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| The Literary Journal of the Silliman University Creative Writing Program |
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| FutureShock Prose: An Anthology of Young Writers and New Literatures Edited by Ian Rosales Casocot |
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| 1. Everything began with a question. Antonino Soria de Veyra had lain bare the challenge one day. It was another one of those sunny, sleepy afternoons in Dumaguete, although I have forgotten exactly where and when the question was first raised and the answer vigorously solicited that it required those present to write a paper on the subject. Perhaps it was over coffee at Silliman Avenue Cafe, perhaps over pasta in poet-artist Kitty Taniguchi’s Mariyah Gallery. But we had just gone through another thoughtful discussion over emergent Philippine writings—and then Nino pounced on us: “So what now? From what we know, read, and observed—what exactly is the future of Philippine literature?” Not a new question, exactly; this one is actually a generic generational favorite. What is the future? For a long time, answers have been forthcoming in the form of more-or-less “definitive” anthologies seeking to paint the trend by which each new generation of Filipino writers take to literature. Each one challenges or affirms accepted canons, inspirations, and aesthetics, and reworks or even creates a variety of literary forms, styles, themes that seek to capture a certain zeitgeist. fter the cultivated, perhaps even mannered, literatures running the spectrum of Edith and Edilberto Tiempo, Estrella Alfon, Nick Joaquin, Gregorio Brillantes, Gilda Cordero-Fernando, Francisco Arcellana, and Kerima Polotan, the local literary scene, by the start of the 1960s, was more than ready to be injected with new blood. Then, suddenly, we were introduced, in the PEN Anthology of 1962, to a new crop of literary hotshots, which included Erwin Castillo, Wilfredo Sanchez, César Ruiz Aquino, Jose Ayala, Wilfrido Nolledo, and Alfred Yuson, whose works, Jose Y. Dalisay Jr. once wrote, “[sought] virtue in conscious artifice of language and situation.” When they arrived at the literary scene in the summer of 1962 and then after, they, together with Ninotchka Rosca, dropped in like a bomb. They wrote fiction and poetry whose locales, narratives, and treatments seemed a far distance from Manuel Arguilla’s Nagrebcan or NVM Gonzalez’s Romblon. “In the very early ‘60s,” Aquino muses, “the new thing in literature, the phenomenon, were the beatniks of America and the Angry Young Men of England... It seems the virus was transmitted to us through the movies—in, or by, Marlon Brando and James Dean.” They arrived, and were readily welcomed to the fold, but later on, surmising, in part, about the hold of Doc Ed Tiempo and his contemporaries, Aquino noted what would perhaps be his most famous remark: “He was Establishment, we were Future Shock.” That remark is telling—Oedipal, the constant theme to Young Writing. How is each new generation of Filipino writers future shockers? What exactly is the future of Philippine writing? Later on, almost despite itself, there would be more introductions to even more younger, newer crops of writing upstarts—perhaps due to the mushrooming of writing opportunities unthinkable only ten or twenty years ago. For the current generation of young writers, there is a mass proliferation of school-based literary folios which publish the works of writers in training—including Sands and Coral in Silliman, Heights in Ateneo de Manila, Quills in UP Diliman, Malate in De La Salle, and Tomas in the University of Santo Tomas, all of which supplement the waxing and waning of national magazines publishing literary works, including Free Press, Graphic, Pen & Ink, HomeLife, Sunday Inquirer Magazine, among others. Writing workshops have helped swell the ranks of young writers as well—and every summer, since the Tiempos in Silliman started the Dumaguete National Writers Workshop in 1962, a new group of young writers are made to hone their craft in the various workshops including UP (both Davao and Baguio), Ateneo, UST, Faigao in Cebu and Romblon, and Mindanao State University in Iligan. Sometime in the 1990s, the Philippine Daily Inquirer started publishing a regular Op-Ed column, Youngblood, which provided expression for those in their twenties and below about what “they thought of current issues.” In the motley of angst and vagaries of young rumination, the column also spawned two best-selling books published by Anvil compiling some of the best essays from the column. In 1996, Anvil published Catfish Arriving in Little Schools, which included the works of three “new” writers: Gina Apostol, Jaime An Lim, and Clinton Palanca. In his introduction to the book, Ricardo de Ungria notes the importance of collections such as this: “A veritable cabinet like this present collection,” de Ungria writes, “is invaluable in documenting, if not fomenting, the fertilities, tunings, and spunky elegance of young writers before these shook them into seriousness, lunacy, or a fruitful literary career, or else exhaust them into philosophy, oblivion, and inconsumable incomes.” The vista expanded in 1999 when Anvil again took to unveiling another set of writers—most of them writing in their early thirties or twenties—who constituted the pages of Dream Noises: A Generation Writes. The collection included Jimmy I. Alcantara, Emil Flores, Ma. Romina Gonzalez, Caroline S. Hau, Luis Joaquin Katigbak, Timothy R. Montes, Clinton Palanca, Andrea Pasion, Lakambini A. Sitoy, Katrina P. Tuvera, Margaret Uy, and Jessica Zafra—a writing lot comprising a veritable anthology of those belonging to the so-called Generation X. Even then, many of the writers in that collection had already made names for themselves for the modern situations and escapes they evoked in their fictions. Luis Katigbak, for example, had already published Happy Endings, his collection of short stories which chronicled, for the most part, the misadventures of the young 1990s persona—yuppie, or otherwise—the same angst-ridden persona who also populates the stories and columns of Jessica Zafra. Then in 2000, in keeping with the turn-of-the-century theme, UP’s Likhaan Online came out with a special issue featuring twentysomething writers writing in the new century. The issue acknowledges the role by which technology and information has come to shape the imaginations of our young literary writers. From the website, webmaster Ivan Tavanlar writes: “What this ‘information’ actually is and where it is taking us to depends inevitably on who creates it.... However, in the Information Age, more than any young person’s role, it is the young writer’s that is of particular importance—for it is what he or she writes that eventually defines and becomes the ‘information’ of the age.... [In this issue], we attempt to survey what young Filipino writers are imagining. Given a more accessible world, what are young creative people writing about? Who are their influences? Where do they come from? These are some of the questions answered by the featured writers. And we found out through their answers that even as we turn into a ‘global village,’ tremendous diversity prevails.” Introduced in this collection are Arvin Mangohig, Libay Linsangan Cantor, Miguel Syjuco, Randolf Bustamante, Allan Popa, Robert JA Basilio Jr., Indira Endaya, Shakira Sison, Baryon Tensor Posadas, Isolde Amante, Roderick Cabotaje, Clifford Rivera, Victor Tagos, Kathleen Meneses, Elmo Gonzaga, Bernice Roldan, River Yao, Orlando Sayman, Joel Toledo, and Conchitina Cruz—many of whom are also presented in this anthology (and the next). Jose Y. Dalisay Jr., in his commonplace essay, has already dissected quite well this particular group of writers, and comes up with the following observations: these young writers’ “inspirations remain largely Western” (citing such diverse contemporary story tellers from Jorge Luis Borges to Milan Kundera, from Woody Allen to David Leavitt, from Bharati Mukherjee to Maya Angelou), their politics “bourgeois-liberal,” their “locales and sensibilities overwhelmingly urban and cross-continental,” and their preferred issues that of “gender and sexuality, the environment, cultural identity, and individual freedom.” “If they are ‘lost’—as most generations at some point claim to be,” Dalisay writes, “they do not show it by screaming; their responses to aggravation is rarely anger, but irony and wit, perhaps withdrawal. They stand on the brink of strong emotion, suspicious or fearful of what lies beyond.” He goes on: “They possess a deftness of language that comes not only from reading, but also from speaking and listening to the language all the time; it is an English inflected with the resonances and accents of pop culture, the Internet, the stock market...” For the present collection, the same generational project is at work—but then also to do more than all other attempts before it: to ambitiously cover fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry, what might as well be what would comprise the future of our literatures, and the forms by which we would soon behold them in a new familiarity. 2. But before the future, there is the clarion call for the dead. Fiction, poetry—dead. It is never a simple question the way we try to ascertain the future (or the present) of something, anything. There is always an innate tendency to decry the death of this and that. Pronouncements of mortality for most of human endeavors—literature, film, manners and right conduct—can be too “romantic,” too seemingly erudite to pass up in the instance of critical reportage: “To proclaim the death of something, anything, has become, almost, a sign of being intellectually mature,” my backpacking Jewish friend Elan Frenkel tells me under the moon. “The Grim Reaper is the ultimate workshop panelist,” I say. We are drinking light beer in a seaside cafe—the kind of beer that takes forever for one to get drunk, but serves the purpose of loosening the tongue and inhibitions. It is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. We have just finished talking about Richard B. Woodward’s amusing proclamation of death for literary criticism in his Slate article, “Readings in the Dark: Has American Lit Crit Burned Out?” “We have killed everything, even God,” is my beer-stained reply. The future must always be bleak, the past more glorious, the present always a tenuous state where nothing must ever be certain. There is no pretense for subtlety. What is the future for Philippine literature? I text the void. And the void soon comes answering back: “no future. novel is dead, only academic elite read n write. pop medium s txt msg or multimedia.”That reply from Francis Ted Limpoco, poet in exile, forever scrambling for breathing space between his calling for chemistry in Ateneo de Manila University and his poetry. “Then again,” Ted says, finally ringing in from Manila, “there is no future for anything. Remember the article Vince emailed us? Even poetry is dead.” Poetry is dead, Michael Lind—poet, novelist, and journalist—wrote in his recent review of the state of American poetry: “Hardly anyone writes poetry... other than professors—and hardly anybody reads it, other than the professors who write it.” “This is literary incest!” Ted says. And incest does not make for effective breeding pools. Literature—while it is, ultimately, about story—must also be about audience. It is a discourse, a symbiosis. Like any seeds of creation, it dies in bad soil. Lind, in his article, continues: “The collapse of American poetry into the black hole of academic obscurity is a process that has been occurring for half a century. As recently as the 1920s and 1930s, poets like Robert Frost and Robinson Jeffers were celebrities... The book-length narrative poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson and Stephen Vincent Benet were bestsellers... All of this changed when a gang of professors hijacked American poetry. TS Eliot and Ezra Pound—two expatriate Americans with PhDs—inspired several generations of literary intellectuals to believe that, in Eliot’s words, ‘poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult.’ Their idea of difficulty was baffling readers with untranslated bits of Sanskrit (Eliot) and Mandarin Chinese (Pound) and writing poems that could not be read, only deciphered, sometimes with the help of footnotes like those the author appended to The Waste Land. This was new.” I wondered, if Lind was right and poetry was dead in America—bastion of all our literary longings—what could be said about Philippine poetry? Or its literature as a whole? I was not alone in my query; others had written volumes on this one. The fate and future of our letters have been a subject of much academic debate and discussion—perhaps a prompting from a world that is fast becoming smaller, more global, more generic and consumeristically homogeneous. (People don’t read Nick Joaquin; they read Nora Roberts.) Father Miguel A. Bernad had once proclaimed our literature “perpetually inchoate,” citing reasons of economy, language, and culture—and proclaimed that our only mature literature, in English, is the short story form. Bienvenido Lumbera, in his recent interview with Lito Zulueta, is more hopeful about our literature’s evolution of form: “It will be multilingual and multicultural; all literatures we call regional will be finally incorporated in what people will call a National Literature... It will become more visual and less conceptual...” Gémino Abad—father-figure for many budding writers in the country and advocate for Philippine literature as a literature to be reckoned with—is even grander in his estimation, taking to task both of them for generally “problematizing” things in the literary world. With Bernad, Abad is more critical. In “Mapping Our Poetic Terrain: Filipino Poetry in English from 1905 to the Present,” Abad negates the perceived inchoateness of Philippine literature, and shows Bernad up by saying that we have negotiated the path to maturity quite well, and have actually come to an “open clearing,” where our writers are “marked by a more heightened consciousness of language in the way it creates its own reality, together with a deep sense of [literature] as artifice” (changes mine). The debate—while hopefully not the last dying gasp of a literature drowning—must or should be taken as a sign that perhaps, contrary to Bernad’s estimation, we have matured—if maturity can be taken to mean self-awareness of our own efforts. 3. “That takes care of language, of form,” Babi Salva emails me. “But Bernad still has a point: literature dies when the writer is dying. He dies because he is hungry. He is hungry because his writing cannot support him. He has to be someone else to feed his stomach—like you, you’re an English teacher now, right? You gotta eat, gotta eat. When was the last time you last wrote a short story in between your classes, your lesson plans, your departmental duties, your five hours of sleep?” My answer: April 3, 2001. A thousand light years into the past. And that was because I drank too much coffee and couldn’t sleep. Babi, poet, Walt Whitman wannabe, has not written anything after his poetry collection, “Songs of Thyself,” passed through the grinding mill of 2000’s Silliman Workshop. Ted texts me: “Babi s DEPRESSED.” But there is no reason to get depressed, Gémino Abad tells Babi, and all of us, that summer day in 2000, in the air-conditioned room Dragon Room in the CAP Building that has housed, for a long time, the Dumaguete National Writers Workshop: apprentices, as the commonplace theme goes, must always endure the pains of growing into the craft. We are all apprentices, we are told by the firing squad, and you do not first become apprentices without the acknowledgment that you have the creative spark. (Of course, a rallying call—but we, especially Babi, still feel like crap. “I am no poet,” he later tells me that night.) And yet, I suspect, he still writes poetry. Because he has to, to breathe. Abad also tells us, in that article which mapped our poetic geography, that the struggle to prognosticate Philippine poetry has always been a struggle for language, taking in mind poet Emmanuel Torres’s 1975 proclamation that “the poet writing in English... may not be completely aware that do so is to exclude himself from certain subjects, themes, ideas, values, and modes of thinking and feeling in many segments of the national life that are better expressed—in fact, in most cases, can only be expressed—in the vernacular.” Abad argues: “Our cultivation of a poetic terrain that had been subtly transformed by more than three centuries of Spanish rule and tilled again in our fascination with the ‘democratic vistas’ in the English language—the poetic course was, as always, a long and creative struggle with both the poet’s medium (language) and the poet’s subject... To create our own literature (poetry), English had to be naturalized and become Filipino—nothing short of a national language. We had to colonize English in and by our own turn of phrase for we had to find ourselves again and found a homeland that had been lost. We had ourselves to inhabit the new language; our own way of looking, our own thinking and feeling in our own historical circumstances, had to become the nerves and sinews of that language... “Shouldn’t it rather have been with our own languages—Tagalog, Sugbuanon, Iloko, Hiligaynon—that we had struggled so? There is no question that our writers in those languages did, although their works were for a long time marginalized in our system of education which was English. But that is another matter entirely, although indicative of our cultural subjugation under Spain and America. “Our concern now is that we have made of English: at first, indeed we write in English, and freely borrowed and adopted, and then, we wrought from English, and forged (in its double sense) ourselves and our own scene where we worked out our own destiny.” The problem then, if poetry in the Philippines has to be checked for its vital signs, is not language. The possible problems then are in the theme, and in the audience, and in the delivery. 4. I was reaching out for butter and toast, and I stopped, almost shell-shocked (but that’s a little too dramatic). I am having brunch with poet/rebel Alfay Vintola: he is not eating his toast, but has drunk down the iced coffee fast. He is composing amusing haiku about Popsicle clouds. I tell him: “Are you saying the poet must no longer write about the national condition if he wants to feed himself?” “Well, he still has a place—but he will alienate a possible bigger audience because of his politics. Poetry will not die, it will never die, but the economic consumption of poetry will die. There is a difference, you know.” Alfay continues: “What’s that you’re reading? Abad? Here, look at this... ‘The Inang Bayan had become the Filipino writer’s first Muse.’ But it can’t be the sole muse forever. Maturity dictates that the poet must come down from his ivory tower and talk about the people, their small lives, their little things.” I stare at my own iced coffee. “In other words, the future becomes the triumph of the mundane...?” “Yes! Because that is what people will buy. Did you really expect people to buy Ted Hughe’s Birthday Letters because he was the consummate poet laureate? Or was it because they were titillated to know what he thought, in poetry form, of Sylvia Plath and her dramatic suicide? Now we have Eric Gamalinda writing poetically about basketball, or Marjorie Evasco talking about Sagada. But this has always been the case for poetry, any poetry—it will continue to live because eventually it thrives on the personal.” “Oh.” “Philippine poetry will live,” Alfay says. “Don’t worry, my friend. Poets have always come down their ladders, sooner or later.” I have not seen Alfay since that iced coffee. But I remember two events: (1) We are in (the now-defunct) Happy Days. Middle of 1999. The smoky interiors are done in the manner of a ‘50s cafe, such as one you may find Archie Bunker in the hit (and old) television series... Happy Days. There are tables and chairs everywhere, scattered in the black and white linoleum floor (like a gigantic chessboard), graced by pictures of Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, James Dean, and Elvis Presley on the walls. We are here for a poetry reading, and already the place is jam-packed like a sardine can—which is very unusual for a poetry reading. Not to mention that the audience has the consistency of a rock concert: no nerds here, only cool or “pa-cool” people, most of them swathed in slinky, polished clothes—often revealing, always sexy. The ambience drips with body heat. “This is like my after-prom party,” a girl named Susie tells me. She is dressed provocatively. “What?” I shout above the din. “Never mind, want some beer?” I nod, and she gives me the San Miguel Lite in her hand, which is half-full, and she smiles flirtatiously. Soon, poet Nino de Veyra goes up the makeshift stage, and starts waxing about his “Mango Woman.” Luscious. Wet. Delicious. Erotic. “Erotica,” we called the event—and ordinary people were clapping, and people were responding. Poetry is not dead. 2) It is the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The Twin Towers—the World Trade Center—have just been downed in a rain of flames and dust and debris by terrorist airplanes. People have died. People are scared. The world, as we know, has changed. Three weeks later: Ground Zero has become a memorial to the dead, and the New York Times reports: “There was poetry everywhere, papers and papers of it, attached to walls and street signs, mourning for loved ones lost, and lamenting this day of infamy.” Poetry can never be dead. 5. And what of fiction? Dalisay gives this diagnosis: “For all that, the Filipino short story in English—the writing and the reading of it—remains an elitist and middle-class enterprise enjoyed by a very few, because very few Filipinos among the middle class whose anxieties make up the stuff of our fiction truly want to read about themselves. Alienation and commercialism will not bed together.” Poet Tintin Ongpin is puzzled. (This was a long time ago, before she departed for Manila in search of sanity and a stable love life. I remember that afternoon well: we are sitting in Chicco’s in the late afternoon. Already the golden hour has started: the sunlight, from the mountains in the west, gives the blue Boulevard in our backdrop a sepia tint. We are having tea.) Tintin continues, quite forgetting her tea for the most part: “This is what I think: I think it is hopeless to assume that for a whole literature to stay alive, it must be consumed by the WHOLE of society—from Lady Who Does the Social Circuit down to Poor But Learned Professor Who Reads and Teaches down to Mang Andoy Who Labors In The Docks To Earn a Living. That is utterly impossible. Can it ever be possible? The only literature Everybody in the Whole of Society ever truly reads as one is the Holy Bible—and even that only when they have to.” “Uh, huh.” She continues. “Reading and writing are privileged acts. It will always be elitist. That is its nature. It comes, so to speak, from some higher plane which not everybody has access to. Such as when we writing teachers feel when confronted by piles and piles of mediocrity passing for student essays. Reading, as well, takes itself to be a highly conscious act: to begin to read is to surrender to some kind of immobility, a surrender to a passivity which will trigger an activity of imagination. Not everybody has the patience to do that. Hence, elitist. And so we must not problematize that elitism, because it will only problematize the essence of writing and reading. This select market—the elites, as Dalisay calls them—is what all that matters. That is the nature of business, and business is all about targeting specific markets.” “Uh, huh.” “And ’alienation and commercialism will not bed together’? How do we account for the success of Jessica Zafra? Why do we persist in reading Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney and Alex Garland? How do we account for the cinematic successes of alienation movies such as The Breakfast Club, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Singles, Pare Ko, Nagbibinata, Bagets, Radio Romance, even Jerry Maguire?” “Uh, huh.” We drink our tea. 6. We’ve come a long way from Manuel “How My Brother Brought Home a Wife” Arguilla country (NVM Gonzales calls it kaingin country). As I have stated near the beginning of this essay, the future of Philippine literature, especially in English, lies in the unapologetic themes of the bourgeois among the current crop of emerging writers, like Palanca, Zafra, Amante, Apostol, Katigbak (who talks of alienation, post-Coupland, in the story “Happy Endings” in Dream Noises)—they who have probably rallied, consciously or unconsciously, around Ninotchka Rosca’s declaration that she writes as a bourgeois writer because only bourgeois readers can buy her books. There is still a place for carabao or kaingin country, of course, but it will be eclipsed by stories depicting modern (and more Western) mores—and the aesthetics developed in this type of young, consumerist literature: e.g., the brand-dropping styles of Bret Easton Ellis, the frank sexuality of Andrew Holleran, the dysfunctionality of Leavitt, the verbal experimentation of Dave Eggers, Helen DeWitt, and David Foster Wallace, and the sophisticated confessional nature of the works of Helen Fielding, Haruki Murakami, Jeanette Winterson, and Nick Hornby. Oprah has become young writers’ literary guru. They do not apologize for it. This is basically a manifestation of the divide between increasingly cosmopolitan writers—who resemble, for the most part, Woody Allen intellectuals—who feel no need to be guilty over their growing distance from the themes and realities of the countryside. They have become “accidental tourists” in their country—aware of the carabao, for example, but looking at it almost as an exotic figure. Their readers are of the same ilk. I am reminded of a popular softdrink commercial which has a group of city kids—dressed in Abercrombie and Fitch fineries—travelling in a colorful Volkswagen through the countryside. One of them spots a carabao—and cringes in fear, to the delight of the rest. The point is: he, and they, are the new target markets if Philippine literature is to live and survive by and large. Their likes are the ones who are buying the books. One wonders why Jessica Zafra has become the prominent best-selling author with her Twisted books? Because she has managed to tap into this generation’s, this target market’s sensibility—and their sensibility is modern, high-rise, McDonald’s, Oprah Winfrey, Western. As Dalisay has said it, the writers of the future are not hampered by the guilt of Western appropriation—they acknowledge, without batting an eyelash, that they belong in a culture entirely different from that of the previous generations, one that is defined by MTV and cable TV, cellphones, globalization, the Internet, and AIDS—and they have the courage to call their expression Filipino, “because that is how I am, and I am a Filipino.” (Already, an entire short story written in text mode by Tony Hidalgo was published, to much acclaim, in the Free Press. There has been a backlashing tendency to call that piece a temporary aberrance, a “now” novelty—but that is beside the point. Is this the future? That is also beside the point. The point is: changes are afoot—in styles, in themes—and Philippine literature cannot go forward if it rankles to cling to the old.) An established older writer once asked a younger writer, “Why do your characters talk like Americans?” The young writer was puzzled, and then replied: “But that is how my friends talk.” He thought of friends like Tiffany and Kristyn and James and Ted and Clee and Lesh and Speedo and Gonzo, whose language drip with commonplace terms like “whatever,” “whatchamacallit,” “whatchamajigger”... and what have you’s. Our Westernization is our unabashed reality, and we have appropriated it to make it Filipino. Hence, we write, and probably talk, “like Americans,” but unapologetically Filipinized. 7. There is a future. It is a postmodern one—what Christopher Keep defines as “a rejection of the sovereign autonomous individual with an emphasis upon anarchic collective, anonymous experience... [where c]ollage, diversity, the mystically unrepresentable, Dionysian passion are the foci of attention... [and m]ost importantly, [where] we see the dissolution of distinctions, the merging of subject and object, self and other.” In other words, “a sarcastic playful parody of western [or Filipino] modernity and a radical, anarchist rejection of all attempts to define, reify or re-present the human subject.” This is a future in which Lumbera have already envisioned that further murkiness in the boundaries of our languages and our vernaculars (already we see that in Jessica Hagedorn’s unapologetic linguistic mishmashing in Dogeaters). One in which the distinctions of high and popular arts are dismantled—poetry by Eraserheads (the same way rock singer Bob Dylan is treated now in American universities), music video as literary texts, Pinoy romance novels as serious texts. One in which the Internet will play a big part: if production is a hindrance for many writers, the Internet democratizes and settles that problem with its infinite promise of space: it will provide the venue for expression for those still relegated to the sides of “mainstream Philippine literature” (i.e., those who do not belong to any of the literary barkadas). Alex Maskara, for example, is a net denizen: his writings—many of them gay—have become popular in the Web. Sites like PinoyLit, Hector Santos’s The Best Philippine Short Stories Website, and Nadine Sarreal’s Our Own Voices promise to become the new wave of literary folios—but free from the constraints of the printing press, and ultimately possessing more power in terms of multimedia. (In that regard, we have to learn to swallow our purist protestations—and accommodate the fact that our world now runs in an edited pace of one shot per 7 seconds.) 8. It is to this reality that Sands & Coral responds to. Indeed, the whole history of Sands & Coral has always been about responding to the need for expression for those who would be the future of writing. S&C began in March 1948—just barely two years after the end of World War II—as a literary supplement to The Sillimanian, with Aida Rivera Ford and Cesar J. Amigo as its first editors, and Rodrigo T. Feria its first adviser. The first issue was a slim volume, with no more than 33 pages from cover to cover. On the front, there is the figure of a hermaphrodite diving, streaming sand—and then a quote from Tagore on the second page: “I touch God with my Song as the Hill touches the faraway sea with its waterfall.” The contents contain only ten short stories, essays, and poems, among them, “Bridge of Morrow” by Ford (“The Chieftest Mourner” would be first published in the journal in the next year), “Let Them Fall” by Clara B. Tenchavez, “One Fine Afternoon” by Martha M. Grant, “Of Poets and Philippine Posts” by Claro M. Ceniza, “There is a Part of Me” by Ricaredo D. Demetillo, “Away With the Scythe” by Mercedes D. Estampador, “To a Madman with a Lovely Daughter” by Luis General Jr., “The Metaphor: Its Use in a Poem” by Edith Tiempo, “Objective Correlative and the Meaning of a Poem” by Edilberto K. Tiempo, and a book review on Avellana’s Without Seeing the Dawn by Dolores S. Feria. (Already, by 1948, the tenets of New Criticism trickled into the country, courtesy of the Tiempos who were at that time international writing fellows in the Iowa University workshop with Paul Engle.) In that issue, Ford writes: “To begin with, there was no office; we had no use for an office and we rather enjoyed working without one... Most of our work had been done on campus grounds, street corners, around university cafeteria tables, and on the very doorsteps of our contributors themselves. One short story was edited at a picnic, and another in the library...” Save for the number of pages and authors, nothing much has changed 54 years later. Edith Tiempo still submits faithfully her contributions—as she does almost every time S&C sees print. (For this volume, she provided for me a willing ear to my woes and dreams.) There is still no office, and work is still being done around campus, on street corners, and on restaurant tables. But, from the ten initial writers in 1948, the 2002-2003 editions will boast of more than 80 writers, considerably more than the mammoth figure of 75 writers Leoncio Deriada featured in the Diamond Jubilee edition in 1976. The number of pages have also grown—although S&C regularly posts thicker widths by each new issue. The means by which the contributions have been processed have changed as well, no longer hostage to the whims of linotype machines and typewriters, now quicker with the advent of new technology unheard of in 1948. Why does S&C exist? The primary raison d’être given in 1948 was threefold: to maintain a higher literary standard among Silliman campus writers, to stimulate genuine creative thinking, and to develop a keener appreciation of the more serious creations of Silliman students. The thrusts essentially remain the same in 2002, but as befits a twenty-first century project, the new Sands & Coral also seeks to undermine a number of traditions, and become a fitting postmodern literary vehicle for all good and note-worthy expressions. This edition, first of all, seeks to answer the question surrounding the issue of the future of Philippine literature by showcasing young writers who will constitute the immediate future of that literature. A majority of these young writers are, fortunately, Sillimanians, or have, in one way or another been connected to Silliman University—thus taking care of the one requisite for a Sillimanian publication; many of the non-Sillimanians, meanwhile, have gone through the Silliman (or Dumaguete) National Writers Workshop, administered since 1962 by the Tiempos. A number of those who are not Sillimanians and who have not gone through the famous writing workshop, are here because they are products of Silliman-trained writer-teachers, or are here because of sheer talent that cannot be missed. They are all here because they deserve to be. These books aim to be the most representative anthology of the current generation of Filipino writers, considering all manner of publication restrictions. At the outset, since anthologies must necessarily be exclusive in pre-determined aspects, the year 1960 became the symbolic benchmark of inclusion—meaning, writers born in 1960 and after, those who are 40 years of age and below, are primarily included in the volume. In a way, the 1960s—and then the 1970s and the 1980s—is a fitting criteria by which to define a generational sensibility, for no other period in contemporary history approximates its marriage of violence, weirdness, and human innovations and accomplishments. Condensing all its forty years in a blink, one sees war waning in Korea, only to rear its ugly, bloody head in Vietnam, and then mutate into a paranoid variety during the Cold War, and then into the ironic in the Gulf War. Pop culture thrived in all its callousness, simplifications, and uncanniness. It was the age of the Flower Children, marijuana and LSD, the mini-skirt, bra-burning, Stonewall, the Pill, Jesus Christ Superstar, Charles Manson, Saturday Night Fever, Andy Warhol and the Factory, the Brady Bunch, Woodstock, Star Wars, Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, the Electrolux Man, break dance, Flordeluna, Pepsi Paloma, Voltes V, big hairdos, Viagra, MTV, O.J., shabu, and Monica Lewinsky. It was the age when Elvis Presley bowed out to the Beatles, who then made way for Ozzie Osbourne, who made way for Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, who made way for Britney Spears. It was the age of JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Ninoy Aquino, Indira Gandhi. It was the age of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and Osama Bin Laden. It was the age of fantastic scientific imaginations made true: we put a man in the moon, and then wired the world via computers and the Internet. It was the age when the over-determination of identities was the way to go and be, and so many then sought free expressions as beatniks, as gays and lesbians, as women, among others. The writers born through this motley mix of instances and happenings, cannot help but naturally become persons bred in a culture (or petri dish?) of irony, and then later of a blurring of distinctions via postmodernism—where everything is not exactly definite as they used to be. The pages of this volume and the next are a testament to the postmodernist (or even post-postmodernist) stance by which all of these writers take of literature. Genres have broken down from the rigid categories of poetry, short fiction, and essay—and have become merry mixed-matches: short fiction approximating the distance of essays, non-fictional narratives blurring nevertheless the divide between fiction and non-fiction, fiction cradling poetic souls.... The tales are also told in a variety of forms—in a kind of collage of styles that would have made graphic designer guru David Carson happy. Literature has also become graphic stories (read: comics), short short fiction, hyperlink fiction, pictorial narratives, bloggers, found poems, haiku. Increasingly, young, academic-trained writers are also abandoning the monolingual rigidity of the past, and now there are an abundance of short stories and poems in Waray, Tagalog, Taglish, Cebuano, Hiligaynon, and Kiniray-a, challenging the traditional predominance of English—and never even batting eyelashes on the age-old controversy over creative languages. Most of these writers, we find, do not concern themselves with the old dilemma of choosing whether to write in a foreign language, or to write in the local tongue: they cross or populate both worlds with a mastery approximating elegance. They have also become technologically savvy. It is indicative of the extent of this generation’s marriage to technology to note that the anthology would not have come to fruition were it not for two things: cellphones and the Internet. Both were essential instruments in the process by which these stories and poems came to be included in the anthology. They buried the dominance of postal mail and the typewriter. Most of the entries were solicited through email and were received as email attachments, and one poem was even submitted as a text message—thus eliminating much of the backbreaking labor of correspondence and encoding (although, when a stray manuscript was sent in by courier, the scanner, with its OCD function, came to the rescue). There is also the fact that almost all of the writers’ email addresses and biographical information have been stumbled upon in the merry glut and information-loaded magic of the Internet, through personal webpages, through the directories of academic institutions, and through Internet yellow pages. Cellphones, meanwhile, have made the world even much smaller: an editor, working now, has the luxury of sending gentle editorial reminders through SMS. There is no hiding place in a world drowning in cellphone signals—especially for writers shying away from deadlines. It is not surprising then that many of the poems and stories in Future Shock celebrate the all-encompassing nature of technology and popular culture, and the way they have affected human relationships and, borrowing Susan Sontag’s portrait of modern living, “the way we live now.” In the end, however, this anthology can never be enough, can never be complete. There are other young writers who also deserve to be in this volume—due to time and editorial constraints, we could not include everybody: Jessica Zafra, Melissa Aranzamendez, Donna Sanchez, Alex Delos Santos, Daryll Jane Delgado, Ibarra Gutierrez, Clinton Palanca, Glenn Sevilla Mas, Fatima Lim-Wilson, Jose Dennis Teodosio, Dinah Rose Baseleres, Tara FT Sering, Pearlsha Abubakar, Ed Geronia Jr., Gina Apostol, Lara Stapleton, Rhoda R. Montes, Mila Faraon Heubeck, Lia Bulaong, Eileen Tabios, Danton Remoto, Veronica Montes, Januar Yap, Jay Ruben Dayrit, Edgar Poma, Greg Sarris, Alma Jill Dizon, Jimmy I. Alcantara, Emil Flores, Ma. Romina Gonzalez, Margaret Uy, Maryann Moll, among many others, should be here, and as should be the case, a more complete volume must be in the offing. In the meantime, it is always heartening to know there will be no such thing as death for Philippine literature. The future is right here, in these pages. Ian Rosales Casocot Dumaguete City 11 May 2002 WORKS CITED Abad, Gemino H. “Mapping Our Poetic Terrain: Filipino Poetry in English From 1905 to the Present.” Likhaan Anthology of Philippine Literature in English. Gen. ed. Abad. Manila: UP Press, 1998. Bernad, Miguel A. “Philippine Literature: Perpetually Inchoate.” Philippine Contemporary Literature in English and Pilipino. 6th ed. Ed. Asuncion David-Maramba. Makati: Bookmark, 1990. Dalisay, Jose Y., Jr. “The Filipino Short Story in English: An Update for the ‘90s.” Likhaan Anthology of Philippine Literature in English. Gen. ed. Gemino H. Abad. Manila: UP Press, 1998. Go, Miriam Grace A., ed. Dream Noises: A Generation Writes. Pasig: Anvil, 1999. Keep, Christopher and Tim McLaughlin. “Defining Postmodernism.” Online. Moscom. Internet. 9 August 2001. Available: http:www.ACM.org. Lind, Michael. “Poetical Correctness.” Article in email. From Vincenz Serrano. 10 June 2001. Zulueta, Lito B. “The Babel Unified.” Sunday Inquirer Magazine 1 October 1 2000: 5. |
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