The Role of the Novelist

The post-launch smaller crowd at Solidaridad were all concerned about the fate of the nation in the light of the impeachment trial. … We ventured that the reason why there seems no end to elite rule is that those in power create or reproduce the conditions for their own reproduction or perpetuation considering that they control the coercive and ideological instruments or agencies of the state. Otherwise, as Marx said, they won’t last a year.

By Elmer Ordonez

The top floor of Solidaridad Book Shop built after the war on Padre Faura, Ermita, Manila, is ideal for a book launching because, for one, it can accommodate about 50 people, the usual number attending such an event. More than that can be a tight squeeze in a space accessed only by a steep narrow staircase from the mezzanine used as office. Frankie Sionil Jose has his nook, the “den of iniquity” as he calls it, in the top floor where writers have met –other National Artists like Nick Joaquin and NVM Gonzalez, Philippine PEN members, and visiting literary figures like Mochtar Lubis, Norman Mailer, Wole Soyinka, and Mario Vargas Llosa, to name a few.

Once, Frankie invited the leading figures of the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP) in a seminar on the Huk rebellion. After a heated and recriminatory discussion Frankie concluded that egos must have gotten in the way of the revolution. Frankie’s Solidarity (now defunct) published the proceedings of the meeting . Other radicals and armchair revolutionaries have met in the same venue; hence, Frankie likes to call the top floor of his book shop a den of conspiracy and lost causes.

(Actually Solidaridad Book Shop is the best stocked bookstore in town catering to the intelligentsia since the early 60s. No pulp fiction or romance pocketbooks here. Just good literature and scholarly work.)

It is in this historic setting that Rony V. Diaz’s novel Canticles for Three Women was launched last Saturday. The discussion focused on why the country, ruled by the elites, cannot break the impasse of poverty, hunger and official corruption. Rony’s novel seeks to show the rot in our society –as Jose Rizal’s novels did to expose the social cancer of friar-dominated Philippines.

“I am no Rizal,” Diaz said when it was noted that Rizal’s novels triggered the 1896 Revolution. He said that his aesthetics prevent him from making a case for armed revolution – though he mentioned the activities of the Huks and other armed groups.

I pointed out that Rizal, with his knowledge of revolutionary practice limited to anarchist socialism in Europe tried to create an anarchist character in Simoun but who failed in his plot to destroy the social and political elite under one roof by a bomb planted in an overhead lamp. It takes conscience-stricken Isagani, seen as Rizal’s persona because of his reformist ideas, to throw the lamp with the bomb into the river just in time. The dying Simoun’s jewels left in the care of Father Florentino who also reflects Rizal’s reformist prescription of education for social change, are cast by the Filipino priest into the Pacific Ocean – praying that they be retrieved and used by those pure in heart for the benefit of the oppressed people.

The banned Rizal’s novels which were circulated surreptitiously by ilustrados (like Jose Ma. Basa) nfluenced those who would lead the armed uprising in the 1890s, a time when the Propaganda movement was at its height here and abroad. The friars were of course furious and had Rizal on his return from abroad arrested and deported to Dapitan. Thus, the birth of the Katipunan led by Andres Bonifacio. .

A writer for a business paper asked, “after Rizal’s novels, what?” There were of course the “seditious plays” of Aurelio Tolentino et al at century’s end, the socialistic novels of Lope K. Santos and Faustino Aguilar, the incendiary Sakdal and PKP tracts, proletarian writings in the 30s, Amado Hernandez’s anti-imperialist novel Mga Ibong Mandaragit, and underground or resistance literature (produced mainly by national democratic writers up to the present).

Fiction in English has not seen any novels approaching the subversive quality of Rizal’s until Frankie Sionil Jose’s anti-oligarchic novels particularly Mass where the principal character joins the underground, Sin where the mestizo elites are excoriated by the author, and The Feet of Juan Bacnang where the malevolent characters are shown to be recognizable contemporary politicians — like the actual persons in society portrayed or caricatured in Diaz’ Canticles for Three Women. Otherwise many novels in English seem to have been written for literary contests like Palanca and Asia Man.

The post-launch smaller crowd at Solidaridad were all concerned about the fate of the nation in the light of the impeachment trial. A lawyer in the defense secretariat was asked to sit with them. A witch hunt, the pro-Corona lawyer promptly said. The discussion turned out to be a replay of arguments for or against the chief justice.

So we ventured that the trial was an instance of the conflict of two rival factions of the elite and that these factions would ultimately come to terms and reconcile common interests. In his closing argument, the chief defense counsel hoped that the trial whatever its resolution would lead to national unity, i.e. the consolidation of the ruling classes..

We also ventured that the reason why there seems no end to elite rule is that those in power create or reproduce the conditions for their own reproduction or perpetuation considering that they control the coercive and ideological instruments or agencies of the state. Otherwise, as Marx said, they won’t last a year.

It is indeed a tall order for those below and the concerned middle class represented in Frankie’s den last Saturday to upset this order of things, and as the novelist said his aesthetics can go only so far –describing the state of society. That’s what Rizal’s first novel Noli did in the first place.

 

Which country is the ‘hoodlum’?

By Isabel Escoda

Was that Beijing blogger who labeled the Philippines “a hoodlum country” serious when he urged his government to “use force” to settle the territorial dispute in the South China Sea? And wasn’t Manila entertainer Jim Paredes being facetious in saying that Filipinos should claim Hong Kong’s Statue Square?

Do the overheated exchanges between the two countries’ bloggers border on the infantile? Are Chinoy media commentators and Pinoy columnists overdoing the threats and pontification? Why did I think of a Marx Brothers scenario when the Philippines yanked out the Chinese flag that had been planted on the Spratly Islands some months ago? Isn’t the wrangling over a bunch of shoals (defined in the dictionary as sandbars) a fatuous tit-for-tat game? Isn’t it reminiscent of that kid’s game where one person slaps a hand over the back of his opponent’s hand while the other slaps his over it, with the hand-over-hand slapping continuing until one party tires?

Did announcer He Jia of state-run CCTV in Beijing, who declared early this month that “We all know that the Philippines is China’s inherent territory,” misspeak on purpose, or was she parroting the claim by Chinese officials that the islands in question are “an indisputable part of China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”? Did her muted apology evaporate into space?

Did Beijing’s pronouncement that China is “prepared to respond to any escalation if Manila engages in more provocations” confirm suspicions among Pinay helpers in Hong Kong that they’re gradually being eased out because more Indonesian women are now being hired as servants in the territory?

Will Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese fulminate forever over President Aquino’s refusal to apologize for the deaths of eight Hong Kong tourists during the 2010 bus hijacking at Rizal Park? Was that a reverberating raspberry response across the sea to his admission that “things could have been handled better”? Are there really “bacteria problems” in Philippine fruit, as Beijing’s quarantine department claims, which is why they’ve stopped banana imports?

Isn’t this territorial imbroglio somewhat reminiscent of the war Britain waged against Argentina over the Falkland Islands in 1982, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher sent her country’s mighty fleet to crush the Latinos? Was Thatcher in the wrong because the Falkland Islands are right next door to Argentina, with Britain half a continent away? Or was that formidable prime minister right in that all of the Falklands’ inhabitants said they preferred to remain British? Wasn’t there a joke then about that war being like a squabble between two bald men fighting over a comb?

Now that Manila commentators are using “West Philippine Sea” instead of South China Sea, can China be stopped from altering its maps? While it’s obvious that the Scarborough Shoal lies just to the left of Luzon and the Spratly Islands are right next door to Palawan (and closer to Vietnam than to China), where is the United Nations’ Law of the Sea now that it’s needed? Does the wrangling just boil down to the possibility of finding oil in the disputed areas?

Is anyone concerned that the Philippine Navy is puny compared to China’s? Aren’t most of our ships and military hardware second-hand stuff, courtesy of the US government? Is the Pinoy dream of being a plucky David to China’s greedy giant realistic?

Wasn’t it another Chinese blogger who said that if every Chinese person spat, the Philippines would drown? Didn’t that remind me of finding, when I first came to Hong Kong in the early 1980s, the locals spitting everywhere? Didn’t the British colony then seem like one big spittoon? Wasn’t it the late writer Anthony Burgess who described hawking and spitting as “the national sound” made by overseas Chinese?

Didn’t my late mother tell us stories about her Chinoy lolo who washed up in Tayabas from impoverished Amoy, cut off his queue, changed his name to Samson and learned to speak Spanish? Didn’t he do well by marrying a savvy Pinay, setting up a business and producing 10 children—one of them my grandmother who spoke and sang beautiful Spanish?

Will the verbal assaults keep ricocheting across the ocean while politicians on both sides ignore more pressing problems on land? Is the issue more about human perversity than nationalist pride? Who knows?

Isabel Escoda is a freelance journalist based in Hong Kong.

Total transparency

By Amando Doronila

Within hours of the removal of Renato Corona as chief justice after the Senate impeachment court found him guilty of betrayal of public trust for failing to disclose all his bank deposits, the Supreme Court ordered on Wednesday all justices and judges to make public their statements of assets, liabilities and net worth (SALNs) for 2011 in an apparent effort to repair the damage wrought on the reputation of the judiciary by Corona’s 6-month trial.

The order was issued after a special full-court session called by Associate Justice Antonio Carpio, who stepped into Corona’s shoes as acting chief justice according to the hierarchy of seniority in the succession ladder. The fact that Carpio swiftly called the meeting signaled that even under an interim leadership, the high court was not crippled by the removal of Corona.

President Aquino, who initiated the campaign to remove Corona, and backed it with the enormous police powers and political patronage resources of the presidency, said on Wednesday that he would not rush the appointment of the next chief justice to avoid the mistake stemming from Corona’s “midnight appointment” by then President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. The question of who will be the next permanent chief justice immediately arose from legal and political circles, which expressed concern that the appointment of a chief justice pliable to the administration’s political objectives, especially on the issue of the President’s anticorruption drive, could fortify fears that such an appointment would further weaken and undermine the independence of the judiciary relative to the executive and legislative branches of the government.

Even at this uncertain period over the uneasy relations between the executive branch and the high court, Carpio seized the initiative to clean up the judiciary with the order to open its members’ SALNs to public scrutiny in the interest of transparency. He did not leave the initiative of a cleanup of the judiciary to a political witch-hunt in the guise of weeding out corrupt judges and those inconveniently standing in the way of implementing the administration’s gospel called “Daang Matuwid.”

The Supreme Court’s decision to open up the SALNs of all justices and judges came as a response to the public clamor for the disclosure of assets of all officials in the judicial, executive and legislative branches, following the failure of Corona to disclose $2.4 million and more than P80 million in bank deposits. Corona admitted these deposits after he submitted to the impeachment court a waiver of their confidentiality protected by the Foreign Currency Deposits Act (FCDA).

The high court said it was its “collective decision to release the SALNs in full, not [just] summaries.” The guidelines for the public release of the SALNs will be taken up in its en banc session on June 13.

The decision to disclose the SALNs is one of the positive outcomes of the testimony of Corona in the Senate impeachment tribunal last Tuesday, although his testimony was limited to only certain portions of his deposits. This led to his conviction that he was not telling the whole truth.

In his explanation of his vote to convict Corona, Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, the presiding officer of the impeachment tribunal, said: “The nondisclosure of these deposits, in both local and foreign currencies, would naturally result in a corresponding distortion of the Chief Justice’s real net worth.”

Enrile maintained that “the constitutional principle of public accountability overrides the confidentiality of foreign currency deposits.”

He added: “The provisions of RA 6426 (FCDA) cannot be interpreted as an exception to the unequivocal command and tenor of Article XI, Sec. 17, of the 1987 Constitution, that the highest magistrate of the land, no less, would think otherwise….

“The so-called conflict between RA 6713 and RA 6426 is more illusory than real. Section 8 of RA 6426 merely prohibits the examination, or looking into, of a foreign currency deposit account by an entity or person other than the depositor himself. But there is nothing in RA 6426 which prohibits the depositor from making a declaration on his own of such foreign currency funds, especially in his case where the Constitution mandates the depositor who is a public officer to declare all assets under oath.”

Enrile said some had wondered why the Chief Justice should be held accountable for an offense of which many, if not most others, in the government are guilty, perhaps even more than he is.

The Senate President added: “Here lies what many have posited as a moral dilemma. I believe that it is our duty to resolve this dilemma in favor of upholding the law and sound public policy. If we were to agree with the respondent that he was correct in not disclosing the value of his foreign currency deposits because they are absolutely confidential, can we ever expect any SALN to be filed by public officials from hereon to be more accurate and true than they are today?

“I am not oblivious to the possible repercussions of the final verdict we are called upon to render today. I am deeply concerned that the people may just so easily ignore, forget, if not completely miss out on, the hard lesson we all must learn from this episode, instead of grow and mature as citizens of a democratic nation.”

In fact it cannot be ignored that there is now a clamor for public servants to disclose their SALNs—not only the justices and judges but also the President down to members of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The doctrine of Enrile in explaining his vote of “guilty” applies to all. Otherwise, we all face a grand hypocrisy by the self-righteous.