1. Voice In A World Of
Voices
I BELIEVE the same itch on our skin that calls us to write
about who we are as a people should be applied to the cut on
our souls as individual writers when the question of identity
becomes that, a question. For I believe the problem of why we
can't arrive at a clear Filipino cultural identity in world
literature, or a successful presence there, really has a deeper
root in our idea of nationhood (an idea full of denials,
akin to a social criticism that desires a Filipino's finding
pride in the indigenous without acknowledging the cultural
mutations the everyday Filipino goes through in time). This deeper root is
nowhere near a collective physicality, instead resides in a deductive view
of the elements in that abstract composite called the nation, which upon
closer examination may not look like a nation at all.
To be candid and quick, I think one
reason why we can't have presence, or can't come up with a
big impact as a load of writers, to a global readership -- among
other political or marketing reasons -- can be found
basically in our inability to collectively (and democratically)
arrive at a large-scale cultural voice with the ring of
integrity. For that's where, I believe, we should start. However, that
collective voice that shall be the sum of many voices cannot start from an
abstraction assigned by a wise man upon his fellow "wise men."
Regarding integrity (and democracy),
it really looks to me quite ludicrous to hear of a people
looking for its identity from the starting point of an
abstract whole instead of from its particulars, as if a
nation's voice can be found in emblems like the flag instead
of in diverse symbols like the land's variegated vegetation.
Identity demands integrity. And unless one's identity chooses not to rest principalia-style
on a corrupt comfort zone of dis-integrity (wherein all the variations in a
society is judged as intolerable in favor of a uniform aesthetic utopia), integrity
as we know it -- my fellow fellows --
will keep on starting from such flowers in a garden as the flower of an old banana tree instead of from the voice of a
philosopher-photographer who thinks a garden should live through a
composite panoramic dream of it and its ecology. The integrity of a garden, I
would tend to believe, comes from toiling at the demands of
the plants' diversity. This presupposes recognition of
identities. However, could this photographer's fruit of a panoramic vision,
recognizing diversity, yet be used to rally the very voice of our identities
around one single unifying aesthetic church, given our very bad
concept of democracy as elitist or partisan, as niche- instead of entire
state-benefitting?
If the Filipino writer is finding it high time
to talk the way it wants to talk, the way Jamaican
poetry uses Jamaican English at one extreme, all in the name
of a possible quest for identity to package one's integrity, I
cannot understand why he begrudges himself talk about the
diversity of selves within his cities. While many
writers prefer to write (and edit, and read for a publisher)
from within a subconscious uniformity of ideals, it is as though they are
seeking to be different in the global seminar of national voices, but
hate the idea of tolerating differences within their own national
voice.
My hands have always believed in
writing the way the whole of me wants to write, and in
writing about my soul's own experiences. Experiences, yes,
also as a member of a race, but firstly as a member of the
composite that includes my heart, my restraints cum cowardices, my
weaknesses, my hatreds, my loves, my own counter-prejudices, my own scruples
cum self-criticalities, my imaginings. This approach may of course not be
healthy to one's writing "career" in, say, a
country like ours. Here, after all, so-called editorship
often looks for writing that simulates the editors' own or at
least the majority's prose or prosodic style and jargon. This behavior is not
my impression of writing in a foreign country with a reputation for
competent literature, a behavior wherein you see writers as friends considering
it taboo to be "criticizing" each other's work like
the French. That latter country is here and is ours. (Though that
would be the least of my worries if you were me, and you'd
have to be something like Americanized me on this to be how I
am with this. Which is the whole damn point, come to
think of it.)
For the question of true identity in
writing, let's say in fiction, I prefer to think in terms of
the central character's experience/s than in terms of that
character's experience as a simplified symbol of/for a nation
or niche. Herein I believe is the formula or key to coming up
with a universal presence, if presence demands integrity.
Again, unfortunately, this may not at all be healthy to one's
career in writing when one hopes to write in and from a town
where writers as individual characters (or at least as
individual stylists) are not encouraged to exist. But then, .
. . the hell one might care. And -- ironically -- maybe you'd
have to say that yourself to find yourself further.
I know America didn't teach us
democracy, the Malolos constitution is evidence of that (despite Rizal's
doubts and Aguinaldo's ego), but
in the American tradition let me now shout, "Power to
other voices!"
2. The Marxist and the
Businessman Target A Market
I MIGHT be inclined to rally, in my usual street form of
Marxism, for the better choice of writing for one's kind of
people alone instead of all the nation's people, one's niche (as maybe writing for a nation or
city might be too ambitious, how much more for a US- and
Europe-dominated planet!) -- and thus might tend to
question usage of such phrases as "only writing what's worthy". In the
sense that contemplating "worth" presupposes the necessity of listening to
judges who would have conferred on themselves the title of a
jury poring over the issue of what's "truly" worthy
and what's not -- judging on whose behalf we usually don't
know and, yes, probably shouldn't care.
The average reader? That really
depends on whether that's your target market. For, after all,
the producer -- the writer -- decides on the market/audience,
wide or narrow, he wants to commune with. This is the point
of view the '80s Marxist critic and the
turn-of-the-millennium businessman would agree on.
How does this section connect to the concern of the first section?
Simple, a nation's writers are noticed in the global market not by its
nationalist clamors but by the interest it solicits in the international
arena. If we've gone tired of writing for all our neighbors about Jose
Rizal's worth in our time, always failing to get their attention, then
perhaps it's time we turn our writing to those neighbors alone who care for
our concerns. Guess what, those types of people in your own neighborhood
would have the same concerns as those same types of people in a neighborhood
in Uganda.
A nation's writers are noticed abroad not for the national uniform
they're wearing courtesy of a PR firm's advise, they're noticed by
neighborhoods all over the globe who find out that these writers from
another continent somewhere seem to be saying the same things they've been
saying and are saying it better.
3. The Market and
the Audience
THE sole challenge, therefore, should be the
marketplace/audience alone. After all, we probably should all
be pragmatic businessmen, especially when we begin to worry
about the elusive dream of selling or, before that, the
soul-shattering nightmare of wanting to get published.
But, again, by a marketplace I don't mean to limit the writer to a
venue for a mind-meeting with people possessed by a "universal
mind", which once was an ideal for a literary audience, an imaginary people with special gifts for poetry and prose
appreciation. Aesthetic scientists have already convincingly
validated the impossibility of targeting such a mind from
the pedestal of one's cultural addresses, more obviously so
in multicultural countries like the US and
multi-"cultures" cities like multi-class Manila.
So, I may prefer not to worry about that mind and go on with
a mind towards addressing the people who would readily listen
to my stuff. Can't win 'em all, simply put. For, after all,
my integrity may not even be in the mastery of a craft
(mastered through the aesthetics of a hegemonic
universities-based establishment -- an aesthetics for
something called the "universal mind," perhaps),
but may rather be in an indulgence over an art's expandable/bendable rules, being an art that has the potential of being
returned to the streets or being posited in the face of an
unliterary intelligentsia.
However, this is not at all as if I
would be trying to dictate certain terms. Again, I am
interested solely in the promotion of an integrity deriving
from the individual -- achieved simply by being honest and
true to oneself as a writer, undaunted by the demands of a
trend or accepted style and its variants, or by manners, or,
in regards to our present issue, by all sorts of nationalisms that might try
-- Department of Tourism-fashion -- to please a present global taste.
But this individual would neither worry about such
universalisms (usually USA universities-based) as
mentioned in the preceding paragraph, nor about a global
presence which happens to be this essay's opening paragraph's
mission. Having said this, I should now be inclined to
pronounce that perhaps being not read or liked or understood
by so many (in one's country; or in the international world
of acclaiming critics, mostly whites), including not being
published in the establishment presses during one's time,
might not necessarily validate a literary worthlessness. In
one's time, perhaps, that may be obvious. And in the presence
of our nation's forgetful un-historied-ness and unquestioning
hagiography (not historicism), that should be reiterated.
Now, this attitude -- if it had grown to become one -- might be labeled as
one among those comforted by the embrace of
what's also been called the "alternative"! And so, . . . what is
this alternative? Where do these alternative elements reside, in the sour
grape groves of an imagined vineyard? In rock music, in aesthetic thought, in political and
social and religious thought, and likewise in literature,
many have derived from this area and had to be "discovered" by some liberating interests
(corporate and what-not), thanks to time's flow and progress. The earth is
old and populated enough now to feel comfortable with the burgeoning trend
of niche marketing, so that "sour-graping" has already been sublimated into
what we are witnessing as alternative niche-creations.
Expectedly, these niches become targets for the threatened ire of the
utopias of the long-ago established. Thus, in this burgeoning world of alternativity,
the counter-lambasting: the widening global disrespect for concepts of
"credible writing," or "well-written
writings," utopian labels pronounced from the corridors of
establishment niches, ringing incessantly and dangerously with malice.
Dangerously, I still say, because still in power.
But. If we truly know our history,
should this alternativism always to be regarded as also in danger
of turning into something just as "hegemonic" and
oppressive if allowed to take over? Oh yes. But, just as an
aside on a possible ethos for a new generation -- if one were
a member of a once-"oppressed group" oppressed by the
judgments of a now-past jury, it should make that member know
better than to become that new oppressor in the now-present. Alternativism, then, should teach one the virtues of
democracy and multiculturalism that protected him and allowed
him to become. For, truly, virtues these are that include the lessons
of the diversity of esthetic tastes and beliefs, virtues our
country's anthology and coffeetable-book editors presently sadly yet need to
accumulate more of.
4. Market
Expansion
FORGIVE my earlier implying the thought "targeting a
market." I should have used something like "expect
sympathy." For some might now be hankering for the
thought "a writer writes as a writer! leaving the
marketing angle to the blurbs maker!" Granted. I stand
corrected.
Then there are probably these other
complaints on my avoiding the virtue of satisfying the calls
of a "universal mind," so that I might now be
forced to agree that indeed one must try to seek as much as
possible an audience as wide and "universal" as
there is possible or available to one's luck. However, just
as the above first argument comes to me as full of validity,
I may yet now fully throw back the latter mode of thinking about a wide audience by saying, "worrying about that
universality is just as much of an interference on one's
writing drift and desires and is thus tantamount to
simulating the corrupted mind-habit of
marketing/advertising for the many." This would be the reason why I
would prefer to call one's arrival at that multi-million
minds' appreciation a stroke of some luck, a fluke as flukes
go. (Was G.G. Marquez, for example, considering while writing
One Hundred Years . . . a universal mind as
defined by, say, the Latin American bestseller lists, or by
the Swedish Nobel committee, or the University of the
Philippines faculty? Mmmm, maybe, but not with much
certainty, I'd believe. Definitely also not the expectations
of a Saul Bellow who would feel uncomfortable about writing for
academics while shamelessly proceeding with a pedestrian
American prose.).
I agree such "subcultures"
or "counter-cultures" as feminism must reach out to
non-feminists and even male chauvinists, socialists to even
the capitalists of the land, the anti-Americans to the
Starbucks-congregating yuppie crowd supposedly brainwashed by
the virtues of American globalization, and so on and so forth. That
should already be an undeniable given, and I swear I was
already assuming it as quite a given while I was writing that
third section above. When I wrote, for example, "I may
prefer not to worry about that mind and go on with a mind
towards addressing the people who would readily listen to my
stuff," it was all in the light of and in reference to a
state of hegemony, with which I was taking issue. As to those writers very much concerned with a (perhaps G8-inspired)
necessity for universality, for reaching out, I'd rather not
pick up a fight with here. My arguments were, after all,
primarily directed at what Marxist critics call "the
politics of publishing," with editors and other
authorities as my referent, and the "politics of distribution," with
booksellers with static ideas about the market as another referent. McDonald's recognizes the limits of universality
and thus spreads its American Dream with tints of geographical adaptations.
But, again, about trying to reach out
to as many people as possible, I say yes! even to editors whose
varied tastes may be quite narrow. I still cannot imagine a
quarrel with them. But if we are now to put ourselves in the
shoes of so-called alternative scene elements who think the
usual editorship in the recurring present is not being
"truly universal" but is instead being abominably
clique-prone, you will see that it is precisely true
universalism, or a real democracy, that they in this
alternative zone are bleeding for. Some might be surprised at
the number of such voices crying out on the fringes, asking
for that expanded universality from a supposedly conservative
establishment that has the access to the present
"politics of publishing." They, as a loose
community but far from being community-less
or small-club, have alternative writers and small-capital
publishers congregating online, intent on pushing and proving
to themselves the validity of their voices in the global
grid, hoping for empathies, simply by being themselves and directly getting
readership feedbacks via email. On the other side of the fence are the
established ones who love to wallow in the illusion that they have the
empathy of many, even as their books rot in the mall bookstores' shelves. Which is
another issue altogether.
But certainly, yes -- this transport called being alternative
cannot be an excuse for
"mediocrity" (even from a more democratic
standard). Indeed, as some would like to think, good writing
is often noticed, bad writing usually the ones ignored. Even
I, who consider myself a relative member of the multi-taste
alternative, would have to ignore bad writing myself
according to what my knowledge's purportedly-widened judgment
can't allow. However, I confess to have primarily ignored a
lot of the establishment's writing after consuming
paragraphs, dismissing many as tired, even while the
powers-that-be in rosters of editorship arrogantly insist,
in self-instigated reviews, on their goodness. But, as we
said, goodness and badness cannot really be our topic here
(for we won't arrive at anything), and so I hasten to remind
my reader that I am here taking issue merely with the
politics of "who decides on what's good" and "how
they do it".
And so who is it I am writing this
for, then? Well, they to whom Identity may be found to be
quite urgent for an impending felt dilemma, writing as no
one. They to whom writing about the things they'd like to
really write about is checked by what older/peer patrons or
professor editors or contest jury members or the publishers in New York would rather
they write about, all the time, like ambitious modeling school candidates
constantly guessing as to what
these x-factors modeling agencies look for are. They to whom writing the way they'd like to
write prose or poetry is checked by an establishment's idea
of the valid and the "beautiful." They who've been attracted to street English
as possibly interesting to write in but suspects it unrewarding perhaps to
their writing career. They to whom writing prose not in the fashion
of a Nick Joaquin, in spite of Joaquin's superior prose, may
be a dangerous path for a young writer. They to whom a poet
like the US' John Ashbery may be dangerously anti-academic.
They to whom the subconscious belief that a nation should
chirp identically has already corrupted their young brains to the extent
that they now think of this Virtue as
something worth conserving.
Indeed it boils down to this.
History, including literary history, is written by people,
not gods. When a certain period referred to Moby Dick as a
forgettable piece of street journal, that was literature
history as written by the establishment of that time. Later,
literary studies and literary historians would declare the
book a classic. A lot of books long considered unworthy, for
example, have cropped up from the backlog of many a publisher
in the '80s and '90s and in now multi-cultural academic
America. It's quite obvious to still state it, but us writers
won't be able to write out our fates in the world of future
letters, or in the futures to the futures. It will always be
the generations in these futures who will do this, operating
from their own hegemonies.
Should I end this essay now with
these disclaimers, then, if they are disclaimers? Firstly,
the disclaimer recognizing now, perhaps, the eternal curse on
humanity -- reflected on the products of the intelligentsia,
with the attending action politics on their differing voices and
their contending philosophies on aesthetic beauty. That will be a disclaimer,
then, here negating my earlier clamor for more
democracy in a literary world eternally propelled by the very
nature of politics, taste, and human judgment with all their
attending frailties and blinded calls for war and annihilation, to be
extra-wordy about it. And secondly, the disclaimer conceding that the
necessity for revolution among the oppressed voices of
stylistics is but a part of an earthly process of
perpetuating the natural law of conflicts God constantly
makes sure remains operative in the world.
Seeing all this in this light, then, what is significant literature to a writer's desired readers, local or global, will be decided
firstly through the writer's integrity in defining what he/she wants to
see in the arena of conflicts, where he/she wants to go in this arena, what he/she wants to do
when the bull or Roman assassin starts to run towards him/her. Not so much by the
place (or formula in a place) where he/she comes from. [VSV]
