No one owns a language

I have just finished reading House of Memory by National Artist Resil B. Mojares, published by Anvil Publishing, and what stayed with me after closing the book was not simply admiration for the quality of his writing but a strange sense of familiarity. As I moved through his essays, I suddenly found myself remembering Dr. Leoncio P. Deriada when he was still alive, not because they wrote in exactly the same way or because they belonged to precisely the same literary tradition, but because there was a deeper sensitivity connecting their work: the ability to see language, literature, history, place, people, and culture as interconnected parts of a larger life. Both showed that writing is not merely the production of text. It is a way of approaching the world. It is a way of remembering, questioning, engaging, understanding, and sometimes quietly resisting.

That is why, while reading Mojares, I could not help but think about how many other people like him and Deriada exist within our universities whose work we have not sufficiently read, introduced, studied, or celebrated. Perhaps one of the biggest problems of our universities is not the absence of writers and cultural workers, but the absence of a serious institutional memory for the work they have done.

In a university like UP Visayas, this becomes even more important. There are names and bodies of work that should not remain confined to library catalogs, old institutional reports, the personal memories of those who knew them, or obituaries that we read only after someone has died. There are people whose work needs to remain at the center of university life. Their names should be encountered in the corridors of old buildings, in reading corners, exhibitions, classrooms, publications, lectures, and conferences, and even in the ordinary conversations of students and faculty. This is why UP Visayas’ continued support for the Leoncio P. Deriada Conference matters to me. It is not simply an annual academic activity that needs to be placed on a calendar. It can become a way of continuing an intellectual and cultural tradition that Deriada left behind. Through initiatives like this, the university reminds us that a writer’s work does not end with death and that his value is not determined by the number of his books sitting on a shelf. What matters more is whether succeeding generations continue to use the questions he left behind.

This is where I see an important connection between Mojares and Deriada: both demonstrated, in different ways, that we do not truly own language. We may use it, cultivate it, study it, teach it, write in it, translate it, and play with it, but we cannot claim it as though it were our personal property. Language is older than us and, in many cases, will live longer than we will. Before we ever used it, other people had already used it to tell stories, express love, complain, pray, argue, joke, teach, and give names to their world. After we use it, other people will use it in ways we can no longer control. This is one reason why the cultural work of Mojares and Deriada matters. They did not treat language as a closed territory that could be controlled by a small group of experts. In their writing, language became a passage toward people, places, and experiences that are often left at the margins of official history.

When we say that no one owns a language, it does not mean that those who use it have no responsibility toward it. Quite the opposite. Because language does not belong to us, we have a greater responsibility in the way we use it. We need to recognize the communities that have shaped it. We need to respect the people whose lives and histories are embedded in it. We need to accept that language changes because the people who use it change. And, above all, we need to challenge the idea that there is only one center capable of deciding what constitutes legitimate language, legitimate literature, legitimate knowledge, or a legitimate way of speaking. In a country like the Philippines, where so many languages have long been spoken by different communities, treating one language as more “correct,” more “important,” or more “civilized” than another is not merely a question of grammar. There is history and power behind it.

This is where the work of Mojares and Deriada becomes particularly significant. They did not simply study culture from a distance. They used language to enter the very life of culture. Their writing was not merely an exercise in storing information about a place. In their work, place becomes a living archive. The names of people, family histories, local histories, traditions, food, buildings, beliefs, memories, landscapes, and ordinary experiences become part of a larger way of understanding society. From this perspective, the cultural worker is not merely a collector of data. The cultural worker is a listener, questioner, translator, and mediator between experiences that might otherwise disappear if they were not written down. This is why I believe their example remains profoundly important today, especially within universities that can sometimes fall into the assumption that knowledge must always be produced in a particular format before it can be considered valuable.

There is a peculiar danger when the university becomes too preoccupied with defining what is “academic” and what is not. Without realizing it, we may gradually narrow the very meaning of knowledge. A newspaper essay may be considered inferior to a journal article simply because it did not go through the same process of academic publication. But what happens when that newspaper essay is the first text to engage the public on an issue? What happens when an essay opens a conversation that an academic paper has not yet been able to open? What happens when a personal essay gives a name to an experience that academia has not yet noticed? In House of Memory, one of the things I particularly value is the possibility of newspaper writing and the essay as forms of public education. One does not have to be inside a classroom to teach. Sometimes the newspaper page becomes the classroom, and the reader sitting at home, in an office, on a jeepney, in a café, or somewhere else becomes a student of a text without an attendance sheet and without an examination.

This matters to me because I believe the personal essay is also a serious practice for studying culture, language, and society. When we write a personal essay, we are not merely telling people what happened to us. We are trying to understand why something happened and what it reveals about the world in which we live. The personal can become a doorway into the social. A memory of an old building can lead to questions about urban development. A story about a word can open a history of a community. An experience of speaking Hiligaynon can raise questions about language hierarchy. An observation about a public plaza can lead to a discussion about heritage, aesthetics, tourism, and power. This is why I do not see the personal essay as a minor literary form. In the right hands, it can be a form of cultural inquiry.

This is also why we need to return to the idea of language as a tool. Language is not merely something we study in order to earn a grade. When we develop sufficient ability in a language, we acquire a tool for examining ourselves, our communities, our society, and the world around us. We can use language to ask why a tradition exists in a particular form. We can use it to understand why certain words disappear. We can use it to observe how a community changes. We can use it to read our own history from perspectives that are not always represented in official textbooks. And we can use it to speak with people whom we would never be able to reach if we relied on only one language. This is one of the most important lessons I see in the cultural work of Mojares and Deriada: language is not merely a medium of expression. It is an instrument of inquiry.

That is why it is not enough to say that we should remember Mojares and Deriada because they are important names in Philippine literature and culture. A more important question is what we are going to do with what they left behind. If we simply read their books as part of a literary canon, we may be missing the larger significance of their work. The more difficult task is to continue the kind of intellectual curiosity they embodied. If they asked questions about place, we should continue asking questions about place. If they tried to understand history through people’s stories, we should continue listening to those stories. If they used writing to speak to the public, we should not allow public writing to disappear simply because academic output is easier to measure through journal indexes and citation counts. If they demonstrated the importance of local languages, we should not allow those languages to remain decorative elements in cultural events. We should use them in research, teaching, publishing, translation, community engagement, and everyday life.

This is why universities can no longer treat language programs, creative writing initiatives, cultural archives, publishing projects, and public humanities work as peripheral activities. They are part of the university’s responsibility to the culture and communities that sustain it. These are not merely extracurricular decorations in a research university. They are part of the responsibility of an institution that claims to serve society. If a university is situated in a particular region, should it not have a deeper engagement with the languages, literature, history, and culture of that region? If writers have devoted their lives to building a literary tradition, should there not be institutional mechanisms to ensure that their work does not disappear? And if languages are spoken by millions of people but have limited dictionaries, books, translations, scholarly resources, and other forms of infrastructure, should this not also be part of the academic agenda? We cannot continue saying that culture matters while the infrastructure needed to sustain it remains weak.

The problem is that sometimes we want to celebrate culture without doing the difficult work of studying it. We want festivals, posters, costumes, programs, opening ceremonies, and photographs, but we are not always willing to spend the time reading old texts, interviewing elders, archiving local materials, translating works, teaching languages, publishing books, maintaining library collections, and training new researchers. But culture does not survive through celebration alone. It survives through practice. It survives when someone uses a language. It survives when someone writes. It survives when someone reads. It survives when someone asks questions. It survives when someone listens. It survives when an institution is willing to provide the space, money, time, and people necessary to sustain these activities.

This may be why House of Memory stayed with me long after I finished reading it. Memory in the book is not simply about remembering the past. It is a way of determining what we must not forget as we construct the future. And as I think about Mojares, I also think about Deriada, and as I think about Deriada, I think about the responsibility of a university like UP Visayas. We are not merely inheritors of their books. We are inheritors of their questions. And a genuine legacy is not something that is simply placed on a shelf. It is a practice that must be continued.

No one owns a language. It does not belong to Mojares, Deriada, an academic, a writer, a university, or an institution. We merely pass through language. We use it while we are alive, and then we pass it on to others. The only thing we can truly claim is responsibility for how we have used it. We can use language to establish boundaries, silence others, and demonstrate who holds power. We can also use it to open doors, preserve memory, question history, listen to communities, and speak with people who are not usually heard within institutions. Between these two possibilities lies the real work of culture.

What Mojares and Deriada leave behind is not a model we are expected to reproduce, but a challenge to look more carefully, ask harder questions, and make sense of our own time. We should read our languages. We should write our stories. We should study our places. We should listen to the people around us. We should bring these things into the classroom, the library, the newspaper, the journal, the conference, and the community. Because when we learn to use language to read ourselves and the world we inhabit, we begin to understand that language is not merely a way of saying who we are. It is also one of the most important ways of discovering how we became who we are, who helped create this world with us, and what kind of world we want to leave behind for those who will continue using words that were never ours alone.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He currently serves as faculty-in-charge of the UP Visayas Language Program Office and as secretary of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). His poetry has been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.