The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
By Alvin I. Dacanay
On April 30, many aspiring and established creative writers will rush to submit their entries to the most prestigious and longest-running literary competition in the country today: the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, which will celebrate its 65th year. That day is doubly significant for writers, for it also marks the end of the country’s celebration of April as National Literature Month, which was proclaimed as such by President Benigno Aquino III in February.
It cannot be denied that the Palanca Awards has contributed significantly to the evolution of Philippine literature and, in a way, to sustaining the Filipino literary community. Look at the books on the shelves of the Philippine Fiction and Literature section of any National Book Store branch, and you’ll find that a lot of them were written by Palanca winners. These include works that earned the Palanca Grand Prize for the Novel when they were still manuscripts.
One of these is the captivating Salamanca (2006; Ateneo de Manila University Press), by Dean Francis Alfar, regarded as the leading advocate of what’s termed as “speculative fiction.” This 159-page marvelous-realist novel narrates the decades-long relationship between what noted critic Caroline Hau described as “polymorphous-perverse Gaudencio Rivera, whose passions ignite prodigious feats of writing and wandering, and Palawena beauty Jacinta Cordova, whose perfection transmutes walls into glass and adoration into art.”
“Alfar has created a love story that is memorable for its emotional restraint, sustained interest, exceptional characters, and well-conceived plot. The narrative moves at an appropriate psychological pace to give us an interpretation of a slice of Philippine life that is both common and unique,” National Artist for Literature Cirilo Bautista wrote on the novel’s first page.
Another is the dazzlingly complex Ilustrado (2010; Farrar, Straus and Giroux), by Miguel Syjuco, who won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize—considered the Asian equivalent of the better-known Man Booker Prize—for this work. The novel—about the controversial life and career of exiled Filipino creative writer Crispin Salvador, as pieced together by his student and friend Miguel using the reclusive author’s own works (poems, novels and memoirs, among others) and by interviewing those who know him—has been seen by some as a landmark book: there are very, very few Philippine novels like it.
In recognition of that fact, fellow novelists have heaped praises on it. The Man Games author Lee Henderson has described Ilustrado as a “fantastic literary mystery that draws from the politics and poetics of Manila” and “global in all aspects of the story, and frank and unpretentious in every right-on detail,” while The Piano Teacher novelist Janice Y.K. Lee calls it “dizzyingly energetic and inventive,” noting that it views the Philippines “with a merciless, yet loving eye, its chorus of voices illuminating the many facets of this chaotic, complicated country.”
Another exiled Filipino is at the heart of The Mango Bride (2013; NAL Accent), by Marivi Soliven, a former University of the Philippines professor who now lives in California. That Filipino is Amparo Guerrero, a woman banished by her wealthy family in Manila to California, whose life is intertwined with that of fellow Filipino Beverly Obejas, an impoverished waitress who came to America as a mail-order bride. Little would they know that they are connected by a deeply buried family secret.
This latest addition to Filipino-immigrant literature has been widely lauded. One of its admirers is poet Joi Barrios-Leblanc, who noted in her review: “The Mango Bride is less about the love stories of its characters than it is about the complex relationships among women—mistress and servant; migrant women helping migrant women; mothers and daughters; competitive best friends; and estranged cousins bound by the challenges of survival in the site of migration.”
Salamanca, Ilustrado and The Mango Bride may be only three of the novels currently on display on bookstore shelves, but they represent just a small part of the complicated Filipino experience. They are just three of the many books in various genres that offer a glimpse of the breathtaking breadth, depth and wealth of our country’s underappreciated literature.
Come September 1, when the latest group of Palanca winners is officially announced, another creative writer would be added to the ranks of Alfar, Syjuco and Soliven; and readers can look forward to the publication of another winning novel that will further enrich the country’s literary output, one that is already gaining long-deserved attention overseas.