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LITERATURE AS HISTORY |
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 by F Sionil Jose
(Speech delivered by F. Sionil Jose at Stanford, CA as Writer in Residence on
May 5, 2005)
I am grateful to Stanford, to Prof. Roland Greene and the Department of
Comparative Literature in particular for having me here as Writer in Residence,
to Prof Ann Gelder who is looking after the details of this visit.
I am only too aware of this university's greatness, its trove of Nobel Prize
winners. I have a bookshop and I know the distinguished publications of the
Hoover Institute. Our best doctors in the Philippines trained here. As for
Stanford's contribution to literature, in the mid fifties, your famous writing
guru, Wallace Stegner, visited Manila. If I may brag we have the same editor,
Samuel S. Vaughan, at Random House. Mr. Stegner correctly observed that there
was yet no literary record of the Hukbalahap peasant uprising that was
then winding down. I should have told him then -- give me time for I was
conceptualizing a novel on that subject.
I originally titled this talk "Revolution as Literature" but my wife said it may
not sit well with an American audience.
Certainly, it does not sit well with Filipinos. But I will digress into it just
the same.
When we arrived last month, I was sent to a room where I was detained for about
half an hour. When I finally joined my wife at the baggage claim area, we were
the last passengers there.
I will share with you my conversation with the Homeland Security officer who
corrected my immigration form. He asked what I wrote and I said novels and
articles on current affairs, politics and history. That started it. He wanted to
know more about us Filipinos.
First, we are not Asians like the Chinese, the Japanese, and the Indians. The
two great religions of Asia, Buddhism and Hinduism, responsible for the
civilization and classical traditions of that continent never reached us
although
geographically, we are there. We are Christians who could have been Islamized if
Islam came a few decades earlier.
I told the officer we are many islands and tribes. In the past were at war with
one another. Much of that ethnicity remains in our languages, customs,
attitudes. And like the United States, we are a young nation.
I am here now to finish a novel which will help us understand our history
better. The novel is about Artemio Ricarte the revolutionary general who refused
to pledge allegiance to the United States at the end of the Philippine-American
War in 1902. Yes, there was such a war which brought America to Asia in 1898 -
America's first colonial venture.
We became America's first and only colony. But not after more than 250 thousand
Filipinos, mostly civilians were killed. In that war, America committed its
first atrocities in Asia.
I have been working on this novel for so long, the research is flowing out of my
ears, shackling my imagination. The English novelist, Robert Graves, advised an
Australian writer to write the novel first then do the research afterwards. But
I got that advice too late.
My five novel saga is named after my hometown, Rosales. It is framed within a
hundred eyars, from 1872 when three Filipino priests were executed by the
Spaniards, to 1972 when Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law. This century is
marked by peasant revolts. Through three centuries that we were ruled by Spain,
peasant revolts erupted intermittently.
A word of caution to those who plan writing historical fiction. DUSK, the first
novel in this saga has a real life character, Apolinario Mabini the brains in
the revolution against Spain -- the first anti-imperialist rebellion in Asia --
and later on in the war with he United States. He was a cripple and I attributed
his infirmity to syphilis as told to me by two venerable historians.
Wrong! When his bones were exhumed in 1980 as told to me by a much younger
historian, Ambeth Ocampo, it was found he had polio. I confronted the two
historians and both scolded me for giving credence to what they told me was
gossip.
According to Ocampo, the upright Mabini opposed a scheme by some of the rich men
who joined the revolution to raise money that would have enriched them but would
have tainted the revolution. So they discredited Mabini.
The second novel in the saga is called TREE after the balete tree,
scientifically named ficus benjamina linn. A scholar
visited Rosales then returned to Manila to tell me there was no such tree in
Rosales. Of course it is not there but is in
many places in the country, in all of Southeast Asia.. As a sapling, the young
tree is soon surrounded by many vines. The vines grow to be the trunk of the
tree itself; they strangle to death the sapling they had embraced. A very apt
metaphor for so many of us.
Literature is myth making. For a young nation, it is necessary. Who can prove
there was a cherry tree the young George Washington chopped down and couldn't
lie about?
Myth makers or not, all artists are ego driven, impelled by, the human impulse
to celebrate themselves in the most personal manner thereby achieving style and
originality. They seek originality although in the end so many are just plain
imitators of life and of other artists, sometimes doing willfully so, sometimes
in blissful ignorance. But the self gets satiated with narcissism so artists
attempt to transcend the self and transcendence becomes the motive for a more
profound expression. I do not claim profundity; there is nothing deep in my
motives. They are moored on the reality of my country, and fiction has
difficulty catching up with that reality.
I use history to impress upon my readers this memory so that if they remember,
they will not only survive, they will prevail. I also present a nobler image of
ordinary Filipinos so that even if we are destitute, amidst the swirling tides
of
corruption, we can raise our heads. With memory, we can face our grim future
with courage.
I created in this saga, characters like Istak, the farmer and healer in DUSK,
his vagabond great grandson, Pepe Samson in MASS and real life hero from
the underclass, Apolinario Mabini. These truths are often ignored by historians
who focus on momentous events and big men but miss the "little people".
Critics call this effort revisionist, the formalists say I mangled the English
language because I think in Ilokano -- my
mother tongue and write in English-- Still others say I romanticize the common,
the mundane. I hope I am shaping not just myths and hollow hallelujahs, but
literature.
In 1955, on my first visit here as guest of the state Department, I spent an
afternoon with the poet Robert Frost at his cottage in Ripton, Vermont. He was
in his late seventies, but still writing. He belonged to that generation which
included Mark Twain. They objected to the American occupation of my
country. They argued that America, which won its freedom through revolution had
no right to invade a nation waging revolution for freedom -- the first in Asia
against western imperialism. The millionaire Andrew Carnegie even offered to
return the 20 million dollars the United states paid Spain to acquire the
Philippines.
Mr. Frost asked how that occupation turned out. I told him were it not for the
public schools established by the United States, at that very moment, I would
most probably be an uneducated farmer atop a water buffalo somewhere in the
island of Luzon.
In 1972, I toured this country lecturing under the auspices of the Council on
Foreign Relations. I told my audiences, if they did not suffer from historical
amnesia and recalled the Philippine American War, they would have never gone to
Vietnam. It was not communism they faced in Vietnam it was that impregnable
force, Asian nationalism.
To be sure, strident voices in my country are critical of the United States. I
sometimes join these out of frustration. Do not get us wrong -- many Filipinos
consider America our second country.
But we must wean ourselves from overpowering American influence, get rid of our
American hangover induced by benevolent neglect. Our cultural workers must shed
off the American veneer, which stifles creativity and use the mud at our feet,
our folk traditions, our sweat and blood to build the enduring Filipino pillars
that can withstand the onslaught of globalism and McDonald's.
I remind our writers about the "Flowering of New England", how Emerson, Walt
Whitman and those innovative Yankees freed themselves from 19th century European
romanticism to celebrate America and give America a granite cultural foundation.
It is not easy for us to do the same. History had done its nefarious job.
Stanley Karnow' s book, "In our Image" sums up the colonial experience. The
Americans wanted a democratic showcase and we eagerly complied. The result is a
disaster. Your fault and ours.
More than ten years ago the Atlantic magazine editor, James Fallows visited us.
After seeing the deadening poverty the callousness and perfidy of our leaders,
he concluded that the obstacle to our progress is our "damaged culture."
Back to our Homeland Security officer in San Francisco to illustrate this
damaged culture. He had interrogated Filipinos wanting entry. He said flatly:
"They are liars".
I told him they had to lie, to do anything to escape my country's poverty and
injustice.
What had happened to us? After World War II, we were Southeast Asia's most
modern, most progressive. Students from the region came to our schools. When I
traveled, the backwardness everywhere amazed me. Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur were
villages. The tallest structure in Bangkok was the Wat Arun. Seoul and Taipeh
were quiet, with horse drawn carts, bicycles and those low brick buildings left
by the Japanese. These cities are no longer recognizable from what they were.
Manila has skyscrapers now but everywhere are the slums that show how we have
decayed.
Thus, the massive hemorrhage of talent, the diaspora. There is no ocean going
vessel without a Filipino on board, from the Captain down to the steward. An
American diplomat had heart surgery in Washington performed by what he said is
one of the top surgeons in America. He is Filipino. A Boeing executive told me
Iran Air wouldn't get off the ground were it not for the Filipino technicians
there. An Indonesian businessman said most of the banks and corporate
headquarters in Indonesia are managed by Filipinos. A Singaporean architect
pointed to the city's soaring skyline as the handiwork of Filipino architects
and engineers. The United Nations headquarters would stand still if all those
Filipina secretaries were absent. And what would happen to your health service
if all those Filipino doctors, nurses and technicians left?
Indeed, the Filipina is not just a maid in Hong Kong or a prostitute in Tokyo.
We have become the proletariat of the world. This is our shame and our pride for
as a European executive wryly commented: "You are such a wonderful people, why
is your country such a mess?"
Your Homeland Security officer said he knew of a Filipino retired general who
was poor.
I said that general should be investigated for unexplained poverty. The "damaged
culture" James Fallows pointed out can be repaired. In the fifties, President
Ramon Magsaysay invigorated the Army to defeat the Hukbalahap rebellion. He
cleaned up government, made it responsive to the needs of the masses. When he
died in a plane crash in 1957, people in the streets wept. When Arsenio Lacson
was mayor of Manila at about the same time, the city was safe, the garbage
collected, the coffers were full. A year after he died, the city was broke.
The moral decay is a slow process exacerbated by the Japanese occupation when
all the rules were thrown out and each man was for himself. The elite
conditioned by colonialism collaborated all through our history with the
imperialists. Like most of us, they imbibed the vices -- not the virtues of our
rulers -- the sense of honor of the Spaniards, the enterprise and democratic
ethos of the Americans, and the discipline and sense of nation of the Japanese.
And like the imperialists, the rich Filipinos sent their loot abroad -- The
Chinese to China and Taiwan, the Spanish mestizos to Spain and Europe, and the
Indios like Marcos to Switzerland and the United States. As the Spanish writer
Salvador de Madariaga said, "A country need not be a colony of a foreign power,
it can be the colony of its own leaders."
How then can we accumulate capital to modernize? How do we end this treason? How
else but through the cleansing power of a nationalist revolution, a continuation
of the revolution the Americans aborted in 1898. It is not only inevitable, it
is righteous.
In 1986, we finally threw out Marcos in a bloodless revolution. But Cory Aquino
who succeeded him turned it into a restoration of the oligarchy -- not democracy
as she claims. Sure, we have free elections and etcetera but these are the empty
trappings -- not the essence -- of democracy. That essence is in the stomach,
when the Manila jeepney driver eats the same food served the President in
Malacanang palace.
Listen, when I was a child, the poorest farmer ate twice a day, but only in the
three hungry months of the planting season. Today, the poor eat only once a day.
They die when they are sick because medicines are expensive. Millions of grade
school kids drop out because they cannot afford to continue. About half of 85
million do not have safe drinking water.
Two ongoing rebellions, one communist and the other secessionist have cost us
billions of pesos and thousands of lives. If the communists win -- and I know
they won't-- they will rule just as badly because they are hostage to barnacled
habits of mind, to ethnicity. the real revolution has to start first in the mind
and its wellsprings are not in Mao or Marx. It is in our history, in Mabini, in
Rizal our national hero whose writing inspired the revolution of 1896. Its creed
is articulated by the peasant leader Pedro Calosa who led the Colorum uprising
near my hometown in 1935. It is this: God created land, air and water for all
men. It is against God's laws for one man, one family to own all of them."
The American reformer, Wendell Phillipps confirms the Colorums. He said, "If you
hold land and land is in the hands of a few, you do not have a democracy--- you
have an oligarchy."
And this is our curse -- an oligarchy that must be destroyed, whose allies are
here in this bulwark of democracy.
Who, after all, was Ferdinand Marcos' best supporter, but Ronald Reagan. Can you
understand now why America is so crucial to us and to those in the poor
countries whose despotic rulers have alliances with American leaders? Washington
wants peace and stability and so do we who are enslaved -- but that peace, that
stability should not be the peace of the grave.
When we parted, the Homeland Security officer said I was the first Filipino
he talked with the way I did. What I told him, which I have said here is also
what I say at home. It grates the ears. For this, I have been accused of
Filipino bashing, labeled a communist, a CIA agent, an opportunist. You name it.
In truth, I am just an old writer whose voice is drowned, unheard in the
maelstrom that is my country. I, end DUSK, the first novel in the Rosales saga
with the battle of Tirad Pass in December 1900. To me, that battle is similar to
Thermopylae in ancient Greece. There, Leonidas, the king of Sparta and his men
died to a man defending the pass against the invading Persians.
In Tirad Pass, high in the roof of the Cordillera range, the 24 year old general
Gregorio del Pilar and 48 of his men -- most of them farmers died defending it
against the invading Texas Rangers closing in on General Emilio Aguinaldo,
President of Asia's first republic.
I remind Filipinos of Jose Rizal who, at 34, was executed by the Spaniards for
writing tracts against them. As Prof. Roland Greene said, he was the first post
colonial writer. In World War II, all of Southeast Asia succumbed so easily to
the Japanese invasion. We didn't. Our valiant stand in Bataan peninsula, our
bitter guerrilla resistance -- these are forgotten.
I repeat -- we are a young nation -- carving our place in the sun. Young, yes
but we have a past which exalts us, which tells us that we have a revolutionary
tradition, and that above all, we are a heroic people.
In our search for social justice and a moral order, in our struggle to build a
just society, we must rely on no one else but ourselves, endowed as we already
are with a history that shaped our sinews and our genius. And from America, what
will we ask of you? Nothing, nothing but your understanding and your compassion.
But first, we must remember.
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Posted on Wednesday, May 25 @ 17:22:09 CDT by don |
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