History as prison, and as liberation

The newlywed writers Jizelle and David Lim dropped by Solidaridad the other day to talk shop with this tired, old hack. David was particularly anxious, unhappy with the recent election results. Moreover, he was afraid that he had immersed himself too deeply in our history, that his vision is narrowed and would eventually render him blind to so many other aspects of living and learning. Both had read me and they wanted to glean whatever they can from the barren plain where I had passed.

I told both what I thought of our unhappy history, which, I emphasized, also binds us together for it is a history all of us have shared.

As for the inequities bred by poverty, we can yet surmount them if we understood better why we continue to be poor in spite of so many chances that have slipped by — chances we failed to exploit, the ballot, most of all.

It’s not tautology — the poor are poor because they are poor. They have so few choices; they must concentrate on searching for food. They have little time or inclination to think. Contemplation is a luxury of the middle class, the very rich. Worse, the poor cannot connect their poverty to the wanton irresponsibility of government and our leaders. They do not realize the latent power in their numbers. Like the rest of us, they are for instant fixes, gratification now. The past means little to them — only the present and its misery and hunger.

Why the past matters

But the past matters for in it are the infallible beginnings — the augury of the present. The past could liberate or imprison — it creates a nation’s character, provides the nourishment or the poison a people imbibe in their very marrow.

Take ancient Greece, for instance.

A veteran diplomat who knew Greece told me that when that country was wracked by economic turmoil, the Greeks were hobbled by their own past — the “glory of Greece” in antiquity. By succumbing to the opiate of that past, they lost the vitality to face the challenge of the future. Their capacity for renewal was deadened by inertia induced by memory.

Indeed, the past could very well be a permanent and serious obstacle to innovation inspired by the creative mind.

Take literature. Even in pre-literate societies, it exists as chanted verses, as folk epics. Some of these were retained after our Christianization by the Spaniards; so, too, during the Spanish regime the literary efforts in our own languages — Tagalog, Ilokano and Visayan. The most outstanding, however, were the few novels in Spanish, among them Rizal’s classics Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. Organizations like the Instituto Cervantes are now resuscitating the few that can be dredged from the past. It could have been much more; the Spaniards were here for 300 years. But as a distinguished Spanish diplomat admitted with much regret, “The colonial government did not teach the Filipinos Spanish like it did in South America. This is one of Spain’s greatest mistakes.”

The Americans did not repeat the Spanish error. Immediately after the Philippine-American war in 1902, the first English teachers — the Thomasites — arrived and taught the new language to peasant and landlord alike. In a generation, the Filipinos had produced a body of distinguished literature in English. Read the stories of Paz Marquez Benitez, Paz Latorena, onward to the work of Manuel Arguilla, Estrella Alfon, the poetry of Angela Manalang Gloria, Tarrosa Subido, even Jose Garcia Villa, the charming fiction of Cornelio Faigao, Sinai Hamada, CV Pedroche, D. Paulo Dizon, Pacita Pestaño, the erudite essays of Fred Mangahas, S.P. Lopez, I.V. Mallari, Leopolodo Yabes, Teodoro M. Locsin; our young writers should read them, and realize a Filipino literary tradition of excellence already exists.

Study the classics

I can imagine the writers of China, England and France, crippled and unsure of themselves when they feel that the ghosts of Confucius, Mencius, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Victor Hugo are looking over their shoulders. How convenient it is for us Filipino writers  —we only have Bukaneg, Balagtas and Rizal to contend and wrestle with. Today, those among us who are excellent are the creators of the identity of this nation — the very same role these ancient chroniclers assumed in their distant time and place.

And so I tell the young writers to read also what these foreign writers wrote — the classics as we label them, to learn from them. The Bible, too, for it is in this religious tome that the story of Man unfurls in its pristine condition.

We will also see that in these chronicles, so little — or none at all — of humanity has changed. The moral dilemmas as probed by the classicists resonate to this very day in the same ethical confrontations that we make.

The ancients have successfully recorded these because they were superb craftsmen, true to themselves and contextual to their time. This most important achievement is what we can learn from them. They shaped a granite continuum to which we can add and contribute.

By looking back into our past — even to the recent past that this generation has experienced — we will know ourselves better, our faults most of all, and why through all the travail that has tested us, we have failed; why we weren’t been able to build the institutions that will ennoble us with justice, the nation we long for.

The curse of betrayal

From this past, we know why. Behind this tragic failure is betrayal — we betray one another — and most of all, we betray ourselves, our ideals, our morality.

Look back: Diego Silang was betrayed. The revolution of 1896 was betrayed by the Pact of Biak-na-Bato — and earlier, Bonifacio was betrayed; and in turn, Aguinaldo was betrayed as well.

In more recent times, today, we are constantly betrayed by political charlatans.

And we betray one another because of envy, our bloated egos or just plain cussedness. Listen to what my old informant observed of Filipinos in the United States; he works as an interpreter in the California courts whenever there are Filipinos with inadequate English on trial. A judge told him: “Why do you Filipinos betray one another? The Japanese, the Chinese, the Koreans —they stick together; they don’t snitch on one another.”

And so, in the conclusion of my Rosales saga, the redeemer, Pepe Samson, is betrayed by his own colleague who, in spite of his successful career, envies Pepe Samson’s perseverance, his commitment to a cause others, including himself, had abandoned. This is the truth about us. We must shout from the rooftops the ethical and political verities if we Filipinos are to deserve this tiny place in the sun.

Yet, from this same ignominious past, we can catch glittering glimpses of our valor, our perseverance and dogged loyalties. Our folk epics — as with almost all epics elsewhere — are adorned by exemplary men and women, some of incomparable strength, and the women of ethereal beauty. From these native sources, for poets and storytellers — here are the materials that we can use, the roots that anchor us on native soil. We will use them all, refrain them with our art and make them useful, transform them into the spirit that will bind and bond us. This valor, this loyalty that exists in our literature abounds as well in reality, in our own history. Rizal wrote about it and lived it, too, because he knew this nation’s past, because he was contextual and most of all, he had vision.

He looks perpetually over all our shoulders, now.

They who stand alone

In our continuing probe into our past, we can always speculate. How would it have ended for us if we were not colonized by Spain or the United States but by Japan? If in 1521, we were fully Islamized? Would our culture, our art, be different?

But there are no “ifs” in history. We are what we are. Weak, fractured — hostage to the whims of our powerful neighbors like China and Taiwan — both of which profited from the billions this country’s ethnic Chinese sent there. This, we must remember, too.

A weak people and its equally debilitated leaders are bludgeoned by history. It maims them into the cripples that they are meant to be.

On the other hand, a strong, creative people are free from such a despicable fate; they shape the national soul, decree history itself in accordance with their dreams.

And the artist — the writer is the loneliest of creatures as he searches and creates the joyful alternative realities from his imagination. He stands alone and is, therefore, the strongest. It is he who owns the future.