Biography of Nick Joaquín 
(1917-2004) Manila’s English-language newspapers and magazines for what Filipinos themselves were
Nicomedes "Nick" Joaquín
The 1996 Ramón Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative
Communication Arts
BIOGRAPHY of Nick Joaquín
Resil B. Mojares
He was the greatest Filipino writer of his generation. Over six decades and a half, he
produced a body of work unmatched in richness and range by any of his contemporaries.
Living a life wholly devoted to the craft of conjuring a world through words, he was the
writer’s writer. In the passion with which he embraced his country’s manifold being, he was
his people’s writer as well.
Nick Joaquín was born in the old district of Pacò in Manila, Philippines, on September 15,
1917, the feast day of Saint Nicomedes, a protomartyr of Rome, after whom he took his
baptismal name. He was born to a home deeply Catholic, educated, and prosperous. His
father, Leocadio Joaquín, was a person of some prominence. Leocadio was a procurador
(attorney) in the Court of First Instance of Laguna, where he met and married his first wife,
at the time of the Philippine Revolution. He shortly joined the insurrection, had the rank of
colonel, and was wounded in action. When the hostilities ceased and the country came
under American rule, he built a successful practice in law. Around 1906, after the death of
his first wife, he married Salomé Márquez, Nick’s mother. A friend of General Emilio
Aguinaldo, Leocadio was a popular lawyer in Manila and the Southern Tagalog provinces.
He was unsuccessful however when he made a bid for a seat in the Philippine Assembly
representing Laguna.
Nick Joaquín’s mother was a pretty, well-read woman of her time who had studied in a
teacher-training institute during the Spanish period. Though still in her teens when the
United States took possession of the Philippines, she was among the first to be trained by
the Americans in English, a language she taught in a Manila public school before she left
teaching after her marriage.
Leocadio and Salomé built a genteel, privileged home where Spanish was spoken, the
family went to church regularly, had outings in the family’s huge European car (one of the
first Renaults in the city), and the children were tutored in Spanish and piano. Salomé (“who
sings beautiful melodies and writes with an exquisite hand,” recalls a family member)
encouraged in her children an interest in the arts. There were ten children in the family,
eight boys and two girls, with Nick as the fifth child. The Joaquín home on Herrán Street in
Pacò was a large section of a two-story residential-commercial building —the first such
building in Pacò— that Leocadio had built and from which the family drew a handsome
income from rentals. In this home the young Nick had “an extremely happy childhood.”
Leocadio Joaquín, however, lost the family fortune in an investment in a pioneering oil
exploration project somewhere in the Visayas in the late 1920s. The family had to move out
of Herrán to a rented house in Pásay. Leocadio’s death not long after, when Nick was only
around twelve years old, was a turning point in the life of the family.
Reticent about his private life, Nick Joaquín revealed little about his father. In the manner of
fathers of his time, Leocadio must have been a presence both distant and dominant. He
was already an accomplished man when Nick was born. One has a glimpse of him in the
character of the proud Doctor Chávez in Joaquín’s short story “After the Picnic,” the father
who lives by a strict patriarchal code and yet is all at once remote, vulnerable, and
sympathetic. In an early poem, Joaquín vaguely alluded to what in his father was somehow
beyond reach (“the patriot life and the failed politician buried with the first wife”). Yet he
mourned the void his father’s death left: “One froze at the graveside in December’s cold, /
childhood stashed with the bier. Oh, afterwards / was no time to be young, until one was
old.”
The young Joaquín dropped out of school. He had attended Pacò Elementary School and
had three years of secondary education in Mapa High School but was too intellectually
restless to be confined in a classroom. Among other changes, he was unable to pursue the
religious vocation that his strictly Catholic family had envisioned to be his future. Joaquín
himself confessed that he always had the vocation for the religious life and would have
entered a seminary if it were not for his father’s death.
After he left school, Joaquín worked as a mozo (boy apprentice) in a bakery in Pásay and
then as a printer’s devil in the composing department of the Tribune, of the TVT (Tribune-
Vanguardia-Taliba) publishing company, which had its offices on F. Torres Street in
Manila’s Santa Cruz district. This got him started on what would be a lifelong association
with the world of print.
Through this time he pursued a passion for reading. Sarah K. Joaquín, Nick’s sister-in-law,
recounts that in his teens Nick had a “rabid and insane love for books.” He would hold a
book with one hand and read while polishing with a coconut husk the floor with his feet. He
would walk down a street, on an errand to buy the family’s meal, with a dinner pail in one
hand and an open book in the other.
Both his parents had encouraged his interest in books. When he was around ten, his father
got him a borrower’s card at the National Library (then in the basement of the Legislative
Building in Luneta) and there he discovered Bambi and Heidi and the novels of Stevenson,
Dumas, and Dickens (David Copperfield was his great favorite). He explored his father’s
library and the bookstores of Carriedo in downtown Manila. He was voracious, reading
practically everything that caught his fancy, from the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and
Vachel Lindsay to the stories of Anton Chekhov, to the novels of Dostoyevsky, D. H.
Lawrence, and Willa Cather. He read American magazines (Saturday Evening Post,
Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Magazine) and discovered the fiction of Booth Tarkington,
Somerset Maugham, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.
Joaquín’s choice of early readings was not exceptional. Joaquín and other writers of his
generation who were schooled in the American era discovered Dostoyevsky and
Hemingway before they did such Tagalog writers as Lope K. Santos and Rosauro Almario.
Yet, it can be said that Joaquín never really lost his sense of where he was. He read
writing. (He had read the José Rizal novels in the Charles Derbyshire translation before he
was thirteen, Joaquín said.) He always had a strong sense of place, a virtue that was to
become a hallmark of his body of work. “When I started writing in the late 1930s,” he would
recall many years later, “I was aware enough of my milieu to know that it was missing from
our writing in English. The Manila I had been born into and had grown up in had yet to
appear in our English fiction, although that fiction was mostly written in Manila and about
Manila.”
His first short story dealt with the vaudeville of Manila, “The Sorrows of Vaudeville,” and
was published in Sunday Tribune Magazine in 1937. (The editors changed its title to
“Behind Tinsel and Grease.”) Earlier, in 1934, he published his first poem in English, a
piece about Don Quixote. The story is told that when this poem appeared in the Tribune,
Serafín Lanot, the Tribune’s poetry editor, liked the poem very much and went to
congratulate the poet when he came to collect his fee, but the shy and elusive Joaquín ran
away.
Very early, Joaquín was set on crafting his own voice. Writing in 1985 on his early years as
a writer, he said that it appeared to him in the 1930s that both an American language and
an American education had distanced Filipino writers in English from their immediate
surroundings. “These young writers could only see what the American language saw.” It
was “modern” to snub anything that wore the name of tradition and, for the boys and girls
who trooped to the American-instituted schools, Philippine history began with Commodore
Dewey and the Battle of Manila Bay. “The result was a fiction so strictly contemporary that
both the authors and their characters seemed to be, as I put it once, ‘without grandfathers.’”
He recalled: “I realize now that what impelled me to start writing was a desire to bring in the
perspective, to bring in the grandfathers, to manifest roots.”
This was Nick Joaquín recalling in 1985 what it was like in the 1930s. Back then, the young
Joaquín was just beginning to find his way into a literary life. He was gaining notice as a
promising writer, publishing between 1934 and 1941 a few stories and over a dozen poems
in the Herald Mid-Week Magazine and the Sunday Tribune Magazine. The literary scene
was vibrant in the Commonwealth years, as writers and critics debated the role and
direction of Philippine writing and formed feuding groups such as the Philippine Writers
League and the Veronicans. Joaquín stood at the periphery of this scene. He probably had
little time to be too reflective. He was already trying to fend for himself while quite young.
He was also growing into a world that was marching toward the cataclysm of a world war.
The period of the Japanese occupation was a difficult time for the Joaquíns who, at this
time, had moved from Pásay to a house on Arlegui Street in the historic San Miguel district
of Manila, where Malacañang Palace is located. Like other residents in the enemy-occupied
city, Joaquín scavenged for work to help support the family. The Japanese had closed
down the Tribune and other publications at the onset of the occupation. Joaquín worked as
a port stevedore, factory watchman, rig driver, road worker, and buy-and-sell salesman.
Seeing corpses on the street, working for a wage in rice, demeaned by fear and poverty,
Joaquín detested the war. He later said in an interview that the experience of the war so
drained both his body and spirit that when it was over, he was filled with the desire to leave
the country and go somewhere far. He dreamed of pursuing a religious vocation by going to
a monastery in Spain or somewhere in Europe, “somewhere where you could clean up.”
Through the war years, he continued writing when and where he could. He finished “The
Woman Who Felt Like Lazarus,” a story about an aging vaudeville star, and the essay “La
Naval de Manila.” Both appeared in the wartime English-language journal Philippine Review
in 1943. A monthly published by the Manila Sinbun-sya and edited by Vicente Albano Pacis
and Francisco Icasiano, the Review also published Joaquín’s story “It Was Later Than We
Thought” (1943) and his translation of Rizal’s Mi Ultimo Adios (1944). Readers were
beginning to take notice. He cultivated a persona inaccessible and mysterious. When he
was asked to fill up a biographical form for the Review, he simply wrote down: “25 years
old, salesman.”
“La Naval de Manila” tells of a Manila religious celebration built on the tradition that the
Blessed Virgin had miraculously intervened in the Spanish victory over a Dutch invasion
fleet in 1646. Already it sets forth a major theme Joaquín would develop in the years ahead:
that the Filipino nation was formed in the matrix of Spanish colonialism and that it was
important for Filipinos to appreciate their Spanish past. He wrote: “The content of our
national destiny is ours to create, but the basic form, the temper, the physiognomy, Spain
created for us.” The article triggered an angry response in a subsequent issue of the
Review from Federico Mañgahas, then a leading intellectual, who testily inquired why the
Review was “building up” this young writer who would have readers believe that precolonial
Philippine society was just a primeval “drift of totem-and-taboo tribes” and that Catholic
saints can be the country’s unifying national symbols. Joaquín declined to reply but he had
raised an issue that would continue to be debated after the war.
After the Americans liberated Manila in February–April 1945, Joaquín worked as a stage
manager for his sister-in-law’s acting troupe and dreamed of getting away. In the meantime,
he continued writing and publishing. He obviously did not sleepwalk through the years of
the war but was writing out stories in his head. In heady years right after the war, he
published in rapid succession such stories as “Summer Solstice,” “May Day Eve,” and
“Guardia de Honor.” These stories have become Nick Joaquín’s signature stories and
classics in Philippine writing in English.
The opportunity to leave the country came in 1947 when he was accepted as a novice at
Saint Albert’s College, a Dominican monastery in Hong Kong. The story is told that the
Dominicans in Manila were so impressed by his “La Naval de Manila” that they offered him
a scholarship to Saint Albert’s and had the Dominican-run University of Santo Tomás award
him an honorary Associate in Arts certificate so he would qualify. His stay at Saint Albert’s
schooled him in Latin and the classics. He enjoyed the pleasant diversions of the scenic
port city and the occasional company of his brother Porfirio (Ping) who was in Hong Kong
on a stint as a jazz musician. It seemed, however, that he was too restless for life in a
monastery. He stayed less than two years and returned to Manila.
Back in the Philippines in 1950, he joined the country’s leading magazine, Philippines Free
Press, working as a proofreader, copywriter, and then member of the staff. At this time,
Free Press was so widely circulated across the country and so dominant a medium for
political reportage and creative writing, it was called “the Bible of the Filipinos.” Practically
all middle-class homes in the country had a copy of the magazine.
Joaquín’s Free Press years established him as a leading public figure in Philippine letters.
In its pages appeared the stories and essays that made him known to a wide national
audience. The publication of Prose and Poems (1952), a collection of short stories, poems,
a novella, and a play, cemented his reputation as an original voice in Philippine literature.
He mined a lode of local experience that no one had quite dealt with in the way he did. He
summoned ancient rites and legends, evoked a Filipino Christianity at once mystical and
profane, and dramatized generational conflicts in a modern society that had not quite come
to terms with its past. His was a vision that ranged through a large expanse of history in an
English so full-bodied and a style sensuous and sure.
In 1955, his first play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes, was
premiered on stage at the Aurora Gardens in Intramuros, Manila, by the Barangay Theater
Guild. He had written the play sometime around 1950 upon the urgings of Sarah Joaquín,
who was active in Manila’s theater circles. Though it had been published in Weekly
Women’s Magazine and Prose and Poems in 1952 and had been aired on radio, the play
was not staged until 1955. It proved to be an immense success. It was made into an
English-language movie by the highly respected Filipino filmmaker Lamberto V. Avellana in
1965, translated into Tagalog, adapted in other forms, and staged hundreds of times. No
Filipino play in English has been as popular.
Using the flashback device of a narrator who recalls the sad fate of a prewar family as he
stands in the ruins of postwar Manila, the play sets itself not only in the divide of war but
that of past and present in Philippine society. Tracing the disintegration of an old and proud
family in the transition from past to present, Nick Joaquín explored what had been abiding
themes in his writing across the years.
He did not see the premiere of the play since, in 1955, Joaquín left the country on a
Rockefeller Foundation creative writing fellowship. The prestigious award took him to Spain,
the United States, and (with a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship from the publishers of Harper’s
Magazine) Mexico. In this sojourn, which lasted more than two years, he worked on his first
novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961), a short and early version of which had
appeared in Prose and Poems. The Woman Who Had Two Navels is a many-layered and
less-than-perfect novel that teases out universal antinomies of truth and falsehood, illusion
and reality, past and present, and locates them in the context of the Filipino search for
identity. Though Joaquín had been criticized for a romantic “nostalgia for the past,” this
novel and his other works, including Portrait, showed that he looked at the past always with
the consciousness of the need for engaging the present world in its own terms.
Joaquín enjoyed his travels. He traveled all over Spain, lived in Madrid and Mallorca, visited
France, stayed a year in Manhattan, went on an American cross-country trip on a
Greyhound bus, crossed the border to Laredo, and had fun exploring Mexico. Spain and
Mexico fascinated him (“my kind of country,” he says). He would, in the years that followed,
take trips to Cuba, Japan, China, Taiwan, and Australia. Yet he was clearly in his element
in his homeland and in Manila, the city that has been his imagination’s favorite haunt.
From the time he rejoined Free Press in 1957 until he left it in 1970 (during which time he
rose to be the magazine’s literary editor and associate editor), Joaquin was as prominent in
his persona as Quijano de Manila (a pseudonym he adopted for his journalistic writings
when he joined the Free Press in 1950) as he was the creative artist Nick Joaquín. He
churned out an average of fifty feature articles a year during this period. He wrote with
eloquence and verve on the most democratic range of subjects, from the arts and popular
culture to history and current politics. He was a widely read chronicler of the times, original
and provocative in his insights and energetic and compassionate in his embrace of local
realities.
One of his contemporaries remarked: “Nick Joaquín the journalist has brought to the craft
the sensibility and style of the literary artist, the perceptions of an astute student of the
Filipino psyche, and the integrity and idealism of the man of conscience, and the result has
been a class of journalism that is dramatic, insightful, memorable, and eminently readable.”
He raised journalistic reportage to an art form. In his crime stories—for example, “The
House on Zapote Street” (1961) and “The Boy Who Wanted to Become Society’” (1961)—
he deployed his narrative skills in producing gripping psychological thrillers rich in scene,
incident, and character. More important, he turned what would otherwise be ordinary crime
reports (e.g., a crime of passion in an unremarkable Makati suburban home or the poor boy
who gets caught up in a teenage gang war) into priceless vignettes of Philippine social
history.
As Free Press literary editor, he virtually presided over the country’s literary scene. Free
Press was the standard in Philippine writing in English because of its wide circulation and
Joaquín’s editorship. Its weekly publication of short stories and poems was avidly followed.
Joaquin was generous in encouraging young writers and exerted an influence on writers not
only in English but in the Philippine languages. In a Filipino generation that had seen
outstanding fictionists (N. V. M. González, F. Sionil José, and others), he was fondly
spoken of as primus inter pares.
Since he joined the Free Press, he had been a full-time writer. The only other “job” he took
was an appointment to the Board of Censors for Motion Pictures, from 1961 to 1972, under
both presidents Diosdado Macapagal and Ferdinand Marcos. He took the post because, in
large part, he loved the movies and practically did no cutting or banning of films, believing in
the intelligence and good sense of moviegoers. He described this stint: “I was non-
censoring.”
Philippine society was going through a period of deepening social crisis. The high hopes
engendered during the popular rule of Ramón Magsaysay began to dissipate after
Magsaysay’s death in 1957, as corruption, factional politics, and economic crisis buffeted
the administrations of presidents Carlos García, Diosdado Macapagal, and Ferdinand
Marcos. The Vietnam War politicized the Filipino intelligentsia, the economy floundered, a
new Communist Party was established in 1969, and a new wave of militant nationalism
swept through such institutions as universities and the media.
In the highly charged days leading up to the declaration of martial law on September 21,
1972, Joaquin maintained his independence as an autonomous voice in Philippine media.
He wrote articles that were current, stayed close to the events, and were deeply fired by
liberal sentiments. In a time polarized by ideological conflict, he continued to speak in his
own voice and not in those of others. This independence had always been a signal virtue of
his writing career.
In the 1930s, when he started writing, he was already a writer apart. At a time when the
United States was viewed as “the very measure of all goodness,” and “history” and
“civilization” in the Philippines seemed to have begun with the advent of America, Joaquin
invoked a deeper past. At a time when to be contemporary was to be “secular,” Joaquín
evoked the country’s Christian tradition. At a time when “proletarian literature” was the
“correct” line for young writers to follow, Joaquín was the skeptic who felt it was one more
instance of local literary hierarchs’ “parroting the Americans, among whom ‘proletarian’ was
then the latest buzzword.” He wrote: “I can see now that my start as a writer was a
swimming against the current, a going against the grain.”
He had always been a writer engaged but apart. Part of the explanation resided in his
character. Engaged in a public profession, with a very public name, he was a very private
person. His reclusive character was formed early. In a rare, affectionate piece his sister-in-
law Sarah Joaquín wrote about him in Philippine Review in 1943, she spoke of the young
Nick as a modest and unassuming young man who was ill at ease with public praise and
shied away from being interviewed or photographed (“he hadn’t had any taken for fifteen
years”). Even then he lived his days according to certain well-loved rites. He loved going
out on long walks (“a tall, thin fellow, a little slouched, walking in Intramuros, almost always
hurriedly”), simply dressed, shoes worn out from a great deal of walking (which helped him
cogitate), observing the street life of the city, making the rounds of churches. “He is the
most religious fellow I know,” Sarah wrote. “Except when his work interferes, he receives
Holy Communion everyday.” He was generous with friends and devoted to the family with
whom, even in his teens, he shared what little money he earned.
A person of habit, he scribbled about himself many decades ago:
I have no hobbies, no degrees; belong to no party, club, or association;
and I like long walks; any kind of guinataan; Dickens and Booth Tarking-
ton; the old Garbo pictures; anything with Fred Astaire… the Opus Dei
according to the Dominican rite… Jimmy Durante and Cole Porter tunes…
the Marx brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Carmen Miranda; Paul’s
Epistles and Mark’s; Piedmont cigarettes… my mother’s cooking…
playing tres-siete; praying the Rosary and the Officium Parvum… I don’t
like fish, sports, and having to dress up.
Though he cut the image of one gregarious with his loud, booming voice; his love for San
Miguel beer (a product that turned him into an icon for Filipino beer drinkers); and his joy in
belting out Cole Porter and Frank Sinatra songs in intimate gatherings in his favorite Manila
cafés, he stuck close to the company of a few friends and hated making formal
appearances in public. He grudgingly gave interviews and revealed such scant detail about
his personal life that there are many gaps and contradictions in his published biographies.
He was not above making mischief on unwitting interviewers by inventing stories about
himself. He refused to give the exact date of his birth (May 4 and September 15 in 1917
have been cited) because, he said, he hated having people come around to celebrate his
birthday.
He had zealously carved out private space in his home where he wrote reams in longhand
or on a typewriter. Though he gave strangers the impression of someone careless and
even dissolute, Joaquín was a very disciplined writer. He woke up early to read the
newspapers, took breakfast, and, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 noon, retired to his library on the
second floor of his house where no one was allowed to disturb him. In his clean and spare
study, with books on shelves lining the walls and, in the center, a chair and a table with a
manual typewriter, Nick did his work. From 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., he took a siesta and, often,
his second bath of the day, and then from around 4:00 p.m. onward, he was out of the
house to go to the editorial office or explore his favorite haunts in Manila.
The turbulent days of political activism, as the 1960s came to a close, did not leave this
very private person unaffected. In 1970, he joined a labor union organized by the workers of
Free Press and agreed to be its president. This was the first union to be organized in the
sixty-two-year-old publishing company that was widely regarded as a beacon of libertarian
ideas. Organized at a time when Manila was seething with civil unrest, the appearance of
the union sparked a bitter fight in the company. When management cracked down on the
union, Joaquín resigned. With Free Press editor-writers Gregorio C. Brillantes and José F.
Lacaba, artist Danilo Dalena, and close to thirty personnel of the administrative and printing
departments, Joaquín launched the weekly Asia-Philippines Leader in 1971 and served as
its editor-in-chief. In the pages of the magazine he wrote a regular column, “This Week’s
Jottings,” where he continued his trenchant commentaries on the Philippine scene.
Martial law closed down Philippine media, including Free Press and Asia-Philippines
Leader. The Marcos government subsequently allowed the publication of a few favored
periodicals controlled by the Marcoses and their cronies. Joaquín refused to contribute.
Among many intellectuals, silence became a form of protest. Joaquín’s irrepressible pen,
however, could not be stilled. “I was never silent during martial law,” Joaquín declared in an
interview in 1980. “I’ve never been silent.” He continued to write, worked independently,
and contributed to both the underground and aboveground alternative press, the small
newspapers and news sheets that came to be referred to as the “mosquito press” during
the martial-law period.
Ironically, there was probably no other time when there was as much publishing of Joaquín
writings as in the 1970s. These publications showcased his boundless creativity and
versatility. In 1977, the National Book Store started issuing popular compilations of his Free
Press human-interest features and crime stories (Reportage on Lovers, Reportage on
Crime) as well as articles on local icons of popular culture (Nora Aunor and Other Profiles,
Ronnie Poe and Other Silhouettes, Amalia Fuentes and Other Etchings, Doveglion and
Other Cameos, Gloria Díaz and Other Delineations, Joseph Estrada and Other Sketches).
Such was his readership that, between 1979 and 1983, more collections of his journalistic
articles were issued: Reportage on the Marcoses, Reportage on Politics, Language of the
Street and Other Essays, and Manila: Sin City and Other Chronicles. A selection of his
speeches and articles appeared in Discourses of the Devil’s Advocate and Other
Controversies (1983). It is not disingenuous to say that such burst of publishing may have
been fueled by a certain nostalgia for the colorful, rough-and-tumble years before martial
law imposed an order of repression and dull conformism.
Mr. & Ms. Publishing published Nick Joaquín’s Almanac for Manileños (1979), a coffee-
table book that turns the form of the old almanac into “a weather chart, a sanctoral, a zodiac
guide, and a mini-encyclopedia on the world of the Manileño.” Almanac is a romp for a
writer whose knowledge of the country’s capital city —from churches to brothels, politicians
and criminals, fashions high and low, past and present— has not been matched by anyone.
In 1978–1979, the same publisher also commissioned Joaquin’s children’s stories and
modernized fairy tales and put them out as independent titles as well as in an anthology,
Pop Stories for Groovy Kids. Some of these stories also appeared in a volume entitled
Joaquinesquerie: Myth á la Mod (1983). He had been asked to write just one story in the
beginning, but he so enjoyed doing it that more followed (“it’s like eating peanuts”). That this
writer of metaphysical thrillers also had a deft hand writing for young readers is shown in his
essays on Manila for young Manileños, Manila, My Manila (1990), and his retelling of the
biography of José Rizal, Rizal in Saga: A Life for Student Fans (1996).
He translated Spanish works into English, something he had done intermittently for years.
His most important in this field was The Complete Poems and Plays of José Rizal (1976).
Nick also returned to theater. He adapted the stories “Three Generations” and “Summer
Solstice” as the plays Fathers and Sons (1977) and Tatarín (1978), respectively. In 1976,
he wrote The Beatas, the story of a seventeenth-century Filipino beguinage, a religious
community of lay women, repressed by a male-dominated, colonial order. The subversive
message of the play, in the particular context of martial rule, lent itself to a staging in
Tagalog translation in the highly political campus of the University of the Philippines in
1978. These plays later appeared in the volume, Tropical Baroque: Four Manileño
Theatricals, published in Manila in 1979 and in Australia in 1982.
In 1972, the University of Queensland Press in Australia published a new edition of his
fiction under the title, Tropical Gothic. An important feature of this edition was the inclusion
of three novellas that originally appeared in Free Press, “Cándido’s Apocalypse,” “Doña
Jerónima,” and “The Order of Melkizedek.” These novellas are powerful, historically
resonant narratives that probably best represent the inventiveness and depth of Joaquín as
fictionist. They are among the most outstanding pieces of Philippine fiction that have been
written.
He went back to writing poetry, something he had not done since 1965. El Camino Real
and Other Rimes appeared in 1983 and Collected Verse, the author’s choice of thirty-three
poems, was published in 1987. Ranging from light verse to long narrative pieces, these
poems —robust, confident, expansive, elegant— are markers in the development of
Philippine poetry. They demonstrate, says the poet-critic Gémino H. Abad, a level of
achievement in which the Filipino is no longer writing in English but has indeed “wrought
from English, having as it were colonized that language.”
That the Filipino writer wrote in English was a virtue that seemed self-evident when Joaquin
started his career in the 1930s. English was the language of government, the schools, and
the leading publications. It was, for young Filipinos, the language of modernity and the
future. In the late 1960s, however, the use of the English language in such fields as
education, literature, and publishing came under serious question as a Marxist-inspired
nationalism sought to establish a radical, popular basis for the national culture. Those who
wrote in English either switched languages or felt called upon to defend their use of a
foreign tongue. Arguing out of his favorite thesis that the Filipino is enriched by his creative
appropriation of new technologies, Joaquin extolled the fresh values of temper and
sensibility that English had brought into the national literature. As for his own writings,
Joaquin’s response to the issue was more blunt: “Whether it is in Tagalog or English,
because I am Filipino, every single line I write is in Filipino.” In a more jocular vein, he had
written about how the local milieu was irrevocably present in his works: “I tell my readers
that the best compliment they can pay me is to say that they smell adobo and lechón when
they read me. I was smelling adobo and lechon when I wrote me.”
In 1976, Nick Joaquín was named National Artist of the Philippines in the field of literature,
the highest recognition given by the state for an artist in the country. Conferred in Manila on
March 27, 1976, the award praised his works as “beacons in the racial landscape” and the
author for his “rare excellence and significant contribution to literature.”
Joaquín had reservations about accepting an award conceived by the Marcos government
as part of First Lady Imelda Marcos’s high-profile program of arts promotion in the country,
but he decided to accept it on the advice of family and friends. He also felt the award would
give him leverage to ask Malacañang Palace to release from prison José F. Lacaba, a
close friend of his and one of the country’s best writers, who was imprisoned for his
involvement in the anti-Marcos resistance. Lacaba was released in 1976.
Joaquín kept his distance from power, studiously resisting invitations to attend state
functions in Malacañang Palace. At a ceremony on Mount Makiling, Laguna, attended by
Mrs. Marcos, who had built on the fabled mountain site a National Arts Center, Joaquín
delivered a speech in which he provocatively spoke of freedom and the artist. He was never
again invited to address formal cultural occasions for the rest of the Marcos regime. He was
too unpredictable to suit the pious pretensions of the martial-law government.
The fact that government had conferred on him the honor of National Artist did not prevent
him from criticizing government. In 1982, he put himself at the forefront of a public
demonstration to protest government’s closure of the oppositionist newspaper We Forum
and the arrest and detention of its publisher and editors. The newspaper had just published
a series of articles exposing Ferdinand Marcos’s fake war medals.
The street appearance was not characteristic of the man. It was in the field of writing that he
engaged power. Joaquin was the provocateur who delighted in debunking what was
politically and intellectually fashionable. One such “fashion” was the interest in the “ethnic”
and “indigenous” during the Marcos era. A legitimate expression of post-Vietnam Filipino
nationalism, the return to the “native” was appropriated by state nationalism during the
martial-law period. In the attempt to clothe with legitimacy Marcos’s “experiment” in
Philippine-style democracy (and authoritarianism) and blunt both the insurgent opposition to
his rule and Western criticism of human-rights violations, the Marcos government appealed
to “nationalism” based on an indigenous and Asian heritage. In the intellectual field, this
found expression in many intersecting ways: the glorification of barangay democracy; the
promotion of Tagalog as the national language and the downgrading of English writing; the
“Filipinization” of scholarly disciplines; the romancing of the 1971 discovery of the allegedly
Stone-Age Tasadays; and the state-sponsored Tadhanà project started in 1975, in which a
group of Filipino historians wrote a “new history” of the Philippines under the name of
Ferdinand Marcos.
Addressing this trend, Nick Joaquín wrote articles attacking nativism and the glorification of
the indigenous and the ethnic. Describing the Filipino as a “work in progress” whose
national identity is the dynamic product of the various cultural influences in his history (in
particular, he stresses, the Spanish-Christian experience), he debunked the idea of a “pure”
native culture and lamented the denigration of Western influence. A vigorous polemicist, he
taunted the “new” nationalists with statements such as “Asia, before 1521, was
conspicuous by its absence in Philippine culture” or “Those who want Philippine culture to
be what it was 400 years ago are afflicted with the Dorian Gray illusion: the illusion that
innocence can be frozen or that a personality can be kept from showing the effects on it of
time, space, nature, society, the outside world.”
The terrain had changed but Joaquín was fighting a battle he had started to wage as early
as the 1930s. Then he was reacting to an intellectual establishment that, infatuated with
America, wanted to wean itself from the past much too quickly. Now he was responding to
leaders and intellectuals who, desiring to break away from the West, were invoking a
golden past he felt was not there. In the years of the Japanese occupation, he was writing
against the grain when he wrote the seminal essay “La Naval de Manila.” Then he was
responding (whether deliberately or not) to the trend, encouraged by the “Greater East Asia
Co-Prosperity Sphere,” for Filipinos to return to their “Asian” and “Malayan” roots. Now, in
the 1970s, he was interrogating the scapegoating of the West and the romancing of
“Asianness.”
Polemical rather than academic, he simplified the terms of the debate, drew dividing lines
much too sharply, and couched arguments in hyperbolic terms. He was impatient with the
either/or rhetoric of indigenists and nationalists. “Why isn’t it enough to be just Filipino?”
Quoting James Joyce, he declared of his own work: “This country and this people shaped
me; I shall express myself as I am.” He was, as always, the writer apart but passionately
engaged.
In A Question of Heroes: Essays in Criticism on Ten Key Figures of Philippine History
(1977) and Culture and History: Occasional Notes on the Process of Philippine Becoming
(1988), he showed himself an insightful historian and vigorous cultural critic. Addressing a
general public rather than specialists, he said that it was his aim to “open up fresh
viewpoints on the national process” by asking “those pesky questions which, though they
seem so obvious, have somehow never been asked about our history and culture.”
In Question of Heroes, a series of articles on Filipino heroes that first appeared in the Free
Press in the 1960s, he demystified the heroes associated with the birth of the nation in the
late nineteenth century. He humanized them, thickened their lives with sharp and telling
detail, and situated them in the living context of their times. The result was not just a critical
reevaluation of historical figures but a coherent picture of a nation in formation. Culture and
History offered a more varied fare of fifteen essays that developed Joaquin’s ideas on what
he called “the process of Filipino becoming.” Underlying these ideas was an evolutionary
and optimistic confidence in the Filipino capacity to invent himself out of the constraints and
opportunities of his historical experience. Attacking the syndrome of shame over the
colonial past and guilt over being “neither East nor West,” Joaquín celebrated hybridity.
Attacking nativism and other forms of exclusionism, he said (quoting Oswald Spengler),
“Historic is that which is, or has been, effective,” and he gloried in what the Filipino has and
will become.
There are conceptual gaps in Joaquín’s view of Philippine history. He tended to be too
dismissive of precolonial culture (even as it figured in his own fiction), overstressed the
transformative role of technology, and was perhaps too apologetic of the Spanish and
Christian influence in Philippine culture. There was no denying, however, the intelligent
passion with which he embraced his people’s culture and history. Few in his time played as
effective a role in the public discourse on the national culture.
The shaking loose of the structure of the martial-law regime after the assassination of
Benigno Aquino Jr. in 1983, and the eventual collapse of the regime in the “People Power
Revolution” of 1986, saw Nick Joaquín right in the public stream as the country’s premier
chronicler of current history. A book that he started writing before martial law was declared
in 1972, The Aquinos of Tarlac: An Essay on History as Three Generations, appeared in
1983. His chronicle of the People Power Revolution, The Quartet of the Tiger Moon, was
published in 1986.
Twenty-two years after The Woman Who Had Two Navels, Joaquín came out with his
second novel, Cave and Shadows (1983). He jokingly remarked at its appearance: “Now, I’ll
be known as the man who has two novels.” Fervid and dense, Cave and Shadows was
Joaquín’s “objective correlative” to the Crisis of ’72. Set in Manila in the steamy month of
August 1972, just before the declaration of martial law, the novel weaves a plot around the
discovery of a woman’s naked body in a cave in the suburbs of Manila. The search for
answers to the mystery of the woman’s death becomes a metaphysical thriller in which past
and present collide and reality is unhinged as a social order breaks down in division and
revolution.
A deep fount of creative energy, Joaquín was a much sought-after biographer. From 1979
to 2000, he authored more than a dozen book-length biographies of prominent Filipinos,
from artists and educators to business people and politicians. These include the
biographies of diplomat Carlos Rómulo, senators Manuel Manahan and Salvador Laurel,
technocrat Rafaél Salas, businessmen Jaime Ongpín and D. M. Guevara, artist Leonor
Orosa Goquingco, educator Nicanor Reyes, civic leader Estefania Aldaba-Lim, and Jaime
Cardinal Sin. He also wrote local and institutional histories—such as San Miguel de Manila:
Memoirs of a Regal Parish (1990) and Hers, This Grove: The Story of Philippine Women’s
University (1996)—and authored or edited diverse other volumes.
He was criticized for “writing too much,” producing commissioned biographies of uneven
quality, and forsaking creative writing for journalism. While his Aquinos of Tarlac was a
masterful interweaving of the life of a family and that of a nation, May Langit Din Ang
Mahirap (1998), his biography of former Manila Mayor Alfredo Lim, seemed like a hurried,
paste-up job. While his talent could be quite profligate, there was no mistaking the
genuineness of his appetite for local life and drive to convert this to memorable form.
Nick Joaquín’s stature in his country is demonstrated by the numerous prizes he received
for his literary and journalistic writings. His contributions to Philippine culture were
acknowledged by the City of Manila with an Araw ng Maynila Award (1963), a Patnubay ng
Sining at Kalinangan Award (1964), and a Diwa ng Lahi Award (1979). The national
government conferred on him its highest cultural honors, the Republic Cultural Heritage
Award (1961) and the title of National Artist of the Philippines (1976).
In 1996, he received the Ramón Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative
Communication Arts, the highest honor for a writer in Asia. The citation honored him for
“exploring the mysteries of the Filipino body and soul in sixty inspired years as a writer.”
Accepting the award on August 31, 1996, Joaquin did not look back on past achievements
but relished the moment, saying that indeed the good wine has been reserved for last and
“the best is yet to be.” This from a man who was about to turn eighty when he received the
award.
In his 1996 Ramón Magsaysay Award lecture, Joaquín addressed what, he said, had
troubled his critics as his “Jekyll/Hyde” personality as journalist and litterateur. He had
never been the hothouse artist, he declared, and had always felt there was no subject not
worthy of his attention. The practice of journalism nourished his populist sympathies.
“Journalism trained me never, never to feel superior to whatever I was reporting, and
always, always to respect an assignment, whether it was a basketball game, or a political
campaign, or a fashion show, or a murder case, or a movie-star interview.” Journalism
exercised his powers of storytelling. “Good reportage is telling it as it is but at the same time
telling it new, telling it surprising, telling it significant.”
Though he largely played his life and career “by ear,” Joaquín relished how he had moved
in the right directions. On the one hand, he could trace himself back to the times when Plato
and Cervantes or the Arabian Nights and the Letters of Saint Paul were all “literature” and
there were no fine distinctions as to which mode of writing was belle and not belle enough.
On the other hand, he had foreshadowed current trends that had broken down the generic
boundaries of fiction and nonfiction or “journalism” and “literature.”
With the mischievous glee of one who enjoyed what he was doing, he said that such
Joaquín reportage as “House on Zapote Street” and “The Boy Who Wanted to Become
‘Society’” antedated the American “New Journalism” that writers such as Norman Mailer,
Truman Capote, and Gore Vidal made famous. Moreover, the fiction that he wrote—from
“May Day Eve” and “The Mass of St. Sylvester” to “Doña Jerónima” and “Cándido’s
Apocalypse”—bodied forth “magic realism” long before the Latin American novelists made it
fashionable.
While Nick Joaquín wrote in English, was published abroad, and had some of his works
translated into foreign languages, he did not quite receive the high attention he deserved
outside the Philippines. This was something probably of no great moment to Joaquín
himself. He was firmly rooted in place and in active dialogue with his Filipino audience. This
speaking to and about his people had always framed his writing life. Though he spoke from
a specific location—writing in English out of Manila (he had not lived for any significant
amount of time outside the capital)—his voice carried far among Filipinos.
In the Philippines, Nick Joaquín was a keeper of tradition and a maker of memory. He grew
up in what he called an “Age of Innocence” in Philippine history, an era when Filipinos,
seduced by the promise of America and modernity, distanced themselves from their
Spanish colonial past and slipped into a kind of amnesia. He saw—having grown up in a
home where his father told stories about the revolution and his mother encouraged a love
for Spanish poetry—that it was his calling “to bring in the perspective, to bring in the
grandfathers, to manifest roots.” In his writings, he traced a landscape haunted by the past
—pagan rites in the shadows of the Christian church, legends of a woman in the cave,
strange prophets roaming the countryside, grandfathers who seem like ghosts who have
strayed into the present. He conjured a society stranded in the present and not quite whole
because it had not come to terms with its past.
The problem of identity was central in Joaquín’s works. In an impressive body of literary,
historical, and journalistic writings, Joaquín was a significant participant in the public
discourse on “Filipino identity.” What marked the positions he took was his refusal of easy
orthodoxies. An outsider to government, the political parties, and the universities, he kept
his space to be an independent thinker on the issues confronting the nation. From the
1930s to until his death, he was consistent in his role as the critic of what passed for the
politically “correct” of the day. In this manner, he opened up spaces for the Filipino to
imagine himself in novel ways and act on this basis.
Nick Joaquín lived through eight decades of Philippine history and witnessed the slow,
uneven, and often violent transformation of the nation—the American idyll of the prewar
years, the violence and degradation of an enemy occupation, the Communist insurgency
and the hard choices it confronted the Filipino with, the dark years of martial rule, the
waxing and waning of hopes for a better nation. It is history that tempts many with despair.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Nick Joaquín, the writer, was that his was always
the voice of a deep, inclusive, and compassionate optimism in the Filipino.
He had always—as Joaquín himself would say, quoting one of his favorite literary lines—
raged, raged against the dying of the light. This was true not only of what he had written but
how he had lived his life. When many of his contemporaries had long faded into the
background, Joaquín continued to speak of his craft with the verve of a young writer. Well
into his eighties, with close to sixty book titles to his name, he was working on more. He
also continued to practice journalism. He wrote the regular columns “Small Beer” and
“Jottings” for the Philippine Daily Inquirer and the Sunday Inquirer Magazine from 1988 to
1990; served as editor of Philippine Graphic magazine and publisher of its sister
publication, Mirror Weekly, in 1990; and continued to contribute to various publications until
his final days. When asked once if he ever intended to retire, Joaquín was said to have
responded, with typical mischief, “I’m not retiring and I’m not resigned.”
NICK Joaquín lived in the city and country of his affections and continued to write until his
death in April 2004 at the age of eighty-six.
*******
Culled from the Ramón Magsaysay Award Foundation website.
Philippine novelist, poet, playwright, and essayist writing in English, the National Artist for
Literature. Joaquin is widely considered the best postwar author in his country. He has
written largely about the Spanish colonial period and the diverse heritage of the Filipino
people. Often he deals with the coexistence of 'primitive' and 'civilized' dimensions inside
the human psyche. In his short story 'The Summer Solstice,' set in the 1850s, Joaquin
portrayed the collision between instincts and refined culture. Doña Lupeng first rejects
ancient beliefs, but under the spell of the moon, she becomes possessed by the spirit of the
Tadtarin cult - she does not want to be loved and respected anymore but adored as the
embodiment of the matriarchal powers.
"He lifted his dripping face and touched his bruised lips to her toes; lifted his hands and
grasped the white foot and kissed it savagely - kissed the step, the sole, the frail ankle -
while she bit her lips and clutched in pain at the windowsill, her body distended and
wracked by horrible shivers, her head flung back and her loose hair streaming out of the
window - streaming fluid and black in the white night where the huge moon glowed like a
sun and the dry air flamed into lightning and the pure heat burned with the immense intense
fever of noon." (from 'The Summer Solstice' in Tropical Gothic, 1972)
Nick Joaquin was born in Paco on Calle Herran, as the the son of Leocadio Y. Joaquin, a
lawyer and a colonel of the Philippine Revolution, and Salome Marquez, a schoolteacher.
After three years of secondary education at the Mapa High School, Joaquin dropped out of
school to work on Manila’s waterfront and in odd jobs. On his spare time he read widely at
the National Library and on his father's library. English had became the official medium of
instruction in 1898 after the Spanish-American war. Especially through the work of short
story writers English became the most developed literary genre and virtually all Spanish
literature ceased.
Starting as a proofreader at the Philippines Free Press, Joaquin rose to contributing editor
and essayist under the pen name 'Quijano de Manila' (Manila Old Timer). After World War II
Joaquin worked as a journalist, gaining fame as a reporter for the Free Press. In 1970 he
left the Philippines Free Press and went on to edit Asia-Philippine Leader. During the reign
of Ferdinand Marcos, who had won presidency in 1965, corruption started to fuel opposition
to his administration. When martial law was declared in 1972 Joaquin was subsequently
suspended. He then became the editor of the Philippine Graphic magazine and publisher of
the Women’s Weekly.
Joaquin started to write short stories, poems, and essays in 1934. One year later his first
work appeared in the Tribune in 1935. In 1947 his essay on the defeat of a Dutch fleet by
the Spaniards off the Philippines in 1646 earned him a scholarship to study in Hong Kong at
the Albert College, founded by the Dominicans. Joaquin's studies for priesthood explains
part the Christian setting of his stories and constant attention to the practices and
superstitions of his characters. However, he left the seminary in 1950, finding it impossible
for him to adjust to rigid rules. Prose and Poems (1952) was followed by the Barangay
Theatre Guild's production of his play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. The title refers to
James Joyce's famous book, not without ironic tone. A Portrait is considered the most
important Filipino play in English. In it Joaquin focused on a family conflict, in which old
cultural models are reconciled with modern values. The descendants of the declining Don
Lorenzo refuse to sell the masterpiece which he has painted for them. With Stevan
Javellana, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Celso Al. Carunungan, and Kerima Polotan Tuvera he
influenced the development of the Philippine novel and short story. He writing also build a
bridge from modern literature to the religious themes of Spanish heritage and primitive
beliefs. When the young Guido in 'The Summer Solstice' had returned from Europe to his
home, he tells Doña Lupeng: "Ah, I also learned to open my eyes over there - to see the
holiness and the mystery of what is vulgar."
The prize-novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961) examined the pressures of the
past upon the present. Monson, the ex-revolutionary, hides in Hong Kong, afraid to face the
trials of postwar independence. Again Joaquin dealt with the tensions between illusion and
reality. The novel won the first Harry Stonehill Award, an yearly grant. The Aquinos of
Tarlac (1983) was a biography of the assassinated presidential candidate Benigno Aquino.
He led the opposition to President Ferdinand Marcos and was shot dead in the airport when Director Jorge W. Ledesma opted for a confusing presentation of this worthy text. He
he returned from exile. Three years after his death his widow Corazon Aquino became divided each major role among up to three actors-possibly an interesting treatment for a
President of the Philippines. Cave and Shadows (1983) occurs in the period of martial law well-known classic but inappropriate to make a case for the play, which many people will be
under Marcos. seeing for the first time. His stated aim is to utilize his cast of 19 Filipino and American
For his work Joaquin received several awards. His essay 'La Naval de Manila' (1943) won actors to reflect the multicultural forces shaping Filipino society, but succeeds only in
in a contest sponsored by the Dominicans; 'Guardia de Honor' was declared the best story obscuring Mr. Joaquin's already eloquent treatment of this very theme. Playing up Mr.
of the year in 1949, he received in 1963 the Araw ng Maynila Award, and in 1966 he was Joaquin's many humorous touches would be a needed contrast for the seriousness of the
conferred the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Literature, Broadcast and Journalism. In 1976 sisters. Finally, better blocking would enliven Donald Eastman's simple setting.
Joaquin was declared a National Artist. He is the most anthologized of all Philippine
authors. Apart from the play, the major interest is in the cast. Kitty Chen gives just the right touch of
cynicism as the photographer Cora. Millie Chow and Eileen Rivera are ideal as the dance
A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS FILIPINO hall girls Violet and Susan. Sharing the role of the boarder Tony Javier, Ron Domingo and
Plot summary and thematic description Louie Leonardo make this con artist likeable. Peggy Yates is memorable as the
sophisticated and well-travelled society girl Elisa Monte.
Set in the Filipino world of pre-World War II Intramuros of Old Manila in October 1941,[4] the
play explores the many aspects of Philippine high society by telling the story of the
Christianne Myers designed costumes that were heavy on early 1940's nostalgia, but she
Marasigan sisters, Candida and Paula, and their father, the painter Don Lorenzo
burdened Candida and Paula with inconvenient trains on their white dresses. Such
Marasigan. Due to an artistic drought on Don Lorenzo's part, the family has to make ends
costuming is appropriate for the occasional vignettes behind a rear scrim but are
meet by relying on the financial support provided by their brother Manolo and sister
unfortunate when moving about on stage.
Pepang, who were urging them to sell the house.[6] Later on, they also had to take a male
boarder, in the person of Tony Javier.[8] Don Lorenzo, who refused to sell, donate, or even
The audience gave this Ma-Yi Theatre Ensemble production a warm reception. Running
exhibit his self-portrait in public, was only content in staying inside his room, a
time is about two and a half hours with one intermission.
stubbornness that already took a period of one year.[4] The painting has attracted the
attention and curiosity of journalists such as a family friend named Bitoy Camacho, and
other obnoxious visitors pretending as art critics.[4] When one of the daughters, Paula,
elopes with Tony, a journey of personal liberation is set in motion, which ends with a
restoration of family relations which had been strained due to the neediness of the artist's
family.[8] She also felt regret after destroying the portrait. [8]
The theme focuses on family conflict and the amalgamation of old Filipino identity and
cultural character with the arrival of contemporary and Western ideals.[6]
Historical setting and background
Before the Second World War, many Filipino intellectuals and artists  – including painters,
as personified by Don Lorenzo Marasigan  – searched for cultural enlightenment from
Spain, the first imposer of colonialism and authority in the Philippines. This group of
Filipinos was acquainted with the Spanish language and customs. After the liberation of the
Philippines from its Spanish colonizer, the United States became the replacement model for
cultural enhancement, where English language and materialism became a part  – as
personified by the boarder Tony Javier  – thus marginalizing native tongues and culture
within the process. During this period, the Philippines was also plagued by the looming war,
frequent blackouts, and untrustworthy characters of the existing nightlife in Old Manila. [

A CurtainUp Review

Portrait of the Artist as a Filipino

By David Lipfert

Known as the Philippine national play, Nick Joaquin's Portrait of the Artist as Filipino from
1952 is currently onstage at Vineyard's Dimson Theatre. The play's immense popularity in
its homeland is due as much to the author's loving look at the multiple cultural components
of Philippine high society as to the reassuring ending for the Marasigan family conflict,
which is the main plot.

Candida and Paula, Don Leonardo's two unmarried daughters, are barely able to maintain
the sprawling family house except through the contributions from their "successful" brother
and sister Pepang and Manolo. By taking in male boarder Tony, they survive in the face of
their father's artistic drought. The daughters resist the temptation to sell father's self-portrait,
which could fetch a small fortune, and ignore their siblings' coercion to dispose of the family
house. Personal liberation begins when Paula briefly elopes with Tony, destroys the
painting and the two daughters apologize to their father for their ill treatment of him.
Imminent war, practice blackouts and sleazy figures from Manila nightlife make a colorful
context.

Just as Philippine society was an amalgam of foreign influences, Mr. Joaquin's plot unites
rigid family mores and implacable siblings (Federico Garcia Lorca) with a Shakespearean
nobility. Akin to the arrival of a god to whisk an unfortunate mortal out of harm's way,
unexpected salvation comes in the form of the Senator's advice to stand pat against the
world.

In the pre-war period, intellectuals and many artists, such as the painter Don Leonardo
Marasigan, looked to the first colonial power Spain for cultural models. Typical of these
circles, the Marasigan family peppers their conversation with Spanish words. They also
used to host a weekly tertulia, a typically Spanish four-person discussion group where
literary and other topics held sway. When the U.S. liberated Spain of its outlying colonies
(Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico) about a century ago, English became the power
language and new models of material success became ascendant. The journalists visiting
Don Leonardo's house in the first scene can think only about how much the painting might
be worth, not about the theme taken from Virgil's Aeneid. Native culture and Tagalog
language were marginalized, just like the boarder Tony Javier, and the elite traveled abroad
to either Europe or America to set themselves apart.