But rather than dismiss it outright, I gave it a fair shot. There clearly was a sense, or at least a hope, that literature had something to offer the nation, a nation in dire need of community. It was a premise I couldn’t argue with, having plowed that field for quite some time, both as a writer and a teacher.
A genuine "community" is an ideal devoutly to be desired in a nation deeply driven by economic, political, ethnic, and linguistic differences; it implies shared values and a common vision of the future. I think we have the ingredients but hardly the reality of this national community.
We’re a nation, all right, politically and legally defined, held together by our isolation from the rest of Asia in the middle of the South China Sea and the Pacific. We even like to comfort ourselves with the idea – more the fiction – that we all stand behind such Pinoy values as bayanihan, utang na loob, and delicadeza.
But we’ve acted more like many nations in one, steadfastly refusing to cohere behind national objectives, deeply suspicious of government and of one another, and – despite the many outstanding displays of charity, selflessness, and heroism we’ve come across – seemingly devoid of any qualms about getting ahead of the next fellow any way we can. It hasn’t helped that our leaders have failed to inspire us with their ideas and by their personal example. In lieu of a real vision, we get trite political sloganeering, and the inevitable self-exculpation. No one big and powerful ever gets punished or lands in prison, and in lieu of justice, we’re fed entertainment, the likes of Jose Pidal, which the media seems just too happy to ladle out.
It’s easy to see what literature can do with material like this, but hard to see what literature can do for it. Truth to tell, I don’t think nations or communities get built by literature. We may like to believe that Rizal’s Noli and Fili – still our finest novels, to my mind – ignited our ancestors to revolt, but they didn’t; they merely crystallized people’s perceptions of objective conditions already present, and perhaps strengthened the resolve of those already about to bear arms against Spanish tyranny.
Books certainly inspire individual readers, and lead to deep personal transformations. In my case, pressed to name a book that changed my life, I’d have to say that it was – no, not the Bible, not Shakespeare, not Tolkien, not Salinger, not Garcia Marquez – an account by an American GI-turned-guerrilla of his days with the Hukbalahap, William Pomeroy’s The Forest, so lyrically written that it turned a guerrilla’s hard life into something beautiful, something I came to want for myself, something I soon converted into more than a decade’s work with the Left, albeit in front of a typewriter rather than in the mud of the rice paddies.
I’ll grant that very popular books can make large masses of readers think about the same things, and maybe even think alike about those things. But I seriously doubt that books – or even comics and newspapers, to employ a broader and more practical definition of literature in print – have the power to whip us into a nation.
First of all, hardly anyone’s reading. Whatever there is to read is heavily segmented by language, topic, sensibility, and price. In other words, there’s hardly anything now that we all tend to read, and read the same way.
And that’s a problem, because nations – and even the communities within them, let alone the community of the nation itself – are held together by the imagination, in the imagination, by myths that embody both our finest aspirations and darkest fears.
My sense is that we simply don’t have enough of the mythic stuff to go around and inflame, perchance unite, the modern Filipino imagination – across classes, across islands, across religions, and across languages, which any national idea, at the core, should be about. (And "the nation" is itself, of course, an imagined community, as the critics remind us. It’s the geographic country that’s made up of rock and water.)
For the longest time, America saw itself as the rugged individual in an open but often hostile frontier, which used to be the North American landmass itself but, unfortunately, is now the world, which America still sees as an environment it has to master for its own security and well-being. Britannia, well, she ruled the waves, and a literature of empire reinforced that precept.
Sometimes, these myths emerge as human or humanoid figures, real-life action heroes like Admiral Nelson or imaginary ones like our own Darna, the everyday Pinay empowered – who, ironically, is being remarketed to a new generation and a new class today in the form of a comic book in English and a ballet.
The one mythic figure who has come closest to binding all of us together is the OFW, whom government PR has taken pains to cultivate as the new Pinoy hero who indeed helps keep our economy afloat at great sacrifice to oneself. But I don’t know anyone who consciously wants to be an OFW; we all want to travel abroad and to make good money there, and many of us will jump at the chance to work, say, as a chambermaid in Italy, but no one says, growing up, "I want to be a chambermaid in Italy, or a DH in Hong Kong." The OFW has made of us a community of martyrdom, suffering, and endurance – a community, again ironically, of the separated. We beatified the martyr to salve or even justify the pain – the pain here not only that of fragmented families, but of our basic inability to provide our people with good, well-paying jobs at home.
A national community – if we’re going to build one at all – should be made of more positive material, of brighter and more sensible reasons to come together: Things like egalitarianism, the rule of law, tolerance, and charity. That kind of society may be for our writers to limn – especially those who like to think of themselves as social visionaries and the reincarnations of Rizal – but it’s really for our political leaders to define and to provide. Writers only weave dreams; it’s for the politicians to make them happen. Given the quality of our political leadership, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
I’m plugging this because I happen to be a fan of Bing Lao’s work. Bing wrote the scripts of some of director Jeffrey Jeturian’s best movies, such as Pila Balde and Tuhog, both of which I greatly admired. He’s also a very methodical teacher of the craft, and I urge people who want to learn scriptwriting – or at least get an insider’s view of Filipino movie making – to study with him (as with Ricky Lee and Rene Villanueva) if and when they can.
You all know the scene where the hero penetrates the enemy’s lair, and has to assume an impromptu disguise – like, say, a security guard’s uniform. Now, I don’t necessarily have a problem with the notion that all moviedom’s security guards are pushovers, absolutely inept peashooters who can fire off a clip of ammo into the ceiling before being dispatched to the undertakers with one shot over the hero’s shoulder. What I do have a problem with is the fact that, when the hero strips off the poor sod’s clothes and gets into them, they invariably fit! I mean – what the hey, I spend hours at the malls just trying to find pants that will snap shut (granted, you don’t find too many 40-inch-waisted slacks around); I might do better bopping some movie dummy on the head and then putting his pants on – I’m sure those pants will stretch and hold up my guts like anything.
And what about that scene where the villains – alerted by screaming alarms to the fact that their lair’s been penetrated – can’t figure out for the life of them exactly where the good guys are? They’re in the ventilation shaft, stupid! It’s where they all go – don’t you watch any movies? Look at that grille – yes, right above you – see the pair of eyeballs blinking in the darkness? Shoot ’em–and finish the movie on the spot. (Tip No. 2: Can’t find them in the ventilation shaft? Check the elevator shaft! Those guys like riding elevators the hard way. Riddle the elevator ceiling with bullets and just wait for all that blood to start dripping.)
But what really got me wondering, watching that Matrix trailer, was this: Why is it, in this age of weapons of mass destruction, that guys still settle their scores through kung fu? You tell me.