Selección de Control y navegación

University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Australia, 1981. 131 pages (Delivered at the book-launching ceremony held

at Xavier University, Cagayan de Oro City on October 3, 1981)

by Reuben R. Canoy

The launching of a ship is usually done by smashing a bottle of champagne on its prow. Having thus been given the ritual alcoholic bath, it is then released down the slipways and into the water, to the tumultuous sound of a band and the cheer of thousands.

I have often wondered why no such pomp or circumstance ever accompanies the launching of a book. My curiousity --- and personal pique --- stem from a long-held belief that our values are frequently misplaced. We make a big fuss over a ship that may end up carrying pigs or bananas, but seldom do we give importance to the launching of a book that could transport us to a world of adventure, ideas, or dreams.

I remember some years ago when I attended the launching of a little book of poetry written by a friend. The guests, many of them celebrities in the literary and journalistic community, arrived at various times. Each had either come or were going to different parties that night, and for this reason were in various states of inebriation.

The flow of clever talk and alcohol was generous; the lesser lights gravitated around the brighter ones; a starlet, very sexy and apparently well-nourished in her childhood, was sulking in a corner because her escort (an aging writer who had left his wife and children in the classic search of lost manhood) was paying too much attention to a woman columnist known for her liberal views and more liberal sleeping habits.

Through all these, however, nobody talked about the book of poems that my friend had written, copies of which stood in another corner opposite the actress. At first, the author tried to circulate, clearing his throat and looking every inch the successful writer that he thought he had become, but still nobody seemed interested in him. Finally, when one of the guests mistook him for a waiter my friend decided that he might as well get drunk like all the others.

I hope that this doesn't happen to Tony Enriquez tonight, especially because I know the circumstances in which he wrote his book.

As a government information officer in his native Zamboanga, Tony became very unpopular with his bosses for trying to expose a case of corruption. The crusade resulted in his transfer --- or exile --- to Cagayan de Oro where the system for which the present regime is well-known also operated with the same vengeance. Soon he found himself grounded or frozen.

The enforced idleness was intended to shame Tony into resigning, but he decided to turn adversity to an advantage. It was during this period that he was able to complete the novel that we have come to celebrate.

If we could only be sure that oppression invariably leads to a burst of creative activity on the part of writers, musicians and artists, I might be less inclined to disagree with the present order. But Tony's case, alas, is more the exception rather than the rule.

Despite the fevered efforts of the regime to compel the belief that we now live in a golden cultural age, one cannot fail to see that what we are witnessing is actually a contrived renaissance for which we have had to pay an incredible price in terms of poverty, malnourishment, and the "salvaging" of young men and women who themselves might have become the writers of finer books that any of us are able to produce.

According to the program, I am supposed to give an "oral review" of Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh. Instead I have spoken at some length about the author and the

conditions under which he has labored because, to me, it is important for us to realize that the creative process which results in, say, a novel such as Tony has done does not end with its publication.

In the words of a critic, "the higher function of art is to revive the world, to bring justice, harmony and reason to social transactions." A book therefore comes alive and acquires significance only when it is read, and the reader becomes affected by it. This is the kind of success that all writers seek, for while the need to express may be great, greater yet is the need to share --- an emotion, a sliver of memory, a point of view, or perhaps an elemental experience.

In the act of sharing, the creative process takes on a larger dimension, with the reader often perceiving more in the narrative than the author saw in his original material. In this sense, I consider Surveyor a real achievement.

As an aspiring (as well as frustrated) novelist, I truly envy my friend Tony Enriquez for this achievement which represents a lot of hard work and attests to a certain vitality so surprising for one extremely self-effacing and physically diminutive. Even if he were to deny it, I would like to confront him with the accusation that Alberto Gonzales, the hero of his novel, is in fact Antonio Enriquez.

There is much of the personality and experience of the writer that inevitably go into the shaping of a major character. Alberto, like the author, is from Zamboanga and works with a surveying company in Cotabato. However, I am not prepared to ask how much of Tony resides in the person of Alberto when the latter and the lusty members of the

surveying team spend a warm and sticky Sunday afternoon in the company of prostitutes, in the red light district of Cotabato known as "the interior."

I will not spoil your enjoyment of the book by describing in erotic and sinful detail incidents of this nature. But I must warn you that Surveyors is that kind of a book. Rather it comes closer to the attempts of Joseph Conrad to explore the murky depths of the human condition.

In the hostile swamps and highlands of Cotabato, where life and love and death are manifested in their most primitive forms, Alberto Gonzales tries to come to terms not only with the harsh environment but with himself. Tony Enriquez refuses to tell us in the end whether Gonzales does. We can only presume the outcome from the fact that the story is told in retrospect, with the hero safely and comfortably settled in a university. But we see the hand of the artist in the way that Tony has subtly focused the narrative light on the process of self-knowledge and self-discovery, rather than on the knowledge or discovery itself. The reader thus becomes involved in the process and reacts to the strange and perilous Cotabato milieu as Gonzales does.

Without realizing it, you undergo a subconscious experience that also brings your own fears, motives, attitudes and prejudices to the surface. I for one found that experience eerie, but it had a kind of liberating effect which I heartily recommend to others.

Will the book stand the test of time? It would be presumptuous to make a prediction, for only the future can decide that. But for now, I should like to recall Alberto's words upon completing the building of a high wooden tower on which the surveying transits would be mounted.

"`It is a beautiful tower,' said Alberto, standing before it, his head craned up, still sweating from climbing down some twenty parallel bars set about two metres apart and held firm by crossboards. `Is it not, Dante?'

"`O, o,' said the rod man beside him. He stared up the tower, his eyes sweeping upward until the tower soared and came to a tapering point against the sky. `I hope the Moros don't destroy it before Alfonso comes to do the observation,' he said.

"`But the tower is beautiful,' said Alberto, not listening, deaf to the words of the rod man. `It would not matter then, really, if it were destroyed. It is beautiful now.'"

Alberto could have said the same thing about the book of which he is the hero. Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh also rises like a tower on the country's literary landscape, and indeed it is beautiful now. -

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Antonio Enriquez. Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh, novel, Asian and Pacific Writing No. 16, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Australia, 1981. 131 pages. A$10.30

As I write, the town is celebrating, blasting off demons and driving harbingers of bad luck that might be found along the way; as it happens, I have emerged out of the

mangrove forests of “Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh”. It is quite a country, indeed. As I was telling Narita at breakfast this monring, you have probably authored one of the most important novels of this generation. I had this impression already, years ago; but it is stronger now and I can justify it most objectively.

Alberto [the protagonist] has not paused to question the altruism that inspired the

planning and building of a watershed to benefit inhabitants of the area for many years to come. The symbolic meaning of this, while probably non-existent in the Moro mind nor significant enough in that of the Christian, cannot be lost to the intelligent reader. Basically, thus, the conflict is one of values. Deep down is the primitive, virginal, innocent represented by the fecund Moroland, to use the story’s own identification of it. While contemporary engineering knowhow, government as well as corporate bureaucracy and common labor and business practices are not actually intended to overwhelm and

dehumanize the Moro and his datuism, the change brought on by these is considered but an extension of the age-old conflict which history, fundamentally, has not resolved nor probably will.

For that matter, the watershed might not be the answer to the needs of the social order, unless understood as symbolic…. The novel’s reticence about other matters is justified by a self-imposed limitation, ostensibly the surveying project. But here, too, is yet another innocent cover for meaning; the story, in fact, invites us to engage in socio-cultural triangulations of our own.

How this has been achieved will defy criticism, as will its forthright structure. What our dream reader will need to do is be attentive to the authorial authenticity which informs the novel while reigning in the intrusions of vernacular syntax and preserving the rhythm and color of the dialog even as precision and economy of language remain functional all throughout. I do not know of any Asian prose at this writing that works toward originality and power of this kind.