Sweets and spices

Sang nagligad nga June 2010, ginlagda sang De La Salle University (DLSU) Press an limang e-books o electronic books, isa ka pioneering initiative sang DLSU Academic Publications Office sa pangunguna ni Dr. Isagani R. Cruz, ang premyado nga kritiko sa pungsod Pilipinas.

Isa sa lima nga libro amo ang Maharang, Mahamis na Literatura sa Mga Tataramon na Bikol (Sweets and Spices in the Languages of Bikol) ni Paz Verdades Santos, literature professor sang amo man nga unibersidad. 

Matahum ang unod sang Maharang, Mahamis na Literatura sa Tataramon na Bikol ni Santos kay tiniripon niya ang madamu nga mga obrang literatura sang mga kontemporaryo kag mga antiguhan nga Bikolanong awtor.

 

The book offers something sweet and something spicy, as it were, that speak much of the Bikol sensibility. Maharang, Mahamis features the creative works of past and contemporary Bikol poets, fictionists and playwrights. The pieces of poetry, fiction and drama were chosen based on the individual text’s contribution to Bikol literary history, its literacy value, the peculiar Bikol turn of phrase and the distinctive Bikol identity, or as Santos herself perceived it. 

Centered on the said criteria, the book surveys representative works that could constitute Santos’s appropriation of the concept of maurag (best) and magayon (beautiful) in Bikol literature.

 

The roster of authors in this collection is indispensable. It includes, among others, the poetry of Rudy Alano who passed away in August this year. Alano, erstwhile professor of literature at the Ateneo de Naga  helped usher in the teaching and appreciation of the vernacular literature in the said school. Alano also produced plays in Bikol in the same institution. 

The book also includes the work of Alano’s student Frank Peñones Jr., who was awarded the CCP literary grant in 1991, and whose work Bikol scholar Ma Lilia Realubit considered to have sounded “the clarion call” to revive the Bikol writing in the 1990s.

It also features the short stories of Ana Calixto and Gloria Racelis who published in the Bikolana magazine in the 1950s. Calixto’s “Dupyas” and Racelis’s “An Doktor,” for one, read as moral tales in the post-war era even as they tackle taga-bayan/taga-bukid dichotomies.

 

Also featured are the works of the bemedaled Abdon Balde, Jr.; the prolific Jason Chancoco, whose book of Bikol poetry critique Pagsasatabuanan came out last year; the indefatigable poet Kristian Cordero who has been making waves here and there; and the Manila-based Bikol poet Marne Kilates from Daraga, Albay. It also features Gode Calleja, publisher of the Canada-based poetry folio Burak; and Estelito Jacob, former president of Kabulig, an aggregate of Bikol literati. 

 

The book also published for the first time Orfelina Tuy and Fe Ico’s “Handiong,” a full-length play written in the 1970s as a school project when they were teachers at Naga Central School.

What is noteworthy in this collection is the inclusion of English translations of the published Bikol texts, an opportunity for Bikolano and non-Bikolano readers alike to appreciate the region's literary genius.

 

And because the e-book can be purchased and perhaps only read through Amazon Kindle, a software and hardware platform developed by Amazon.com that renders and displays e-books and other digital media, this unprecedented publication effort is an indispensable opportunity to get acquainted with the Bikol genius in today’s times.

 

The book is virtually what we can call the life’s work of Paz Verdades Santos, featuring the products of her research in Bikol literary history and sensibility. Santos spent three decades teaching literature in Ateneo de Naga and De la Salle University. In 2003, she published Hagkus: Twentieth -century Bikol Women Writers, which profiles the evolution of the Bikolana writer from the 1900s to the present.

 

In her work, Santos, who is herself not a Bikolana, but whose passion for Bikol is perhaps unprecedented, has featured the sweets (matamis) and the spices (makahang) rendered by the creative juices of past and contemporary Bikol writers which, indeed,  altogether lend additional flavor to the feast of Philippine literature.

Desire to acquire

Ours is now a world of things.

Everything around us these days is commodified, (meaning: produced or made, sold, bought, and consumed.) Every single day, we consume—we eat, we use things, we burn up anything, everything. In fact, we consume too much. While we are overwhelmed with too many things, there is  yet no satisfying our desire to acquire, to fill ourselves with everything until we tell ourselves we still want more.

In simpler terms, we could say that the mall culture rules our sensibilities these days. In this one-stop business establishment, we people  are over-empowered to conquer our lack of everything. The presence of almost everything inside a convenient edifice affords us the luxury we did not have before.

The mall culture has gradually and successfully ingrained in us that we can always desire to acquire. And that we can always acquire more than what we need. Who can resist the itch of malling and shopping when midnight sales and bargains come almost every week? Backed up by television and newspaper, these business strategies do not only deplete our ATM funds; they intensify our desire to constantly acquire.

Consumerism has become our chronic tendency to have and have more.

Madeline Levine, an American psychologist, writes, "Beginning in the 1990s, the most frequent reason given for attending college had changed to making a lot of money, outranking reasons such as becoming an authority in a field or helping others in difficulty. This correlates with the rise of materialism, specifically the technological aspect: the increasing prevalence of compact disc players, digital media, personal computers, and cellular telephones. Levine criticized what she saw as “a shift away from values of community, spirituality, and integrity, and toward competition, materialism and disconnection.”

While Levine's study only involved the American community, the same can be said in this country. Nowadays, what we live for may, in fact, depend on what we have. To the extent of spreading ourselves thin, we have required so much of ourselves  and we have acquired so much for ourselves, that our gauges for success or worse, happiness and contentment are mountains of things which we have to acquire and possess and burn up and use up, until it is time for us to have another one and another one and another one and more and more and more and more.

It is ridiculous, for instance, that even one newspaper ad reads—“It’s your watch that tells most about who you are.” If we take it literally, though, this is not true—you are not your watch. It’s a pity that you depend on a mere wristwatch to say much of yourself. It’s a pity that it is a thing that might just sum you up. Truth is—you use the watch for a purpose, not to tell you essentially who you are. Even then, you are worth more than your watch. Among other things, you’re a human person with a soul; your watch is not. In this sense, it is hilarious how consumerist propaganda can persuade us to think this way about our lives; funny how this sensible persuasion has so pervaded our modern life.

We now perceive that everything that is of value is on the shelf and so we should buy them; otherwise, we cease to live—as if not being able to buy them lessens our value.  We go out in the mall, in the flea markets, every stall we can find, we look for the things we usually look for to satisfy ourselves.

As we browse and read books, read ads, fit clothes, read product labels or watch movies, we seem to devour anything we find on the shelf. And in any merchandise we take out from all types of shelves—books, CDs, DVDs, shoes, store products, anything, or everything—we always seek to benefit from them.

Yet, isn't it better to see these things simply as our means to get to where we want to go, or we ought to be. Do we really [just have to] use things, so we as human beings survive, and prosper, and as one friend puts it, “elevate”?

We hardly wonder what can make us see that we can use things beyond their normal end. We hardly consider what can make us see that we can desire to acquire other things, those things beyond the usual purpose of the tangible things we normally acquire. We hardly bother what else can convince us that we are worth more than our new pair of pants or imported watch.

At the end of the day, isn't it good to ask what we are here for, and not how much more we can acquire further? While we are here.