The Challenge Of History: Why, where and how we failed, and what will we do now

Last week, the Na-tional Commis-sion for Culture and the Arts brought together more than a hundred writers from all over the archipelago to the UP and Ateneo campuses in Diliman for a three-day conference. The convener, the brilliant poet Ricardo M. de Ungria, asked me to speak at the conference opening. This is what I told them:

Given the nostalgic and magisterial inclination of the elderly, please don’t mind too much the grandiose title of this brief.

We are writers. What impact do we have on our history? We do not make the decisions that alter the nation’s destiny. And what can the solitary writer do now that will make a difference?

There will even be those who will insist that we have not failed. Those of you who are nearly as old as I am — look at the stunning skyline of Manila, there weren’t these many skyscrapers before, nor as many shiny cars in the streets and tony restaurants everywhere. Multitudes of Filipinos are traveling abroad — we have become a very cosmopolitan nation.

Indeed, the grass-roofed houses such as the one where I lived as a boy are nowhere to be seen. Almost all the houses all over the country are now roofed with tin.

I have also said again and yet again that be-hind our flamboyant fiestas, our bright smiles, deep within us is deep unhappi-ness. Just consider these: we are now 90 million and half of our people consider themselves poor, hunger stalks our land bountiful though it is with verdant plains. So many Filipinos now eat only once a day. An economist predicted that there will be 11 million Filipinos this year who will be jobless. And the corruption! The businessman Vicente Paterno said recently only two cabinet officers in the Arroyo government are honest; the secretary of the Department of Social Welfare, Esperanza I. Cabral, and the National Defense Secretary, Gilbert C. Teodoro. Jr. I have great respect for Mr. Paterno; of the many technocrats who backstopped Marcos, only he had the courage and humility to come out and say, Mea culpa.

Our courts are discredited, we have the highest drug addiction rate in Southeast Asia. Given these grim conditions, it is very possible that our country could implode — a failed state. What is our response to the coming deluge?

Our history tells in the last hundred years, three momentous events tested us as a people: the Revolution of 1896, the Japanese Occupation in 1942, and the declaration of Martial Law in 1972 by Ferdinand Marcos.

How did our writers respond to these watershed events? I will mention just a few: in 1896, Jose Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar, Apolinario Mabini, and yes, even Andres Bonifacio. Lest we forget. Bonifacio also wrote essays and poetry.

So much has been said about Rizal repudiating that revolution but his novels — by citing in them (primarily the Noli) the injustices of Spanish colonialism — argued for revolution. In writing the Noli, Rizal signed his own death warrant. He did not have to but he returned to Filipinas where the battle was to be fought; he could have easily stayed abroad and, being a medical doctor, he would not have starved like Marcelo H. del Pilar. Mabini provided the intellectual underpinning of that struggle. He also served the very poor. Exiled in Guam by the Americans, he decided to pledge allegiance to the United States so he could return home to die.

The other day, I was accompanied by Sylvia Roces, the daughter of Rafael Roces, Jr., writer, patriot and one of the founding members of the pre-war Civil Liberties Union. We visited the unimposing mausoleum in the Manila North cemetery where the bones of her father are interred with 27 others, including Manuel Arguilla whom we all know. Roces, Arguilla and the others were executed by the Japanese in August 1944 for their guerrilla activities. I never got to meet Liling Roces but I did see Arguilla in the afternoons before World War II when I read at the National Library which was then in the basement of what is now the National Museum. Arguilla was easily recognizable because he had a big dark mole on his left cheek. In 1950, I went to Bauang in La Union where I met his father, a peasant like my grandfather, whose toes were splayed “like ginger.”

In the late ‘60s, Ferdinand Marcos was able to convince some of our best writers to work for him. Among them, OD Corpuz, Blas Ople, Adrian Cristobal, Francisco “Kit” Tatad. When he declared Martial Law in 1972, one young poet, Emmanuel Lacaba fought the regime, one of the few writers who really cared. I published his poetry in my journal Solidarity, shared his company, his conversation. I was stunned when I learned he joined the New People’s Army, and that he had died in Davao.

It is now a generation since Marcos has passed away but the stigma he left behind is much too indelible to be erased.

As for those who worked with him, those who are still alive, the challenge to them now is to tell us what they knew, show us why Marcos failed. They owe this not just to history, but to us.

And now, this global crisis that is battering our shores. For so many of us, time is just a simple sequence with no other meaning, except for those whose work is defined by either hours or the seasons. Punctuality is a virtue that has yet to be acquired by most Filipinos. Time is, of course, history — wherein events occur, wherein people live and die and act out their fates.

For so many people in our part of the world, ancestors are worshipped and re-membered and a person’s lineage or that of a family or a clan is not only recorded but revered and held precious. Not so for so many of us, particularly those in the lower classes, where family members are now strewn all over the globe as the agrarian culture which promotes family closeness is shattered by the modernizing process; thus, time renders even more difficult the development of the community spirit, from where the sense of nation grows.

Without this sense of community/nation, memory fades and history is disregarded, or even rejected. So Filipinos do not remember the past, except that past which has affected them as individuals — the personal past, not the past which impacts on communities and people.

I bring this process of erosion to mind so we can locate ourselves, so we can perceive the necessity of how important it is for us to be contextual — not just in our writing but in our very lives, the way Rizal was, and Arguilla, and that young poet, Eman Lacaba.

But even contextuality is not enough; ethics also matters, perhaps more so than contextuality. Remember always: writers are also teachers.

If art and literature are moral, if literature is the noblest of the arts — it follows that writers should then be of noble bearing, capable of lofty deeds or, at the very least, living in a manner that enables us to look others straight in the eye. In these times of want, of cowardice and compromise, this requires of us not just courage but compassion.

But we also know that virtue can be punishment and thus knowledge is what drives us to seek refuge in the cave, in the eyrie of loneliness itself.

As writers, we know only too well this profound loneliness which torments us and also sustains us — this loneliness from which emanates the melancholy that suffuses the best, the loftiest of the arts. This loneliness is humankind’s fate, though not often recognized as such; it grows from the darkness of the womb, and we immerse deeper in it into a larger darkness of the soul. From this loneliness, we try to connect with other human beings, and in the process, we then form the coterie, the ethnic community, and hopefully, as it is with us today, the nation.

In striving to free ourselves from the loneliness of ourselves, we derive some strength and also some meaning by giving our struggle a definition, a purpose, an ideology, even, to which we can then subscribe, to which we can then gather around and be bonded with our kith and kin, our neighbors, our tribe and our race. This hankering for belonging, for an identity, is sometimes labeled as racism, or nationalism, and this nationalism never really dies although it has been corrupted, debased and condemned. It will persist because it is also one illustration — perhaps the only valid illustration — of how we banish our loneliness, how we triumph over it. For as Jean Paul Sartre said, “man is doomed to be free.”

This freedom, even though it be nurtured only in the mind, is elusive — not an illusion. As artists, we will always be alone. We are self-centered, narcissistic and hypersensitive. We are constantly at war with one another, envious of the success of others and forever finding fault with them, and the world even, and never with ourselves. We are whiners, building plots and myths about ourselves, dramatizing our failures and enlarging our little sorrows into mega tragedies. Suffering, particularly the emotional kind, is the ambrosia on which we feed.

We die early when we celebrate only ourselves.

It is those among us who can transcend the narrow compass of our egos, who can then elaborate on our virtues not just as singular individuals but as bonded people of a nation, who do not die young, who are also capable of realizing themselves, who know they have to strive always and do better every time.

It is they who can see also beyond themselves, who know what the larger truths in life that are not expressed should be — that they must always emphasize the obvious. This is not just function but duty, which we often do not recognize — those wrinkles in our faces and in the social fabric that we take for granted, the vile corruption, the inchoate evil that pervades the atmosphere.

For us, then, the challenge of the past, of our own history, is constant and unending, ever alive every moment of the day. All through time, while artists have persevered to achieve excellence and permanence, they have also tried to mirror their times, not just to express themselves but to locate themselves in the vortex of their societies.

For those of us who have grown old stirring the rubble around us, and aware of the frailty of our response, let us take comfort in our youth for, indeed, not just our people but our country as well are very young. The oldest document that validates our youth is that brass relic found in a Laguna riverbed some two decades ago — it is not more than 900 years old.

In the context of history, therefore, we are in the founding stage, the age of Honor, or Chaucer. As I sometimes tell young writers, we have no Confucius looking down over our shoulder, nor even Cervantes, but only Rizal and before him Balagtas, and for the Ilokanos, Pedro Bukaneg although, I suspect, he wasn’t that ancient.

What we are writing now, if excellent, will survive the severest critic of all — which is time. These will be the classics a few centuries hence although, of course, we will never know what the future will bring. And thank God for our youth because we are not crippled by tradition, by necrophilic bondage to the past.

We can be comforted, too, by our own history, brief though it be; of how we fought colonialism and its depredations upon us, and most of all, upon our minds.

No, colonialism is not dead! It hovers over us every day, right in this hall, in those of us who think that the imprimatur of recognition is to be published in the United States, in those of us who ape the literary pyrotechnics of the latest best sellers over there. Just think back, how many among us tried to imitate Gabriel Garcia Marquez when he first bloomed two decades ago. How many among our teachers to this very day still parrot the tenets of the New Criticism, when it died long ago in American academe where it started.

As I always say, write for our people and not for the Americans — if we are good, not just they, then the whole world will recognize us. But first we must be read by our own people and this, indeed, is very sad for we don’t even read one another.

Be that as it may, our history tells us with force and certitude that above the travail that we have gone through in these calamitous events that I have mentioned, although we did not prevail, we persevered.

That perseverance must now be channeled into a struggle versus a virus we often don’t recognize. For too long, we have regarded ourselves as victims of oppression, of oligarchic exploitation, and in us is the accretion of anger against injustice. We understand all these burdens, in many instances they are what fuel our striving, our sense of purpose. We must now go beyond this syndrome, this labeling of ourselves as victims, not to forget the condition as it has warped us but as the durable cocoon from which we must emerge into the freedom of a larger vision and effort, into thinking beyond our geography to recognize that the larger world outside is threatening us, engulfing us as with the economic crisis which we cannot escape.

We know that it is greed — untrammeled and wanton — which has caused so much grief not just on our shores but elsewhere. How to regulate this greed within and beyond us, how to help build the fragile institutions that will save us, show us how to morph this avarice into a more meaningful hunger for knowledge, for truth, for fulfillment.

Back to the solid, sordid reality of our times.

My generation failed; I pray that yours will not, must not — that in whatever language you write, wherever you will live, on native soil or in exile, nurture your roots with steadfast integrity, as did Rizal, Arguilla, Eman; you may not have read them, you may not even think of them, but like them; you will then build the marmoreal foundation for this nation.

All of us know that our country does not realize how important literature is, or the arts, for that matter. We know that we will never earn enough with our writing and we will be lucky if our families understand this for our greatest support comes from our loved ones. But even if we will not be appreciated or amply rewarded, we also know that we have to plod on, to write as best and as honestly as we can and we will do this not because we are masochists or because a munificent bonus awaits us in the afterlife. We must bear this duty, endure it, if we are to be true not just to the vocation we have chosen but to this land that sustains us, which gave us life and a reason to be.