Going home

This pandemic requires us to stay home where the virus may not reach us. For so many of us, home is in the provinces, and it is there, too, where our survival is best assured.

Going home reconnects us with our roots, our past, and perhaps, even renews our bonds with relatives, with town mates, with memories. Home also means for so many of us enforced solitude, where we can read, where we can be alone with ourselves to meditate our lives, to look deep into ourselves. I am very sure that when this is over, and we will survive it, almost all of us shall have become different people, I hope for the better.

But what about those who have no homes, who have left their old, perhaps dilapidated houses, to look for one, and those who sleep in the sidewalks, whose roof is the big sky.

Home then for them, is an inchoate reality which houses not the physical self but the imagination, the aspirations all bottled up. And for the hungry – it could be the anger that cannot be vented.

Home – what a sweet and melancholy word. I left mine when I was 13 years old with vague intentions of returning but the fact is I never really returned to it, and all I have are memories of that home or house where I grew up. It was a peasant house, roofed with grass, its walls of buri palm leaves, the posts, the stairs and the floor of bamboo. The entire neighborhood is composed of such houses. A dirt road connected it to the town, and a narrow alley to the rice fields which encompassed the village. It is in a similar village where Tony Samson, the hero in The Pretenders, and his illegitimate son, Pepe, grew up.

The Pretenders

Antonio Samson, in this novel is like Crisostomo Ibarra in Rizal’s Noli, or Simoun in El Filibusterismo. He returns home from the United States with a newly minted PhD, and he is going to teach in the state University. That was his ambition, but he had already compromised himself while abroad by starting a relationship with a girl from a wealthy family. He marries her, and in his desire to be somebody, he abandons his earlier dreams, his teaching profession. He turns against his past and his future. Above all, Tony Samson loses his humanity, his compassion, but not his courage.

This is the tragedy, the end result for those who go home to a home and to a future which they have betrayed.

Viajero

My French translator, the poet, Amina Said, considers this book as my very best single novel. Actually, Viajero can be a part of the Rosales saga because Pepe Samson, the major protagonist in the saga, appears in it. It may be considered an allegory of the Filipino as traveler looking for his final home. The major protagonist, is the young Salvador dela Raza, orphaned in the Philippines and smuggled into the United States by a black American soldier. He grows up pampered and well-provided for but at the same time curious about the land of his birth which his foster father, an anthropologist, new very well. He finally decides to go back reclaiming memory; he goes to the mountain village that he remembers as his first home. In returning to his country, Salvador dela Raza finds his true identity as well as his purpose in life.

When I told Edith Tiempo, the National Artist, about the plot, she suggested that I use the poem by T.S. Eliot, of the Wanderer who goes home and gets to know it for the first time.

Mass

Pepe Samson, the great grandson of Istak Samson in the first novel of the Rosales saga, leaves his village, Cabugawan, to stay with an aunt in Manila and go on to college. He is a sensualist, interested only in eating and sex, although he is still a virgin when he leaves. In the two years that he is in the city, he is completely transformed, his transformation akin to an ideological and emotional journey; he changes his thinking as well, and he decides to return to this village, no longer a truant and sensualist but a revolutionary.

His return, however, is not to that particular village where he grew up. It is a much larger space, defined in the mind, and alive in the heart. His village is no longer a huddle of small grass roofed houses, it has become much much bigger, bigger than he ever imagined in the beginning. The voyage home is often tedious and long if not fraught with danger. The Jews returning to the promise land from Egypt faced many vicissitudes. The mythical Ulysses, going home from the war must navigate his ship through a narrow channel guarded on both sides by huge boulders that clash. He must sail through a realm where sirens sing and lull the sailors to eternal sleep. Reality follows myth; Rizal returning to his town is beset by family problems and bankruptcy, suspicion and distrust. The hundreds of returning overseas workers often find the money they sent home was misspent, their spouses disloyal, their children on drugs. Home has become hell.

Dong-Ao

The conclusion of the Rosales saga is a two-act play, Dong-Ao, the ritualized Ilokano wake, translated into Tagalog by that genius, Rody Vera. It was presented at the Cultural Center a few years back. Pepe Samson, now a tired middle aged revolutionary, is betrayed by a former colleague in college. As allegory, Dong-Ao is also a commentary on Filipinos, their institutions, and those who betray them. With Pepe’s death is the passing of a generation as well as much earlier the exemplars, Rizal, Mabini – all of them hallowed and true will Pepe be the last?

In the end, Home is not Rosales, or Tondo – not even Davao. Home is Filipinas, this unhappy country which is all we really have, if only all of us understood this.