A country of short story writers

By Elmer Ordonez

Last week, in a tribute to novelist Azucena Grajo Uranza, I said something to the effect that we have very few novelists in a country of short story writers.

How so? This has something to do with our literary history particularly in English. It is commonplace to say that two novels of Jose Rizal sparked the Revolution of 1896. They were the first social realist novels ever written, departing from the earlier harmless novel Ninay of Pedro Paterno and the epistolary novel Urbana at Feliza, providing moral guidance to women. The next epoch-making novel is Banaag at Sikat (1906) by Lope K. Santos with a more explicit socialist message than El Filibusterismo which has a failed anarchist character in Simoun.

In the 1880s Rizal, with funds from friends, sent his manuscripts directly to printers in Europe while Santos had his novel Banaag at Sikat serialized in his Muling Pagsilang which was the mouthpiece of the workers movement. The magazines that came later like Liwayway, Bannawag and Bisaya continued the practice of serializing longer works of fictionists like Amado Hernandez with his anti-imperialist Mga Ibong Mandaragit. The novel in Spanish died with Rizal but saw a brief resuscitation in the surviving writers in Spanish like Antonio Abad whose El Campeon won in the Commonwealth Lirterary Contest. Novels in Tagalog, Ilocano, and Bisayan continued coming out in serial form.

The first novel in English is said to be Zoilo Galang’s A Child of Sorrow, a product of the author’s stay in America. Maximo Kalaw, a UP professor and dean, came out with The Filipino Rebel, a roman a clef whose characters are based on real personages in the political scene. A few other novels in English came out before the war like Jaime Laya’s His Native Soil and N.V.M Gonzalez’s The Winds of April which won the Commonwealth prize in 1941.

Leopoldo Yabes marked the coming of age of the Filipino short story in English with Paz Marquez’s “Dead Stars” in 1926. At about this time the UP Writers Club was founded by Jose Garcia Villa, Federico Mangahas, and Gabriel Tuazon. Its publication Literary Apprentice began publishing stories from campus writers and others who were also contributing to A.V.Hartendorp’s Philippine Magazine and the Philippines Free Press, edited by another American. F. Theo Rogers. Villa who had left for the United States after winning the P1000 prize for the short story “Mir-i-nisa” in the Free Press , continued to keep track of the burgeoning literary scene by coming out with an annual Roll of Honor of stories during the thirties which saw prodigious output of stories and even poetry in English in campus and national magazines.

Teachers like Paz Marquez-Benitez and Paz Latorena taught the short story form to UP and UST students, respectively. Short story anthologies from US publishers served as textbooks in English courses.

Writers mainly from the UP like Salvador P. Lopez, Federico Managahas, Jose Lansang, and Teodoro Agoncillo formed the Philippine Writers League which had a proletarian bent, influenced by Marxist writers all over the world during the Depression years. The New Critics initially composed of conservative Southern writers espoused formalism to oppose the Marxist approach in literature. But their influence did not reach Filipino writers until after the war. The Philippine Writers League convinced President Quezon to pursue a social justice program and to fund the Commonwealth Literary Contest, 1940-41. Younger writers like Francisco Arcellana, NVM Gonzalez, Hernando Ocampo, Delfin Fresnoza, Manuel Arguilla and others had their own group The Veronicans who put out little magazines Expression and Story Manuscripts. Ocampo, Fresnoza and Arguilla were inclined to write about workers and peasants while Franz Arcellana argued with S.P. Lopez and Arturo B.Rotor’s call for literature with social content. Franz sided with Jose Garcia Villa about literature for art’s sake in a debate in journals like the Herald Midweek Magazine.

This debate ended during the Japanese Occupation when some writers collaborated with the Japanese for putting out Philippine Review and Pillars where for less than two years (1943-44) they came out with a number of stories, essays, and poems. It was a bleak period all around.

After the war Bienvenido Santos came back from exile during the war with many stories like “Scent of Apples.” He also wrote four novels in his lifetime. NVM Gonzalez got a Rockefeller award that enabled him to write and attend writers workshops in Iowa, Breadloaf and Stanford, and was the first to introduce the workshop idea in UP Diliman, formally in class and in other venues during the 50s. The national UP Writers Workshop was first held in 1965 in Baguio. The Tiempos returned in the early 60s and began the Silliman writers workshop.

Since then, the writers workshop (replicated in other schools) with emphasis on the craft of fiction and formalist tenets has produced bumper crops of short story writers and poets who were all aiming for cash prizes in the several literary awards like the Free Press and Palanca. As Free Press editor Angelo Lacuesta said, the 90s produced “the workshop generation.”

Many are writing novels. As fictionist Rony Diaz noted as judge, he had to read 350 novel entries for the Philippine centennial literary contest in 1998. (To be continued)

calling out angel #azkals

so she’s dating, or is in a relationship with an azkal, but she’s also a gabriela supporter? member? which makes it even more dismaying that angel locsin has not seen fit to keep her silence while due process for cristy ramos takes its course.  instead she saw fit to pounce on arnold clavio and accuse him of “racism” for saying that the culprits are not really pinoy, not having been raised here.

In one of Unang Hirit‘s segments, Clavio had discussed the Ramos-Azkals issue. Then, at some point, Clavio addressed the Azkals, saying, “Talagang aral na sa inyo ‘yan. Ang yayabang n’yo. Akala n’yo porke’t dinadagsa kayo ng mga fans, ang gaguwapo n’yo, e. Parang God’s gift to women (Let it serve as a lesson to all of you. You’re all so arrogant. You think because you have fans that you look so good. Like God’s gift to women).” Clavio went on to defend Ramos and support her statement against the Azkals. Clavio then addressed the Azkals once more: “Hindi naman kayo Filipino. Nagpapanggap lang kayong kayumanggi. Hindi kayo dito lumaki, mahirap yun. Insensitive (You’re not Filipinos. You’re only pretending to be brown-skinned. You didn’t grow up here, that’s hard. Insensitive).”

clavio was quite candid about expressing his feelings, good for him, which must have caught many viewers unprepared dahil hindi naman tayo sanay sa prangkahan — we’re just so non-confrontational, so averse to facing facts; easier to deceive than to confront ourselves.

even better, clavio hit a sensitive nerve when he suggested that these azkals are not really filipino, not having been raised in the philippines, even if half-filipino by parentage.  it raises the question of what is it to be filipino ba.  is half-parentage good enough even if they don’t behave like pinoys do around here, rather, like ill-bred conquering whites who are so full of themselves, they think they’re entitled to break rules and get away with it?

no, there was nothing racist about clavio’s remarks.  sabi nga ni marco harder sa facebook:

Heard it, it’s not even remotely racist. Saying someone is dumb because he’s black is racist. Saying all Jews are loan sharks is racist. Saying two people were clueless about cultural norms isn’t. [march 14]

clueless about cultural norms, mismo.  one of my first reactions when i heard of cristy ramos’s travails was, ay, walang takot ang azkals kay FVR, the general, the disciplinarian, chief of the martial law police, EDSA hero, and former president?  which is not to say na ok lang if cristy were the daughter of a nobody, NOT AT ALL, as angel would know.  rather, that even the most bastos and mal-educado konyo pinoy would know better than to behave improperly with a ramos lady dahil hindi ‘yan magpapalampas ng kabastusan, matakot ka.  i guess no one told them.

good of cristy to do this, show pinays the way, what to do when harassed: don’t put up with it.  women are dejado enough in the arena of sex without having to put up with inappropriate remarks and indecent behavior in the workplace, including boys’ locker rooms.

and if it’s true, as told to beth celis the sports columnist, that the azkals have a contract with abs-cbn, it explains why the machos of Hard Ball choose to give the azkals the benefit of the doubt and to take it out on arnold clavio of the rival network instead.  good job, guys :(

i don’t care that the azkals just lost to turkmenistan.  karma kicking in maybe.  in my book, until they get down on their knees, all of them, and apologize to cristy, show real remorse, the occasional victory is theirs only, and abs-cbn‘s, but certainly not worth claiming for nation.

*

the latest is this from gma network, a response to the philippine football federation (pff) ‘s complaint re clavio et al’s commentary.

Sa liham ng Philippine Football Federation, sinabi nilang racist, discriminatory, libelous at malicious ang mga pahayag nina Arnold Clavio at Rhea Santos. Pero ang GMA Network po, walang nakitang racist, walang discriminatory, walang libelous at walang malicious sa mga komentaryo nina Arnold at Rhea.

way to go, gma!

 

The truth about sexual harassment #azkals

By Katrina Stuart Santiago

Is that it happens to the best of us. It happens to every Pinay who commutes and suffers through a “miss miss miss!” from the tambay in the kanto or the kuya construction worker; it happens to every Pinay who has had to deal with a policeman looking at her legs through the window of her car. It happens to us even when all it might be is a lewd gaze from a random commuter, or a guy at a restaurant, or a student, or a teacher, or a boss. Or talk of the size of our breasts in a roomful of male athletes.

Cristina Ramos’ complaint of sexual harassment against the Azkals is all too familiar to me, and I don’t need to be a Sports Commissioner tasked with doing a pre-match inspection for me to sympathize. If you’ve experienced sexual harassment in any form, then you know how it can bring you to tears, how it can make you feel so small, and how it can only be a threat to you as a woman. And it’s the same whether you walk the streets on the way to work, or you enter the national football team’s locker room because you are so required by your job.

It is the same: sexual harassment is sexual harassment is sexual harassment.

Of course this complaint against the Azkals can only be larger than the manong throwing a lewd glance my way. The latter is a random daily occurrence of sexual harassment which one doesn’t get used to but which one expects. The former is within a set of circumstances that should have been controlled, within which decency was expected, during which respect should have been default. Ramos after all was in that locker room on official business, she had the right to expect a team dressed and ready for inspection, she had a right to expect a halt in testosterone and boisterous machismo, at least for the duration of her official presence in that room.

She had a right to expect that all the members of this team would be properly dressed, i.e., why would most of the team be in uniforms and one guy be in his underwear still? She had the right to expect proper decorum at the very least. Certainly the statement “Must be a B cup”delivered to the laughter and amusement of the rest of the all-male team that was there, could be nothing but sexual harassment, could be nothing but an assessment of the one woman in the room based on how large her breasts are. There was no excuse – no excuse at all – for those words to have even been articulated as if it’s a punchline to some running testosterone-driven joke.

And it is ultimately unfair to say that Ramos was imagining things, or wanting to “get attention” as one of them Azkals insinuates, or that the B-cup was referring to something else as another says. These excuses, along with having the more famous captain of the team saying that this is something that’s been blown out of proportion, are brush-offs that no one, least of all Ramos, needs to hear. These are brush-offs that hit at the victim’s credibility, excuses that shouldn’t even be on the table at this point.

Here is where Arnold Clavio was so right: the thing to do at the point of being accused of committing sexual harassment was to apologize. Clavio was en pointe: bakit kayo nagpalusot pa? Why could this not have been a sorry, quick and easy, the kind that any respectable Pinoy man would do, with head bowed, pasensya na, na-offend kayo Ma’am. Even the most macho of our stereotypical men, from Robin Padilla to Joseph Estrada, all of them, would know to raise their hands in surrender, and on bended knee say sorry for their inappropriate behavior, never putting into question how the woman felt, how she had taken offense. As per Clavio: “Lagi nating ilagay do’n sa nagrereklamo, siya yung na-offend eh. Sa sexual harassment laging binibigyang-diin diyan, kung naramdaman mong nabastos ka.”

It’s the same way that I know when a man stares at my breasts, or my legs, or looks me in the eye as we converse; in the same way that any woman would know when she is being ogled versus being treated with respect. The Azkals are in no position to question Ramos’ statements that she felt sexually harassed in that locker room; the woman who cries sexual harassment is articulating a feeling, a sense of being belittled, of being maltreated based on her gender. The proper response was a sorry, full stop.

Ah, but apparently in third- world patriarchal Philippines, we can take sexual harassment and make the men look like the victims – especially when those men are part of a well-loved Philippine sports team. Apparently here, we will re-focus all our energies on crying racist! Even when all that’s being pointed out is the fact that these boys did not grow up here, and therefore had no sense of the Robin Padilla respecting-women-while-being-a-bad-boy school of ironic gentlemanly behavior. Here, we will all fall silent instead of supporting the woman who dared point a finger at bad behavior; and then in the next breath we will judge anyone who criticizes the adored pretty-boy-athletes .

Here in this instance, we prove that instead of a collective disgust at those accused of sexual harassment, we will be more certain about vilifying the woman, whose intentions are questioned, her reasons for crying foul seen as foolish or presumptuous. And here we are all reminded about how patriarchy is so deeply ingrained in our psyches that we are still being told that we ask to be harassed because of how we look, what we wear, where we go. We forget that it is our fundamental right to live free of harassment, sexual and otherwise. It is our fundamental right to freedom that is being denied us when we are told not to do certain things because kabastusan is just around the corner.

Republic Act 9262 or the “Anti-Violence Against Women and Their Children Act of 2004″ exists in this day and age precisely because men have yet to prove that they can deal with women’s freedoms. Meanwhile, sexual harassment exists because men continue to think of women as objects: body parts to be assessed in terms of size, body parts to jack off to, body parts period. Sexual harassment happens not because the woman is in the wrong place at the wrong time: it’s because the man continues to conform to the stereotype of being a chauvinist pig, unable to look a woman in the eye and see her as an equal because she is a person, full stop. The act of sexual harassment is always and necessarily one that puts the woman in her place: it’s a place that puts her beneath the man.

I don’t know about you, but men who get a kick out of kabastusan and belittling women in this day and age? They are nothing but boys. And I don’t care how many medals the Azkals win for this country, it seems that for them the more difficult task is looking a woman in the eye, treating her as an equal, and apologizing for having offended her. Seriously boys, get some balls and man the fuck up.

K to 12: Wasteland

By Raul V. Fabella

The Philippines has embarked on an enormous P150-billion project — the K to 12 — that is set to add as part of the basic education a mandatory kindergarten and an additional two years to the high school. The mandatory kindergarten is not contentious because there is empirical evidence that it does improve learning outcomes. It is the learning outcomes that should concern us here. I still have to see evidence (perhaps I did not look hard enough) that the additional two years of high school will improve learning performance.

Evidence-based policy making is now a buzzword in the development policy arena. Two celebrated books published in 2011, namely, Poor Economics by Abhisit Banerjee and Ester Duflo and More Than Good Intentions by Dean Karlan & Appel make their mark by hammering home the need for evidence-based policy making. Dean Karlan, who was a speaker at a seminar at the University of the Philippines School of Economics, gave examples of a particular methodology — the randomized controlled testing — results of which inform policy makers of what is actually happening on the ground as opposed to what policy makers believe is happening on the ground. Banerjee and Duflo cited the case of a controlled experiment in India where video cameras were installed in some randomly selected classrooms among the universe of classrooms. The result was a dramatic increase in the learning outcomes of students! This intervention changed teacher behavior in terms of attendance and proficiency, which led to improved student performance. Randomized controlled trials are just one vehicle in the garage of evidence-based policy.

Unfortunately, this evidence in support is precisely what is lacking in the additional two years segment of K to 12. We have only lame statements of belief by DepEd officials that the 10-year cycle is crammed and teaching the material in 12 years will decongest the curriculum and improve outcomes. Nobody seemed to have asked how the congestion arose in the first place. If the congestion came from our penchant to accommodate each and every fad and fancy at every turn to the detriment of 3R’s, then, in time, the 12-year cycle will be also congested and we will need to go for K to 14. Did anybody ask why some courses may not be attenuated, de-emphasized or dropped altogether? Lengthening the years is, however, the path of least resistance and as experience amply tells us promises to be the more disastrous course in the long run. In other words, “tapunan natin ng pera para tumino.”

Learning outcomes have dramatically improved by other means other than lengthening the years. The Dynamic Learning Program (DLP) devised by the Bernidos of Bohol has delivered dramatic improvements in learning outcomes of students with even keeping one day a week, Wednesday, academics-free. It is a matter of good time management, improved teacher commitment and good pedagogy! But these are precisely the stumbling blocks in our current pre-college education does not have the mettle to brush aside. Two more years will not solve these; they will only scale them up.

The province of Bohol is very fortunate that Governor Edgar Chatto has gotten DepEd’s and Secretary Luistro’s leave to implement the Bernido DLP for all public high schools in the province. This a far-reaching and innovative concordat entered into by DepEd and a local government unit. This worthy project will start this June 2012 and preparations are underway. But the additional resource requirement is minuscule and is being shouldered by the province itself. If the learning outcomes are as promising as envisioned, then we can think seriously of scaling it up nationwide. Meanwhile, other provinces similarly motivated should be allowed to follow the lead. That should have been the process followed for any educational reform including K to 12.

Improvements in learning outcomes is the holy grail in every educational reform. Lengthening the number of years was at best a peripheral and lame proposal. It did not involve “a change in behavior,” which is a sine-qua-non for a meaningful reform. It’s just more of the same rotten banana. How it became the 500-pound gorilla in the education agenda is a mystery to me. Sure there were scattered anecdotes of Philippine diploma holders having some problems in the global job market but that the concern for “missing years” could be partly explained by the perceived decline in quality of our graduates. Indian Institute of Technology engineering graduates are highly sought after globally despite no more aggregate number of schooling years than Philippine engineering graduates. Those potentially affected Philippine graduates can solve the missing years’ problem themselves by taking two years more of schooling after college, say, taking an MA privately financed. “Private benefit, private cost” is a healthy economic principle.

K to 12 needs a radical change in operating philosophy. It must go slowly and gingerly beyond the Kindergarten segment and abort any segment unsupported by evidence of learning improvement. For the moment it should be open to the two years being added to the college curriculum on the basis of private benefit private cost principle.