Should our writers globalize?

A hundred writers and literature teachers from Mindanao and the Visayas met at the University of the Philippines in Tacloban last Monday. This is what I told them:

Prof. Merle Alunan asked me to comment on “Literature in the Environment of Globalism.” For those of us who write in English, since English has become the lengua franca of the world, our literature will have a global reach even without our intending it. And such megaton words like globalism, globalization, what could they possibly mean to a farmer in storm-lashed Samar, who had slaved to send his children to this university in Tacloban? What can such words mean to us, knowing that the world has shrunk so much with the laptop and television, and of course, with our thousands upon thousands of relatives strewn at random all over the world. Truly, we have become a cosmopolitan people although our roots are embedded deep in the provincial soil of this unhappy country.

We now see our workers here and abroad losing their jobs because of the rapacity of capitalists, and at home, the myopia of those Makati moneybags. These are the sordid realities of the present, the ugly face of globalism staring at us.

We cannot demand of writers, to portray a particular theme, a particular view, although, of course, it was common for Popes and Kings to patronize writers who pandered to them affirming their greatness. But maybe, just maybe, from this impending catastrophe — “Only the event will teach us in its hour…” and, so it must be — from the great conundrums in history have sprung equally great writers. From the Spanish Inquisition emerged Miguel de Cervantes and the world’s greatest novel, “Don Quixote dela Mancha.” Bad times create good if not excellent literature — in living memory, the Great Depression in America in the ’30s brought forth the brightest of American writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner.

Stalinist repression from the Thirties to the Seventies did not extinguish the creativity of Russia’s authors; from those horrendous decades of imprisonment, torture and death sprang Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Boris Paternak, poets like Osip Mandelstam who died in prison and my favorite poet, Anna Akhmatova whose poem, permit me now to recite, is a tribute to those who stayed behind and braved the lash:

 I am not one of those who left the land

to the mercy of its enemies.

Their flattery leaves me cold,

my songs are not for them to praise.

But I pity the exile’s lot.

Like a felon, like a man half-dead,

dark is your path, wanderer;

wormwood infects your foreign bread.

But here in the murk of conflagration

when scarcely a friend is left to know,

we, the survivors, do not flinch

from anything, not from a single blow.

Surely, the reckoning will be made

after the passing of this cloud.

We are the people without tears,

straighter than you, more proud.

In the last hundred years — think back, momentous watersheds — in our history; the revolution of 1896, the Japanese Occupation in 1942 and the dictatorship of Marcos in 1972; these tested us, and we were found wanting, but at least, the twilight of Spanish colonialism brought us the Noli Me Tangere and the El Filibusterismo — the two great novels that have loomed brightest in this tumultuous past to remind us the necessity for writers to be contextual, if our writing is to survive and prevail. For in the end, although we cannot wait that long, time is the ultimate — and the best critic.

Let me digress and be personal.

In a couple of days, I will be 84 — a very old man. I have earned the privilege of saying what I please because now, I know so much — and yet, I also know so little. Indeed the whole of living is a learning experience. I have seen how this nation has decayed, how our leaders betrayed the Filipino dream. I think I can also question now without quibbling what Ninoy Aquino said, that the Filipino is worth dying for.

With my background, then I hope I can impart to you some thoughts about writing — shortcuts, perhaps, in the craft which will spare you some trouble.

Early enough answer some basic questions which all writers should ask of themselves, like, what is literature? Why do I write? What will I write about? And who is my audience?

Before doing so, let me salute those of you who are teachers or who plan to teach bearing in mind that teaching, like writing, is a vocation.

I owe so much to my teachers, my mother most of all who taught me patience and industry, and my grade school teacher Soledad Oriel who introduced me to literature, to the novels of Rizal, Miguel de Cervantes and Willa Cather and thereby opened a vast new world for me. And Paz Latorena in college who defined for me the difference between telling a story and writing one. And the Dominican, Juan Labrador who taught me clarity.

First, what is literature? So many of us and even teachers at that do not realize how valuable literature is, not just as entertainment or history, but as a shaper of culture and of ethics for as I have so often stated, it is only literature which can teach us ethics.

And this very personal question, why do you write?

Globalism? Forget it — we will infuse our literature with what we are, our gonads, the odors of our bodies and the verdure of our land. We will write as Filipinos, free from the influences of our colonizers, from the canons they imposed on us. In this way, we will not be swept under by the dulcet enticements of McDonald’s, Toyota and Harry Potter. It is the Filipinoness, this particularity which will identify us, from which the universal begins.

And for whom are we writing? This is such a simple question which demands a simple answer but if we think a little bit more, then we realize that our answer will embrace so much.

We are writing for ourselves and for our own people.

What then should we write about and what do we tell our people? We will entertain them, that’s for sure but writers are also teachers so we will teach them our history, about ourselves. We will do this bearing in mind that we can dig into the rich lode of our folk traditions, the mud at our feet if need be. We must remember that we are creatures of geography, of our colonized history which shaped us not as Asians but as Westerners, Latinos, perhaps, people given to flamboyance, to hyperbole, to rococo excesses — all of these which we must refine and infuse with more depth for this is also a fact about us — we are shallow, without the philosophical profundity of Buddhism and Hinduism — the two great religions of Asia that did not touch us. We are Christians, most of us, without a profound knowledge of Christianity itself and its roots in the Greco-Judaic past. Depth, and more depth, that is what we need in our arts, in our literature — not just the purely visceral which characterizes our response to the arts.

To acquire that depth requires of our writers more knowledge, a keener understanding of the social process, and of art itself.

A priest who is an excellent writer of both fiction and non-fiction, not too long ago, confessed that he was no longer as prolific as he was in his younger days and that now, he found difficulty in creative writing. I asked if it was his vocation — the priesthood that was inhibiting him. For a while, he seemed in deep thought, then he said quietly, it was, indeed the priesthood that was in the way.

Indeed, art is very demanding — and it is difficult if not impossible for any man to serve two masters. Think about this dilemma, too.

A writer’s life is harsh. First there is the very tedious struggle to put down on paper the fires that burn in our bellies, the honing of craft into art, the total immersion into what we are writing, the shutting off the outside world so that we enter the new world of the imagination with clarity and anxiety.

And then, there are the iron demands of the other world wherein we actually live, the need to provide three meals a day for family, a roof that does not leak, and hopefully, a future that is free from drought and storm.

And we know that the stuff we produce does not earn us money, and that integrity cannot really be translated into milk for the children. What then?

All of us know only too well these grim realities not as masochists who thrive on suffering, but as reminders of the risks to limb and to the spirit most of all which we must take.

Let this sign be before every writer’s desk: write at your own peril.

What can an old man tell young Filipino writers, their eyes ablaze with purpose, their hearts bursting with conviction? Why should someone grow old writing when there is no reward to it? I have seen so many of my contemporaries, many of them more gifted that I with the magic of words and creativity, go into more lucrative enterprises. Why then must we continue writing?

The world demands that we go global, that our vision should extend beyond the confines of our national frontiers.

Yes, but in the end, if we are to prevail, we have to have that passion to do so. Call it commitment, or just plain doggedness or stubbornness of which we have a lot.

But to sustain it means only one thing, that we are rooted tenaciously and affectionately in the native soil — that though our minds may soar to the ether, our feet are on solid ground, this earth we call Filipinas.

Sure, there is going to be Elysium, and Nirvana, and Utopia where justice exists and happiness is all around for everyone to share.

But even when that moment comes, the artist in us will still be, seeking, not just perfectibility, but the eternal essence of art, that which transcends our puny selves, that which will exist for always, and which sustains us and drives us to act, although we with our infantile minds cannot quite define or grasp.

We are a very young nation; we don’t have the august megalithic monuments that adorn our neighbors’ lands, edifices which remind them of their noble traditions. How difficult it would be for us as creative writers if there was a Confucious looking over our shoulders, or for that matter since we are in a sense Westerners, illustrious writers like Homer, Cervantes or Shakespeare.

In the beginning of this presentation, I had sounded apocalyptic by citing the coming depression that has already afflicted the industrialized countries. It has already started to batter our very shores, and vaulting difficulties await us in the coming year and even beyond 2009. Our leaders say we can weather this economic tsunami and they are partly right because subsistence economics such as ours can take a lot of punishment. There is also a saying in the army that you cannot demote a buck private any lower because he is already there.

But even without this disaster brought about by greed and capitalism gone wild—we would still have troublous times ahead. Just remember this — we are now ninety million; some 10 year ago, more than half of our grade school children stopped schooling at grade 5 — we now have millions of young adults illiterate and ill trained for any job which modern industry demands. Our natural resources are depleted and they are not renewable. It is not just physical poverty which condemns us to penury — it is poverty of the spirit, the endemic corruption, the gross and obscene irresponsibility of our elites which will bring about the implosion that will destroy this nation — not the ongoing communist rebellion or the Moro separatist impulse.

Before this terrible challenge, what can the individual do, least of all those of us who write?

Let us hearken to those hoary panegyrics that he who stands alone is the strongest, that the pen is mightier than the sword.

Brave words, but meaningless, and even foolish. Can a poem, a beautiful essay, or even an epic novel stem this creeping rot, or like some magic drug, stop the metastasis?

Though our futile craft and intention will humble or even humiliate us, we also know that we have to plod on, to write as best as we can, to build that one brick, lay it down with our sweat and blood and shape that noble foundation on which this nation will stand and, hopefully, endure.

And to do this, we know that we have to transcend our puny selves, shatter the towering egos that prop us, and seek beyond ourselves the sublime meaning of what we do, to make this life more meaningful as well.

We will write in spite of our knowledge that we can do only so much and we do this as duty if we are to accept that duty as did our most heroic writer, that exemplar Jose Rizal, in whose shadow we work. The salvific resonance of his work and life affirms us for Rizal redeemed us.

We may now pause and ask ourselves — are we worth redeeming at all?