unstated
Warrants : The president is responsible for creating jobs; when
unemployment is high, it is a sign that the president is doing a
poor job; or, even though the president may be doing well in
other areas, creating jobs is the main index to how well he is
doing.
Here’s another one (Wood 1998):
Claim : Business profits are adversely affected by environmental
protection laws.
Support : Obeying environmental protection laws that call for clean air,
for example, costs industry money that could otherwise be
realized as profit.
Warrant : Profit is more important than clean air.
Businesses make profit to survive.
Environmental protection laws are threatening the capitalistic
system.
Directions: From the box below, choose the letter corresponding to the appropriate warrant for the given statements.
a. The Supreme Court is expected to be composed of lawyers of high
Integrity.
b. A politician running for presidency will try to forge as many political
allies as possible.
c. Celibacy is a virtue.
d. Science and technology are important for the progress of a country.
e. The Catholic Church is not easily daunted.
f. The Erap administration is a failure.
______________ 1. The Catholic Church will remain steadfast despite the human failings of
clergymen.
______________ 2. PGMA is running for presidency and this is her motive for appointing
Bonifacio to the San Miguel Board.
______________ 3. FPJ should not run for presidency because the Philippines’ experience
under Erap will be repeated.
______________ 4. What the SC needs is a justice who is not prone to influence and
coercion.
______________ 5. We should provide more funds for the development of science and
technology if we want this country to go somewhere.
ACTVITY SIX
q This activity will help you infer the warrant from the claim and support provided.
Tip Seven:
“To help you discover warrants, ask questions like the following:
What is left out here?
Where is this author coming from?
What is causing this author to say these things?
Where am I coming from?
Do I believe that this evidence supports this claim. Why or why not?” (Wood1998)
Directions: Identify the warrant based on the given claim and support.
1. Claim : We no longer value human life.
Support : Because we have legalized abortion.
Warrant : _____________________________________________________
2. Claim : Laws should be passed to limit immigration.
Support : Because we have our own unskilled laborers who need those jobs.
Warrant : _____________________________________________________
3. Claim : Importation should be curbed.
Support : Because the local industries are suffering from unmitigated
importation.
Warrant : _____________________________________________________
4. Claim : A person should not marry at a young age.
Support : Because separation usually happens with couples who marry young.
Warrant : _____________________________________________________
5. Claim : Death penalty should be re-instituted.
Support : Because people are no longer afraid to commit crimes.
Warrant : _____________________________________________________
Activity Seven:
q This activity will integrate all three parts discussed.
Directions: Identify the claim, support, and warrant in the print advertisement below. Identify the kind of claim and whether the support is a fact or an opinion. Please also indicate whether you agree or disagree with the warrant.
Claim (Kind of Claim) :_____________________________________________________
Support (Fact or Opinion):___________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Warrant(Agree or Disagree):__________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Congratulations!!! You have just completed our first module. We shall be discussing your answers when we get back to school. In the meantime, have fun!!!J
Sunday, March 11, 2007
BLOGS: PAGBUBUO NG IDENTIDAD AT KOMUNIDAD
Ang papel na ito ay karugtong ng pag-aaral na isinagawa ko tungkol sa Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGS) particular na ang Philippine Ragnarok Online (pRO). Sa nabanggit na pag-aaral, sinubok kong suriin kung paano magagamit ang Ragnarok sa pagbuo ng isang nasyon. Lumabas sa aking pag-aaral na walang ibang epektibong simulan ng pagbubuo ng isang nasyon kundi ang indibidwal, ang paghihinang sa kasanayan nito at ang pagpapatibay ng pakikipag-ugnayan nito sa ibang tao. Ang malaking katanungan ko noon ay kung paano malalaman na ang ipinapakitang kagitingan, pagkamalikhain, at pagkamatulungin ng mga manlalaro, ng mga avatars sa mundo ng Midgard ay hindi nagtatapos sa virtual na mundo kundi sumasangay sa “tunay” na mundo. Dito pumasok ang “weblogs” o ang itinuturing na “on-line journals”. Sa wakas, makikilala ko na ang ilang mga mukha sa likod ng mga “avatars”.
Hindi ko ginamit sa nakaraang pag-aaral ang salitang “empowerment”. Ngunit naniniwala ako na dito nag-uugat ang lahat. Ang pagakakaroon ng isang inidibidwal ng konsepto na “empowered” siya ang makapagpapakilos sa kanya o makapagbibigay sa kanya ng motibasyon para maging bahagi sa pagbuo ng kanyang nasyon. Sinabi ni Tim Jordan sa kanyang librong Cyberpower (199) na “Cyberspace is the land of empowerment of individuals, of reinventing identities out of thought.” Hindi ako lubos na sang-ayon sa sinabi ni Tim Jordan. Naniniwala ako sa kakayahan ng internet na i-empower ang isang indibidwal sa pamamagitan ng pagbibigay sa kanya ng isang medium para mailabas ang kanyang mga hinaing, maibahagi sa iba ang kanyang mga nalalaman at pinaniniwalaan, ang makapagpabago. Naniniwala din ako na hindi iisa o buo ang identidad ng isang tao. Maaari lamang pumili siya ng ilang bahagi ng kanyang pagkatao na gusto niyang ipakita sa iba. Ngunit ang pagbuo ng identidad na ito na ipinapakita mo sa “cyberspace” ay hindi nabuo “out of thought.” Produkto ito ng ating “subject positions”. Produkto ito ng maraming taong pagkakahulma o dikdik sa sari-saring institusyonal na aparato ng estado. Ang identidad ding ito ay sang-ayon sa medium na ginagamit (internet, computer), sa lingwahe, at sa kung anong klaseng mga tao ang babasa sa iyo o sa kung anong klaseng tao ang gusto mong bumasa sa iyo. Ang kagandahan ng “blogging” ay ang kakayahan nitong baliktarin ang mga sitwasyon. Maaaring kailanganing makibagay ng isang “blogista” sa medium o program na kanyang pinili para makalikha ng kanyang sariling blog ngunti di tulad ng “chat rooms” kung saan papasok ka sa isang komunidad bilang isang “unknown entity”, sa blogs, magsisimula ka muna sa pagbuo ng iyong sariling identidad bago ka gumawa ng link sa ibang mga blog sites o komunidad para ikaw ay makilala. Masasabi nating mas buo ang identidad ng isang blogista pagpasok niya sa blog communities kaysa mga “chatters”. Bagama’t magbabago pa rin ang pagkakakilanlan sa blogista sa pagdaan ng mga araw sa kanyang on-line journal, na-establish na niya kung anong identidad ang gusto niyang makita ng ibang tao sa kanya. Mas may pagkakataon din ang isang blogista na bumuo ng sarili niyang komunidad. Sa ganitong paraan, bawat “blogista” ay may kakayahang maging tagabuo at parte ng isang binubuong komunidad. Dito nagsisimula ang empowerment.
Naimbento ang Internet ng Pentagon noong 1969 bilang isang proyekto ng US Militar para sa Cold War. Tinawag itong ARPAnet dahil kontrolado ito ng Advanced Research Projects Administration. Ang pangunahing gamit nito ay ang magsilbing daan para sa komunikasyon ng military kung sakaling magkaroon ng nuclear war. (Hebrona in Teng, 1997). Sa kabilang banda, ang blogs as nagsimula lamang sa pagitan ng mga taong 1994 at 1997. Noong 1997, ginamit ni Jorn Barger ang terminong weblog upang tumukoy sa kanyang online journal na “Robot Wisdom” at marami nang sumunod dito. Kalimitan sa mga gumagawa ng blogs noon ay mga “web designers”, “software designers” and “computer scientists” at kinakailangang may kaalaman ka sa hypertext markup language (HTML) at Java. Subalit dahil sa paglabas ng mga blogs-for-the-idiots (gaya ko) gaya ng Blogger, naging madali na para sa kahit sinong may access sa internet at interesadong magbahagi ng kanyang identidad o mga kwento sa ibang tao ang lumikha ng kanyang sariling blog. (Gurak et. Al in WWW) Sa ating bansa, ayon sa Pinoyblog, ang pinakamatandang blog ng Pilipino na alam ng sumulat ng “blog entry” ay nalikha noong huling bahagi ng taong 1999. Hindi pa kumpleto ang ginagawang pagbubuo ng kasaysayan ng blog sa Pilipinas kaya hindi pa sigurado ang dato na ito. Gayunpaman, makikita nating hindi bumilang ng maraming taon bago tayo naabot ng blogs. Sa kasalukuyan, base sa NITLE Blog Census, mahigit dalawang milyon na ang sa tingin nila’y weblogs at mahigit kalahati nito ay nasa salitang Ingles. Ang Pinoyblog noong aking huling bisitahin (March 18, 2005) ay mayroon nang 5,529 entries at 1,173 members gayong wala pang tatlong taon itong nabubuo.
Anu-ano ba ang karakteristiks ng blogs? Karamihan sa mga sinangguni sa internet nagsasabing ang blogs ay binubuo ng mga repleksyon, muni-muni, alaala, kaalaman, sanaysay, litrato, problema sa mundo, haka-haka, iba pang mga likha at higit sa lahat ng mga “links”. Itong mga links na ito ang pinagkaiba ng blogs sa “diaries”. Maaaring links ito sa ibang mga blogs, internet communities, sites na interesante para sa blogista, atbp. Nagsisimula din ang blogs sa pinakabagong entry pababa ngunit hindi hanggang sa pinakaluma sapagkat matatagpuan na ang mga lumang entries sa archives section ng blog. Maaari ding gumawa ng maraming categories o sections ang blogista para sa pag-oorganize ng mga data sa kanyang blog. Maaaring hindi lamang iisa ang blogista ng isang blog, mayroong blog na maraming blogista katulad ng Pinoyblog, Philippine Gaming Community, atbp. Ang pinagkaiba ng blog sa website ay ang pag-a-update sa entries dito. Mayroon ding bahagi ang bawat blogs kung saan pwedeng magbigay ng komento ang mga mambabasa.
Madali lamang gumawa ng blogs dahil sa loob ng labinglimang minuto ay nakagawa na ako ng sarili kong blog kahit iisang entry pa lamang ang nailalagay ko dito at wala pang links. Ang aking blogsite ay http://cloudychugs.blogspot.com/. Kailangan mo lamang sundin ang mga alituntunin ng isang blog portal gaya ng Blogger at ang pangarap mong makapag-publish ng iyong mga likha ay magagawa mo na sa isang iglap.
Sinabi ni Sherry Turkle sa kanyang “Lives on the Screen” na ang pagsusuot ng iba’t ibang identidad sa internet ay pinaka-obvious sa “role-playing” virtual communities o “online games” sapagkat sa mga role-playing games (RPGs) gaya ng Ragnarok, ang manlalaro ay pumipili ng kanyang “avatar” (online character/ personality) na maaaring naiiba sa kanyang pagkatao “physically” ngunit sa katunayan ay sumasalamin din sa kanyang mga saloobin, hangarin, nakaugaliang asal. Kaiba naman ang blogs dito dahil ang identitidad ng avatar ay hindi na lamang “inferred” mula sa karakter ng isang laro kundi “explicitly shared” kahit pa man piling identidad lamang ito o iba sa identidad sa totoong buhay. Sa isang blog, ang mismong blogista na ang nagsasabi na ganito ako, o ganito ako dahil kayo ang nagbabasa sa akin, o ganito ako dahil ito ang gusto kong ipakita sa inyo o dahil basta ganito ako. Ang nagbunsad sa akin na suriin ang mga blogs ay ang libro ni Rolando B. Tolentino “ National/ Transnational: Subject Formation and Media in and on the Philippines.” Sinabi ng aklat na:
“Subject formation is a negotiated and working identity. Hegemonic power remains unevenly porous, thus evenly penetrating and penetrable. Subjectivity remains always in a process of coming into being, never complete… Subjectivity remains enmeshed in both discourses of the national and transnational… By interfacing the national and transnational, the disjunctures are made pronounced, providing instances in which subjectivity both subverts and is dominated by hegemonic power.” (2001)
Bagamat hindi national at transnational ang mga salitang aking gagamitin kundi personal/indibidwal at komunal/komunidad, ang dichotomy na ito ay maaaring matagpuan sa blog/blogista. Sapagkat sa pagbuo ng isang blog, bukod sa kagustuhan ng blogista na marinig o mabasa siya sa kung anong personalidad ang gusto niyang ipakita o ikuwento, sa oras na gumawa siya ng isang blog, ang nasa isip agad niya ay ang kanyang mambabasa. Maaaring magpailalaim ang blogista sa komunidad na gusto niyang kabilangan o kaya’y magsimula siya ng sarili niyang komunidad o baguhin ang komunidad na pinasukan niya o pumasok sa kanya. Hindi kinakailangang gawin niya ito ng magkakahiwalay sapagkat hindi unidirectional ang blogs, sangay sangay ang mga ito. Kaya’t sa pagbuo ng isang blogista ng kanyang identidad sa internet, nabubuo din ang isang komunidad.
Maraming limitasyon ang aking pag-aaral. Una dahil “purposive” ang naging pagpili ko ng mga blogs na pinag-aralan. Ang unang karakteristiks na aking hinanap sa pagpili ay ang pagkahilig ng bawat blogista sa online games, karamihan sa kanila ay naglaro o naglalaro ng Ragnarok o ibang RPGs. Makikita ang hilig na ito sa profile nila, sa links, at maging sa blog entries mismo. Para makapili ng blogista na naglalaro ng RPGs, nag-search lang ako sa Yahoo engine at nang may makuha na akong ilan, tiningnan ko din ang mga links nito para silipin kung “hooked” din sa RPGs ang mga “kaibigan” ng blogista. Binisita ko din ang mga blogs sa Pinoy Blog Awards at nakakuha ng marami sa sample mula dito. Ang Pinoy Blog Awards ay naglalayong kilalanin ang mga blogista at mga blogs ng mga Pinoy na kakikitaan ng pagkamalikhain o kahusayan. Ilan sa mga rekognisyong binibigay ang Philippine Blog Website of the Year, Filipino Blogger of the Year, at Most Informative Blog Site. Ang blog directory nito ay nagli-link sa 99 na blog sites ng babae at 82 blog sites ng lalaki. Nilimita ko ang bilang ng blogs na tatalakayin dito sa sampu, limang babae at limang lalaki, ayon sa sex na idineklara nila sa kanilang mga blogs. Ang huling naging pagbisita ko sa mga napiling blogs ay noong Marso 31, 2005.
Sa pagsuri sa mga blogs ay gumamit ako ng iba’t ibang kategorya gaya ng blog adres, titulo, pangalan/ pagkakakilanlan (handle), porma/disenyo, nilalaman (Expresiv/ Informativ), hayag o di-hayag na layunin/ motibo, at digri ng rebelasyon sa tunay na identidad (makikilala, di-makikilala, kilala, inimbento).
Makikita natin sa dalawang table na halos hindi maaaring paghiwalayin ang expresiv sa informative na kontent o nilalaman. Nagkakaiba lamang sa kung alin ang lumalabas na mas nakakahigit kaysa isa. Kinlasify bilang personal ang mga blogs na karamihan sa entries ay tungkol sa sarili at sa mga pangyayari sa sariling buhay. Expresiv naman kapag tungkol ito sa mga nararamdaman o komento sa iba’t ibang aspeto ng buhay. Informativ naman ang blogs na nagbibigay ng balita o impormasyon na maaaring maging interesante para sa mambabasa o makatulong dito. Kinlasipika ko na rin na informative ang mga advertisements.
Dalawa sa mga blogs ng babae ang kinlasipika bilang Personal/ Expresiv, dalawa din ang Expresiv/Informative, at isang blog ang kinlasipikang Personal, Expresiv, at Informativ. Sa mga blogs naman ng lalaki, dalawa ang kinlasipikang Expresiv/ Informativ, dalawa ang Informativ/ Expresiv at isang Informativ. Nauuna sa banghay ang mas matimbang. Base ang mga ito sa mga pinakabagong entries ng blogs at sa mga links nito. Gayunpaman, bagamat mayroong mga kinlasipika bilang expresiv lamang o informative lamang, kung iku-konsidera natin na ang mga links sa ibang bloggers bilang maaaring pagmulan ng karagdagang impormasyon o ibang expresyon ng sarili/ identidad at mga paniniwala, hindi natin maaaring sabihin na natatapos sa pagiging informative o expresiv ang isang blog. Sa kadahilanan ngang kaiba ang medium na ito sa balita, chat room, o maging sa RPGs. Ang identidad ng isang tao ang nakataya dito, bagamat maaaring identidad na kaiba sa identidad sa tunay na mundo. Kung sino mang babasa sa blog mo ay maaaring mag-iwan ng komento; nagustuhan ba niya ang iyong sinabi? Mayroon ba siyang karagdagang sasabihin? Nire-recognize ba niya ang credibilidad mo o ang mga pananaw mo? Bawat salitang tinatayp natin sa ating keyboard at pino-post natin sa ating blog ay nagbibigay ng impormasyon sa mga “surfers” at “bloggers” sa kung sino ba tayo o kung ano ba ang ating nalalaman. Maaring hindi intensyon ng isang blogista ang mag-lecture o magbahagi ng kaalaman o mga katotohanan. Ngunit hindi niya maaaring pigilin ang Google, Yahoo o Yehey Search na palitawin ang kanyang blog sa mga saliksik kung saan nakapagbitiw siya ng isang pahayag na konektado dito. Samakatuwid, anuman ang iyong isinulat ay maaaring maging mahalagang impormasyon para sa iba. Hindi rin naman pwedeng maging pulos informative ang isang blog dahil lumalabas pa rin dito ang sariling estilo at pananaw. Maaaring makipag-interact online din ang blogista sa kanyang mga mambabasa sa pamamagitan ng pagsagot o pag-react sa mga komento nito. Hindi maiiwasan na dito ay lumabas ang mga personal na pananaw o pahayag. Hindi ko pa nadalaw ang blog ni George W. Bush kaya gagawin ko na lamang halimbawa si Gabby Dizon na siyang tinitingala ng mga Pinoy game developers dahil sa pagkakabuo nito ng pinakaunang Pinoy RPG na Anito: defend a Land Enraged. Kung noon ay kilala lamang natin siya sa pamamagitan ng interviews niya at sa mga manaka-nakang guesting sa mga Computer Digital shows, ngayon mas nakita na natin ang porma ng kanyang mukha. Nabasa natin kung ano ang mga nasa isip niya na gusto niyang ibahagi sa atin. Sa mga blogs, nagkakaroon ng mas buo bagama’t patuloy pa ring binubuong personalidad ang mga tanyag na tao. Sa pamamagitan din ng blogs, hindi mo kinakailangang maging isang Conrado De Quiros upang mabasa, o maging isang Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo upang marinig sa buong mundo. Hindi mo rin kinakailangang lumabas ng iyong bahay o mangibangbayan para maibahagi ang iyong mga pananaw, upang makilala ka sa kung sino ka o sa kung anong klaseng pagkatao ang gustong mong makilala. Sa pagkakaroon lamang ng access sa computer at internet, maaaring mong buuin ang iyong virtual na pagkatao at maging tagabuo ng isang komunidad.
Makikita rin sa mga ligwaheng ginamit sa pagsulat sa blog kung paano isinaalang-alang ng isang blogista ang kanyang mga mambabasa. Tatlo sa mga blogs ng babae ang nasusulat sa Ingles at dalawa naman ang sa magkahalong Filipino at Ingles. Sa mga lalaking blogista naman, apat ang nagsusulat sa Ingles at iisa ang sa magkahalong Filipino at Ingles. Marahil mas marami sa mga lalaking blogista ang nagsusulat sa Ingles dahil marami sa kanila ay teknikal na mga terminolohiya ang pinag-uusapan. Katulad ng sa blog ni Gabby Dizon na nasusulat sa Ingles kung saan bumibisita ang maraming game developers dahil sa mga impormasyong nakukuha dito bukod sa pagiging kilala niya. Maaari din naming pinili ng mga itong magsulat sa wikang Ingles dahil mas gamay nila ang lingwaheng ito. Sa kaso naman ni Ferdinand De Cena, makikita sa istilo ng pagsusulat niya kung paanong piling-pili ang mga salitang ginagamit at siya mismo ay umamin sa self-censorship na ginagawa niya sa kadahilanang ayaw niyang ikompromiso ang ilang mga taong kilala niya. Maging ang istilo ni Mayan ng Lady Lazarus Blog ay makikitang nakasulat sa “written English” at hindi “conversational.” Dahil personal kong kilala si Mayan, alam ko na writer siya at lumalabas ito sa kanyang blog. Sa kanyang estilo ay maaari mong sabihin na isa siyang “proficient/professional writer”. Maaari nating sabihin na ito ang limitasyon ng blog, na hindi tulad ng diary na ang inibidwal na manunulat lamang ang babasa at hindi kailangang sumunod sa ilang kumbensyon. Subalit ang limitasyong ito, ang dayalektik na ito sa pagitan ng personal at komunal ay hindi hadlang para lumago ang isang blogista sa kanyang “subject position.” Sapagkat sa blogs posible ang “reversal of roles”. Maaari kang makibagay at maaari karing pakibagayan.
Malaki ang potensyal ng blogs at nakita na ang potensyal na ito ng marami. Ang potensyal na impluwensiyahan ang ibang tao para baguhin ang kanilang pamamalakad, ang potensyal na makapagbigay ng magandang trabaho, ang potensyal na makapagpabagao. Bukod sa mga blogs na binanggit ko sa pag-aaral na ito, marami rin akong binisita. Ang iba ay entertaining lamang, ang iba naman informative talaga at enlightening pa. Katulad ng blog entry ni Migs Paraz sa kanyang blog na Migs Paraz: Random Takes kung saan nag-interview sila ng isang parking attendant para sa kanilang school project. Sa pagtatapos ng interview ay naantig ang kanilang mga puso dahil sa kwento ng buhay ni Mang “Jun”. Walang pagdadalawang isip na inabutan nila ito ng pera na umabot sa mahigit anim na daan. Tuwang tuwa si Mang Jun at sinabing ibibigay niya ito sa kanyang asawa para makapagsimula ng isang maliit na negosyo ng banana cue. Pagkatapos ng interview ay nagkaroon ng maraming katanungan ang tatlo sa kung dapat ba ay pinahiram na lamang nila ang pera para siguradong iingatan ito at susubukang palaguin. Nang huli ay nakapag-isip sila ng ischema kung paano matutulungan si Mang Jun na umanagat sa kanyang buhay. Maganda ang ischemang kanilang naisip subali’t hindi nila nakonsider ang mga buwayang mahilig mangikil sa mga tindera.
Hindi malaki ang pinagkaiba ng virtual na mundo sa tunay na mundo sapagkat gaya ng aking sinabi sa nauna kong pag-aaral, ang virtual na mundo ay tunay na mundo sa pagkat parte ito ng mundong ginagalawan natin. Ang mga gahum na matatagpuan sa mundo sa labas ng internet ay matatagpuan rin dito. Mayroon ding computer elites, mayroon ding middle class, at mayroon ding pulubi. Matatawag na pulubi iyong nakikiamot lamang ng impormasyon at hindi nakikita ang potensyal ng internet na makapagpa-aksyon. Middle class naman yaong mulat sa potensyal ng internet ngunit kuntento na sa komportableng estadong kinalalagyan nito. Elites naman yaong may malalawak na kaalaman sa computer programming at mayroong kasangkapan upang kontrolin ang pagdaloy ng impormasyon. Mayroon din naming umuusbong na revolutionary class. Ito yaong mga ‘avatars’ na bumubuo ng sarili nilang identidad at tumutulong para bumuo ng isang malakas na komunidad kung saan hindi lamang ang boses ng iisang tao ang naghahari. Kung san maaaring magpailalim o makibagay ang isang lider sa kanyang mga kakomunidad.
Maraming mga negatibong nasabi na tungkol sa mga taong mahilig maglaro ng RPGs. Ang paglalaro daw nila ay ginagamit nila upang tumakas at hindi makisangkot sa mga pulitikal na usapin ng kanilang bayan. Nakukuntento na lamang daw ang mga ito na pumatay sa mga monsters na kalaban niya sa virtual na mundo. Atin nang tiningan ang ilang mga blogs ng mga sinasabi nating “apathetic youth”. Makikita natin na nangingibabaw pa rin dito ang panggitnang uri, ang sarili bago ang iba. Gayunpaman, mayroon ding mga ilang gusto ring magdulot ng pagbabago bagama’t hindi ito nagsisimula sa pulitikal na aspeto kundi teknolohikal. Ang pagiging available ng sari-saring kaalaman sa teknolohiya, ang patuloy na pagbabahaginan ng kaalamang ito ang inaasahang magdudulot ng pagbabago sa ating bansa. Bagama’t ang pag-angat pa rin sa sarili ang binibigyan ng prioridad ng marami sa blogista, ang pagkakaroon ng links sa bawat blogs ay daan upang mabuksan ang pinto patungo sa ibang uri ng mga “avatars” o “komunidad” na sa huli’y maaaring makapagdulot ng pagkamulat at pag-aksyon.. Ang mahalaga, sa blogs matatagpuan ang isang indibidwal na bumubuo ng kanyang sariling identidad sa gitna ng mga limitasyon ng medium na kanyang kinapapalooban, kasabay ng pagbubuo niya ng isang komunidad kung saan hindi lamang siya ang reyna o hari o ang makapangyarihan.
References:
Jordan, Tim. Cyber Power: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet. New
York: Routledge, 1999.
Teng, Lester M. & Pekka Vainio. “The Image of Filipino Women as promoted by
Filipino and non-Filipino sites in the Internet.” Th. DLSU Manila, 1997.
Tolentino, Rolando B. National/ Transnational. Subject Formation and Media in and on
the Philippines. Manila: Ateneo Univ P, 2001.
Turkle, Sherry. “Whither Psychoanalysis in a Computer Culture?”
http://www/kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0529.html. March
31, 2005.
Websites
Aya. Gabriela’s Crib. http;//livejournal.com/users/gabriela’scrib/
Edwin Soriano. Technobiography. http://technobiography.blogspot.com/
Fallenstar “Perfectly Flawed”.http://fallenstar.so-phobic.com/wordpress/
Ferdinand De Cena. Ironwulf. http://ironwulf.net/about/
Gabby Dizon. Fuel Factor: 3rd World Game Developer. http://www.fuelfactor.net/3wgd/
Gurak, Laura, et al. Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture of
Weblogs.”Introduction” http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere. March 17, 2005
JPF maligalig. JPFM: Writers log. http://www.jpfmwritersblog.blogspot.com/
It’s a Happy Orange Day. http://www.tabulas.com/~chocoby
Mayan. Blogisa: The Diary of a blue stocking. http://ladylazarus.blogdrive.com
Nald’s Blog. http://www.xanga .com/home.aspx?user=rsuello
NITLE Blog Census. http://www.onfocus.com/2003/07/3243. March 30, 2005
Nomad Programming.http://developer.nomadph.com/
Philippine Blogawards. http://www.philippine blogawards.com. March 17, 2005
Pinoyblog.Com: The Philippines According to Blogs. www.pinoyblog.com. March 17, 2005
Yaonne. I will Bloom like a Flower. http://www.tabulas.com/~yaone
Xiu Xie. Game Master. http://www.laibcoms.com/Laibeus/GameMaster
Hindi ko ginamit sa nakaraang pag-aaral ang salitang “empowerment”. Ngunit naniniwala ako na dito nag-uugat ang lahat. Ang pagakakaroon ng isang inidibidwal ng konsepto na “empowered” siya ang makapagpapakilos sa kanya o makapagbibigay sa kanya ng motibasyon para maging bahagi sa pagbuo ng kanyang nasyon. Sinabi ni Tim Jordan sa kanyang librong Cyberpower (199) na “Cyberspace is the land of empowerment of individuals, of reinventing identities out of thought.” Hindi ako lubos na sang-ayon sa sinabi ni Tim Jordan. Naniniwala ako sa kakayahan ng internet na i-empower ang isang indibidwal sa pamamagitan ng pagbibigay sa kanya ng isang medium para mailabas ang kanyang mga hinaing, maibahagi sa iba ang kanyang mga nalalaman at pinaniniwalaan, ang makapagpabago. Naniniwala din ako na hindi iisa o buo ang identidad ng isang tao. Maaari lamang pumili siya ng ilang bahagi ng kanyang pagkatao na gusto niyang ipakita sa iba. Ngunit ang pagbuo ng identidad na ito na ipinapakita mo sa “cyberspace” ay hindi nabuo “out of thought.” Produkto ito ng ating “subject positions”. Produkto ito ng maraming taong pagkakahulma o dikdik sa sari-saring institusyonal na aparato ng estado. Ang identidad ding ito ay sang-ayon sa medium na ginagamit (internet, computer), sa lingwahe, at sa kung anong klaseng mga tao ang babasa sa iyo o sa kung anong klaseng tao ang gusto mong bumasa sa iyo. Ang kagandahan ng “blogging” ay ang kakayahan nitong baliktarin ang mga sitwasyon. Maaaring kailanganing makibagay ng isang “blogista” sa medium o program na kanyang pinili para makalikha ng kanyang sariling blog ngunti di tulad ng “chat rooms” kung saan papasok ka sa isang komunidad bilang isang “unknown entity”, sa blogs, magsisimula ka muna sa pagbuo ng iyong sariling identidad bago ka gumawa ng link sa ibang mga blog sites o komunidad para ikaw ay makilala. Masasabi nating mas buo ang identidad ng isang blogista pagpasok niya sa blog communities kaysa mga “chatters”. Bagama’t magbabago pa rin ang pagkakakilanlan sa blogista sa pagdaan ng mga araw sa kanyang on-line journal, na-establish na niya kung anong identidad ang gusto niyang makita ng ibang tao sa kanya. Mas may pagkakataon din ang isang blogista na bumuo ng sarili niyang komunidad. Sa ganitong paraan, bawat “blogista” ay may kakayahang maging tagabuo at parte ng isang binubuong komunidad. Dito nagsisimula ang empowerment.
Naimbento ang Internet ng Pentagon noong 1969 bilang isang proyekto ng US Militar para sa Cold War. Tinawag itong ARPAnet dahil kontrolado ito ng Advanced Research Projects Administration. Ang pangunahing gamit nito ay ang magsilbing daan para sa komunikasyon ng military kung sakaling magkaroon ng nuclear war. (Hebrona in Teng, 1997). Sa kabilang banda, ang blogs as nagsimula lamang sa pagitan ng mga taong 1994 at 1997. Noong 1997, ginamit ni Jorn Barger ang terminong weblog upang tumukoy sa kanyang online journal na “Robot Wisdom” at marami nang sumunod dito. Kalimitan sa mga gumagawa ng blogs noon ay mga “web designers”, “software designers” and “computer scientists” at kinakailangang may kaalaman ka sa hypertext markup language (HTML) at Java. Subalit dahil sa paglabas ng mga blogs-for-the-idiots (gaya ko) gaya ng Blogger, naging madali na para sa kahit sinong may access sa internet at interesadong magbahagi ng kanyang identidad o mga kwento sa ibang tao ang lumikha ng kanyang sariling blog. (Gurak et. Al in WWW) Sa ating bansa, ayon sa Pinoyblog, ang pinakamatandang blog ng Pilipino na alam ng sumulat ng “blog entry” ay nalikha noong huling bahagi ng taong 1999. Hindi pa kumpleto ang ginagawang pagbubuo ng kasaysayan ng blog sa Pilipinas kaya hindi pa sigurado ang dato na ito. Gayunpaman, makikita nating hindi bumilang ng maraming taon bago tayo naabot ng blogs. Sa kasalukuyan, base sa NITLE Blog Census, mahigit dalawang milyon na ang sa tingin nila’y weblogs at mahigit kalahati nito ay nasa salitang Ingles. Ang Pinoyblog noong aking huling bisitahin (March 18, 2005) ay mayroon nang 5,529 entries at 1,173 members gayong wala pang tatlong taon itong nabubuo.
Anu-ano ba ang karakteristiks ng blogs? Karamihan sa mga sinangguni sa internet nagsasabing ang blogs ay binubuo ng mga repleksyon, muni-muni, alaala, kaalaman, sanaysay, litrato, problema sa mundo, haka-haka, iba pang mga likha at higit sa lahat ng mga “links”. Itong mga links na ito ang pinagkaiba ng blogs sa “diaries”. Maaaring links ito sa ibang mga blogs, internet communities, sites na interesante para sa blogista, atbp. Nagsisimula din ang blogs sa pinakabagong entry pababa ngunit hindi hanggang sa pinakaluma sapagkat matatagpuan na ang mga lumang entries sa archives section ng blog. Maaari ding gumawa ng maraming categories o sections ang blogista para sa pag-oorganize ng mga data sa kanyang blog. Maaaring hindi lamang iisa ang blogista ng isang blog, mayroong blog na maraming blogista katulad ng Pinoyblog, Philippine Gaming Community, atbp. Ang pinagkaiba ng blog sa website ay ang pag-a-update sa entries dito. Mayroon ding bahagi ang bawat blogs kung saan pwedeng magbigay ng komento ang mga mambabasa.
Madali lamang gumawa ng blogs dahil sa loob ng labinglimang minuto ay nakagawa na ako ng sarili kong blog kahit iisang entry pa lamang ang nailalagay ko dito at wala pang links. Ang aking blogsite ay http://cloudychugs.blogspot.com/. Kailangan mo lamang sundin ang mga alituntunin ng isang blog portal gaya ng Blogger at ang pangarap mong makapag-publish ng iyong mga likha ay magagawa mo na sa isang iglap.
Sinabi ni Sherry Turkle sa kanyang “Lives on the Screen” na ang pagsusuot ng iba’t ibang identidad sa internet ay pinaka-obvious sa “role-playing” virtual communities o “online games” sapagkat sa mga role-playing games (RPGs) gaya ng Ragnarok, ang manlalaro ay pumipili ng kanyang “avatar” (online character/ personality) na maaaring naiiba sa kanyang pagkatao “physically” ngunit sa katunayan ay sumasalamin din sa kanyang mga saloobin, hangarin, nakaugaliang asal. Kaiba naman ang blogs dito dahil ang identitidad ng avatar ay hindi na lamang “inferred” mula sa karakter ng isang laro kundi “explicitly shared” kahit pa man piling identidad lamang ito o iba sa identidad sa totoong buhay. Sa isang blog, ang mismong blogista na ang nagsasabi na ganito ako, o ganito ako dahil kayo ang nagbabasa sa akin, o ganito ako dahil ito ang gusto kong ipakita sa inyo o dahil basta ganito ako. Ang nagbunsad sa akin na suriin ang mga blogs ay ang libro ni Rolando B. Tolentino “ National/ Transnational: Subject Formation and Media in and on the Philippines.” Sinabi ng aklat na:
“Subject formation is a negotiated and working identity. Hegemonic power remains unevenly porous, thus evenly penetrating and penetrable. Subjectivity remains always in a process of coming into being, never complete… Subjectivity remains enmeshed in both discourses of the national and transnational… By interfacing the national and transnational, the disjunctures are made pronounced, providing instances in which subjectivity both subverts and is dominated by hegemonic power.” (2001)
Bagamat hindi national at transnational ang mga salitang aking gagamitin kundi personal/indibidwal at komunal/komunidad, ang dichotomy na ito ay maaaring matagpuan sa blog/blogista. Sapagkat sa pagbuo ng isang blog, bukod sa kagustuhan ng blogista na marinig o mabasa siya sa kung anong personalidad ang gusto niyang ipakita o ikuwento, sa oras na gumawa siya ng isang blog, ang nasa isip agad niya ay ang kanyang mambabasa. Maaaring magpailalaim ang blogista sa komunidad na gusto niyang kabilangan o kaya’y magsimula siya ng sarili niyang komunidad o baguhin ang komunidad na pinasukan niya o pumasok sa kanya. Hindi kinakailangang gawin niya ito ng magkakahiwalay sapagkat hindi unidirectional ang blogs, sangay sangay ang mga ito. Kaya’t sa pagbuo ng isang blogista ng kanyang identidad sa internet, nabubuo din ang isang komunidad.
Maraming limitasyon ang aking pag-aaral. Una dahil “purposive” ang naging pagpili ko ng mga blogs na pinag-aralan. Ang unang karakteristiks na aking hinanap sa pagpili ay ang pagkahilig ng bawat blogista sa online games, karamihan sa kanila ay naglaro o naglalaro ng Ragnarok o ibang RPGs. Makikita ang hilig na ito sa profile nila, sa links, at maging sa blog entries mismo. Para makapili ng blogista na naglalaro ng RPGs, nag-search lang ako sa Yahoo engine at nang may makuha na akong ilan, tiningnan ko din ang mga links nito para silipin kung “hooked” din sa RPGs ang mga “kaibigan” ng blogista. Binisita ko din ang mga blogs sa Pinoy Blog Awards at nakakuha ng marami sa sample mula dito. Ang Pinoy Blog Awards ay naglalayong kilalanin ang mga blogista at mga blogs ng mga Pinoy na kakikitaan ng pagkamalikhain o kahusayan. Ilan sa mga rekognisyong binibigay ang Philippine Blog Website of the Year, Filipino Blogger of the Year, at Most Informative Blog Site. Ang blog directory nito ay nagli-link sa 99 na blog sites ng babae at 82 blog sites ng lalaki. Nilimita ko ang bilang ng blogs na tatalakayin dito sa sampu, limang babae at limang lalaki, ayon sa sex na idineklara nila sa kanilang mga blogs. Ang huling naging pagbisita ko sa mga napiling blogs ay noong Marso 31, 2005.
Sa pagsuri sa mga blogs ay gumamit ako ng iba’t ibang kategorya gaya ng blog adres, titulo, pangalan/ pagkakakilanlan (handle), porma/disenyo, nilalaman (Expresiv/ Informativ), hayag o di-hayag na layunin/ motibo, at digri ng rebelasyon sa tunay na identidad (makikilala, di-makikilala, kilala, inimbento).
Makikita natin sa dalawang table na halos hindi maaaring paghiwalayin ang expresiv sa informative na kontent o nilalaman. Nagkakaiba lamang sa kung alin ang lumalabas na mas nakakahigit kaysa isa. Kinlasify bilang personal ang mga blogs na karamihan sa entries ay tungkol sa sarili at sa mga pangyayari sa sariling buhay. Expresiv naman kapag tungkol ito sa mga nararamdaman o komento sa iba’t ibang aspeto ng buhay. Informativ naman ang blogs na nagbibigay ng balita o impormasyon na maaaring maging interesante para sa mambabasa o makatulong dito. Kinlasipika ko na rin na informative ang mga advertisements.
Dalawa sa mga blogs ng babae ang kinlasipika bilang Personal/ Expresiv, dalawa din ang Expresiv/Informative, at isang blog ang kinlasipikang Personal, Expresiv, at Informativ. Sa mga blogs naman ng lalaki, dalawa ang kinlasipikang Expresiv/ Informativ, dalawa ang Informativ/ Expresiv at isang Informativ. Nauuna sa banghay ang mas matimbang. Base ang mga ito sa mga pinakabagong entries ng blogs at sa mga links nito. Gayunpaman, bagamat mayroong mga kinlasipika bilang expresiv lamang o informative lamang, kung iku-konsidera natin na ang mga links sa ibang bloggers bilang maaaring pagmulan ng karagdagang impormasyon o ibang expresyon ng sarili/ identidad at mga paniniwala, hindi natin maaaring sabihin na natatapos sa pagiging informative o expresiv ang isang blog. Sa kadahilanan ngang kaiba ang medium na ito sa balita, chat room, o maging sa RPGs. Ang identidad ng isang tao ang nakataya dito, bagamat maaaring identidad na kaiba sa identidad sa tunay na mundo. Kung sino mang babasa sa blog mo ay maaaring mag-iwan ng komento; nagustuhan ba niya ang iyong sinabi? Mayroon ba siyang karagdagang sasabihin? Nire-recognize ba niya ang credibilidad mo o ang mga pananaw mo? Bawat salitang tinatayp natin sa ating keyboard at pino-post natin sa ating blog ay nagbibigay ng impormasyon sa mga “surfers” at “bloggers” sa kung sino ba tayo o kung ano ba ang ating nalalaman. Maaring hindi intensyon ng isang blogista ang mag-lecture o magbahagi ng kaalaman o mga katotohanan. Ngunit hindi niya maaaring pigilin ang Google, Yahoo o Yehey Search na palitawin ang kanyang blog sa mga saliksik kung saan nakapagbitiw siya ng isang pahayag na konektado dito. Samakatuwid, anuman ang iyong isinulat ay maaaring maging mahalagang impormasyon para sa iba. Hindi rin naman pwedeng maging pulos informative ang isang blog dahil lumalabas pa rin dito ang sariling estilo at pananaw. Maaaring makipag-interact online din ang blogista sa kanyang mga mambabasa sa pamamagitan ng pagsagot o pag-react sa mga komento nito. Hindi maiiwasan na dito ay lumabas ang mga personal na pananaw o pahayag. Hindi ko pa nadalaw ang blog ni George W. Bush kaya gagawin ko na lamang halimbawa si Gabby Dizon na siyang tinitingala ng mga Pinoy game developers dahil sa pagkakabuo nito ng pinakaunang Pinoy RPG na Anito: defend a Land Enraged. Kung noon ay kilala lamang natin siya sa pamamagitan ng interviews niya at sa mga manaka-nakang guesting sa mga Computer Digital shows, ngayon mas nakita na natin ang porma ng kanyang mukha. Nabasa natin kung ano ang mga nasa isip niya na gusto niyang ibahagi sa atin. Sa mga blogs, nagkakaroon ng mas buo bagama’t patuloy pa ring binubuong personalidad ang mga tanyag na tao. Sa pamamagitan din ng blogs, hindi mo kinakailangang maging isang Conrado De Quiros upang mabasa, o maging isang Gloria Macapagal- Arroyo upang marinig sa buong mundo. Hindi mo rin kinakailangang lumabas ng iyong bahay o mangibangbayan para maibahagi ang iyong mga pananaw, upang makilala ka sa kung sino ka o sa kung anong klaseng pagkatao ang gustong mong makilala. Sa pagkakaroon lamang ng access sa computer at internet, maaaring mong buuin ang iyong virtual na pagkatao at maging tagabuo ng isang komunidad.
Makikita rin sa mga ligwaheng ginamit sa pagsulat sa blog kung paano isinaalang-alang ng isang blogista ang kanyang mga mambabasa. Tatlo sa mga blogs ng babae ang nasusulat sa Ingles at dalawa naman ang sa magkahalong Filipino at Ingles. Sa mga lalaking blogista naman, apat ang nagsusulat sa Ingles at iisa ang sa magkahalong Filipino at Ingles. Marahil mas marami sa mga lalaking blogista ang nagsusulat sa Ingles dahil marami sa kanila ay teknikal na mga terminolohiya ang pinag-uusapan. Katulad ng sa blog ni Gabby Dizon na nasusulat sa Ingles kung saan bumibisita ang maraming game developers dahil sa mga impormasyong nakukuha dito bukod sa pagiging kilala niya. Maaari din naming pinili ng mga itong magsulat sa wikang Ingles dahil mas gamay nila ang lingwaheng ito. Sa kaso naman ni Ferdinand De Cena, makikita sa istilo ng pagsusulat niya kung paanong piling-pili ang mga salitang ginagamit at siya mismo ay umamin sa self-censorship na ginagawa niya sa kadahilanang ayaw niyang ikompromiso ang ilang mga taong kilala niya. Maging ang istilo ni Mayan ng Lady Lazarus Blog ay makikitang nakasulat sa “written English” at hindi “conversational.” Dahil personal kong kilala si Mayan, alam ko na writer siya at lumalabas ito sa kanyang blog. Sa kanyang estilo ay maaari mong sabihin na isa siyang “proficient/professional writer”. Maaari nating sabihin na ito ang limitasyon ng blog, na hindi tulad ng diary na ang inibidwal na manunulat lamang ang babasa at hindi kailangang sumunod sa ilang kumbensyon. Subalit ang limitasyong ito, ang dayalektik na ito sa pagitan ng personal at komunal ay hindi hadlang para lumago ang isang blogista sa kanyang “subject position.” Sapagkat sa blogs posible ang “reversal of roles”. Maaari kang makibagay at maaari karing pakibagayan.
Malaki ang potensyal ng blogs at nakita na ang potensyal na ito ng marami. Ang potensyal na impluwensiyahan ang ibang tao para baguhin ang kanilang pamamalakad, ang potensyal na makapagbigay ng magandang trabaho, ang potensyal na makapagpabagao. Bukod sa mga blogs na binanggit ko sa pag-aaral na ito, marami rin akong binisita. Ang iba ay entertaining lamang, ang iba naman informative talaga at enlightening pa. Katulad ng blog entry ni Migs Paraz sa kanyang blog na Migs Paraz: Random Takes kung saan nag-interview sila ng isang parking attendant para sa kanilang school project. Sa pagtatapos ng interview ay naantig ang kanilang mga puso dahil sa kwento ng buhay ni Mang “Jun”. Walang pagdadalawang isip na inabutan nila ito ng pera na umabot sa mahigit anim na daan. Tuwang tuwa si Mang Jun at sinabing ibibigay niya ito sa kanyang asawa para makapagsimula ng isang maliit na negosyo ng banana cue. Pagkatapos ng interview ay nagkaroon ng maraming katanungan ang tatlo sa kung dapat ba ay pinahiram na lamang nila ang pera para siguradong iingatan ito at susubukang palaguin. Nang huli ay nakapag-isip sila ng ischema kung paano matutulungan si Mang Jun na umanagat sa kanyang buhay. Maganda ang ischemang kanilang naisip subali’t hindi nila nakonsider ang mga buwayang mahilig mangikil sa mga tindera.
Hindi malaki ang pinagkaiba ng virtual na mundo sa tunay na mundo sapagkat gaya ng aking sinabi sa nauna kong pag-aaral, ang virtual na mundo ay tunay na mundo sa pagkat parte ito ng mundong ginagalawan natin. Ang mga gahum na matatagpuan sa mundo sa labas ng internet ay matatagpuan rin dito. Mayroon ding computer elites, mayroon ding middle class, at mayroon ding pulubi. Matatawag na pulubi iyong nakikiamot lamang ng impormasyon at hindi nakikita ang potensyal ng internet na makapagpa-aksyon. Middle class naman yaong mulat sa potensyal ng internet ngunit kuntento na sa komportableng estadong kinalalagyan nito. Elites naman yaong may malalawak na kaalaman sa computer programming at mayroong kasangkapan upang kontrolin ang pagdaloy ng impormasyon. Mayroon din naming umuusbong na revolutionary class. Ito yaong mga ‘avatars’ na bumubuo ng sarili nilang identidad at tumutulong para bumuo ng isang malakas na komunidad kung saan hindi lamang ang boses ng iisang tao ang naghahari. Kung san maaaring magpailalim o makibagay ang isang lider sa kanyang mga kakomunidad.
Maraming mga negatibong nasabi na tungkol sa mga taong mahilig maglaro ng RPGs. Ang paglalaro daw nila ay ginagamit nila upang tumakas at hindi makisangkot sa mga pulitikal na usapin ng kanilang bayan. Nakukuntento na lamang daw ang mga ito na pumatay sa mga monsters na kalaban niya sa virtual na mundo. Atin nang tiningan ang ilang mga blogs ng mga sinasabi nating “apathetic youth”. Makikita natin na nangingibabaw pa rin dito ang panggitnang uri, ang sarili bago ang iba. Gayunpaman, mayroon ding mga ilang gusto ring magdulot ng pagbabago bagama’t hindi ito nagsisimula sa pulitikal na aspeto kundi teknolohikal. Ang pagiging available ng sari-saring kaalaman sa teknolohiya, ang patuloy na pagbabahaginan ng kaalamang ito ang inaasahang magdudulot ng pagbabago sa ating bansa. Bagama’t ang pag-angat pa rin sa sarili ang binibigyan ng prioridad ng marami sa blogista, ang pagkakaroon ng links sa bawat blogs ay daan upang mabuksan ang pinto patungo sa ibang uri ng mga “avatars” o “komunidad” na sa huli’y maaaring makapagdulot ng pagkamulat at pag-aksyon.. Ang mahalaga, sa blogs matatagpuan ang isang indibidwal na bumubuo ng kanyang sariling identidad sa gitna ng mga limitasyon ng medium na kanyang kinapapalooban, kasabay ng pagbubuo niya ng isang komunidad kung saan hindi lamang siya ang reyna o hari o ang makapangyarihan.
References:
Jordan, Tim. Cyber Power: The Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet. New
York: Routledge, 1999.
Teng, Lester M. & Pekka Vainio. “The Image of Filipino Women as promoted by
Filipino and non-Filipino sites in the Internet.” Th. DLSU Manila, 1997.
Tolentino, Rolando B. National/ Transnational. Subject Formation and Media in and on
the Philippines. Manila: Ateneo Univ P, 2001.
Turkle, Sherry. “Whither Psychoanalysis in a Computer Culture?”
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Websites
Aya. Gabriela’s Crib. http;//livejournal.com/users/gabriela’scrib/
Edwin Soriano. Technobiography. http://technobiography.blogspot.com/
Fallenstar “Perfectly Flawed”.http://fallenstar.so-phobic.com/wordpress/
Ferdinand De Cena. Ironwulf. http://ironwulf.net/about/
Gabby Dizon. Fuel Factor: 3rd World Game Developer. http://www.fuelfactor.net/3wgd/
Gurak, Laura, et al. Into the Blogosphere: Rhetoric, Community and Culture of
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Mayan. Blogisa: The Diary of a blue stocking. http://ladylazarus.blogdrive.com
Nald’s Blog. http://www.xanga .com/home.aspx?user=rsuello
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Nomad Programming.http://developer.nomadph.com/
Philippine Blogawards. http://www.philippine blogawards.com. March 17, 2005
Pinoyblog.Com: The Philippines According to Blogs. www.pinoyblog.com. March 17, 2005
Yaonne. I will Bloom like a Flower. http://www.tabulas.com/~yaone
Xiu Xie. Game Master. http://www.laibcoms.com/Laibeus/GameMaster
AN ANALYSIS OF EDITORIALS OF PDI, PHILIPPINE STAR, TEMPO AND PEOPLE’S JOURNAL BASED ON THE TOULMIN MODEL OF ARGUMENTATION
Introduction
Nearly everyday of our lives, we engage in arguments. We argue with our friends, colleagues, parents, bosses (if we can), professors, and even with ourselves. We sometimes even catch ourselves arguing against what we read in the newspapers, hear in the radio, or watch in television. And sometimes, when we engage in arguments, we do not realize that our sparring mate has already stirred us into another direction and we find ourselves agreeing to what she is saying. Now, how was she able to do that?
Arguments have existed since time immemorial. We can trace this even as far back as Aristotle and Plato. It is quite certain that arguments existed way before them. But Plato and Aristotle, because of their notable contributions in philosophy nd theology, are often cited as the professional arguers of ancient times. Their style, however, differ from each other. Whereas Plato was more concerned with the idea of establishing the truth as seen in his dialogues, Aristotle was more concerned with probabilities, as seen in his “Rhetoric”.
“The ancient audiences, like modern audiences, would disagree with many views that were stated as absolutely true.” (Wood 124) And so, to communicate effectively, the persuaders had to “modify and qualify their views in order to make them acceptable to the audiences.” (Wood 124) It was man’s natural sharp instinct that gave birth to organized arguments.
“Views that are probably true comprise the realm of argument.” (Wood 124) However, even if we are only talking about probabilities, the connections and the qualified conclusions must follow a logical pattern. This is how Stephen Toulmin, the modern English philosopher, came up with the framework where most of the other frameworks in argumentative analysis stemmed from. As a logician, he argued that logic can be applied to the analysis of arguments.
“Logic is concerned with the soundness of the claims we make – with the solidity of the grounds we produce to support them, the firmness of the backing we provide for them – or to change the metaphor, with the sort of case we present in defense of our claims.” (Toulmin 1964)
The Toulmin model of Argumentative analysis is divided into six parts, with the three others having an optional character. The essential parts are claim, proof (Support), and warrant. The three others, which are of equal importance although not always present in arguments, are rebuttal, backing, and qualifier. Such will be discussed in detail later in the methodology and framework of study.
I chose to study the editorials of Philippine newspapers written in English not only because they were the most accessible argumentative pieces but because of the impact of editorials in print. Editorials represent the “opinion function of the “ publication. There are some newspapers that believe that “editorials should only express the writer’s viewpoint while others believe that editorials must express the pro and the con of a subject for the benefit of the reader.” (WWW O’Fallon July 2003) Editorials serve a variety of functions such as explain a policy, persuade readers to take action or respond, warn or caution readers to beware of possible consequences, criticize an action or performance, praise accomplishments, entertain, and lead readers to espouse a course of action or resolve an issue. (WWW O”Fallon) Realizing this, it is pertinent that editorials be studied based on how they make claims and support them. This will train us to become active readers and be conscious of where the writer is coming from and where she is leading you. It would also serve as a good springboard for future argumentative writing.
It was unfortunate that I was not able to find a journal that is the exact replica of my study, but I did find journals on the representation of truth in academic medical writing and justification of outcomes in qualitative research. Although, we used different frameworks, we share almost similar objectives in trying to identify patterns in the arrival of truth or probability. Each journal will be discussed briefly.
“The Representation of Truth in Academic Medical Writing” by John Skelton that appears in the Applied Lingusitics journal Vol. 18 looks at research papers from three leading British medical journals and identifies three types of truths namely contextual truth, evidential truth, and interpreted truth. His main objective is to point out “that scientific writers have a position with respect to facts as well as to an audience, that the purpose of scientific writing is therefore to express claims and relationships in matters of fact and logic rather than of interaction.” (121) In this sense, his objective and mine are almost similar. Although editorials are written precisely to express a claim and defend it while medical journals are written to present scientific facts, we both want to reveal patterns of logic construction.
Skelton defines contextual truths as the “set of schemata which are the backdrop against which the research to be displayed is interpreted, and the set of generalizations which constrain the enquiry”. (126) This is the context established in the Introduction or the givens of the study. Evidential truths, on the other hand, are the unambiguous parts of the study. These are the truths as results of the study in question. They comprise the Results section. On the other hand, the Interpreted truth, as the name suggests, is found in the Discussion part or Interpretation of results. Interpretations can be interpretative labeling or speculative. “Interpretative labeling involves judgements about value, and speculation involves judgement of facts.” (132)
The paper shows that representation of truth in many scientific disciplines is highly formalized and that the three types of truth and the options to refer to them are restricted by conventions.
The second journal article entitled “May I see Your Warrant, Please? Justifying Outcomes in Qualitative Research” by Julian Edge and Keith Richards that appeared in Applied Linguistics Vol. 19 addresses the need to provide adequate justification or warrant for the specific claims in qualitative research in TESOL/Applied Linguistics. They argue that researchers must be aware of its subject position, the voice in which he or she is allowed to speak or does he allow the readers to make interpretations for themselves, and the kind of discourse or representation embedded in the text. Who is the audience that the author was thinking in writing his research? They say that what is important is in submitting a thesis or dissertation is that researcher is able to answer the question “What warrant do you have for the statements that you make?”
“The researcher is called upon to reflect his or her motivations in the framing of the argument, or to be prepared to formulate an appropriate defense against charges of naivety and/or supporting an iniquitous status quo” (Edge and Richards 352) Position, voice, and representation must be mapped onto authenticity and legitimacy.
The previous journal speaks of voice, position, and representation, which are in a way also reflected in editorials. How an editorial is organized in a certain newspaper characterizes the stand of that publication. Whether it is political or apolitical, pro-administration, anti-administration or neither, what particular audience do the writers have in mind, thinking individuals that are concerned with the status of the Philippine politics or economy, or people who hardly even go through the editorials and instead read just the sports or entertainment sections.
My study aims to establish the argumentative structure that Philippine editorials namely Philippine Daily Inquirer, Philippine Star, People’s Journal, and Tempo follow by identifying the six parts of argument imbedded in them using the Toulmin Model. Hopefully, this will also in a way open the eyes of readers into certain patterns of argument which they may criticize or apply when they write argumentative pieces.
Methodology
A total of twenty editorials were chosen for the study, five from each of the four newspapers. Philippine Daily Inquirer and Philippine Star were chosen among the Philippine broadsheets because they are among the top three sellers according to the recent Asia Research Organization (ARO) survey. The Manila Bulletin was left out since it has the same publisher as that of Tempo. Tempo and People’s Journal are the only morning tabloids written in English. The newspaper issues were picked up during the first week of study, from July 7 to July 11, 2003.
After gathering the data, finding enough related literature, and identifying the framework, reading and re-reading plus taking down of notes/ tabularizing was done to the editorials. A table was devised for each newspaper where the parts of the argument are classified according to the six elements of argument based on the Toulmin model.
Because editorials are written for a variety of purposes, I decided to incorporate Nancy V. Wood’s (1995) classification of claim with Toulmin’s parts of argument. Wood’s classification is the same as that of Rotenberg (1985) except that Rotenberg has only three classifications while Wood has five. I chose Wood over Rotenberg in that her work is more recent. They both classifiy claims into claim of fact, value, and policy. Wood, however, adds two more categories. These are the claims of definition and cause.
Let us first discuss the Toulmin model of argumentative analysis. It has six parts as mentioned earlier. The first three are essential while the last three are optional. All in all, the six parts are the claim, data, warrant, backing, rebuttal, and the qualifier.
Claim organizes the entire argument and everything else related to it. It is the thesis, the proposition, conclusion, or the main point. It seeks to answer the question “What is the author trying to prove?” An argument may have a central claim and a number of sub-claims. In the present analysis, the central claim was classified according to category and the sub-claims were enumerated.
Here, let me insert Wood’s five categories of claims. First is the claim of fact which answers the question “Did it happen?” Is it true?” “Does it exist” Is it a fact?” Claims of fact may either be absolutely true or probably true and are usually controversial issues like America’s military is prepared for any crisis or the sort. It is backed up by facts, statistics, real examples, or quotations from reliable authorities and the possible organizational strategy is chronological or topical. The claim is usually stated near or in the beginning.(Wood 162-163)
Second is the claim of definition. Claim of definition seeks to answer questions like “What is it? What is it like? How does its usual meaning change in a particular context?” Claims of definition are usually backed up by references to reliable authorities, well-known works, analogies and other comparisons, real and hypothetical examples and signs. The possible organizational structures are comparison and contrast, topical organization, and explanation of controversy over the term. (164-165)
Another category is the claim of cause. It answers the questions “What caused it? Where did it come from? Why did it happen? What probably will be the result both on a short-term and long-term basis? The types of proof that go with such claim are cause and effect relationship among data, factual information, statistics, analogies that are both literal and historical, signs of certain causes and effects, induction and deduction. The possible organizational structures are cause and effect or effect and cause and refutation of other possible or actual causes or effects. (165-166)
On the other hand, claim of value answers the questions “Is it good or bad? How bad? How good? Or what worth is it? Is it amoral or immoral? Are my values different from other people’s values or from the author’s values?”. Claims of value are usually backed up by value proofs or appeals to what the audience value and motivational proofs or appeals to what the audience wants. There are also analogies, quotations from authorities, induction, signs that something are either good or bad, and definitions. The possible organizational structures are applied criteria. These are established criteria or belief that is applied to the subject at issue. Other structures can be topical organization, narrative structure or narrations of real life or made-up stories to illustrate values in action. (168-171)
The last classification, one that is most used in the articles herein analyzed, is the claim of policy. Claim of policy seeks to answer the questions “What should we do? How should we act? What should future policy be? How can we solve this problem? What concrete course of action should we pursue to solve this problem?” Statements usually have words like should have, should be, or must have, must be. The types of proof usually associated with it are data and statistics, moral and common sense appeals, motivational appeals, literal analogies, value proofs, comparison of a small-scale effort to a large-scale effort, arguments from authority figures, cause to establish the origin of the problem, definition to clarify it and deduction to reach a common conclusion based on general principle. The possible organizational structure is problem-solution, visualization of how matters will be improved if the proposed solution is followed, anticipation of other possible solutions and what is wrong with them. Arguments usually end with an action step that directs the audience to take a particular course of action. (171-172)
Support
The second part of the Toulmin Model is the support, also known as data and grounds, proof, evidence, reasons, and premises. Support provides the factual information, opinion or reasoning about a claim that make it possible for readers to accept it. Support is always explicitly stated and are comprised of facts, opinions of experts or the author, and examples; real-life or made-up.
Support answers the question “What additional information does the author supply to convince me of this claim?”
Warrant
Warrants, on the other hand, are unstated assumptions, unstated premises, presuppositions, general principles, conventions of specific discourse, widely held values, commonly accepted beliefs, and appeals to human motives. They answer the question “Where is the author coming from?.”
Warrants can either be field independent or field-dependent. Field-independent warrants are those ideas or beliefs that cut-across groups. One does not have to be a specialist to be able to understand the warrant of the statement. Examples of such warrants are “Abortion is a choice or abortion is bad” “Freedom is a privilege not a right” “Terrorism is evil” and so forth. While field-dependent warrants are those principles or conventions unique or comprehensive only to specific groups. Examples of such warrants are….
Rebuttal
Rebuttal establishes what is wrong, invalid or unacceptable about an argument and may also present counterarguments or new arguments of an entirely different perspective. When writing or preparing an argument, the author is aware that his audience may have a different view in mind or they may not agree with his premise. The job of the author is to take not of these other opposing views and state them in his argument and provide proof of the contrary. The author has to justify why his claim is better over the others.
Backing
Backing are additional evidence to “back up” a warrant, whenever the audience is in danger of rejecting it.
Qualifier
Qualifiers are used or added to make a claim or statement sound less absolute and therefore more acceptable to the audience. Phrases like for some instead of everyone, we believe or we think instead of we know and statements like this is the case here, it might be different in other instances. Words like maybe, might, sometimes, most, supposing, among others may also be used.
These six parts do not follow any particular order. A rebuttal may come early on in the argumentative piece or it may appear midway or in the end, the same with the claim. A good argument will naturally have sound proof to back up the argument. Supports must be given in consideration of the claim being made. Qualifiers will spring up every now and then.
The Toulmin Model of Argumentative analysis is useful both in making oral and written arguments because it takes into account the audience. Even in written forms, the model recognizes the seemingly passive but actually active role of the audience in “good” arguments. Good arguments meaning the voice of the audience can be heard in the piece, not just that of the author’s. These are logical arguments where the claim is well-backed up.
Before we go straight to the discussion of results, it is important to keep in mind that this study is exploratory or descriptive rather than conclusive. It is assumed that more articles should have been analyzed for the finding to be conclusive and the author must have had at least some expertise in argumentative analysis to generate conclusions. As it is, even if I have engaged in arguments all my life, the Toulmin concept is fairly new to me. However, I hope I did some justice to the great philosopher.
Results and Discussion
Each newspaper was chunked into separate tables that reveal the different Toulmin parts of an argument in separate dates. The issue and the specific related issue are first identified followed by the claim. For each claim, the classification is also given whether it is a claim of fact, definition, cause, value, or policy. Indicators (B), (M), and (E) are also used to signify whether the claim was found in the beginning, middle, or end. The initial letters of the positions are taken. An argument will always have a central claim and several sub claims connected to it. The sub claims were also identified. Support or proofs were given in reference to the central claim and the sub claim. The corresponding number indicates which claim is being supported by the proof.
Table one shows a tabular analysis of the editorials of PDI.
Referring first to the issues raised, we can see the diversity of the issues tackled by the PDI editorials. In a week long period, it was able to tackle issues ranging from education, peace and order, politics, and even religion. Only the issues for July 7 and July 9 are similar in nature since both dealt with political appointees and ulterior motives in choosing such politicians. The July 7 issue was labeled “Political Appointees” while the July 9 was labeled “Government and election Tactics” based on the claim being made. The July 9 issue was almost explicit in claiming that PGMA is running for presidency and this is the reason why she asked Maceda to seat in the SMB board which Maceda later declined. In the Political Appointees issue, the editorial dwelt more on how PGMA has control over who gets appointed in the government not just the Supreme Court. The author cited many other names that were not just chosen in random or unanimously voted but influenced by the President’s preference. The specific related issue gave the topic of the editorials for each date.
For the claims, we can see in the table that for dates July 7,8 and 11, claims of policy were raised while claim of value for July 9 and claim of fact for July 10. Here, we can see that the editorials are critical of the government system of the country. They are scrutinizing the policies and suggesting counter-policies. Majority of the claims were also found at the end of the editorials. In fact, only the July 10 issue positioned the claim in the beginning, and this was the editorial where the writer has something good to say about what is being done. The claim was commending the CBCP for doing a good job with its secular community, while the rest of the issues were criticizing the government and the way it is running the country.
It should be noted that PDI has most number of words for the editorials covered by the study, approximately, 3,400 while People’s Journal comes in second with 2,577, then Philippine Star with 1,791, and Tempo with 1,531. These numbers include the dates and names of the publications plus the titles. From this, it might appear that PDI provides more backing for the claim it makes. However, as seen in the table, several sub claims are also generated by the PDI editorials. These sub claims, in a way, also serve as support for their central claim. In the July 8 issue, there are eight sub claims. The first five stated the problem and the cause of it which all had corresponding proofs. The last three claims were already stating what should be done, and since this is the author speaking from his point of view, no proof was given to back them up. This organizational structure conforms with the one postulated by Nancy Wood on claims of policy which usually take the form of problem-solution. Having described in detail the current state of education in the country by using facts and statistics, the author arrived at a conclusion in the end. His claim is that the department of education needs more budget to meet its current needs.
For the July 7 issue, the claim is that the President should not let her preference influence who gets appointed in the government. The proofs given to back up this claim was directed towards proving that GMA lets her motives influence who gets appointed in the government. Instances or actual events were given that indicate how the President always gets her way. For this, four cases were given. Here, the warrant is that the President, as the highest power in the country, must not be biased. Also, the SC being the highest court of the country, should be composed of men of moral integrity. Tinga, a political appointee is not supposed to be in the SC at this particular juncture. The author recognizes the voice of the audience by giving a rebuttal saying that “we do not think that a background in elective politics should disqualify someone from entering the SC but that this is not just the right time for Tinga to get in” or something of that sort. The author also cites examples of justices who were politicians before and how they performed or are performing well. But that is not the case here, the author is saying. He makes a sub claim by stating that Tinga will only bring more political rubble in the SC.
As for the July 9 issue, quotes from Haidee Yorac, Chairperson of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, was used to back up the claim that Maceda should not have been appointed by the president in the first place. The assumption here is that Yorac is a reliable authority. Yorac stated the reasons why Maceda is not a good choice, him being a friend of Edurdo Cojuanco who has amassed millions of pesos from the SMB. And then several sub claims are also given showing why Maceda is not a good choice and making claims about what the President should have considered. The author made a claim of fact by deducing what could be the ulterior motive of the president for appointing Maceda when he was once a political foe. The fact is clearly not absolute with the author phrasing it in a question form “Who says Ms. Macapagal is not running for the election?” The claim is qualified because not enough proof were given, just this one instance.
For the July 10 issue, there are seven sub claims supporting the central claim. Most of thess sub claims also act as value proofs meaning they are universal beliefs that should be taken as they are. A lift off from the CBCP statement was used to support the central claim that the Church is doing a good job in facing the sex scandal issues.
The July 11 issue tackled peace negotiation among the rebels and the government. The proofs are towards showing all the other parties including foreign governments are cooperative and pliant to the peace talks except the President who appears to be holding up the process. The president was shown in the proof to be dilly-dallying for some reason.
All the warrants are field-independent. Qualifiers were absent only in the issue on CBCP, the only positive editorial among the five.
For Table 2 which analyzes the editorials of Philippine Star, the issues are all economic or social problems; Military War Fare, Poverty, Drug Trafficking, and two issues on Terrorism. All of the claims are claims of policy and comes in the problem-solution, cause-effect format. The claims are either found in the end or near the end as signified by (M,E).
The proofs given for each claim were quotes from reliable sources, facts, statistics, and examples. For the July 7 issue, the proofs were directed toward showing how other countries who used to lag behind us are now providing us with our needed aircraft and the ineptness of our present military because they have depended much on the American soldiers. The problem was presented and then the claim or the solution. The issue on the criminalization of professional squatting followed the basic problem-solution format. It first referred to the alarm cause by the proliferation of squatting syndicates by Secretary Mike Defensor and several cases of professional squatting in places like UP and claiming how this is affects private property process. The proofs narrate the process the owners have to go through in reclaiming their lands without being slapped by administrative charges.
The third issue which was on anti-drug campaign of the government, sub-claims which also supported the claim that wiping off drug-trafficking takes patience are raised by saying that we need more evidence to imprison the drug barons. The proofs came from the statements of PGMA herself that say PNP must reveal the names of the drug traffickers, but that there is not enough evidence to incriminate the criminals. The central claim was basically derived from her statements. It is common sense knowledge that once the names are revealed without enough evidence to incriminate the criminals, then these criminals will be alerted enough and to go into hiding. The suggestion of the president will only worsen the situation. The claim was then arrived at.
The fourth and fifth issue which were both on terrorism illustrate the ill-effects brought by the armed rebels which is why they should be captured or pacified. The July 9 issue showed the kinds of evil done by the terrorists in the past and why they shouldn’t be easily forgiven. The July 10 issue, on the other hand, show why the government must capture the armed rebels now that appeared in other places in Mindanao instead of waiting for American help to come. The evils or damage caused by terrorists were shown enough to incite the military into action.
The warrants are all field-independent.
3,401 – PDI
1,791 – pstar
1,531 – Tempo
2,577 - Pjournal
Nearly everyday of our lives, we engage in arguments. We argue with our friends, colleagues, parents, bosses (if we can), professors, and even with ourselves. We sometimes even catch ourselves arguing against what we read in the newspapers, hear in the radio, or watch in television. And sometimes, when we engage in arguments, we do not realize that our sparring mate has already stirred us into another direction and we find ourselves agreeing to what she is saying. Now, how was she able to do that?
Arguments have existed since time immemorial. We can trace this even as far back as Aristotle and Plato. It is quite certain that arguments existed way before them. But Plato and Aristotle, because of their notable contributions in philosophy nd theology, are often cited as the professional arguers of ancient times. Their style, however, differ from each other. Whereas Plato was more concerned with the idea of establishing the truth as seen in his dialogues, Aristotle was more concerned with probabilities, as seen in his “Rhetoric”.
“The ancient audiences, like modern audiences, would disagree with many views that were stated as absolutely true.” (Wood 124) And so, to communicate effectively, the persuaders had to “modify and qualify their views in order to make them acceptable to the audiences.” (Wood 124) It was man’s natural sharp instinct that gave birth to organized arguments.
“Views that are probably true comprise the realm of argument.” (Wood 124) However, even if we are only talking about probabilities, the connections and the qualified conclusions must follow a logical pattern. This is how Stephen Toulmin, the modern English philosopher, came up with the framework where most of the other frameworks in argumentative analysis stemmed from. As a logician, he argued that logic can be applied to the analysis of arguments.
“Logic is concerned with the soundness of the claims we make – with the solidity of the grounds we produce to support them, the firmness of the backing we provide for them – or to change the metaphor, with the sort of case we present in defense of our claims.” (Toulmin 1964)
The Toulmin model of Argumentative analysis is divided into six parts, with the three others having an optional character. The essential parts are claim, proof (Support), and warrant. The three others, which are of equal importance although not always present in arguments, are rebuttal, backing, and qualifier. Such will be discussed in detail later in the methodology and framework of study.
I chose to study the editorials of Philippine newspapers written in English not only because they were the most accessible argumentative pieces but because of the impact of editorials in print. Editorials represent the “opinion function of the “ publication. There are some newspapers that believe that “editorials should only express the writer’s viewpoint while others believe that editorials must express the pro and the con of a subject for the benefit of the reader.” (WWW O’Fallon July 2003) Editorials serve a variety of functions such as explain a policy, persuade readers to take action or respond, warn or caution readers to beware of possible consequences, criticize an action or performance, praise accomplishments, entertain, and lead readers to espouse a course of action or resolve an issue. (WWW O”Fallon) Realizing this, it is pertinent that editorials be studied based on how they make claims and support them. This will train us to become active readers and be conscious of where the writer is coming from and where she is leading you. It would also serve as a good springboard for future argumentative writing.
It was unfortunate that I was not able to find a journal that is the exact replica of my study, but I did find journals on the representation of truth in academic medical writing and justification of outcomes in qualitative research. Although, we used different frameworks, we share almost similar objectives in trying to identify patterns in the arrival of truth or probability. Each journal will be discussed briefly.
“The Representation of Truth in Academic Medical Writing” by John Skelton that appears in the Applied Lingusitics journal Vol. 18 looks at research papers from three leading British medical journals and identifies three types of truths namely contextual truth, evidential truth, and interpreted truth. His main objective is to point out “that scientific writers have a position with respect to facts as well as to an audience, that the purpose of scientific writing is therefore to express claims and relationships in matters of fact and logic rather than of interaction.” (121) In this sense, his objective and mine are almost similar. Although editorials are written precisely to express a claim and defend it while medical journals are written to present scientific facts, we both want to reveal patterns of logic construction.
Skelton defines contextual truths as the “set of schemata which are the backdrop against which the research to be displayed is interpreted, and the set of generalizations which constrain the enquiry”. (126) This is the context established in the Introduction or the givens of the study. Evidential truths, on the other hand, are the unambiguous parts of the study. These are the truths as results of the study in question. They comprise the Results section. On the other hand, the Interpreted truth, as the name suggests, is found in the Discussion part or Interpretation of results. Interpretations can be interpretative labeling or speculative. “Interpretative labeling involves judgements about value, and speculation involves judgement of facts.” (132)
The paper shows that representation of truth in many scientific disciplines is highly formalized and that the three types of truth and the options to refer to them are restricted by conventions.
The second journal article entitled “May I see Your Warrant, Please? Justifying Outcomes in Qualitative Research” by Julian Edge and Keith Richards that appeared in Applied Linguistics Vol. 19 addresses the need to provide adequate justification or warrant for the specific claims in qualitative research in TESOL/Applied Linguistics. They argue that researchers must be aware of its subject position, the voice in which he or she is allowed to speak or does he allow the readers to make interpretations for themselves, and the kind of discourse or representation embedded in the text. Who is the audience that the author was thinking in writing his research? They say that what is important is in submitting a thesis or dissertation is that researcher is able to answer the question “What warrant do you have for the statements that you make?”
“The researcher is called upon to reflect his or her motivations in the framing of the argument, or to be prepared to formulate an appropriate defense against charges of naivety and/or supporting an iniquitous status quo” (Edge and Richards 352) Position, voice, and representation must be mapped onto authenticity and legitimacy.
The previous journal speaks of voice, position, and representation, which are in a way also reflected in editorials. How an editorial is organized in a certain newspaper characterizes the stand of that publication. Whether it is political or apolitical, pro-administration, anti-administration or neither, what particular audience do the writers have in mind, thinking individuals that are concerned with the status of the Philippine politics or economy, or people who hardly even go through the editorials and instead read just the sports or entertainment sections.
My study aims to establish the argumentative structure that Philippine editorials namely Philippine Daily Inquirer, Philippine Star, People’s Journal, and Tempo follow by identifying the six parts of argument imbedded in them using the Toulmin Model. Hopefully, this will also in a way open the eyes of readers into certain patterns of argument which they may criticize or apply when they write argumentative pieces.
Methodology
A total of twenty editorials were chosen for the study, five from each of the four newspapers. Philippine Daily Inquirer and Philippine Star were chosen among the Philippine broadsheets because they are among the top three sellers according to the recent Asia Research Organization (ARO) survey. The Manila Bulletin was left out since it has the same publisher as that of Tempo. Tempo and People’s Journal are the only morning tabloids written in English. The newspaper issues were picked up during the first week of study, from July 7 to July 11, 2003.
After gathering the data, finding enough related literature, and identifying the framework, reading and re-reading plus taking down of notes/ tabularizing was done to the editorials. A table was devised for each newspaper where the parts of the argument are classified according to the six elements of argument based on the Toulmin model.
Because editorials are written for a variety of purposes, I decided to incorporate Nancy V. Wood’s (1995) classification of claim with Toulmin’s parts of argument. Wood’s classification is the same as that of Rotenberg (1985) except that Rotenberg has only three classifications while Wood has five. I chose Wood over Rotenberg in that her work is more recent. They both classifiy claims into claim of fact, value, and policy. Wood, however, adds two more categories. These are the claims of definition and cause.
Let us first discuss the Toulmin model of argumentative analysis. It has six parts as mentioned earlier. The first three are essential while the last three are optional. All in all, the six parts are the claim, data, warrant, backing, rebuttal, and the qualifier.
Claim organizes the entire argument and everything else related to it. It is the thesis, the proposition, conclusion, or the main point. It seeks to answer the question “What is the author trying to prove?” An argument may have a central claim and a number of sub-claims. In the present analysis, the central claim was classified according to category and the sub-claims were enumerated.
Here, let me insert Wood’s five categories of claims. First is the claim of fact which answers the question “Did it happen?” Is it true?” “Does it exist” Is it a fact?” Claims of fact may either be absolutely true or probably true and are usually controversial issues like America’s military is prepared for any crisis or the sort. It is backed up by facts, statistics, real examples, or quotations from reliable authorities and the possible organizational strategy is chronological or topical. The claim is usually stated near or in the beginning.(Wood 162-163)
Second is the claim of definition. Claim of definition seeks to answer questions like “What is it? What is it like? How does its usual meaning change in a particular context?” Claims of definition are usually backed up by references to reliable authorities, well-known works, analogies and other comparisons, real and hypothetical examples and signs. The possible organizational structures are comparison and contrast, topical organization, and explanation of controversy over the term. (164-165)
Another category is the claim of cause. It answers the questions “What caused it? Where did it come from? Why did it happen? What probably will be the result both on a short-term and long-term basis? The types of proof that go with such claim are cause and effect relationship among data, factual information, statistics, analogies that are both literal and historical, signs of certain causes and effects, induction and deduction. The possible organizational structures are cause and effect or effect and cause and refutation of other possible or actual causes or effects. (165-166)
On the other hand, claim of value answers the questions “Is it good or bad? How bad? How good? Or what worth is it? Is it amoral or immoral? Are my values different from other people’s values or from the author’s values?”. Claims of value are usually backed up by value proofs or appeals to what the audience value and motivational proofs or appeals to what the audience wants. There are also analogies, quotations from authorities, induction, signs that something are either good or bad, and definitions. The possible organizational structures are applied criteria. These are established criteria or belief that is applied to the subject at issue. Other structures can be topical organization, narrative structure or narrations of real life or made-up stories to illustrate values in action. (168-171)
The last classification, one that is most used in the articles herein analyzed, is the claim of policy. Claim of policy seeks to answer the questions “What should we do? How should we act? What should future policy be? How can we solve this problem? What concrete course of action should we pursue to solve this problem?” Statements usually have words like should have, should be, or must have, must be. The types of proof usually associated with it are data and statistics, moral and common sense appeals, motivational appeals, literal analogies, value proofs, comparison of a small-scale effort to a large-scale effort, arguments from authority figures, cause to establish the origin of the problem, definition to clarify it and deduction to reach a common conclusion based on general principle. The possible organizational structure is problem-solution, visualization of how matters will be improved if the proposed solution is followed, anticipation of other possible solutions and what is wrong with them. Arguments usually end with an action step that directs the audience to take a particular course of action. (171-172)
Support
The second part of the Toulmin Model is the support, also known as data and grounds, proof, evidence, reasons, and premises. Support provides the factual information, opinion or reasoning about a claim that make it possible for readers to accept it. Support is always explicitly stated and are comprised of facts, opinions of experts or the author, and examples; real-life or made-up.
Support answers the question “What additional information does the author supply to convince me of this claim?”
Warrant
Warrants, on the other hand, are unstated assumptions, unstated premises, presuppositions, general principles, conventions of specific discourse, widely held values, commonly accepted beliefs, and appeals to human motives. They answer the question “Where is the author coming from?.”
Warrants can either be field independent or field-dependent. Field-independent warrants are those ideas or beliefs that cut-across groups. One does not have to be a specialist to be able to understand the warrant of the statement. Examples of such warrants are “Abortion is a choice or abortion is bad” “Freedom is a privilege not a right” “Terrorism is evil” and so forth. While field-dependent warrants are those principles or conventions unique or comprehensive only to specific groups. Examples of such warrants are….
Rebuttal
Rebuttal establishes what is wrong, invalid or unacceptable about an argument and may also present counterarguments or new arguments of an entirely different perspective. When writing or preparing an argument, the author is aware that his audience may have a different view in mind or they may not agree with his premise. The job of the author is to take not of these other opposing views and state them in his argument and provide proof of the contrary. The author has to justify why his claim is better over the others.
Backing
Backing are additional evidence to “back up” a warrant, whenever the audience is in danger of rejecting it.
Qualifier
Qualifiers are used or added to make a claim or statement sound less absolute and therefore more acceptable to the audience. Phrases like for some instead of everyone, we believe or we think instead of we know and statements like this is the case here, it might be different in other instances. Words like maybe, might, sometimes, most, supposing, among others may also be used.
These six parts do not follow any particular order. A rebuttal may come early on in the argumentative piece or it may appear midway or in the end, the same with the claim. A good argument will naturally have sound proof to back up the argument. Supports must be given in consideration of the claim being made. Qualifiers will spring up every now and then.
The Toulmin Model of Argumentative analysis is useful both in making oral and written arguments because it takes into account the audience. Even in written forms, the model recognizes the seemingly passive but actually active role of the audience in “good” arguments. Good arguments meaning the voice of the audience can be heard in the piece, not just that of the author’s. These are logical arguments where the claim is well-backed up.
Before we go straight to the discussion of results, it is important to keep in mind that this study is exploratory or descriptive rather than conclusive. It is assumed that more articles should have been analyzed for the finding to be conclusive and the author must have had at least some expertise in argumentative analysis to generate conclusions. As it is, even if I have engaged in arguments all my life, the Toulmin concept is fairly new to me. However, I hope I did some justice to the great philosopher.
Results and Discussion
Each newspaper was chunked into separate tables that reveal the different Toulmin parts of an argument in separate dates. The issue and the specific related issue are first identified followed by the claim. For each claim, the classification is also given whether it is a claim of fact, definition, cause, value, or policy. Indicators (B), (M), and (E) are also used to signify whether the claim was found in the beginning, middle, or end. The initial letters of the positions are taken. An argument will always have a central claim and several sub claims connected to it. The sub claims were also identified. Support or proofs were given in reference to the central claim and the sub claim. The corresponding number indicates which claim is being supported by the proof.
Table one shows a tabular analysis of the editorials of PDI.
Referring first to the issues raised, we can see the diversity of the issues tackled by the PDI editorials. In a week long period, it was able to tackle issues ranging from education, peace and order, politics, and even religion. Only the issues for July 7 and July 9 are similar in nature since both dealt with political appointees and ulterior motives in choosing such politicians. The July 7 issue was labeled “Political Appointees” while the July 9 was labeled “Government and election Tactics” based on the claim being made. The July 9 issue was almost explicit in claiming that PGMA is running for presidency and this is the reason why she asked Maceda to seat in the SMB board which Maceda later declined. In the Political Appointees issue, the editorial dwelt more on how PGMA has control over who gets appointed in the government not just the Supreme Court. The author cited many other names that were not just chosen in random or unanimously voted but influenced by the President’s preference. The specific related issue gave the topic of the editorials for each date.
For the claims, we can see in the table that for dates July 7,8 and 11, claims of policy were raised while claim of value for July 9 and claim of fact for July 10. Here, we can see that the editorials are critical of the government system of the country. They are scrutinizing the policies and suggesting counter-policies. Majority of the claims were also found at the end of the editorials. In fact, only the July 10 issue positioned the claim in the beginning, and this was the editorial where the writer has something good to say about what is being done. The claim was commending the CBCP for doing a good job with its secular community, while the rest of the issues were criticizing the government and the way it is running the country.
It should be noted that PDI has most number of words for the editorials covered by the study, approximately, 3,400 while People’s Journal comes in second with 2,577, then Philippine Star with 1,791, and Tempo with 1,531. These numbers include the dates and names of the publications plus the titles. From this, it might appear that PDI provides more backing for the claim it makes. However, as seen in the table, several sub claims are also generated by the PDI editorials. These sub claims, in a way, also serve as support for their central claim. In the July 8 issue, there are eight sub claims. The first five stated the problem and the cause of it which all had corresponding proofs. The last three claims were already stating what should be done, and since this is the author speaking from his point of view, no proof was given to back them up. This organizational structure conforms with the one postulated by Nancy Wood on claims of policy which usually take the form of problem-solution. Having described in detail the current state of education in the country by using facts and statistics, the author arrived at a conclusion in the end. His claim is that the department of education needs more budget to meet its current needs.
For the July 7 issue, the claim is that the President should not let her preference influence who gets appointed in the government. The proofs given to back up this claim was directed towards proving that GMA lets her motives influence who gets appointed in the government. Instances or actual events were given that indicate how the President always gets her way. For this, four cases were given. Here, the warrant is that the President, as the highest power in the country, must not be biased. Also, the SC being the highest court of the country, should be composed of men of moral integrity. Tinga, a political appointee is not supposed to be in the SC at this particular juncture. The author recognizes the voice of the audience by giving a rebuttal saying that “we do not think that a background in elective politics should disqualify someone from entering the SC but that this is not just the right time for Tinga to get in” or something of that sort. The author also cites examples of justices who were politicians before and how they performed or are performing well. But that is not the case here, the author is saying. He makes a sub claim by stating that Tinga will only bring more political rubble in the SC.
As for the July 9 issue, quotes from Haidee Yorac, Chairperson of the Presidential Commission on Good Government, was used to back up the claim that Maceda should not have been appointed by the president in the first place. The assumption here is that Yorac is a reliable authority. Yorac stated the reasons why Maceda is not a good choice, him being a friend of Edurdo Cojuanco who has amassed millions of pesos from the SMB. And then several sub claims are also given showing why Maceda is not a good choice and making claims about what the President should have considered. The author made a claim of fact by deducing what could be the ulterior motive of the president for appointing Maceda when he was once a political foe. The fact is clearly not absolute with the author phrasing it in a question form “Who says Ms. Macapagal is not running for the election?” The claim is qualified because not enough proof were given, just this one instance.
For the July 10 issue, there are seven sub claims supporting the central claim. Most of thess sub claims also act as value proofs meaning they are universal beliefs that should be taken as they are. A lift off from the CBCP statement was used to support the central claim that the Church is doing a good job in facing the sex scandal issues.
The July 11 issue tackled peace negotiation among the rebels and the government. The proofs are towards showing all the other parties including foreign governments are cooperative and pliant to the peace talks except the President who appears to be holding up the process. The president was shown in the proof to be dilly-dallying for some reason.
All the warrants are field-independent. Qualifiers were absent only in the issue on CBCP, the only positive editorial among the five.
For Table 2 which analyzes the editorials of Philippine Star, the issues are all economic or social problems; Military War Fare, Poverty, Drug Trafficking, and two issues on Terrorism. All of the claims are claims of policy and comes in the problem-solution, cause-effect format. The claims are either found in the end or near the end as signified by (M,E).
The proofs given for each claim were quotes from reliable sources, facts, statistics, and examples. For the July 7 issue, the proofs were directed toward showing how other countries who used to lag behind us are now providing us with our needed aircraft and the ineptness of our present military because they have depended much on the American soldiers. The problem was presented and then the claim or the solution. The issue on the criminalization of professional squatting followed the basic problem-solution format. It first referred to the alarm cause by the proliferation of squatting syndicates by Secretary Mike Defensor and several cases of professional squatting in places like UP and claiming how this is affects private property process. The proofs narrate the process the owners have to go through in reclaiming their lands without being slapped by administrative charges.
The third issue which was on anti-drug campaign of the government, sub-claims which also supported the claim that wiping off drug-trafficking takes patience are raised by saying that we need more evidence to imprison the drug barons. The proofs came from the statements of PGMA herself that say PNP must reveal the names of the drug traffickers, but that there is not enough evidence to incriminate the criminals. The central claim was basically derived from her statements. It is common sense knowledge that once the names are revealed without enough evidence to incriminate the criminals, then these criminals will be alerted enough and to go into hiding. The suggestion of the president will only worsen the situation. The claim was then arrived at.
The fourth and fifth issue which were both on terrorism illustrate the ill-effects brought by the armed rebels which is why they should be captured or pacified. The July 9 issue showed the kinds of evil done by the terrorists in the past and why they shouldn’t be easily forgiven. The July 10 issue, on the other hand, show why the government must capture the armed rebels now that appeared in other places in Mindanao instead of waiting for American help to come. The evils or damage caused by terrorists were shown enough to incite the military into action.
The warrants are all field-independent.
3,401 – PDI
1,791 – pstar
1,531 – Tempo
2,577 - Pjournal
Recuerdos of the past, present, and future
A whiff of dried saliva around the rim of a bottle of milk, a Menudo tune, grade schoolers counting off by ten with every jump their playmates make “ten, twenty, thirty…”, that threatening look from my mom when I said too much, too loud… things that bring a flood of memories on my childhood. Relieving memories has been a favorite past time of mine. They make an ordinary day seem eventful. I can cry when I feel like it. I can laugh when I like to.
As it always is, there are some experiences we want to forget but nevertheless continue to hunt us. There are also some instances we want to enact in our minds over and over again, that one wonderful moment, that moment of realization that we keep on going back to, to have a good laugh or a good cry. We have memories of our friends, of our family members, of people we encountered at some point in our lives, and if we tie them all up together, we, in a way, make a story of our life based on how we perceived other people, based on what we remember or choose to.
But memories are not just all that we remember from our past. It also constitutes events that happened even before we had memories of them. Memories that were shared to us by our professors, books, media. These are points of intersections. We have our own recollections based on actual happenings.
No experience is not worth talking about. No experience is not worth sharing with. We all have our stories to tell, no matter how mundane and trivial it may seem, or obscure and alien to other people. The basic principle underlying minority literature. Listen. Remember. Share.
My paper aims to draw on the memories relieved by Celaya or Lala and the other characters in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo. The novel shows how different persons can have different memories of each other. Since the story was like a narrative, not linear though, as it is with reality interspersed by recollections, of Lala’s memories of her childhood, of growing up, of the society she grew up in, of the family and people she had been associated with, it was like a novel of remembering. But she wasn’t the only one who was recalling. Even her father, her mother, and most especially her grandmother have memories of their own. Memories within a memory. The approach might appear to be a bit simplistic, but memories are more complex than they may seem. They form a bridge between reality and imagination. The Chicana has a rich heritage, one replete with struggles, myths, displacements, and the formation of new consciousness. It is because of this rich past, one that is characterized by defeats and triumphs, that Chicana, as reflected by their literature, like to dwell in the past, to learn from them and to move forward.
Chicanas are complex. They are made up of a long history of colonization, border crossings, and identity struggles. They constantly go back to images of the eagle and the serpent, the story of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, and La Virgen Guadalupe to make sense of their experiences, constantly going back to their indigenous roots for support or strength.
CHICANA (que?)
Let me first define terms. Chicana is that self-label used by the Mexican-Americans when they resisted the term imposed on them by the dominant culture. Mexican-American. Why should they be called as such when they are Americans albeit also Mexicans, having born in the United States, but are still annexed, hyphenated, alienated, treated as inferiors to Anglos and even “Anti-American”? (Macias 1969). Prior to the late 1960’s, Mexicans preferred to dissociate themselves from their ancestry, calling themselves rather “Greeks, Italians, Spanish, etc…” (Macias 1969) However, beginning 1966, during the Civil Rights Movement which continued through the late 1970’s, the Mexican-Americans, mostly the youths, chose to adopt the term Chicana. Some believe that the term was actually a revival of the label used by the people from Chihuahua, a city and state of northern Mexico during the 1930’s. It is postulated that the Chi was taken from the name of the place and the Cano from Mexicano. (Macias 1969) The term implies one is neither a full Mexican or a full American, but a mixture, a mestizo.
“Salient aspects of Chicano include a self-awareness or self-respect and a personal commitment to Chicano communities.” (Macias 1969)
Sandra Cisneros is a Chicana although sometimes she likes to call herself “Latina, Mexican-American or American-Mexican depending on whether my audience understands the term or not.” (Cisneros 2000) But Cisneros is a true-blooded Chicana. One who recognizes her responsibility to her community and to every cultural minority who longs to be heard. “Women like my mama and Emily Dickinson’s housekeeper who must be recorded so that their stories can finally be heard,” said Cisneros during her lecture on the Second Annual Hispanic Achievement Festival in La Cumbre Santa Barbara Junior High School on October 22, 1986.
Sandra y Celaya
I would like to believe that Cisneros drew a lot from her personal experiences in writing Caramelo. This is because Celaya’s story has a lot of similarities with Cisneros’ own story. The recollections of Celaya were anchored in her lonely childhood, being the youngest and only girl in a family of six sons. All she had on her side was her father who considered her “Mi cielo”. In real life, Cisneros grew up being the only daughter in a family of six sons, although not the youngest but third oldest. She had for parents a Mexican Father and a Mexican-American mother. The same as that of in the story. In fact, even in her other works like the short story Tepeyac which is included in the Women Hollering Creek and other Short Stories, the narrator described her childhood in their house in La Fortuna 12 which is actually the real house address where Cisneros grew up in. Truth is, all of Cisneros’ works including the House on Mango Street, Loose Woman: Poems, and My Wicked Wicked Ways are reflections or narrations of the experiences of Chicanas or Mexican-Americans. Cisneros draws from her personal experiences and from the experiences shared by people around her, feelings of powerlessness, of being treated as inferiors, of the collective and unique experiences of Chicanas. This she was able to do after finding her voice. In an article entitled “Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession” (1995), Cisneros narrated how she found her voice during a seminar on “Memory and Imagination” when they were having a heated discussion on Gustav Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. Prior to this seminar, she was trying to emulate other “big, male writers like James Wright and Richard Hugo” (Cisneros 1995, 48). They were talking about the metaphor of a house. And then it hit her. She cannot write in the same way as that of those big, male authors because she had a different experience of a “house”, of a neighborhood. She always longed to have a peaceful home where she would have a space all to herself and not sleep in lazy boys (the same with Celaya) but this dream was elusive to her. After coming into terms with her mixed identity, she fled home although she never escaped from it. And it was in fact when she left home that she came to understand what home is, it is in her blood and as having come from two different races, she learned to speak in different voices and be in two places at the same time or neither, a result of living in the borderlands, the Mexico City, the U.S. Southwest.
“Memory and Imagination”
As my paper will look into the construction of memory in Caramelo, let me first discuss the article of Robert A. Lee in Memory & Culture Politics entitled “Chicanismo as Memory: The Fictions of Rudolfo Anaya, Nash Candelaria, Sandra Cisneros, and Ron Arias.”
According to Lee, “chicanismo invites a play of memory coevally personal and collective.” “For it is the memory that serves as solvent for each generation’s telling of la raza (which more aptly means ethnicity rather than race) and nowhere more so than in the ongoing body of fiction of what rightly has become known as chicanismo’s literary renaissance.” (Lee in Singh 1996) He further said that in the works of Anaya, Candelaria, Cisneros, and Arias, there is a constant going back to the past however different their styles are and reinventing this past by looking at it from “now”. He noted that “the Chicano tradition can virtually be said to have thrived on the shaping energies of remembrance, a present told and reinvented in the mirrors of the past.” Chicano writers employ memory construction to make sense of their present situation, to understand their people as having stories distinct from those of the dominant class.
In glorifying the past, we tend to intersperse it with an imagined past or dreams mixed with experience. This is what makes the work provoking, fiction. In Rodolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima, he enraveled his Chicano childhood in actual events, but also mixing it with a “drama of fantasy and imagining.” As with Nash Canderia’s trilogy Memories of the Alhambra (1977), Not by The Sword (1985), and Inheritance of Strangers (1985), Lee points out how Candelaria “invoked a distinct phase in the evolution of Chicano history while at the same time building into the larger, more encompassing memory.” Candelaria made a “meditation on history” in narrating the journey of Jose and his family from Albuquerque to California in 1920s and from California to Mexico and then to Spain, the experience during the Mexican-American war in 1846-1848, and the land wars that characterized the colonization of Mexico by the U.S.
In Lee’s discussion of Ron Arias’ The Road to Tamazunchale (1975), he showed another aspect of Chicana fiction which is magic realism. Memories as catalysts of metamorphosis, using wizardy or magic to shape and reshape memories. Chicana has a rich reservoir of mythic stories/ legends which are almost always alluded in remembering the past in the works of its writers.
In Cisneros’ Caramelo, there is also this allusion to the Chicana mythic past or even to magic realism with Cisneros treating her past as ghost that continues to hunt her, the ghost of her grandmother Soledad.
Another important article is Feathering the Serpent: Chicano Mythic “Memory” by Rafael Perez Torres. It begun by first invoking the memory of the Delano strike in 1965 where a group organized by Cesar Chavez gathered to demand “basic, God-given rights as human beings” which were deprived from them like “fair wages, legal protection, and decent working conditions.” This event triggered a series of movements known as el Movimiento, Mexican workers trying to reclaim their land, their heritage, their roots, the Aztlan, the land “that was home prior to invasion.” And “like a persistent dream that return vaguely during daytime, the notion of an ancestral memory has haunted contemporary Chicano cultural production.” Torres further says that the “connection to a Mexican political past resonates with a spirituality invoked by the beneficent presence of the Virgin. The Virgin of Guadalupe also evokes a more distant spirituality, since the image of the Virgin represents a postconquest confluence of pre-Cortesian and European religious imagery. Ancestral memory thus merges with mythic memory, and a central trope in the articulation of Chicana culture emerges.”
In Caramelo, you would find the Virgin of Guadalupe inside the bedroom of the Grandmother and in the house of Lala even when they moved out and transferred to Texas. A family not religious at the very least, showing no statue of Sto. Nino, a family who do not hear mass on Sundays, or cross themselves “twice and kiss” their thumbs when passing a Church, a family where the Children go to a Catholic school to get good education and not turn religious, but still has a frame of the Virgin of Guadalupe inside the master’s bedroom, at the head of the bed where the Father and the Mother sleep. The picture courtesy of the Awful Grandmother who insisted on having it hand delivered to them in memory of her. The Virgin of Guadalupe as a symbol of the Mother’s undying love for her son.
Another mythic story that was mentioned in the novel was the legend of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, the twin volcanoes of Mexico where the lovers were engaged in a secret love affair because their families were enemies. Just like Romeo and Juliet. However unlike Shakespeare’s story where Romeo and Juliet killed themselves, Popo killed Izta for some reason but upon seeing his beautiful partner die, he knelt down and cried his heart out, overcome by love and beauty. Both turned into volcanoes. “But if he loved her so much, why did he kill her?” asked Lala to her Grandfather who was narrating the story during Inocencio’s birthday celebration. “I don’t know… Suppose that’s how Mexicans love, I suppose,” answered the Grandfather. Sometimes we couldn’t help but kill the ones we love, either by loving them too much or too little, I suppose.
This story of Izta and Popo is very symbolic in the story of Cisneros who talked about different kinds of love, the love of a mother for her son, the love for one’s roots, the love for self-identity, the love for a father and a mother, familial love and romantic love. Each one varying in degrees.
“Memory in other words, in all its overlapping and coalescing kinds, also yields mixed emotional fare for the narrator-memoirist, pain and warmth, breakage as well as love.” (Lee in Singh 1996)
Recuerdos in Sweet Caramelo
“We’re all little in the photograph above Father’s bed. We were little in Acapulco. We will always be little. For him we are just as we were then.” This is the opening statement of the novel, an image, a recuerdo.
A photograph which served as a recuerdo on that day where they all went to the ocean to get out from the house, all of them including the Grandmother and Candelaria, the daughter of the housemaid. A still picture which seemed to say stop, let’s stop moving and getting nowhere. The need to put a still in the movements, so many, which characterized the novel from the very start. That trip to Mexico to the house of the Awful Grandmother at the Destiny Steet, number 12 (the address of Cisneros’ grandmother is actually La Fortuna, numero 12), the trip to a new house in Texas and back to Chicago, the constant displacements and anxieties over getting acquainted to new people and place. But more than this, the statement showed the connection of Lala and the father and the impression of the father for his sons and daughter.
Here, let me point out how Sandra said in the article “Only Daughter” published in the book Women’s Voices from the Borderlands showed her affection for her daughter and how she was constantly trying to get his attention and approval. She admitted that “in a sense, everything I have written has been for him, to win his approval” even when she knows her Father can’t read English words. She even shared her experience when at one time, one of her stories were translated in Spanish and her Father for some reason took notice of her and read the story she was offering him and commented “where can we get more copies of this for our relatives”, and her inexplicable joy upon hearing those words. Finally, her Father realized what she can do, what she is worth.
On that same day, the day that still photograph was taken, was a day of revelation. Zoila, Lala’s mother, found out from her mother-in-law, no less than the Awful Grandmother, the truth behind Candelaria’s roots. On that same day, without having been told, Lala also knew. She knew that Cande is her half-sister. But this truth was never confirmed by the Father. Not even in the end, when he already seemed repentant, almost invalid after suffering from a stroke, during the celebration of their almost, but not quite thirtieth anniversary. Lala was waiting expectantly for him to ask for forgiveness, to admit the truth, but he never did. Instead, he just told her the story of her grandmother, how her grandfather almost did not take responsibility for Inocencio whom she was carrying at that time until the great-grandfather Eleuterio Reyes said to him that “we are not dogs!” Eleuterio Reyes who could barely speak at that time and yet managed to utter those words. And that’s what Inocencio told Lala, not to bring shame to the family. But Lala longed to ask but “Why weren’t you a gentleman? I thought we weren’t dogs. I thought we were kings and meant to act like kings, Father. And why didn’t the Little Grandfather remind you of your responsibility if he was feo, fuerte, y formal?” “All my life, you’ve said I was ‘the only girl’ Father.. Why would you tell a lie?” And then Lala tries to understand her Father, his silence to the truth. “ Maybe Father has his own questions. Maybe he wants to hear, or doesn’t want to hear about me and Ernesto (the boyfriend Lala ran away with but things didn’t work out), but he doesn’t ask. We’re so Mexican. So much left unsaid.”
In real life, Sandra Cisneros had a sister, but she died when they were so young and she hardly remembers her. Candelaria may be the personification of that lost sister, that friend she was supposed to have had if she had not passed away. They may have been able to share experiences, secrets, Cisneros’s childhood may not have been as lonely as it had been. But Sandra also said that had it not been for that loneliness, she may have not turned to books as her consolation. In a way, she may not be as good a writer as she is now. That’s how she makes sense of her lonely childhood. In the same manner, Lala made sense of the reason why her Father deprived her of a sister.
“We were all little in that photograph… We will always be little for him. We are just as we were before.”
El Rebozo is a symbol of the Chicana culture’s “protection” of women. (Anzaldua 1999). The Awful Grandmother or Soledad’s parents were reboceros. They manufacture the best silk shawls. They were the famed reboceros from Santa Maria del Rio. Wrapped in the finest rebozo, Soledad was born. She was wrapped in this delicate weaving until her mother Guillermina died so soon, long before Soledad was able to marvel in her mother’s care. She left the Caramelo rebozo, the one she had been working on before she died, unfinished. And that became Soledad’s sole possession from then on, after her father remarried and she was sent to a cousin in Mexico City. She, who used to be her Father’s chuchuluco suddenly became unwanted enough to be discarded.
At one point in the novel, Lala’s Father Inocencio offered to buy her a rebozo which the Awful Grandmother contested saying that she is the one deserving of something as expensive as such. In the end, the gift did not materialize, Lala had to steal away that Caramelo rebozo from the walnut-armoire of her grandmother after she passed away. And on that day of the celebration of her parents nearly thirtieth anniversary, she chew on that rebozo which she has around herself as she ponders over the silence of her Father.
“The rebozo was born in Mexico, but like all mestizos, it came from everywhere.” (Caramelo) Rebozo is a symbol of the culture’s protection of women (Anzaldua 1999), of Lala’s Father protecting her from the truth not knowing she knows the truth, that she can protect herself. He doesn’t have to do it for her. That Caramelo rebozo not being a gift to her, but a stolen prize, that same Caramelo rebozo not being a gift of anybody to Soledad, but a stolen prize. They both stole it from the dead, the past which should have been left there but was instead nurtured, to protect them from the future. The ghost of Soledad chose to materialize to Lala because in a way they have similarities. A lonely childhood, not having a mother to provide comfort, Lala’s mother being alive yet so distant, both clinging to Inocencio, as a son and as a father, but are in a way letting go of that desperate hold. Soledad finally letting go of his one son whom she felt pure love and adoration. Lala standing on her own, attempting to break away, but going back to their home not because he dictated it, but because she misses them.
But Lala understands why her Father wants to protect her from the harsh realities. She understands because she knows he has also felt alienation. She has after all the same face as his, that face that lived in the borderlands.
The ending of the novel signifies Lala’s or Celaya’s arrival at understanding, at the reason for his Father’s silence, at the reason for the silence of most Mexicans, she finally understands that she is not alone, the she is not just the odd one out, she has arrived into a certain degree of consciousness where she has to make a sound and break away from the hands that gag her mouth, the mestiza consciousness.
One cannot achieve this mestiza consciousness without going back to the roots, without historicizing, and that’s what Sandra Cisneros’ did. She told the story of her roots, her story which may find some points of intersection with the stories of other Chicanas. She did this by weaving facts with fiction, with events and dreams, before she arrived in a level of consciousness and found herself.
The novel spanned four generations. A glimpse on the story of Soledad’s parents Guillermina and Ambrocio Reyes, an anecdote on the story of Narcisso’s (the Little Grandfather) parents Regina and Euleterio, and the whole second part of the novel entitled “When I was Dirt” narrating the story of Soledad and Narcisso and the coming of Inocencio and his finding Zoila in the dancefloor. And then Celaya’s story, the story of the six sons and one daughter.
As the love stories of Soledad and Narcisso and Zoila and Incocencio unfolded, so did the Mexican-American history. Both were characterized by battles to be won and defeats to be faced. During the Mexican – American war in 1916, Narcisso found himself booted out from the safe confines of his home and dumped right in the middle of the crossfire. The same happened to Toto or Alberto, fifty years or so later. He was drafted during the Vietnam War in 1969. His birthdate was among the top 200 picked up during the draft lottery which determined the civilians who will be sent to war with the Vietnams. The revolution against the American invaders began in 1911, and has continued from then on. “Then as now, people voted for peace, and then as now, nobody believed their votes made a bit of difference.”
The novel is not blind to the injuries done by Chicanas or Mexicans to each other. Inocencio when asked to narrate the monstrosities of war he witnessed during the U.S. war against the Japanese, the only action he was able to share was between two Mexicans who killed each other in a knife fight in a bar in Tokyo. Inoncencio had his share of Mexicans turning their backs from fellow Mexicans when his friend Marcelino Ordonez appears to have sold out their friendship and turned him over to the INS officer as an alien suspect. Good thing Inocencio had papers to show. But that incident brought his once steadfast friendship with Mars to an end.
Even in the Mexican Society, especially with its patriarchal order, women do not feel safe to roam around by herself. Once, when Celaya attempted to go to the town to buy herself a balloon, she felt scared, she felt the prying eyes of the man around her. A child like her was not even safe in her supposed hometown. Sandra Cisneros shared her personal experience in Barcelona, Spain where she went to a restaurant to eat all by herself and she was refused food. During her short stay in the country, she never again attempted to eat by herself in a restaurant, especially if the night is closing in. (Cisneros 2000)
Celaya couldn’t escape home, just like Incocencio, and all the others. Because home is in the way they talk. It is in their skin. It is in the food they eat. It is their destiny. Cisneros’ is a feminist, she admits this herself, but she does not believe in revenge or bequeathing power or supremacy over males. Her novel demonstrates a different level of consciousness, a responsibility to one’s la raza.
“At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes.” (Anzaldua 1999). The eagle and the serpent in the Mexican flag which Celaya thought to be Mexica and America fighting, and on other times, her mother and father. “The eagle symbolizes the spirit (as the sun, the father); the serpent symbolizes the soul (as the earth, the mother.) Together, they symbolize the struggle between the spiritual/celestial/male and the underworld/earth/feminine.”
But to see through the serpent and eagle eyes, to see through the eyes of the Anglos and the Mexicans, through the eyes of men and women is not the only way to consciousness. We have the freedom to choose whatever path we wish to take. The point is, as Anzaldua said, is to act, not just react.
“We are not dried leaves that go with the ebb of the river, blindly accepting wherever destiny takes us. We can shape and reshape our lives just as soon as we open our minds and recognize the past. There is no one Chicana experience as there is no one Chicana destiny. But telling our stories unique from each other or similar can influence how we face the present and the future, and treat our fellow Chicanas, those of whom we inadvertently silence or gag because even if we belong to the same race, we are women nonetheless.”
The memories of Celaya of her past, her present, and the future that awaits her on that day of realization are all part of the bigger picture, the historias of their ethnicity which she carries with her like a mountain and ammunition. I like the way Anzaldua said in Borderlands: La Frontera how she is like a turtle, she carries home wherever she goes. And that’s how it is with Celaya and Cisneros and in fact anybody who has a past. Today will be a memory tomorrow. What is important is that we don’t forget but we also dream.
References:
Books
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt
Lute, 1987, 1999.
Castillo-Speed, Lillian, ed. Women’s Voices from the Borderlands. Simon and Schuster,
1995.
Cortina, Rodolfo. Hispanic American Literature: An Anthology. U of Houston: NTC
Publishing Group, 1998.
De Jesus Hernandez- Gutierrez, Manuel and David William Foster, ed. Literatura
Chicana: An Anthology in Spanish, English and Calo. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997.
Kanellos, Nicolas. Hispanic American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology.
Longman: U of California Berkeley, 1995.
Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldua, ed. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color. New York: Women of Color P, 1981, 1983.
Singh, Amritjit, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogam, ed. Memory and Cultural
Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Boston: Northeastern U P, 1996.
Web
Dasenbrock, Reed. “Interview with Sandra Cisneros”. Interviews with Writers of the
Post-Colonial World. Jackson: U of Mississippi Press. 18 July 2003. <http://acunix-wheatonma.edu/vpearce/multiC_Web/Authors/Sandra%20Cisneros/body_sandra_cisneros.html>.
Oliver, Rotger, Maria-Antonia. “An Interview with Sandra Cisneros” Voice from the
Gaps. U of Minnesota. 18 July 2003. <http://voices.cla.umu.edu/SOUNDINGS/%20ROTGERSoundings.html>.
Sandra Cisneros: Coveying the Riches of the Latin America Culture is the Author’s
Literary Goal. 18 July 2003 <http://www.lasmujeres.com/sandra%20cisneros/cisnerosgoal.shtml>.
As it always is, there are some experiences we want to forget but nevertheless continue to hunt us. There are also some instances we want to enact in our minds over and over again, that one wonderful moment, that moment of realization that we keep on going back to, to have a good laugh or a good cry. We have memories of our friends, of our family members, of people we encountered at some point in our lives, and if we tie them all up together, we, in a way, make a story of our life based on how we perceived other people, based on what we remember or choose to.
But memories are not just all that we remember from our past. It also constitutes events that happened even before we had memories of them. Memories that were shared to us by our professors, books, media. These are points of intersections. We have our own recollections based on actual happenings.
No experience is not worth talking about. No experience is not worth sharing with. We all have our stories to tell, no matter how mundane and trivial it may seem, or obscure and alien to other people. The basic principle underlying minority literature. Listen. Remember. Share.
My paper aims to draw on the memories relieved by Celaya or Lala and the other characters in Sandra Cisneros’ Caramelo. The novel shows how different persons can have different memories of each other. Since the story was like a narrative, not linear though, as it is with reality interspersed by recollections, of Lala’s memories of her childhood, of growing up, of the society she grew up in, of the family and people she had been associated with, it was like a novel of remembering. But she wasn’t the only one who was recalling. Even her father, her mother, and most especially her grandmother have memories of their own. Memories within a memory. The approach might appear to be a bit simplistic, but memories are more complex than they may seem. They form a bridge between reality and imagination. The Chicana has a rich heritage, one replete with struggles, myths, displacements, and the formation of new consciousness. It is because of this rich past, one that is characterized by defeats and triumphs, that Chicana, as reflected by their literature, like to dwell in the past, to learn from them and to move forward.
Chicanas are complex. They are made up of a long history of colonization, border crossings, and identity struggles. They constantly go back to images of the eagle and the serpent, the story of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, and La Virgen Guadalupe to make sense of their experiences, constantly going back to their indigenous roots for support or strength.
CHICANA (que?)
Let me first define terms. Chicana is that self-label used by the Mexican-Americans when they resisted the term imposed on them by the dominant culture. Mexican-American. Why should they be called as such when they are Americans albeit also Mexicans, having born in the United States, but are still annexed, hyphenated, alienated, treated as inferiors to Anglos and even “Anti-American”? (Macias 1969). Prior to the late 1960’s, Mexicans preferred to dissociate themselves from their ancestry, calling themselves rather “Greeks, Italians, Spanish, etc…” (Macias 1969) However, beginning 1966, during the Civil Rights Movement which continued through the late 1970’s, the Mexican-Americans, mostly the youths, chose to adopt the term Chicana. Some believe that the term was actually a revival of the label used by the people from Chihuahua, a city and state of northern Mexico during the 1930’s. It is postulated that the Chi was taken from the name of the place and the Cano from Mexicano. (Macias 1969) The term implies one is neither a full Mexican or a full American, but a mixture, a mestizo.
“Salient aspects of Chicano include a self-awareness or self-respect and a personal commitment to Chicano communities.” (Macias 1969)
Sandra Cisneros is a Chicana although sometimes she likes to call herself “Latina, Mexican-American or American-Mexican depending on whether my audience understands the term or not.” (Cisneros 2000) But Cisneros is a true-blooded Chicana. One who recognizes her responsibility to her community and to every cultural minority who longs to be heard. “Women like my mama and Emily Dickinson’s housekeeper who must be recorded so that their stories can finally be heard,” said Cisneros during her lecture on the Second Annual Hispanic Achievement Festival in La Cumbre Santa Barbara Junior High School on October 22, 1986.
Sandra y Celaya
I would like to believe that Cisneros drew a lot from her personal experiences in writing Caramelo. This is because Celaya’s story has a lot of similarities with Cisneros’ own story. The recollections of Celaya were anchored in her lonely childhood, being the youngest and only girl in a family of six sons. All she had on her side was her father who considered her “Mi cielo”. In real life, Cisneros grew up being the only daughter in a family of six sons, although not the youngest but third oldest. She had for parents a Mexican Father and a Mexican-American mother. The same as that of in the story. In fact, even in her other works like the short story Tepeyac which is included in the Women Hollering Creek and other Short Stories, the narrator described her childhood in their house in La Fortuna 12 which is actually the real house address where Cisneros grew up in. Truth is, all of Cisneros’ works including the House on Mango Street, Loose Woman: Poems, and My Wicked Wicked Ways are reflections or narrations of the experiences of Chicanas or Mexican-Americans. Cisneros draws from her personal experiences and from the experiences shared by people around her, feelings of powerlessness, of being treated as inferiors, of the collective and unique experiences of Chicanas. This she was able to do after finding her voice. In an article entitled “Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession” (1995), Cisneros narrated how she found her voice during a seminar on “Memory and Imagination” when they were having a heated discussion on Gustav Bachelard’s Poetics of Space. Prior to this seminar, she was trying to emulate other “big, male writers like James Wright and Richard Hugo” (Cisneros 1995, 48). They were talking about the metaphor of a house. And then it hit her. She cannot write in the same way as that of those big, male authors because she had a different experience of a “house”, of a neighborhood. She always longed to have a peaceful home where she would have a space all to herself and not sleep in lazy boys (the same with Celaya) but this dream was elusive to her. After coming into terms with her mixed identity, she fled home although she never escaped from it. And it was in fact when she left home that she came to understand what home is, it is in her blood and as having come from two different races, she learned to speak in different voices and be in two places at the same time or neither, a result of living in the borderlands, the Mexico City, the U.S. Southwest.
“Memory and Imagination”
As my paper will look into the construction of memory in Caramelo, let me first discuss the article of Robert A. Lee in Memory & Culture Politics entitled “Chicanismo as Memory: The Fictions of Rudolfo Anaya, Nash Candelaria, Sandra Cisneros, and Ron Arias.”
According to Lee, “chicanismo invites a play of memory coevally personal and collective.” “For it is the memory that serves as solvent for each generation’s telling of la raza (which more aptly means ethnicity rather than race) and nowhere more so than in the ongoing body of fiction of what rightly has become known as chicanismo’s literary renaissance.” (Lee in Singh 1996) He further said that in the works of Anaya, Candelaria, Cisneros, and Arias, there is a constant going back to the past however different their styles are and reinventing this past by looking at it from “now”. He noted that “the Chicano tradition can virtually be said to have thrived on the shaping energies of remembrance, a present told and reinvented in the mirrors of the past.” Chicano writers employ memory construction to make sense of their present situation, to understand their people as having stories distinct from those of the dominant class.
In glorifying the past, we tend to intersperse it with an imagined past or dreams mixed with experience. This is what makes the work provoking, fiction. In Rodolfo Anaya’s Bless Me Ultima, he enraveled his Chicano childhood in actual events, but also mixing it with a “drama of fantasy and imagining.” As with Nash Canderia’s trilogy Memories of the Alhambra (1977), Not by The Sword (1985), and Inheritance of Strangers (1985), Lee points out how Candelaria “invoked a distinct phase in the evolution of Chicano history while at the same time building into the larger, more encompassing memory.” Candelaria made a “meditation on history” in narrating the journey of Jose and his family from Albuquerque to California in 1920s and from California to Mexico and then to Spain, the experience during the Mexican-American war in 1846-1848, and the land wars that characterized the colonization of Mexico by the U.S.
In Lee’s discussion of Ron Arias’ The Road to Tamazunchale (1975), he showed another aspect of Chicana fiction which is magic realism. Memories as catalysts of metamorphosis, using wizardy or magic to shape and reshape memories. Chicana has a rich reservoir of mythic stories/ legends which are almost always alluded in remembering the past in the works of its writers.
In Cisneros’ Caramelo, there is also this allusion to the Chicana mythic past or even to magic realism with Cisneros treating her past as ghost that continues to hunt her, the ghost of her grandmother Soledad.
Another important article is Feathering the Serpent: Chicano Mythic “Memory” by Rafael Perez Torres. It begun by first invoking the memory of the Delano strike in 1965 where a group organized by Cesar Chavez gathered to demand “basic, God-given rights as human beings” which were deprived from them like “fair wages, legal protection, and decent working conditions.” This event triggered a series of movements known as el Movimiento, Mexican workers trying to reclaim their land, their heritage, their roots, the Aztlan, the land “that was home prior to invasion.” And “like a persistent dream that return vaguely during daytime, the notion of an ancestral memory has haunted contemporary Chicano cultural production.” Torres further says that the “connection to a Mexican political past resonates with a spirituality invoked by the beneficent presence of the Virgin. The Virgin of Guadalupe also evokes a more distant spirituality, since the image of the Virgin represents a postconquest confluence of pre-Cortesian and European religious imagery. Ancestral memory thus merges with mythic memory, and a central trope in the articulation of Chicana culture emerges.”
In Caramelo, you would find the Virgin of Guadalupe inside the bedroom of the Grandmother and in the house of Lala even when they moved out and transferred to Texas. A family not religious at the very least, showing no statue of Sto. Nino, a family who do not hear mass on Sundays, or cross themselves “twice and kiss” their thumbs when passing a Church, a family where the Children go to a Catholic school to get good education and not turn religious, but still has a frame of the Virgin of Guadalupe inside the master’s bedroom, at the head of the bed where the Father and the Mother sleep. The picture courtesy of the Awful Grandmother who insisted on having it hand delivered to them in memory of her. The Virgin of Guadalupe as a symbol of the Mother’s undying love for her son.
Another mythic story that was mentioned in the novel was the legend of Iztaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, the twin volcanoes of Mexico where the lovers were engaged in a secret love affair because their families were enemies. Just like Romeo and Juliet. However unlike Shakespeare’s story where Romeo and Juliet killed themselves, Popo killed Izta for some reason but upon seeing his beautiful partner die, he knelt down and cried his heart out, overcome by love and beauty. Both turned into volcanoes. “But if he loved her so much, why did he kill her?” asked Lala to her Grandfather who was narrating the story during Inocencio’s birthday celebration. “I don’t know… Suppose that’s how Mexicans love, I suppose,” answered the Grandfather. Sometimes we couldn’t help but kill the ones we love, either by loving them too much or too little, I suppose.
This story of Izta and Popo is very symbolic in the story of Cisneros who talked about different kinds of love, the love of a mother for her son, the love for one’s roots, the love for self-identity, the love for a father and a mother, familial love and romantic love. Each one varying in degrees.
“Memory in other words, in all its overlapping and coalescing kinds, also yields mixed emotional fare for the narrator-memoirist, pain and warmth, breakage as well as love.” (Lee in Singh 1996)
Recuerdos in Sweet Caramelo
“We’re all little in the photograph above Father’s bed. We were little in Acapulco. We will always be little. For him we are just as we were then.” This is the opening statement of the novel, an image, a recuerdo.
A photograph which served as a recuerdo on that day where they all went to the ocean to get out from the house, all of them including the Grandmother and Candelaria, the daughter of the housemaid. A still picture which seemed to say stop, let’s stop moving and getting nowhere. The need to put a still in the movements, so many, which characterized the novel from the very start. That trip to Mexico to the house of the Awful Grandmother at the Destiny Steet, number 12 (the address of Cisneros’ grandmother is actually La Fortuna, numero 12), the trip to a new house in Texas and back to Chicago, the constant displacements and anxieties over getting acquainted to new people and place. But more than this, the statement showed the connection of Lala and the father and the impression of the father for his sons and daughter.
Here, let me point out how Sandra said in the article “Only Daughter” published in the book Women’s Voices from the Borderlands showed her affection for her daughter and how she was constantly trying to get his attention and approval. She admitted that “in a sense, everything I have written has been for him, to win his approval” even when she knows her Father can’t read English words. She even shared her experience when at one time, one of her stories were translated in Spanish and her Father for some reason took notice of her and read the story she was offering him and commented “where can we get more copies of this for our relatives”, and her inexplicable joy upon hearing those words. Finally, her Father realized what she can do, what she is worth.
On that same day, the day that still photograph was taken, was a day of revelation. Zoila, Lala’s mother, found out from her mother-in-law, no less than the Awful Grandmother, the truth behind Candelaria’s roots. On that same day, without having been told, Lala also knew. She knew that Cande is her half-sister. But this truth was never confirmed by the Father. Not even in the end, when he already seemed repentant, almost invalid after suffering from a stroke, during the celebration of their almost, but not quite thirtieth anniversary. Lala was waiting expectantly for him to ask for forgiveness, to admit the truth, but he never did. Instead, he just told her the story of her grandmother, how her grandfather almost did not take responsibility for Inocencio whom she was carrying at that time until the great-grandfather Eleuterio Reyes said to him that “we are not dogs!” Eleuterio Reyes who could barely speak at that time and yet managed to utter those words. And that’s what Inocencio told Lala, not to bring shame to the family. But Lala longed to ask but “Why weren’t you a gentleman? I thought we weren’t dogs. I thought we were kings and meant to act like kings, Father. And why didn’t the Little Grandfather remind you of your responsibility if he was feo, fuerte, y formal?” “All my life, you’ve said I was ‘the only girl’ Father.. Why would you tell a lie?” And then Lala tries to understand her Father, his silence to the truth. “ Maybe Father has his own questions. Maybe he wants to hear, or doesn’t want to hear about me and Ernesto (the boyfriend Lala ran away with but things didn’t work out), but he doesn’t ask. We’re so Mexican. So much left unsaid.”
In real life, Sandra Cisneros had a sister, but she died when they were so young and she hardly remembers her. Candelaria may be the personification of that lost sister, that friend she was supposed to have had if she had not passed away. They may have been able to share experiences, secrets, Cisneros’s childhood may not have been as lonely as it had been. But Sandra also said that had it not been for that loneliness, she may have not turned to books as her consolation. In a way, she may not be as good a writer as she is now. That’s how she makes sense of her lonely childhood. In the same manner, Lala made sense of the reason why her Father deprived her of a sister.
“We were all little in that photograph… We will always be little for him. We are just as we were before.”
El Rebozo is a symbol of the Chicana culture’s “protection” of women. (Anzaldua 1999). The Awful Grandmother or Soledad’s parents were reboceros. They manufacture the best silk shawls. They were the famed reboceros from Santa Maria del Rio. Wrapped in the finest rebozo, Soledad was born. She was wrapped in this delicate weaving until her mother Guillermina died so soon, long before Soledad was able to marvel in her mother’s care. She left the Caramelo rebozo, the one she had been working on before she died, unfinished. And that became Soledad’s sole possession from then on, after her father remarried and she was sent to a cousin in Mexico City. She, who used to be her Father’s chuchuluco suddenly became unwanted enough to be discarded.
At one point in the novel, Lala’s Father Inocencio offered to buy her a rebozo which the Awful Grandmother contested saying that she is the one deserving of something as expensive as such. In the end, the gift did not materialize, Lala had to steal away that Caramelo rebozo from the walnut-armoire of her grandmother after she passed away. And on that day of the celebration of her parents nearly thirtieth anniversary, she chew on that rebozo which she has around herself as she ponders over the silence of her Father.
“The rebozo was born in Mexico, but like all mestizos, it came from everywhere.” (Caramelo) Rebozo is a symbol of the culture’s protection of women (Anzaldua 1999), of Lala’s Father protecting her from the truth not knowing she knows the truth, that she can protect herself. He doesn’t have to do it for her. That Caramelo rebozo not being a gift to her, but a stolen prize, that same Caramelo rebozo not being a gift of anybody to Soledad, but a stolen prize. They both stole it from the dead, the past which should have been left there but was instead nurtured, to protect them from the future. The ghost of Soledad chose to materialize to Lala because in a way they have similarities. A lonely childhood, not having a mother to provide comfort, Lala’s mother being alive yet so distant, both clinging to Inocencio, as a son and as a father, but are in a way letting go of that desperate hold. Soledad finally letting go of his one son whom she felt pure love and adoration. Lala standing on her own, attempting to break away, but going back to their home not because he dictated it, but because she misses them.
But Lala understands why her Father wants to protect her from the harsh realities. She understands because she knows he has also felt alienation. She has after all the same face as his, that face that lived in the borderlands.
The ending of the novel signifies Lala’s or Celaya’s arrival at understanding, at the reason for his Father’s silence, at the reason for the silence of most Mexicans, she finally understands that she is not alone, the she is not just the odd one out, she has arrived into a certain degree of consciousness where she has to make a sound and break away from the hands that gag her mouth, the mestiza consciousness.
One cannot achieve this mestiza consciousness without going back to the roots, without historicizing, and that’s what Sandra Cisneros’ did. She told the story of her roots, her story which may find some points of intersection with the stories of other Chicanas. She did this by weaving facts with fiction, with events and dreams, before she arrived in a level of consciousness and found herself.
The novel spanned four generations. A glimpse on the story of Soledad’s parents Guillermina and Ambrocio Reyes, an anecdote on the story of Narcisso’s (the Little Grandfather) parents Regina and Euleterio, and the whole second part of the novel entitled “When I was Dirt” narrating the story of Soledad and Narcisso and the coming of Inocencio and his finding Zoila in the dancefloor. And then Celaya’s story, the story of the six sons and one daughter.
As the love stories of Soledad and Narcisso and Zoila and Incocencio unfolded, so did the Mexican-American history. Both were characterized by battles to be won and defeats to be faced. During the Mexican – American war in 1916, Narcisso found himself booted out from the safe confines of his home and dumped right in the middle of the crossfire. The same happened to Toto or Alberto, fifty years or so later. He was drafted during the Vietnam War in 1969. His birthdate was among the top 200 picked up during the draft lottery which determined the civilians who will be sent to war with the Vietnams. The revolution against the American invaders began in 1911, and has continued from then on. “Then as now, people voted for peace, and then as now, nobody believed their votes made a bit of difference.”
The novel is not blind to the injuries done by Chicanas or Mexicans to each other. Inocencio when asked to narrate the monstrosities of war he witnessed during the U.S. war against the Japanese, the only action he was able to share was between two Mexicans who killed each other in a knife fight in a bar in Tokyo. Inoncencio had his share of Mexicans turning their backs from fellow Mexicans when his friend Marcelino Ordonez appears to have sold out their friendship and turned him over to the INS officer as an alien suspect. Good thing Inocencio had papers to show. But that incident brought his once steadfast friendship with Mars to an end.
Even in the Mexican Society, especially with its patriarchal order, women do not feel safe to roam around by herself. Once, when Celaya attempted to go to the town to buy herself a balloon, she felt scared, she felt the prying eyes of the man around her. A child like her was not even safe in her supposed hometown. Sandra Cisneros shared her personal experience in Barcelona, Spain where she went to a restaurant to eat all by herself and she was refused food. During her short stay in the country, she never again attempted to eat by herself in a restaurant, especially if the night is closing in. (Cisneros 2000)
Celaya couldn’t escape home, just like Incocencio, and all the others. Because home is in the way they talk. It is in their skin. It is in the food they eat. It is their destiny. Cisneros’ is a feminist, she admits this herself, but she does not believe in revenge or bequeathing power or supremacy over males. Her novel demonstrates a different level of consciousness, a responsibility to one’s la raza.
“At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once and, at once, see through serpent and eagle eyes.” (Anzaldua 1999). The eagle and the serpent in the Mexican flag which Celaya thought to be Mexica and America fighting, and on other times, her mother and father. “The eagle symbolizes the spirit (as the sun, the father); the serpent symbolizes the soul (as the earth, the mother.) Together, they symbolize the struggle between the spiritual/celestial/male and the underworld/earth/feminine.”
But to see through the serpent and eagle eyes, to see through the eyes of the Anglos and the Mexicans, through the eyes of men and women is not the only way to consciousness. We have the freedom to choose whatever path we wish to take. The point is, as Anzaldua said, is to act, not just react.
“We are not dried leaves that go with the ebb of the river, blindly accepting wherever destiny takes us. We can shape and reshape our lives just as soon as we open our minds and recognize the past. There is no one Chicana experience as there is no one Chicana destiny. But telling our stories unique from each other or similar can influence how we face the present and the future, and treat our fellow Chicanas, those of whom we inadvertently silence or gag because even if we belong to the same race, we are women nonetheless.”
The memories of Celaya of her past, her present, and the future that awaits her on that day of realization are all part of the bigger picture, the historias of their ethnicity which she carries with her like a mountain and ammunition. I like the way Anzaldua said in Borderlands: La Frontera how she is like a turtle, she carries home wherever she goes. And that’s how it is with Celaya and Cisneros and in fact anybody who has a past. Today will be a memory tomorrow. What is important is that we don’t forget but we also dream.
References:
Books
Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands, La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt
Lute, 1987, 1999.
Castillo-Speed, Lillian, ed. Women’s Voices from the Borderlands. Simon and Schuster,
1995.
Cortina, Rodolfo. Hispanic American Literature: An Anthology. U of Houston: NTC
Publishing Group, 1998.
De Jesus Hernandez- Gutierrez, Manuel and David William Foster, ed. Literatura
Chicana: An Anthology in Spanish, English and Calo. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1997.
Kanellos, Nicolas. Hispanic American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology.
Longman: U of California Berkeley, 1995.
Moraga, Cherrie and Gloria Anzaldua, ed. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by
Radical Women of Color. New York: Women of Color P, 1981, 1983.
Singh, Amritjit, Joseph T. Skerrett, Jr., and Robert E. Hogam, ed. Memory and Cultural
Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Boston: Northeastern U P, 1996.
Web
Dasenbrock, Reed. “Interview with Sandra Cisneros”. Interviews with Writers of the
Post-Colonial World. Jackson: U of Mississippi Press. 18 July 2003. <http://acunix-wheatonma.edu/vpearce/multiC_Web/Authors/Sandra%20Cisneros/body_sandra_cisneros.html>.
Oliver, Rotger, Maria-Antonia. “An Interview with Sandra Cisneros” Voice from the
Gaps. U of Minnesota. 18 July 2003. <http://voices.cla.umu.edu/SOUNDINGS/%20ROTGERSoundings.html>.
Sandra Cisneros: Coveying the Riches of the Latin America Culture is the Author’s
Literary Goal. 18 July 2003 <http://www.lasmujeres.com/sandra%20cisneros/cisnerosgoal.shtml>.
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