Pinoy Penman

Penman for Monday, December 26, 2005



Let me use this day after Christmas—Boxing Day for the British, the birthday of Chairman Mao and of the “re-established” Communist Party of the Philippines to some old comrades, and the first anniversary of the Great Tsunami disaster for millions of people in the Indo-Pacific region—for some personal notes, wishes, kudos, and reflections.

My first note is a sad one, coming so soon after the death of a well-loved teacher in the English department of the University of the Philippines, Prof. Pacita “Pachot” Fernandez. The UP community lost another titan with the recent passing of Dr. Alfredo V. Lagmay—a National Scientist and longtime professor of psychology, whose teaching and research influenced generations of Filipino psychologists and social scientists.

The forthcoming history of the University of the Philippines—which I’m helping to edit—contains numerous references to the contributions and ideas of Lagmay and his colleagues in the philosophy department, people such as Ricardo Pascual, Armando Bonifacio, Ruben Santos-Cuyugan, O.D. Corpuz, Pepe Encarnacion, and Cesar Adib Majul, some of whom—like Lagmay himself—would become luminaries in other fields such as political science (Corpuz), economics (Encarnacion), and history (Majul). These teachers and scholars had towering intellects, and they established—for those of us who were their students and who followed them into the professoriat—a standard difficult to match but ennobling and exhilarating to even aspire for.

Lagmay himself took his PhD in Experimental Psychology under B. F. Skinner at Harvard in the mid-1950s, but he returned to devote the rest of his life to promoting the study and teaching of psychology in the Philippines—especially the new approach of Philippine Psychology or Sikolohiyang Pilipino, which takes the particularities of our culture into account, fusing psychology with linguistics. (Instead of accepting the traditional notion of “bahala na” as an expression of leave-it-to-God fatalism, for example, Lagmay chose to see it as an expression of resolve and risk-taking in the most stressful, unpredictable situations.) Lagmay was also a staunch advocate of academic freedom and fought many good fights on its behalf.

It must have been around 1968 or 1969 when I first met him; he used to pick up his daughter Cherie at the Philippine Science High School in his white Rambler American, and while I was only 14 or 15 then, he did me the great honor of treating me as an adult, once telling me (years before I would find out for myself) how so much of the academic life was tied up in committee work—a phenomenon he described as “comitology.”

But our most memorable encounter took place just a few years later, when I was 17 and in the thick of the short-lived but exuberantly defiant Diliman Commune, a student uprising in February 1971 that barricaded the UP campus against the military hordes massed at its gates. I was new on the staff of the Philippine Collegian, and our editor Tony Tagamolila felt it was imperative for us to publish an issue during the Commune; but the printing press was out in Quiapo. The barricades meant that while no one could get in, no one could also get out without attracting unwelcome attention.

So, close to midnight, we went to the house of the only professor I personally knew who might be able to help us: Alfredo V. Lagmay, who lived out in Purok Aguinaldo. We roused him from bed and explained the situation. Without any if’s and but’s, Dr. Lagmay pulled his Rambler out of the driveway and we piled in. I can’t remember what story he must have put past the guards on the other side of the barricade, but he took us as far as we needed to get on a regular jeepney, and the Collegian came out with its special Commune issue. Many, many thanks, Professor, for that and a whole lot more.



IN A HAPPIER vein, let me congratulate my younger brother Jess (Jose III) for winning second prize in the Supreme Court National Essay-Writing Contest for Law Students on “Judicial Reforms Under the Davide Watch”, sponsored by the Philippine Association of Law Professors and the Association of Law Students of the Philippines.

He and I picked up our love of writing from our father, Jose Sr., who wanted to be a lawyer but who was too poor to finish college. This was why my mother—a 1956 BSE graduate from UP—spurred us to get our degrees no matter what it took. After many twists and turns, I got my AB in English in 1984, at the age of 30; Jess just got his in Journalism, thanks to the Polytechnic University of the Philippines’ special program for working and older students, at the age of 49. As soon as he graduated, Jess entered law school at the University of the East to achieve a lifelong dream of his and to realize my father’s as well. (Our sister Elaine also became a lawyer relatively late, after she had already built up a successful career in finance.)

I suppose Jess had the advantage of maturity in this competition, but he speaks of his law classes with the bubbly enthusiasm of the freshman that he is. Keep it up, brother! Incidentally, first place went to UP, and third place to Ateneo; I can live with that.



ONE MORE person deserving of special congratulations this Christmas is Anthony F. V. Serrano—friend, guide, and confidant of generations of UP Writers Workshop fellows. Now approaching retirement after decades of faithful service to the UP Creative Writing Center (now the Institute of Creative Writing), Tony finally published his own first book of poems, Quantum Fluctuations (Manila: UST Publishing House, 2005, 66 pp.).

A gentle person whose quietness disguises a robust passion for life, Tony has been the writing community’s unofficial keeper of secrets—and the source, we sometimes suspect, of riotously good but probably apocryphal stories about writers and their escapades. As it now turns out, his best-kept secrets were his own. They are these poems, and in these poems, written in a plaintive, almost archaic, vocabulary.

Critic Lily Rose Tope calls the book Tony’s “secret garden of sentiment and words. The poems are personal, intimate, at times revealing, and yet like the man himself, introspective, mysterious, gently evasive. His poetic garden is a wordsmith’s paradise where neologisms and verbal inventiveness are the norm. It is also a romantic site where love takes center place in the poetic architecture—the heart hurting, hurtful, desiring, desirous.”



SPEAKING OF books, let me share my joy in discovering—or make that rediscovering—the treasure trove of used and remaindered books on the fourth floor of National Book Store in Cubao. (I believe they have the same setup at NBS Quezon Avenue.)

I found myself with a free hour on my hands a couple of weeks ago and remembered Clinton Palanca mentioning to me once that he went up to that floor for his fix of French books. I don’t read French, but any bookstore that has a corner for such rare treats must have something more, and I gave up my usual foray into the seafood section of Farmers Market for a stroll though the NBS shelves.

What a cornucopia it turned out to be—shelf upon shelf and row upon row of books in glorious disarray; there was some effort to put all the books, say, about the vacation-spots of England in one corner, and all the computer books in another, but ultimately a grand disorder prevailed, refreshing and compelling in its challenge for you to explore the place for its hidden prizes. I’d stopped buying books for some years, having hopelessly fallen behind in my reading of what I already had, and I’d forgotten what a pleasure it was to brush the deckled edges of carefully bound books or to savor the prose of an unremarked genius.

In the end, I came away with a fine balance between interests old and new: the hardbound and well-illustrated In Search of Shakespeare by Michael Wood (P500), and a thick paperback I just couldn’t resist, Infinite Loop (How Apple, the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company, Went Insane) by Michael S. Malone (P360). There went my budget for crab and shrimp, but I’m not complaining.



AND SPEAKING of National Book Store (the STAR’s partner in promoting book reading), I received an e-mail from a former student, Ginny Mata, who’s now working as the Projects Coordinator of the National Book Store Foundation, Inc., the official corporate social responsibility arm of NBS.

“As a foundation,” Ginny says, “we create and implement projects geared towards the promotion of literacy and education by making books more accessible to Filipinos. Our flagship project, Buklat-Aklat, is a 400-book-strong mobile library that goes around public schools and barangay halls in the Philippines. To date, we have benefited over 1,000 schools since the project started in 2001.

“We’re looking for volunteers who can help us with the creation and maintenance of our official website; getting educators and literacy experts to give free workshops and seminars to public school teachers in the schools we will be touring in; story-telling sessions for the public school kids in the schools that we will be touring in; and suggestions as to where the Buklat-Aklat library can tour, and when.”

All forms of assistance are welcome. If you think you can help, please e-mail Ms. Mata at matalu@nationalbookstore.com.ph, or call their office landline at 631-8061 loc. 1111. (UPDATE: Sorry, but Ginny doesn't work with NBS anymore.)

Penman for Monday, December 19, 2005



WHEN I teach fiction writing to undergraduates, I take them through a two-semester program, devoting the first semester to realist and the second to non-realist fiction. My idea is for young writers to develop or at least be aware of basic skills that almost any genre of fiction will require—attention to detail, some notion of dramatic necessity and plausibility, character development, the use of time, the physical setting, and so on—before they move on to experimenting with if not subverting these elements.

It’s an old-fashioned approach, and one that some of my young students understandably chafe under—especially the kind of bright, impatient mind eager to jump into the things most important to him or her, which likely have nothing to do with rendering believable scenes in a painterly sort of way. Granted, there’s always that genius whose time you might be wasting on finger exercises, who has imagined and peopled universes you yourself have never seen; but anyone that good doesn’t need to be in my class, or in a creative writing program for that matter; that person should just go ahead and write, while making good money as a banker or a wine merchant.

On the first day of CW 110, someone in the back row inevitably groans or winces when I announce that, for the time being, I would not be accepting science fiction, fantasy, or magic realist stories; they’d have to wait another semester—or drop the class.

I don’t want to dull or kill anyone’s imagination—people can always write for themselves outside of class, like they did for centuries before creative writing courses became all the rage—but I liken my method to teaching and learning draftsmanship or figure drawing, which every budding architect or artist goes through in school. I’ve also tried to get young writers to realize that it’s a lot more difficult to deal with the here-and-now, with the in-your-face concretion and surface dullness of things, than to invent new civilizations in distant galaxies far, far away. That merely reflects my conviction that a writer’s truest and hardest challenge lies in probing the obvious, the commonplace, the simple, and the uninteresting to reveal its hidden marvels and mysteries.

Somehow this policy seems to have earned me a reputation for being anti-sci-fi or anti-fantasy, which just isn’t true. As a kid, I devoured science fiction, or what there was of it in the 1960s. I was particularly enamored of the Martian series of Edgar Rice Burroughs (yup, the very same one who would create Tarzan in 1912 a year after he introduced John Carter, a Confederate Army captain who, a Burroughs website notes, “is whisked to Mars and discovers a dying world of dry ocean beds where giant four-armed barbarians rule, of crumbling cities home to an advanced but decaying civilization, a world of strange beasts and savage combat, a world where love, honor and loyalty become the stuff of adventure…. Without Burroughs there probably never would have been Star Wars!”). The Martian or “Barsoomian” books, numbering 11 (I read them all, and still have a copy of Llana of Gathol), would later be acknowledged by Ray Bradbury and Carl Sagan among their seminal influences, so vivid and compelling was Burroughs’ imagination.



I also plowed through the Tom Swift series—he was a boy-gadgeteer and adventurer—and picked up what stray issues of pulp sci-fi magazines I could find on C. M. Recto, encountering such masters as Robert Heinlein, Frederick Pohl, Isaac Asimov, and, of course, Bradbury (whom I would later discover was a terrific writer as well of conventional fiction). For some odd reason, I missed out completely on Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and on “Alice in Wonderland,” for that matter; I guess I was a hardware kind of guy even then, for whom E. T. did nothing and Star Wars looked like a toy store gone amuck, but who sat through 2001: A Space Odyssey and the whole Aliens series spellbound.

I graduated from a science high school and might’ve been a biologist or an engineer if my math grades were any better; so why didn’t I do sci-fi when I made up my mind to become a writer? Partly, it had to have been because of my involvement with the Left in the 1970s, imbibing its heavy emphasis on realism (or a variety of it); and in graduate school in the US in the 1980s, minimalism (yet another, dehydrated, version of realism) was king. The other reason was that I didn’t have any good local models to work with or work from, and I think it’s because science fiction requires, well, a certain level of science and a scientific consciousness to seize the popular imagination. We Pinoys seem more receptive and attuned to fantasy and romance—less of the futuristic than the medieval kind (of which, on the other hand, modern epics like Star Wars are just high-tech remakes).

And there’s my problem with some of the sci-fi (or, to enlarge the concept, the speculative fiction) that I’ve come across in my classes, in workshops, and in the occasional magazine or journal. The stories can be too plainly derivative, unimaginative, juvenile, and even downright incredible. Of course you can say that as well for many drafts of realist stories I get in class, but I tend to expect more from speculative fiction, precisely because it’s pushing the horizons of the possible. The strain often shows in stories that spend an awful amount of time and detail on “worlding” or the creation of new life-forms, societies (utopian or dystopian), social rules, and technical gadgetry without paying enough attention to the human drama at the very core of things. Secondly, as though flustered by our scientific and economic backwardness, some authors have chosen to deny our realities altogether, fast-forwarding into the distant future and bleeding nearly everything Filipino out of their stories.

To this I’ve responded with a challenge that my students have coming out of their ears: write me a marvelous, credible sci-fi or fantasy story that takes place, say, at a Jollibee outlet in Cubao. In other words, turn everyday grime into fairy dust.

I’m glad that, whether they heard me or not, young Filipino authors are beginning to create and define a distinctly Filipino brand of speculative fiction. A few years ago, while judging for the Palancas, one story I was impressed by had a band of space travelers thinking that they had gone back in time to witness the crucifixion of Jesus Christ—not realizing that they were watching a Pinoy senakulo at Lenten season. One of the most memorable stories in this year’s batch of NCCA Writer’s Prize submissions was one that revisited Jose Rizal’s execution at Bagumbayan, as observed and monitored by more sentient beings. (Not all sci-fi is futuristic; Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent "Sur: A Summary Report of the Yelcho Expedition to the Antarctic, 1909-1910”, published in 1982, has nine South American women reaching the South Pole ahead of everyone else, only to keep it a secret—“feminizing,” as the critics would say, “a masculine legend.”)

And today we have new cause for celebration, with the recent launch of Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1, edited by Dean Francis Alfar. The 200-plus-page book (published by Kestrel, Inc., and available for P300 at all Fully Booked and Comicquest branches) features the work of 18 young Filipinos—some younger, some better known than others, but all of them imbued with the same visionary zeal that the editor (this year’s grand prize winner for the novel in English in the Palancas) is making a name for. The back-cover blurb declares that “Between these covers you will find magic realism next to science fiction, traditional fantasy beside slipstream, and imaginary worlds rubbing shoulders with alternate Philippine history—demonstrating that the literature of the fantastic is alive and well in the Philippines.”

Dean, whom I first met in a UP Writers Workshop many years ago, is proving to be a powerful and positive influence over a group of young authors and artists dedicated to new forms of and new directions in Philippine writing, beyond the sometimes stolid realism that I and my generation of writers espouse. (His wife Nikki, herself a Palanca prizewinner, shares in this mission.) While paying homage to their elders and precursors like Alfred Yuson and Rosario Lucero, these young writers are seeking to write what Alfar calls a true “literature of the fantastic—unashamedly magical, beyond lyricism and tenor and style.” Dean explains further: “To find the fantastic, we must create the fantastic. We must write it ourselves, develop it brick by enchanted brick. We must write literature that unabashedly revels in wonder, infused with the culture of our imagination—which means being Filipino and, at the same time, surrendering that very same limiting notion—being more than Filipino, unleashing the Filipino of our imagination, divorcing and embracing the ideas of identity, nationhood and universality. We need to do magic.”

The authors in this volume—the first of a planned annual series—are Cyan Abad-Jugo, Angelo R. Lacuesta, Ian Rosales Casocot, Nikki Alfar, Francezca C. Kwe, Vincent Michael Simbulan, Douglas L. Candano, J. Pocholo Martin Goitia, Joseph Nacino, Gabriela Lee, Tyron Caliente, Pauline Orendain, Khavn, K. Mandigma, Sean Uy, Jay Steven Uy Anyong, Andrew Drilon, and Dean Alfar.

Good luck, guys. I was always more of a Star Trek than a Star Wars fan, but may the Force, as they say, be with you.

Penman for Monday, December 12, 2005



I HADN'T BEEN to Malaysia in 13 years, so I was happy for an opportunity to return for a literary conference a couple of weeks ago. The invitation from the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka—Malaysia’s language and literature institute—had come months earlier, and while it didn’t include airfare (I used frequent-flyer miles that would’ve expired anyway), the prospect of three nights at the five-star Hotel Istana in downtown Kuala Lumpur sounded positively tempting.

The last time I flew into KL in 1992, it was also for a literary conference—a bit farther on, in the resort island of Penang—but I remember that trip more for the abject penury that my roommate (the poet Fidel Rillo) and I had to endure, subsisting for days on cheap hawker food while the Thais and the others lived it up in the revolving rooftop restaurant. (Today, of course, I find nothing more delectable than Hainanese chicken.) Our only relief came when we were hosted in KL after the conference by the late lamented Luisa Mallari, then still taking her PhD in Malay literature, with whom we gorged streetside on beer and barbecue. It left me with the firm impression that, for an otherwise Islamic country, Malaysia was coolly laid back. And even in 1992, I was amazed by the absolute flatness of the asphalt roads, the general cleanliness—you know the drill: everything we didn’t have then and still don’t.

This time around, Malaysia was even more impressive, starting with a new airport that had a train take us just from one terminal to the other. About an hour’s drive from downtown (and half that by high-speed train), the airport far outstripped many others I’d seen in Europe and the US in modernity.

There’s something about locating your international airport way out in the boonies—like Chek Lap Kok in Hong Kong and Centrair in Nagoya—that has always appealed to me. First, the shuttle service between the airport and the city center is bound to be faster than slogging through the downtown traffic; and second, it gives the arriving visitor time to take in the scenery, compose himself or herself, and form an attitude to the place and to the visit, picking up both obvious and subtle hints from the unfolding landscape and one’s fellow passengers on the shuttle.

The first thing that struck me about the view outside the window was its greenness; the palm trees seemed squatter than ours, but most looked none the worse for hosting a stubborn colony of vines. And then the raw countryside began giving way to new estates and increasingly urban construction, distinguished by the gentle arches of traditional Malay architecture. When I saw the twin spires of the Petronas Towers shimmering climactically on the horizon, I knew we had arrived—and so had Malaysia, not too long ago our economic peer, even distantly our backwater (just before the War, we had the highest per capita income in Southeast Asia).

The contrasts softened at close range; the taxi I got into exuded a familiar rattiness, and the Istana itself, while certainly comfortable and centrally located (as most tourist brochures will take pains to remind you of their offerings; location is all), had seen better days. My first impulse on arriving in a new place is always to hit the streets for a stroll through the nearest mall or market, and I did; we were in Bukit Bintang, mall central itself, and I set out to confirm (as I invariably do) my unoriginal thesis that the world is ruled by Starbucks and KFC.

As I would discover over the next couple of days, Malaysians love malling just as much as we do; there were five or six of these malls within walking distance of my hotel, ranging from the ultrasophisticated Starhill Gallery—where, on one floor, posh watch brands like Chopard and Ulysse Nardin had huge shops, not just shelf space, all to themselves—to the decidedly more pedestrian BB Plaza. I myself wasn’t looking out for anything, but you know how it is, and I walked away with an export-surplus Brooks Brothers shirt for about 500 pesos from the factory-outlet store in KL Plaza.

I did do more than shop or window-shop; I actually attended every session of the seminar, never mind that 75 percent of it was conducted entirely in untranslated Bahasa. In today’s headlong rush toward English, Malaysia’s official downgrading of English to privilege Bahasa seems strangely anachronistic and counterproductive (as some young Malaysian intellectuals themselves are pointing out), but it’s a long, complicated, and continuing debate.

Mahathir’s Malaysia seemed stupidly out of step when it refused to peg the ringgit to the US dollar when everyone else did—but the sky didn’t fall, and the economy’s booming. Twenty years ago, Petronas was a backroom operation working out of rented office space; today its twin towers are among the world’s tallest buildings, and I have to confess—despite being no big fan of Mahathir’s or Lee Kuan Yew’s experiments in social engineering—that those towers are an awesome sight, especially at night when they sparkle like diamond-encrusted brooches against the velvet sky.

So once again, as always happens when I venture into a roomful of fellow Southeast Asians, I felt the odd man out, despite the intriguing closeness of many of our words: bukit (hill or mountain), jalan (road), masuk (entrance). One interesting difference, my hosts would point out, was sayang—to us, a sorry waste, to them, a sweet affection.

More parallels emerged in the news: the scandal of the week was a video being spread by MMS of a Chinese woman detained, stripped, and humiliated by Malaysian police. A bigger furor arose when the government chose to focus on who took and spread and the video, rather than on what it contained.

In another story in the New Straits Times, a man running a pyramid scheme fled with 5 million ringgit (about P70 million) of his investors’ money, but not without sending them an apology by text: “I am sorry. I have no other choice. I’ve to run and hide.” The irate investors ransacked his home for anything salvageable—computers, bottles of wine, even the front gate, which someone tore off with a crane.

“Oh, why are wives in dramas so rude?” bewailed an NTS headline, quoting a politician. “Why can’t we produce dramas like those from Korea and Japan? These show wives speaking respectfully to their husbands, even when they are having a disagreement,” lamented opposition MP Salahudin Ayub—a man, naturally—in deliberations over the 2006 budget.

In the same budget proceedings, the Deputy Minister of Culture, Arts, and Heritage swore to keep Satan’s minions out of Malaysia: “Black metal groups are not welcome in Malaysia,” he said, citing a group called Mayhem, which was “anti-Christ, anti-all other religions, and anti-establishment. It promotes devil worship.”

As if these weren’t entertaining enough, the politicians invoked poetic license in aid of legislation, resorting to the pantun, a traditional Malay quatrain: “Proceedings were livened up yesterday when many MPs decided to show off their creative prowess and pepper their speeches with pantuns. They asked their questions in pantuns, sought clarifications using poems, and even replied in a similar manner—with hilarious consequences.”

Why, now, I thought, there’s something where our congressmen can do the Malaysians one better—in producing the same hilarious consequences, without bothering with the poetry.



SPEAKING OF literature, I’d like to help publicize a new book showcasing creative work by countrymen we hardly know and hardly ever hear from—the lumads, the indigenous peoples of the Philippine South. The book is titled Sikami'n Lumad: Bagong Panitikan ng Katutubong Mindanaw, and it was launched last Tuesday at the Ateneo Professional Schools in Makati. Published by the Davao-based Mindanawon Initiatives for Cultural Dialogue, it features lumad poems, folktales, short stories, histories, and accounts of rituals.

I’ve long known Mindanawon’s director, Fr. Albert Alejo, SJ—himself a prizewinning poet—and can understand him when he laments the fact that as in life and law, the lumads feel left out even in literature. “People hear only the twin voices of the Muslims and the Christians,” Fr. Albert says, "leaving the indigenous peoples out of the picture."

The book is also a way of generating funds for Mindanawon’s college scholars, who come from various tribes and who are taking courses ranging from education and law to computer science and agricultural technology.

To help, please buy the book (available through the Ateneo de Manila University Press) or send a donation to the Mindanawon Foundation, Inc., Metrobank Savings Account # 667-3667017000, Davao Doctor's Hospital Branch, Davao City, Philippines. You can also e-mail them at support@mindanawon.com.

Penman for Monday, December 5, 2005



EXCUSE ME while I put on a serious mien to talk about being funny. Below is an excerpt from the continuation of a paper I delivered last week in Kuala Lumpur at a conference on “Literature and Politics”:

Journalism, not creative writing, has taken to the forefront of political engagement in the Philippines. We pride ourselves in having Asia’s freest—some would say most licentious—press, and again it has served the cause of public debate with riotous distinction. And over the past few years, Filipino journalists have paid the price for their audacity. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, the Philippines is the “most murderous country in the world” for journalists—more than Iraq, Colombia, and Bangladesh—with 18 journalists killed in the line of work since 2000. [Two more were killed since I wrote this paper—BD.]

No Filipino novelists, poets, playwrights, or essayists have recently shared in this dubious distinction, and for good reason. For all the literary talent we think we have, it can be argued that creative writers really don’t matter in Philippine politics—certainly not as much they used to—because, to be hyperbolic about it, no one reads, no one buys books, and no one understands what we’re doing.

It’s a sad fact that in a country of over 80 million people, with a literacy rate of about 95%, a first edition for a new novel or book of stories even by an established author will run to no more 1,000 copies—which will take about a year to sell, and earn the author less than P50,000 for a few years’ work. There’s no such thing as a professional novelist (outside the popular komiks) or poet in the Philippines, which makes it easier for writers of any worth to be sidetracked or co-opted by the government or by industry.

It’s ironic that Philippine literature’s political edge should be blunted not by timidity nor by censorship but by sheer logistics or market forces. The simplest and clearest reason many Filipinos don’t buy books has to be poverty, with the price of an average paperback being higher than the minimum daily wage prescribed by law. Even among the middle class readers whom we expect to be our major market, we face stiff competition for the same disposable peso from, say, John Grisham.

But perhaps we writers ourselves are partly to blame, for distancing ourselves from the mainstream of popular discourse. Politics is nothing if not the domain of the popular, and the very fact that many of us write in English is already the most distancing of these mechanisms. The question of language has always been a heavily political issue in multilingual Philippines, where some regionalists still resent the choice of Tagalog as the basis of the new national language Filipino in 1935, and where English is reacquiring its prominence not only as the lingua franca and the language of the elite but as our economic ticket to the burgeoning global call-center industry.

The inadequacy of English as a medium for the creative expression of native experience was put forward by such poets and critics as Emmanuel Torres (quoted by Gemino Abad) who said in 1975 that “The poet writing in English… may not be completely aware that to do so is to exclude himself from certain subjects, themes, ideas, values, and modes of thinking and feeling in many segments of the national life that are better expressed—in fact, in most cases, can only be expressed—in the vernacular.” With this, Abad (himself a poet and critic) vehemently disagreed, contending that “If anything at all must needs be expressed—must, because it is somehow crucial that not a single spore nor filament of the thought or feeling be lost—then one must needs also struggle with one’s language, be it indigenous or adopted, so that the Word might shine in the essential dark of language. Otherwise, the vernacular, by its own etymology, is condemned to remain the same ‘slave born in his master’s house.’”

It’s an old debate that those of us who inhabit the postcolonial world have dealt with and engaged in for ages. But to cut that long and familiar story short, even if Dr. Abad were correct in claiming for English the ability to convey every nuance of our native experience, the fact remains that any kind of writing in English—least of all creative writing—will reach a severely limited number of Filipinos. What may be fine for poetry could be absolutely useless if not even counter-productive in politics.

Politics, of course, is more than a numbers game, especially where the few have always ruled the many. Political change in the Philippines has historically been led by the middle class, from the Revolution against Spain of 1896 to the anti-Marcos struggle of the 1970s and the 1980s to the Edsa uprisings of 1986 and 2001. Therefore, one might argue that English is, in fact, the language of reform and revolt in the Philippines. But it is this same English-literate middle class—our potential readership—that is the strongest bastion of neocolonialism in the Philippines, blindly infatuated with Hollywood, hip-hop, and Harry Potter, keen on trading the local for the global, opportunistic in its outlook and largely unmindful of the social volcano on the slopes of which it has built its bungalows. As I often say at home, our rivals on the bookshelves are not each other, but Tom Clancy, Danielle Steele, and, yes, J. K. Rowling.

I’m certainly not suggesting that we stop patronizing these authors. Rather, if we are to be interested at all in readership and consequence, we Filipino writers should re-examine whether there are huge unvisited corners of the popular imagination that we have failed or even disdained to reach.

In a recent lecture on “Our Revolutionary Tradition,” the essayist and sometime government minister Adrian Cristobal (who incidentally attended Baguio as one of its youngest participants) observed that “English is not the enemy, it’s the absence of a common language. We can, as intellectuals—whether writers, journalists, orators, politicians—fulminate as much as we can against an unjust social order—but it’s doubtful that we can move out multitudes to revolution. We cannot touch their minds and hearts because we speak in a foreign language, because despite all our protestations, we are also of the elite by virtue of our alien education. We gain prestige, we can even achieve glory, but we shall remain out of touch because we cannot reach the hearts and minds of the many. For to reach the heart of the Filipino requires the discovery of its language.”

Indeed it may not even be the language but the medium and the mode of creative expression that we should be looking at. Given the near-constancy of turmoil in our politics, it’s hardly surprising that new forms of protest literature have arisen—chiefly, the SMS or “text” message as it’s more popularly known in the Philippines. According to industry reports, “at least 200 million text or SMS messages are sent every day in the Philippines—that's more than two for every Filipino and earns the country its reputation as the world's SMS capital.”

The extreme fluidity and the cumulative force of these text messages brought a flood of people to the streets and helped depose President Joseph Estrada in 2001. The opposition’s weapon of choice was comic ridicule in the form of the “Erap” joke—“Erap” being the presidential nickname—which circulated with lightning speed, cementing the public (or more accurately the middle-class) perception of its leader as grossly corrupt, incompetent, and therefore unworthy of continued support.

The most popular ones addressed his alleged stupidity and venery in ways for which ordinary citizens elsewhere would have been shot or imprisoned, but not in the Philippines. Given the numbers, repression would have been futile. More than a hundred million text messages would fly across the country at the height of the frenzy, most of them bearing another call to arms, or another joke to bring President Estrada down another peg. These text messages and jokes were reinforced by spoofs of popular songs, distributed on CDs that couldn’t be duplicated fast enough. It may be an overstatement to say that technology did Estrada in—Chairman Mao’s dictum about “people, not things” making the difference would be well worth quoting at this point—but what we call “Edsa 2” or “People Power 2” would certainly not have gone as smoothly as it did without some digital lubrication.

Today, with Mrs. Arroyo, the situation is somewhat different, although it’s ironic and telling that her credibility and Presidency are being undone by another technological imp—the digitized copy, in CD and transcribed PDF formats, of a damning series of wiretapped conversations (the “Hello, Garci” tapes) President Arroyo was supposed to have had with an election commissioner who promised to deliver the votes she needed to win. A flood of GMA jokes—like the old Erap jokes—swept the cellular networks.

Like other examples of folk humor, these short, spontaneous, and often imaginative comic outbursts are, I submit, a new form of popular literature that empowers individual citizens and allows them to engage political authority in a manner that may not be directly confrontational and certainly not violent, but whose cumulative impact can wear reputations down as water does stone. A despot should have more to fear from text jokes, from messages forwarded to dozens of Hotmail and Yahoo addresses, and from a satirical comedy skit on TV, than from any novel or epic poem or three-act play. (This reminds us of Martin Esslin’s proposition that the dominant dramatic form today is the 15-second TV commercial, which contains all the elements of classical drama, delivered in a compact, compelling way.)

Those jokes and the deep wellspring of satirical humor that bred them need to acquire more permanence in a Great Filipino Comic Novel, which has yet to be written.

I’ve often remarked on this strange feature of our literary landscape, so far removed from our everyday reality as a people: the crushing humorlessness of much of our literature. We are a laughing, smiling people; we laugh even in the worst of times and the most perilous of moments as a nervous reaction and as a coping mechanism. We have had great comedians like Dolphy and comic heroes like Juan Tamad—dunces, tricksters, kind-hearted rogues, characters who survive by their wits no matter what. But when we write novels, it’s as if we were confessing to a priest or preaching from the pulpit instead of confiding in one another; our words suddenly acquire a numbing solemnity, a high seriousness that may yet be Jose Rizal’s most enduring and yet also most paralyzing legacy to his successors.

I remain convinced that fresh comic insights—instead of belabored iterations of the sadness we already know—are the key to the revitalization of our literature, and that comic sufferance, not tragic suffering, may yet be the best nexus between Philippine literature and politics.