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.
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| 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.
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| 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.”
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| 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 20th
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
19th-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.
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| 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.
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| 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).’”
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| 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.
