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I can hear him now ... "It's the FORM stupid! Not the MEANING!"
-- AlexMaskara's Review of
At my age, the more I read about our Filipino authors (we call them canonical I think) who germinated the Philippine English Literature, the more I see clearly what went right and wrong in our English literature. Or maybe at my age I expect too much from our Philippine literature in English - after only a hundred years of the language in our country - but then, we never had a great Spanish literature either after 300 years of Spanish colonization - and we never had a great Tagalog literature even after our national language had been used by our people for millennia. Something went wrong. Something is wrong when we lament the people's lack of interest in reading literature by Filipinos. Something is wrong when I hear a Pinoy friend of mine say (after he learned I'm doing reviews of Philippine Literature books), "Philippine Lit is dead honey." Worse, I have no defense to that. I wish I could use Garcia Villa as the representative of our great English literature, but to my dismay, after reading his poetry and articles about him in The Anchored Angel, I found him more as a culprit than a hero. Let me explain my point here, and I want to remind you all first that I am no expert in poetry. I admire Garcia Villa for his experimentations, his bravery, his independence, his comma poems, his too-perfect lines - but since I am no poet - I don't understand him and I am not sure if I'd like to understand him. Garcia Villa, to my utter disappointment, was totally the writer I am not. If he looked for structure and form, willing to sacrifice meaning just so his poem could sing - well, I don't like singing poems. I don't like to be controlled by some pre-defined rules (who started these fiction rules anyway?) in writing. I hate formulas. I don't intend to write by emulating some trying-hard foreign writer, I basically am chaotic and I don't find the Beatnik writing as "typewriting" writing ( Garcia Villa apparently enjoyed using this borrowed line from Truman Capote). And to be frank, both of them were as queers as I am. And I see them just like the ones I find abhorring in gay circles. Honey, the way Garcia Villa was described, I find him as queenie as I find princesses everywhere. I want poems tell me some earth-shaking truths. No make-ups. No tiaras. No well-defined eye lines. No well chosen foundation. No aspiring perfect shape for Miss America. In other words, no matter how godly a poem is, to me orgasm is still an orgasm. In whatever form or shape. You can be in Buckingham Palace or a street corner in Recto - orgasm will still be the same. The most important rule is - you must feel it. You Don't Listen, You Feel I am here tying the writing and life of Garcia Villa to our English literature - which is but appropriate since Garcia Villa had figuratively led the so-called "Golden Age" of English writing in the Philippines. He was given by the Philippines a title equal to the Emperor of English literature during his heyday, his "feats" were even regularly featured in a newspaper column. "Feat" in this case meant Garcia Villa becoming acceptable in the literary world of the West, a writer that could match the writers of the West. I have no qualms about Garcia Villa becoming a Western icon -- what I find horrible in that concept of "feat" is the negligence of the public which was the source of his writing and "for whom" his writing should have been directed at. The Filipino people. And when we start asking why Garcia Villa was completely forgotten by the West - well, it's because he wrote for a people who never considered him as one of them. Garcia Villa's greatest mistake was his negligence of the people who considered him as their own. The Filipino people. His "queenie" persona, his stubborn insistence to stay in New York even when every Filipino wanted him in the Philippines 9even for a moment) isn't a source of pride. I think a writer should not only think of his own self-concept. He must also consider the wishes of the readers who love him. Garcia Villa was no Greta Garbo. He should have been a Mark Twain. A writer must always nurture not only his craft but his audience as well. That is one of the greatest lessons I learned in computer programming. To make your computer program work and useful and popular to people, its interface must always be user-friendly. And to tell you the truth, the more you want your computer language to be simple and user-friendly, the harder work it involves. The greatest writers to me are not those who write with words that can only be understood by the "anchored angels" of heavens. The greatest writers to me are the writers who are understood even by the insects and scum of the earth. To be understood by a typical high school student is my goal when I write. If whoever started our Philippine English literature had a more people-oriented concept of writing - our literature would have thrived. And this is where I disagree with many Filipino authors - we sometimes write as if our readers were Americans or British or ... well ... anyone foreign. I suspect that sometimes we write just to show we know grammar or have a bulky box of vocabulary at our disposal. Sometimes, I have this feeling we write to impress other writers. Or to meet a certain awarding body. Or to meet someone's (a literary figure mostly) expectations. I praise Garcia Villa for his style but the philosophy behind his writing do not agree with mine. I'm not intending to dishonor his value as one of the greatest Filipino writers we ever had. And to do it when he is no longer around! Garcia Villa would have considered "Rizal as a great man but a great writer he's not". I guess writers have different ways of looking at Philippine writing and literature. read more about this enigmatic & controversial Pinoy by ordering The Anchored Angel book from:
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Volume 1 |
Alex Maskara |
