Reality and Filipino Scholarship

F. Sionil Jose

My most important bonafide in addressing you is my age: I am ninety and much older than all of you. This age has endowed me with so much hindsight. As you know, hindsight is the lowest form of wisdom but wisdom just the same. I now have a much broader understanding of time as history, of time as the ultimate arbiter of conflicts, human dilemmas, political controversies. For instance, even if we did not oppose Marcos, we would have simply waited for him to die—which he did. Yes, it is difficult to divine the future but if we looked hard enough—and this is what scholarship is supposed to do—in the fifties and the sixties when we were the richest, most modern country in Southeast Asia but with visionless, corrupt leaders, we could have foreseen then that we would now be the “sick man” of the region.

It is necessary then for us to appreciate history, learn from it particularly if this knowledge helps us know ourselves better.

So many givens are in our culture but these givens, though obvious, are often not recognized because of our personal biases motivated by ethnicity, or nationalism, the search for identity—all these feelings passionately aroused in us who regard our origins as the bedrock of nation.

For instance, many of our scholars want our country to be identified with Asia. This is a logical aspiration for there is no denying that we are, indeed, in Asia. But the two great religions of this region—Buddhism and Hinduism, did not really take root here: the Spaniards came and Christianized us; over the original native culture, they imposed this Catholic patina which survived three hundred years and influenced our lives.

We are, therefore, heirs to the Greco-Roman tradition that Christianity brought. The classical aspects of culture which the Hindus and the Buddhists implanted in the Asian region and in the Asian mind did not develop here; much of our culture then is folk.

The Western aspects of our culture are subsumed in our arts.

So many of our cultural workers are bent on preserving and encouraging the culture of our ethnic minorities. After all, if we are truly looking for indigenous sources of cultural pride, it is in these ethnic achievements. We must beware, however, of the tendency to transform these cultures into museum specimens, to freeze them in time. What we must do is assist our benighted minorities to modernize so they can compete in the market for jobs. The avenues to modernity and, most of all, to justice must not be denied them even by wellmeaning cultural workers who want their traditional way of life preserved.

Scholars on folk culture—like specialists everywhere—talk among themselves; they cannot see how folk culture opens the door to many development possibilities. Folklorists wallowing in myths and native epics should have their knowledge transmitted to creative writers who will then transform such epics and myths into a larger, nobler literary vision. The same with our musicologists, our folk dance scholars. The creation of fresh, vigorous artistic forms—these can be inspired by our folk culture: such innovations will then acquire a distinct Filipino face with which we can identify, about which we can exalt.

Folklorists have conferences but they never invite creative writers, poets, and composers to attend. They miss out in giving relevance and practical use of their knowledge.

History

There is so much to unearth in our unrecorded past. Although archeological findings illustrate that these islands were inhabited more than two thousand years ago, no written record of our ancient forefathers are extant; the oldest which was found some years back in a Laguna riverbed is not more than 900 years old. Ancient gold artifacts have, of course, been found to attest to the high scientific culture of our ancestors. But compared to our neighbors with their august and remembered past, its relics and monuments, we are a young nation, indeed. And our history, more often than not, is written by our colonizers. It is our duty now to write our own history, to popularize this history, remembering always that memory as recorded history—is the granite foundation of any nation.

We must now write this history from our point of view, from the bottom up and not from the top down. All too often, historians are concerned only with front page events, the powerful men who created these events. Look at history not from this rarified perspective but from the eye level of the masa. Listen, journalism is history in hurry, but literature is history that is lived.

The Two Cultures

Sometime in the mid-1950s the English scientist C.P. Snow postulated that a wide chasm has grown between the humanist and the scientific cultures. This observation is still valid today as it applies not just to the West but to us. The divide is not just between cultures but between social classes—the very many who are poor, and the very few who are rich. This division impacts on almost everything not just on values but on thinking. It explains the crippling ignorance of the masa who cannot afford a college education and, therefore, a better life and an intelligent view of our political system. If the masa votes for dumb movie stars and media celebrities to the highest public office, it is because they are shallow.

In looking at our unexamined past, at our lower classes, our very poor, and the rebel movements, we also unlock the basic ethos of nationhood. The efforts of our scholars to probe deeply into the thinking of the peasantry, of the lumpen in our villages, should be appreciated. Among these well- intentioned scholars is Rey Ileto whose Pasyon and Revolution attracted so much attention some three decades ago. The problem with that study is not so much the emphasis on the Pasyon and the lower classes as such but the misinterpretation of the Pasyon’s influence on the masa. This is not so—the Pasyon is brought out only during the Holy Week and is then completely forgotten. It is the old Latin mass and the story of Christ that hold great influence on the imagination, the beliefs and rituals of the masa. How could Rey miss this? Simple. Like most scholars who can afford college and get their MAs and PhDs, Rey is middle class—he has not lived with the peasant.

This ignorance of the masa, of the quasireligious nature of mass movements, could lead to avoidable tragedies such as the massacre in 1965 of Valentin delos Santos’s Lapiang Malaya followers in Taft Avenue. If the government only knew, instead of a platoon of soldiers confronting the peasant demonstrators—they killed many—Malacañang should have sent a Tagalog politician overdressed in the regalia of a general—braid, epaulets, and all that color—to mollify them, and that he—a leading Filipino leader—will attend to their grievances then send them back to their villages with a jeepful of goodies.

Ethnicity

Filipino scholarship must recognize ethnicity for it is very real and divisive. The late F. Landa Jocano, who was making an ethnic map in the fifties, after several weeks of living in the Ilocos, said, Ilocanos are different.
Of course, they are distinct from the Tagalogs, the Visayans. Even the Moros are different from one another; the Maranaos, the Maguindanaos, the Tausugs—they are not united. Even among themselves, clans have existed for generations generating deadly clan wars.
In the sixties, a book titled Sikolohiyang Filipino, actually defined Tagalog psychology, not that of Filipinos as a people.