"You are going to die," I told him.

"But I will die decently," he said, pausing. "Isn't that what we should live for?"
His question had a quality of coldness, of challenge.
Reading the first book, PO-ON , of the Rosales series last year by prolific Filipino writer and
living legend F. Sionil Jose was a gruellingly reflective experience that awoken a dormant
passion of the nationalistic sense within me that I never thought I ever had to begin with. I
would go as far as to say that this should have been a required reading in schools all across my
country, and it baffles me now that it's wasn't. Simply put, this series is an extraordinary piece
of work that needs to be celebrated and read every day because of its relevant commentary in
the Philippine society as a whole, using no other than the means of fiction to deliver across
some of the most crucial and moving points regarding the state of our post-colonial country.
The Rosales saga is comprised of five books with stories told across history starting with the
Spanish era down to the Martial Law years. Each story is interrelated or consequential of the
one before it. The stories' shared setting is the Ilocos region, particularly the Rosales area. We
follow the lives of a select family for every installment who lives in Rosales.
In Po-On, we have the story of the Salvador family as told by the eldest son Istak, narrating the
events starting from the moment they were driven from their lands to seek out a new home
after one of their own committed a crime, and then as they venture on in a trip so often
beautifully and tragically reminiscent of the Biblical text, Exodus. The struggles of this
ordinary family could have easily been our own as well, and it's with the characters of Istak and
Dalin that Po-On weaves a tale so engrossing that even the most subtle details in their lives
such as their vulnerabilities and sentimentalities become nearly sublime. It was just a
remarkable story about a Filipino's ruthless quest for freedom and identity which still rings
true even to this day.

"The balete tree--it was there for always, tall, leafy and majestic. In the beginning, it sprang
from the earth as vines coiled around a sapling. The vines strangled the young tree they had
embraced. They multiplied, fattened and grew, became the sturdy trunk, the branches
spread out to catch the sun. And beneath this tree, nothing grows!"
Meanwhile, in Tree, the approach is vastly different from its predecessor. Now written in firstperson narrative, this story is almost autobiographical if not for the fact that the narrator
himself (who remains unnamed) was actually more focused on telling the stories of specific
relatives, including their idiosyncrasies, most striking experiences and eventual end. This
makes Tree more of an exploration of a social status than a personal one where the focal family
arehaciendero elites during the American era. They supervise the lands owned by the feudal
mogul Don Vincente (who interestingly enough becomes the main character in the next book),
as well as the lives of modest farmers who have no choice but to work these lands with barely
enough compensation.

Chronologically designed to follow the tale of this unnamed narrator from childhood to college
years, Tree is semi-autobiographical because of this, but readers never learn about the
narrator as much as they learn about his family's way of life, and the servants with their
children within his household and out there in the farmlands. What follows then are chapters
specifically devoted to certain relatives (mostly his uncles) or childhood friends and their
families who have worked tirelessly for him and his father all throughout their lives.
In the span of seventy pages or so, the narrator would recall circumstances in his childhood
that would allow readers to develop their own insights and interpretations as to the harsh
realities the people around him are striving to get through while he himself was living rather
comfortably if not ignorantly as a rich haciendero's son.
As he grows older, the narrator has learned to understand the subtleties of the socio-political
climate during those times, as well as the unending class struggle and corruption happening
around him, but he was still ultimately powerless to do anything about them. In this sense,
Tree is more intimately close to the way modern Filipinos react to the dire situations of the
politics that dominate our lives these days, fully aware of the persistent effects and yet a great
number of us would still rather choose to remain individually negligent in finding solutions to
the nation's prevalent social diseases. Not because of apathy but more as a product of collective
exhaustion because the corruption of the rich and the abuse of the poor has become too much
of a convenient commonplace that we are no longer moved to act against this terrible status
quo.
Tree only has a hundred and thirty-five pages which meant that it can be consumed within two
days or so. With this brevity, the story itself is engaging in such a way that each chapter
deliberately and seamlessly explores what it means to live in a world where people are
suffering on different levels of oppression; that whether rich or poor, a family and the
individual can suffer because of the overall inequality in the society they live in. Tree's
metaphor of the balete tree found in the story further emphasizes this truth; a seemingly noble
tree that is a centuries old can also be viewed as a parasitic entity that thrives in expense of the
plants surrounding its breadth, much like those who live in luxury and comfort indirectly
harms those who are less fortunate than they are.
Perhaps through this novel, F. Sionil Jose is making the argument that such a dog-eat-dog
mentality will always be the natural state of things which allow only the strongest (if not
ruthless) to survive, and now perhaps it's merely up to us as a nation whether or not to
embrace this evolutionary state, or rebel against it and redefine our place.

Set in the 1950s in the Philippines,[3] Tree was the story about an unnamed Filipino boy, the
son of a plantation manager and subjugator of other Filipinos,[3] who grew up in
an Ilocano town known as Rosales, Pangasinan. He was surrounded by acquaintances
beneath his social class, relatives, and servants.[2] He was described as a youth who
searched for parental love and a place in a society with rigid class structures. He was also
the grandson of the landlord protagonized by Jos in the novel Po-on. In Tree, the boy
narrated the weakening relationship between the peasants and landowners in Ilocos, including
how Don Vicente Asperri took over their landsTTTTT
Once the center of rice trading in eastern Luzon, Rosales became insolvent, thus making the
protagonist child a witness to a series of social inequalities,[3] humiliations and tragedies,
making him despise his father, the overseer for the wealthy provincial[4] and feudal[3] landowner
known as Don Vicente Asperri[4] (Asperris illegitimate son, Luis Asperri, became a main
character in Joss My Brother, My Executioner[3]) The Philippine revolution brought no
changes in the feudal system of the Philippines agrarian economy, except for the shift from
Spanish to American colonialism. Only the Filipino landowners, their people, and the industrial
leaders benefited from the free trade that was established between the Philippines and
the United States. The tenants of the land and industrial laborers became impoverished. In
spite of the injustices and suffering during the American period, the poor tenants
became guerrillas to fight the Japanese occupiers in return for improved living conditions.
[5]

The inequalities received by the tenants of the plantations resulted to the birth of an uprising

that would change Philippine society forever.[ v.m 3]

qQQ

ccgdiqqlTree by F Sionil Jos

Having just re-read Ngugis A Grain Of Wheat, I decided to visit Frankie Sionil Joss novel Tree.
Ngugi described a struggle for freedom that succeeded. The perspective he chose was that of poor
people caught up in events. Francisco Sionil Jos, on the other hand, describes the aftermath of a
national struggle that failed, and from the point of view of the middle classes who may even have
benefited from the USAs initially opportunist snatch of victory from the nationalists. In the
Philippines, the struggle was against Spain, and it was won. But then Spain collapsed and the USA
intervened and a new war had to be won. From the point of view of Filipinos, perhaps it was lost.
Four hundred years in a convent followed by fifty in Hollywood is how Filipinos often sum up their
history. In its own way, Francisco Sionil Jos attempts a description of that history via his sequence
of Rosales novels.

Tree covers the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, and follows the growth of its main character
from a child to a freshman medical student. It describes the Philippines from Commonwealth to
independence. Crucially, when the latter arrives, it is hardly celebrated. The social order has long
since been cemented and our family in Rosales are on the landowners side. Independence brings
the Huk rebellion and a dangerous challenge to their status.

Tree is a novel that is not strong on plot. It is almost possible to read its chapters as a series of short
stories, portraits of the people and events that filled its narrators life. In concept, the Rosales
novels have something only something, I stress! in common with Anthony Powells Dance To
The Music Of Time. They bear witness, but only rarely interpret.

In the centre of Rosales, a small town in Pangasinan, north of Manila, is a large, old and rambling
balete tree. It seems to be indestructible. Even when an American soldier with an excavator runs
into it, the tree survives. The excavator is ruined the hardware, not the person and hangs
around until locals cut it up for scrap. Now theres a comment on the USAs legacy in the
Philippines.

Spains colonial legacy survives in the form of vocabulary, names of dishes and of people. Whats in
a name? The answer is a culture a landowner versus a peasant, a Catholic versus an Aglipayan,
not to mention a new-fangled follower of Iglesia Ni Kristo. Tree, essentially, is an impressionistic

picture of a small society. There are hints at conflict, suggestions of the unrealised, usually centred
on lack of rights to land, to produce, to opportunity. In microcosm, Tree suggests what the
Philippines might have been, but never achieved. Crucially, had it done so, its main character would
probably never have the chance of entering medical school.

It is also important to note that beneath the balete tree nothing grows. Now most tropical earth
stays blank when it is denied light. In Tree, F. Sionil Jos uses this image to suggest that, left to its
own device, maybe the Philippines might have prospered but then maybe not. After all, the tree
was indigenous.

Tree is a novel replete with cultural experience mixed with personal reference. Its lack of linear plot
has to be accepted and not criticised. Its just not that kind of book. And, as with most things
Filipino, theres much more going on under the surface, despite the fact that under the tree theres
nothing but bare earth.

Setting: The story was set-in the 1950s in an Ilocano Town which
is Rosales, Pangasinan located in Central Luzon (Region 3).

Theme: It depicts man's continuing and often futile search for

justice and a moral order. In this story, it emphasizes the
oppression and compassion of a young boy lived in Rosales,
Pangasinan.
21`