Writers near and far

The death of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison was an occasion for grief for the writing community the world over. Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2003, for her writing that honored the black memory in American history. She called it “rememory,” the act of inscribing stories and shielding tales from those who would want to banish them from official history largely written by the white majority.

I attended some of her lectures at Rutgers University and at Princeton University in New Jersey when I was a Fulbright scholar 20 years ago. She was a large, tall woman with a sweet and warm voice, and she would always introduce herself in the simplest manner. “Good morning,” she would say, “I am Toni Morrison and today I would talk about the American Novel.”

This was the woman whose novel, Beloved, I read in the PhD class of Professor Thelma Arambulo at the University of the Philippines. And this was the same woman whose same novel I would read again, this time at the class of Dr. Marianne De Koven at Rutgers. Morisson could talk about the difficult novels of William Faulkner with eyes closed. At the Ateneo de Manila University, where I taught full-time for 20 years, whenever I taught Faulkner I came to class armed with a suitcase of notes. But Morrison just sailed into the classroom and talked to us about The Sound and the Fury, that most difficult of novels, took it apart and put it back again as if it were some easy piece of clockwork.

The same clarity can also be found in the mind of A.S. Byatt, whom I met at the Conference on the Contemporary British Novel at Downing College, Cambridge University. She talked about her writing, especially her career-changing novel, Possession which had just been turned into a film. She was also a large woman who spoke slowly, enunciating her words carefully. After her talk, the Filipino writer Felix Fojas and I went to her. I asked her to sign a copy of her book, Sugar and Other Stories, while Felix regaled her with tales about the supernatural creatures in the Philippines.

“Do you know, Antonia,” he said, calling her by her first name and tapping her on the thigh, making me squirm in my seat, “that there is something wrong with your novel, Angels and Insects?”

“And what might be the error, Felix?” she asked gravely.

“Angels are really bodiless creatures. They are just pure spirits. But in your novel, they assume bodily form.”

A.S. Byatt just looked at Felix Fojas silently for what seemed like ten seconds, then she answered with a wicked smile: “But that was how I imagined them to be.”

Imagination was also one strong suit of another Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing, who was also at the same conference. Some people thought she was such a snob but I liked her: she dished her answers as they came into her mind, darting like swift birds. Remember this was the young woman who wrote The Grass is Singing when newly arrived in London from Rhodesia (now South Africa) in 1950. This novel, along with her other books, especially The Golden Notebook (1962), served notice to the world that a startling imagination had arrived.

When asked by a female delegate that since she wrote all those “feminist” books, what does she now think of feminism and where is it heading?

 Doris Lessing, her white curls tight about her head, turned her gaze at the woman and answered coolly: “Please do not pigeonhole my novels as ‘feminist.’ And frankly, I don’t care about feminism and where it is heading.”

Later I went to her and asked her to sign copies of her two memoirs, Under My Skin and Walking in the Shade, which I had just bought at Water Stones. She smiled when she saw her memoirs and she said, “Oh, these books. How could a whole life be distilled in them?” 

Later I would meet Doris Lessing again in New York City, when I was a Fulbright Scholar studying at Rutgers University. I would spend my weekends in New York in the company of writers like Gina Apostol, Eric Gamalinda and Bino Realuyo, with whom I sometimes stayed. One night we were at a restaurant in New York when I saw Doris Lessing enter the restaurant with two people. She had just launched the American edition of her latest novel, Ben, in the World (2000) and she seemed to be in the company of two publicity people. She looked bored.

So I stood up and introduced myself to her. Her eyes brightened and she said, “I do remember you. You were the fellow from the Philippines who bought my two lifetimes at the Cambridge conference.”

I laughed and asked her for a photograph but she demurred, saying she did not look good that night. I thanked her and then she clasped my hand, wishing me well in my writing.

Such generosity is also found in Ngugi Wa Thiong O, whose lecture I attended at the University of Stirling a week after I arrived in 1989, to take my postgraduate degree in Publishing. He used to be called James Ngugi but reverted to his old Kikuyu name, and he was there to talk about his novel, Petals of Blood.

He talked about the origins of his novel, which was based on the dictatorship regnant in Kenya, how the law was flouted, and how the prisoners were tortured in the military chambers. Some people in the audience were shocked by his lecture, not being inured to the ways of dictatorships. After his talk I came to Ngugi Wa Thiong O and asked him to sign Petals of Blood. He asked where I am from and I said, “the Philippines.”

He stood tall at six feet and he regarded me with his liquid eyes. “You are a brave people,” he said, recalling our People Power Revolution that kicked out the dictator Marcos. “Write about your country, Danton, and write about it with bitter love.”

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