I
DISTINCTLY remember that in one of our college classes in literature,
our professor asked the following question: “Should literature
be for its own sake, or should it espouse social causes?” As
our professor herself would later on explain, the question was a way
of asking whether the writer should be concerned with form or with
content.
We can be sure that if the late writer Amado V. Hernandez, whose
centennial birth anniversary will be celebrated on Sept. 13, were
asked that question, he would have answered—without a moment’s
hesitation, without batting an eyelash—that writers have a responsibility
to involve themselves in society. As he said in his speech when he
accepted the 1964 Manila Cultural Award (which is just one of the
many awards he received), “The days are gone when the artist
was like Narcissus, adoring his own image. Today the artist is witness
to and part of the immediate present.”
As his very writings prove, in the manner that one of his literary
idols, Jose Rizal, proved decades before him; and another writer,
Eman Lacaba, would start to prove while he was still alive—espousing
social causes does not have to diminish the aesthetic quality of one’s
literary output.
Society as Truth
In his essay “The Filipino and the Man,” which he wrote
as a college freshman at the Ateneo de Manila University, Eman Lacaba
said: “The responsibility of any writer in the world is to write
truthfully and comprehensibly about the world he lives in, the world
he remembers and continues to know, the world he experiences.”
Hernandez, who was born decades before Lacaba, also knew this. And
his prolific and diverse writings attest to his vast knowledge of
the reality of human experience.
Hernandez’s grasp of the scope of human reality was so deep
that he was well aware that society and social phenomena, like romantic
affairs which comprise the greater bulk of subjects in the world’s
body of literature, are also parts of human reality. In fact to Hernandez,
society and social phenomena play the most prominent parts in the
human drama: he knew perfectly well that all human beings are inevitably
affected by society since they are all part of it.
Thus, even as he would sometimes write of a woman wooed with orchids,
of a lover’s Rip van Winkle heart, he wrote infinitely more of
the battle between the oppressor and the oppressed—and because
he knew that rectitude can never side with the oppressor, he in his
writings showed unequivocal support for the oppressed and undeniable
hatred for the oppressor.
Hernandez wrote clearly and eloquently of enslavement in the hands
of a colonial power, of workers in unspeakable penury amidst unimaginable
abundance, of peasants stripped of their lands, of children begging
on the streets, of people eaten by the prisons for refusing to bow
before iniquity, of the heroism of fighters for freedom and justice.
His poems, articles, novels, short stories, and one-act plays contained
such lucid expositions of the social issues of the times in which
he lived (issues that are still very much with us), and were so splendidly
written, that he became (and still is) an icon for many a succeeding
generation of cause-oriented writers.
Among the People
One of Hernandez’s distinguishing marks is the fact that unlike
so many politicians who in their campaign speeches tell sob stories
of how as boys they had to catch frogs for supper because there was
nothing else to eat, he stayed by the side of the people of whom he
was born—and served them to his very last breath.
Hernandez was born on Sept. 13, 1903 but it is not quite clear where;
the conventional wisdom is that he was born in the slums of Tondo,
where he grew up, but a short story by Jun Cruz Reyes implies that
his origins can be traced to a town in Bulacan.
He took his pre-college education in public schools in Manila. After
high school he began the study of Fine Arts at the University of Santo
Tomas, where fellow cause-oriented writers Bien Lumbera and Rogelio
Sicat also studied. However, he did not finish his course, and instead
settled for a course under the American Correspondence Schools.
Afterwards he entered the worlds of journalism and literature. He
would climb the ladder and eventually become editor of Mabuhay
in 1934, a post he held until 1941. Even at the earliest days of his
career he was already writing against US imperialism and social
injustice.
When the Second World War broke out, he refused offers to collaborate
with the Japanese. He took to the hills and became an intelligence
officer of a guerilla unit.
In 1945, he co-founded the Philippine Newspaper Guild and the Congress
of Labor Organizations (CLO). He would become chairman of the CLO.
These organizations were in the forefront of struggles not only for
press freedom and better economic conditions for workers, but also
against US economic domination and military intervention.
Hernandez was arrested in 1951 amidst a crackdown by the Quirino
administration on both legal progressive organizations and the underground
Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas-Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan. For five
months he was held in solitary confinement, after which he was charged
with “rebellion complexed with murder and other crimes.”
He was convicted by the lower court and sentenced to imprisonment
for five years and six months. In 1956 he won temporary liberty, and
after eight more years was acquitted, with the Supreme Court ruling
that there is no such crime as rebellion complexed with murder.
After that, he became editor of the progressive newspapers Makabayan
and Ang Masa, and continued to write poetry, fiction, and short
drama. He also resumed active participation in the people’s movement.
Aside from his work as writer and activist, he had a brief stint
in teaching, and also served four terms as a Manila councilor.
He died of heart attack in March 1970.
The Writer as Hero
Amado V. Hernandez definitely has a place in the country’s pantheon
of heroes, along with Emilio Jacinto, Apolinario Mabini, and Aurelio
Tolentino—like whom he was a brilliant writer with unswerving
dedication to the fight for freedom and justice. Like Mabini and Tolentino,
he suffered for his refusal to accept a status quo characterized by
a rule of a small elite and their foreign masters, but held fast to
his convictions to his last breath.
Because of the sharp and stirring literary expression of the social
causes he pursued, he is rightly considered a prime example of the
writer as agent of social change and purveyor of people’s culture.
He may not be as well-known as he deserves to be, as activist artist
Nanding Josef lamented in a recent press conference, but that does
not mean he is unworthy of admiration. In fact he is infinitely worthier
of admiration than the celebrities whose antics today’s pop culture
is heavily drawn from. (Bulatlat.com)
