“When Manila sneezes, the Philippines catches a cold.” So goes the quotable quote of the prodigious Nick Joaquin, 1976 National Artist for Literature (Manila, My Manila, Anvil Publishing 1990), expressing his own sentiment on the pejorative epithet Manila imperialism.
That the dominance of cultural apparatuses and privileged sites such as Manila can be replicated elsewhere underscores rather than resists Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci’s “cultural hegemony.” One that characterized replication instead of resistance was Sara Duterte’s slamming of the use of the Hotdog pop song “Manila” for the 2019 Southeast Asian Games opening. She argued that the dance song Budots Davao City had invented was more inclusive. Politics from one’s position of power – her imagined imperial center – is the driver for creating peripheries.
A culturally appropriate worldview of Manila hegemony was articulated of late by the anthropologist writer Gideon Lasco: “Imperial Manila is but a symptom of the larger inequalities that have plagued our nation,” the change of which involves participation of “culture bearers and the educational system.”
Adopting Lasco’s sense then, imperial centers and its peripheries can be multi-locale. That is an important understanding, for it nuances what Gramsci calls “organic individuals” capable of being recognized and articulated. Members of the group Katig of Eastern Visayas are exactly that: individuals playing a counter-hegemonic discourse because they understand their ontological position that within the nature of things they can carry out change, not the baduy budots that cannot change power inequalities.
Who and what is Katig? It is an elongated name that needs to be said: Katig-uban han mga Magsusurat ha Sinirangan Bisayas (the short name katig is “outrigger,” denoting support). It is a network of Eastern Visayas writers that runs the Lamiraw Creative Writing Workshops championing the use of Eastern Visayas’ mother tongues: the lingua franca Waray, its auxiliary language Cebuano, and Inabaknon, the native language of the Abaknon people of Capul Island which does not belong to the Visayan family but to the Sama linguistic family (Balangingi, Jama Mapun, Sama Dilaut).
Katig is involved in its latest collegial thrust it deems solemn: nominating University of the Philippines professor emeritus Merlie Alunan for the Order of National Artists. For Katig, a national artist can be one whose support base and geographical influence is not necessarily Metro Manila. It tenders the worldview that the provinces (peripheries) can be not just audiences but knowledge production conveyors as well. Alunan was chosen for her valor as a regional writer with a national influence (seven Palanca Awards, six National Book Awards, etc.). Katig pillar and Calbayog writer Harold Mercurio reasons: “Because she stands on her roots where she is organically located, she does not need to go to the center to be validated.” Katig believes that a promdi writer is a celebration because the writer’s vantage point in viewing the national from the periphery is uniquely distinct. Alunan taught generations of writers to write in their mother tongue. Born in Iloilo, she had lived in Negros, Dumaguete, Bohol, Cebu, and Ormoc (where her parents lived and died in the Ormoc tragedy). Settling in Tacloban, she established a writing workshop and a writers’ organization that publishes books and anthologies of literature in Waray, Inabaknon, and Cebuano.
The National Commission for Culture and the Arts announced on December 14 that the deadline of nominations for the Order of National Artists has been extended to February 28, 2021.
Katig does not disparage the other nominees based in Manila (all stellar, by the way), but attempts to expand the scope of national artistry in literature. In fact, it was buoyed by the precedence of the 2018 National Artists for Literature: Cebu-based Resil Mojares, known for pioneering Cebuano national identity formation, and Iloilo-based Ramon Muzones, who wrote groundbreaking Hiligaynon poetry, essays, short stories, and novels.
Together with Hubon Manunulat of Iloilo, Katig runs the UP VisWrite Program. Hubon, in turn, is re-nominating the Hiligaynon, Kinaray-a, and Cebuano writer of Western Visayas Leoncio Deriada (posthumously, since he died in 2019 after 17 Palanca Awards and enshrinement in the Palanca Hall of Fame).
Of the entire corps of awardees for the Order of National Artists, how many are from the peripheries? There is only a handful. Botong Francisco (Visual Arts) never abandoned Angono, where he painted and died. And so did his townmate Lucio San Pedro (Music). Kidlat Tahimik (Film) agitated the motion picture world from his Baguio City base with his postcolonial essay films.
When I was a writer for a national daily, the opinion editor once asked a rather bizarre piece of editorial caveat: write only about Mindanao events without a view of the national. Yet other writers who are capital-based can write about Mindanao. But for us not Manila-gentrified, it was not possible to speak our Mindanao minds about the larger picture, exactly the philosophy that creates peripheries.
Medical doctor and writer Floriño Arrieta Francisco, scion of National Artist for Literature Lazaro Francisco, recalls how his father was loyally based in Cabanatuan, where he created his production of exemplary Tagalog literature. Dr. Francisco narrates: “Ateneo de Manila University president Fr. Jose Cruz SJ had to send his representative to Cabanatuan in 1979 to persuade him to attend his conferment of the Tanglaw ng Lahi honors at its 122nd commencement rites.” Appealing to Filipino social conscience by writing from his supple prose style on the angst of oppressed peasants, Lazaro could not have done so outside his organic roots. He was honored 29 years after his death. His vantage point of the national – the formation of Filipino nationalism – was validated.
The views in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of VERA Files.