Francisco Jose - Don Vicente - Two Novels

Toward the last decades of Spanish rule, the desire of the Indios to be educated could no longer be restrained. Some were already in the priesthood, and families who could afford it sent their children to Europe for their education. They imbibed the ideas of the European Enlightenment. They were not so much interested in an independent Filipinas as they were in proving themselves equal to their Spanish overlords. They set up in Barcelona La Solidaridad , a fortnightly edited by Marcelo H. del Pilar, wherein they espoused ideas of equality, cultural nationalism, and democracy. They satirized the friars and showed an erudition that proved to themselves, at least, that they deserved seats in the Spanish Cortes.

This period is known as the Propaganda Movement, and the brightest lights of our Spanish literature shone in the pages of La Solidaridad . The newspaper was banned in the Philippines; like most exiles, the Filipino patriots and writers were condemned to penury. Penniless and often at odds with his own countrymen, Marcelo H. del Pilar is one of our tragic figures; soon after the paper was forced to close for lack of funds, he died in Spain of starvation.

Rizal foresaw the coming of America not only to Asia but to the Philippines, and America did come. Our literature in Spanish was fired by anti-American feelings after 1898.

The soldiers from Idaho and Montana became overnight teachers, and there were more to come: the first Peace Corps, the Thomasites, those dedicated young Americans who arrived on the S.S. Thomas and set up the beginnings of the public school system.

Our first literary models were asinine. In high school, we read and delighted in O. Henry’s trick endings. We did have some classics, the Gettysburg Address, the hortatory writings of Tom Paine, but in a sense our colonial educational system fostered a culture that did not emphasize our Filipino-ness. In fact, in the late sixties, I was forced to write to the principal of the academy where my boys went to school; their elocution text included only one Filipino author. Looking back, I am convinced that this educational system created for many of us a warped view of our own society; it made us hanker for the luxuries that we could not produce. Worst of all, we came to accept cultural symbols that were alien to us.

The Americans, with their sincere naïveté and mixed intentions, as evidenced in the Washington archives, could not help themselves, either. Our elite, from the very beginning, chose to collaborate almost uncritically with them just as they collaborated with the Spaniards and the Japanese. In literary terms, it would take time before we would appreciate the “flowering of New England” and those writers who gave American literature its sinew and its marrow.

By the thirties, Filipino authors with new sensibilities, like Paz Marquez Benitez, Narciso G. Reyes, Paz Latorena, Federico Mangahas, and Salvador P. Lopez, began to surface. Shortly before World War II, our literature in English had completely changed from the suffocatingly simple stuff of the twenties.

The war came and its brutality was deeply imprinted in our psyche; we continue to this day to ask questions about Japanese culture — how a people with highly polished aesthetics, with austere and contemplative philosophies, could surrender themselves to the obscenities of barbarism. During those three years of Occupation we were taught a new language, but at the same time the Japanese promoted Tagalog as the national language in a manner unequaled during the American regime. Tagalog literary magazines, associations, and literary experimentation flourished during this period. Another astute quality of Japanese propaganda was to point out our Asian-ness; it mattered not that we were under the heel of an Asian people — did they not prove themselves superior to the white race?

The Occupation brought to the surface fatal flaws of our society: the collaboration of the elite with the Japanese and how readily they gave up the ideals of freedom.

The history of our literary development is one of dilution, infusion, and impermanence. It is not strange, then, that some of us who today write in English feel that we are holding on to ropes of sand, that we may become irrelevant and extinct, unread by our people just as our literature in Spanish is entombed in Filipiniana indices.

This is not to denigrate the achievements of our writers in English who have joined the mainstream of English letters and honored the language with their excellence. But in writing in English, we also accepted the encumbrances of the language. We had to accept as part of our tradition Shakespeare and Dickens and Faulkner, just as those who wrote in Spanish had Cervantes and Lorca as hallmarks of their tradition.

This is not what I personally want, this fact forced upon me by my history, by my profession. Language is not just grammar and syntax, or poetry and prose; language is also a way of thinking, a culture. I do not deny my debt to English literature, my appreciation of its beauty, but English is also associated with my colonial past and its excesses, and because I have succumbed to it, it continually reminds me of and crucifies me for my weakness.

And much as I appreciate Faulkner and his commitment not only to the agrarian South but to man, much as I identify with Dickens’s righteous indignation at man’s inhumanity to man, both are alien to me; they come from another planet, and in our tortured geography they have little to say to me.

My tradition is the village, its filth and its poverty, the agony and the confusion of my striving to be free from it yet be part of it.

Tradition — what a beautiful blind, what an ambiguous, all-purpose façade; like patriotism, it can very well be the last resort of scoundrels or writers grown obese with comfort and adulation. It is, of course, never enough. One can find in it his hope or his perdition and for most of us, it is usually the latter. The businessman who hires his relatives no matter how inefficient they are is paying a heavy price for his tradition. The Filipino critic who lavishes praise on his incompetent writer friends because he does not want to ruffle their feelings is no different. Literature suffers because writers give their books to colleagues who will then write glowing reviews or saccharine introductions.

These acts are done regularly in the Philippines and they can be easily rationalized. Aside from the desire to maintain “smooth interpersonal relations,” jobs are difficult to find, and coteries are not just for social and intellectual amenities; they are also for assistance, which comes in the form of awards, fellowships, and grants. All down the line, from the editors of literary magazines to the teachers in the universities, this social system operates. The public does not really care, consensus becomes the final accolade, and sometimes, only in private conversations or in our innermost thoughts is the true worth of many of our writers ever acknowledged.

And because criticism is permissive, literary reputations — as with other reputations — are easy to garner; mediocrity often masquerades as genius. Some writers who have not produced any body of work acquire a tremendous literary following, even the National Artist Award!

This is one reason, I feel, why little is known of our literature in English outside of Manila or, for that matter, of our Spanish literature. Many of our writers are contented and smug with their reputation at home, but more than this, if we try to get published abroad and are rejected, we feel that foreign editors and publishers do not understand us. It will be difficult for us to realize that our shortcomings could be on craft, that our skills can be honed not only by dogged perseverance but also by an honest tradition in criticism.