MAILEEN HAMTO Reviews
(Anvil Publishing, 1996)
How does one begin to
offer an analysis of the works of the late Philippine literary icon N.V. M.
Gonzalez, a pioneer of Philippine literature in English, whose novels and short
stories defined the imaginative soul of a nation still coming to its own?
The essays compiled in
“The Novel of Justice: Selected Essays 1968-1994” embody the thoughtful and ruminative
quality of N.V.M.’s work in the last decades of his illustrious writing and
teaching career. Thirteen thought pieces fixated on an artist’s meditations on
his craft: form, readership, voice, point of view, even critiques of other writers.
What sets N.V.M.’s essays
apart is its focus on the diasporic experience of a storyteller writing of myth
and memory, about the aspirations and apathy of a people long expulsed from the
idyllic landscape of the Philippine countryside. The essays focus on identity and
place as a writer in exile, whose works decode the Filipino experience and psyche
to a global audience unfamiliar and oftentimes indifferent to the legacy of
colonization.
In fairness (in
current-day Tagalog vernacular), each essay in the volume could easily command
multiple analyses from varying perspectives. To properly and adequately offer
another perspective of “The Novel of Justice,” it was important to understand
the legacy of N.V.M. Along with his contemporaries Nick Joaquin and Bienvenido
Santos, N.V.M. braved the unforgiving literary jungle to rise as the
indomitable novelist-poet-essayist who straddled and navigated the complexities
of his mantel as the bard of his people: gifted and eloquent in the new
empire’s language.
Nelson Vincent Madali
Gonzalez was born in 1915, a mere 13 years after the end of the
Philippine-American War. After more than 300 years of Spanish conquest, the Philippines
was then a new addition to the United States’ execution of Manifest Destiny in
the Pacific. N.V.M. began writing in the 1930s in literary forms both foreign
and familiar, in a language new to the indigenous tongue. In his lifetime, N.V.M.
authored six novels, multiple collections of short stories and numerous essays,
and won critical acclaim for his disarmingly self-aware depictions of the lived
Filipino experience.
The colonists required
exceptional people with extraordinary talent to represent the best of the
empire, and N.V.M. was indeed genius. Not only did N.V.M. write about
Philippine folk life with great authenticity and empathy, he also schooled
himself in the tradition of American writers and Western thought. Among American and Philippine critics, he drew
comparisons to William Faulkner.
In academia was where he
truly belonged, as he relished the opportunity to connect with emerging writers
through teaching appointments in the Philippines, San Francisco and Los
Angeles. In 1987, N.V.M. received the degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from the
University of the Philippines. He was honored with the 1996 “Diwa ng Lahi”
recognition, in honor of his contributions to Philippine literature. N.V.M.
received the Philippines’ 1997 “National Artist for Literature” award.
Peerless as he was among
Philippine writers in the “received language,” N.V.M. often critiqued the
Filipino writer’s place in English-language literature as a son of the
“third-world.” He handled with great care his responsibility as a storyteller,
capturing myth and truth in equal measure. In the 1975 essay “The Literature of
Emerging Nations,” he wrote:
“Disequilibirum
is the essential quality of life in emerging nations: and this is not a
political statement but a literary one… It is the writers – the poets,
novelists, short-story writers and playwrights – who make available the ‘felt
life’ in the experience of the national community” (50).
Acknowledging the primacy
of the novel in Western literary tradition, he pondered whether the novel truly
belonged in the social and economic realities of young nations, still reeling
from post-colonial woes, in the backdrop of a “workaday world lived by people
struggling out of colonialism.”
“Why
not native verse forms, native narrative epic structures or whatever to fit
today’s themes?
Must
one indeed do the novel? Judging by its very history, the novel I a product of
leisure. But how real is leisure in the societies that we speak of here?” (58)
From his perch in the
diaspora, N.V.M. translated Philippine rural landscapes and her people to a
Western audience, most likely well-intentioned Americans who, for one reason or
another, sought to develop an intimation and appreciation for colonial writers.
In writing about writing, N.V.M.
conveys a longing for amid isolation from his own people whose complex lives serve
as his muse. His reflections – bordering on “self-flagellation” – constantly
critiqued purpose and intent: who is the reader? Despite mastering the colonial
language, he laments the lack of a Philippine middle-class literary audience. For
how can a people legitimately construct a literary identity out of the
disparate and disjointed experience of self and nationhood. In his 1990 essay “Up and About the Cultural
Wake,” N.V.M. writes:
“Our
more than seventy years of literacy in at least four languages – Spanish,
Tagalog or Pilipino, English and Visayan – have not created in the Philippines
a readership large enough to support and see a national literature flourish”
(154).
Irony coexists with
justice. N.V.M. wrote extensively about the impact of Dr. Jose Rizal on
Philippine literature and what the late novelist’s works represented for the
Filipino. That Rizal’s primary audience wasn’t the Filipino indio, and that the
national hero wrote in the colonial language of Spanish was not lost on N.V.M.
Essays written for
California publications in the 1990s more directly address the political realities
of the ongoing occupation of the Philippines. In his 1992 essay “Even as the
Mountains Speak,” he alludes to the tragedy of Filipino flight from the
homeland and into “diasporic suspension, un-countried, often undocumented” (106).
In his last decade, N.V.M.’s writings bore the toll of decades of exasperation,
carrying the heaviness of witnessing and telling story of the Filipino’s grief
and toil in the fast-moving machine of globalization.
Enshrining storytelling,
myth- and meaning-making, N.V.M. challenges the next generation of culture-bearers
to source imagination from indigenous thought. He regrets that the
“intellectualism of the past” (107) has caused writers and other creatives to
be uncomfortable with drawing upon the richness and expanse of Philippine indigenous
knowledge that survived by adapting to millennia of foreign influences. Hopeful
that the act of remembering our sacred stories will lend credence to pure and
convincing metaphors for the Filipino worldview, he summons students of
literature and history to come home and look within, for “our legacy from
‘once-upon-a-time’ is too rich to discard in the name of progress” (69).
*****
Born
and raised in Manila, Philippines, Maileen Hamto currently lives in Colorado,
by way of the Pacific Northwest and the Texas Gulf Coast. For more than 20
years, Maileen has worked in organizations focused on eliminating poverty,
dismantling racism, and creating opportunities for diverse communities. Presently,
she leads equity
and inclusion strategies for a community mental health agency. In her everyday
work, she is guided by wisdom gleaned from her lived experiences as an
immigrant woman of color who is humbled everyday by the journey of
decolonization. Maileen
curates content for the Colors of
Influence blog, which covers issues from workforce
diversity, cultural preservation, community advocacy, health disparities, and
social inequities. Since obtaining a
degree in Journalism from the University of Houston, Maileen has earned two
master’s degrees: an MBA from the University of Portland and a master’s in
Healthcare Management from Oregon Health & Science University. She is
currently pursuing doctoral studies in Educational Leadership with a
concentration in Urban and Diverse Communities at the University of Colorado in
Denver.
