Hidden writers, silent voices: Thoughts on the writing of diaries and the gathering of life narratives

Some days had passed after my father, Enrique Cariño Lolarga Jr, died on Jan. 12, 1992, when my brother found a black diary tucked among Daddy’s clothes that were about to be packed for giving away. None of us, including my mother, were aware that Daddy kept this notebook.

Upon opening the cover, the flyleaf had an inscription: “For Kimi Only.” Kimi is my firstborn child, my parents’ first granddaughter and apparently Daddy’s favorite because he chose to bequeath to her this record of his life over all of us. She was six years old then.

His first entry began Dec. 2, 1990 and the last, Jan. 2, 1992. These entries were mostly written while he was vacationing or doing medical outreach in Barangay Canan Sur, Malasiqui, Pangasinan. He filled up 68 pages of the diary. The remaining ones, more than three-fourths of the diary, were blank because three or four days after he wrote his last entry, he suffered a stroke, spent weeks at the ICU of the Heart Center where his organs failed him one after another, part of the complications of his diabetes, until he finally “expired” as I had prayed he would.

This notebook has frustrated whoever bothers to read it, primarily because Daddy has a physician’s penmanship--cryptic, difficult to decipher. Come to think of it, that was what he was to many people, even to some of his children. 

In his diary, he attempted to “explain” himself. He was matipid (stingy) with words in person, the perfect foil to my chatty, 60-words-a-minute mother. 

Seated from left are: Pacita Lolarga Romero, Telesfora Cariño Lolarga, Febe Lolarga Valdellon. Standing are Celso, Enrique Jr. and Ernesto Lolarga

 He wrote, “Becoming a doctor must have been my greatest mistake because my Dad wanted me to be an agriculturist. I did not heed him because I did not want to end up a businessman. Dad offered to finance my studies at UP Los Baños or Silliman University. I didn’t listen. But my first love remains agriculture. Ever since I was a child, I was fond of plants and animals. I love to watch things grow.

“I have no regrets. Believe me when I tell you that I have not enriched myself in the medical profession. Perhaps you can say that all my services are offered to my fellowmen.

“Until now I am still wondering why I became a doctor. It must have been by accident. After high school I was still undecided on what college course to take. Two of my classmates told me to take up medicine with them at the University of Santo Tomas. I finished the course, but one of them finished only our freshman year. The other one dropped out after pre-med. They have become my compadre: Ding Sandico became a drug company representative and married a lady physician, Dr. Lydia Alcantara. The other one, Tony Ramos, became a supervisor at Abbott Laboratories. Such twists of fate.

Dad on horseback. That's his penmanship indicating the picture was taken in Baguio in April 1948.

 “My only consolation is I have made some friends. Some people love me, I think. I have not made enemies although I know a few don’t like me. I have been shy since childhood and still am. That is why people think I’m arrogant and suplado which I’m not.

“I want to recall as much of my past while my only sound eye is still functioning. My sight is fast failing me, and I’m afraid one of these days that light will turn to darkness. Kimi, I dread that day when I will no longer be able to see you but only feel you the way my great grandmother did. I was only six when I spent my vacation in Barrio Bitolay, Bacnotan, La Union. My mother introduced me to my great grandmother who was totally blind. She placed her fingers all over my face and neck and started uttering words that I could barely comprehend. Nevertheless, I think she must have been overjoyed to meet her great grandson.”

Dad as a medical resident in the late 1950s

And here I stop momentarily on the matter of Daddy.

A few weeks ago, whenever my schedule allowed, I observed the first UST Varsitarian-J. Elizalde Navarro national workshop on arts criticism in Baguio. I caught the tailend of the first session when Prof. Oscar Campomanes of the Ateneo English Department and the UST graduate school said something significant about autobiographical narratives.  It was a serendipitous moment, the confirmation of a vague notion that I just might be on to something by being the appointed keeper of our family’s papers.

Campomanes, who teaches writing courses, semiotics and literature of empire, agreed to an interview. Here’s what he had to say: “In the first decade of the 20^th century a distinct publishing niche emerged. There arose interest in the life narratives of people who are ordinary, unknown, who did not distinguish themselves and who represent a personality type from a particular community…

“In late 19^th-century France, as industrial capitalism began to wane, many workers lost their jobs. They became itinerants, tramping all over the place. Their previously small world was shattered as they encountered other intelligent forms of life. These French workers taught themselves enough literacy to leave narratives behind—not published but collected and deposited in archives.

“When these narratives were discovered and read, they made for a fascinating read. It was radical Otherness, different from the life narratives of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie,” Campones said.

He also said, “Confessional writing (e.g. confessions of St. Augustine) asks the writer/author to make himself/herself amenable or available to judgment by the reader or the interpretive community. The author makes visible the unseen feeling of vulnerability. This feeling colors the writing process so that it almost becomes fictional, selective and partial. Any detail that might not comport with the idea of an idealized self is edited out.

“The most amazing insight that came out of the study of autobiographical forms of writing is that the writing of a life, or the narrative of a self, is at one and the same time a making of a life, a making of a self.”

Campomanes said the notion that you are, or somebody else is, only authorized to write about you when you’re old or when you’re safely dead no longer holds.

In other words, he said, “While you are writing, you are making your life and your self. The act of writing gives you a sense of coherence, a standard of self.” If we must use a Jesuitic term, writing leads to self-empowerment and self-formation.

While we’re on the subject of ordinary lives, I’ve asked Carolina “Bobbie” S. Malay, former peace negotiator of the National Democratic Front and retired UP journalism professor, on what it was like spending nearly 20 years in the underground gathering the life stories of farmers and workers.

This is what Malay said: “When I went full-time in the movement, my writing aimed to arouse, mobilize, organize the farmers. I also wrote for cadres in the movement most of whom were peasants, workers and generally intellectual. There were creative writers who wrote about the lives of the masses as their subject.”

She continued, “During our dealings with the people, conversations, story-telling were common. The masses taught me each person is unique with a special and interesting life. All you need is a genuine interest in them. They should feel that you respect them.

“If not for what they taught me, which was more than I ever learned from books, I would not have been inspired nor would have lasted that long in the movement. I like to think that my work improved because of the deep well of experiences I drew from.”

I also asked Ms. Malay if she had time for muni-muni or a more reflective, personal type of writing. She answered, “There was enough time for that. The natural rhythm of our work was there would be months when we would be so busy, there would be seasons when I could quietly reflect.”

Her outlet for personal expression and thoughts were her letters to her husband Satur who was a political prisoner from 1976 to1985. She wanted to share the stories she had gathered apart from the changes going on in her life.

She said, “I wanted him to know me again because I was evolving. I sent a series of letters that I entitled ‘Conversations with Myourself.’ He was supposed to do the same thing but you know, he’s not that type of person. He has no personal urge for personal expression.”

And so it goes, wrote Kurt Vonnegut. Once dismissed as just the practice pages or exercise books where the writers clarified their thoughts while in the process of creating something more important, the diary has joined mainstream literature.

Daddy with grand-daughters Marga Susi, Ida and Kimi Fernandez

 So what was my father’s point when he wrote a diary meant for Kimi’s eyes? Campomanes surmised that Daddy might have intended for Kimi, now 23 years old, to read the diary with a six-year-old’s eyes. Dad’s stipulation “For Kimi Only” might have also stood for an ideal/exemplary reader.

Daddy trying to grab grandsons Carlo Trinidad and Paolo Susi. Behind them is his second daughter Embeng.

My younger daughter Ida, four years old when my father died, told my Mom upon realizing that Kimi seemed the favored one, “Lola, bilis, gawa ka na rin ng iyo. Tapos lagay mo ‘For Ida Only. (Lola, hurry up, do your own. Then write “For Ida Only).’”

My brother Dennis carries Ida so she can say goodbye to her lolo.

 Often it is asked, when you are writing a diary, who are you addressing?  Campomanes said, “Language is what enables us to speak as individuals. But to speak always in company, in society or with another because the individual is always social. The ‘I’ is never alone; it presupposes a ‘you.’”

Writers write, read and listen so when you keep a diary, journal, doodle book, dream notebook or whatever you call it, you are splitting yourself into two: the self and the other self. Campomanes said, “You are never quite alone. A diary is a conversation with your other self, a way of easing solitude or even loneliness. You are with your other self.”

Alexandra Johnson, author of The Hidden Writer: Diaries and the Creative Life, from whence I borrowed the title of this essay, wrote that diaries, especially those kept by women, show “writers emerging from the shadows, from silence, from the necessary cunning of pleasing others, writers no longer exiled from their own voice.”

Go to any bookstore. There are memoirs galore, collections of personal essays on a wide range of subjects: insomnia or sleeplessness, comfort food, how grandmothers shaped writers’ lives, midlife crises, family trees, maladies, favorite shopping malls, the diaspora, gays and lesbians.

This is my chance to plug Baguio Calligraphy, a multi-lingual anthology of creative writings from the Cordillera’s premier city, edited by Baguio Writers Group stalwarts Francis Macansantos and Luz B. Maranan. Four to five generations of living writers are represented here: from Cecile Afable, born in 1916, to Solana Perez, born 1994. There is a separate volume, The Baguio We Know, edited by Grace Celeste T. Subido, amply devoted to creative non-fiction.

Campomanes called this “a wonderful development, a democracy becoming real.”  He said when 
people who, as a matter of social class or social conditions, were not allowed or were not supposed to speak and now they find their voices, the result is a joyous, joyful “turbulence of the multiple.” His other way of putting it is “the polyvocal clash and plurality of voices overturning social positions.”

My wish for the fellows, resident critics and literature lovers is an echo of the dedication written by Menchu Aquino Sarmiento on my copy of Daisy Nueve, her collection of short stories with characters so thinly disguised you may as well add the words “creative non-“ before “fiction.” She wrote: “May words never fail us.”--Elizabeth Lolarga

The author gave this lecture at the second Cordillera Creative Writing Workshop held April 28-30, 2010, at St. Mary’s School in Sagada, Mountain Province, a project of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts and the University of the Philippines Baguio. Another version of this was published in an August 2010 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.