The Writer’s Role
By Jose F. Lacaba
A few years ago, for a writers’ conference in another
Asian country—the Republic of Korea, to be exact—I was asked to give a talk on
what it’s like to be a writer in Asia, a place where we speak and write in many
mutually unintelligible languages, a place about which we know little, outside
of our own national boundaries.
In my lecture, I noted that writers’ conferences are
“helpful because they provide a forum for us to share ideas and experiences,
and perhaps even to air grievances, real or imagined.” At the same time, I
spoke of another type of gathering that deserved to be explored. “Perhaps,” I
wrote back then, “we also need a specifically Asian literary festival similar
to the Osian’s-Cinefan Festival of Asian and Arab Cinema, a literary festival
in which we can be exposed, not to academic disquisitions, but to poetry and
fiction and drama.”
It seems that my wish has now been granted.
Of course, ASEAN, or the Association of Southeast
Asian Nations, does not encompass the whole of Asia, although the region known
as Southeast Asia, like the entire continent of Asia, is a place where the
component nations hardly know each other. Still, I’d like to think that my wish
has been granted because what we have here is a literary festival, the First
ASEAN Literary Festival—in other words, an event that will primarily feature,
not academic disquisitions, but poetry and fiction and drama. In short,
literature.
I guess literature in this festival also includes the
essay, because I have been asked to say a few words here tonight, about the
role of the writer in the making of a just and humane society.
This is a tough topic. Plus, I have to confess that
I’m not very good at delivering written lectures. Allow me, then, to approach
this topic from a personal perspective.
The making of a just and humane society was not
something I envisioned when I started to write poetry and short fiction, and
when I joined the cabal of dreamers who fantasized about writing the Great
Filipino Novel. As a teenager, I believed that my role as a writer was simply
to write. After all, that’s what the word writer
means, right? A worker works, a farmer farms, a driver drives, a teacher
teaches, and a writer writes, right?
So I just wrote without any thought of grand and
lofty goals. I wrote about my annoying pimples and my existential angst, the
view from the classroom window and the food on the dining table, the stars in
the sky and the carabao dung on the road. The way I saw it, I was writing
primarily about myself and my surroundings, not about society in general, not
about humanity as a whole.
Without realizing it, of course, I was writing about
aspects of reality that I was not entirely happy with. And that reality began
to assume a larger dimension after I dropped out of college and ended up in
journalism. My work as a journalist put me in touch with a wide range of social
types—beauty queens and jailbirds, slum dwellers and mansion owners,
smooth-talking politicians and sloganeering student activists—and made me
realize that my day job as a field reporter and my weekend diversion as a
versifier shared the same goal: to tell the truth.
Early on, even as a journalist engaged in
truth-telling, I saw myself primarily as an observer—not exactly detached, but
still an observer. I liked quoting Groucho Marx: “I am not interested in
joining any organization that is willing to accept me as member.”
When the student protest movement that I was writing
about went into that intense period that has come to be known in Philippine
history as the First Quarter Storm, I started to become not just an observer
but also a participant, a joiner. I even became an organizer, helping set up a
trade union in the magazine I worked for, and becoming a founding member of
artists’ groups that held up the pen as an instrument for the people’s welfare.
That was when I started quoting the other Marx: “The philosophers have only
interpreted the world. The point, however, is to change it.”
Telling the truth and changing the world became
dangerous preoccupations when martial law was declared in my country. The
martial-law dictatorship shut down or took over television stations,
newspapers, and magazines, and I found myself not only jobless but also on the
wanted list of media practitioners. I ended up joining a group of fugitive
journalists who put out mimeographed underground publications that dared to
publish what the government-controlled aboveground media would not touch.
Less than two years after I went underground, the
authorities caught up with me and threw me into a military prison, where I was
subjected to torture and other indignities. I spent nearly two years in prison.
No charges were ever filed against me.
But before my time in prison, I succeeded in pulling
off a literary prank that was also a form of protest. Writing under a
pseudonym, I submitted an English poem to a dictatorship-controlled magazine.
On the surface, the poem, titled “Prometheus Unbound” and written in rather
flowery language, was just about an episode in Greek mythology. But it could
also be read as a metaphor of anti-dictatorship protest, since Prometheus was
the Titan who was punished by the supreme god Zeus for giving the gift of fire
to man.
To top it all, “Prometheus Unbound” was also an
acrostic poem. When the magazine came out with the poem, word soon got around
that the capitalized first letters of the lines, if read downwards, spelled out
a Tagalog slogan that activists shouted in the streets before martial law:
MARCOS HITLER DIKTADOR TUTA, meaning, Marcos, Hitler, Dictator, Running Dog.
The military quickly swooped down on newstands and pulled out all unsold copies
of the magazine.
This brings me back to the topic that I’m supposed to
be discussing in this lecture: what is the role of the writer in the making of
a just and humane society?
I will go further back, back to my youthful days,
when I thought that the role of the writer, the task of the writer, is plain
and simple: to write.
If you sincerely believe that you can build a just
and humane society by running for public office, or by working with nonprofit
organizations, or by marching in the streets, then, by all means, feel free to
do so. Writers and artists, after all, are also citizens and must concern
themselves not only with their art but also with the issues and problems
confronting their society and their country.
But if you see yourself as a writer, then your
primary task is clear: Write.
Write a song describing your utopian vision of what a
just and humane society should be. Write a poem denouncing the injustice and
inhumanity of governments that violate human rights. Write a story exposing the
tyranny and the repression that make people’s lives miserable. Write a play
extolling the work of those who fight for freedom and democracy.
Above all, in writing, tell the truth. Write with
metaphors and symbolism, or write with bluntness and without disguise, but tell
the truth.
There was a time in my country, in the time of
martial rule, when the dictator’s wife dictated that artists and cultural
workers should deal with “the good, the true, and the beautiful.” That phrase
has a nice ring to it, but the really important thing is to write about what’s
true. What’s true is good, even if brings you misery and pain in a dictator’s
prison. What’s true is beautiful, even if the dictator’s wife finds it ugly and
revolting.
