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HOW did
you begin to write? And why in English?
Friends and strangers alike would ask me
that question. But the notion of beginning still
surprises me until now.
As a child, I loved to draw, to
memorize in my mind’s eye images of the passing day. I
also loved to read—I would finish reading my English
textbooks in one week, when we were supposed to read
them for the whole year. I read ravenously and I read
everything—the ingredients in a can of soup, the
newspaper my father bought every day, the Philippine
Journal of Education my mother subscribed to, the
ten-volume Children’s Classics that an uncle had given
to us.
I grew up in Basa Air Base, Pampanga, in
a small white house with a sloping roof and French
windows. My father was a soldier, when soldiers were
still honorable, and my mother taught Music in school.
The Distance to Andromeda and Other Stories by the
peerless Gregorio Brillantes was the first book I bought
with my own money. Listen to the reasons he writes,
spoken in the third person.
“The answer . . . was tied up somehow
with the town in Tarlac where he was born, and the
acacias beside the house where he grew up, the sounds
that wind and rain made in them. In that house, its
rooms suffused with a clear white light in his memory,
he learned that words, combinations of them, could
unlock the doors to fancy and fable: the strange lands
visited by Gulliver, Lord Greystoke shipwrecked on the
African shore . . . .”
Memory is the mother of all writing, it
has been said, and many of my memories are tied up with
the books I read in English, or imprinted in my mind in
English. I was born of a generation when you were fined
five centavos if you spoke a word of Tagalog in school,
and you did not only learn in English—you also had to be
excellent in it! Essays written with a good hand in
perfect English were marked 100 and tacked on the
bulletin board for the entire world to see.
After my father resigned from military
service, we moved to Quezon City. Our textbooks included
the Philippine Prose and Poetry series, published in the
1950s and constantly reprinted. It collected the
brightest and the best writing in English done by
Filipinos, and I was amazed at its quality. I still
remember “The Scent of Apples” by Bienvenido N. Santos,
where the photograph of a Filipina in a terno is slowly
fading in a crumbling house. I remember “May Day Eve” by
National Artist Nick Joaquin, whose long, first sentence
is also its first paragraph—a startling, shimmering
train of words that sinuously moves from page to page.
It left me breathless.
I went to college at the Ateneo—my prize
for winning the plum spot in a nationwide essay-writing
contest for high-school students, in English. The prize
said I could go to a school of my choice, and I went to
the Ateneo, because it was the school nearest my house
and I could walk to and from school. One day in college,
the writer Linda Ty-Casper came and gave us a workshop.
Mrs. Casper was the valedictorian of her
class at the UP College of Law and has an MA in Law from
Harvard, but she chose to write novels about Philippine
history—in English. She affected no airs, was quiet and
dependable, like the maroon Volkswagen that picked her
up from her parents’ house in Malabon and brought her to
Ateneo every day. I was young and shy, given to dark
moods I could never understand, but the words of Mrs.
Casper were most instructive.
“We can survive almost anything, as long
as we know that what we are suffering has been suffered
before. When our time comes to falter, we can take
comfort in the small, triumphant gestures that rendered
someone, very much like ourselves, indestructible
despite death. Or we can ignore literature and banish
ourselves from our own lives.”
When you are young and in love with
English, these words could make your day. I knew, then,
that I wanted nothing else in the world, except to
write. My days began to blaze with happiness because I
could put order to the chaos—even the sadness—of life.
I was dazed with words. I kept a journal
where I wrote poems, shards of memory, the tug of
dreams. During those days, as Marcel Proust would put
it, “an hour [was] not merely an hour. It [was] a vase
filled with perfumes, plans, sounds and climate.”
I was in love with English and I was in
love with words. I knew, then, that I was finally home.
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