Notes on the Fictionist's Role in the Time of Emergency*
A month or so into the Duterte
administration, when the killings began as promised, a blog called “The Kill
List Chronicles” began to gather works that constituted what the curator, the
writer Ian Casocot, had called “the new protest literature.” These are the
stories, essays, and poems, he said, that were being written in response to the
manifold violence that was unleashed by the president and the impunity with
which they are committed.
In a brief introductory essay, Casocot
traced the genealogy of such new works to the writings during and about
critical periods in Philippine history, from the waning years of Spanish rule
to the American occupation and all the way to Martial Law. While he implies a
sort of urgent documentary ethos to the project, the alignment with figures
like Jose Rizal and Jose Lacaba nevertheless attempts to lend a sense of
gravity and foresight to the endeavor.
Consider, for instance, how
Casocot appraises the project’s potential value: “Only the future can tell how
this literature, as a prospective tool for change, can impact what is going on
at present. Protest literature are almost always considered only in the
aftermath; perhaps this project can change that, and can demonstrate, once and
for all, the power of literature as a social tool.”
I remember being puzzled by this
project, in particular the self-christening as “new protest literature.” It
diverged so wildly from the tradition that I was familiar with. The spirit of
works like Lope K. Santos’s Banaag at
Sikat (1905), Amado V. Hernandez’s Mga
lbong Mandaragit (1965), or the anthology Sigwa (1971) go beyond mere documentation. While they sought to
bear witness to the immediate reality of everyday violence and injustice, what
sets them apart is an astute diagnosis of how such violence and injustice are
rooted in entrenched social structures. And always they culminated in a clear
call for these structures to be dismantled. Their radicalism, their protest, in
other words, whether they’re novels or vignettes or poems, lies in how they
situate something within a larger ecosystem of oppressions.
Also curious for me was the role that
the project assigns to the writer in the task of fermenting social change. Too
cavalier, I thought. Too writerly,
which again represented a divergence from the tradition that I knew. After all,
we remember that Carlos Bulosan became heavily involved in the labor movements
in early 20th-century America en route to writing America is in the Heart (1946); Emman Lacaba, as an NPA cadre in
Mindanao in the 1970s, not only penned what is often considered the ars poetica
of Philippine revolutionary literature, he also learned Bisaya and put
revolutionary lyrics to popular Visayan folk songs, some of which are still used
today; and, more recently, groups like KM 64 write protest poetry even as
members participate in teach-ins and mobilizations, bringing their works to the
broader society about which they write.
Their writing, in other words,
represented but a mere fraction of a broader engagement with society’s myriad
contradictions. They venture outside the page and abandon the heinous solitude
of writing in order to participate in other ways. Which means protest
literature didn’t really stop, especially outside traditional publishing
channels, the natural and most potent habitat for these works. They continue to
be written and recited and sung, whether it be in picket lines outside factory
premises and haciendas or the invisible forest trails in the countryside. Any grandiloquent
declarations about its resurgence must reckon with this fact.
These misgivings, of course, are
not incompatible with welcoming a project like “The Kill List Chronicles.” Any
well-meaning response to Duterte’s bloodbath is a move against acquiescent
silence and is thus welcome. It is understandable for writers to be moved by
images of bloodied bodies splayed on pavement and to respond in the way writers
know: by words.
But it’s instructive, I think,
and might reveal a pervasive attitude about writing as a response to crisis
that’s worth further examination. After EDSA, there was an upswing in literary
production due to a regained sense of independence and the potency of an
experience like Martial Law. But the increasing academization of creative
writing in the country with the establishment of creative writing centers and
programs saw the writer retreating ever so gradually to the cozy cocoon of
academia, lulled by the occasional award, grant, or publication. And as the
writing community grew insular, for many, this also imperiled, if not
completely discarded, modes of involvement that go beyond writing.
For instance, that the works in
“The Kill List Chronicles” are archived in a website for wider access and
posterity certainly has its value; but in the context of such an insular
writing community, and as an intervention in Duterte’s genocidal rampage, its worth
is suspect. I think it’s important to be suspicious of the comforting notion
that writing can ever be enough, and
that by writing about something, we would have already done our part.
In an interview, the poet and
teacher Conchitina Cruz talked about the danger of poetry acting as
“insufficient proxy” in responding to a crisis. She said: “I think the least we
can do as poets is to be conscious of the limits of engaging ‘as poets’ in the
work of social transformation. Our words on the page simply can’t stand-in for
our bodies out on the streets.” An infatuation with writing’s relevance, she
said, can authorize detachment from collective struggle. For me this is why it
is always heartening to see writers participating in the many mobilizations
against the killings, to see writers, in other words, not writing, or not only writing.
But isn’t the intervention proffered
by fiction enough? Fiction, after all, by its very nature, engages with notions
of reality and is thus inherently in the business of raising political
consciousness in some shape or form. Furthermore, by scrutinizing motivation,
it cultivates empathy. By attending to details, it commands a meditative attitude.
Because it relies on imagining a possibility, an alternative, whether for the
self or for society, its default stance is always hope, even as its avenue is
via hopelessness. These alone can be radical, especially as antidotes to things
like modernity’s penchant for speed, for example, or the reign of
literal-mindedness, or a broad sense of debilitating despair.
But all these are impotent in the
face of a nation that doesn’t read us. The fundamental material conditions for many
Filipinos remain violently incompatible with the nourishment of an interior
life, for many a prerequisite for the complete appreciation of literature. For
Filipino writers then, I think an important truth that writing should testify
to is its own inadequacy, whether in times of emergency or not.
And for Walter Benjamin, “the
tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we
live is not the exception but the rule.” In the Philippines, this state goes
well beyond the killings, horrible as they are. Just recently, Manila’s hosting
of the ASEAN Summit gave us a scene right out of either a terrible dystopia or a
Latin American dictator novel: Duterte toasting to Donald Trump at a lavish gala
dinner in a sparkling pavilion while Manila’s homeless scavenge for their next
meal, driven away from their regular spots along the suddenly immaculate Roxas
Boulevard.
More importantly, the mad hosting
signaled the country’s dogged belief in a mode of development that had brought
little relief to its citizens. Between 2010 and 2015—before the killings—the
wealth of the 10 richest Filipinos has more than tripled, from an already
obscene P630 billion to P2.2 trillion. This, as 66 million Filipinos live on less
than P125 a day. Elsewhere: landlessness, extrajudicial killings, attacks on
higher education, institutionalized bigotry, fake news, the West Philippine Sea
and China, the traffic on EDSA, climate change, etc. etc.
Any form of artistic production
is necessarily in conversation with these realities. In a country like the
Philippines, inscribed in the Filipino artist’s subject-position are the many
privileges that make art production possible in the first place, be it education
or a disposable income or free time. My book, which will be launched later, costs
just shy of the daily minimum wage in Metro Manila. It may contain interesting
ideas about the call center industry and globalization, but it is written in a
language and structure that some call center agents, my target audience, might
find inscrutable or unappetizing. (I hope I’m wrong though.) Thus, the categories
of “truth” that I think fiction should bear witness to has not changed: the
capacity of fiction to imagine an alternative and at the same time a constant disenchantment
with this self-same capacity.
I’d like to end with a quote from
a writer whose fiction writing was famously interrupted by doing something else
other than fiction writing. It took 20 years for Arundhati Roy to write and
publish a follow-up to her 1997 debut The
God of Small Things. In the intervening years she did many things. She
joined Maoist fighters in central India and lent her voice to many causes that
could use amplification, consequently earning the ire of just about every group
in the country, from the religious right wing to big business, among others.
Responding to being described as
an activist, she said: “To call someone like me a writer-activist suggests that
it’s not the job of a writer to write about the society in which they live. But
it used to be our job. It’s a peculiar thing, until writers were embraced by
the market, that’s what writers did—they wrote against the grain, they
patrolled the borders, they framed the debates about how society should think.
They were dangerous people.”
The absolute lunacy of this
regime, it’s true, demands more than ever for writers to regain this sense of danger,
not only in condemning the killings but in dissecting the basket case society
of which the killings are merely symptomatic. Fiction as a form can of course
do this, but given our realities its value as a potent intervention might well
be fictional as well; hence, the need to do more. Thank you.
* Delivered during the “The Fictionist and the Challenge of Truth Telling” panel, Philippine PEN 60th Congress, Buenaventura Garcia Paredes OP Alumni Center, University of Santo Tomas, November 21, 2017
