To be worthy of great writers

Last week’s column (“Preying on Ignorance”) generated a strong and largely positive response that surprised me. I was stunned by how strongly people felt about what I wrote: a defense of literature, and Philippine literature especially, against a recent column by The Manila Standard Today’s Connie Veneracion in which she dissed Amado Hernandez’s novel Mga Ibong Mandaragit. It was a surprise, and an exceedingly pleasant one, to see how fervently many people in this country believe in the value of reading literature, and one’s own literature, as well as teaching it in our schools. I received several e-mails and text messages from people thanking me for the article, some of whom even passed it along to other readers; a few bloggers have linked to the piece and generated further discussion. For this I am most grateful.

As a way of continuing the conversation, I’ve compiled a handful of quotes from some of the responses to my piece (and Veneracion’s too), comments that amplify some of the points I raised or that pursue others that I was not able to touch on or did so only briefly.

Many of those who wrote were, like me, taken aback by Veneracion’s disparagement of Hernandez for writing a “difficult” and “incomprehensible” novel and her insistence that literary works be easy to read. Dino Manrique, writer and founder of sites FilipinoWriter.com and PinoyFilm.com, wrote in his blog, “Veneracion errs because her underlying thesis is that all literary works should be easy to read linguistically and structurally. She doesn’t take into account the reality that in literature, there are many ways to communicate, that sometimes, or actually most of the time, the story is in the telling itself. . . . My theory is that we Filipinos have been so cut off from our own language and our own literature that these two things have become totally foreign to us. . . . We cannot lay the blame on our authors for our incompetence and negligence. Imagine, taking the creators of our culture to task because we are intellectually lazy and have abandoned something which is supposed to be an intrinsic part of us.”

On the contrary, a complex or difficult work can be the most fulfilling, according to Wyatt Ong, a student entering her third year in Ateneo. “Some of the finest work I’ve ever read (and I’m not one to boast that I’ve climbed highest of literary mountains) were also the most difficult, and the most fulfilling,” she writes in a blog comment. “The only experience I’ve ever had with Hernandez’s work was with his poem ‘Isang Dipang Langit,’ and even if it took me a couple of days to figure it out, being as limited as I am with the language, to this day that remains one of the most beautiful, emotional works in Filipino I’ve ever read.”

The attitude that reading, and by extension learning, should be easy has larger, more serious consequences for society, according to FH Batacan. The author of Smaller and Smaller Circles, perhaps the country’s first crime thriller in English, Ichi writes in her blog: “What worries me about (Veneracion’s piece) is what it seems to be saying about learning and work in general: that these should be made easy, easily digestible, easily absorbable, easily doable, with quick and easy payoffs. That doing so is somehow democratic — note that defiant ‘They are not all of us’ — and that failing to do so is elitist.

“I’d say the complete opposite. To pursue simplicity and ease at the expense of the tough and sometimes necessarily painful process of learning is to ill-prepare our young people for the realities of our time and the crushing problems of our country and our world. It is to leave them vulnerable to the real elitists — our corrupt politicians, our profit-oriented media — to take advantage of. It is to leave them weak and easily daunted by challenges — and plain lazy. It is to leave them ill-equipped for all but a few life options. . . .

“This stupidification of our national consciousness has been going on for years, but it seems to have snowballed in the last decade. . . . Is it a stretch to extend an argument over literary standards into the larger issue of a nation’s work ethic and approach to learning? I don’t think so. Cancers start small. . . . Where does this sense of entitlement come from? And where do we draw the line? If a passing grade, a diploma are made easy to get, what of a job, a career? What of the things that must be expected from a good citizen, a good civil servant, a good government? Do we lower the bar on these too, so as not to be accused of that deadly sin of elitism?”

Academic and sometime colleague Ina Stuart Santiago elaborates on the need to decolonize the Filipino mind through an encounter with Filipino texts particularly in a culture where English reigns supreme. “(The dichotomy between high art and low art is) particularly difficult for a text such as Mga Ibong Mandaragit,” she writes in her blog. “Yes, Ka Amado’s status as a Tagalog classic that’s required reading makes him ‘high art’ in a sense, but contextualize that in the continued dominance of Philippine writing in English (and here I speak not just of literature but of magazines and blogs as well), and the notion of high and low become problematic. . . . The presence of these Filipino classics (Mga Ibong Mandaragit, Florante at Laura, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo) in our school curriculum is anything but an effort at making it more difficult for our daughters (and apparently their parents) to appreciate literature. [It] is the product of a continuous struggle to wrest our classrooms from the throes of a Western(ized) syllabus/reading list. And yes, save our children from colonial mentality.”

Good thing we have teachers like Paz Verdades Santos of La Salle who try to get students to encounter the works of our own culture. “Term after term,” Doods writes in an e-mail, “I meet students who have ‘white heads, brown bodies’ and who look down their noses at Philippine literature because of arrogant and colonial-minded parents and teachers. Fortunately, they eventually see the beauty of folk forms such as the Mangyan ambahan and the Ivatan laji, as well as very good contemporary pieces written by Filipinos.” As several others have done, Santos highlights the crucial role the teacher plays in getting the student to come around. She concludes her email thus: “What a good teacher can do is to remove the prejudices wrought by ignorance and arrogance.”

Ian Casocot, a Dumaguete-based writer and also a teacher, writes in his blog about his own experience making his students read Filipino works. In this passage he dwells on the importance of recognizing one’s own shortcomings: “Sometimes, [students] find reading stories and poems ‘boring’ — but in my years of teaching, I’ve [found that] being bored over something is more often than not a reflection of who you are than of the quality of the text itself. . . . The art of appreciation is ultimately colored by where you come from, so don’t judge anything . . . as being flawed, especially if you’re the one who lacks the tools to understand the nuances of the text at hand.”

Ian brings me to my final thought. In another entry on his blog he quotes from Ursula LeGuin, the widely respected writer of science fiction and fantasy. In a 2006 article for The Guardian (UK), she recounts how arduous Blindness, a novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago, was for her. Her reaction to her first struggle with the book is instructive: “Faced with pages of run-on sentences and unparagraphed dialogue without quotation marks, I soon quit, snarling about literary affectations. Later I tried again, went further, and quit because I was scared. Blindness is a frightening book. Before I’d let an author of such evident power give me the horrors, he’d have to earn my trust. So I went back to the earlier novels and put myself through a course of Saramago.”

“It’s hard not to gallop through prose that uses commas instead of full stops, but once I learned to slow down, the rewards piled up: his sound, sweet humor, his startling imagination, his admirable dogs and lovers, the subtle, honest workings of his mind. Here indeed was a novelist worthy of a reader’s trust. So at last I could read his great book . . .”

A novelist worthy of a reader’s trust: some of the highest praise a reader may pay a writer. I admire LeGuin for not giving up on Saramago’s novel, and for even reading his previous books as a way of taking up a “course” on the author before entering the world of his “frightening” novel. Such a reader is one worthy of a great writer’s trust.

To be worthy of great writers — now that is something to which we readers should aspire.

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