The 1980 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and Creative Communication Arts

BIOGRAPHY of Francisco Sionil Jose

In his novels and short stories FRANCISCO SIONIL JOSÉ draws upon his memories of Barrio Cabugawan, the village of his birth, to depict the rural Filipino and point up the social and economic inequalities inherent in modern Philippine society.

Cabugawan, in Rosales township, Pangasinan province, Luzon, the Philippines, had been settled by the Ilocano people of northern Luzon. JOSÉ's father, Antonio, was a minister of the Aglipayan (Philippine Independent) Church and had three children by his wife, Sofia Sionil, before leaving her for another woman; FRANCISCO, born December 3, 1924, was the eldest of two boys and a girl.

The years following Antonio's departure were fraught with physical hardship for the family he left behind. Sofia owned only a houselot in the barrio (village), although as settlers her family had cleared a plot of farmland. Along with most immigrants, however, the Sionils had not filed claims to their property, since an individual's boundary lines were marked—and respected by the community—by landmarks such as creeks, trees and dikes. In the 1920s, when the American colonial administration tried to record and regularize land claims; the Sionils, along with many other small farmers, became victims of the local educated elite who had contacts in Manila and who understood bureaucratic procedures. These wealthy landholders simply filed claims on all the cleared lands in their areas, forcing the original settlers to become tenants or laborers. FRANKIE, as he is familiarly known, remembers his grandmother saying, "If we were only smarter we wouldn't be having such difficult times today."

Sofia sold rice cakes to support her family and the children were sometimes allowed to glean the rice fields of others. FRANKIE himself raised hogs and hired out as a farm laborer. Years later to prove to urban friends that he had grown up in a rural barrio he would tell them how to catch crabs in a rice field. "It's very simple," he would explain. "You see a hole. If there's water in it, you stick your hand in. You'll get pinched by a crab, but at least you'll know it's a crab. If there's no water in it, don't stick your hand in. There might be a snake. That's the first simple wisdom that any village boy learns."

As a child JOSÉ was aware of tensions and demonstrations in his home town during the Colorum uprising in Pangasinan in 1931. The Colorums were members of a quasi-religious secret society which embodied, JOSÉ feels, "the peasant's search for moral order and social justice." Although officially the uprising was attributed to "religious fanaticism," one American historian wrote that the peasants "were rebelling chiefly against 'caciquism' (domination by political bosses, usually landowners), agrarian oppression, and Constabulary abuses." JOSÉ confesses, however, that although he was often hungry as a child, he was not fully aware of the social injustices implied by his family's condition. For him the local landlords who sent him scampering behind the bamboo fences as they thundered down the village street on their horses were the objects of childish admiration. "I did not hate them at all," he says. "It's only in hindsight, when I was in high school or in college, that I realized I had quite an unhappy childhood!"

Despite their poverty Sofia insisted that all her children complete elementary school. FRANKIE attended Rosales Elementary School (1931-1937) where one of his teachers, Soledad Oriel, inculcated in him his lifelong love of books. "She saw to it that I was always reading," he recalls. The first novels she introduced him to were English translations of Noli Me Tangere (literally Touch Me Not, but commonly entitled The Social Cancer) and El Filibusterismo (Reign of Greed) by the Philippine national hero Jose Rizal; My Antonia by Willa Cather; and Don Quixote by Cervantes. After he finished elementary school, JOSÉ went to live in Manila with his maternal uncle, where he did household chores in exchange for tuition at Far Eastern University High School (1939-1941).

FRANKIE was in his senior year during World War II when the Japanese attacked Manila in December 1941 and schools were closed. Although it was three months short of the full term students were given credit for the year. High school thus completed, JOSÉ returned to his hometown. His mother's house in Barrio Cabugawan was burned down so the family stayed in Rosales with a second cousin who was a doctor. This cousin collected medicines which he several times delivered to guerrillas. His cousin also had a house in Manila where some of her family stayed. It was one of JOSÉ's jobs to take sacks of rice from Rosales into the city which was chronically suffering from food shortages. One day his calesa (one-horse carriage)—along with other vehicles carrying rice—was halted by Japanese sentries. In spite of the fact that he had a special permit to convey grain to Manila, his 50-kilogram sack of rice was confiscated and he was badly mistreated by the soldiers. He continued to commute between Rosales and Manila, however, but carried only a small amount of grain on subsequent trips.

Schools were reopened in late 1943 and in June 1944 JOSÉ enrolled at Santo Tomas University in Manila. American air raids on the city began in September that year, and in November he and his mother returned to Rosales, walking for three days before they could find a calesa to take them the rest of the distance. In January, as United States forces neared Rosales, JOSÉ and a young cousin set out by foot down the highway to join them, only to be sent running for cover by Japanese sentry fire. When the Americans finally took the town JOSÉ became a paid civilian technician in the U.S. medical corps. He qualified for this position since he had assisted his cousin in her clinic and at that time hoped to become a doctor himself.

As soon as the war was over JOSÉ returned to Manila and enrolled in premedical courses at the Manila College of Pharmacy and Dentistry, which he attended for one semester until the University of Santo Tomas again reopened. For the first two years he pursued premedical training. When it became apparent, however, that he was not suited for the sciences, he transferred to the faculty of liberal arts. Here his writing was encouraged by his English teacher, Paz Latorena, who was, according to JOSÉ, a "wonderful writer" and who introduced him "to the finer aspects of literature." It was she who taught him how to dramatize his stories rather than tell simple narratives.

During his years at the university JOSÉ lived with relatives in Manila in what he describes as "a very decrepit room right beside the railroad tracks"—a room which he immortalized in his best-known novel, The Pretenders. In addition to helping with household chores in return for room and board, JOSÉ worked for the U.S. Army as a checker in the port area from 6:00 p.m. to midnight. He would have preferred the higher paid position of stevedore, but was told that he didn't have a strong enough build; "I wasn't eating enough," he says. Soon he became a typist in the army office at night and he worked there until the office was disbanded five months later. Fortunately he was then able to obtain a paid position as assistant literary editor on the university's newspaper, the Varsitarian and became in quick succession literary editor, managing editor and finally editor-in-chief. During his last two years at the university the newspaper's advisor also arranged for him to have a full scholarship, since his only income was the 80 pesos (US$40) a month he received from the Varsitarian and the approximately P50 each he got for the short stories he wrote for weekly magazines. Moreover he sent home a portion of the money he was paid for his stories to help support his mother and to send his brother and sister to school. The stories, incidentally, were designed to be chapters of novels which he published later.

In 1947 JOSÉ became a staff member of Commonweal, the national Catholic weekly, but he continued to economize, wearing his old olive-drab T-shirts and army khaki, so that he could send half his income home.

When he was a junior JOSÉ met fellow student Maria Teresita (Tessie) Jovellanos, who came from a "genteel middle class" family. Her father was a physician and director of a leprosarium; one uncle was vice-president of the prosperous San Miguel corporation, and another was Vicar General of the Archbishopric of Manila. Tessie herself had attended the foremost girls' school in the city. Her family, JOSÉ recalls, received him civilly but were unhappy that their daughter was interested in an author: "they thought there was no future for writers." In August 1949, therefore, the couple eloped, partly because JOSÉ did not have enough money for a church wedding—in the Philippines the groom's responsibility—and partly because they knew her parents would object to the marriage. "But the objection lasted very briefly," JOSÉ comments, "just about six months."

Although he would have graduated from Santo Tomas in March 1949 JOSÉ left the university in December in order to accept a job as assistant editor with the United States Information Service (USIS). "The diploma never really mattered to me," he says; "I went to school because I wanted to get a job."

After one year writing articles for USIS, JOSÉ was asked to join the staff of the Manila Times Sunday Magazine as an associate editor. He remained with the magazine for 10 years, eventually becoming managing editor. In a society where it was customary for prominent figures to give reporters extra money to write articles in their favor, the magazine section, JOSÉ says, "was very clean." The first time someone gave him P50 for something he wrote he was, as he said, "frightened and ashamed" and immediately returned it. He tried to live on his monthly salary, earning extra money from other writing. Aside from short stories he published two novels in serial form while he was on the Times, the Chief Mourner (1953) and the Balete Tree (1956). The latter was rewritten and published as Tree in 1977.

During these years JOSÉ began seriously to study and write about the problems of rural poverty and land reform. Until President Ramon Magsaysay came to power, JOSÉ says, he was "very pro-Huk" because of his concern over the plight of the farmer. [The Hukbalahap movement was a communist-led agrarian revolt in central Luzon, the center of peasant revolts over the centuries, which threatened the stability of the central government. Ramon Magsaysay, first as defense minister and then as president, succeeded not only in breaking the movement militarily, but in gaining the confidence of the people by his efforts at land reform, resettlement and rural public works. In connection with his interest in land reform JOSÉ traveled, as a journalist, to different parts of the country, learning to his dismay that wealthy landgrabbers were still defrauding the peasantry as they had his own family years before.

In 1955 JOSÉ received a Smith-Mundt Leader Grant from the U.S. Department of State to meet literary figures, such as the poet Robert Frost, critic Malcolm Cowley and John Crowe Ransom, poet and editor of the influential literary Kenyon Review (Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio). Two grants from the Asia Foundation—one to visit the Middle East and Southeast Asia for one month (1955) and a second (1960) to revisit the United States and Southeast Asia and to tour South America—enabled him not only to make further valuable contacts with other writers and journalists, but also to study land reform measures undertaken in those areas. "I have seen," he has since said, "almost every viable land reform program in Southeast Asia, plus Mexico, Israel and Brazil." These observation tours helped him gain the perspective necessary to evaluate the work of his own government in this field. He published his material on land reform in the Manila Times Sunday Magazine and subsequently in the magazines Comment and Solidarity.

JOSÉ has made a point of returning to the sites of the projects whose initial stages he had witnessed, whether overseas or in the Philippines. In his own country he revisited some project sites only to find they had quickly become ghost towns due, he says, "to the absence of planning or of basic knowledge of how farmers work." One community collapsed for lack of a preliminary hydrological survey: the land had no proper drainage. Another town, beautifully laid out in a grid pattern, was deserted within a year because the farmers' fields were three kilometers distant.

In 1956 JOSÉ was among a group of intellectuals with leftist political sympathies (due primarily to their strong desire for agrarian reform) who started a small magazine called Comment. Funding was provided by Alberto Benipayo and JOSÉ was one of the editors. The year after Comment was founded Prabhakar Padhye, the Asian representative of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, offered to assist the magazine. The Congress had been founded in 1950 by socially concerned individuals with a broad spectrum of political inclinations, but with one thing in common—a profound abhorrence for any form of totalitarian government. At that time JOSÉ turned down his offer; he and his colleagues did not really begin discussions with the Congress until 1960 when they were invited to its meeting in Berlin.

In the meantime JOSÉ founded and became the national secretary of the Philippine branch of PEN, an international organization of poets, playwrights, essayists and novelists. PEN held its first conference in Baguio in 1958. At this meeting the Filipino writers began to align themselves according to ideologies and politics. JOSÉ’s own position was, he says, that of a "real liberal": he believed then, as he does now, that communism and the landholding oligarchy were equally enemies of the Philippine people. And at Baguio he saw what he called "the betrayal of nationalism by the nationalists"—the use of nationalist slogans and catchwords by the Filipino elite for their own narrow ends.

In 1958 JOSÉ also became editor of Progress, an annual publication of the Manila Times. By then he was one of the highest paid editors in the country, although, he notes, he still lived very plainly: "I didn't even have a car," he laments. However that same year he was able to move his wife and their five children into a home in a government housing development; the JOSÉ’s enlarged their small house gradually, as the number of their children grew to seven and their income improved.

Three years later JOSÉ became managing editor of The Asia Magazine, a Sunday supplement distributed throughout Asia from Hong Kong, and moved his family to that British colony. While there JOSÉ published The Pretenders (1962), a novel whose hero is alienated from both the poor rural background of his birth and the corrupt luxury of his wife's wealthy family. This is the most widely read of JOSÉ’s works and has been translated into Russian, Latvian, Ukranian, Dutch, Indonesian and Ilocano, his own language.

JOSÉ stayed with The Asia Magazine only one year before moving on to the more lucrative post of Information Officer for the Colombo Plan Bureau. Despite the excellent pay, the large house for his family in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and the opportunity to travel and meet people all over Southeast Asia, JOSÉ was "so bored with the job" that at the end of two years he quit and returned to Manila.

Using the money saved during his term with the Colombo Plan, JOSÉ and Tessie opened the Solidaridad Bookshop and publishing firm in 1965 in the latter's old family house on Padre Faura Street in Ermita, Manila's bustling commercial and tourist district. The JOSÉ’s rented this house until April 1976 when they took out a mortgage on their own home in order to buy the bookstore building from Tessie's family.

Tessie managed the bookshop from its inception and the children—Antonio (born in 1950), Evelina (1951), Brigada (1953), Ephraim (1955), Eugenio (1957), Alejo (1963), and Irwin Nicanor (1969)— performed such chores as salesman, janitor, cashier and proofreader, as soon as they become old enough. The shop, intended as a showcase for Philippine and Asian writers, may indeed be as JOSÉ claims, "just a small business," but it is also, according to its many devotees, "one of the centers of cultural life in the Philippines." As Antonio Lopez wrote in Asiaweek, "Manila writers, artists and notables often gather there to discuss the raging issues of the day or an emerging literary trend." Foreign writers and journalists, too, are always welcome. One of them described his stocky ebullient host as "a constant catalyst, a conduit for the exchange of knowledge . . . an invaluable source of inspiration and information. This is because there is virtually no phase of Filipino life with which he is not in touch, directly or indirectly. Beyond being a fountain of knowledge himself, he knows where all the other fountains can be located, and graciously guides or conducts the inquiring visitor to them. He is thus, among other things, a supreme intellectual guide and stimulant."

JOSÉ had pinned his hopes on the publishing house, even more than on the bookstore, to give him financial liquidity. "I was very naive," he says. The publishing house, rather than being an asset, became a liability, and has left him with large debts. However, among the works of literary significance published during the early years by Solidaridad were Equinox I, an anthology of new English writing by Filipinos (1965) and the Asian PEN Anthology I (1966), both edited by JOSÉ .

The premier publication, however, was Solidarity, a magazine started in 1966 as a cultural, intellectual and literary quarterly and successor to Comment which had ceased publication when he went to Hong Kong. The Congress for Cultural Freedom gave him US$10,000 a year for the quarterly's printing costs, but JOSÉ managed, over the course of three years, to increase the magazine's frequency until it became a monthly, acquiring the extra funds needed from subscriptions.

In 1967, when it was charged that the Congress for Cultural Freedom was receiving funds from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States, the Congress disbanded and regrouped as the International Association for Cultural Freedom (IACF), funded wholly by the Ford Foundation. Solidarity continued to receive an annual grant through the IACF until 1972, but the funding was reduced to approximately US$8,000 annually. The magazine, however, continued to thrive—reaching a printing peak of 8,000 copies per issue as a result of the Ministry of Education, in 1968, taking 3,000 subscriptions. However when the ministry suddenly cut off its subscriptions in 1972 in order to channel funds into a new publication, Solidarity suffered. JOSÉ subsidized the journal through proceeds from the bookshop until 1977 when he could no longer meet rising production costs.

At the time of the charges against the Congress for Cultural Freedom, JOSÉ himself was accused of being a CIA agent. He protested his innocence and sued for criminal libel. The case dragged on for two years, but he eventually won. The charges, in fact, did him no harm. On the contrary, he said, some friends thought he could help them obtain U.S. scholarships and visas!

Solidarity was intended to perpetuate the tradition of La Solidaridad, the fortnightly journal which was the voice of the nineteenth century nationalist movement of the Philippine upper class against Spain. "This is not to say," wrote JOSÉ in the maiden issue, "that Solidarity can ever approximate the stature and dedication to the Filipino cause of Marcelo H. del Pilar and his colleagues. But in a country with a leadership grown flabby with corruption it is the fond hope of Solidarity to be, even in a feeble fashion, a vehicle of protest against those well-entrenched individuals and institutions—foreign as well as Filipino—who continue to strangle this nation."

Solidarity provided, according to Asiaweek in 1979, "a ready vehicle for the works of both budding and established writers, statesmen and politicians, historians, businessmen and laymen in the Philippines and abroad. Its contributors included a glittering gallery of celebrities." At home they included diplomat and foreign minister Carlos P. Romulo; former senators Benigno Aquino and Jovito Salonga; and writers Nick Joaquin, Teodoro Agoncillo and O.D. Corpuz. The list of foreign contributors was equally impressive: S. Rajaratnam, foreign minister of Singapore; Yukio Mishima, Japanese novelist; Richard Kim, Korean writer, and Ramon Magsaysay Awardees—Indonesian newspaperman Mochtar Lubis (1958 for Journalism and Literature), Japanese economic planner Saburo Okita (1971 for International Understanding), Singapore minister Goh Keng Swee (1972 for Government Service) and Indonesian editor and diplomat Soedjatmoko (1978 for International Understanding).

Through Solidarity JOSÉ continued his battle for justice for the rural poor. In particular he led a major campaign against the powerful Filipino sugar planters who had successfully lobbied the United States Congress over the years for continuation of the preferential sugar quota. According to JOSÉ the sugar quota benefited only the planters and helped perpetuate their political and economic dominance: sugar, he says, "moves governments here; it has traditionally been the basis of power." He told audiences at American universities and testified before U.S. congressional committees—Foreign Relations, Appropriations, and Ways and Means—that the United States, in continuing to buy Philippine sugar at prices higher than the world market, was helping only the rich and the powerful in the Philippines. His efforts led the U.S. Congress to lay down the guideline that no country should be the recipient of favored quotas unless that country provided social services or social justice for its workers.

When JOSÉ returned home major figures in the sugar oligarchy invited him to lunch and asked him what they should do to meet that requirement. He suggested they begin by paying the amelioration fund, a Philippine government subsidy for sugar intended to be paid to the workers but which, JOSÉ claims, has been pocketed by the planters. Although the conditions of the workers have changed little in the intervening years, the quota was abolished in 1974 and "the odium no longer rests with the United States."

Both the bookshop and Solidarity have been copied by admirers—in Thailand and Singapore—but according to a Thai imitator, they have failed to equal the originals.

Two years after establishing the bookshop the JOSÉ’s started the Solidaridad Art Gallery for the promotion of Philippine artists. "I wanted to give a Philippine direction to our culture,"JOSÉ said. The gallery, like the bookshop, also served as a center for cultural exchange with other Asian countries. "Originally housed in roomy quarters in nearby M. H. del Pilar Street," wrote Lopez, "the gallery was where JOSÉ held large-scale art exhibitions, seminars, lectures and such demonstrations of Asian culture as the Indian dance." The gallery was forced to close in the early 1970s when the landlord decided to convert the building it was housed in into a restaurant. JOSÉ still continues to hold small exhibits and to sell paintings to walk-in customers on the third floor of the bookstore. He notes sadly that "running an art gallery is a risky, losing business." Still, he has no regrets; despite financial losses he found it a personally satisfying experience. JOSÉ plans to use part of the Award money to pay off debts left by the publishing house and gallery and part to pay down on the mortgage he had taken on his home in order to buy the bookstore.

Throughout the late 1960s JOSÉ was active in the international arena as well as at home. In 1967 he became a member of the Association for Asian Studies and became a correspondent for the London Economist. Acquaintances made with British Embassy personnel due to this connection resulted in a British Council grant for travel in Britain. JOSÉ exchanged his first class ticket for two economy tickets in order to be able to take Tessie with him. In 1968 he became, as a publisher, a member of the Press Foundation of Asia which is headquartered in Manila. That same year he became a consultant for the Philippine government's Department of Agrarian Reform (a position he held throughout the next decade) and published his book of short stories, The God Stealer.

During this period a number of his short stories and essays appeared in various journals and anthologies abroad. These publications include the Malaysian literary journal Tenggara, Commentary in Singapore, and several Thai journals, which published his pieces in translation. In addition, his works appeared in an anthology published by the Japan Foundation and were translated into Japanese by Matsuyo Yamamoto for her publication, Filipinas. The Korean PEN used some of his pieces in their series on Asia, and in Australia his stories were published in Span, the Australian anthology on writing in Asia. His stories and essays also appeared in American and German publications.

During the next decade JOSÉ was equally active. In 1971 he received an Asian and Pacific Council (ASPAC) fellowship to study Japanese modernization and Japan and Southeast Asian regionalism. He went twice to the United States (in 1971 and 1973) under the auspices of the Council of Foreign Relations of New York to lecture at American universities on Philippine-American relations, Philippine culture, and agrarian problems. He lectured on "The Artist in Times of Change" in Malaysia in 1972 and 1973. In 1972 he took time out to stay in the Dominiko-Kai monastery in Tokyo to write My Brother, My Executioner. The novel was banned by the Media Advisory Council in 1973 for "political reasons," as the Council explained in its letter, and therefore was not published until 1979. In 1974 he became a professorial lecturer on Philippine culture in the graduate school of the University of the East, Manila. His Selected Works was published in Moscow in 1977, and in 1979 he wrote the first draft of the story, "Cadena de Amor" (Chain of Love) at Sei Tomas Gakuin in Kyoto.

JOSÉ has received in the Philippines three first prize Palanca awards for his short stories ("The God Stealer" 1959, "Waywaya" 1979, "Arbor del Fuego" 1980) and three first prize National Press Club awards (1957, 1961, 1962) for journalism for his articles on social change and agrarian reform. He was recognized as an Outstanding Alumnus in 1974 by the University of Santo Tomas Alumni Association, and was given the Fernando M. Guerrero Memorial Foundation Award for Literature in 1979 by the same organization. Also in 1979 he received the Republic Heritage Cultural Award for Literature from

the City of Manila and the Tenth Annual Cultural Center of the Philippines Award for the Novel for Tree, published the preceding year. In 1980 the Ilocano Heritage Foundation presented him with the Tawid Award for Cultural Nationalism.

JOSÉ writes in English—rather than in Pilipino (the national language that is basically Tagalog) or his native Ilocano—because English was the language demanded by his early professional career. Furthermore, he notes, "although [Pilipino] can be understood in almost every part of the country now, the language of science, of culture, of the elite continues to be English." He blames the slowness of the shift to the use of Pilipino on the purists who insist on retaining complicated archaic forms. They "refuse to accept the first verity of language—that of communication," he comments.

Nonetheless JOSÉ feels the future of English as the language of literature is dubious. He realizes that if English falls into disuse in the literary world his own books may cease to be read in the original just as Rizal's books are rarely read in the original Spanish—but he recognizes that "this may well be the price we have to pay so that a national literature will evolve, one that will be read by our people."

A further problem faced by the writer whose medium is English is a sense of alienation from his roots, a phenomenon, however, experienced by most educated urbanized Filipinos. In a 1968 essay in Solidarity JOSÉ describes his own dismay upon returning to Rosales to address a group of Ilocano writers in his native language: "I fumbled, strove to articulate the thoughts that sought to be released, strained with an expression that had suddenly become alien to me. I had never felt as I felt then that terrible sense of inadequacy, of hopelessness and guilt. In the end, I had to speak in the language I knew best . . . English, and all the time, I felt that I had damned myself and, in a sense, become a phony before my colleagues."

JOSÉ believes that a writer's capital is his childhood and most of his novels revolve around the vivid images of his early life. But after this experience he wrote: "It is not with the same eyes that I look at the land nor with the same ears that I listen to remembered sounds. It is not the same anymore—the creek where I had swum is dirtied and muddy and the shapes of the houses in the old neighborhood are now sorry looking and decrepit. And yet, in a sense, this small, immemorial town has not changed. I have." But then he asked himself, if he were alienated from his roots, could he be as valid a spokesman for his people as he had believed himself to be? Did a new understanding of that past and his present relationship to it undermine his sincerity? On the contrary, he writes, "this is the new reality which must be synthesized, this is the answer to the alienation not only of the artist but of the man. A return to the past is always painful. But we must go back home to pick up the pieces, to live again." Luis Asperri, in JOSÉ's novel My Brother, My Executioner, cites an old Ilocano saying: "He who does not know where he came from cannot know where he is going."

The Filipino whose chosen language is English faces professional problems not faced by someone writing in the vernacular. On the one hand he automatically joins the mainstream of English letters and must compete with other internationally famous writers in English. Therefore, as JOSÉ wrote in 1968, "he must be more than Filipino; he must be a craftsman, he must excel." On the other hand "he must not fall into the trap of blindly imitating western standards, such as following the pattern for the short story set by The New Yorker magazine. The writers that are held up as good examples of American craft may be good for Americans but they are not good for us," JOSÉ declared, but "there are so many subjects in the context of our society which Filipino writers could really tackle." JOSÉ admires Asian writers like Ved Mehta, V.S. Naipaul and Richard Kim who have mastered English, not only to write in it, but, through it to express to the world the idiom and nuances of their own cultures. In like manner JOSÉ believes that Filipinos must return to the realities of their own society and culture.

Although he recognizes his and his country's debt to the United States, has many American friends and two American sons-in-law, he insists that "our artists and our creative people must champion Filipino originality at the risk of being chauvinist. To do this, first and foremost we must kill our Western fathers and cast aside everything American from our minds and start with what we have, the mud of our villages, the poverty of our slums, and build from there no matter how arduous the effort, no matter how niggardly our material."

Since in his mind he constantly intertwines his philosophy as a writer with the problems of society as a whole, JOSÉ further reasons: "It is necessary to cut off the links of an irresponsible and rapacious Filipino elite to its American counterpart, not only because these ties perpetuate the colonial relationship, but because these ties condition us into accepting wholly and uncritically the American model."

The object of all of JOSÉ's writing, whether fiction or essay, is "to move people, to change society toward truth and social justice," i.e. to lessen the effects of the "irresponsible and rapacious" elite. However in recent years he has come to doubt the efficacy of the printed word. "If you will look at the hundreds of books and the reams and reams of journals aflame with social consciousness and then realize that nothing much has been done really about poverty or injustice," he comments, "then you will understand how much writers like myself have deluded themselves."

Nevertheless awareness of this limitation has not stopped JOSÉ who considers himself an artist, not a mere propagandist; the latter he defines as a writer who "has the virtue, but does not have the excellence." As an artist, he incorporates the devastating knowledge of his probable ineffectuality with his refusal to cease prodding the social conscience of his countrymen. "I want to be a mirror or a witness to my time," he writes, "and in so being I also hope I am expressing [the point of view of those millions who have no voice." Moreover, JOSÉ believes, as one of his characters says, that "we die when we stop being angry."

JOSÉ bears witness to his time through the medium of his childhood memories because, he feels, little has changed; the rural Philippines remains as it was and men's relationships are still the same. He therefore seeks to portray, as one critic has said, "the social forces that structure men's relationships and the way these warp individuals and their lives." Two of his novels deal with the remembered barrio of his youth—Tree and My Brother, My Executioner. In them JOSÉ explores the peasant-landowner relationship as seen through the eyes of a landholding family. In The Pretenders (1962) his protagonist, Antonio Samson, moves through all strata of urban society, revealing the destructive social forces that operate within it. Although alienated from it, neither Samson nor the central figures of the other novels have it within their characters to change that society. Worse yet, all three heroes understand that not only is their protest ineffectual, but they are, to a greater or lesser extent, implicated in the evil that they deplore, if only by their passivity. "I find it so difficult and enervating," says the narrator of Tree, "to rationalize a middle-aged life that has been built on a rubble of compromise and procrastination."

All JOSÉ's heroes, writes another critic, encounter "a new hell and a new purgatory in postwar Filipino society. How [JOSÉ asks] can one come to terms with this particular crisis in the nation's history? Shall it be revolution? Shall it be suicide? Shall it be nostalgia for the past, alternated with current protest and seeping disillusionment?"

To describe the social forces that broke his heroes, JOSÉ created in Tree the powerful image of the balete tree (Ficus Benjamina Linn.) and made it, with profound irony, the guardian spirit of Rosales: "Who then lives? Who then triumphs when all others have succumbed? The balete tree—it is there for always, tall and leafy and majestic. In the beginning, it sprang from the earth as vines coiled around a sapling. The vines strangled the young tree they had embraced. They multiplied, fattened and grew, became the sturdy trunk, the branches spread out to catch the sun. And beneath this tree, nothing grows!"

Writers and artists, too, come under the shade of "the balete tree" in the Philippines, JOSÉ believes, and for them he has mixed advice. He urges those who can leave the country "to work elsewhere where they can discover themselves and their calling without the danger of corruption from early adulation and patronage." These, he feels, "stifle art and the spirit of inquiry and revolt so vital to the growth of art itself." Even Rizal, he points out, wrote in exile. Those who stay behind "must remember the past and hold up the candle no matter how strong the wind blows for it is in doing so that they commit themselves." He has done work in both worlds but considers himself basically one who has stayed behind.

September 1980 Manila

REFERENCES:

Agoncillo, Teodoro A. and Oscar M. Alfonso. A Short History of the Filipino People. Quezon City: University of the Philippines. 1960.

Cerdona, Cris "Most Well-read Filipino Author," Philippines Daily Express. Manila Vol. 2, no. 5, October 20, 1981.

"F. Sionil Jose: 'It is also good to be born poor,' " People (Supplement of the Times Journal). Manila. Vol. 2, no. 9, February 15, 1980.

Goloy, Angge G. "What is an RM Awardee made of?" People (Supplement of the Times Journal). Manila Vol. 3, no. 35, August 17, 1980.

Jose, F. Sionil. "The Artist as Rebel," Solidarity. Manila. Vol. 3, no. 7, July 1968.

______. The God Stealer. Quezon City: R.P. Garcia 1968.

______. "How do Writers Become Relevant to the Needs of Their Societies? " Presentation made to Group Discussion. Transcript. Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Manila September 2, 1980. (Typewritten.)

______. My Brother, My Executioner. Quezon City: New Day. 1979.

______. The Pretenders. Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House. 1962.

______. "The Progressive View: The Nationalist Sell Out," Solidarity. Manila. Vol. 1, no. 1, January-March 1966.

______. "The Roots of Anti-Americanism," Solidarity. Manila. Vol. 1, no. 1, January 1970.

______. "Self and Nation in Literature," Solidarity. Manila. Vol. 9, no. 5, May-June 1975.

______. Waywaya and Other Short Stories from the Philippines. Hong Kong: Heinemann Asia. 1980.

Lopez, Antonio. "Cultural Complex of Padre Faura" Asiaweek (Literary Supplement). Hong Kong. April 27, 1979.

Podberezsky, Igor. "Master of Social Analysis." Weekend (Sunday Supplement of Daily Express). Manila. May 4, 1980.

Salanga Alfredo Navarro. "A Tree Grows in Memory," Philippines Panorama Magazine. Manila. January 27, 1980.

Interviews with Francisco Sionil Jose and interviews with and letters from persons acquainted with him and his work .