the literary life magazine The Sunday Times


December 5, 2010


BY RESIL B. MOJARES


ARLIER this year, I was in Davao to speak at the Davao Writers Workshop on whether there is such a thing as “Mindanaoan writing.” A


few days ago, I was in Tacloban to attend an “All- Visayas Writers Conference” where I was asked to speak on the subject of “Visayan writing” and what it means. Today, in Manila, I feel like I have traveled from the margins to the center to bring news about what is going on “out there.”


This is not exactly what I am going to do however. Instead, I would like to begin by troubling the concept of margins. What, after all, are centers and margins? I don’t think there is anyone in this gathering of writers who is not positioned in the margins, if one construes this in economic, social, political, ethnic, or territorial terms, or any combination of these forms of marginality. Writers can imagine themselves writing from the center if they write speeches for the president, policy papers for a government think tank, propaganda for a ruling party; or when they fancy themselves a national opinion-maker, setter of trends, creator of canons, or a “national artist” who, taking the title too seriously, imagines himself his nation’s oracle. This is ambition or delusion. In the end, a writer as writer can only speak for himself or herself, and write out of literature’s fragile, contested, and threatened claims of authority, an authority a literary writer can exercise only in diffuse, complexly mediated ways. We can pamper ourselves with the thought that we write out of the nation’s “moral center,” but where is that center in a society, under a government, that has consigned morality to the margins by distorting and demeaning it for its own ends? We hold ourselves the keepers of language, a nation’s moral resource, but the language that has dominated has not been our own but the language of politicians, a political language that (in the words of George Orwell) is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”1


All this is not really a cause of lamentation. It is the writer’s challenge. A writer’s relations to power in the “real world” are such that the margin is not only that social space the writer occupies but the intellectual/political location from which the writer must write. The margin is a good place to be in. I suspect that this is not quite the “margin” this conference had in mind. Today’s conference focuses on writers and writings commonly thought of, in the context of the nation, as marginal for reasons of class, ethnicity, religion, gender or geography. If I have spoken of the margin as the shared location of all writers, it is not to gloss over the very real acts by which particular social groups are dominated and excluded. It is to warn against the tendency in which familiar classificatory systems only serve to essentialize and exoticize and thus authorize responses that confirm and reinforce existing divi- sions, blind us to where the more urgent challenges lie, or encourage acts of tokenism that create fictions of inclusion ad representativeness. MARGINS are created by that process in which power is concentrated and centered. In precolonial Southeast Asia, this is eloquently expressed in the earliest known polity known in the region, called mandala, an Indian- derived concept of a centered world in which a complex of geopolitical relations define where centers, margins, and boundaries lie. In the mandala, power is strongest at the center and progressively weaker the further one moves away from it. Yet, it is also a deeply unstable political field in which relations of power can ebb and flow as competing centers emerge, accumulate power, and grow. It is the accumulation and centering of power—signally illustrated in the formation of states and development of markets—that creates the different kinds of overlapping and interacting margins, territorial, economic, politi- cal, social and cultural.


From the earliest days, poets played an important role in the maintenance and subversion of the system, represented, on one hand by the court poets who glorified and mystified the power of the ruler or king, and on the other, the charismatic figure the Javanese call ajar or kyai, the wild poet who roamed the undisciplined margins of the kingdom and prophesied the coming of a new order.


In the Philippines, a history of margins can be done by tracing how the primacy of print marginalized oral literature, the introduction of dominant colonial languages, Spanish and English, marginalized local languages, the concentration of resources in the state capital marginalized the outlying regions,


or the privileging of the “national” (or what political and cultural elites imagine to be “national”) marginalized the local. I shall not attempt to trace this history since I will be rehearsing what many of us already know. What is important is the appreciation that centers and margins are constructed in history and can be reconfigured in history as well. WHAT does writing from the margins require? Here I shall limit my remarks to the relations of the national and the regional (or local) although I am confi- dent that these somewhat scattered remarks will be useful as well in thinking about other kinds of marginality. What does writing from the margins require? The first is to recognize and build on the advantages of one’s location. Location is not a simple fact of resi- dence. It is all at once the place that has inexorably shaped the kind of person one is or has become, the site one has consciously chosen to imaginatively locate oneself in, the epistemic base out of which one looks out into the world. Imagine what the creative possibilities are if one were a writer in Sulu or Samar, immersed in histories, languages, traditions, environments that one knows better than anybody else does. Imagine if the writer is a Muslim woman in Sulu, an NPA soldier in Samar, or a local botanist in Palawan. While the advantages of location have to be realized through the exercise of craft and imagination, location is clearly a resource. (Consider the case of Jiang Rong, the Chinese writer who won last year’s Man Asian Literary Prize with the novel Wolf Totem (2004/2007). He lived an exile in Inner Mongolia for 11 years, doing agricultural work during the Cultural Revolution, and spent six years working on his novel. While these facts do not guarantee a great novel, or even a good one, imagine the advantage of experience he was starting out with.)


The second has to do with the stance the writer takes. We must question, even deny, the power-laden dichotomy of “national” and “regional.” Too often, when discussions turn towards the so- called “marginal literatures,” one finds a discourse of complaint, victimhood, parochial localism, or even the mendicancies encouraged by programs of affirmative action, instead of the stance of confidence, autonomy and possibility. To write from the margins but stand assured that what one writes is not marginal but central is the key, for if writing is, Vaclav Havel’s words, a “living truth,” the truth realized in literature cannot be marginal. The third observation I wish to make has to do with orientation, the question not only of where one stands but where or in what direction one is turned. The national capital region looms large in the ambition of writers: it is where resources and rewards are concentrated (state cultural agencies, grants and awards- giving bodies, publishing houses, mass media, textbook selection boards); it is where critics and writers assume the status of being “national,” consigning others to being “local.” (A Cebuano writer who publishes in a “vernacular” magazine with a circulation of 30,000 is a “local” writer while one who publishes a book of English poetry in Manila, with a print run of 750 copies, is “national.”) So dominant is the center that a writer may start out from Davao but Manila is where he hopes to “arrive.”


Speaking in Davao, I called this the “northward” orientation—being oriented towards Manila (the “front door” to the southern “back door”) and what lies beyond (usually, the United States and Europe) as the source of models, trends, recognition. This needs to be revised. We need to look “south,” immersing our- selves not only in the immediate worlds in which our art is nourished but looking towards that wider “south,” geographic, as well as cultural, from which one can draw fresh stimulation. I wonder, for instance, to what extent writers in Mindanao (particularly Muslim Mindanao) are reading writers like the Indonesian Pramudya Ananta Tur, the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz, or the Lebanese Elias Khoury, instead of, say, Americans like Kurt Vonnegut or Philip Roth. (I was gratified to learn from a teacher in Cotabato that in fact he already carried selections from Indonesian and Malaysian writers in his course readings.)


The Italian literary theorist Franco has


stirred controversy with his proposals for “distant reading” (as against “close reading”), with his use of quantitative methods for dealing with large masses of literary texts. Moretti’s methods, how- ever, suggest a project that can be done for, say, Philippine fiction over the past hundred years. If we are to inventory the setting or locale (scenic or imagined) of novels and stories published over the past 100 years, then render the data on a map, what would this map be like? In this cartography of the Filipino literary imagination, as it were, would frequently-portrayed Rizal and Laguna appear darkly shaded while areas like Surigao and Misamis virtually blank spaces on the map? Will we find that more novels and stories have been written about the one town of Antipolo (romantic capital of early Tagalog fiction) than Masbate or the Camarines provinces?


The Ilocos perhaps will be fairly visible, not only because it has a vibrant community of writers in Iloko but because it has F. Sionil Jose (who shows what a single writer can do to put a place on the map.) (Although of Frankie, one can complain, as Jose Rizal did of Isabelo de los Reyes in the 1890s: the man is so prolific, foreign readers will think the Ilocos is the Philippines! It is not Frankie’s fault, of course, but ours since we have not quite matched his work.)


Still, without doubt, we will have a map highly discontinuous and uneven, and particularly so if we limit our survey to works critics have canonized as “national” as opposed to the “merely regional.”


Many reasons can be cited to explain this (inequalities of language, access to publishing, and other conditions or opportunities). The point, however, is that we need to create a broader, denser, literary geography, to “flesh out” the nation’s imaginary body. The nation should be written out of many places. And here we can think not only of territorial location but other locations as well, social, economic and political. REVISING relations of power, however, involves more than the creative choices an individual writer can make. It involves, in the case of national-local relations, the empowerment of the regions themselves.


The National Commission for Culture and the Arts has been sensitive to the


idea of building a broad base for the national culture by reaching out to the regions: getting regional representatives to sit in national committees, funding festivals and performances in the provinces, spreading out grants and honors to the regions. The main strategy, however, remains that of redistributing the largesse of the center to the regions instead of investing in long-term, sustainable programs for building local capacity and infrastructure for literary and artistic production. Instead of giving occasional grants for book publication, for instance, would it not be better to explore ways in which assistance can be given to creating centers for small, low- cost book publishing in the regions? In the longer view, however, it is the economic and political growth of the regions themselves that will stimulate the rise of autonomous centers of literary production. Regional centers like Cebu, Iloilo, and Davao have become focal points for literary work but they have yet to develop into significant centers of publishing, for instance.


A current buzzword is “creative industries” (which, I understand, is being promoted by the British Council in the Philippines and other countries). Last week, a national conference on creative industries took place in the University of the Philippines. In the British Council program, Cebu has been chosen as pilot city, and discussions have been initiated by the city’s artist- entrepreneurs on the promotion of Cebu as the “creative city.” While this is an interesting development in drawing public attention to the need to build local infrastructure and support net- works for creative work, the focus on what the British Council calls “wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual prop- erty” can easily distort the character and orientation of local creative work in favor of what is marketable, exotic, exportable.2


Predictably, in Cebu, the


initial discussions on promoting Cebu as the “creative city” have been dominated by leaders in the crafts-and- furniture design industry and have ignored writers.


The drift of this kind of promotion can lead to such a situation as that V.S. Naipaul laments when he attacked contemporary Indian writing in English: “no national literature has ever been created like this, at such a remove,


WRITING FROM THE MARGINS E


b


3


where the books are published by people outside, judged by people outside, and to a large extent bought by people outside.” He contrasts this with the work of the great nineteenth-century Russian writers who wrote in Russian for Russian readers. “Russia was where they were published and had their readers. Russia was where their ideas fermented.” 2 Whether it is writing construed as regional or national, it will be vital only to the extent that it is rooted in the realities of place, and only to the extent that it stays in active conversation with its own people.


SEVERAL years ago (it must be ten years ago now), I was with Gelacio Guillermo at a writer’s conference in Cebu. We had not seen each other for many years and, with the then Zamboanga-based writer Antonio Enriquez, we went out drinking one night after the conference. We remi- nisced about the days when we were “Free Press writers,” generational cohorts who saw our first works published in the old Philippines Free Press. We appeared on “the national scene,” as it were, at about the same time and, though we had not met at the time, we knew each other’s names and imagined ourselves bound together as part of a select fraternity of newly- arrived “national” writers. (That night in Cebu, in fact, was the very first I met Tony Enriquez.) We were getting nostalgic when Gelacio [Guillermo] , with a naughty glint, remarked that, yes, but that I, Resil, had since regressed from being a “national” to becoming a “local” writer. A truly sharp observation. And not because I had in the intervening years turned my attention to the promotion of local studies and regional writing. But because the image we had of ourselves then was so parochial. We were “na- tional” only by virtue of excluding all those who did not write in English, publish in Free Press, pass muster with an editor like Nick Joaquin, or win a Palanca. It was (still is) quite parochial. Though Gelacio may not have intended his remark as a compliment, I will take it as such. Earlier I said, the margin is a good place for a writer to be in. So is the local. (Delivered as the keynote address at the Philippine PEN conference held December 6, 2008 at the Cultural C enter of the Philippines)


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