Mothers Earth & literary tributes

Everyone’s pitching in to help Narita Gonzalez, widow of the late great and beloved writer NVM Gonzalez, rebuild her family’s home at the UP Diliman campus. In the wake of that tragic fire 10 days ago that consumed NVM’s literary treasures and his family’s possessions, a flurry of e-mail and text messages has gone around, globally at that, to ensure that the spirit of the phoenix rises again through sheer strength of communal concern and camaraderie.

It is the same spirit that won the test when fictionist in Filipino Jun Cruz Reyes suffered a similar mishap over a year ago. Literary readings cum musical concerts were quickly mounted to assure dear Jun of everyone’s support.

Now the instant call for start-up donations for the Gonzalez family, led off by Mila Aguilar and Jimmy Abad of UP, has generated positive response from UPSCAns in the US. Linda Nietes, an online Filipiniana book seller in California, is committing her own effort to galvanize Fil-Am writers and literature lovers, especially in San Francisco which declared an NVM Gonzalez Day in the 1990s.

A parallel call to help restart a new archive for NVM’s literary memorabilia is being addressed with equal dispatch. Fil-Am poet Nick Carbo in Miami has inquired about the possibility of sending in copies of his correspondence with NVM when he was conducting preliminary work on his landmark anthology Returning A Borrowed Tongue.

We expect a similar gesture from Fil-Am poet-novelist Bino Realuyo of New York, who still treasures a grace note he received from NVM sometime in 1997, when the master chanced upon the young fellow’s first poems ever published here, in The Evening Paper. At the time, NVM was in Baguio City, serving in the panel at the UP Writers Workshop, but he took the trouble of commending Realuyo’s poetry with a handwritten encomium.

Fiction writer and journalist Lakambini "Bing" Sitoy, recent returnee from lengthy peregrination in Europe, has also helped lead the effort with a detailed, front-page story on the blaze that ironically seemed to cap a month of fast and furious literary goings-on.

We’ve had book launches galore, for one, which have had us shuttling nearly daily among venues in Makati, Ortigas, and Quezon City. Tributes have also kept the pace up in making it a memorable month, till Hermann Melville’s "When it’s a grey November in your soul…" brought us all down to charred earth with that improvidential fire.

But there’s no stopping writers from picking themselves up from a nadir and quickly assuming "grace under pressure," per Ernest Hemingway, so that the NVM Gonzalez Awards ceremony still pushed on last Saturday at the UP Executive House, where dear Mother Earth Narita herself expectedly became a picture of amazing grace.

It may be a bit inappropriate to say that the torch has been passed, but indeed it has, to the next generation of fine fiction writers of which the NVM Gonzalez Awards 2005 winner, Exie Abola, bids to be a fast-rising exemplar. Congratulations to Exie, who teaches with us at the English Department of the Ateneo de Manila University. He’s off to a hat trick, having won the top prize in the Palanca short story contest last September.

A nodding hello was all we shared with him during Greg Brillantes’ launching of three books at UP’s Balay Kalinaw on Nov. 16. We hadn’t known yet that Exie had won the NVM Prize, else we would have offered early kudos and a brotherly abrazo.

By the by, Greg’s three new books, with characteristically kilometric titles, were: Chronicles of Interesting Times: Essays, Discourses, Gems of Wisdom, Some Laughs and Other Non-Biodegradable Articles (Anvil); The Cardinal’s Sins, the General’s Cross, the Martyr’s Testimony and Other Affirmations (AdMU Press); and Looking for Rizal in Madrid: Journeys, Latitudes, Perspectives, Destinations (UP Press).

That was the same afternoon when the eminent scholar and annual balikbayan Vince Rafael, of the University of Washington in Seattle, gave a talk in Ateneo and pre-launched his latest title, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Anvil). The official launch was held the following day at PowerBooks in Greenbelt, Makati, but then we had to stick it out at the Loyola Heights campus for another bellwether event, the ALIWW or Ateneo Library of Women’s Writing’s tribute to Tita Lacambra Ayala.

Billed as "Sunflowers and Road Maps: The Many Lives of Tita Lacambra Ayala," the 11th Paz Marquez Benitez Memorial Lecture/Exhibit at the Pardo de Tavera Room of the Rizal Library also served to launch Tita’s latest title: The Rocking Chair Stories (Giraffe Books).

Now, dear Tita’s another mother slash sister slash poet-friend with whom we’ve kept a lifelong bond of caring correspondence. Seeing her paintings at the library’s walls, and her literary archives on exhibit in glass cases, was like being transported back through time and gaining refreshed perspective.

Her celebrity offspring, Joey Ayala and Cynthia Alexander, offered musical numbers for Mama Tita, while yet another pair of Mothers Earth, poet Marjorie Evasco and environmentalist Odette Alcantara, paid tribute to the Davao star who signs her artworks with "TALA" – her initials. For Tita, our generational lady of the flowers who has also mothered The Roadmap Series that regularly features Davao’s young poets and painters, the literary homage was certainly long overdue.

That afternoon, we couldn’t help but think of another lady from Davao, Aida Rivera Ford, who must have recently offered flowers at the foot of the greater than life-size statue of NVM Gonzalez at her very own River Ford Park, where it stands some meters away from another statue, that of his compañero Nick Joaquin.

Another tribute, billed as "An Epic of a Poet: Homage to Cirilo F. Bautista," was conducted by the De La Salle University, its Department of Literature, and the Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center on Nov. 24, at DLSU’s Marilen Gaerlan Conservatory. Among the speakers who rendered homage by deconstructing Bautista’s prodigious output (epic and lyric poetry, criticism, stories and a novel, in English and Filipino) was Dr. Isagani Cruz.

And of course there was that Saturday series of tributes billed as "Pete Lacaba: Retrospektib" held at the News Desk Café on Scout Madriñan in Quezon City, where writers and entertainers read along or sung with Ka Pete, who turned a golden 60 last week.

By the by, a couple of other books launched recently were Merlinda Bobis’ Banana Heart Summer (Anvil) and R. Pandan Torres’ Days of Grace: Selected Poems and New, 1984-2002.

Merlinda took a vacation from her teaching post at the University of Wollongong in Australia to launch her latest fiction title and spend a couple of weeks in her native Bicol. Bacolodnon RayBoy Pandan, a Dumaguete workshop alumnus, joined our ranks of authors with his first poetry collection, which was launched at the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod last Thursday.

Lastly, our congratulations to our Fil-Am bro Oscar Peñaranda of San Francisco, CA for winning the Global Filipino Literary Award for Fiction from the e-zine Our Own Voice, for his short fiction collection Seasons by the Bay (T’boli Publishing, SF). Manong Oka was also recently honored with a tribute in San Francisco for his continuing fine work in poetry, fiction, education and community involvement. One of the stories in the prizewinning book will be included in OOV’s yearend issue, which may be accessed at www.oovrag.com.