Published below are excerpts from F Sionil Jose's article, To the young writers of Cavite.
Now we must realize how our leaders today have betrayed us, too; they used the slogans of nationalism, the enduring ties of kinship, of patronage to assume power and colonize us.
Aside from these painful contradictions, our past also informs us how empty our country is of the hoary civilizations of Asia, the great temples, the classical arts and particularly literature, which our part of the world has in abundance.
Must we then, particularly those of us who write, feel inferior to our neighbors with their ancient cultural achievements, their great pre-colonial art?
For those of us who write, the paucity of such artistic effusions should not cripple us into despair and cultural paralysis. On the contrary, our past should be the challenge, the future faced with trepidation, hard work, originality. We are the shapers of culture, the builders of those cathedrals, the proud foundation of a nation. It is a heavy burden we ourselves do not quite realize — least of all our countrymen who are shallow and who do not care. But we the architects and builders must — if only to deserve our legacy from Rizal.
How will this be done?
Whatever history teaches us, whatever historians tell us, we must not forget that in the end, we should not be just Caviteños, or Ilokanos, Maranaos or Mangyans — from the strength of these identities, we must be Filipinos, committed to Cavite, to the Ilokos, to Mindanao — yes, but never forgetting that these loyalties are the tenacious roots of a wider loyalty to this unhappy country where we live, whose effulgent future is ours to shape.
We must never forget that Aguinaldo was captured because he was betrayed by Filipino mercenaries — many of whom demean us to this very day.
We must not forget that Filipinos — our men of history like Andres Bonifacio and Antonio Luna — were not killed by either the Spaniards or the Americans but by Filipinos; that today the same pitiable continuum is in the Moro and communist rebellions — Filipinos killing Filipinos.
These are for the young and particularly the writers — the brains of the country — to ponder, to ingest and more so this season when so many of you will go to the polls and elect new leaders.
It matters very much who you will vote for and your vote should not be for someone who you like because he has done you, your family and your town favors, or because you like what he says, or that he comes to you with an array of promises and gladdens your day with the antics of professional entertainers, movie and TV personalities.
Think of the candidate who has the intelligence, the track record and the sincerity not just to be president but to be truly Filipino. Think hard for you must vote not just with your heart but with your intellect.
Whenever starry-eyed young people ask me for advice because they want to be writers, I tell them: Don’t. I speak not just with a lot of hindsight but with the wisdom of experience and age.
In spite of the hard work, the emotional and spiritual anguish, writing does not pay. As we all know, writers in general all over the world seldom make a comfortable living.
Writing is a vocation, not a profession. As such, it may explain the travail writers must live with. I was discussing this very subject with that brilliant young writer Francesca Kwe a while ago, and she said, “Why, then, must the writer persevere?” Why will you ignore what this decrepit octogenarian tells you?
Yes, why should we continue? We will persevere because we are hopelessly hopeful that our work may fulfill us, and in the process, do a bit of good for others. We will go on because we are egoists but this ego is transcended by our obdurate faith that we may yet help create a just society. Maybe, we are motivated by hate — but that is the other side of love, first for our own selves and beyond us, our fellow men.
We will not prevail, we will probably fail, but we will try and try again, because you — we — are truly Filipino.
