Two of the very best

We can’t let this week pass without paying tribute to two of our very best writers, who sadly passed away recently within a day or two of each other — Kerima Polotan-Tuvera and National Artist Edith Lopez Tiempo. Both women were consummately dedicated to their craft, and their loss diminishes the ranks of those among us who believe that the care with which we write is as important as what we write about. One way or another both of them helped me out early in my writing career, for which I have been deeply thankful.

I didn’t know Kerima too well; we may have met just once or twice, very likely at a Palanca awards ceremony that she attended to accompany her daughter Kimi, herself an accomplished fictionist. Late in life she became something of a private person; in the 1970s, when she published and edited Focus magazine, she kept the literary ambitions of young writers alive. One of those was me; my first nationally published short story came out in Focus in 1974.

Whenever I get the chance to, I teach her classic short story “The Virgin” to a generation of writing students who seem to have forgotten how to handle romance and desire with both subtlety and power. Published in 1952, “The Virgin” deals with the proud but lonely figure of the spinster Miss Mijares, who finally yields to her own inner importunings in the story’s climactic finish:

“In her secret heart, Miss Mijares’ young dreams fluttered faintly to life, seeming monstrous in the rain, near this man — seeming monstrous but sweet overwhelming. I must get away, she thought wildly, but he had moved and brushed against her, and where his touch had fallen, her flesh leaped, and she recalled how his hands had looked that first day, lain tenderly on the edge of her desk and about the wooden bird (that had looked like a moving, shining dove) and she turned to him with her ruffles wet and wilted, in the dark she turned to him.”

The other icon we lost was Edith Lopez Tiempo — “Mom Edith” to hundreds of Silliman workshoppers — who, together with her husband Edilberto, established and animated that seaside workshop in Dumaguete. I’m sure Krip Yuson, who flew off to Dumaguete for the wake, will have more to say about her and her importance to our literature both as a fictionist and as a poet, but let me add my own word of thanks to the Tiempos, whom I’ve acknowledged since my very first book in 1984 as being among my guiding lights. They took me into the workshop in 1981 and, but for that encounter, I might have drifted off to other pursuits.

People may think it’s fun to sit on the panel and play God at writers’ workshops, but having been there and done that for three decades now, I can only appreciate the patience that Edith and Ed — I’d say Edith more than Ed — demonstrated over half a century of looking over rough and messy manuscripts, trying to find something positive to encourage in them, pointing out the flaws, and dealing with adamantly misguided fellows.

Ed tended to be more blunt in his judgments; Edith had you clinging to every word to figure out what she was telling you, and if you didn’t get it, then you probably didn’t deserve your workshopper’s seat. From her mouth, during one critique, came one of my favorite Emersonian quotes, which I’ve since used myself a few times to suggest the absence of achievement in certain painstaking efforts: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

“They were the best of friends,” said poet Jimmy Abad of Kerima and Edith. How sad, but how fitting in a way, that they should depart together. And so, for now, farewell and Godspeed to these two grandes dames of the written word. They will not be forgotten.

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And as some writers leave, others emerge. I’m happy to acknowledge receipt of copies of two recent works by Filipino writers, one of them based in Macau. Let me qualify that the outset that both works were written by amateurs — and I use that in the original, non-disparaging sense of the word, to mean “lovers” rather than professional producers of literature—and so both could use some careful editing, but whatever shortcomings they may have in style are more than made up for by their spirit and substance.

Not too long ago, the Philippine consul-general to Macau, Rene Villapando, brought to my attention the launching of a book of poems (Pan Chai: A Filipino Boy in Macau) by Macau-based poet Oscar Balajadia. This time, Rene wrote in to share the good news that yet another Filipino in Macau, Zenon Arthur Siloran Udani, won prize in the English short story category of a competition held by the Macau Daily Times. The story, “Mommy, Come Home!” follows the travails of a domestic helper in Macau struggling with her deep homesickness while endeavoring to work hard and honestly. Udani is an Assistant Professor of Management at the University of Macau, so he belongs to another class of expatriates, but his sympathy for his less fortunate compatriots and his sharp eye for detail are obvious in the story, which has the kind of happy ending we can only wish would happen to more of our toiling countrymen overseas.

The other work I’d like to mention, with thanks to the author who sent me a copy while I was in Italy several months ago, is Milagros Royeca Evangelista’s moving biography of her late father, Dr. Jorge Paroni Royeca, titled Bong To: The Settlers’ Doctor (Meissa Publishing, 2011). The B’laans among whom the Royecas lived in Mindanao called him bong doctol as a sign of respect, and the good doctor earned it by ministering to the community’s ailments — first, in the physical sense, as a Medical Officer attached to the Commonwealth-era National Land Settlement Administration, and later more broadly as mayor of General Santos before it became a city.

The sizeable, handsomely published book is a daughter’s loving tribute to her father (and, let’s not forget, her mother Elvira, an accomplished painter), but beyond that, it’s an intimate social and political history of what has become one of Mindanao’s most vibrant growth centers. The story details Dr. Royeca’s friendship with two titans of postwar Mindanao, who became his mentors — Gen. Paulino Santos, the man who gave what used to be Dadiangas his name, and Muslim political leader Salipada Pendatun. Santos had recruited the young MD from Pangasinan to join him in what was being touted as a brave new world, and the book captures the idealism of those settlers from the North — the inevitable complications would follow later.

As a biographer myself, these are the scenes I like recreating best — the turning points, the moments when, for better or for worse, lives change forever, as it were, on the flip of a coin. For the young Jorge Royeca, that moment came in 1939; leaving his wife and three-week old son behind in Manila, he boarded a ship for Cotabato.

“He believed that he had made the right decision to come to Koronadal, for here he would have a chance to acquire land. His parents in Pangasinan were not landed…. They had a small farm, but it was not enough for all of them…. Jorge boarded a small boat that shuttled the passengers ashore. The shoreline had patches of palm trees, rows of thorny bushes called dadiangas and one big acacia tree in the middle of dry land that looked like a desert bordering a vast plain covered with grass that spread as far as his eyes could see….”

And so began, for this man and his family, the grand adventure of uprooting and sinking new roots in Mindanao.

I’m not sure where the book is being sold, but it might be worth writing meissa.publishing@gmail.com to ask.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.