No Identity Crisis Here

It was 1955 when an aspiring writer named Frankie Jose arrived in the U.S. on a three-month fellowship. When Jose was growing up in the Philippines, his family couldn’t afford kerosene for their lamp, so he had to read the tiny, cheap paperbacks of Cervantes and Cather that American soldiers gave him during the war under street lamps. Now the journalist, who had turned to short story writing because his day job at the Manila Times didn’t pay enough to support his family, found himself meeting literary lions like poet Robert Frost and critic Malcolm Cowley, who took a shine to a manuscript that Jose had lugged across the Pacific. Cowley offered to get it published--with a few changes.

Back home, Jose struggled for a week with the revisions, then gave up.

“I asked the question: Am I writing for Americans or for Filipinos?” said Jose, who’s teaching at UC Berkeley this semester. “Don’t get me wrong. I’d like to be published in America. Who doesn’t want to publish here and get rich? But I decided to write in my own way, and I did.”

Write he did: F. Sionil Jose has published 16 books (novels, short stories and verse) and has been translated from his supple English into two dozen other languages. And, since 1992, his work has even belatedly begun appearing in the U.S.

But that’s only about half of what Jose has done over the last 35 years. He is virtually a one-man Bertelsmann AG: In Manila, Jose runs the company (Solidaridad) that publishes his books, as well as a bookshop (same name) that sells them and edits a current affairs journal. He also teaches college courses in which his works are required reading and founded the Philippines chapter of the writers’ group PEN.

“America really has no counterpart to Jose,” wrote author and editor James Fallows in the Atlantic after a visit to Jose’s literary salon above his bookstore, “no one who is simultaneously a prolific novelist, a social and political organizer, an editor and journalist, and a small-scale entrepreneur.”

The focus of this unceasing energy is, always, the Philippines.

“We are a paradox,” Jose once wrote, “even to ourselves.”

In an effort to explain the nation to itself, Jose spent 22 years writing a cycle of five novels (the Rosales saga) that spans Filipino history from Spanish hegemony to the Marcos tyranny. This restless plumbing of the national soul, personified in the struggles of individuals grappling with justice and morality, makes Jose the Balzac of Luzon, a fictive chronicler of peons and the powerful and the conflicts between them spread across the tapestry of his homeland.

The first installment, “Dusk” (Modern Library), has just been published in this country. (Two other books have been released in the U.S.--a collection of novellas, “Three Filipino Women” and “Sins” [both Random House].)

While Jose, now 73, writes eloquently about the people of the Philippines, their losses and longings, he also lovingly describes the trees, plants and topography of the land that suffuses his books with a natural lyricism.

Although it opens the series, “Dusk” was the last one written, largely because of the decades of historical research Jose pursued before pounding out the first draft in a month while on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. The book was published in Manila in 1984 under the title of “Po-on,” for the name of the village in which it starts (and which means “the beginning” or “tree trunk” in Jose’s native Ilokano language).

The book opens in 1880 with Eustaquio Samson, a young acolyte of high promise, who has mastered Spanish and Latin but whose dreams of attending a seminary and entering the priesthood have been smashed by a venal padre. Samson’s father, who lost a hand when the Spaniards punished him, murders the priest, and the entire village is forced to flee, undertaking an arduous journey across the mountains in search of land to work. After almost 20 years and much sadness--his father is killed by a python, his mother drowns in a river, his brother is slain by revenge-seeking Spaniards--Samson is raising his family and living in peace as the village healer, almost unaware that the Americans have replaced the Spanish as the island’s colonial rulers. The Americans are hunting down a guerrilla army fighting for independence--a savage war in which some 250,000 Filipinos died, presaging, to Jose, much of the futility of Vietnam.

“It wasn’t a Spanish-American War,” Jose said, “it was a Filipino-American War.”

After the revolutionary intellectual Apolinario Mabini hides in Samson’s village (as he actually did in Jose’s hometown of Rosales), Samson finds himself risking his life as a courier for the nationalist army, although he doesn’t know why.

“They love Filipinas, and this I cannot say for myself because I am not sure,” Samson thinks as he stumbles toward the battle of Tirad Pass in 1899, where 60 barefoot peasant soldiers made an Alamo-like last stand. “How can I love a thousand islands, a million people speaking not my language but their very own which I cannot understand? Who, then, do I love?”

The healer then picks up a gun--a metaphor for Jose’s belief that his country still needs a historically clarifying struggle like the American Civil War to dislodge an irredeemably corrupt elite.

“I always thought that we needed a revolution in the Philippines,” Jose said. “I’m not a bloodthirsty radical, but the primary necessity in the Philippines is the destruction of the oligarchy. You are poor, you get sick, you die. It’s as simple as that. There are no rich people in jail. If you can have social change with the minimum of violence, I support it, but we must never eschew the principle of violence. These people have guns and power and won’t just give up their privileges like that.”

*

Francisco Jose was born in the northern reaches of the country’s main island of Luzon. At school he was taught in English. When he went to high school in Manila he learned Tagalog.

“I often muse why, as an Ilokano from the North, I do not write in my own language, which is very rich in nuances and that I am comfortable writing with a borrowed idiom,” he once said. “I did not make that choice; history tells me I would be writing today in Spanish, even Portuguese, German or Japanese, if we did not become America’s only colony.”

The need for a national identity in a land without even its own name (the islands were named in honor of Spanish King Felipe II) is a constant theme in his work. But so is a deep affection for all things American. On Jose’s first trip to the U.S., Robert Frost asked about the occupation.

“I told him that but for the public schools introduced by the Americans, at that very moment, I would probably be an unlettered peasant atop a water buffalo in my Pangasinan village,” Jose wrote later.

Instead, Jose went to the University of Santo Tomas in Manila, worked as an editor at various publications and for the U.S. Information Service. In 1965, he started the publishing house to make money but wound up having to support it with his bookshop, which he helped fund with a $10,000 yearly grant from the U.S. government, which actually was supposed to be financing his journal--a tangled tale he delights in telling.

Jose’s passion for politics has caused his critics at home to label him everything from a Communist to a CIA agent--and, in truth, he has supported the hard left at times, while he also hasn’t exactly sniffed at handouts from the U.S. government. But Jose seems too naturally combative to carry anyone else’s water.

Making a living became much tougher under the martial law of Ferdinand Marcos. The government canceled thousands of public school subscriptions to Jose’s journal, sending his publishing business into a tailspin. Jose says that his bookstore (where Corazon Aquino, later president, used to load up on books before visiting her dissident husband, Benigno, in jail) was broken into by agents of the government, and that his passport was confiscated for years--both of which he dismisses as trifles.

“So many were jailed. So many were tortured,” he said. “I wasn’t tortured. I wasn’t imprisoned. I was just harassed.”

He did have trouble publishing “Mass,” the last book of the Rosales series, because his company was too strapped to print it and other local houses refused to touch the novel, which included a portrait of a ruthless ruler named Marcos. He finally sold it to a Dutch publisher, using his advance to print it in Manila. In the 19th century, Jose Rizal’s “Noli Me Tangere” (the first book Jose read) might have been the intellectual fuel for the rebellion against Spain, but Marcos never seemed too concerned about intellectuals. Literature, Jose says, is not exactly the national pastime.

“Filipinos don’t read books,” Jose said. “They read comic books. They watch television. Books? No!”

*

A short, plump man with skin the color of a sun-bleached coconut shell and a nearly bald head, Jose was wearing a stripped short-sleeve shirt with suspenders, making him look something like a stockbroker headed to the tropics. Actually, for the last semester he’s been a visiting professor of Asian studies at Berkeley, teaching “The Sociology and Aesthetics of Philippine Culture,” which covers everything from the advent of colonialism to food and sexuality.

“I earn dollars, which I cannot earn in the Philippines,” he said, “but I can’t identify with Americans, even if my students want to be Filipinos.”

Jose told the Filipino American students who make up about half his class that they are not Filipino, they’re American. Undaunted, they invited the islands’ most celebrated man of letters to a Filipino culture night. He turned them down--couldn’t stand another damned bamboo dance, he explains.

“I tell my students if you are involved with your society, you have no time to worry about your identity,” he said.

Jose sat down to a dinner of sushi and salad at his daughter Jette’s apartment, where he has been staying, which is fortunate since she is also his editor. His left hand is in a brace from dragging two book-stuffed suitcases through the airport, but Jose bats away any suggestion that he’s a productive writer.

“How many books did Graham Greene write? John Updike?” he said with a laugh. “But these are professional writers.” The slight sales of his previous U.S. books also doesn’t faze him. “Who’s interested in the Philippines?” he shrugged. “I would have been surprised if they had sold.”

Over the years all of his seven children have moved to the U.S., and they’ve asked him and his wife, Teresita, to come here as well.

“This place is for young people. I’m too old,” he said, looking around a nice living room full of Asian art, framed maps of the Philippines, his back to a view of the Bay Bridge. “Manila is like a very ugly son that only a mother can love, but I love it. I miss the Philippines. Whatever is negative about it--and there is a lot that is negative about my country--it is what sustains me.”

Behind him, the lights of the bridge twinkled like a strand of stars hung over the bay.

“I live by my angers,” he said, throwing his napkin down on the table. “When I stop being angry it means I’m dead. It’s the anger that makes me write, but I have to control it so I won’t be smearing blood all over the place. When you’re here and everything is so nice and comfortable, it’s hard to be angry.”