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.
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/
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