Researching Nick Joaquin

In the high school that I went to, each freshman class gets to choose the name of their batch from the roster of National Artists of the Philippines. If there are two classes, the names are hyphenated, as in the Hernandez-Legaspi (or, more sexily, Her-Legs) Batch of 1994. The point of the exercise, I think, is to set expectations for the country’s “art scholars”: the National Artist after whom their batch is named is to serve as their class’ standard for “artistic excellence.”

Our 21-member class entered the school in 1997, a year after National Artist for Literature Nick Joaquin received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, & Creative Communication. I forget why we chose his name, pero ‘yun. I belong to Batch Nick Joaquin which graduated in March 2001, three years before Joaquin peacefully died in his sleep at the age of 86.

All I remember from my encounters with Joaquin’s works in my early teens was how I could not for the life of me understand them, although I felt that he was an important writer & that I must read him as soon as I was mature enough. We discussed “The Summer Solstice” in our fiction writing class & I remember feeling ecstatic about this supposedly feminist work, although that was all I could glean from the story—or from the discussion of it. I couldn’t have explained how or why it was feminist. If I were asked, I would’ve only pointed out that Don Paeng kissed Doña Lupeng’s feet in the end—& stopped at that. In our playwriting class, we had to analyze A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. I was 14, & I couldn’t have comprehended that the central image of the play, that of Aeneas carrying his father out of Troy, may refer to the idea that in the process of “Philippine becoming,” the present bears the weight of the past on its shoulders. All that I could relate to was the scene in which the Marasigan sisters laughed with relief when they discovered that their electricity wasn’t cut due to nonpayment of bill.

My interest in Joaquin was sparked again when I decided to study Philippine crime fiction for my master’s thesis (now abandoned). During my preliminary research, I was led to Quijano de Manila’s Reportage on Crime & to the supposed whodunit, Cave & Shadows (I didn’t find Jack Henson an effective detective). Later, I read Bookmark’s edition of The Woman Who Had Two Navels, which I had found in a small second-hand book store in Guadalupe. I thought that the novel could be perfectly translated into film by Wong Kar Wai, what with the setting being Hong Kong! after the war! & its female protagonist wearing fur coats & driving a Jaguar, while “Only the moon, intent on fulfillment, moved through its own feast in silence.”

Part of my work in the library involves producing educational materials on Philippine history & culture. Some years ago, I was tasked to create an AVP on Nick Joaquin. During those days all I had was Windows Movie Maker which crashed every so often, low- & medium-resolution photographs from the Internet, a few scanned book covers & Philippines Free Press pages, & Relly Coloma’s rendition of “Je t’aime moi non plus” & Pilita Corrales’ “Por Un Grande Amor” for background music. The output was a three-minute AVP on Joaquin’s life in bullet points, viz:

born in Paco in 1917;
dropped out of high school;
published poems & stories in magazines during the war;
spent two years in a Hong Kong seminary;
wrote Portrait;
wrote Woman abroad by means of two fellowships;
worked at the Free Press; &
received the National Artist Award.

Recently I produced another AVP on Nick Joaquin for a literary event. I researched, wrote the script, scanned & Photoshopped images, searched for background music, coordinated with the voice talent, & put all the files together in the more sophisticated iMovie. For research, I reread Resil Mojares’ definitive biography of Joaquin, as well as Marra Lanot’s profile of her kumpare.  I read Nick: A Portrait of the Artist Nick Joaquin, which shares more of Joaquin’s life as a young man. It talked of his close relationship with his sister-in-law, Sarah Katigbak, whose essay on the young, reclusive Joaquin can be found in one of the issues of Philippine Review, which also first published “The Sorrows of Vaudeville” & “It Was Later than We Thought.” The biography elaborated on the death of Joaquin’s father & its effect on the family; & on Joaquin’s life with Sarah & her husband Ping, on whom the character of Paco Texeira was based, I think. It mentioned Joaquin’s job as a stevedore during the war, & later as a stage manager for Sarah’s dance troupe. The succeeding pages—almost half of the book—contain what family members, & other writers & editors, think of Nick Joaquin (“Nick, you are the greatest Filipino writer,” said F Sionil Jose).

The library director (who was able to watch Portrait in one of its early stagings) made me revise the script three or four times. She wanted the video to show why Joaquin is great. I, on the other hand, didn’t want to make any grand statements. Anyway I gladly researched some more, & ended up making an AVP that includes critics’ insights on Joaquin’s works, such as its contribution to the development of Philippine English. I marveled at the realization that many of his works were adapted into various forms of popular culture—“The Summer Solstice” was made into a commercial film, as were “The House on Zapote Street” & “Johnny Tiñoso & the Proud Beauty.” “May Day Eve” has been staged by university theater troupes. I read the various reviews in Philippine Studies: of Portrait by James Reuter & Gloria Castro (is she the Ms Kismadi who eventually co-wrote the first book-length biography of the writer?), of Prose & Poems by Harry Furay, of Woman by Lourdes Pablo, & of Joaquin’s latter stories by Emmanuel Lacaba.

(Finding this last piece brought back memories of youth, for Eman was my childhood hero. At 15 I read his profile in Six Young Filipino Martyrs twice or thrice & was so taken with the image of him writing poems on cigarette foils that I wrote love poems & love letters on cigarette foils, too. Eman, of course, wrote on foils because there wasn’t any paper in the jungle. I did it because I thought it was romantic. Anyway, I made a quick calculation & guessed that Eman must be 19 when his essay on Joaquin was published. What was I doing at 19? Squirreling & smoothing away cigarette foils from my parents’ ashtrays. Eman has been called “the Brown Rimbaud,” & I think that was what made me first read Rimbaud, who stopped writing poetry at, according to some accounts, 19.)

What’s interesting in Lacaba’s essay is the notion that, as early as the 1960s, after only about three decades of writing, Joaquin was already seen as a writer past his prime: “For many Philippine literary critics, Nick Joaquin’s three most recent stories are merely the forced spurts of creativity of a spent writer.” Fr Joseph Galdon, in an interview, said something similar: that in martial law, Joaquin “hasn’t come up with anything new, except for Cave & Shadows which I feel most critics have failed to understand. He’s been writing journalistically & republishing, rehashing. But there’s nothing new, nothing really creatively new.” Galdon continues, “The golden period was Prose & Poems. Perhaps he’s exhausted the vein.”

In the essay, Lacaba foretells what would become one of Joaquin’s literary preoccupations/contributions when he wrote: “It is Quijano de Manila the journalist that has made the masses aware of Nick Joaquin the artist, and—of more importance—Joaquin has lifted his journalism to the level of his art.” According to Lacaba, Joaquin revived the art of the essay, which was dying not only in the Philippines but in the rest of the world. Joaquin delivered the classic speech, “Journalism vs Literature?” when he received the Ramon Magsaysay Award two decades after Lacaba’s essay was published. That speech explains why any talk about Joaquin’s-creativity-after-Prose & Poems is, I think, moot.

Further into my research, I read Joaquin’s essay in Archipelago, a handsome cultural magazine published in the 1980s by a motoring company. There, he staked his claim that he has been pushing for the incorporation of history & tradition in literature; & that it was slowly happening, the incorporation of history & tradition in literature. I also leafed through old magazines like Focus & Fookien Times & of course, Free Press to look for images. I found a picture of Joaquin when Woman won the Republic Cultural Heritage Award in 1961; another of him at the UP Writers’ Workshop, accompanying an article by Estrella Alfon; & several others of him with other Free Press writers in China.

I also found two pictures of him when he was given the National Artist Award in 1976. These photos come with articles about the establishment of the National Arts Center in Mt Makiling. Joaquin delivered the invocation at the inauguration of the Philippine High School for the Arts. Pete Lacaba, brother of Eman, said elsewhere that in that occasion, Joaquin delivered a speech about the necessity of freedom in creation, & was never again invited to speak by the Marcoses.

I set aside the periodicals for when I finally get around to investigating the institution that first compelled me, along with 20 other kids, to “make art” in the name of Nick Joaquin. Meanwhile I finished the video, my own humble corporate-sponsored tribute to the man, although a creative piece of written work would of course be more meaningful. For background music, I found copyright-free jazz pieces. Joaquin is said to love jazz. I couldn’t find any public domain pieces by Cole Porter or Frank Sinatra, his favorites, so I settled with Louis Armstrong’s raspy version of “La vie en rose.”