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About penmanila

A Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Hamiltons, poker bad beats, and desktop lint.

Qwertyman No. 124: In Sin and Error Pining

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 16, 2024

IT WAS at an early Christmas lunch when a friend asked if I thought that Vice President Sara Duterte would be impeached, with all the motions now on the table to that effect. I wasn’t expecting politics to be taken up over the merrymaking, but this is the Philippines where we breathe politics, so I obliged. 

I said that while I certainly believed that the VP was fit to be impeached for all the obvious financial irregularities happening under her watch, I very much doubted that it was going to happen. And why not? Because it was going to come down to the votes in the House and in the Senate, and while President BBM and his allies doubtlessly had the muscle to push the motion through, I just didn’t see why they would. And again why not? You don’t think they can come up with the evidence to find her culpable for the misuse of hundreds of millions of public money in confidential funds? They could, if they want to, I said—but again, why would they? 

Think about it this way, I said. Impeachment is political, so the facts don’t really matter much, except for propaganda purposes—especially with elections coming up in a few months. Don’t get me wrong—there are people who take the process and its reasons seriously, as we all really should, because millions going to non-people like “Mary Grace Piattos,” “Chippy McDonald,” and “Fernando Tempura” in the guise of “intelligence operations” insults our non-artificial intelligence. 

VP Sara’s refusal to explain these strange endowments paints her further into a corner—which, it seems, is exactly where she wants to be. When she says, “I’ll be at peace when I’m impeached,” and when her drumbeaters exclaim that the hearings are turning the Dutertes into “folk heroes,” then you know that she’s not going to get what she wants. 

Why would PBBM let her go? What would be in it for him? He doesn’t need a functioning Vice President—he never had one; this VP can’t point to a single memorable deed beyond publishing an expensive book. Cutting off his “Uniteam” partner and depriving her of her last official job would simply give her free rein to wreak more mayhem with no accountability to the government or the people. 

Keeping her on the official payroll—but fundamentally powerless—would be the smarter thing. It was never in Sara’s nature to do a VP Leni, and turn political Siberia into a veritable factory of good deeds. She’ll stew in the OVP, sans her confidential kitty, until she can’t take it any longer and resigns, which could easily be spun into a form of surrender or an abandonment of her sworn duties.

The other reason, of course, is that while VP Sara is drawing fire, PBBM can enjoy some peace of mind, and make benign speeches at this and that forum with a heartfelt smile. He knows that he has benefited immensely from the odious alternative the Dutertes represent in the eyes of many Filipinos, even those who staunchly opposed his candidacy in 2022. 

The Dutertes have done Marcos Jr. the priceless favor of making him and whatever he does look good by comparison—a difference he has substantively emphasized by rejecting his predecessor’s slavishly pro-China policy and (despite reports of continued EJKs under his regime) withdrawing Digong’s murderous tokhangcampaign. He has had his missteps, like that bizarrely ill-conceived Maharlika Fund, but I have been hearing murmurs of approval from otherwise progressive friends—albeit grudging and cautious—for many of his positions, an unthinkable proposition just a year ago, when the wounds of 2022 were still fresh. 

But with more than half his term yet ahead of him, there’s opportunity aplenty for unraveling and for even graver misdeeds. Even now, while we profess shock and dismay over the P500 million spent by the OVP in confidential and intelligence funds for 2023, the House has given BBM a free pass on the even more staggering P4.57 billion his office disbursed for the same purposes that year. 

And that’s why I think it’s wiser to keep the focus on the Dutertes and to keep the VP where you can see and hear her, flailing around and squealing like a stuck pig. The impeachment drama will play itself out in the New Year with more twists and turns than a telenovela, and then, for some reason, the votes will fall short, and the VP will be censured and chastised before being sent back to the pen. For what it’s worth, I don’t think impeachment is the proper penalty here; criminal prosecution, conviction, and punishment should be, but that’s a whole other game.

* * * * *

Christmas will soon be upon us—my 70th, in my case, a milestone I never expected to reach given the many young deaths that marked my generation, but one I thankfully accept as the ultimate gift and blessing, no matter the turmoil in our world today. I personally have much to cheer about and be grateful for—so why can’t I be merrier?

We associate Christmas with joy and new life, with the Christ child’s coming, but there is nothing to be jolly about where wanton greed and senseless death are concerned. 

Everything today points to a headlong dive into a global cataclysm, a World War III that may not have a clear and time-stamped beginning like the invasion of Poland or the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but a prolonged and widespread series of provocative and catastrophic events occurring all over the planet—Russian incursions into Eastern Europe, Chinese occupation of Southeast Asian waters, Israel’s pyrrhic extermination of its enemies, North Korea’s incessant saber-rattling and nuclear brinkmanship, America’s surrender of the asylum to the lunatics, and the inexorable degradation of the environment—all of which will come to a head. It will be horrific, but a side of me wonders if we need this cataclysm to remind us of our most basic values and virtues as humans, beyond ideology, religion, power, and wealth.

The other week I had a reader, a pro-Israel partisan, writing me to contend that there was no one else to blame for all the dead children in Gaza but their parents who refused to stand up to Hamas. It saddened more than infuriated me to see that this is where all our presumably educated reasoning has come to—a justification for the slaughter of innocents. I wanted to shake the man by the shoulders, across the Internet, to awaken the terrified and hungry child in him.

Our world will become yet darker and more difficult before it comes to its senses, rediscovers the value of truth, beauty, and courage, and pulls back from the brink of self-annihilation. Yes, I remain optimistic about the future of humanity, about a time when reason and justice will prevail, but I am quite sure I will not live to see this “new and glorious morn.”

Qwertyman No. 123: A Forgotten Hero

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 9, 2024

A HANDSOME book—as handsome as its subject—was launched last week by the Ateneo University Press, a biography of another unsung Filipino hero who would have faded into oblivion had it not been for the efforts of an American expat in the Philippines with a deep sense of history. 

The hero was Col. Narciso L. Manzano, the highest-ranking Filipino in the US Army during the Second World War, and the man who rescued his memory is Craig Scharlin, a former English teacher, gallery owner, and biographer who served for some time as Manzano’s personal secretary fifty years ago. I had met and known Craig earlier as the author, with his wife Lilia Villanueva, of the biography of Filipino-American labor leader Philip Vera Cruz; when he asked me to help him put together what eventually became The Manzano Memoirs: The Life and Military Career of Colonel Narciso L. Manzano, I agreed, especially after hearing his story of the life of this remarkable man. 

Craig had learned that the MacArthur Library in Virginia had a 260-page handwritten autobiographical manuscript that had been written by Col. Manzano in 1948, to which were later added another memoir written in 1983 for his grandchildren; his son Jaime had also written a family history. Craig acquired copies of all these and the necessary permissions to publish them; I helped stitch the manuscripts together into a more coherent whole and edit the text.

Though born in Manila in 1899, Manzano grew up in Atimonan, Quezon before leaving at age ten for Spain where his family hailed from. He was a mestizo through and through: Filipino by birth and allegiance, Spanish by blood, and American by military service and later citizenship. After returning to Manila and studying Engineering at UST, he signed up to join the US Army, hoping to fight in the First World War, which ended too soon for him. He went to the US for further military training, and served back home as a Philippine Scout, and then as a colonel in the US Army Corps of Engineers under Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

It had been one of Manzano’s pre-war missions to map out the Bataan peninsula carefully in preparation for War Plan Orange 3, which MacArthur eventually discarded. It was in this zone that Manzano would first earn praise for his bravery. As Craig’s introduction tells it, “It was Manzano, along with his American co-commander, Lt. Col. Skerry, who led their engineers in setting the explosives to blow the bridge at Calumpit, the last and most vital bridge in Central Luzon…. When Gen. Wainwright decided the bridge had to be destroyed to halt the rapidly advancing Japanese invading forces, the Army engineers assigned this task led by Manzano were on the wrong side of the bridge, the Japanese side. Manzano requested that Skerry wait to blow it until he and his men could get across… but Wainwright had no choice: the bridge had to be blown as the Japanese were advancing too fast in order to save the entire American and Filipino forces and allow them time to retreat to Bataan…. Somehow Manzano, along with another of his American officers was able to evade the Japanese on their own and made their way with all their men to Bataan.”

Working in intelligence in Bataan, he was later captured and imprisoned in Camp O’Donnell; upon release, he was quickly assigned to develop an intelligence network in Luzon, at which he proved exceptionally capable. His wife Charo was arrested and imprisoned by the Japanese. But he pressed on, and when his network was exposed, he moved to Mindanao from where he hoped to be taken by submarine to Australia so he could properly advise MacArthur, who was getting poor intelligence. MacArthur’s lackeys scotched that plan, forcing Manzano to improvise as a guerrilla until MacArthur returned. He later moved to the US with his family, where he died in 1986, proud of his life’s work despite being embittered by the betrayals he had to suffer, and disappointed at being passed over for the generalship he had expected.

That’s not even half of the story; brimming with the candor of a man with nothing to lose, Manzano’s memoirs are full of vignettes and reflections about people at war, and Manzano can be painfully scathing in his estimations of those he felt had betrayed his country. He whittles down MacArthur and his aides for what he saw to be their foolish and costly unwillingness to listen to lifesaving intelligence (an opinion shared by historians such as Hampton Sides, who wrote that “MacArthur’s judgement, clouded by his gargantuan ego, was sometimes deeply, dangerously flawed. The men who fought under him, and the civilians who happened to get in his way, often paid a terrible price.”) Manzano was highly critical of MacArthur’s abandonment of War Plan Orange 3, and even said that he would have testified in support of Japanese Gen. Masaharu Homma had he been asked.

He not only believed President Jose P. Laurel to be a collaborator, but plotted the failed operation to assassinate him on the golf course at Wack Wack. For this alone, the book should be well worth reading; I among others have a contrary view of Laurel, but Manzano was there and we were not. Manzano has spicy opinions of other wartime and postwar personalities whom we have named streets after—again, quite an eye-opener. He reserved some of his choicest words for Ferdinand Marcos, whom he called “a poser, a phony, a fake, a war profiteer.”

In his introduction to the book, Craig Scharlin recalls his first meeting with Col. Manzano in San Francisco in 1975: The movie “Scent of a Woman” with Al Pacino had not yet come out. However, the character Pacino played in that movie, Frank, was a retired lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. As portrayed by Pacino, the character had Old-World charm, dressed impeccably, and even in his older age had ramrod-straight posture, showed strength of character and conviction, and the demeanor of an officer who had commanded other men and led them into battle. But he also carried scars of resentment and a certain sadness, a lament of unfulfilled destinies, of real battles won and others lost. And of course it was all Al Pacino—short, dark, brooding, yet still incredibly charismatic.

“That was the man I met in 1975 in a well-appointed penthouse apartment on Nob Hill in San Francisco. The only difference was that this wasn’t Al Pacino nor a fictional movie character, but the real deal—a retired US Army colonel named Narciso L. Manzano.”

Meet the rest of the man in the book, which you can order here: https://unipress.ateneo.edu/product/manzano-memoirs-life-and-military-career-colonel-narcisco-l-manzano.

Qwertyman No. 122: On Writing as a Profession

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Qwertyman for Monday, December 2, 2024

FOLLOWING THROUGH on last week’s piece about the challenges faced by creative writers trying to make a living in this country, let me share some further thoughts on that topic that I wove into my Rizal Lecture last week at the annual congress of Philippine PEN. My talk was titled “The Living Is in the Writing: Notes on the Profession of  Writing in the Philippines.”

Our writers of old made a profession of writing, often by working as journalists, speechwriters, and PR people at the same time that they wrote poems, stories, novels, and essays on the side. Some also taught, and of course some writing comes with that territory, but with teaching you get paid for your classroom hours than for your word count. (To which I should also add, so much of the writing that our literature professors do today is understandable only to themselves.)

Our best and most prolific writers lived by the word and died by it. The two who probably best exemplified this kind of commitment to writing—and nothing but writing—were Nick Joaquin and his good friend Frankie Sionil Jose. Both were journalists and fictionists (in Joaquin’s case, a poet and playwright as well). We can say the same for Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and Kerima Polotan, as well as for Gregorio Brillantes, Jose Lacaba, Ricky Lee, Alfred Yuson, Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, and Charlson Ong, among others. 

These were all writers whom you never heard to claim, as has been recent practice, that “I am a poet!” or “I am a fictionist!” They were all just writers, for whom the practice of words was one natural and seamless continuum, and a profession they mastered just as well as we expect doctors, engineers, mechanics, and lawyers to do. This was also when journalists could be poets who could also be politicians and even reformers, revolutionaries, and heroes.

This was paralleled in other arts such as painting, where artists such as Juan Luna, Fernando Amorsolo, and Botong Francisco routinely accepted commissions to support themselves and any other personal undertakings. (Of course, this was well within the old Western tradition of writers and artists having wealthy patrons to help keep them alive and productive.)

But then came a time when, for some reason, creative and professional writing began to diverge, as creative writing withdrew from the popular sphere and became lodged in academia, where it largely remains today. Professional writing, or writing for, money, came to be seen as the work of hacks, devoid of art and honor. Even George Orwell urged writers to take on non-literary jobs such as banking and insurance—which incidentally T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens did, respectively—rather than what he called “semi-creative jobs” like teaching and journalism, which he felt was beneath them. (Orwell himself worked as a dishwasher in Paris, where he wryly observed that “nothing unusual for a waiter to wash his face in the water in which clean crockery was rinsing. But the customers saw nothing of this.”)

An attitude of condescension soon emerged among poets and fictionists who looked down on journalists as a lesser breed—something I have always warned my students against, having been a journalist who had to turn in a story, any story, by 2 pm every day on pain of losing my job. Never knock journalists. Let’s not forget that when it comes to facing real dangers brought on by one’s written word, poets and fictionists have it easy. The last Filipino novelist who was shot for what he wrote was Jose Rizal; the only writers dying today are our journalists and broadcasters in the hinterlands offending the local poobahs. Governors and generals read newspapers, not novels; they are impervious to metaphor.

Professional writers, on the other hand, saw creative writers as artsy dilettantes enchanted by fancy words and phrases that no one else understood and very few people paid for. Creative writers took it as a given that they were wedded to a life of monastic penury, unless they had another skill or job like teaching, doctoring or lawyering, or marrying into wealth. It even became a badge of honor of sorts to languish in financial distress while reaping all manner of writing honors, in the misguided notion that starving artists produced the finest and most honest work. 

The fact is, both are two sides of the same coin, which is the currency of public persuasion through words and language. One is an artist, the master of design; the other is the artisan or craftsman, the master of execution. Both can reside in the same person, unless you’re foolish enough to disdain one or the other. You can produce great art, if you have the talent, the discipline, and the hubris for it; but you can also live off your artistic skills, if you have the talent, the discipline, and the humility for it. 

(That said, I have to report that in my forty years of teaching creative writing, some of the students who find it hardest to switch to fiction are journalists, who just can’t let go of the gritty and often linear reality they’ve been accustomed to; poets come next, those who feel preciousness in every word and turn of phrase, so much that they can’t move from one page to the next without agonizing, or, going the other way, without drowning us in verbiage.)

This was why, more than twenty years ago, I designed and began teaching an undergraduate course at the University of the Philippines called “CW198—Professional Writing.” Mainly intended for Creative Writing and English majors who had very little idea of their career options after college aside from teaching, the course syllabus includes everything from business letters, news, interviews, and features to brochures, scripts, speeches, editing, publishing, and professional ethics. The first thing I tell them on Day One is this: “There is writing that you do for yourself, and writing that you do for others. Don’t ever get the two mixed up.”

Penman No. 468: A Game of Prompts

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Penman for Sunday, November 17, 2024

I WAS in Dumaguete recently for a seminar organized by the Intellectual Property Office of the Philippines to encourage local authors and publishers to break out into the international market, following through on our participation at the Frankfurt Book Fair. I was asked to talk about “The Future of Literature,” but I chose to turn that around and talk instead about the literature of the future.

Taking off from the challenges and opportunities posed by artificial intelligence, I put forth a series of “provocations” that writers and publishers could think about. Let me share part of what I said:

My first provocation: the literature of the future, or some part of it, will be a game of prompts: not just or not mainly to copy existing writers, but to produce results that will be a hybrid of the author’s creativity in prompt-making and AI’s selectivity, drawing from its enormous stock of possible responses. This will be writing as a form of play, of co-authorship between man and machine.

Following through from this is Provocation No. 2: Expect the growth of the literature of hybridity—of more crossovers from one genre or form to another, from one language to another, from one sensibility to another. This is by no means new and has been happening for some time now, but there will be an even greater and more deliberate blurring of traditional boundaries, more experimentation.

To some extent, that will be because—and here’s Provocation No. 3, and to use this generation’s favorite trigger-word—there will be less gatekeeping. Or, if not less, then more resistance to or disregard of it. There will be more independent publishing and self-publishing to counter the influence of traditional publishing houses. But this free-for-all will also likely lead to a general decline of standards, as writers forgo the services of editors and the critical evaluations of quality- and market-minded publishers.

Provocation No. 4: The big novel will survive, simply because of the power of inertia, and because there will always be a need for something as capacious to contain and possibly comprehend the ever-growing complexity of human life. Our exposure to the international market at the Frankfurt Book Fair will also provide more impetus to the production of novels, something at which we Filipinos have not been particularly good at, historically speaking. 

On the other hand—Provocation No. 5—there will be a general shortening and simplification of form, as writing seeks to approximate the meme, or Tiktok. I don’t know exactly how this will happen, or what form it will take, but when I look at the frankly scary popularity of Lang Leav, I worry that people will see that kind of poetry as the new standard. Of course Emily Dickinson was just as short if not even shorter 150 years ago; she would have made a fine poet for our time.

Given what the world is going through, and the even bleaker future humanity faces, I propose—Provocation No. 6—that the literature of the future will be one of survival, of coping, of enduring. I have recently been advocating the need to produce a literature of hope, but that will be a difficult ask for young writers just trying to keep their heads above the water, and more understandably concerned with this life than with anything that may follow. Science fiction and fantasy will always go over the visible horizon, anticipating a distant future albeit in often dystopian terms, but for most, it will be the literature of next week.

And in that increasingly diminishing and threatening universe—Provocation No. 7—when our precious selves are all we have left to cling to, the literature of “I am,” the first-person narrative, and the politics of identity will prevail. When we no longer trust the government, business, education, our parents, the Church, and even God, and on the verge of losing control of our own petty lives, we will desperately fight to be recognized, acknowledged, and maybe even loved. We will leave nations and societies to the editorialists and social scientists; in fiction and poetry, we will seek solace and sense.

Let me just say a few words about the Frankfurt Book Fair, the 2024 edition of which I and some of us here attended last month. As you know, the Philippines will be Guest of Honor next year, which will do much to project the visibility of Philippine literature overseas. Even this year, many gains were already achieved by our writers and publishers, with dozens of deals signed for the translation and publication of our books in foreign markets.

Post-Frankfurt, Filipino writers will think of writing for the world—not necessarily in English although that’s always an option, but through translation, which will be the great equalizer. The huge surge in translation coming out of Frankfurt—not just from Filipino to English but from our other Philippine languages, including English, to other global languages—will forever change our literary culture, which has traditionally and quite unfairly favored our writers in English when it comes to recognition beyond our shores.

Also, and this may be a controversial point, I’ve long had this suspicion—and maybe Frankfurt proves it—that the rest of the world doesn’t really care about (because it doesn’t know about nor understand) the differences between Tagalog, Iluko, Bikol, and Cebuano etc. literature. When we reach foreign readers in translation, we’re all Filipino—and only Filipino—just as African or Indian literature  appear to us as cultural blocs rather than deeply variegated constructs. This has its positives and negatives, but I tend to lean on the positives, which are a reminder that our literature helps define a cohesive national experience and identity above the regional and ethnic markers otherwise so precious to us.

In one of my sessions in Frankfurt, I was asked a question, to which I replied: “I will always be more optimistic about literature than politics.” Given what has just happened in America, and what that will mean for the rest of the world, I have to believe this even more than ever.

Qwertyman No. 121: Fame, Fortune, and the Filipino Writer

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 25, 2024

CREATIVE WRITERS don’t earn much in this country, unless they lend their talents to someone else, for far less literary reasons than writing a novel or a collection of poems. A senator might need to deliver an important speech to an international audience; a taipan might be marking a milestone like a 75th birthday, and fancy having his biography written; a conglomerate might want to have its history written and published, to trumpet its accomplishments and contributions to society. 

For all these, many novelists, poets, and essayists will drop their pens and exchange their metaphors for the plainer but more remunerative prose of public relations. I know I have; I’m one of these people for whom writing isn’t just an art but a profession, a means of livelihood, a trade I’m grateful to be able to ply instead of hauling gravel or fixing carburetors. 

I’ve been writing for a living since I dropped out of college and became a newspaper reporter at eighteen, and I’ve been at it ever since, even throughout my whole other life as an academic (yes, I went back to school and got all the right degrees just so I could teach). At seventy, I’m still working on three or four simultaneous book projects for clients, with my own third novel in the back burner. (I’ve already drawn the line at seventy; after these, no more, so I can focus on my own work, and live modestly off my professor’s pension.)

I daresay, however, that most Filipino writers don’t operate like this, either because they can’t (you have to park your ego at the door and be extremely adaptable) or they won’t (for some, writing for money is selling your soul, although you can always say no to jobs and clients you don’t like, as I have). So creative writers have to keep day jobs like teaching or lawyering or newswriting and editing, and tap away at their magnum opuses on the side.

Why do they even bother? It’s not as if they’re hoping to write novels that will become bestsellers, make them millions, and get sold to Hollywood or Netflix. Ours is also a culture and society not known for buying and reading books, unlike, say, the Japanese whose faces you’ll find buried between pages on the Tokyo subway. In a country of around 115 million people, a new book will still typically be published in a first (and likely only) print run of 1,000 copies, which will probably take a year to sell out, if ever (Filipino relatives and friends also expect to be given free signed copies, which they won’t even read).

So again, what are we writing for? Perhaps thanks to Jose Rizal (who, let’s not forget, was shot for what he wrote), to be a writer still carries with it an aura of honor and fame, the suggestion of some extraordinary talent, a special way with words. We may not pay or read our writers, but w e admire them, maybe because they seem to know something most people don’t, like saying “I love you” in enchanting ways, or drafting convincing letters and papers, or even just fancy words like “somnolent” and “adumbrate.” There’s some glory to be won in writing—maybe even a little cash, if you know how to market yourself.

Last Friday, at the PICC, many of the country’s best writers got together to bask in that shared glory. In one of the highlights of the literary year, 54 authors were feted at the 72nd edition of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. Begun in 1950 and faithfully and generously endowed by the Palanca family, the Palancas are the country’s longest-running and most prestigious literary competition, and for the past seven decades (almost uninterrupted except for the pandemic) have heralded the emergence of our finest writers—in English, Filipino, and more recently our other major Philippine languages.

According to the foundation that oversees the awards, this year’s competition drew in 1,823 entries in 22 categories, with 60 winning works produced by 54 writers. New winners outnumbered previous ones by 31 to 23, a good sign of new talent emerging—and not just new but young. Five winners were 20 and below, the youngest being only 14 years old (and the oldest 78). That’s quite a range, which tells us that the future of Philippine literature is safe and strong.

I myself won my first Palanca when I was 21, and of course I thought I was God’s gift to literature—until I lost for the next four years straight. I probably learned more from those losses than from my lucky win, and as I grew older the writing became more important than the winning, but the incentives—a little of both fame and fortune—that the Palancas provided never diminished in their attractiveness, especially during the martial law years when there was very little publishing going on.

You certainly don’t have to join the Palancas or win one to gain a literary reputation, and the value of such awards can easily get overblown, such as when egos get the better of writers starved for attention. Ultimately prizes don’t count nearly as much as publication, and all those honors will be meaningless until and unless one’s books are read, understood, argued about, and maybe even cherished. (With the Philippines poised to become Guest of Honor at next year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, we can expect the global readership for Filipino works to increase, and international publication will be a new goal for our writers to aspire for.)

Not everyone who writes for a living can win a Palanca, but not everyone who wins a Palanca can make a living out of writing, either. I’m blessed and thankful to have been able to do both, but at this point in my life I’ve come to realize that even more than seeking fame or fortune, a writer’s greatest mission is to tell and spread the truth, in that moving and memorable form only art can deliver.

Qwertyman No. 120: Greatness of Spirit

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 18, 2024

AFTER A week marked by sordid political revelations, reversals, and antics that make us despair over the future of democracy in this country and elsewhere in the world, it was refreshing and inspiring to be reminded last Saturday that goodness, reason, and justice still prevail somewhere, even against monumental odds.

Saturday was when the 2024 Ramon Magsaysay Awards were handed out to five Asian champions who made landmark contributions to their societies and the world at large  by manifesting “greatness of spirit,” the lofty benchmark established by the foundation granting the prestigious awards, often referred to as Asia’s Nobel Prize.

I was privileged to attend the award ceremonies at the Metropolitan Theater, and thereby to meet this year’s laureates. There were no Filipinos among them this time around (last year, they had peace negotiator Miriam Coronel-Ferrer), but the causes and concerns that each laureate represented would have resonated well with Filipinos on many levels.

The Thai Rural Doctors Movement (RDM), for example, addressed a problem that has plagued many developing countries around the world: the chronic lack of doctors to provide adequate medical care in the countryside. In the 1970s, idealistic young doctors joined the popular pro-democracy movement in Thailand, but a government crackdown forced them to seek refuge in the rural areas. The doctors formed close bonds with their host communities and attended to their needs. When these doctors later gained national influence, they maintained their focus on the rural poor, to the point that Thailand now has one of the best Universal Health Coverage systems in the world.

In Vietnam, Dr. Nguyen Thi Ngoc Phuong confronted a lethal legacy of the war that had nearly destroyed her country half a century earlier. Despite the passage of so much time, many Vietnamese, including newborn babies, continued to suffer from one of the war’s cruelest after-effects: the damage caused by TCDD or “Agent Orange,” one of the most toxic chemicals known, used freely by the American military to flush out their enemy. Dr. Phuong took it upon herself to discover the truth about Agent Orange, seek justice for its victims, and help the afflicted.

Indonesia’s Farwiza Farhan took on a most formidable challenge despite her relative youth: the environmental damage wrought on the Leuser Ecosystem in her home province of Aceh on the island of Sumatra. Working with fellow activists and especially local women, she founded the Forest Nature and Environment of Aceh Foundation or Yayasan Hutan Alam dan Lingkungan Aceh (HAkA), which has succeeded, among others, in gaining a court verdict that led to USD26 million in fines against a palm oil company that burned forests, and stopped a hydroelectric dam that would have threatened the elephant’s habitat. Most importantly, her organization has trained local communities to protect their environment through sustainable forest management.

Mountainous Bhutan is a country often idealized as an idyllic Shangri-la and prime tourist destination, but it is in fact a low-income country plagued by unemployment, inadequate social services, and threatened traditions and values. Taking these problems by the horns, a young Oxford-trained monk has combined his religious devotion and historical scholarship with modern management to help bring Bhutan into the 21st century. Karma Phuntsho established the Loden Foundation to promote education, practice social entrepreneurship, and document the country’s cultural heritage. Phuntsho himself has written a definitive history of Bhutan, whose next stages he and the Loden Foundation will help define.

And finally, Japan’s Miyazaki Hayao has created some of the world’s most memorable animated films through Studio Ghibli, established in 1985 and today a byword in digital animation. While animated films in the West have fed off a broad audience employing superheroes with lucrative market appeal, Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have focused on an audience most difficult to please—children. Nevertheless, Ghibli classics such as My Neighbor Totoro have also called out to an adult fan base charmed by Miyazaki’s craft. This director has taken animation beyond entertainment and even education to enlightenment, always in an engaging manner.

That such good people exist and persist in their passions offers a bracing antidote to the creeping pessimism in which we seem to be wallowing today, an easy and perhaps fatalistic surrender to inaction, tyranny, and hopelessness. We Filipinos are no strangers to distress and despair, with millions remaining in abject poverty, left behind by any growth in our economy. Adequate healthcare remains beyond the reach of most of us, with even middle-class families left devastated by just one catastrophic illness. But neither do we lack for champions and heroes seeking to alleviate these hardships.

Instructively, for the Ramon Magsaysay laureates, their life’s mission often began with dark epiphanies. For Dr. Phuong—who would go on to head Vietnam’s largest obstetric hospital—it was her encounter as a young doctor with babies severely deformed by Agent Orange and their mothers’ anguished and then-unanswerable questions. For Farwiza Farhan, it was returning to Indonesia from her studies abroad, only to discover that the island home whose forests she had embraced as a child was now being ravaged by commercial exploitation. For rural doctors in Thailand, it was seeing poor farmers sell their daughters just so they could pay for the medical care they needed. But rather than be paralyzed by the enormity of the challenge, they decided to do something about it, rolled up their sleeves, and have yet to roll them down.

Something that stands out to me is that these Magsaysay awardees were hardly fire-breathing revolutionaries who sought sweeping changes in one convulsive action, but reformers who pursued their objectives over decades with as much patience as passion—and, of course, vision, anchored on a unquenchable faith in the attainability of a better world, starting with one’s own space and sphere. And beyond individual actions, they set up networks of influence to spread the message and the work, and ensure that whatever they began would survive them. It was never about them, and that’s greatness of spirit.

Qwertyman No. 119: The MAGAverse

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 11, 2024

IT’S NEVER good to write out of rage, no matter how righteous you think your rage might be; the anger clouds your reasoning and could reduce you to incoherence. So as I’m writing this—on the afternoon of November 6, our time, and early morning in America where Donald Trump has already claimed victory in a bitterly fought election—I’m taking deep breaths and thinking of happy and pleasant things, far away from politics, before returning to the task at hand.

After the initial sting, it isn’t so much anger as sadness and consternation that stay with me, a deep sense of regret over what could have been, had the outcome been different. There are at least 15 million Filipinos who know what I’m feeling, having gone through a similar shock that May two years ago, when what we most dreaded happened.

Of course, to many Filipinos, a Trump return won’t make one bit of difference, and why should it? We have enough of our own problems to worry about. But for those like me who see the world today as a widening battleground between good and evil, November 5 was a loss not only for American Democrats, but for freedom-loving and truth-seeking people all over the planet, whose lives will eventually be affected by whatever comes out of Washington, like it or not.

On the eve of November 5, perplexed and dismayed by the statistical closeness of a fight that good sense should have blown wide open, I sent a message to friends saying that “My inner cynic almost wants Trump to win so Americans will see for themselves exactly what MAGA means over the next four years.” So I guess I got my cruel wish, except that to “America” we can now add “the rest of us.” Welcome to the MAGAverse.

But before this moment passes, let me just put this out there to those whom we should hold responsible for trusting a felon with the White House and for whatever he may do hereon.

If you didn’t vote for Harris and stayed home because of what you saw to be her lack of support for the Palestinian cause, just wait until Trump dances with Netanyahu over the graves of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

If you thought that voting for Trump was a vote for the precious life forming in an unborn fetus, start counting the bodies of the living that will pile up in Ukraine when Trump greenlights Putin to take what he wants, with America looking on.

If you’re a legal immigrant from Asia, Africa, and Latin America (one of those “garbage” countries, in Trump-speak) who went for Trump because you think he knows and cares about how hard you worked for your citizenship and sees you as his co-equal American, let’s see how well his Justice Department defends you at your next run-in with the police or with a gun-toting redneck.

If you didn’t vote for Harris because you made a fine point of her waffling on the fracking issue, wait till Trump puts climate-change deniers in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency—which he did, by the way, in 2016, when he appointed a lawyer who led 28 states in a fight against the EPA’s Clean Power Plan.

If you’re a normally bright and decent person who chose to overlook Trump’s moral flaws and lack of character because you thought he would stabilize and grow the economy, and appoint geniuses to manage the store, wait until the likes of Elon Musk play with government like he did with Twitter. 

(And never mind national security, with Trump being chummy with Putin, Kim Jong Un, and the Hungarian tyrant Orban, who just congratulated Trump for “the biggest comeback in US political history…. A much-needed victory for the world!” Who needs counterintelligence when these guys have direct access to the White House? Worry about tooth decay, when RFK Jr. pulls fluoride out of your tap water, because it was supposedly part of a Cold War communist plot to poison America.)

If you took pity on Trump because you felt that Joe Biden had “weaponized” the Department of Justice against him (on cases he had only himself to blame for, like sleeping with a porn star and paying her to shut up), wait until Trump unleashes the DOJ on his political opponents, as he has sworn to do, and anything and anyone else that gets in his way—including you. (I thought that the best endorsement for Kamala was the one from Harrison Ford: “Vote for Harris if you want to protect your right to disagree with her.”)

If this is nothing but doomsaying, what do you think Donald Trump did all throughout his campaign? He is doom, and doom won. This round goes to Darth Vader and the Dark Side.

Excepting Ukraine and Gaza, much of the world will move on like it always has, and so will we. America itself already had a foretaste of Trump in his first incarnation; they survived him and the pandemic as well. We Filipinos survived martial law, right? 

The question is, what did people learn? Or, since those who learn anything eventually die, are people fated to make the same mistakes all over again from generation to generation? There hasn’t even been enough time for the generations to roll over in America since Trump 1.0—didn’t those voters learn anything?

With our own midterm elections coming up next year, we could be telling each other the same things. I better keep my inner cynic in check.

Qwertyman No. 118: A Flickering Flame

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Qwertyman for Monday, November 4, 2024

TOMORROW, NOVEMBER 5 (or Wednesday, November 6, our time), American voters will choose who between Republican Donald J. Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris will lead them from the White House over the next four years.

For more than four million Filipino-Americans, the outcome will bear a direct impact on their daily lives, their choices, their standing in society, their future. For the rest of the world, including those of us here in the Philippines, the result will shape not only how we see America, but also how America sees us in the global scheme of things.

Only the foolish will think that we have no stake in this election, and that America’s position in the world will be the same regardless of who wins. For the people of Ukraine, a Trump victory might as well be his friend Putin’s; for the Taiwanese, the Filipinos, and others dependent on at least the deterrence if not the active deployment of American military power vis-à-vis Chinese expansionism in Asia, Trumpian isolationism can only invite more unbridled aggressiveness from the region’s bullies.

As I’ve often said here before, like many millions of Filipinos, my stake is more personal than that: our daughter lives and works in California, and my sister is also a US citizen, both of them contributing productively to that country’s economic and social well-being. Both are proudly voting and campaigning for the only candidate who offers real hope for the future of America and the world: Kamala Harris. To them, she represents not just the right political but also and even perhaps more importantly the right moral choice.

Of course, I totally agree. Why anyone would vote for a man who even many of his supporters admit is a convicted felon, a habitual liar, a womanizer, a pervert, a racist, a chauvinist, and a would-be dictator is beyond me. But apparently enough Americans will, enough to make all polls point to a dead heat between the two candidates, with the outcome likely to be decided by voters in a handful of so-called “battleground” states.

Among those many millions of Trumpists willing to overlook his not-insubstantial shortcomings are legions of Fil-Ams who—despite having historically voted Democrat as an ethnic minority—now find common cause with Trump’s blatantly racist anti-immigrant rhetoric (it isn’t even about illegal immigration anymore, but about immigrants from “garbage” countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America) and his supposed “anti-abortion” stance (since diluted for political expediency). Among other single-issue MAGA voters, “the economy” remains their strongest reason for choosing Trump, despite 23 Nobel-prizewinning economists writing that Trump’s tariff-based economic plans will be disastrous for the US.

Eighty-two Nobel laureates, in fact, are on record supporting Harris, but that clearly matters little in an election driven more by primal fear than by truth and reason. As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson lamented, “How sad it must be—believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your only beacon of truth and honesty.”

My own sense is that many Trump voters won’t be voting for Trump the man, whom his sharper and more hidebound supporters—many of whom, like Sen. Ted Cruz, he has savagely maligned but who have masochistically endured his insults to ensure their own survival—will admit before God to be the lowest of the execrably low. They will be voting for the deep grievances and resentments that Trump has so craftily stoked in them, and against the idea of an “elite” and a “swamp” that Trump and his new acolyte Elon Musk, strangely enough, represent more visibly than most Democrats.

Thus the very real possibility remains that we may wake up Friday morning to the specter of Trump 2.0 and whatever it will bring. Should that happen, we can imagine the global wave of consternation and dismay that will ensue among liberals and progressives everywhere. On the other front will resound the triumphant cheers and chuckles of global despots and their minions.

All this brings me to what I suspect has been my real worry all along—not the US election, about which we can do nothing, but our own political horizon, on which familiar dangers are looming large.

At least one online pundit with an unusual point of view has lauded the recent performances of Vice President Sara Duterte and her father former President Rodrigo Duterte at their Senate hearings as a kind of resurrection—in the very least, an affirmation of their continuing political viability, if not resurgent power. 

The Dutertes mastered their fumbling inquisitors, this commentator crowed, reporting that the gallery even clapped for the senior Duterte at the end of a raucous session at which he virtually confessed to willfully causing the summary execution of suspects without ever being prosecuted. The Dutertes, he seemed to imply, remain above and beyond the law; with their cohorts in office, they are the law, or shall soon be again.

Indeed Philippine politics has become a theater where bravado, bluster, and buffoonery matter. We cannot even tell the actors from the characters any longer. Lies resound louder than the truth, and the audience rewards the best “hugot line” with wild applause.

The upcoming midterm election already promises to showcase the worst of our political predilections, with family dynasties and patently unfit candidates crowding the top of the poll rankings.

So if the Americans choose Trump over Harris, why should we be surprised? Where character, reason, and talent no longer matter, the tyrants rule with fools at their feet to keep the populace amused.

But if Kamala Harris wins, whatever it brings to America, it will mean for me that, however fragile, hope remains for good sense to prevail even in extremely fraught situations such as ours. If only for that flickering flame, I pray she wins.

(Image from newsweek.com)

Qwertyman N0. 117: Our Best Books Forward

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 28, 2024

NOW ON its 76th year, the Frankfurter Buchmesse (FBM)—better known outside Germany as the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world’s oldest and largest such event—ended successfully last October 20 with a significant representation from the Philippines, which sent scores of authors, publishers, and book industry officials to the fair. All that was in preparation for FBM 2025, when the Philippines will be Guest of Honor (GOH), the country whose literature will be the focus of the fair’s attention.

You can think of the Frankfurt Book Fair as the Olympics of the global book industry, with over 200,000 participants (book industry persons and the public) representing over 100 countries. However, there are no prizes for Best Novel, Best Nonfiction Book, Best Children’s Book, and so on. Everyone is effectively in competition with everyone else, but the real rewards are in the professional and personal connections made between and among authors, publishers, agents, editors, and translators at the fair, connections that materialize into deals for translation and publication rights. Although exhibited books can be sold at the close of the fair, the FBM isn’t meant to sell books, but rights to books, for which it has become the world’s oldest and largest marketplace. This means that, through the right contacts, Filipino books can be translated into and sold in French, Turkish, Spanish, and Urdu editions, etc. and vice versa. 

Becoming GOH is a signal distinction—but it doesn’t come free. Nations vie and pay for the honor, which this year went to Italy and in 2026 will go to the Czech Republic. I’m sure that there have been and will be more criticisms of our participation in Frankfurt, chiefly of the costs of our foreign exposure vs. the local promotion of our literature, but it’s not a zero-sum game. We need both kinds of investments. We have impressive literary production from all over the country—much of it unknown even to ourselves—but we also need to share the best of it with the world, to raise their understanding of the Filipino above the stereotypes they know (Imelda’s shoes, Manny Pacquiao, DHs, cruise ship crewmen, etc.—not all of them bad, for sure, especially our OFWs, but in need of context).

If FBM 2024 was any indication, FBM 2025 will be an even more resounding success for the Philippines. All literary genres were represented this year in terms of books and panel discussions, and valuable connections were made with European publishers, translators, and agents. Philippine literature will never be the same after this. (This year’s upshot for me is that my novel Soledad’s Sister will be coming out soon in Spanish, after its versions in Italian, French, and German.)

Having followed trends in international publishing for some time, I’m particularly impressed by the way the FBM has helped to promote our new writing by young authors in literary categories that have traditionally received less attention compared to what I’ve called “the big white whale” of publishing, the novel. Approach most publishers and agents at the FBM, and what they’ll ask you is, “Where’s your novel?” For primarily commercial reasons, the novel remains the most saleable and traded commodity at book fairs. (I know many who will wince at my reference to books as commodities, but let’s be absolutely clear about this: the bottom line of book publishing and book fairs is business, not “Kumbaya”-type international peace and understanding.) 

Sadly, however, Filipinos have historically not been a novel-writing, novel-buying, and novel-reading people. In this respect, Rizal’s Noli and Fili are aberrations, familiar to us only and thankfully because of the law requiring their study. That said, our writers are masters of the short literary forms—poetry and the short story in particular. I’ve often remarked that we Pinoys are world-class sprinters, not marathoners; our world-view is not Olympian, but pedestrian, formed close-quarters at street level. 

This year, I’m told that over 70 deals were made between Filipino authors and foreign agents and publishers for the translation and publication of works that went well beyond the traditional novel, including children’s stories (another of our strongest suits) and genre and graphic fiction. These authors were young, and some had their works translated from languages other than English. If anything, this surge in translations, long overdue, is one strategic benefit that our FBM participation has enabled, and our GOH status next year should boost it even further.

According to FBM Director Juergen Boos, “I am very excited about the Philippines’ Guest of Honor presentation in 2025. The motto ‘The imagination peoples the air’ resonates with the universality of storytelling. Even though the Philippines is the world’s thirteenth largest nation with more than 109 million citizens, I believe for many of us in Europe, Philippine literature is currently still rather unknown territory. As the country steps into its role as Guest of Honor, we will learn a lot about the importance of storytelling and today’s cultural scene for Philippine civil society. With an incredible 183 different languages spoken on its 7,641 islands, the country’s diverse influences are one of the aspects I am looking forward to seeing in Frankfurt in 2025.”

I did say that there are no prizes awarded at the FBM, but I have to correct that to acknowledge the Diagram Group Prize for the Oddest Title at the FBM, given since 1978 and now voted upon by the public, and won by such books as Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice, The Joy of Chickens, How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art, and If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start with Your Legs. This is not a prize to which Filipino writers have so far aspired, but who knows? Pinoy wackiness (alongside wisdom) knows no bounds.

Many thanks to the National Book Development Board, the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the German literary organization LitProm, culture champion Sen. Loren Legarda, and our other sponsors and supporters for this great opportunity to put our best books forward on the global stage. Mabuhay!

Penman No. 467: Recovering Our Memory of the Sea

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Penman for October 20, 2024

I’VE OFTEN remarked, in academic conferences, about the glaring absence of the sea in our mainstream and modern literature, beyond serving as a decorative backdrop or romantic element. I recently learned that this may not be so true of the native literatures of the Philippine South, for whose people the sea is their economic and cultural lifeblood, but for most of the rest of us, the only sea we’ll ever know is Boracay, or the Dolomite Beach.

That’s a sad thing when we consider that the Philippines—the world’s second largest archipelago after Indonesia—also has one of the world’s longest coastlines (over 36,000 kilometers), is rich in marine biodiversity, and can look back to a long, proud, and continuing seafaring tradition. Despite the alarming depletion of our marine resources due to overfishing and damage to marine ecosystems, we continue to rank high among the world’s fish producers; ironically, our fishermen are among our country’s poorest citizens. And for many decades now, the Philippines has sent out its seafarers to crew the ships of the world—over 550,000 of them last year, making up a fourth of all the world’s seaborne workers.

To go back even farther into the past, pre-Hispanic Filipinos built the balangay that helped populate Austronesia as well as the speedy warship, the caracoa; in Spanish times our ancestors built the galleons that crossed the oceans. In Moby Dick, Herman Melville referred to Filipinos aboard the whalers as “Manila men.”

Behind these figures runs a compelling human and social drama, but it’s a story largely unknown and untold to our own people, and what little we know is fading even faster as more of us leave our islands for the big cities, slowly but surely losing our personal connections to the sea. We encounter sea life only in the fish market or the seafood section of the grocery, or in tin cans; our children do not know the names of fish, which many now refuse to eat, in favor of sausages and noodles.

Thankfully, the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP) has done something critically important to fill this gap in our collective memory—by establishing a Museum of Philippine Maritime History (MPMH) that tells the story of our seafaring past. And it’s significant that this museum isn’t located in Manila, which would seem to be the logical first choice given Manila Bay and its port, but in Iloilo, which has also had a long and continuing affinity with the sea. Iloilo has historically supplied many if not most of the country’s seafarers to the global market. The city has a plethora of schools offering maritime courses, ensuring the continuity of talent.

I stumbled on the MPMH during a recent visit to Iloilo—among my favorite local destinations for all the obvious reasons (the food, the Esplanade, the heritage houses, the churches, the hospitality, the culture, and of course the people). The amazing boom it’s undergone over the past two decades under the sponsorship of former Sen. Frank Drilon and his local counterparts has dramatically transformed the city’s physical and economic landscape, but it hasn’t forgotten its past as it moves resolutely forward. 

Iloilo has long been known as the city of museums. Aside from the Museo Iloilo and any number of restored mansions, it now boasts the Museum of Philippine Economic History, which chronicles the city’s and region’s central role in sugar, shipping, and commerce; the Rosendo Mejica Museum, which celebrates Iloilo’s journalistic heritage (and I’m proud to say that my wife Beng descends from a Mejica); and the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art, which places Iloilo squarely in the center of cutting-edge art production.

The MPMH, which opened in January 2023 at what used to be the Old Customs House on Calle Loney and Aduana in City Proper behind Sunburst Park, walks the visitor through exhibits covering the past until the Spanish era, and the American period to modern times. One very informative section presents the variety of Philippine boats (biray, casco, vinta, batil, etc.); scale models bring some to life. Key figures in our maritime history such as Luis Yangco (1841-1907), who had a shipping empire and supported the revolution are introduced. Historical photographs, posters, and other artifacts provide vivid visual proof of how vital the maritime industry was to our economy and society. Another panel notes the many waterborne festivals we Filipinos hold throughout the country, such as the Pista ‘Y Dayat in Lingayen, Pangasinan every May, and the Bangkero Festival in Pagsanjan, Laguna every March.

It’s not a huge gallery, and one wishes there were even more artifacts on display to ponder, but in terms of curation and presentation, the MPMH can hold its own, given its present limitations, against other international museums of its kind, with crisp, clear graphics, well-chosen items, and useful and interesting detail. (I’ve had the privilege of visiting the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich in the UK and the Museo Naval in Madrid, so as global standards go, those two maritime giants would be tough to match.) The MPMH’s best come-on—which probably accounted for the hordes of students present when we came by—is that it’s absolutely free, although donations are welcome. That’s a great start, with the kids, toward recovering our memory of the sea.