Atisan Novels

Diary of a Bad Year

2009-11-08T04:50:00.002Z

1. The novel is made possible by divisions. Coetzee divided the book into two sections called "Strong Opinions" and "Second Diary" in order to differentiate issues extrinsic and intrinsic to the self, only to reveal that they're actually both driven by external events on the one hand, and limitations of intellectual and affective visions on the other. Additionally Coetzee divided each page into essays supposedly written by Señor C, an aging Australian writer born in South Africa, who wrote a novel called Waiting for the Barbarians, not unlike Coetzee himself; his narration of encounters with and thoughts of Anya, a Filipina who never lived in the Philippines whom he invited to work as his typist; and Anya's observations of Señor C's writings, and of his actions and reactions towards her.

2. An excerpt from Señor C's essay, "On terrorism,": "... a secret is an item of information and as such falls under the wing of information science, one of whose branches is mining, the extraction of scintillae of information (secrets) from tons of data. The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible." He liked to call his brand of political thought "pessimistic anarchistic quietism, or anarchist quietistic pessimism, or pessimistic quietistic anarchism," even if he doubted his own qualification as a thinker.

3. Anya recognizes herself, and knows that she's most probably viewed, as "racy, exciting, exotic" yet "just the little Filipina"--but with a tinge of irony, which is the only probable tone Coetzee could have given her, if he would like to survive in our age of political correctness. She even teased, that is return the gaze to, the old man when he asked her where she was born: "Why do you want to know? Am I not blonde-eyed and blue-haired enough for your tastes?" Señor C was speechless, but in another occasion, upon seeing Anya's clothes "enough to outfit a middle-sized cathouse," he asked if she had "a shoe collection too." Filipinas are remembered for how little they are, and how extravagant. But Anya remembered her mother as someone very loyal to her Australian father, and mused: "That is how we are, we Filipinas. Good wives, good mistresses, good friends too. Everything good."

4. Movies, aside from literary works, are among Señor C's immediate intertexts in his essays, like Kurasawa's Seven Samurai and Kubrick's film adaption of Lolita. His was a commissioned series of essays because he admitted to no longer have the endurance needed for writing novels. He told Anya that, "To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out."

Anya was eager to tell the old man, however, that his essays, especially the one about the terrorists, were a bit "idealistic" and "unrealistic," and then shared her own uncle's encounters with the Islamists in Mindanao, who don't mind dying if it could bring nearer "the day of the battle to end all battles, when the infidels are defeated and Islam takes over the world." She was so opinionated, a "little Filipina typist who thinks she knows everything," that Señor C wondered if Anya was the real mother of the thoughts he was putting down on paper. But, really, where does authorship begin and end?

~ After J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year (2007)

The History of Love

2009-11-06T15:00:00.000Z

1. The tragedy of lost opportunities is what makes most stories sad; but being unaware of this tragedy is what makes them effectively poignant. And poignant was the life of Leopold Gursky, who unknowingly was robbed authorship of a novel called The History of Love; he entrusted it to a friend and was betrayed without him ever knowing. Further he was estranged from his own son who grew up to be a famous writer and died searching for his father--something our old guy was also not fully allowed by the fates to know.

Needless to say, Gursky grew old living alone, and prepared himself to die alone. In his wallet was an index card that says: MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. The thing is that, "He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him."

2. Krauss balanced the heavy drama in Gursky's life with the charming innocence with which fourteen-year-old Alma Singer, named after the beloved in Gursky's novel, tried to search for the author of the novel that his father gave her mother as a gift. The excerpted chapters ("The Age of Glass," "The Birth of Feeling," "The Age of String") from Gurksky's novel are equally delightful, almost poetic, reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in their mythic texture.

3. Of course Leo loved to read, as did Alma. He devoured Anna Karenina, Ulysses, the works. Meanwhile, the young girl's hero was Antoine de Saint-Exupery (whose The Little Prince was read to her by her father when she was six). Leo's son, who pretended to be his own character in able to search clues for the whereabouts of his father, wrote to Alma's mother: "You also asked what I do. I read. This morning I finished The Street of Crocodiles for the third time. I found it almost unbearably beautiful." One time, Alma caught her mother reading Cervantes, "the most famous Spanish writer," her mother claimed. These are people whose lives are somewhat occupied by literary works, lives in which literature still has some power.

4. A little mention of the Philippines, through Alma: "Henry Lavender... told us about his collection of seashells, many of which he'd dove for himself on trips to the Philippines." I would not even go to issues of legality; it was fiction, obviously, and worse crimes happen everyday. But moments like this, no matter how brief, or precisely because they were brief, reveal so much of how a nation is commonly condensedly perceived from the outside. This one: apparently driven by a vision of the country as of tourists, some place to go to when you need to collect things.

~ After Nicole Krauss's The History of Love (2005)

The Baron in the Trees

2009-11-04T18:03:00.001Z

1. This is Calvino's story of a boy who decided not to walk this earth, quite literally, but to live on trees instead--as narrated by his younger brother, who realized early on that he would live a rather contrary, normal life.

2. The younger boy is Biagio: the writer, who had a weakness toward stasis, and consequently became the preserver of text. The older boy Cosimo who would grow up as the baron was the singer of tales, and "was swept by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful; the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality." Cosimo's seeming abandon caused Biagio much deliberation in his written versions: how valid would be his disbelief when those things did not actually happen to him?

3. Cosimo's friendship with the brigand Gian dei Brughi in Chapter 12 is a story that could stand by itself. They shared the love of reading--as with many other novel heroes before them--and exchanged books, mostly novels. Gian dei Brughi lost interest with banditry altogether, something that worried his younger apprentices, who threatened to set dei Brughi's copy of Richardson's Clarissa on fire if the reluctant bandit would not go back to his old ways. Because he no longer had his heart in thievery, dei Brughi was caught and put on trial. Before his execution, the only thing he wanted was to know how Jonathan Wild's story ended in a novel by Fielding's. In the end: the need for closure, even if it was only imagined; or: the only closure we're guaranteed in this life is a fiction.

~ After Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees (1957)

The Cloven Viscount

2009-11-03T17:31:00.000Z

1. Calvino admitted that he wrote this romanzo "almost for fun," and that he was "not prepared for the outcry that greeted it." His idea of fun: to thrust a character into the middle of a war between Christians and Turks and have a cannonball fired "right in his chest," splitting him into the novelist's own Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Later the two halves would fall in love almost inevitably with the same woman, leading to their reunion in the end, but only after a bloody duel & a few people's intervention--a closure that was almost bound to happen yet I wished the novelist avoided, even if only to arrive at an ending that was as disagreeable as the premise.

2. Now I could understand an outcry, but more for its narrative discontentment, rather than for what it actually contains. Perhaps Calvino was aware of this, and so he sent away Dr. Trelawney, with whom our young narrator "found a companion such as [he] never had," aboard Captain Cook's ship, while the boy, who also happened to be the viscount's nephew, was "deep in the wood telling [himself] stories."

~ After Italo Calvino's The Cloven Viscount (1952)

In the Labyrinth

2009-11-02T22:00:00.000Z

1. Still the trademark Robbe-Grillet obsession with details, with visuals. But towards the end, near the end, the soldier who until then was mostly just the observed, the object of the I's gaze (who told us s/he was alone, in the very first sentence of the novel), was now allowed a glimpse of his interiority--even if only to justify the compulsion to record the surroundings: "... the soldier is still perturbed by such a gap in his memory. He wonders if anything else in his surroundings might have escaped him and even continues to escape him now. It suddenly seems very important to make an exact inventory of the room."

2. The novel begins with I and ends with me, and yet s/he does not reveal anything about her/himself; s/he's the least known in the end. The self is ultimately the location of the most intricate of labyrinths.

~ After Alain Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth (1959)

Jealousy

2009-11-01T22:00:00.001Z

1. Somewhere in the middle of the novel the narrator reported that A and Franck had both finished reading this African novel that they'd been discussing for sometime. Robbe-Grillet, via his narrator, made a commentary on the nature of our "readings" of texts--on how we focus not on "the novel's value" but on its "reality," and so we blame the characters for certain acts, or we comment on the implausibility of some events, and we even suggest alternative outcomes, although we know that in the end, nothing could be changed, the "reality stays the same." But I would like to underscore the tendency of interpretations as mentioned by Robbe-Grillet: "They seem to enjoy multiplying these choices, exchanging smiles, carried away by their enthusiasm, probably a little intoxicated by this proliferation... ." Intoxication by proliferation. This is the ecstasy of reading, the apex of interpretation. To multiply meanings--to be more than what the text probably is or was just intended to be.

2. The narrator/husband refers to himself as the "third person"--in front of A and Franck's, and unlike these two, he does not read the African novel they are so enthusiastic about.

3. To the jealous every moment becomes present, again and again; he reviews the same scenes, hears the same words--from the same angle, from the same distance, although with a different focus.

4. "A novel whose action takes place in Africa" was lent by Franck's to A--and it gave connection to the two of them; yet the novel turns out to be a symbol of the narrator's disconnection from his wife, the unknown, what couldn't be fully shared with him, what he could only half-guess. The novel connected Franck and A even if, paradoxically, it provided them with different, and sometimes opposing, understandings.

5. When the narrator had to describe the novel towards the end, based on what he could get from the conversations, he summed it up as, "Psychological complications aside, it is a standard narrative of colonial life in Africa, with a description of a tornado, a native revolt, and incidents at the club." In other words: Not unlike Jealousy (or Robbe-Grillet's narration of it), he wants to strip the novel of "psychological complications" and so everything is seen from the outside--toward the physicality of things; and also, that there's really nothing special with the novel at hand: it is a "standard narrative"--and with the label comes the expectations of its contents.

~ After Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy (1957)

Ang Sandali ng mga Mata

2009-10-31T17:00:00.000Z

1. I first read this novel as an M.A. thesis called “Kamatayan sa Piling ng mga Lilang Nimpeya” back in 2001. Yapan changed the novel’s title in its eventual publication for it to reflect, perhaps, the various senses in “mata” that the narrative attempts to deal with. The most obvious of course is “mata” as sense of sight.

In Filipino, we use our eyes to have paningin and pagtingin, which may connote opinion and affection, respectively. In the novel, we get to know the stories from Esteban’s point of view, an albularyo who supposedly saw all that could be seen in the events that he recounted, even those that only his sixth sense could witness. Of course, he did not have only his “views” of the things that happened in Sagrada; he also certainly had emotional stakes in them for they involved Selya, the one he used to love but could not help in the moment (perhaps one of the most central “sandali” in the story) she needed him most. If Esteban’s view of things seemed very intimate, there were also distant pananaw and pagtanaw, like the opinions of the unnamed people of Sagrada when they learned of Estela’s suicide in the beginning of the novel.

2. Mata could also mean “the center” or “from where things come,” as in the “eye of the storm,” and this certainly does not overread for Sagrada is in Bicol, one of the regions most visited by typhoons in the Philippines—and the chapter “Mga Bahay sa Gitna ng Bagyo” dealt with the very naturalist relationship of the space’s climate and weather to the internal and external conflicts that the characters had to deal with.

3. Mata, when used as a verb in Filipino, could additionally mean two things. One is “to make obvious, to reveal.” We say this to people in frustration of their inability to see commonsensically. This is probably Esteban’s reason why he had to write the stories he already narrated before: the textuality of the story corners it, makes it subject to the storyteller’s gaze, unlike the fluidity and context dependence of oral narration, that is more likely the reason why deaths ensued after Nene, and later, her son, Boboy, “heard” the stories of their epic heroes. They misheard or missed entirely the metaphors that function as both representation and revelation at the same time, like the unbridled presences of snakes and Oryol throughout their family history and the local history of Bicol. Mata could also mean “to devalue” someone or something (as in “matahin,” “ipamata”): and so this is also certainly a story of reviewing the marginalized, those outside the center. For example, the woman, the native and the uneducated that Agatha somehow represents.

4. In the end, mata, when pronounced as máta, is also death, the inescapable death that was expressed more overtly in this novel’s first working title. The novel began with Estela’s death, and it was maybe a death that had to happen—not just for her, but—for the child in her womb to end the curse of Nuevas growing up fatherless, like Boboy and Nene did.

~ After Alvin B. Yapan's Ang Sandali ng mga Mata (2006)

Displaced

2009-10-30T22:00:00.000Z

1. Last July 20, Aneka and I met at Cello's in Katipunan so that she could give me a copy of her newly-released young adult novel-in-verse, Displaced, co-published by Adarna House and Filipinas Heritage Library. The 152-page book contains illustrations by Mitzi Villavecer, who also did the cover design.

I'm glad that I saw how the novel evolved from the manuscript we critiqued in the 6th Barlaya Writing for Young Adults Workshop in 2007, when I sat in the panel with Heidi Abad, Astrid Tobias and Zarah Gagatiga, up to its pre-printing form in more than a year of intermittent conversations over coffee that Aneka and I had discussing her revisions of the novel, the state of Philippine YA literature, and the condition of artistic production in general.

2. Displaced is the story of Gabriella--Elay to her family & Gabby to her friends--and the events that happened during her last year in high school. Her experience of displacement is triggered by the return of her mom from working abroad for four years, on the one hand, and the introduction of Justin in her life, which challenged her long-term friendship with Trixie, on the other. All these amidst the challenges of academics, especially her difficulties with Physics. Gabriella tried to make sense of learning and life with her interest in music; chapter titles are consequently based on physics concepts and/or musical terms and titles of U2 songs.

3. The novel, while concerning itself with issues of the young (crush, friendship, school life), primarily deals with a larger issue of how family relationships are disrupted by the continued movement of Filipino workers outside the Philippines. The novel is touching without necessarily falling into the trap of the romantic. It does not involve death, premarital sex, addiction, sickness, or any other issues that are by themselves disturbing. Displaced deals with an ordinary life that has currency, the kind that many young girls of Gabriella's age living in the city experience at present, and the novel's charm rests in its simplicity of concerns and rendering, coupled with the complexity of truths it tries to confront.

~ After Aneka Rodriguez's Displaced (2009)

Unang Ulan ng Mayo

2009-10-29T17:00:00.000Z

1. Unang Ulan ng Mayo is Sicat’s sequel to her earlier novel, Paghuhunos. Here we see that after the death of her husband Carlos, Gloria tried to organize his journals; but when people outlive their beloved, his presence paradoxically overwhelms them in his very absence. As soon as Gloria realized this, she admitted to herself that she wanted to write her own stories, and thus her journey as a writer began.

This is not another novel about writing a novel, however. It is a woman’s journey into understanding, and getting into, the psyche of a writer (hence in hindsight forgiving her husband’s seeming shortcomings as her partner and father to their children), and initiation into the much complex reality of current Philippine literary scene: publications, critical and popular receptions, awards, and the prestige and honor that come with them, and how they potentially sustain, on the one hand, and cripple, on the other hand, one’s writing interests.

2. The first chapter of the novel, “Alimuom,” is also the title of Sicat’s first short story collection, published by the Ateneo de Manila University Press (incidentally available through GoogleBooks) and introduced by Edgardo M. Reyes, who is most likely the Edgar in the novel from whom Gloria would seek literary counsel, besides her eldest daughter. This certainly sets ground for one of the major interests in the novel—to depict Gloria’s creative process: her thoughts on, and the incidents that led to, the writing of particular stories that certainly echo what Sicat actually wrote and included in her collection. Perhaps incidentally, but Sicat elevates the nature of intertextuality in Filipino fiction and also its reference to reality: despite the difference in names (Gloria, not Ellen), no Filipino contemporary fiction in recent history dared to refer to her own earlier novel in a second novel.

3. Gloria would outline her stories in verse, even if she would not consider herself a poet, because she associates poetry with memorability, and she sees storytelling as an act of remembrance. This is therefore also a novel-testament to her own poetics. She would reiterate the need to use the vernacular in local literature, perhaps initially as defense to her own admission as colonial, and so she would talk with the common people, and would hear them speak, and would try to capture the tone and rhythm of their language and the sentiments and humor they contain. They are afterall her intended readers; she knew from the start that she would speak to them if she were to write at all.

4. Sicat’s expertise in comic dialogue manifests in several occasions, and it is definitely her most formidable tool in sustaining the reader’s interest with her stories. She knows how to laugh at herself, laugh with her characters, and make her readers at least smile once in a while. Even if many parts would sound like an apologia for her not being a "real writer," the whole novel is an assurance that we are in good hands, and that after all, Ellen might not be Gloria, or at least not fully, with the latter’s often shifts from false humilities to arrogance to indifference to sheer fear. But are we not all made of these stuff that make us truly human: so complex that we are unpredictable, as the first summer rain is, even to ourselves?

~ After Ellen L. Sicat's Unang Ulan ng Mayo (2009)

Timbuktu

2009-10-28T22:00:00.000Z

1. Page 21: This unlikeliest of fictions. To think of another life. A dog's. Dreaming of heavens. A beyond: Timbuktu.

2. In one of Willy's schizophrenic moments, while talking to Mr. Bones, Henry James and James Joyce are thrown in together with other "American know-how" that "keeps coming at you, and every minute there's new junk to push out the old junk."

3. Again, Willy: "I was reading a book. The Magic Mountain it was, written by Thomas Mann... I never finished the damned thing, by the way, it was so boring, but said Herr Mann was a muckety-muck, a hotshot in the Writers Hall of Fame, and I figured I should take a look."

4. And so that's what it meant to be human, Mr. Bones must have thought. To aspire for a certain literacy. To have a culture, and then to laugh at it, to think it unnecessary--waste even--in order to live life, a life, after all.

~ After Paul Auster's Timbuktu (1999)

Sa mga Suso ng Liwanag

2009-10-27T17:00:00.000Z

1. In U Z. Eliserio’s debut novel (or nobeleta, a novellete, as he preferred to call it) we find the narrative voice of a writer (who couldn’t find time to write) who’s also a teacher (who incidentally got his student-girlfriend pregnant). The postmodern play begins with the power of the name to produce uncertainties: is U the author the same as U the narrator? The play goes on when the last name Eliserio was given to the Lord Chancellor (Chancing Lord) of UPLB, the campus where U the narrator teaches, and U the author formerly taught. Because of the setting, the novel inevitably becomes an inquiry to the culture of the academe as symptomatic of the entire educational system in the country (with constant brownouts, the rise of the call centers, et. al.), and the culture of fraternity as metonymic to the societal violence.

2. The novel inevitably has metaconsciousness: it is aware of itself as a novel. And of other novels: The title clearly alludes to the classic Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag by Edgardo M. Reyes; We'd find U always carrying a book, or reading Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy; U also specializes on the novels of Jose Zembrano, an Aklanon.

It so happened that Chancing Lord Eliserio was also a novelist in English, and supposedly wrote one about a sculptor. However, U later on decided that amidst the unreasonable dismissal of faculty who were not in agreement with the chair’s policy, “the departmental politics was more important” than the novel, even if there were times when reality was seen as story material, and a source of humor, like when they were given a pamphlet about the Key to Paradise immediately after they had their dormitory key duplicated—a detail used by U’s friend JB (who also happened to be an obsession to the former’s) in a story that eventually won the Palanca!

3. Even if there were mentions of issues in reality (9/11, Mike Arroyo, Hacienda Luisita) as “characters’ topics for conversation,” kuko was clearly not suso. And so another concern of the novel was the issues on sexuality: “Titi ng Ama” was an expression/curse that U got from his own mother; U’d always pass by Pekpek Tower because it was just in front of the Old Hum; and how would he face the tension between the possibility of being a father and the consideration of an abortion? A chapter that graphically describes a sexual act (while talking and thinking about death: clearly, a play with eros & thanatos) would end in U farting to his own girlfriend’s face.

4. Because of a death threat that U got on his birthday, and because of the killings of Long Sleeves and Sando (two fratmen), the novel teases us into the genre of detective fiction, but it would not satisfy us with the expectations of the form; this was perhaps the homage to Auster's. The setting was also the time when sex video scandals proliferated—and so the camera at the ceiling of U’s room might be the only thing that could solve the crimes, but in turn would also reveal his sexual exploits.

Why did U leave the dorm and walked past the alley in the end of the novel—even if no one was literally running after him, unlike Edgardo M. Reyes’s Julio Madiaga in the end of his novel? Clearly he found something in the video, but the readers are not given access to that revelation. This was probably the novel’s final argument on what separates the novel’s reality to our reality: the readers can’t know everything a character had access to. Titi ng Ama.

~ After U Z. Eliserio's Sa mga Suso ng Liwanag (2006)

This Earth of Mankind

2009-10-26T17:00:00.000Z

1. This Earth of Mankind is the first book in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Buru Quartet, supposedly composed initially as a spoken narrative--and was written only two years later in 1975-- while Toer was imprisoned in the Buru Island Prison Camp. As far as memory serves, this was the first novel by a Southeast Asian, other than a Filipino, I read.

Even if was mostly a chronological narration of events that happened in the lives of some natives and Indos towards the end of the nineteenth century in the Dutch East Indies, there was an attempt to complicate its internal narrativity and textuality. The novel, as revealed by the narrator early on, supposedly began as short notes that were thirteen years later read and studied over again, merged “together with dreams, imagining. Naturally they became different from the original.” It was also recognized, nonetheless, that this fetish to make notes was probably caused by the narrator’s “European training.” In the latter part of the novel, Europe’s dependence on paper, on what’s been documented and set on record, is argued to be almost proportional to its disregard to the human person, to relationships built on emotion and faith.

2. The novel is a story of Minke—not his “real name,” but the name he’s been called by other people. Later we would realize that the moniker could have come from “monkey”—a recurring image to which the natives were compared, something not unlike the allusion the Spaniards made to the natives in the Philippines during their colonization, as revealed in Fray Miguel Lucio y Bustamante’s Si Tandang Basio Macunat. In This Earth, name is a central issue. The natives, like Minke was, did not have surnames, and in the then modernized and educated milieu in which he was a part of, the fact could cause one’s shame—or pride, depending on one’s attitude toward the Dutch colonial policies. Born on the same day (August 31, 1880) as Netherland’s Queen Wilhelmina, Minke was situated in a conflicting position: he was the only pure native studying in the most prestigious Dutch High School (H.B.S.) in Surabaya. Would he be the perfect colonial subject—or rebel?

3. Minke turned out to be a good writer (writing stories and essays as Max Tollenaar for the Surabaya Daily News) and the perfect lover to Annelies, daughter of a nyai or a Dutch’s concubine, and, true to the tradition of the beloved in most classics, simply the most beautiful woman that this earth of mankind could possibly conceive.

4. Chapter 10 is a fascinating brief account of being an Asian prostitute in the late nineteenth century, as recounted by Maiko, a Japanese working in the brothel owned by Babah Ah Tjong. Except for Annelies who was always lovesick with Minke until she found a strong resolve in an almost melodramatic ending, Toer presented a cast of strong women: Nyai Ontosoroh, Minke’s Mother, and Miss Magda Peters—all in their respective ways had guided Minke to the ways of tradition and civilization.

5. Miss Magda Peters was fascinated with the amount of reading that a nyai like Ontosoroh’s had. Faithful to the thrust of the written word, this is another novel that encourages reading. There was even a period when Minke would make a reading list for Annelies that she had to consume for a certain amount of time. Aside from the Western canon (like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend), it also mentioned several Malayan titles like G. Francis’s Nyai Dasima and the legends of Babad Tanah Jawi.

6. When Minke told his father that he did not want to be a bupati like the latter was, and said that, “My world was not rank and position, wages and embezzlement. My world was this earth of mankind and its problems,” I felt that it was a little naïve for him to not recognize that politics plays a major role in the problems of this world. Of course he would acknowledge it a little too late in the end when even his wife Annelies would be taken away from him by the European law that clearly contradicted their Islamic tradition. But it was a rite-of-passage novel, and no such story would prove successful unless the main character proved to have some shortcomings, a little shortsightedness, for where would his potential towards growth be if not for these lack and failures of vision?

~ After Pramoedya Ananta Toer's This Earth of Mankind (1980)

Soledad's Sister

2009-10-25T17:00:00.001Z

1. Shortlisted to the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, Jose Dalisay’s second novel Soledad’s Sister somewhat paved the way for contemporary Filipino novelists based in the Philippines to gain international recognition. Only a year later, Filipinos would dominate the prize’s longlist, and Miguel Syjuco, a Filipino now living in Canada, would win the award for his novel Ilustrado.

2. Unlike Dalisay's first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place, that obviously had a number of autobiographical inspirations, Soledad’s Sister is a novel that pushed him to imagine more of other people’s lives and sentiments. Although this is primarily a story of the encounter between Aurora V. Cabahug, a bar singer in Paez whose sister Soledad died of drowning in Saudi, and Walter G. Zamora, a police officer from Marikina that was assigned to the same remote town of Paez after a failed case on the kidnapping of Charlie Uyboco and an affair with masseuse Noemi that ultimately sacrificed his marriage with Bessie, we also get a glimpse of the stories of the other people that were somehow involved in theirs, no matter how tangentially: Filemon Catabay, the OFW beheaded in Saudi; Ms. Principe, the Paez chief of police’s secretary who had some affection towards Walter; Choi the Korean engineer who would table Rory in between her sets; Mercedes Laquindanum, more known as Mama Merry, the one who manages the Flame Tree after the demise of her husband Filomelo, the name of the bar being her “last concession to poetry and metaphor”; Nick Panganiban, the old piano player who taught Rory some classic songs; Nathan, Soledad’s son to the teenager Edison, a Hong Kong national and only son of the Lau family she formerly served; Paez Vice Mayor Tennyson Yip, who had some fling with Rory, and, later, with a bar newbie, Francine; Jose Maria Pulumbarit, or Jomar, aka “Boy Alambre,” who carnapped the van driven by Walter that contained Soledad’s casket; Meenakshi, the maid from India, who escaped with Soledad in the night of their disappearance; and a lot lot of other names and faces that made this a novel that recognizes that there were no uninteresting characters, only a limited space to have their own stories fully fleshed out.

On the side, the novel made references to pop and contemporary culture that somehow affect the ordinary Filipino’s psyche: Brother Mike, People’s Tonight, Megamall, National Geographic, Readers Digest, Ruffa Gutierrez, Joey Marquez & Alma Moreno, Schwarzenegger, Ricky Martin, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the divas Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Donna Summer, Olivia Newton-John, Sharon Cuneta, Ivy Violan, Vernie Varga, and Regine Velasquez, and several pop songs that remain to dominate our airwaves: “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Love Is Stronger Far Than We,” "I'm a Fool to Want You," "Am I Blue."

3. In the end, we would realize that both Rory and Walter had deep desires to be remembered, even by people they don’t know personally, to not just be lost in obscurity in their ostensibly mundane lives: Rory, by trying to be a successful singer, and not just be one of the Regines in this country that so loves to sing both in its lowest and highest points; and Walter, by dreaming of eventually writing that master’s thesis on “criminal propensities in the Philippine countryside,” that hopefully would be of some use to someone. They hoped to accomplish their dreams without having to leave their country behind, despite the allure of working abroad (in the case of Rory), or following his estranged family in England (in the case of Walter), so unlike the thousands of other Filipinos who would gamble on where their fate and dreams would lead them, even if it were to their own deaths, outside the Philippines.

~ After Jose Y. Dalisay's Soledad's Sister (2008)

Batbat hi Udan

2009-10-24T17:00:00.000Z

1. With all the lack of rootedness in the Filipino precolonial psyche that proliferates in Philippine local primetime viewing, thanks mostly to the fantaserye hype that’s been going on for several years now, it is about time that Filipino novels revisit our epics in order to reawaken our true imaginative gifts as a people. I had never read a novel in Filipino that deals entirely with the epic world, until T. S. Sungkit, Jr.’s Batbat hi Udan came out early this 2009. A true Higaonon by blood and sentiment, Sungkit wrote an interesting adventure set in a land where places were still called by their olden names, like Kagayhaan for Cagayan de Oro City, Yandang for Bugcaon and Kimambong for Malaybalay City.

2. Naturally, this is a story that involves a central hero, named Udan, who had to undergo his own rights of passage: go through some adventures (which in the epic translates to wars and battles) to save his tribe, fall in love with the most beautiful woman conceivable in their world (here named as Ananaw, but more known as the Hapoy ha Tagkalegdeg, Bolak ha Mahumot, which means “naglalagablab na apoy, mabangong bulaklak”), lose almost all his beloved (his father Datu Maghusay, and later, even Ananaw) in the course of pangayaw, meet his fiercest enemies (from Kalibato to the Tium). In the end, of course, he’d be able to overcome all the challenges, as a true epic hero, and that would signify the beginning of a new era for his ethnic group.

3. Two l’s are at the top of an epic’s concerns: land and lineage. To introduce onself is to invoke one’s roots: Mansugkil, when he introduced himself to Datu Maghusay, would tell the latter that he was the son of Mambulawan, who was the son of Manlagunha, who was in turn Mambinunsad’s son. During battles, Udan would summon the spirits of his ancestors, Buuy Manlunggo and Apu Maliga, to give him strength. But everyone from their land, from their banuwa, is considered a brother. That was why Udan was saddened upon learning that Mansugkil’s troop was salvaged by Kalibato acting as Datu Masagila: “Sapagkat ang mga kasama niya’y kanyang mga kapatid. Sapagkat ang lahat sa Lantapan ay kanyang kapatid. Sapagkat iisang dugo lamang ang nananalaytay sa kanilang mga ugat.”

4. Of all the places mentioned in the story’s geographic map, Lidasan was the most mysterious and dangerous of all, “a crossroad of secret passageways.” In that land once headed by Datu Mansugyang before he was defeated by Datu Maghusay and Datu Manlidasan lived the aligasis, mantianaks, bakesans, busaws, kabug and other creatures that could cause ordinary humans unimaginable harm. Lidasan was now headed by Datu Binigsulan, the chief of the aligasis and father of Kalibato and Ananaw, and assisted by Datu Mangiyab-kiyab, chief of the mantianaks, and Datu Magahiyup, chief of the tagbayang ahas. After a series of deception and cunning and deaths, Lidasan would eventually fall under Udan’s command when he defeated even the Tium hi Gaun, the tagbaya of his own great ancestor. Further revelations on real blood relations were untied in the end.

In Batbat hi Udan, we get a classic narrative rendering of an epic, only in prose and written form. For instance, details are being repeated several times, often successively, only in different ways, clearly a mnemonic device in the epic. In the end, this is a story of beginnings, for, as the real Datu Masagila told Udan, there are stories only because they have roots.

~ After T. S. Sungkit Jr.'s Batbat hi Udan (2009)

Kumpisal

2009-09-18T14:25:00.006Z

Earlier today Heights launched its first regular issue this school-year, which published one of my latest works, "Kumpisal." It is part of the collection I'm working on right now called Samantalang Sakop at Iniibig. (Please click on the images in order to read the text.)

Heights Launch

2009-09-16T02:50:00.002Z

Walang Diwata ng Apoy / There Is No Fire Goddess

2009-09-12T14:14:00.003Z

Walang Diwata ng Apoy
Ni Edgar Calabia Samar

Naunang natupok sa kaniya ang ating mga alaala.
Nilimot natin siya gaya ng pagsunog sa mga bagay

na atin nang iniiwan sa nakaraan. Kaya ngayon,
wala na tayong mabalikan kundi hinagpis

ng ibang diwata: Cacao, Makiling, Sinukuan.
Tumititig tayo sa pingkian at nagugulumihanan

kung bakit walang nananahang alamat
ng apoy sa sulok nitong ating dibdib at malay.

Sinong ada ang nagnakaw ng ningas kay Ladlao,
diyos natin ng araw, upang matigib itong katawan

ng init ng buhay? Mga mangingibig tayong tigib
ng pagal ang kahapon sa sumpang tag-init

at tag-ulan bawat taon. Binubuhay ng pagkakaingin
sa gubat, ano't nagugulat pa rin tayo sa haplit-babala

ng mga bagay na likas: kay lakas ng ihip ng hangin
at baha sa pusod ng lungsod na binagyo; bitak

naman ang lupa sa bayang niyugyog ng lindol.
Namamad itong ating damdamin sa paghahalo

ng tubig, lupa at hangin, kaya itinatanong natin:
kailan naman ang pagliyab ng apoy sa dibdib?

Namaalam marahil siya noon habang ang gubat
ay naglalagablab, at abong naiwan tayong umibig

sa kaniya nang di-nararapat sapagkat karaniwan:
lumalapit pa lamang ay natutupok na ang katawan.

Kaya sinasabi natin ngayon: walang diwata ng apoy,
habang tayo'y nananaghoy sa mga biktima ng sunog

o hindi makatulog sa lamig ni Amihan kapag tag-ulan.

* * *
There Is No Fire Goddess
Translation by Marne L. Kilates

The first to be consumed in her were our memories.
We forgot her the way we burned things

that we wanted consigned to the past. That's why now
we could return to nothing but the grief

of other goddesses: Cacao, Makiling, Sinukuan.
We stare at the conflict and wonder

why no myth of fire resides anywhere
within our breast and consciousness.

What nymph stole Ladlao's flame,
our sun god, to fill her body

with life's warmth? We are lovers whose past
spill with emptiness yearly in the dry

and rainy seasons. Surviving on our swiddens
burned out of forest, why are we frightened still by the slash

and warning from nature: wind thrashing
and floods raging in heart of city lashed by typhoon; earth

cracking in parts visited by temblors.
Our hearts are numb in the mingling

of water, earth, and wind, that's why we ask:
when will it rage, the fire in the breast?

She must have disappeared at the time when forests
were burning, and we were ashes who were left loving

her--which was forbidden because it was ordinary:
if we got just a bit closer our bodies burned.

And so we say now: there is no fire goddess,
even as we grieve over victims of conflagration

or can't sleep in Amihan's cold during the rainy season.

["Walang Diwata ng Apoy" is part of the collection Tayong Lumalakad Nang Matulin, which won first prize in the Tula Category of the Palanca in 2004. Together with the English translation, it was published in Pitik-Bulag, Letra at Liwanag: A Celebration of Contemporary Filipino Art & Poetry (Manila: Government Service Insurance Service, 2009), edited by Virgilio S. Almario, pp. 128-129.]

Palanca Awards Ceremony 2009

2009-08-31T22:00:00.001Z

Lively, Martel

2009-08-30T22:00:00.004Z

Coming from our Naratibo workshop in Antipolo I passed by Robinsons-Metro East before I went home yesterday. I decided I had to buy a new electric fan if I wanted some good night sleep. I naturally visited the Booksale at the basement along the way and ended up buying two hardcovers: Penelope Lively's Making It Up and Yann Martel's The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios.

I was surprised to find when I arrived home that Martel's supposed signature on the inside cover page of the book might be authentic.

Calvino, Guillermo, Rafael, Davies

2009-08-29T22:00:00.003Z

National Bookstore is having its annual sale beginning last Thursday until sometime in September. I happen to have P2,000-worth of gift checks courtesy of Bookwatch, and so I visited the super branch in Cubao yesterday, hoping to have some good finds. I ended up using only half of the gift checks I had, and bought Italo Calvino's Our Ancestors 30% less than the tag price (P675.00). Filipiniana titles are sadly not part of the sale, but I had to get these two books for my continuing comprehensive exams review: Vicente L. Rafael's The Promise of the Foreign and Ramon Guillermo's newly-released Pook at Paninindigan.

When I went to the Booksale in Farmers, Sir Marx Lopez was already there, and so I had to settle for his leftovers. I've been seeing this collection of letters by Robertson Davies, whose The Deptford Trilogy I read early this year, in Booksales for some time now, but it's now being sold for only P45 and so I just had to buy it. Besides, his letters detailed his novel-writing process, and so I might get some inspiration from him.

Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel Until 1940 (1983) by Resil B. Mojares

2009-08-28T22:00:00.007Z

1. That Mojares attempts at a more encompassing history of the Filipino novel, which considers those written in English, Tagalog, Cebuano, and a few other vernaculars, is very inspiring. The amount of his bibliographic citations alone attests to the breadth and earnestness in his study.

2. The return to the folk narratives, especially the epic, as forms that preempted the novel almost inevitably made them the logical source from which novelistic impulses would generate inspiration and possibilities. The singular most effecting change in Philippine history is of course colonialism, which set the stage for the rise of literacy that coincides with the arrival of the printing press. With the cultural and economic powers that the missionaries held in our islands, the epics were conveniently replaced by the pasyon narratives. Mojares took the case of Biag ti Lam-ang to illustrate the problematics in this transition and translation of forms (oral to written, precolonial to colonial, "epos to fiction").

3. Mojares: "The rise of the novel is tied to the development of prose as a medium, for prose encourages or makes possible the cultivation of the values formative or constitutive of the novel." With this, Antonio de Borja's Barlaan at Josaphat (1712), a prose work in translation, proved Tagalog's tenacity to sustain an extended written prose. It is also contiguous with the "rise of the author"--a movement away from the imagination of the collective folk.

4. The popularity of metrical corrido and awit in the 19th century strengthened the romantic tradition, making it easier for the novel to succumb to romance despite its realist intents and projections.

5. The four anatomies of conduct Mojares considered as proto-novels, where "non-narrative purpose dominates": Urbana at Felisa (1867; epistolario) by Fr. Modesto de Castro; Ang Bagong Robinson (1879; ejemplo) by Joaquin Tuason; La Teresa (1852; dialogo) by Fr. Antonio Ubeda; and Si Tandang Basio Macunat (1885; tratado) by Fr. Miguel Lucio y Bustamante. This determination, however, Mojares acknowledged as biased: their "imperfections" are considered only in light of the development of the novel; seeing them from a different textual tradition can definitely deliver a different understanding (e.g., the Urbana as not essentially a "narrative text" but a manual de urbanidad).

6. The Propaganda Movement's "creation of national consciousness" ushered the early phases of writings in the realist mode: Isabelo de los Reyes' historia and Pedro Paterno's cuadro de costumbres, especially in the latter's Ninay (1885), considered as the "first Filipino novel."

7. Mojares acknowledged in Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891) the rise of the Filipino novel, and Rizal as the "first great realist."

8. Gabriel Beato Francisco is recognized as the first novelist in the vernacular with the serialization of his Cababalaghan ni P. Bravo in Ang Kapatid ng Bayan in 1899. The arrival of the 20th century with Americanization and secularization of the printing press made the increase in number of newspapers and publications possible, which in turn made the link between journalism and the novel seemed almost natural. Notables are Lope K. Santos (Banaag at Sikat, 1905) and Valeriano Hernandez Peña (Nena at Neneng, 1903), although both are seen by Mojares as limited in talent.

9. In its incipience the novel somewhat salvaged the earlier oral and textual forms from possible oblivion by integrating them in its own novelization, as seen in Patricio Mariano's Ang Mga Anak Dalita (1911), which is part-corrido and part-tract; in Angel Magahum's Benjamin (1907), the "first Visayan novel," that combines the exemplum and the chronicle. This made the form largely unnamed in its early years, or was called by different names until as late as 1930. In Cebuano the preferred term now is sugilambong: "sugil" (sugilon: narrate) + "ambong" (kaamong, maambong: beauty) or "lambong" (elaborate, developed).

10. When Mojares discussed what he called as the impulses of fiction (didactic, empirical, aesthetic), he extensively looked on works by Roman Reyes (Pusong Walang Pag-ibig, 1910; Bulaklak ng Kalumpang, 1907), Rosauro Almario (Ang Mananayaw, 1910; Mga Anak-Bukid, 1911), Iñigo Ed. Regalado (Sampaguitang Walang Bango, 1918; Madaling Araw, 1909), Lope K. Santos (Banaag at Sikat, 1905; Kundangan, 1927), Francisco Laksamana (Anino ng Kahapon, 1907), Maximo B. Sevilla (Ulilang Kalapati, 1914), among others, but it was only Faustino Aguilar who merited Mojares' admiration. He called Aguilar's Pinaglahuan (1907) as "one of the best novels of its time," and Nangalunod sa Katihan (1911) as Aguilar's "best novel": "the coolness with which its characters confront their condition mirrors the deliberation with which the author develops his material."

11. The "decline" of the novel (meaning, its aesthetic impulse depreciation) is seen as a factor of its commercialization, wherein the novels are seen as "commodity"--as exemplified in the cases of Fausto J. Galauran (whose works, Mojares claimed, should be considered as "romances rather than novels") and the Cebuano Sulpicio Osorio. Meanwhile Flaviano P. Boquecosa and Lazaro Francisco are seen as cases of "passionate involvement in the problems of the nation," especially in Francisco, despite the commercialism that determined the large part of the literary production during his time.

12. Mojares closed his book with the Filipino novels in English, which recognizes Zoilo M. Galang's A Child of Sorrow (1921) as seminal. He focused, however, on what he considered as "landmarks in the history of the Filipino novel," both completed in 1940: Juan C. Laya's His Native Soil, the first-prize winner of the Commonwealth Literary Contest, and N.V.M. Gonzalez's The Winds of April; Mojares was particularly fond of what Gonzalez achieved in fiction. I understand for purposes of a sense of continuity, thus change, Mojares must have felt the need to end/close with novels in English alone. It would have been more representative however if he decided to juxtapose the two novels with other novels also written during the 1940 but in the Philippine vernaculars he covered (mostly Tagalog and Cebuano), even if only to avoid readings that might interpret his design as favorable to, and more hopeful of, writings in English.

Butong Munti

2009-08-27T22:00:00.001Z

High Chair Launches 5 Poetry Books

2009-08-26T22:00:00.003Z

Pitik-Bulag / Letra at Liwanag (2009), edited by Virgilio S. Almario

2009-08-25T22:00:00.008Z

Yesterday I attended the opening of the Pitik-Bulag Exhibit at the GSIS Museum of Art, where the coffeetable book containing the poems and artworks was also launched. Two of my poems are included in the said anthology, with English translations by Marne L. Kilates, and paintings by Leonardo Aguinaldo. I scanned the table of contents below; click on the pictures for larger resolutions.

Mae Astrid Tobias, 1979-2009

2009-08-23T22:00:00.004Z

Yesterday began with a sad news: writer for children Mae Astrid Tobias lost her battle to sickness, and left us at a very young age of 30. A simple Google search would reveal how much she had achieved: "She graduated with a degree in English (Creative Writing) from UP Diliman. She is also the manager of the Kabataan News Network (KNN) Manila Bureau. She was a fellow in the 1st Barlaya Writing for Children Workshop and the 43rd UP National Writers' Workshop. She has received recognition from the PBBY and Palanca for her works for children. Astrid was president of the Kuwentista ng mga Tsikiting (KUTING) from 2004-2006."

Among her published books are Bakawan, Bayong ng Kuting (also a winner of the Palanca), Ang Aking mga Kaibigan sa Gubat, and the retelling of the Hudhud, Pumbakhayon and Halikpon, which were finalists for the National Book Award in 2006. She also edited Literatura 4, which was devoted to children's writings in the Philippines. She also wrote articles for the newspaper, besides working for Creative Campaigns and Advocacies, Inc.

The last time I saw Astrid was when she introduced me to Job Pagsibigan during the restaging of Job's adaptation of my Uuwi na ang Nanay Kong si Darna! at the Virgin Labfest last June 2009. I did not notice that she was suffering from any illness then. We worked together as co-writers in the 101 Filipino Icons and as co-panelists in the 6th Barlaya Writing for Young Adults Workshop in 2007. Sometimes she would text me that she saw me waiting for an FX ride home in Barangka. I often couldn't even find the time to reply.

Now I pray for her peace and happiness, in another life, where I believe she must have been welcomed by a multitude of children waiting for her stories.