Nieves in Excelsis

Today, July 24, is Nieves Benito Epistola's 84th birthday. She left too soon in 2002. Following is a reprint of an old piece where this blogger, her student in stylistics, tried to sum up her life after her death in September that year.
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Why do you feed your students?

Nieves Benito Epistola, professor emeritus of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman, was often asked this through much of her career that spanned 51 years. Her answer remained the same: “There are three good reasons for doing things. The first important need is physiological; the second, to have security or a sense of belonging, and the third, self-actualization.”

She used to say, whenever she was assigned to a 7 a.m. or a 12 noon class, “How can you expect them to learn if they are hungry? Communication is easier if you eat the same things. On the metaphorical level, you give them nourishment for the mind.”

Apart from language, the center of her life’s work, this genuine concern for the needs of students and other people marked the life of the woman popularly known as Mrs. E.

She almost did not make it to UP. Her original dream was to become a teacher at the provincial high school in Lingayen, Pangasinan, her hometown. Her idol was her teacher, Fe Manza, who went on to become a Department of Education superintendent.
“I wanted to be like her, to go back and serve my province,” Mrs. E said.

In those days, high school teachers in the provinces were mostly UP graduates. But the parish priest discouraged Nieves Benito from going to UP because he feared that she would become an atheist and a communist.

She went to Bishop Mariano Madriaga to ask his permission. He said, “You can take care of yourself. By the way, I am also a UP graduate.”

She entered postwar UP in 1946 along with the valedictorians, salutatorians and other high school honor graduates. When the main campus moved from Padre Faura street, Manila, to Diliman in 1949, so did she and her batch mates. Then UP President Bienvenido Gonzalez gave them diplomas of distinction for being pioneer students of Diliman, Quezon City.

For her undergraduate practicum, she taught Section A of UP High School. The class, made up of the brightest fourth-year students, was notorious for making practice teachers cry.

“They were not able to make me cry. Takot sa akin,” said the towering, five-feet-seven B.S. Education major.

The next semester, she was again given Section A, but she didn’t prepare a lesson plan, only an outline of activities. She taught English like a college class, and it worked.

Her career interconnected with the growth of the campus. Gonzalez showed her his vision for UP Diliman from his office. He told her that the Main Library would be at the center because it is the heart and soul of the university. Around it would be the classroom buildings. Dormitories would occupy the circle outside the classrooms. The outermost rim would be for employee housing.

“That was when I realized the symbolic structure of Diliman,” she said.
Gonzalez recruited her to be a UP instructor. Ever since, she personally knew every university president after him.

After graduating in 1950, Miss Benito was first sent to UP’s small college in Iloilo where she taught English and philosophy of education for a year. She witnessed the experiments of the community school movement led by the late father of writer Mila D. Aguilar.

These experiments used Hiligaynon as the medium of instruction in grade school. Research showed that two out of 10 pupils dropped out because they only learned a smattering of English. They still ended up illiterate.

She said, “In the control group conducted in English, the children were attentive, respectful and looked up to the teacher. That was the teacher-centered class. In the experimental group, a little boy was in front, conducting class discussions, interacting in Hiligaynon while the teacher stayed at the back. It was a student-centered class. That made an impact on me.”

She continued, “I had no technical terms for my observations then, no vocabulary to deal with the new situation. My B.S.E. training was in traditional grammar which is prescriptive. When you say grammar, you look at every sentence a student writes to see how well he or she knows and applies the rules.”

To Diliman, she returned. Dr. Cecilio Lopez, the father of linguistics in the Philippines, tried to “pirate” her from the English department where she was taking course work for her masters.

Lopez invited her to the colloquia of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. The focus was on studies of the unrecorded languages in Mindanao done by missionary couples. She wondered, “Why were foreigners doing the research for us? We should do it ourselves!”

She went back to her home province to study the Pangasinan language. In linguistics she found a blend of the humanities and sciences. When Lopez attended conferences abroad, she took over his classes.

One day he told her, “Miss Benito, you’re going to Yale University to do your Ph.D. under Dr. Isidore Dyen.” (Dyen was a famous linguist.)

Her answer was: “I’ll think about it.” Silvino V. Epistola, now a retired professor of philosophy and Asian studies, was her boyfriend. The year was 1958; they planned to wed in 1960.

Over dinner, she told him that she was going to be sent to the US so the wedding would not push through as scheduled. S.V. insisted, “It’s 1960 or nothing.”

Dr. Tomas Fonacier, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, told S.V. that he would soon be sent as a Mombusho scholar, one of the first from the Philippines, to the University of Tokyo.

That was the clincher–the faculty sweethearts decided to marry on April 26, 1958 at historic Pinaglabanan Church in San Juan with Fr. Pacifico Ortiz, S.J., officiating. The new Mrs. Epistola wore a white dress of mid-calf length. The only other people present were the couple’s respective parents, fellow faculty member Josefa Lava and her husband Buddy.

Mrs. E paraphrased D.H. Lawrence in describing her relationship with S.V., “You should not feel superior or inferior to anyone. You’re just aware of a human presence."

Having been a wartime teenager, Mrs. E always associated the Japanese with soldiers. But when their plane touched down in Tokyo on a Sunday, she and her husband saw families taking a stroll, the women in their kimono.

The two years spent honeymooning and studying there were, in her words, “a beautiful sojourn. The Japanese have a sense of aesthetics. Even the smallest shop displayed flowers. When I first went to a department store, I was awed because all that they sold were made in Japan. I acquired a consciousness of not just being a Filipino but an Asian, too.”

While S.V. got the meat and bones of Tanizaki and other novelists, in the original Japanese, Mrs. E trained in Malayo-Polynesian linguistics under the eminent linguist, Prof. Shiro Hattori. She earned his admiration for doing the first work on a Filipino verbal system.

Her facility in linguistics enabled her to communicate with Japanese vendors. She guested in cultural radio programs six times and memorized or read messages in Nippongo translated for her in Roman letters by a friend.

The Japanese students went to the Epistola house to practice their English, accompanying the Filipino couple to the Catholic church on Sundays.

One Sunday, Mrs. E overhead a student asking another, “Do you believe in God?”

“No,” came the reply. “I just came to hear English.”

Mrs. E cooked sinigang for many Filipinos stationed in Japan. This dish she served moved them to tears. They often said, “Ganito ang luto ng nanay namin sa Pilipinas.”

In 1960, the Epistolas returned to their home country only for her to fall ill. After her appendectomy was complicated by intestinal adhesions, she nearly died. She described the experience, “I was up there, looking at my body lying on the hospital bed with S.V. seated beside it. It was like the book Embraced by the Light."

UP President Carlos P. Romulo chose S.V. to go to Harvard University on a Rockefeller grant.

Although she would be entitled to $400 a month as “wife allowance” to support her husband’s studies, Mrs. E applied as an M.A. student in linguistics at Harvard. Dr. Lopez and Shiro Hattori sent to Boston testimonials about her excellence as a teacher and a scholar. She received her acceptance papers two weeks ahead of S.V. That got him worried.

Dr. Felixberto Santa Maria, then the English department chair, objected to Mrs. E’s going into linguistics. “That means when you come back, you’ll be with the Department of Linguistics. You’re the best English 1 and 2 teacher there is.”

She argued, “Eighty percent of work in the English department involves language teaching. Graduate studies in linguistics will make me a better freshman English teacher. Masarap turuan ang freshmen. They’re starry-eyed.”

And she vowed to herself, “Maski na matanda na ako, I’ll still be enthusiastic about teaching.”

During the Epistolas’ five years in Boston, they were exposed to the students’ anti-Vietnam War activism. This readied them for the First Quarter Storm.

The couple attended a memorable lecture of Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. He recited poems in Old English and said, “What are words but shared memories?”

Mrs. E went backstage and introduced herself to him as “your admirer from the Philippines.” The poet-fictionist said, “Oh, I’ve read Rizal” in the original Spanish. She also shook hands with pianists Van Cliburn and Arthur Rubinstein and cellist Mtislav Rostropovich, and enjoyed other concerts at Boston Symphony Hall with its perfect acoustics.

Roman Jacobson, the founder of stylistics (the application of linguistic methods to literary study), was Mrs. E’s mentor for five years. “I got it straight from the horse’s mouth,” she said, she simplified his formula into style equals repetition with variation, with or without contrast.

Jacobson was the first to create a language communication model that integrated many ideas in the 1950s. This model focuses on an ideal communication between an addresser and an addressee.

She said, “An addresser sends a message to the addressee by means of a code common to them. There must be a context. More importantly, there must be contact.”

From Calvert Watkins, head of Harvard’s linguistics department and a classical scholar, she learned this: “When you’re a student of linguistics, you must be interested in anything involving language.”

Her own view was: “We need a healthy dose of science in dealing with language. In the Philippine context, it’s so difficult to get people to understand the nature of language because everybody thinks that he/she is an expert. Everybody is either bilingual or multilingual.”

Since Harvard students were allowed access to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which is just 10 minutes away by bus, Mrs. E went there to listen to Noam Chomsky, considered the god of linguistics. Only two to three MIT students were formally enrolled, but many auditors and admirers came. The class moved to a bigger lecture room.

Every time Mrs. E, the elected secretary of the Harvard Linguistics Club, returned to her home campus, her classmates asked her, “What’s the latest from the god?”

She was exposed to Harvard’s male chauvinism (“Anywhere you go, it’s downward from here”), and learned the finer points of baseball and American football when she watched these games with S.V.

When they went to the States, they brought with them two suitcases. Although they accumulated knickknacks and household appliances, including a complete set of glassware for every type of drink, they gave these all away. They carried the same number of suitcases upon their return to the Philippines.

They brought back books, and records. Mrs. E said Dr. Rod Paras Perez, then enrolled at Harvard, “lovingly packed our books. Everything he does is a work of art.”

She offered to cook him a special breakfast before his comprehensives. “I’ll come, provided S.V. doesn’t say anything,” he said. He came, had breakfast with the E’s, and S.V. kept his promise to keep his trap shut.

Back at UP, she introduced to her department the idea of a dynamic, interactive classroom. Instead of giving a lecture on linguistics, she presented to her colleagues for discussion Tom Fawthrop’s “On Examinations.” This essay “revolutionized the thinking of everybody. It attacked the grading systems that were based on exams,” she said.

Her expository writing classes not only meant writing exercises but also opportunities for oral interaction. Chairs were rearranged face to face. She and Prof. Dolores Stephens Feria turned these classes into “idea courses” where Third World perspectives, sexual politics, among other topics, were discussed.

Aware that “you cannot come from a vacuum when you have to talk about ideas in a group,” Mrs. E put together essays by assorted writers, condensed and edited them. The collection is called Democratic Visions: Readings in English 5.

An indication of her participation in upholding freedom during the Marcos regime was when she tried getting her passport validated for an academic year’s stay in China. She could not get her clearance and was given the runaround. Later, an official told her that there was a thick military dossier on her because she had helped many students who went underground.

Not batting an eyelash, she answered, “Yes, that’s true. I help all my students, whether underground or above ground.” She proceeded to lecture the official for two hours telling him, “What we do at UP is also for the country.”

From 1983 to 1984, she taught at the Beijing Language Institute. It was her first time to be abroad without S.V. “After 25 years of marriage, he wasn’t my bedmate. Many of my pet cats died,” she mused.

She lived in a suite at the Friendship Hotel. Her bedroom had two single beds. When Mrs. Feria visited her and stayed for some time, she introduced the American woman to others as her half-sister. “In the land of concubines, that wasn’t unusual,” Mrs. E said.

During her first six months in Beijing, her movements were restricted to the hotel, the school and the Friendship Store. She got her mail by diplomatic pouch from the Philippine Embassy which was 10 minutes away from the store.

“It was like living in a huge cage. I couldn’t keep notes or a diary. I was limited to teaching and my instructional materials. Six Chinese persons would clean my room. They were the eyes and ears of the administration. I borrowed Animal Farm from the British Council, but I never got to show it to my students because we were being monitored,” she said of the cramped democratic space.

She did not call her students by their Chinese names. They adopted English names. One even chose “Chomsky” for himself.

Mrs. E said, “I bet you some of my former students died at Tiananmen Square. They were listening to the Voice of America, and most were asking for recommendations to study in the States.”

In a small room in the institute, she saw the books of Mao Zedong gathering dust. In the Great Hall of the People, she witnessed Communist Party leaders enjoying huge ponkan oranges that were unavailable in the public market. She learned that these were only for the leaders. She had caught the tail-end of the Cultural Revolution.

The stay was instructive though. “Everything is grand and great in China,” she said. “I saw a one-thousand-year-old tree. In most of Europe, the landmarks can only go as far back as hundreds of years. I climbed the Great Wall twice, the right and the left sides, and had my lunch up there.”

Again she returned to UP where she later become associate dean of the College of Arts and Letters. She officially retired in 1991. But the English department asked her to continue teaching on a reduced load. She handled graduate courses in rhetoric, pragmatics and discourse analysis.

She went on teaching, learning (“Everything is a learning experience!” she often exclaimed) and taking care of S.V. In 2000, two aneurysms were discovered in the left side of his brain. The condition sidelined him. For a month Mrs. E commuted from Diliman to the Philippine General Hospital, where he was confined, and back.

Her dream was “to still be alive in 2000, but the year went by just like that.”

In January this year, S.V. had a heart attack. He seems to have recovered. His wife pointedly told him at Gilda and Marcelo Fernando’s golden wedding anniversary party in June to stay the course so they could make it to their own 50th in 2008. Suddenly, she caught a persistent cold in August.

Her health spiraled downward so fast. From her PGH sickbed, she instructed S.V. to drop by a supermarket on his way home and buy cans of mackerel for her cats and kittens. She reminded him to religiously take his medicines. She sent several text messages on the eve of her death, one wishing “Good luck” to a grandniece finishing her thesis.

Her final actions showed that she was summing up a life that replicated the prayer, “Others, Lord, others that I may live in Thee.” And so she went.

Originally published in Malaya, Sept. 23, 2002

Photo shows Nieves with National Artist Jose Maceda and Dr. S.V. Epistola (taken by the author at her 75th birthday celebration at the UP Executive House in 2001)