Why literature? It does not teach us how to run a business and make a fortune. The traditional function of the writer, the poet, and the storyteller is that of a teacher, a recorder of history, and the infallible creator of the granite foundation on which a nation stands. In other words, literature gives a nation its identity and memory.
What is Greece without Homer, England without Shakespeare, Spain without Cervantes, and Filipinas without Rizal?
Another function of the writer is to create a clear mirror of his time, emphasizing the obvious, so that his readers will be able to see themselves as they are. Self knowledge is the most important of all knowledge. It enables us to know our strengths, which we will then put to the test, and to point out our weaknesses, which we must vanquish.
Perhaps the least understood but most important function of literature is in its depiction of moral dilemmas. In presenting such dilemmas, literature enables readers to make distinctions between right and wrong and allows us to use our God-given freedom of moral choice. No religion can do this. Nor any government or political movement. Literature, above all, teaches us ethics. Only literature can; for this reason, Jesus was also a story teller, and the Bible the greatest novel ever written.
Literature—the noblest of the arts—implies that writers are of noble bearing. It is not always so; in the recent past some of us pandered to Marcos. We can be wicked, and corrupt—and this is why I have always insisted writers must be judged not only by their pious pronouncements but by how they live. The inseparable Socratic precept of virtue and excellence, valid for the ancients, is even more our need today.
A writer contributes to the culture of his society. How important is this culture to a nation and its development? If culture determines direction, perhaps, with it we can answer these questions: In the fifties and sixties, we were THE country in Southeast Asia. Why did we slip behind? Why have our neighbors surpassed us? To blame Marcos is too easy.
The American writer, James Fallows, postulated more than a decade ago that our pitiable condition can be traced to our "damaged" culture. Really? Pakikisama, utang na loob, pasikat, ningas cogon? Aren't we moving forward despite these?
Much as I would like to believe that our economy is doing better, several facts deny this euphoric perception. Our population increase is eating up all our economic gains. Our natural resources have been ravaged and they are not renewable. Some 15 years ago, more than 50 percent of grade school pupils had to stop at grade five; millions of adult Filipinos therefore are ill prepared for better jobs. Corruption is rife in government, our courts are discredited, and no citizen can feel safe with our police.
We know enough of our poverty—it is everywhere for us to see in our squatter shacks, our street children. It explains the migration of thousands of Filipinos so that they will have a better life. If the Filipino dream cannot be fulfilled here, perhaps—just perhaps—it will be in the gilded cities of America, in the pitiless deserts of the Middle East, and even in the yakuza brothels in Japan.
But a greater poverty afflicts us, distorts the national will, and damns us with the wastefulness of cronyism and corruption. And this poverty, exacerbated by a profligate oligarchy and a leadership that has lost its ethical moorings, is the poverty of the spirit.
How do we reclaim the sense of nation, of goodwill that in the past lifted our people and our leaders from apathy and propelled them to fight colonialism?
When I read the Noli for the first time as a child I wept over the agony of Sisa and Crispin and Basilio, her two sons wrongly accused by a Spanish friar. That early, I truly learned what injustice was and recognized it as an evil that can only be destroyed by truth, which is justice in action.
We acquire knowledge in the university—how to make money, how to utilize the sciences, -- but wisdom and compassion, these are altogether different acquisitions. If compassion, these literature teaches ethics, then it follows that the literature departments of universities are the ethical centers of these institutions. It follows, further, that universities are also the genuine cathedrals of the nation where we acquire virtue, much more than from those magnificent churches and massive religious rallies.
You will have to contend with the new challenges wrought by technology, and with the old ones that my generation created.
I am truly sorry for all of you because I cannot tell you that the future is rosy. It is bleak because my generation was weak, because we created leaders like Jose Abad Santos, Ramon Magsaysay, Arsenio Lacson, Jose W. Diokno.
Now, the future is for you to shape. You will encounter great difficulty finding jobs. In all probability, within the next few years, many of you will lose your idealism if not your integrity as, indeed, so many of my own generation have betrayed the ideals of our youth.
More than forty years ago when I was finishing my first novel, The Pretenders, this idea came to me with great lucidity and finality that we can yet get out of our deepest malaise only by accepting the necessity of a nationalist revolution—the same revolution that the masa mounted against the Spanish regime in 1896.
Revolution? Come again—isn't one being waged now by the New People's Army? And what about our Moro brothers who are also waging war and demanding a separate state?
Let me explain.
Our aborted revolution in 1896 clearly defined the enemy—Spanish colonialism. Now we must clearly identify our enemy that enemy is colonialism in its most despicable form. It is the colonialism of the Filipino elite itself. a nation need not be a colony of a foreign power — it can be a colony of its own leaders. We are a colony of the rich Chinese mestizos who send their money to China, to Hong Kong and to Taiwan. We are a colony of the rich Spanish mestizos who send their money to Europe. And, finally, we are a colony of the rich Indios who send their money to Switzerland and America. Their forebears collaborated with our colonizers in the past and now they carry their forebears attitudes and vices.
But there is an enemy more insidious than these native colonizers and this enemy lurks in the shadows, in the secret niches of our own psyche. We are a colony because we permit ourselves to be colonized, and because we do not ostracize or condemn our colonizers. Evil prospers when good men are silent. We marched to the tune of phony nationalists like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tañada who opposed land reform. If nationalism is to be truly meaningful, it must have profound social relevance and must be much more than anti-Americanism or simple flag waving. The logic of nationalism or patriotism is sacrifice. What does a nationalist ideology mean to the peasant who fought the Spaniards, the Americans, and the Japanese?
Listen, even if the New People's Army wins, even if the Moros succeed in creating a Moro state—they will still fail because they are Filipinos, hostage to old habits of mind, to the culture that has condemned us, as James Fallows postulated, to ethnicity, the barkada, and the towering egos we never transcend.
Individualism carried to its absurdity. Yabang. This is perhaps the foremost reason why we have never been able to put our act together. Look at the aborted revolution in 1896, the breakup of the Huk leadership and the present splintering of the Communist Party. And our politicians. How yabang they are, how unable to recognize their limitations -- for which reason we have movie stars, basketball players, and TV personalities aspiring for positions they are not intellectually or professionally capable of holding. All because of yabang. And look at our status symbols, the fancy mansions of social climbers, the useless expenditures for frills. All the giddy evidence of yabang that have blighted Filipino society because this yabang is not identified with genuine achievement nor excellence.
It is our educational system that will promote critical standards. The Socratic precept of virtue and excellence. Without these standards, we will always have foisted before us popular politicians who have nothing to offer but hollow promises. So Cory Aquino goes around telling the world she restored democracy in the Philippines with EDSA I. What nonsense. EDSA I was a real revolution, and almost bloodless at that but she turned that revolution into a restoration of the oligarchy.
Yes, we have free elections, albeit often marred by cheating, we have a free and rambunctious press, and we have free worship. But all these are the hollow institutions of democracy — not the essence. The essence of democracy is in the stomach—as when a taxi driver in Washington can eat the steak that President Bush eats in the White House. What lower class Filipinos eat is not the same food that is served in the mansions in Forbes Park. There is widespread hunger in our country now. Many landless workers and slum dwellers eat only once a day. Will revolution change all these?
Revolution by itself is not enough unless it is first imbibed in the heart and mind, unless it is coupled with education—which is a long and tedious process far more difficult than mounting a revolution that simplifies choices.
This education is not just about learning how to manufacture better and cheaper goods, as did Korea and Taiwan. It has to do with our insides, with remoulding our minds, and our guts, and instilling in us an iron sense of nation, vision, and confidence.
Last week, an American visitor asked me if it was possible to liken Philippine conditions today to those in America in the age of the robber barons. I said no, there is a big difference. The Vanderbilts, the J.P. Morgans, the Rockefellers—they were nation builders. They laced America with railroads, built steel industries, they laid down the basic infrastructure of an industrial United States. And, most of all, they did not squander their money abroad. It stayed in America.
So every president goes around with a begging bowl, asking for foreign investments. We do not need these foreign investments—there is enough money in Philippine hands—if these moneys were not sent abroad. When Rafael Salas left government in the 70s to take on a job as population czar in the United Nations, he told me that if Marcos returned all the money he had stashed abroad, our foreign debt then, which was around 21 billion dollars, would be wiped out.
Look at our banking system. How much better things would be if interest rates were not excessive, if our banks operated not as pawnshops but as easy sources of venture capital, if factories were built instead of fancy condos and shopping malls. How much better if our businessmen were to realize that money is like fertilizer. To do any good, it must be spread around. Listen now to the forgotten but egalitarian clichés that fired American enterprise: a Ford in every garage, a chicken in every pot. Eighty million Filipinos; 80,000,000 customers! To achieve such goals is, in itself, revolutionary for revolution need not mean the shedding of blood.
As a writer, I have tried to rekindle our memory and to exalt our past even if it denigrates us. For this past defines who we are, what we can do, and where we can go. Look into this past, and know that we have a revolutionary tradition, that we are a heroic people. Rizal symbolizes all of us.
In the Noli, when Ibarra returns to his hometown, he proceeds to build a school. Rizal affirmed that the way to liberty and progress is also through education. In fact, he was an educator first, then a novelist, an artist, a poet, a sculptor, a medical doctor, a scholar, and a martyr at so young an age, 33. Listen—where in the world is the country that has produced a man like this indio, this Rizal, but Filipinas.
Today, some two million Filipinos are spread all over the world, I hope they will return someday with their expertise to build this nation. It is possible that you will join them. Do injustice to yourselves and to our unhappy country by never forgetting her.
*National Artist for Literature as he delivered his address when he was invited
UP Commenement speaker in Tacloban, Leyte, 2006
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