You know it's summer...

...when you cannot resist the invitation to spend time by a huge body of water even if there are a gazillion filial duties to fulfill and a gazillion more writing deadlines to meet, thus a heavy beach bag it was I carried with the laptop inside. I exaggerate when I use the word gazillion, but the pressure does feel like a gazillion albatrosses hanging around my neck. Oh, to be at the beach with kin spirits! It was an answered prayer.

With the blogger in this photo taken by journalist Alan Robles are Dr. Margarita Holmes, Gemma Luz Corotan-Kolb of Casa Amara in San Juan, Batangas, and Dr. Melen Araos. All our hair are wet from a swim, except for Gemma, Casa Amara's moving body-spirit, who was earlier in the kitchen supervising the making of canapes and guinataang bilo-bilo to be served to us.

In the book I brought with me to the Casa, To Remember to Remember (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2015), author Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo observed how writers of autobiographical narratives are impelled by a need to recount a past experience, begin a personal exploration and "expand to become an engagement with the world." When women gather, you feel there is something inside them in need of healing and recovery. The break from the urban life that my kinswomen live and move in was more than welcome. I for one will have stories to tell no longer in the farthest future but in the nearest one...while there is time.

Six women keep art of writing alive

Scholar Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, a fictionist and essayist in her own right, describes the state of literary biography in the Philippines in her latest book “Six Sketches of Filipino Women Writers” as “a wide, arid stretch, with a few patches of grass, and perhaps a tree or two.”

 She seeks to rectify the situation in her portraits of six contemporary writers; she prefers the words “sketches” or “cameos” for their fragmentary nature to qualify that what she has written is not a full-length biography. Hidalgo points out why there is a dearth of information on writers—the academe prioritizes literary theory over literary history in training writing majors. This she considers “a pity” because “beginning writers …should be familiar with the entire landscape before they can stake their own claim to one portion of it, or venture beyond its borders into fields unknown.”

Merlie Alunan, Sylvia Mayuga, Marra Lanot, Barbara Gonzalez, Elsa Martinez Coscoluella and Rosario Cruz Lucero are not only united by their being female but also by being post-war babies who were raised in the stable 1950s. They saw the rise of student rebellion in the 1960s, lived through martial law in the 1970s and throughout all these, have continued to write actively. She acknowledges past volumes that have attempted to record the lives of the country’s literary ancestors through the research and writing done by the late Doreen Fernandez and Edilberto Alegre, by Edna Zapanta Manlapaz’s biographies of Angela Manalang Gloria, Estrella Alfon and Lina Espina Moore, by Manlapaz and Marjorie Evasco’s oral history of poets Manalang Gloria, Trinidad Tarrosa Subido, Edith Tiempo, Virginia Moreno, Ophelia Dimalanta and Tita Lacambra Ayala.

In the last few years, Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and Gilda Cordero Fernando have come up with their own autobiographies by way of setting records straight. Hidalgo agrees with feminist biographer Linda Wagner-Martin that her subjects must be involved in the biography so readers can appreciate their lives in their full context.

Apart from communicating with her subjects through the technological convenience provided by e-mail, Hidalgo puts them at ease. The telling of their stories has the intimacy of two women friends, who haven’t seen one another in years, catching up over a cup of coffee and slices of cake, and lingering way past the café’s business hours.

Like the author, half of the subjects (Alunan, Coscoluella and Lucero, and for a time, Lanot) have found refuge in the academe to support their writing projects as they realize that despite the joy in creating poems, fiction and essays, Philippine society does not provide a stable economic support for this.

Lanot, in the blunt, to-the-point style that her poems are noted for, says, quoting family friend Nick Joaquin: “You don’t do hack writing, you write and try to write well all the time, whether the pay is high or low or nil.” Lanot offered piano lessons to young neighbors when her husband Pete Lacaba was in the underground and later jailed without charges.

Lucero gave ballet lessons to aspiring young dancers who could be accommodated in the sala of a rented house to stretch the family budget.

Mayuga was employed in print and broadcast media.

Gonzalez rose to become one of the country’s few women advertising executives when a marriage failed. She continues to paint and craft handmade jewelry to sell at weekend markets.

Although she married into a hacendero’s family in Negros Occidental, Coscoluella went on to write and submit an epic poem or a full-length drama to national literary contests and win. She served as a vice president of the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod. Her duties included running the university press apart from expanding the Institute of Culinary Arts, managing a master’s program for police officers, among other things, making her recent retirement not fully realized yet. Wifehood and motherhood are not romanticized, although that would be how machos would portray them—the be-all and end-all of a woman’s existence.

Alunan wrote of the exhaustion and frustration she felt as a young mom: “Your brain will turn into putty if you go on this way, you can’t be doing this all your life, how long can you put up with this…The watching half of me complains and scolds, angry and resentful for the time and space it had lost to this selfish demanding little beast that all infants are, jealous and envious of all the attention it takes for granted as an inviolable right…”

Throughout their narratives, these women did astonishing balancing acts: they bore and raised children, held down regular jobs, struggled with difficult partners and wrote for expression and for the freedom it gives in circumstances far from what Virginia Woolf required that a woman who wishes to write should have a room of her own. Because of these writers’ efforts and the critical recognition they’ve received, they have cleared a path for younger sisters who dream of making writing not just a worthy hobby but a lifelong occupation and a commitment.

“Six Sketches of Filipino Women Writers” is published by the University of the Philippines Press, 2011.--Elizabeth Lolarga  

Originally published in Vera Files/Yahoo Phililippines, Jan. 19, 2012

Pink Roses for Tony Hidalgo

The color pink is not one I associate with a very macho and seniority-conscious organization like Upsilon Sigma Phi, the oldest fraternity in Asia at 93 this year. And yet, at the farewell rites held Feb. 6 at Mt. Carmel Shrine for the late Antonio "Tony" Atienza Hidalgo, writer, publisher of Milflores books, international civil servant and illustrious Upsilonian, each living brod (short for "brother") of his held a pink rose and solemnly placed it atop his coffin.

I was afraid the rites would be marked by blustery speeches. It was for a reason that "barbarians" or non-sister sorority members like myself refer to this frat's members behind their backs as "Upsilon yabang" because some members are so full of themselves and seem to enjoy the sport of putting their brods in positions of influence and power.

But to their credit, the frat has produced outstanding citizens like patriot Wenceslao Vinzons, assassinated Sen. Benigno Aquino Jr., the Laurel brothers (Jose Jr., Salvador and Sotero), past University of the Philippines presidents Salvador P. Lopez and Onofre D. Corpuz, journalist-professor Armando J. Malay, poets Gemino H. Abad and Raul R. Ingles, Sen. Joker Arroyo, Latin American studies expert Modesto "Chibu" Lagman, filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik, even couturier Pitoy Moreno.

My fears were laid to rest that evening. The rites began with a simple roll call of Tony's fraternity batch mates from 1960. The living ones answered with a clear, strong "Here," "Present" or "Aye." When Tony's full name was announced three times in a row, there was silence until a batch mate piped up that Tony could not respond because he was no longer with them; he had departed.

The eulogies by writers Efren Yambot and Ricardo "Dick" Malay and retired diplomat Oscar Valenzuela were short, touching, humorous in parts and revealed the personality of the deceased.

Efren recalled how Tony brought him and other brods to the University of Santo Tomas campus where Tony was courting a junior faculty member, Cristina "Jing" Pantoja. Her office was inside an old, imposing building with a Latin inscription carved on the façade.

Efren bragged that he could understand Latin and volunteered this translation of the Latin aphorism. He said that it just meant "Bawal ang umihi dito (Urinating is forbidden here)." Tony was flushed with irritation at his brod. Obviously, he was embarrassed before the woman who he was courting and who would eventually become his wife. For a time, he snubbed Efren because of this incident.

Efren remembered a time when his play was severely criticized. He went to Tony for words of comfort because he suffered from writer's block. Quoting a French writer, Tony told him that writers are like caravans travelling in the desert at night; dogs are howling at them, but the caravan ignores them and keeps on moving. Consoled, Efren proceeded to write another play.

Dick asked Jing if her Thomasian education clashed with Tony's more secular background. He wondered what it was like to live with an intellectual of Tony's caliber. In a word, the widow replied, "Tough!"

Oscar recalled meeting Tony during his application period in the fraternity. The more senior brod noted how Oscar was partial to the works of existentialist writer Albert Camus. They discussed his works, thus sparing the neophyte a possible rough manhandling which was part of initiation rites.

Later, Oscar and Tony became fast friends, exchanging and discussing books. Among the more memorable discussions was the need for a philosophy grounded on Philippine realities to underpin the leftist ideology that was then sweeping the country in the late '60s. Both were sympathetic to the movement for social change. Each went on to contribute his bit in their spheres of influence.

A little-known anecdote about Tony was he was even photographed joining an anti-Marcos demonstration, and the picture landed in the newspapers. This caused Jing's sudden termination as a teacher at UST while in the middle of her class.

At the end of the rites, the pile of pink roses was bundled up and handed over to slim, dry-eyed, serene-looking Jing. In her brief response, she said she realized that marrying an Upsilonian came with a package deal. She had to embrace and accept the brods, too, entertaining and feeding them when Tony brought them home.

The Pantoja-Hidalgo love story is evident in Jing's collections of essays where Tony figures as a steadfast, dependable partner and literary equal (they served at one time as the INQUIRER's grammar police). Certainly, he is the love of her life. He brought his convent-bred wife and their family to live in politically volatile countries in his line of work as a ranking officer of Unicef. They lived for sometime in countries like war-torn Lebanon and Burma which experienced a military upheaval. For a writer like Jing, these foreign postings deepened her writings.

Looking back at their relationship in an essay in the book “Telling Lives: Essays by Filipino Women” (Circle Publications), she was 22 and Tony 23 when they married. She wrote: “Neither my husband nor I had planned on marrying so early. We were bright and ambitious and gregarious, our heads full of plans for 'making a name for ourselves' and 'changing the world'...

“I was myself also scandalously unprepared for even the role of housewife. My husband still likes to entertain our friends with tales of my early mishaps: the bacon that I drowned in cooking oil, the eggs that got stuck in the pan, the pancake mix that I poured directly into a hot frying pan and watched in awe as it rose to the ceiling like some gothic castle, the rellenong bangus that I sewed up with bright blue embroidery thread, the socks that I left soaking in Chlorox for a week, the pocket-sized front yard which remained totally bare until my father-in-law came one Sunday morning with some flowering shrubs and planted them himself.”

Lucky Tony--he lived long enough to celebrate his golden year as an Upsilonian last year. And a few days before Valentine's, his brods sent him off with offerings of pink roses. This flower is the frat's official one. In the language of flowers, it symbolizes admiration. I cannot think of a more romantic, sensitively masculine gesture than that.

As for Jing as she struggles to come to terms with the loss of Tony, I am sure, that in time, like the iconic American essayist-novelist Joan Didion who bore the death of husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, she will “make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends...”

In that same book “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Didion realized towards the end

“why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

“I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

“Let them become the photograph on the table.

“Let them become the name on the trust accounts.

“Let go of them in the water.”

To Jing, from your wide writing family, here is our inadequate bouquet of words.


Photo from Antonio Hidalgo's Facebook profile, used with his family's permission, shows Tony (left) and Jing (second from right) with fellow writers Ralph Semino Galan, Erlinda Panlilio and Susan Lara.