In December 1958, almost 57 years ago, about a hundred of the leading writers of the Philippines went up to the resort city of Baguio in the northern highlands to attend a conference sponsored by the Philippine Center of International PEN. They mostly met among themselves – the event was, after all, billed as the National Writers Conference – but they were also visited and spoken to by an impressive array of guests that included the President of the Philippines, Mr. Carlos P. Garcia, himself a noted vernacular poet; the nationalist Senator Claro M. Recto, also a poet and a playwright in Spanish; the president of the University of the Philippines, Mr. Vicente G. Sinco; and a sprinkling of Caucasians from the American and British embassies. Also in attendance were notable politicians, businessmen, diplomats, academics, publishers, and at least one priest and one general of the army.
As far as I can tell, there had never been a writer’s conference of this magnitude in the Philippines before December 1958, when I was just about to turn five years old – and there has surely never been one since. And what could have brought all these literary luminaries together to the mountaintop? Nothing less than the same general subject that brings us here together today, in another Asian city, nearly six decades later: the vital, inescapable, and compelling but also troubled, thorny, and challenging relationship between literature and politics.
In that 1958 meeting, the subject fell under the rubric of the conference theme, "The Filipino Writer and National Growth." In the course of dusting my office library during an idle moment a few weeks ago, I chanced upon the conference proceedings, compiled in a special issue (First Quarter, 1959) of the journal Comment – and it struck me, preparing for this conference with quite another beginning in mind, that it might as well have been 1958 all over again, given what I was dealing with. More than half a century after bringing the best of our literary minds to bear on literature and politics (not to mention two and a half millennia after Plato), we Filipino writers remain consumed by the subject, for good reasons both old and new.
Typical of the views expressed during that 1958 conference was that of the novelist Edilberto Tiempo: "A novelist and a pamphleteer belong to two different, irreconcilable categories. Literature, we must recognize, is not so directly concerned with finding answers to social problems that will be immediately embodied in action; and, furthermore, novelists and poets are not equipped to substitute for political or economic leaders. Their concern is not so much to act as recorders of life and events (but to) give them synthesis, to give them order and coherence… The successful writer transcends the incidents of his time and becomes a sage and prophet… Artistic revelation is his final responsibility to himself and his art."
That sounds today like a fairly safe and sensible statement to make, but in 1958 it was merely the latest in a decades-old series of salvos and counter-salvos fired even before the Second World War by partisans of what, on the one hand, was called the "art for art’s sake" school of poet Jose Garcia Villa and, on the other, the "proletarian literature" bannered by Salvador P. Lopez. In the 1930s, Filipino writers had been torn by these adversarial positions, with Villa and Co. on the cutting edge of poetic modernism and Lopez and Co. harking back to a long tradition of revolutionary and subversive literature in the Philippines.
The critic Elmer Ordoñez, who was one of the editors of that Comment issue, would recall the sarcasm of one of Villa’s staunchest allies, the physician and short story writer Arturo B. Rotor, who had earlier written thus: "That no Filipino has shown a notable grasp of the events that now absorb the country’s attention indicates the extent to which he has failed in his art. No notable story, for example, has appeared thus far about the peasants in Central Luzon and their efforts to improve their living conditions. While the rest of the country are talking about the slums of Tondo, our poets still sing ecstatically about the sunset in Manila Bay. What then shall we think of these writers who debate so learnedly about rhythm and balance in prose and who do not even glance at the newspapers? What shall we say of them who will work for weeks over a single phrase, but who will not spend five minutes trying to understand what is social justice and why some peasants in Bulacan were caught stealing firewood from a rich landowner’s preserves?"
Dr. Rotor, who died in 1988, was absent from the Baguio conference so we cannot know for sure what he would have said to the likes of Dr. Tiempo (who, incidentally, neither believed in art for art’s sake, thinking that it lacked "high seriousness"), but we can guess. Indeed, if he were still alive today, he could be making the same caustic complaint about much of contemporary Philippine literature, especially in English – unless he were made to understand that our appreciation of issues like social justice has become rather more complex than dealing simply with land ownership or gainful employment. These continue to be major problems, for sure, but they have been compounded by such recent developments as the large-scale export of Filipino labor and its effects on the Filipino family, the globalization of economic and cultural modes and practices, and the growth of the digital divide within our societies.
How far have we Filipinos come in our experience of and thinking about literature and politics since 1958?
Politics and literature have had a long and uneasy relationship in the Philippines, where creative writers and journalists have been the bane of an almost unbroken succession of colonial rulers, despots, autocrats, and dictators. The country’s tortuous political history has given rise to many opportunities for direct engagement in political resistance by Filipino authors, from Francisco Balagtas’s anti-despotic Florante at Laura and Jose Rizal’s novels in the 1800s to the anti-imperialist playwrights of the early 1900s and the anti-Marcos propagandists of the 1980s onwards. Beneath the larger and more obvious national political issues, of course, have lurked the politics of gender, religion, region, and – most importantly in our experience – of class.
What is interesting for us today is how closely our political and poetic histories have often coincided. Our heroes were poets, and our poets were heroes. Our first great poet, Francisco Balagtas, published a long poem in 1830 titled Florante at Laura, a political allegory against despotism set in Albania, where a Christian prince condemned to death by a usurper is saved by a Muslim warrior.
The revolution against Spain in 1896 was instigated by men of letters, from privileged scholars such as Jose Rizal – who wrote a long lyrical poem, "My Last Farewell," in his prison cell shortly before his execution, among many other works – to proletarian revolutionary Andres Bonifacio, who wrote a stirring poem about love for the Motherland. These poems continue to be recited and studied in schools.
During the American occupation, political theater – also conducted in verse and song–became the primary form of resistance. And while our literature in English has been largely personal and introspective, the period of political ferment in the 1960s and 1970s saw traditional poets in English exchanging T.S. Eliot for the kind of poetry associated with Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse Tung. One of our finest poets, Eman Lacaba, joined the communist guerrillas and was killed in combat in 1976.
For my generation of young writers in the 1970s, Eman Lacaba was the apotheosis of the writer as revolutionary – an ideal to which we passionately subscribed, seeing ourselves as the vanguard of what we called the Second Propaganda Movement after that of Jose Rizal and his comrades-in-exile in Barcelona in the 1880s. As his older brother Pete (himself one of our most talented and significant poets) recalls, Eman was a prototypical ‘60s hippie enamored of Rimbaud, marijuana, and other mindbenders. "His early poems were high complex, allusive, hermetic, obscure; we had, after all, nurtured our verse on objective correlatives and the seven levels of ambiguity. In the English and Tagalog poems that Eman wrote in Mindanao [where he had joined the New People’s Army], you can feel the tension created by his attempt to turn his back on his former style, and work for greater simplicity, directness, and clarity," Pete notes. Perhaps more than his poetry, Eman Lacaba’s brutal death – shot through the mouth by an informer, after capture in the mountains–ensconced him in the pantheon of Filipino writer-heroes. (To be continued)