Thread by @sejoalzir

THE REACTIONARY READING COMPREHENSION OF FILIPINOS

English isn't the only reason behind the poor reading comprehension of Filipinos. Even when a text uses Filipino, their lingua franca, their reading comprehension is still poor. Their reactionary reading is one of the culprits.

By reactionary, I mean two things: overreaction to anything without calm examination and hostile reaction to something that isn't comfortably familiar. We see this reactionary reading and comprehension in politics, in cultural discourse, and even in mundane chats on social media.

I tweeted recently about the positive representation of transwomen by exposing the achievers and the social shakers among them in the media. The reactions I got brought me back to my high school days when I first encountered Barthes, the purveyor of authorial absence in texts.

I was called transphobic because I authored the text they deemed as a form of gatekeeping transwomen, and they placed themselves in the text by saying it was a discriminatory requirement imposed upon them. Such hyper or overreactions are due to reactionary reading comprehension.

If you read the tweet carefully, it doesn't say that transwomen should study to become doctors or attorneys. It does imply that trans who are already doctors or attorneys should be exposed in the media for positive representation. Gays do that. That's why we see Boy Abunda on TV.

In Philippine politics, reactionary reading comprehension is almost a rule for engagement on social media. When someone, neither a Kakampink nor a Marcosyan, says "You vote wisely", a Marcosyan understands that as a statement from a Kakampink made to disparage him as a bobotante.

Again the author is resurrected, and the reader is part of the text even when "You vote wisely" is simply about casting votes. I suspect such reactionary reading comprehension is a colonial cognition made worse by anger or hostility coupled with belongingness and self-importance.

This kind of unrestrained reading comprehension extends a text and makes it personal. Perhaps this is the reason why Filipino students can't understand an original text as what it is. If there's a poem about a carabao flying, a farmer's child will have a sudden mental blackout.

I also suspect that reactionary comprehension, the one about hyper or overreaction" is part of our cultural thinking as a colonized people. In Ethnophilosophy, cultural logic and indigenous ways of understanding things are studied. It's time to study Filipino minds and cognition.

When a fraile then said "Let's build a church", the foundation of Catholicism, the enslaved Filipinos thought of it as the message from God, the author represented by a priest, and they inserted themselves, the characters, in that message by saying it was for their salvation.

Even Rizal succumbed to this reactionary reading comprehension when he read De Morga's account about stinky bagoong. He enumerated some foreign delicacies he described as unpalatable and brought up the Spaniards as the offensive author and himself as the victim of their disgust.

Remember De Morga only described bagoong as what it is--stinky and sometimes rotten. There are even Filipinos today who don't eat bagoong or can't stand its smell. I can understand Rizal though. It was the time of colonization, and pride was important for positive representation.

Then came the Americans who didn't spread originalism in reading but oppressive symbolism. To anti-American Filipinos, "The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga" wasn't about those arboreal hairy animals but Filipinos, the characters, who were colonized by the Yankees, the authors.

Again, I can understand how Filipinos extended the colonial texts under the American occupation to unearth the nature of white men, who used their language to turn insults and indignities against Filipinos into codes and symbols. Such reactionary reading comprehension was needed.

Now it's 2022. Postmodernism, postsructuralism, and postcolonialism have invaded the Philippine universities like a plague, even though the Filipino minds have never been enlightened or modern. How can you deconstruct a text when Filipinos cannot still literally comprehend it?

The Philippine educational system has been busy implementing originalist reading and literal comprehension--read what is there or do not go out of the text--but it seems Filipino students still want the author to be present and themselves to be part of what they read extendedly.

The result of that cognitive stubbornness is poor reading comprehension, hostile overreaction, and unnecessary anger that are evident on social media and even in mainstream media. Oh, the deconstructionists of texts, which are countable in the Philippines, make the matter worse.

They teach abstruse mentally abusive pretexts, subtexts, contexts, intertexts, and hypertexts to Filipinos who still cannot read texts properly and who still go back to the old ways--resuscitate the author and shoot him and make themselves the characters who are victims in texts.

Imagine originalist reading and literal comprehension of long ago, it seems, are still new to Filipino minds that are reactionary to what they really need to know--proper reading comprehension. If they're capable of that, truths and lies won't be gray but black and white--period.

Reactionary reading comprehension in the minds of the discriminated, marginalized, and alienated, real or imagined, is socially destructive. We see how DDS and BBM are using it to malign truths and drown facts. LGBT Filipinos use that too to highlight their anger and hostility.

Done.