Memory, all alone in the moonlight

Leoncio P. Deriada, People on Guerrero Street
Seguiban Printers and Publishing House, 2004
Manila Critics Circle's Juan S. Laya Prize for Best Novel, 2004


LEONCIO P. DERIADA’S People on Guerrero Street, the author’s first novel insistently profuse with memory, illustrates that the literary author is predominantly a diarist—one who chronicles his own life and its realities.


Here, 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.


The narrator’s sensibility 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 Deriada’s “I” speaks very cynical 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—when he sees that the new year beckons for him better and brighter possibilities.


While he displays utter disgust for the usual, inane, unruly or ridiculous behavior of people in his neighborhood, the events happening around him affords for us the culture itself, the society that ridicules and supports him. The narrator “I” makes clear that he yanks away superstition and fake religiosity, as much as he abhors his rivals for his crush.


Through vivid recollection of things past and present—“I” expresses his utter fondness 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, with whom he is oriented to the lascivious characters and tendencies of a woman—while still being able to hold Terry as his chalice, his prized possession.


Yet, Deriada’s piece 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 death is the persona’s first encounter with tragedy, virtually the first step in toughening the persona as he faces figurative and real deaths in the immediate future.


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.


Lush with his memorable past, 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.


Here and there awarded for his fiction and outstanding work in other literary genres, 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.


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 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.


Of the book’s creative style, Deriada says the blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction is [also] 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.


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 sweeping 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 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.


For instance, Deriada recalls fondly, “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’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.


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 to create his craft.


Of his work, Deriada says he has virtually written his life—with some “beautiful, little lies.”