This is tomorrow

The more or less annual literary journal of Silliman University, Sands & Coral, came out with its latest issue late last year with the theme "Future Shock," edited by the writer and teacher at the university’s English Department, Ian Rosales Casocot.

Future Shock is described as an anthology of young writers and new literatures, and focuses solely on prose, with a poetry edition to come out early this year.

The double anthology’s theme was inspired by a comment by Dumaguete City’s resident chess master and writer Cesar Ruiz Aquino in a recollection of the late novelist Edilberto K. Tiempo, in an essay that appeared in the S&C issue the year previous, that "he (Tiempo) was establishment, we (young writers of the ’60s) were future shock."

Any similarity with futurist Alvin Toffler, wherever he is now, begins and ends there. In this volume of Sands & Coral, the first of a double-barreled offering on emergent literatures in the south of the country, the remark has less to do with Pinoy-style science fiction than with the age-old tradition of slaying the father.

Though the science fiction genre itself may not be contradictory to the Oedipal concept – on the other hand, what this S&C volume seems to be saying is that this is tomorrow, the future is now, the stories you read here may well set the direction of Philippine prose in English at least in the first years of the new millennium.

Such claims of new literatures have their necessary baggage, among them a creeping self-consciousness if not a studied pretentiousness in fictional as well non-fictional exposition, but then this almost always comes with the territory, and the risk a publication such as this and other of its kind like Evergreen Review and Granta must take in aiming higher than usual.

S&C has the added advantage of being published in Dumaguete, host city of the yearly summer writers workshop that has been a regular rite of passage for young writers, and older ones too just raring to tap the long-dormant juices. This explains why the journal itself has a ready and ever faithful pool of contributors, the only thing lacking being an interesting enough theme or concept.

The latest S&C hits it right on the head, with stories by Fil-Am Sabina Murray, Dumagueteña since transplanted to Manila Lakambini Sitoy, former UP Fine Arts habitué and late bloomer Menchu Aquino Sarmiento, and other up and coming writers like Luis Katigbak, Augie Rivera, Rebecca Khan, Lilledeshan Bose, Peter Mayshle, and Casocot, among others.

It is an impressive list, and their concerns and styles more divergent than the colors of a gasoline stain in a mud puddle. Sure they still tip the occasional hat to the old mentors, but here clearly a new and ambient voice is speaking. The present generation of writers, probably with an average age of not quite 30, have finally broken out of their fetters.

And no where is the changing of the guard more evident than in the fact that last year’s Palanca grand prize winner in the novel was of generation next, Vince Groyon, who curiously is not included in the present S&C, Groyon coming from the other side of Negros (Occidental).

Of the writers in the present volume, Sitoy is the one who dares venture into science fiction, and reaps amazing dividends by exploring the possibilities in this so far underexposed genre in Philippine letters.

Past attempts at Pinoy science fiction have been pathetic excursions into the fantastic better served in graphic novels, but Sitoy in her story "Secret Notes on the Dead Star" stakes out a well defined territory of the imagist future. It could echo Mad Max, but even that celebrated cinematic trilogy was never as lyrical.

Katigbak, who has also been writing interesting science fiction, has a story here called "Passengers" which however is not of that genre. In an essay incorporated in the afterword by co-adviser (with Ruiz Aquino) Tim Montes, Katigbak says how young writers must strive to break new ground and not necessarily pick up the proverbial torch, even as they are constantly aware of tradition’s shadow hovering about.

Bose’s very young voice comes across as post- and ultracool, the new hip without being breezy. She has successfully mined a protracted adolescence to write with mature phrasing that goes beyond feminism. She also has a strong visual bent, the tender years granting her passage to find her center yet.

Khan’s "Drops" is full of ominous foreboding, a story with enough influence of past masters in its strictly linear plot, that nevertheless manages to convey something of the extraordinary in the mundane, and how even compassion can be a lost currency.

A Filipino-western hybrid is evident in Murray’s "Vows of Silence," a tale of subdued pain in the recounting of the death of the narrator’s father as well as her mother’s lover, who also happens to be the father’s best friend. What could be merely be stuff for soap opera is rescued from the potentially mawkish by Murray’s control and subtlety.

Casocot, too, is something of a revelation in the story "Old Movies," which is reassuring proof that the city of gentle people continues to nurture its writers.

In his foreword, Casocot makes no bones that S&C is drawing the lines in current Philippine fiction in English with this issue, though in many ways it can be a beautiful burden.

The young ones certainly have a tough act to follow, but as long as the heart is pure then they have all the right to will one thing: take over the ever shifting future of our country’s fiction in a language that through time can be finally claimed as our own. Not all the duendes in the world can stop them now.