Good morning. While I represent UMPIL – Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas or Writers Union of the Philippines – as its chair – and UMPIL happens to be one of the event sponsors, I would still like to take this opportunity to laud the people behind this important assembly.
We owe it to a couple of young fellows, Rosmon Tuazon and Arvin Mangohig of the UP Writers Club – guided as they were by UP Institute of Creative Writing director Vim Carmelo B. Nadera, who is also Secretary-General of UMPIL – that they conceived of this groundbreaking conference, and more than that, manifested the determination to push their idea and turn it into reality, gaining support from institutions such as the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA).
We are well aware that our writers, our women and men of letters, are getting younger by the year, and practically coming out of the woodwork. Each year, various writers’ workshops conduct a rigorous selection process before they can identify the applicants that deserve fellowships, from among scores of submissions.
In my youth, one or two workshops seemed to suffice. There were probably not as many young writers then who could fill the slots offered by the current number of creative writing workshops. And this goes to show that our numbers have gone rampant, and that the literary torch is being passed to an ever-expanding tribe of willing fire-bearers.
But this assembly is unique in that it is the first conference of its nature: a national students’ conference on literature, our literature. Well should its conduct go hand in hand with the exercise of mentorship that goes on in annual literary workshops.
And it should not be the last time that people of your age, and status, as students of literature, as literary practitioners yourselves, gather together and discuss the ideas and insights that our works of literature engender. Surely the critical discourse that is expected as a result of your scholarly efforts will go a long way in establishing, finally, a level of critical commentary that bids fair for continuity and enhancement.
Some of us in this hall have heard time and again how our literature is not served well by sufficient critical discourse. It is heartening then to welcome ten young people who may just prove to be the key to a corollary advancement in the field of literary exegesis and appreciation.
I see from the titles of your papers that they cover quite a range of thematic and topical concerns: from interest in my "Mom" Edith L. Tiempo’s latest novel to the exemplary work of our expatriate writer Merlinda Bobis, from the poetic bitch goddess to video gaming vis-à-vis writing, from detective novels to… ah, this one interests me fairly – "The Peril of Immaturity in Campus Journalism."
Allow me the early-morning luxury of digressing a bit. Past the mid-’60s, or close to four decades ago, I served as literary editor of the UP Collegian. And I still retain very fond memories of the experience as well as the quality of that institution, then possibly the best college newspaper. After all, it was the official "organ" of the State University.
These days, however, I am chagrined to hear how pettiness in the guise of ideological resolve appears to have taken hold of the once exalted editorship of the "Ku-le." Why, in a recent issue it even descended to such depths of mean-spiritedness as to heckle the personal and national triumph of a fellow UP student, Patricia Evangelista, who topped all rivals some weeks ago in London, in the finals of the annual International Public Speaking contest conducted by the English Speaking Union.
The "Ku-le" led off by publishing another contrary voice – singularly contrary that is to the nearly unanimous consensus that Ms. Evangelista had done us proud. It was the characteristically errant voice of long-time expatriate – and presumed long-time beneficiary of globalization – tan-ta-ra-ran… Epifanio San Juan, Jr., whose junior ways had him hectoring Evangelista’s triumph, this 19-year-old girl’s moment in the global sun, in the pettiest and meanest of manners, by issuing a childish counter-dictum, in Filipino, that made much of the pa-cute refrain "Tenk Yu Beri Mats."
Oh, vell. As it’s been said, those who can, like Patricia Evangelista, do. And those who can’t, why, worse than teach, they heckle. Like any genuine, true-blue PESAO.
Well, that is not so much a digression, as it has some relation to what you are about to embark on, a series of discussions on literary papers. Fortunately, you are still young and can still change your ways, unlike those of us who are already long in the tooth (but are still, somewhat justifiably, called Sonny). You can still change your ways, in the event that your minds open up to the possibility that what you write, and/or how you write it, may only sound like impressive jargon masquerading as scholarly bullshit, or is it the other way around.
Let me warn you, especially those of you who may be disposed to overly serious therefore overly tendentious ways of regarding things, like literature, and yourselves – that there is nothing like expressing yourselves authoritatively without having to sound like Barthes or Derrida or Foucault, who are after all translated… OR, heaven help you, someone like Sonny San Juan, Junior, in this wise (and here I quote particularly egregious instances of viscous prose parading itself as high-flown critique):
"Despite Bulosan’s achievement, it remains the case that the vision of a nation-in-the-making sedimented in Filipino writing in English cannot be fully assayed except in antithesis to the metropolis… Filipino writers cannot escape the vocation of resistance against neo (not post) colonial forces crystallized, for instance, in the World Bank/IMF …"
And:
"Joaquin’s empiricist naiveté posits a syncretic adaptation of European forms, values, knowledge – an internationalism which replicates the less subtle conditionalities of the World Bank-International Monetary Fund. Such a mimicry of colonial icons and paradigms springs from a myth of self-apprehension characterized by syncretism and hybridity, signs of ‘difference’ so highly prized by the current theoreticians of postcolonial or minority discourse reacting to the master narratives of bourgeois freedom and progress. But what would differentiate this axiom of syncretism from the doctrine of liberal pluralism (either postKeynesian or post-Fordist) under which the ‘New World Order’…"
BLAH-BLAH-BLAH… BLAH-BLAH-BLAH…
Or:
"Our response to this strategy of incorporation by subsumption is the privileging of contradictions inscribed in the site of what is alter/native, the other of paranoid mystery. In other words, Philippine writing is not…
BLAH-BLAH-BLAH… ETCETERA… BLAH-BLAH-BLAH…
I say in turn that when one writes "in other words," it can only mean that he knew he didn’t get it right the first time. Besides, does this fellow ever enjoy literature or what?
Paradigms. Parameters. Praxis. Habitus. Conjunctures.
Such words are the tools of a poster-maker, not a creative writer, nor a valid critic of literature.
Here’s a last quote (and I certainly hope none of you approaches this sort of ek-ek in your own papers):
"An allegorizing strategy of storytelling is explored. Its point of departure is an alter/native sensibility rooted in acts of decolonizing intransigence, in a critique of the illusions propagated by the world system of transnational capital."
Blah-blah-blah. Ho-hum.
Now, you wouldn’t want to write literary criticism like that, would you?
I rest my case, and must now go along my merry ways. You young fellows have fun yourselves! Thank you.
Postscript: I’m not really given to picking a fight with anyone. But whoever’s gonna get it that wants it. A couple of Christmases ago, I wanted to write the esteemed Dr. Epifanio San Juan, Jr. a personal letter, to disabuse him of the notion that I was "leading a crusade" of vilification against him here in our home country. All I ever did was write something I thought funny about what I thought funny in his critical writings. And this was about a decade ago. Nothing else since then. But maybe Sonny heard differently. I wanted to correct that hearsay impression, and offer an olive branch. After all, I did appreciate his essay on Hugh MacDiarmid’s poetry, despite the obvious qualification that it was the poet’s Marxist posture that occasioned San Juan’s positive regard. Call me simplistic, but should literary appreciation ever be premised on any ideological requisites? But okay, hey, different strokes for different folks. And I did appreciate San Juan’s quality of writing in that piece on MacDiarmid. But now this snide commentary passing itself off as a poem, on Patricia Evangelista and/or what she represents, inclusive of "barkada ng mga elitistang patakbuhing sipsip sa padrino" which I take to refer to myself and co-mentors (for Patricia) Butch Dalisay, Jimmy Abad and Ed Maranan. Those who may want to sample another critical style manifested by Epifanio San Juan, Jr. can check out what I regard as his childish rejoinder on Patricia Evangelista’s winning speech by accessing http://www.bulatlat.com/news/4-21/4-21-tenkyu.html.