Until about two years ago, in 1996, when, to quote a line from a Doris Day song, I was still "ready, willing, and able" (if you remember the title of this song, you’re going to show your age!), I used to go hunting with some friends in the boondocks of Bukidnon, not the big thing, the rather big game, I knew in my youth on that now besieged island of Basilan (called Taquima by my ancestors). There I used to hunt wild boar, deer, monkey; they were every where then. I remember sometimes shooting at wild boars not in the thick of forest or woods, but right there in the cornfields of Moro Abdul, shooting them without much effort as shooting at domesticated pigs that would overnight devour poor Moro Abdul’s entire corn harvest he had tended for months. But now I was told that gone are the wild game, just as the forest and the rivers are gone, and the wild orchids too, taken over by even something wilder, more cruel and unpredictable than the wildest beast or denizen: yes, man himself — hunting his own kind, Moros against Christians, in a fratricidal war!

The fields of Bukidnon are excellent hunting ground for wild pigeons and wild ducks, commonly known as mallards (did you know there are 65-70 species of river duck?); and after hunting there for some while you have as much fun, great time, as you had hunting wild game in the wilds of the island of old Taguima. And so, now, after we’ve decided which hunting area we’d go to and the pre-dawn hour we’d meet at a friend’s place, we’d conclude our meeting, saying:

"Sigui, `pareng; we’ll all meet here, here at Jun’s, tomorrow about two, buntag, morning, ha, hindi afternoon: rain or shine — basta hindi u-ulan!"

Obviously a contradiction in terms, but besides drawing laughter, notice that the local words or phrase have not corrupted, diminished, nor diluted the host language, English; rather they enhance the dialogue and localize the thematic structure and understanding. We can even say, in all humility, that without the local words and phrase we couldn’t have gotten the same stylish and farcical effect.

With this on mind, we then start the first stride down the solitary, seldom trodden path, hopefully not for long, to the smithy of forging our own voice: using a foreign tongue.

Thus, at this point, consider this: that we Filipinos have as many languages, such as Cebuano, Bicolano, Ilongo, Tagalog, Pampangueño, Subanon, Tausog, Visaya, and my own, Chabacano, et cetera, and so forth, as there are tribes; but not unusual when writing, formal, vulgar, or literary, to have a common denominator, that is, English, which we came upon not by choice but by design spawned not exactly from the magnanimous heart of our then colonial master, the Norte Americanos.

Nick Joaquin, a couple of years back, said in Davao city that in the 1930s the "city of Manila became invisible to our writers in English. Something in their upbringing," he went on, "in their schooling, had made them unable to see what had been so apparent to their grandfathers. These young writers in English could see only what the American language saw."

And the $64 question (present-time prizes are now paid in kind, say, a refrigerator, washing machine, even a car; as if money has lost its face value) is: Can a Filipino writer, inebriated, steeped, parboiled, in his native tongue, write in English; but not just write, but write as well and as truly, and beautifully as his counterparts, in the four corners, or should I say, in the circumferential edges of the World; for that is the picture both Russian and U.S.A. astronauts sent us from up there of Mother Earth.

And can he satisfy his critics, unbelievers, who lose no chance to croak their crabby, whining, and heretical belief: "that Filipino writers writing in English can’t, won’t, be able to capture, seize the soul of the Filipinos, the spirit of his country."

No doubt, clasping the soul of the Filipinos is no less easy, mind you, than to catch and clasp in your hands a cloud in the heavens or puff of smoke from a camp fire: where, in ancient times, the writers’ ancestors gathered and spun myths and tales of lore.

Be that as it may, non-Anglo writers, writing in English, have written in fact admirably in English than many born into it; for instance, Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, eventually made into a film starring that famous continental actor Marcello Mastroani, and that sizzling, pursed lips pouting blank-blank; and Polish writer Joseph Conrad, of the "Into the Heart of Darkness" fame, the basis of the movie Apocalypse Now, with Marlon Brando, speaking in his yet worse slurs, and of Lord Jim, also made into a movie, and, if memory has not faded yet, starred irreverently un-American looking Peter O’toole.

Vladimir Nabokov, who was writing in Russian, even years later after he arrived as an adult in the U.S., is considered one of the finest craftsman in the English language, that medium which he learned much, much later into his adulthood. He has been praised, and acknowledged by his peers as well, and in his novel Lolita, he shows us why:

‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth, Lo. Lee. Ta.

On the other hand, Joseph Conrad, a Polish sailor on an American merchant ship, undoubtedly learned the English language while serving there with American shipmates; thus, for his formal English there wasn’t any English Grammar or Speech teacher, and no suerte ... luck ... of having on board a Thomasite from whom not a few Filipinos learned to write in beautiful, elaborate script and in correct grammar. Conrad was twenty-three years old then. Listen to this exquisite lines from one of my favorite stories, "The Heart of Darkness":

Can anyone but Joseph Conrad, learning the English language at the age of twenty-three, while the ocean winds blew and the rough sea rolled — write any better than that?

And here’s something you can bite into while mulling, brooding, of what I just said; but in a reverse way, or baligtad ... pero birao in Chabacano: two of the finest, perfect gems in American literature, of the lost generation era, in the ‘20s, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway, captured the spirit and the romance of the Spanish language, so clear and admirably that you could feel it in the air and smell it in your sweat: in such stories as written in the Pacific coast setting.

One very memorable novella is John Steinbeck’s The Pearl, which, only sometime after you’ve read the story, been mesmerized, and had fallen in love with it, that you realize what rang in your ears wasn’t the natives’ Spanish tongue, but its snared grid and resonance from Castellano to English.

And there’s Ernest Hemingway: who could imagine the author of "The Killers," with his cryptic, cutting, terse prose, wrote The Old Man and the Sea, transforming his cryptic and economical prose into a sort of a mutant: an earthy, romantic, Latin-American English.

Unfortunately, we only have in hand Steinbeck’s work to extract upon, and elaborate on. Usually Steinbeck’s prose goes like this, as in his novel Dubious Battle:

Now notice the change in mood and style in his novelette, The Pearl:

But capturing the Filipino soul, in an alien language, enhancing the spirit, is, like we said earlier, grasping at patches of clouds, puffs of smoke, and imprisoning in the shell of one’s hand the fluttering of a thousand wings of butterflies — but without halting their flight in mid-air or breaking a single spotted wing.

Nevertheless, what seemingly looks impossible has been surmounted by the story-teller’s fables and myths, and by man’s creativeness and imagination alone: the discovery of fire and the first stone wheel.

And so, listen to this:

Recently, like the legendary sphinx, there rose from the ashes, as from the turmoil and terror of colonial rule and oppression, what many had not foreseen, and if foreseen were to look down upon it with envy and incredibility: writers writing not in English-English, or American-English, but their own English, born, nurtured, and hammered, in the smithy of their very soul. Thus, using English from far apart of each other as Africa to India, straddling on two different sides of the world’s great oceans, the former in the Atlantic Ocean and the latter in the Indian Ocean, these writers, though writing in a unique, novel language, had shown to the incredulous world, by their ritualistic work, how rich, provocative, and mystical is their culture and tradition. And more than that forever marked are their work with this momentous and significant seal: no one will mistake their tales, and the poems, and the stories, as anybody else’s, but typically, as the case maybe, Indian or African writing, as one New York reviewer said, "in a highly individualistic style."

If only to satisfy our curiosity, let us look at samples from the work of these two great African writers:

African writer Chinua Achebe, in his novel Things Fall Apart, which has so far sold eight million copies in 50 different languages, writes:

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino. He was called the Cat because his back would never touch the earth. It was this man that Okonkwo threw in a fight which the old men agreed was one of the fiercest since the founder of their town engaged a spirit of the wild for seven days and seven nights.

And this from the distinguished Ben Okri, winner of the "Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Africa, winner of the "Paris Review Aga Khan Prize," in his "1991 Booker Prize" novel, The Famished Road:

But what has shocked the literary world are the Indian writers who have changed the English literature scene. While about a decade ago in the late 1980s, barely ten Indian writers were published internationally; now there are more than that new writers overflowing India’s literary well every year. And no longer do Indian writers look in awe to London, but now London looks back in awe at the Indian writers.

AsiaWeek, August 7, 1997 issue, said:

"Thanks to [Salman] Rushdie, Indian literature no longer needed to explain itself to a foreign readership, to provide glossaries for native words and explanations for the subcontinental oddities of life."

You’ve heard, if not read, Salman Rushdie, whose publication in 1981 of Midnight’s Children, shook the literary world by its magic, fantasy, and myths, and got him the prestigious Booker Prize. And, of course, his equally, and perhaps more famous, but for a different reason, novel Satan’s Verses. If Gabriel Marquez dazzled you in A Hundred Years of Solitude with his Latin American magic-realism, Rushdie bubbles with it in his own fiction: such dialogue as taken from his robust, baroque, historical novel Shame (published by Vintage 1995), and may I ask you to lend a lobed ear to the certainly unmistakably magic-reality of the language, which stamps this dialogue with Indian tonality and inflection:

And in the same book, we hear Little Mir Harappa shouting from horseback, at his cousin’s wife, Rani Begum, while his soldiers loot the house:

In October, 1996, at the U.P. Writer’s workshop in Davao city, held every year since the past 4 years or so, I asked NVM Gonzalez how we Filipino fictionists writing in English can achieve, even just a grain, a scrap, of our contemporaries’ literary success, writing in English, like African and Indian writers, who, like us, had been under chains, at one long period or another, by some colonial white power. And in answer, he said, not in his same words, but in quite the same vein that I may quote him:

"What we need, Tony, is a voice that would liberate Filipino writing." And he went on to say something about the nuances of our culture and tradition, of native soul and homeland, and their stamp and resonance (this he would repeatedly use) in our writing.

Perhaps, among the Filipino writers, he is the most conscious of this: the native voice that has not escaped the African and Indian writers, and has indeed freed them from seeing only, as Nick Joquin said what the English language saw. In his short story "Children of the Ash-Covered Loam," NVM Gonzalez writes:

Here, as elsewhere, but like in Rushdie’s novel Shame, in that little scene with Little Mir Harappa, we hear clearly, vividly, the personas speaking in their own tongue, in their own inescapable, unique tonality and rhythm; although actually it’s all said in English.

Through the years, NVM Gonzalez, long considered to be the dean of modern Philippine literature, has his devoted readers, here and internationally, and had most especially influenced a generation of authors. Though I had never met him personally until several years ago, in 1989, when to the State University I went to receive U.P.’s National Fellow for Literature grant, much, much too late to say he had also influenced my writing, but there we were: he on his mountain top in his "colonial island of Mindoro," while I on my white (tourism people say "pink") shores of Zamboanga city—also writing about the simple barrio folks, the farmers, fishermen, in other words, about the underclass, the common people, the hard-life beaten ones, as well as the mind-of-their-own, leave-us-alone villagers.

Unconsciously then, without plan, strategy, but by chance or suerte, both of us were writing in English about our people, our mountains, our rivers, and our barrios.

In my short story "Asocena," a contraction of the two words: "aso" (dog) and "cena" (meat), that is "dog’s meat," I tried, though unconsciously doing it then, to tell the story of a boy whose favorite pet, a dog named Leal, a Chabacano word for "loyal," was killed by the barrio’s uncouths and drunkards, to tell it as well and as best as I could — without losing the heart and soul of the barrio and the simple, common life of the barrio folk.

Thus I wrote, for the feel of the pastoral setting:

LIKE most of the boys in Labuan, a coastal barrio in Zamboanga, Chu had a farm dog. He called him Leal, which in the Chavacano dialect means loyal. It was always fun to watch Leal chase the big monkeys in the cornfield for as the dog passed under the low branches of the trees on the slope of a small hill above the kaingin, the monkeys hanging by their tails from the low branches would reach out and pull Leal’s tail....

But nothing, I think, catches quickly the nuances and resonance of barrio life, its culture, than in the dialogue. In fact, so long as it didn’t clutter the prose too much, I put in as many Chabacano words or expressions, so there wouldn’t be any mistake the villagers are indeed my compoblanos, rich and rustic in their language. Thus:

The farmer felt it again, now feeling it and hearing it clearly in his son’s voice, quiet and soft, not even rising above a whisper. ‘Qué pasa, hijo?’

‘Valiente?’

‘Si, so when he becomes big he’ll bite ‘Ñor Tomas.’

Let us write then with a voice that will liberate Filipino writing from seeing only what the English language sees, that celebrates and resonates our identity, and our native homeland, as the African black writers and the Indians have, so it won’t be long when we are read more and more by our Filipino readers; and no longer will foreigners, particularly the Anglo-Saxons and the Norte Americanos, look just as if through an aquarium glass at us in surprise and disbelief for writing in Egnlish.

End