1

PUP Professorial Chairholder on Literary Studies

October 11, 2019; 8:00am-12:00nn
Lecture 1:

Where in the World is the Filipino Writer?

Dr. Resil B. Mojares

National Artist for Literature
Professor Emeritus, University of San Carlos

{1} In a remarkable book entitled The World Republic of Letters (2004), French
scholar Pascale Casanova traces the historical formation of what she calls “world
literary space.” World literary space, she says, has its own capital(s), its provinces
and borders, its forms of communication, its systems of reward and recognition.
It is a world dominated by “big” languages and “big” literatures, with capitals like
Paris, London, New York, Barcelona –- and, on the other hand, “small”
languages, “small” literatures that have either been annexed to dominant literary
spaces or are invisible outside their national borders.1 A world constituted through
competition, hierarchy, and inequality, what the French idealized in the eighteenth
century as a “world republic of letters” is in fact (in Casanova‟s telling) more an
empire than a republic.

{2} One can ask: Where in this empire of letters is the Filipino writer?

While Casanova‟s book has been criticized as too Eurocentric, it is quite

remarkable for the international breadth of its material. I have not read a book of
literary scholarship as broadly “international” as this one. Casanova ranges
through an impressive mix of writers: from Argentinian Julio Cortazar,
Portuguese Antonio Lobo Antunes, Kenyan Ngugi wa Thiong‟o, Serbo-Croatian
Danilo Kis, and Japanese Kenzaburo Oe, to others less well-known, like the
Algerian Kateb Yacine, Somali Nuruddin Farah, and Iranian Sadiq Hidayat.

Southeast Asia and the Philippines do not appear in Casanova‟s book. I

am not complaining. Examples, in a field so vast, are necessarily selective; or
perhaps she has not simply traveled this far. Yet, one cannot but be nudged by the
thought that, indeed, we may be among the marginals and the invisibles, even
more marginal, more invisible.

What does being “small” or “marginal” mean? “Smallness” is not a

simple matter of size or number, the size of a territory or population, the numbers
of speakers and readers in a language. The Philippines has a territorial size equal
to that of Poland, but we do not have contemporary writers of the stature of
Czeslaw Milosz, Witold Gombrowicz or Wistawa Szymborska. We have a
population five times larger than that of Chile, but we cannot claim as remarkable
a roster of writers -- Nobel Prize winners Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda,
Nicanor Parra (considered the best living poet in the Spanish language), the
novelist Jose Donoso, today‟s literary sensation Roberto Bolano, and (if you wish)
Isabel Allende, whose novels have sold more than 50 million copies worldwide.
 2

There is twice the number of native speakers in Tagalog than in Catalan, but I do
not think we have matched the vitality and reputation of Catalan writing.

This is not to say that size does not matter. V.S. Naipaul abandoned his
small island of Trinidad for the glory that is England, believing (as he says rather
superciliously) that “small countries breed small imaginations.” And then there is
the case of the writer E.M. Cioran, who left his impoverished Romania, moved to
France, and at the age of thirty-six decided to switch language from Romanian to
French.

But it is, as I have said, not just a question of physical and demographic
size. Obviously, we have to think of the whole historical process (political,
economic, as well as cultural) to explain how centers and margins, “big” and
“small,” the dominant and the dominated, the visible and the invisible, are
created. It is a history I do not have the appetite to rehearse, and one you don‟t
really want to hear again.

{3} I would rather ask: How does the Filipino writer escape invisibility?

The examples of Naipaul and Cioran point to one way: writing in a “big”
language.

Colonized by Spain and the United States, we are no strangers to writing

in big languages. Our greatest writer, Jose Rizal, wrote in Spanish. Self-
published in Berlin, his Noli me Tangere would be reprinted in Spanish in Spain
and Latin America, published in French in Paris, in English in England and the
United States, and, in the Philippines, in Spanish, English, and various Philippine
languages. Recently, Penguin consecrated Rizal‟s two novels by publishing them
in its “world classics” series, and this December, the Spanish government is
staging a Rizal Exhibition in Madrid to showcase Rizal as one of the great writers
of “the Spanish-speaking world.”

We appreciate the wondrous possibilities of writing in another language,

but we also know its cost and consequence, or lack of consequence. Rizal was
perfectly aware of cost and consequence. He did not choose Spanish because he
wanted to crash into the international market. He chose Spanish because (as a
well-educated colonial subject) it was the language he knew best, and, more
important, because he aimed to speak to power in its own language (addressing
Spain and Europe, for which reason he also considered writing the novel in
French) – even as he sought, in the mode of `double address‟, to speak to his own
people as well. And, in the end, when he decided it was politically more
important to speak to his own people, he attempted to write his third novel in
Tagalog. The novel was not finished. Rizal realized he did not know his own
language enough; more decisively, he ran out of time; the Spaniards executed
him.

Rizal‟s keen sense of the politics of language was not to be found in the
first generation of writers who, now under the spell of U.S. colonial rule, wrote in
English. In their early twentieth-century romance with the English language,
Filipino writers saw English as their ticket to the world (which, at the time, mostly
 3

meant the United States), claimed themselves “heirs to Shakespeare,” dreamed of

“making it” in the American book market, and hankered for recognition in the
United States. There is the story (pathetic and comic, perhaps apocryphal) of the
poet Amador Daguio, earnestly sending samples of his poetry to the American
critic Yvor Winters, who returned them with the note dismissing Daguio‟s
creations as the sort that could be fashioned out of the pages of the San Francisco
telephone directory. The rejection sent Daguio to such a state of depression he
contemplated committing suicide.

{4} Writing in English (even writing in English well) does not guarantee that one
will be read „in the world‟. (The Chinese and Japanese write in their own
languages and have a much larger international readership than Filipino writers in
English have.) And writing for an outside readership has its costs as well in the
kinds of dependency or pandering it fosters --- as in the case of literature that
bends and falsifies local realities to suit a taste for the quaint, bizarre, or exotic in
the foreign book market, or, at the other extreme, the suppression, dilution, or loss
of difference that results in a writer disappearing from one‟s homeland as he or
she is incorporated or absorbed into other, more dominant spaces. One is
reminded of Naipaul‟s acerbic remark on contemporary Indian writing in English:

… no national literature has ever been created like this, at

such a remove, where the books are published outside,
judged by people outside, and to a large extent bought by
people outside.2

The remark is unfair: Naipaul is thinking of Indian writing in the diaspora

rather than the body of work produced in India itself. But his point is important.
As Gabriel Garcia Marquez, speaking of early Latin American writing: “The
interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own serves only to make us
ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.”3

{5} If “a writer‟s language,” as it has been said, “is his homeland,” what
homeland does one, in choosing a language, inhabit or build?

Asked what homeland means to him, the novelist Roberto Bolano (who
loves to be contrary) replied: “… my children… maybe a few instants, a few
streets, a few faces or scenes or books that live inside me.” “It‟s possible to have
many homelands… but only one passport, and that passport is obviously the
quality of one‟s writing… which does not only mean writing well but incredibly
well.”4 Bolano is right, of course, about the passport (but then again, it is not
always true), and he is, in a way, right in suggesting that”homeland” means
something beyond language iself. It is that location from which we look at the
world, the place out of which we write and speak, the person we are, but also that
which, because we have chosen it as home, we call “nation.”

For the individual writer, there is a wide, diverse range of artistic

positions, strategies, and solutions to the problems of both language and location.
It will all come down to the choices the individual writer makes. But if we must
speak of the Filipino writer – with what that conveys of the distinctness of
 4

nationality – we have to speak of the conjunction of choices Filipino writers, as a

definable formation, make.

{6} I know that there are many who think that notions of nationality are romantic
and outdated, citing, for one, hybridities of language use and the role of
translation – writers who write in two or more languages, merge languages, write
between languages (or, as Jimmy Abad puts it, from a language instead of in a
language); writers who cross language borders by being translated. Or one can
cite the case of writers who have become truly “international,” not only by virtue
of being translated into many languages but by becoming “world citizens,”
traveling, maintaining residences in New York and Buenos Aires, or London and
New Delhi; writing authoritatively not only on their homeland of Trinidad or
Great Britain but Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world. But how many writers
enjoy or claim such a status?

I do not think we have to worry about the specter of a “narrow and

insular” nationalism. No one should speak to us as if we have not heard of
“globalization.” The first book authored by a Filipino was a Tagalog manual for
learning Castilian (Tomas Pinpin‟s Libro, 1610); the first book of poetry written
by a Filipino was a book of verses in Latin (Bartolome Saguinsin‟s Epigrammata,
1766); and the first novelist in Tagalog (Gabriel Beato Francisco, writing between
1890 and 1910) wrote in a pastiche of journalism, historical chronicle, and
metrical romance, that, at a time when the “modern” had just began, was already
“post-modern.”

And we have been a moving, migrating people, and not just in recent
times. A fact that may not be known to many (but the idea of which is not
surprising at all): In the 1860s, there was a small Filipino community in Cape
Town (South Africa), that started with a Filipino crew member of the U.S.
Confederate vessel Alabama who jumped ship when that which visited Cape
Town in 1863.5

We are, historically, a people open to the world – although a world that,

over the past century, has been heavily mediated by the English language and the
United States. Consider, for instance, what percentage of the inventory of local
bookstores and libraries is produced in the United States. What come to us from
Europe and the Middle East come by way of the United States.

Browsing in a country‟s bookstores is a quick introduction to its people‟s

mental environment. Walk into a big bookstore in Barcelona, and one finds that
roughly seventy percent of the books is in Spanish (a substantial part being
translations from non-Spanish works), and the rest sections for works in Catalan,
English, French, German, and even Italian. What the shelves convey is the sense
of a cosmopolitan literary space, but one that is also autonomous in the
dominance of local languages and the control exercised in the translation of
outside literature.

What impression would one have of the intellectual life of the Philippines
browsing in the National Book Store?
 5

{7} We need to escape bias in our cultural formation by drawing more fully from
transnational influences, as we need to deepen our connection not only to a local
or national heritage but to a more broadly regional one as well.

The Latin American example is interesting. While Latin America can be

reckoned as one of the world‟s dominated spaces, politically and economically, its
literature is dominant. This is occasioned, first of all, by its sheer size and its use
of a “world language” (Spanish). But this is also because of its creative
appropriation of a vast and rich indigenous tradition, its historical connections to
Europe and the United States, and the dramatic realities of its contemporary
history.

The “Latin American boom” that began in the 1960s did not well out of
the Andes but out of Latin America‟s encounter with the world – whether we
think of Alejo Carpentier dreaming in Paris of creating a Carribean version of
French surrealism; Gabriel Garcia Marquez finding inspiration from early
European narratives of discovery and conquest, or Mario Vargas Llosa reading
Spanish metrical romances in Madrid.

What it has drawn from the outside has been fermented within the region
itself – in its deep collective memory of its past as well as its shared experience of
contemporary violence, corruption, and dictatorship. (Thus, Garcia Marquez,
combining the two, would find in the fabulous monsters of the European literature
of discovery a way of speaking of the monstrous marvels of modern dictatorship
itself.)

Then there is the fact that Latin American writing, for reasons of history
and geography, has become truly “continental,” rather than strictly “national.”
Typically, Latin American writers crisscross national borders, speak the same
language, publish in each other‟s countries, and read each other‟s works. Thus,
we do not think of Garcia Marquez or Jorge Amado as Colombian or Brazilian,
but, simply, “Latin American.” This is not just a case of outside perception but of
self-identification as well. When Roberto Bolano was asked, shortly before his
death, whether he considered himself Chilean (since he was born in Chile), or
Mexican (since his early career was spent in Mexico), or Spanish (since it was in
Spain that he eventually settled), he confidently replied: “I‟m Latin American.”6
(Blurring national boundaries, his Savage Detectives has been called “the great
Mexican novel.”)

How many of us can say, with equal confidence, that we are “Asians” or
“Southeast Asians”?

The comparison, of course, is grossly unfair. History consigned us to the

outer periphery of the Spanish Empire, and (despite current efforts of the Spanish
government to reincorporate us into the “Spanish-speaking world”), we are not,
cannot be, Latin America. History consigned us as well to being a small, distant,
best-forgotten outpost in the early days of the American Empire (even if that
empire, though no longer quite recognizable as the old one, Is still with us).
Three centuries of history disengaged us from fully participating in the region we
are in (call it “Asian” or “Malay”), and it is a region that, in literary terms, we
 6

have not quite claimed as our own. Yes, the comparison is unfair, but there are
here lessons to be learned.

{8} How does Filipino writing become visible in the world? Where does one
begin?

One or two books or writers winning international recognition will not

suffice (though, of course, it helps). The process must begin with (to use
Casanova once again) building “national literary space,”a space defined by its
claim to a different, autonomous literary identity, and one that is built up through
the accumulation and concentration of intellectual or literary capital, in the form
of a professional milieu of schools and academies, publishing houses, a large and
active community of writers and readers, its own systems of recognition and
reward, and, most important, a truly distinctive body of work. It requires the
articulation and expansion of a tradition that is, first of all, local, but one that
appropriates foreign and transnational influences as well.

Such accumulation does not come easy, and it is dependent on other forms
of capital, economic as well as political. Yet, this is the way by which “national
literary spaces” are built.

The important thing is not to wonder whether we are visible to the world
but to ask how fully visible we are to ourselves. It is by becoming fully visible
ourselves that, I trust, we shall be visible to others.

{9} If I have sounded too harsh and prescriptive, I ask for your indulgence. I
shall draw my excuse from the knowledge that writers feed on discontent as much
as joy, and that, in the pit of writing, there is really no difference between the two.

NOTES

1
Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M.B. DeBevoise
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 4, 11.

2
V.S. Naipaul, A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling (London:
Picador, 2007), 192.

3
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “The Solitude of Latin America,” New York
Times (6 February 1983), IV, 17. The text of his Nobel Prize lecture of 1982.

4
Roberto Bolano, Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches,
1998-2003, trans. N. Wimmer (New York: New Directions, 2011), 34.
 7

5
See Robert McMicking, Recollections of Manilla and the Philippines
(Manila: Filipiniana Book Guild, 1967), 31-32n.

6
Bolano, Between Parentheses, 357.