Category: elmer ordonez

Nationalist writers

By Elmer Ordonez

EDUCATED in English from grade to graduate school, I belong to the generation(s) of what Renato Constantino called “the miseducated Filipino.” My exposure to Tagalog literature was limited to a high school subject using Diwang Kayumanggi as text. At home, my parents spoke Spanish to each other and English or “garil” (fractured) Tagalog to their children, who in turn spoke Manila street Tagalog to each other. Ilokano and Bikol were also heard at home whenever my father’s relatives or my mother’s kin visited us.

As an academician, I moved around in an English milieu such that when the First Quarter Storm (FQS) broke out in the early 1970s, we senior professors in the English department at UP Diliman felt beleaguered by nationalists (including English major students and young instructors in English) who mocked us and our English discipline or specialization. The newly created Department of Filipino and Philippine Literature (founded ironically by Leopoldo Y. Yabes, a professor of English whose forte was Ilocano literature, and staffed by former instructors or English majors like Petronilo Daroy, Ernesto Constantino, Patricia Melendres and Romeo Dizon and new graduates majoring in Filipino like Rosario Torres) became the “premier” department as far as the nationalists were concerned. Teaching in Pilipino/Filipino was the “in” thing then.

Bienvenido Lumbera, the former head of the English department and founding chairman of the Filipino department at Ateneo de Manila University whom I invited to lecture on Philippine literature in English, was lured from my department to teach Tagalog poetry in the Filipino department. Lumbera was an instant hit among UP students and young writers. During the FQS, he was to head the organization Paksa (Panitikan para sa Kaunlaran ng Sambayanan) with a national democratic orientation. Martial law forced Paksa underground; Lumbera was arrested and detained for more than a year. Ateneo refused to take him back but he was welcomed in UP.

Lumbera, now a National Artist for Literature, was one of the writers in Filipino discussed in Alinagnag: Sanaysay ng mga Panlipunang Panunuri sa Panitikan (UST Publishing House) by Rosario Torres-Yu, who became dean of the UP College of Arts and Letters. Lumbera majored in English literature at the University of Santo Tomas and comparative literature at Indiana University in the United States. He wanted to write his dissertation on Indian literature in English, but his dorm mate, top English-language fictionist Rony Diaz, convinced Lumbera—who wrote poetry both in Tagalog and English—to write on Tagalog poetry instead. This was the beginning of Lumbera’s veering away from a Western to a Filipino orientation.

Torres-Yu sees the conversion of Lumbera when he picked up the challenge posed by Amado Hernandez to write in Filipino. At that time the challenge was made—the 1960s—writers in Filipino like Rogelio Ordoñez, Efren Abueg, Norma Miraflor and Rogelio Sikat were making waves with their social realist fiction as embodied in their anthology Agos sa Disyerto. Undoubtedly an influence on the younger writers, Hernandez himself was to become the first Tagalog National Artist for Literature on the basis of his nationalist poetry and plays written in prison and his novel Mga Ibong Mandaragit. Hernandez was chairman of the Congress of Labor Organizations (CLO) when the Politburo of the PKP (Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas) was rounded up by the military in 1950. This was the beginning of the McCarthy-like witchhunt in the city, in labor groups, and in government offices and universities. Hernandez was arrested on the charge that the CLO was a PKP front. Jailed along with the Politburo members, Hernandez spent his time writing even in the bartolina. He wrote lines of poetry in slips of newsprint smuggled out by his wife Atang de la Rama, who pieced them together and had the poems published under the title Isang Dipang Langit.

Torres-Yu devoted her studies on Hernandez and became an authority on the Filipino nationalist writer. She has several books on his works, as well as on the labor movement that Hernandez once led. After he was released in the early 1960s, Hernandez published Mga Ibong Mandaragit in installments in Liwayway. His re-entry into the literary scene during the 1960s was marked by his getting the Republic Heritage Award. During the FQS, he was always invited to speak at activists gatherings. In a necrological rite for the slain activist Enrique Brigada of the Lyceum of the Philippines, his oration ended with the slogan “Makibaka! Huwag Matakot!” which became a battle cry at FQS demonstrations. Hernandez died in March 1970. Kabataang Makabayan members carried his bier to rest in the Manila North Cemetery. When he posthumously received the National Artist award in 1973, Salvador P. Lopez noted that the Marcos regime gave the award when Hernandez was “safely dead.”

Torres-Yu also wrote about feminist literature in her book, devoting essays on Genoveva Matute and Lope K. Santos, as well as on underground literature during martial law, Valerio Nofuente and other martyred writers, and the history of the workers movement. Alinagnag seeks to provide illumination on social issues through nationalist literature. It is Marxist literary criticism that runs against the grain of the prevalent formalist/neo-formalist critical practice of the literary establishment.

Disaster and imagination

By Elmer A. Ordonez

I MISSED the Philippine PEN conference (Dec. 1-2) at which I was supposed to chair a panel on “Apocalyptic Writing: Disaster and Imagination.” I inveigled Gilda Cordero-Fernando to be one of the panelists. But recently I experienced my own “apocalyptic” moment that compelled me to skip everything, cancel all my appointments, and declare that my column “Romance of the Seas” might be my last. Faithful readers swamped my e-mail with queries “Why?” My daughter Mo who sometimes has a strange sense of humor, rejoined, “Why only now?”

But here’s why. We in the family have learned to accept fate. My wife, the afflicted one, and I, both of “uncertain age,” have become philosophical about it. None of that Dylan Thomas thing about not going “gentle into the night” and raging against “the dying of the light.” It’s more like just coming to terms. The lyrical stuff may or may not come later.

Read the rest here

Armies of the Night

By Elmer Ordonez

OCTOBER 1967 saw a huge anti-Vietnam war march to the Pentagon in Washington, DC participated in by protesters from all over the United States as well as replicated in major cities across the nation. Novelist Norman Mailer joined the march and was roughed up by the riot police and arrested. After this experience he called up Harpers to say he was writing about it.

The following year Armies of the Night, a kind of documentary novel came out.

I commented on Mailer’s book in the 1969 UP writers workshop in Iloilo where resource person/critic Leonard Casper noted my “clairvoyance” in foretelling the new genre first tagged as “documentary novel, ” “non-fiction novel” or “history in a novel/the novel as history”—which today’s students of literature would call “creative non-fiction.”

The 60s practitioners of this new journalism are Truman Capote in his In Cold Blood (1965), about a berserk student’s shooting spree in a Texas university, Hunter S. Thompson in Hells Angels, (1966), about the notorious motorcycle gangs, and Tom Wolfe in The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test (1968), about Ken Kesey and hippie counterculture. Mailer who gained early fame with his The Naked and the Dead (1948), (which includes his experience as a GI in Leyte during the Pacific War) would win the Pulitzer and the National Book award for Armies of the Night. Jerry Rubin called it the Bible of the anti-war movement. (Peter Manso, Mailer)

The First Quarter Storm demonstrations in 1970 would produce Jose Lacaba’s Days of Disquiet, Nights of Rage, outstanding for its gripping reportage of the successive student and worker protest rallies. It is in the reading list of young activists to this day, a book icon reissued by Anvil.

In my last column on the destructive large scale mining in Surigao del Norte I alluded to the green “armies of the night” —the quiet legions fighting for clean water, clean air, environmental and cultural protection. Little did I realize then that the peaceful Occupy Wall Street protesters, harassed by police with arrests and pepper spray for violations of odious laws, (e.g. no standing or smoking on side-walks) and belittled by establishment media like the New York Times, would spread rapidly across the globe. The OWS or Occupy Movement is against corporate greed symbolized by the bankers in the Lower Manhattan street and stock exchanges around the world. It has become anti-capitalism and anti-rich not only by the dispossessed and unemployed but those with jobs and professions. Intellectuals speak before its assemblies.

The state and corporate elites are said to be frightened by the Occupy movement. Hence, the attempts at suppression ranging from violent in cities where the protesters are small and vulnerable and less brutal in cities like New York where OWS protest is strong. The 2011 armies of the night may yet cause a reverse Fall of Berlin Wall syndrome—the decline of capitalism. In Taipeh the protesters sang the “Internationale.”

In the US there could be a rebirth of FDR’s New Deal which is socialist enough and therefore anathema to conservatives, Republicans and Tea Party followers. This will not be surprising since the entry of neo-liberal policies under the tag of globalization pushing privatization, deregulation, and liberalization has resulted in contractualization of labor, outsourcing of production and services, lowering of corporate taxes, debasing of labor unions, privatizing of medical care, reduction of social programs and security, and poverty all around.

The Occupy movement is enjoined by allies to have leaders and make clear their demands, but apparently the New York OWS assembly which has anarchist tendencies prefer consensus building and direct action to central leadership, and not to have specific demands. However, considering what the corporate world has inflicted on the working class, they want to tax the rich to create job programs and provide fully paid education, universal health care and social security, single payer health care among others.

In the Philippines, according to Bayan, 49 million Filipinos are poor, 36 million can not afford food, 15 million experience hunger, 11 million are jobless. Local participation in the global movement would escalate and the people’s struggle would intensify unless the lot of the masses is radically changed.

As it is, the West—Europe and the US—are in deep economic crisis, now seeking ironically China’s help for fiscal bailout. But China, its socialist regime having made capitalism work to its advantage, is itself experiencing the inevitable results of capitalism in the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor, the underpayment of labor, unemployment, shoddy and toxic products, corruption in the bureaucracy and industry, and diminution of social security. The economic system shall have created many internal contradictions the regime may realize unbridled capitalism is self-defeating. One writer noted, China needs Marx and Mao at this time.

Hark, then, the armies of the night are abroad. Do you hear them sing in Taipeh, “Arise, ye wretched of the earth…” Or in Berlin (ironically?) Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”?

mining & the NPA, chacha & the environment

‘Victory to the noble in heart!’
By Elmer Ordonez

A VIDEO of mining operations and the havoc wrought in the mountains of Surigao is making the rounds of social media and the Internet. It was produced by GMA network as a segment of Reporters Notebook. Unable to watch it on TV, I was glad a friend e-mailed to me the video which shows wide swaths of once forest cover now baring reddish soil as results of open-pit mining—truly destructive of the pristine environment fast vanishing from our land. In Surigao large wooded areas have been gouged with machine hoes and payloaders to harvest mineral ore which are borne by trucks to the sea wharf for loading in cargo ships.

The video came together with a Star report about the New People’s Army (NPA) raid on the mining firms’ camp where dump trucks and heavy equipment were torched, three security guards killed, and two hostages taken.

A reader wrote, “After watching the video, I realized that the rebels’ belligerence is called for and completely justified. Victory to the noble in heart!” The reader, an award-winning fictionist, is not a partisan for the rebel movement, but she must have been so outraged by the miners’ assault on our diminishing forest cover and the pollution it has caused that she could not help but express herself thus. “Victory. . .” may well be for all those fighting for clean air, clean water, environmental protection — the green “armies of the night.”

Another reader involved in anti-large scale mining advocacy in Surigao del Sur wrote that Manobos live in the area. “It is difficult and dangerous to do mass work there because local executives of towns are pro-mining; they get huge amounts and benefits from the mining companies,” she said.

Official reaction to the NPA raid is typical. The president condemned the raid and expressed concern that this would discourage foreign investments. The government’s chief negotiator in the peace talks called the NPA raiders “more of bandits than rebels.” The police chief in the same Kapihan forum cried NPA “extortion.”

On the other hand, PNoy’s adviser on environment is on video saying (prior to the raid) that the mining firms have violated the Mining Act of 1995; his DENR secretary maintains that the government pursues development not at the expense of the people.

Actually the government was remiss in enforcing the laws on mining and environment while the NPA chose to punish the erring mining firms in keeping with the policy enunciated by Luis Jalandoni, chief negotiator of the National Democratic Front in the peace talks. In a statement (October 5), Jalandoni criticized the president’s reaction to the NPA raid as thinking “only . . .of favoring foreign investments, even if extremely exploitative.” He points out that “1) the extraction of nonrenewable resources such as mineral ores for export at dirt cheap prices kills the Philippine prospects for industrialization, 2) the indigenous people are subjected to dispossession of land, mass dislocation and ruination of their lives and culture, and 3) the unbridled mining poisons the environment and damages agriculture and other forms of livelihood.”

Jalandoni reminds the government about the petition filed by the Tribal Coalition of Mindanao et al. with the Supreme Court on May 30, 2011 against the targeted mines that have already poisoned the rivers and creeks and the coastal waters of Claver, Surigao del Norte.

The petition for a writ of Kalikasan (calling for a temporary environmental protection order against the mining corporations) cites a UP study finding nickel levels in the river/water systems in the area as high as 190 mg/l while the maximum level of nickel in drinking water should only be 0.02 mg/l (according to the Department of Health and the Bureau of Food and Drugs).

For years now civil society, environmental groups and church groups like the Ecumenical Bishops Forum and the Catholic bishops have expressed alarm over the destruction of our natural resources to extract mineral deposits as in Marinduque, Negros, Benguet, Zamboanga del Norte, and Surigao. The purported financial returns for the government from the Surigao mining are shown in the video to be a pittance (P 13.7 million in taxes) compared to the P144.4 billion in profit going to the mining companies for 2010.

Now both houses of Congress are agreed in principle to change the economic provisions in the charter apparently to favor foreign investments, in keeping with the lawmakers’ neoliberal tendencies. On the other hand, the progressive party-list groups and members in the House are pushing for a People’s Mining Bill to regulate the operations of mining firms and address ecological concerns for people’s welfare.

It is time for the government to reorient its economic policies for the benefit of the people, particularly the poor and indigenous peoples, and not to endlessly feed corporate greed. It is time to take seriously environmental concerns since the country is experiencing disastrous results (like floods) of past neglect and acquiescence to foreign control.

Victory, indeed, to the noble in heart!