No Filipino writers in their reading lists

Thank God, De La Salle professor Elfren Cruz and his wife Neni, who heads the Book Development Council, had several Filipino books on their Christmas gift list. Otherwise, if those celebrities and personalities are to be believed, we have no authors worth reading. Their lists of the books they like best do not include our writers, not Rizal, not Nick Joaquin, not Ben Santos. I’d like to mention more who are still alive, but naming the dead raises no controversies.

For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In my Solidaridad Bookshop, half of my stock consists of Filipino books written in English and in the native languages. I just went through our 2013 catalogue. In it are discoveries of great academic and creative writing.

Why don’t our celebrities read Filipino authors? Is it colonial mentality that has afflicted them? Or intellectual snobbery which concludes that Filipino writers are incapable of intellectual and artistic excellence? I’ll be charitable and say it’s ignorance, aggravated by an educational system that diminishes reading, of bookshops which tuck Filipino titles in inaccessible corners called Filipiniana.

The Manila Review, Tomas, etc.

Being this old and quite cynical, I am heartened — meaning, I feel so much younger — whenever I see young earnest people strike out towards romantic or idealistic goals because I am only too aware of how easily dreams fade and die. I refer to Leloy Claudio and Mara Coson who have started Manila Review; looking at their pictures in this paper, I think they have years ahead of them to build this journal which, both say, is inspired by the New York Review of Books.

I was in my late 30s when I started Solidarity, which lasted some 30 years, with a long hiatus during the martial law years and then revived soon after before dying of old age (I got tired of going around with a begging bowl). I hope that Claudio and Coson will be able to sustain the magazine so as to improve the IQ of Filipinos and we will then stop voting into office scoundrels, warlords and movie stars with nothing between their ears. Take it from an old hack — both need to have a wide range of acquaintances in the intelligentsia not only of this nation but of the region, the world, particularly those interested in Asia and the Philippines. If they have followed the New York Review for sometime, I hope they will be able to move away from coterie comfort and reach out to writers from whatever group or university with one overriding criteria — that these writers are capable of intelligent social and cultural criticism. Their first issue includes historians Resil Mojares and Ambeth Ocampo — this fulfills our greatest need today: to remember. I hope they can also build a good marketing system so that the journal will be available in all our major cities, in Southeast Asia, and like the defunct Filipinas monthly in San Francisco, even in foreign bookshops and magazine counters, in university libraries.

And that brilliant young writer, Clinton Palanca — he also started a literary magazine some 10 years ago. Where is he now? It is very sad to see young writers start so well, then disappear.

Tomas, the literary journal of the UST Creative Writing Center, is now out in a new format. It should solicit manuscripts not just from Santo Tomas but from all over the country, keep separate the English and Tagalog sections. Santo Tomas has oodles and oodles of cash — this will be just tiny dribble from its huge coffers.

In the meantime, here are some good titles:

Chronicle of a Life Foretold

By Mila D. Aguilar

196 pages

Published by Popular Bookstore

Mila D. Aguilar (nom de guerre Clarita Roja) was a University of the Philippines teacher. She continues to be a teacher and more. She was very much involved with the revolutionary opposition to Marcos and the oligarchy for which she paid dearly, with years in prison. She continues to resist and her resistance now is strengthened by her religious faith and her continuing devotion to her art, as this brilliant collection of poetry — her latest — illustrates.

I have admired Mila since the ’70s when I became aware of her work, and this admiration continues to this very day when so many of her contemporaries have fallen by the wayside or succumbed to the pleasures of a bourgeois life.

I also remember fondly her publisher — the still struggling, fighting, persevering bookstore Popular, whose founder Joaquin Po I met in the ’40s and whose friendship I have always valued.

The bookshop launched Mila’s collection the other week. It was my first visit to the bookshop at its new site in Quezon City. It was the first time, too, I met Julie Po whose occasional trenchant comments I read in the papers. She continues to persevere. Much, much earlier, on those occasions that my wife and I visit California and our children there, we see her sister Susan.

This generation knows nothing about Joaquin Po and his hole-in-the-wall bookshop in Doroteo Jose in Santa Cruz. It was no bigger than my Solidaridad in Padre Faura. In the years immediately after World War II, it was the mecca of the country’s intelligentsia. We were a mere 20 million then, hungry for knowledge and insights and it was at this tiny bookshop where so much knowledge and ideas could be gleaned. Lording over it in his office cramped with books, Joaquin Po was readily available for conversation, comments, and assistance to the writers who, he knew, had little money. Books then cost an average of three dollars (or P6) at a time when writers like myself were making only P250 a month. Joaquin would let me have my choice of books for which I paid in installment. He would also suggest which of the new titles were excellent. It was in his shop where I often met the leading lights of the time: Jose W. Diokno, Teddy Locsin Sr, etc.

When I returned in 1966 after a posting of two years with the Colombo Plan in Ceylon, I started a publishing house, a journal (Solidarity) and a bookshop. My shelves were quite empty as shipment from the United States and England had not yet arrived. A week before the opening, I went to Joaquin and he readily helped me with his stock — half of the books on display were from Popular when General Carlos P. Romulo opened it.

Mila’s book launch was also a reunion of the anti-Marcos opposition, aging stalwarts like Bobbie and Satur Ocampo. In those years that both were in hiding, Bobbie, darkened with sun and punished by harsh rebel life, sometimes dropped by the bookshop. Being from the comfortable middle class, Bobbie told me now she knew what it was to be hungry and not to have a single centavo in her pocket. She asked me never to tell her father, Armando Malay, who was a personal friend that she had visited. I kept my promise.

I had asked Satur way back to write about his personal past, ditto with Bobbie who is a very good writer. Facts must be brought out before they are glossed over and revised by people like Juan Ponce Enrile or Bongbong Marcos who keeps insisting life was far better during his father’s brutal dictatorship. It is for this reason, for history, for memory and our revolutionary tradition that books like Mila Aguilar’s should prevail.

A Clash of Cultures — Early American Protestant Missions and the Filipino Religious Consciousness

By Melba Padilla Maggay

233 pages

Anvil

After the Spaniards formally ceded the Philippines to the Americans in 1898 for $20 million, American Protestant missionaries came to the Philippines and set up missions all over, some of them in remote areas that were never reached by the Spanish Catholic missionaries.

This study probes into the weaknesses, the problems which the Protestant missionaries encountered during more than five decades of intensive evangelism. This careful and innovative study by Melba Padilla Maggay — a social anthropologist and creative writer — tells us the reasons why. Deeply researched and with piercing insight, she relates the “clash” of cultures in the work of the missionaries. More than this, she also explains the Filipino world view in the context of history, colonialism, and the Filipino struggle for nationhood.

I do not think it was the intention of Melba to go into further study on the other religious sects like El Shaddai other than the American sects. It would be interesting to find out, for instance, why the Philippine Independent Church was unable to use nationalism as the basis for growth and for becoming like the Church of England.

It would be interesting, too, for us to know the reasons for the steady growth of a millenarian church like the Iglesia Ni Cristo and the equally rapid reach of the El Shaddai which has the approval of the Catholic Church.

An excellent read for those who want a deeper understanding of Filipino society.

Kano-nization: More secrets from the x-pat files

By Scott Garceau

183 pages

Anvil

The Way Things Work

By Scott Garceau

153 pages

University of the Philippines Press

Simianology: Stories by Scott Garceau

By Scott Garceau

139 pages

Anvil

Scott Garceau is The STAR’s Lifestyle desk editor. I take notice of his books for the simple reason that I like them, his gentle, playful view of our quirks (some of them linguistic), his continuing amazement at the trifles (including Imelda’s shoes) which fascinate us. I can understand his politeness — being an expat and married to his lovely Filipina wife Therese — but I wish in his comments a bludgeon might work better than a fan.

Although much of his short stories have to do with his American background, he has at least written a story or two in these two collections set locally which illustrate that he is a superb wordsmith, in the elegance of his prose, the subtle undertones.

What I now hope to read in the very near future is a novel which unravels the complexity of our relationship with the United States (meaning the Americans), giving such a relationship a human balance which will perhaps explain why such a relationship has lasted so long. It should not be laborious for him — his very readable stories flow, unimpeded by too much attention to form.

Introduction to Philippine History

By Jose S. Arcilla, SJ

141 pages

Fourth Edition, Ateneo de Manila University Press, Manila

This slim volume, called an introduction to our past, is actually a condensation of our history from pre-history to the start of the martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos. It is not exhaustive so, for those who want to know more, Father Arcilla has included titles for further reading.

Father Arcilla is well-versed in Spanish, which is good, because without this knowledge, a Filipino historian will be denied the primary sources in Spanish here and abroad. And there is so much of that Spanish past which up to now we really do not know — the whole of the 16th and 17th centuries, for instance.

Such records are scattered all over, in Mexico, in the archives in Europe and, of course, in Spain.

The three centuries of Spanish rule influenced so much of our culture. They gave the country its national boundaries. But scholars have yet to unravel so many details about how the country was ruled, the attitudes of the Spanish rulers. One question I would like Father Arcilla to ask is this: by the 1820s most of South America had already shaken off Spanish rule. It took 60 years for the Filipinos to initiate the rebellion that ended in the stalemate of Biak na Bato. Why did it take so long?

He also makes this interesting observation that the Filipino nation did not yet exist when Lapu-Lapu killed Magellan, and he shouldn’t be considered, therefore, as a Filipino hero.

Perhaps, it was not the intention of Father Arcilla to analyze the socio-political problems that have hobbled this nation. But those interested in our history should try to ponder the reasons for the revolutionary movement in the past, and which continue to this very day.

Father Arcilla avoids comment on the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. He should speak up and write the truth before the Marcoses, who are back in power, and Juan Ponce Enrile succeed in distorting the historical facts. It is now 40 years, almost two generations, since the Marcoses were booted out of the country — so many of the victims of the infamy are still around.

I can understand the scholar, O.D. Corpuz for not commenting, for ending his magnificent opus, The Roots of the Filipino Nation, before the Marcos regime because he was part of that cabal — but like I said, it is precisely because of their roles in that dictatorship that writers like Corpuz must speak now, not for the sake of their families or of history itself, but for the nation to know the truths.

Father Arcilla has no reason to withhold comment on the Marcos regime particularly since this book is in its ninth printing. To really deserve his reputation as a judicious scholar and historian, he must comment on the Marcos dictatorship in his next edition.