Poetic Injustice

(The following account is quite vitriolic. But hey, isn't the blog entitled I Sound My Monstrous Yawp? I think it's only right for me to air my opinions, as the issue concerns me very much.)

If you ride on the Light Rail Transit, you will notice the "Berso sa Metro" posters. These posters have poems printed in the original Spanish and in Tagalog. On the other side of the aisle there is another poster, an advertisement from the Instituto Cervantes. It's more likely that people will pay more attention to the Instituto posters, because they're more conspicuous, and the font on the "Berso" posters are small enough that you have to squint to read the poems. I hate this ad campaign. For one thing, they only got the idea from the New York subway. Then, too, they're encouraging colonial mentality by ignoring our own poets. It would be somewhat justified were they to post the poems of, say, Lorca, or any of the great Spanish poets, but the only author of note featured is Pablo Neruda. And why Spanish? We've had enough of that language for three hundred-odd years. Why not German, so that Filipinos can read Schiller (translated into Tagalog) and think about things a little more profoundly? Why not Chinese, so that the Tang poets can gain a wider audience in the Philippines? Better yet, why not advocate our National Artists? Even in the tiniest details of our existence, the government shows just what a pack of cringing toadies it is. We are not yet free. If we were, there would be poems about nationalism, or some such theme relevant to us, instead of sentimental Spanish poetry about sampaguitas. I'm not against freedom of expression, nor am I against foreign poetry, which I avidly read; the monopoly of the Spanish Instituto, however, shows the pervasive disparity in our country, and makes us underrepresented on our own turf. When you consider the burden of oppression and its long existence, isn't it time to throw it off and sever all ties with it?