Category Archives: Pinoys

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.”

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)

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.

Qwertyman No. 116: Dynasty

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 21, 2024

“MAMA, PAPA, I wanna be a congressman!”

Senator Bebot Maybunga and Governor Kikay Maybunga looked up from their dinner plates at Mikmik, who sat at the far end of the table, to where they had deported him for a little peace of mind. Their younger son was given to wild outbursts that disrupted his parents’ serious deliberations about politics, business, and entertainment. Governor Kikay and her friends were planning for Paris Fashion Week, while Senator Bebot was thinking F1 at the Austrian Grand Prix.

“Well it’s about time Hamilton left Mercedes,” Bebot was saying while chewing at his bistek, “after all the crappy cars they built for him. A man’s got to go where he’ll do best. That’s why we joined the Federalistas, right? What’s the use of being a Progresibo if you can’t get any of your projects through? Pity our poor constituents! So we go with the Ferraris of Philippine politics—the Federalistas! And let me tell you something, honey—I’m going to be their Verstappen!”

“Who’s Fershwersh?” asked Kikay. “I want to know what really happened between Nicole Kidman and Selma Hayek. I mean, did Nicole really brush Selma off at the Balenciaga show?” She popped an overripe tomato into her mouth, savoring its sweet-sourness. “The only time I’d swat your hand away is if it was pawing someone else, like that starlet at the XYZ Awards. Don’t tell me you didn’t know she was coming on to you while you played Daddy-o!”

“I want to be a congressman!” cried Mikmik again, this time hitting his plate with his spoon four times for emphasis. Their housemaid Yeye hurriedly mopped the bistek sauce that scattered all around him.

“Stop yelling and finish your food!” said Bebot. “You can’t be a congressman if you don’t finish your food.” That had been Mikmik’s problem since early childhood—half his plate always went to the dogs, so they now had three Rottweilers and three dachshunds, despite which the boy got all puffed up like an Obemio painting. They’d sent him everywhere from the Mayo Clinic to a sanatorium in Switzerland, but all the doctors could tell the Maybungas was that Mikmik had low self-esteem, for which he tried to compensate by eating a little a lot—something called the Schlumpfegel Syndrome, which could be addressed only if the boy succeeded at something truly outstanding, after which he would then complete his meals. It was complicated—and expensive, but thankfully there was all that land that Kikay owned, which Bebot found ways to run public roads and bridges through.

“But what do you want to be a congressman for, hijo?” asked his mama, trying to play the part of the good parent, as Bebot groaned. “It’s a hard job. Look at your Kuya Pepito, he’s always out somewhere with the President, trying to make sure that everything will be okay for—well, everybody.”

“The only thing that bastard is looking out for is himself,” grumbled Bebot. “After everything I did for him, imagine, he goes to Singapore for F1 with the President and leaves me behind!”

“Don’t call him a bastard! He’s our son, he has a father and a mother!”

“Am I a bastard, Mama?” asked Mikmik. Kikay rushed over to where Mikmik sat to wrap her arms around him, as Bebot smirked. Their political enemies had spread the dastardly humor that Mikmik had actually been fathered by one of Kikay’s old flames—something Bebot himself had long suspected, for how could he possibly have spawned such an idiot, but had never pressed because he still needed Kikay’s old-family money for his higher ambitions.

“No, of course not, Mikmik! You too have a mother—and a father!”

“I wanna be a congressman!”

“But your Kuya Pepito is already congressman for the first district, hijo! When his next term ends, Mama will be congressman, because Kuya will be governor.”

“But I can be congressman for the second district, Mama—”

“No, hijo, we don’t live there—”

“But Papa has a house there! A nice house, with a swimming pool!” Bebot nearly choked on his ball of rice, as Kikay’s eyes narrowed into slits. Their political enemies had let it be known to one and all that the senator kept a mistress in the second district, but Kikay decided not to bring it up because, well, she was a firm believer in family unity, and her brothers and sisters would never have forgiven her if they lost their juicy contracts on account of some silly spat over a querida. 

“I know what we can do, hijo!” Kikay exclaimed, struck by a brilliant idea. “We can make you mayor! This nincompoop mayor of ours has been talking about getting his even more nincompoop wife to run against me for governor, so why not take his job? I agree, it’s about time you joined us in this noble profession!”

“Can a mayor drive a big car and go wang-wang? Because Kuya Pepito does that and it’s why I want to be a congressman!”

“Of course, hijo, you can drive a big car around town all day and go wang-wang if you like. You can even have a police escort and they’ll go wang-wang too.”

“And Papa won’t get mad and hit me over the head like he always does?”

Kikay glared at Bebot who was looking away, whistling.

“No, hijo, even senators can’t hit mayors over the head—”

“But if I’m mayor, then I can hit people over the head, right? Like a, a sheriff, right? I saw it on TV once!”

Bebot finally turned and said, “You can’t be congressman, you can’t even be mayor! The law says you have to be at least twenty-three to be mayor, and you’re only twenty-one—at best!”

“What does he mean by that, Mama? Look, Mama, Papa’s making a face at me again, like he’s going to hit me!”

Again Kikay wrapped her arms around Mikmik and flashed Bebot her meanest look. “No, baby, he won’t, and you’re going to be mayor, Mama will make sure of it. Don’t worry about your age, it’s only a birth certificate, and since when was that piece of paper a problem? Mayor Mikmik Maybunga—let’s not forget your middle name, Mikmik Macatangay Maybunga. Aren’t these people just so lucky to have us at their service?”

Qwertyman No. 115: Why I Teach

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 14, 2024

LAST OCTOBER 5, we marked World Teachers Day—not one of our most popular or noisiest holidays (it isn’t even an official one), but one that gives us pause to remember some of the most important people in our young lives. I taught for 35 years before I retired in 2019, and I still teach one writing subject every semester as professor emeritus, so I suppose I wanted to be that “VIP” in someone’s life. 

When we teach writing—and not even creative writing, but composition—to freshmen, we take young people by the hand and help them make sense out of their lives and their ideas, such as they are. The term “composition” applies as much to the writer as to the text: one composes oneself, drawing out the essentials and leaving out the dross. Creative writing pushes that process one step farther, by turning to the imagination instead of one’s limited experience for material and insight. 

The creative writing teacher’s task is not only to encourage but also to guide and to train that imagination, sparing the student from having to reinvent the wheel but affording him or her the thrill of self-discovery. 

It’s an inarguably fine and noble mission. On the other hand, and in economic terms, the teaching of creative writing is brutally inefficient. In a typical workshop class of 20 people, an instructor would be fortunate to find two or three with real talent—an aptitude for language, a maturity of insight, a stylistic flair. Among those, far fewer will have the discipline and perseverance to write and write well for life.

So why should we even persist, or expend public funds to produce boatloads of people who will probably never write the kind of line you will mumble in your half-sleep, or will cry out to the heavens in your most painful or most euphoric moment?

For one, because producing good creative writers is like mining for precious stones, where a ton of ore might have to be torn out of the earth and sifted through to produce one small jewel-grade rock, which has yet to be cut and shaped by expert hands. 

We must also persist in teaching creative writing because the production of new literature reinvigorates and replenishes our imagination as a people, our imagination of ourselves. It is that imagination, however dark, that gives us hope and makes reality endurable. The truth of numbers—of GDP and ROI and per capita income and population growth rates—is important (I’ve often remarked what a terribly innumerate society we are); but it is a limited and even sometimes deceptive truth that barely begins to tell our story. History does this, but without much latitude for pure conjecture. As in painting and the other arts, creative writers have often simply done, and done first, what critics and theorists would later describe and systematize. Creative writing is a breath of intuition caught on paper.

But I also teach creative writing in the conviction that every student—no matter the person’s background—has at least one good story to tell, and that it is our task as teachers to release that story. Most of my students may come to my classes merely to pass the time, or fulfill a requirement, or satisfy a craving for some critical attention; many may never write another story in their lives. But I want them to come out appreciating and respecting the liberative and ameliorative power of art—which is a fancy way of saying that, for those of us who will never be mistaken on the street for Brad Pitt or Superman, here we can be and do anything, for as long as we make artistic sense.

As K. Patricia Cross, professor emerita of higher education at Berkeley, reminds us, “The task of the excellent teacher is to stimulate ‘apparently ordinary’ people to unusual effort. The tough problem is not in identifying winners: it is in making winners out of ordinary people.”

Anyone can write anything, but not everyone can be a writer. By the same token, not every writer can be a teacher. People who have no problems stringing seamless paragraphs of compound-complex sentences can’t give a lecture or an exercise worth an ATM receipt. It takes a different sensibility—and, yes, another set of talents (or what I call a whole bunch of P’s—preparation, perseverance, patience, and passion)—to teach well and to endure in the classroom.

I feel passionate about teaching in UP and in this country, and in giving back to them, through my students, what they have given me. But teaching is not a word I often say in the same breath as love. I cannot honestly say that I love teaching, in the sense of wanting to do it for most of my waking hours, or missing it terribly when I’m doing something else. Teaching is one of the most exhausting jobs you can get. The job doesn’t begin or end in the classroom; it just happens there.

Every time I step into a classroom, I pause at the doorway to expel a deep sigh and collect my thoughts, wondering if I have enough to sustain a 90-minute performance. As the American novelist Gail Godwin famously said, “Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theatre.” Indeed I spend the last ten minutes before class writing a script in my head: I will say this; I will do this; I will bring these props and use them at some point; I will ignite an argument; I will leave them with a question that will buzz in their ears for a week. Even bad stories can be turned to great lessons; where’s the teaching point? How can I say it without crushing or diminishing the person? 

It doesn’t always work—sometimes I simply collapse into my chair and count away the minutes—but we all attempt some variation of this drill. Basically, we are saying: I will do my best to make this day worth their time and mine. It’s what they expect; it’s what I promised.

It is not love but duty that drives me to teach—although duty, perhaps, can also be a form of love; a love not of the thing itself but of some larger principle. That principle to me is service—service to country, people, university, and service to the great and truly free republic of the imagination.

“How do you know that what you’re doing matters?” I was asked once. “How can you tell if you’re making a difference?” My answer was, I don’t know, I can’t tell. But for a teacher, the only distinguished achievement that counts is the quality of one’s students. You are distinguished by their achievement, and in this sense, I have been distinguished aplenty.

Qwertyman No. 114: That Viral Picture

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Qwertyman for Monday, October 7, 2024

IT’S TOO bad that we don’t have space on this page for cartoons, because I would have asked for one to illustrate this piece for this week. Imagine this: a scene at the NAIA baggage claim area on a busy day, with throngs of passengers crowded around the carousel, waiting for their luggage. Behind the yellow line stands a slim senior lady in a simple black outfit, holding on to a cart, chatting casually with her companion. Across them, let’s show two other passengers, both watching the woman intently. The elderly man has this thought bubble: “Oh, wow, that’s Mrs. Billionaire CEO, waiting for her luggage.” The grim-faced young woman beside him is thinking: “Heartless capitalist! Too cheap to even pay a porter!” 

Now how and why did image cross my mind?

Last week, a picture I took of that same scene and which I (perhaps stupidly) posted on Facebook went viral. If I got a peso for every time that image was liked and reposted, I could get myself a new iPhone 16. But what really surprised me wasn’t the velocity with which my post went out there, but how sharply it divided the people who responded to it and the intensity—sometimes the vehemence—with which they expressed their thoughts. Maybe I should’ve expected that, knowing how social media works. As psychologists will tell us, the same picture can mean very different things to different people.

Most responses—especially the initial ones—were positive, and praised the subject for her “just-like-us” simplicity and humility. I saw a lot of messages attesting to this being her usual behavior, harking back to her family’s rise from modest and hard-working origins to their present prominence and affluence. Sure, some of the praise may have been effusive, but it was consistent and anecdotal, drawn from personal knowledge of and encounters with the lady (whom, I have to say, I’ve never formally met, although I interviewed her briefly once on Zoom for a book project). 

And then, perhaps inevitably, the backlash came. Someone accused me of being a stalker and a marites, of invading a celebrity’s privacy. And what was the big deal, someone else said, when we all have to wait for our luggage? In other places like Scandinavia, even prime ministers carry their own bags. Why praise a billionaire for doing what the rest of us do? Why get starstruck by the rich and powerful?

That puzzled me, because I thought that was the whole point. The rich are not like you and me, as Fitzgerald said: they have others do their menial chores for them. (When was the last time you saw a senator or a CEO pick up his or her own bags?) This is the Philippines, not Scandinavia, where entitlement is king; the lady’s noteworthiness comes not from her being one of us, but her being one of them doing something like one of us.

It went on from there to a dissection of the lady’s family fortune and how it was allegedly fattened by the blood and sweat of underpaid contractual workers, particularly at her family’s department store chain. “You’re blind to capitalist exploitation!” someone screamed. (I was aware of the labor issues, which have yet to be fully resolved, but all I decided to reply was “If you say so.” I was blind because it wasn’t what I saw at that moment or was looking for.) “How many UP students have been truncheoned by the police because they marched with that company’s striking employees?” another asked. (I honestly don’t know, but UP being UP, it would have been quite a few. “How many UP students shop at that department store?” I had to ask back. I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t admit to being a suki of that store and a holder of its card; I can’t afford upscale boutiques.) And so on.

I could’ve been snarkier in my retorts, but what for? I’m a quiet and largely benign (I think) presence on Facebook, a platform I eschewed for the longest time before finally giving in a few years ago, out of the need for its marketplace (yes, I was looking for things, not people, which probably tells you something). Since then, despite my natural tendency to stay away from what the Desiderata calls “loud and aggressive persons… vexatious to the spirit,” I’ve run into a good number of them—some even happen to be my friends with good reason to be loud and aggressive over causes they feel passionate about. When you get into social media, that comes with the territory. But at my age, I have to pick my fights, no longer having the kind of moral stoutness that can comprehensively and intensely feel outrage at every instance of perceived injustice; I keep trying to do right, but am happy for small graces in an unkind world.

Much of this goes to how we view the rich from our middle-class perches. There’s a part of us that suspects that all that wealth has to be the fruit of evil, with so many exemplars around to prove it, and another part that yearns for all that ease and comfort (or the lifestyle and the luxury, for the younger set). Having dealt with a number of them because of my work, I’ve come to see the rich and famous as characters in stories with surprisingly unsurprising and fairly predictable arcs, so I’m gratified when now and then I come across an interesting deviation. 

Historians, journalists, and critics will exhaust the complexity of the big picture; they like landscapes. My inner fictionist responds to telling moments in isolation; I draw portraits. To write good stories, we script the unscripted. I often say at lectures that characters become most interesting when they go out of character—when they do something that they were never expected to do, whether good or bad, but which had always been in them in wait for the right confluence of conditions to emerge. I challenge my students to bring their characters out of their usual context to reveal more of their true selves: don’t show a priest in church, but bring him to a fish market, or a construction site (or even a girlie bar, but Somerset Maugham already did that, sort of, in “Rain”).

Social media is a huge lens that hyper-magnifies everything—virtue and vice alike. It’s also a mirror that ultimately tells us that what we see (or decide to see) is who and what we are. My little experiment with a picture that went viral just showed us how.

Qwertyman No. 113: My Lessons from Martial Law

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 30, 2024

I WAS recently invited by a student organization at the University of the Philippines to speak to them about my martial-law experience, given that I had been a student activist in UP during what we called the First Quarter Storm, had been imprisoned, and had, against all odds, survived into a reasonably comfortable old age. It occurred to me, as I entered the SOLAIR building in Diliman where the event was going to be held, that I had last stepped into that place as a 17-year-old activist back in 1971 (that’s me in the picture, second from right, in that building). What had I learned since then? Here are some points I raised with my young audience:

1. We were always in the minority. Even at the height of student activism in UP and in other universities, those of us whom you might call truly militant or at least progressive were far smaller in numbers than the majority who dutifully went on with their studies and their lives and saw us as little more than a rowdy, noisy bunch of troublemakers. And the fact is, we were still in the minority in 2022, which is why Leni lost (yes, even in Barangay UP Campus). This bears emphasizing and thinking about, because sometimes we fall into the trap of believing that since we think we’re so right, surely others must think the same way. Which brings us to my next point.

2. We have to learn to communicate with other people with different views. The phrase “echo chamber” often came up in the last election, and with 2025 looming, it’s even more vital that we master modern propaganda as well as the other side does. This means sharper and more effective messaging. Enough of those two-page, single-spaced manifestoes written in the Marxist jargon of the 1970s and 1980s and ending with a string of slogans. Learn how to fight the meme war, how to navigate and employ Tiktok, Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and all the arenas now open in digital space.

3. When talking about martial law, don’t just dwell on it as the horror movie that it was for some of us. True, many thousands of people were killed, tortured, raped, imprisoned, and harassed. True, the trauma of that experience has lasted a lifetime for those involved. But most Filipinos never went through that experience, adjusting quickly to the new authoritarianism; many even look back to that period with nostalgic longing. That’s proof of martial law’s more widespread and insidious damage—the capture of the passive mind, and its acceptance or denial of the massive scale of theft and State terror taking place behind the scenes. Martial law imprisoned our minds.

3. People change; you could, too. One pointed question I was asked at the forum was, “Why is it that some very prominent student activists turned their backs on the movement and went over to the dark side?” It’s true—many of the shrillest Red-taggers we’ve seen these past few years were reportedly once high-ranking Reds themselves. So why the 180-degree turn? Well, it’s perfectly human, I said, trying to be as kind as I could, despite being at the receiving end of some of that calumny. People can hardly be expected to stay the same after twenty or forty years. Even if many if not most of my generation of activists have remained steadfast in our quest of the truth, freedom, and justice, one’s definition of exactly what is true, free, and just can change. Some people change their stripes out of conviction; some others do it for the oldest of reasons—money and power, or sheer survival. I’m saddened but no longer surprised by brazen betrayal. I learned from martial-law prison that people have breaking points, and some thresholds are much lower than others. 

4. We have to admit we were wrong about some things. This will vary from person to person, and there’s a line that could even constitute the “betrayal” I mentioned above. Some fellow activists will probably disagree with me on one of these key points: armed struggle didn’t work, and it won’t, not in the Philippines nor anytime soon. However we feel about the subject, the fact is, one armed Filipino revolutionary force or other has been at it for more than 80 years now—“the world’s longest running insurgency” as it’s often been referred to—with little gain to show for it. I don’t mean to denigrate the noble and heroic sacrifice of the thousands who gave up their lives fighting what they believed was a brutal dictatorship—many were personal friends—but how many more lives will it take to prove the efficacy of revolutionary violence, one way or another?

5. That leads me to the last point I made to my young listeners: live, don’t die, for your country. We can and will die for it if we absolutely have to (especially us seniors who have little more to lose), but today’s youth have options we never did. In the 1970s, if you were young, idealistic, politically aware, and daring if not brave, you could not but conclude that something was terribly wrong with Philippine society, and that change was badly and urgently needed. You chose between reform and revolution—and it was only a matter of time before you became convinced that the latter was the only way forward. 

Agreed, the basic problems of Philippine society may not have changed much—but one’s ways and means of addressing them have. The growth of civil society—the proliferation of NGOs covering a broad range of causes and concerns—offers practical, focused, peaceful, and professional alternatives to young people seeking social and economic change. One need not embrace the burdens of the entire nation, only to feel inadequate or ineffectual; one can do much if not enough by improving the lives of families and communities. Beyond feeling sorry or guilty for those who fought and died as martyrs, do what you can as a living, intelligent, and capable citizen to create a better Filipino future to the best of your ability.

If this sounds like the voice of a tired old man, it is. I’m tired of death and despair; I choose to fight for life and hope. 

Qwertyman No.112: Reversals of Fortune

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 23, 2024

“ROQUE VS. Roque.” I wish I’d thought up that line, but it was Rappler—yes, that pesky news organization that’s caused many government officials past and present to choke on their soup—that used it for one of their stories on the continuing saga of Atty. Herminio “Harry” Lopez Roque.

In an article posted on September 7, 2020, Sofia Tomacruz reported how Roque had lawyered for the family of Jennifer Laude, the transgender person killed by US Marine Joseph Scott Pemberton in October 2014. On September 3, 2020, Pemberton was ordered to be released by a Philippine court, prompting Roque—still in crusader mode—to recall Laude’s death as “symbolic of the death” of Philippine sovereignty. 

A few days later, however, his current boss, President Rodrigo Duterte, granted Pemberton an absolute pardon, claiming that the convicted murderer had not been treated fairly by Philippine justice (only to add, a few moments later, that as far as drug users were concerned, “Be cruel!”). Spokesman Roque then defended the move as a presidential prerogative—and later rationalized, in his “personal opinion,” that Duterte had made the move to secure American vaccines given the ongoing pandemic. So much for Philippine sovereignty.

It wasn’t the first and certainly not the only time Harry Roque had to eat his own words.

He lawyered for the families of the victims of the 2009 Maguindanao Massacre, where 58 people were killed; eleven years later, as presidential spokesman, he said that “justice had been served” with the conviction of two Ampatuan brothers, despite the acquittal of 56 others. 

But in what has to be the most ironic of these reversals, let’s give a listen to Harry Roque ca. February 2018. Duterte’s nemesis, former Justice Secretary Leila de Lima, had just marked her first year in detention, falsely charged with involvement in the illegal drug trade in what clearly was political vendetta. (The charges would be dismissed and de Lima released—but only after almost seven years.) 

In a news briefing, Roque gloated: “Happy anniversary on your first year of detention. May you spend the rest of your life in jail!” Calling de Lima “the mother of all drug lords,” Roque claimed that “Senator de Lima’s incarceration shows that the criminal justice system in the Philippines is alive, effective and working.” 

Fast forward to September 2024. Asked to explain by a congressional probe how and why his assets in his family business rose from P125,000 in 2014 to P67.7 million just four years later, Roque refused to comply, and was cited in contempt and ordered arrested. On Facebook, he defiantly claimed to be a victim of injustice: “I am not a fugitive because I violated the law. It’s only Congress that considers me a fugitive, and I don’t care. The way I see it, if Congress cited me in contempt, I think Congress is cited in contempt by the people of the Philippines.” 

He had earlier been placed under 24-hour detention in the House, which was investigating him in connection with his ties to a notorious POGO. “I will not wish, even on my fiercest political opponents, to be deprived of their personal liberty and freedom,” he had sonorously spoken of that experience, amplifying his persecution with a reference to a rather more famous political prisoner: “Worse than hunger, said Mahatma Gandhi, is to lose your freedom.”

Let’s forget for a minute that lifetime imprisonment was exactly what Roque had wished on his fierce political opponent, Leila de Lima, who spent 2,454 days in incarceration without even being convicted (even longer than Gandhi, whose total jail time amounted to 2,338 days in colonial South Africa and India). So harrowing must have been his 24 hours in House detention that—faced with the prospect of a few more days in the guest room of an august chamber he once inhabited as a proud member—he declined to yield himself to further scrutiny, and vanished. Given his aversion to discomfort, we can be sure it will only be a matter of time before he resurfaces, perhaps leaner and sexier for the experience.

Indeed, never mind the news, which most people will forget in a week. Worry about scholarship, which, while obscure and often useless, has a way of defining you in perpetuity because of its pre-AI presumption of truthfulness. Harry Roque, I discovered, proved worthy of an academic paper titled “Turn-Taking Strategies of Secretary Harry Roque as a Presidential Spokesperson: A Conversation Analysis” by Janine Satorre Gelaga of Caraga State University, from which I quote:

“Roque had an aggressive and confrontational way of speaking, often responding to criticism or questions from the media with sarcastic comments and eye-rolling…. Roque’s conversation style did not develop understanding, let alone promote public trust…. As Geducos (2021) has put it, “Roque has been at the center of controversy for many remarks that did not sit well with the public.’”

To say the least. How the mighty have fallen, but then again, what can soldiers of fortune expect but, well, reversals of fortune? 

Qwertyman No. 111: Justice Fever

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Qwertyman for Monday, September 16, 2024

A DANGEROUS outbreak of justice fever has hit the Philippines these past few weeks, threatening to make that country’s startled citizens believe that their government is intent on doing right by the people, no matter what and come what may.

In quick succession, Bamban ex-mayor Alice Guo, alleged to be a Manchurian candidate, was picked up in Indonesia and flown back to the Philippines; another on the Philippines’ most wanted list, the self-styled “Son of God” Pastor Apollo Quiboloy, emerged from his subterranean kingdom to surrender to the Pharisees, er, authorities; why, even former Palawan governor Joel Reyes, wanted for the murder of an environmental crusader and long out of sight and out of mind, turned himself in; and it should only be a matter of time before ex-Rep. Arnie Teves comes home from his extended Timorese vacation to face murder charges in Negros Oriental. (I don’t think the return of former Iloilo Mayor Jed Mabilog, hounded out of office by the former President on trumped-up charges of drug trafficking, counts in this category.)

What on earth, you might ask, is going on? Is the government running some secret—and wildly successful—“balik-fugitive” campaign? Were there possibly offers and assurances made of kid-gloves treatment, fully furnished jail cells, state-witness options, conjugal visits, and lifetime colonoscopies?

For a while back there, it seemed like the old regime hadn’t completely vanished—you know, the chummy-chummy-with-criminals vibe, which that viral photo with the chinita mayor smiling sweetly and flashing “V” signs between her two captors seemed to suggest. But justice fever is vicious when it takes hold of its victims, and by the time Pastor Apollo Quiboloy was caught in Davao, the afflicted authorities had learned their lesson, and quickly whisked him away in a C-130 to Manila. Why, President Marcos Jr. even fired the chief of the Bureau of Immigration, Norman Tansingco, over the Guo affair. Illegal POGOs were raided, and captives freed.

As if this spate of high-profile catches and prosecutions wasn’t enough, in the Senate and the House of Representatives—once safely Duterte territory—lawmakers were outdoing each other poking holes into Vice President Sara Duterte’s P2-billion budget proposal. Her friend Harry Roque was found in contempt of Congress and served a warrant of arrest for failing or refusing to account for his unexplained wealth. 

Duterte ally Sen. Bong Go also caught the fever, proclaiming in a tweet that he had always been against POGOs, seeing them as a threat to peace and order. “For the record,” he emphasized, “I really hate POGOs.” Justice fever apparently induces amnesia, because the good senator forgot that three years ago, he voted in favor of RA 11591, taxing and effectively legitimizing POGOs in the country.

All this would have been unimaginable then, but here’s something even more incredible: former President Rodrigo Duterte—who routinely ordered his supporters and the police to “shoot” drug suspects without worrying too much about the finer points of the law—seems to have woken up from a kind of coma, suddenly remembering that he was, once upon a time, a lawyer wedded to the idea that people have human rights. 

We know that because Atty. Digong, probably still in a slight daze but overcome with a resurgent sense of right and wrong, filed charges of malicious mischief against Interior Secretary Benhur Abalos, PNP chief General Rommel Marbil, and PNP Region XI chief Brigadier General Nicolas Torre III in the wake of his patron and spiritual adviser’s arrest. 

Not being a lawyer, I had to look up exactly what “malicious mischief” means. Here’s what I found online: “Malicious mischief is a crime of property damage. In order to convict someone of malicious mischief, the prosecutor must prove the damage done to the property was not accidental. A person is guilty of malicious mischief when he or she ‘knowingly or maliciously’ causes physical damage to another person’s property.”

From what I gather, malicious mischief requires a certain, uhm, finesse, a delicacy that appreciates degrees of injury, and even ironic humor. “Mischief” isn’t like the sledgehammer of bloody, first-degree murder; it’s more like a yap rather than a roar, a pinch rather than a punch. You commit malicious mischief by, say, kicking your neighbor’s dog or unpotting his daisies. It’s meant more to annoy and enrage rather than to kill. (Interestingly, under the Revised Penal  Code, “destroying or damaging statues, public monuments or paintings” and “using any poisonous or corrosive substance; or spreading any infection or contagion among cattle; or who cause damage to the property of the National Museum or National Library” also qualify as special cases of malicious mischief.)

I haven’t read the charges in their entirety, so I don’t know exactly what Atty. Digong was complaining about—I’m guessing door locks broken and, okay, egos pricked. But the mere fact of Digong the Terrible sallying forth into a court of law on a matter as grievous as upended flower pots suggests to me—as I wrote about a few weeks ago—that the man has truly undergone the kind of religious conversion that now allows him to believe in, well, judicial justice. He, too, has caught the fever, and now reposes his faith in a judicial system he once decapitated with pronouncements such as this one from April 9, 2018, referencing then Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno: “I’m putting you on notice that I’m your enemy, and you have to be out of the Supreme Court!”

The only problem with this rash of righteousness and conscience is, how long will it last, and what will happen when it wears off and we return to our old jolly, reprobate selves? 

The Dutertes are easy targets, no thanks to their patriarch’s resolve to establish himself as the least presidential president in Philippine history. His successor is reaping the low-hanging fruit of that unpopularity, enjoying, no doubt, the unfolding spectacle. BBM should be warned, however, that like many afflictions, the effects of justice fever can be long-lasting. Once its victims get used to it, their delusions could linger, and they’ll keep expecting and wanting more, and more.

(Photo from dzar1026.ph)