Nick Joaquin campaigned for a nation built on the truth

By Rene Q. Bas, Assistant Executive Editor

NICK JOAQUIN occupied the intellectual consciousness of the FEU writers when I entered the university in the late fifties. That was because Dean Alejandro Roces was shaking up the campus into developing a passion for literature and cultural nationalism, and Sarah Joaquin and Mrs. Josephine Cojuangco-Reyes were championing the FEU Drama Guild.

The campus intellectuals included some of the best short-story writers of the time, like the late Agustin “Ben” Benitez and Azucena “AG” Grajo-Uranza (who has two Palanca Award novels to her name). Both Ben and AG became friends who encouraged me to continue writing poems and short stories.

AG and her best friend, Eva San Jose (who became Mrs. Alberto Florentino), infected me with their love for Nick Joaquin’s work and their their reverence for the words and artistry of A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, an elegiac play that must, however, be read as a novel. AG always spoke in hushed tones about the magic of the play that we saw presented by Lamberto Avellana—not on the stage but in the Sunken Garden in Intramuros.

That was also the time when I first discovered the metaphysical outlook—from reading the Apologist Frank J. Sheed and translations of Saints Thomas Aquinas and Augustine lent to me by the late Fr. Michael Nolan, then the young and handsome chaplain of FEU’s Student Catholic Action. I found Nick Joaquin’s writings reinforcing that outlook within me—and my version of nationalism.

‘Great metaphysical seeing’

Later it gave me a thrill to read that Jose Garcia Villa—another icon in Philippine literature whom Dean Roces had persuaded to break his life of exile in New York for a spell to share his august existence among us Filipinos at UP and FEU—had valued Nick Joaquin for being metaphysical. Villa said not only that Nick Joaquin “is our only poet who has language, who writes poetry, and who reveals behind his writing a genuine first rate mind” but also that he “is a writer with real imagination, an imagination of power and depth and great metaphysical seeing.”

Joaquin’s rich body of works has contributed to the post-World War II Filipinos’ understanding of their place in history, the uniqueness and importance of their being—despite the antipathy toward him of some nationalist writers. They labeled as nostalgic hispanism Joaquin’s insistence on the reality that until the Spaniards came the people who were the ancestors of today’s Filipinos had no “national consciousness.” Joaquin in fact maintained that it was the martyrdom of Gomburza—the priests Gomez, Burgos and Zamora—three and a quarter century after Magellan discovered the Philippines for the Europeans, which marked the beginning of Filipino nationalist consciousness.

What Nick Joaquin, the historian, advocated in handsomely crafted essays was not for Filipinos to become sentimentally attached to their Hispanic heritage but for them to become a mature people who know the truth about themselves. He never failed to remind that this truth includes the fact that much of our being is what we have become as a result of the impact on our native cultures of the Roman Catholic Christianity brought to us by the Spaniards. He wanted us Filipinos to chart our destiny as a people guided by the truth.

Nick Joaquin wrote this dedication on my copy of The Complete Poems and Plays of Jose Rizal Translated by Nick Joaquin: “For Rene Bas: Happy reading of what I hope you find to be Happy de-Hispanizing!”

His 1988 book, Culture and History, corrects a wrong historical viewpoint that erroneously leads Filipinos to believe that their sense of nationhood should be traced to a nonexistent golden age in the pre-Hispanic past and that the Spanish conquest should be blamed for aborting the development of Filipinos as an Asian people.

Against that viewpoint, Joaquin argued that “before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we became nothing but Filipino.”

The essays collected in A Question of Heroes paints realistic warts-and-all portraits of the leading names in our pantheon.

Few doubt that Joaquin—born Nicomedes Marquez Joaquin on May 4, 1917, in Paco, Manila—was the greatest Filipino writer in English.

Joaquin was a dropout from the Dominican seminary in Hong Kong. He went to church almost daily and had a special devotion to the Santo Domingo Church’s Our Lady of La Naval.

Joaquin’s novels and stories often deal with the coexistence of the primitive and the cultured dimensions in the human psyche. His most graphic work that contains this concept is the short story “The Summer Solstice.”

A schizophrenic generation of Filipinos

In the novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels, the vivid human drama turns into an effective metaphor to portray the schizophrenic generation of Filipinos whose Spanish-Catholic heritage was still very much alive in their being while they were also being raised under the American version of civilization.

Joaquin was also a consummate journalist. In the fifties and sixties he began writing his reportage pieces under the pen name Quijano de Manila. These were journalistic works—on crime, politics, entertainment and various celebrities—marked with the vividness of short stories and the depth but not the academic drone of sociological treatises. In the USA, works of the kind that Joaquin called reportage had appeared only in The New Yorker at first and then came to be called “the new journalism.”

Joaquin started his literary career by contributing poems and essays to national magazines. He published his first poem in 1935 in The Tribune.

He joined the Philippines Free Press magazine in 1950 as proofreader. He soon became a staff writer, signing his work as Quijano de Manila. Then as the Free Press literary editor, he influenced the careers of young writers, most of whom have become icons of Philippine literature themselves.

He later edited the Asia-Philippine Leader magazine. And became editor in chief of the Philippine Weekly Graphic. He was publisher of the Mirror magazine when he died.

His short stories have won every major prize in the Philippines, including the Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. In 1996 he was chosen Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for literature and journalism.

He received the Republic Heritage Cultural Award in 1961 as journalist of the year.

His essays, short stories and poems have been collected into best-selling books, most of which are out of print.

A first-rate biographer

He also wrote first-rate biographies. His last work, Abe: A Frank Sketch, which he finished writing in February and is now being prepared for printing, is a biography of another cultural icon, the late editor, writer, art enthusiast and painter Emilio Aguilar “Abe” Cruz.

Joaquin was born in Paco on Calle Herran, the son of Leocadio Y. Joaquin, a lawyer and a colonel of the Philippine Revolution, and Salome Marquez, a schoolteacher. After three years of secondary education at the Mapa High School, he dropped out of school to work on Manila’s waterfront and in odd jobs.

He read widely at the National Library but before that he had read all the books in his father’s library.

He is survived by his sister Carmen Joaquin Enriquez, the wife of the former mayor of Zamboanga City, Joaquin Enriquez.

His other siblings are the late publisher Enrique (Ike) Joaquin, the jazz pianist Porfirio (Ping) Joaquin, Augusto Joaquin, Adolf Joaquin and Generosa Joaquin.

President Arroyo expressed deep emotion over Joaquin’s death. Spokesman Ignacio Bunye said the President felt it as a personal loss because Joaquin was a good friend of the Macapagal family.

She declared Sunday, May 2, a day of national mourning for Joaquin.

She said: “In writing of politics and history, Nick taught us that without memories, we are orphans, without memories we are fated to repeat the past and all of its mistakes.

“But he always gave us hope and the promise of a new beginning. Even as we lay him to rest, I see a new light on the horizon. I see a new Filipino emerging: confident, self-assured, forward-looking. I see a new nation rising from the field of our past battles.

“In memory of Nick, let us come together this day to build a society worthy of our heroes, our artists, and our best selves.”

Joaquin’s ashes were buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani at Fort Bonifacio, Makati City. He was given a three-gun salute.

Fellow National Artists and some of his close friends paid tribute to him.