Farewell to formidable ladies of the word

Sadly, a couple of much-admired lady writers left us recently.

Alice V. Guillermo had been ill for some time. Friends in UP Diliman had organized benefit activities, one of which featured a donation of an artwork by premier singer-composer and visual artist Jess Santiago, who gifted her family with a wonderful watercolor portrait of Alice.

Last month, at the Likhaan workshop on the novel where we both served as panelists, I had thought of asking her son Bomen how she was, but thought better of it, afraid to hear the worst. A fortnight later, she was gone. She had reached her 80th year. My sincere condolences go to Bomen and his sister Sofia, and their dad, literary artist Gelacio Guillermo.

If memory serves me right, Alice had briefly joined the Manila Critics Circle organized by Dr. Isagani Cruz over three decades ago. We had some meetings at the Asian Institute of Tourism restaurant. Her status as an art critic of the first water certainly qualified her in helping our small group (then still with poet-authors Alfrredo Navarro Salanga and Ophie Dimalanta) decide on the outstanding books on art for the year.

 Apart from her distinguished scholastic record that included a magna cum laude for her Education degree and a scholarship from the French government, she authored numerous books, among them Social Realism in the Philippines (1987), Blanco: The Blanco Family of Artists (1987), Alfredo Carmelo: His Life and Art (1990), The National Museum Visual Arts Collection and Cebu: A Heritage of Art (1991). This was in addition to her prolific output of reviews and critiques for various publications.

She won the Art Association of the Philippines’ Art Criticism Award in 1976, a Palanca award for an essay in Filipino in 1979, and a Japan Foundation Fellowship Grant in Tokyo in 1991. She also chaired the Art Studies department of the UP College of Arts and Letters

Both the art world and the written word suffer from her passing.

Barely had Alice been laid to rest when an even more senior lady of letters had our writing community mourning further. The demise of Carmen Guerrero Nakpil occasioned numerous tributes online.

Most memorable for me were the lengthy recollections offered by Pablo A. Tariman and Jojo G. Silvestre. Pablo shared his breaking column, “Islander in the City,” on “Carmen Guerrero Nakpil: 96 Years of a Life,” from which this excerpt is drawn:

“If she introduced me to history without pain (and with a dose of humor), imagine my surprise when I found out she lived history.

“After reading her autobiographical trilogy (Myself, Elsewhere; Legends & Adventures; and Exeunt), my admiration grew many times over.

“From those books, I saw the writer as a human being and survivor and the many roles she played in her lifetime.

“The trilogy is a goldmine of film material. Her life would make a ravishing period film, with her nostalgic account of life in Ermita before and after the war.

Carmen Guerrero Nakpil in champagne form at one of the last times she joined the CG N lunch club organized in her honor. (Photo by Mav Rufino)

Pablo also quotes from her last book, Exeunt, where “Nakpil confronts the inevitable”:

“I have come to the conclusion that old age is really just a form of slow death. That’s probably why people say that ‘the good die young.’ They die swiftly, in their prime. The other kind, ‘the poor sinners’ like me, hang on, unaware that the series of minute changes, difficulties, disappearances that occur with increasing regularity, a tooth missing, a bone breaking, a sudden ache, a mysterious weakening are really part of the inevitable final dissolution.”

That’s a fine example of her elegant, exquisitely crafted prose, which was also marked by a characteristically nuanced evaluation of memory and history’s ironies.

Silvestre’s account of Chitang’s discourses with Nick Joaquin was infinitely interesting:

“She and Nick were very close friends. They shouted at each other and fought over issues, with Nick Joaquin holding his beer in one hand while the other gestured: ‘If not for the Spaniards, Chitang, you would be an Igorota.’ She thought to herself, so what is wrong with being an Igorota? Aloud, she told him, ‘No, I would be Princess Urduja.’ She was one of the boys in Philippine letters and journalism ‘because I drank with them. I could out-drink all of them in the National Press Club and the Overseas Press Club.’”

It reminds me of a similar recollection by Cesar Ruiz Aquino, in his 2008 essay “The Beautiful Filipina in Philippine Literature.”

“… Nakpil wrote that Maria Clara was a caricature — ‘a silly girl, coy, sentimental, and often rather foolish.’ But having read Nick Joaquin’s defense of Maria Clara against her 1930s detractors, Nakpil says that Rizal’s literary creation was ‘not all of a piece’ and concedes that the girl who “was so utterly feminine that everyone wished to protect her… was also strong…’

“… (However), Maria Clara is … seen as insufferably soggy and affected. But it is the following remark that may have particularly outraged Nick Joaquin: ‘The greatest misfortune that has befallen Filipino women in the last one hundred years is Maria Clara.’ It is even the first sentence of the essay, and the last straw for Joaquin, who … in turn wrote Hamlet and Maria Clara, a refutation of Nakpil‘s piece…”

Chitang was as gracious and generous a person as she was formidable, with a keen intellect that allowed humility in her own appraisal of her topnotch literary skills. She once granted a request for a blurb for a book of my essays. It was so positive that it made my big ears flap.

Around a cocktails table one evening, she turned self-deprecating when her novel The Rice Conspiracy was mentioned. It was our company’s turn to pooh-pooh her concerns.

She certainly remains one of the fortunes that have blessed the Filipino writer in the last hundred years, and beyond.