Tag Archives: literary

Qwertyman No. 153: Our Literary Fathers

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Qwertyman for Monday, July 7, 2025

THE RECENT announcement of the impending sale of the Solidaridad bookshop in Ermita owned and run by the family of the late National Artist F. Sionil Jose understandably triggered a wave of nostalgia for the place, the old man, his dear wife Tessie, and for a bygone era when people strolled into book stores over their lunch break or after work to browse and pick up an Updike, a Le Guin, or a Garcia Marquez—and, of course, a Sionil Jose, and get it signed by the man himself if he was luckily around. Five decades ago, as a writer for the National Economic and Development Authority just a couple of blocks away on the same street, that browser would have been me, for whom Solidaridad and the equally legendary Erehwon nearby were a godsend, an unlisted perk. 

Indeed Solidaridad and FSJ (or Manong Frankie, as we his juniors called him) were inseparably conjoined in the public’s imagination of a man who was not only our most productive and best-known novelist but also an indefatigable purveyor of great literature and critical if occasionally controversial thinking, through his journal Solidarity and his long-running column “Hindsight,” this very space I was honored to have inherited.

Like many others—even those with whom he had quarreled fiercely—I was deeply saddened when Manong Frankie passed away three years ago. It was particularly bittersweet for me because we had become quite close in his last years, after having been somewhat estranged for the longest time. 

He had taken me under his wing on a writers’ conference in Bali in 1983, in a group of young, aspiring writers finding their way in a broadening literary world. But shortly after, in an interview with National Public Radio in America where I had gone to study, I offered my rather injudicious opinion of his prose—not mine alone—which he must have gotten wind of and found disparaging, because he gave me the cold shoulder afterwards. Like other younger writers, I would bristle at his hectoring moods—which I would better understand as I myself got older—during which he lamented the seeming alienation of the Filipino writer from his or her own social and political reality. 

It was a concern we happened to share, and he began to know and appreciate me as someone who eschewed academic snobbery as much as he did, having transitioned to fiction from a background in journalism rather than the writers’ workshop system that he was deeply dubious of. In other words, we had more in common than each of us thought, and our work in the Akademyang Filipino brought us closer together. At one time I gifted him with the very first issue of Solidarity—Vol. I, No. 1—which I had found, and which he had not seen for ages; he was happy. After my speech at the Palancas in 2017, he came up to shake my hand.

Ironically, this happened at a time when FSJ, ever strongly opinionated, turned off many of his readers with his pro-Duterte sentiments, his putdowns of Nobel prizewinner Maria Ressa and others he thought undeserving of their fame, and his acerbic loathing of certain families he considered oligarchs despite their long having been supplanted by new and far more ravenous overlords. I did not share these views, and he knew that, but I think we had quietly decided that our friendship was more important than our politics. Shortly before he died, he sent me a brief letter that will be a cherished secret to keep until I myself pass on.

I didn’t learn writing from Manong Frankie; rather, I observed and admired his persistence and perseverance, literally writing to the last on what turned out to be his deathbed. I enjoyed his stories more than his novels, but in the end my own preferences don’t matter. He left a sprawling, robust, and indelible body of work that for many readers here and overseas will define Philippine literature in English for the latter 20th century. He led what our mutual friend the novelist Charlson Ong called “a well-managed life,” building a legacy partly through Solidaridad, Solidarity, and Philippine PEN which he led for a long time, apart of course from his work, and making sure he was heard when he spoke. 

His passing reminded me of the other members of his generation—his seniors and juniors by a decade or so—whom my generation in turn looked up to and at the same time, in that perpetual cycle of revolt and renewal, sought to depose. Nick Joaquin we adored as much for his prose as for his prodigious drinking (and seriously, for putting as much of his heart and craft into his journalism as into his fiction). NVM Gonzalez, who happened to have been born in Romblon (and not in Mindoro as many think) several kilometers away and forty years ahead of me, had that common touch many citified writers lost. Edilberto Tiempo I owe for urging me to return to school and devote my life to studying and writing rather than to bureaucratic servitude. 

Bienvenido Santos, twinkly-eyed and gently smiling, was my favorite of them all in terms of the quietude but also the emotional resonance of his stories, so graceful and yet so powerful. If I were to think of a literary father, it would have been Franz Arcellana, whose work may have been so vastly different from mine and yet, as my mentor in school, was the one I sought to please, slipping my story drafts under his office door and praying for his approval. Gregorio Brillantes, the youngest of them and perhaps more properly belonging to the next generation along with Gemino Abad, has been my writing hero for his superlative technique and unfailing sense of character. All these men (and women as well, for whom a separate story should be told) have taught me and my peers much, not just about the craft of writing but just as importantly the writing life, this vocation of books and words we have ddevote ourselves to for the bliss and yet also often the anguish of finding meaning in life through language.

Manong Frankie has passed on and soon so will his fabled bookshop, but his words, as well as ours, now have a life of their own.

Penman No. 275: Listening in Bali

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Penman for Monday, October 30, 2017

 

The first time I saw Bali was 34 years ago. I was a much younger man, then only 29, an eager participant in a writers’ conference organized by F. Sionil Jose, in the company of other Filipinos who included, as far as I can remember, the late Rey Duque, Marjorie Evasco, Charlson Ong, and Fanny Llego. We spent a week in a villa on the steamy banks of Lake Batur, far away from the tourist traps of Denpasar and Ubud, which we would visit only at the very end of our trip.

It was my first time to attend an international gathering of writers, and I was deeply impressed by all the big names I met, aside from Manong Frankie himself—our host, the scholar S. Takdir Alisjabanah, among the pillars of Bahasa Indonesia; the Singaporean poet and professor Edwin Thumboo; the Malaysian poet and lawyer Cecil Rajendra; and the Malaysian-American poet Shirley Geok-lin Lim. I can’t recall a thing I said in the impassioned discussions that took place; that first time, it was all about listening and imbibing the wisdom of the masters in an environment that could not have been more conducive to inspiration.

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The lake was a caldera, which explained the hot springs simmering on its fringes, where we joined the unabashed Balinese in their early-morning ablutions; at night, we argued literature under the spell of the stars and the aptly named Bintang beer, to the faint accompaniment of a gamelan symphony. The one discordant note that I would later write about in a short story was an ill-advised sortie across the lake to a private graveyard, which the locals resented; but even that was a writerly touch, an almost obligatory twist to a near-perfect plot. And rightly so: back home, Ninoy and EDSA had yet to happen, and the country was seething in the darkness.

These memories swarmed through my senses last week when I returned to Bali for yet another literary conference, the tenth annual meeting of the Asia Pacific Writers and Translators (APWT), the region’s largest and most active literary network. Hosted by the Ganesha University of Education in the city of Singaraja in the northern part of the island, the conference brought together about a hundred delegates from all over, but mostly from Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, the US, and, of course, the Philippines, which has always figured prominently in this organization (I sit on its Advisory Board). With me were UPICW Director Roland Tolentino, the essayist and playwright Luna Sicat-Cleto, the poet and translator Randy Bustamante, and my wife the art restorer Beng, an avid observer and fully paid member of APWT.

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Even the most jaded of writers can’t be faulted for flying into Bali and expecting a bit of paradise, and the island and its people can still deliver on that promise in spades. The manicured rice terraces, the monkeys lining the road, the meticulously patterned garlands, the whiskery banyan trees, the uncountable temples and altars—and let’s not forget the scenically smoldering Mount Agung on the horizon—all suggest transport to another realm of blissful serenity. That illusion, of course, was broken fifteen years ago by catastrophic terror bombings that took more than 200 lives, and in the course of our three-day conference, testimonials by our Balinese friends themselves would reveal certain painful realities behind the festive façade.

“It’s very difficult to be a Balinese woman,” more than one of them said (I’m pooling their voices together, as in a chorus). “People expect you just to be a pretty flower. I have a PhD and I make more than my husband, but I still have to appear subordinate to him and to his wishes, and I have to serve him at home, making his coffee and serving his clothes. When I received a fellowship abroad, people congratulated my husband, instantly assuming that it was his achievement and not mine—and I had to smile and say nothing about it. You know why I write in English? Because my husband can’t read English, so English liberates me, allows me to express my true feelings.”

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Another intriguing panel I attended took up “Nostalgia and the Asian City,” and the discussion dwelt on how cities like Hong Kong and Singapore had changed in the literary imagination. But, from the floor, I had to interject the Philippine experience and note how nostalgia in many other places like ours referred to a longing for an unspoiled rural Eden that no longer exists, an unrecoverable if not fact an imaginary past. Over lunch, I pursued the point: nostalgia is being used as a powerful political tool, such as in defense of a mythical “better time under martial law” to support a restoration of that regime.

I was assigned to a panel devoted to protest literature, and found myself grouped with three Australians who spoke on their respective struggles as immigrant, aborigine, and bohemian writers. I chose to speak about our history of protest literature and what a deadly business it was. So, our moderator asked in the end, what were we personally doing to upend the status quo? The status quo for me, I said, was darkness and despair, and it was winning out even in literature, so that there’s nothing easier to write these days than another sad and dismal story. Therefore, I would strive to write happy stories—stories with a believably, hard-won, happy ending—as my form of resistance. We have to fight for joy as much as justice; we have to keep fighting for happiness, hope, and beauty in this age of Trump and tokhang—what else were we persisting for?

As I said those words—which I had not expected to say, but had long been coming around to saying—I felt all of my 63 years, hoping perhaps that some young soul in that audience was truly listening.