This column celebrates the vibrant literary culture and heritage of Dumaguete City, in anticipation of its bid to be designated as UNESCO City of Literature under the Creative Cities Network. It is produced by the Buglas Writers Guild, a network of literary artists from Negros Oriental, Negros Occidental, and Siquijor. Each week, we will focus on the work of one local writer.
The six days—virtually a week—between April 29 and May 4 is sacred to the memory of National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin.
Thoroughly a Manileño, he was born on 4 May 1917 in Paco, and he died on 29 April 2004 in San Juan—and the middle of that week, the first of May, is emblematic of his most famous short story, May Day Eve, which is set in Intramuros in the waning days of Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines.
To be sure, when one thinks of Nick Joaquin in terms of “place” in literature, there is only one such place to consider: Manila. Nick Joaquin is the foremost chronicler of Manila, and it is no wonder then that he signed his journalistic pieces with the pen name “Quijano de Manila,” and is rightfully considered the poet laureate of that city. In early 1988, then Manila Mayor Mel Lopez invited him to write a popular history of Manila that young Manileños would enjoy, and Joaquin complied with gusto and came out, in 1990, with Manila, My Manila.
Nicomedes Márquez Joaquín was the singular Filipino writer who perhaps embodied the best of Philippine writing in English, having published true classics in almost all the genres of literature. When you talk about the Philippine novel, there is no denying the eminence of The Woman who had Two Navels, published in 1961, or Cave and Shadows, published in 1983.
When it comes to the short story, several of his vie for the top spot as the best by Filipino writers—the aforementioned May Day Eve, for example, or The Summer Solstice, or Three Generations—many of which have been collected in Prose and Poems, first published in 1952, and Tropical Gothic, first published in 1972. As noted, he also wrote poetry, collecting his verses under two books, The Ballad of the Five Battles (1981) and Collected Verse (1987). His stories and poems would later be collected in assorted fashion in many volumes, the most recent one being the celebrated Penguin Classics edition of The Woman who had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic, published in 2017, which ushered Joaquin to the ranks of literary world classics.
His essays and journalism, the latter under the name of Quijano de Manila, were always topnotch, and this would include works such as A Heritage of Smallness, an engaging diatribe about Filipino mentality and the culture that it engenders, and The House on Zapote Street, a gripping true crime narrative involving a mass murder of a family by its patriarch. His journalistic pieces would later be collected in assorted thematic books, including Reportage on Lovers (1977), Reportage on Crime (1977), Reportage on Politics (1981), and Reportage on the Marcoses (1981). His more showbiz-heavy writeups would end up in Amalia Fuentes and Other Etchings (1977).
When it comes to children’s literature, Joaquin published a series of children’s books in 1979, under the banner of Pop Stories for Groovy Kids, which included such classics as Johnny Tiñoso and the Proud Beauty and Lilit Bulilit and the Babe-in-the-Womb. [Another children’s book, Gotita de Dragon and Other Stories, would be published post-humously in 2014.]
And if there is one Filipino play that has been staged ad infinitum in the country—and would come to embody the Filipino soul in the crossroads of the country’s history—it would be Joaquin’s Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, which was staged for the first time on 25 March 1955 at the Aurora Gardens in Intramuros. The play would later be adapted into film in 1965, starring many of the principals in the original staging, by Lamberto Avellana, who would later become National Artist for Cinema. It would also inspire many translations, especially a 1988 musical version, Larawan, with libretto by the late National Artist for Theatre Rolando S. Tinio, and music by National Artist for Music Ryan Cayabyab. That musical version would also be adapted to film, Ang Larawan, in 2017, by Loy Arcenas. [He also came out with an anthology of four of his plays, which he called “Manileno theatricals,” in Tropical Baroque, published in 1983.]
He mostly abandoned fiction and wrote histories, essays, and commissioned biographies after Martial Law was declared in 1972, foremost of which would be A Question of Heroes (1977), Almanac for Manileños (1979), Language of the Street and Other Essays (1980), Joaquinesquerie: Myth A La Mod (1983), The Aquinos of Tarlac: The Making of a Subversive (1983), Discourses of the Devil’s Advocate and Other Controversies (1983), and Culture and History (1988).
As a much sought-after biographer, he wrote the life stories of Carlos P. Romulo, Jaime Ongpin, Leonor Goquinco, Doy Laurel, Rafael Salas, E. Aguilar Cruz, Ruben Torres, Estefania Aldaba-Lim, Ed Angara, Alfredo Lim, Nicanor Reyes, D.M. Guevara, Dakila F. Castro, Elang Uhing, and Jaime Cardinal Sin, among others. This would include biographies of institutions, including Malacañan Palace and Philippine Women’s University.
All these cement Nick Joaquin as not just the grand storyteller of Manila, but also the foremost Filipino writer in English. In one of his self-confessed mission as a writer, as chronicled by Silliman writer Carminia Yaptengco in an early study of his work, Joaquin considered himself a sort of “cultural apostle” whose purpose was to revive interest in Philippine national life through literature—and provide the necessary drive and inspiration for a fuller comprehension of their cultural background. She wrote: “His awareness of the significance of the past to the present is part of a concerted effort to preserve the spiritual tradition and the orthodox faith of the Catholic past—which he perceives as the only solution to our modern ills.”
So what does Dumaguete mean to him, as befits the purpose of this column? We scarcely know, because he has never written about it, although, from testimonies of some of his contemporaries and acolytes, he loved the city, primarily because of his enduring friendship with the Tiempos, Edilberto and Edith, the two stalwarts of Dumaguete writing for most of the twentieth century.
His enduring legacy to Dumaguete literarature is his position as founding panelist of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop in 1962, which he mentored together with the Tiempos and [soon to be fellow National Artist for Literature] Francisco Arcellana. That workshop would actually be one of his last, altogether foregoing being a panelist soon after.
But Dumaguete writers would always take note of his influence in their writings. The Dumaguete poet and fictionist Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas, in Face to Face with Missing Pieces of Myself, would write of two encounters with Nick Joaquin, one in 1962 in Dumaguete when she was 11, and then a few years later, in Iowa City in America: “I was 13 then … an ugly age to be, and I was designed to walk at wrong angles with the universe. He looked down at me and said, why it was the best age, he wished he could be 13 again. I didn’t believe him. I am sure he remembers none of this incident; the skill with which he launched into that tiny proto-flirtation proves that he must have performed the same act of kindness and gentility countless times, and with people who were more in need of it than I. When grateful little girls grow up to be instructors in literature, they learn to give a name to the sort of generosity of spirit such as Nick Joaquin spent on me that evening. They call it ‘insight.’
“He opened doors for me, and saved the seat next to him, and extracted my gauche opinions with such skill that I was only vaguely aware of what was happening; but by the time we were driving home with him I was completely intoxicated. The long, snow-laden rolling Iowa hills on either side of the road streamed by, touched with a pearly grey purity I seemed not to have seen in them before, even the bare branches were part of the inarticulate poetry that had something to do with the sound of the big gruff voice.”
