Manila Int’l Book Fair: Gintong Aklat Keynote Speech by Ric de Ungria, part 1

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Last Friday, Sept 12, was the first day of the Manila International Bookfair. It was also the day the winners of the Gintong Aklat Book Awards sponsored by the Book Development Association of the Philippines were announced. Unlike simple writing contests, it awards the best *books* of the year which means that not only the contents but also the physical construction of a book are taken into account. In addition, the board of judges includes not just writers and academics but book trade professionals who understand book production. Factors such as binding, paper and price are taken into account. I don’t always agree with the choices but I do agree that it’s an important contest and the only one where the book as a made object is given its due.Am posting in two installments the piece written by the keynote speaker for this year’s bookfair. Ric de Ungria, Commissioner of the Arts NCCA, UP-Mindanao professor and former chancellor of the same and one of best poets of the country.

Here’s the speech:

Recent events in our history, specifically in the past twenty years or so, have more than less convinced me that ours is a culture not of ideas and intellection but of emotions, hints, and suspicions. Our predilection is for the unsaid or the merely implied, the shadowy and adumbrated, the peripheral and the underground as appropriate instruments to counter what has been perceived as the given brutality of power and force exercised by the few oligarchs and pseudo-monarchs in appropriate political positions. The dynamics in our culture is such that there seems to be always an agon between the outer and the inner, between the overt and the secret, the official and the unofficial, mainstream and underground—with the outer and overt and official conceived of as tyrannically powerful and repressive, and the inner and secret and unofficial wielded as a submissive and abiding force whose time will eventually come. The complexity of the interplay between these two “forces” has remained inexhaustible and a source of inspiration for our inventiveness that has spanned the gamut from the ludicrous to the ludic.

Our basic stance is subversive of any established order, and the reality of our daily life is rooted in infringements of various kinds tolerated and even elevated to the level of norms—from blatant disobedience of simple traffic signs and rules, to secret deals and agreements at the highest levels of the echelon that explode in the faces of the players when exposed to the public. Witness the aborted Memorandum of Agreement between the government panel and the MILF, which has plunged the peace process in Mindanao into a crisis and cost deaths to civilians and soldiers alike and displacements of hundreds of thousands of families in central Mindanao. “If you were the MILF,” Mayor Rodrigo Duterte of Davao had remarked, expressing the sentiment of many Mindanaons, “after a gestation of five years, talking laboriously for five years, tapos sabihin na, ‘Oh no, the MOA-AD is just a piece of paper,’ and as a matter of fact, ‘they [that is, members of the government panel] were not given the authority to sign.’ If you were the MILF, would you be happy to hear that?” Little wonder that given the kind of governance that this sad republic of ours has, who wouldn’t want to break away from it?

Our memories are full of treacheries and betrayals, and our ideal is martyrdom for a cause that should not have been put on the pedestal of grievance had our civil life been shaped and ruled by simple observance of basic laws and rules of public conduct. But we prefer to move with stealth, duplicity, and cunning, and make a show of conservatism and righteousness to make up for our deep lack of a strong moral center. Of course, the majority of us have their religion to fall back on, but even in that realm we know how to play the gods.

All these may appear to be bad sociology simplified for dummies by a poet, but this poet thinks we’ve allowed ourselves to be played with as such for as long as he can remember. And at no time in our history had we been placed in such a moral quandary—or muck, or nadir—and at such tragic scale of helplessness and inaction than the one we are in at the present time. There is certainly no lack of imagination on our part to cope with this kind of predicament, but in our present case, we seem to be facing a blank wall—and making the best of the cracks and fissures we see on it.

I mention these things here because I want to locate the publishing industry to which you belong within such dismal state of affairs as I see it.

One can go over statistics in your sector—which, by the way, is just beginning to appreciate the importance of data and data gathering in your field (which is something we should all be thankful for)—and see its continued though slow flourishing or progress in terms of revenue, gradual increase in number of stakeholders or new publishers, and in the number of books published by the year. This is all heartening to note, especially for an academician like myself. But the fact remains that, for all the increasing richness and variety of publications you have made available to us the reading public through the years, we still have to see an intellectual culture forming before our very minds—one fueled by discussions and debates not only in the academic world but also in the realm of newspapers and magazines—and helping sustain a healthy public opinion and pointing at directions in the rational formulation of principles and policies for governance. For isn’t a rational life and an intellectual culture in the service of truth and the common good among the basic end products of books and literary? But one can think of many reasons for this abysmal lack.

Outside of Manila, the culture remains mostly oral and informal, lending itself immediately available to blogs and egroup discussions that appear to have improved on barbershop or streetcorner disputations of yore. In Mindanao, egroup discussions on the present situation—fervid and informed and varied—have overtaken the news and are well on the way to developing a dialogue among intellectuals and other stakeholders in the island. (Whether the discourses will turn towards a plan of action remains, however, to be seen.) The wealth of such informal discourses is simply staggering, and media and the book industry would probably do well to address this new source of information and knowledge as viable contributions to the knowledge economy.

While a number of good local books have been made increasingly available to the public, the public, including the underpaid academic, has not found them affordable enough to spend enough on them. This is embarrassing but true, given the difficult, unkind, and unequal economic opportunities in the country. But the money, or lack of, is not all there is to it. The more shameful thing is that given a degree of purchasing power, most people will opt to buy foreign books than local ones. Not only is there glamour and sophistication in being up-to-date with bestsellers in the American market, there is really no interest at all in matters Filipiniana, which have never really been a part of our breeding in our formative years. Having been the first among our Asian neighbors to grow up globally in Americana, most of us have really very little choice but to sustain such global interests above the local ones. It is hoped that the present cultural mapping project at the NCCA should lay soon enough the groundwork for a cultural literacy program from elementary to college that will help instill a sense of pride in the Filipino student for the achievements in his own varied culture and in the exploits of his culture bearers.

 continues…