Filipino Diaspora

Blogging opened the floodgates for plethora of online journals on the trivialities of life: on how one cleans his pad during the weekend or why Jen and Brad broke up…

Hence, when I read this article, I felt compelled to post this in my blog to share it with my friends. It might be trivial for some, but for me it’s an eye opener and a source of pride for all of us Filipinos…

In an age when so much is written about something so little, this one is BIG in inspiration...

“Literature as history
HINDSIGHT By F. Sionil JoseThe Philippine STAR 06/13/2005
(The author gave this lecture at Cubberley Auditorium at Stanford, May5,2005.)

I am grateful to Stanford, to Prof. Roland Greene and the Department ofComparative Literature in particular, for having me here as writer-in-residence, to Prof. Ann Gelder who is looking after the details of this visit.I am only too aware of this university's greatness, its trove of Nobel Prize winners. I have a bookshop and I know the distinguished publicationsof the Hoover Institute. Our best doctors in the Philippines trained here.As for Stanford's contribution to literature, in the mid-Fifties, your famous writing guru, Wallace Stegner, visited Manila. If I may brag, we have the same editor, Samuel S. Vaughan, at Random House. Mr. Stegner correctly observed that there was yet no literary record of the Hukbalahap peasant uprising that was then winding down. I should have told him then -give me time, for I was conceptualizing a novel on that subject.I originally titled this talk "Revolution as Literature," but my wife said it may not sit well with an American audience. Certainly, it does not sit well with Filipinos. But I will digress into it just the same.When we arrived last month, I was sent to a room where I was detained for about half an hour. When I finally joined my wife at the baggage claim area, we were the last passengers there.I will share with you my conversation with the Homeland Security officer who corrected my immigration form. He asked what I wrote and I said novels and articles on current affairs, politics, history. That started it. He wanted to know more about we Filipinos.First, we are not Asians, like the Chinese, the Japanese, the Indians. The two great religions of Asia, Buddhism and Hinduism, responsible for the civilization and classical traditions of that continent never reached us although geographically, we are there. We are Christians who could have been Islamized if Islam came a few decades earlier.I told the officer we are many islands and tribes. In the past, we were atwar with one another. Much of that ethnicity remains in our languages,customs, attitudes. And like the United States, we are a young nation.I am here now to finish a novel, which, will help us understand our historybetter. The novel is about Artemio Ricarte, the revolutionary general whorefused to pledge allegiance to the United States at the end of thePhilippine-American War in 1902. Yes, there was such a war, which broughtAmerica to Asia in 1898 - America's first colonial venture. We became America's first and only colony. But not after more than 250 thousand Filipinos, mostly civilians were killed. In that war, America committed its first atrocities in Asia.I have been working on this novel for so long, the research is flowing outof my ears, shackling my imagination. The English novelist, Robert Graves,advised an Australian writer to write the novel first then do the research afterwards. But I got that advice too late.My five-novel saga is named after my hometown, Rosales. It is framed within a hundred years, from 1872, when three Filipino priests were executed bythe Spaniards, to 1972,when Ferdinand Marcos declared Martial Law. This century is marked by peasant revolts. Through three centuries that we were ruled by Spain, peasant revolts erupted intermittently.A word of caution to those who plan writing historical fiction. Dusk, thefirst novel in this saga, has a real-life character, Apolinario Mabini, the brains in the revolution against Spain - the first anti-imperialist rebellion in Asia - and later on in the war with the United States. He wasa cripple, and I attributed his infirmity to syphilis as told to me by two venerable historians.Wrong! When his bones were exhumed in 1980, as told to me by a much youngerhistorian, Ambeth Ocampo, it was found that he had polio. I confronted the historians and both scolded me for giving credence to what they told me was gossip.According to Ocampo, the upright Mabini opposed a scheme by some of the rich men who joined the revolution to raise money that would have enriched them but would have tainted the revolution. So they discredited Mabini.The second novel in the saga is called Tree after the balete tree,scientifically named Ficus Benjamina Linn. A scholar visited Rosales thenreturned to Manila to tell me there was no such tree in Rosales. Of course,it is not there but is in many places in the country, in all of Southeast Asia. As a sapling, the young tree is soon surrounded by many vines. The vines grow to be the trunk of the tree itself; they strangle to death the sapling they had embraced. A very apt metaphor for so many of us.Literature is mythmaking. For a young nation, it is necessary. Who canprove there was a cherry tree the young George Washington chopped down andcouldn't lie about?Mythmakers or not, all artists are ego driven, impelled by the human impulse to celebrate themselves in the most personal manner thereby achieving style, originality. They seek originality, although in the end,so many are just plain imitators of life and of other artists, sometimes doing willfully so, sometimes in blissful ignorance. But the self gets satiated with narcissism, so artists attempt to transcend the self and transcendence becomes the motive for a more profound _expression. I do not! claim profundity; there is nothing deep in my motives.They are moored on the reality of my country, and fiction has difficulty catching up with that reality.I use history to impress upon my readers this memory so that if they remember, they will not only survive, they will prevail.I also present a nobler image of ordinary Filipinos, so that even if we are destitute, amidst the swirling tides of corruption, we can raise our heads.With memory, we can face our grim future with courage.I created in this saga, characters like Istak, the farmer and healer inDusk, his vagabond great grandson, Pepe Samson in Mass, and a real lifehero from the underclass, Apolinario Mabini. These truths are often ignoredby historians who focus on momentous events and big men but miss the"little people."Critics call this effort revisionist, the formalists say I mangled theEnglish language because I think in Ilokano - my mother tongue ! - and write in English. Still others say I romanticize the common, the mundane. I hope I am shaping not just myths and hollow hallelujahs, but literature.In 1955, on my first visit here as guest of the US State Department, Ispent an afternoon with the poet Robert Frost at his cottage in Ripton,Vermont. He was in his late seventies but still writing. He belonged tothat generation which included Mark Twain. They objected to the Americanoccupation of my country. They argued that America, which won its freedomthrough revolution, had no right to invade a nation waging revolution forfreedom the first in Asia against Western imperialism. The millionaire Andrew Carnegie even offered to return the $20 million the United States paid Spain to acquire the Philippines.Mr. Frost asked how that occupation turned out. I told him were it not forthe public schools established by the United States, at that very moment, Iwould most probably! be an unlettered farmer atop a water buffalo somewherein the island of Luzon.In 1972, I toured this country lecturing under the auspices of the Councilon Foreign Relations. I told my audiences, if they did not suffer fromhistorical amnesia and recalled the Philippine-American War, they wouldhave never gone to Vietnam. It was not communism, which they faced inVietnam - it was that impregnable force, Asian nationalism.To be sure, strident voices in my country are critical of the UnitedStates. I sometimes join these out of frustration. Do no get us wrong -many Filipinos consider America our second country.But we must wean ourselves form overpowering American influence, get rid ofour American hangover induced by benevolent neglect. Our cultural workersmust shed off the American veneer, which stifles creativity, and use themud at our feet, our folk traditions, our sweat and blood to build the enduring Filipino pillars ! that can withstand the onslaught of globalism andMcDonald's.I remind our writers about the "flowering of New England," how Emerson,Walt Whitman and those innovative Yankees freed themselves from 19thcentury European romanticism to celebrate America and give America agranite cultural foundation.It is not easy for us to do the same. History had done its nefarious job.Stanley Karnow's book, In our Image, sums up the colonial experience. TheAmericans wanted a democratic showcase and we eagerly complied. The resultis a disaster. Your fault and ours.More than 10 years ago, the Atlantic magazine editor, James Fallow'svisited us. After seeing the deadening poverty and the callousness andperfidy of our leaders, he concluded that the obstacle to our progress isour "damaged culture."Back to our Homeland Security officer in San Francisco to illustrate thisdamaged culture. He had interrogated Filipinos wanting entry. He saidflatly: "They are liars."I told him they had to lie, to do anything to escape my country's povertyand injustice.What had happened to us?After World War II, we were Southeast Asia's most modern, most progressive.Students from the region came to our schools. When I traveled, thebackwardness everywhere amazed me. Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur were villages.The tallest structure in Bangkok was the Wat Arun. Seoul and Taipei werequiet, with horse-drawn carts, bicycles and those low brick buildings leftby the Japanese. These cities are no longer recognizable from what theywere. Manila has skyscrapers now, but everywhere are the slums that showhow we have decayed.Thus, the massive hemorrhage of talent, the diasporas. There is noocean-going vessel without a Filipino on board, from the captain down tothe steward. An American diplomat had heart surgery in Washington performedby what he said is one of the t! op surgeons in America. He is Filipino. ABoeing executive told me Iran Air wouldn't get off the ground were it notfor the Filipino technicians there. An Indonesian businessman said most ofthe banks and corporate headquarters in Indonesia are managed by Filipinos.A Singaporean architect pointed to the city's soaring skyline as the handiwork of Filipino architects and engineers.Here, the United Nations headquarters in New York would stand still if allthose Filipina secretaries were absent. And what would happen to yourhealth service if all those Filipino doctors, nurses and technicians left?Indeed, the Filipina is not just a maid in Hong Kong or a prostitute inTokyo. We have become the proletariat of the world. This is our shame andour pride for as a European executive wryly commented: "You are such awonderful people, why is your country such a mess?"Is this mess for always?Your Homeland Security officer said! he knew of a Filipino retired generalwho was poor.I said that general should be investigated for unexplained poverty.The "damaged culture" James Fallows pointed out can be repaired. In theFifties, President Ramon Magsaysay invigorated the Army to defeat theHukbalahap rebellion. He cleaned up government, made it responsive to theneeds of the masses. When he died in a plane crash in 1957, people in thestreets wept. When Arsenio Lacson was Mayor of Manila at about the sametime, the city was safe, the garbage collected, the coffers were full. Ayear after he died, the city was broke.The moral decay is a slow process exacerbated by the Japanese Occupationwhen all the rules were thrown out and each man was for himself. The eliteconditioned by colonialism collaborated all through our history with theimperialists. Like most of us, they imbibed the vices - not the virtues ofour rulers - the sense of honor of the Spaniards, t! he enterprise anddemocratic ethos of the Americans, and the discipline and sense of nationof the Japanese. And like the imperialists, the rich Filipinos send their loot abroad - the Chinese to China and Taiwan, the Spanish mestizos toSpain and Europe, and the Indios like Marcos to Switzerland and the UnitedStates. As the Spanish writer Salvador de Madriaga said, "A country neednot be a colony of a foreign power, it can be the colony of its ownleaders."How then can we accumulate capital to modernize? How do we end thistreason? How else but through the cleansing power of a nationalistrevolution, a continuation of the revolution the Americans aborted in 1898.It is not only inevitable, it is righteous.In 1985, we finally threw out Marcos in a bloodless revolution. But CoryAquino who succeeded him turned it into a restoration of the oligarchy -not democracy as she claims. Sure, we have free elections and etceteras butthese are the empty trappings - not the essence of democracy. That essenceis in the stomach, when the Manila jeepney driver eats the same food servedthe president in Malacañang Palace.Listen, when I was a child, the poorest farmer ate twice a day but only inthe three hungry months of the planting season. Today, the poor eat onlyonce a day. They die when they are sick because medicines are expensive.Millions of grade school kids drop out because they cannot afford tocontinue. About half of 85 million do not have safe drinking water.Two ongoing rebellions, one communist and the other secessionist, have costus billions and thousands of lives. If the communists win - and I know theywon't - they will rule just as badly because they are Filipinos hostage tobarnacled habits of mind, to ethnicity.The real revolution has to start first in the mind and its wellsprings arenot in Mao or Marx. It is in our history, in Mabini, in ! Rizal, our nationalhero, whose writing inspired the revolution of 1896.Its creed is articulated by the peasant leader Pedro Calosa who led theColorum uprising near my hometown in 1935. It is this: "God created land,air and water for all men. It is against God's laws for one man, one familyto own all of them."The American reformer, Wendell Phillips confirms the Colorums. He said, "Ifyou hold land and land is in the hands of a few, you do not have democracy- you have an oligarchy."And this is our curse - an oligarchy that must be destroyed, whose alliesare here in this bulwark of democracy. Who, after all, was FerdinandMarcos's best supporter but Ronald Reagan? Can you understand now whyAmerica is so crucial to us and to those in the poor countries whosedespotic rulers have alliances with American leaders? Washington wantspeace and stability, and so do we who are enslaved, but that peace, thatstability should no! t be the peace of the grave.When we parted, the Homeland Security officer said I was the first Filipinohe talked with the way I did. What I told him, which I have said here, isalso what I say at home. It grates the ears. For this, I have been accusedof Filipino bashing, labeled a communist, a CIA agent, an opportunist. Youname it. In truth, I am just an old writer whose discordant voice isdrowned, unheard in the maelstrom that is my country.I end Dusk, the first novel in the Rosales saga, with the battle of TiradPass in December 1900. To me, that battle is similar to Thermopylae inancient Greece. There, Leonidas, the king of Sparta, and his men died to aman defending the pass against the invading Persians.In Tirad Pass, high in the roof of the Cordillera range, the24-year-oldGeneral Gregorio del Pilar and 48 of his men, most of themfarmers died defending it against the invading Texas Rangers closing in onGeneral Emi! lio Aguinaldo, President of Asia's first republic.I remind Filipinos of Jose Rizal who, at 34, was executed by the Spaniardsfor writing tracts against them. As Prof. Roland Greene said, he was thefirst post-colonial writer. In World War II, all of Southeast Asia succumbed so easily to the Japanese invasion. We didn't. Our valiant standin Bataan Peninsula, our bitter guerilla resistance - these are forgotten.I repeat - we are a young nation carving our place in the sun. Young, yes,but we have a past which exalts us, which tells us that we have arevolutionary tradition, and that above all, we are a heroic people.In our search for social justice and a moral order, in our struggle tobuild a just society, we must rely on no one else but ourselves, endowed aswe already are with a history that shaped our sinews and our genius.And from America, what will we ask of you? Nothing, nothing but yourunderstanding and your compassion.
But first, we must remember.”