K.D. Absolutely's review of Nick Joaquín's The Woman Who Had Two Navels

When I bought this book a couple of months ago, I immediately skimmed the first two pages. I did think that this was a book about a female character with anatomical deformity and the book was about what caused the deformity and what should be done to correct it. I thought that this book would make me endlessly laugh.

Having formed that ridiculous image in my mind, I set this book aside. There were and there still are so many books by foreign authors that beckon on me. Also, just like most Filipinos, I always thought that foreign books were far better than local ones even those by our local literary greats.

On many counts, I was awfully wrong. First, this novel has nothing to do with the study of medicine, anthropology or anatomy. It is a novel that every Filipino should be proud of. It is a novel written by a Filipino about Filipinos and for the Filipinos. However, it does not preach. It does not self-deprecate. It does not promote self-interest nor does it encourage us Filipinos to hate ourselves and wish that we were of different nationalities. This novel is part of who we are as it shows a pivotal part in our nation’s history and how our race was formed or came into being by getting sustenance from two colonizers, akin to two navels: those of Mother Spain’s and Mother USA’s. The two countries that greatly influenced our nation’s psyche and will forever be part of who we are as an Asian race.

But I was right too. It made me endless laugh. But not for the thought of a person having two navels. I laughed endlessly albeit silently as I grieved about having to realize how much I’ve been missing while I prioritize foreign authors in my book choices. I also shamelessly laughed realizing how distorted asking myself who we are as a raceour culture is and we just couldn’t do anything about it.

Nicomedes “Onching”, today just “Nick” Joaquin (1917-2004) was awarded the National Artist for Literature trophy in 1976. This award is the highest national recognition given to Filipino artists who have made significant contributions to the development of Philippine arts and to the cultural heritages of the country. He was said to be the Greatest Filipino writer of the 20th century and third to Rizal and Recto as the greatest Filipino writer ever. He was #1 in Filipino writers list in English. Dr. Alejandro Roces compared him to William Faulkner. His Portrait of the Artist as Filipino is said to be the most important Filipino play in English. Before his death due to cardiac arrest in 2004, he was a friend and the biographer of the former president Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. After his death, this bookworm with a gift of total recall, expressed his wish of donating the 3,000 books from his personal library to University of Santo Thomas. He did not marry.

Without providing too many spoilers, the story is about a Connie Escobar who claims to have two navels. She discloses this to a Filipino doctor, Pepe Monson who is one (the other being the priest Father Tony) of the two sons of a former rich Filipino businessman who is hiding in Hong Kong to avoid postwar trials of post war independence. Connie is in Hong Kong apparently to chase a band player Paco Texiera even if she is already married to Macho Escobar. However, Connie says that she left the Philippines to run away from her husband because he is having an affair with her mother Senora de Vidal.

The novel’s theme of pressure of the past upon the present is similar to G. G. Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude although Joaquin did not cover as many generations as Marquez did. In fact, Connie has only the relationship between her husband and mother as the immediate past that greatly affect her present. However, the symbolisms are clear. Connie suffers due to the strong influence of her mother when she was growing up (with the incident about the dolls as the image that got etched in my mind) and the indiscretions the mother did in having extra-marital affairs. All these while the supposedly the strong patriarch Don Manolo Vidal was busy protecting his business and his political turfs. Don Vidal can be likened to the Filipino businessmen who sided to whoever was in power during the Spanish and American occupations just to protect their interest while overlooking the interest of the many poor peasants (symbolized by Connie Escobar).

This is not an easy read though. Joaquin’s narrative is confusing especially in the first 50 pages of the book due to mixed points of view and multiple flows of thoughts in just one paragraph. I worked for two years in Hong Kong and I thought it would have been more interesting if Joaquin took time to describe his milieu for imagery impact. He also did not resort to using local languages or phrases, e.g., Chinese nor in Filipino, to give authenticity to the spoken dialogues. Lastly, I did not notice any effort to give distinct and recognizable voices at least to the main characters. All the voices seem to be coming from the same person.

However, the plot is brilliant. My first time to read a local book with Hong Kong and Philippines as settings. Prior to this, I thought that the post-war (WWII) era has been that part of Philippine history that seems to be “untouched” by fictional writers. This was due to the fact that many literary works mainly focused on the time when the WWII was on-going. Joaquin’s use of his characters to symbolize the bigger scope – the Philippines as it is trying to rise from the ashes – is astounding and the impact is comparable to the intent that Dr. Jose Rizal probably had when he was writing his Noli and Fili.

I will be reading Joaquin’s Cave and Shadows and Tropical Gothic next to know more about the man.

Portrait of the Artist as Filipino

written by: Prof. Florina “Lala” Castillo

National Artist Nick Joaquin’s “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino” occupies an unparalleled place of honor in the history, not only of Philippine dramatic literature but in all of Philippine literature as well.
Perhaps it is the poetry in it, the subtle, unspoken pain of the genteel poor of Old Manila struggling to survive in a world their genteel past never anticipated. It is pre-war Manila, just before the bombs fell in 1944.

In Bitoy’s words “while the world was hurrying gaily towards destruction…there was one house that never became a slum.”
What happens in that house is what “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino” is all about.  It is about a great but impoverished painter slowly dying along with the Old Manila.  It is about his daughters Candida and Paula, two women in whom youth and dreams have died but not dignity and gentility, trying to survive the ravages of poverty in an old paternal home which their brother and sister, Manolo and Pepang want to sell.

It is about the young go-getter of a jazz pianist Tony Javier, wanting to make an extra buck out of this situation of desperate poverty getting caught in his own trap.  It is about Don Perico, the Senator who stopped writing poetry so he could earn a living for his family.  It is about Bitoy, the young journalist, trying to interpret for himself and for us, the paradoxes of his times and who takes upon himself the poet’s mandate “to remember and to sing.”  It is about all of them, their choices showing us as the Senator says, that “Life is not as simple as it is in art.”

Source: http://lifestyle.inquirer.net/72500/what-portrait-of-the-artist-is-all-about

In 1955, his first play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes, was premiered on stage at the Aurora Gardens in Intramuros, Manila, by the Barangay Theater Guild. He had written the play sometime around 1950 upon the urgings of Sarah Joaquin, who was active in Manila’s theater circles. Though it had been published in Weekly Women’s Magazine and Prose and Poems in 1952 and had been aired on radio, the play was not staged until 1955. It proved to be an immense success. It was made into an English-language movie by the highly respected Filipino filmmaker Lamberto V. Avellana in 1965, translated into Tagalog, adapted in other forms, and staged hundreds of times. No Filipino play in English has been as popular.

Using the flashback device of a narrator who recalls the sad fate of a prewar family as he stands in the ruins of postwar Manila, the play sets itself not only in the divide of war but that of past and present in Philippine society. Tracing the disintegration of an old and proud family in the transition from past to present, Nick Joaquin explored what had been abiding themes in his writing across the years.

Source: http://www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyJoaquinNic.htm

List of His Published Works

Works

• May Day Eve (1947)
• Prose and Poems (1952)
• The Woman Who had Two Navels (1961)
• La Naval de Manila and Other Essays (1964)
• A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (1966)
• Tropical Gothic (1972)
• A Question of Heroes (1977)
• Jeseph Estrada and Other Sketches (1977)
• Nora Aunor & Other Profiles (1977)
• Ronnie Poe & Other Silhouettes (1977)
• Reportage on Lovers (1977)
• Reportage on Crime (1977)
• Amalia Fuentes & Other Etchings (1977)
• Gloria Diaz & Other Delineations (1977)
• Doveglion & Other Cameos (1977)
• Language of the Streets and Other Essays (1977)
• Manila: Sin City and Other Chronicles (1977)
• Tropical Baroque (1979),
• Pop Stories for Groovy Kids (1979)
• Reportage on the Marcoses (1979)
• Language of the Street and Other Essays (1980)
• The Ballad of the Five Battles (1981)
• Reportage on Politics (1981)
• The Aquinos of Tarlac: An Essay on History as Three Generations (1983)
• Almanac for Manileños
• Cave and Shadows (1983)
• The Quartet of the Tiger Moon: Scenes from the People Power Apocalypse (1986)
• Collected Verse (1987)
• Culture and History: Occasional Notes on the Process of Philippine Becoming (1988)
• Manila, My Manila: A History for the Young (1990),
• The D.M. Guevara Story (1993),
• Mr. F.E.U., the Culture Hero That Was Nicanor Reyes (1995).
• Rizal in Saga (1996)
• ABE: A Frank Sketch of E. Aguilar Cruz (2004)

 

 

 

Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/nick-joaquin

The Summer Solstice Review by John Louise Ramos

Created on: July 16, 2011   Last Updated: July 19, 2011

Nick Joaquin may easily be regarded as the figurehead of Philippine literature outside the national hero Jose Rizal and the statesman Claro M. Recto. Despite this, Joaquin isn’t entirely vulnerable to criticisms and controversies. Take for example his 1972 classic short story, The Summer Solstice.
The Summer Solstice is considered as one of the finest and most popular work of the late Filipino National Artist for Literature. However, The Summer Solstice made social critics out of Joaquin’s legion of fans.

While Joaquin is easily the finest Filipino literary genius after Rizal, The Summer Solstice is easily his most controversial piece – second to none.
The short story touches sensitive and highly controversial issues including religion, paganism, sexuality and the equality of both sexes. The plot of the short story centers on the traditional three-day fertility festival known as the Tadtarin or Tatarin to some regions. Needless to say, the last day of this pagan festival coincides with Christianity’s Saint John’s Day, making it more controversial.
Despite the fact that the Christian faith had already been brought by the Spanish colonizers to the Philippine archipelago, Filipinos participated in the annual Tadtarin festival up to the latter parts of the 19th century.
The short story takes place in the mid-19th century when the Philippines was still a colony of Spain. It starts with the Moretas, a highly urban and affluent family. Don Paeng Moreta was respectful and a real gentleman to his lovely wife, Dona Lupe Moreta.

The Summer Solstice was intense and passionate right from the start. Dona Lupe witnessed in horror their maid, Amanda, in a state of madness as she became the Tadtarin personified.
At first, Dona Lupe was indifferent to the pagan tradition, but the incidents during the day stirred her curiosity and eventually made her join the ritual. The short story ends in what most critics says is a “pseudo-feminist” ending, wherein the feminine authority portrayed was short-lived and has no real societal significance.

The beauty of The Summer Solstice roots perhaps from the struggles on its theme. It is founded on different and opposing points of view – Pagan vs. Christian, Man vs. Woman and the savage nature of animals against the chivalric nature of knights. As they say, opposites do attract.
The Summer Solstice was written in the most passionate way it could be. No writer could have written it better and more freely than this ever-prolific national artist.


source: http://www.helium.com/items/2199224-short-story-reviews-the-summer-solstice-by-nick-joaquin

Some of His Awards

Awards and recognition

Republic Cultural Heritage Award, 1961
Stonehill Award for the Novel, 1960
first prize, Philippine Free Press Short Story Contest, 1949
first prize, Palance Memorial Award, 1957-58
Jose Garcia Villa's honor roll, 1940
National Artist Award, 1976

http://en.wikipilipinas.org/index.php?title=Nick_Joaquin

• José García Villa's Honor Roll (1940)
• Philippines Free Press Short Story Contest (1949)
• Ten Most Outstanding Young Men of the Philippines (TOYM), Awardee for Literature (1955)
• Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Literary Awards (1957–1958; 1965; 1976)
• Harper Publishing Company (New York, U.S.A.) writing fellowship
• Stonehill Award for the Novel (1960)
• Republic Cultural Heritage Award (1961)
• Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan Award from the City of Manila (1964)
• National Artist Award (1976).
• S.E.A. Write Award (1980)
• Ramon Magsaysay Award for Literature (1996)
• Tanglaw ng Lahi Award from the Ateneo de Manila University (1997)
• Several ESSO Journalism awards, including the highly-covetedJournalist of the Year Award.
• Several National Book Awards from the Manila Critics' Circle for The Aquinos of Tarlac: An Essay in History as Three Generations; The Quartet of the Tiger Moon: Scenes from the People Power Apocalypse; Culture and History: Occasional Notes on the Process of Philippine Becoming; The World of Damian Domingo: 19th Century Manila (co-authored with Luciano P.R. Santiago); and Jaime Ongpin: The Enigma: The Profile of a Filipino as Manager.

Source: http://www.answers.com/topic/nick-joaquin

May Day Eve Review

reviewed by: Patrick Shane Diaz

Life is always full of regret, for we always realize what we have when it is gone. For Badoy and Agueda Montiya, they both lived and loved with hate, resentment, regret. As the story ends, Badoy realized how he wasted his time with Agueda, how he could have loved her, so much more than he did. He realized that he became the devil in Agueda's life, as she became the witch in his. In the end, they both blamed the superstition of May Day Eve.

For a moment he had forgotten that she was dead, that she had perished---the poor Agueda; that they were at peace at last, the two of them, her tired body at rest; her broken body set free at last from the brutal pranks of the earth---from the trap of a May night; from the snare of summer; from the terrible silver nets of the moon.

Fate is defined in the dictionary as an inevitable and often adverse outcome, condition, or end. The story is set under the assumption that Badoy and Agueda both believe in superstition, as well as fate. They believed that for they saw each other in the mirror that fated night that they are bound to be with each other.
What they failed to realize is that fate is dictated by the people involved. It is not anything inevitable, since love cannot be forced, only given or received. Badoy and Agueda fell into the trap of the May Day Eve, wherein they saw it as fate, only to be duped in the end by the circumstance of their relationship. However, they failed to see that it was how they saw their relationship to begin with, that caused them to be the devil/witch in their mirror that night.
Love is a splendid thing: it just happens, as most romantics say. That is how it had happened for Badoy and Agueda. But as the honeymoon stage ended, they both felt what was missing, and in turn grew to hate each other. What they never realized is that love is constantly worked on. Love is earned, and given willingly like it is free to the one we love.
Badoy and Agueda both saw the worst in each other whenever they told their children the story of that fateful night. They chose to see the worst, but in the end, it can be seen that they were in love. The worst in each other only came out when they chose to see it that way. Happiness comes out whenever we choose to be happy.

And remembering how she had sobbed so piteously; remembering how she had bitten his hand and fled and how he had sung aloud in the dark room and surprised his heart in the instant of falling in love: such a grief tore up his throat and eyes that he felt ashamed before the boy; pushed the boy away; stood up and looked out----looked out upon the medieval shadows of the foul street where a couple of street-lamps flickered and a last carriage was rattling away upon the cobbles, while the blind black houses muttered hush-hush, their tiled roofs looming like sinister chessboards against a wild sky murky with clouds, save where an evil old moon prowled about in a corner or where a murderous wind whirled, whistling and whining, smelling now of the sea and now of the summer orchards and wafting unbearable the window; the bowed old man sobbing so bitterly at the window; the tears streaming down his cheeks and the wind in his hair and one hand pressed to his mouth...

Regret comes to Badoy in the end, when he realized what he had lost. However, in the way he chose to see Agueda, he loved her in the end. The realization may have come too late. It is a pity that he had to regret the life he had with Agueda, as she did with him. Yet the May Day Eve can be seen as a blessing for the both of them. For they both loved each other, even though they failed to realize it.

Source:  http://www.litreact.com/reactions/may%20day%20eve_joaquin_diaz.html

Bibliography

Nick Joaquin, byname of Nicomedes Joaquin   (born May 4, 1917, Paco, Manila, Phil.—died April 29, 2004, San Juan, Phil.), Filipino novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and biographer whose works present the diverse heritage of the Filipino people.
Joaquin was awarded a scholarship to the Dominican monastery in Hong Kong after publication of his essay “La Naval de Manila” (1943), a description of Manila’s fabled resistance to 17th-century Dutch invaders. After World War II he traveled to the United States, Mexico, and Spain, later serving as a cultural representative of the Philippines to Taiwan, Cuba, and China.
Starting as a proofreader for the Philippines Free Press, Joaquin rose to contributing editor and essayist under the nom de plume “Quijano de Manila” (“Manila Old-Timer”). He was well known as a historian of the brief Golden Age of Spain in the Philippines, as a writer of short stories suffused with folk Roman Catholicism, as a playwright, and as a novelist.

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/304268/Nick-Joaquin

He was the greatest Filipino writer of his generation. Over six decades and a half, he produced a body of work unmatched in richness and range by any of his contemporaries. Living a life wholly devoted to the craft of conjuring a world through words, he was the writer’s writer. In the passion with which he embraced his country’s manifold being, he was his people’s writer as well.

Joaquín’s choice of early readings was not exceptional. Joaquín and other writers of his generation who were schooled in the American era discovered Dostoyevsky and Hemingway before they did such Tagalog writers as Lope K. Santos and Rosauro Almario. Yet, it can be said that Joaquín never really lost his sense of where he was. He read Manila’s English-language newspapers and magazines for what Filipinos themselves were writing. (He had read the José Rizal novels in the Charles Derbyshire translation before he was thirteen, Joaquín said.) He always had a strong sense of place, a virtue that was to become a hallmark of his body of work. “When I started writing in the late 1930s,” he would recall many years later, “I was aware enough of my milieu to know that it was missing from our writing in English. The Manila I had been born into and had grown up in had yet to appear in our English fiction, although that fiction was mostly written in Manila and about Manila.”

His first short story dealt with the vaudeville of Manila, “The Sorrows of Vaudeville,” and was published in Sunday Tribune Magazine in 1937. (The editors changed its title to “Behind Tinsel and Grease.”) Earlier, in 1934, he published his first poem in English, a piece about Don Quixote. The story is told that when this poem appeared in the Tribune, Serafín Lanot, the Tribune’s poetry editor, liked the poem very much and went to congratulate the poet when he came to collect his fee, but the shy and elusive Joaquín ran away.
Very early, Joaquín was set on crafting his own voice. Writing in 1985 on his early years as a writer, he said that it appeared to him in the 1930s that both an American language and an American education had distanced Filipino writers in English from their immediate surroundings. “These young writers could only see what the American language saw.” It was “modern” to snub anything that wore the name of tradition and, for the boys and girls who trooped to the American-instituted schools, Philippine history began with Commodore Dewey and the Battle of Manila Bay. “The result was a fiction so strictly contemporary that both the authors and their characters seemed to be, as I put it once, ‘without grandfathers.’” He recalled: “I realize now that what impelled me to start writing was a desire to bring in the perspective, to bring in the grandfathers, to manifest roots.”

This was Nick Joaquín recalling in 1985 what it was like in the 1930s. Back then, the young Joaquín was just beginning to find his way into a literary life. He was gaining notice as a promising writer, publishing between 1934 and 1941 a few stories and over a dozen poems in the Herald Mid-Week Magazine and the Sunday Tribune Magazine. The literary scene was vibrant in the Commonwealth years, as writers and critics debated the role and direction of Philippine writing and formed feuding groups such as the Philippine Writers League and the Veronicans. Joaquín stood at the periphery of this scene. He probably had little time to be too reflective. He was already trying to fend for himself while quite young. He was also growing into a world that was marching toward the cataclysm of a world war.
The period of the Japanese occupation was a difficult time for the Joaquíns who, at this time, had moved from Pásay to a house on Arlegui Street in the historic San Miguel district of Manila, where Malacañang Palace is located. Like other residents in the enemy-occupied city, Joaquín scavenged for work to help support the family. The Japanese had closed down the Tribune and other publications at the onset of the occupation. Joaquín worked as a port stevedore, factory watchman, rig driver, road worker, and buy-and-sell salesman. Seeing corpses on the street, working for a wage in rice, demeaned by fear and poverty, Joaquín detested the war. He later said in an interview that the experience of the war so drained both his body and spirit that when it was over, he was filled with the desire to leave the country and go somewhere far. He dreamed of pursuing a religious vocation by going to a monastery in Spain or somewhere in Europe, “somewhere where you could clean up.”

Through the war years, he continued writing when and where he could. He finished “The Woman Who Felt Like Lazarus,” a story about an aging vaudeville star, and the essay “La Naval de Manila.” Both appeared in the wartime English-language journal Philippine Review in 1943. A monthly published by the Manila Sinbun-sya and edited by Vicente Albano Pacis and Francisco Icasiano, the Review also published Joaquín’s story “It Was Later Than We Thought” (1943) and his translation of Rizal’s Mi Ultimo Adios (1944). Readers were beginning to take notice. He cultivated a persona inaccessible and mysterious. When he was asked to fill up a biographical form for the Review, he simply wrote down: “25 years old, salesman.”

http://filipinoscribbles.wordpress.com/2010/09/15/biography-of-nick-joaquin-1917-2004/