From Medellin to Diliman, through words
I’m sorry in a major, major way that I couldn’t attend last Saturday’s UMPIL (Unyon ng mga Manunulat ng Pilipinas or Writers Union of the Philippines) Congress held at the GT Toyota Asian Center Auditorium in UP Diliman. I had to take a quick weekend trip to Xiamen, where the agenda didn’t quite include testing the locals’ hostage-situation handling capabilities.
In any case, congrats to the recipients of this year’s Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Francisco Balagtas: Amando Doronila for Essay in English; Bonifacio Ilagan for Drama in Filipino; Gremer Chan Reyes for Fiction in Cebuano; Go Bon Juan for Essay in Chinese; and Ricarte Agnes for Drama/Essay/Fiction in Iluko.
The Gawad Paz Marquez Benitez for an educator was given to Dr. Thelma Kintanar of UP, while the Gawad Pedro Bucaneg for a literary organization went to Linangan sa Imahen, Retorika, at Anyo (LIRA).
The afternoon program also included a panel discussion on this year’s Congress theme of “Literature and Change,” with Chris Martinez, Bob Ong (represented by a proxy, since he chooses to remain very private), Rody Vera, and Criselda Yabes.
Earlier, Dr. Mario Miclat, dean of the UP Asian Center, rendered the welcome remarks, followed by the annual report by UMPIL chair Vim Nadera. The highlight of the morning program was the 1st Adrian Cristobal Lecture, with UMPIL secretary-general Celina Cristobal introducing the speaker, UP professor emeritus Dr. Gémino H. Abad.
Just the other Sunday, “Jimmy” Abad and his better half Mercy had hosted dinner at Ninyo, the excellent fusion restaurant on Esteban Abada St. parallel to Katipunan Avenue in Loyola Heights, QC. The occasion was... well, something like a bienvenida for the Abad couple, who had come back from a 10-day gig, the 20th International Poetry Festival of Medellin in Colombia.
I had attended the 17th edition in July 2007. Marjorie Evasco followed suit, in 2008. Then Dr. Alice Sun-Cua had represented RP last year. At that Sunday dinner with Mr. Cua, Mr. and Mrs. Greg Brillantes, and Mr. and Mrs. Ben Bautista joining in Alice proposed the formation of El Club Medellin de Filipinas, and took group pictures of us alumnae to send to the Medellin Fest organizers who had become our amigos para siempre.
Following are excerpts from Jimmy Abad’s Adrian Cristobal Lecture, titled “The Future Is First Shaped By Words,” delivered last Saturday at the UMPIL Congress:
“I am truly deeply honored by the invitation to be the first speaker in the Adrian Cristobal lecture series of UMPIL. I should quickly add, though, that only upon encouragement from National Artist Virgilio Almario and Prof. Vim Nadera, chairman of UMPIL, did I accept with much reservation and not a little embarrassment. Why so? simply because, to my mind, there are more worthy speakers who would do Adrian Cristobal, chair emeritus of UMPIL, much more honor.
“Let me first tell you about my recent experience at the 20th International Poetry Festival of Medellin in Colombia, South America, last July a celebration of the world’s poetry like nothing that I have ever witnessed. To that Festival were invited 100 poets from 58 countries; 93 poets came. I was astounded by the incredible spectacle at the inaugural ceremonies on July 8 in Cerro Nutibara at the Carlos Vieco theater a spectacle repeated there during the closing ceremonies on July 17.
“Imagine an open-air amphitheatre in the woods; imagine about 5,000 people in attendance, sitting on the stone steps that descend toward the stage; for four hours this multitude quietly, intently listen to the poets reading or performing their poems, non-stop, without intermission; and then it rains, a heavy downpour, and it becomes quite chilly, and our stage floods with little runnels of rainwater, but no one leaves, the audience just puts up their umbrellas, or puts on their white plastic raincoats, or takes shelter under the trees, and continues to listen avidly in silence and applaud, sometimes shouting out their approval.
“Since we were 93 poets in all all expenses except for our plane fare paid for during the course of that 10-day festival, we were divided into groups of five or six and sent by plane or van to 11 ciudades colombianas and 27 municipios antioqueños in Colombia for daily poetic performances, and in every venue a university campus, a public plaza, a medieval castle, a mountain village there would be an audience of 300 to 500 people who would, after every performance, gather excitedly around the poets on stage for their autographs.
“The festival had a most revealing shibboleth in all its posters and streamers: “El destino humano es un solo ritmo celeste” / Humanity’s destiny is the sole rhythm of the heavens. The principal motive of the festival, I learned later, is the conviction of its founder-organizers, Fernando Rendón and his son, Luis Eduardo, that poetry takes away the violence, the thirst for blood, from the human heart. Twenty years running with that festival, Medellin can justly claim to be the world’s center of poetry.
“Where in our country or any other country in the world is there such enthusiasm for the incarnation of the word? It makes me think that writing, that wrestle with the words of a language, that lonely and desperate craft, is a descent first to darkness before a resurrection.
“It is a curious thing that in Colombia, when they grouped a number of us as “poetas asiáticos,” the countries involved, as represented by the poets invited to Medellin, were other than the Philippines, Cambodia, Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka Turkmenistan, Syria, Armenia, Palestine, and Mongolia. So then, in Medellin at least, Asia encompasses more than our local sense of geography. It makes me thrill to an intuition that, for us, today, our world is Asia, our future is Asia. Perhaps, even the world’s future is Asia. And the future as all writers know in their hearts the future is first shaped by words.
“... And now It is even time for us, however late, to know more about our fellow-writers in Asia, time now to know more about the literatures in Asia. A country’s literature, in whatever language, whether indigenous or hybrid or adopted, is her people’s memory: there lies literature’s chief value, for a people is only as strong as their memory. This has been my principal motive in those historical anthologies that I have edited so far of our poetry and our short stories in English or rather, from or through English.
“Consider, for a moment, that tangle of English prepositions: I say, from or through, or by means of, from a long-held realization that any language is only a medium as sound is the medium of music, or color and line, the medium of painting, and wood or marble, the medium of sculpture. At first, any writer writes in English or in Tagalog, but much later, in his agon or contest with the words, as he gains mastery over their grammar, syntax, and rhetoric, he works from them his story or poem. He forges his own trail through the tangled woods of a language, and makes his own clearing there where his own people might recognize themselves.
“Without words and words, there is no memory; without memory, there is no country, no culture. Words and words, no matter their provenance, for what endows the words with their weight and substance, their meaningfulness, is their usage by a people through their own lives in their own workaday world, through their own griefs and joys, through their own history and culture. The words of any language are like a writ of habeas corpus by which our human reality is brought to mind that is, the world as we perceive it, all of nature and the world of human affairs so that it becomes clearer to our understanding, and we can more willingly take the responsibility for it. We have no other reality but the human, and it is always changing as the sole rhythm of the universe in our limited perception. Human nature is universal, but as a field of energy, it is perpetually transformative; our vale of tears and laughter is imperfect, but as the poet Wallace Stevens says, ‘The imperfect is our paradise.’
“I take note of the UMPIL’s Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas, Gawad Paz Marquez Benitez, Gawad Pedro Bukaneg. They encompass various Philippine languages, including English as we have made it our own. The Ubod series of the NCCA, devoted to our young writers, also comprises our various languages. This affirms what I’ve long held, that for anyone, it is the sense for language that needs to be nurtured and cultivated, because the sense for language is the basic poetic sense. It is the poetic sense that later in one’s life, says the poet Yves Bonnefoy, ‘opens to the intuition that all language refuses.’ One may be language-bound, culture-bound, but it is the poetic sense that liberates. In that light, there is ultimately no English, no Filipino, no Cebuano there is only language itself, the supreme human achievement, the finest human technology. Indeed, language is the hidden Muse, for it is one’s imagination’s agon or struggle with language that gives rise to the literary work as both work of imagination and work of art. Come to think of it, in all the arts – music, painting, sculpture, film their medium is the Muse: only with imagination’s wrestle with it does Art arise.
“... Literature, in the end, always implies change in our psychic weather. Language itself, the literary medium, is in flux, reflecting through a people’s history, our mind-set, our ‘jejemons’ of feeling. Besides that constancy of change and transformation, we should also be aware that imagination, by its very nature, has infinite possibilities, especially, precisely, because the imperfect is our paradise.
“I spoke just now of psychic weather: here, figuratively, there could also be a global climate change I believe it is always happening, more so that our world is now smaller. We may for the moment be hardly aware of any change, but we need only reflect on works of imagination in our reading life which have borne our spirit on a flood of light and cheer. Now, of course, I am already thinking of literature beyond the restrictive categories of thought; I am thinking of literature as work of imagination in every field of human endeavor where language is the crux in philosophy and religion, in history and psychology, in science and technology, etc. Whatever the language, whether that of physics or a poem, the writer or scholar must clear his own path through it by which a new understanding of our reality might be achieved.
“‘Text’ is from Latin texere, textus, ‘to weave,’ as in textile. So, that new understanding may be the word-weave, the text-tale, of our future.”
