IN THE STUDY of 21stCentury Literature from the Philippines featuring the stories of Peter Solis Nery, 19-time Palanca awardee including the Hall of Fame, the following question is often asked (which, of course, your dutiful writer answers):
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What was the political milieu that influenced you in the writing of “Lirio,” “Ang Kapid,” and “Candido”?
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To be clear, most of my stories were not written as a response to specific political picture or atmosphere.
I have no great political agenda in the writing of my literature.
But surely, my writing, and my stories especially, are informed and influenced by what I appropriate or understand of my world and my society at the time of my writing.
I have a great memory, and things that have happened decades earlier can still affect or be reflected in the plotting or telling of my stories.
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“Lirio,” a first prize winner at the 1998 Palanca Awards, was written earlier in that same year.
It was the year of the Philippine Centennial celebrations.
A decade earlier, in 1989, the country went crazy with the Miracle of Agoo in La Union with Judiel Nieva claiming an apparition of the Virgin Mary atop a guava tree.
Earlier in that decade of the 1990s, I was very interested in the magic realism of South America.
And I was just thinking, the Philippines is also ripe as a setting for magico-realist stories.
So I wanted to write a magic realist story myself, that was my motivation.
To give it a Filipino flavor, and celebrate the centenary of our independence, I set it in a typical Filipino rural and provincial town patterned after my hometown of Dumangas.
I gave details of the local color that were pretty awesome, if I say so myself.
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“Lirio” dealt with marital rape.
I’m pretty sure the expansion of the Anti-Rape Law passed in the previous year, 1997, influenced it.
I remembered because changes in the 1997 law reclassified rape as a Crime against personsinstead of just Crimes against Chastity.
That expansion recognized male rape.
But clearly, I wasn’t really interested in writing about male rape.
I wanted to write about the abuse of women for my first ever Palanca entry.
Again, almost a decade earlier, back in 1989-1990, I worked with Stop Trafficking Of Pilipinos Foundation.
It gave me knowledge and experience about abused women and children in Iloilo City even if our main thrust was working and streetchildren.
Also, I remembered that in 1992, under President Cory Aquino, the Magna Carta for Disabled Persons was approved.
Lirio, the protagonist of my story, is a deaf-mute.
Clearly, I have considered the events in the decade before 1998 and included them in the writing of the story.
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“Ang Kapid” won the Palanca in 2006, but I wrote the story in 2004, after my Psychiatric Nursing exposure or clinical rotation at the psychiatric ward of the Western Visayas Medical Center Annex in Pototan, Iloilo.
I thought that my experience as a student nurse was pretty unique so I wanted to write a story based on the nurses, doctors, health workers, and patients in a mental health unit.
I won’t force the issue and say that the Philippine Generics Law, enacted in 1988, influenced my story about the treatment of psych patients.
But I did remember those news and events with Sen. Juan Flavier.
And after all, it was only in 1996 that the pharmacology industry was mandated to effectively enforce generic names in drug labeling and advertising.
I have a pretty good memory of the things in my youth, and all these contributed to the details of my stories.
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“Candido,” the first prize winner at the 2007 Palanca Awards, is a historical story, a period piece, about the Philippine Revolution of 1898.
It is a rehash or a retelling of my 1998 Centennial Literary Prize award-winning screenplay called “Buyong.”
It was almost a decade since my screenplay won, and I didn’t see opportunities for it to be made into a movie.
So, I decided I should write it again, but this time as a short story — something that can be read in 15 pages rather than 120 pages of script.
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There was a synchronized national and local elections in May 2007.
But I was already living in the US.
Still, I’m pretty updated with the happenings in the Philippines even when I’m in America.
I’m pretty sure that it was the campaign period (usually starting “illegally” in November of the previous year) and the emotional fervor it carries that reminded me of my pretty nationalistic or patriotic screenplay that I could refashion and adapt in a new genre like the short story.
But I’m not about to say that the political climate of 2007 influenced the judges to award my story the first prize. Haha.
I really think that I wrote the story of Candido Iban very well that it deserved the highest prize at the Palanca contest. Haha.
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We will continue with the political milieu around the composition of two more stories in the PSN literary corpus in my next column. (To be continued/PN)
