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Antonio Enriquez

AWARENESS

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on
his not understanding it.” ---Upton Sinclair, American novelist

WHILE I WAS preparing the intro for the 14th Iligan National Writers
Workshop book, I kept hearing over the radio and seeing on TV and newspapers
the daily news about corruption, over-pricing, unsolved political killings, and
radio commentators saying that we don’t have enough rice, the Filipino food
staple, in the market. That last item, if indeed true, is serious and a delicate
matter. Because the Filipino cannot live without eating rice; bread doesn’t really
satisfy him and make him full. Sabes tu que quieres yo decir –you know what I
mean.
Since, always, all this is heard daily, how many weeks have gone already
that it has gained its own force and will --- that whether I like it or not it got into
my head. So strong that what I was already about to write today stalled like a
dying motor car, which had run out of gas or its battery dead.
And this took over: what is important and relevant now is not how the
creative writing workshops or M. F. A. programs can help the writing fellows to
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improve their craft, but what we are writing now or about to write --– that is
important and decisive.
So, I browsed the internet in order to see what was the literary scene
during those times of crisis, anarchy, and social injustice. What were the writers
writing in those times? And this was what I discovered: that what was written
evolved from the grim situation of that period and the writers’ response to it.
And these which were written have become classics that we read, enjoy, and get
much joy from them today.
Look at these, these writers from Russia, U.S.A., and France to Spain, and
I will not cut down as much what I took, so that you won’t say I only made this
up.
According to the internet & other sources:

• Charles Dickens
His novels, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, for instance, we can say
were all social commentary, and he was a fierce critic against poverty and social
stratification of the Victorian society. In his second novel, Oliver Twist (1839) with
its brutal images of poverty and crime, he so shocked the readers that the slum
area in London was cleared of scum and muck.
Dickens’ fiction “was probably all the more powerful in changing public
opinion in regard to class inequalities. He often depicted the exploitation and
repression of the poor and condemned the public officials and institutions that
allowed such abuses to exist. For example, the prison scenes in Little Dorrit and
The Pickwick Papers were prime movers in having the Marshalsea and Fleet
Prisons shut down.”

• Victor-Marie Hugo
In the English-speaking world, Hugo is known for his novels Les
Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (French title, Notre-(Dame de Paris).
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He was a passionate supporter of republicanism, and his work was devoted to


political and social issues and artistic trends of his time.
He was elevated to the peerage by King Louis-Philippe in 1841 and
entered the Higher Chamber as a pair de France, where he spoke “against the
death penalty and social injustice, and in favor of freedom of the press and self-
government for Poland ...
“When Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III) seized complete power in 1851,
establishing an anti-parliamentary constitution, Hugo openly declared him a
traitor of France. He fled to Brussels, then Jersey, and finally settled with his
family on the channel island of Guernsey at Hauteville House, where he would
live in exile until 1870. His influence was credited in the removal of the death
penalty from the constitutions of Geneva, Portugal and Colombia.”

• Ivan Turgenev
Whenever Turgenev is mentioned, what always springs to my mind is his
A Sportsman's Sketches (Записки охотника), also known as Sketches from a
Hunter's Album or Notes of a Hunter, which first made his name. It was based on
his own observations of peasant life and nature “while hunting in the forests
around his mother's estate of Spasskoye, most of the stories were published in a
single volume in 1852 and are credited with having influenced public opinion in
favor of the abolition of serfdom in 1861. Turgenev himself considered the
Sportman's Sketches to be his most important contribution to Russian literature,
and Tolstoy, amongst others, heartily agreed, saying that his evocations of nature
in these stories were unsurpassed. ”

• Mark Twain
From 1901, until his death in 1910, we learn that Twain was vice-president
of the American Anti-Imperialist League; and listen to this --- which opposed the
annexation of the Philippines by the United States and had "tens of thousands of
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members". He wrote many political pamphlets for the organization. The Incident
in the Philippines, posthumously published in 1924, was in response to the Moro
Crater Massacre, in Jolo, south of Manila, in which six hundred Moros were
killed; including women and children. We don’t need yet to ask ourselves why
“many of his neglected and previously uncollected writings on anti-imperialism
appeared for the first time in book form only in 1992. Twain was critical of
imperialism in other countries as well …. He was highly critical of European
imperialism, notably of Cecil Rhodes, who greatly expanded the British Empire,
and of Leopold II, King of the Belgians. King Leopold's Soliloquy is a stinging
political satire about his private colony, the Congo Free State. Reports of
outrageous exploitation and grotesque abuses led to widespread international
protest in the early 1900s, arguably the first large-scale human rights
movement.” And reading farther: “Leopold’s rubber gatherers were tortured,
maimed and slaughtered until the turn of the century, when the conscience of the
Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.”

• Miguel de Cervantes
Our referring to writers as exceptional proponents of social justice,
morality, and freedom is not complete without a Spanish writer on our list;
understandably since we were a colony of Spain for nearly five centuries, and
our interest of her greatest writer has not waned: Cervantes has been declared a
Christian humanist.
Don Quixote (sometimes spelled "Quijote") is actually two separate books
that cover the adventures of Don Quixote, also known as the knight or man of La
Mancha, “a hero who carries his enthusiasm and self-deception to unintentional
and comic ends. On one level, Don Quixote works as a satire of the romances of
chivalry which ruled the literary environment of Cervantes' time. However, the
novel also allows Cervantes to illuminate various aspects of human nature by
using the ridiculous example of the delusional Quixote.”
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Since it is more delightful to read him than to churn out symbolism and
metaphors to get at the meanings of Don Quixote --- let us say that we don’t have
to look farther than our nose to see the double-meaning, the hypocrisy,
smugness, and the pure and unadulterated evil nurturing in our country’s
political leaders.
And what does all this say to us?
That great works have always exhalted for truth and humanity: their great
concern is for social justice, morality, and freedom.
That we need to change our theme, the content of what we are or shall be
writing about. It is about time that we should stop writing of a school teacher
falling in love with his student or vice-versa; a writer’s trip to Europe on a
writing fellowship grant; an old spinster craving for a stud/lover; and about
one’s trip to the mall. Dios mio!
As the world needs these classics, we also need to redirect the middling
path most of our literary works have taken, turn them from mediocrity to
lucidity and hardnosed usefulness.
Let’s go back to the masters: as one Victor Hugo, says the critic René
Wellek in History of Modern Criticism: 1750-1950, Yale University,1966, “came to
think of literature more and more in terms of its social function. The civilizing
power of art, we are told, imposes on the writer the duties of an intentional
reformer; the poet’s function is to change ‘charity to fraternity, laziness to utility,
iniquity to justice, the crowd to a people, the mob to nation, the nations to
humanity, war to love, etc.’”
But before we shall think that art is for purely political propaganda,
Wellek continues, saying, “Style determines the life of a work and the fame of a
poet. He rejects the direct utility of art, its immediate service to political truths.”
And here, less we forget, he quotes Hugo, ‘Art should, above all, be its own
proper aim, and it should moralize, civilize, edify along the way but without
deviating from its path.’”
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So, what we wish to say, after everything, is that we need literary works of
the sort we just adumbrated above, in order our readers will see through the
scum and the evildoers will be aware that we are aware, aware as Dominican
writer Julia Alvarez, author of the novel The Time of the Butterflies, was, saying in
an interview:
“--- but I also need to make sense of it [out of the mass of information,
terrorism, 9/11, Iraq]…How do I make meaning of the experience of living in
this world? That's what I think fiction can help us do. It provides a way to
emotionally integrate and make sense of this mysterious world through story
and character. …. This awareness doesn't have to come out in obvious ways, and
in fact the writing gets flat and useless if it comes out in obvious ways. But good
writing has a level of awareness of its own time. So if you are living in Nazi
Germany, say, and you are writing delightful, exquisitely beautiful little clueless
poems and stories, well, how can those be of value to your readers trying to
integrate the reality around them? …. So I agree with Milosz's observation that
good poems, good stories must have a certain level of awareness to be of value to
the people we are writing for in our own time and down the line to others in the
future.”
And we can do it, too. Our past shines like a coconut-frond torch of being
first in many episodic adventures in history. I had used novelist F. Sionil Jose’s
pamphlet Gleanings from a Life in Literature, as source before and I’ll use it again,
for it has not at all lost its luster.
Listen: It says there that the Philippines was the first republic in Asia; and
rising against Spain in 1898, our insurrection became the first Asian anti-colonial
rebellion; and fighting for freedom against the U.S. invaders we became too the
first Asian country to resist and fight against Western Imperialism: 250, 000
Filipinos died in that war, it was U.S. first atrocities in Asia.
As the world chants praises for Thermopylae in Ancient Greece, in which
Leonidas, the Spartan king, and his men all died defending Greece, we too
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should cry mabuhay! for the Battle of Tirad Pass. Here the young General
Gregorio del Pilar and 48 of his men perished defending the pass against the
Texas Rangers.
We have a stronger claim than that that we can do it, redirect our
mediocre path and write the stuff which spawns classics; for it was done before.
In his book, Mr. Sionil José has, in simpler but thoughtful terms, advocated and
endorsed a moral order and social concern, which we find in the Rosales saga
novels—Po-on, Tree, My Brother, My Executioner, The Pretenders, and Mass—to
obstruct the fruition of what Atlantic magazine editor, James Fallows, saw as a
“damaged culture.”
And as they say, the next move is ours.
O, Yes --- before I forget: Our national hero, José Rizal, executed by Spain
for advocating for reforms, not rebellion, was the first post colonial writer the
world knew.

End

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