Abad on Daguio: ‘His soul’s native cargo

The Philippine Literary Arts Council’s lecture series billed as "Homage,"a mid-monthly tribute to our dear departed masters in poetry and fiction, had its second outing last Thursday afternoon at the Ariston Estrada Seminar Room at De Sa Lalle University on Taft Ave.

I stress Taft Ave., that aging tribute to Manila’s concrete jungle, which DLSU-Taft appears to be aiding and abetting. How? By adding more structures to its already rather congested campus. Perhaps the La Sallian brothers can start making representations to government in the hope of taking over the Rizal Memorial sports complex right behind its property. That might be the only way to avoid choking what’s left of its open spaces.

In any case, getting there was half the agony and double the fun, through chaotic, rain-soaked traffic, but with premier poets Cirilo F. Bautista and Gémino H. Abad as company.

It was Jimmy Abad’s turn to deliver a talk, the second in the Homage series initiated last month to highlight PLAC’s 20th anniversary. The series goes on till next year, until about 15 to 18 individual reassessments of an earlier generation of Filipino writers in English are conducted in various universities all over the country. The lectures will eventually find their common, collegial place between covers.

Host for the mid-August lecture was the DLSU Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing and Research Center, headed by another premier poet, Marjorie Evasco. The venue was filled, with a good number of students joining the audience that included other literary stalwarts.

Among these were: Dr. Ophelia A. Dimalanta, on a rare foray outside her own fiefdom that is the University of Santo Tomas Center for Creative Writing & Studies; Dr. Isagani F. Cruz, who’s recently rejoined the private sector after a seven-month stint as Department of Education Undersecretary (he’s not talking to media on the reasons behind his resignation; the curious may wait for the revival of his column in this paper); and Fil-Am exchange professors Paulino Lim and Oscar Campomanes.

Also present were Malou Jacob, Connie Jan Maraan, Joy Cruz, the young Wanggo Gallaga, who served as emcee, and visiting Fil-Am writer and cultural worker Irene Suico Soriano with her cousin Rina Soriano. Dean Estrellita V. Gruenberg graced the occasion, while offering the invocation was Shirley Lua, assistant director of the host center.

Dr. Abad’s lecture was titled "Amador T. Daguio: A Turning-Point in Filipino Poetry from English." A welcome surprise was the attendance of poet Daguio’s octogenarian widow Estella, accompanied by three nieces. It seems someone spotted the press release on the lecture and e-mailed the info to Estella’s son-in-law in Australia, who in turn phoned the family back home about it.

Quoting the early Daguio poem "Man of Earth," Ms. Lua’s invocation set the tone for the lecture.

"Pliant is the bamboo;/ I am man of earth;/ They say that from the bamboo/ We had our first birth.// Am I of the body, Or of the green leaf?/ Do I have to whisper/ My every sin and grief?// If the wind passes by,/ Must I stoop and try/ To measure fully/ My flexibility?// I might have been the bamboo,/ But I will be a man./ Bend me then, O Lord,/ Bend me if you can."

Dr. Abad is well-known for his monumental trilogy that anthologizes the past century’s Philippine poetry in English, which he prefers to stress as "from English." The first volume of this trilogy, co-edited with Dr. Edna Manlapaz of Ateneo de Manila University, is titled Man of Earth, after the Daguio poem. One infers therefore that Abad has long abided by his appreciation of Daguio’s poetry and influence. The appreciation finds full voice in his lecture, which begins thus, in reference to the poem that is projected onscreen:

"The opening stanza bears the pronouns of power – I, They, We: the self-assertive individual, the foreigner (the view imposed from outside), the community (imposed upon). ‘Am I of the body / Or of the green leaf?’ – if this is a ghost of Yeats (‘Among School Children’) and dearly purchased, yet does the poem’s body absorb the cost, for it reconverts those English words into the individual cry of protest: ‘Pliant is the bamboo; I am man of earth...’"

Abad amply entertains by inserting an ad-lib, reciting from his glorious literary memory the lines from William Butler Yeats: "O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,/ Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?/ O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,/ How can we know the dancer from the dance?"

More from Abad’s lecture:

"Amador T. Daguio was only 20 when he wrote ‘Man of Earth’ in 1932, but the translated voice in Fernando M. Maramag’s ‘Cagayano Peasant Songs’ in 1912 seems to have already found an English tongue that does not falsify it. The word translation is from the Latin transferre, translatus, meaning, to carry or ferry across. ‘Man of Earth’ is translation in that deeper sense: the poet ferries across the (English) words his soul’s native cargo; no sea-change is suffered because the words have rather been found again or reinvented so that, in the poem’s own usage, they establish a native idiom. We must quote Daguio’s poem in full because it marks a turning-point in Filipino verses from English."

An aside: why does the poet-scholar Gémino H. Abad insist on using and italicizing, thus stressing, "from"? Anyone familiar with his pet thesis will tell you that Abad has long asserted, with validity, that "The English language is now ours. We have colonized it." The claim has gone around the globe, even gaining exact quotation in a recent article in the New York Times titled "Nations in Asia Give English their Own Quirks."

This relates to Abad’s appreciation of Daguio. His brief for the 30-minute lecture that has been excerpted from a longer paper runs thus:

"The poems of Amador T. Daguio – from ‘Man of Earth,’ 1932, to ‘Off the Aleutian Islands,’ 1954, and his unpublished collection, Poet in Equinox (1965) – first persuaded me about my general thesis regarding our writing in English over the last century, namely, that it seeks to recover a country we have lost, but that also, our country now is within ourselves, as it were, a spiritual homeland. Daguio is exemplary of that effort because he was able to transform an adopted tongue into a fit instrument for his poetic representations beyond what the English vocabulary and syntax might by their own cultural subscript tend to disfigure. I say that at first our writers wrote in English, but later they wrought from it; all along, over the past century, our writers have colonized English, by which I mean that it has been remodeled to our own image."

From Daguio’s "To Those of Other Lands," circa 1941, then, more of the illustrative example:

"Though I may speak the English language,/ Let me tell you: I am a Filipino,/ I stand for that which make my nation,/ The virtues of the country where I was born.// I may have traces of the American,/ Be deceived not: Spain has, too, her traces in me,/ But my songs are those of my race… //…Our fathers gave the graces,/ Our hearts pure as the hills, clear as the seas,/ I tell you not of greed nor of accumulation./ We have washed off these stains of the West./ Look through us then, beyond what you think,/ Know us, understand us; we, too, have our pride./ If you give us flowers, we exchange pearls;/ We greet you sincerely; acclaim what we have."

Some of Daguio’s assertions of 60 years back may not have proven entirely prophetic, specifically those on "greed" and (the yen for) "accumulation." These are "stains" we have not exactly "washed off," but rather, especially in recent instances, seem to have displayed in gross extreme.

But other poems of Daguio in turn manifest the continuing truism that, as Abad asserts, "A fundamental weakness in our nature seems to prevent us from gathering our islands into one nation."

From the 1934 poem "The Hordes" come the following superlative lines:

"The land was a black dream/ Of ruby/ On the navel of the earth./ We built our homes on her belly,/ We tilled there our desires./ But we could not find the ruby/ On the navel of the earth,/ We could not make the ruby/ Into the stone of a ring./ The land of our visions loomed/ A rich, vast land for us,/ But strange hordes came after us/ And drove us all away."

Abad comments: "The poem, originally called ‘Land of Our Desire,’ is quintessential Daguio: the verse or medium is English but the poetry or matter is Filipino."

Another poem, "Mountain People" of 1934, is remarkable for its prescience in the predominant use of imagined dialogue, which has become a contemporary poetic technique.

Further, Abad points out, "It is very interesting to note how the poet Daguio forged a new path through English under the New Critical influence in the 1950s. His poem, ‘Off the Aleutian Islands,’ which the American New Critic, Leonard Casper, included in his anthology, Six Filipino Poets, in 1954, is as it were the New Critical version of ‘Man of Earth.’ It goes:

"I have reaped the sickle edge of rain,/ Rain harvests that had no grass:/ In youth I let, instead, lusty mushrooms/ Discover me.// Also have I known/ The craving blade of rainwash, clean/ To my clean bones. But overnight I rose/ Upright in marsh ground, naked/ Looming with rain.// Now, I do not cry, here, because I am bigger/ Than a sea gull. A sea gull screams,/ Ungently leaps into the wind/ Following the concave shine of water.// Does it break, irrevocably,/ The all-pathos of mirrors,/ To look back at rain memories, unvexed?/ A gull now cries to the other/ Sea gulls: follow me./ Follow."

What a beautiful phrase, that "craving blade of rainwash." As well "the concave shine of water." How imagistically 90s, how millennial and universal. How far-seeing it must have been for Daguio’s time.

We salute Amador T. Daguio, as we salute Gémino H. Abad on his excellent exegesis, as finely and charmingly delivered before a lectern as it has been wrought, from English, on paper, as wondrous part and parcel of our "soul’s native cargo."