Keynote speech delivered at the Iligan

Writers Workshop, Dec. 1, 2020

I am very pleased to address this workshop knowing that it has also become a cultural venue for Mindanao. It has so much to contribute to our national culture – not just the indigenous literatures on this big island, but so many facets of its culture, the folk arts, the dances and the history of its courageous and enterprising people about whom we know so little. This Center has opened a new window through which we can understand the Southerners better, not just for us but for all of Southeast Asia whose ties with this Center has developed and continues to develop. I hope that this workshop will also have discussions on history, politics and philosophy, that it enlarges its focus to include nationhood, that it nurtures the bonding of writers and that it imbues them with a higher purpose that will make them more human, more compassionate.

I would like to go back to the basics and review our definitions of art, literature and the writer. As I have often said, the writer is basically the keeper of memory, without which there is no nation. We see then how important the writer is, not just as the entertainer or even the keeper of memory. But if he is true to himself and his roots, he speaks for his people, especially the masses. He voices their anguish and their fondest hopes, and he can do this very well because he is truly rooted in native soil and is also true to himself.

This has always been true even in ancient times when the poet chanted the folk epics to ennoble his tribe. This was true with Jose Rizal and, after him, the host of Filipino writers who truly love this country and are willing to sacrifice their very lives for her. I have mentioned Jose Rizal, first and foremost, because he had been the inspiration for so many writers like myself. He had more than two novels in mind had the Spaniards not cut short his life and his literary career.

Permit me now to talk about my writing because I think it is instructive for anyone foolish and daring enough to write a novel. Materials for this are all around us, in the newspapers, in history, in the secrets nurtured by everyone, in the books we read.

I wrote my five-novel Rosales Saga with Rizal in mind. Those who have read the Saga will recognize immediately that it is also a historical record of a century of Filipino life. I have readers who think that my novel, Viajero, should also be included in the Saga because a major character in the Saga, Pepe Samson, also appears in it. What I’ve tried to do with this collection of novels is basically to record our history in terms that we can see history alive and not just a fleeting record. With it, I hope that we will understand not just our past better, but most of all, ourselves.

A lot of my experiences as a journalist are the material for many of the characterizations and events in the Saga. It has been said that journalism is history in a hurry, and I regard myself more as a creative writer than as a journalist. Although in both careers, first and foremost, I have tried to be honest with myself and, of course, with what I write. We all know that literature is a lie because it is a work of the imagination, but we also know that the so-called greater truth in life is in it, especially if the writer is rooted in his native soil so that he will be writing not only for himself but for, most of all, his own people.

The idea of the Rosales Saga, particularly Po-on, the first novel in it, is an effort to define a nation and the Filipino. It has been my primary motive and particularly since I am writing in a foreign language that I have made this my own. Does that make me less Filipino? I hope not. After all, Rizal wrote in Spanish.

I have also written about the ongoing diaspora and this is the theme of Viajero which my French translator, the poet Amina Said, considers my very best. It is the Filipino traveler looking for himself and eventually finding it and eventually understanding what nationhood demands from him. I know only too well that the United States looms very largely in the Filipino imagination because it is the second country to most of us. The United States dominates our culture to this very day. I know only too well how such dominance cripples the imagination but at the same time the struggle against it, freezing the Filipino creative mind and directing it inward to the very soul of the Filipino himself. This struggle for the Filipino soul to emerge is sometimes political in the sense that the writer himself has to be political, and he has to confront those politicians who diminish his freedom and who want him to be subservient to them and to the power they hold.

It is here in Mindanao that so many problems are, in themselves, the most valid reason for writers to be political in the sense that they must be engaged, that they must concern themselves as writers with freedom and human rights. It is here where so many basic issues on nationhood will be resolved, where diversities must be recognized and also overcome – all in the interest of nationhood.

It is so easy to conclude that everything eventually is political in nature. In the end, however, the writer is judged not by his politics but by how true he has been to his art. This is what I would like to emphasize: great writers are great artists and, as great artists, they ennoble life, and they leave behind them a legacy that lives long after they have turned to dust. And if they are true to their roots and honest with their art as well, they will contribute lasting beauty to humanity.

In succeeding columns, I’ll answer some of the questions asked after this talk.