Diversity, politics, criticism

I’ll start this column to answer the questions that were raised after my talk before the Iligan Writers Workshop last Dec. 1. Diversity is perhaps the most common feature of this huge island of Mindanao. Various indigenous tribes (lumad) – Moslems and Christians of dissimilar ethnicities – are supposed live harmoniously together, but it is their diversity that separates them. Yet it is important that such diversity must be nurtured, for such endows them with their truest identity which will then define them. Now, they must learn to transcend those divides for their own future good because there is something bigger than their tribes or themselves – the nation that will insure their survival in unity, peace and progress.

The bonding of these people is an arduous, often violent, political process that all Mindanaoans, particularly the writers, must promote. Politics is the search for power, its use and abuse and eventual loss. Since most human relationships are power relationships, it is inevitable for writers and literature itself to be engaged in politics, and its criticism. In other words, writing is a political act with the writer often denying it, concerned as he is with his craft. The writer who solemnly renounces politics is hollow. The writer then is a critic of society itself; being a thinking member of society or a nation, he is constantly aware of that society’s faults as they impinge on him.

Then, it could be the other way around. In that society are individuals – not many of them – with keen sensibilities, steeped in aesthetics who evaluate the writer’s work and, of course, his politics. Criticism, like the original work of art, is important in the sense that the critic points out the shortcomings or the excellence of a particular literary work.

The critic, particularly in modern times, is therefore a person of learned perceptions and keen sensibilities. He knows the history of the art that he is reviewing and the creative process that went with it. For critic and artist, certain rules and standards must be observed. The writer must know words, grammar, symbolism, narrative technique; the artist must know form, balance and, most of all, how to draw. I cannot really admire an artist who cannot draw.

In the traditional folk tradition, the function of the critic is simplified by the fact that almost everyone in a particular milieu is familiar with the difficulties of weaving, pottery or wood working. For instance, when you go to a particular Cordillera village, people there are active participants in their culture, and almost everybody in that village knows who in the region is the best wood carver or weaver.

However, beyond this traditional folk culture, skills are sharpened and modernized, not everyone can now be a producer of creative work. This is where the modern critic comes armed, as I already mentioned, with keen perception and capability explaining a seemingly obscure work of art.

Take for instance, my short story, The God Stealer, which is my most anthologized narrative. It can be interpreted on several levels. On the narrative level the story is about a young Ifugao who steals the wooden bulol (or granary god) from his grandfather and then presents this as a gift to his American friend. On a different level however, as first explained by Dante five hundred years ago, the story is much more than this. It is also a commentary on the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, or the nature of gratitude or, on a philosophical level, how a man or the people will lose its soul and how that soul may be regained. This is the innate quality of literature, its ambiguity and the possibility of several interpretations that can only be arrived at with the keen analytic perception of a critic.

It goes without saying that when a work of art is presented to the public, the artist must be prepared for commentaries on his work that will be made by both intellectual and idiot. Even if the reaction is very negative, the writer still wins because his work is read.

It also goes without saying that the writer himself must be his own most severe critic; he can develop acute self-criticism if he is able to take on the responsibility of a critic and not of the creative writer. One way he can do this is to put away his manuscript when he is finished for a couple of weeks or even more, then he will have to review it with the fresh and objective mind. It will be very difficult for him to slash away not just whole sentences but paragraphs if he knows instinctively that they do not contribute to the final beauty of his own creation.

There will be those critics who may have a grudge against this particular writer or artist and have nothing good to say about him or his work. It is easy to identify this kind of critic, no matter how well he may camouflage his bias and naughtiness with sophisticated jargon. When this happens, the writer should just ignore this kind of criticism like the duck that takes to water but does not drown in it.

In the long run, the best and perhaps the ultimate critic is not an individual but time itself. If any work of literature is read and appreciated more than a hundred years after it was written, then it has passed the most severe test of all, which is the test of time and has become a classic.

However, the good writer or artist rarely thinks of critics when he is at work. Creativity is a gift because the writer knows in his bones that not everyone can be like him and that his worst competitor is himself.

In Asian tradition, there is that belief that God is the greatest artist of all and sometimes in the spirit of humility, an Asian artist with a stake in this tradition will willfully create a flaw in his work, like putting a dent in his pottery, to illustrate his humility before the Creator.

The first writers in both the Asian and Western tradition were not only storytellers creating epics to ennoble their own people. They were also historians, teachers and moralists, for in the end, art must be moral even though some artists themselves are not.