To teachers: Why literature

The distinguished UP literature teachers Adelaida Lucero and Mila Laurel convened their fellow teachers the other week. Both asked me to talk about language and literature. This is what I told them:

I have always admired teachers because teaching, like the priesthood, medicine and writing, is a vocation. You don’t become a teacher because you want wealth  it is the same with writing. No Filipino writer is wealthy except Ambeth Ocampo but he didn’t get rich writing those many tomes on history  he inherited his wealth from his father.

In the Western tradition to which we belong because most of us are Christians, the first writers like Herodotus were historians, and most important, moral teachers.

The influence of teachers extends beyond the classroom, well into the future. It is they who shape and enrich the minds of the young, who touch their hearts and souls. It is they who shape a nation’s future.

I have a special niche for teachers in literature for it is in literature that we learn ethics  a crucial need for us today, mired as we are in a moral swamp. You can have 10 years learning theology, cosmology, but you will never learn ethics. Ask the famous Marxist professor Francisco Nemenzo Jr. who was president of the University of the Philippines. He will tell you the same thing. It is for this reason why I always accept invitations to speak before teachers, even just half a dozen of them.

I have never taken a course in pedagogy but I have had the happy experience of being under the tutelage of good teachers. When I started teaching part-time in the Sixties, I thought I would follow what my excellent teachers did. The only book on teaching which I had read was Gilbert Highet’s The Art of Teaching.

I taught in La Salle in the under-grad and post-grad levels upon the invitation of the late Brother Andrew Gonzalez. I was shuffling the class cards in the first day of the trimester and I came across two familiar names. I asked why they were in my class when I did not flunk them.

They said that they had learned so much in my class, they decided to take the course again for they were sure that there would be new insights that they could learn. And they were, of course, quite correct for in my lectures, all of a sudden, I dredge forth an insight that bloomed at that very instant.

Enough of my personal yabang.

Recently, I was in Lingayen, Pangasinan; where Governor Amado T. Espino, Jr. had launched a program of reinvigorating the language of the province. I said some of our minor languages will die  oh, not immediately, but perhaps in another hundred years. These will most probably be Zambal, Capampangan, Pangasinan, some minor languages in the Visayas and Bicol but certainly not Ilokano, Cebuano, Waray and Ilonggo. It is therefore necessary that we record the literatures of these languages before they die.

This is the fate of language everywhere. From antiquity, Latin died but is still studied in seminaries and elite universities. So did Sanskrit in Asia  it was replaced by Pali but even Pali died, too. Linguists say the only ancient language which was resuscitated from the grave was Hebrew of Israel.

About 500 languages in Papua New Guinea are spoken only by a few hundred. Languages there die every two or three years. I think Pidgin will eventually be the common language in that country.

Which brings us to our part of the world; only Indonesia was able to develop a minority language into the national language. I can speak of this experience with some authority because the foremost promoter of Bahasa, the late Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana was a personal friend. He was some 30 years older than I.

The leaders of the Indonesian independence movement in the Twenties were Javanese. Their language is well developed and the majority population of the archipelago was Javanese. But the Javanese leaders didn’t want their national language to divide them so they elected to have Bahasa, the language of commerce in the port cities. Today, Bahasa is used all over Indonesia; it was also adopted in Malaysia and continues to be modernized.

The last time I saw Takdir in the early Sixties, he said that they had a problem with Bahasa; the other languages were being neglected. They found it necessary to adopt English for it gave them a wider window to the world. Besides, they did not have enough translators to translate the latest books in science.

Tagalog was made the national language by President Quezon in 1935. Manila was the capital. Tagalog was the language of the capital city. If Cebu became the capital, then Cebuano would be the national language today. It is for this reason why there are so many debates in Congress, in public fora, some of them really virulent, for language is the very root of a person’s identity.

English as introduced by the Americans was immediately and unanimously accepted because it made all Filipinos equal.

Language should unite, not divide.

In spite of bitter opposition in the past, Tagalog has truly become a national language spread by TV, radio and, of course, by the public school system which forced it on the students  unlike Hindi in India which was not forced on the people.

I write entirely in English; Tagalog chauvinists chide me for this. I feel no guilt in doing so. But I am sad that I cannot write in my native Ilokano. History demanded this; if it isn’t English I am using now, I would most probably be writing in Spanish like Rizal, or even German, or Japanese.

What I have done is Filipinize English. This has been difficult for language carries with it a whole baggage of nuances, culture and even ideology. I do not say apple green  I say mango green, chico-brown. Our languages are symbolic but to translate literally phrases of common usage into English will make such phrases quaint. Hampas lupa  in English it would be “whip the ground.”

An Ilokano teacher said that he could feel the Ilokano-ness in my dialogues. But more important was what the critic, Bien Lumbera said, that I belong to the vernacular tradition because my fiction embodies “searing social criticism” which characterizes our vernacular literature. This being so, then Rizal  who wrote in Spanish   also belongs to the vernacular tradition.

Life is a learning experience; I was also learning from my students. A scholar teacher friend monitored my classes for a week and said I was using the venerable Socratic Method. I do not assign term papers. I know students copy en toto from the Web. I give instead instant quizzes.

In teaching literature, do not assign boring short stories or novels. As for the stories, select those that will teach students forbearance, virtue, compassion.

NVM Gonzalez wrote many stories, most of which are not memorable. There is one story, however, which this giant in our literature wrote; it should be included in all Philippine anthologies of short fiction. It is titled, “Hunger in Barok.” The farmers in this barrio are hungry  it is the planting season, the “hungry months” as we Ilokano call it. The villagers are hungry and after much discussion, they go to town to the landlord to ask him for grain. The landlord grants their request  after all, come harvest time, he will have a hundred percent return of his loan. The villagers hurry home; they do not eat the grain  they plant it instead.

Then, there’s Les Miserables by Victor Hugo which I read in high school. Jean Valjean, the convict, stays with a priest then steals the silver of the priest. He is accosted by the police and brought to the priest. Instead of confirming the thievery, the priest tells the police  Jean Valjean did not steal the silver  he gave them to him.

In grade five, my teacher Miss Soledad Oriel, gave me Rizal’s two novels. In that section where Sisa’s two sons, Crispin and Basilio were wrongly accused of stealing by the Spanish friar, I was so moved by the injustice of it all, I wept. Looking back at my first encounter with Rizal, I realize that from him, I learned to hate injustice. I have carried that hate from that tender age on to this, my decrepit twilight.

In a class of 50, you will be fortunate if there is one who has the promise of being a writer. It is easy to recognize this  his prose is usually brighter, more imaginative than those of the others. Get to know this student, lend him some of your books and encourage him.

But do not neglect the others; get them interested in literature for enjoyment, for understanding people and though the story may not be about Filipinos, find out how it can relate to them.

The materials for fiction are all around us  the newspapers, their front pages. The English writer James Hamilton Paterson wondered why there were no Western writers working in the Philippines; he used to live half of the year in Marinduque from where he wrote that classic, Playing with Water, and the novel, The Ghosts of Manila.

Fiction in this country has difficulty catching up with reality.

I will cite two of my stories  “The God Stealer” and “Waywaya.”

In 1948, I was assistant editor of the US Information Service of the American Embassy. Even after I left the job to join the Manila Times, I used to go to the US embassy to visit friends. On one such visit, the Cultural attaché William Dunn and his assistant Don Gail  a handsome Ifugao who was very proud of his ethnic origins, invited me to join them in a visit to Banaue.

It was my first time to go there via Baguio. The dirt road then was narrow, the mountains clad with huge pine trees. From Baguio in the early dawn, we reached Banaue in the afternoon. There being no hotels, we stayed in the house of the son of the American anthropologist, Otley Beyer. A small shop close by sold hand-woven cloth, a few carved souvenirs, and that wooden statue of an Ifugao god, or bulol as the Ifugaos call it. Bill said he would buy one and that was when Don Gail said, “Don’t. There are many of them in the fields; tonight, I will just steal one for you.”

What he said stuck in my mind and within a month after that trip, the story was finished  not just a story of an Ifugao stealing a god to give to his American friend, but as a commentary as well on the sanctity of identity, the ambiguous and pernicious relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.

“Waywaya” is based on a true Papua New Guinea story. Georgina, the wife of the German ethnographer Ulli Beier who headed the Institute of PNG Culture in the early sixties related it. A man kidnapped a woman from an enemy tribe to be his slave but he fell in love with her. When she died, custom demanded that she be returned to her tribe. He did because he truly loved her. As expected, he was killed and eaten by the woman’s relatives. Waywaya, in Ilokano, means freedom. I decided to set it in a time frame before the Spaniards came. Having almost no information of that period, I showed the draft to the anthropologist, F. Landa Jocano, who upon reading it, said I should remove the flowers on the girl’s hair  that was Polynesian, not Filipino. The ethnographer and historian, William Henry Scott, told me to change Waywaya’s bangles from copper to gold  he said there was plenty of gold in the country then. The story was about to go to press in Hong Kong when I, myself, caught this error  “it took almost an hour for Waywaya to go to the river to bathe.” There were no clocks or watches then. The story was also a critique of martial law. Indeed, censorship is no problem for truly creative writers.

Social criticism, symbolism are evident in these stories. Symbolism should be integral to the narrative. It must not be an artificial grafted construct, merely because the writer wants to show he is capable of creating symbols.

The temptation to compare the recent past with the present is compulsive. For a population of 30 million in the ’50s and the ’60s, we had so many outlets for literary work. The many English and vernacular magazines had literary sections devoted to fiction and poetry. As editor of the old Sunday Times Magazine, I published fiction, literary criticism, poetry every week. This is the practice, too, of newspapers in Japan, China and Korea.

So many glossy and expensive magazines today are published in Manila but they cater mostly to entertainment, to fashion, to young people desiring consumerist baubles  there is hardly any material in them that promotes national consciousness, for which reason we are now raising a flabby, narcissistic generation.

Teachers should reach out, consider the divide between the humanities and the scientific culture. Sometime in the 1950s, the English scientist and writer C. P. Snow wrote about this great divide; he postulated that in both camps, there exists ignorance and indifference. If humanity must move forward, this chasm must be bridged. It exists not just between the two cultures. There is also a wide gulf between the culture of town and country, of the social classes which developed because of the different educational backgrounds of Filipinos themselves.

This divide is best seen in the attitudes of the upper classes who often deride the tastes of the masa as bakya, badoy. And the masa has gotten back in sweet revenge to all of us by electing their role models, the glamorous crooks, the ignoramus movie stars.

Language also illustrates this divide  the more popular TV programs for the masa, are in Tagalog. The English programs are for the upper classes. The bestseller among Tagalog writers now is Bob Ong. Who among the writers in English have read him  the oracle of the future, or claim to have their books sold by the thousands in one year like him?

While teachers and writers may have the same purpose  to impart wisdom and virtue and hopefully, compassion, too, to our fellowmen, a difference exists between writers and teachers. Teachers work with people, they can see progress, the instant reaction to their ministration.

It is not so with writers who work alone, in terrifying loneliness, seemingly distanced from the raging realities of the mundane world, immersed as they are in the ethereal realm of the imagination.

I agonize over words  have I chosen them with precision? Are my ideas lucid and logical? Are my characters believable? I wrestle with myself in resolving these questions; I forget the passage of time, heeding only the stern demands of art. The act of writing becomes an ordeal, painful and pleasurable at the same time, and all the time, too, I pray that I will not bore my readers; that I have something important to say to them, which will enrich them, lift them up from their apathy, their lethargy, and make them desire a life with purpose.

In closing, let me reiterate how I often feel  perhaps, you have felt the same way about our unhappy country  that we are sometimes shouting our frustrations, our angers in the wilderness, with no one listening. Those of us who are committed to our vocationwe work very hard reaching out for excellence, for meaning although we know that such a glorious state may not be reached but only dreamed. And after all that harsh labor we have no reward except, perhaps, the self-satisfaction, the knowledge that we really tried and did our very best.

We must try again and yet again, not because we are masochists or fools, but because this is our duty  to love, to sacrifice for these people, for this land where we were born, where we will most probably die  this Filipinas which gave us our reason to be.