A second chance
My pal Krip Yuson already did his roundup of this event last week, but let me turn in my own report on the Third Taboan International Writers Festival, which took place in Davao under the auspices of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, supported by the Davao Writers Guild and the LCB Performing Arts Center. In previous years, Taboan had been held in Manila and Cebu, and it was Mindanao’s turn to host the festival, which has become a major feature of National Arts Month.
This year, we had several writers join us from overseas: the fictionist Xu Xi from the US and Hong Kong, and the Singapore-based poets and cultural activists Chris Mooney-Singh and his wife Savinder Kaur. They contributed immensely to the festival not only by presenting opportunities for Filipino writers to expand their horizons (such as through the low-residential MFA program that Xu Xi directs at the City University of Hong Kong and WritersConnect.org, which Chris and Savinder run), but by giving them more ideas how to promote literature locally, such as in schools.
The usual topics were on the festival menu — e.g., breaking into the literary market, the importance of translation, writing and the Internet, new genres and techniques — but special focus was given to the literature of the region, and to the problems and opportunities faced by writers in Mindanao. I participated in a panel on the memoir and creative nonfiction and moderated another one on “Globalizing Local Writing.” But I sat in on many other discussions as well, and took the opportunity to meet with fellow Filipino writers across regions and generations.
Among others, I had a good time chatting with the fictionist and former Manila Times publisher Rony Diaz at Taboan. While he was almost a generation ahead of me at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, I discovered that he and I had quite a few things in common: a background in college and professional journalism, an interest in history and politics, time spent in government service, a passion for poker, and, not the least, a penchant for using and collecting fountain pens.
Rony — whose short story “Death in a Sawmill” has become one of the standard texts of postwar Philippine literature — has just completed the first of three novels spanning Philippine history from the Spanish period to the present. He relishes the opportunity that retirement affords him to do nothing else but write fiction — a pleasure I’m looking forward to, not too long from now. Rony stepped out of his writer’s cubicle just long enough to attend Taboan, to reconnect with the literary community and to see for himself what today’s young writers were up to.
While he was impressed by the energy and the talent of the young, Rony admitted to being dismayed by their seeming lack of interest in the past, and even in current affairs, beyond what they read in the headlines. Instead — as another Taboan delegate put it — they were writing about vampires, not even in the Filipino mold but in that of Anne Rice and Twilight.
In a session I moderated, mention was made of a seeming aspiration among many Filipinos today to avoid or ignore the intermediate stage between the local and the global — that is to say, the national. I’d heard this before: the loss of the sense of nation, or the suggestion that “the nation” has been rendered irrelevant by globalization and the Internet.
I think myself that it’s not only a troubling but ultimately a mistaken proposition, given how so much of what we call “globalization” is merely submission to more things Western and, indeed, American. Pity the poor Filipino author who thinks he or she can leapfrog into “globality” by removing all traces of Filipino-ness from his or her work in anticipation of being published in New York or London, only to come up with a mediocre, wannabe-Updike or wannabe-Gaiman piece that thousands of native New Yorkers or Londoners could likewise have produced, with better mastery of the idiom at that.
Still and all, I’m confident that young writers will sort things out for themselves and find their own voice, their own grand causes beyond the “me, me, me” drone of so many blogs on the Web (an affliction to which I can’t say I’ve been immune). You wonder if it takes something titanic like World War II, martial law, or an EDSA to define a generation’s connection to its own society, or the lack thereof.
Or perhaps we’re just being too literal. Perhaps those vampires do have a social conscience, or at least a social consciousness — you know, half beast, half human, half rich, half poor. Somebody write that story.
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Eight years ago, early in 2003, I did something very unusual for someone more often obsessed with such baubles as PowerBooks and Parkers. I took up the plight of one Dionisio “Bong” Ulep, a driver for a security agency whose wife worked as a domestic helper in Hong Kong until she had to return home to help him fight kidney disease and raise their brood of three.
The true humanitarian in the family — my wife Beng — soon devoted herself to Bong’s cause with a passion, raising donations so Bong could have dialysis, secure a kidney transplant, and resume a productive life. It got so that Beng would sometimes collapse in tears over her failure to secure a few thousand pesos for our patient, who bore his pains with courage.
But Providence smiled on Bong; his daughter proved to be the perfect kidney donor, and the National Kidney Institute and the PCSO helped with the transplant. Bong soon recovered and entered the employ of a good friend, and for a while back there it seemed as though Bong was back to leading a full and happy life with his family, going to church, and waving at me with a smile whenever I saw him.
However, things would take yet another turn for Bong, who would realize that an extended life was in many ways more difficult and full of challenges and disappointments than impending death. Where there had been faith and joy, he soon found doubt and sorrow.
Last week, on Valentine’s Day, I heard that Bong had died, early that morning, of yet unknown causes. His kidney may have failed him for good, but I suspect it was his heart that finally gave way.
We’re no longer taking donations, but to all those who helped Bong Ulep, our deepest thanks. Everyone deserves a second chance at life and happiness, and Bong got his.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.
