Monthly Archives: June 2023

Qwertyman No. 47: An Open Door

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Qwertyman for June 26, 2023

A FEW weekends ago, the traffic was tied up in knots around the University of the Philippines campus in Diliman, where we live, and we knew why. Many thousands of high school seniors hoping to enter UP were taking the university’s UPCAT or entrance exam, which had gone back to its old physical, face-to-face format after two years of being suspended in favor of a statistical formula because of the pandemic. This year, over 100,000 applicants took the UPCAT, out of whom about a tenth will be taken in, the actual number of admissions being determined by the capacity of UP’s eight “constituent universities” like UP Los Bañ0s and UP Mindanao, aside from Diliman, to absorb new freshmen.

As a campus resident and now a retired professor who still teaches a course every semester (an option I avail myself of, just to keep my foot in the classroom and know what the young people are thinking), I witness this ritual every year, and smile every time I see those bright and eager faces, squinting at the sun and looking a little lost; the first challenge every UP freshman faces is finding out where things are and the fastest way to get from Point A to Point B. 

That’s literally thinking on your feet, which is a survival skill we inculcate in our students. If there’s a smarter way to solve a problem than brute force, we’ll find it. (I recall how, in the middle of an exam for a Shakespeare class which I usually aced, I was stumped for the right answer, and in despair just responded with a quotation from A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “So quick bright things come to confusion!” My professor let me off with a 1.25.)

Frankly or perhaps unkindly, UP people are called pilosopo, magulang, or maangas by those unfamiliar or uncomfortable with the forthrightness and cleverness that our academic culture encourages. At worst, we’re called “godless communists” by those who don’t see how packed our chapels and parking lots are (although of course, today, the most successful communists are called oligarchs). On this point, I can guarantee you that no one can be more annoyed if not enraged by a UP person than another UP person; our faculty feuds are legendary. Indeed that has become a liability with some employers who prefer to hire graduates who will simply do as they’re told without asking “Why?”

“Why?” may indeed be the wrong entry-level thing to say, but it’s also what has moved science and society forward, quickly followed by “How?” If no one asked it, we’d still be chasing animals over clifftops for food and sacrificing our first-borns for bigger harvests. This urge to apply reason to the most basic of human and natural functions again can be occasionally irritating, especially when it is accompanied by the unflinching (or perhaps juvenile) certitude that one is absolutely right. 

As a teenage activist in Diliman, I was sure that the only way out of the mess we were (and continue to be) in was an armed revolution; Marxist logic said so. Approaching 70, I’m just glad that I lived long enough to reason my way out of it, but looking back at that pimply 17-year-old who carried Harry Shaw’s College English in one hand and Mao’s Little Red Book in the other, I can understand why I thought the way I did. And no, it wasn’t like my professors force-fed me with rebellious notions. I was a reasonably bright kid who read the news—murders and massacres here, extreme poverty and hunger there, corruption and scandal all around, with few of our leaders seeming to care—and I was looking for a comprehensive and compelling framework to explain all this and map out a route forward. The Left offered that.

It’s important to note that then, as now, most UP students and certainly most Filipino students didn’t feel the same way and do as I and my comrades did, which was to put activism over academics. Our protests may have hogged the headlines and typecast UP for good as a school for rebels (although it had been a hotbed of student protest since Quezon’s time), but the majority of UP students then continued attending their classes, turning in their assignments, and picking up their diplomas, as was their right. Like I often emphasize, as vocal dissidents, we were (and are) in a distinct minority. That comes with the territory of resistance—not just in a university but in society as a whole.

Given what’s happened since, were we wrong to protest and did we waste our youth (and, as some politicians and red-tag-happy trolls might say, our people’s money as well)? Some of us persisted and stayed on that path; many paid with their lives, or devoted the entirety of their lives to their cause. Some turned 180 degrees and now rabidly renounce their past, casting their lot with their former enemies. Some, like me, now see moderate liberalism as the only viable way forward—to endure and survive, gaining ground from one generation and one community to the next, instead of in one fell swoop. Somehow I understand all of these outcomes, which are all human, all fallible, and none of them assured of success. I can only be hopeful, and not certain, that my option is the best one.

As I looked at the UPCAT examinees posing for selfies in front of the Carillon and the Oblation in Diliman, I remembered that eight UP students are now facing charges for their recent attempt to storm past a closed door at Quezon Hall to protest an unpopular decision by the Board of Regents. Among the complainants’ grievances, ostensibly, was that the wooden door was part of UP’s heritage, and had to be protected at all costs.

That saddened me, because the last image that one could imagine to stand for a university like UP is that of a closed and impregnable door. UP’s true heritage doesn’t lie in its furniture but in its tradition of free speech, and even of protest, the occasional overflow of passion included. I can only pray that UP’s new and compassionate president, Jijil Jimenez, can draw on his own activist past to see that point, and to keep an open door for his constituents to his mind and heart.

Qwertyman No. 46: The Writer as Liberator

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 19, 2023

AS PART of its Independence Day celebration, the J. Amado Araneta Foundation asked me to give a talk on “The Writer as Liberator” last Saturday, and today being Jose Rizal’s birthday, I’m very happy to share that talk in full (a shorter version appeared as my Qwertyman column in the Star):

When I was first asked to talk about “The Writer as Liberator,” the first thought that went through my mind was probably the thought that’s now going through yours, which was that of the writer as political revolutionary or dissident, in the mold of Jose Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar, Lorraine Hansberry, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nadine Gordimer, Wole Soyinka, and so many others of their caliber and stature.

That presumption, of course, is certainly valid and reasonable. Indeed, human history is fraught with examples of writers who fought colonialism, slavery, racial prejudice, and feudal and capitalist oppression and exploitation in India, South Africa, and the United States, particularly the American South, among many if not most other countries in the world. Wherever evil has reared its head, writers have arisen to call it out by name in all its forms—overweening pride among the ancient Greeks, blind ambition in Shakespeare’s time, lust and greed everywhere down the ages. 

The Philippines has been no exception. Decades before Rizal, Francisco Baltazar or Balagtas employed allegory in Florante at Laura to depict suffering and denounce injustice. Rizal and the whole Propaganda Movement followed, in a story of resistance and revolution that many of us already know. It’s a high climactic point that we could talk about all day but I won’t, because I’d rather talk about other things that most of us don’t know about writers and liberation. 

Again, to deal with the obvious, writers of all kinds have been at the forefront of political and social change. They included poets, playwrights, novelists, journalists, screenwriters, and today we would have to count bloggers and comic book script writers.

Our heroes and champions of freedom were poets—Rizal’s Mi Ultimo Adios and Bonifacio’s Pag-Ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa spring to mind, but they were also followed by the likes of Claro M. Recto, Francisco “Soc” Rodrigo, Carlos P. Garcia, and Diosdado Macapagal. These men—sadly, our political and even our cultural life was dominated then by the patriarchy—came from a generation when there was a very thin line between journalism and creative writing, when an opinion column could appear in verse, and when senators were expected to be literate and eloquent.

As I mentioned earlier, this was true of many countries around the world where people were fighting for freedom and justice. In South America, Simon Bolivar—who was known as The Liberator or El Libertador—led the fight for independence from Spain of what are now his native Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Panama, but he was also a poet, alongside the Cuban Jose Marti, among others. The Chilean poet and Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda wrote a poem in tribute to Bolivar, titled “A Song for Bolivar,” which I will read to you:

Our Father thou art in Heaven,
in water, in air
in all our silent and broad latitude
everything bears your name, Father in our dwelling:
your name raises sweetness in sugar cane
Bolívar tin has a Bolívar gleam
the Bolívar bird flies over the Bolívar volcano
the potato, the saltpeter, the special shadows,
the brooks, the phosphorous stone veins
everything comes from your extinguished life
your legacy was rivers, plains, bell towers
your legacy is our daily bread, oh Father.

The line “everything comes from your extinguished life” might as well have applied go Neruda himself, who was murdered by the fascist Pinochet government he opposed. Many writers have died for what they have written—and again we go back to Rizal—but others fought, lived on, and even succeeded in their struggles for national liberation. Two of the most prominent were Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong, who led long and ferocious wars against both local and foreign oppressors.

Imprisoned in China during the war, Ho Chi Minh wrote this poem in 1943 upon reading a book called the Anthology of a Thousand Poets:

The ancients liked to sing about natural beauty:
Snow and flowers, moon and wind, mists, mountains and rivers.
Today we should make poems including iron and steel,
And the poet should also know how to lead an attack.

In 1950, shortly after the Communists took over in China, Mao wrote this poem in reply to another poet named Liu Yazi:

The night was long and dawn came slow to the Crimson Land.

For a century demons and monsters whirled in a wild dance,

And the five hundred million people were disunited.

Now the rooster has crowed and all under heaven is bright,

Here is music from all our peoples, even from Yutian,

And the poet is inspired as never before. 

Note how, in these two poems, Ho and Mao locate the poet at the center of a collective struggle. This idea is developed even more strongly by Jose Ma. Sison—who by the way was an English major in UP—in his poem from the 196os titled “The Guerilla is Like a Poet”:

The guerilla is like a poet 
Keen to the rustle of leaves 
The break of twigs 
The ripples of the river 
The smell of fire 
And the ashes of departure. 

The guerilla is like a poet. 
He has merged with the trees 
The bushes and the rocks 
Ambiguous but precise 
Well-versed on the law of motion 
And master of myriad images. 

The guerilla is like a poet. 
Enrhymed with nature 
The subtle rhythm of the greenery 
The inner silence, the outer innocence 
The steel tensile in-grace 
That ensnares the enemy. 

The guerilla is like a poet. 
He moves with the green brown multitude 
In bush burning with red flowers 
That crown and hearten all 
Swarming the terrain as a flood 
Marching at last against the stronghold. 

An endless movement of strength 
Behold the protracted theme: 
The people’s epic, the people’s war. 

Given the aesthetics of the Philippine Left at that time, you could actually reverse this proposition to read “The poet is like a guerilla,” which Emman Lacaba certainly was, as was Ma. Lorena Barros, whose poem “Sampaguita” follows:

This morning Little Comrade

gave me a flower’s bud

I look at it now

remembering you, Felix,

dear friend and comrade

and all the brave sons and daughters

of our suffering land

whose death

makes our blades sharper

gives our bullets

surer aim.

How like this pure white bud

are our martyrs

fiercely fragrant with love

for our country and people!

With what radiance they should still have unfolded!

But sadness should not be

their monument.  

Whipped and lashed desperately

by bombed-raised storms

has not our Asian land

continued to bloom?

Look how bravely our ranks

bloom into each gap.

With the same intense purity and fragrance

we are learning to overcome.

Decades later, her namesake Kerima Lorena Tariman would write “Pagkilos,” a poem that celebrates motion in both nature and society:

Ang lahat ng bagay ay tila kitikiti,
Palagiang kumikilos at hindi mapakali.
Ang paggalaw ay kakambal ng bawat bagay,
Likas na kaugnay at hindi maihihiwalay.

Ang mga bagay-bagay ay kay hirap isipin,
Kung walang paggalaw, kung kaya, gayundin,
Ang paggalaw mismo ay di natin matatanto,
Kung wala ang mga bagay dito sa mundo.

Sa daigdig, halimbawa, nagpapahinga man ang pagod,
Matikas man ang estatwa at patay-malisya ang tuod,
Sila’y hindi naliligtas sa paggalaw ng planeta,
Ang pag-ikid at pag-inog ang palagiang sistema.

Kung kaya ang masa na akala mo’y walang imik,
Kapag natutong lumaban ay nagiging matinik!
May mga kasama man na natitigil sa pagkilos,
Ang rebolusyon sa daigdig ay hindi natatapos!

A, lahat ng bagay ay saklaw ng ating kilusan,
Katotohanan ito na di maaaring iwasan.
Kung kaya’t habang tayo ay may lakas at talino,
Sa pagkilos natin ialay ang ating bawat segundo!

Tragically, both Lorenas—and Emman Lacaba before them—would be killed in the struggle that they took on, and be hallowed as revolutionary martyrs.

Now, all this may sound like an open invitation for our favorite red-taggers to call all poets rebels, and all rebels communists. That would be ridiculous. Most poets are still happy and perfectly within their rights to write about the moon and the stars and undying love. Some rebel-poets were proud and self-admitted communists, at a time when the word was invested with a sheen of holiness. But the abject failure of communism to set up a truly free and egalitarian society and its appropriation in both China and Russia by new and autocratic elites has shed much of that romantic mystique, and it is supremely ironic that those writers and artists now fighting for civil liberties in both countries are considered enemies of the state.

“The Writer as Liberator” was an easier concept to deal with when we had a foreign occupier like Spain, America, or Japan. Today, our oppressors are internal, lodged within our society, and within our hearts and minds. The liberation we need today is from our worst selves, which is often the hardest enemy to face. Bad leadership has enabled and encouraged that side of us that accepts extrajudicial killing and unjust imprisonment as normal. 

The minds of so many of our people remain shackled by ignorance, falsehood, prejudice, superstition, fear, and a crippling dependency on the old and familiar, however self-destructive they may be. In an increasingly polarized and intolerant world, people everywhere face racial violence and discrimination, gender inequality, economic exploitation, and political repression.

The writers who will battle this chimera have many weapons at their disposal—not just books and the traditional press but social media, a universe of communication unto itself that Rizal and his contemporaries never dreamed of. Journalists fight with the truth, creative writers fight with the truth dressed up as artistic lies. 

I have often said that the best antidote to fake news is true fiction. By this I mean that it often takes artistry and good storytelling, more than a mere recitation of facts, to show people what is true.

Long before there were newspapers, writers gave voice to their people’s hopes and fears through what today would be called fiction: through myths, legends, tales, epics. These stories transported people from the crushing routine of their everyday lives to the realm of the gods, to a romantic past cloaked in the mists of fable and fancy. Indeed, these stories came even earlier than literacy itself, transmitted orally from one generation to the next. Creation myths validated and gave meaning to a tribe’s or a people’s existence; tragic drama reminded them of the consequences of our moral choices. 

When I started my Qwertyman column in the Philippine Star and began writing what I called “editorial fiction,” a columnist in another newspaper immediately cried “Foul!”, claiming that fiction cannot possibly be taken as opinion. I responded that all fiction is opinion, if you know how to read it closely enough. Like the mirror Perseus used to kill Medusa, we employ fiction to deal with truths we cannot bear to face.


I am under no illusion that the next revolution, whatever it may be against or when, will be sparked by a novel or a poem. Very likely, it will be a viral video that will ignite that flame. I pray it will not be violent, but rather a comprehensive conversion of our people’s minds and spirits for the good. But there will always be a place for the writer in the offices, kitchens, and workshops of democracy, on the bunkbeds where we lie dreaming of justice and prosperity for all. 

Let me close with a short poem that I wrote last year, titled “Freedom Is When”:

Freedom is when 

We don’t think about it

But it’s there like air

We seek only in its absence

When we’re gasping for breath.

Freedom is when

We can choose whom to love

Or whom or what to believe 

Without any fear

Of punishment or death.

Freedom is when

We can sleep without guilt

And dream without ghosts

Waking up to the aroma

Of steaming rice and stewed fish.

Ang kalayaan ay kung

Hindi natin ito iniisip

Tulad ng hangin

Hanggat ito’y mawala

At tayo’y maghingalo.

Ang kalayaan ay kung

Malaya tayong pumili

Ng iibigin, o paniniwalaan

Nang walang katatakutang

Parusa o kamatayan.

Ang kalayaan ay kung

Mahimbing tayong makakatulog

At managinip nang di minimulto

Hanggang tayo’y pukawin ng halimuyak

Ng bagong saing na kanin at pinangat.

Qwertyman No. 45: Onward to Frankfurt?

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 12, 2023

IF YOU were at the Philippine Book Festival (PBF) that took place at the World Trade Center earlier this month, you would have been surprised to find how many Filipinos were writing, publishing, selling, buying, and reading books. A project of the National Book Development Board (NBDB), the PBF was the first such event devoted solely to locally produced books—as opposed to, say, the Manila International Book Fair (MIBF) in September, which is open to books and publications from overseas. The NBDB wisely decided to showcase our homegrown literary talents—not only from Manila, and not only from my generation of old fogeys, but from all over the country, and writers of all persuasions and ages (as young as fourteen!).

We Pinoys have become so immersed in Netflix, YouTube, and social media that many of us have forgotten about reading, and what a good book can do for one’s mind and soul. We want everything delivered to us in short sentences—even in acronyms or, if possible, in memes—because long paragraphs (and, God forbid, pages) can only mean a waste of our precious time (which is, of course, best spent posting what we last ate on Instagram, and critiquing someone’s OOTD). Whether fiction or nonfiction, books challenge us to carry ideas through to the limits of our reason and imagination. The difference between a good meme and a good book can be that between wit and wisdom—between the bubbles that rise to the top of your champagne and the notes that linger on your tongue and senses long after you’ve put your drink down.

And despite the death knells that have been tolled for publishing and reading in this country, the droves of people who flocked to the PBF and the MIBF show otherwise; as I’ve noted elsewhere, more new authors and publishers are emerging across various genres and languages than ever before, spurred by writing programs and workshops, new technologies, and more exposure for Filipino writers in international markets.

That last note—the emergence of Philippine writing in the global consciousness—has been a long time coming. We’ve had, of course, writers who’ve been published abroad, most notably Jose Rizal and the late National Artist F. Sionil Jose. In America, both expatriate and US-born writers such as Gina Apostol, Ninotchka Rosca, Jessica Hagedorn, Eric Gamalinda, Zach Linmark, and Brian Ascalon Roley have made important inroads into publishing, some with mainstream publishers. Of course, they were preceded by the likes of Carlos Bulosan, Jose Garcia Villa, NVM Gonzalez, and Bienvenido Santos, in a time when getting published in America seemed to be the apex of a literary career. We’re way past that now, having found our own voice and our own readers right here at home. 

I’ve often remarked that I’d rather be read by 10,000 Filipinos than 100,000 Americans, but I may have spoken too soon, as even those 10,000 Pinoys willing to buy and read a serious novel can be hard to round up. Therein lies the irony: we’re happy to write and publishers seem happy to publish, and the high attendance at the PBF could be a sign that things are changing, but creating a critical mass of local readers for literature remains a struggle. 

Even in America, where we imagine that almost four million Filipinos should be able to clear out an edition of 5,000 books without any trouble, that simply doesn’t happen. I suspect that that’s because we’ve never really been a book-reading culture, unlike the Japanese and the Indians, and the easy availability of entertainment on Netflix and Tiktok just aggravates the situation. (A more disturbing possibility is that our writers still haven’t learned to write the kind of stories with the kind of treatment that Filipino readers—and there are also many kinds of them—expect, without sacrificing literary “quality,” whatever that means. In my old age, this is what I’m aiming for—to give my readers stories that they’d want to see turned into movies.) 

There’s no doubt that we’re producing materials of high literary value—in English, Filipino, and our regional languages; we saw that in the PBF and we see it in our classes and workshops all the time. These works deserve to be shared with a broad audience—not just here, but overseas, where the Chinese, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Indonesians, and the Vietnamese have already made a name for themselves in the publishing world. 

But that takes a network we still have to familiarize ourselves with and learn how to navigate—a network of translators, literary agents, editors, publishers, and booksellers largely unknown and therefore closed to us. We’re not totally clueless. Through the NBDB and local publishing stalwarts such as Karina Bolasco (just recently retired from the Ateneo Press and the founder of Anvil Publishing before that) and Andrea Pasion-Flores (our very first international literary agent, now owner of Milflores Publishing and president of the Book Development Association of the Philippines), the Philippines has been represented over the past few years in such major events as the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s largest such market of authors, publishers, and agents.

Not meaning to be immodest, thanks to my agents and publishers, I myself have benefited from this kind of exposure, having sold my second novel Soledad’s Sister in last year’s FBF into a German translation and edition, which just came out; before that, it had already been translated into and published in Italian and French, aside from an American edition. Imagine what that network could do for the rest of our writers.

This brings me to an idea whose time, I strongly believe, has come: focal representation in a forthcoming Frankfurt Book Fair as a “guest of honor,” a position reserved for a country wishing to showcase the best of its literary talent across all genres (two years ago it was Canada, followed by Slovenia). This has to be accompanied by a strong effort in translation—from the regional languages to English, and from English to other international languages like Spanish and French, perhaps even Chinese. It will take much planning and a sizeable budget, but as our recent forays into the Venice Biennale have shown on behalf of our leading artists, with the right cultural leadership and vision, it can be done.

Qwertyman No. 44: Again, America

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Qwertyman for Monday, June 5, 2023

I HAVE a good friend whom we’ll call Ted, a Fil-Am who retired a few years ago as a ranking officer in the US Navy. He was in town recently on some family business, and like we always do when circumstances permit, we had dinner and a good chat just before he and his wife flew back home.

Most of us have friends if not relatives in America, and all of this would be pretty routine except for one fact: I’m a flaming liberal, and Ted is a Trump Republican. Over the fifteen years or so that we’ve known each other—well before Donald Trump entered the picture—we’ve been aware of those political differences, but rather than politely skirt them in our conversation like many sane people would, we feel comfortable enough with each other to talk at length about them, and even exchange some friendly barbs.

Much of that level of comfort comes from my belief that, in his own way, Ted sincerely and deeply loves his country—and his ancestral home, the Philippines. He’s smart, curious, eager to learn and understand. In his former naval job and as a private citizen, Ted—who was born in the US but spent some of his formative years in his family’s hometown in Bicol, and speaks some of the local language aside from Filipino—has visited the Philippines as often as he can, trying his best to improve relations between the two countries on a personal level. (On this last visit, for example, he also took part in a ceremony to celebrate the commissioning of the USS Telesforo Trinidad, named after an Aklan-born Filipino petty officer who was awarded the Medal of Honor for bravely rescuing his shipmates from an explosion aboard their ship in 1915.)

Given his naval background—his dad joined the Navy in the 1970s—I’m not surprised that Ted is a Republican, like many military Fil-Ams are. (One notable exception is a mutual friend of ours, the former West Pointer, Army Ranger, and diplomat Sonny Busa, as staunch a Democrat as they come, and a key figure behind Filipino veterans’ causes in Washington.) His support for Trump despite the man’s many failings continues to mystify me, but I’m guessing that in his calculations, Ted chose to cast his lot with the man best positioned to thwart the liberal agenda. That includes items that Ted and other Republicans feel extremely uncomfortable with, such as what he calls the “celebration, beyond just acceptance” of transgender rights, and their judicial enforcement.

Perhaps with any other person, my liberal hair-trigger would have fired away at such comments with a fusillade of counter-arguments, but with Ted I find more value in listening and trying to understand a certain mindset, as different as some of its premises may be from mine. In our last conversation, what Ted had to say was profoundly disturbing. I’m paraphrasing here, but essentially it was this: “America is a mess. People can’t talk civilly to each other anymore. When I say I’m a Republican, people instantly assume I’m a racist.” To which I said that people at the top like Trump (and our own version of him here) greenlighted that kind of boorish discourse, with additional pressure brought on by right-wing militias armed with AR-15s. We talked about January 6 (which he opined was not an insurrection) and the Second Amendment (which I said seemed sacrosanct in American politics). “You have cancel culture,” he sighed, “to which the other guy responds by going bam bam bam!” He was deploring, not endorsing it, trying to get a fix on his own society’s ailments. “It’s in our DNA,” he said glumly about guns.

Thankfully Ted and I always have other things to talk about—like the Philippines, in which Ted said he feels much more relaxed than his own country. He knows how worked up I can get about politics and our own leadership (or the lack thereof), but as far as he could see on this trip, I and my fellow Filipinos (including those he met in Bicol) were just chugging along. “We’re survivors,” I said, “and we’ll do what it takes to get by from day to day.”

That brings me to another friend, “Tony,” who messaged me out of the blue the other day, obviously distraught by the Senate vote on the Maharlika Fund bill and asking if it was time for him and his family to leave the country, given how we seem to be back on the road to political plunder and economic ruin. It wasn’t just a rhetorical question; he was really thinking about it. Here’s what I said:

“Hi, Tony—If it’s a realistic option, I don’t think anyone can or should blame you for leaving or wanting to leave. We have only one life and we have to make the most of it in all ways. Politics is important, but it’s only one of many other factors that define who we are—love, art, family, and faith, among others. That said, it can have a way of complicating our lives and life choices. 

“Moving to the US has also been an option for me for some time now. Our only daughter lives in California and has been wanting to petition us. But my wife and I have been strongly reluctant to move there, although we visit almost every year and are familiar and comfortable with living in the US, where I spent five years as a grad student. We are artists, and our work is culture-bound. We feel appreciated here, within our small circle of friends. However good we may be, in America we would be marginalized; we don’t want to become an American minority and deal with all the issues that will come with it. And America has become much less inviting now, with all the intolerance and racial violence provoked by Trumpism. 

“So unless it were a matter of life and death, we’ll stay here, despite the present dispensation and many more aggravations like the Maharlika Fund to come in the years ahead, because I feel that my continued survival and success will be my best way of fighting back. Having survived martial law, we can survive this as well. Everyone’s circumstances are different, and again you should feel free to find your place where you can best live with your family and secure their future. Nothing is ever final anyway, and you can always come back. Follow your heart and conscience, and you should be all right, wherever you may go. All best!”

(Image from bu.edu)

Penman No. 451: A Harvest of Books

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Penman for Sunday, June 4, 2023

IF YOU’RE reading this on this Sunday morning, then it’s not yet too late for you to find a cab and get yourself over to the World Trade Center in Pasay City to catch the last day of the Philippine Book Festival, and have your favorite Filipino authors sign their books for you.

Organized by the National Book Development Board (NBDB) in partnership with the National Library and other agencies and organizations, the PBF will showcase the best of new Philippine writing and publishing, with the bonus of having most of the authors around for signings, chats, and the now-obligatory selfies.

Since the Internet took off thirty years ago, people have been declaring that “Books are dead!” (And even before that, “The Author is dead!”—although, of course, not quite in that almost literal sense). Well, guess what—both are very much alive, whole new generations of them, as if the Internet never happened. I don’t have the hard figures to show—I’m sure the NBDB has them—but just from what I’ve seen at the past Manila International Book Fairs (the next one of which will be held in September), there’s much more new writing and publishing happening now than there was before the Internet. 

There are many drivers for that, one of which has to be the proliferation of writing programs and workshops, whose graduates really succeed only when they come out with books. (Like I often remind Creative Writing grad students who take forever to “perfect” their thesis projects, “You’re writing for no more than five readers—your dissertation committee—and when you’re done, your thesis will be sitting on a solitary shelf. Just do what you need to pass the damned defense and focus on producing your first book out of that draft! Your real examiners will be your readers.”) 

Another factor is the growth of the publishing industry, which has become much more diversified in terms of ownership, material, and audience. The long years of martial law drove much creative output underground, so to speak, with few available venues for literary publishing and only competitions like the Palancas providing incentives for continued production. (On the other hand, the government presses kept churning out books on the First Couple’s abounding wisdom.) Post-EDSA, the pent-up dam broke, and literature flourished, but still hardly on the scale we’re seeing today.

I suspect that’s because many new players have gone into publishing, finding niche markets for everything from religious and self-help books to graphic novels and high-end coffee-table books. Among these, I’d count Milflores Publishing, founded by the late Tony Hidalgo and now in the hands of the very capable Andrea Pasion-Flores. Balangay Books, focused on local literature, has been opening doors for new young authors, and belongs to the Indie Pub Collab PH, a group of independent publishers. Down south, Savage Mind Bookshop and the Ateneo de Naga University Press have made great strides in literary publishing not just in the Bicol region but well beyond. Emerging in the wake of the Pink Revolution, San Anselmo Publications has made a name for itself as a purveyor of progressive thought. A recent visit to OMF Literature’s bookshop and office along Boni Avenue showed me how Christian literature is flourishing, attracting both new authors and readers. 

Let’s not forget self-publishing, which with such new technologies as print-on-demand and e-books has outgrown the stigma of “vanity” publishing and has produced both commercial and critical successes. While overall quality remains highly variable, the free Internet has empowered and enabled a new generation of young people to feel like they can become “writers” by posting on such sites as Wattpad—and some of them will be. (The irony here is that, as on Amazon, writers who succeed in their e-book debuts then get picked up by publishers of physical books.) Professional design and editorial outfits such as Studio 5 and Perez NuMedia also exist to help individuals and institutions turn their ideas into prizewinning books.

And then of course the long-established big-name publishers and academic publishers are still around: Anvil Publishing, UP Press, Ateneo de Manila University Press, UST Publishing House, and the University of San Carlos Press, among others. Vibal Publishing has produced impressive and sumptuously printed historical books—as has, let’s not forget, the National Historical Commission. They remain the publishers of choice for what might generally be considered prestigious but non-commercial projects, although their marketing savvy has vastly improved, from book design to distribution (much of the bookselling has moved online, to Shopee and Lazada). But since the wait at these publishing houses tends to be long, even established Filipino authors like novelist Charlson Ong (White Lady, Black Christ) have gone with such alternatives as Milflores (as did I, in its previous incarnation), which can often provide speedier results with no sacrifice of quality.

One more thing: more Filipino authors have begun to get published and noticed abroad, beyond America. Note the recent publication of Ulirát: The Best Contemporary Stories in Translation from the Philippines, edited by Tilde Acuña et al., and the South Africa-based Jim Pascual Agustin’s Waking Up to the Pattern Left by a Snail Overnight, both by Gaudy Boy in Singapore. Singapore is also where Penguin Random House SEA is based, and from where it published Danton Remoto’s novel Riverrun and his book of stories The Heart of Summer(aside from his translations of our classic works in Filipino), and Maryanne Moll’s novel The Maps of Camarines. I’m also happy to report that my novel Soledad’s Sister just came out in a German hardcover edition (as Last Call Manila) from Transit Buchverlag, following earlier editions in Italy, France, and the US. A 15th-anniversary edition of the novel, along with a new edition of my Voyager collected stories, are on sale at PFB—as are almost all of the books I mentioned here, with their authors on hand to sign them.

So wait no further and grab that ride to the WTC, for your share of this bountiful harvest of Filipino books. (Did I say that entrance is free?)