Year 2004-2005

NVM Gonzales:Beautiful

It is the role of the artist to create beauty and the beholder to see it that way.



Dear Blog Reader,
Note: I am currently reading NVM Gonzales and Ha Jin.

I am compelled to offer as many books to read as possible only because books and writing have saved me from many crises in life. Reading is a profitable way to spend one's life. A good book can transport one's existence somewhere else, and in that place, there is discovery and surprise and learning and beauty.

What is occuring in our country is becoming very very ugly. Just look at the bloated faces of the politicians and it makes you jump out of your chair. The political culture drives us away from the native land. Anywhere to live but in the Philippines.

For many of us, we can't run away. We are so dying to get rid of the endless conspiracies, theories, sensationalisms, press releases, accusations, counter-accusations, investigations as if these were all we want to hear. I just HATE it. And I live in the USA. I can not imagine how the ordinary Filipino can stomach all the things going on in his country.

Gone is decency, gone is Christianity, gone is patriotism, gone is love for what is intelligent and practical, gone is the hard work for nation-building. Instead, we have fights and dirty linen hangings; rock throwings; verbal assaults; insults; insinuations; denials; accusations. And they wonder why no one listens to them.

And all of the things I am saying now are becoming cliches.

History will equalize us all. Later, we will know the truth. In another era and generation, the names of those who played the dirty political game of today will be mocked at. Their antics will be scoffed at. And their children will become ashamed of them. They will be known as anti-nation. In their haste to acquire power, they became caricatures of disservice; they became the Personification of Evil. History will someday ask -- When was the time we nearly lost everything as a nation?

The answer is 2005, thanks to following politicians: (names will follow).

On the other hand, history will be kindlier to the one who has sincerely, in his most miniscule role, contributed to the country's peace of mind and well-being.

This is the time the Filipino artist is needed the most. The Filipino Artist, not the politician, will save this nation. There no one else who works as hard as an artist to create a thing of beauty for all to see. Even the beholding of beauty is a privilege and I don't know why we seem not to put importance to it.

What is beautiful in our country?


When there is a sense of hopelessness in a society, it's necessary that the Artist must come to the rescue by countering this hopelessness. The Artist possesses the power to light up his society by creating beauty: beauty in poetry, beauty in music, beauty in films and TV, beauty in prose, beauty in paintings and sculpture, beauty in the environment that is the background of that society.

Do not think that the problems besetting this nation will be solved by politics or religion or military or leftist ideology. What will save us is the color of the rainbow, the music of our hearts, the clear sky that covers our oceans and seas, the thoughts of people whose true desires are to save this country and people. And true artists like NVM Gonzales who can create these difficult but beautiful lines:


There was the rice husk, too. Before, it did not matter whether Nanay saved the chaff, once the rice was pounded; from the mortar she would take the rice in her wide, flat winnowing basket and, with the wind helping her, clean the grains right there under the hinagdong tree at the edge of the yard. But from now on it would not do to leave the rice husk there on the ground. The kitchen wash mixed with rice husk won much favor with the sow; and for ever so long after feeding-time, you could see hear wear a brown band of rice husk round the mouth.


For somebody like me who grew in the barrio, the images NVM Gonzales created in "The Children of Ash Covered Loam" can be so pleasant it brings me back home and my childhood.

For that is what Filipinos need to feel right now – being at home and being innocent again.

I don't know how our society had ended up the way it is today – ruled by politicians and showbiz people whose task it is - is to find garbage where garbage is found. And to do it in a hideous manner… When and where did we start becoming this way?

Just look at all the political maneuverings around us – when I was a child, I never thought we Filipinos will end this way.

How can that be possible to a hospitable and trusting people? Isn’t our hospitality and trust the very culprits that subjected us to Imperial Powers?

….I can’t remember at what date or year we started assuming everybody is an enemy and not worth our acceptance. How did our culture become so dirty like it is now and how did these politicians manage to control our lives? When did we start giving the control to them, putting them in front of our cameras to babble about their wicked sagacity which everybody knows are lies?

Let’s now begin calling our true Artists. For Art can not lie. It is either beautiful or ugly and regardless of its case, it is clearly manifested.

I have read a few pages of Ha Jin's Waiting and I instantly fell in love with this story. It is the story of two people who struggle under the difficult situations of their lives imposed by the ideology that prohibited expression of emotion in public, like love – they are a people who can not even read novels written by the bourgeois.

I find this story so beautiful only because the atmosphere that produced it was the communism of old – people were suffering, people were being deprived – yet in the midst of that suffering and deprivation, true love developed. It is a story made more precious because of its human triumph.

To me, the story to be written by the Filipino Artist of the future will not be the story of the ruling class. It will be the story of simple folk who thrived and succeeded DESPITE the political lunacy ruling the country. Filipinos will eventually write stories using the ordinary people as models. Our future will involve the men and women who maintained their grace and integrity under the sky of uncertainties.

What the future will condemn are those men and women who created our current uncertainties, who, in the name of their ambitions would rather see this nation wiped out and people die of hunger and poverty. In the future, they will become well-known as anti-Filipinos. No amount of explaining or rationalizing or speech-ing in Congress will save these people's images and reputations. I myself will never be convinced if they’d try to explain themselves to me in the future. They have already damaged this country now. My writings will forever condemn them, they are all damaged goods, and someday, they will be wandering the streets of the Philippines begging people to listen to them…and no one would. Whatever side they belonged to in the political game they play now, they, as a member of the political culture have destroyed the very society they swore to serve.

They will be lumped in the future as destroyers; they will be the Friars of Jose Rizal’s time. They are the same as Father Damaso, who externally demanded from the natives respect while internally, he raped the natives and exacted taxation from those who were made to suffer due to him. Tell me exactly how different our current politicians are from Father Damaso?

These politicians will be the ones the next generation will dare not praise. No amount of fighting and ‘investigations in aid of legislation’ today will convince any Filipino of any goodness in them, pro and anti. They are the worst we have delegated to rule our lives. What is so appalling is, they seem to enjoy seeing this country imploding day by day without even realizing they are incapable of saving it. Worse, they live in an illusion of being able to save the country. They don't realize they can no longer save the ordinary folks struggling to maintain humanity in this inhumane society. Which they created.

It’s like the movie Ghostbusters. When the Evil took control of New York City, a nasty gel began creeping all over. Anyone touched by that evil gel became evil himself. And when the Ghostbusters asked how to get rid of that evil nasty gel, they thought of the symbol that was completely opposite of evil and they made the Ghost of Liberty walk.

Our country, thanks to our politicians is now surrounded by evil gel, and as that gel touches each one of us, we all become evil and we become destroyers of our country.

What symbol do we need? What Filipino value will save us?

The true Filipino Artist will. He will produce a Manansala of a mother breastfeeding her child, wearing a simple dress, a scarf covering her head and behind her is a background of the endless golden rice fields. People are harvesting. Staring at that beauty, you suddenly forget ugliness of the country and you enter the Manansala painting and you say hello to the young mother feeding her child, and you feel the wind blowing the fields and you join the men and women harvesting. And you become the Filipino of old again.

That is the power of an Artist.


All afternoon, Pico lingered about the beach restlessly. Around sundown, he saw a parao sailing east from somewhere down Lumawig Point, five miles south of the mouth of Malig River. Perhaps it had come from Palaon, its sails of buri leaves dark-grey in the sunset glow. Pico wondered whether Lupo had meant what he said about going to Pinagsabangan, or somewhere faraway. A spell of loneliness seized him, and he hurried back to the hut to help Manding Paula pound rice and to feed the pig in the pen behind the kitchen shed.


(Lupo and the River, NVM Gonzales)