Literatura
hispanofilipina actual, by Isaac Donoso and Andrea Gallo. Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 2011. ISBN 978-84-7962-694-5
The
authors’ chapter title "Crónicas de la heterodoxia" says it all:
contemporary Philippine literature in Spanish language is a heterodox entity in
the world of Hispanic letters. The writers who produce it come from or hail
from a country that abolished the status of Spanish as an official language with
its 1987 constitution, effectively relegating it to the less-than-prestigious
category of a "colonial language" associated with a pre-American past
and with the members of the elite who had access to the educational institutions
in which it was taught. Spanish in the Philippines, paradoxically, however, as
the authors remind us, retains its value as the expressive medium of that country’s
nationalist discourse: it was in this language that the illustrious makers of
the Philippine nation--the activist scholars of the nineteenth century called ilustrados, either reformists and
revolutionaries, whose company included the revered names of José Rizal,
Marcelo H. del Pilar, Graciano López Jaena, Antonio Luna, and Apolinario
Mabini, among many others--wrote and published and orated in the language of
Castilla With this broken genealogy in
mind, the authors of Literatura
hispanofilipina actual attribute to the literary phenomenon "la
capacidad de manifestar integralmente la entidad filipina" (9), giving it a
claim to a wholeness whose fracturing, the authors aver, lies at the roots of
the country's continuing state of dependency and the nation's continuing search
for identity (10). Donoso and Gallo, in drawing attention to recent Filipino
writing in Spanish, refute therewith the notion that Spanish language had
sounded its swan song in 1987.
Philippine
literature in Spanish divides broadly into three great blocks in Donoso and
Gallo’s periodization. The first block extends from the end of the nineteenth
century to the beginning of the Pacific War in 1945, a span that embraces the
work of the cosmopolite ilustrados of
the nationalist Propaganda Movement and extends through the period of the
American colony and commonwealth, prior to the Japanese occupation. It is not
clear why the authors did not foreground at this point the emergence of a
vibrant Hispanophilippine production of the early decades of the twentieth
century that saw the publications of Wenceslao Retana, Rafael Palma, Claro M.
Recto, Jesús Balmori, Enrique K. Laygo, and Manuel Bernabé, among many others
whose period and achievement has been dignified with the name of "The
Golden Age of Spanish Philippine Literature." The second historical block
mapped by Donoso and Gallo accounts for the three decades, from 1946 to 1987,
when Hispanophilippine literature, along with the works written in the islands'
vernaculars, are further eclipsed by the hegemony of English; during which time
a national language based on Tagalog is formed on the Bahasa model, a sort of
Philippine coiné. The authors reserve a bit of praise for the
accomplishment of such Filipinos writers in English who openly acknowledge the
Hispanic presence in Philippine culture (as do Nick Joaquín, F. Sionil José and
Bienvenido Lumbera), and yet, surprisingly, they remain silent on the
achievements of Filipino writers in Spanish in the postwar period leading up to
the People’s Power Revolution of 1986. The third phase of
Hispanophilippine literature accounts for works emerging after the
nullification of Spanish language officiality, and it is the production of this
period that constitutes the main focus of the book.
Literatura hispanofilipina actual itself is divided into the two
parts titled “Estudio crítico” and “Antología.” The part of critical study
provides an overview of Spanish writing in Philippine letters since its
colonial beginnings inclusive of the following: a discussion of the
"linguistic canon" in its relations to Hispanophilippine literature;
a summary of the media channels by which Spanish language expression attempts
to address an international audience; a discussion of the "origins"
of twenty-first century Philippine literature in Spanish, consisting of a
typology of recent publications with representative figures; and a survey of
contemporary Philippine literature in Spanish. These synoptic chapters of the
first part are followed by a series of studies of individual Hispanofilipino
writers, both modern and contemporary, whom Donoso and Gallo have identified as
leading figures in the field. The section "Continuidad histórica"
gives an account of the three established writers of some renown (virtually a
triumvirate) of Guillermo Gómez Rivera, Edmundo Farolán Romero, and Hilario
Ziálcita Legarda. The last chapter of the critical study part gives a detailed
account of the rising stars in the field (Edwin Agustín Lozada, Elizabeth
Medina, Paulina Constancia, Daisy López, Marra Lanot, Noel Guivani Ramiscal,
and "Otros escritores"). That women authors figure prominently in
this list is a salutary sign in a literary landscape long dominated by men. In
the part of the book dedicated to the anthology can be found pieces and
excerpts of the previously discussed authors, and these texts fall into the
generic categories of poetry, narrative, theater and essay. Passim, the book’s footnotes provide detailed
bibliographical information to those who wish to pursue further research in this
overlooked body of literature.
Explaining
thus the whys and wherefores of this largely forgotten body of literature and
its tradition, Donoso and Gallo’s history-cum-anthology can serve as a traveler’s
guide through the scattered texts of recent and contemporary literary works
written in Spanish language by Filipinos, both in the archipelago and abroad. Another
unique feature of this study is the authors’ account of the e-publishing Hispanophilippine
works on the internet, by which they undergo a globalizing, deterritorializing
dissemination, one that allows it to link up with the discursive universes of
literature “originating” in Spain and Latin America.
Informing
the authors’ classification of recent Hispanophilippine literature is John W.
Burton's 1975 categorization of the same body of works. In Burton’s broad
taxonomy divides these writers into 1) Tradicionalistas; 2) Innovadores; and 3)
Experimentalistas. The first two comprise the authors who have learned the
language at home, as a lengua materna,
going on to write either in a classical mode, as in the case of Francisco
Zaragoza (Quiapo, 1914-1990) who combined his classicism with modernist
elements. A clearer distinction could be made between the Innovators, who
crossed from neomodernismo to postmodernism, and the Experimentalistas, the
latter being those who learned their Spanish in school or by other means and wrote
in two or more languages. The works of the Experimentalistas are represented by
the Duchamps-inspired "Desnuda bajando por la ecalera" of Federico
Espino Licsi, published in 1970 (28-30).
Among
the authors to whom Donoso and Gallo give special recognition are Guillermo
Gómez Rivera, who, as a poet, dramatist, essayist, and polemicist who defends
in his writings the idea of Spanish as a patrimonial language of the
Philippines (35-36). A writer representing the group of author writing in the
diaspora is Edwin Agustín Lozada. Born in the Philippines in 1958 and resident
in Spain, Lozada is the founder of the Carayan Press and webmaster of Revista Filipina stands out like Gómez
Rivera in keeping the legacy of Philippine literature in Spanish alive and promoting
its stature in the world literature. The search for the Hispanic grounds of
Philippine identity has an intimate dimension, as manifest in the Lozada's Bosquejos (2002), in which the poet give
voice to the experience of solitude and recourse to a certain aestheticism; or,
more exactly, to "un amor nerudiano a la belleza." The case of
Elizabeth Medina--born in Quezon City in 1954, raised and educated in the
United States, married to a Chilean and living in Santiago de Chile since
1983--is especially illuminating for understanding the significance of
Hispanophilippine literature today as writing that is subject to the
dislocations of the expatriate. Donoso and Gallo see in Medina's Sampaguitas en la cordillera "un
libro mosaico, una auto/etnobiografía en la cual relata acontecimientos de su
vida y su familia, especialmente como consecuencia de los hechos que afectaron
a los Medina durante la invasión japonesa" (42). With a uniquely
trans-continental perspective, Medina seeks in her “mosaic book” to create a
bridge between the Philippines and Latin America.
Something different, a metaphysical perspective, one that Donoso and Gallo call “anagócica,” finds expression in the haikus of Noel Guivani Ramiscal’s Noelses. Selected Poems in English, Tagalog, Spanish (1985-2005). Donoso and Gallo remark the way these poems evoke the gestation or phenomenological origins of the world, achieving therewith an “eschatology,” a mystical elevation glimpsed in silence: "No te temas,” writes Ramiscal, “La luz ahuyenta la sequía / De las preguntas y los dioses" (109). Writing itself for Guivani Ramiscal amounts to an act of “weaving the void,” but there is somehow somewhere a miraculous burgeoning of something: "Tejo el vacío / De las palabras en papel / Mientras se abre un girasol" (110).
Throughout
Literatura hispanofilipina actual the
authors return repeatedly to the idea that the very persistence of a
contemporary Hispanophilippine literature is a value unto itself: it is an
"elaboración cultural" that continues "una cierta
tradición" carrying a patrimony of unknown riches into the present, resources
with which to interpret this present in ways in which the dominant culture remains
oblivious (44-45). In the context of the re-Hispanicized present, in Donoso and
Gallo’s multifaceted portrait of the Hispanophone author as Filipino, identity
matters to the subject who wonders at his place and role in a world not of his
making, who asks what place and role she must assume to make the world the home
it should be. A correlative to this theme, expressed perhaps most saliently in
the poetry of Edmundo Farolán Romero (Manila, 1943), is the motif of the
fragmented self: of identity that is broken, alienated, dispossessed,
displaced, and mediatized. This universal condition is experienced with special
poignancy by the Filipino as a sort of global villager in search of “roots and
routes” (as in Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s homonymous topoi for “navigating”
Caribbean and Pacific Islander literatures), and it is by the route of the
Hispanic way, if Donoso and Gallo and their authors are correct, that the
Filipino will discover the roots of this identity.
Literatura hispanofilipina actual does an outstanding job of bringing a vibrant and significant body of works to the attention of a wide Spanish-reading public. The study foregrounds the critical resistance performed in those works with a generous account of their producers, publishing venues and reading publics, both actual and potential. By giving the reasons of being of contemporary Philippine literature in Spanish, and by providing more than plausible reasons for reading it, this slim but substantial volume more than amply justifies a reloading the canons, so to speak, of a what is becoming a truly global Hispanophone literature.
Iowa State University