Don Vicente: Two Novels

AFTERWORD SELF AND NATION IN LITERATURE

Many years back, a group of Ilokano writers from central and northern Luzon invited me to talk at a workshop they had set up in my hometown, Rosales, Pangasinan. They wanted me, with my background as literary editor and novelist, to clarify some of the problems of craft that had been bedeviling them. I did not think it was a difficult assignment; I had done some writing in my own language several years back but had stopped and devoted myself to English, as demanded by my job.

A few words about Ilokano: it is spoken today by some fifteen million Filipinos in northern Luzon and in Mindanao. In Hawaii, the majority of the citizens of Philippine ancestry are Ilokanos, which is perhaps why Marcos elected Honolulu as his place of exile. We are an adventurous people, hardy and given to thrift and perseverance. We are supposedly endowed with carabao patience and cast-iron stomachs, but more than these ethnic idiosyncracies, our language is very precise and sensual, and in the back of my mind I had hoped that I could enrich my writing in English by extracting from my native Ilokano the same nuances and musicality that Richard Llewelyn drew from his native Welsh or, on a much more magnificent scale, James Joyce, from Irish. In fact, one Filipino writer with an Ilokano background had done this successfully: the late Manuel Arguilla. He flavored his stories with the earthiness, the vivid color, and the vitality of Ilokano. Had the Japanese not killed him, his work would have fully flowered and would have brought about — at least for our writers — a deeper appreciation of their native languages — all ninety of them — and the richness they could have imparted to English.

But this is digression; I had meant to say that I was going back to my hometown after many years of living in Manila and elsewhere in Asia. I relished going home; all the remembered words came alive again. I could understand everything that was said in Ilokano, including the archaic expressions and the poetry bubbling all over the place. Slowly I came to realize that I had missed a lot.

Then it was my turn to speak. I started in my own language, but after the first phrases of elaborate greeting, I found myself fumbling, groping for words. The ideas were crystal-clear, but I could not express them and I strained with an expression that had become alien to me. In the end, I had to give up Ilokano and speak in English. I had never felt as I felt then, the terrible sense of inadequacy and helplessness.

They all understood me, of course, for English is one of our three official languages, but the experience humbled me and impinged upon me the fact that, perhaps, I cannot go home again.

I am sure that this experience can be duplicated easily in any part of the world by those individuals like myself who have become urbanized. I am sure that many of us in Asia have raised questions that probe deep into the very core of our personalities and even into the very purpose of our inconsequential lives.

This is not just the result of our history but the complexity of the Philippines itself. Although Tagalog, the national language, can be understood in almost every part of the country now, the language of science and culture, of government and the elite, continues to be English. With a population of seventy million, a third of our people is capable of communication of sorts in English, a fact that has been embroidered into the dubious statistic that we are the third-largest English-speaking country in the world.

Theoretically, the Philippines is ripe for the media revolution, and as a publisher, I should now be printing thousands of books for this mass market. But we do not read, and most of our people are more comfortable with comic books and TV. Moreover, our low per capita income seems to indicate that a Filipino will take care of his stomach first before he attends to food for the mind. And who can blame him?

What, then, is the future for English? As the lingua franca of the region, it will continue well into the future. But to modernize, we have to develop our own language even, perhaps, at the cost of ignoring altogether our other languages. In promoting this national language, we will also give a genuine cultural base for nationalism. This is no longer an option; it has become a compulsion.

It is perhaps too premature to say that our literature in English may probably decline. This is what happened to the prose and poetry in Spanish written in the 1880s and up to the early 1920s. Even the novels of José Rizal, our national hero, are now seldom read in their original Spanish, although they are required reading in English translation in our schools. Our Spanish poets Fernando Ma. Guerrero and José Corazon de Jesus are unappreciated except by scholars in search of footnotes. Indeed, the literary hiatus between our Spanish past and the American era is wide and final, and Spanish as a literary language in the Philippines is dead. This may well be the price we have to pay so that a national literature will evolve, one that will be read by all our people.

The shift to Tagalog, however, is slow. It could be hastened, but there is continuing opposition by Tagalog chauvinists who refuse to accept the first verity of language, that of communication. Some of these oppositionists wield influence in government and have vested interests as teachers or as bureaucrats; some still insist on the use of archaic Tagalog, on a complicated grammar that favors coinage of words when there are equivalents in popular use. They use aklat (“book”) when everybody uses the Spanish libro.

Perhaps it is time that the Institute of National Language be led and staffed by non-Tagalogs so that the grafting to the national lexicon of non-Tagalog words that are widely used could be hastened. By provoking non-Tagalogs to opt for their own languages in opposition to Tagalog, by making language a vehicle for Tagalog chauvinism, the issue of language, which is central to Philippine development, has been derailed, and what is worse, instead of unifying Filipinos, it has sorely divided us. The worst enemies of Filipino nationalism, therefore, may be found in the Institute of National Language, among them the late Lope K. Santos, who forced upon the school system his balarilà (“grammar,” in Tagalog).

The past has created attitudes embedded deep in our cultural matrix that are just as pernicious. No less than a cultural revolution can exorcise us of such attitudes and their stigma. We may have survived three hundred years of Spanish tyranny, forty years of grudging American benevolence, and three brutal years of Japanese occupation, but we continue to languish in the prison created by this past. How many times have we been awed by our neighbors, by their granite monuments and fabulous ruins, by their classical arts and dances? Go find us a temple, we often tell our archaeologists — half in fun but in our heart of hearts with wishful longing — but we know these monuments are not there, that we may have to build them ourselves. We do console ourselves with the thought that these monuments of past grandeur could be — and are — anchors to poverty that cannot be lifted. What, then, is the Filipino artist? Is he a helmsman beholden to no celestial guide, to no route to his past as Asia knows this past? We have no moorings to break away from and we hope to God that we are not drifting, that we can, perhaps, be light-bringers, although it is a feeble light that we are holding up to our own benighted people.

We cannot but accept the history that has shaped us. When Spain came to us with Catholicism, she destroyed the beginnings of an indigenous culture. Spain also imposed a social structure that afflicts us to this day. It is a structure of power and privilege wherein the social elite is also the political and economic elite whose power and privilege were not earned but mandated, as evidenced in the land grants or encomiendas, in the bulk space of the galleons that sailed to Acapulco. It was a system of exploitation and forced labor that enabled the chosen few, mostly Spanish mestizos, to amass fortunes without lifting a finger at honest toil, and it was from such beginnings that the obnoxious attitudes and values of colonialism were ingrained later into the very culture of our people.

Toward the last decades of Spanish rule, the desire of the Indios to be educated could no longer be restrained. Some were already in the priesthood, and families who could afford it sent their children to Europe for their education. They imbibed the ideas of the European Enlightenment. They were not so much interested in an independent Filipinas as they were in proving themselves equal to their Spanish overlords. They set up in Barcelona La Solidaridad, a fortnightly edited by Marcelo H. del Pilar, wherein they espoused ideas of equality, cultural nationalism, and democracy. They satirized the friars and showed an erudition that proved to themselves, at least, that they deserved seats in the Spanish Cortes.

This period is known as the Propaganda Movement, and the brightest lights of our Spanish literature shone in the pages of La Solidaridad. The newspaper was banned in the Philippines; like most exiles, the Filipino patriots and writers were condemned to penury. Penniless and often at odds with his own countrymen, Marcelo H. del Pilar is one of our tragic figures; soon after the paper was forced to close for lack of funds, he died in Spain of starvation.

Rizal foresaw the coming of America not only to Asia but to the Philippines, and America did come. Our literature in Spanish was fired by anti-American feelings after 1898.

The soldiers from Idaho and Montana became overnight teachers, and there were more to come: the first Peace Corps, the Thomasites, those dedicated young Americans who arrived on the S.S. Thomas and set up the beginnings of the public school system.

Our first literary models were asinine. In high school, we read and delighted in O. Henry’s trick endings. We did have some classics, the Gettysburg Address, the hortatory writings of Tom Paine, but in a sense our colonial educational system fostered a culture that did not emphasize our Filipino-ness. In fact, in the late sixties, I was forced to write to the principal of the academy where my boys went to school; their elocution text included only one Filipino author. Looking back, I am convinced that this educational system created for many of us a warped view of our own society; it made us hanker for the luxuries that we could not produce. Worst of all, we came to accept cultural symbols that were alien to us.

The Americans, with their sincere naïveté and mixed intentions, as evidenced in the Washington archives, could not help themselves, either. Our elite, from the very beginning, chose to collaborate almost uncritically with them just as they collaborated with the Spaniards and the Japanese. In literary terms, it would take time before we would appreciate the “flowering of New England” and those writers who gave American literature its sinew and its marrow.

By the thirties, Filipino authors with new sensibilities, like Paz Marquez Benitez, Narciso G. Reyes, Paz Latorena, Federico Mangahas, and Salvador P. Lopez, began to surface. Shortly before World War II, our literature in English had completely changed from the suffocatingly simple stuff of the twenties.

The war came and its brutality was deeply imprinted in our psyche; we continue to this day to ask questions about Japanese culture — how a people with highly polished aesthetics, with austere and contemplative philosophies, could surrender themselves to the obscenities of barbarism. During those three years of Occupation we were taught a new language, but at the same time the Japanese promoted Tagalog as the national language in a manner unequaled during the American regime. Tagalog literary magazines, associations, and literary experimentation flourished during this period. Another astute quality of Japanese propaganda was to point out our Asian-ness; it mattered not that we were under the heel of an Asian people — did they not prove themselves superior to the white race?

The Occupation brought to the surface fatal flaws of our society: the collaboration of the elite with the Japanese and how readily they gave up the ideals of freedom.

The history of our literary development is one of dilution, infusion, and impermanence. It is not strange, then, that some of us who today write in English feel that we are holding on to ropes of sand, that we may become irrelevant and extinct, unread by our people just as our literature in Spanish is entombed in Filipiniana indices.

This is not to denigrate the achievements of our writers in English who have joined the mainstream of English letters and honored the language with their excellence. But in writing in English, we also accepted the encumbrances of the language. We had to accept as part of our tradition Shakespeare and Dickens and Faulkner, just as those who wrote in Spanish had Cervantes and Lorca as hallmarks of their tradition.

This is not what I personally want, this fact forced upon me by my history, by my profession. Language is not just grammar and syntax, or poetry and prose; language is also a way of thinking, a culture. I do not deny my debt to English literature, my appreciation of its beauty, but English is also associated with my colonial past and its excesses, and because I have succumbed to it, it continually reminds me of and crucifies me for my weakness.

And much as I appreciate Faulkner and his commitment not only to the agrarian South but to man, much as I identify with Dickens’s righteous indignation at man’s inhumanity to man, both are alien to me; they come from another planet, and in our tortured geography they have little to say to me.

My tradition is the village, its filth and its poverty, the agony and the confusion of my striving to be free from it yet be part of it.

Tradition — what a beautiful blind, what an ambiguous, all-purpose façade; like patriotism, it can very well be the last resort of scoundrels or writers grown obese with comfort and adulation. It is, of course, never enough. One can find in it his hope or his perdition and for most of us, it is usually the latter. The businessman who hires his relatives no matter how inefficient they are is paying a heavy price for his tradition. The Filipino critic who lavishes praise on his incompetent writer friends because he does not want to ruffle their feelings is no different. Literature suffers because writers give their books to colleagues who will then write glowing reviews or saccharine introductions.

These acts are done regularly in the Philippines and they can be easily rationalized. Aside from the desire to maintain “smooth interpersonal relations,” jobs are difficult to find, and coteries are not just for social and intellectual amenities; they are also for assistance, which comes in the form of awards, fellowships, and grants. All down the line, from the editors of literary magazines to the teachers in the universities, this social system operates. The public does not really care, consensus becomes the final accolade, and sometimes, only in private conversations or in our innermost thoughts is the true worth of many of our writers ever acknowledged.

And because criticism is permissive, literary reputations — as with other reputations — are easy to garner; mediocrity often masquerades as genius. Some writers who have not produced any body of work acquire a tremendous literary following, even the National Artist Award!

This is one reason, I feel, why little is known of our literature in English outside of Manila or, for that matter, of our Spanish literature. Many of our writers are contented and smug with their reputation at home, but more than this, if we try to get published abroad and are rejected, we feel that foreign editors and publishers do not understand us. It will be difficult for us to realize that our shortcomings could be on craft, that our skills can be honed not only by dogged perseverance but also by an honest tradition in criticism.

But all these do not really add up to the greater malaise that permeates the Filipino literary life: the seeming irresponsibility of many toward our own society and, therefore, to the great themes in art itself. These themes are, in a sense, unchanged since Rizal’s time — the disparity between the countryside and the city, the poverty of the masses and the sickening affluence of a few.

Our critics abroad and at home who hear this complaint often conclude that we are utopians. Indeed, the utopia as we understand it is far removed from Plato’s Republic or from Thomas Moore’s definition; most of the time, all that we desire are clothes for our people, three meals, potable water, garbage collection, education for the children. There is nothing utopian about needs as basic as these.

Some of our writers have recognized this, but others have shied away not only from this truth but from the other truths of society. If they had not done so, there should be a great novel on rural life, on the peasant revolts that have shaken up the countryside intermittently all through the Spanish regime and up to the present. By extension, there should be other novels on the Japanese occupation, not just Stevan Javellana’s Without Seeing the Dawn and Edilberto Tiempo’s Watch in the Night. To this day, one of the best literary documents to come out of the Huk experience is The Forest by William Pomeroy. There is reason enough for many of us to disagree with Pomeroy’s ideology, but there can be no quarrel about the literary validity of his book, which recounts his life as a hunted man.

Commitment — again, one of those megaton words loosely used in the Philippines today. To what or to whom must the artist be committed? Certainly to his art, first and foremost, because he will survive only to the degree that he is devoted to his calling. Beyond his craft, this art, is that transcendental rationale that constitutes all art. Different societies have described it according to their lights, but I would borrow the famous fifth-century Chinese critic Hsieh Ho’s first principle, that it is the concept of “spiritual energy which animates all things.” Though fundamentally metaphysical, it may well be — for those of us who are not Buddhists or Taoists — the belief that in contemporary terms must have sustained Solzhenitsyn through the bleakness of Soviet disapproval. It could well be ideology, too, though nothing as pedestrian as rightist or leftist or even nationalist. It is, after all, the inner strength which finally enables the cripple to rise, the spirit which renders the impossible easy to contemplate, the vision which arms the artist in his demolition of the reality that suffocates him and replaces it with his own truth as only truth can liberate.

Many of us have searched for this truth, this vision, but because we have missed it, we are creating a culture that is not just derivative, but one that makes a mockery of decency and makes our collective death wish loom real and near. This theme is epitomized in E. P. Patanñe’s classic story, “The Bomb.” The fisherman in the story could be any Filipino, and like most fishermen in our country, he has dived to the depths where the American navy dumped many bombs after World War II. He brings up one such bomb, and with primitive implements proceeds to open it to extract the gunpowder that he will then use to dynamite the water and kill the fish.

Many fishermen have been blown up with just one mistake. Whole neighborhoods — as attested to by our newspapers — have been wiped out. The fisherman knows this, his wife knows this, and this most memorable story ends with the fisherman trying to open the bomb — but around him are his wife and children.

Life is absurd — if it should end, let it end for us all. We can extend this fatalism to almost every Filipino aspect of life. We have denuded our forests for the Japanese plywood industry. In so doing, we have also removed much of our watershed; the mountains are bald, and our reservoirs will soon dry up or will be rendered useless with silt. Floods ravage the fields, and money that should go for dams goes into the pockets of the elite. We went through notions of free elections but ushered into office evil men. We exhort the young but our youth are as corrupt as the leaders they criticize.

Our revolutionary elite was bought by the Spaniards at the Pact of Biak-na-bato; the Japanese did the same and so did the Americans, who gave them high positions, annual proffers of sugar quotas. Our writers can be enthralled by the blandishments of power, social position, adulation. Under Marcos, some became speechwriters, propagandists. It is easy to rationalize this sellout by saying that they have to live. But one can live as a baker, the way the poet G. Burce Bunao elected to become before he left for America as an exile, or as a merchant of folk art and handbags like the short-story writer Gilda Cordero Fernando.

Today, as in the recent past, I tell my writer friends to leave if they have the opportunity to do so, to work elsewhere where their imagination can be given free rein, where the obdurate demands of living do not obstruct the free will, knowing as I do that the spirit of inquiry, without which the literary imagination would shrivel and die, was stilled by Marcos.

In December 1958 a hundred writers met in the mountain city of Baguio and argued about the writer’s responsibility to the country, never about the government’s or the state’s responsibility to its citizens. The theme of the PEN-sponsored conference was “Nationalism and the Filipino Writer.” A tenacious group of “committed” writers felt that literature must be nationalist or be damned as useless. They argued that the writer, if need be, write propaganda for social change.

This is, of course, extremely understandable. One of the greatest dilemmas that confront our writers is how to be useful to a society undergoing traumatic change.

Some of the vociferous propagandists of that meeting became powerful members of the Marcos government. Did conditions change merely because a few writers opted to work for the dictator?

“No artist,” said Nietzsche, “can tolerate the real.”

Indeed, Nietzsche confirms only too well the artistic sensibility, the fact that the artist is the perpetual rebel seeking that elusive truth, or beauty, or perfection, although these may never be, for as a Chinese sage once said, “I searched and searched for the truth and in the end found there was no truth.”