And these readings feature not just one or two readers, mind you, but often a whole platoon of them, recruited and deployed like a basketball team, with veterans and rookies alike in the line-up. I think it’s all well and good – great, in fact, for ordinary Pinoys who’ve never seen and heard a writer up close, as well as for the authors, who need to get out of their closets and cloisters once in a while to meet their audiences.
I’ve always maintained that one of the best ways of promoting Philippine literature is by getting the writers to the readers – especially young readers in schools, and their teachers – and by bringing book prices down to affordable levels. It was in response to this idea that the University of the Philippines Press, now under the helm of prize-winning fictionist Jing Hidalgo, launched the low-priced Jubilee Student Edition, and followed that up with the UP Press "Read UP" Literary Caravan, bringing featured writers to schools in places like Baguio, Davao, Iloilo, and Cebu. (More on our recent Davao visit in an upcoming PenMan.) Of course you spend more money on these promotions than you make back from immediate sales of books, but this is the kind of strategic investment that educational and publishing institutions need to make for the long-term good: you introduce writers and their books to teachers, who might then use these books for their classes.
But for readings to work as a come-on, they have to be good – produced and executed with professional finesse (quite apart from the kind of spontaneous combustion you get from bar-side poetry "slams" and other such impromptu entertainments). To help prospective readers along, I’ve come up with this short list of do’s and don’ts for literary readings, culled from years of sitting (or standing) on both sides of the auditorium:
1. Know your audience, and read something appropriate. Sometimes it’s good to surprise audiences with something completely foreign to them – a new idea is always welcome – but unless the material is in some way accessible, you might as well be reading to the wall, and might even do yourself and literature a favor just by shutting up. Public readings are meant to prove that literature can be shared, understood, and even enjoyed; not all literature can or has to do that, but we have enough books in print to take care of more private needs and expressions.
2. Relax yourself, and relax the audience. That’s not a loaded gun or a poisonous viper in your hand, that’s a book, and you wrote it. Break the ice with a short – emphasis on short – introduction to yourself and to the material. Show a little humor – self-deprecating humor always helps. Bear in mind that it’s your privilege – not only theirs – that this reading is taking place.
3. Read clearly. No matter how private your message, you’re still reading to be understood. Choose the material beforehand, and practice if you must. Some passages will always be knottier than others; try and roll them on your tongue, and cut them out if they won’t. When reading poetry, try to memorize a few lines or even whole poem or two; audiences love it when you just seem to be talking to them (something mastered by poet Ricky de Ungria).
4. Above all, mind the time. Don’t outgrow your welcome by hogging the mike for 30 minutes when you’ve been allotted 10, no matter how interesting and brilliant you think your own writing is. This is especially true for group readings, where there’s only so much time for everyone, and where an extra ten minutes means rudely cutting into someone else’s allotment. Again, pre-select and pre-edit your material; don’t dawdle onstage. Remember that the reading is just a free sampler, an appetizer, and that the main course can be bought in your books. Go easy on the ad libs – those can take longer than the reading itself.
Don’t read like it’s your first and last chance to be heard – if you do, it will be.
Some of them became full-fledged communists, some did not; but all of them sacrificed what might have been flourishing professions and careers to defend basic principles they held dearly all their lives. Among others, these principles included the conviction that American interests held Philippine politics and the economy by the throat, and that injustice born of feudal tenancy relations ruled the countryside; the only way to change this for good was through revolution – which meant, at the time, armed struggle.
I had the remarkable good fortune of being asked by the surviving Lavas, several years ago, to write the story of their family, and this was published in 1999 by Anvil Books (The Lavas: A Filipino Family). To be honest, I sought that commission, having been fascinated by what I had previously heard and read of the family – who were, after all, moderately affluent landowners in Bulacan, with postgraduate degrees from Columbia, Berkeley, and Stanford on their roster (Vicente, Horacio, and Francisco, respectively: Jose finished law at UP near the top of his class).
I had actually met Jesus incredibly and unexpectedly – as a fellow political prisoner in Fort Bonifacio’s maximum-security Youth Rehabilitation Center (don’t you just love these martial-law euphemisms?) in 1973, when he was 59 and I was 19, in a game of pick-up basketball. He was exceptionally tall, sprightly, and with a ready smile. (Well into his 80s, Jesus played three-to-a-side tennis regularly, and kept a job as a company physician.)
The encounter left a firm impression on me, not the least because the Lavas and their cohorts, at that point, were supposed to be the enemy – former revolutionaries who had sold out to the regime, had descended into banditry, had missed the ideological boat, etc. etc. We (of the KM-SDK persuasion) even had a song where the refrain went "Sapagkat maraming taksil – Lava! Taruc! Sumulong! – nagpapanggap na sila’y lider…." In 1980, I wrote a play titled Pagsabog ng Liwanag, about three fictional brothers who take part in the revolutionary movement from the 1930s to the 1950s. When the call came in 1996 to ask if I wanted to write the Lava family biography, there was no question about my doing it, whatever it was going to take. Over the next couple of years, I visited the surviving brothers – Peping and Jess – in their Mandaluyong home, which they shared with their wives, and lifelong comrade Casto "GY" Alejandrino (now there’s another interesting story – an Atenean who came to command the revolutionary army). We had quite a time sitting around the dinner table, my feeble tape recorder trying to compete against the chickens and the tricycles in the background.
Jesus Lava was a medical doctor (UP ’38), an easygoing guy with a spring in his step and a twinkle in his eye whom his kuyas thought a most unlikely candidate for the Party and its iron discipline. It took the Second World War and imprisonment and torture by the Japanese to seal Jesus’s commitment to the Party and its causes. He would persevere and rise to the general-secretaryship of the PKP, even serving for a very brief while as a congressman representing the Democratic Alliance before going back underground after being falsely tagged with a political assassination.
Just about a month ago, Jesus Lava came out with his own book, Memoirs of a Communist (Anvil, 2002), a hefty but eminently readable and engaging chronicle of his life, from the early ‘40s onward – in other words, his years as a conscious revolutionary. I last met him at the book launch; I had no idea – and neither did his family – just how ill he was (he died of undiagnosed prostate cancer – something that he, as a doctor, might have suspected, but kept stoically quiet about until the very end). Thoughtfully edited by his nephew Paco Lava and son-in-law Gener Cedilla, the autobiography is a must-read for students of Philippine politics and society, and you won’t even have to agree with the good doctor and his ideology to appreciate his and his family’s signal contribution to the elevation of critical political thought in this country.
The book isn’t all about politics; it’s mostly about being a Filipino responding to one’s time and its challenges. Despite the inevitable swatches of violence and terror that darken a life spent largely underground, Jesus’s humanity shows through luminously. (And what these memoirs do, which I could not while Jesus’s wife Anita was yet alive, is to properly acknowledge the role of the other women in his life, notably his guerrilla wife Librada Ayala, aka Ka Aida.) Lava even occasionally waxes lyrical: "Furiously and with sudden sparks the talahib blazed, their burnt blades drooping like melting clay."
His account of that historic first session of Congress after Liberation might as well have come out of The Godfather: "As congressmen and spectators entered the halls of the Lower House of Congress along Lepanto St., the atmosphere was tense. Strident laughter and whispered conversations could be observed everywhere. There was a blatant display of firearms, especially by some congressmen and their bodyguards; I myself had my .38 caliber pistol inside my portfolio, while my security detail was just around the hall…. (Alejo Santos) challenged (Jose Topacio) Nueno and the rest of the LP stalwarts to fight in whatever way they chose…. With that challenge, Alex brought out his pistol from his portfolio, and placed it square on his table. I myself had my hand grasping my pistol inside my portfolio, not really knowing what to do, whom to shoot at, if and when the firing started. I was not used to these things, although I succeeded in keeping as calm as possible, thinking of the options open, how best to attack when necessary, and survive."
There are a few curious though minor slip-ups: "George Frieneza" and "Gerry La Cuesta," for example, should I think have been "Jorge Frianeza" and "Gerry Lacuesta," but then again my own first sources could have been wrong; my fellow writer Raul Rodrigo has kindly pointed out to me some discrepancies in the dates which Dr. Lava and I use in our respective accounts – with Mang Jess being proven right by the records.
Read this book, and you’ll feel proud to have met and known, however vicariously, a Filipino patriot who just happened to be a Communist as well. Fare thee well, Ka Jesus.