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.
“Every man’s memory is his private literature.” ~ ALDOUS HUXLEY
The publication of the golden anniversary of the Sands & Coral brings us nostalgia and inevitably takes us back into our very own period or ambience.
Since the literary folio’s birth in 1948, we have witnessed the growth and development of literary gems by the Silliman writers. The graceful use of the English language in both poetry and prose has never been surpassed, let alone the magnificence, competence, and eruditeness in the crafting of various styles. On a broader scale, we have enjoyed the titillating and eloquent coda of criticisms of various literary genre which somehow prodded some of them to venture into the sensitive and visionary experiments of writing in search of a distinctive Silliman school of thought.
The S&C logo—the figure of a naked ungendered individual rising to the surface of the water with both hands dripping with the grains of sand while the live corals wave nearby symbolizes such noble efforts of the Silliman tale-spinners not to pay hostage to dormant literary standards. It also reflects the visions of the men and women behind the creation of the Sands & Coral who were moved by identical reasons, though diverse in some minor matters, but absolutely absent of material motives.
This memoir is also a tribute to them.
A journey back into the mid-fifties evokes fond memories of the bumper of literary pieces crafted mostly by the mavericks, whose only instruction was their urge to write, which was the only soul of their pens. This may sound strange or even preposterous but this was the reality of our time. Along this line, it is inevitable not to mention the Sillimanian, the Philippines’ oldest campus or student publication. Its pages friendly towards the campus pen pushers have provided the seeds into the mind of its adviser, Rodrigo T. Feria, the necessity of putting up a truly literary magazine. He saw the profundity of the minds among the contributors to the weekly student tabloid, whose only literary effusions even merited the attention of some editors of the national publications. Among them was the poem of the unforgettable Reuben R. Canoy, whose “Birth: The Hypothesis” elicited praises from critics, both local and national.
Indeed, walking back into the meadows of memory, now grown with some reeds of forgetfulness, brings nostalgia and some memorable events in the campus. For instance, when this author took the helm of the weekly student newspaper, there were two most popular columns, namely: “The Point of View” by Alphonse and Gaston, and “My Diary” by James M. Matheson, the editor of the 1954 Sands & Coral.
“Alphonse and Gaston” was actually Jose V. Montebon Jr., a law student then, and Kenneth R. Woods, who took up chemistry. The latter was the literary editor of the Sillimanian and then co-editor of the 1953 edition of Sands & Coral. More often than not, the duo would taunt the English majors to produce literary pieces worthy of the attention of the editors of national magazines. The friendly squabble as to who can write better drew the attention of the literary gurus in the campus and no less than Ed Tiempo, already then a leading light in the literary world intervened and chided the irresponsible critics and the literary monstrosities created by some of the campus mavericks. Ed’s persuasive advice did not deter the rebellious writers from pursuing their goals in providing their worth. The efforts had its dividend when Alphonse, a.k.a. Jose V. Montebon Jr., romped away with the second prize of the annual Philippines Free Press short story contest with his piece “Bottle Full of Smoke.” Kenneth R. Woods, on the other hand, co-authored several short stories with campus writers, which saw print in various national magazines; among them was “The Monkey Feast” co-written by this author. Woods wrote “Wanderjarh” in the 1953 Sands & Coral, which he planned to extend as a novel, to be co-authored by Reuben R. Canoy.
Lest we forget, perhaps the most popular writer in campus at that time was James M. Matheson, editor of the 1954 Sands & Coral. His column “My Diary” in the Sillimanian exhibited some mania for commenting on the mores and conduct of Silliman students and faculty members. He was also prone to commenting on the contemporary literary scene during his solitary moments. One Friday afternoon, when the weekly student newspaper hit the streets, the campus exploded with the unmitigated anger of the internationally-famous Filipino biologist in whose honor the biggest rodent caught in the northern Zamboanga peninsula during a field trip was named after. Without malice in fact or in law (as lawyers would put it), James M. Matheson wrote in his column to the effect that “it was not surprising at all that some professors are named after rats.” The famous natural scientist, who considered his profession “like religion,” upon reading the column went on a warpath and like a bounty hunter went looking for poor Jimmy all over the campus to “break his bones.” The threat could have been done had it not been for proverbial cooler heads. Truly, the muscular biologist could have crumpled Jimmy boy like a piece of paper, taking into account his size. Jimmy was considered as the shortest and smallest American mestizo who ever walked on this planet. The incident did not ruin his sense of humor. His story, “Sands on the Seashore,” in the 1954 edition of Sands & Coral, exemplifies his scathing commentaries on the social mores of our people: his stories often garbed in humor though.
There was some kind of a controversy relative to the numbering of the volume of Sands & Coral. It is imperative that this little puzzle must be resolved with finality.
When this author took the editorship of the Sillimanian in 1952-1953, we made an independent stand that all student-budgeted publications, including the Sands & Coral, must be the sole responsibility of the student editors. To make the story short, a compromise was reached with the university administration that a Supervisory Board of Student Publications must be created, composed of two faculty and five student leaders. In effect, the editorial and business responsibilities were devolved to the student staffers with minimal interference from the faculty supervisor. Under such arrangements, literature and politics became harmonious partners when the student government channeled some of their funds in order to have two issues of the Sands & Coral during the 1954-1955 school year. Some kind of diplomacy was infused. Thus, in October 1954, the magazine under the editorship of James M. Matheson came out as Volume 8, Number 1. I am too proud to say that I was then the chair of the Supervisory Board of Student Publications. With sufficient funds, another issue by March 1955 came out under my editorship. In the same year, another edition was issued under Maria Luisa E. Centena as editor.
The relationship between the student editors and the university authorities at that time, though marked by some differences of opinion as to the contents of the magazine, was excellent. The policy adopted during our time antedated by several decades the controversial Journalism Act of 1991. It is but fitting that I must pay tribute to the two genial, amiable and fatherly members of the board, namely Dean Pedro E.Y. Rio of the College of Education and Dr. Rodrigo Tugade, whose humor equaled if not surpassed that of Jimmy Matheson. There never was any controversy during the existence of the student board as all were unanimous that Silliman students were responsible enough to protect the prestige of the university.
The Silliman writers, in more ways than one, looked beyond the distant shores to look for models of their work. We did not confine ourselves to the writings of Faulkner, Hemingway or Steinbeck but also to Camus, Moravia, Svevo, Sartre, and other European masters. The Latin American writers with their so-called magical realism like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda were still distant stellars.
The success of Sands & Coral is no longer an issue. The literary grace is well-received by critics, here and abroad. All of these could not have been achieved had it not been for the heroic efforts of the English Department, more specifically the monumental contributions of the famous writing couple Ed and Edith Tiempo, followed by their beauteous daughter Rowena, who is presently with the Iowa International Writers Workshop as one of the top honchos. The literary achievements and honors garnered can never be dissociated from the accomplishment of the university as one of the best learning and writing centers in Asia today. For instance, the Silliman Writers Workshop, reputed to be the oldest in Southeast Asia, has been replicated in many areas of the country, whose founding members were mostly once under the tutelage of the Tiempos.
In the field of poetry, the famous Ilonggo poet, Ricaredo Demetillo of the “Barter of Panay” fame, and many others have enriched the local poets in how to universalize the local mood and culture.
R. T. Feria, the long-reigning adviser of the student newspaper may be considered the father of Sands & Coral, who with his idea borne over cups of coffee is responsible for making this magazine exist today. His wife, Dolores Stephens Feria, or Dee, enlivened the pages with her brief reviews and criticisms with some philosophical touches.
Except for Edith L. Tiempo, who is a consultant of the CAP, all of those I have mentioned have returned to our Father’s House, probably still musing.
If there is any reward in an endeavor like creative writing, it is the consolation of reading your name years after you have gone out of the scene.
In an article, “Center of Creative Writing,” by T. A. Rodriguez, published in the August 22, 1964 issue of the Chronicle Magazine, she wrote:
Now in its sixteenth year, the magazine has introduced to national literary circles such writers as Graciano Arinday Jr., Alexis Baban, Leticia Dizon, James Matheson, Jose Montebon Jr., David Quemada and Carmina A. Yaptenco.
Except probably for David Quemada, who is still abroad engrossed in the teaching of literature, none of these above-mentioned names are still in the so-called “literary circle.”
One writer who can be considered as part of the literary group of Silliman is Rinaldo G. Remitio, who won a literary contest in the mid-1950s with his poem “Walking on the Tight Rope.” He was then taking up Pre-Law in Silliman University. He has written a book of short stories entitled Scents of Sampaguita, and his story in Free Press entitled “The Raft” won critical acclaim.
One incident which I can never forget relative to creative writing was when I received a pay check for my poem “Apocalyptic Morning” from the Saturday Evening News Magazine, then edited by an ardent Silliman admirer Antonio S. Gabila. Such an incident is still heavily etched in my mind because on the very day I received my fee I did not have a cent to my name. It made me think that writers do not necessarily go hungry.
Every man has his own las vegas de la memoria, just as John Steinbeck has his own LasPasturas del Cielo.
This memoir is history, subjective though. It is also a statement of concern and, as someone said, it is a relevant sentiment.
Today, I still do write but no longer in the world of fiction. The demand of my writing is limited by the parameters of the virtues of justice. In a sense, it is still literature. Judicial interpretation rather than imagination takes the form to weed out the truth so that justice shall prevail. I do hope that in the near future I may be able to give finishing touches to a novel which I have promised the late Ed Tiempo, whose friendship and advice left some unforgettable instructions in my mind about writing and criticism.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Graciano H. Arinday Jr. was editor of Sands & Coral in 1955. He retired as Regional Trial Court Judge of Branch 69 in Silay City, Negros Occidental in 1999. He died in 2012.
In that long ago and far away time, Diosdado Macapagal would become our country’s president. He dabbled in Kapampangan poetry (though my recollection may be faulty), but when the price of commodities went up, we called him “President Macamahal.” The Cuban missile crisis brought home the real threat of nuclear war. A popular American president who spoke and wrote with great style would be assassinated in Dallas, causing my friend Liling’s father a fatal heart attack. But mostly, we were, self-consciously, serious about literature and writing, as only the young can be. Never mind that a lot of what we rushed to publish is cause for embarrassment, viewed now with the hindsight and experience of more than three decades. No one could have told us then that there wasn’t a chance we could, would become writers.
Write we did and publish. It was the “golden age” of Silliman. The Sands & Coral, well-respected in the country, was the place to be. If you made it there, you had “arrived” as a campus writer, sometimes seeing your work alongside those of established national writers who submitted work to Silliman’s literary annual. Being appointed editor was a great honor. The Sillimanian was the campus newspaper, receptive to a broader range of student writing. Antonio Gabila, adviser and journalism professor (and the director of the Office of Information and Publications), scrupulously demanded that all university material for local or national release be professionally written and presented, taking into consideration things that don’t seem to matter much these days, such as, yes, correct grammar. His standards provided invaluable training to future journalists. The Sillimanian editor under his guidance was a position of prestige and honor. For editors, it was a lot of work. Often, pressed with deadlines, we would have to beg and cajole the amiable University Press Manager, Josue Rodriguez, who always came to our rescue.
It was not uncommon for creative writing majors to take journalism classes and vice versa. At Silliman, we did not see the two disciplines as exclusionary. Seeing how stories in newspapers and magazines are written today, and the current popularity of “creative non-fiction,“ it seems that Silliman was on to something early.
Another university publication, the Silliman Journal, printing mainly scholarly articles, was not usually an outlet for creative writers.
At that time, some of us also started seeing our poems and short stories accepted by the more prestigious, not to mention paying, national publications: Philippines Free Press, Comment, Graphic, Women’s Weekly.
We did not have an official campus writers group or organization, but in 1958-60 when Edilberto and Edith Tiempo had returned with doctorates in creative writing from abroad, we met and discussed our manuscripts at the creative writing workshop taught by Edith and required of all English majors but open to anyone interested. (Before the Tiempos returned, David V. Quemada was our campus literary guru. In fact, as a college sophomore in his Intro to Lit class, I was introduced to the excitement and challenge of modern poetry and prose. I showed Dave a poem I had written, which he passed on to Gene Baban, a pre-med student with literary interests, then editor of Sands & Coral. That would be my first appearance in S&C.)
The workshop where we discussed poetry and fiction was held at an unholy time—Saturday afternoons when we would rather have been siesta-ing or doing other things, glad to be done with school work for the week. I confess to skipping a few sessions, especially on very hot afternoons when I succumbed to long naps. Since there were usually not more than a dozen or so enrollees, every absence was prominently noticeable, and it was easy to feel guilty, although Edith never mentioned it.
Raymond Llorca, Williamor Marquez, Erlendo Constantino, Teresita Afiover-Rodriguez, Lorna Occeña, Amiel Leonardia, Ben Cabral, Edna Ygnalaga, Fe Roble, David Guimbongan, Lorna Peña-Reyes (my twin who majored in anthro-socio but has always been seriously interested in literature), were among the “workshoppers,“ as were Priscilla Lasmarias and Domini Torrevillas. Attending the workshop briefly was Artemio Tadena whose lyric poems I admired. Somehow, unlike most of us who, from necessity, learned to give and take frank public criticism of each other’s work, “Boy” Tadena was acutely sensitive about having his poems discussed in a workshop. Sure enough, when some negative comments were made about his poem, he became irate, crumpled up his manuscript, and stormed out of class, never to return. We were all flustered, but felt he was a big talent. (Boy and I remained in regular, although not close, contact through the years. He was employed at Foundation College, and I was working at Silliman. On the day I was returning to the States in 1972, I was touched when he came to our house bringing me copies of his two poetry books inscribed with priceless sentiments in his beautiful handwriting. I didn’t know then that I was seeing him for the last time. His untimely death at a very young age deprived the country of a truly gifted poet.)
Our workshop classes were held in the front room of the Tiempo home in Piapi. Being invited into the homes of our professors for classes or meals was a Silliman tradition. The Tiempos were among the most hospitable and welcoming of the faculty. Their home became a second home for many of us. Although Edith handled the workshop (“dramatize, don’t state; show, don’t tell”), Ed sometimes would join our discussions. Like Edith, he was generous with praise when something pleased him, but also like Edith, he could be bluntly hurting. We enjoyed it when the two would argue spiritedly with each other. Ed had a delightful sense of humor—who can forget his incredulous “Kisses in the morning!“ deflating a writer’s idealized image of lovers exchanging kisses first thing upon waking up? He liked to tease us young ladies who embarrassed easily. I think that instead of spending the whole afternoon with us, he preferred working in their yard, puttering among his grape plants and fruit trees, digging and putting in a lily/lotus pond that became the centerpiece of their spacious backyard. During class breaks when we were served delicious cookies and naranjita punch, we would gather in that backyard. Ed, in his tattered straw hat and shabby work clothes, pushing a wheelbarrow, would mutter “Coolie! Coolie!” to our amusement. Sometimes he would take the time to cut down some ripe bananas to share with us.
During class, Rowena, still a small child, sometimes sat quietly to the side of our class circle, perhaps listening to our discussion. But when she decided she had something to tell her mother, which happened more than once, she did not hesitate to go over to whisper in her ear, often interrupting Edith who would be in the middle of a sentence. I still chuckle when I remember how Edith would hold the little girl at bay with an outstretched arm while trying to finish whatever she was telling us. Rowena, like a colt chafing at the bit, strained all the while to reach her mother’s ear, satisfied only when she would be allowed to whisper whatever was so urgent. Donny was still a baby, sleeping or playing in his crib in one corner of the dining room.
Younger campus writers came later: Edgar Libre-Grifio, Roberto Ponteñila, Arthur Lim, Rogelio Tangara. A member of the College of Nursing faculty, Nora Pascua-Sanchez, sister of national prize -winning U.P writer Wilfredo Pascua-Sanchez, was also one of the writers on campus then. The top literary prizes were the Philippines Free Press, Palanca, Republic Heritage, Pro Patria, and the short-lived and controversial Stonehill P.E.N. awards. We basked in the reflected glory of Silliman winners Tiempos and Quemada.
After graduation in 1960, many of us stayed on in Dumaguete, attending graduate school and/or working at the university. Though we were far from the country’s main centers of culture, we felt no deprivation. In addition to hosting prominent Manila writers and speakers, Silliman, which some people called the “U.P of the South,” was often on the itinerary of Fulbright lecturers and U.S. artists and writers on State Department tours. Jesse Stuart and Hortense Calisher discussed our works in workshop sessions on campus. The latter wrote about her Silliman visit in her memoirs, Herself). We regularly got the national papers and weeklies where we could read the work of leading writers. It was easy to send for the latest books published in Manila. At that time they were Estrella Alfon’s Magnificence; Frankie Sionil-Jose’s The Pretenders; Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels (Nick, the Free Press literary editor, often accepted for publication the stories and poems we submitted, as did Frankie for Comment); Kerima Polotan’s The Hand of the Enemy; N.V.M. Gonzalez’s The Bamboo Dancers; Bienvenido Santos’ Brother, My Brother; Ed Tiempo’s More Than Conquerors (his “Daughters of Time” was serialized in the Women’s Magazine, to become later in book form To Be Free); Edith Tiempo’s Abide, Joshua, and that wonderful series of “Peso Books” put out by Alberto Florentino which those of us with limited finances could afford, a favorite of mine being Carlos Angeles’ A Stun of Jewels.
On campus, Luz Ausejo, a history professor who had regular access to publications from abroad, generously shared her books, introducing me especially to the South-American writers. Albert Faurot, a music (piano) professor who was very literary, was also am unselfish lender of his poetry and fiction books from abroad.
My life at Silliman (I had been a resident since 1950) was interrupted when I took a year off to enroll at the U.P in Diliman, during which time I attended the poetry workshop of Jose Garcia Villa (“clean up…tighten…ideas don’t belong in poetry…above all, be lyrical”). Gémino “Jimmy” Abad was a classmate, ever talented and gentlemanly. I also worked briefly as secretary to F. Sionil Jose who was editing and running the Philippine P.E.N., office where I met several big-name national writers, including Estrella Alfon who immediately engaged me in Cebuano conversation when she learned where I was from. But I decided I wasn’t meant for the big city, especially after a frightening experience with an open manhole during one of the many Manila floods (I could never get used to wading through sewer-tainted water either). But my stay in Diliman/Manila showed me that their literati respected the Silliman writing scene, mainly because the Tiempos were an institution.
I returned to Silliman summer of 1962 just in time to attend some sessions of the first Silliman Summer Writers Workshop started by the Tiempos. Patterned after the Iowa Writers Workshop, the three-week workshop was the first of its kind in the country and would become an annual event involving writers from all over the Philippines (some from abroad) , and put Silliman prominently on the creative writing map. Visiting lecturers for the early part of that decade were among the country’s best writers: Nick Joaquin, Francisco Arcellana, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Bienvenido Santos, Kerima Polotan, Emmanuel Torres, Bienvenido Lumbera, Celso Al. Carunungan, Emigdio Enriquez, Severino Montano, as well as Paul Engle, poet and director of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and critic Leonard Casper, well known for his knowledge of Philippine writing. Sionil Jose would drop by for a quick visit.
The Sands & Coral would print work from workshop participants such as Ko Won, a leading Korean poet. We were delighted when Nick Joaquin took some of our stories and poems that were discussed in the Workshop and published them in the Free Press. Indeed that was a good time for young writers. Editors were generous in their support and encouragement.
When the Tiempos left for the States (1963-66), Dave Quemada, himself just returned from graduate studies abroad, took over as Director of the Sumrner Writers Workshop as well as Head of the Literature and Creative Writing program. With his gracious wife, Pat, the Quemada home in Silliman Farm was the setting for many memorable get-togethers of campus writers and their friends.
Dave recruited me to help with the Workshop. Working mainly in administration and teaching literature part time, my participation was as some sort of executive officer-in-charge of behind-the-scene chores for the Workshop to function smoothly. But people-problems were our biggest challenge. At the first Workshop, there was the guest lecturer who, with his coterie of writing fellows, celebrated nightly into the early morning hours, discomfiting the other customers and proprietor of a local watering hole; the group then, talking loudly and singing uninhibitedly through the quiet Dumaguete streets, would make their way back to the dorm, only to be met by the dorm manager, understandably leery of letting them in. Then there was the lady writing fellow, on the staff of a Manila weekly, who was so homesick that she wanted to leave before the Workshop started. And there was the visiting male lecturer, known for his proclivity for other men, who grabbed and kissed a resident lecturer while they were swimming in Silliman Farm (“Lips to lips!” as the resident lecturer, greatly scandalized, would later recount). We also had to arrange once for the return of a well-known poet to Manila who had a nervous breakdown shortly after the Workshop started, breathing easily only after PAL allowed him to board. Though we understood and were willing to give allowance for “artistic temperament,” for most of the “gentle people” in our quiet, laid-back town, such incidents provided grist for exciting, if not “scandalous” talk—what are “those writers” coming to?—putting those of us involved in the Workshop on the defensive.
Fortunately, we had excellent support from the Silliman community: Frank Flores, Celia Gomez, Priscilla Lasmarias, Eleanor Funda, Nora Ausejo, Amiel Leonardia, Trining Malanog in the English Department; Albert Faurot whose literary-musical soirees showed our visitors that Silliman had culture; Nonon Rodriguez, university social secretary, with her community contacts; Mimi Palmore, Lyds Niguidula, Ephraim Bejar, our unofficial drivers.
With a few exceptions, the visiting lecturers and fellows were truly appreciative of the Workshop and admired, envied the beautiful, quiet setting of Silliman which nurtured writers. Like proud proprietors, we were eager to show and share with them our simple provincial pleasures: the quiet, shady streets that were a delight to walk (before the invasion of too many muffler-missing, fume-spewing motorized pedicabs); the uncluttered boulevard by the sea where one could watch the evenings descend on nearby Siquijor, Cebu, and Bohol islands, and rediscover the magic of tropical moonlight nights; Cuernos de Negros and its blue-green mountain range on the western side of the city; Silliman Farm when the beach and waters were still perfect and safe for picknicking and swimming; Banilad, Bacong, Wuthering Heights, among other easily-accessible beaches; Apo Island, marine biology research site, ideal for snorkeling and scuba diving; the idyllic San Antonio golf course; the Sycip Plantation in Manjuyod, belonging to a Silliman alumnus who welcomed the Workshoppers and always prepared a sumptuous spread of seafood that our big city guests could only dream about; the mountain communities of Valencia, Camp Lookout, Palinpinon. (There was a hard-to-find waterfall that we used to trek to in Palinpinon. Willy Marquez wrote a story about it. Decades later, I would write a poem, “The River Singing Stone,” which became the title of my first book.)
At last, we Silliman writers, provincial Cebuano speakers, could feel superior to our supposedly more sophisticated Tagalog guests from the north. No other school had a national writers workshop then. Great and not-so-great-yet writers from Manila and various parts of the country—and abroad—came to talk about literature and writing in our small, secluded university town by the sea. For three weeks every summer we shared with them the pleasures of living and working in what some would call “God’s country.” It was a good time to be young and writing, when our dreams held the promise of future success, and with youthful energy and a strange mixture of trepidation and confidence, the writing came easy.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Myrna Peña-Reyes was born in Cagayan de Oro City, but her family moved to Dumaguete where she was educated at Silliman University from elementary through college, graduating with a BA in English. She went on to earn her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon. While a resident of Eugene, Oregon where she lived with her late husband, the poet William T. Sweet, she was a winner of the Oregon Literary Fellowship grant for poetry in 2002. She is presently retired in her hometown of Dumaguete. Her poetry collections include The River Singing Stone (1994), Almost Home: Poems (2004), and Memory’s Mercy: New and Selected Poems (2014). She was recipient of the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Francisco Balagtas for Poetry in English from the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas [UMPIL] and the Taboan Award for Poetry in English from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts [NCCA], both in 2018.
Because the writers workshop began in 1962 we somehow thought, wrongly, that the world of writers came to Silliman also at that time. I was in that workshop, a callow youth from Zamboanga who had come to Dumaguete for the first time, unaware that his grandfather, whom he never saw, was a Negrense.
Well, in time we learned that Dumaguete had been some sort of Southern writer’s Shambala forever. Ricaredo Demetillo was here in the 50s. He’s the poet who gave Sands & Coral its name. Like the Tiempos and Franz Arcellana, a graduate of the Iowa workshop. The book that we knew him for at that time was The Authentic Voice of Poetry, the first book-length attempt in the country at formal literary criticism of the Filipino poets then on the scene, pre-eminently Villa, Joaquin, and Lansang. Others who had been on the campus were Aida Rivera-Ford, Dolores Feria who was later to become my teacher in the European Novel at UP Dilliman, and Antonio Gabila. In fact Gabila was very much on the campus when we came, only people were not so aware of him because he had stopped writing.
In June after the workshop I returned to Silliman to enroll as a college sophomore. I only stayed for a semester and I’m afraid I don’t have enough literary memories to regale the interested reader with. Edith Tiempo was my teacher in Creative Writing. Not one of my classmates in the class turned out a writer, though Ephraim Bejar became a theater director and, in a not so defined, rather general fashion, some kind of supporter for what may be called the literature of national awareness. I lived at Woodward Hall and for a week or so had for one of my roommates Williamor Marquez, who wrote in imitation of the prose style and manner of Ernest Hemingway. He had a real writing talent but he stopped writing when he left Silliman. I was not to see him again until 16 years later in Manila when he had become a man of piety, having had a fundamentalist American pastor for a foster father whose boat, which I never had the good fortune to ride or even just see, he inherited.
Marquez kept company with Eph Bejar and a certain Bert Ferrer, campus editors both, who held the Tiempos in respect and affection, these being their literary mentors and of national fame. I remember Bejar walking into our Woodward Room carrying a paperback by Henry Miller— A Devil in Paradise. That was the first Henry Miller book I ever saw and, I think, browsed. Ferrer always wore dark glasses and when I saw his eyes for the first time I remember that they looked as disarming as his voice. He was an Ilonggo.
There was also Myrna Peña-Reyes who wrote exceedingly clipped, terse, imagist poems a la Emily Dickinson but, in person, was so unliterary and so unarty (though I think it was an effort) that I do not wonder why we never became friends. In Myrna’s choice of a model poet and Williamor’s of a model writer we see of course the influence of the Tiempos. But how to account for Bejar’s reading of Henry Miller? And Ferrer’s dark glasses? Not to mention Marquez’s somewhat droll habit of going to and coming from the Woodward bathrooms in the nude? Surely these were not the New Criticism.
2.
In the very early 60s the new thing in literature, the phenomenon, were the beatniks of America and the Angry Young Men of England. Actually they came in the 50s but the cultural time lag delayed their shock wave here and, anyway, I don’t think we really got to read them in depth. It seems the virus was transmitted to us through the movies—in, or by, Marlon Brando and James Dean. Two new names in Philippine letters represented this trend or quality. These were the gifted young poet praised by Demetillo in his book, Jose Lansang Jr., who lived on the UP Diliman campus and who had been to Greenwich in New York—and Wilfrido D. Nolledo who was writing very conspicuously, very self-consciously eccentric short-stories that amounted to a revolution in Philippine letters. Really the quality of Nolledo’s prose was so excitingly new, that the others who were writing at the time generally paled into immediate pedestrianism.
Nolledo and Lansang both came to the Silliman writers workshop as writing fellows. The other fellows included Greg Brillantes and Gilda Cordero-Fernando (the two great no-shows), Petronilo Daroy, Virgilio Samonte, and Socorro Federis-Tate. All the fellows had published short-stories in the national magazines. Moreover, Daroy had published a book criticism, The Politics of the Imagination. Looking back on these names now, one cannot help seeing that the Tiempos had sat down and carefully chosen the definitive list of the top young writers of the time. Too bad, Brillantes and Fernando were unable to come. They would have enforced the judgement that this workshop, the first ever, was also the best ever in the country. In the panel were Ed and Edith Tiempo, Nick Joaquin, and Franz Arcellana. The Jun Lansang then was the Jun Lansang who wrote 55 Poems, to this day still the book of lyric poems in this country. The Brillantes who failed to show up was the Brillantes who wrote The Distance To Andromeda, still one of the authentic Philippine short-story masterpieces, written when the author was in his early or middle twenties, and adjudged first-prize winner in the Free Press. The Nolledo who came and stayed for the entire three weeks was the Nolledo who wrote Rice Wine, Of Things Guadalupe, and Kayumanggi Mon Amor, stories that influenced, quickened, and sent a generation of future Filipino novelists crashing into the sky.
3.
Repeat, the fellows in 1962 were not, as workshop fellows go these days, campus writers. They were published writers and national prize-winners. By today’s standards, the fellows then should have been panelists—or at least the best of them.
And sure enough, there were auditors then who should have been writing fellows. These were not the Silliman English teachers who all attended—but the handful of youngsters whose stories and poems were actually taken up and two of whom enjoyed, since they were not from Dumaguete, free lodging at the Alumni Hall where the fellows stayed. These youngsters were Williamor Marquez, David Martinez, Wilfredo Pascua Sanchez, and myself. Marquez was Silliman’s bet, Martinez was from St. Paul’s College Dumaguete, Sanchez was from UP Diliman, and I was from Zamboanga City. We were all four of us teenagers and it seemed we stole the show from the fellows because we were so young and we were writing passable, publishable (all four of us in fact contributed stories that Joaquin, then also the literary editor of the Free Press), promising, really hooray stuff. I remember Marquez voicing his objection to Nolledo’s experimental writing after the panelists had discussed a Nolledo story in a uniformly appreciative note.
Nolledo was then thirty. It was as the 50s waned that he started publishing those strange, or strangely written, stories of his and zoomed to local stardom shoulder-to-shoulder with his contemporary Greg Brillantes. Nick Joaquin and Virgie Moreno and Franz Arcellana took turns saying how good and baroque and brilliant the young man was. Nolledo seemed to embody the new things then like the Sputnik, the first rocket successfully launched into space. Joaquin was saying something of the sort. How the young writers like Lansang and Nolledo were a different, new breed writing with the bomb in their subconscious and you could feel it in their rhythm and in fact, the Bomb, Joaquin said, was not only a subliminal fear and anxiety but had actually exploded in Lansang’s mind.
Nolledo subsequently, in the late 60s, went to Paul Engle’s Iowa workshop and stayed there for about ten years. He became a friend of the Chilean novelist Jose Donoso whose The Obscene Bird Of Night ranks with Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (Columbia) and Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers (Cuba) as the three great novels from Latin America in this century. But recently Nolledo’s novel, But For The Lovers, produced during his stay in Iowa, was published anew in an edition that bears a word of introduction from Robert Coover (or Robert Stone I can’t remember). The intro says that Nolledo’s novel is a neglected masterpiece. It also says that Nolledo was writing magic realism a good decade ahead of the Latin Americans.
In conversation at the 1962 workshop, Nolledo told Sanchez he liked Dylan Thomas. Indeed Dylan Thomas seems the literary artist likely to have influenced him. The title of his novel is a quote from a Dylan Thomas poem. I suspect that Nolledo’s heightened language, his extravagant prose, was done under the intoxicating influence of Dylan Thomas and Nick Joaquin, particularly the Nick Joaquin who wrote the prose of “May Day Eve” and “The Summer Solstice.”
4.
After the workshop, Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo wrote a paper which he had occasion to read at some literary gathering in Manila later that year. That paper dealt with what was done in the workshop by three young writers. These were Nolledo, Sanchez, and myself. The late old man (not really that old, he was younger then than I am today) perfunctorily saying a good word or two for the new direction these young writers were taking, proceeded to build a critical stand against it. He particularly took to task Sanchez’s “Moon Under My Feet.” I still think that story, the work of a sixteen-year-old, an amazing masterpiece. And that Dr. Tiempo may have been right in his critique of “The Summer Solstice” but was wrong in his opinion of “Moon Under My Feet.” I’ve read the story through four decades and my admiration for it has grown with each reading.
How swiftly Sanchez came upon the heels of his namesake, the erstwhile daring young man of the Philippine literary trapeze, Nolledo. After Sanchez, the literary scene was never the same again. And not only because he revealed himself, at the 1962 Silliman summer writers workshop, as the new sensation in Philippine writing, taking the new fiction farther, much farther than Nolledo who now appeared to be merely a precursor, but because along with Sanchez came a whole new bright bunch of literary youngsters, Erwin Castillo and Ninotchka Rosca and Alfred Yuson, foremost. At the UP campus, Sanchez was idolized by an inner circle of coevals who were themselves gifted albeit more shyly so. Rosca was writing opaque (a description popularized by Teddy Locsin, editor of the Free Press when he applied it to Willy Sanchez), rather murky precious prose in imitation of Sanchez which she later consciously discarded in her activist, political years. Before this change from Frenchy bohemianism to the literature of commitment (you can say, from Genet to Malraux) she had written a story called “Diabolus of Sphere,” which won her the prestigious Free Press first prize. The story’s title could have come straight from Sanchez. Like Nolledo, she subsequently migrated to the U.S. In 1976, I saw her again at some party in Diliman where she noticed the book I was carrying under my arm, Count Julian by Juan Goytisolo, Spain’s celebrated expatriate writer, and sort of chided me for it, saying it was the same stuff we used to indulge in back in the 60s at the UP.
By the 90s, Ninotchka published three novels in the US. The first of these appears to be the best—State of War, wildly praised by our women writers and at least two men, Edgar Maranan—who confessed his admiration for Ninotchka as a writer from his formative years the early 70s—and Juaniyo Arcellana who is a practitioner of what might be called magic criticism. Nick Joaquin gave State of War a sober review in his column, the gist of which seems to be that Ninotchka succeeds not as a novelist of our history (she commits a historical howler or two, Joaquin showed) but as playful writer, imaginative fictionist, or poet.
5.
Now why do I write at some length about Ninotchka who was from UP Diliman? Well, first—as I said—she was one of those who belonged to a movement that Nolledo initiated. Second, she came to the 1964 Silliman summer writers workshop. Third, not many people know it but she had been briefly a ward of the Tiempos. And really it may be false to draw a dividing line between North and South even in a literary reminiscence that is more or less private. I think that’s one of the effects of the Silliman summer writers workshop—obliteration of such a boundary.
This holds true too in the case of Willy Sanchez. Sure, Willy was the literary wunderkind of Manila in the 60s and the 70s—but in Dumaguete? In Dumaguete, yes—it was in Dumaguete that he met Jun Lansang, Ding Nolledo, Nick Joaquin, Franz Arcellana, Pete Daroy, and of course, the Tiempos of Silliman. It was in Dumaguete that his story “Moon Under My Feet” was first read. And yes, by the way, he had a sister at Silliman who eventually married her boyfriend, a nephew of the Garcias of Amigo Subdivision. There’s also the fact that he attended the Silliman workshop three times—in 1962, in 1964, and in 1970.
The “blinding thing” as Erwin Castillo put it in our mature, reviewing years, Willy Sanchez too left for the U.S. in the golden (if false gold) years of the Marcos regime and there incredibly stopped writing altogether. Today, more than twenty years after, one still asks, is this really true? Is Willy Sanchez really not going to write again ever? I think he will just surprise us one of these days. And I wouldn’t be too surprised. After all Ninotchka came out with her novel well into the 90s. Before that they were all saying she was a 60s thing, to talk about whom was to mumble in a time-warp, wake up man. Well, who woke up?
Anyway it was Erwin Castillo who won the race in the 60s, at least in the considered opinion of the Free Press literary editor. While Willy wrote stories that grew more and more opaque and impenetrable, Erwin offered an alternative metafiction rendered less inaccessible by a neo-primitive, Hemingway quality. And how many times was Erwin Castillo in the Silliman writers workshop? He successively attended in 1963 and 1964. Then returned as a grizzled veteran in 1971. I was not in any of these workshops. But was in close contact, even actually worked in the same advertising office, with him in the later 70s when—like the rest of his generation, the generation most injured by the dictatorship, Sanchez, Rosca, Mojares, Madrid, Lacaba—he drifted into silence, into Remontadoism. He came again successively in 1992 and 1993 and I couldn’t believe the telegram that came that May of the presidential election. He came because he wanted to finish a novel he was writing at Dostoevskyan speed: The Firewalkers. He needed, one surmises, a breath of the workshop atmosphere of old to keep going. Even if that worksop atmosphere consisted solely of a drinking buddy’s company. But he did attend the sessions for a week—interacted with the fellows. The novel was serialized in the Graphic that same year. In book form, it had a blurb each from National Artists Nick Joaquin and Franz Arcellana.
6.
There were other bright young writers in the 60s. Not all were of the style or temper or manner set by Nolledo. Appropriately enough, Nolledo’s coeval who preceded him by a year or two, Gregorio Brillantes, was writing from an opposite pole. It can be said that to be a young writer then was to choose between two poles or two paths—to write like Nolledo or to write like Brillantes. Brillantes was winning the top prizes earlier than Nolledo. His writing tended towards sure, solid, balanced craft. What we call conventional or traditional as opposed to experimental or new wave or futurist. Edith Tiempo favors the art of Greg Brillantes over that of Nolledo. It is the style of Timothy Montes and Charlson Ong and Susan Lara. Carlos Cortes and Juaniyo Arcellana and Bimboy Peñaranda, on the other hand, are children of Nolledo. In the 60s, the young writers who were in the Brillantes mold were Resil Mojares and Renato Madrid, both based in Cebu, who were giving the Manila young writers decent competition. Unforgettable were the 1966 Free Press awards in which Castillo won first, Madrid second, and Mojares third. It was the coming of age of a generation.
While the Free Press helped to foster a forum or even scene for the writing then being done in the country, Silliman maintained a proudly independent enclave of sorts. The Tiempos conducted, besides the summer writers workshop, semestral classes in literary criticism and creative writing. Silliman naturally suffered from sheer numerical limitation, but there were very good times. I remember a 1967 class under Dr. Ed Tiempo where my classmates were Kerima Polotan, Antonio Enriquez, Darnay Demetillo, Vic Montes, the Ceniza couple, and Florence Baban. The next year, a poetry class under Edith Tiempo where some of the students were her daughter Rowena, Darnay Demetillo again, Voltaire de Leon, and myself. I remember a Georgia Jones from New York who introduced Exupery’s The Little Prince to me. There was Dale Law also taking up his MA, looking at the Zorba the Greek that I carried and telling me P.A. Bien, one of Kazantzakis’ translators, was his teacher. There were the British boys, Terence Ward of London and Roger Wade of the Isle of Man, like Law, non-writers but serving to enhance the English Department’s reputation though the British boys did not even belong to it. The English majors then also had the advantage of being in the neighborhood of a Speech and Theater department that had Amiel Leonardia put on plays like All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, Sleep of Prisoners, Six Characters in Search of An Author, Rashomon, Waiting for Godot, Romeo and Juliet, and Zoo Story. I remember first meeting the theatre people at the 1967 summer writers workshop poetry reading at Faurot’s studio (as it was called then, not yet the “End House” of a later day).
The 1967 writers workshop was my second workshop and I attended as a fellow. Again the Tiempos hosted and from Manila the guest panelists were Kerima Polotan and NVM Gonzales. The participants came from various places in the Philippines. Bobby Villasis of St. Paul College and Elsie Martinez of Silliman were the hometown fellows. There were Jun Cañizares, Ric Patalinghug, Eddie Yap, and Nelson la Rosa from Cebu. Two guys from Manila—Mar Arcega and Romy Virtusio—and two guys from Zamboanga, Tony Enriguez and myself. Two nuns—Sister Delia and Sister Imelda, the latter of a beauty that I fear far exceeded that of the works submitted to the workshop. A girl from Manila, Joy Dayrit. An observer who later became a poet herself and coordinator of the Silliman workshop: Merlie Alunan. Lately I came across an article by Merlie in which she writes that she was in the 1963 workshop where Bert Florentino, Andy Afable, Raymond Lorca, Roger Sicat, and Erwin Castillo attended. This puzzles me, unless it’s a lapse in memory on Merlie’s part or else she is experimenting with history as fiction—or is it fiction as history. There was also Edgar Libre-Griño, Sands & Coral editor and cousin to two other girls from Manila, the Osorio sisters.
Elsie Martinez outshone her elder brother Danny who appeared to have stopped writing after 1967, though he has recently made a comeback by winning top Palanca prizes in both the short-story and poetry categories. Elsie wrote poetry in the 60s and one short-story that won her the Palanca first prize—“All About Me.” She was a dear friend of Bobby Villasis and both turned playwrights in the 80s. This seems to some a desertion, the literature of theater being somewhat remote and inaccessible in our country. No matter that the greatest Philippine literary work in English so far is a play—A Portrait of The Artist As Filipino. I think myself that the Filipino writer must always write with his fellow Filipino writers in mind. If I am correct in this then the Filipino writer must sooner or later face the challenge of the novel. Rosca of my generation has made three bids. Krip Yuson has two. Resil has hinted he will write an alternative Leon Kilat novel. Erwin has published one, withheld another, and will soon blow our minds with Cape Engaño, his third, which I have read in parts and found better than many of these touted magic realists of Latin America. As for Willy—it’s as his name indicates, WILL HE? Will he write again?
Postcript
To say, as I did early in this essay, that the literary current in the air then (the early 60s or even late 50s) were the beatniks and the angry young men may be misleading. The actual stuff that were being read was not Osborne or Sillitoe or Wilson or Ginsberg or Kerouac. At Silliman it was Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Housman, Frost, Eliot,Joyce, Conrad, Thomas, Crane, James among other names in the modernist tradition and noticeably Anglo-Saxon. At the UP, the names to read and to drop were predominantly European: Federico Garcia Lorca, Rilke, Kafka, Mann, Proust, Camus, Sartre, etc. It was in the 60s, of course, that Barth and Pynchon and Barthelme and other postmoderns emerged in the U.S. but we did not get to read them until the 70s. The “avant garde” authors then were Jean Genet, Henry Miller, and Samuel Beckett, figures who came at the tail-end of modernism. The list can include Lawrence Durrell and Vladimir Nabokov, whose dazzling prose was so natural to take if you were already addicted to Nolledo.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Cesar Ruiz Aquino was born in Zamboanga City, and has a Ph.D. in Literature from Silliman University. He writes both poetry and prose for which he has won virtually all the national awards in the Philippines and one international – the SEA Write Award from the royal family of Thailand in 2004. His books include the short story collection Chronicles of Suspicion, the poetry collections Word Without End, In Samarkand, Caesuras: 155 New Poems, Like a Shadow That Only Fits a Figure of Which It is Not the Shadow, and Fire If It Were Ice, Ice If It Were Fire, and the personal anthology Checkmeta: The Cesar Ruiz Aquino Reader. He lives in Dumaguete City.
Maybe we’re here only to say: house, bridge, well, gate, jug, olive tree, window— at most, pillar, tower…but to say them, remember, oh to say them in a way that the things themselves never dreamed of existing so intensely.
Albert Faurot, the music teacher, gave me a bilingual edition of Rilke’s Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. His dedication—“To another poet and friend“—gave me one of the high moments of my life in Silliman. His End House was a favorite haunt for Butch Macasantos, Armando, my younger brother, and me; yet when he passed away I was not even around to pay him my last respects.
When for the first time I came to Silliman, I was trying to escape from the limitations of my island home in the Sulu sea. I was in search of another island, disdaining a humdrum destiny that was mine at birth, the destiny my ancestors, even from their graves, seemed to have foisted on me. I had thought then that I was urged on, like Tennyson’s Ulysses, by hunger for new knowledge. Even before this hunger had been appeased, a deeper kind of hunger was growing inside of me. It masked itself as the hunger to move about, but in reality it was not wanderlust but, my enemies would think, the other kind of wandering and lusting. I must be kind and just to myself and think simply that this new kind of hunger grew out of the demise of an old love, unfortunately because of my immaturity. I wanted to make up for that loss, and I thought a new island would be the right place to start anew because in a manner of speaking, my old island home had been washed away by the waves of time and misfortune.
So it was then that in the summer of 1970 I found myself in Silliman.
I was like a shipwrecked sailor who had come upon an island, and I was learning the names of things which I thought did not exist.
Many things crowd into my memory when I look back to that time nearly 30 years ago. I remember the languor and rhythm of the afternoon, the horses’ hooves clip-clopping down the asphalt streets, the pleasant rattle the cochero made when he touched the spokes of the turning wheel of his tartanilla with the handle of his whip. In the noon heat the sea just off the Boulevard would be shimmering and blinding as if someone had thrown a million shards of mirrors on the water. It was just like in the old home with the sea breeze coming in from another island. The stead, white houses of the elite facing the sea reminded one of the relaxed atmosphere of the boulevard. Late afternoon it would be full of the happy sounds of children, their concerned parents or yayas watching over them. But there would also be wrinkled habitués promenading in the sunset, or into the sunset of their years. Meanwhile, the boats docked at the wharf, but soon to depart for other ports and to carry away someone else to another country, to strange seas and climes.
After sundown or early evening, as you walked down to the university cafeteria to eat supper, you would hear again the clip-clopping tartanilla pass by. And again late at night when you paused from whatever it was you were doing or reading. The ending of one Nick Joaquin’s stories would come to life except that here there was no resonance or suggestions of romance but simply the humdrum sound of tartanilla. But who knows what was taking place behind the cochero: maybe a pair of lovers, coming home from a movie downtown, were kissing behind the cochero, their hearts beating each to each.
Unbeknownst to a provinciano like me, living in this untroubled paradise, with only my yearning for love as a kind of unrelieved pain, deep trouble was already brewing in many parts of the land. There was profound discontent among the masses. The President, who proved to be a dictator, was stealing the people’s money and depositing it in banks outside the country, while his wife was buying shoes and more shoes and vats of perfumes and body lotion to keep her young and beautiful. The generals were jockeying for power while their wives were ingratiating themselves with the First Lady. Meanwhile, the lowly-paid, underfed, ordinary foot soldiers were dying daily in the hinterlands of Mindanao at the hands of the communist rebels, or in the jungles of Jolo, redolent with the smell of durian and rotting lanzones; they were being slaughtered by roving bands of bandits and zealous mujahedeens. Unbeknownst to many in the country the president was planning to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and later to declare martial law.
As a graduate student in English in 1970, I had to enroll in a creative writing class. In the summer, this class happened to be the famous National Summer Writers Workshop. Although I had no ambition to be a creative writer, I was excited to be in a writers workshop. Here was an opportunity to sharpen my skills in writing, even if I did not intend to be a writer. At that time I did not know what exactly I wanted to do with my life.
Some of the writing fellows in the 1970 summer writers workshop, mostly from Manila-based schools like UP, Ateneo, and De La Salle, have today become nationally famous, although not all of them turned out to be the poets that they first thought they would be. Many of course are hardly heard of these days, deciding perhaps to do something better. Some joined the underground movement in order to fight the coming dictatorship. In the aftermath of martial law some changed their occupations, becoming journalists instead, or copy editors in some lucrative advertising firms. And some went abroad, to the U.S.A., to do something else like taxi driving. Taxi driving might seem embarrassing, but it is not without precedence in literary history, a precedence that moved Albert Camus to remark that art is gratuitous because look what Rimbaud did in Abyssinia after he had left the writing of poetry.
The few who persevered have become well-known writers and are now harvesting the coveted awards that are given annually by the Manila-based weeklies and the Carlos Palanca Foundation. One name stands out today, Carlos Ojeda Aureus, the Bicolano writer whose book of short stories, Nagueños, is the Philippine counterpart of James Joyce’s Dubliners. The other famous name is Ricky Lee, a scriptwriter of Tagalog movies. And of course there is Conrado de Quiros, a well-known columnist with the big time Philippine Daily inquirer.
There were others in that batch like Willie Sanchez, Albert Casuga, and Celedonio Aguilar who, for one reason or another, have stopped writing. The members of the panel of critics in the 1970 workshop, aside from Dr. Edilberto K. Tiempo and Dr. Edith L. Tiempo, were Myrna Peña-Reyes, Raymond Llorca, Bien Lumbera, and Mig Enriquez.
In retrospect the writing fellows and the critics formed an august body of intelligent men, but at that time, because of my ignorance and naïveté, because of my lack of ambition to be a serious writer, I did not feel the awe that was due to this group of men and women. There is something about me that until now is not impressed by importance, literary or otherwise, but I take off my hat to kind, honest, intelligent men and women.
Since I was not a writing fellow but a graduate student enrolled for credit, I had the leisure to sit back and listen 99 percent of the time to the fellows and critics discuss the manuscripts submitted to the workshop. I remember that the only time I had the opportunity to speak was when Dr. Lumbera thought that it would be good to let the fellows and the students talk first. Uncharacteristic for a timid person like me, I immediately and boldly grabbed the opportunity, opened my big mouth, bared my fangs like a dog lately unleashed. Having honed my critical sword in the periodical section of the old Silliman library, on the whetstone of such periodicals as Modern Fiction Studies, I decided to wield it on short story that did not live up to the standards of good fiction, pointing out the failure of characterization and the consequent improbability of the story. Apparently Dr. Lumbera noticed what I did because at the end of the session he approached me and talked to me about something, maybe it was about work. I remember saying that I was looking for work because I had already resigned from a teaching job with the Notre Dame of Siasi. He suggested that I see the Tiempos, but I was too timid to follow his advice. I would meet Bien again six years later when I was a writing fellow at the UP Writers Workshop.
How Doc Ed got me into the English Department of Silliman is a long story itself. Looking back I could say it was one of those turning points in one’s life that did not seem, at the moment it was taking place, momentous at all.
After the workshop, after we had gone back home and had returned to campus, when classes for the first semester were about to begin, Caloy Aureus, who had become a friend, asked me to accompany him to the residence of the Tiempos because he had to arrange the schedule of his classes. The Tiempos had promised him a teaching job so that he could at the same time study for his master’s degree in Creative Writing. As a writing fellow, Caloy had submitted a short story which, in spite of its subject matter (a rape near a cathedral) impressed the panel of critics. Dad, as we later came to call him, was the Dean of the Graduate School, and Mom Edith was the head of the English Department.
I had no inkling that that very evening, that Friday evening, still warm and pleasant as if the long days of summer were not over yet, the tide of my fortune was going to change.
It was my first time to be at the residence of the Tiempos in Amigo Subdivision. I remember the warm glow of the lights in the sala and in the adjacent dining room. There was snack for Caloy and me, brewed coffee I think it was, and cookies. While Caloy and the Tiempos were busy with the schedule of Caloy’s classes—those that he was going to teach in the undergrad and those that he was going to attend as a student in the graduate school—I sat back, looked around the sala, at the books and a bric-a-brac on the shelves, the large, wooden stereo and the large records, hardly enjoying the brewed coffee because in two days I had to pack my things up and go back to that God-forsaken island in the Sulu Sea where I came from. The prospect of going back, of repeating history—that is, the family history of store-keeping—gave me that sinking feeling that there was no justice in the universe, the feeling of a sailor in a rickety boat driven into the teeth of a storm.
We were walking to the iron gate when some good angel bent over Doc Ed and whispered to him, urging him to ask me what I was going to do. As calmly as I could, although the tide of dejection was rising to my head, I explained to him my situation, the dreadful prospect of return, without giving him a hint of that dread, and the desire to stay on if possible. He said there were available scholarships in the Graduate School. Was I willing to work as a graduate fellow and also study for a master’s degree? Could I postpone my return trip that Sunday? Could I see him on Monday in his office and see what could be done?
Those words and my affirmative response cancelled out the order possibilities of my life, turned the possibilities to might-have-beens: like I could have been a rich but discontented store keeper in a loveless island, or a rebel with the MNLF.
In Dumaguete and Silliman I stayed on and stayed on for the next thirteen years.
Every year I looked forward to summer and the workshop. In 1972, I worked as the assistant of Mr. Joe Torres, the reliable typist of the workshop manuscripts. I mimeographed the stencils that he had cut in that small room on the ground floor of the old library, which was an extension office of the English Department because at one time or another Mr. Jess Chanco, Mr. Darnay Demetillo, Mr. Joe Teague, and Mr. Antonio Enriquez held office there.
The following year I qualified as a writing fellow. I submitted a few poems and a short story about Tausug vengeance. It had an epigraph from a William Butler Yeats’s poem about things falling apart because the center cannot hold. The story was hotly debated by the panelists and writing fellows. I was thrilled by the reactions of the participants, whether they were favorable or otherwise. It was then that I realized that anything about Tausug was interesting to many readers. Somewhere on the fringe of my subconscious, I began to entertain the idea of someday writing a novel about my God-forsaken island.
The late Mr. Rolando Tinio was a panelist that year, and he played the role of the devil’s advocate to the hilt. There was no story or poem that pleased him. I remember an incident one afternoon when a literature-teacher fellow showed his poem to Mr. Tinio. It was under the acacia tree in front of Larena Hall. A circle of benches surrounded the tree. It was where idle students would make tambay, where the laundry women on Saturday and Sunday afternoons would wait for the students to pick up the laundry. After a quick reading of the poem, Mr. Tinio dropped the piece of paper, bent down and covered it with a pile of sand, and remarked that the poem deserved the burial. The way he scooped the sand with both hands, wordlessly pouring the grains of sand on the paper, how he quickly stood up and delivered the punch line was a brilliant comic action. We were all entertained. We all laughed, including the mustachioed victim of this joke who, we learned later, he invited to teach with him at the Ateneo de Manila.
Except for the summer of 1976 when I was at the UP Writers Workshop in Diliman, I attended the Silliman workshop every year in various capacity: sometimes as a tour guide to the visiting writing-fellows from Manila and Cebu, the role being performed by Mickey and Victor today; sometimes as an unofficial, unpaid panelist; and later with Butch Macasantos, as jester who entertained the writing fellows with ethnic jokes. I remember those long, carefree evening hours, lying on the ball-field between the men’s dorms and the nurses’ home, exchanging jokes with the fellows while above us the moon sailed by in the cloudless summer sky.
The writ of habeas corpus was suspended in 1971. The rumor of martial law was in the air. The campus weekly was full of omens and portents of things to come, side by side with pictures of Fidel Castro and Che Guevarra as icons of rebellion and liberation. Although Mao was equally qualified to stand as icon, his picture was not often reprinted in the weekly because (and this is a wild guess because I did not know the editors of the paper) Mao had some ethnic resemblance to the aspiring dictator. Everywhere in the dormitory rooms, the walls were plastered with theses pictures. The excessive presence of Che’s bearded image moved one run-of-mill lawyer to complain that instead of Che the students ought to hang the picture of clean-shaven Richard Nixon, then president of the United States. With his lower lip protruding, he asked in earnest “Why not Nixon?”
We would get free copies of various Marxist writings. Mao’s little red book was easily available; the quotations were familiar. The Internationale, in English and Filipino, sounded inspiring. When sung in protest against beauty pageants on campus, or some irrelevant cultural shows, it could move you to righteous anger. Let me hasten to add though that the airwaves were still dominated by American pop songs, like ”MacArthur Park” and “Leaving on a Jet Plane.”
One day the late Senator Benigno Aquino came to campus, and everybody was at the gym to listen to him. A brilliant and charismatic speaker, he warned the country that Marcos was going to declare martial law, that the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was merely a dry-run in order to gauge the reaction or opposition of the body politic. According to Aquino, Marcos had repeatedly denied he was going to declare martial law, but don’t you believe Marcos, he said, because Marcos, Goebbels-like, was a congenital liar. I had heard of incorrigible liar and inveterate liar, but it was my first time to hear of congenital liar. Imagine, to lie as soon as you are born. True enough, exactly a year after the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, martial law was declared.
The night before September 21, we were already burning our piles of the Weekly Sillimanian, returning Mao’s little red book to its rightful owner, removing from the walls and cabinets the pictures of bearded heroes and replacing them with glossy pages from some magazines whose heroines had longs legs but were not necessarily beardless. I learned early on that you can be a rebel but you don’t have to go to jail; that when your enemy is pushing you against the wall, a quick change of hair color or wave is absolutely necessary. Put the hair somewhere. It can save your life. So while some of my dormmates had to flee to the other provinces, I stayed on in the third floor of Woodward Hall, partly out of necessity because I didn’t have the money to go back to far Zamboanga.
There were three kinds of rebel-heroes then. The real ones lived in the mountains, shoeless and in rags, so that the suggestion that they were naked was not without basis; hence they were called hubad na bayani. The ones who believed they were rebels but who couldn’t let a day go without smoking imported cigarettes, and who devoured PX goods, were referred to a huwad na bayani. The last worst kind were those who sold their souls to the regime so that they could enjoy the luxuries their neighbors were enjoying. There were referred to as tuwad na bayani because in order to sell their souls they had to bare something physical.
It took Silliman a long time to open again, probably the last of the private schools to resume classes. The reason was that, according to military non-intelligence, Silliman was full of rebels. It had that impression because the campus paper printed Marxist writings, and hardly a week went by when some pictures of Fidel or Che did not grace the pages of its campus paper. But as a matter of fact, there were hardly a hundred students who were really that serious about rebellion. I had been a witness to one protest march against a cultural show held in the gym. There were only about thirty placard-carrying students who marched and shouted in front of the gym. They hardly made a dent on the show inside the gym until an agent provocateur advised them to get into the gym and do their shouting and marching there. Only then did they succeed in disrupting the show. But sheer number there was none. Out of a population of 5,000 students, you have only thirty. What percentage of the population is that? Is that enough to say that the campus was swarming with rebels?
When school resumed, some changes were in order. Before martial law, the physical setting of the campus was such that it was integrated into the larger Dumaguete community. Anyone could get in and out of the campus. After martial law, some wire fences had to be put up per instruction from the military. The freedom to move about was already restricted by the construction of gates near the dormitories. Curfew was imposed on the residents of the dorms. We had to climb the fence once the gates were already closed, or we had to cut away a few feet of wire to make a hole in the fence. The administration, trying to tow the line, had to impose the wearing of short hair. In protest, one of my professors had his head shaven.
It took sometime before the campus paper was given the license to operate again. When it came back there was none of the usual Marxist writings, absolutely none of the pre-martial law pictures. In its first year of resumption, I was the technical adviser, meaning my job was to see to it that no such thing happened in the paper. On the other hand, the paper did not sing praises to martial law, but went quietly to do its job as a campus paper and as a workshop for aspiring journalists of the School of Communication.
The presence of the wire fences and the uniformed security guards manning the gates made the campus look like one huge garrison. Under the seeming sense of normalcy there was a seething hatred for the dictator. The Silliman community as a whole consistently voted no in the referendums and plebiscites when the dictator asked for a yes, and yes when he asked for a no. An excellent example of how students thought about the so-called virtues of martial law was the English translation it as “One Day, One Eat.”
Slowly, imperceptibly, people got used to martial law except the occasional outpourings of hatred for the dictator and his dragon lady. We returned to the library to read again the complete works of such and such poet. It was Eliot, then Auden, then Yeats and Frost and Dylan Thomas. Later it was Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce and James. Then the critics. Then the journals put out by American universities. We were becoming Anglophiles. Even on Saturday nights, when most of the undergraduates were out with their friends, we were in the desolate library pouring over books or periodicals.
It took me sometime to finish my thesis so I did not graduate until 1975. Caloy had finished earlier, and as soon as he had his master’s degree, he left Silliman and went to UP. Lack of ambition, lackadaisical attitude, and the desire to just stay on in Silliman campus were the reasons why I did not finish in two years. But one day it occurred to me that I wanted to move up to Baguio City. To inspire me to get the degree I wrote on a piece of paper: “Next Destination: Baguio.” I pasted it on the mirror so that I would see it every morning. In one semester, I finished the thesis and defended it in time for graduation in March of 1975.
I went to Baguio with the intention of finally moving there, but when I saw the city I was disappointed. The UP Baguio campus was so small. The terrain of the city was so uneven. The houses were perched on hillsides and gave the impression that any rainy time they would fall on the houses just under them on the next tier. I felt like it was being on tenterhooks everyday of your life. I did not want that kind of precariousness. But I think the main reason was that it was too far from the sea. Having grown up on the seashore, I could not, for the life of me, live far from it.
So I went back to Dumaguete , back to old, cozy Silliman, in the security of the century-old acacia trees. And I stayed on until finally I thought I really needed a change of scene.
In 1983, I resigned from the English Department, quietly, without fanfare. When Dad learned about it, he did not talk to me. He could not accept that I was leaving, that I who had stayed the longest when everybody else had left for one reason or another, was also leaving. I couldn’t shake off that Et tu, Brute feeling. But I had to leave for the sake of my sanity. I am amused now when I remember that morning during the 1983 workshop. Krip Yuson, Cesar Aquino, and I were in Krip’s room at the Alumni Hall. Dad came in to see Krip who had just arrived from Manila. Although he talked to both Krip and Cesar, Dad completely ignored me. Oh, where is that angel that made him talk to me thirteen years ago? I tried to put myself in his shoes. How would a father feel when his son was going away from home?
Life indeed is a series of arrivals and departures, mostly departures, someone said. And when we bid good-bye in this life, we are just rehearsing for the final good-bye we all must bid someday. Right, Mr. Laurence Sterne?
Another thirteen years went by. In September 1996, I learned that Dad had passed away quietly. Like a dutiful son, I came to Dumaguete to pay my last respects. I crossed two bodies of water, traveled ten hours, just so I could be at his funeral. For the first time in my life, I became a pall-bearer and delivered a eulogy. But I envy what Mr. Ernesto Yee did when he learned that Dad had passed away: he went to the house to polish Dad’s pair of shoes. I wish I had done that myself, for Dad deserved that act of kindness. In spite of his detractors and enemies, he was a kind man whose heart was not only in the right place but was also, as Cesar Aquino put in a glowing tribute, as large as Africa.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Anthony L. Tan was born in Siasi, Sulu. He earned his BA English from the Ateneo de Zamboanga in 1968 and went on to Silliman University in Dumaguete City for both his MA Creative Writing (1975) and PhD. in British Literature (1982). For more than a decade he taught at the English Department of Silliman University and was a regular member of the panel of critics at the Silliman University National Writers Workshop. In 1983, he joined the faculty of the English Department at MSU-Iligan Institute of Technology and became one of its chairpersons in 1984-85. Together with Jaime An Lim and Christine Godinez Ortega, he helped organize the first Iligan National Writers Workshop/Literature Teachers Conference in 1993. He retired from teaching in 2012. He has won a number of awards for his writings, among them the Focus Philippines award for poetry, the Palanca 1st prize for “Poems for Muddas” (1993) and another Palanca for the essay. His poems and stories have been published locally and abroad, more prominently in the prestigious Atlanta Review and Manoa, the literary journal at the University of Hawaii. He is the author of two books of poems titled The Badjao Cemeteryand Other Poems (1985) and Poems for Muddas (1996).
You step down from a George & Peter Lines boat still reeling from a two-day trip from the backwaters of Samar. Your first view of the school, college boy, is that of Guy Hall partly hidden by coconuts. You didn’t expect this: coconuts! Dumaguete was supposed to be a city—you had dreamed of riding escalators and watching movies in shopping malls. But now you are confronted by coconuts and dilapidated buildings and realize the place is as rustic as the hometown you left behind.
You are fifteen. Your bag feels heavy with a generation of memories, a family tradition, really—a grand uncle, uncles, brothers, and a sister who have studied in the old school. You read the rotting signboard: SILLIMAN UNIVERSITY Founded 1901. A school as old as that should smell musty, but it is the smell of the sea that overwhelms you. And just then a tartanilla passes by; your nose is assailed by horse dung. Your tired brain is prone to synesthesia: waves smashing on the wharf, the smell of asphalt streets, tocino stalls along the boulevard, the early-morning sounds of a university town—they get mixed up except for this eschatological revelation that wakes you up from your lethargy: horse shit. (Fifteen years later, you would have a deja vu while walking along the boulevard at midnight but something will be absent from this synesthetic memory that you associate with the Dumaguete of your youth. Then you will realize what’s wrong: there is no smell of horse dung anymore. The last tartanilla has passed by.) But on this first day of your college life you look up at the coconuts and hold your bag and realize with a certain sadness that if you can stand the place until your senior year you will be able to hurdle the loneliness of youth.
You arrive in Silliman at the tail-end of Martial Law. The school is still enclosed by a barbed wire fence, a remnant of its closure in 1972. But after more than ten years of martial rule, the school still echoes with radical political protest from the late 60s and early 70s. To be an intellectual is to be a political radical. Your teachers in religion advocate liberation theology and you are amused by how Old Testament lessons like Exodus are being interpreted in light of Marxist ideology.
You don’t know who Ninoy Aquino is until he gets assassinated. As a martial Law baby, you have grown up on Niño Muhlach movies and the songs of ABBA. Half-understanding the significance of his death, you go to the Student Government office to watch a video showing of Ninoy’s assassination. But the film is as blurred and shaky as your political convictions. When you hear one assassin shouting “Pusila! Pusila!” you wish Fernando Poe Jr. will appear.
College boy, why are you walking around campus at night? You are a biology scholar but instead of being amazed by Darwin’s evolutionary paradigm you are here walking around the soccer field at midnight, self-absorbed in a poetic feeling that would make your hair stand when, years later, you will read Frost’s “I have been one acquainted with the night.” For you are bored with your science classes. In your intellectual arrogance, you dismiss most of your teachers as mediocre and think Silliman education does not challenge you.
So you scan the university library for novels, reading voraciously as only a young man who grew up in a small town without a library would suddenly discover the joy of books. On your own you explore the library stacks and fall in love with F. Sionil Jose and Herman Wouk. Sometimes you spend a whole weekend at the library just scanning books, suffused with the thought that even if a lifetime is too short to read all the books, you would, at least, get to touch all of them.
The ache of young love is subconsciously associated with the smell of books in the library. Sometimes you look up from a book you are reading and imagine a beautiful face with long, flowing black hair. Your sexual awakening comes with the gluey smell of old, old books in the library. You roam the library floors like a gangly freak, overwhelmed by the sight of one beautiful girl after another. (The sense of beauty you experience when reading a good book is still that feeling of adolescent dizziness with the sight of pretty girls.)
Unfortunately, you have also arrived at the tail-end of Silliman’s literary golden age. The famous Tiempo-Deriada war is raging.
When you enroll in English 12, you read with a certain pride the bulletin board of the English Department announcing that Leoncio Deriada and Rowena Torrevillas have won the top Palanca awards. That year the school is featured in Asiaweek because two of the Tiempo students won the short story contest sponsored by the magazine. Silliman is touted as a center of excellence in literary writing in Asia.
Whiffs, glances, words—your memory of Silliman writers is colored by your awe of books.
One morning, on your way to biology class, you meet Rowena Tiempo-Torrevillas on the second floor of Science Complex. You gaze at the goddess as she adjusts the strap of her high-heel shoes, straightens up without looking at the students walking past her, and walks on with that regal bearing, leaving a strong scent of perfume in her wake. (A few years later, when you first read Arguilla’s “How My Brother Leon Brought Home A Wife,” you will associate “the fragrance of her was like a morning when papayas are in bloom” with Rowena walking by. The nose, indeed, has its own memory.)
Edilberto Tiempo, Vice President for Academic Affairs, sleeps during convocations. As an impressionable young man, you think his narcolepsy is a sign of genius.
Leo Deriada, with a string of Palancas to his name, is chairman of the English Department. During the second sem enrollment, you accompany a friend to the English Department to inquire about your English 11 grades. The famous writer himself is behind the window dispensing grades. “I’m sorry, you flunked,” he casually says to your friend, who breaks down in tears. When your turn comes, you edge over to the window to get a better look at him: curly hair, furrows on the forehead. He calls out your name as he nonchalantly scans the grading sheets. Then, in exaggerated tones which sound almost sarcastic, he says “Congratulations! You got an A minus.” (Later, after years of teaching, you will often catch yourself sounding that way, too. Academic exhaustion, you realize. Not literary sarcasm.)
Edith Tiempo is Dean of the Graduate School. Everyday you see the famous red car waiting for her outside Katipunan Hall. One time your teacher in Philippine literature assigns you to write a critical interpretation of Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels. You go to the grad school library to plagiarize a thesis on your assigned topic—and Mrs. Tiempo, followed by her masteral students, enters the room and holds a class right there. You try to disappear into a corner, sinking into a chair while reading a critical analysis of Joaquin’s women characters, half-listening to Mrs. Tiempo talk about the history of the English language. You wonder how such a gentle-spoken old woman could be so revered by so many people. (Later, when she becomes your teacher in poetry, you will understand the Tiempo magic.)
Being a science student, you observe the school’s literary events from a more objective distance. Secretly, however, you write stories inspired by Maupassant; you write poems about each beautiful girl who inspires you into excreting verbal diarrhea.
But there comes a time when you develop a more systematic, discriminating way of reading in the library. You scan the books to look for the names of the borrowers, looking for the names of Rowena, Tony Tan, Cesar Aquino. You reckon that by reading the books they’ve read, some of their craft will rub off on you. Their signatures on borrowers cards will become familiar to you, as familiar as the books you will read with them. You will read The Isaac Bashevis Singer Reader with Rowena; you will write on the margins of Nabokov’s Lolita with Cesar Aquino. Reading the same books that the Silliman writers have read is like surfing in the wake of the Titanic. You re-create the grandeur of the ship before it sank.
For two weeks during your first year, the school is paralyzed by literary politics. The faculty goes on strike to express lack of confidence in the university president. (You join the nightly vigils in front of the president’s house to pressure him to resign. You think that abuse of administrative power in the school is somehow connected with the despotism of Marcos.)
The issues are murky. Edilberto Tiempo, the VPAA, has changed the teaching loads of literature teachers in the English department. Leo Deriada feels slighted by this VPAA action which bypassed his authority as chairman of the department. The university president stands by the decision of the VPAA and the faculty union rallies behind Deriada. The words during rallies become more scathing: the Tiempos are portrayed as dictators. Edilberto, however, says this is a dirty tactic by Deriada who flunked in his Ph. D. class.
Only in Silliman do you see classes disrupted by literary politics. The writers on the different sides of the fence articulately argue out issues. (You listen in amusement to the two sides and decide that this is an ego war.) Kerima Polotan writes about the school’s academic crisis in Focus magazine (and her friendship with the Tiempos will never be the same again.)
After two weeks of academic holiday, the students get bored. You join them in the march to the house of the chairman of the Board of Trustees to pressure him into convening the board to resolve the educational crisis.
In the end, it turns out to be a war with no victors. Edilberto resigns and retires. Rowena leaves the English department in tears and leaves for the U.S. (Except for Cesar Aquino, the other Tiempo babies like Marj Evasco, Tony Tan, and Christine Godinez-Ortega had left Dumaguete a few years before this.) Deriada himself, as if doubting the vindication of his cause, leaves for U.P. Iloilo in a year.
By the time you are a junior student ripe for literature courses, the literary scene is eerily quiet. It is a quietness conducive to your own creative exploration as you decide that despite your majoring in science your real education will be through books and movies.
The gods have crumbled and the landscape has lost a mythic quality.
The hand of memory sweeps over the mind; it ruffles the crowns of acacias, and the leaves, as if twirling to autumnal music, falls gracefully over the past.
Your soul dwells on those moments of grace when historic events are signaled by the leaf-falling season of trees in Silliman. You remember singing Bayan Ko under the rain with Cory Aquino, and the senescent leaves falling down on the crowd like the yellow ribbons Ninoy had dreamt of.
During your third year in college, one afternoon on your way to Physics class, the acacia leaves come raining down on you carried on the waves of pealing bells. The bells ring with urgency and the air is filled with portentous sound and sense. You think you can stay forever under the leaf-rain. When you get to your room, you find your classmates jumping and shouting. Marcos is gone! The dictator has left! You don’t know how to react to the news; you tell yourself you don’t care as you continue to bask in some kind of poetic loneliness, thinking the bells had been for you, for the falling of leaves. Everyone becomes quiet as the Physics teacher enters the room; without any reference to the fall of the dictator he discusses Newtonian mechanics. A car travels at 20 mph; another car travels at 50 mph. This, you realize, is the essence of it all. One car will overtake another car, the velocity of historical events are incongruent to emotional inertia. But you don’t really care because the leaves, the graceful leaves, will continue to fall in your mind.
Two weeks before graduation, after taking all your final exams, you walk around the campus prematurely saying goodbye to the ghosts you will leave behind. That’s how sentimental you are. To avoid hang-ups, you decide to tell all your crushes about your secret feelings for them. It is your mission before graduating to erase all your emotional uncertainties about girls in order to have enough room for honest-to-goodness uncertainties of the working world. (But your passion for books won’t go away with your adolescent hang-ups.)
So you walk around waiting for graduation, feeling empty while contemplating the bare crowns of the acacias. After four years in the school, you ask yourself, what have you learned? Nothing, comes the humble reply. A few interesting teachers, a few plays you’ve acted in, a few songs you’ve sung in the Men’s Glee Club—life leaves you only the soundtrack for the movie in your mind. The film itself has been reduced to an incoherent montage. The music remains even as the memories get blurred around the edges.
You remember climbing over the barbed wire fence at night so you can drink beer with your friends inside the campus to celebrate your winning the student government elections. You remember the plays you’ve acted in and how psychically draining they were. You remember wet kisses behind dark school buildings. You remember agnostic questions you asked yourself even as you continued to attend Silliman Church. You remember your biology professor (Prof. Gonzales, with the profile of Joseph Conrad) saying: “Man is just a society of cells.” ou remember your weekend hikes up Camp Lookout, field trips to Lake Balinsasayao (where you first got drunk), snorkeling in Apo Island (where you got sunburned).
Before graduation, you say goodbye to the old school, your mind melodramatically rushing up to meet another leaf-falling season. You have to have a sad tale to tell to go with the dreary music in your head even as the leaves come falling down your head. Adagio, the heart says, but the mind vehemently denies: no, no, you were not—never—lonely here. And still the leaves rain down on you like music fit to commit suicide in.
Six months after graduation, you are back in Silliman. After a few months of working for San Miguel Aquaculture Operations as a babysitter of prawns, you have decided to become a writer. You talk to Merlie Alunan about the possibility of your pursuing graduate studies in literature and she offers you a graduate fellowship in creative writing. The Tiempos have come back from the U.S. and have revived the Creative Writing Program.
And so in the late 80s and early 90s you find yourself joining the inner circle. Your classmates include the De Veyra brothers (Nino and Jojo), Dinah Roma, Vim Nadera, and Cynthia Lopez-Dee. The Tiempos, Merlie Alunan, and Cesar Aquino become your teachers; you end up teaching in the English department but steer away from the old politics. And through it all you dispassionately go through your studies as if some part of you has remained suspended in another time. During your graduate years, you overtake your writing dreams and get to meet those idols of your youth—Edilberto Tiempo assuring you at the beach that you can write; Edith telling you that writing is a way of life, not an act of pencil-pushing; Marj Evasco serving you tea in her bowered garden at Hagdang Bato; Tony Tan serving you beer in his Iligan apartment as he talks about his disillusionment with love; courting nursing students at Chapman dorm with Cesar Aquino; meeting Fanny Lllego during Albert Faurot’s wake; meeting Rowena in SU Church who says she’s impressed with your work; Carlos Ojeda Aureus showing you his Silliman memorabilia in his office at U.P. Faculty Center (a framed diploma, a sepia photograph)—as you get introduced to the Silliman literati of the 70s as a promising writer and the last Tiempo baby.
You realize you have overtaken the ripples you used to surf in. The achievements of 70s and the silence of the 80s fold into each other in your mind. But while the loop of memory-time twists to a seamless resolution, you tell yourself you don’t belong to that generation. These people could have been your teachers. Even when you laugh with them and talk with them about Silliman, you know deep inside that you are talking across an Einstenian divide. You tell yourself you are a creature of the 80s, that era of your life when you thought you arrived too late for Silliman’s literary bus, when your teachers held classes even while the People’s Power Revolution went on in EDSA, when you were too thin to be handsome and too sensitive to be likable. The 80s was the time when you read books like crazy and fell in love so passionately. Even as Tony, Marj, and Caloy talk about glorious Silliman days, you find yourself looking in from the outside, you see yourself as an outcast walking to that sad music in his head, back to the 80s when it was an inauspicious time to grow up dreaming of being a Sillimanian writer, when the landscape was empty and the leaves fell on one’s head.
And one day you wake up to realize you are already thirty and still stuck in Silliman. You fear you’ll end up a doddering professor teaching literature to the children of your classmates.
Fifteen years have passed since you gazed at those coconuts (they are still there!) but the same ambivalent feeling remains. But you also realize you have been partly wrong in your judgment of the school, that morning fifteen years ago. You were able to stand the place so long because you never got over the loneliness of your youth.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Timothy R. Montes is from Borongan, Eastern Samar. He studied in the Creative Writing Program of Silliman University under the tutelage of Edilberto Tiempo and Edith Tiempo, and published his first story collection, The Black Men and Other Stories [Anvil] in 1994. He also co-edited, with Cesar Ruiz Aquino, Tribute: An Anthology of Contemporary Philippine Fiction, in memory of his mentor Edilberto K. Tiempo. He has been the recipient of various national awards, such as the Palanca, the Philippines Graphic Literary Prize, the Philippines Free Press Literary Prize, and the Writers Prize from the National Commission for Culture and the Arts. He has taught at Silliman University, the University of the Philippines in Mindanao, and De La Salle University Taft.
It was a year after I graduated from college that I decided to enter Silliman. After months of working as a cub reporter for a daily and a brief stint with an ad agency in my hometown, I realized I wanted to write for a different audience.
I first heard of the National Writers Workshop back in high school. The Tiempos, to me, seemed to be icons. When my parents couldn’t afford to send me to Silliman for college, I told myself I’d let her wait; my opportune time would just arrive.
And so, May of 1993, I set foot on Silliman. I tried to “read” the place and the atmosphere it exuded. After a month, I went back, enrolled, and dared to risk the whole of me to the Creative Writing Program.
The first semester consisted of months of “serious” work—study, research, reports. I wasn’t very particular with joining a clique or creating one. I was determined to leave a good impression on my instructors, especially since this was the first semester. But it was during this semester that I saw the real scenario of the Creative Writing Program. There weren’t enough professors to teach me: the Tiempos had retired, Cesar Aquino had gone back to Manila, and the rest, to name a few—Merlie Alunan-Wenceslao, Jaime Am Lim, Anthony Tan—had long left. They left, I would suppose, to seek for greener (read: financially fulfilling) pastures. I think the English Department panicked when I came in. I was the first one to enroll for a Creative Writing degree again after Timothy Montes defended his master’s thesis. I never knew then that the program was in shambles, , and all those graduating hopefuls—Creative Writing majors who are one step away from having an M.A. degree (if only they’d finish their theses)— were turning helpless. For lack of professors to teach, the program was dead.
It would explain the kind of panic which struck the department. Who would teach this virtually unknown newcomer? They would have to take a close look again at the subjects I would have to enroll in. I could only look back at it now: I might have been the small spark which made the program alive again.
The semester that followed was one I would consider my writing stage. From my major subjects, I was exposed to writers and their techniques: Poe’s organic unity, Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness, Updike’s peripheral-tangential. But far better than this, I labored to understand the writers themselves and their angst: Faulkner’s “human heart in conflict,” Kafka’s “ontological crisis,” Durell’s “pain becoming literature.” I was not aware that I had dug deeper into Truth in literature. I wasn’t just writing for myself: fiction, I learned, possesses universal values.
The first National Writers Workshop I attended—in 1994—exposed me to a newer and more challenging dimension in writing: literary criticism. I actually was in front of the literary giants—criticizing, praising, underestimating, glorifying, poking fun at, or taking seriously, the manuscripts I submitted. Mom Edith remained sweet-looking even when she delivered her attacks, Ate Marj was always the “ever-charming” panelist even in the middle of her punches, Butch Dalisay was restrained and particular with the language used, Ricky de Ungria had that pretty smile on his face especially after workshop time but would give us a stiff look when everyone would be awaiting his verdict, Cesar Aquino was forgiving and had that memorable hand gesture which I liked best because that would mean he’s very interested in your work. And Doc Ed? To survive a workshop is to survive Doc Ed.
Friendships bloomed the remaining semesters. The English Department revived the Sands & Coral, and we, the bunch who would meet Saturdays, sorted through hundreds of manuscripts. Kuya Noel, Ton-Ton, Dinah, Bobby, Tim, Jared, Angeline, and the rest of the staff shared a common bond which we did not have to make obvious: a deep interest in the revival of literary talent on campus. Our efforts have been rewarded: issues have been appearing each year on the stands.
The following summer, I joined the 2nd Iligan National Writers Workshop. I survived that workshop, too, despite the “blasphemy” my story earned. I still remember telling Dr. Cirilo Bautista that I might not again write a story on how the world would end.
Those two long years proved to be arduous. But my last year was equally painstaking. I strove to write more stories and saw them published. I “devoured” books for a probable thesis. I tried to beat the past record I had when I was still reviewing for my comprehensive exams—an 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily ordeal in the library. Time was proving to be more cruel. Juggling my time in-between teaching and researching, I felt that everything seemed to be more difficult. I was at a crossroads.
I attended the summer workshops in Dumaguete after my first. Those times, I was a veteran. Fresh, young faces were there, experiencing what it takes to consider oneself a writer. I remember looking at all their flustered and/or happy faces. I was there once.
All my years in Silliman are present in who I am now—including that long stretch of academic learning. But greater still would be the moments undocumented by words: they are found in the Self I was finally re-introduced to.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Anne-Marie Jennifer Eligio earned her M.A. in Creative Writing at Silliman University.
I met Tonton at Noel’s kitchen, during the summer of 1995, a couple of weeks after the workshop. Gray and long-haired, tattered pants and hand-painted shirt, hunger in his eyes. He was strumming the guitar and was jamming it up with some jolly old chap from ULB who kept on mumbling between guzzles of beer about bringing his family from stinking Manila to placid Dumaguete where they may live forever and ever. He finished each burst of tearful talk with an eloquently rendered “What a sorry state of affair, oh what a sorry state of affair!”
The night before, I had slept at a bus terminal one shabby bridge over a dead river away from the city’s thoroughfare. I had unceremoniously left my last hovel, after a nasty quarrel with my sister, bearing only my bag of a few shirts. It was a wild idea: boarding the boat bound for Dumaguete.
Angst was the in-word in Dumaguete when I got there. Angst, it seemed, was what poetry was all about. I can’t remember where and from whom I heard it first, but before long, I realized that every poet and quasi-poet in Dumaguete was supposed to know the word by heart. Perhaps it was Tonton who said it first to me, but perhaps not. He was mostly quiet the first few hours that we met that I immediately respected him, no matter what ailed him then. Or maybe it was Jenny who said the word, for she it was who loved peppering her speech with in-words and in-names. Jenny chugged in while we were sipping coffee at Noel’s kitchen. So all-adoring she was. In ten minutes I learned what she had been reading over the past few months, what nastiness Siliman teachers were capable of, what terrific things Doc Ed said over the last piece that he trashed during which workshop. Whatever her faults were, I thank Jenny. Jenny helped me see that there was indeed a wonderful class of poets in Siliman.
It required a robbery before I could get my bloody transcript of record from the last school I attended even awfully beautiful years ago and finally squeeze myself in in that long queue of Silliman enrollees, but to make the story short, by June of the year 1995, I was among the handful of students who were congratulating themselves or having been taken in for an adorable English major. Whatever remained of the past glory of the English department (it was once the prima donna of Silliman, Ma’am Andre said), we were the cocks who crowed on its dung, to quote Hemmingway.
And if I was a cock, Ester was my mother cock. Ester was in her forties who graduated as a Nursing student in Siliman twenty or twenty-five years back. She was there again because…oh, the dunghill that school’s all about, she’d been teaching English in a State University in Mindanao for many years now, and suddenly her administrator, like all administrators, decided that English teachers, no matter how well they’ve been doing in their job, should be holding an English degree first of all.
We were best friends, Ester and I: I was her friend-in-need. I pity you, she always told me. You’re so deprived. Financially and emotionally.
Our friendship was not always mercenary though. It was also intellectual. Or rather, quasi-intellectual. Together we dug the library’s archives trying to salvage what scraps and dregs of human intelligence were there to benefit from. We took Shakespeare to heart, chasing after Lysander in the forest and doubling over with laughter at Kate’s hysterics. We cursed Iago and Othello, felt sorry for Shylock, and wondered in Bassanio was worth all of Portia’s wealth. How we raged against the gods who made sport of King Lear.
Ma’am Andre was happy. We studied our Vernacular Literature seriously, going to the barrios on weekends to retrieve songs and verses that would have died with our grandmothers. We learned by heart the Manuvu epic, knew the Ulahingan heroes by name, and would have staged a play if not for our lack of talent (mine, particularly: I could not dance, to Archie’s disgust and triumph).
I never thought of Silliman without Doc Ed and Ma’am Edith being there. I was therefore surprised not to see them among the faculty when enrolled in 1995. I had believed that what made every Silliman Creative Writing student possible was the Tiempos. Getting there in June and finding they were no longer with the English Department was puzzling. More puzzling was the passing references to them used by people. “The old man,” “the old woman,” they were called, not always in fondness, and sometimes, in a tone of anger. It was a curious thing for a young aspiring fool with unchecked notions about writers and poets.
“Have you met Cesar Ruiz Aquino?” Noel, then editor of the just-revived Sands & Coral, asked me. If it is poetry you want, he is the poet, or words to that effect. Up to that time, the only poetry that had stuck with me—beside a good dose of Latin American novels—was those of Eman Lacaba’s, Jason Montana’s, Alan Jazmine’s and from back in Dabaw, Don Pagusara’s. curiously male, it was, but that was as far as my education went in my literate NGO days.
But my first true encounter with Silliman poetry did not come with Cesar’s. It was from Migen, Franklin’s sister, who came to the Dumaguete workshop in the late sixties or thereabouts. Franklin was a classmate, beside Ester, in his fifties, also writing, and sculpting, beside a gift of circumlocution.
I cannot think of Franklin now without feeling bird droppings on my skin, but that’s not what I want to say here. What I want to say is, Franklin got a sister who wrote poetry better than T.S. Eliot.
Ester and I would go to Franklin’s quarters. Our common academic pursuit, namely Shakespeare and anything literary, sort of united us. Franklin would serve us with coffee or juice and his favorite French bread while we searched for literature from his hoard: a tumble of books carried over to Dumaguete from his theatre arts and scriptwriting days in Manila. When I read Migen’s poems, my school of poetry crumbled behind me. Migen heard hushes and laughter; saw gnomes, goblins and ghosts.
But nobody thought much of Migen’s poetry in Silliman. To each his own god, and Tonton’s poet was Sylvia Plath. He was also dying over Fatima V. Lim’s poetry, tucking with him The Wandering Roots/To The Hothouse wherever he went, along with Lina Sagaral-Reyes’ Storya. One thing which Tonton said, which made him grow tall and big in my esteem: The most important thing will be written by women.
Besides the graces of Ester, I needed the graces of God. My money from robbery was running out and my landlady was threatening me with a new rate or I will have to share the room with another starveling. At seven hundred a month, the rent was a luxury. I had clung to the place because it was near the beach, where I kept on going early mornings and late evenings, just for the need of sea water. It was a good life, except that one day she thought of raising pigs and made a hogstead right across my window. On early mornings, I would be awakened by the grunting of pigs and their smell. My head began to spin. By then, I was already taking my meals at the tiangge, at a carinderia called Tiaga’s, owned by Franklin’s neighbor, or rather, Sawi’s. Franklin was lodging at Sawi’s backboards and shared his front yard and his bathroom. The hunger that stalked his front yard and his bathroom. The hunger that stalked the land on account of delayed allowances and the like: Sawi took Franklin to Nang Tiaga to allow him meals in her carinderia on credit, and Franklin accompanied me in turn to her stall at the tiangge for my regular meal, also on credit. That settled the food question, but again, there was the lodging to look after and Franklin thought of a brilliant idea: He would saw his room off into two. Or rather, partition it so as to accommodate me. We would divide the rent between us, he said, and with Sawi in the neighborhood, we could talk poetry day and night. Just don’t mention it yet to Sawi, I’ll take care of that. Dr. Law, who was trying to find interest in people’s whereabouts, seemed perplexed. Ester was amused, as she always was, with ideas that didn’t get to her skin.
Enough with economics.
Jenny got high every time she spoke of Sawi. She was sauntering in Sawi’s class of senior citizens—a herd of MAEd students serving their second life terms in the academe in pursuit of professional advancement-and was having the time of her life watching Sawi hipping it up with the old cows. “Have you ever known love without hope?” Sawi, in inimitable grandiloquence would work the question on the dazzled cowheads, and Jenny’s heart alone, I imagined, bloated under the magic of his words. On my way to class at Villareal Hall, I would find Jenny’s poet seated on his table, knees spread apart, his heart leaping out of him. Some afternoons, he would be under an acacia tree, engaged with a clump of girls, his face dazed, Love Without Hope becoming him. Ester, indulgent mother and sympathetic friend, would shake her head every time a teener classmate confessed about Sir Aquino’s advances.
Love was what ailed the poets of Silliman. When Jenny introduced me to Lorena, I understood why Tonton should be so disheveled. So sharp-edged she was, from limb to limb. She was more devastating when she was upon the stage. Whatever role she played—battered wife, union organizer, ugly snob—she gripped you. What little space she occupied with her thin frame, she solidified with her being there. Perhaps it was her untranquil face; perhaps it was her carelessly done hair. Or perhaps it was her bundle of bones. But whatever it was, she was about one stage actress who could make her character come so strong.
But when it came to Poetry, Sawi was the mentor in Silliman. You can hear Mikki raving his name, from table to table, in every watering hole round the city. Younger poets, like Tonton, Gracchus, and Viktor, would rather cut him as a comic figure instead of the eternal lover title which the Sands & Coral generously gave him. It doesn’t help him, they say, half-sincerely, half-bitterly. But far from wishing him dead, they gave praise to Cesar when praise was due. They would hover over his poems and hunt for women’s names in the lines. Tonton, in solidarity with John Keats and all blighted lovers, would carry in his pack Word Without End as though it were a secret weapon and wield Sawi’s poetry like crazy:
Ultimately she couples with the sun However axes retrace their way and heads Roll by the blade Of her eye
I mentioned Viktor. I first met Viktor in December of 1995. He was limping, or maybe it was the mumps on his face that gave me the impression that he was mobbed and sore all over and could hardly pull himself up. Anyway, Sawi dragged him to the Weekly Sillimanian office one late late evening while we were readying the Sand’s manuscript for the typeset (we were borrowing Weekly Sillimanian’s computer, thanks to Dinah, then Sands & Coral’s editor-in-chief, who was also editing the Weekly Sillimanian). With them were three other fellows, Gerard from Cebu, Mikki who loudly announced his entry through every door by his sheer bulk and grease, and Jared a faithful disciple of The Word. I didn’t mind them then, Viktor and Gerard. They both looked like a couple of catatonics straight from the urinal. All the time they just sat there, gaping and grinning at what went on before them.
While Dinah was rocking it up with Alanis:
I’m sad but I’m happy I’m brave but I’m chickenshit…
If we had an anthem, she said, this must be it.
Oh the joys of editing. Late into the December nights we type our lived away: Bitoy, Dinah and myself, to the accompaniment of Jagged Little Pill. Dinah was unbeatable in her race to beat the deadline, which she herself set. It was mid-December, she said, and we should have gone home from the Christmas break, like the rest of the students, and not stuck there in front of the computer. Gracchus, our Poetry Editor, never showed up, after submitting his first try at a post-modernist fiction, “Ana Andrea,” which on third prize in the Sands & Coral Literary Contest, and a modest controversy. So ungraciously laced with pubic hair it was. Sawi tried to be useful by taking the manuscript home, deleting or changing a word or line here and there. Now, doesn’t it have more taste, he asked, after encoding his rewordings. Bitoy, our Essay Editor and lay-out artist, chuckled behind his thick glasses.
At a little after eleven, our stomachs would be grumbling, and we would leave our clutter and walk to the Engineering building, clambering up the fence behind it (the gates were closed by then), and landing right across the Burger stand beside Opeña’s where we would get our refill. Once, on our way back to the workroom, we almost jumped right into the guard who was lying in wait for us beneath the fence, cocking his gun. I laughed. He looked so ridiculous, lying there on the ground, as though poised for a surprise attack, like some idiot living his fantastic imagined war. But Dinah was quick, profusely apologizing over our infraction and calling him “Sir” several times over, promising we wouldn’t be climbing fences again without his permission. He looked appeased and he let us loose.
Viktor came back to Silliman like a recidivist, a year and half later, and occupied one of the seats in our English classes. He was a minor event, being a young returning poet. He joined a workshop one or two summers back and was enrolled as a Creative Writing student before he conked out. What a sight he and Sawi made as they walked around the streets of Dumaguete. Like a picture straight from Darwin’s Evolution of the Species, I would tell Ester. He was renting one of Sawi’s backdoors, just opposite Franklin’s door, and complained about his neighbor, who would knock at his door early morning bringing a tray of food. Does he think I need looking after? He would ask.
When I started going out with bayots, Ester and I had a falling out. Ester felt traded in for a bunch of bayots—or so I imagined, for unlike the company that I chose, Ester was not given to slander. Douglas just came to Silliman then, straight from an extended drinking binge in Davao, and I liked the bayot. I liked who he liked. Except Jessica Zafra. Like Viktor, he was enrolled at Silliman before. We were classmates in Sir Tim’s Fiction Class, so with Ester, Franklin, and Bobby. Except for Ester and a handful of spectators from the Philosophy and Math departments, we were mostly bayots. Sir Tim was freshly returned from U.P. then, and was dazzling us with great fiction. A happy class we were: Bobby spoke good English, quoting verbatim his favorite line from Lisa Minot’s “Lust”; Archie tienes-tienesed; Dennis laughed and cupped his mouth; Franklin trembled with feminist ideas. I was inarticulate with anger, as ever.
Among the boys, Dennis was a celebrity. You could find his name scrawled on the walls of Katipunan Hall, thanking him for his services. At El Amigo, he and Archie made a double attraction. Archie had only to open his mouth and Dennis had only to flick his lashes and guys would move over to our table. He had the saddest pair of eyes—or so he’d like to project—that went with the sexiest pair of legs. Like Archie, he was mean, but unlike Archie (who was always warm with fat), he could turn into an ice queen any moment and punish us with his trademark cold look on days without end, if we made the mistake of laughing at his hurt. He had this habit of breaking into a song. Douglas and I would often find ourselves conversing with ourselves as Dennis had suddenly transformed into a music box.
I don’t expect my love affair to last For long…
Gay love oozed in the alleys of Silliman like God’s piss. Riding and walking around with Dennis he would point to me every room and ground where he made a good, or bad, lay. In my Religion class, right under the nose of our school pastor, my friends would show me pictures of Korean thighs.
Have you tried something like that? It looks like ice cream cone.
At the cafeteria, men marched in through the glass door like a festival of food. See that guy in Coca-Cola shirt, Shielfa? He had nothing inside him. Look to your left, Shielfa, he’s the rapist I was telling you about. To your right, Shielfa. Hmm! Delicious! For a time, watching men had become a dreary occupation. The whole lot of them, it seemed to me, had been reduced to dangling penises. Others, though, did not agree.
Ellen gyrated like a boa. No I’ve never seen a boa, much more watch it gyrate, and Ellen was more knowing than a man-eating boa. Ellen lived a healthy virgin’s life: She was like Eve, when Eve chose the serpent.
How Ellen laughed, at men’s jokes, especially if they talked about women. She and Pinky would come to my ragtag of a house at San Juan Road (a new improvement from the last pigsty) to look for erotic literature from my trunkful of books, sometimes bringing with them an imbecile who would dare lay his hand on my Isabel Allende books, and never return them.
I loved Pinky. She introduced me to a boyfriend who later trundled up to me while I was peacefully sitting at the boulevard. Where is Pinky, huh? Huh? He asked. I sat there, shocked, while his knuckles kept on knocking against my skull. He looked like he was about to kick me, too. Like I was the bitch.
Life is a cabaret, said Pamela at a workshop in Tacloban, and for many late nights in Dumaguete, Dennis and I walked the streets like tramps. He would wear his fuschia pink shorts while I let my bra strap alone. (It kept on falling off my shoulder.) If I were not a teacher, I would have been a whore, Dennis would say. And earning, too, I’d tell him. We’d laugh through the highway, smoking, flaunting, and staring men in the eye. They would look away and give us right-of-way. We felt free. Like we could screw the world and get away with it, too.
Claire thinned down to half her last size as bulimia became the rage of the day. It was annoying: Ellen counting her calorie intake as though she were Nanette Medved or some other deity; Dennis, praying over his bilbil, his bilbil, while gorging himself with tarts and chocolate; Mark and Earl refusing to take beer lest they’d lose their shapes. But shape or no shape, they were hefty with talent. When the sky was dark and Katipunan Hall was quiet, Mark would gather his cast of post-England witches and stage a grand performance for a special audience, namely, faggots only. Together with Archie and other budding virgins, he would sing his incantation with a voice that could summon the burnt heroines of Salem back to life.
There’s a house in Amigo you can move into, said Sir Tim, who somehow kept tabs of the poverty indices at the department. Something funny happened in my slimy San Juan neighborhood: My roommate a girl of nineteen uninitiated to the manners of men, happened to look into an eye one morning while she was scrubbing herself at our bathroom cum urinal. (My landlady’s husband and sons pissed there, when we were not looking). I stomped down the stair leading to the rooms downstairs, banged at the door occupied by the male lodgers whose faces I really never bothered to look at till then, and screamed obscenities. The landlady, subjected to more obscene beatings by his exhibitionist of a husband (he liked walking out of their room with only his briefs on just when we were going out to pee at night) just looked, unsure as to who to defend, her boys, or us female lodgers. The husband blabbered a little, then went about some carpentry work, mending holes and patching the floor. A couple of days after, my roommate packed up, fetched by friends and a relative. I received a notice of eviction, later. The room will be used by their relatives, my landlady said.
The house at Amigo was an artists’ den, with ropings and spider webs spun by human hands, and paintings of bats and creatures of the dark. At the latrine, a recognizable fellow squatted right before you, comfortably defecating. Rhoda, Sir Tim’s sister, was minding the house. She was a Creative Writing student and was back there to finish her thesis. It’s open-house for kindred spirits, she said. Vibes is all that is required for any would-be occupant.
Cleaning my would-be room upstairs, I struggled with a window that refused to open, feeling horrible at my incapacity to feel for the place. You’re not an artist. You’re a lunatic, I chided myself. When Ophie, Rhoda’s best friend and resident-hag of the house, wrote from Mindanao and said she’d be dropping by Dumaguete and would need the room I was to occupy, I found an excuse not to move in. Nahadlok ka, Shelf? Rhoda asked, smiling. The evening I was hauling my things out, Krevo, another resident-artist, just arrived from America and was distributing books. He brought us a vibrator, too, Ophie said to me. You want? Claire and Nino waltzed: Mikki, who happened by, talked and laughed; I was dazed. Later, when I told Nino I was afraid of their house’s spirits, he jeered. You should befriend them and not fear them.
Something did not happen in the summer of 1996. I was spending night at Andre’s house, over another idea after the stage play that never happened. One late afternoon Viktor came carrying with him his bundle of clothes. He and Sawi had a quarrel and Sawi threw him out of his house. Or rather, Viktor himself had sense enough to evacuate. Can I, he asked Andre, rather honestly, sleep in your sala? The sala was an open-air affair, nipa roofing above it, bamboo walls and flooring adjoined to the main house.
He came all the way from Cebu to sit in the workshop, staying at Sawi’s as was his tradition, but something happened midway through the workshop: Sawi’s heart was broken anew, I seemed. He fell for some girl from Manila, or this girl fell for him—whichever, it does not matter now—but in what looked like an inversion of Prufrock’s lament, he left her to a bottle of beer. The rest is history, said Viktor, and old Prufrock went home to his cottage. A couple of days later, Grace, an old friend, called. Sawi ordered Viktor to clear away, sat with Grace, then went to his room to catch on some sleep. When Viktor went out of his room to leave, he found Grace unattended (he knew her from his Silliman days), and so he sat down awhile to entertain her. When Sawi woke up, he found them talking.
A cute story it was, and Andre, a little humored, took Viktor in a couple of days later, the two gentlemen patched up, and Viktor went back to Sawi’s house at Purok Santan, leaving Andre a handful of books.
In a poetry reading later, during the fellows’ last night in Dumaguete, Sawi wore a barong and read a poem, in honor of women. The poem, he said, was written by an obscure poet, and he chose it because in that year’s workshop, the girls proved themselves better than boys. All I can recall of the poem is that it was about her who folds the sheets. So simple it was, and so quiet. And so was Sawi.
Nino and Andre thought of a Poetry Reading in celebration of Women’s Day, and of all venues, we chose the university chapel. The English and Literature family was all there, in full force. It as a gay affair, with almost everyone having a good piece to say. Tonton read his poem, about a rubber band that you gave, which ended with “You don’t even remember my name”; Ellen read Migen’s “April Wedding,” about wanting to be Cleopatra and putting sleep into God’s eyes, and ending with “And they unawares/Bore apes”; Pinky read Ellen’s “The Journey” about opening one’s thigh, and becoming the world.
Other women were there, too. Dennis read a poem that began with “You made love to me at a stockroom,” ending with “And laugh with your wife about the fag at work”; Bobby read a sexy piece about hot pizza and a boy he wanted to take home; Archie choreographed a dance, performed by his women at the Telun Theater, to the music of Elynia S. Mabanglo’s “Kung Ibig Mo Akong Makilala.” (Telun was Archie’s and Ma’am Andre’s reply to Siliman’s broadway culture).
Married women also chimed in: Hermie read Dinah’s poem about the laundry that stank o family; Chinky read a Tagalog translation of Padmapani Perez’s “Newborn,” a motherhood poem ending with “She is at once my life-saver/And my death,” which Mabanglo translated as “Siya ang aking tagapagligtas, at mamamatay ko”; while Ma’am Andre read a naughty piece from Lualhati Baustista, “Dyugdyugan,” about romance after marriage and motherhood.
Lorena’s piece was a n erotic poem, Jocelyn de Jesus’ “One-Way Samba,” which sounded more angry than erotic, Tonton said. Dr. Law read Emily Dickenson’s “I’m Nobody,” while Sir Tim read Adrienne Rich’s “A woman in the shape of a monster/ a monster in the shape of a woman/ the skies are full of them.” Ma’am Mel and Gina dramatized a dialogue between a middle-class Latin American woman and a working woman.
Noticeably absent was the resident-poet of Dumaguete, who was by then still lost in the woods of Dumaguete, looking for the Poetry Reading lights. Along with two other idiots, he went round and round Silliman, led by the Muse of the night, whom we realized later must have been a feminist. We learned that he, Franklin, and Voltaire ( a brother just came home from Canada), ended up reading their poems to the rocks at the Boulevard.
SUFA staged a strike in January of 1997. They couldn’t take it anymore, the sahod-sakada, to use Mr. Deriada’s words, and so they staged a strike. That was after months and months of roundabout negotiations with the SU administration. The front yard of the Guy Hall and the Admin Building blossomed with placards, pleading for Christian compassion and the like or demanding the resignation of this or that asshole, and the hogwire fencing the campus grounds on both sides of the Hibbard Avenue were draped with streamers screaming the hunger that plague the lovely country. The city of gentle people, as it was called, unaccustomed to labor unrest, stirred aghast at the sight of university professors waving placard and their fists in the air. Dr. Law was in his youthful best, manning the forefront, tirelessly running errands, sometimes with Ma’am Rose, who pedaled with him on their tandem bike.
The prudish and the ignorant were displeased. Isn’t it scandalous? they asked, University professors of Silliman? Behaving like laborers? When a member of the board came from Manila, the whole throng picketed at the airport, announcing to all those coming and going of their miserable plight. The tricycle drivers and porters laughed in wonder as they read the huge streamer that enumerated the teachers’ salaries. Mas dako pa diay among suweldo ninyo, Ma’am?
That was not the first scandal to hit the holy land though. In late 1995, the air waves were shocked when fishermen at the Silliman Beach demonstrated in front of the City Hall after the tents that they constructed at the beach were demolished. The demolition was enforced (by the INP and Silliman’s Security Forces) after Silliman’s Ethics Committee decided that the shacks were a disgrace to the University. Students made out there; for the rate that the fishing families were charging was attractively low: twenty or thirty pesos per night. A legal tussle ensued, and Silliman was made to pay. The fishing village was economically dislocated, or so a fisherman told me one afternoon, in one of my mad walks to the beach.
The beach was combed clean, and the city was peaceful again. But funny things happened. In the campus, the guards was altered anew to new tremors on the ground. Condoms would be found littering in likely corners: deserted classrooms, stock rooms, including the backyards of the chapel and other holy places. A happy thing that was, which, we surmised, must have fired Gracchus’ imagination to write “Ana Andrea.”
Viktor called me a peripatetic. He had this habit of pacing up and down the floor as he ruminated. It ran in the family, he said. His brother back in Cebu would span all the three floor levels of their house, from the living room, to his bedroom, and down to the kitchen. I sit on my ass when I think, I told him. But you are a peripatetic, he said. You keep on going round and round just looking for a place to live in, without really getting settled in one.
At the time, we were both squatting in Ma’am Andre’s place in Bantayan, and I had just moved in and out of at least two other houses: the first after the room with peeping holes, a boarding house owned by an aging couple who kept a store downstairs and a kitchen upstairs that served galunggong everyday of our lives. The old lady hoarded bottles of all sizes, lined up to the wall and every corner of the kitchen, all filled with water. So we won’t run out of water, just in case there is going to be another drought, she said. Every night without fail, she counted her money on the table. It was so bizarre, like watching one of Dickens’ cartoon characters materialize right before your very eyes. If she found my book and papers on the table, she would sweep them aside and replace them with placemats.
They padlocked the door from the outside, beside padlocking the gate from the inside. My housemates, who escaped the lahar in Pampanga, laughed when I said I cannot bear the disgrace of dying in fire with the couple as a company. The husband slept at the store downstairs and kept the keys around his waist while the old woman occupied the room next to mine. I moved out after the tiny window of my room was blocked by a new building that rose right beside the house, letting the canal down below breathe right into my room, and after the latrine clogged and the old lady insisted on using the rod rather than calling the man from the sewers bureau.
I landed in a bowl-of-dust of a house right across Hibbard Avenue, occupied by girls who liked stuffing their used napkins into the holes of the bathroom walls. The day I tried cleaning the whole shit, I got sick for days. That was April, I had just finished another term. I moved all my things into the room, and escaped to Jolo for a summer job. By June, I was groveling at Andre’s place in Bantayan.
Andre was on leave, taking up her doctoral degree, and Diutay, her roommate, was commuting between the house and work in Dumaguete and the children in Bacolod. I played the housesitter and life was quiet and full of clean air, until it was time to move out again.
People went in and out of the house in Bantayan, The summer I was there, Neil and his poet-friends came, and Diutay played the flute. Tonton, who was at the time already employed in Cebu and was also into climbing rocks and mountains, came and talked about Kafka and The Hunger Artist. Did you know that once I had to cut down our neighbor’s banana tree, without her permission, just so I could eat boiled banana? he asked. I sent him out of the house, but walked with him to Bantayan Road, shouting I am walking with Kafka, which he took as a compliment.
I didn’t know that I would be sharing kitchen with Henry Miller, too. When Viktor barged again into the house with another story (he jumped down of Sawi’s window and broke his neighbors pots of orchid plants or something like that), my cramped life became more cramped. Viktor lived his life the uro-genital way, and annoyed me with stories about dying minotaurs rejuvenated by a good screw. Like Miller, he slandered every woman he knew and counted his erections. There would be mornings I feared going out of my room, lest he was having one. He let me Black Spring, a glorious book about the glory of pissing.
Diutay whose interest lay more on the esoteric and the extraterrestrial experience, wasn’t so pleased with Viktor. Beside fetching pails and pails of water and gallons of drinking water Viktor wasn’t very useful. He was like a stump of wood that lay there eternally on the bamboo divan, with his books for his pillow. It was a sad affair: the three of us without money, keeping to ourselves our bitterness—and our spite—while trying to be kind to each other. The only thing that connected us was Bob Dylan. Every time Diutay played my Bob Dylan tapes, the three of us jelled like brothers. One thing I would always appreciate about Viktor: The night I went down to burn my bale of letters, he helped me with the fire.
Doc Ed died. The news hardly hit me: I didn’t know the man; his life did not touch me. And I didn’t hear him speak to me, although at one time, I had thought he would be a mentor. I only saw him once. In the last workshop that I sat in, in 1996, which no one knew would be the last workshop he’d be sitting in. I saw him as an angry old man despairing at the world that stood before him. Had he talked to me, I might have misbelieved his words, must have looked him down, must have left him. In his passing age.
Until I saw him in his coffin, I did not know him, did not know his pain, did not know his battles.
In the next workshop the following year, Ma’am Edith’s voice wasn’t as strong either. And we sank in our seats when, after a fit of coughing, she begged off not to be made to speak any further. “Go on. Please go ahead,” she said to the strong and the healthy.
And they did.
I had my times in Silliman. They crown the heart.
[Reprinted from Sands & Coral Centennial Issue, 2001]
Shielfa B. Alojamiento was a Creative Writing major at Silliman University and edited the 1997 edition of the Sands & Coral. She has worked for various nongovernment organizations. She won the Palanca for the Short Story in Cebuano in 2002.
Buglas Writers Journal 