Francisco Jose - The Samsons - Two Novels

As a journalist, I had closely kept track of our agrarian tensions, the Huk uprising from 1949 to 1953, and much earlier, had researched the Colorum peasant uprising in eastern Pangasinan in 1931. But first, I remembered my own relatives and neighbors in that small barrio where I was born, especially my grandfather, who was a tenant farmer, and how he had participated in the Revolution of 1896. My most memorable moment with that old man was when he took me to the fields beyond our village. It was harvest time, and the fields spread before us, golden with ripening grain. He had carried me on his shoulders, then he had put me down, and with one arm outstretched, he pointed to the near distance, to the land he had claimed from the forest together with his brothers, and spoke of how the land was stolen by the rich ilustrados with their new-fangled torrens titles. I remember most of all his crumpled face, the tears streaming down his cheeks, and his admonition: I should study, be literate so that I would not be oppressed.

Working in journalism in the fifties, I sought out Pedro Calosa, who led the Colorum uprising in eastern Pangasinan. Earlier, in 1948, I was drawn to the Huks and met their leader, Luis Taruc, when he came down from the mountains and stayed briefly at the old Quirino house in Dewey Boulevard. I was then on the staff of the Catholic weekly The Commonweal . Both had impressed upon me the immensity of the struggle for agrarian justice.

Now, here I was in the Basque, putting together my first novel, The Pretenders . I had included in it an old rebel, the father of protagonist Antonio Samson, who was in prison for being a member of the Colorum movement, and had burned the municipio of the fictional town of Rosales (Tayug).

There, far from the Philippines, I thought about the continuing poverty of our peasantry, which I knew firsthand.

In that month in Marquina, I often walked beyond the village to the hillside farms. My afternoons were punctuated by what seemed like the crack of pistol shots. The boys were playing pelota , the traditional Basque game that we in Manila call jai-alai. One day, a pelotari who had played at the fronton in Manila came in his big Ford — the only Ford in the entire region — and he drove me around the beautiful Basque country, and reminisced about the Philippines, and he made me homesick. I went to the posh resort town of San Sebastian. It was June and pleasant, and for a couple of nights I slept on the beach, the Playa dela Concha, the surf murmuring softly through the night, the laughter of vacationers lolling on the sand reaching out to me, dismembered voices from another world. I also ventured into Guernica, remembering Picasso’s famous painting about the doomed town that was leveled by Hitler’s planes during the Spanish Civil War.

In these meanderings I brought to mind our own revolution, its betrayal, and the continuing oppression of the Filipino masses, not so much more recently by the colonialists, but by our own mestizo elites. How did we get to be so miserable, so downtrodden? I recalled my grandfather, his careworn face, and slowly — ever so slowly — I came to realize how necessary it was for us to rebel, to overthrow the status quo, the exploiters who claimed they were Filipinos.

I had been taught to believe in the sanctity of democracy, in the use of reason, and the evil that is violence. I had read voraciously Das Kapital in college, and was very much impressed by it although I found it difficult reading. But it was not Marxism that made me abandon the idea of peaceful change. It was my knowledge of the poverty in that barrio where I came from and how it was almost impossible for people like us to rise from the dungheap of internal colonialism.

It was in that Basque village where I finally and irrevocably accepted revolution. The moment I did, I immediately felt a gladsome lifting of the spirit, as if freed from a damning burden that had weighted me down all my life.

So the main character in The Pretenders , Antonio Samson, kills himself. Betrayed, corrupted, his death is for him a measure of redemption.

Where do you get your ideas? What inspires you? These are common enough questions often asked by readers. The imagination, of course, always helps, but the truth is that I write from my own inconsequential life. Like most egoists, I had thought of doing my autobiography but had desisted, for I know that in every story I wrote, I was in it not so much as a peacockish character, but as the fount of most of those thoughts, feelings, and the minutiae of detail and incident, I hope, that gives my fiction some semblance of throbbing reality.

For example, there is my past — our past. In conceptualizing the five-novel Rosales saga in the early fifties, I had planned on writing only four. I had not intended it to cover a hundred years of our history — perhaps, at the most, just three generations.

During the Liberation in 1945, when I was briefly in the American Army as a civilian technician, I read those free paperback editions that GIs casually threw away, among them the novels of William Faulkner. The literary geography that Faulkner created fascinated me, and I decided to try doing the same, that is, using those vivid memories of my boyhood and of my village. Too poor to buy a typewriter in those days, when my colleagues in the Manila Times left the office, I used to stay there and work till past midnight, writing the chapters first as short stories so that I could sell them to the weekly magazines to augment my income. As a friend, Austin Coates, said when we talked about my working habits, even if I was good at carpentry, the joints would show. And also: I should not write like this but try to get away from it all so that I could concentrate on my fiction.

Very sound advice, which I valued. Since then, I have tried writing away from my own country. The Rosales novels were mostly written abroad, with the exception of Tree , which I wrote in Baguio, in a modest hotel, Vallejo Inn, below the old Pines Hotel which had burned down. Vallejo, built before World War II, was for clerks, and the Pines was for the brass. I wrote The Pretenders in a small village in the Basque country, Mass in Paris, and the last to be finished, Poon , in Bellagio, Italy. My favorite writing escape is Tokyo. As everyone knows, Tokyo is one of the most expensive cities in the world, but I am very fortunate to know Gaston Petit, a French-Canadian Dominican and a superb artist. His atelier is in Shibuya, just behind the Dominican church. He allows me to stay in the monastery and in his atelier. Half of the year, during the summer months, Father Petit hastens to Champlain in Canada, but when the harsh Canadian winter sets in, he returns to Japan. If his atelier, which I call the Petit Hilton, is not available, Professor Yasushi Kikuchi of Waseda, another old friend, tries to locate inexpensive lodging in his university for me.

My own generation was matured by World War II. In those three years that we were brutalized by the Japanese, we were deprived and hungry, we suffered torture and feared for our lives. War tempered and at the same time ravaged us. When we returned to school in 1945, we were fired with idealism, as young people often are. We aspired to build a free and prosperous nation. Then, through the two decades after college, I saw many of my contemporaries forsake our idealism and our consciences. I found an apt symbol for such an apostasy — the balete tree ( ficus benjamina linn ) — also known as the strangler tree. It starts as a sapling encircled by vines that fatten and eventually become the trunk of the tree itself. In their growth, they choke the young tree they have embraced. It is with such a pervasive sense of futility that I wrote Tree , then My Brother, My Executioner about the peasant Huk uprising in the early fifties. At that time, at the height of the Hukbalahap (short for Army of the Nation against the Japanese) uprising, the American writer Wallace Stegner visited the Philippines. I attended one of his lectures. Having read the fiction of the period, he said that Filipino writers were not engaged — or engagée as the French would call it; he had not seen anything written about that rebellion that had already cost so many lives.