In the past tense
I’d been meaning to write about this for several weeks now, but some current topic always got it in the way. And so, before necessity gives way to neglect, let me mark and mourn the passing of a friend and a brother in the writing trade — the historian and biographer Raul Rodrigo, who died all too suddenly and all too soon, at age 46, last Jan. 30.
Raul was best known for his books on the Lopez family and business empire. As I remarked at his wake, he was one of the very best in a line of work that I myself have engaged in, and I admired the scholarly care and the journalistic doggedness that Raul brought to the job. I quoted from him for my own book on Washington SyCip. He was a man of far greater patience and thoroughness than I was; his prose was crisp and impeccably written, a breeze to read, a model of clarity and correctness.
I just now recall a lunch I had a few years ago with Raul and with another writer I consider one of my mentors — the essayist, fictionist, and editor Johnny Gatbonton. We dreamt idly of writing biographies of figures in the arts who had led interesting lives — the names of Botong Francisco, Franz Arcellana, and Dolphy (whose searing autobiography hadn’t been published yet, then) came up. Both Raul and Johnny were terribly well read, and soon waxed ecstatic over a nonfiction author I hadn’t even heard of — I should have been embarrassed, and I was, but it was good to feel like a student once again in the company of better men.
It’s a very sad honor, as I noted at the wake, to speak of a friend in the past tense. The strange thing about sudden loss is that you find yourself groping for specific things to remember, because everything seems so recent and so mundane. But Raul himself would have been the first to agree how silly it often is to try and capture a life in a few sentences or paragraphs. To the real writer, every life deserves a book.
Again, to Raul’s wife and my sometime collaborator Nancy, and to their daughters Isabel and Beatriz Sophia, my deepest condolences.
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Speaking of paying tribute to the departed, the UP Writers Club — with some help from the UP Institute of Creative Writing and the Ateneo Library of Women’s Writing — put up a program and a photo exhibit last February 21 in honor of Edith Tiempo and Kerima Polotan-Tuvera, who both passed away within days of each other last year. This activity, sponsored by the NCCA, was an offshoot of the Taboan 2012 Literary Festival, the main event of which was held in Pampanga but which also encouraged and supported satellite projects in various parts of the country.
Some people might have wondered what UP had to do with these two writers —two of the finest we have ever produced, who could stand their ground against any man who wrote alongside them — who had very little, if anything, to do with UP, at least as far as most people knew. I’m told that Edith studied briefly in UP before the war, and Kerima took up Nursing in UP in 1944 before transferring to Arellano University.
More than these glancing connections, however, it’s part of the UPICW’s mandate to help develop a national writing community, so that we try to recognize, encourage, and support writing even beyond UP’s campuses, as far as we can. One of our major initiatives in this regard has been the publication and management of the website www.panitikan.com.ph, the most comprehensive, updated, and useful portal to contemporary Philippine literature you can find on the Internet. This website, also supported by the NCCA, is maintained by the UPICW, but it’s for all Filipino writers everywhere. If you want to learn about writing programs, workshops, lectures, and other literary events — or if you have your own bit of news to share — this is the place to go.
Another Taboan-related event that took place last month (which was National Arts Month, so flurry of events is understandable) was the launch of Issue No. 18 of Ateneo’s refereed e-journal Kritika Kultura, the only Philippine humanities journal in the Thomson Reuters (formerly ISI) index, accessible at http://kritikakultura.ateneo.net . (For those unfamiliar with academic practice, ISI indexing is widely taken to be a guarantee of the high quality of the materials accepted and published in the journal.)
Significantly, the issue focused on the South African novel, which again may seem foreign to many Filipino readers, but can easily resonate with us upon closer reading. (My own Soledad’s Sister was partly inspired by Nadine Gordimer’s story “Six Feet of the Country.”) Kritika Kultura’s point in hosting a virtual symposium on the literature of another country halfway around the globe is, I would suppose, the idea that if we want to command international respect and to invite interest from the international community, then we will have to engage in discussions beyond our immediate sphere.
And every now and then, the world’s attention does turn in our direction, and not just when Manny Pacquiao has a big fight, or when hundreds of our people die in another major disaster. Believe it or not, every four years, a big international conference on Philippine issues and concerns — from history, politics and economics to popular culture, mass media, and entertainment — takes place, drawing scholars from all around the world.
This year, the Ninth International Conference on the Philippines (ICOPHIL-9) will be held at Michigan State University in East Lansing from Oct. 28 to 30. I hope to be there — finances and the organizers permitting — to talk about the kind of work that Raul Rodrigo, Alfred Yuson, Isagani Cruz, Charlson Ong, and I myself have done — chronicling the lives of (mainly) our rich and famous, and the opportunities and problems attendant on this mode of biography.
And before you even ask, yes, I do write about the poor and the obscure, in the genre I most enjoy working in: fiction, which is my own and not for sale, except at the bookstore.
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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.
