To the young writers of Cavite

The young writers of Cavite met last Saturday in the town of Bacoor. La Salle literature professor Dr. Efren Abueg, asked me to speak to them. This is what I said:

Some years back, when I realized that I would be asked again and yet again to speak before young writers, I decided to write a generic talk that I could give on any such occasion. In it, I emphasized the importance of literature as the only course in school that will teach students ethics; in the human dilemmas and conflicts it depicts, the student is made to use his conscience in determining what is right and what is wrong. In that essay, I also illustrated how literature rekindles memory, strengthens it and with it, binds a people into a community; without this memory, there is no nation. I then concluded that literature also gives a people their truest identity — what is England without Shakespeare, Spain without Cervantes, Greece without Homer and our country without Rizal?

But since I am now before young Caviteños, I will not repeat this archaic presentation and, instead, I celebrate your noble province. Cavite, after all, has contributed so much to our heroic past, just as Laguna being the birthplace of Jose Rizal, Batangas produced Mabini and Bulacan, Marcelo and Gregorio del Pilar.

In another two months, we will have a national election. I hope that what I will say now will be relevant to you not just as keepers of our collective memory but as the anointed shapers of our future. Remember the men I just mentioned were all very young, in their 20s and 30s when they launched our Revolution in 1896 — the first Asian armed response to Western imperialism — and thereby created Asia’s first republic as well.

Let us start with the not so distant past, in 1872 when 200 Caviteños initiated the mutiny that ended with the martyrdom of those three Filipino priests — Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos and Jacinto Zamra. The outcry against their murky kangaroo trial and execution at the Luneta, according to the historians, marked the beginning of a hankering for a Filipino nation. It resulted in the immersion of writers like Jose Rizal in the propaganda movement that eventually led to the Revolution of 1896.

In that revolution, this town of Bacoor was the site of the major battle of Zapote bridge where Gen. Edilberto Evangelista was killed.

Towering in this major event in our history, one man from this province emerged from nearby Kawit to give direction to that epochal event: the youthful landlord and ilustrado, Emilio Aguinaldo.

In the early 1950s, as a young writer and staff member of the old Manila Times, I visited Kawit with my oldest son, Antonio and the photographer, Dominador Suba, and spent the whole day with the then 80-ish Emilio Aguinaldo. Before going to Kawit and meeting the general I had talked with historians Teodoro Agoncillo and Cesar Majul; I was researching on the Revolution of 1896 for my novel Poon, a major portion of which covers that period and the Philippine American war. As our historians have written, in that meeting of Katipunan leaders in Tejeros that ended with the assassination of Andres Bonifacio, Aguinaldo was considered the architect of that assassination. I had asked General Aguinaldo about Bonifacio and he gave me his side of the story.

One important human factor emerged from that meeting with the old soldier; he was so soft-spoken and polite — he addressed me, a fledgling journalist in his 20s, in polite Tagalog as “Po.” It embarrassed me no end, I was unable to ask more questions about the death of Bonifacio. He described instead the life, the harrowing conditions of those years.

During the Japanese Occupation, I was made aware of how the guerrillas often fought one another rather than uniting and concentrating on the anti-Japanese effort. Talking with the old soldier it was not difficult for me to understand the compulsive demands of power and turf of survival. Too, for all his initiative and courage, Bonifacio did not act with circumspection and caution; had he gone to Cavite with a formidable force, or had he asked for the meeting to be held in Manila, his territory, he would have avoided the tragic end. But there are no “ifs” in history.

I recount all these not so much to impress upon you my meeting with Emilio Aguinaldo but to show you how important the past is if we have the intelligence not just to remember but to learn from it.

This past is littered with the detritus of contradictions, some of them very sad because they expose a dangerous fault in our character. Our loyalties circumscribed by ethnicity, family and ego obstruct the making of a nation. And this is what we still are this very day — Caviteños, Warays, Ilokanos — we are yet to be a nation. Our institutions of nationhood in themselves are hollow as evidenced in the corruption in the highest precincts of power, in our continuing poverty, not only the physical kind but the most damning of all — which is the poverty of the spirit.

In that tumultuous event in Tejeros, General Artemio Ricarte turned his back on his former leader. If Bonifacio was betrayed at Tejeros, Aguinaldo himself was, in turn, betrayed later on in Palanan when the Macabebe collaborators tricked him into his capture by the Americans.

This is all water under the bridge; now we must realize how our leaders today have betrayed us, too; they used the slogans of nationalism, the enduring ties of kinship, of patronage to assume power and colonize us.

Aside from these painful contradictions, our past also informs us how empty our country is of the hoary civilizations of Asia, the great temples, the classical arts and particularly literature, which our part of the world has in abundance.

Must we then, particularly those of us who write, feel inferior to our neighbors with their ancient cultural achievements, their great pre-colonial art?

For those of us who write, the paucity of such artistic effusions should not cripple us into despair and cultural paralysis. On the contrary, our past should be the challenge, the future faced with trepidation, hard work, originality. We are the shapers of culture, the builders of those cathedrals, the proud foundation of a nation. It is a heavy burden we ourselves do not quite realize — least of all our countrymen who are shallow and who do not care. But we the architects and builders must — if only to deserve our legacy from Rizal.

How will this be done?

Whatever history teaches us, whatever historians tell us, we must not forget that in the end, we should not be just Caviteños, or Ilokanos, Maranaos or Mangyans — from the strength of these identities, we must be Filipinos, committed to Cavite, to the Ilokos, to Mindanao — yes, but never forgetting that these loyalties are the tenacious roots of a wider loyalty to this unhappy country where we live, whose effulgent future is ours to shape.

We must never forget that Aguinaldo was captured because he was betrayed by Filipino mercenaries — many of whom demean us to this very day.

We must not forget that Filipinos — our men of history like Andres Bonifacio and Antonio Luna — were not killed by either the Spaniards or the Americans but by Filipinos; that today the same pitiable continuum is in the Moro and communist rebellions — Filipinos killing Filipinos.

These are for the young and particularly the writers — the brains of the country — to ponder, to ingest and more so this season when so many of you will go to the polls and elect new leaders.

It matters very much who you will vote for and your vote should not be for someone who you like because he has done you, your family and your town favors, or because you like what he says, or that he comes to you with an array of promises and gladdens your day with the antics of professional entertainers, movie and TV personalities.

Think of the candidate who has the intelligence, the track record and the sincerity not just to be president but to be truly Filipino. Think hard for you must vote not just with your heart but with your intellect.

Whenever starry-eyed young people ask me for advice because they want to be writers, I tell them: Don’t. I speak not just with a lot of hindsight but with the wisdom of experience and age.

In spite of the hard work, the emotional and spiritual anguish, writing does not pay. As we all know, writers in general all over the world seldom make a comfortable living.

Writing is a vocation, not a profession. As such, it may explain the travail writers must live with. I was discussing this very subject with that brilliant young writer Francesca Kwe a while ago, and she said, “Why, then, must the writer persevere?” Why will you ignore what this decrepit octogenarian tells you?

Yes, why should we continue? We will persevere because we are hopelessly hopeful that our work may fulfill us, and in the process, do a bit of good for others. We will go on because we are egoists but this ego is transcended by our obdurate faith that we may yet help create a just society. Maybe, we are motivated by hate — but that is the other side of love, first for our own selves and beyond us, our fellow men.

We will not prevail, we will probably fail, but we will try and try again, because you — we — are truly Filipino.