Speech
of
His Excellency Fidel V. Ramos
President of the Philippines
At the 43rd Carlos Palanca Award Ceremonies

Delivered at the Rigodon Ballroom, Manila Peninsula, September 1, 1993]

Forging a national
literature

ALTHOUGH for the greater part of history the relationship between writers and their government appears to have been opportunistic at best, tenuous for the most part and adversarial at worst, I feel privileged to share your company.

And this is to recognize that, though from different premises, we seek and share the same goal—a better Filipino society—and not promote any indifference or enmity between us.

Leo Tolstoy said: “All art has this characteristic—it unites people.” This, too, is the purpose of political leadership. Writers and artists imagine the possible; we in Government aspire to turn the possible into reality.

We share a deep and fundamental commitment to the betterment of humanity—a commitment you express through the action of words upon the spirit and we in Government through some spirited action.

Celebrating the Filipino

We have much to thank the Palanca Foundation for bringing us together this evening. This gathering of writers—and of the Palanca winners before them—is as close as we can possibly get to a literary peerage or an Academy of Letters, entry into which can be gained solely by proven merit and excellence. Virtually every Filipino writer of note has been recognized by a Palanca award.

The Palanca Foundation’s library of prizewinners is a compendium of much of the best of our modern literature and an invaluable resource for students, historians and future generations of Filipino readers. These awards have not only honored the best of our writers but also and, more important, encouraged writers, especially the young, to produce new and vital literature. They also have served as rites of passage for aspiring Filipino writers.

I note that this year the entries to most contest categories were about double the usual volume, with many new names, representing a wider cross-section of our country and society. This was certainly due to the massive nationwide information campaign the Foundation conducted in search of literary talent beyond Metro Manila and our other traditional centers of cultural activity.

Uplifting our own culture

As I have noted of similar initiatives undertaken by other cultural foundations and non-Government organizations, this campaign is especially critical at a time when foreign entertainment fare threatens to overpower, if not obliterate, the truly native elements in our culture. New technologies such as video and the inevitable cosmopolitanization of our society have made such process even easier.

This is not to say that we should, defensively, shut ourselves from foreign influences, which are not only beneficial within reason but also vital to our own cultural growth. But we certainly need to rediscover and uplift our own native cultural character and strength.

It is significant and propitious that the 1993 Ramón Magsaysay awardee for journalism, literature and creative communication arts is our very own Professor Bienvenido Lumbera—one of five awardees chosen from a field of 200 outstanding Asian achievers.

Culture is an inalienable element of development and nation building. It establishes our identity and gives us the inner fortitude and pride, without which all our other efforts are bound to fail.

By their continuing importance, their growing popularity and their broader reach, the Palanca Awards have been a continuing workshop for the forging of a truly national literature. This is of strategic value, for without such a national literature, no nation can possibly aspire to greatness.

Indeed, the experience of those countries that have mattered most in shaping the global face of the twentieth century—the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, the former Soviet Union, France, Italy, Germany and China, among others—will tell us that each of them has had a long and grand tradition of letters behind them. Their literature has been a vital source of nourishment for the national spirit, a well-spring for their people to draw from in times of gravest need.

My Administration, through such organizations as the National Commission on Culture and the Arts, the National Historical Institute and the Cultural Center of the Philippines, has been greatly involved in the shaping and promotion of a national cultural policy that takes our ethnolinguistic and other diversities into account in charting our direction to the future.

To seek and speak the truth

But let me assure you that even as we speak of a “national literature” or of a “national cultural policy,” it cannot be for Government to prescribe or to dictate what our writers should think and write. No government—except for the irreparably corrupt and the compulsively repressive—should fear its writers, for they, too, are a part of society; they are its rawest nerve, its clearest voice, its keenest minds.

Duty-bound to seek and speak the truth, writers can be both the most difficult and yet the most responsible of citizens Their nobility—as the French writer Albert Camus noted in accepting his Nobel Prize—”will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know and resistance to oppression.”

These are commitments our greatest writers like José Rizal and “Ka” Amado Hernández did observe; indeed their greatness emanates from such commitments.

The constructive and unrelenting criticisms that writers provide—in creative literature as well as in the mass media—are democracy’s best insurance for its enduring health and its survival.

Democracy is not a process of cultural homogenizing, but one of tolerance, understanding, and taking the moral action that will make a true virtue of our intelligence.

Today we need the writer’s ministrations more than ever. This is because we are faced today with very real problems of daunting proportions. Our newspapers scream of crime and violence in the streets and in our homes. Although these are far from the actual norm, the mere perception of evil can be very damaging to our spirits and to the national prestige.

Institutionalized violence

Less visibly but at least just as insidiously, institutionalized violence stalks us in the many forms of corruption in Government, injustice in our courts, and the poverty and hunger of millions of our poor.

And we say as citizens—you and I—that we have had enough, we can no longer suffer to be brutalized in complicit silence. We are humans: we deserve better and much more.

I cannot be your President and yet be unaware and unmindful of these realities. To ensure that these evils are defeated and banished from our society, I am doing now what others before me did not do or refused to do.

And yet I would suggest to you that our reality can be neither so loveless nor so desolate that we could not retrieve from it—and return to it—some well-being of hope to nurture and to multiply.

With clear heads and clear hearts, we can go beyond our common complaints and even our deepest griefs. Each of us can say: I will be different; I will lead a life of love and service; I will give cause for my neighbor to do the same. Surely these are simple propositions, and surely, like many simple things, they are supremely difficult.

But it is both literature’s virtue and its responsibility to engage in reaffirming our fundamental humanity and the unity of our interests and aspirations as a people.

Toward a new literary hero

In this regard, let me suggest—not dictate—that we need a literature that will uplift, and not debase, the human spirit—a literature more in the heroic, than in the tragic, mode. We need new heroes—heroes who will inspire us not because they own some superhuman talents, but because they exemplify the best of what it is to be human. No character can be great and be inspiring who has not lived on the open page, who has not struggled mightily against real, overbearing forces, and yet has prevailed.

I believe that literature and art must do more than mechanically represent the sordidness around us. True, evil and squalor are a part of our daily existence. No work would be authentic and complete if it did not accept these among its premises.

But mere representation alone—however finely detailed or however stylishly composed—will not of itself lead to the positive moral action we need to design and exemplify.

That the world is full of evil is old news. Even the aesthetic challenges in its presentation have largely been met. Now we must ask: What is to be good? How can one be good in such a seemingly blighted universe? What are the limits of our humanity, and how do we extend them?

It is in dealing with such questions that, I think, the greatness of our writers and their vision will be tested.

It will be in the grand sweep of such as the Russian Masters who were not afraid to raise the simplest—but the most difficult—moral questions of the age, beyond the passing politics of the morning’s newspaper.

It may be the natural province of art to idealize and to invent, but one can be too clever at invention. Seek artistry, yes, but one even more enlarged by a fundamental honesty.

And if you must be honest with yourselves as writers, I think we will all agree that when all is said and done, you will have wanted to have written something that mattered, something that made a positive difference in the consciousness and lives of our people.

I propose that you can do this by helping create a new archetypal hero of the triumphant Filipino, a hero who has faced the odds, made the difficult choice and emerged the better person and citizen. Someone who will not fear to hope and to love; someone with the humility of faith and the grandeur of ambition.

Do this, and we in Government will march with you to realize that common dream.