Dead souls

Ilaw sa Hilaga (Northern Light) by Lázaro Francisco (University of the Philippines Press, 1997)

CAPE BOJEADOR LIGHTHOUSE, ILOCOS NORTE (Wikipedia)

Mapalalo at mahumindig na nakatunghay sa malawak na Liwasan ng San Carlos, pangulong bayan ng lalawigang lalong kilala sa pamagat na "Bangan ng Sangkapuluan," ang malaki at magarang tahanan ni Don Alejandro Vargas. Yaon ay isang matanda ngunit maringal na pilas ng makalumang arkitektura na tila nagmamalaki sa mga kalapit na gusali at nagmamarangyang may pagpalibhasa sa mga dampang palasak sa maraming dako ng nasabing bayan.

Tall and full of itself, Don Alejandro Vargas’ huge and handsome house overlooked the wide Plaza of San Carlos, capital town of the province more known as the “Granary of the Islands.” It looked as though it came out of the yellowed pages of an old architectural tome, ancient but venerable, haughty among the nearby buildings, preening above the common shanties. [translated by Marne Kilates]

Lázaro Francisco's major novel, Ilaw sa Hilaga, demonstrated, in my opinion, another corrective to Nick Joaquín's assertion that the Tagalog novel was constrained with orality and unable to get past the idea that "Tagalog is not yet a written language." This novel was a solid edifice of prose that showed Tagalog writers were capable of artistry in their own language, whether resorting to the oral tradition or not, for the Tagalog novelist's prose was an indelible example of creative inquiry into subjects as lofty as the establishment of a national consciousness and the rejection of the colonial imagination. Francisco dared to challenge the "colonized mind", the prevailing colonial mentality among Filipinos during the early decades of American occupation.

Ilaw sa Hilaga had had a rather colorful publication history. It first appeared in 1931-32 as a serial novel in Alitaptap magazine—as novels in those times were consumed by the Filipino public in weekly installments—using a title that was hardly appealing: Bayang Nagpatiwakal (Suicide Country, or more literally, The Nation That Committed Suicide). An extract of the novel was also published in another periodical in 1932 under the title Ang Pagbabangon (The Awakening). In 1947-48 it was republished in Liwayway magazine, at that time the most popular weekly, under its current title Ilaw sa Hilaga. It was rewritten in 1977 and reissued in book form in 1980 and later in 1997.

The novel was a testing ground of Francisco's preoccupations found in his later novels, Maganda pa ang Daigdig (The World Is Wondrous Still, 1956) and Daluyong (Storm Surge, 1961). But the ideas here were already threshed out philosophical ideas on political economy, national identity, economic independence from colonial America and foreign investors, inequality of agrarian and commercial transactions, injustices from "cacique" landlords, and disruptive, guerrilla methods to "awaken" a nation on the brink of suicide. But more than establishing a position against the tyranny of "self-hate", the novel contained a plan of action to transcend the state of national stupor, to transform and reverse engineer a state of self-destruction and hopelessness.

At the center of the novel was the debate against foreign capital and control of the local economy of San Carlos, an emerging town north of the Philippines. Instead of supporting local products, native language, local writings, national costumes, and local businesses, the elite of San Carlos was blinded by the allure of all things foreign. Hence, it promoted the capital investment of foreigners and its exploitation of natural resources. The leading members of society even led the campaign to close down local businesses! Fresh from fighting two wars of conquest—the 1896 Philippine Revolution against Spain and the protracted defeat in the Philippine-American War—the citizens of San Carlos would rather give tribute and honor to outsiders than celebrate its own national war heroes.

In the midst of this conflict was the character of Javier Santos, a rich idealistic young man, the embodiment of the titular "northern light", the hope of the motherland that was a direct descendant of the characters created by José Rizal in his twin novels of Philippine revolution, Noli Me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891). Javier was an Ilustrado-like figure modeled from Rizal's double identities of Juan Crisostomo Ibarra and the mysterious figure of Simoun who fomented revolution and anarchy years before Joseph Conrad tackled terrorism and anarchy in The Secret Agent (1907).

As local businessman competing against foreign capital, Javier Santos fought and lost against the elite and aristocracia of San Carlos. He then reinvented and disguised himself as another person after setting fire to his own transport business and arranging for his false death. Just like Simoun—complete with dark spectacles—Javier Santos, the light of the north, became a vengeful blazing "fire" who will teach his people a painful lesson in economics and national pride. The symbol of "light in the north", the carrier of light—the modern Ilustrado figure, or the enlightened—was here heavily referenced as the light that would point the right direction for the lost seafarers, together with "Aurora Borealis", a manifesto or philosophical tract written by Maestro Tumas—a character borrowed from Rizal's philosopher Tasio. The manifesto supposedly detailed strategies on how to solve the seemingly impossible problems faced by a country dying of self-inflicted wound, a people lost in the sea of disillusions. Tasio who, along with an enlightened few, was probably the only rational one in a continent of mad citizens, would declare: "Oo, baliw ako, pagkat dito ang katinuan ay itinuturing na kabaliwan" (Yes, I am mad, because here sanity is considered madness)—A quote almost straight out of The Alienist by Machado de Assis: "I know nothing about science, but if so many men whom we considered sane are locked up as madmen, how do we know that the real madman is not the alienist himself?".

Beyond its affinities to the anarchic objectives of Rizal's El Filibusterismo, Francisco's "committed" literature did not just offer a diagnosis but also a cure. I hardly knew of any other Philippine "socioeconomic" novel that explicitly dealt with business tactics to overcome the competition, curtail the abuse of dominant economic position, and assert the moral imperative to combat foreign capitalism, which is here synonymous to imperialism. Javier Santos ala Simoun became the fiery instrument to overhaul the mindset of the people of San Carlos. His cruel provocations and wounding of the pride of the people catalyzed the"awakening" of the soul of the nation.

—Papaypayan natin ang apoy upang lalong maglagablab! Duduhagihin natin ang damdamin ng bayang ito upang maibunsod sa pagpapakagiting! Susugatan natin at papagduruguin and kaniyang kaluluwa hanggang sa matutuhan niyang gumawa ng isang himala tungo sa kaniyang ikaliligtas!

—We will fan the flames to stoke the raging fire! And we will humiliate the nation's pride to incite it to embrace nobility! We will wound and bloody its soul until it learned to perform a miracle that will deliver it to its own salvation! [my translation]

The anarchic and anticolonial sentiment displayed by this early novel—published when Lázaro Francisco was just 33 years old—was already at a grand scale and concentrated form, rivaling his later novels. Its treatment of economic competition was universal in appeal and would resonate with other nations fighting their own economic wars and invoking sovereignty and independence through nationalist economic policies. Necessary methods (novels) that would make it value self-preservation. That would illuminate and resurrect the dying soul of the nation.

* * *

The upcoming translation of the novel—as "Light in the North", its working title—would bear out the strong literary qualities of the novel. Marne Kilates, a well accomplished poet and translator, would bring out his version in English. Kilates was the prolific translator of several volumes of poetry, particularly the ones by Rio Alma (pen name of Virgilio Almario when writing poetry), before he branched out to translating book-length prose—producing fluid translations of Seven Mountains of the Imagination (2011), literary criticism by Virgilio Almario, and then Typewriter Altar (2016) by Luna Sicat Cleto. These two books owed a lot to the facility of Kilates, and if they are any indication, he would be able to spell out the cathartic flavor of the humor and irony in "Light in the North".

A background reading on Marne Kilates's translation of the first chapters of Francisco's novel can be found in "My Practice of Translation, or: The Vanishing, Relocation, and Transfiguration", download link here (see pages 3-5).

Typewriter Altar

Typewriter Altar by Luna Sicat Cleto, tr. Marne L. Kilates (The University of the Philippines Press, 2016)

No matter how one approaches Luna Sicat Cleto's first novel, Makinilyang Altar (2002), the default reading of it as biographical and autobiographical would certainly be the one to generate a lot of meanings and ideas. Its writing was a form of confessional and, at times, even of exorcism. Rogelio Sicat (1940-1997), Cleto's father, author of the novel Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway (Blood Spilled at Dawn) among many other writings, was the driver of the novel. In her preface to Marne L. Kilates's translation from the Filipino edition, the novelist admitted that "witnessing my father's passion to write was a painful experience, and writing about that pain was a mirroring exercise that could literally wound you with shards of broken glass." A wounding reading experience this novel certainly was, but it was almost a religious form of wounding, where the muse of creativity and inspiration was ever sought like a bashful deity to be worshiped at the altar of literature.

The novel began self-reflexively, with a lyrical dream and with writer's block.

I am about to pick up the book on the windowsill when I notice a flock of long-tailed sparrows fluttering down the branches of the tamarind tree in the yard. Briefly, I listen to their chirping, then wonder why there are no letters, no words, or no text on the pages of the book in my hand. The sparrows then fly from the tree as a flapping, fluttering flock, and with it the pages of the book fluttering to a close.

Here was Laya Dimasupil, a writer tentatively testing the waters of literary creation, clearing the blank pages for whatever forms of expression would manifest themselves into words, sentences, passages, and chapters. She resolved to tell her journey into literature and "sing the elegy of the altar of the typewriter."

The typewriter generation of Laya's father was now anachronistic. Sometimes I think of those writers as the last literary craftsmen, the ones who first carefully weighed the words, completed their thoughts in their minds, before typing their sweat and blood. No delete and backspace for them. No tentative steps but an already instantaneous finality marking the words on paper. Laya's father, Deo Dimasupil, was a domineering father and writer to reckon with. He could not stand the noise of his children that would perforce stand in the way of his writing his masterpieces. A former activist, Deo was the quintessential revolutionary writer and professor in a state university, always combative and opinionated. The materials of his principled art were the proletarian struggle for equity and equality. He was the writer of the people, the writer who tasted poverty and hard work first hand and who was eternally frustrated by university politics and false righteousness and posturings among revolutionaries and rebels. Deo could never reconcile the (for him) hypocritical lifestyle of national leaders and supposedly creative class of writers with their (lip service) literary cause and vocation. His convictions were always eroded by the realization that the world was an unfair playing field.

Amid her father's frustrations, bitterness, and cynicism, Laya's literary consciousness slowly developed. Though her father had his fair share of quirks and impatience, hers was not a dysfunctional family although her childhood was not entirely lacking in neighborhood and domestic conflicts (from relatives outside the nuclear family). Her family experiences certainly marked her for life and shaped her critical and practical worldview. The discrete units of memory (hers, Deo's, her mother Gloria's) disrupted and invaded the flow of Laya's narrative. The reliance on unreliable memory was a novel device to get at the crux, at the essence or substance or point, of a writing life.

When will he write these memories into a novel? How will he draw out from his life the right words, and the words into a novel that would respond to these times? The blank page from his notebook stared at him waiting for his pen.

Like Edgar Calabia Samar's first novel, Eight Muses of the Fall (2008), this turned out to be a modern exploration of the fount of creativity and the ways with which lived and remembered and imagined and dreamed experiences colonized the writer's blank pages to produce the first novel of the would-be novelist. Samar and Cleto's protagonists were equally possessed by (literary) demons. They had to get the first novel out of their system if only to make sense of the materials they excavated from their personal experience. They had to make a report of their spiritual sojourns into literature and to publish their findings.

The same impulse and literary sickness afflicted Cleto's accountant mother, Ellen Sicat, who at the age of 57 decided to write a novel after the death of her husband Rogelio Sicat. Interestingly, to begin the literary conversation with her daughter's novel, she also named her character Gloria in her two novels Paghuhunos (Molting) and Unang Ulan ng Mayo (First Raindrops of May).

But since this was after all an elegy, or more like a homage, to a father, the onset and progress of Deo's fatal disease finally exposed the festering grief and loss in the novel's center. For the mortal Deo, brought face to face with his impending demise, this existential crisis was the closest he would get to an imagined holocaust or auto-da-fé. For the impressionable Laya, the loss of a parent was harbinger not only of pain but of the loss of her moral compass. A subplot concerned Laya's unfaithfulness to her husband. An affair with a co-worker was presented like a temporary bout of lust and insanity, a sacrilegious offense to the typewriter altar, symbol not only of the altar of creative minds, but of the spiritual moorings and moral groundings of a person.

By the time the novel inhabited Gloria's memory in the final chapter of the book, we were already used at following the episodic mind of a creative writer. The relationship between reader and writer was already secured, in the same manner Gloria appreciated being the first reader (and reviewer) of Deo's writings and feeling "privileged" because of it.

And I knew where it started—my own voice had been looking for its own space. I wasn't a writer but he let me feel the fulfillment, the exhilaration whenever he finished a work. And I admit, it was a privilege. I could tell him what I thought of what he wrote.

Perhaps like Laya's growth as a writer based on her close observation of and fascination with her father's explosive temperament as a writer, the incremental cultivation of Gloria's literary consciousness had its beginnings with the daily observation of her husband's habits and a close reading of his writings. Tentative and unsure like her daughter at the beginning of the narrative, Gloria was awakening from a dream of letters.

Would she be able to write her own narrative, her own story? She didn't know where these musings would lead. But she knew she had material that she could write, that she wanted to express. She removed her name and began the narrative again by using the gender nouns "woman" or "man," and the children were simply their family rank: eldest, second, youngest. In erasing their names she was putting back the story she knew. She was not aware that she was now creating her own parable.

In the altar of memory and grief, the creative mind wanted to assuage its pain. What better way to find comfort than to follow the source spring of inspiration: to try one's hand at creative writing. Give in to the compulsion to write, inhabit fictive memories and fictional personalities, temper the point of view, hone the technique, discover subtlety.

Since the writing bug bit her she neglected to scrub the floors, forgot all about the curtains that had been hanging at the windows for, perhaps, three years now. When Gloria was writing, it was as if time stood still, everything was suspended. She had no morning, no noon, no night, so on that desk was parked a pink-lidded tray. Inside were some fruit. She'd peel a ponkan orange or a banana whenever she felt hungry.

That's Gloria Dimasupil now. My mother.

Laya and Gloria emerged as keyboard novelists after breaking out of the oppressive shadow of the father and husband. The "writing bug" that inspired them to tell stories proved to be a legacy just as lasting as the stories Deo Dimasupil typed in his typewriter, at nights when Laya and her sister would sleep outside their only room in the house so that Deo in deep concentration in his sacred altar would never be disturbed.



Typewriter Altar is part of the short reading list of Filipino women novelists in translation.