The necessity for nonfiction

Afew weeks ago, in Melbourne, I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking before a global audience of experts in and practitioners of nonfiction  that broad branch of writing that straddles everything from journalistic reportage, history, and philosophical essays to personal memoirs, travelogues, and cookbooks. I gave one of the four keynote addresses in that three-day-long Bedell Nonfictionow Conference; the other speakers were David Shields, on collage and appropriation; Helen Garner, on the central place of the interview in nonfiction; and Margo Jefferson, on the boundary between criticism and nonfiction. I chose to take a less technical and more social tack, and talked about why, more than ever, there’s a need for nonfiction in this age of the Internet, particularly in places off the global literary centers like the Philippines.

I wasn’t alone in representing the Philippines and its literature. Lawrence Ypil, one of our brightest young poets who’s doing a second MFA at the University of Iowa, this time for nonfiction, spoke about using family photographs to solve a mystery, and also introduced the work of Resil Mojares and Simeon Dumdum Jr. from his native Cebu. Longtime activists Bonifacio Ilagan and Marili Fernandez-Ilagan discussed the political possibilities of nonfiction in print, film, and theater; Boni also gave a comprehensive overview of recent political nonfiction from the Philippines. Their talks provoked much interest, and reminded me of just how far ahead of the curve our writing is in many ways, despite the obvious obstacles to writing in a society that doesn’t seem to value books much.

So I used my keynote as an opportunity to reintroduce contemporary Philippine literature to others, highlighting our work in nonfiction, particularly that of the late, great Nick Joaquin. Below are some excerpts from that 40-minute talk:

A wealth of nonfiction titles has been emerging in the Philippines over the past 20 to 30 years  memoirs, biographies, histories, essays, travelogues, cookbooks, and motivational materials for business and religion. There has also been a perceptible rise in enrollments in courses and workshops for nonfiction, seen by many correctly or otherwise  to be a less formidable and more accessible entry point to writing than fiction or poetry.

To state the obvious, nonfiction provides an alternative to fiction and of course to itself. In the first instance, I don’t simply mean the choice the reader faces at the bookshop at any given moment between buying a novel or a book of essays, but as a means to appreciating the truth, in which everyone is presumably interested and invested.

That truth can be particularly elusive in a country and society where there has been a longstanding tradition of suppressing it  in our case, the nearly two decades of the rule of Ferdinand Marcos, carrying over to his successors, one or two of whom turned out to be even more adept than Marcos in kleptocracy and in hiding the truth.

In this experience we Filipinos can hardly be alone, given the emergence and in many cases the continuing rule of autocrats, despots, and demagogues around the world, from Asia and the Middle East to Africa and Latin America. Personal accounts and testimonies are important in such places where an “official version” of events is often promoted, if not enforced.

While fiction might best capture the grotesqueness of life and the absurdity of the truth in many of these places  and I’ll get back to this later  it is nonfiction that bears the burden of presenting the facts on the ground, often at great risk to the author and even to the reader.

The authoritarian State not only seeks to stifle the truth: it is an active and imaginative producer of fiction. In the Philippines, this was never more palpable than during the long years of martial law, from 1972 until the expulsion of the Marcoses  at least for the time being  in 1986. Let me share a few stories in this regard. (And here I spoke about Marcos’ biography by Hartzell Spence and his claims of wartime heroism, the Tasaday controversy, the Tadhana Philippine history project that Marcos commissioned, and the abortive Kasaysayan ng Lahi film epic that Imelda commissioned.)

But this kind of mythologizing did not begin nor end with Marcos, and it would be naïve to think that other Filipino leaders did not avail themselves of the power of fiction  or, otherwise, the power of silence.

Let me point out here quickly that while repression remains a very real threat in our society, Philippine literature and journalism are wonderfully wanton  we have no sacred cows, no taboos. We feel free to write as we please, if only because we suspect, with some justification, that the government is functionally illiterate, and doesn’t give a rat’s ass about what you say in your obscure novel or inscrutable poem. But this doesn’t mean that there’s no political backlash, when someone upstairs does read or misread your report in the newspaper, the magazine, or online.

Those genres tell us something, by the way  that, at least in the Philippines, nonfiction is a far riskier enterprise than fiction. Statistics kept by the international Committee to Protect Journalists show that 73 Filipino journalists have been killed since 1992. So far, no novelists or poets have figured on the death list.

(And here I introduced Nick Joaquin as someone who excelled in both journalism and creative writing, and read excerpts of his best work in creative nonfiction.)

I brought up Nick Joaquin not just to introduce a name, but also to show that the New Journalism and creative nonfiction were laying down native roots in other parts of the world outside of the West  certainly not only in the Philippines before we knew them by these terms. Joaquin’s Free Press pieces, which began in 1957, antedated Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which was published in 1966.

The highest crimes, of course, are often perpetrated by the State, and this again is where the greatest value of nonfiction lies, in unraveling the truth where the outcome could affect the lives and fortunes of millions. Sometimes the most significant outcomes are no more immediate and practical than an understanding of the past, especially when alternative histories face off against each other.

This is where nonfiction competes against itself, one version versus another. We often speak of nonfiction in the same breath that we say “the truth,” as if nonfiction and the truth were interchangeable, but this is something that everyone in this conference should know cannot always be so. Nonfiction is, in a sense, a process rather than a product, a way to establishing certain verities most of us can accept or agree with or recognize, albeit with some resistance.

Most notably, nonfiction is an arena for competing histories or interpretations of history. This again is particularly important where the formation of a people’s self-image is involved, especially in a colonial or postcolonial context.

Nonfiction is even more essential in this age of Facebook and Twitter, when every event is deemed newsworthy within five seconds of its occurrence, for even the worst  or some would say the best  of gonzo journalism bears some of the composure and the composition of art.

Nevertheless, the argument can always be made that sometimes the best response to fact is fiction  not the fiction of the State, but the fiction that emanates from deep within the individual’s heart and conscience, bodied forth by the free imagination. Fiction  especially the kind of realist, pre-postmodern fiction that still predominates in Asia  is relentless in its effort to make sense of events and of the characters who impel them. Our narratives tend to be straightforward, transparent or at least translucent rather than opaque, trading cleverness of presentation and virtuosity of language for what is seen  or hoped to be seen  as honest, heartfelt storytelling, the object of which is the understanding of character and the improvement of community.

Our national hero Jose Rizal was an excellent polemicist who scored the abuses and effects of Spanish colonial rule in one essay after another  but it was his two novels from the 1880s, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, that captured both the obviousness of the need for some kind of revolutionary action and yet also the complexity and difficulty of making this choice. His farewell poem, supposedly written in his prison cell on the eve of his execution by firing squad, is impressed in the national consciousness.

Under martial law, when our presses were shut down and all the newspapers and magazines were producing hosannas, it was poetry, fiction, and drama that took up the fight  slyly, stealthily, employing such disguises and devices as we knew would escape the regime’s eyes and yet catch the public’s.

Simply put, the full story of this most traumatic episode in our modern history has yet to be told. Most of us never knew what happened behind the barbed wire; most of us never understood that the prison began well before the barbed wire, and extended into our homes and our subconscious. We cannot remember what we never knew, and we can never learn from what we cannot remember.

And this, ultimately, is the necessity for nonfiction  whether it comes in the form of personal memoir or national history, of comic musing or tragic reflection, of travelogue or cookbook, of political polemic or erotic encounter: it constrains us to confront the tangible world, reminds us of our vulnerable, mutable, insurgent physicality, and connects us to a shared past, present, and future.

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