The Risk

Here's Adrian's column which came out in Philippine Graphic magazine:


By Adrian Cristobal

If I were to ape Kundera, I would write a novel entitled The Risk
with a writer as the protagonist.
I would use a quotation from Claude Lefort's book, "Writing: the
political test," which goes this way:
Writing involves risks—the risks that one will be misunderstood, the
risk of being persecuted, the risk of being made a champion in which
one does not believe, the risk of inadvertently supporting a reader's
prejudices, to name a few. In trying to give expression to what is
true, the writer must 'clear a passage within the agitated world of
passions,' an undertaking that always to some extent fails: writers
are never the masters of their own speech.

"Never the masters of their own speech"? Is this compatible with the
writer's stance that he stands by everything—well, most
everything—that he has written? However, if one lives long enough, one
can reconcile this contradiction, in fact, many other contradictions.
One must accept that life offers many instances of disenchantments,
betrayals, and disappointments (as well as triumphs and inspirations,
of course), that in the end one can only endure. It's so difficult as
Albert Camus once advised, to maintain an allegiance to the ideals of
one's youth.

These thoughts struck me when a good friend, Krip Yuson, a fine
writer, was denounced by colleagues and academics when he wrote that
another writer, Bienvenido Lumbera, was the candidate of the
communists for the National Artist award for literature. Not a
communist but a candidate of the communists, or as some people would
say, "leftist" or sympathizer. It's not a question of evidence or
testimony (for which there's none, unless one chooses to "ideologize"
literature of protest), and even so, it seems to me beside the point.

Look at the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pablo Neruda, Nobel awardee in
1971, was a communist, also a recipient of the Lenin Peace Prize
(1953). Jaroslav Seifert (1984) broke with the communist party.
Octavio Paz (1990) broke with the communist party but remained a
Marxist. Halder Laxness (1955) and Mikhail Sholokov (1985) also got
the Order of Lenin (1955) and the Stalin Prize (1941). Closer to home,
Pramedja Ananta Toer got the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Literature
(1995), although another awardee turned in his statue without the cash
because Toer was a communist, but Mochtar Lubis, despite his
identification (probably false) with the CIA also got the same prize:
two ideologically opposed writers but recognized for their merits as
writers. It's true, of course, that some writers are thought by other
writers as unworthy of awards, but on literary not political or
"moral" grounds. As Thomas Mann once said, writing is not virtue but
virtuosity.

Krip Yuson made enemies because of his denunciation of Lumbera on
extraneous grounds, dangerously so, for in this time of witch-hunting,
he puts Lumbera in a precarious position with the government and the
military by his "testimony." It's a throwback to the denunciations
made by writers of the unlamented Stalinist era, on the one hand, and,
on the other, a revival of McCarthyism. And all because, as his
detractors pointed out, his favored candidate for National Artist,
Cirilo F. Bautista, won't make it. Because of what he did and its
consequences, Yuson has resigned as chairman of UMPIL, the writers'
union.

The question in his friends' minds is whether or not he fully
considered the consequences of his denunciation. When asked by another
friend, Virgilio Almario, a National Artist himself, Yuson simply said
(I was told)" Gago kasi ako!" This self-deprecation is neither an
apology nor a withdrawal of his denunciation. It doesn't put Lumbera
in the clear with witch-hunters in these perilous times,
notwithstanding the fact that Amado V. Hernandez, accused and jailed
for 10 years as a communist under the nullified charge of "rebellion
complex with murder," was given the National Artist Award for
Literature during Martial Law.

Both Bienvenido Lumbera and Krip Yuson now know the risks of writing,
albeit differently, since one is in more real danger than the other,
if you consider losing one's friends and admirers to be less dangerous
than risking your freedom.

But a single act should not forever mark a person even if Andres
Malraux once said that every act is immortal. We should judge writers
by their works alone, lest we consider Ezra Pound and Carlos Bulosan
to be bad writers because one was a fascist and the other a communist.
That risk belongs to the philistine. May their tribe decrease! #