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I received an invitation from Jose “Butch”
Dalisay Jr. to be a speaker in a panel called “Ganito Kami Noon:
Writing Through the Decades” in a writers gathering during the
February 2009 National Arts Festival sponsored by the National
Commission for Culture and the Arts. I am to speak of the literary
situation during the 50s.
It happens Epifanio “Sonny”
San Juan Jr., author of many books, now based in Connecticut, USA,
sent me a piece intended for the golden anniversary of his UP Class
’58”. For now, I yield this space to “Memories of student
days, 1954 to 1958 by E. San Juan Jr. Long before I wandered around
the GI quonset huts and the ramshackle Little Quiapo of the Fifties
in Diliman, I read copies of The Philippine Collegian religiously in
1952 to 1953. This took place in the crumbling prison cells of
Binondo, Manila, which housed the office of the Jose Abad Santos
High School Gazette of which I was editor. I pored over the writings
of Lourdes Paez, Andres Cristobal Cruz, Tita Lacambra, Amelia Lapena,
Maro Santaromana, Godofredo Roperos and also thumbed copies of The
Literary Apprentice where I read Homero Veloso, Armando Manalo and
Jose Garcia Villa’s poems. Both my mother and father were pre-war
UP graduates, contemporaries of Loreto Paras-Sulit and Salvador
Lopez, so I read their yellowed copies of Lopez’s Literature and
Society, Villa’s Footnote to Youth and Poems by Doveglion at the
height of Magsaysay’s anti-Huk campaigns.
UP was a fabled wonderland of
artists and word-magicians. I was happy and eager to enter this zone
of free play where I didn’t have to obey my teachers and please my
elders. Years passed quickly. I never entered any fraternity nor did
I attach myself to any campus clique. The real lesson I learned was
outside, when I was recruited by Mario Alcantara of the Recto-Tanada
party for an election campaign in Pangasinan and La Union. Although
I was initially a pre-med student, I put away my chemistry books
when I was appointed as a rookie reporter by Louie Uranza, then
editor of the Collegian, in 1954 to 1955. I wrote news reports about
the hearings on fraternity/sorority hazings, but they were never
published. Later, when I got more involved with the fight between
Fr. Delaney’s UPSCA and the “seculars,” I understood why.
One time Franz Arcellana, who was
my teacher in English 2, asked me to write a review of Signatures
#1, edited by Rony Diaz and Alex Hufana. This got me into trouble
with Oscar de Zuniga, who threatened to file a libel case against
me. Somehow the internal rivalries between Franz and the Manila
crowd of journalists (NVM Gonzalez asked us to support Estrella
Alfon by attending the court hearing on her “Fairy Tale of the
City”) also played a part in my suspension from writing for The
Collegian for a year. As everyone knew then, my poem Man is a
Political Animal (inspired by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound) was
attacked by Amador Daguio, Prof. Ramon Tapales of the UP
Conservatory of Music and other “holier-than-thou” conformists
(the phrase is from my other English teacher, Elmer Ordonez).
Throughout my apprenticeship, Franz was very supportive, and
solidarity was extended by the UP Writers Club and Dolores Feria.
During those days, I was a loner,
though I mixed with the crowd of Pete Daroy, Ruben Garcia, Gerry
Acay and some fraternity folks. I was befriended by Armando
Bonifacio, Alex Hufana, Andres Cristobal Cruz and Rony Diaz, who
introduced me to Adrian Cristobal and the Manila barkada who
gathered at the National Press Club and the watering-holes around
Florentino Torres and Soler Streets. During the 1958 PEN Conference
in Baguio City, I witnessed the confrontations between the “Young
Turks” of Diliman, the aesthetes around Edilberto Tiempo, Joe
Lansang and the nationalists and the Manila circle of F. Sionil
Jose. That was my other unforgettable pedagogical moment, again
outside the Diliman classrooms.
My memorable teachers were Dr.
Ricardo Pascual, Leopoldo Yabes and Cesar Majul—I also never
forgot Dr. Pascual Capiz’s advice to read Spinoza; and also those
administrators and mentors who ignored, misunderstood or excluded
me—they are all part of my now greyish UP experience, an allegory
of the Filipino young man growing up in an impoverished third-world
neocolony convulsed by peasant/proletarian rebellion, soon to be
overtaken by the horrors of Marcos’ martial law and the prophetic
Moro insurgency.
Today the Philippine PEN holds
its whole-day conference on the theme: “Literature from the
Margins: Changes in the Literary Canon.” Venue: CCP main building
at Roxas boulevard, Pasay. Dr. Resil Mojares will give the keynote
address while UST Rector Magnificus Fr. Rolando V. de la Rosa, O.P.
will deliver the Jose Rizal Lecture. Writers, teachers, students and
lovers of literature are welcome.
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