Leoncio's Little Lies

BOOK REVIEW
Leoncio P. Deriada, People on Guerrero Street
Seguiban Publishing and Printing Press
Iloilo City, 2005
2004 Juan S. Laya Prize for the Best Novel
The Manila Critics Circle

The issues of how writers “commemorate the biographical past and how the sense of self is constituted in the act of narration” present themselves in Leoncio P. Deriada’s People on Guerrero Street, the author’s first novel insistently profuse with memory.
 
It is said that storytelling is an essential feature of how we remember things; and remembering plays an important part in the way we conceive ourselves. Gaining prominence in recent years, autobiographical fiction has provided a medium for investigating personal identity in relation to the social world and to past experiences—¬¬¬¬sad or otherwise.
 
Memory—specifically of the past—forms part of Deriada’s fictions, The Road to Mawab and Other Stories (1984), and The Week of the Whales and Other Stories (1994), culminating in his autobiographical novel titled People on Guerrero Street (2004), which the author considered too personal to be fiction. Stories such as “Coming Home,” “The Ride” “Rabid,” “The Road to Mawab,” and “Of Scissors and Saints,” the author utterly declares mostly autobiographical. On “The Road to Mawab,” for instance, Deriada as youth practically experienced the stark poverty in the rural parts of Davao. Looking back, the author says he has drawn a familiar, formidable character in Manang Atang, his relative, whom he drew to epitomize the plight of the poor in the Philippine countryside in the 1970s. Deriada’s own exposure to the other members of the cultural minorities in Davao had enriched his knowledge of them, and such found their way in some of his award-winning pieces such as “Dabadaba,” Ati-atihan” and “The Coin Divers,” in which Bagobos, Aetas, and Tausug face the challenges of living with the people who are not like them. His experiences with these people have afforded him the necessary lenses with which he can scrutinize and explore their realities.
 
Lush with his memorable past—such that his fictions are practically autobiographical, Deriada’s autobiographical tract declares that the author’s memory is worth the beauty rendered in literature. They mirror a beautiful life, something that is full of anticipations, as the “I” narrator’s prospects at the end of People on Guerrero Street. Such tendency affords us the idea that the literary author is predominantly a diarist—one who chronicles his own life and its realities.
 
People on Guerrero Street is Deriada’s first novel in which the narrator “I” essays in 55 chapter-episodes his experiences with the people of Guerrero Street in the 1950s Davao City. Set in Davao City’s Guerrero Street during the school year 1953–1954 when the author was a junior in Davao City High School, People on Guerrero Street tells a good lot of realities in Davao City at the time. Deriada says that many characters in the novel are real people just as many are pure inventions or merely transplanted from other times and other neighborhoods. Regardless of which is real or fictional, he says, these characters all belong to the realities insofar demanded by the novel.
 
Deriada demonstrates this very well in his fiction. His protagonist boy character is simply growing up; the fact that his consciousness is engendered by the People in Guerrero Street attests that. All his experiences consist the very sensibility he will have in the future. The character in the novel acts more like an adult than an ordinary boy growing up.
 
The narrator’s sensibility even appears to be that of a grownup man, cautious and wary of life’s harsh nature and sarcastic and cynical about life’s funny nature. Reminiscent of J. D. Salinger’s Houden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, his character is in their cynicism against the harsh modern world but promises more hope for himself when after the death of his brother’s brother-in-law Pepe, he realizes he needs to go on—for he sees that the new year beckons for him better, brighter possibilities.
 
He displays utter disgust for the usual, inane, unruly or ridiculous behavior of people in his neighborhood. By and large, the events happening in the growing up boy affords for us the culture itself, the society that ridicules and supports him.
 
In being constructed as a subject—being a student in the Davao City High School, being a brother to their household’s breadwinner, being a friend to some other characters, he assumes a number of personas, masks which make him sociable and facilitate his existence in the society.
 
The narrator “I” clearly displays how the Philippine society subjects its constituents to behave in manner that he himself will either abhor or acquire willingly. It is clear that he yanks away superstition and fake religiosity, as much as he abhors his rivals for his crush.
 
He expresses—through vivid recollection of things past and present—his utter liking for a male figure, perhaps being with no father figure in the household he is sharing with his brother. Hewing a verbose reportage of events, faces, things, and realities, the novel unfolds before the reader as it unfolds to the eyes and ears of the narrator “I.”
 
He is also “subject” to the immorality of some other characters—Carna and Luchi, who afford for him the promiscuous and lascivious character and tendencies of a woman—while still being able to hold Terry as his chalice, his prized possession.
 
            People on Guerrero Street portrays a colorful childhood only someone with vivid memory and lush recollection of the past can muster and afford to articulate. The myriad details and countless images, colors, and sounds in each reminiscence altogether work for a sensible whole—one which says that growing up in those places in those times is not just living in an idyllic setting, or it is so? For the characters and possibilities in that part of the world are worth the memory of the author himself.
 
Deriada stresses on the factuality of some parts of his novel, “Of course, nothing could be truer than my first love letter or my misery in helping dress Mr. Baldado’s 200 chickens on Saturdays,” accounts for his nostalgia, the willingness to go back to some events in his life which he considers worth mentioning, “…the Baldado family were as real as Ren’s serenading Rosing and Leoncio Buang’s taking off his clothes and marching behind the Davao Chinese High School band on July 4 (Deriada, 2004).
 
However, Deriada considers that the biographical novelist has to tamper with reality for the sake of fictional reality. He says his remembering of the past was sweepy and holistic, while the parts he needed for the novel he had to choose carefully. At some point, he recognized the need to be factual, and in some instances, he needed to be fabricate. While the girding or the main structure of the novel is factual, inventing or “fabricating” was necessary only when the real past needed the unity demanded of fiction. This fabrication entails tampering with the temporal succession of events, transplanting characters and incidents from other times and neighborhoods and the outright inventing of characters and incidents.
 
Expectedly, most of the dialogue was pure invention according to the personality of the real or the “fabricated” characters. Deriada admits that—playing the fact and fiction game by ear—he realized that whenever the conception of the structure was clear, it was easy for him to decide which part needed the “fabrication.”
 
Deriada declares that the “autonovelist makes use of one or more of these unrealized possibilities and integrates them with the real past by arranging both the constructed reality and the reconstructed reality in the order demanded of fiction.” Always, the writer must employ careful selection by removing splurges of the real and controlling the unlimited potentials of the constructed parts.
 
According to Deriada, the blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction is necessary in writing an autobiographical or historical novel. The writing must be good if the boundaries between the real and the invented are blurred. A less skilled writer would not be capable of doing so.
 
“For instance, objective events, like a rainfall chart, did not develop in an ascending, climactic manner as demanded by fiction. I had to rearrange the chronological sequence of many events. Davao oldtimers would remember that the big Santa Ana fire was in 1952, not in 1953, and that the first taxis in Davao City came in 1955 or 1956, not earlier” (Deriada, 2004).
 
Deriada recalls fondly, “likewise the big theater production on the college grounds of the Ateneo de Davao was not in 1953 but in 1954. It was in celebration of the International Marian Year,” and even says, “Certainly, Purico’s famous amateur singing derby was called Tawag ng Tanghalan, not Tinig ng Tanghalan.
 
Deriada shares the sentiment that the “past is distorted,” primarily because it is given existence by memory. “Reality does not have the discipline of fiction. So the writer has to tamper with reality” for them create their craft.
 
Memory is said to be a construct created by the individual but not independent of the social environment. The individual memory of a certain person results from his/her participation in the communicative process.
 
Deriada’s freedom to play around with his facts in order to back up his literary purpose—aided him to turn in some durable portraits of people, places, and events,” which can’t be done if it were pure facts alone. Through this, Deriada immortalized his friends, classmates and even loved ones in his works of art.
 
If this novel were indeed his autobiography, it, then, almost always “exceeds the individual who writes it, exceeds the life and the subjective experiences of the writing subject”— autobiography will also be about the others who surround the writing subject and whose experiences are enmeshed with those of the writer (Braziel, 2004).
 
Virginia Woolf is said to have taken hold of the past—being affected and inspired by it for the rest of her life—in her lifetime she generated durable portraits of her own family members: parents, brother, sister, husband and friends. At her strongest, Woolf did not wish to dwell on death itself, but to paint durable portraits. In her lifetime she wrote most of the time and when she did, the prolific Woolf transformed people whom she loved—parents, brother, sister, friends, husband—into figures fixed in attitudes that could outlive their time. These portraits were not photographic—for it is said she would distort her subject to fit private memory to some historical or universal pattern (Gordon, 1988).
 
Deriada has perhaps one of the clearest memories—an exceptional ability to remember the past and recollect facts in order to portray significant characters that exist for a purpose. The narrator “I” even remembers words when he encounters images and events which he is narrating. He swings from the present back to the past when some characters remind him of certain things in the past. By simple remembering, Deriada employs his memory in including facts into the “fiction.” Maybe, he says he has what is called the photographic memory. “Until now, I have a very clear picture of past incidents in my life, from childhood to the most recent, and Deriada says, “I was born in 1938 but I can remember incidents when I was three. I remember practically everything that happened to my family from the first day of the War [World War I] to the last days of the Japanese in 1945” (Deriada, 2004).
 
Even in the novel, the treatment of things that happened in the past is equally lengthy—as if the entire purpose of the narrator is to remember everything, and when he does he becomes an anti-character, one whose existence in the novel is questioned because of his very sensibility which sounds like the author’s himself.
 
A number of authors share insights and ideas about how memory—particularly of the past—plays critical roles to defining the beauty of literature—or to the very least construct the human subject. British literary icon Virginia Woolf considers the past beautiful, such that the literary mind cannot at all ignore. It is something on which the author thrives and with which the author starts to exist. “The past is beautiful,” she said, because “one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus, we don’t have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” As a writer, Woolf took hold of the past, of ghostly voices speaking with increasing clarity, perhaps more real for her than were the people who lived by her side. When the voices of the dead urged her to impossible things they drove her mad but, controlled, they became the material of fiction. With each death, her sense of the past grew. Her novels were responses to these disappearances. To such extent was her “creative response” to such memories (Gordon, 1988).
 
On People on Guerrero Street (2004), his first novel which he considers autobiographical, Deriada says that “the past is beautiful” because distance—a writer’s physical and emotional remoteness from the things, peoples, and events in the past, colors, and gives varied and fresh perspectives to them. In writing the autobiographical fiction, Deriada simply wanted to share certain experiences which appear interesting to him and probably other people, “especially those who know me or [are familiar with] Davao City.”
 
Quite wary of the delayed publication of his work, Deriada hopes the readers—especially those in Davao, about which the novel highlights, will “enjoy going back to half a century earlier and feel how it was to live at that time… on the Guerrero Street of my memory and the Davao City of our affection.”
 
Both Deriada and Woolf, along with the plethora of authors intimating memory in their “life’s fictions” are enamored by the beautiful past—the grandeur and glory that was the past—that they have drawn durable portraits of them. Free from human malice, any author’s rendering becomes innocent, pure as childhood, naïve as youth, and free as detachment.
 
Memory has created varied subjects in Leoncio P. Deriada’s autobiographical novel profuse with real-life characters whose stories are even larger-than-life. Through memory, the author has constructed ‘realities’ in his characters, placing them and situating them in particular events, places, and hewing their lives in different stories.
 
Deriada’s People on Guerrero Street is more than about teenage puppy love; rather it illustrates a young man’s initiation into the harsh realities of the world, which he is soon facing as an adult. Pepe’s literal death supplies the persona’s first encounter with tragedy. This is the first step in toughening the persona as he faces figurative and real deaths in the immediate future.
 
In his work of “fiction,” Deriada says he has virtually written his life—with some “beautiful, little lies.”