SIX WOMEN KEEP ART OF WRITING ALIVE

By Elizabeth Lolarga, VERA Files

Scholar Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, a fictionist and essayist in her own right, describes the state of literary biography in the Philippines in her latest book "Six Sketches of Filipino Women Writers"  as "a wide, arid stretch, with a few patches of grass, and perhaps a tree or two."

She seeks to rectify the situation in her portraits of six contemporary writers; she prefers the words "sketches" or "cameos" for their fragmentary nature to qualify that what she has written is not a full-length biography.

Hidalgo points out why there is a dearth of information on writers—the academe prioritizes literary theory over literary history in training writing majors. This she considers "a pity" because "beginning writers …should be familiar with the entire landscape before they can stake their own claim to one portion of it, or venture beyond its borders into fields unknown."

Merlin Alunan, Sylvia Mayuga, Marra Lanot, Barbara Gonzalez, Elsa Martinez Coscoluella and Rosario Cruz Lucero are not only united by their being female but also by being post-war babies who were raised in the stable 1950s. They saw the rise of student rebellion in the 1960s, lived through martial law in the 1970s and throughout all these, have continued to write actively.

She acknowledges past volumes that have attempted to record the lives of the country's literary ancestors through the research and writing done by the late Doreen Fernandez and Edilberto Alegre, by Edna Zapanta Manlapaz's biographies of Angela Manalang Gloria, Estrella Alfon and Lina Espina Moore, by Manlapaz and Marjorie Evasco's oral history of poets Manalang Gloria, Trinidad Tarrosa Subido, Edith Tiempo, Virginia Moreno, Ophelia Dimalanta and Tita Lacambra Ayala.

In the last few years, Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and Gilda Cordero Fernando have come up with their own autobiographies by way of setting records straight.

Hidalgo agrees with feminist biographer Linda Wagner-Martin that her subjects must be involved in the biography so readers can appreciate their lives in their full context.

Apart from communicating with her subjects through the technological convenience provided by e-mail, Hidalgo puts them at ease. The telling of their stories has the intimacy of two women friends, who haven't seen one another in years, catching up over a cup of coffee and slices of cake, and lingering way past the café's business hours.

Like the author, half of the subjects (Alunan, Coscoluella and Lucero, and for a time, Lanot) have found refuge in the academe to support their writing projects as they realize that despite the joy in creating poems, fiction and essays, Philippine society does not provide a stable economic support for this.

Lanot, in the blunt, to-the-point style that her poems are noted for, says, quoting family friend Nick Joaquin: "You don't do hack writing, you write and try to write well all the time, whether the pay is high or low or nil."

Lanot offered piano lessons to young neighbors when her husband Pete Lacaba was in the underground and later jailed on subversion charges. Lucero gave ballet lessons to aspiring young dancers who could be accommodated in the sala of a rented house to stretch the family budget. Mayuga was employed in print and broadcast media.

Gonzalez rose to become one of the country's few women advertising executives when a marriage failed. She continues to paint and craft handmade jewelry to sell at weekend markets.

Although she married into a hacendero's family in Negros Occidental, Coscoluella went on to write and submit an epic poem or a full-length drama to national literary contests and win. She served as a vice president of the University of St. La Salle in Bacolod. Her duties included running the university press apart from expanding the Institute of Culinary Arts, managing a master's program for police officers, among other things, making her recent retirement not fully realized yet.

Wifehood and motherhood are not romanticized, although that would be how machos would portray them—the be-all and end-all of a woman's existence.

Alunan wrote of the exhaustion and frustration she felt as a young mom: "Your brain will turn into putty if you go on this way, you can't be doing this all your life, how long can you put up with this…The watching half of me complains and scolds, angry and resentful for the time and space it had lost to this selfish demanding little beast that all infants are, jealous and envious of all the attention it takes for granted as an inviolable right…"

Throughout their narratives, these women did astonishing balancing acts: they bore and raised children, held down regular jobs, struggled with difficult partners and wrote for expression and for the freedom it gives in circumstances far from what Virginia Woolf required that a woman who wishes to write should have a room of her own.

Because of these writers' efforts and the critical recognition they've received, they have cleared a path for younger sisters who dream of making writing not just a worthy hobby but a lifelong occupation and a commitment.

"Six Sketches of Filipino Women Writers"  is published by the University of the Philippines Press, 2011.

(VERA Files is put out by veteran journalists taking a deeper look at current issues. Vera is Latin for "true.")

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