Philippine literature today

The student group WIKA Kabataan asked me to explain to more than a hundred of their members last week in UP Diliman the state of Philippine literature today.

Here are some of the thoughts I shared with them.

Philippine literature is alive and well and living on the Web.

Excellent books of fiction, poetry, criticism, and creative nonfiction continue to be published. Through PowerPoint slides, I showed the covers of some National Book Award finalists of the last few years, such as Rebecca T. Añonuevo’s Saulado, Teo T. Antonio’s Pagsunog ng Dayami, Eros S. Atalia’s Taguan-Pung, Abdon M. Balde Jr.’s Hunyango sa Bato, Lito Casaje’s Mga Premyadong Dula, Bienvenido Lumbera’s Sa Sariling Bayan, Rogelio G. Mangahas’ Gagamba sa Uhay, Victor Emmanuel Carmelo D. Nadera Jr.’s (H)istoryador(a), Tony Perez’s Sitio Catacutan series, Benjamin Pimentel’s Mga Gerilya sa Powell Street, Zosimo Quibilan Jr.’s Pagluwas, Frank G. Rivera’s Oyayi, Ellen L. Sicat’s Paghuhunos, and Alvin B. Yapan’s Ang Sandali ng mga Mata.

I then showed the front pages of websites devoted to Philippine literature, starting with the pioneering GUMIL sites, the institutional sites, and personal blogs consisting of literary works in various languages, notably Ilocano, Tagalog, and Filipino.

I then showed a prose paragraph without mentioning the author or the source and asked the students to decide, through a show of hands, whether it was a poem or not. Many of the students surprised me by guessing correctly that the excerpt from Virgilio Almario’s Huling Hudhud was indeed a poem, despite its being in prose form.

They were less certain when I showed a long text that looked like a poem, which I had taken from a blog. The text summarized Philippine history, using the familiar image of the country as a woman raped by Spanish, American, and Japanese colonizers in turn. The text had the proper content (“proper” as most Marxist critics would define the term), but it failed miserably when measured with formalistic yardsticks (meter or rhythm, rhyme or sound design, density of language, consistency of symbolism and voice, and so on). I said that it looked like a poem, but that it was not.

Then I showed a paragraph that had all the students enjoying themselves. I then revealed that the text came from a blog done by Bob Ong (or people pretending to be the enigmatic Bob Ong). It was clear from the reaction of the audience that they immediately related to Bob Ong, but had problems with the more aesthetically correct Almario or even the pseudo-verse of the Marxist blogger.

I then stated my thesis for my lecture, which was that Bob Ong represented Philippine literature today, for better or worse.

I ended the lecture the way I always end my lectures nowadays, by showing the various sites that I handle (some more religiously than others), such as my sites on Blogger, Facebook, Linked-In, Multiply, MySpace, and WordPress.

I could not stay for the open forum, but I flashed my cellphone number on the screen for the students to text me in case they had questions or comments. (I do that routinely now with my lectures; it saves time, allows my audiences more time to think through their questions before they ask them, and gives them the safety of anonymity.)

With young audiences, I always score a hit by saying that I no longer hand out business cards, because I have become a digital citizen. Instead of saying, this is my contact number, digital natives (namely, those born with computers in the hospital room) say, “Facebook me.”

I like talking to young people. They find it amusing that I pretend to be 50 years (half a century!) younger.

NATIONAL CONFERENCE: Speaking of young people, a national conference will be held in the Sampaloc campus of Far Eastern University next week that should be of interest to teachers and school administrators. Entitled “Class 2013: Educating for the Future,” the conference aims to paint a picture of what students now in college will face when they graduate.

Sponsored by the Teachers Academy and the Center for Continuing Education of FEU, in cooperation with CHED, the conference will be held on Aug. 25 to 27. Among the speakers are: Emmanuel Y. Angeles, Jaime An Lim, Milagros Ibe, Auxencia Limjap, Cayetano Paderanga Jr., and Evelyn Vicencio. Overall coordinator is Violeta Jerusalem.

The conference takes off from three groundbreaking approaches to contemporary education, namely, the famous statement of former Education USEC Victor Ordoñez that “we cannot equip the youth of the future with the tools of the past,” Marc Prensky’s distinction between “digital natives” and “digital immigrants,” and YouTube’s widely-watched “Did You Know.”

If you are a teacher still using old-fashioned methods such as lecturing, recitation, or group discussion, or if you think that studying is best done in a quiet library without an iPod or a TV set on or without getting online through a cellphone, you might want to attend this conference to find out why you are having difficulty getting your students excited over what you have spent a lifetime studying. We are now well into the 21st century, and the 20th century, in case you haven’t noticed, was the last century.