Philippine Literature
Perpetually Inchoate
FATHER MIGUEL BERNAD was a Jesuit priest, scholar and mountainee, and a Professor of Literature at the Xavier University (Ateneo de Cagayan de Oro).
occasions held the supreme magistracy of Rome. He complains of how his mind was often weary and his ears often jaded with legal debate and now he sought solace in letters: ut animus ex hoc forensi strepitu reficiatur, et aures convicio defessae conquiescant. Thus, despite his other preoccupations, he found time to write and rewrite and polish, and his writings will be read as long as there are cultivated minds that can appreciate subtlety of argument and the cadence of words. We refer, of course, to his speeches and essays: his verse is happily lost.
Lest we be accused of dwelling on the past, we hasten to cite two contemporary writers busy with other work.
One is a writer of unforgettable prose: Sir Winston Churchill, the prime minister of a great country at a time of great crisis when he was burdened with problems of astronomical proportions, weighed down with anxiety, distracted with numberless details amid “blood, sweat, and tears.” The other is an excellent poet, T. S. Eliot: by day a businessman, by night engaged in “the intolerable wrestle with words.”
Therefore if we in the Philippines complain that writing is not lucrative, or that we cannot find the leisure to write at our ease, we have indeed a case, but it is not our most important drawback. There are more serious problems: on the other hand we need writers of profounder and broader cultural formation; on the other, we need a much wider reading public. That we have difficulty in getting both is partly a linguistic, partly a cultural problem.
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The linguistic difficulty is obvious. It is possible to, produce great literature only in a language that has been mastered. By
“mastered” is meant more than mere grammatical or idiomatic mastery. It must be the type of mastery which assimilates the thought processes, the verbal nuances, and the characteristic rhythms, peculiar to an idiom. Every language has its peculiar genius: he is the master of the language who has caught that genius. Unfortunately the Philippines has not had a thorough chance to assimilate the genius of any particular language. Those whose education has been in English but whose parents were educated in Spanish will understand what this implies. In their case a wall of separation stands as a barrier between parents and children, between the younger generation and the one that preceded it. It is not that parents cannot understand English or the children Spanish, or that parents and children have no common medium of conversation.
It is not a question of conversing; it is a question of thought processes. The thought patterns are different.
The Filipinos who denounced Spanish tyranny at the end of the nineteenth century, some of whom paid for their labors with their blood, were themselves champions of Filipino-Hispanic culture. They wrote their works in Spanish, and one of their grievances was the reluctance of the Spanish colonial government to extend throughout the Philippines the benefits of education in the Spanish tongue. Much of their writing was of course of a polemic character and will probably not survive as literature. But some of it was of genuine literary worth. The permanent value of Rizal’s prose is still controversial, but few will deny the literary quality of his verse. It was a genuine poet who, on the eve of execution, could indulge the poetic whimsy that after his death he would sing to his beloved country:
Soy yo, querida patria, yo que te canto a ti.
Rizal was not alone. Filipino writers in Spanish flourished at the end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. But this flowering of a culture never bore fruit: its roots were soon withered. While Apostol and Guerrero, Bernabe and Balmori, Barcelon and Recto, were writing poems that were admired in Spain, a generation of Filipinos was growing up that could not understand the language in which they were written.
This is not to deplore the coming of English to our shores. The coming of English was by no means deplorable:
it was a cultural windfall. It does explain, however, why Philippine letters, which had finally flowered (and it is a curious thing that it did not come to its full flowering until after Spanish political domination was over) died out so quickly, even in flower. Philippine letters had to seek other roots in a different cultural soil. That is why even after sixty years of English in the Philippines, Philippine literature in English is still young. But it has much promise: it may eventually attain to full maturity.
While Filipino writers in Spanish seemed to take more easily to verse, the Filipino writers in English have taken more kindly to prose, and in particular to the short story. Essays, novels, plays and poems have been written, but the short story is at the moment the most developed literary genre. Arturo Roseburg, in his compilation of Philippine literature in English, has chosen nine writers as the most representative: Jose Garcia Villa, Carlos Bulosan, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Alejandro Roces, Bienvenido Santos, Salvador Lopez, Manuel Arguilla, Nick Joaquin, and Arturo Rotor. Six of the nine are short story writers.
There are some, saddened by the passing away of Spanish in our culture, who would reimpose it by legislative or other means. They seek to impose it at the expense of English and other cultural disciplines. Others, saddened by the neglect of Tagalog or other Filipino languages, would prefer to impose Tagalog (or “Pilipino” as the Institute of National Language calls it), again at the expense of English or Spanish and other cultural studies. Others would impose English at the expense of everything else. And still others, impatient of the slow and fluctuating progress that English is making in this country, would impose a diluted form of English upon the schools which is to be called “Filipino English.” These attempts are all well-meant, but their promoters have the defect of youth, though some of them are no longer physically young. Youth is always in a hurry. It is ever looking for short cuts. But there is no short cut in cultural growth. Ars longa, vita brevis. Life is brief, but art remains a lifelong pursuit. There is no short cut to greatness, not even in literature.
The solution to our problem is not to impose anything. Our own experience and that of other countries should deter us from trying to impose anything at the expense of other factors. The solution to our problem is not to empty the well of one kind of liquid and try to refill it with another: we could be doing that forever without ever producing permanent results. That would make our literature forever inchoate, forever adolescent. The solution rather is to see our
III
That is why the most serious drawback to Philippine letters is not economic nor merely linguistic. It is cultural. The tree cannot grow (as Father Reuter has recently pointed out in reviewing Nick Joaquin’s “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino”) unless it is in contact with the elements. Its roots must be deeply in the soil, and the soil must he enriched by rain; the chlorophyll in the leaf must have the sunlight, and pollination must be brought about by wind and bees. The poet’s phrase has a wide application: no man is an island. If islanded, he retrogresses from the civilized to the savage.
We are in danger of cultural isolation in the Philippines, of being islanded culturally as we are islanded in geography. We are in danger of isolation from the thought currents of Europe and America, isolation from the living present, isolation from the past: not only our Indo-Malayan past but also our European past for our roots are in Europe and in America no less than in Asia. We are a part of Christendom as much as Europe is. The Graeco-Roman civilization is not an exclusive heirloom of Europe: it is ours as well.
If the Filipino writers in Spanish were influenced by the Spanish romanticists, our writers in English must seek cultural unity with Shakespeare and his cultural heritage. Indeed, we must seek cultural continuity with Greece and with Rome. Homer and Virgil, Dante and Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas are our ancestors.
Cut off from this great tradition, cut off from the great thought and the literature of the world, and cut off from our own native soil, our literature would die of inanition. Properly nurtured, it may grow to something great, or at least something robust. But it must have deep roots: it must draw vitality from the soil, elegance from civilized art, and universality from Christendom.