By AIDA RIVERA FORD

To go to Silliman by the Sea after the war, I rode on a rice truck from Bacolod escorted by Mama, not via the sunny route passing San Carlos but through the towns with airy names—Hinigaran, Binalbagan, Himamaylan, Kabankalan—and from thence through dark mountains where lurked guerrilla-turned-bandits or just plain waylayers. We spent a night at a barrio chieftain’s hut, with our buri baskets containing our precious few clothing left out on the bamboo porch, Mama worrying visibly about them, and a Chinese trader whose baskets contained bundles of money nonchalantly putting on an air of calm. Nothing did happen that night. Late the next afternoon, we made it to Dumaguete and the famed Silliman University.

My earliest recollection of Silliman centered on Assembly Hall and the doomsday voice of Mr. Molina; Guy Hall where we could see male clothing hanging on lines (and during a series of earthquakes, sheets tied from the third floor for easy exit); the cafeteria where friendships developed; the thatched-roof cottages underneath huge acacia trees where we visited the Sillimans, the Ausejos, the Utzurrums, the Magdamos, the Horrillenos; the passage between the little chapel and the chemistry building with dark bushes from which occasionally sprang malaria-crazed young men in camouflage uniform and gave the girls a scare; the Amphitheatre with its tall hedges that served as entrance and exit as well as screens for costume changes for operettas and Shakespearean plays; the library to the right and behind the Amphitheatre; Oriental Hall presided over by the Iron Lady, Mrs. Banogon.

I remember being lodged in the third floor of Oriental Hall, with Rachel Cervantes (now a world traveler) as my roommate among those occupying rows of beds and awakening to a piercing shriek. We all groped in panic to see if our clothes were still in place. A thief had climbed up the third floor and carried away the contents of three lockers. This was tragedy indeed!

In April 1946, Miss Abby Jacobs directed the first postwar Shakespearean play, The Taming of the Shrew, starring myself as Kate the Shrew and Honorio Ridad as Petrucchio. Since there was no money for costumes, the play was Filipinized and Mama brought over a haul of prewar ternos on a rice truck, which she herself filled with rice. The cast included Leonor “Nena” Sumcad, now a retired CFI Judge in Davao, and Ed Diago who, many years later, became a PAL steward and died in a plane crash—was it in the late 1950s?

In April 1948, a second Shakespearean play, As You Like It, directed by Mr. William Hamme, was presented at the Amphitheatre. I was Rosalind to Reuben Canoy’s Orlando. This time the forest of Arden had its thespians attired in Elizabethan costumes. Rosalind’s long boots, as she transformed into the page Ganymede, were made-to-order from Davao City where Mama had transformed herself from a judge’s wife to an abaca planter.

Among the cast of As You Like It were Pedro Carag, Benjamin Somera, Jose Jacinto Jr., Enrique Sobrepeña, Amaldy Quizmundo, Nena Ausejo, and Alma Oliver.

In 1948, too, the little magazine Sands & Coral was born with Cesar Jalandoni Amigo and myself as editors. It was conceived over steaming cups of coffee in the living room of Rodrigo T. Feria, our adviser, and his American wife—the critic Dolores Stephens Feria. We had the terrifying job of turning out a purely literary magazine, with these aims: (1) to maintain a higher literary standard among our campus writers, (2) to stimulate genuine creative thinking, and (3) to develop a keener appreciation of the more serious creations of our students. We had no office; we plotted at street corners or at the North Pole where being seen drinking beer made one the talk-of-the town; we worked at cafeteria tables or at the library; we even did some editing at a picnic. For our cover design, Reuben Canoy squiggled a skeletal figure reaching for the top of the sea, strewing sand over coral. This poetic squiggle has managed to be somewhere on every subsequent issue of S&C.

Rereading this first super-slim issue after 50 years, I must say that it contains not much sand but coral streaked with gold. Claro Ceniza in “Of Poets and Philippine Poetry” responds to William Van O’Connor’s comment on the pretentiousness of Philippine literary journals “because Filipinos try to write in a manner appropriate to the minds of Eliot or Yeats before they have learned to write in a manner appropriate to the minds of contemporary Filipinos.” Ceniza maintains that “a poet is individual, not national” although there are “poets who are born with nations in their hearts”; whether their mindstream is Eliotsian or Yeatsian seems beside the point.

Ricaredo D. Demetillo’s “There is a Part of Me Born on Some Battlefield” seems perfectly placed right after Ceniza’s statement. If I may reproduce the poem here, the reader may find the poet to be individual as well as the summary of his nation…and Yeatsian as well?

There is a Part of Me Born on Some Battlefield

There is a part of me born on some battlefield,
Unknown save for the hawks that wing across,
Screeching and wheeling in ominous design
Before they swoop to where the tangled barbed wires
Lift pronged fingers heavenward. There soldiers tumbled,
Cursed, flinging frantic arms suddenly helpless,
Fighting the numbness which precedes cold death.
That part of me is stranger to myself;
He looks with sad detached eyes at the men
Who laughing pass, and sees in each child’s face
The Comrade who’d stumbled, singing, into death.
He smells the stinging smoke which rises from a field
Of rice or sugar-cane, and he re-lives
The stench of trench mud and the animal smell
Of men bathed in their own sweat and filth.

There is a part of me which, living, is yet dead,
Only to rise in moments to haunt my days,
To turn my sweets to sour, the sensuous form
To sick maciated flesh. Him with my tears
I lave; I fondle him, but contrary,
He turns away and would not speak; his eyes
Are a reproach—his deep, cold, lidless eyes.
Him would I drive to wander in the wet;
Him would I spurn and call him not my own,
And yet so close to me he is, to my sleep
And my waking up! The world is full of him—
So silent. So helpless seemingly, so potent, he;
And where tired hands are lifted, there he turns
And men imagine they have seen him weep;
And where the young weave dreams upon their days
But irreverent hands slash at the fragile web,
He turns and looks—is it in sorrow or despair?

Part of my memory of Silliman is the audio-visual image of Rick Demetillo—one eye benign and the other raised in malevolent leer, his distinctive baritone cackling away into the distance. I recall coming to a Silliman Writers Workshop under the Tiempos in a martial year with Silliman a virtual concentration camp enclosed in barbed wire, our luggage meticulously examined at a checkpoint near the cafeteria and one night attending a party at Albert Faurot’s under the dark canopy of hundred-year-old acacia where horror stories of the military barging in on gatherings like ours—faculty members arrested right then and there—and suddenly Rick’s baritone booming into the still, still night. We gasped collectively in fearful expectation of the knock on the door…. It didn’t happen that night. After the workshop, on a plane to Davao where Rick’s “The Heart of Emptiness is Black” was to be premiered by our English Teachers Association Davao with the author as special guest, Rick must have experienced a sudden blackness for he noisily demanded to be let off in Cebu—a stopover. Davao missed its opportunity to listen to the vigorous voice of a sterling poet.

The Tiempos—Edilberto and Edith—what a fiercely combative couple they were! The fun of the Writers Workshop was having the two at loggerheads over works being workshopped … and yet they were so obviously caring of each other.

The 1948 S&C had Edith L. Tiempo scrutinizing Amando Unite’s “Manhood in a House in Cabildo,” a poem of nine lines, from the point of Metaphor as “bound up in the poem’s execution; and the success of the execution as manifested by the accomplished structure is really the basis for the most objective judgment of the soundness of the poem.” Her analysis finds the poem, in spite of its merits, to be less than successful in the use of metaphor as the poet “merely states a situation without proving its existence in the structure of the poem.”

Edilberto K. Tiempo, on the other hand, scrutinizes the same poem in “Objective Correlative and the Meaning of a Poem” and shows exhaustively that “artistic ‘inevitability’ has been achieved by the adequacy of objective correlative.” He therefore deemed the poem to be successful.

Both Edith and Edilberto, however, succeed in giving the reader instructive treatises on Metaphor and the Objective Correlative.

Dolores S. Feria takes upon herself the review of Stevan Javellana’s Without Seeing the Dawn which raised expectations of “The Great Filipino Novel for its vivid warmth and sly humor,” in its characterization not just of Carding, son of Juan Suerte, “the strongest and the most valiant of the village youths” and his wife Lucing, but also the other prewar barrio folk and through them emerges the story of the barrio and the people. However, she finds Part Two with its shift to action-packed incidents an over-ambitious attempt to record the total effect of the war—a task beyond the experience of Javellana as he tackles his first novel. What is astonishing in the first little mag of Silliman University is that it has these enduring names—Demetillo, the Tiempos, Dolores Feria who was among the activist faculty of the University of the Philippines incarcerated during the Martial Law years.

On my part, I felt pressured to write my first story “Bridge to the Morrow” which was based on the war-time experience of the Gurucharri family of Kabankalan, Negros Occidental, as they were badgered by guerrillas. Twenty-eight years later, in the S&C issue marking the Diamond Jubilee of Silliman, this story was fleshed out in “Ordeal in Hacienda Mercedes” where the big house was moved to central Luzon and the romance of Vince and Skit made to blossom in Chicago, USA. The mother-son-wife relationship likewise came into play.

The second issue of Sands & Coral, published March 1949, was thicker and had me as sole editor. The pressure was doubled and I wrote my second story “The Chieftest Mourner.“ It was to become one of my most anthologized stories. Its inception took place in Manila where I spent the previous summer with relatives—the family of the Director of the National Library, Eulogio Rodriguez—my “Tio Lolong.“ Upon the death of the poet “Baticuling”—Jesus Balmori—who wrote in Spanish and Tagalog—his glamorous live-in wife Nena Yance turned to Director Rodriguez to make the funeral arrangements. He was the poet’s good friend and adviser and could be counted on to handle diplomatically the ticklish problem of two widows and protocol in a wake where the President himself would pay his respects. I had a grandstand view of the tense but ludicrous situation! And it was only in death that I met my poet-uncle, he with the somber smile in my story “The Chieftest Mourner.” And I feel flattered that readers assume I really am the poet’s niece.

The 1949 S&C had a short but hilariously memorable Christmas story entitled “A Deer for Jesus” by a Moslem—Lugum Uka—set in a pagan Bilaan school in deepest Mindanao. Over the years, I remember the story of the deer, the monkey, and the lizard doing absolute mayhem on the unique Christmas tree.

Reuben R. Canoy wrote a painfully violent story, “Sons of Darkness,” and a poem on Jesus, “Birth: The Hypothesis,” which counterpoints the simple Jesus with the technological geniuses of the age who nevertheless cannot move mountains. Many, many years later, Reuben would be part of a movement to move Mindanao out of the Philippines.

Demetillo, the Ferias, and the Tiempos were heavy contributors in poetry and criticism: Demetillo’s poem “Tragic Victory” is Villaesque and in his critique “Villa: An Estimate,” he writes on Villa’s “secure place among the world’s great poets…strikingly original artist in design, vocabulary, and thought…one of those few poets who casting the pebbles of their genius upon the pool of literature, change the pattern of ripples on it.”

Our “little mag” adviser, Rodrigo T. Feria, who had worked in America and whose poetry was included in Chorus for America, a Carlos Bulosan-edited anthology, “succumbed to editorial pressure” and submitted his “Madness We Bequeth Thee,” a terse poem written in a hospital in New Guinea during the war. His American wife, Dolores S. Feria, our New Criticism guru at Silliman, who had taught at the University of Southern California, bewails the damaging effect of the war on both the literary output from the years 1941-1947 and the “complete critical drought in the national literary taproots” in her essay “Literary Criticism in Postwar Philippines.” She feels strongly that producing first-rate critics will hasten the flowering of Philippine Literature,

Edilberto K. Tiempo gives a primer on “The Handling of Time in Narrative Fiction” and Edith L. Tiempo reveals the fine working of her poetic mind in her poem “The Pane” through the use of unifying devices as she seeks to prove the paradox of the blind man in her poem “being safer than one who has his sight intact.” Her brother, Francisco “Ike” Lopez, needles the Filipino’s over-niceness in the charming little essay “A Very Proper Gentlemen.”

The 1949 S&C had gained 23 pages from its first issue. I left Silliman soon after graduation in 1949 but I would return time and again to bask in the sands and coral of my literary youth.

[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]          

Aida Rivera Ford was the first editor of Sands & Coral, helming the literary magazine of Silliman University in 1948 and 1949. She graduated cum laude from Silliman University that year, and pursued further studies abroad on a Fulbright grant, graduating with an MA in English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1954. She received the Jules and Avery Hopwood Award for fiction in 1954. In 1958, Benipayo Press published her Now and at the Hour and Other Stories. Her other published works include poems, essays, operettas, plays, and other short stories. In 1978, she received an East-West Cultural Center Grant at the University of Hawaii. In 1980, she founded the Learning Center of the Arts in Davao City, the first college of fine arts in Mindanao. It was later renamed Ford Academy of the Arts, Inc. in 1993. She received the Datu Bago Award in 1982, the highest honor that the City of Davao bestows on its citizens who have contributed to its development and prestige. In 1984, she was also the recipient of the Philippine Government’s Parangal for Post-War Writers award. In 1993, she was given the Outstanding Sillimanian Award for Literature and Creative Writing. That same year, she was named National Fellow for Fiction by the University of the Philippines Creative Writing Center. In 1997, she published Born in the Year 1900, which included the five stories from her previous collection and added thirteen new ones, most of them written in the 1990s.