The continuing chronicles of Jose Dalisay Jr., aka Butch Dalisay, a Filipino collector of old fountain pens, disused PowerBooks, '50s Hamiltons, creaky cameras and typewriters, VW spare parts, poker bad beats, and desktop lint.
U.S. President Donald Trump places a note in the Western Wall in Jerusalem May 22. (CNS photo/Jonathan Ernst, Reuters) See TRUMP-JERUSALEM-HOLY-SEPULCHER May 22, 2017.
I JUST love it when a piece of mine about the goings-on in the US gets a rise out of some MAGA expat—and you’ll be surprised how many of them have chosen to reside here, forsaking what I would have thought would have been the sweet comforts of life in Fortress America.
A message from a guy we’ll call “Bob” reacted to my recent column on “What I Told the Fil-Ams” by suggesting that I had imbibed too much “Cali water,” referring to that state’s trenchant liberalism. I responded by sending him a joke about an American President in the Holy Land, which I hope he appreciated. (I’ve resolved that this is how I’ll deal with my critics from now on, as long as they remain friendly enough—which to his credit Bob was—kill them with kindness, or at least with corny jokes, of which I have a barrelful. I’ll save a special section for MAGA Pinoys, who keep telling me to butt out of their business but who can’t help doling out prescriptions for their ex-countrymen to find their way to the light.)
I’ve often wondered if our world can get much worse than it already is, knowing all the while that the answer can only be yes, yes, emphatically yes. Still, it comes as a rude shock every time fresh confirmation arrives of a new Marianas Trench in human greed, crassness, and stupidity.
All by himself, Donald J. Trump accounts for more than half of every week’s lows, and I’d like to think that I’ve become immune to further aggravation by this man, only to be roundly disabused. Last week, Trump outdid himself in crudity by putting out a meme on his social network depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as monkeys.
When called out by even his own, usually docile partymates for the patently racist post, Trump passed it off to some unnamed “assistant” who supposedly made the mistake, which Trump claimed to have been too occupied to pay close attention to. Why the President of the United States would leave his personal account open to some junior flunky is ludicrous enough; that he would expect anyone to believe his lame excuse is beyond laughable. His spokesperson derided the ensuing protest as “fake outrage” and called for renewed attention to “the things that truly matter to the American people,” as though racism, decency, and honesty no longer mattered.
But Trump isn’t even the issue here any longer; the man is irredeemably vain, vile, and vicious. (Let’s not even mention—but heck, let’s—his offensiveness to beauty and good taste, with his insistence on gilding the White House, plastering his name all over the place, and picking Kid Rock over Bad Bunny.) Like our own Rodrigo Duterte, he has long cast his lot with Darth Vader & Co., not even pretending to be good, or to be aiming for such banalities as truth, freedom, and justice. In the words of one of his chief lieutenants, Stephen Miller, the age of “international niceties” is over; the only things that count today are “strength, force, and power,” which Trump & Co. have liberally deployed—not against global bullies like Vladimir Putin, but chiefly against the American people themselves.
But again, let’s put the Orange Man aside for a minute. The real danger is that there are tens of millions of people who think the way he does, and who probably thought that way even before he gave Trumpism a face, a voice, and a name. These are people for whom daily doses of falsehood have become the norm, and I really couldn’t care less if they believe that Satanic Democrats drink the blood of kidnapped children, except that their weirdness creeps up to the White House and into the kind of domestic and foreign policy that makes life difficult for us 8,000 miles away, and emboldens other despots.
I’m not saying here that we don’t have our own version of Trumpers to deal with (and I’m adding this paragraph for the MAGAs who’ll remind me to stick to the local, a description I expect them to extend, in MAGA logic, to Greenland). Our DDS, in many ways, offer a parallel constituency; like many MAGA members, their grievances are rooted in historical neglect and a sense of displacement in rapidly changing times. They pinned their hopes on a man who was supposed to improve their lives—but who didn’t, distracted by a megalomaniacal drive to reshape society to his grim vision.
This is why I haven’t given up on Digong’s faithful; there’s a valid cultural dimension to their disaffection in terms of Mindanao and Manila-centrism, but their issues can be addressed by attentive and equitable governance. The corruption issues that have gutted the country have devastated them as well. Except for the shrillest and most invested in a Sara succession, I feel that many can yet be persuaded to choose responsible leadership.
In this respect—and this may not be shared by many, given the lows to which our own politicos have fallen, with some in need of growing a spine and others a brain or at least a heart—I feel more hopeful for the Philippines in the medium term than I do for America, and I think that’s saying a lot.
Now let’s wait for the MAGA backlash; I have lots of Trump jokes lined up to brighten their day, restore their sense of humor, and maybe help bring about world peace.
HAVING NO idea how Gen Z people write love letters (and if they even do), I asked AI, and this is what it told me:
“Gen Z love letters are characterized by digital-native, emotionally fluent, and, often, casual expressions that prioritize vulnerability, mental health, and boundary-setting. They frequently use lowercase, rapid-fire, multi-message formats, and ‘ily’ (informal) or ‘love ya’ to avoid excessive intensity. Common themes include a rejection of traditional, performative romance in favor of ‘soft launching’ relationships (gradually revealing a partner online) and a focus on authenticity over aesthetics.”
I have to confess that the answer left me feeling much relieved to be 72 years old and increasingly irrelevant. If I were young and seventeen today but with the mind and heart that I had back in 1971, I seriously doubt that I could make a significant connection to the Gen Z girl of my dreams, from whom I would have drawn derisive laughter for a long, convoluted, meandering letter asking for a first date (I will neither confirm nor deny that this actually happened). I may have lacked in “emotional fluency,” but certainly not for words, which were all I had when, in 1973, I met a pretty girl named Beng and pounded her with prose, in my crabbed, ungainly penmanship using a technical pen; within months we were married (and still are, 52 years later).
Time was when love needed to be declared in big, bold, wet letters—and I don’t mean letters as in ABC, but letters as in pages of paper filled with scribbled and impassioned professions of affection, sometimes of hurt, sometimes of longing, but always of desire for the addressee. Setting everything else aside, overtaken and overwhelmed by this most urgent need, a man or a woman sat at a desk—or kitchen table, or any hard surface on a beach or a moving vehicle—and put pen to paper to release a flood of pent-up emotion.
It all came down to the same three-word idea: “I love you” (sometimes, or more often, with a fourth word, “but”). As with love poems, some letters were better, more unique, more persuasive than others; most, in hindsight, were likely mawkish or mediocre. But rarely—except perhaps to writers keen on grammar and style—did literary merit matter, neither to sender nor receiver; the profession of love alone was monumental enough. Because it was handwritten and signed, it was personal and deliberate, a statement of commitment impossible to deny.
Indeed what was thought to be intimate and ephemeral sometimes became history. Little did lovers realize or perhaps care they would become famous, and that their private correspondence would become known—thankfully not to their peers but to posterity and the critical judgment of strangers.
In one of the books I treasure most in my library titled The Magic of Handwriting: The Pedro Correa de Lago Collection (Taschen, 2018), two envelopes offer proof of love affairs—illicit in this case, as all the parties concerned were married to someone else—between Lord Nelson and his mistress Lady Hamilton, and between the revolutionary Leon Trotsky and artist Frida Kahlo (who had given the outcast Trotskys refuge in her home).
This was the same free-spirited Frida who would write her husband Diego Rivera that “Nothing compares to your hands, nothing like the green-gold of your eyes. My body is filled with you for days and days. You are the mirror of the night. The violent flash of lightning. The dampness of the earth. The hollow of your armpits is my shelter. My fingers touch your blood. All my joy is to feel life spring from your flower-fountain that mine keeps to fill all the paths of my nerves which are yours.” (To be fair to Frida, Diego was far more liberal with his vagrant attentions.)
In one of literary history’s worst-kept secrets, Vita Sackville-West would write to Virginia Woolf that “I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia… I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality…. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.”
Jose Rizal’s letters to Leonor Rivera were reportedly all burned, but as Ambeth Ocampo notes, two of her letters to Rizal survive, in which she uses the pseudonym “Taimis” and tells him that “I was very much surprised that you had a letter for Papa and none for me; but at first when they told me about it I did not believe it, because he did not expect that a person like you would do such a thing. But later I was convinced that you are like a newly opened rose, very flushed and fragrant at the beginning, but afterwards it begins to wither…. Truly I tell you that I’m very resentful for what you have done and for another thing that I’ll tell you later when you come.” We know how that story ended, with the both of them going their separate ways and marrying another, although Leonor was said to have pined for Pepe to the end.
Again thanks to Ambeth, I can quote Manuel L. Quezon’s 1937 letter to his wife Doña Aurora, where he engages in what today might be called “gaslighting”:
“Darling, I am still wondering if you really think that I love you less. Please don’t doubt me, my love has never changed from the first day I have realized that I was in love with you. I have my weakness as you know, but, dear, it’s all superficial and you know also, that, except for the case of that bailarina, my weaknesses in this respect have not been serious. When you married me, you were frankly informed by me of my shortcomings. I did not want to deceive you by promising something that I could not fulfill. After we have been married you have placed [me], sometimes, in a position when I thought that it was better that I should not confess to you what I had done that might hurt your feelings, but I want you to know that whenever such a thing took place I have felt very bad about it, because nothing I dislike more than not to tell the truth and I always resented the fact that you should prefer to put me in such a situation, thus making me almost hate myself.”
That would still have been more preferable than receiving this ardent letter from a king, and falling for him: “But if you please to do the office of a true loyal mistress and friend, and to give up yourself body and heart to me, who will be, and have been, your most loyal servant, (if your rigour does not forbid me) I promise you that not only the name shall be given you, but also that I will take you for my only mistress, casting off all others besides you out of my thoughts and affections, and serve you only…. And if it does not please you to answer me in writing, appoint some place where I may have it by word of mouth, and I will go thither with all my heart. No more, for fear of tiring you.” The recipient, Anne Boleyn, lost her head in more ways than one, and the sender, Henry VIII, went on to court her successor, Jane Seymour, who wisely returned his love letter unopened—sparking his interest in her even more intensely.
The letter I found too coarse and too embarrassing (brimming with scatological detail) to even quote was written by James Joyce to his wife Nora, but the technologically adept will surely find it online.
My own letters to Beng, and hers to me, are stored in a moldering box that occasionally gets lost and then resurfaces in a year or two, and when we go over them we laugh and cringe at their melodramatic prolixity, as though life itself would run out soon (as it did for many of our generation, under the cloud of martial law, and thus the urgency).
So how do the love letters that we—perhaps the last of the art’s practitioners—have written stack up against history’s and literature’s most memorable? But first, who are “we?”
The immediate “we” are members of our Fountain Pen Network-Philippines who still value and use pens for handwritten communication, beyond signing checks and office forms. Old fogeys like me naturally fall into that category, but surprisingly, given the fountain pen’s and handwriting’s resurgence as a form of protest, if you will, against digital homogenization, many younger people, even some Gen Z’ers, have taken up the cause. Ballpoints are all right—but there’s still nothing better than a vintage fountain pen nib, which flexes with pressure and gives the inked line more character, to convey emotion.
From what I’ve gathered, the best love letters people write go far beyond the often vapid promises and profuse assertions of courtship. They’re unbidden reminders and reassurances of affection, a note quietly written in the morning, a message of congratulations. This, too, is love with a deeper, more hushed voice that comes with maturity and assurance.
I should take my own advice and write Beng more love letters with my hundreds of pens, every single act of which would validate that pen’s existence and probably exorbitant purchase price. I should employ all the colors of ink stored in the dozen bottles that crowd my desk to express love in all its shades and moods, in the same spirit that Robert Graves wrote: “As green commands the variables of green, so love my loves of you.”
But sadly this old man’s fingers have become cramped from being curled too long over keyboards, and can barely finish a page of handwriting before tiring. So instead—though not quite a Gen Z’er accustomed to “lowercase, rapid-fire, multi-message formats”—I write articles like this and stories on Facebook that suggest, ever so obliquely, how central she remains to my life, albeit in Georgia 12 points and .DOCX rather than flowing script. My idle pens, dear Beng, are like the books I’ve yet to write for you, the words still forming in the opaque ink, like the colorful and wide umbrellas I keep buying to shield you with, waiting for rain. So there, and Happy Valentine’s.
I’M WRITING this piece on my 72nd birthday, so I hope you’ll indulge me if I revert to the memory of another January 56 years ago. On the afternoon of January 26, 1970, I milled with thousands of other young students on the campus of the University of Sto. Tomas, the staging ground for a large contingent of demonstrators marching to the Legislative Building near the Luneta (now the National Museum). President Ferdinand Marcos was going to deliver his State of the Nation Address, and a mass action had been called to protest a host of issues, from Marcos’ increasingly authoritarian rule to rising prices, militarization, corruption, and Philippine subservience to American interests.
I had just turned 16, and was a senior and an activist at the Philippine Science High School. But I was no radical—not yet; I stood under the banner of the National Union of Students of the Philippines (NUSP), among so-called “moderates” led by Edgar Jopson, derided by FM as the “grocer’s son” and later to become a revolutionary martyr. Unlike the far-Left Kabataang Makabayan (KM) and the Samahang Demokratiko ng Kabataan (SDK, which I would soon join) who were railing against “imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucrat capitalism,” the NUSP’s cause sounded much more tangible albeit modest: a non-partisan 1971 Constitutional Convention.
What happened next that afternoon, when both groups of protesters converged at the Senate, would change Philippine political history. The moderates had paid for the rental of the protest mikes and loudspeakers, and wanted to pack up early, but the radicals literally seized the paraphernalia—and figuratively seized the day—launching into a verbal offensive that soon turned physical. Then a young journalist covering the event, Jose “Pete” Lacaba provides the reportage:
“Where the demonstration leaders stood, emblems of the enemy were prominently displayed: a cardboard coffin representing the death of democracy at the hands of the goonstabulary in the last elections; a cardboard crocodile, painted green, symbolizing congressmen greedy for allowances; a paper effigy of Ferdinand Marcos. When the President stepped out of Congress, the effigy was set on fire and, according to report, the coffin was pushed toward him, the crocodile hurled at him. From my position down on the street, I saw only the burning of the effigy—a singularly undramatic incident, since it took the effigy so long to catch fire. I could not even see the President and could only deduce the fact of his coming out of Congress from the commotion at the doors, the sudden radiance created by dozens of flashbulbs bursting simultaneously, and the rise in the streets of the cry: “MARcos PUPpet! MARcos PUPpet! MARcos PUPpet!”
“Things got so confused at this point that I cannot honestly say which came first: the pebbles flying or the cops charging. I remember only the cops rushing down the steps of Congress, pushing aside the demonstration leaders, and jumping down to the streets, straight into the mass of demonstrators. The cops flailed away, the demonstrators scattered. The cops gave chase to anything that moved, clubbed anyone who resisted, and hauled off those they caught up with. The demonstrators who got as far as the sidewalk that led to the Muni golf links started to pick up pebbles and rocks with which they pelted the police. Very soon, placards had turned into missiles, and the sound of broken glass punctuated the yelling: soft-drink bottles were flying, too. The effigy was down on the ground, still burning.”
The January 26 rally and the trouble that erupted would lead to the January 30-31 demos that would prove even more violent, and what would become the First Quarter Storm or the FQS was born. “First quarter” would turn out to describe not only the beginning of 1970 but of the decade itself, as the start of 1971 would prove just as incendiary, with the establishment of the Diliman Commune (and of course, now as a UP freshman, I was there). It seemed that the entire country was politically on fire, with protests mounting by the week, and it would all culminate in what everyone predicted: the declaration of martial law in September 1972.
It took another 14 years and another “first quarter storm”—the tumultuous months of January and February 1986, following the snap election—to depose Marcos. Fifteen years later in 2001, on another January, yet another president, Joseph Estrada, would be hounded out of office over issues of corruption.
What is it about these first quarters that provoke such firestorms? And do we still have it in us to begin the year on a note of political resolve?
I’ve been worried, like many of us, that the Christmas break, the congressional recess, and intervening issues may have sucked the steam out of the public outrage that boiled over the flood-control scam last year, and lulled the government into thinking that the worst was over and that we could all just settle back into the old routine: let the Ombudsman and the courts do their job, etc.
What’s worse is if we fall into that mindset, too. The budget deliberations, the Cabral death mystery, the Leviste files, the Barzaga antics, and even a traffic violation episode have all seemed to be distractions from our laser-sharp focus on bringing the crooks to justice. But in fact, they’re all of one piece: demanding better and honest government, the overarching issue we need to press.
And just as the radicals seized the initiative from the moderates 56 years ago, FM’s son, PBBM, can still seize the day by going against all expectations, even against his own nature, and finishing what he may have inadvertently begun: weeding out corruption in government. Never mind the motive—reviving his sagging poll numbers, saving his skin, redeeming the Marcos name, or leaving a worthy legacy behind. He has little choice, if he and his family are to survive.
There are immediate and concrete steps he can take to achieve this:
1. Activate the Independent People’s Commission. The people are waiting for his next move in this respect; get the enabling law passed and the job done.
2. Impeach VP Sara Duterte. The grounds haven’t changed, and the urgency can only increase as 2028 approaches.
3. Revamp the Cabinet, but replace the non-performers. PBBM knows who they are as well as the public—especially the publicity-seekers whose departments haven’t delivered.
4. Find Atong Ang, Zaldy Co, Harry Roque, etc. and jail the big fish—including political allies. It’s hard to believe that with billions in intelligence funds, the administration can’t track and nail these highly visible fugitives down. Justice is perception.
Do these, and maybe we’ll avoid the generational kind of flare-up and meltdown that followed January 26, 1970.
THE DEATH last week at the age of 95 of Cesar Augusto Buenaventura—known to his friends and associates as CAB—marked the passing of yet another member of that golden generation of Filipinos who lived through the Second World War and almost literally built and shaped Philippine industry and society in its aftermath. An engineer by training, CAB was also a management pioneer, a business leader, a civil libertarian, and a valued adviser to presidents. (As a former member of the UP Board of Regents, CAB would often text me for news about goings-on in Diliman, concerned as ever with the state of Philippine higher education and of UP’s role in it.)
I had the privilege of writing a yet-unpublished biography of the Buenaventura siblings (Cesar was followed by social worker Elisa, lawyer Chito, and banker Paeng). And while Cesar chose to self-publish his own three-volume biography a few years ago (I Have a Story to Tell), the original draft has many interesting anecdotes worth sharing with young Filipinos who barely know their economic history. Let me pull up this except you can keep in mind the next time you gas up at a Shell station, visit the UP Chapel, or see a DMCI building.
As soon as he graduated from UP in 1950, Cesar started looking for a job, and almost immediately found one with a man who would become an important influence in his life and a titan in the Philippine construction industry, David M. Consunji. Right after the war, Consunji began building houses—a skill then in high demand in the war-ravaged city—competing on the principle of “price plus quality.” David also made sure that he got the best people and paid them the best wages. And so a strapping 21-year-old named Cesar Buenaventura, fresh out of college, strode into Consunji’s office and got his first job, as Consunji himself recounts:
“In 1951, I hired my very first engineer, Cesar Buenaventura. He was then a young civil engineering graduate from UP who was waiting for the results of the board exams he had just taken. It was my brother Raul, his classmate in UP, who told him to see me because I was starting my own construction company. I thought he was very capable so I hired Cesar.
“Soon after, we started doing our own projects, and among Cesar’s first assignments were three houses we were building in Forbes Park. Forbes was not yet a posh village then; land there was selling at just P4.00 to P6.00 per square meter. After that, Cesar and I did some more houses. I made Cesar the cost engineer and field engineer for our various other projects. He also took care of the payroll, which amounted to P15,000 to P20,000 a week.
“It was in the Laguna College project that Cesar took on greater responsibilities. While we were doing the plans, Cesar said, ‘Don’t bother hiring a structural engineer, I’ll do it. I asked him if he was sure he could do it and he said ‘Yes.’ Every time I would see him, long after the building was finished, I would tell him that it was still standing intact, even after several earthquakes, without a single crack on a wall.
“Cesar was my very first assistant, and even then, I could see that he would go far. I wanted him to stay with us, but he decided to go to the United States for graduate studies in 1952.”
(Upon returning from Lehigh University with his MS in Civil Engineering), Cesar rejoined Consunji for some work on the UP Chapel, which had been designed by a young architect named Leandro Locsin. Locsin had impressed Fr. Delaney with a small church he had designed in Victorias, and now he took on what would become one of his signature pieces, the UP Chapel. Fred Juinio served as structural engineer, with Dave Consunji as the builder.
But armed with his Lehigh degree and eager to make full use of his new learning, Cesar could now consider more options. And the offers came. UP, for one, wanted him to teach, and was willing to pay him P400 a month. But a big petroleum company offered him P300 more, with his salary to be raised upon completing probation as an executive trainee. In 1956, Cesar went with Shell—a decision that would define the rest of his professional life.
In 1975, Cesar Buenaventura achieved what no other Filipino had up to that point by becoming president of Shell Philippines and Chief Executive Officer of the Shell Group of Companies.
Cesar’s rise to the helmsmanship of Shell also got the attention of someone in great need of executive talent: Ferdinand E. Marcos, president of the Philippines and, at that time, the country’s martial-law ruler. With the global oil crisis still hurting the Philippines in the wake of the Arab-Israeli war, Marcos put up the Philippine National Oil Company to explore for oil and develop alternative energy sources, and was scouting for the right man to head it. His eye fell on Cesar, who had just stepped up to the Shell presidency; surely such a man had the skills and the vision to head the new PNOC. Marcos had Buenaventura called to Malacañang.
While he may have been honored to be offered the position, Cesar remembered his father’s admonition against serving in government. He went to see Marcos in the Palace. Luckily, before Marcos could make his pitch and demand Cesar’s commitment, a phone call from the First Lady, who was in New York, interrupted the conversation. Cesar used that break to gather his wits and to come up with the argument that such a move to government would be premature, coming so soon after his appointment as the first Filipino head of a major multinational company. Cesar suggested that he could serve the country’s interests better if he were able to persuade Shell to search for oil in the Philippines—which they eventually did. Marcos did not press the point, and Cesar was spared.
Yet more of Cesar’s friends would join Marcos’s Cabinet: David Consunji, as Secretary and later Minister of Public Works, Transportation, and Communication, then by Dean Fred Juinio in the same post, followed much later by Totoy Dans, when the Cabinet post was divided into two departments—Public Works, and Transportation and Communications. Consunji labored mightily to fight corruption in that notoriously graft-ridden department, only to find himself unceremoniously removed for refusing to play along. Dans followed the same straight and narrow path when took on the job in 1979, but he would later be, in Cesar’s eyes, unjustly vilified for his association with Marcos, even if he hadn’t enriched himself.
So instead of taking what could have been a personally and politically costly detour into the Marcos government, Cesar Buenaventura managed to stay on at his beloved Shell, in a position he would hold with distinction for the next 14 years.
AS NOT a few placards in yesterday’s big anti-corruption march would have said, both President Bongbong Marcos and VP Sara Duterte should resign, along with everyone in public office implicated in the flood-control scandal and all the other shenanigans that have come to light over the past couple of months.
That probably means half the government, but given the current public mood, the more the better, to give the nation a chance to rebuild itself on new foundations of moral rectitude and accountability. At least that’s the long view, supported by the Left among other parties who think that anything short of a national reset will simply paper over the problems and guarantee their comeback.
It all sounds good, and it does make sense—except that, as we all know, it ain’t gonna happen.
It’s about as realistic as the expectation that BBM will fall to his knees, own up to the Marcos billions, and ship all that money back to the Philippines on a FedEx plane for mass distribution, any more than VP Sara will admit to her father’s drug-fueled bloodlust, seek forgiveness of all the tokhang victims, and forsake her presidential ambitions. Let’s face it: the Marcos and Duterte dragons will be clawing at each other all the way to 2028. Meanwhile, what are we mere mortals supposed to do or to hope for?
In the very least, we can ignore the DDS calls for BBM to step down and for Sara to take over, because there’s even less appetite for that than the Both-Resign demand. The Dutertes want to make hay of the moment, but the sun isn’t exactly shining on them. Despite their strong and well-funded social media efforts, the DDS camp seems pretty much in disarray, with Digong in jail, Sara in limbo until February (it tells me something that they approved the OVP’s 2026 budget in full—it’s for the office, not VP Sara, although she doesn’t seem to know the difference), Bato de la Rosa suddenly scarce, and their shot at a junta takeover badly misfiring.
(The ICC’s predictable decision not to grant his interim release could in fact prove to be an ironic win. Digong at this point is useful only as emotional capital for Sara’s survival and triumph. His camp, I suspect, secretly wants him to stay in The Hague as a symbol of the Marcoses’ unforgivable perfidy. Bringing him back home will mean having to take care of a grumpy old man whose greatest ability—cursing—isn’t helping him much in his present situation; he was never a Leila de Lima, and certainly no Ninoy Aquino.)
All the players’ moves are interesting in this grand melodrama. I frankly can’t trust the Left, either, to show the way forward. Like a religion (did I hear someone say “Iglesia ni Cristo”?), the Left likes to flaunt its moral ascendancy—to “virtue-signal,” in today’s parlance—and its rock-solid grasp of the global and local situation from the Marxist standpoint. And yet it gets all tone-deaf and cross-eyed when it comes to picking its horses—ditching EDSA, but backing billionaire capitalist Manny Villar and then pseudo-nationalist and butcher Rodrigo Duterte for the presidency (should we even mention slaughtering comrades it deemed wayward in the Ahos campaign?).
Interestingly, the INC also supported Duterte in 2016, and then BBM and Sara Duterte in 2022. While adopting some progressive liberals like Franklin Drilon, Risa Hontiveros, and more recently Bam Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan into its senatorial slate, it has also flexed its machinery behind Duterte surrogates Bong Go and Bato de la Rosa, as well as corruption-tainted Senators Joel Villanueva and Jinggoy Estrada. During its last mass rally last November 25 for “peace, transparency, and accountability,” however, it was careful to distance itself from recent calls for BBM’s resignation. In other words, the INC is the perfect straddler, the seguristathat makes sure it will survive and prosper under any administration, reportedly to secure key government appointments for its favored nominees.
That leaves us and our own wits, which—considering everyone’s else’s brain fog—might yet prove the most trustworthy.
In the realm of the doable, I want to see heads roll—as close to the top as the situation will allow. One way of looking at this, and strangely enough, is that the Filipino people aside, the party with the greatest stake in seeing this anti-corruption campaign through to the end (i.e., just short of the Palace) is PBBM himself. Having opened this Pandora’s box, he well knows that the only way he can keep his own head and hold sway over 2028 is to catch all those demons he released. I don’t know about you, but right now I’m desperate enough to let BBM finish his term in relative peace if he achieves nothing else than the herculean task of cleaning up the stables.
VP Sara’s impeachment trial should resume in February and will be a more efficient and definitive way to shut her out for good. But we have loads of senators, congressmen, department secretaries and undersecretaries, and lesser flunkies all caught up in this mess who should be held to account for their thievery. Hold the big bosses, the ultimate signatories, accountable, sure. But don’t let the second- and third-level enablers and functionaries off, because the message needs to be sent that complicity won’t pay—and that your sponsors will ditch you when things get too hot.
I want to see our courts work, overtime, to expedite the prosecution of these corruption cases. No pussyfooting, please, no Maguindanao massacre here. Let’s put a quick and decisive end to the kind of legalistic foolishness that lets a senator off the hook for a P30-million “private contribution,” with the judgment rendered by the Comelec commissioner who had previously served as that senator’s lawyer. How the heck can that be allowed to happen? What ethical universe are we in? The same goes for former Ombudsman Samuel Martires’ “forgetting” why he had kept secret his decision junking his predecessor’s carefully crafted case against Sen. Joel Villanueva.
If the Comelec accepts Sen. Rodante Marcoleta’s ridiculous excuse that he kept millions of political donations off his report of campaign expenses because they were meant to be “secret,” then we should launch a million-people march not just against the likes of Marcoleta but also specifically against the Comelec to hound those charlatans out of office. That commissioner who couldn’t find the shame to recuse himself from his former client’s case should be impeached if he doesn’t resign.
I have no problem with people marching and screaming “Marcos, Duterte, resign!”, because we have billions of reasons to be upset with both. But I hope that doesn’t keep us from going after immediate and tangible if less-than-perfect results. Look at it this way—gut the body, and you’ve effectively chopped off the head.
I”M NOT a historian, although there are times I wish I were, and at an early crossroads in my youth, I actually had to choose between Literature and History for my major, settling for the former only because I thought I could finish it faster. But I’ve retained a lifelong interest in history, for the treasure trove of stories to be found in the past and for what those stories might foretell of the future.
I’m particularly fascinated by the prewar period—what Filipinos of the midcentury looked back on as “peacetime” and what Carmen Guerrero Nakpil called our “fifty years in Hollywood,” which were enough to occlude much of the influence of our “three hundred fifty years in a convent” under the Spanish. It was an age of many transitions, from the jota to jazz, from the caruaje to the Chevrolet, from tradition to that liberative and all-embracing buzzword, the “modern.” Much of that went up in smoke during the Second World War, but you can still catch the ghost of this lost world on the Escolta, among other vestiges of our love-hate affair with America. (You might want to visit the Art Deco exhibition at the National Museum of Fine Arts, ongoing until May 2026; I have some items on display there.)
So entranced have I been by this time that I decided, during the pandemic, to set my third novel in it, at the birth of the Commonwealth and upon Quezon’s assumption of ultimate power, an upstairs-downstairs narrative about the comprador upper class and the world of the Manila Carnival set against the embers of the Sakdal uprising, the fuming and scheming Aguinaldistas, and the netherworld of printing-press Marxists and tranvia pickpockets. Progress has been slow because novels always take the back seat to life’s more pressing needs, but I still hope to get this done if it’s the last thing I do.
The research for the book, however, has brought its own rewards. Among my main sources for the background has been a slim volume—long out of print and now very hard to find—titled The Radical Left on the Eve of War: A Political Memoir by James S. Allen (Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1985). Allen (actually a pseudonym for Sol Auerbach) was an American scholar and journalist, an avowed Marxist who traveled to the Philippines in 1936 and 1938 with his wife Isabelle, also a member of the American Communist Party, to meet with local communists and socialists (then headed by Crisanto Evangelista and Pedro Abad Santos, respectively) and to get a sense of the Philippine situation under American rule.
Even that early, the threat of a Japanese invasion was already looming on the horizon and causing great anxiety in the Philippines; Japan had earlier occupied Manchuria and as much as a quarter of the entirety of China by 1937. It seemed like a confrontation between Japan and the United States was inevitable, although some Filipino nationalists—fiercely anti-American—preferred to ally themselves with their fellow Asians than with prolonged white rule. At the same time, others like Pedro Abad Santos feared that the independence Quezon sought would be granted prematurely to give the US an excuse to abandon the islands and avoid confronting the Japanese.
This is where I tell you why I’m bringing up James Allen’s memoirs this Monday—because of our present situation vis-à-vis China and (in one of history’s ironic reversals from victim to victimizer) its growing domination of the South China Sea. In Quezon, Filipinos had a leader who was deeply mistrusted and opposed by many; the United States’ willingness to defend the Philippines was in doubt; and the threat of a foreign invasion was clear and imminent.
Allen actually sat down with Quezon for a long interview at the latter’s invitation, and was impressed by the man’s grasp of politics and his singular ambition. But the article that came out of that encounter displeased MLQ; Allen, after all, was still a communist at heart, which makes the following quotation—from a letter Allen would compose and send to his American colleagues in October 1937—even more interesting. I’ll leave it to you to observe the parallels, and to cast them against the Marcos-Duterte issues of our time.
“Filipino Marxists and radicals need to relate independence from the United States to the world crisis created by fascism. The immediate concern in the struggle for an independent and democratic Philippines is to safeguard the country against the threat of Japanese aggression. The objectives of complete independence from the United States and the internal democratic transformation must be obtained without endangering such gains as have been made or subjecting the country to new masters. The people must be awakened to the prime and pressing danger to their national existence. The United States is moving toward alignment with the democratic powers against the fascist bloc, albeit slowly and indecisively.
“Roosevelt is shifting somewhat toward the Left of Center to keep pace with his mass support from the surging labor movement and anti-fascist and anti-war popular sentiment. The national interests of the Philippines call for vigilance and precautions against Japanese aggression. This coincides with the interests of the United States in the Pacific area, and it would be folly not to take full advantage of this concurrence. In the broader perspective, the outcome of the struggle in China will be crucial for all the peoples of the Far East, and if the United States were to withdraw from the Philippines this would be a serious blow against China and encouragement to Japan’s designs upon Southeast Asia and the islands of the Pacific. The cause of Philippine independence at this time can best be served by cooperation with the United States.
“The situation also requires a change in the attitude toward Quezon, from frontal attack to critical support. Unprincipled opposition for the sake of opposition-as with some leading participants in the Popular Alliance is dangerous, for it plays into the hand of pro-Japanese elements and sentiments. Quezon certainly is not an anti-fascist, but he is not intriguing behind the scenes with Japan. The greatest opposition to his early independence plan comes from the landed proprietors, particularly the sugar barons, while it enjoys support among the people. The Popular Alliance should also support the plan, including provisions for mutually satisfactory economic, military and diplomatic collaboration after independence. Though Quezon is far from being a Cardenas or Roosevelt in his domestic policies, every effort should be made to move him away from his pro-fascist and land baron support by providing him with mass backing for such pro-labor and progressive measures as are included in his social justice program. In sum, the Popular Alliance should encourage a national democratic front devoted to the preservation of peace in the Pacific, the safeguarding of Philippine independence, and defense and extension of democracy in the country.”
AS A professional writer and editor, I take on many jobs that the other side of me—the fictionist, journalist, and teacher—usually wouldn’t get to do. I write biographies, speeches, and feature stories, among others, and while I do them to the best of my ability and to my clients’ satisfaction, they don’t always coincide with my personal interests, nor necessarily inspire me to think or act a certain way.
These past two years, however, I’ve been proud and privileged to perform a very special assignment that I’ve come to look forward to, because it renews my faith in people and my hopes for a better future—phrases that would otherwise just roll off the tongue like so many other tired and meaningless clichés. At 71, I’d like to believe that I’ve pretty much seen it all and can afford to be cynical, as even Gen Z’ers can affect—a bit prematurely, I think, but understandably so in this sad and sordid world of ours.
So it often comes as a surprise to be reminded that some good people persist at doing good if not great deeds, and that’s what this unique responsibility I’ve taken on is all about—writing the citations for the year’s Ramon Magsaysay Awards laureates, a task I inherited from RMAF stalwart Jim Rush and National Artist Resil Mojares. (Before I go any further I should clarify that I have nothing to do with the selection process, I am covered by an NDA—not even my wife gets to know the winners ahead of everyone else—and I cannot and do not cozy up to the likes of Hayao Miyazaki for selfies and signatures.)
This year only three laureates were chosen, but again the range and the depth of their accomplishments tell us that ordinary people can achieve extraordinary successes—not just for themselves but for society at large—with vision, faith, and perseverance, or what the Ramon Magsaysay Awards Foundation calls “greatness of spirit,” the common element among its 356 winners from 23 countries since 1957.
They included Shaheena Ali from the Maldives, an island-country that often appears in tourist brochures and websites as a tropical island paradise, surrounded by aquamarine waters ideal for snorkeling and fishing. Behind this idyllic façade, however, lies a murkier and unpleasant truth. Plastic pollution has befouled the island chain’s crystalline waters, threatening the marine ecosystem, the economy, and the health of its residents. Waste is either burned or tossed into the ocean, producing harmful smoke and microplastics. As a diver, photojournalist, and diving instructor herself, Ali often came literally face to face with the tides of trash clouding up the once-pristine waters of her beloved islands.
In 2015, deciding to fight back, Ali linked up with an NGO, Parley for the Oceans, to frame a comprehensive program to save the country’s waters from pollution and to turn plastic waste into a useful source of livelihood for the people. Today, as executive director of Parley Maldives, she oversees the implementation of their signature strategy: Avoid, Intercept, and Redesign (AIR) plastics for a better environment. With Ali, Parley has introduced plastic interception and collection sites in island communities and over seventy schools, leading over 700 collaborative cleanups along affected coastlines. Ali has also worked with the government to address climate change. “I go there to clean up with hope,” she says, “hope that my grandchildren will see whales in the ocean in their lifetime as I did growing up.”
For its part, India has become both an economic and political powerhouse, with many visible signs of its rising affluence. Despite the overall surge in growth, however, many rural and tribal girls have had no access to an adequate education. Because of this disparity, illiterate girls are forced to marry early, have children, and work—while culturally privileged males go to school.
In 2005, a young graduate of the London School of Economics decided to return home to India to take on this challenge. Safeena Husain established the Foundation to Educate Girls Globally (FEGG) or “Educate Girls.” Starting out in Rajasthan, Educate Girls identified the neediest communities, brought unschooled or out-of-school girls into the classroom, and worked to keep them there until they were able to acquire credentials for higher education and gainful employment.
The results were dramatic. What began with fifty pilot village schools reached over 30,000 villages across India’s most underserved regions, involving over two million girls, with a retention rate of over 90%. Educate Girls also launched Pragati, an open-schooling program that allows young women aged 15-29 to complete their education and avail themselves of lifelong opportunities. Its initial cohort of 300 learners has grown to over 31,500. “Girls’ education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet to solve some of the world’s most difficult problems,” says Husain. “It is one of the best investments a country can make, impacting nine of the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals, including health, nutrition, and employment. By scaling our programs, deepening government partnerships, and embedding community-led solutions, we strive to create a brighter, more equitable future—one girl at a time.”
The third awardee was no stranger to those of us long aware of his special ministry. Flaviano Antonio L. Villanueva or simply “Father Flavie” belongs to that breed of socially committed clergy for whom godliness is to be found not in the halls of influence and wealth but in the streets, among the poorest and the most forgotten.
In 2015, he founded the Arnold Janssen Kalinga Center in Manila to provide “dignified care and service” to thousands of poor and marginalized Filipinos. Kalinga works to recreate the poor’s self-image, reclaim their self-respect, and restore their self-worth. Villanueva also led the effort to locate the bodies of victims of the government’s “war on drugs” where thousands of Filipinos were summarily executed. Often, their impoverished families could not secure permanent graves for them. Villanueva found the funds to exhume, cremate, inurn, and relocate the bodies to a proper resting place. This Paghilom program brought comfort to widows and orphans and allowed them to continue leading productive lives. “Justice can take many forms—among them, the recovery of one’s self-confidence, and forgiving oneself,” he says. Following the late Pope Francis’ example, he initiated showers for the homeless as both a literal and symbolic act of cleansing, to prepare them for a fresh start in life.
I always end up doing more than writing up these people’s stories—I learn from them, and am reminded that instead of just mouthing slogans and railing at the universe—at all the evil, the injustice, and the ugliness we have to live with—we can choose to act and to fight back, like these avatars of social action did.
I’M COMING late to the party, having been away for a couple of weeks, but even in faraway Frankfurt, I was itching to come home to see what the brouhaha over the “Quezon” movie was all about.
Rarely does a Pinoy movie stir a hornet’s nest like this one did, and even without seeing it, I took that as a good sign for our film industry, especially big-ticket projects which sometimes leave people wondering why they were even made.
What especially piqued my interest, of course, was the reaction of Quezon family members and friends who thought the old man’s cartoonish depiction as a womanizing, scheming, and power-hungry politician despicable.
Now, my own grandfathers led pretty quiet lives, so I’m sure that if anyone called them womanizing, scheming, and power-hungry, I’d be mighty upset, too.
The difference is, unlike my lolos and going by what the historians suggest, Manuel Luis Quezon seems to have been all of the above—which isn’t to say he wasn’t much more than all those negatives put together. It was apparently that “much more” that the Quezonistas were looking for—MLQ the patriot and freedom fighter—to balance out the picture, especially since most young Filipinos know nothing of the man except as a place-name. Had that been shown, the outrage might arguably have been muted, the image softened.
But of course that wasn’t what the movie’s makers were going for. As has already been noted by dozens of reviewers before me, “Quezon” is no documentary (and let’s not forget that even documentaries can be biased—just watch Leni Riefenstahl’s adoring portrayal of Hitler and his Nazis in her bizarrely beautiful “Triumph of the Will”). From the outset, it declares that it is mixing up history with “elements of fiction,” which is just as good as using that old commercial come-on, “based on a true story.”
I’m no historian—I’ll confess to being an enthusiast—but as it so happens, I’ve been a playwright, screenwriter, biographer, and fictionist at various points of my otherwise uneventful life, so I can probably speak to these issues with some experience. I can attest, for example, having written some biographies of the rich and famous, that families and descendants can inherit myths about their patriarchs, and treat and pr0pagate them as God’s own truth.
My take is, I don’t think we should receive “Quezon” as history, biography, fiction, or even film. It’s theater (captured on film), and it declares itself as such right from the beginning, as I’ll shortly explain. This may be due to the fact that the script was co-written by one or our most accomplished playwrights, Rody Vera, alongside director Jerrold Tarog. His approach was explicitly stylized and non-realistic, from the use of silent-movie title cards, ghoulish makeup, and painted backdrops in the black-and-white sequences (including that almost balletic choreography of the young MLQ rising from the floor of his prison cell) to the conception and blocking of such scenes as those of Quezon working the floor of the House and the capitalist bosses gathering round the table. (If all this seems obvious and elementary, dear reader, my apologies—in these days of TikTok, I don’t know what people are looking at anymore).
So what if the movie is theater disguised as film? Does that explain or excuse its supposed excesses and exaggerations?
Well, theater is, almost by nature, exaggeration—movements and motives get simplified and magnified, the easier to get them across. Theater is agitational—it aims to provoke emotion, to bring people to their feet, clapping in delight or screaming in rage.
And that’s what “Quezon” did, didn’t it? It got its message across, effectively and efficiently, like a train on schedule, and taking it as theater, I found it roundly entertaining. By and large, the actors carried themselves off with aplomb, from Jericho Rosales’ masterful Quezon, Romnick Sarmenta’s comic-cool Osmeña (his was actually the most difficult role to play, to my mind), Mon Confiado’s aggrieved Aguinaldo, and Karylle’s restrained Aurora. The employment of the fictional journalist Joven Hernando was what a smart scriptwriter would do, to weave the narrative threads together. (Teaser: Quezon and Aguinaldo figure in the novel I’ve been writing about prewar Manila.)
My quibbles have to do with minor complaints like (don’t be surprised) “Wrong period fountain pens again, all of them—why don’t they ever ask me?” (Quezon did hold his pen that odd way, though) and “Does every movie chess scene have to end with a checkmate?” I could have added “Why does everyone’s shirt and pants look fresh in a period movie?” but we’ll excuse those as theatrical costumes.
If there was anything I would have added to the content, it would have been a quiet moment of self-reflection, in which we realize just how Quezon sees himself. That alone might have lifted up his character from caricature.
The real Quezon seems to have been every bit as petty as the movie shows him to be, but also every bit as great, as it seems to have taken for granted.
Quezon had something of a history with the University of the Philippines, whose protesting students (one of them a young buck named Ferdinand Marcos, who accused Quezon of “frivolity” over all the dance parties in Malacañang) led him to ride into UP’s Padre Faura campus astride a white horse to either charm or intimidate them.
He had a long-running tiff with then UP President Rafael Palma over the Hare-Hawes-Cutting Act, and when Palma retired after ten hard years in the hot seat, citing a technicality, the government denied Palma the gratuity that was his due. When Palma died, however, Quezon reportedly went to his wake to deliver a eulogy worthy of the man.
You didn’t see that Quezon in the movie—and then again, maybe you did.
ON THE sidelines of the Frankfurt book fair, over many breakfasts and cups of coffee with fellow writers, the tangled web of Philippine politics inevitably came up for discussion, particularly at this juncture when it seems imperative to sort out the good from the bad (or, to account for the nuances of the moment, the better from the worse).
One interesting idea that came up from a seasoned journalist in the group was the suggestion to create a Truth Commission to receive the testimonies of tokhang survivors and the families of victims, presumably in support of the case against former President Rodrigo Duterte at the International Criminal Court.
The legalities aside—as we don’t know if these statements would even be admissible as evidence—it was argued that what was more important was to compile a dossier of stories, for the people to know now and for the historians and critics to evaluate later. That way, whatever happens in the courts—including the possibility that nothing ever will—a trail of blood and accountability will have been established, an ineradicable record of state-sponsored crime against its own citizens.
Most of us will recall that South Africa set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 1994—at the end of apartheid and upon the assumption to the presidency of Nelson Mandela—to hear from victims of human rights violations and to dispense justice, following the principle of “forgiveness over prosecution, and reparation over retaliation.” We ourselves briefly had a Philippine Truth Commission in 2010 at the urging of new President Noynoy Aquino, organized to investigate graft and corruption under the previous administration, until it was declared unconstitutional even before it could do any real work.
Mandela’s government supported the TRC, led by Archbishop (and later Nobel Peace Laureate) Desmond Tutu, keenly aware of the need to heal the deep wounds left by apartheid so South Africans could move forward to the bright new future that beckoned then.
But that was thirty years ago, and South Africa today remains far from Mandela’s vision of a just and prosperous “Rainbow Nation.” The country remains saddled with corruption and crime, lorded over by new political and economic elites. Despite some successes in its mission of bringing out the truth, in the eyes of many, the TRC failed in what people expected to follow: punishing the guilty and bringing restitution to the victims. (Interestingly, after initially planning to conduct its hearings behind closed doors, the TRC yielded to public pressure and allowed its hearings to be broadcast on radio and television, even appearing as a Sunday TV program.)
In an article for the Nelson Mandela Foundation published online last January, foundation consultant Verne Harris looked back on the TRC’s establishment and pointed out its weaknesses:
“The TRC made wide-ranging recommendations, so wide in fact that it would not be inaccurate to call them a provisional agenda for societal transformation. In my reading of the recommendations, three areas loomed largest in addition to the question of prosecutions: 1) for the longer term healing of a traumatized society to be supported, the state (guided by the ANC) had to find a way of turning the TRC’s own highly stylized performance of testimony into durable community-based spaces for remembering and storytelling; 2) the TRC’s limited short-term reparations work had to be expanded and connected to South Africa’s other special instruments for restitution in ways that would contribute meaningfully to a broader societal restructuring, informed fundamentally by a redistribution of wealth; and 3) the archive assembled by the TRC would have to be built on determinedly and made as accessible as possible both to the public and to the continuing work outlined above. All of these outcomes, of course, were structurally out of the TRC’s hands. They were in the hands of the ruling party and institutions of the state.
“The TRC got a lot wrong, without a doubt. But from the perspective of 2025, it is relatively easy to see that the fundamental failure of the TRC as an instrument of restitution and transformation has to do with the fact that the springboard which it created for continuing work was instead turned into an inert museum artefact by prevailing relations of power. Why did that happen? What went wrong?
“… Elements within the African National Congress (ANC), led by Nelson Mandela, had every intention of turning the TRC springboard into continuing longer term restorative work, but that after Mandela both the ANC and institutions of the state quickly became dominated by constellations of power having a vested interest in shelving TRC recommendations and simply moving on. So, for example, as Du Toit reminds us, in 1999 Mandela was crystal clear on the need for prosecutions: ‘Accountability does need to be established and, where evidence exists of a serious crime, prosecution should be instituted within a fixed time frame. That time frame needs to be realistic … for we cannot afford as a nation and as government to be saddled with unending judicial processes.’ And yet, the subsequent failure to take up prosecutions seriously—there have been a handful of isolated cases and a litany of laughable promises to ‘start the process’—has meant that the ANC has overseen what amounts to a blanket amnesty, the very outcome the leadership had rejected in the early 1990s.”
What we learn from here is that good intentions and even the truth itself can’t ever be enough; once the truth is out, speedy prosecution and commensurate punishment have to follow, or what began as a moral imperative ends up as a sham and eventually a betrayal of the public trust. This bears remembering when we look at the current work of the Independent Commission for Infrastructure, on the results of which a nation’s hopes for deep and overdue reform hang.
My own pedestrian response to the suggestion for a Truth Commission for extrajudicial killings during the Duterte regime was to dissent. Bringing out the truth was a good idea, I said—but we already have a Human Rights Commission to do that. Let it do its job. If it won’t—like an Ombudsman more interested in setting crooks free—then let’s exert pressure to put the right people in place.
It’s about time we put bloody revolutions, street uprisings, special commissions, and other such shortcuts to democracy aside. We have to make the system work, hold people (beginning with our leaders) accountable, and bring justice back to the mainstream.
IT WILLl be remembered as one of the largest, most complex, possibly most impactful—and yes, also most expensive and controversial—showcases of Filipino cultural and intellectual talent overseas, and above and beside all else, that fact alone will ensure that few things will remain the same for Philippine literature after Frankfurt 2025: it will be remembered.
Last month—officially from October 14 to 19, but with many other related engagements before and after—the Philippines attended the 77th Frankfurter Buchmesse or FBM, better known as the Frankfurt Book Fair, in a stellar role as its Guest of Honor or GOH. Accorded yearly to a country with the talent, the energy, and the resources to rise to the challenge, GOH status involves setting up a national stand showcasing the best of that country’s recent publications, filling up a huge national pavilion with exhibits covering not only that country’s literature but also its music, visual art, film, food, and other cultural highlights, presenting a full program of literary discussions, book launches, off-site exhibits, and lectures, and, of course, bringing over a delegation of the country’s best writers and artists.
It’s as much a job as it is an honor. Past honorees have predictably come mainly from the West, such as France (2017), Norway (2019), Spain (2022), and Italy (2024); only once before was Asia represented, by Indonesia in 2016. Little known to many then, Sen. Loren Legarda—the chief advocate for the arts and culture in the government—had already broached the idea of pushing for the Philippines as GOH in 2015. It took ten years, with a pandemic and two changes of government intervening, but Legarda finally secured the funds—coursed through the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the National Book Development Board—for us to serve as GOH this year, announced a year earlier.
The Filipino delegates, over a hundred writers and creatives and as many publishers and journalists, took part in a program of about 150 events—talks, panel discussions, demonstrations, book launches, and performances—and ranged from Nobel Peace Prize winner and journalist Maria Ressa and National Artists Virgilio Almario, Ramon Santos, and Kidlat Tahimik to feminist humorist Bebang Siy, graphic novelist Jay Ignacio, poet Mookie Katigbak Lacuesta, and fellow STAR columnist AA Patawaran.
It was my third FBM, having gone for the first time in 2016 and then again last year, when the German translations of my novels Killing Time in a Warm Place and Soledad’s Sister were launched. This year, it was the Spanish translation of Soledad that was set to be launched at Frankfurt’s Instituto Cervantes.
Those two previous exposures allowed me to appreciate our GOH role for what it was—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to put our best foot forward on the global stage. What began in the 1980s as a tiny booth with a few dozen books—which it still was when I first visited nine years ago—had become a full-on promotional campaign, not for the government (which did not object to outspoken critics of authoritarianism being on the delegation) and not even just for Philippine books and writers but for the Filipino people themselves.
Six out of my eight events took place outside the FBM—two of them involving side-trips to Bad Berleburg in Germany and Zofingen in Switzerland—to bring us closer to local communities interested in what Filipinos were writing and thinking. Indeed my most memorable interactions were those with local Pinoys and with ordinary Germans and Swiss who asked us about everything from the current state of affairs (the resurgence of the Right in both the Philippines and Europe, Marcos and Duterte, the threat from China, the corruption scandal) to Filipino food and culture, the diaspora, the aswang, and inevitably, Jose Rizal, who completed the Noli in Germany and in whose tall and broad shadow we all worked.
Everywhere we went, in Frankfurt and beyond, the local Pinoy community embraced us, eager for news from home and proud to be represented, to hear their stories told in words they themselves could not articulate. “I’ve been living a hard life working here as a nurse in Mannheim,” Elmer Castigador Grampon told me, “and it brings tears to my eyes to see our people here, and to be seen differently.”
A German lady accosted me on the street outside the exhibition hall and asked if I was the Filipino she had seen on TV explaining the Philippines, and we had our picture taken. A German author in his seventies, Dr. Rainer Werning, recounted how he had been in Manila during the First Quarter Storm and the Diliman Commune, had co-authored two books with Joma Sison since the late 1980s, and had describedthe Ahos purge in Mindanao and similar ops in other parts of the islands as the most tragic and saddest chapter in the history of the Philippine Left. A sweet and tiny Filipina-Swiss lady, Theresita Reyes Gauckler, brought trays of ube bread she had baked to our reception in Zofingen (the trays were wiped out). Multiply these connections by the hundreds of other Filipinos who participated in the FBM, and you have an idea of the positive energy generated by our visit.
From our indefatigable ambassador in Berlin, Susie Natividad, I learned about how Filipino migrant workers have to learn and pass a test in German to find jobs in Germany, a task even harder in Switzerland, where Swiss German is required. Despite these challenges, our compatriots have done us proud, as the maiden issue of Filipino Voices (The Ultimate Guide to Filipino Life in Switzerland) bears out.
The FBM was as much a learning as it was a teaching experience for us, for which we all feel deeply grateful. By the time our group took our final bows on the stage in Zofingen—a small Swiss city that hosts writers from the GOH after the FBM as part of its own Literaturtage festival—I felt teary-eyed as well, amazed by how a few words exchanged across a room could spark the laughter of recognition that instantly defined our common humanity.
I am under no illusion that GOH participation will dramatically expand our global literary footprint overnight, but it has created many new opportunities and openings for our younger writers to pursue in the years to come. It is a beginning and a means, not an end. The greater immediate impact will be to spur domestic literary production and publishing, to have a keener sense of readership, and to encourage the development of new forms of writing.
Sadly, a move to boycott the FBM by Filipino writers protesting what they saw to be Germany’s complicity with Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has also impacted our literary community. (For the record, there were Palestinian writers—and even an Iranian. delegation—at the FBM, with whom Filipino writers interacted in a forum. There was also a Palestinian book fair across the fairgrounds.)
I have long taken it as my mission to promote an awareness of our work overseas and had opposed the boycott from the very beginning for reasons I have already given many times elsewhere. Many hurtful words have been spoken and many friendships frayed or broken, to which I will add no more, except to quote the Palestinian-Ukrainian refugee Zoya Miari, who visited the Philippine pavilion and sent our delegates this message afterward:
“I’m on my way from Frankfurt back to Zurich, and I’m filled with so much love that I can’t stop thinking about the love I felt in the Philippine Pavilion. I came back today to the Pavilion to say goodbye, not to a specific person, but to the whole community. This space became a safe space for me, one where I deeply felt a sense of belonging.
“I’m writing these words to thank you and your people for creating a space where
I, where we, felt heard and seen. That in itself is such a powerful impact. I know some people decided to stay in the Philippines to show support for the Palestinians, and I want to say that I hear and see them, and I thank them. And to those who decided to come, to resist by existing, by speaking up, by showing up, by connecting the dots, by being present and by sharing stories, I also hear you, see you, and deeply thank you.
“We all share the same intention: to stand for justice, to fight against injustice, and we’re all doing it in the best way we know how. I truly believe that the first step to changing the world is to create safe spaces where people are deeply heard and seen. When stories are heard and seen, we begin to share our vulnerabilities and showing that side of ourselves is an act of love. Through this collectiveness, this solidarity, we fight for collective liberation.”
Pinoy Penman 3.0 