Bahala na. Is it really Filipino fatalism?

“Bahala na”, as I had first come to experience it growing up outside the Philippines, was defined unofficially as “there’s nothing we can do about it”. Later on in life, my mom’s sister (who is also a sister of the nun kind) told me that it loosely translated to “leave it up to God.” And during an Asian-American studies class, the professor indicated that it was a “Filipino value” that prohibited Filipinos to make their own destinies by making them “fatalistic“.

You can even use the word “bahala” toward people. My mom used it on me all the time when I was a teenager. Whenever I asked if I could go out with friends late at night or for anything else that she didn’t approve of, she would say “bahala ka!” This translated to me as, “Go ahead, don’t listen to your mom.”

Using “Bahala na” in the Philippines

Fast forward to several days ago; I’m now in the Philippines. My cousin had brought home a batch of bananas that weren’t ripe yet because the ones at the market were unripe altogether. And as I flashed back to my life before I arrived, to those moments when I walked into a Raley’s or Food Max or Costco or Best Buy to find a mountain of bananas with at least 50% of them being soft, ripe, and ready to eat, I bit into a rock solid bland banana, hungry for a snack, and thought in my head “bahala na”.

It was official. Not only was I beginning to incorporate my mom’s language into my mental dictionary, but I was also beginning to take in my mom’s fatalistic attitude. But I was more proud of the former than the latter. A monolinguist like me benefits greatly from learning a new language, let alone that of one’s parents. But as a self-proclaimed Filipino, was I supposed to look at “bahala na” as a negative thing, an “incantation” instilling defeat? And if it is a “negative” trait, why is it referred to as a Filipino “value”?

Luckily, the answers to these questions came to me in three forms.

The first, a book “Filipino-American Psychology” providing a Filipino-American take. The second, an article entitled “Sikolohiyang Pilipino (Filipino psychology): A legacy of Virgilio G. Enriquez” providing views from a Philippine standpoint.

And the third, my 16 year old cousin.

Different perspectives on “Bahala na”

“Filipino-American Psychology” describes “bahala na” as “fatalistic passiveness”, the same definition found in the Wiki for “bahala na”:

Bahala na (fatalistic passiveness) is best translated as “Leave it up to God.” Individuals who subscribe to a bahala na attitude tend to live without worry, have a low locus of control, and accept things as they are. For example, some Filipinos will not go to the doctor because they believe if they were meant to get sick, that is “how God wanted it”…

But in the “Sikolohiyang Pilipino” article the authors provide a different take:

…bahala na is not “fatalism” but “determination and risk-taking”. When Filipinos utter the expression “Bahala na!” they are not leaving their fate to God and remaining passive. Rather, they are telling themselves that they are ready to face the difficult situation before them, and will do their best to achieve their objectives.

Although it seemed I wasn’t going to find a consensus among them, it was good to know that a Filipino-American psychologist validated my own personal experiences and views on “bahala na” in America. And despite that being a very different view from that of Filipinos in the Philippines, the Philippine perspectives gave me hope: “bahala na” wasn’t negative as I had thought based on my own personal experience outside of the Philippines. In fact, the “Sikolohiyang Pilipino” article also states that American perspectives on Filipino traits are negative in general and should be taken with a grain of asin (salt):

For example, the predisposition to indirectness of Filipino communication was regarded as being dishonest and socially ingratiating and reflecting a deceptive verbal description of reality rather than a concern for the feelings of others… Thus, using American categories and standards, “the native Filipino invariably suffers from the comparison in not too subtle attempts to put forward Western behavior patterns as models for the Filipino”…

After searching online a bit, I also noticed that Filipinos abroad tend to describe “bahala na” as negative, while Filipinos in the Philippines provide a more positive or neutral position.

In fact Filipinos abroad in general go through unique stresses and difficult situations while living away from home, so “bahala na” acts more of a coping mechanism in the face of foreign and seemingly far more uncontrollable conditions in a fatalistic way than in its local context.

Most American-born Filipinos never use “bahala na”. It is our immigrant parents or grandparents who do. And our perspective on “bahala na” seems negative only because we hear it mostly used in a foreign context, specifically in a fatalistic way. Whereas if we had grown up in the Philippines, we’d probably have a more neutral, or even positive take on “bahala na”.

But as for a concrete definition, I didn’t have one yet. Is “bahala na” then both fatalism and determination? Is it merely east versus west? Before I could recite the ancient Filipino incantation “bahala na” to wash away my frustrations, my cousin walked in and sat on the couch. He grew up in the Philippines so I asked him for his thoughts on “bahala na”.

He sat and thought a bit. “I think it means who cares,” he said. I asked if he believed it was negative or positive, and he answered, “both.”

He gave me the following example: there is a person drowning in the water and a person who spots him from the shore but who can’t swim. The person on the shore can either say, “Bahala na ug mo matay siya” (who cares if he dies) and the person does nothing. Or she can say, “Bahala na ug mo matay ko” (who cares if I die), and she jumps in to save him (spoken in the southern-Philippine language Bisaya).

This simplified “bahala na” for me. It told me that “bahala na” is neutral and whether it promoted risk-aversion or risk-taking, negative action or positive action, depended on what the speaker did (or did not do) next. I felt “responsibility” was a closer, more encompassing western definition than fatalism. It is a tool, specifically a “de-stressor” if you will, that enables its speaker to place the responsibility either on herself, on others, or to a greater power so she can do one thing: move forward. A tool in the tool belt of “Filipino values” that one writer said were “ambivalent in the sense that they are a potential for good or evil, a help or hindrance to personal and national development, depending on how they are understood, practiced or lived.”

With this take, I find “bahala na” can be used effectively in America, the Philippines, or anywhere else in the world. Life has its ups and downs, eastern or western or wherever one is and “bahala na” promotes moving on, or moving forward. The previous Filipino-American and Philippine views on “bahala na” brought the definition to me half of the way. My cousin who has yet to graduate high school took care of the rest, or “siya na bahala naho”, via a batch of unripe bananas and two people who can’t swim.