Essays of place and mutable time

The informal essay in English has come of age with a flurry of entries in the Palanca contest this year, ranging from topics such as the search for fathers to patterns of displacement, the prose rich enough to verge on the short story. Indeed a few might qualify as fiction, with a barely discernible plot peeking through.

Consistently in the upper rungs of the lists of the three judges of the category was “Of Legends,” about a Filipino-Arab’s coming to terms with his roots, the narrative shifting between Damascus and Ermita-Malate. Juxtaposition of the two settings a la split screen is a device of fiction and cinema, but here it is employed rather seamlessly in creative non-fiction.

The legends the writer speaks of could well be akin to the Arabian nights, and just when Scheherazade is about to run out of tales to tell the scene gets back to Manila and its gray on gray.

Extensive use of epigraphs aptly frames each section of the essay, the subsequent prose filling up the blank spaces.

Another regular topnotcher was “Dao,” about a yuppie striking out on his own, literally, in a bare condominium unit. Here setting is also a back and forth between the condo and the ancestral home in the suburbs with extended dysfunctional family.

One might remark on the relative youth of the narrator, but for one so young already purged of sentimentality and nostalgia. The bare bones approach is not one of disaffection, but a dismantling of props to get to the heart of the matter. There are rather vivid passages of the elderly contained in the essay, as well as a detached remembrance of a former residence now since turned into an art gallery.

In “Patterns,” the narrator detects a similarity in the series of leave-takings and arrivals from one residence to another, the ride between apartments and habitations the only common denominator. Remarkable too is the author’s power of description, how one house about to be left has a roof resembling a steeple, and how family can scarcely exist without some form of dysfunction.

Maybe the message is that the only permanent thing is change, and that without change you’re as good as dead.

The three unnamed authors of the aforementioned essays have a facility of language not uncommon for a generation with a plethora of gadgets at its disposal, yet the difference is that they do not suffer from attention deficit. Literature is their default mode, or at least the act of writing is.

They could be in their late 20s or early 30s, just out of the old house or into new jobs, with little more than a story to tell.

Others too who made it to the shortlist seem to have been writing for quite a while but the language remains fresh and inventive, on the cusp of insight or revelation.

“Recollections from a Safe Distance” has the narrator’s father cooking the annual pochero every New Year, which happens to also be the old man’s birthday. The cooking and preparation are described as if in a recipe book, and this is interspersed with the patriarch’s stories of the Japanese Occupation and the beheading of some bandidos in the town square. Wonderfully macabre is the passage about how the smoke from last cigarettes of the condemned men wafted out of their torsos after decapitation.

“Ambling North” also receives high marks for being part travelogue and part Freudian reflection, or is this just a mere exercise in syntactics? The essayist remembers a line from a poem by Gamalinda while standing under the huge windmills in an Ilocos town, the beauty and the mortality of it all.

“Chewew” is a laudable heartrending tribute to the author’s late younger sister after a disabling illness, the relation between siblings highlighted by trips to the grand folks’ place and whiling away the time listening to radio programs and observing the house pets. You can hardly blame the writer for a lack of restraint, however clear-eyed and levelheaded.

“A Gun” is a philosophical treatise that would have done students of any academic persuasion proud, again using elements of fiction to drive the essay forward. The pokerfaced, matter-of-fact exposition is itself a manifestation of literary dogma, or is it deadma.

“The Geography of Virtue: Reflections on the Pawikan” has a Fil-Am Jersey girl retracing her roots back to the home country, through the haze of Irish whisky, drugs, and sex.

“Tales from the Felt” is an amusing take on a poker mom and her also card-playing hubby and teenage son.

Two essays that did not make it to the list of the other judges were more like stories or found fiction than essays, no matter how informal.

“As a Blackbird” draws perhaps unintentional references to Wallace Stevens, but it really is a grieving piece over a childhood friend lost in a fire. One image stands out and bears witness to the author’s imagination: just what does a pet bird do when a cloth is draped over its cage? The reader cannot help but grieve along and watch that birdie.

“Corsair of cor-street” is likely the entry most resembling a short story, such that I wouldn’t be surprised if it was also entered in that category. It is also possible that I’d read it somewhere before in the fiction pages of a magazine.

Like most stories, it has a beginning, a middle and an end. Curiously, though, it also has several footnotes that might distract from the flow of the prose, like an academic paper. The writer takes risks, as writers should, and what seemed a loss is really no loss at all.