Taboan 2013

I was invited to join National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera, keynote speaker Resil B. Mojares, and Leoncio Deriada in a panel entitled “Your Place at the Writers’ Table” during the opening ceremonies of Taboan 2013: The 5th Philippine Writers Festival, held in Dumaguete City.

This was my speech:

Taking off from the title of this panel, allow me to wax biblical. After all, as Luke 13:29 puts it, we have “come from east and west, and from north and south, and shall lie down at [this] table.”

I start with Matthew 5:15: “And a burning light is not put under a vessel, but on its table; so that its rays may be shining on all who are in the house.” Or as Mark 4:21 puts it, “And he said to them, When the light comes in, do people put it under a vessel, or under the bed, and not on its table?” Or Luke 8:16: “No man, when the light is lighted, puts a cover over it, or puts it under a bed, but he puts it on its table, so that those who come in may see the light.”

As writers, we are mandated by heaven to share our brilliant insights with everyone. I really mean brilliant. Let us put modesty aside. Our country, our world, needs righting. Everybody else puts their vested interests ahead of the welfare of the world. Politicians want to retain or regain power. Business people want to take our money away from us. Educators want us to think the way they were taught. Priests and pastors want us to follow what they preach. Revolutionaries want us to think and act the way they do.

Only we writers have no vested interests. Although we want others to read us, we do not really care if nobody does. We are happy enough writing what we are writing. But the evangelists tell us that we must let our rays shine so all who read us may see the light.

On the other hand, Paul, in his letter to the Romans 11:9, reminds us that “David says, ‘Let their table be made a snare, and a trap, a stumbling block, and a retribution to them.’”

We writers may easily fall into the trap of thinking that we matter. We think that, because we have put our thoughts into words and our words on paper or screen, we have made the world a better place. That could be (I do not say it is) a snare, a trap, a stumbling block, a retribution. As writers, we know what it feels to have a dual personality anyway, to be bipolar, to live in two worlds simultaneously, the one that we eat and sleep and f**k in, and the one in our imagination, where we are the creator (even if sometimes our creations create us).

We have to let our light shine upon the unimaginative masses and elites, but we also have to shine the light upon ourselves, in order that we do not fall into the darkness of arrogance or angst.

Finally, for my third exhibit, there is Psalm 23, verse 5: “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil. My cup runs over.”

Yes, our cup runneth over in Dumaguete, a magical place that has bred hundreds of Filipino writers, and of course in this fifth Taboan. But like the table of the sheep in the psalm, our table is set in the presence of our enemies. We have enemies galore, from the materialism of the politicians to the spiritualism of the churches, from the need to earn a living prostituting ourselves as journalists to the need to dumb down to the level of students, from the onslaught of pretentious writers doing pretentious blogs to the genuine challenge of genuinely talented Facebookers. Yes, we are surrounded by demons, real and virtual, imagined and real.

I am myself guilty of what Paul charged the Corinthians in his first letter 10:21: “You can’t both partake of the table of the Lord, and of the table of demons.”

This is the word of one writer.

CONGRATULATIONS: The Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission on Culture and the Arts, which sponsored Taboan, gave awards at the end of Taboan. Congratulations to the awardees:

The Taboan 2013 Literary Awardees: Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Paolo Maria Diosdado Casurao y Granados, Erma M. Cuizon, Lamberto G. Ceballos, Marjorie Evasco, Maria Luisa S. Defante-Gibraltar, Alice Tan-Gonzales, Ernesto D. Lariosa, Ma. Rosario S. Cruz Lucero, and Victorio N. Sugbo.

The Taboan Lifetime Achievement Awardees: Cirilo F. Bautista, Leoncio P. Deriada, Bienvenido Lumbera, Resil B. Mojares, Elmer A. Ordoñez, and me.