Category: literati

the house that literature built

thanks, Rogue Magazine, for letting me share this.
something that’s not common knowledge, and needed to be said.

BURN AFTER READING
By Katrina Stuart Santiago

There is much to be said about the probability that the writer who has not done any of the writing workshops, has not come out with a book with any of the commercial and academic publishing houses, has not taught at one of the four major Manila universities in the past five years, has not won any major writing prize in the past three, has not been employed by the academe or the publishing industry either, would be brushed off as a non-writer. Or just a not-one-of-us, the “us” being the writing community—the literati—in third-world Philippines. That “us” necessarily revolving around Manila’s academe and the literary stalwarts—and yes, they exist here and now even if you would rather read Game of Thrones any day.

This “us” of course is no surprise, and lest you imagine that this is another conspiracy theory about how the literary sector sets out to ostracize and disenfranchise people who are unworthy, I assure you that it’s so much worse than that. The years have taught me that right here what operates is an unspoken/ unconscious/ unexplained set of rules that have nothing to do with writing skill or literary merit. Right here, what operates is a togetherness that might be premised on friendships, but half the time is just a fascinating display of parochialism and patronage. Here’s a shameless alaga system versus real mentorship, here’s condoning the mistakes elders make because they’ve got past glory to fall back on, here’s a togetherness that banks on closing ranks against the deemed enemy.

Which would be okay if we were talking about the grand enemy that is globalization bringing in cheaper imported books, or the commercial publishing industry making sure writers don’t make money, or the government failing tremendously at funneling support to the arts in general. But no, the enemy is not the system as it is just a person. You or me, depending on who has dared point a finger at—or who has given them the finger for—what can only be a bubble within which criticism is frowned upon, no one’s held accountable, and everything happens with the giddiness of the most recent book launch/contest/workshop and a false sense of relevance.

Welcome to the Philippine literary world, leave your self at the door.

Because here’s a house with its own set of unspoken rules, ones that you know for certain exist because the moment you enter it there’s a sense of propriety and order in the hushed tones you suddenly use to speak, in the silences you’re expected to keep. And you shouldn’t mind. After all, right here your writing will be deemed legit, no matter how uncertain even you are about its merit. Here, all it takes to survive is to keep your critical thoughts to yourself, and (maybe unknowingly) keep your writing within the box of the expected. Here, the question “Is it new?” doesn’t matter as much as “Who wrote it?” Here, creativity is the least of your worries.

Here, all you must know is this: the foundations of this house are as strong as the literary barkada is, in control as they are of the academe and publishing, workshops and contests, everything that would deem anyone a “writer” on these shores. It’s a private literati party, and you’re made to believe you’re lucky to be invited. Know that it takes very little to keep you out of this house. Very few consciously and knowingly walk out that door.

There is after all a sense of security in community here, and the warmth of hearth and home can only be inviting. And you can learn in this space, make friends here, too, but it doesn’t mean that you’re home safe. Dissenting with popular opinion or aesthetic, doing things differently will not only warrant a reprimand or a snub, it could mean being thrown out the window altogether. Just like that, there will be no friends in sight.

Yes, it sounds brutal. Welcome to the real world of the Philippine literati. And much like reality TV, it’s a world where everything—everything—is personal.

Which is to say that any form of criticism is reason enough for you to be seen as the enemy. Questions that go against the grain of established thought, or which bend in a different ideological direction, are taken against you. It doesn’t matter that you talk about the work and not the people; the work is the person who wrote it, and these writers have built this house. How dare you bite the hand that feeds you. Don’t be surprised when “lacking collegiality” and “disrespecting elders” become epithets used against you. Soon enough, out of the woodwork, the monsters of this house reveal themselves.

They reveal themselves in letters written and sent out declaring you persona non grata, telling the world that you should be reprimanded and/or kicked out of the job you love. Or instances where you are told to your face that you’ve got an ideological chip on your shoulder. It won’t matter how fantastic a teacher you are, because outside your classroom talk can and will bring you down. When you find that no matter how wonderful your writing is, you will be without a publisher for your books. And forget about winning contests.

In what we imagine to be the most creative and intelligent of houses, where we’d like to imagine that conversations about culture and society, writing and responsibility, are taking place, right here is tsismis that can be vile and vicious, the kind that can break you. That is if your heart isn’t broken yet by this revelation: this house would rather the elder who commits intellectual dishonesty, than the young asking the most valid of questions. In here, you are as puny as you are negligible, as you are someone who can be transformed into the obedient, unquestioning, bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed son or daughter.

It is in these instances that it becomes clear that you’re not one of “them” and it takes a while before you realize that there is much freedom in that, in being away—far far away—from the house that literature built.

Because it means that you dare grow up, you dare stand by writing with which not many might agree, but for which you do find readers. Or haters who are willing to talk to you about it, who will tell you what’s wrong, who will dare question you because they appreciate that you do the same for them. Out of that house you will find that creativity is not about how the workshops or creative writing classes taught you to write, nor is it about finding so much comfort in the writing niche that’s gotten you published.

Out here where there are no comforts, there is also much freedom. Out here is where survival of the fittest actually applies, because they are the most creative, because they are continuously evolving, because they are continuously learning. Out here, people read, they write, they talk to each other and come up with ideas that are different, if not new. Out here, the more daring of writers challenge limitations and transgress institutionalized lines. Out here, the Internet, technology, and the changing landscape of cultural production across the world are not scary things; they are the writing on the wall. Out here, you prove there are readers, and they are beyond Manila, beyond the division between English and Filipino, beyond the familiar academic and cultural institutions. Out here, you see this audience and you want to write the books they might like to read. Out here, writing and creativity find their relevance.

Out here, you find that the great house of multiple sensitivities actually lives off the idea that there are no readers on these shores, that there is no money in writing, because this idea is what keeps that house up. The stronger the belief in the lack of readers, the easier it is to justify the little money that writers are paid for their books, the easier to justify the need to keep to oneself, keep to this house, stay in the rooms many others inhabit. The better, too, to imagine that the audience is America—for we should all want to be published there, after all.

This is why the Pinoy reading public doesn’t care about the literati. It’s because the literati doesn’t care about these readers. And that’s you, the Harry Potter, Hunger Games-reading public, you.

Meanwhile that house sure looks like it’s getting smaller and smaller by the day. And as you grapple with your writing, and think of how to self-publish your book, you look out the one window you, yourself built and see that the house up on that hill is on fire, ready to crumble under the weight of its own monsters. But the literati’s in there and they’re keeping it up—writers, plagiarists, sons and daughters, and alagas, all together now.

You got out just in time.

This article can be found in the April 2012 issue of Rogue Magazine, out on newsstands now! Other essays: How Nick Joaquin shocked polite society by Marra PL. Lanot; Junot Diaz on Writer’s Block, Oscar Wao, and Winning the Pulitzer Prize; “We were enemies of the state.” Butch Dalisay, Jo Ann Maglipon, Ricky Lee, and Pete lacaba revisit their darkest chapter.

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)

The waiting room

By Elmer Ordonez

IT is also known as the departure lounge for people of “un certain age” as they say in Quebec, although anyone above sixty or one who just survived a heart attack or is diagnosed with a terminal ailment may well be a passenger in waiting.

December 15 I turned 82. No big deal for Frankie Sionil Jose. The last time we met, he asked me to his lair where he types out his fiction or essays, “I have something to give you, “ and handed me a small ornate blue vase. “What’s this for?” I asked. “Well, I am giving my things away,” he said, “I am 87 and may go any time.” We both laughed. And that’s how it usually is in the waiting room. People are ready (or almost ready) to board, sometimes joking about their mortality or affliction.

The signs of getting ready are palpable. The writer reminisces in his column, or finishes a memoir, collects scattered pieces of writing – poems, stories, plays, essays—and inveigles a publisher, to please have his book out before he goes.

The departing one may also have forgiven those who have offended him, or made amends to those he has offended. Literary or ideological feuds that become personal happen among writers as in any group. They include National Artists for Literature. But no names here. Their disputes are reflected in what they write. Writers can get back at persons they dislike through their work. This could be a special area for literary investigation.

It is inevitable that writers of my generation have dwindled. The Ravens (a post-war offshoot of the venerable UP Writers Club founded by Jose Garcia Villa, Fred Mangahas, Salvador P. Lopez, and Jose Lansang in 1927) had originally 16 members (including Adrian Cristobal, Larry Francia, Alex Hufana, SV Epistola, and Pic Aprieto) are now down to 7, not counting Morli Dharam (a.k.a Anthony Morli) who had not been heard from in New York’s theater world where he immersed himself since the late 50s until we ran his obit in The Times last month. Still around are Virgie Moreno, Raul Ingles, Rony Diaz, Armando Bonifacio, Godo Roperos (in Cebu), Maro Santaromana (in Pennsylvania), and myself.

The Veronicans formed by Franz Arcellana, Hernando Ocampo, NVM Gonzalez (all National Artists) and others like Bienvenido Santos, Narciso Reyes, Cornelio Reyes, and Armando Malay before the war had all left the lounge.

The only writers group with a notable link to the 50s is the active Philippine Center of International PEN (Poetry. Essay, Novel). Founded in 1957 by writers, mostly Ravens, led by F. Sionil Jose, Philippine PEN just had a successful national conference on the theme “Archipelagic Feasts, Tropical Disasters” keynoted by Raven Rony V. Diaz, who spoke on the disastrous effects of climate change.

Gilda Cordero Fernando (“Forever 81”) spoke bravely in the panel “Apocalyptic Writing: Disaster and Imagination” which I organized but was unable to attend to my own apocalyptic moment. The conference approved a resolution urging writers to focus their creativity on saving the environment.

PEN continues to work (as it did during martial law) for the release of writers from prison—like the case of Ericson Acosta, poet/visual artist, now confined along with other political prisoners in the Calbayog, Samar jail. Acosta and prison mates were on hunger strike until December 10, Human Rights Day.

A literary/cultural landmark of the 50s is the Solidarity Bookshop on Padre Faura st., Ermita, Manila, run by Frankie and Tessie Jose. Sort of anachronistic in a neighborhood of high rise modern buildings, the two-story wooden building (built after the war) of a bookstore catering largely to the intelligentsia is among the first places visited by foreign writers (including Norman Mailer, Mario Vargas Llosa, Wole Soyinka, James Fallows, and recently Edward Jones) who are greeted by Frankie with “ Welcome to the den of iniquity.” The den is in the second floor where meetings, book launchings and little conspiracies are held. Here before his famous round table, Frankie invariably holds court, trying at one time to get the Lavas, Luis Taruc, and Casto Alejandrino reconciled. Underground literature also managed to be sold in the bookshop during martial law. Satur Ocampo and Bobbie Malay, old media friends of Jose, visited the bookstore when they were still on the run.

The “old world” of my 50s generation has given way to the new. Veronican Bienvenido Santos earlier expressed that much for his 30s generation (NVM and Franz Arcellana were still around) that “new and young actors” had taken over the stage. He had just received a literary award from the National Commission for Culture and Arts, together with Genoveva Matute, in 1995.

Raven Andres Cristobal Cruz once wrote that “to the Asian Filipino consciousness, the raven is a symbol of immortality, “expressed in the Filipino saying “pagputi ng uwak” – when the crow turns white, indeed “an intimation of immortality, which is what the artist/writer is.”

The poets in the waiting room may also be reflecting on William Butler Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium,” the city where one implores the sages to be “the singing masters of my soul” and “gather me into the artifice of eternity.”

Slim pickings @ Manila’s lit fest 2011

by Katrina Stuart Santiago

Let me begin with a confession: I take festivals and conferences, no matter how big or small, seriously.

Regardless of whether I pay to get in or not, whether it’s here or elsewhere, whether it’s an art fest or a literature conference, I go in on that first day, knowing I will go the rest of the days, always ready to get involved in discussions and prepared to be blown away by the brilliance of artists who are ready to discuss their work and the landscape of creativity that they are necessarily part of. These gatherings after all carry the weight of diversity and difference, rendering us all—participants and panelists alike—uncomfortable to some extent, and rightfully so. We prepare to be questioned, we prepare for discussions.

The Manila International Literary Festival (MILF) 2011 deserved this expectation. Organized by the National Book Development Board (NBDB), this is a measure of what government thinks important in light of literature and publishing in the country; happening in posh Makati with a P2000-peso price tag, its exclusivity was clear.  But I paid. Despite my gut telling me I shouldn’t need to—I’m a working writer after all, and I was flown in by the National Arts Council (NAC) of Singapore for their Singapore Writers’ Fest after all.

But I’m not one to throw my weight around. Besides I thought this would be a venue for some intelligent discussions on literature and publishing as they happen in these shores, and I thought this was something I couldn’t miss because it will inform the kind of writing that I do. Given the changing landscape of publishing and literature, at the very least I thought the conversations to be had here would be new.

A sinking feeling  

I thought wrong. A day in, and after the tone was set for more critical discourses on literature and writing by both plenary speaker Resil Mojares and Pulitzer Prize Winner Junot Diaz (both of whom deserve essays all their own), I began to have a sinking feeling that this wasn’t a literary fest as it was a writers’ fest; that this wasn’t even a writers’ fest, but a how-to-be-a-writer fest. Because there were one too many panels with the international literary agents and book editor who were invited to speak; there were also by-invitation-only meet-and-greet sessions with them for “chosen writers”—that should’ve been a sign that this was not for those of us who are not chosen. Later it becomes clear that the goal was to bring together our writers and these international literary agents; had I known this was the point, I wouldn’t have attended the MILF at all.

But of course there were other panels here, and surely steering clear of the how-to-get-published-elsewhere and how-to-write talks should’ve meant some intelligent discussions with our local writers? Surely the brilliance I was looking for, the reason for these international agents to even want to be here, must come from our own writers?   But our local writers could only be found wanting.

Granted I could only go to one panel out of three parallel sessions at any given time, and experiences will differ (check out Carmela Lapeña’s write-up ), but for a government-organized international festival, at a price so steep even middle-class-earner-me had to think twice about paying up, every darn panel should’ve been brilliant.   Or at the very least honest about the creative task, with a great dose of self-reflexivity about the literary system in these shores, with a sense of what needs to change especially if the goal is global competitiveness.   No such luck. If there’s anything the MILF 2011 proved, it’s still this fact: the literary world in this country remains a very small circle made up of older writers who have cared for and to whom a set of younger writers are indebted.

Here was literary patronage like no other, nepotism lives, uncritical participants included. That the last time I was a Comparative Literature major was in the year 2000, and that a decade since things remain within the same bubble, is just tragic.

Of false notions and shamelessness 

In the panel with the international literary agents, instead of the Pinoy audience honestly answering questions about why there’s no editing process in place for local books, the response was about a lack of funds instead of the truth: in the land of sacred cows, established writers would get offended were they told they needed editing.   In the panel on writing away from home, the representative for Filipino American writing, Gemma Nemenzo, categorically said that the Filipino-American question has “long been settled.”

I wanted to ask: pray tell, since when? In truth when you talk about Filipino writing that happens elsewhere in the world, you must also know that it’s only as unstable as an economy that’s dependent on foreign remittances. In truth if we are to talk about Filipino writing in America, we must only raise two names and right there see how false notions of settling and celebration are: Carlos Bulosan and Miguel Syjuco.

The former was a migrant worker, an apple picker who published books on the migrant Filipino experience in America in the 1940s, and a writer of fiction in English who rarely studied in the academe, rarely honored with inclusion in seminal anthologies and studies on Filipino writing, much less Filipino writing in America.

The latter is celebrated by the local literati, and in an interview with The New York Times decided to talk about being part of the elite in Manila, with no apologies in sight.   We might say that this is shamelessness reserved for someone like Syjuco, elite in Manila, expat in Canada—far from being a Filipino apple picker.

But there is shamelessness in our shores too, and it’s the kind that we reveal when we decide that we can sit in a panel to talk about writing and not prepare for it. It’s a shamelessness that’s about resting on one’s laurels—in fact, a shamelessness that’s about even imagining laurels to be true.

Not prepared    

Now much must be said about the Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgos, Charlson Ongs and Gemino Abads of this world who prepared for their panels, no matter that they might invoke their right to not have to, or go the way of their peers who presume that charm and extemporaneity can see them through to a panel’s end. But there’s no excuse—no excuse!—for younger writers to think that all they have to do is sit in front of an audience, rattle off the work they’ve done, and then demand that they be seen as credible.

The panel that was supposed to discuss literature off the page, that is literature being rendered in other media, only had as one bright light Joel Toledo, jetlagged and obviously tired, but prepared with a piece on how poetry must first work on that page, before it’s removed from it in whatever way.  That panel went downhill from there.

Khavn dela Cruz talked about his work as filmmaker and showed a clip of the film version of Norman Wilwayco’s “Mondomanila,” saying nothing about the process, and instead spending his time talking about the film festivals he’s been invited to. Kookie Tuason talked about herself, and then showed spoken-word videos that she’s worked on recently and not much else. For both dela Cruz and Tuason there was nothing but a whole lot of self-centered rhetoric, not even a sense of being critical about their own work, about the kind of creativity that must be negotiated, sacrificed, and highlighted in the act of transferring text from the page to elsewhere.

The lack of a critical stance was also in the panel on creative non-fiction. Save for Susan Lara who actually wrote something for the panel (but rightfully thought she should be in the panel on the memoir), here were young writers who had nothing prepared for the subject of writing the real, and nothing new to say about creative non-fiction: none of them were going beyond the notions of honesty and just writing about oneself.   When asked how to deal with real people being hurt by this kind of writing, the answers were either of the you-can’t-please-everybody vein (Luis Katigbak and Carljoe Javier) or the fictionalize-it! vein (April Yap and Lara); that these are highly questionable responses seemed beside the point. When questions about the form being masturbatory and the lack of liability they all subscribed to were raised, the answers were neither here nor there.

In this sense, it’s not even the fact that these young writers didn’t prepare for their panels that’s the problem; it’s the fact that they think exactly within the box set by their literary parents, which is just ultimately sad. It’s also proof positive of how the system of patronage works, sacrificing the kind of critical thinking that has to inform any kind of writing at all.

Refreshing honesty

Thank goodness for four (count that!) younger writers who were obviously removed from this system in some form or manner, and had the gall and temerity (probably without knowing it) to talk about their work differently. Tweet Sering and Bebang Siy’s panel on gendered writing was refreshing because both women were honest about the task of creativity.

Siy’s narration of her writing history was riddled with stories of the pittance she’d get paid and the difficulty of getting into a writers’ group. Sering’s take on the question of gender inadvertently revealed her as a writer who reads, and thinks her writing part of these other voices.

Across these two writers it became clear how putting a premium on honesty ties together with a clear sense of being responsible for what we say. And how it is hard work, no ifs and buts about it.

Hard work resonated as well in the panel on poetry with Abad and younger poets/teachers Paolo Manalo and Allan Popa. I would’ve wished the latter two a panel that wasn’t focused on the teaching of poetry, especially since there weren’t a whole lot of teachers in the audience anyway. Suffice it to say that Manalo’s take on poetry as something that’s about both mind and body, and Popa’s piece on inhabiting a poem and its field of possibilities, alongside Toledo’s piece, should’ve been in a poetry panel all their own.

That Popa responded to Mojares’ questions about local poetry and its teaching, with the intelligence of someone who knows it like the back of his hand, and who knows of the landscape bigger than that small room in Ayala Museum and the smaller circle of the literati, was that one moment when I thought there was hope for literature extraneous to the MILF.

That the Popas and Serings, Manalos and Siys, of this world are few and far between, and are dealt with accordingly by the young and old members of the literati, with nary a celebration is telling of the kind of systemic parochialism that ails publishing and writing in this country. That this is all I take from an event organized by my own government via the NBDB, is beyond tragic.   I want my money back. –KG, GMA News

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