Luis H. Francia introduces Brown River,
White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English
(Rutgers University Press, 1993)
Mr.
and Mrs. English Travel with a Rattan Suitcase
When I first mentioned to American friends
that I was editing an anthology of Philippine literature in English, most
assumed that it would be literature translated
into English. That they should have assumed so didn’t surprise me. Years ago,
when I first came to New York, I thought somewhat naively that everyone knew
Filipinos spoke English, not as a borrowed tongue but as one they grew up with.
My settling in Manhattan quickly disabused me of that notion. I learned early
on, living in a country that once occupied my own, that former colonizers
rarely know much about the histories of their ex-colonies beyond the
superficial, the exotic. The reverse was true, of course: the vanquished
quickly learn the victors’ customs and quirks. In a sense, our voyage here
reflects an artificial nostalgia, a remembrance of what we never actually had.
Initially, I was puzzled when people I met on different occasions often
remarked about how fluent my English was, wondering innocently where I had
picked it up. My reply was usually a flippant “on the plane coming here.” It
didn’t take me long to realize, however, that, while uninformed, the question
was perfectly innocent.
In fact, English is
spoken throughout the archipelago that is the Philippines. A good number of
Filipinos grow up bilingual and even trilingual, not uncommon considering that
approximately eighty-seven indigenous languages exist in the country. This
linguistic bonus may be the only advantage to having been colonized, although,
strange as it may seem, Spanish is no longer widely spoken. Although modern
Tagalog (or Pilipino, as the national tongue is now termed) has a large,
Spanish-derived vocabulary, and although the Southeast Asian nation was part of
New Spain for three and a half centuries, Spanish never took hold the way it
did in Latin America, or the way that the Spanish form of Catholicism did. Not
being a linguist, I can only hazard a guess. In 1898, when the USS Maine was blown up while anchored off
Havana, the United States of America, spoiling for a fight, quickly declared
war on Spain and brought the hostilities to its colonies: the Philippines,
Puerto Rico, and Cuba. With that martial embrace, the United States permanently
altered Philippine history, forever delaying the emergence of Philippine
Spanish as a full-grown language.
This emergence, that
flowering, would have come earlier had the Spanish proved to be as fervent
educators as they were proselytizers. The conquistador and the friar
constituted a formidable duo, implanting the fear of God in brown breasts,
teaching the indios prayering charms
to ward off the devil but lacking the same zeal in educating the masses. Higher
education was reserved for the wellborn, the ilustrados, scions of transplanted Spanish families and of
prominent creole clans. Old World imperialists that they were, the Spanish
disdained any notion of democracy, horrified by the thought of a brown-skinned
people ever identifying with them. Whatever their faults they always made it
perfectly clear how unattractive cross-cultural pollination was to them.
Such unabashed elitism
did little to blunt a burgeoning nationalist consciousness. There were at least
two hundred revolts before 1896, when the Katipunan, a secret revolutionary
society determined to oust the Spanish, launched a successful revolution, the
first in colonial Asia. But victory, however sweet, was short-lived. Another
victor had emerged, more powerful than the fledgling republic. The United
States had easily defeated Spain and, in a betrayal of its alliance with the
Philippine revolutionaries, struck an onerous bargain in Paris in December
1898, paying the Spanish government $20 million for the privilege of being the
new plantation master.
The Yankee embrace
quickly turned into a stranglehold. In a little-known guerrilla war that
prefigured Vietnam by more than fifty years and may have claimed a million
Filipino lives, the Philippine revolutionary government under the leadership of
General Emilio Aguinaldo resisted this New World strain of imperialism for three
years before succumbing to superior arms.
Of the U.S. colonial
adventure, Mark Twain, in his essay “The Philippine Incident,” portrayed a
Filipino “sitting in darkness” who tells himself: “There must be two Americas:
one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom
away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then
kills him to get his land.”[i]
These Caesars proved to be slier and more efficient than the Spanish. Urged on
by both the missionary zeal of Manifest Destiny—a patently racist policy based
on the Kiplingesque idea of the White Man’s Burden—and self-interest, the
Yankees realized very quickly that it would be easier for their values to take
hold if their subjects—or as we were referred to patronizingly in those days,
“little brown brothers”—learned their language. As poet and critic Bienvenido
Lumbera points out, “Although there was some debate as to whether or not a
language native to the Filipinos ought to be the language of education, the
architects of the colonial educational system quickly decided it would be to
the advantage of the U.S. to make English the medium of instruction in the
Philippine schools…. English opened the floodgates of colonial values through
the conduits of textbooks originally intended for American children.”[ii]
So it was that six
hundred American teachers arrived in 1901, on board the USS Thomas (from then on, all the
colonial-era teachers were called “Thomasites”) to spread the gospel according
to Thomas Jefferson & Co. and later to make us forever imagine the ethereal
beauty of white Christmases, Coca Cola bottles in hand. The Philippine Normal
School was founded the same year, so Filipinos could be trained as teachers. In
the meantime, a nationwide public school system was being set in place. Having
been denied mass public education by the Spanish, Filipinos took to learning
their ABCs and nursery rhymes like the proverbial ducks to water, water of a
distinctive New England character. By enabling Filipinos of proletarian
background to go not just to grammar school but all the way to university, the
American occupiers seemed downright revolutionary. While Filipino intellectuals
had previously come from the ranks of the affluent, now they came as well from
the poorer socioeconomic classes. An American-inspired education gave them, in
theory anyway, the means for economic and social mobility. In a feudal society,
however, dependent on clan and blood ties, the notion of mobility ultimately
proved to be a cruel illusion.
Although Spanish
continued to be taught formally in schools through to the early 1970s, English
quickly supplanted it as the language not just of the literati but of
businessmen and politicians as well. In short, it took hold in every arena of
the public sector. Students learned schoolroom Spanish but chose instead to mimic
American accents and slang. Today, except in certain boardrooms and bedrooms,
Spanish hardly figures in any significant public or private discourse. If the
most enduring legacy of the Spaniard was his religion, that of the Yankee was
his language, not, as some claim, democratic institutions. The Americans may
have set these up, but they never allowed unfettered discourse, certainly not
radical criticism of their rule. And they continued to accommodate the same
narrow interests as had existed under the Spanish. As a result, democracy in
the Philippines has always been subject to a great deal of instability. But the
language of administration remains. As in India, it has also served as a
unifying language: people from different linguistic regions often communicate
much better with each other through English. Of course, it is English filtered
through regional accents, just as it is elsewhere.
As with most Filipinos
who get an education, I grew up with three languages: English, Spanish, and
Pilipino. The order in which I list them indicated for a very long time each
tongue’s social standing. And of the three, I am most fluent in English,
reflecting both the conditions of a home where our parents spoke to us in
English and the middle-class society I was reared in, as attuned to the mores
of the Western World as to those of its own milieu. And my education at the
hands of American Jesuits guaranteed an assiduous cultivation of the language
at the expense of Pilipino, referred to by our teachers as the “dialect.” In high
school we were forbidden to speak “dialect” on the premises, and if caught
indulging in it by a teacher or a school monitor (a student who performed the
equivalent functions of a jail trusty) had to undergo “Post”—a form of corporal
punishment whereby we had to perform numbing calisthenics after school.
Except for classes in
Pilipino at the primary school level, my education was thoroughly Western and
almost as thoroughly colonial. The very name of the Jesuit university I attended—Ateneo
de Manila, Spanish for Atheneum of Manila—reflected its European origins.
Naturally, the texts we studied were from the traditional Western canon of
literary and philosophical classics, from Beowulf
and Virgil’s Aeneid to Milton’s Paradise Lost, from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets to Ernest Hemingway’s
stories, from the pre-Socratics to Kant and Martin Buber, from James Joyce’s Dubliners to the plays of Albee and
Beckett. It was fashionable to be given over to bouts of doubt, of angst, to
have, in other words, in a way only the young possess, the dissolute airs of
resolute iconoclasts. And the juvenile rebellions we indulged in were the
sincerest form of flattery we could give the Western authors we so revered. The
Thomasites and their successors had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Given the slant of our
education, not a single class in Philippine literature in English, or in any of
the country’s major languages, was ever taught. (That situation has since been
remedied—proof that a sense of nationalism has finally made some impact on the
private school system.) So I knew it only through my own intermittent readings
outside of school, and through meeting some of its authors. In hindsight that
might have been best, for then I approached the texts with no preconceptions
whatsoever. Still, Philippine literature in English deserved a place in the
curriculum, although its body of works was understandably slim compared to that
of the English and the Americans.
Steeped as I and my
peers were in Western literature, we looked upon our own literature in English
as a poor relative, to be visited from time to time as an act of charity. Our
indifference was inevitable. Had our educators not been so slavish in their
singular imitation of the West, there was absolutely no reason then, as there
is none now, not to appreciate more than one body of literature. This mistaken,
patronizing attitude which we confused with hipness unfortunately extended to
the other arts as well. Thus, for instance, we
much preferred Hollywood films to Filipino ones—sneeringly labeled bakya, a word meaning “wooden clogs”
(footwear for the peasantry) and, in the cultural jargon of the day, used as a
pejorative for any manifestation of popular art. The beauty of the local screen
goddesses had to have Caucasian antecedents. The more mestiza the better.
Our education, alleged
to attune us to the complexities of a heavily Western, heavily modern world,
really served as a wedge between what was native to our soil and what we were
in the process of becoming: stand-ins for our American and Americanized
mentors. More than anything else, our postcolonial education revealed vividly
that school was really more about the process of socialization. We were
expected to embody the store of traditions that mark a society. The irony of
course was that many of these so-called traditions had been transplanted and
considered superior to native ones by that very fact. No more fitting epigraph
exists about our condition, our altered state, than what Edward Said,
discussing Jean Genet’s late works, wrote: “Imperialism is the export of
identity.”[iii]
Sometimes there were
funny consequences. I remember a classmate and friend of mine who was the only
soul on campus who owned a surfboard. He was a devotee of the Southern
California lifestyle, from his Beach Boys haircut to his sockless feet in penny
loafers. Sometimes there were pathetic results: classmates who spoke very
little Pilipino and when they did, spoke it with difficulty. Most of us, however,
straddled the cultural divide quite easily, blending both worlds unconsciously.
Even my surfer friend (he spoke Pilipino fluently), to his credit, had enough
of a sense of the absurd to laugh at himself. This balancing act was an art,
honed over the centuries by a people continually visited by stranger after
stranger, each with fixed ideas as to who we were.
Only after graduating
from university did I begin to methodically read the works of writers who were
homegrown, marked with the same cultural influences, and who used English in a
manner I could instinctively identify with. Not only was the tongue familiar;
so too were the writers. I’ve always resented the lack of formal studies of
Philippine literature in English and when the chance came to do this anthology,
I took it readily. My preparation for it has been a second education, a
rereading of much of what I had read before and a getting to know works I had
hitherto not read. If the idea of a literature in English other than American
or British was lodged somewhat amorphously in my brain, work on this anthology
has shaped it up, and given the word flesh, so to speak. It has also stripped
away certain misplaced expectations. Simply for the reason that Philippine
literature in English has existed for barely nine decades, it would be unwise
and unfair to think of it along the same lines as those of English and American
literatures which both have the advantage of time and which originate in
sources different from those of Philippine culture. It would be more
appropriate to compare it, say, to Indian literature in English, or to other
literatures whose midwife was colonialism: the Caribbean countries, Kenya,
Singapore, Malaysia and the rest.
Yet
it would be a great mistake to view the literatures produced during and after
the colonial era as merely expressions of a foreign culture in native disguise.
Certainly there are in these literatures works that simply mimic, often
artfully, the (as it were) “mother” literature. But most of the writers, having
subsumed English as an expressive vehicle, have long cast it in their image,
shedding the mantle of imitation and self-consciousness. Not surprisingly, the
complex, even Byzantine, web of relations between the colonizer and the
colonized, and the discourse between different cultures, often figure as
prominent themes in these literatures, with their characters embodying cultural
contradictions, North-South, East-West.
We have often been accused of not knowing ourselves, of lacking a clear-cut,
well-defined cultural sensibility. It is an accusation born of the belief that
culture is a neat package, convenient for handling and weighing. This concept,
intrinsically related to ideas of racial purity and a defensive insularity, is
the complete antithesis of living Philippine culture, an attempt to pasteurize
and sterilize it. And many of us are forever attempting to be irreducibly pure
when what we really want to be is irreducibly Filipino. In the Philippine
context, what is foreign and what is indigenous has always been a tricky and
ultimately impossible subject. For better or worse, Filipinos have
unconsciously perfected the art of mixing the two up, confounding definitions
and scholars. To be a purist in such a situation is not just to be a hopeless
romantic but to turn away from the modern Filipino as he or she is: Malayan,
Chinese, Indian, Hispanic, and American—somewhat like a Cubist painting with
blurry lines. As in the painting, a synthesis is involved, a recognition, an
acceptance, of a confusion that can be seen in positive terms. Poet Rolando
Tinio hits it right on the head when he declares, “I mean, somehow the idea of
cultural confusion appeals to me, and I hope that it happens everywhere else
even as I suspect that it happened to the Greeks and the Romans and the Europeans.
The trouble is that we look at the past and the present through the eyes of
scholarship, and scholarship being in love with death, it necessarily kills
what it brings to light.”[iv]
This hodgepodge quality of Philippine society is deliberately reflected in the
works of many of our writers, imparting an idiosyncratic flavor and a layered complexity
to their works. Thus, in her novel, Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn captures
the mestizo nature and soap-operatic flair of Manila society. The two main
characters, Rio and Joey, are of mixed blood, as is their milieu which has
everything, from Hollywood icons and Pacific island languor to Catholic rituals
and macho posturing.
In terms of a genuinely Philippine literary tradition, the past nine decades of
Philippine writing in English form part of its core. There are other, older
streams forming this river of tradition: Tagalog, Visayan, Spanish, among
others. A parallel situation obtains here in the United States, the
quintessential immigrant society: The Anglo tradition may be the most
prominent, but it certainly isn’t the only one. There are African-American,
Hispanic-American, Asian-American and—the oldest—Native- American traditions.
English in the Philippines many have come from a feared Anglo America, but it
has since blended with the landscape. The poet Gemino Abad declares that “the
Filipino writer of English is enabled to transform, to mold unto his own image
and sensibility, the ideology or the way of seeing and feeling which the alien
language secretes. English in Filipino hands, under the pressure of his own
circumstances and choices, becomes not English but Filipino. If he is at first
possessed, he comes also in time to posses both the medium and the message in
his own way, by the language of his blood.”[v]
I believe writers write primarily for self-knowledge, to try to understand the
mystery of being, and of being themselves, perhaps in relation to others—to
society–or simply in relation to their own ideas and perceptions of who they
are. Apart from style, what differentiates two writers from different
backgrounds is language and culture. The process of exploration, of writing, of
language itself, cannot be separated from the cultural process. Nick Joaquin,
then, or Ninotchka Rosca is no more American than the Caribbean poet Derek
Walcott or the Indian writer R.K. Narayan is English. Language—as filtered
through a particular culture—and writer always interact, each language offering
a distinct if stubborn landscape, the writer seeking to alter its contours to
fit, more or less, the geography of his or her experience, real or imagined.
Whatever Philippine writers write about, whether they intend to or not, reveals
them as being ineluctably Filipino.
In a postcolonial society such as ours, the question of cultural identity is a
crucial one, particularly since our sense of collective self tends to be
fragmented. Social distinctions in an industrial society normally presuppose a
distance between “I” and “Thou” – and an even greater one between “I” and “We,”
with the “I” holding the preeminent spot. We take this atomization for granted;
but from all indications, precolonial Philippine society—a geographic grouping
of different kingdoms and tribes—stressed the communal over the individual. And
it was a sense of communality that embraced strangers as long as these weren’t
hostile. It was an extremely hospitable embrace: a semitropical climate,
volcanic soil, and fertile waters meant abundance was the rule rather the
exception. We could afford to be generous to a fault and so were. Such
generosity was manipulated by the Westerner, rendering us victims of our own
hospitality.
Behind our legendary open arms is a deeper reason than sheer bonhomie. Good
that the newcomer feels relaxed but make no mistake: the paroxysms of
generosity and friendliness are essentially masks to conceal our inner selves.
Seduced by kindness, the stranger will be less inclined to probe further and
inquire about the secret compartments every people possesses. When Octavio Paz
in his study of the Mexican character, The Labyrinth of Solitude,
describes his typical compatriot as “a person who shuts himself away to protect
himself: his face is a mask and so is his smile,” he could have been describing
the Filipino.[vi] Our masks of kindness
have helped us survive, as the apt and familiar phrase in Manila goes, four
hundred years in a convent and fifty in Hollywood.
Filipinos have been so good at hiding their selves that these are in danger of
being lost. It has been fashionable for a while now to speak of the “Other”:
one hears this notion incessantly discussed in panel after panel, often with
predictable rhetoric substituting for insight. For most Westernized Filipinos –
and I certainly can be categorized as such – the “Other” exists but as a
rudimentary reminder of what the pre-Western inhabitant of the archipelago was
like, or was imagined to be like. Here ultimately lies the cruel legacy of
colonialism: the Other refers to what was once our familiar but now has become
foreign; and what was once foreign has now become our familiar. If the idea of
the Other appears as an exoticized objectification of the alien in contemporary
Western society, in the Philippines what has been exoticized and commodified
has been the deepest part of our selves. The chroniclers of our history who
were known to the world were invariably Westerners; these wrote about us as
though “us” were distant. No wonder then that between the chronicled and the
chronicler there existed a tremendous gap. Even today, in a supposedly
postcolonial age, colonial images of the Philippines—for that matter, of Third
World countries—linger on in global discourse like an invincible virus, spread
by “experts” who, like their predecessors, happen for the most part to be white
and male. Inheritors of that formalist history (as opposed to living, unwritten
traditions) occupy the exact same spot where stood the original observers and
with the same bent: viewing themselves as though they were Other, perpetuating
a decidedly painful colonial hangover.
Literary texts being historical texts as well, i.e., written at precise moments
in a country’s evolution, they can help the process of commodification, or they
can expose it. Apart from their literariness, they tell us a great deal about
ourselves. Even more, they can give us back our “selves.” In a sense, many of
our Filipino writers in English are engaged in the literary equivalent of
guerrilla warfare, using the very same weapon that had been employed to foist
another set of foreign values upon a ravished nation, but now as part of an
arsenal meant for conscious self-determination and the unwieldy process of
reclaiming psychic territory from the invader. In the process, as we have grown
more assured, no longer self-conscious in the use of what was once a foreign
tongue, we have become more aware of—no, much more comfortable with—the many
disparate strands of the collective self.
Imagine, then, English in the Philippines as an American-made train, its
luggage racks and boxcars crammed with American baggage and freight. Imagine
the train rolling out of the depot and across the country, picking up Filipino
passengers along the way. As the train’s racks and freight cars are filled with
what to the Filipino are strange-looking suitcases, portmanteaus, and various
other items, it becomes readily apparent that there is no place for his or her
own luggage. In a supreme act of accommodation, many chuck their goods out the
window and cheerfully appropriate what is already there. But as the train goes
deeper and deeper into the countryside, more and more passengers come aboard
until eventually one or two or three start to toss out the strange-looking
suitcases, portmanteaus, and various other items and replace them with their
own, but made of bamboo, rattan, buri. And almost everyone follows suit, until
finally the train’s metamorphosis is complete, and it becomes indisputably
Philippine.
The stories and poems in this anthology are portmanteaus or a unique society,
containing images drawn from different social strata, different time periods,
different locals. Businessmen, doctors, soldiers, farmers, workers, slum
dwellers, immigrants, artists, students—they’re all here. And the themes are as
varied: incest, the burdens of tradition, reincarnation, the horror of tyranny,
young love, exile, among others. From Paz Marquez Benitez’s short story “Dead
Stars” (the earliest story included here) and Amador Daguio’s poem “Man of
Earth” to Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas’s story, “Prodigal Season,” and Emmanuel
Lacaba’s poem “Open Letters to Filipino Artists,” this collection of short
stories and poetry should give the American reader—and, for that matter, any
reader of English—more than aesthetic pleasure, even though that is the main
intent here. It should also give the reader a view of Philippine society, past
and present, different from what could otherwise be obtained.
Because this is a single volume, I have limited its scope to the short story
and to poetry; my choices are based on an exhaustive reading of works published
since Philippine literature in English began. As is probably true of other anthologies,
I selected more than could finally fit in this one-volume format. The
subsequent and painful task of eliminating stories and poems was solely mine
so, yes, I am to blame for this book’s omissions, no one else.
•
When we consider that English was brought in at the turn of this now-ending
century and that recognizably serious literary efforts started to emerge in the
1920s, the results in literature have been remarkable. For one thing, many of
the pioneers in Philippine literature in English are still with us. And we
benefit from their recollections, especially on their early literary
influences. Bienvenido Santos, now in his early eighties, says at the beginning
of his career that he was “impressed by Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson. I like, I
loved, Anderson. … It was a tribute to the way Sherwood Anderson wrote, I
really like Anderson better than Hemingway. Later, of course, I even liked
Faulker better than Hemingway.” The poet Angela Manalang Gloria remembers
reading Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
although she “preferred Spanish poetry, which cast a heady spell over me.”[vii]
Inevitably, the way
most of the early Philippine writers used English indicated that it had come
from the outside. This couldn’t be helped. They grew up in a society that,
while governed by English-speakers, was still very much Hispanic. Describing
those early efforts, critic Pura Santillan-Castrence points out: “Indeed,
Spanish was the language which the predecessor-writers used. …Much of that
Spanish psychology has clung to the writing of some of them, as well as the
Spanish floridness of expression, the flowery turn of phrase. Perhaps also some
of the bombast.”[viii] So we had a Filipino,
steeped in a Catholic, Spanish tradition, articulating the creative impulse in
an Anglo-Saxon tongue.
In literary endeavors,
the first known Filipino poem in English, Justo Juliano’s “Sursum Corda,” was
printed in 1907, six years from the arrival of the Thomasites. In 1920, the
first collection of poems was published, Never
Mind and Other Poems, by Procopio Solidum. But as early as 1899 there existed
English-language newspapers, and in 1900 the Daily Bulletin, (now the Manila
Bulletin) was founded. As was to be expected, initial literary expressions
were stiff, betraying the still-heavy influence of Spanish. Thus for instance
these lines, from Maximo Kalaw’s “The Parting Year”:
But
no! O no! leave that alone –
Awakening
love! I have it hid
Within
me deep, leave it unknown
Till
it o’ergrows and flies unbid.[ix]
The early short stories in English,
which favored romances and adventures as themes, displayed the same awkward
characteristics.[i] By the mid-1920s, however,
stories were beginning to shed the mantle of imitation and, with the
publication of Paz Marquez Benitez’s “Dead Stars” in 1925, the Philippine short
story in English had arrived. A tale of loss and disillusionment, “Dead Stars”
is simply constructed but gives a convincing portrait of a man’s inner
conflict, born of a kind of romantic idealism, and his attempts to resolve it.[ii]
There is little dialogue, and the author skillfully situates the reader
squarely in the middle of the protagonist Alfredo’s romantic turmoil.
In
poetry Luis Dato, born during the early years of American rule, was among the
first poets to create work that, like “Dead Stars,” established its own
identity, its own place. “Day on the Farm,” written in 1934 and following the
classical sonnet form with its ABAB rhyme scheme, isn’t really about farm life
but about the poet’s beloved whose “smiles have died.” While romantic, it
avoids the exaggerated rhetorical flourish typical of the lines above. And the
couplet, with its gentle remonstrance, is distinctly modernist in tone.
Unquestionably,
English has been ingrained into our writers’ consciousness as yet another
language in which to express themselves. Yet, though no longer in an
overbearing way, an unmistakable Spanish flavor lingers on in much of
contemporary Philippine literature in English. As many have remarked, our
fiction bears a strong resemblance to South America’s. And why not? With our
Hispanic roots we could very well be a displaced Latin American country,
Southeast Asia’s odd man.
But
it is precisely the tensions and contradictions that result from two or more
cultures coexisting with the same social framework that give much of our
literature its impetus. The best example is Nick Joaquin, one of the country’s
most gifted writers. Joaquin, who has written in both Spanish and English,
represents a bridge between a Hispanic Philippines and an Americanized
archipelago. His subjects have included the ilustrados
as well as young modern couples very much attuned to Yankee ways. But it is in
his stories of the dying class of Hispanicized Filipinos that Joaquin is at his
best. Such masterpieces as “The Summer Solstice” and “Mayday Eve” could only
have been penned by a Filipino of a certain generation steeped in the Hispanic
traditions, especially Catholicism, that took root in the islands.
His
stories of predominantly creole characters form a collective romantic elegy,
infused with a bittersweet tone, on the grandeur of the colonial Spanish era.
Often, Joaquin reveals how a pre-Hispanic and Hispanic ways are a curious and
in the end contrapuntal conjunction. In “The Summer Solstice,” the upper-class
Don Paeng and Doña Lupeng have
all the affections of Spanish gentry, but Doña
Lupeng gets drawn into a pre-Hispanic ritual, the Tadtarin, where only women are allowed to participate and which
ultimately asserts the supremacy of the female principle. It is something the
domineering husband cannot understand, so distant is he from the native
traditions, but in a powerful ending, he submits to her totally.
This
tug between two cultures is a common note sounded by many of our writers, such
as Carlos Bulosan, Bienvenido Santos, F.Sionil Jose, Sinai Hamada, and
Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas. The stories of Bulosan and Santos in particular very
often deal with the confluence and conflict of Philippine and American values.
Bulosan is especially concerned with the social dimensions of this uneasy
exchange, expressing his concerns mostly in comedy and satire. Santos favors an
understated emotionalism, and records the psychological toll years of exile
take on womenless manongs, or aging
Filipino men. Both Bulosan’s and Santos’s characters embody the inequities and
loneliness of being a person of color in a predominately white society.
In
Philippine poetry in English, with themes that are even more varied, the
cultural tug is not so evident simply because of poetry’s elliptical nature.
But a debate began in the 1930s, between art for art’s sake and art informed by
social causes, continues to be an influential one. That was the decade when
Jose Garcia Villa – the best-known Philippine poet in English – first declared
meaning anathema to poetry, or at the very least irrelevant. He stressed craft
and the supremacy of language and music over content. Because Villa, who has
lived most of his life in New York, acquired an international reputation, his
pronouncements have had a seminal influence on younger generations of
Philippine writers. His credo – formalist, abstract, experimental – broke with
tradition, a tradition created by Tagalog and Spanish works written from the
nineteenth century to the 1920s. Prior to 1946, when we gained our independence
from the United States, writers drew principally from this tradition, fueled by
the 1896 Revolution, in their drive for the Filipinos’ right to
self-determination. Accompanying the clamor for independence was a campaign “to
make Americans aware of the cultural legacy of the Filipino people, as this was
concretized in the folklore, history and literature of the Philippines.”[iii]
It
was precisely this tradition and the agrarian and social unrest of the 1930s
(an unrest even greater today) that prompted Villa’s contemporary, the critic
and educator Salvador P. Lopez, to repudiate the poet’s aesthetics as the
meaningless result of a writer, “a decadent aesthete who stubbornly confuses
literature with painting and refuses to place works in the employ of man and
his civilization.” For Lopez, the writer ignored society and its political and
social struggles only at the risk of becoming irrelevant, of being read solely
in elitist circles. Lopez favored the creation of works in service of political
and social change—in a word, proletarian literature.[iv]
The
advent of New Criticism as an influential critical theory, with its overriding
emphasis on the text as a thing-in-itself (whether as object of scrutiny or in
the making), meant that appreciating literature apart from its social context
was not merely permissible but necessary as well, if writers were to be
artistically effective. The supremacy given to the text swung the debate in favor
of Villa’s nontraditional aesthetics.[v]
While New Criticism meant the short end of the stick for social issues
(although this wasn’t true of writing in the Philippines), it did force writers
to pay close attention to craft, to the “literariness” of their works. But
since the fundamental changes wrought in the national consciousness by the
martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos, from the 1970s to the mid-eighties, and
the aggravation of persistent social and political problems, the debate has
been rekindled.
Nevertheless,
it would be reductive thinking to categorize the poems one way or the other.
Good poets, natural subverters of dogma, render the debate, and any pigeonholing,
superfluous. The best example I can think of is Emmanuel Lacaba who, having
joined the New People’s Army in the 1970s after acquiring a Byronic reputation
in Manila, was at the age of twenty-seven treacherously shot by a military
patrol after his capture in 1976. His early works are evidence of a
tremendously gifted bard; they can also be easily seen as the writings of an
“aesthete.” However, the works composed after he went underground (many of
which were written in Pilipino) retain a lyrical tone even as they grapple with
highly political issues. His last poem, “Open Letters to Filipino Artists,” a
magnificent three-part work finished two months before his death, is also his
best, a moving testament to the revolutionary spirit of the poet himself and of
the masses. The third and last section, with its brief quote from Robert
Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” is unrivaled for the way it seamlessly weaves
lyrical intensity and political fervor. There can be no question that as the
poet wrote this he was for one transcendent moment both the incarnation of past
Filipino revolutionaries and a modern
man schooled in the ways and tongue of the west.
=====
The
flux that characterizes Philippine society today is as great as any that has
gripped it in the past. It will certainly affect the future of English in the
Philippines but precisely in what way is extremely difficult to predict.
Change, as the recent tumultuous events on the global stage have shown, has a
way of thumbing its nose at prediction. Certainly as a language English has set
down roots. Just as there is “Spanglish,” there is also “Taglish”— a
conversational mode where speakers shuttle effortlessly between Tagalog and
English and where English words have been Filipinized. The use of English may
have begun, as Francisco Arcellana points out, as a “historical mistake,” but
by the thirties “the Filipino writer in English may be said to have mastered
the language well enough to enable him to observe the life around him without
the language interfering. … he felt he had sufficient control of it to be able
to look at his material with a clear vision, unobstructed by language only
partially possessed.” He goes on to note that “the writer is a writer exactly
because he sees with language, not
just with his eyes: only that has been which has been verbalized. The harsh
truth is that the writer is a writer exactly because he lives with words: until
experience is transfigured into words, it is not experience.”[vi]
Many
nationalists would eliminate this “historical mistake” altogether, relying on
arguments traditionally used against Spanish that appeal to a vision of the
Filipino as untainted by foreign influences. More pragmatic nationalists simply
point to the enormous gulf that separates the mass of readers of Pilipino and
other indigenous languages from English-language readers. The latter is a
strong argument, but it is an argument not so much against the use of English
as for a wider use—and appreciation—of the various main languages of the
archipelago such as Tagalog, Cebuano, and Ilocano. Indeed, it is not uncommon
for many of our writers to write in two languages, including English. If after
all it is the writer’s prerogative to use the language(s) most suited to his or
her temperament, then the question isn’t so problematic as it seems. I quite
agree with Tinio when he writes, “And … the best thing for the Filipino writer
in English is to write in English. If tomorrow I suddenly decide to read
nothing but Tagalog poems, perhaps even write Tagalog poems—well, isn’t that
nice? Perhaps I will, and perhaps I won’t, but whatever I choose to do is
certainly nobody else’s business.”[vii]
Ironically,
a significant portion of the literature that contributed to the debate on nationalism,
or served to fan its flames, has been written either in Spanish or English, from
the anticlerical Spanish novels of the nineteenth-century reformist and genius
Jose Rizal (he was executed by the Spanish in 1896) to the continuing critiques
in English of Philippine society by nationalist historian Renato Constantino.
The
debate over language and identity continues. Personally, I find the idea of
cultural diversity appealing, although it may seem like pointless confusion to
others. And perhaps, having been raised in a multicultural society, I am making
a virtue out of a historical condition. Still, as boundaries disappear and
cultures become more fluid than ever, diversity will be the keynote of a global
community even as it strives to become unified. In the case of the Philippines,
by wishing our intracultural differences weren’t so pronounced, we strain after
a false homogeneity. Is it that we lack, or that we have too much? The daunting
challenge of a twice-colonized people is to assimilate constructive aspects of
the past and forge a new identity that unstintingly acknowledges history, but
in ways that liberate rather than constrict us.
One
thing is evident: Philippine writers in English know better than to expect a
mass audience in their home country, partly for reasons discussed and partly
because of the absence of a viable publishing industry. The books in English
published in the Philippines stand little chance of international distribution.
There are a few distributors here and there, but these cater to a specialized
audience. Being published outside of the country, then, is prized not so much
for its cachet as for the opportunity of tapping into a much greater reading
public. Of course, to be shut off from a wider audience is not the mere result
of market mechanisms but more precisely of a lack of empowerment, the
consequences of which the late great film director Luis Buñuel in his autobiography, My Last Breath, clearly saw: “It seems clear to me that without the
enormous influence of the canon of American culture, Steinbeck would be
unknown, as would Dos Passos and Hemingway. If they’d been born in Paraguay or
Turkey, no one would have ever read them, which suggests the alarming fact that
the greatness of a writer is in direct proportion to the power of his country.
Galdos, for instance, is often as remarkable as Dostoevsky, but who outside of
Spain ever reads him?”[viii]
This
anthology is a small but, I believe, important gesture toward addressing the
disparities in dissemination that exist between Third World literatures and
those of the West. It also represents in some way a creative subversion of the
Thomasites’ efforts, in a way they never dreamed of. The language they brought
with them almost a century ago is not the language that exists today. Language
survives and flourishes as a mutable form, or not at all.
In
the long run, what endures in the physical language is the language of the
spirit. Surely it is enough that the creative minds behind these stories, these
poems, are leaving their unique imprints to be noticed and remarked upon by the
society they lived in, and by the society that will come after. I hope the
reader who comes to these works fresh will be enlivened and pleased, and that
the reader already familiar with them will have memory not only delightfully
rekindled but added to.
====
I would like to thank the following individuals and
institutions for lending me hard-to-find books or for facilitating access to
certain libraries: Reynaldo Alejandro, Luis Cabalquinto, Nick Deocampo, Jessica
Hagedorn, Prospero Hernandez of Rutgers University Press, the Philippine
Center, Ninotchka Rosca, Jack Salzman and Ian Moulton of the Center for
American Culture Studies, Bart Suretsky, and Ted Tanoue.
My
gratitude as well to my editor Kenneth Arnold, and to David Friedman and
Virgilio Reyes for their invaluable comments on the draft of my Introduction.
NEW YORK CITY
NOVEMBER 1992
*****
Luis H. Francia is a poet and a nonfiction
writer. His
latest volume of poetry is Tattered Boat,
released in 2014. His poems have been translated into several languages. He has
read at numerous literary festivals and most recently at the XIth International Festival of Poetry (2015), held
annually in Granada, Nicaragua. His nonfiction works include Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago,
winner of both the 2002 PEN Open Book Award and the 2002 Asian American Writers
Award, and Memories of Overdevelopment:
Reviews and Essays of Two Decades. A collection of his most recent
nonfiction, RE: Recollections, Reviews,
Reflections, was just published this summer. He is on the faculty of Asian
American Studies at New York University and Hunter College. He teaches creative
writing at the City University of Hong Kong.
[ii]
Bienvenido Lumbera and Cynthia Nograles-Lumbera, Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology (Manila: National
Bookstore, 1982), 109-110.
[iii]
Edward Said, “On Jean Genet’s Late Works,” Grand
Street 9, No. 4(1990), 38.
[iv]
Rolando Tinio, “Period of Awareness: The Poets,” in Brown Heritage, ed. Antonio Gella Manuud (Manila: Ateneo de Manila
University Press, 1967), 618.
[v]
Gemino H. Abad, “Reading past Writ,” in Man
of Earth: An Anthology of Filipino Poetry and Verse from English, 1905 to the
Mid-1950s., eds. G.H. Abad and E.Z. Manlapaz (Manila: Ateneo de Manila
University Press, 1989), 9.
[vi]
Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude
(New York: Grove Press, 1985), 29.
[vii]
Edilberto N. Alegre and Doreen G. Fernandez, The Writer and His Milieu (Manila:
De La Salle University Press, 1984), 63.
[viii]
Pura Santillan-Castrence, “The Period of Apprenticeship,” in Brown Heritage, ed. Manuud, 548.
[ix]
Abad and Manlapaz, eds. Man of Earth,
30.
[x]
Richard Croghan, S.J., The Development of
Philippine Literature in English (Quezon City: Alemar-Phoenix Publishing House, 1975), 6.
[xi]
Santillan-Castrence, “The Period of Apprenticeship,” 551.
[xii]
Lumbera and Nograles-Lumbera, Philippine
Literature, 103.
[xiii]
Herbert Schneider, S.J., “The Period of Emergence of Philippine Letters
(1930-1944),” in Brown Heritage, ed.
Manuud, 583.
[xiv]
Lumbera and Nograles-Lumbera, Philippine
Literature, 235 ff.
[xv]
Francisco Arcellan, “Period of Emergence: The Short Story,” in Brown Heritage, ed. Manuud, 607-608.
[xvi]
Tinio, “Period of Awareness,” 619.
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