NERUDA & COURAGE

The centennial of Pablo Neruda was marked last fortnight, not only in Chile where he was born, but all over the world where the Nobel laureate is read, where his courage also resonates.

It is in this manner why he reminds us so much of those times when our writers were also subjected to the pillory of tyranny just as Neruda was.

Let us not forget that we have a revolutionary tradition, and with this tradition, is our heritage in courage as epitomized by Rizal, by Mabini, and in the early days of the American Occupation, by those sterling characters, poets and playwrights who opposed the American hegemony.

Rizal, more than any of our writers, is an exemplar of that courage. He knew how cruel the Spaniards were, and yet, he returned to Filipinas after he had written the Noli which doomed him for martyrdom. There have been efforts by the communists, then and now, to denigrate him as an American-made hero, which of course, is partly true in the sense that they honored him more than they honored the other heroes of our revolution.

But the Americans did not write the Noli and Fili, those two books which inspired Bonifacio and so many of the revolutionists; in affect, as the historian Ambeth Ocampo says, he was the "soul of the revolution," and he could still be the soul of the revolution that is yet to come.

If only we Filipinos remember.

I recall the honesty of Norman Mailer who, at that Solidaridad reception more than twenty years ago, admitted candidly that if he were in the Soviet Union then, he would have easily acceded to the demands of the Soviet state because he liked his comforts. It was for this reason that he was all admiration for such courageous Russians like Pasternak, like Solshenitzyn, just as I am in admiration of Anna Akhmatova and Osip Mandelstam, two poets who stood their ground, who never left home when Stalin hovered over Russia like a dark cloud.

And what about us?

Writing is always a political act; some writers elect to be spineless aesthetes, like Jose Garcia Villa, not only by leaving their homeland, but by exalting their clever poetry, justifying it all in the name of art. We have enough of such creatures, particularly during the Marcos dictatorship, when some of our writers pandered to Marcos. They organized the Writers Union because Marcos could not make Philippine PEN do his bidding. They spent millions of the people’s money for their travels, entertainment, conferences without any accounting of the public funds. One of their leaders went as far as publish a bogus edition of Mr & Ms Magazine to perpetuate the lies of the regime. Mr & Ms was critical of the regime.

Political power brought out the worst of them. They saw to it that writers not friendly to Marcos were harassed and not allowed to travel. Their books censored.

Such harassment is, of course, nothing compared to what happened to those who were imprisoned, tortured, or who disappeared without any trace.

What happened to these toadies of Marcos? They are today in media, and like those who collaborated with the Japanese, they were never punished. Filipinos who have little or no memory have not ostracized them.

It is easy to understand why they served Marcos. In the first place, there are no rich, comfortable writers in this country. Creative writers have neither an economic nor social base. But if this is so in the Philippines, it is also true in other countries where writers have to make a living working as academics, as journalists, or in whatever job is available to them.

Much earlier, in Indonesia, such onerous activities also happened. Mochtar Lubis and I objected to the bestowal of the Ramon Magsaysay Award to the Indonesian author, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, not because he was a lackey of Sukarno, not because he wrote on themes that were considered at the time politically incorrect. Far from it – we objected and so did other Indonesian writers because when he was in power, he oppressed the Indonesian writers who were the critics of the Sukarno regime. He had their meetings stoned, their books burned, he saw to it that they were not employed and in those days, the government was the largest employer in Indonesia.

The French writer Jean Paul Sartre openly expressed his admiration of the Soviets and was a professed pro communist – but he did not personally oppress a single French author.

We may blame Pablo Neruda for giving the communists his approval, but I am positive Neruda never harmed a single Chilean writer.

There are writers and writers. T.S. Eliot was anti-semitic. Ezra Pound worked for the fascists in Europe, for which reason he was sent to the nuthouse in America.

I have always admired V.S. Naipaul, for instance, and also Paul Theroux – they are wonderful wordsmiths, I love reading them – but these are characters I do not want to meet personally. When the two broke their friendship, they really deserved each other. Even their excellent writing shows they are not capable of compassion, for both are arrogant, intellectually and otherwise, as those who know them personally have told me.

We have not been very judicious in our literary judgment as can be seen in the National Artist awards. The nation’s highest literary honor has been given to some so- called writers who, if judged by their body of work and their regard for their homeland, should not have gotten the award at all.

Too, some of our so-called critics have praised to high heavens – Jose Maria Sison as a poet, when all those who know poetry know he is no poet at all. That so-called Marxist critic Epifanio San Juan has been lionized by some university presses because of his politics. They should never have published him, not because of his political views, but because he is such an awful writer, whose gibberish is mistaken for profundity.

Carlos Bulosan was never a great writer – his The Laughter of My Father was phony, any village boy will tell you that. But our communist leaning critics eulogized him because of his politics. Fortunately for Bulosan, he was able to redeem himself, not with his fiction, but with his autobiography, America is in the Heart – a moving recount of his travail as a stoop laborer in the United States.

This is not to say that all writers, particularly those who were with the NPA, were dubious. Jose Lacaba, Bienvenido Lumbera and Mila Aguilar are genuine exceptions, as can be judged by their work, either in Tagalog or in English.

Many years back, I needed a copy reader. I called Ophie Dimalanta who was then dean of the University of Santo Tomas College of Arts and Letters to send me one of her brightest students.

I remember very well the lanky fellow who came to see me. As with all editorial applicants, I asked him to write a short essay. When I read it, I knew at once that he was a poet – I didn’t need one – all I wanted was a copy reader who knew his grammar. A poet working as a copy reader will be wasting his talents.

Years again afterwards, I was at Santo Tomas and I was telling Ophie about a brilliant young poet whose work I liked and Ophie told me that was Neil Garcia whom I rejected as a copyreader because "he is homosexual."

So next time I met Neil, I took him aside and told him it was not so. Whoever gave him the idea that I am homophobic? I told him that the person I hired to do the job was gay. Moreover, I have several gay friends because they are an undeniable presence in the cultural endeavor.

But I told him I resented homosexuals who make capital out of their homosexuality, an excuse for their mediocrity. In the same manner, I resent artists who proclaim they are Catholics, feminists, nationalists, do-gooding humanists, communists and make these labels as emblems of their art, camouflaging their weaknesses or the triteness of their effort.

So then, what does Neruda teach us?

First, there is no great literature without nationality. Neruda sings beautifully, loudly about his native land, its unblemished landscapes: he celebrates his countrymen although many of them pilloried him for his political stand.

Another lesson he teaches is the transitory nature of politics, and I may add, even literary fads. What would Neruda say now that the Soviet Union which he idolized collapsed? It is the same with those who opposed apartheid in Africa, Nadine Godimer, and those who opposed Sukarno –Suharto – their regimes also collapsed. And so did Marcos and his dictatorship.

Those who acted only because of their opposition to these regimes did right, but what now that these regimes are gone?

Neruda’s poetry, however, continues to have resonance because though he was a communist, he addressed the larger issues of injustice, of tyranny and the evils of a capitalist system gone astray.

So it must be with us – we continue opposing injustice in whatever form it takes, and ignore the labels.

In the end, what remains, what survives perhaps well into eternity is the work of art that the writer leaves behind. If he has written with honesty, and faithfulness to his own conscience, he shall have left behind not just a document of his time, but also the memory and final bonding of a people into a nation. In this way then, it is not the politician who is also a man of words, but the writer who creates and gives the clearest boundaries, and the soul as well to nationhood.

This, after all, is what Rizal did, what Pablo Neruda did, two men bonded together, not so much because they both wrote in Spanish but because both were endowed not just with genius, but most important of all, with indomitable courage.