Nick Carbó introduces
BABAYLAN: An Anthology of Filipina and
Filipina American Writers edited by Nick Carbó and Eileen R. Tabios
(Aunt Lute Press, San
Francisco, 2000)
THE OTHER HALF OF THE
SKY
In the
Philippine Literary Constellation, most of the brightest stars (whose names are
repeated by the lips of every Filipino high school student) are those of men:
Jose Rizal, Francisco Balagtas, Jose Garcia Villa, Bienvenido N. Santos, N.V.M.
Gonzalez, F. Sionil Jose, and Nick Joaquin. But there is another half of the
sky—pacificblue, pearlwhite, alizarin sunset red, a keeper of secrets at night,
a mysterious kiss, a music box of precious scents, a shelf of sounds, a
comfortable womb, a rainbow of silk, a sudden storm—a place that is eternally
feminine. This is an area of the sky
that male literary cartographers have rarely paid attention to with their
sextants, compasses, telescopes, and slide rulers. Though there is little mention of Filipina
women writers like Leona Florentino, Magdalena Jalandoni, Paz Marquez Benitez,
Estrella Alfon, Angela Manalang Gloria, or Paz M. Latorena, these women—poets,
short story writers, and novelists—contributed much to Philippine literature
during the last part of the 19th century and well into the first half of the
twentieth century. Without them Philippine literature would be only
half as rich. The scholar and critic
Thelma B. Kintanar notes: “A bibliography of the Philippine novel from its
beginnings to 1975 shows that of 352 novelists listed, 33 were women who wrote
167 of the some 1,200 novels in the list—roughly 10 per cent” (Emergent Voices 1994)
The
tradition of women's writing in the Philippines can be traced back to the pre-hispanic
era of the archipelago when, in certain communities, priestess-poets called babaylan (Bisayan) and catalonan (Tagalog) held sway in the
spiritual and ritualistic lives of the people.
These women provided healing, wisdom, and direction for the inhabitants
of their barangays (towns) with
morality stories, myths, poems, prayers, and chants. When the Spanish colonizers arrived with
Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, they called these women pintadas (painted ones) because of the decorative tattoos on their
arms. During the subsequent 300 years of
Spanish colonization under the Catholic Church these priestess-poets gradually
lost their positions of privilege and much of that early oral tradition has
been erased.
The
earliest Filipina woman of letters is a poet, Leona Florentino
(1849-1884). She was born in Vigan,
Ilokos Sur to a rich landed family and began to write youthful verses in
Spanish at the age of ten. Her parents,
following the feudal/patriarchal tradition of the time, married her off to
Elias de los Reyes, the son of another landed family in the area. Together they had five children but their
marriage was full of strife. Her husband
forbade her from writing and threatened to ban her from his house. Leona considered the threat and came to the
conclusion that her writing was more important than her marriage to an abusive
husband. So she left her children in
care of her sister and went into self-exile to live alone in a place called
An-annam, Bantay. Considering the strong
patriarchal and religious codes of the time, this was a very brave act, even
braver when one realizes that the husband Leona dared to defy was then the Alcalde (Mayor) of the town she lived
in. Living in relative isolation, she
was free to express her creativity in verses and plays she now wrote in Iloko,
her native tongue. She wrote mostly for
herself, not intending to have her work published. At the age of thirty-five,
she died of tuberculosis. It was only
after her death that she became the first Filipino poet, man or woman, to achieve
international acclaim. In 1887 her son,
Isabelo de los Reyes, of the Ilustrado
generation living in Spain, managed to have a selection of her poems exhibited
in the Exposition Filipina in Madrid.
Her poems were also exhibited in the 1889 Exposition Internationale in
Paris and were subsequently selected by Madame Andzia Wolska for inclusion in
the book Bibliotheque Internationale des
Ourves des Femmes (1889). Leona was
a contemporary of the poets Christina Rossetti in England and Emily Dickinson
in America, and her uncompromising poems record a rich imagination that only a
Filipina could have captured. Here is a
poem of hers translated from the Spanish by Norma Lua (another appears at the
end of this volume to close out the poetry section):
TO AN OLD MAID ON HER BIRTHDAY
A maiden who turns twenty-eight
years old
is like a wilted jasmine, and she
should indeed worry
that her merchandise does not
become consumo.
Because even if all possible
efforts are exerted
to sustain a jasmine past its
bloom, when it bends
toward the earth, it always has to
fall, for its vitality
has been spent. As early as
possible, therefore, you must avoid
terrible old age; always show
vitality and cheerfulness
although your old age is already
approaching.
If you measure well the wine that
you sell
(she addresses a beverage vendor),
many will like you, especially the
old men S and B.
Check your bad temper because it is
one
of the reasons for the hastening of
age,
especially when G the flirt puts one over you.
Try to divert yourself especially
when
the old women D and N become
flirtatious,
for they are like the plant tigui
that makes one itch.
If you follow my advice, have no
doubt that you will get
to the seventh sacrament, which Don
Domingo
(another old suitor of yours) has
offered.
Another
matriarch of Filipina writing is Magdalena Jalandoni (1891-1978), who wrote twenty-five
novels and seventy volumes of corridos
in Hiligaynon, a Philippine dialect. She
was born in Iloilo, on the island of Panay, and from a young age was considered
a “rebellious” child. When her mother
discovered that Magdalena was writing poems and stories, she discouraged this
activity by beating her daughter; Magdalena’s brother, Luis, on the other hand,
was encouraged when he showed some talent in writing. The beatings, however, did not stop Magdalena
from expressing her rich imagination; by the age of 16, she had written her
first novel Ang Mga Tunok Sang Isa Ka
Bulak (A Flower’s Thorns) behind her
mother’s back and had it published under a pseudonym. Magdalena is known as the first full-time
Filipina woman of letters. Devoting all
of her energies to the life of the imagination, she stipulated that if she were
to ever marry, her husband would have to be “a man with the soul of an artist .
. . and as a first test, the man must first write a good novel.” She stayed single her whole life.
The arrival
of another colonizer, the United States, to the Philippines in 1898 brought a
new language which the natives used to express themselves. 1902 to 1940 marks
the period in which Philippine literature in English begins to “emerge” from
the shackles of American colonization.
During this period of literary “apprenticeship” (in English—as noted
above, Filipinas had already well established literary traditions in the
vernacular as well as in Spanish) several Filipina women took the front stage
in the development of English as a Philippine literary tradition. The first published short story in English
that attained superior praise from American and Filipino critics was “Dead
Stars” (1927) by Paz Marquez Benitez (1894-1983). Other master short story writers of this
period included Loreto Paras Sulit, Paz Latorena, and Estrella Alfon. Angela Manalang Gloria was the first woman to
publish a book of poetry in English in the Philippines. Her collection Poems (1940) was entered in the competition for the Commonwealth
Prize but did not win because a number of the judges (all male) objected to
three controversial poems: “Revolt From Hymen,” “Querida,” and “Heloise to
Abelard.” She had to revise the book, changing
the word “whore” to “bore” in one of her poems, so it could be used in schools.
The closing
decade of this century has brought change, a new horizon, and new stars to the Philippine
literary constellation. Patterns of
migration have brought Filipinos to the United States as immigrants and
sojourners. Among these pioneer writers
is Felicidad V. Ocampo, who authored The
Lonesome Cabin (1932) and The Brown
Maiden (1933), both published in the United States. The first Filipina poet to achieve a measure
of success in the U.S. was Edith Tiempo when her poem "Lament for the
Littlest Fellow" was published in the February 1952 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse and her book
of poetry The Tracks of Babylon and Other
Poems was published in 1966. In 1975
Jessica Hagedorn published Dangerous
Music, a ground-breaking book of poetry, and followed it with a book of
short fiction, Pet Food and Tropical
Apparitions (1981). Hagedorn's star
began to glow brighter in 1990 when her first novel Dogeaters was published by Pantheon and was nominated for a
National Book Award. She followed this success
with a book of poetry and short fiction Danger
and Beauty (1993) and a second novel The
Gangster of Love (1996). Another
Filipina novelist whose star is also illuminating the night sky is Ninotchka
Rosca. Her two novels State of War (1988) and Twice Blessed (1992) are watershed marks
in Filipino and Filipino American literature.
Other
Filipina writers have gained acclaim in this part of the world as well,
including Marianne Villanueva’s
acclaimed book of short stories Ginseng
and Other Tales from Manila (1991), Cecilia Manguerra-Brainard’s first
novel to be published in the U.S., When
the Rainbow Goddess Wept (1992) and first time novelist Sophia Romero’s Always Hiding (1998). Filipina poets’
collections are also making their mark in the U.S., such as Mila D. Aguilar’s A Comrade is as Precious as a Rice Seedling
(1984), Virginia Cerenio’s influential Trespassing
Innocence (1989), and Maria Luisa Aguilar-Carino’s In the Garden of the Three Islands (1995). In 1995, Fatima
Lim-Wilson won a Pushcart Prize and the Journal Award/Ohio State University
Prize for her book Crossing the Snow
Bridge (1995). All of these prominent Filipina poets and writers have had
two or more books (written in English) published in the Philippines.
The
Filipina American literature written in this country is inextricably linked to
the tradition of Filipina literature back in the islands. The appearance of this anthology dedicated
solely to the writing of Filipinas and Filipina Americans is an historic first
in the United States. There have been
anthologies of women’s writing published in the Philippines within the last
twenty years such as Edna Zapanta Manlapaz’s watershed collection Song of Ourselves (1994), Tina Cuyugan’s
Forbidden Fruit (1992), Mila Astorga
Garcia, Marra PL. Lanot, and Lilia Quindoza-Santiago’s Filipina I (1984), but until now, none have been published on this
side of the Pacific Ocean. Babaylan does not attempt to be a
comprehensive collection of all the important women writers of Filipino
heritage. What Eileen Tabios and I have assembled here is just a glimpse of the
varied contemporary talent of women writing today. We begin each section with the work of a
woman writer (Paz Marquez-Benitez’s “Dead Stars” in Prose and Angela
Manalang-Gloria’s three poems in Poetry) who is no longer alive but is
considered as a literary matriarch of her field. Then we present the writers and poets in
alphabetical order to let the stories, poems, and plays speak for themselves in
their natural grandeur. We have created
a sub-section, “Poetry in Translation,” which includes poems written in Tagalog,
Ilokano, Cebuano, and Kinaray-a with English translations. Some of the poems were written originally in
the vernacular language like those of Luisa A. Igloria, Elynia S. Ruth
Mabanglo, and Milagros Lachica. Marjorie Evasco, by contrast, “transcreates”
into her native Cebuano poems written originally in English. We hope that this section helps to elucidate
the multilingual aspect of Filipino culture in which a writer is comfortable
expressing herself not only in her native dialect but also in the national
language (Pilipino/Tagalog) and in English.
The transnational component of Filipina writing is represented by women
who have productive creative lives in cities as glamorous as Paris, Madrid,
London, Sydney, and Singapore. These Filipinas, like the formidable short story
writer Reine Arcache Melvin in Paris and the multi-awarded
poet/fictionist/playwright Merlinda Bobis in Australia have made their careers
in their respective countries as Filipina identified writers.
There are
also many younger Filipina Americans emerging as points of light on the horizon
who are now establishing publishing careers in the United States, like M.
Evelina Galang, author of the influential collection of short stories Her Wild American Self (1996); and Lara
Stapleton, author of a critically acclaimed short story collection The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing
(1998). In the genre of poetry Catalina Cariaga announces the presence of a powerful
Filipina voice in the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement of American poetry with her
first book Cultural Evidence (1999),
while Marisa de los Santos’ prize-winning first book From the Bones Out (2000) provides us a glimpse of a future star in
American poetry. The Filipinas in this
anthology will continue the rich tradition of Philippine literature in English
and they will contribute much to the ever-expanding vista of the American and
global literary sky.
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