I didn’t know Edilberto Tiempo personally, but I knew Mom Edith. When I was in my twenties, I spent so many afternoons in her office at the College Assurance Plan just soaking up on her personality and generally “making up for lost time.” This was in the early 2000s, shortly after I became a fellow at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, the oldest creative writing workshop in Asia, and the “mother of all workshops” in the Philippines.
She had by then long retired from teaching at Silliman University, and I never got to be her student. So, while we ate merienda, I asked her a lot of questions–one of them being, “Have you ever written in Binisaya?” This was important for me.
I remember her telling me that, alas, she came to her writing at a very specific moment in history, and came to express herself best in English. It was the tool she learned to master her craft in, and she couldn’t see herself mastering her poetics in a language she did use at home but knew she could only do so much in, in the name of creative writing.
Plus she was Gaddang transplanted to Visayan soil. (A factual matter of roots that soon led to an old retort Dr. Ed Tiempo used to blurt out during the workshop, at least according to writer Ino Manalo: “Whenever Ma’am Edith wanted to do things her way he’d indicate his agreement by saying, ‘Go ahead, Gaddang it!’”)
A formalist by training, the National Artist for Literature was unsurprisingly cautious about other -isms (you can read her essay, “Return to Literary Arts,” where she voices out her frustrations over the other reading and writing strategies), but she studied all these nevertheless.
She never also believed in the notion that you couldn’t express your Filipinoness in English, and she never begrudged others–even her students–from writing in Binisaya. One edition of the workshop, in fact, was held in Cebu, with panelists like Cebuano poet Temistokles Adlawan. And many alumni from the creative writing program in Silliman University would also go on to become pillars in regional language literature.
Consider the following names: Erlinda Alburo, Merlie Alunan, Marjorie Evasco, Leoncio Deriada, Christine Godinez-Ortega, Grace Monte de Ramos, and many others. Resil Mojares studied in Silliman (but finished at the University of San Carlos.) You couldn’t find a fiercer bunch of torchbearers for Binisaya writing.
So, yes, the Silliman Workshop was–and is–famously and perhaps notoriously an English-only workshop, but to see that as a limitation that has contributed to the miseducation of the Filipino writer may be begging to see things too much in black and white. Nothing is that stark, and the actuality of things does show the otherwise.
This year will be my 17th straight year with the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. I started as a fellow in 2000, then yaya for a number of years after that, then an organizer helping out the Dumaguete Literary Arts in putting the workshop together starting in 2007, then coordinator in 2013 and 2014, then finally a panelist in 2016 and this year. Some years have been awesome, some not so. I have seen almost everything since the turn of the 21st century. In other words, nanigulang na ko dinhi, nitaruk na.
At the Silliman Workshop, we had as late as 2012 (when I became the coordinator of the Edilberto and Edith Tiempo Creative Writing Center) entertained the idea of accepting manuscripts in Cebuano. The new mandates we drew up for the center, after all, required that we try to develop local literature according to three specific literary strains we felt we inherited: literature in Binisayang Binuglas, literature in English (Silliman, after all, is an institution founded by Americans), and Southeast Asian literature. Many of the changes we’ve adopted into the center’s programs and the workshop’s mechanisms are a result of this three-fold focus.
But we also felt that Christine Godinez-Ortega was already doing a fabulous job with doing Cebuano manuscripts at the Iligan National Writers Workshop. The same with Elsa Martinez Coscolluela (another Silliman alumane) at the Iyas Workshop in Bacolod. With the proliferation of other workshops all over the country, we felt that the only way we could be different and provide our brand of being “alternative,” was to continue accepting manuscripts in English. (The UP Workshop, for example, became a workshop for mid-career writers.)
But if ever you visit a session of the SUNWW in recent years, it’s far from being a strictly formalist orgy others make it out to be, simply because its founders were two of the biggest purveyors of New Criticism in the Philippines.
One of the best things about the workshop is that you get panelists with very different points of view, and very different ideas of what constitutes “good writing.” We have feminists and deconstructionists and queers and Marxists and Cesar Ruiz Aquino who is his own -ism. (Heck, one of the most entertaining things in the workshop is to watch panelists “quarrel” with each other.) Which benefits the fellow, really, because s/he is getting all THESE different inputs and insights.
And Silliman, lastly, is famous for being the veritable melting pot of the other “writing schools” all over the country: this is where writers from UP, La Salle, Ateneo, UST, USC, Xavier, and others come together, and rightly call “home.” Alma Cruz Miclat recently told me: “I still remember the sparkle in my [late] Maningning [Miclat]’s eyes when she got the telegram that she was accepted as a fellow in the Silliman writers’ workshop. Yes, Ian, telegram! No email then, nor FB. It was a dream come true for our Ningning. Ma’am and Mom Edith I think criticized her poem ‘Father and I’ for talking about snow. Why snow in the Philippines! I still don’t know if Maningning ever told Mom Edith that she was born in China and she experienced snow from 1972 to 1986. The poignant poem in her trilingual book of poetry, Voice from the Underworld, remains one of my favorites. I’m sure she learned a lot from Mom Edith and the other panelists in improving her craft. She came back from that workshop fired up and focused.”
As for writing in the local language, yes, Edilberto Tiempo also wrote in Cebuano.
And that’s my five-peso coin.
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Author’s email: ian.casocot@gmail.com
