Three intros to new fiction

I had the pleasure, a few months ago, of helping to select some bright new Filipino fictionists for publication under the "Ubod" series of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and it fell to me as well to edit and to introduce three of those choices. (Charlson Ong, now based in Davao, did the same for two others.) My assignments covered a former student of mine, Anna Felicia Sanchez, and two other young writers I had never read before, Arifah M. Jamil and Mildred J. Malaki, who both come from Mindanao and write about its predicaments from interestingly different viewpoints.

The "Ubod" series is a laudable effort by the NCCA to give new authors a chance to get their first books published, albeit in thin chapbooks rather than big glossy hardbacks. The authors – separate selections were made for poetry and the essay – are limited to 60 pages each, so it was left to the editors to prune the selections further. "Ubod" is in effect a publication grant that will make it possible for a couple of dozen of our best young writers in English and Filipino to see their first books in print before turning 30.

That’s a privilege not too many people get, and something we could only have wished for in our time. Like I often remind my students, there’s nothing like visualizing and then finally seeing and holding your first book to confirm your talent (or at least your perseverance) and to encourage you to write some more. In my case, I "saw" my first book in my mind’s eye years before I wrote the stories that eventually went into it. It was going to be just this size and just this thick (my model was the old Penguin paperback – I thought nothing was neater than to be published by Penguin, and I still do). Of course, much earlier than that, I pretended as a young boy to be a published author by folding several sheets of bond paper and sewing them down the middle (that passion for sewing would remain with me to this day; I’ve shortened many a pair of pants and even the sleeves of blazers).

At a literary reading last week, responding to a question from the audience at the Philippine Normal University, I had a chance to compare notes with poets Cirilo Bautista and Teo Antonio. We discovered that all our first books had been published by our friends – people who just happened to own presses and to have a stack of leftover paper somewhere. My "angel" was a nice guy named Raffy Benitez whom I’d spent time with in martial-law prison; today he runs a huge printing business, which wasn’t the case yet when he offered to print (and, in effect, publish) Oldtimer and Other Stories back in 1984. I don’t mean to suggest that you should languish in jail to find a friendly publisher, only that luck – and a publishable manuscript – can do wonders for your writing life.

Let me just get this clear for the sake of the newbies in the business: Printing and publishing are two very different things. A printer transfers your words to black ink on white paper, slaps the pages together, and expects to be paid for the service. That payment will come from the publisher, who is gambling on your presumably explosive talent to make even more money than the printer. The publisher is the risk-taker, the financier, and also the talent scout, the impresario, the masseur, the one who gets author, book designer, photographer, printer, and bookseller together to make sure a good book hits the shelves in good time. Sometimes a publisher will also be a printer, and vice versa – but these operations today are usually so big and involve so much money (not a lot of it, I’m afraid, at the individual writer’s end of things) that they tend to be entirely separate.

With "Ubod," the NCCA is picking up the tab for the first books of what could well be the next generation of Philippine literature’s brightest lights. Our thanks and congratulations to them for making this opportunity possible.

I hope that these introductions – purposely kept short, to accord more space and attention to the fiction itself – will interest you enough in buying the books when they come out early next year. Here they go:

For Anna Felicia Sanchez, "Frog Leap and Other Stories":

Now that the selections have been made and these books of first-time Filipino authors are out in print, I can disclose – with much pride and absolutely no shame – that the author of these stories, Anna Felicia Sanchez, was a student of mine in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines.

That meant no extra points for her when the time came to judge the stories – I could spot other works in the pile by former students and acquaintances as well; on the contrary, I set a higher standard for stories written by people who I often foolishly think should know better, having been taught by such as myself. Thankfully, the quality of the prose in these four stories should set any doubt aside as to their reason for having been included in this series.

Young as she is, Sanchez writes with the maturity and the sensitivity of the real writer who writes beyond oneself, one’s own experience, and one’s own preoccupations. She writes about children without having to be childlike and without patronizing them; she writes about men and women with a firm and fair understanding of where they both come from, what they feel, and what they think. In the title story, "Frog Leap," the sudden chaos in a laboratory class unwittingly reveals a deeper and quieter turmoil in a student’s undissected life.

These complex stories are uniformly painful, but theirs is the kind of pain that provides relief – the relief of recognition, of seeing our own aches and sorrows mirrored in these situations, which Ms. Sanchez so sharply delineates.

For Arifah M. Jamil, "Women of the Lake and Other Stories":

It is always a pleasure to discover a bright new voice and sensibility in fiction, and these stories by a young woman named Arifah M. Jamil deliver that pleasure.

These stories are suffused with the music of the Maranaos – the people of the lake whom she has chosen to write about, forgoing a planned career in accountancy for a degree in creative writing from the University of the Philippines’ newest campus in Davao – a city that to her seemed "as foreign as the strangers who smiled at me for reasons I could not understand."

"If half of my soul is influenced by my Maranao culture," writes the author, "the other half is driven by my desire to read." And read she did, in English, devouring everything from Sweet Valley High to the inevitable texts of her literature classes.

Those tensions resonate in these works, which are a window on the age-old struggle between tradition and modernity, between – as one of the stories goes – prayers and vodka. Its particular focus is on the women of the lake, who often suffer the worst of things, and yet continue to feel, most sharply, the echoes of the kulintang and the agong in their hearts.

So much has been written in the media about Mindanao, and yet it remains so little understood. Perhaps these stories can help fiction succeed where journalism and politics have failed.

For Mildred J. Malaki, "Believing and Other Stories":

The young author of these stories, Mildred J. Malaki, typifies what we might call the other side of Mindanao, the Christian long settled in a place where, she says, "explosions were a part of our lives" and yet who can happily sit down to a feast with her Tausug friends to celebrate the end of Ramadan. She speaks for the many millions of Mindanaoans who would rather have peace and prosperity any day over war and politics, and yet who have little choice but to survive as well as they can, anxious and yet hopeful.

The typicality ends there, for Ms. Malaki is clearly much more articulate than most people in her situation, and she has chosen to speak out, to employ her prose in the cause of understanding. And unlike previous attempts at portraying an ancient conflict, her stories are rife with complexity, the characters motivated by more intimate reasons than mere religion. In "Putri," a pretty Muslim girl takes on the Virgin’s role in a Christmas pageant, fearful of what her father would have to say – suggesting that great personal risks need to be taken by anyone wishing to close the breach.

The stories provide the bonus of introducing us to Zamboanga, rarely visited by the Manileño and even by the fictionist. For that and more, we have this new talent to thank.

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And speaking of new writing, I’d like to announce that the UP Institute of Creative Writing, which sponsors the annual UP Writers Workshop – held every April in Baguio – has extended the deadline for applications for the 2004 workshop to January 15. Call the UPICW at 922-1830 for more details.

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Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at penmanila@yahoo.com.