Over the past few days, Manila was home and much-needed get-away from Dumaguete City as I took part in the 3rd Philippine International Literary Festival, a project of the National Book Development Board which has been gaining in reputation as the premiere literary festival in the country. “Read Lit District” it was called–and for a three days at least, that was the literary persona, sans the sexual innuendo, the Ayala Museum took as it hosted this gathering of some of the best writers from all over the country. There were international writing luminaries as well. The Los Angeles novelist Chris Abani, for example, and New York Writers Workshop founder Tim Tomlinson. There was Hong Kong-based poet David McKirdy, and crime fiction editor Juliet Grames, and children’s author Ken Spillman. It was illustrious company.
I sat on two panels–one on Fifty Shades of Gay, with J. Neil C. Garcia moderating Nerisa del Carmen Guevara, Jhoanna Lynn Cruz, Ralph Semino Galan, and I; the other one was on Visayan Exclusives, which turned out to be “exclusive” specific to Negros, as I shared the panel table with Rosario Cruz Lucero who talked about her Bacolod fiction, while I talked about my Dumaguete ones. The great Gemino H. Abad moderated the latter panel, which made for interesting conversation among the participants as my literary goddess Chari Lucero beguiled us all with her infinite knowledge of Philippine mythology.
This was a panel topic I’ve been interested in for some years now. Increasingly, I have come to think more deeply about the geographical resonance of my writings.
At the outset, I think I have always made Dumaguete in Negros Oriental the heartbeat that governed my fiction simply because I was heeding the advise of my writing mentors, and had to “write what I know.” But the first time I really made it a conscious decision to write-in a sense of place in my stories was when I was fellow at the Iligan workshop in 2002, and our keynote speaker was no other than Chari. I learned so many things from her speech that year that has since found their way into the crafting of my work, but for the purposes of this talk, I would like to talk about what she told us about digging up our own narrative heritage to enrich our creative writing. She calls this a process of “remembrance.” Remembrance suggests how fiction should be a keeper of memory, especially vastly eroded ones, or ones that are in danger of falling off into historical amnesia because we know no better.
Chari recounted a massacre in Negros sometime in the Spanish colonial period. According to her, in 1856, two Spanish frayles went up a mountain in the remote region of Kabankalan for the purpose of reduccion. They succeeded in appeasing the Carol-an tribe and then prepared them for settlement, but the island governor treacherously set out to vanquish the tribe by sending an army of 450 police and 60 guardia civil “who were armed with rifles and two cannons.” The Carol-ans built a wooden fort, and readied with their spears and arrows. The one-sided battle was fierce and brief, and victory of course went to the heavily-armed Spanish. They refused to surrender, and shut themselves in huts inside the fort, and then finally set themselves on fire–while continuing to defend their territory even when they were breathing their last from the smoke and from the curling flames.
Chari contended that this was an act erasure, particularly an erasure of a people. But this does not just come via violent means, but also by historical amnesia. She said: “We today–my generation and yours and your children’s generation and so on ad infinitum–are as much the victims of this massacre in Kabankalan as the Carol-ans were in 1856. If we do not remember, much less know, in vivid and concrete detail how our people fiercely and nobly fought to preserve the integrity of their spirit and to defend the validity of their own traditions, we will always look outward in search of cultural and intellectual models to explain our daily lives.”
Our literature, she says, must be used to counterbalance this amnesia. Her parting words were: “As creative writers we are, or should be, speakers for our people’s daily lives, mediated by a historical consciousness, and rooted in our indigenous concept of our cosmos and its laws.”
I have not looked back since. After Iligan, I wrote stories after stories about Dumaguete and Negros Oriental that sought to push back this historical and narrative amnesia.
The urge to do a fictional rendering of the story of one’s own place has always been the silent project for many writers, whether they admit it or not. There are easy examples to highlight. Alice Munro’s Ontario, Canada. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Macondo. John Updike’s Olinger, Pennsylvania. William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. Edith Wharton’s New York. When we think of these writers and many more like them, what immediately comes to us is a sense of a specific world that they conjure in their works. With story after story, they essentially give us the bricks and the seeds and the atmosphere to make up this specific sense of place, which becomes an embracing stage upon which their diverse characters play out their conflict and their drama.
The Filipino fictionist Timothy Montes once wrote that a “sense of place” is linked to, but is not necessarily the same as, “setting,” which itself is an often “overlooked as an active element” in the creation of stories, always secondary to plot and character, and often scaled down to a “cosmetic role.” But he noticed that many writers return again and again to a particular setting that in the end what they have created is a believable world whose “air” blends so well with the characters and their stories that we begin to feel they could only have existed in the very place they occupy. He goes on: “I think most writers, especially those writing short stories, operate from this single-minded creation of a sense of place. They take great pains to make each story complete or self-enclosed, but the sense of place can only be formed by an accretion of stories, the building of worlds that will be more subtle than the alien worlds of science fiction, and sooner or later they will see that the sense of place will loom larger than the individual stories that make them. The impulse may be conscious or unconscious, and one has to drink deep from the well of memory to be able to tap into it.”
Needless to say, Dumaguete is my mythical place of roots. In Dumaguete lay the secrets of my blood, my history. Also here is the setting of my mother’s bedside stories, of those moments when I was a young child and she’d tuck me to bed and gamely recall a life when she was a young woman and World War II was brewing, or much later when she had returned to Bayawan town as a married woman in the sugar boom of the late 1960s and became, for a while, one of its fairer society hostesses. Those were the heady days, when sugar cane oiled the pockets of young hacenderos on the make, and everybody was rich… Dumaguete means memory–and this word alone means so much in the ways it must mean: as a threshold of recollections both happy and tragic.
Dumaguete also dictates form and theme–there’s a society built on sugar and the intricacies of class that comes with it; there’s the geographical consideration of being smack right in the middle of the divide between Cuernos de Negros, the towering mountains in the west, and Tañon Strait, the deep-blue, dolphin-filled waters in the east. There is a reason why the National Artist Edith Tiempo has called her home in Dumaguete, “Montemar.” Home is always a marriage of monte (mountain) and mar (sea). And true enough, an artist friend once told me that I was quite lucky to have the accessibility of 15 minutes to go to either mountains or sea. This divide, however, is what I suspect give my characters and the city itself a schizophrenic feel in my fiction.
In the final analysis, however, the sense of place that I try to cultivate in my fiction eventually comes sidled with a higher agenda–to help create a sense of nation, a sense of the Philippines, with my stories. I apparently am not alone in this “endeavor,” as the poet and anthologist Gemino Abad once deftly observed in his exhausting survey of Filipino short stories in English that were published between 1956 to 1972.
But Timothy says it better: “For me, the Ilocanos are fixed in a small town called Nagrebcan in La Union because of the stories of Manuel Arguilla, [the island of] Mindoro in the works of N.V.M. Gonzalez, [the province of] Tarlac in the Camiling stories of Gregorio Brillantes, and the old Manila in the works of Nick Joaquin. I never believed in a monolithic National Literature because my impression of Philippine literature was that of the variety of particular worlds created by writers I admired, worlds that felt as concrete as the jutting stones in the unpaved streets of my town as well as the smoothness of the streets of the poblacion under my chinelas. So the Philippines would be an act of the imagination as different writers so rooted in their regional origins would reveal to me…
“I believe that we are forming our literature in the story-telling projects that our writers have made of their particular towns, their particular cities. We are not creating a Nation from an abstract perspective; we are building it town by town, city by city, house by house, character by character. The imagined community is not only formed by a daily newspaper with a national headline informing us what happened in the national center; it is also brought forth by ordinary sights, smells and sounds that a ten-year-old boy in a small, obscure town in Samar [or Dumaguete] would try to convey through stories.”
