Comic sufferance
December 5, 2005 | 12:00am
Excuse me while I put on a serious mien to talk about being funny. Below is an excerpt from the continuation of a paper I delivered last week in Kuala Lumpur at a conference on "Literature and Politics":
Journalism, not creative writing, has taken to the forefront of political engagement in the Philippines. We pride ourselves on having Asia’s freest – some would say most licentious – press, and again it has served the cause of public debate with riotous distinction. And over the past few years, Filipino journalists have paid the price for their audacity. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, the Philippines is the "most murderous country in the world" for journalists – more than Iraq, Colombia, and Bangladesh – with 18 journalists killed in the line of work since 2000. (Two more were killed since I wrote this paper.)
No Filipino novelists, poets, playwrights, or essayists have recently shared in this dubious distinction, and for good reason. For all the literary talent we think we have, it can be argued that creative writers really don’t matter in Philippine politics – certainly not as much as they used to – because, to be hyperbolic about it, no one reads, no one buys books, and no one understands what we’re doing.
It’s a sad fact that in a country of over 80 million people, with a literacy rate of about 95 percent, a first edition for a new novel or book of stories even by an established author will run to no more than 1,000 copies – which will take about a year to sell, and earn the author less than P50,000 for a few years’ work. There’s no such thing as a professional novelist (outside the popular komiks) or poet in the Philippines, which makes it easier for writers of any worth to be sidetracked or co-opted by the government or by industry.
It’s ironic that Philippine literature’s political edge should be blunted not by timidity nor by censorship but by sheer logistics or market forces. The simplest and clearest reason many Filipinos don’t buy books has to be poverty, with the price of an average paperback being higher than the minimum daily wage prescribed by law. Even among the middle-class readers whom we expect to be our major market, we face stiff competition for the same disposable peso from, say, John Grisham.
But perhaps we writers ourselves are partly to blame, for distancing ourselves from the mainstream of popular discourse. Politics is nothing if not the domain of the popular, and the very fact that many of us write in English is already the most distancing of these mechanisms. The question of language has always been a heavily political issue in multilingual Philippines, where some regionalists still resent the choice of Tagalog as the basis of the new national language Filipino in 1935, and where English is reacquiring its prominence not only as the lingua franca and the language of the elite but as our economic ticket to the burgeoning global call-center industry.
The inadequacy of English as a medium for the creative expression of native experience was put forward by such poets and critics as Emmanuel Torres (quoted by Gemino Abad) who said in 1975 that "The poet writing in English… may not be completely aware that to do so is to exclude himself from certain subjects, themes, ideas, values, and modes of thinking and feeling in many segments of the national life that are better expressed – in fact, in most cases, can only be expressed – in the vernacular." With this, Abad (himself a poet and critic) vehemently disagreed, contending that "If anything at all must needs be expressed – must, because it is somehow crucial that not a single spore nor filament of the thought or feeling be lost – then one must need also struggle with one’s language, be it indigenous or adopted, so that the Word might shine in the essential dark of language. Otherwise, the vernacular, by its own etymology, is condemned to remain the same ‘slave born in his master’s house.’"
It’s an old debate that those of us who inhabit the postcolonial world have dealt with and engaged in for ages. But to cut that long and familiar story short, even if Dr. Abad were correct in claiming for English the ability to convey every nuance of our native experience, the fact remains that any kind of writing in English – least of all creative writing – will reach a severely limited number of Filipinos. What may be fine for poetry could be absolutely useless if not even counter-productive in politics.
Politics, of course, is more than a numbers game, especially where the few have always ruled the many. Political change in the Philippines has historically been led by the middle class, from the revolution against Spain of 1896 to the anti-Marcos struggle of the 1970s and the 1980s to the Edsa uprisings of 1986 and 2001. Therefore, one might argue that English is, in fact, the language of reform and revolt in the Philippines.
But it is this same English-literate middle class – our potential readership – that is the strongest bastion of neocolonialism in the Philippines, blindly infatuated with Hollywood, hip-hop, and Harry Potter, keen on trading the local for the global, opportunistic in its outlook and largely unmindful of the social volcano on the slopes of which it has built its bungalows. As I often say at home, our rivals on the bookshelves are not each other, but Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, and, yes, J. K. Rowling.
I’m certainly not suggesting that we stop patronizing these authors. Rather, if we are to be interested at all in readership and consequence, we Filipino writers should reexamine whether there are huge unvisited corners of the popular imagination that we have failed or even disdained to reach.
In a recent lecture on "Our Revolutionary Tradition," the essayist and sometime government minister Adrian Cristobal (who incidentally attended Baguio as one of its youngest participants) observed that "English is not the enemy, it’s the absence of a common language. We can, as intellectuals – whether writers, journalists, orators, politicians – fulminate as much as we can against an unjust social order – but it’s doubtful that we can move out multitudes to revolution. We cannot touch their minds and hearts because we speak in a foreign language, because despite all our protestations, we are also of the elite by virtue of our alien education. We gain prestige, we can even achieve glory, but we shall remain out of touch because we cannot reach the hearts and minds of the many. For to reach the heart of the Filipino requires the discovery of its language."
Indeed it may not even be the language but the medium and the mode of creative expression that we should be looking at.
Given the near-constancy of turmoil in our politics, it’s hardly surprising that new forms of protest literature have arisen – chiefly, the SMS or "text" message as it’s more popularly known in the Philippines. According to industry reports, "at least 200 million text or SMS messages are sent every day in the Philippines – that’s more than two for every Filipino and earns the country its reputation as the world’s SMS capital."
The extreme fluidity and the cumulative force of these text messages brought a flood of people to the streets and helped depose President Joseph Estrada in 2001. The opposition’s weapon of choice was comic ridicule in the form of the "Erap" joke – "Erap" being the presidential nickname – which circulated with lightning speed, cementing the public (or more accurately the middle-class) perception of its leader as grossly corrupt, incompetent, and therefore unworthy of continued support.
The most popular ones addressed his alleged stupidity and venery in ways for which ordinary citizens elsewhere would have been shot or imprisoned, but not in the Philippines. Given the numbers, repression would have been futile. More than a hundred million text messages would fly across the country at the height of the frenzy, most of them bearing another call to arms, or another joke to bring President Estrada down another peg. These text messages and jokes were reinforced by spoofs of popular songs, distributed on CDs that couldn’t be duplicated fast enough. It may be an overstatement to say that technology did Estrada in – Chairman Mao’s dictum about "people, not things" making the difference would be well worth quoting at this point – but what we call "Edsa 2" or "People Power 2" would certainly not have gone as smoothly as it did without some digital lubrication.
Today, with Mrs. Arroyo, the situation is somewhat different, although it’s ironic and telling that her credibility and presidency are being undone by another technological imp – the digitized copy, in CD and transcribed PDF formats, of a damning series of wiretapped conversations (the "Hello, Garci" tapes) President Arroyo was supposed to have had with an election commissioner who promised to deliver the votes she needed to win. A flood of GMA jokes – like the old Erap jokes – swept the cellular networks.
Like other examples of folk humor, these short, spontaneous, and often imaginative comic outbursts are, I submit, a new form of popular literature that empowers individual citizens and allows them to engage political authority in a manner that may not be directly confrontational and certainly not violent, but whose cumulative impact can wear reputations down as water does stone. A despot should have more to fear from text jokes, from messages forwarded to dozens of Hotmail and Yahoo addresses, and from a satirical comedy skit on TV, than from any novel or epic poem or three-act play. (This reminds us of Martin Esslin’s proposition that the dominant dramatic form today is the 15-second TV commercial, which contains all the elements of classical drama, delivered in a compact, compelling way.)
Those jokes and the deep wellspring of satirical humor that bred them need to acquire more permanence in a Great Filipino Comic Novel, which has yet to be written.
I’ve often remarked on this strange feature of our literary landscape, so far removed from our everyday reality as a people: the crushing humorlessness of much of our literature. We are a laughing, smiling people; we laugh even in the worst of times and the most perilous of moments as a nervous reaction and as a coping mechanism. We have had great comedians like Dolphy and comic heroes like Juan Tamad – dunces, tricksters, kind-hearted rogues, characters who survive by their wits no matter what. But when we write novels, it’s as if we were confessing to a priest or preaching from the pulpit instead of confiding in one another; our words suddenly acquire a numbing solemnity, a high seriousness that may yet be Jose Rizal’s most enduring and yet also most paralyzing legacy to his successors.
I remain convinced that fresh comic insights – instead of belabored iterations of the sadness we already know – are the key to the revitalization of our literature, and that comic sufferance, not tragic suffering, may yet be the best nexus between Philippine literature and politics.
E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at http://homepage.mac.com/jdalisay/blog/MyBlog.html.
Journalism, not creative writing, has taken to the forefront of political engagement in the Philippines. We pride ourselves on having Asia’s freest – some would say most licentious – press, and again it has served the cause of public debate with riotous distinction. And over the past few years, Filipino journalists have paid the price for their audacity. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, the Philippines is the "most murderous country in the world" for journalists – more than Iraq, Colombia, and Bangladesh – with 18 journalists killed in the line of work since 2000. (Two more were killed since I wrote this paper.)
No Filipino novelists, poets, playwrights, or essayists have recently shared in this dubious distinction, and for good reason. For all the literary talent we think we have, it can be argued that creative writers really don’t matter in Philippine politics – certainly not as much as they used to – because, to be hyperbolic about it, no one reads, no one buys books, and no one understands what we’re doing.
It’s a sad fact that in a country of over 80 million people, with a literacy rate of about 95 percent, a first edition for a new novel or book of stories even by an established author will run to no more than 1,000 copies – which will take about a year to sell, and earn the author less than P50,000 for a few years’ work. There’s no such thing as a professional novelist (outside the popular komiks) or poet in the Philippines, which makes it easier for writers of any worth to be sidetracked or co-opted by the government or by industry.
It’s ironic that Philippine literature’s political edge should be blunted not by timidity nor by censorship but by sheer logistics or market forces. The simplest and clearest reason many Filipinos don’t buy books has to be poverty, with the price of an average paperback being higher than the minimum daily wage prescribed by law. Even among the middle-class readers whom we expect to be our major market, we face stiff competition for the same disposable peso from, say, John Grisham.
But perhaps we writers ourselves are partly to blame, for distancing ourselves from the mainstream of popular discourse. Politics is nothing if not the domain of the popular, and the very fact that many of us write in English is already the most distancing of these mechanisms. The question of language has always been a heavily political issue in multilingual Philippines, where some regionalists still resent the choice of Tagalog as the basis of the new national language Filipino in 1935, and where English is reacquiring its prominence not only as the lingua franca and the language of the elite but as our economic ticket to the burgeoning global call-center industry.
The inadequacy of English as a medium for the creative expression of native experience was put forward by such poets and critics as Emmanuel Torres (quoted by Gemino Abad) who said in 1975 that "The poet writing in English… may not be completely aware that to do so is to exclude himself from certain subjects, themes, ideas, values, and modes of thinking and feeling in many segments of the national life that are better expressed – in fact, in most cases, can only be expressed – in the vernacular." With this, Abad (himself a poet and critic) vehemently disagreed, contending that "If anything at all must needs be expressed – must, because it is somehow crucial that not a single spore nor filament of the thought or feeling be lost – then one must need also struggle with one’s language, be it indigenous or adopted, so that the Word might shine in the essential dark of language. Otherwise, the vernacular, by its own etymology, is condemned to remain the same ‘slave born in his master’s house.’"
It’s an old debate that those of us who inhabit the postcolonial world have dealt with and engaged in for ages. But to cut that long and familiar story short, even if Dr. Abad were correct in claiming for English the ability to convey every nuance of our native experience, the fact remains that any kind of writing in English – least of all creative writing – will reach a severely limited number of Filipinos. What may be fine for poetry could be absolutely useless if not even counter-productive in politics.
Politics, of course, is more than a numbers game, especially where the few have always ruled the many. Political change in the Philippines has historically been led by the middle class, from the revolution against Spain of 1896 to the anti-Marcos struggle of the 1970s and the 1980s to the Edsa uprisings of 1986 and 2001. Therefore, one might argue that English is, in fact, the language of reform and revolt in the Philippines.
But it is this same English-literate middle class – our potential readership – that is the strongest bastion of neocolonialism in the Philippines, blindly infatuated with Hollywood, hip-hop, and Harry Potter, keen on trading the local for the global, opportunistic in its outlook and largely unmindful of the social volcano on the slopes of which it has built its bungalows. As I often say at home, our rivals on the bookshelves are not each other, but Tom Clancy, Danielle Steel, and, yes, J. K. Rowling.
I’m certainly not suggesting that we stop patronizing these authors. Rather, if we are to be interested at all in readership and consequence, we Filipino writers should reexamine whether there are huge unvisited corners of the popular imagination that we have failed or even disdained to reach.
In a recent lecture on "Our Revolutionary Tradition," the essayist and sometime government minister Adrian Cristobal (who incidentally attended Baguio as one of its youngest participants) observed that "English is not the enemy, it’s the absence of a common language. We can, as intellectuals – whether writers, journalists, orators, politicians – fulminate as much as we can against an unjust social order – but it’s doubtful that we can move out multitudes to revolution. We cannot touch their minds and hearts because we speak in a foreign language, because despite all our protestations, we are also of the elite by virtue of our alien education. We gain prestige, we can even achieve glory, but we shall remain out of touch because we cannot reach the hearts and minds of the many. For to reach the heart of the Filipino requires the discovery of its language."
Indeed it may not even be the language but the medium and the mode of creative expression that we should be looking at.
Given the near-constancy of turmoil in our politics, it’s hardly surprising that new forms of protest literature have arisen – chiefly, the SMS or "text" message as it’s more popularly known in the Philippines. According to industry reports, "at least 200 million text or SMS messages are sent every day in the Philippines – that’s more than two for every Filipino and earns the country its reputation as the world’s SMS capital."
The extreme fluidity and the cumulative force of these text messages brought a flood of people to the streets and helped depose President Joseph Estrada in 2001. The opposition’s weapon of choice was comic ridicule in the form of the "Erap" joke – "Erap" being the presidential nickname – which circulated with lightning speed, cementing the public (or more accurately the middle-class) perception of its leader as grossly corrupt, incompetent, and therefore unworthy of continued support.
The most popular ones addressed his alleged stupidity and venery in ways for which ordinary citizens elsewhere would have been shot or imprisoned, but not in the Philippines. Given the numbers, repression would have been futile. More than a hundred million text messages would fly across the country at the height of the frenzy, most of them bearing another call to arms, or another joke to bring President Estrada down another peg. These text messages and jokes were reinforced by spoofs of popular songs, distributed on CDs that couldn’t be duplicated fast enough. It may be an overstatement to say that technology did Estrada in – Chairman Mao’s dictum about "people, not things" making the difference would be well worth quoting at this point – but what we call "Edsa 2" or "People Power 2" would certainly not have gone as smoothly as it did without some digital lubrication.
Today, with Mrs. Arroyo, the situation is somewhat different, although it’s ironic and telling that her credibility and presidency are being undone by another technological imp – the digitized copy, in CD and transcribed PDF formats, of a damning series of wiretapped conversations (the "Hello, Garci" tapes) President Arroyo was supposed to have had with an election commissioner who promised to deliver the votes she needed to win. A flood of GMA jokes – like the old Erap jokes – swept the cellular networks.
Like other examples of folk humor, these short, spontaneous, and often imaginative comic outbursts are, I submit, a new form of popular literature that empowers individual citizens and allows them to engage political authority in a manner that may not be directly confrontational and certainly not violent, but whose cumulative impact can wear reputations down as water does stone. A despot should have more to fear from text jokes, from messages forwarded to dozens of Hotmail and Yahoo addresses, and from a satirical comedy skit on TV, than from any novel or epic poem or three-act play. (This reminds us of Martin Esslin’s proposition that the dominant dramatic form today is the 15-second TV commercial, which contains all the elements of classical drama, delivered in a compact, compelling way.)
Those jokes and the deep wellspring of satirical humor that bred them need to acquire more permanence in a Great Filipino Comic Novel, which has yet to be written.
I’ve often remarked on this strange feature of our literary landscape, so far removed from our everyday reality as a people: the crushing humorlessness of much of our literature. We are a laughing, smiling people; we laugh even in the worst of times and the most perilous of moments as a nervous reaction and as a coping mechanism. We have had great comedians like Dolphy and comic heroes like Juan Tamad – dunces, tricksters, kind-hearted rogues, characters who survive by their wits no matter what. But when we write novels, it’s as if we were confessing to a priest or preaching from the pulpit instead of confiding in one another; our words suddenly acquire a numbing solemnity, a high seriousness that may yet be Jose Rizal’s most enduring and yet also most paralyzing legacy to his successors.
I remain convinced that fresh comic insights – instead of belabored iterations of the sadness we already know – are the key to the revitalization of our literature, and that comic sufferance, not tragic suffering, may yet be the best nexus between Philippine literature and politics.
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