In the 10th century, the Philippines was a great marine and economic power, building ships for its neighbors and setting up homes on foreign soil.  In the 19th century, a group of young writers from the Philippines, studying in colonial master Spain, invented the idea of a free country in Asia, eventually inspiring the first successful anti-colonial revolution in our part of the world and establishing its first independent republic.  Today, as far as I am concerned, the Philippines is the center of the first world (I don’t know about you, but as far as I know, the first personal pronoun is I, the second, you, and the third they).  I am from the Philippines, and therefore, I start counting from myself – first world, then you as second world, and the rest of the globe the third world.

Why do I come with such a high regard for myself and for my country?  Because we Filipinos have nothing else to be proud of.  We live in a country which used to have enormous wealth in natural resources; now, the country has very little forest left and no potable water anywhere.  We have a government that has consistently stolen money from the citizens and stashed private, ill-gotten money abroad.  We have a government run mostly by untouchable gambling lords, indicted murderers and rapists, incompetent movie stars, selfish business interests, and idiots with average IQs of 30.  We have a population of 85 million that we claim to be more than 90% literate, but is in fact 90% illiterate, if we judge by the number of newspapers and books printed and sold; no newspaper sells more than half a million copies a day and no book sells more than a hundred thousand copies – after several years.  We have a people whose main aim in life, according to all surveys, is to go abroad.  We have children whose main fantasy, according to all surveys, is to have been born abroad.  We have a people that supply the world with its best doctors, nurses, teachers, and engineers, but also its most undemanding mail-order brides, uninhibited prostitutes, oppressed housemaids, and hunted pickpockets.  We have a country where successful doctors give up medicine in order to study nursing, so they can move their entire families elsewhere in the world.  There is nothing to be proud of about the way we are today; that is why we are proud of the way we were yesterday.

At least, those of us that are writers are proud of our past.  Our writers write about what we really are, as well as what we really were.  There is a problem, however.  Nobody reads what we write, not only because they cannot read, but also because we cannot get them published.

A creative writer of short stories can publish in literary magazines that come out occasionally.  These magazines – paid for by the government’s cultural agencies – are priced way above the daily wage, so that nobody gets to buy, let alone read, the stores.  A couple of weekly magazines have space for one story per issue, but only if the story is short and does not challenge anything, especially writing conventions.  Poets can and do publish in the Sunday supplements of newspapers, but only if there is space and only if the poems are really paragraphs cut up to look like verse.  Theater companies – of which there quite a number, way out of proportion to the size of the theater-going public – used to focus on new plays by Filipino playwrights, but that is now part of nostalgia; the trend nowadays is to revive old plays (if they are Filipino) or to ape foreign productions.

So what do Filipino writers do?  They go abroad, if not physically like one out of every ten Filipinos (or one out of every five Filipino adults), then spiritually.  Filipino writers today get published outside the country, where they have had some kind of fame but not much fortune.  In fact, Filipino writers aim only for their few lines of fame, because writing does not pay in the Philippines.  Royalty for a book can go only as high as 20%, if that high, and since books sell an average of a couple of hundred copies, royalty cannot even buy a meal at a non-fast food restaurant.  Newspapers pay for poems and magazines pay for short stories, but since there are few poems and stories published, not too many writers benefit from this benefit, and the pay is so small it does not pay for the gasoline needed to get to the cashier.

Technically, there is freedom of expression and freedom of speech, but since nobody takes writing seriously, neither do writers.  There is an occasional novel published that is truly in the tradition of the national hero Jose Rizal’s two incendiary novels during the Spanish colonial period, but nobody gets to read it, except for the Manila Critics Circle which I helped found; we give out National Book Awards and get to read practically every book published in the country, but there are only ten of us.  Because each of us reads at least one book a day, we raised the national average to something incredible:  in the recent German GFK NOP World survey, the Philippines ranked fourth in the world in the number of hours spent reading per capita.  Filipinos spend 7.6 hours a week reading, less only than Indians (10.7), Thais (9.4), and Chinese (8.0).  Although we all know that statistics lie, this is one set of statistics that we prefer to believe.

The reality, however, is something else.  Most Filipino writers do not even read works written by their fellow writers.  This is a major stumbling block to establishing a true national literature.  It is not only the expense involved in buying each other’s books.  There is also the problem of language.  The country has more than a hundred different and mutually unintelligible languages, more than twenty or so of which have active writing going on right now.  Nobody can read these twenty languages; I myself can read only four (Tagalog, Filipino, English, and Spanish) with any kind of confidence.  I cannot even read the language in which the majority of Filipino creative works are written – Mandarin Chinese.

Is there censorship?  Not legally, but there does not have to be.  I cannot write against big business interests because, if I do, I will never get published by any media organization, media being owned solely by big business interests.  I cannot even teach in any reputable school, such schools being owned if not by big business interests, then by the big business interest that is the Roman Catholic Church.  I cannot even experiment with literary forms, because the canon is determined by literary contests and writing workshops, of which there are plenty in the country; the old guards guard the old literary norms with their blue pencils and their deaf pronouncements.  These contests and workshops give writers fame, at least among the few that participate in them.

Maybe, our fortune will change someday, as it has changed so radically since the 19th century, when every poem or novel by a Filipino writer was read by hundreds of people, who then armed themselves with knives to attack invading heavily-armed soldiers, and won.  Or perhaps our fortune will change as it indeed changed just 35 years ago, when every poem or short story or play by a Filipino writer was read, recited, or watched by thousands of students, who then armed themselves with placards to warn against an American-sponsored dictatorship that imposed itself anyway and today is about to impose itself again.  The Philippine Center of International PEN is committed to helping writers tell the truth, but unless the writers tell the truth first, there is nothing and no one to help. 

Meanwhile, we pride ourselves on our glorious past, on our country’s having been created by writers, on our being first world.  Otherwise, we would commit suicide, or acknowledge that we have already committed suicide.