In a class by themselves was my older sister’s in-laws who had a stack of Reader’s Digests above the water closet in their house in Fort Bonifacio, a tradition which was passed on to her own family with a little difference: the next generation preferred Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast.
If kids these days thrive on Harry Potter and Roald Dahl, their parents lived off Peanuts, Nancy Drew and the rest of their imported ilk. There are rare instances of common ground that bridges the generations, such as Pugad Baboy, Asterix, and even the aforementioned Potter, whose author JK Rowling is now a millionaire several times over, what with the movie and other spin-off items based on her novels’ characters.
And July 17 being National Children’s Book Day, the Salanga prize will be awarded to author Kristine Canon for the story Bakit Matagal ang Sundo Ko? (Adarna Books) with illustrations by Mariano Ching.
Both Canon and Ching get P25,000 each, according to contest organizer and illustrator Beulah Taguiwalo of the PBBY.
It’s a great tribute to the late Freddie Salanga, naming a children’s book prize after him; he who was much like a Lola Basyang himself until his dying day.
In Freddie’s own poetry there is almost a child-like simplicity, but whose profundity is never lost.
Another poet who came out with a children’s short story, and which won a Free Press award, the prize money of which he used to take a ship to the United States, was the National Artist Jose Garcia Villa. The story was Mir-i-nisa, one of the favored books of childhood.
It was made into a storybook with illustrations, and was about two men who vied for the love of a princess, Mir-i-nisa by name. As is the custom in resolving such dilemma, the girl’s father gave the two suitors a test: letting them dive for a pearl which he had dropped in the middle of the sea.
The ending to this moral tale day still shocks: the one who won Mir-i-nisa’s hand was the fellow who admitted not having recovered the pearl, his eyes bloodshot while he crawled exhausted on the sand. It turns out that the father merely dropped a lump of salt, and so the guy who managed to retrieve a pearl was considered dishonest and so unworthy of Mir-i-nisa. But how was he to know? It could also serve as a warning on in-laws.
Lately, Villa’s poems have been given a new packaging as children’s literature, with the collection Parliament of Giraffes, illustrated by the poet’s old buddy Hilario Francia.
Another book which made an impression during our growing up years was Makisig, the Little Hero of Mactan, by the former Gemma Cruz. As the story goes, Makisig was up early that morning when the conquistadores sailed into Mactan bay, and he saw the foreign ships while he was at the tip of a coconut tree (collecting tuba?).
Makisig as expected warns the villagers of the invaders, and what follows is the stuff of history books and fate’s little tricks: Magallanes is slain in battle, and gets an exclusive village named after him, while the hero Lapu-Lapu winds up on a one-centavo coin and inspiration for escabeche.
The little hero of Mactan could be likened to that Dutch folk tale about the boy who plugged his finger in a hole in the dike, thereby saving his village from going under water. Makisig however survives the battle of Mactan; the Dutch boy was less fortunate than a house painter –he died after shivering through the night outdoors.
The folk tale and others of its genre are a regular feature in the Camilo Osias grade school series of textbooks, The Philippine Readers. Not only were the selections followed by thought-provoking "guide questions," many were also accompanied by illustrations by masters such as Fernando Amorsolo, most likely when he was still a struggling artist. The Readers series are that antique and therefore a veritable collector’s edition if the anay did not get to them first.
Still another book that captured our young imagination was Maximo Ramos’ The Creatures of Midnight. Here we got to see the difference between the manananggal and the mangkukulam, the tiyanak and the capre, and other frightening personages and visages.
The manananggal would make its way to modern folk lore, chronicled in Jessica Zafra’s bestselling collection of short stories, which kind of treatment we may never read in the newspapers. But Zafra, unlike many journalists, does not make up in swagger whatever she lacks in talent.
One of my own favorite books discovered fairly recently is the Dylan Thomas lyric, A Child’s Christmas in Wales. All the things that made Thomas a great writer is right there in that children’s story.
Overall it is a rather rich medium, and there are several Filipino authors who’ve made a name in that genre: Mailin Paterno-Locsin, Carla Pacis, and Natasha Vizcarra, to name just three.