MANILA, Philippines - Francisco Sionil Jose is the most widely read Filipino writer in the English language. He looms large in the global literary scene as the recipient of the 1980 Ramon Magasaysay Award for Literature, the 2001 National Artist Award for Literature, and the 2004 Pablo Neruda Centennial Award from Chile. His novels and short stories have been translated into 28 languages. Time Magazine has called his work as “grivaled only by Jose Rizal’s.”
Considered to be his greatest work is the five-volume Rosales saga, which is set in the Pangasinan town he was born in 1924. The Rosales saga — Po-on, Tree, My Brother My Executioner, The Pretenders, and Mass — covers 100 years of Philippine history, from the execution of the three priests, Gomez, Burgos, and Zamora in 1872 to the declaration of martial law in l972.
Here, he brings us on a rare tour of the Rosales of his childhood and his novels, and the SM mall in his hometown. This is his Rosales. This is his SM.
Filipinos are so talented. When I was the editor of Asia Magazine, I had the chance to work with people from many countries, and I can say that we have some of the most gifted people in the world.
Whenever I bring guests to Rosales, I show them the schoolhouse I went to, then bring them to the setting of the saga — the houses of the landlords, the municipal building. Then I take them to Balungao, the mountains, then to Tayug, where the uprising took place in the 1930s.
Perhaps, I started writing the Rosales saga when I was a child, not even in grade school; my grandfather took me to the fields beyond our village and when we stopped, he pointed to the expanse of ripening grain and all that land was cleared from the forest by him and his brothers. But that land, after all that hard work, was stolen by the Spanish mestizos. He then said that I must go to school so I will not be oppressed the way he was.
Then there was my teacher Miss Soledad Oriel who gave me Rizal’s novels when I was in Grade F to 10 years old — the Noli and Fili, as translated by Charles Derbyshire — they were the first novels in English which I read. As a writer and as a Filipino, Rizal has been my greatest inspiration.
After the Noli and the Fili, Miss Oriel gave me My Antonia by Willa Cather then Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes.
In writing the saga, I also tried to portray the Filipino condition honestly and as best as I could so we would be able to recognize the truest image of ourselves. We would then be able to fashion for ourselves an alternative reality, a redeeming vision emergent from our unblemished understanding of why we are.
I remember climbing Mt. Balungao as a child during school vacations. I hiked barefoot for a day passing through the fields of Cuyapo going to Balungao just bringing a bottle of water, half a panutsa, and leftover rice for the hike.
I was there during the opening of SM City Rosales, and have been back there several times. During the town fiesta last year, we had a series of cultural events, including the staging of my short story “Progress” at SM Cinema. Just as it has become a center for shopping, I hope that SM will become a center for cultural and community events in Pangasinan.
My wife and I like going to SM to walk, to eat, and to visit bookstores.