Writing into the future

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Over glasses of cool drinks in a downtown resto one balmy evening, Amy showed me her son’s writing drafts. I read a few pieces and was amazed by what Attriu, her high school kid, had written. Here’s a sample:

John Slowan was one of the fastest men I knew and the best strategist in the squad. By taking a hovercraft, we crossed the city through the sewerage system. Even when unused, the sewers had such a horrible smell. The dead civilians and dead orks we saw all piled up in the sewer gave the word “united” a foul meaning. Crossing the main ork line we encountered some ork patrols, but we were quick enough to keep them from detecting our position…. We have reported orks massing just three kilometers from our line….

I told her Attriu could give some of our Creative Writing students a run for their money. And I was not pulling her leg. While some college kids stumble over their grammar as they try to put together a story or a poem, here is this fifteen-year-old who plays around with characters he appropriates from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, from video games, and from movies, then – instinctively, or influenced by the language and storytelling techniques of the media – puts them together in an imaginary battle for the Emperor’s dominion.

I told Amy she should check out some of the fan fiction – for that is what we call the genre her son writes in – posted all over the Internet. Or perhaps buy some gamer magazines that publish stories like Attriu’s. Which soon got us to talking about putting up again the Ways of Seeing page that used to grace this paper a few years back.

I asked myself, why not? We could make it into a literary and arts page of some sorts, perhaps feature contributions from readers. And we could call the section Ways of Saying, not to depart too far from that old page, so we could highlight the different expressive art forms readers may want to submit works in and which – if we find the piece interesting – we would gladly accommodate on this page. Hmmm. Something doable, I thought.

We had some nagging doubts, though. Reading is supposedly on the decline, more so reading of literary texts. The 1982-2002 National Endowment for the Arts study, Reading At Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, shows a “dramatic decline” with fewer than 50% of Americans reported to have read literary works during the survey years. I think we can hazard the guess that the figures would be lesser in this country. So why put up a literary page?

The same study revealed that while readership had decreased, “the number of people doing creative writing increased by 30 percent, from 11 million in 1982 to more than 14 million in 2002″ (Reading at Risk, 2004). And if the number of Creative Writing students who enroll every year in our school is any indication, there is a sustained interest if not an increase in Creative Writing in this region.

Not surprisingly, the works our Creative Writing students produce are not so different from what Attriu does on his spare time. While some of our students have published their pieces in local and national publications or have presented these in national literary workshops, they most have fun doing stuff for their Pop Lit class.

One such work is Gabriel Millado’s “Knightmare,” which he presented last October 10 during the 2nd Popular Literature Forum sponsored by the UP Mindanao Creative Writing Program. Gabriel, or Kid as he is known among his friends, ripped the characters of Sandman and the Dark Knight and placed them in one graphic tale he entitled, in classic Batman fashion, “Knightmare” (see sample panel above). His story goes this way:

Batman is racing against time to rescue the kidnapped Jed Walker, heir to the Kincaid fortune. At the same time, Morpheus is also looking for the boy, who may be a dream vortex, and in whose mind a rogue dream is hiding. As the two collide, Batman will find out if his determination is strong enough to stand against the duties of an Endless: for if the Sandman is to secure his realm, he may have to destroy the boy Jed Walker….

But Kid did not just write his crossover narrative of Batman and Sandman. He created a bricolage made up of frames from the two graphic stories: The Dark Knight Returns and Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes. He took frames from each, rearranged them, erased the word balloons, and lettered in his own dialogues from the two tales.

Here is a sample (see the graphic above), the frame showing Rose Walker walking into a dark room to find Batman lurking in the shadows. In the original story, Rose Walker walks into a dark room to find the Three Witches who warns her about her fate. Using the digital technology available to him, Kid meticulously crafted the frames to create his own tale. Cool, right?

(More next week: Another graphic novel inspired by local creative artists.)

This is the first part of a series to start off our literary page, Ways of Saying, printed every Sunday on Mindanao Times.

Anne Rice’s Christ

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Found a copy of Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (2006) in the local bookstore. I’ve been curious how the author, popular for her novels of vampires and witches, would tackle the subject of Christ. Would she portray Christ the human being or would she depict him as the Son of God?

The blurb on the back cover says this much:

With the Holy Land in turmoil, seven-year-old Jesus and his family leave Egypt for the dangerous road home to Jerusalem. As they travel, the boy tries to unlock the secret of his birth and comprehend his terrifying power to work miracles. Anne Rice’s dazzling, kaleidoscopic novel, based on the gospels and the most respected New Testament scholarship, summons up the voice, the presence, and the words of Jesus, allowing him to tell his own story as he struggles to grasp the holy purpose of his life.

So it’s going to be Jesus narrating his own story. Hmmm, interesting. Reminds me of The Vampire Lestat. But how would the voice of this boy Jesus sound like? And so I turned to the first page. And what do you know, right at the novel’s beginning, I read about how Jesus kills a boy. A few pages later, of course, he brings this boy back to life.

But with this incident, which we later on learn from her “Author’s Note” that she got from the Apocrypha, Rice proceeds with the premise of a child Jesus not fully aware of his supernatural powers. It is this secret or this mystery — that his family keeps from him, presumably to protect him until he is ready to face his destiny — that becomes Jesus’ quest.

So even as the family journeys from the safety of exile in Egypt to the turmoil in Jerusalem, Jesus embarks on a venture to seek the truth of his birth. The journey as rendered in the book tends to be plodding, with descriptions of the Jewish life taking up most of the book’s 317 pages. But then the story is told from the point of view of a seven-year-old Jesus, just out of exile, who finds Nazareth a foreign and strange land.

But then, the Jesus we meet in the novel seems to be a pensive boy. He seems too passive, too contemplative for a boy that age. It does not help, too, that the language Rice chooses for Jesus to tell us what’s happening reveals a consciousness that is, according to Melvin Jules Bukiet’s review in the Washington Post:

repetitive as well as uninformative. Meeting cousin Elizabeth for the first time, Jesus notes, “I thought her face pleasing in a way I couldn’t put into words to myself.” Then he describes himself as having “the mind of a child who had grown up sleeping in a room with men and women in that same room and in other rooms open to it, and sleeping in the open courtyard with the men and women in the heat of summer, and living always close with them, and hearing and seeing many things,” none of which he shares with us.

Bukiet also says of the linguistic style employed in the book:

Worse still, clumsy and outright ungrammatical prose infects every page. For instance, we’re told, “Joseph and Mary were cousins themselves of each other, that meant happiness for both of them.” Presumably aiming for the resounding echoes of biblical syntax, Rice is merely redundant, so much so that the 300-plus pages of this book feel infinitely longer. Here’s a sample of dialogue. Mary says, “Think of all the signs. . . . Think of the night when the men from the East came.” Then Joseph says, “Do you think anybody there has forgotten that? Do you think they’ve forgotten anything. . . . They’ll remember the star. . . . They’ll remember the men from the East,” to which Mary replies, “Don’t say it, please. . . . Please don’t say those words.”

What kept me going, however, was curiousity about how Rice would make Jesus confront his destiny. I was not disappointed in that crucial scene with the old priest inside the Temple of Jerusalem. That makes me want to read the more mature Jesus in Rice’s sequel, Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana.

The Good Thing About the Waray

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An Maupay ha mga Waray ug iba pa nga mga Siday
Voltaire Q. Oyzon
NCCA and UPV Tacloban Creative Writing Program
Manila, 2008

The good thing about the Waray is that they do not give up. Or, as Voltaire puts it: “Kun hinuhobsan inin akon dughan / sugad hiton medyahan / dayon ko ini inaalgan / didto kanda Mana Semang / (Mana Semang, ilista la anay)” [When the heart dries up / like this half-gallon jug / quickly I rush to Mana Semang's / to fill it up / (just put it in my bill, Mana Semang)].

This wry sensibility characterizes how the Waray copes with the tough life dealt to most. As long as there is tuba to go with life’s vicissitudes the heart will still beat and “mangayat hin away” [spoil for a fight].

Perhaps that is why so many siday or poem in Waray deal with social issues. Tongues loosened by the tart taste of tuba, poets can spew the bitter in dribbles of sweetened lines some may consider as harmless nonsense.

In the poem “Lagung” [Fly], for instance, Voltaire draws a picture of a fly that can only look on and drool at the food it cannot taste because the glass walls of fastfood joints, while providing an enticing gastronomic view, prohibit its entrance to “undesirable creatures.”

Like the fly and, by extension, street urchins who peer through the glass and “tutok / simhot / … ha Jollibee, Dunkin’ / di ngani Cindy’s [popular fastfood joints in Tacloban] / … hamot / laway” [stare / sniff / ... at Jollibee, Dunkin' / or Cindy's / ... smell / drool] at scrumptious meals patrons eat but which they can only look at or beg for until the service crew shoos them away.

It is Voltaire’s deft use of such images and situations that such harmless nonsense can contain scathing truths. In his “Kan Toytoy Pag-asoy han Agsob nga Karantahay ha Ira Balay” [Toytoy Tells About the Singing at Home], Voltaire shows how aesthetics and social commentary can go together in a poem about domestic violence.

The poem describes how when the drunken father arrives home “naglulubay-lubay, / nagkikinanta han Inday, Inday [a popular Waray folk song] / diretso ini hiya ha kusina / manngungukab, / babagtingan an kardero, / mapakarakatak han mga plato” [swaying / singing Inday, Inday / heads straight for the kitchen / rummaging, / clanking pots, / jangling plates].

The wife’s pacifying and soft alto, “baga’n kanan aghoy taghoy” [like a forest spirit's whistle], soon sings second voice to the husband’s gruff complaints. Then, “… may malagubo, / bati han bug-os nga baryo, / hi nanay – napalsito” [a thud, / and the whole barrio hears / my mother singing in falsetto].

But it is not only Voltaire’s skillful presentation technique that shines through in the poem. The aural play of onomatopoeic Waray words, the use of rhyme, and the counterpointing of the husband’s bass and the wife’s alto/falsetto complement the poem’s descriptive narration and the delayed ironic twist in the ending.

Merlie Alunan, who writes the book’s “Introduction,” is right indeed about Voltaire being at home in the Waray language: “He [understands] its nuances. Its tones and accents [echo] in his inner ear. He [is] at home with its rhythms. He can deal with its intricacies with the delicacy and finesse required by the poetic process” (9).

And several poems in the collection reflects Voltaire’s love for the Waray tongue. Rather than take a more strident but definitely less effective tone, Voltaire displays the same subtlety and humor in the use of language and images when he tackles the language theme.

In “Nagbalyo-balyo Ako hin Nanay” [Changing Mothers], Voltaire effectively uses snippets of a Waray popular song to counterpoint the cultural effects of a colonial and/or linguistic hegemony. And parodying the Tagalog patriot, Marcelo H. del Pilar, who parodied “The Hail Mary” in “Ang Aba Guinoong Baria” [The Hail Money] to protest the greed of Spanish friars, Voltaire throws a gibe at the imperialism of the so-called national language in “Paghimaya” [Glory Be].

But even as Voltaire pays tribute to a heritage that is seemingly on the verge of extinction, his use of Waray is a testimony that the local tongue continues to flourish even as it confronts the onslaught of technological progress and the consequent homogenization of culture.

In “Para han mga Pulong ha Waray nga Pinamatay” [For the Murdered Words in Waray], he turns quasi-scientific as he likens seemingly lost words in Waray to the dew that covers the earth every morning. But he also turns wistful and hopeful as he writes: “Ano an angay ta basolan? / Ano an angay ikabido? / Ha kalibotan, waray butang, / waray butang nga naaanaw” [What's there to regret then? / What's to feel bad about? / In this world, nothing, / nothing's gone forever].

Voltaire’s collection – with poems tackling themes from the domestic and particular to the more universal in their very particularity – is, to use a perhaps rather outdated New Critical term, well-wrought indeed. In his use of linguistic and literary elements – folkloric allusions or appropriations of earlier literary forms and/or themes – coupled with a truly homegrown humor, Voltaire Q. Oyzon is an original talent worthy to be the heir to the Leyte-Samar literary tradition.

Usa pa ka tagay [One more round].