Selected Book Reviews: Antonio Enriquez

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“CRITICISM & REVIEWS: Dance a White HorseTo Sleep and Other Stories, short story collection Antonio Enriquez. Dance a White Horse to Sleep Asian and Pacific Writing No. 16, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Brisbane. 330 pages including 13-page glossary. Cloth A$13.95, paperback A$6.95 Library Journal R.R. Bowker Company 1180 Avenue of the Americas New York, New York 10036 212 764-1500 Enriquez, Antonio. Dance a White Horse to Sleep. Univ. of Queensland Prs. dist. by Technical Impex Corp., 5 S Union St., Lawrence, Mass. 01843. (Asian & Pacific Writing). 1977, 330 p. $17; pap. $9.95. This is the eight volume in the excellent series edited by Michael Wilding and Harry Aveling. The Filipino author works for the Department of Public Information in Zamboanga city. The stories are varied, from a tale of a fisherman pitted against the sea to a complicated story showing the shifts within a family when the father dies. They are all set in a variety of locations on the island of Mindanao, giving the reader a full impression of the place and of the fishermen, farmers, teachers, natives, and newspapermen who live there. The best in the collection --- "Dance a White Horse to Sleep" and "Spots on Their Wings" among them --- transcend the anecdote and illuminate general verities in a clear and absorbing way. An interesting collection even if read only for its lush, harsh, exotic setting. Page Edwards, Jr. Haverhill P I .. Mass. January 15, 1978

>>>>>> Southern Man

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Dance a White Horse to Sleep By Antonio Enriquez University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Brisbane. 330 pages including 13-page glossary. A$6.95 Even for many Filipinos, the differing religious and social mentalities at work in the simmering Zamboanga region remain a mystery. Antonio Enriquez is a sensitive observer who has grown to know the area with a sympathy and understanding which transcends the pettiness of a family disagreement or the flashing anger of inter-village rivalry. Time and again in this excellent book of short stories, vague feelings and interested outsider might have about underlying tensions, the sudden, savage displays of communal temper or the vivacity and charm of an individual met and well-liked, are identified and explained with economy and clarity. Himself a Zamboangueño, Enriquez has travelled extensively throughout the Philippine south in his capacity as an officer of the Department of Public Information. His work has caused him to meet countless people: the landed aristocracy, the farmer for whom a 10-mi. journey might as well be a trip into a foreign land, fishermen whose livelihoods depend on superstition, elders in countless barrios with time aplenty to spin tall and wondrous yarns, the cynical and devout city dwellers, young soldiers left confused and abused after they have fought for the cause, been wounded, decorated and then allowed to fade away. No feeling is too slight and no detail is too small to escape the eye of this consummate storyteller. In the title story, Dance a White Horse to Sleep, a son witnesses how relatives make off with all his grandfather's worthiest possessions ("... his shaving instrument, box of medals, the canes and his carpentry tools ...") within hours of his last great struggle to breathe. In The Wild Boars, a badly wounded old bandit named Etoka is deserted by his followers in a jungle hut to await the Philippine Constabulary. Instinctively, he knows they will never catch him because the sharp-tusked, meat-eating pigs will first fight with him and then over him. "Etoka fought them with his bare hands, fighting them fiercely, roaring like a beast himself, fighting as though he was not wounded at all, as though death had not earlier lain so close with him on the bamboo pallet." Later the P.C. patrol comes across his body, the head half-eaten by the puercos de monte. Apart from the skill with which he weaves his stories, Enriquez often becomes melancholy when describing the small, individual cruelties of ethnic misunderstanding or stupidity. The barrio of Labuan is the setting for the story Asocena (dog supper). A Zamboangan (sic) boy named Chu witnesses the end of his innocence as a group of Ilocano fishermen steal his farm dog and then use it for one of the casseroles much loved by them but regarded by dog-loving Zamboangueos as a meal for savages. And yet, any sadness within the eighteen stories chosen for this book is diffused with the tenderness and compassion Enriquez so obviously feels and wants to convey to others --- others who merely see his home as a troubled place. And the publishers have sought

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to perpetuate his original intentions by leaving Tagalog and Spanish expressions, too difficult to explain in English, as they were written by the author. It is a technique which works well in Enriquez' stories. With the aid of a short but well-compiled glossary, sentences are allowed to remain fluid and concise, and in their correct context. Rather than disrupt the economy of style which seems to come so naturally to the author, his publishers have left him as he is. With Southeast Asian writers now sowing the seeds of greater regional understanding and interaction, and even discussing the possibility of an A.S.E.A.N. language, this book represents a workable and eminently readable compromise through the use of English. Jacob Wu ASIAWEEK December 9, 1977 Vol. 3 No. 49

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Kabar Seberang Series 4 Antonio Enriquez - Dance a White Horse to Sleep and Other Stories Asian and Pacific Writing 8, University of Queensland Press, 1977 Writing in 1953 on the future of Philippine literature, Leopold Yabes allowed that Philippine literature in English had already achieved some technical excellence but he found much of it "largely escapist and two-dimentional." Its future, he said, depended on how closely writers would express the hopes, fears and aspirations of their own people and on the greatness of soul which alone would invest their writing with the stamp of greatness. It is difficult to claim greatness of soul for any man until his life's work is known, but there is a breach of understanding, a depth of insight, a sensitivity and a flexible creativity in the work of Antonio Enriquez that give his short stories already an intimation

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of greatness. Enriquez is a generation younger than the better known Nick Joaquin and Francisco Sionil Jose, but already his work invites comparison with theirs, and in none of these writers is it possible to find the escapism and flatness that Yabes complained of twenty-five years ago. If conflict and balance of tensions are the elements of all art, the Philippines today supply an infinite variety of these in the subtlest degree as the raw material for literature, and the short story form is an excellent vehicle for conveying their essence. Enriquez' stories are set on the island of Mindanao where the conflict between the barrio and the city, the old and the new, and the Muslim Moros and Christians supply bases of the stories. But some of the stories also transcend race and region and time, being concerned with the bewilderment, rebellion and the insights of childhood as in Son, Asocena, Iguana and The Night I Cry. But even here the universal themes are grounded in a specific Filipino culture and depend upon the sensitive presentation of mores for their true value as art. There is no deliberate evocation of the exotic, no suggestion of rendering local thing curious or attractive for the literary tourist, in Enriquez' work. He has as a writer a high sense of delicadeza, of honour and tradition, which seems to make absolute fidelity to the truth as he sees it his first compulsion. But while the delicadeza of the Spanish Filipino tradition maybe his personal moral guide as a writer, he seems also to comprehend the adat, the unwritten customary law and respect, the interior moral imperative that governs the conduct of Filipino minorities like the Moros. It is because he writes first for his own people, and is exploring for them the subtleties and complexities of their lives, and of their past, present and possible future, that his work is valuable to foreigners. The title story, Dance a White Horse to Sleep, introduces the young surveyor, Alberto Gonzales, descendant of a proud Spanish ruling family of Zamboanga, the chief city of Mindanao. Gonzales returns home for the funeral of his grandfather, an aristocrat who before the war and the Americans kept always three or four white riding horses. Alberto's determination to have the hearse drawn by a white horse, incongruously followed by a fleet of fifty motor buses for the mourners, results in the death of the tenant Ciano, when the horse takes fright and bolts. The story, like many others, can be read as an allegory without doing violence to its reality. For the work of the surveyor is to travel the land and map it for the future, and as he gets to know the land he must learn more about himself in relation to the land. Alberto, the first of his family to require a science and move out to the uncharted province of Cotabato, also learnt his sense of delicadeza and the story of the white horses from his family. In bringing together the noisy mechanical buses and the white horse to support the traditional respect paid to a former gobernadorcillo, he brings about the death of Ciano. But the tenant, in whose veins flowed "the servile blood of one who is a tenant himself, but now among the few living on land remaining from the original vast Gonzales holdings of the Spanish era" conspires in his own death, for although Ciano protested, "This horse is crazy ... I won't be responsible for him tomorrow," he yields his better judgment to the demands of his traditional master. Three more stories, The Surveyor, The Old Bridge and Spots on Their Wings, follow Alberto Gonzales into Cotabato where he is in charge of a team of men setting up triangulation towers and surveying for the erection of dams and irrigation systems in the hill country of the primitive and proud Moros. In Cotabato Gonzales treads more delicately than in the city where his way was more than half determined by the paths of

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his ancestors. His actions are not destructive as in Dance a White Horse to Sleep. Here Gonzales is a stranger, exploring the territory of others and acutely sensitive to the respect owed to their customs and mindful of his obligations as the leader responsible for the safety of his men. His work is made more difficult because the Moros themselves have their own internal conflicts and brigands, because his men comprise a mixture of Tagalogs, Ilocanos and Visayans, and because the Moros believe that the surveys are for taxation purposes rather than to benefit themselves. Almost over-whelmed by the beauty and strangeness of the country, Gonzales moves quietly and respectfully, yet with authority and responsibility, and while adapting to the provisions of the people he retains his own standards. In Tacurong Gonzales and his men stop at a half-completed hotel whose "outhouses, roofless, and patched with flattened cans and cardboard, squatted in the middle of the stream in front of the hotel: incongruous and obtrusive." The surveyor, descending after weeks in the mountains, and ignored y the indifferent Moros, settles for the accommodation. Nevertheless "in his native tongue, in Chavacano, unable to segregate entirely his Zamboangueño heritage and ancestry from his mind in all these years living and working with Tagalogs, Ilocanos, and Visayans, though he would never use his own dialect when speaking to any of them: Me cago con mala gana!" (I defecate unwillingly.) Enriquez is not the kind of historian who estimates civilizations by the sophistication of their plumbing but neither does he sentimentalize the nobility of savagery. His stories are greater, too, because he does not yield to the zeal of crusading nationalism which sets a duty to concentrate on the social group rather than on the individual. The Old Bridge, one of the most clearly allegorical tales, is also a fine study of the outsider Teng, loud, humiliated, a constant embarrassment to and snubbed by the surveying team whose friendship he desperately courted. Ambushed at the old bridge by Moros, Teng is killed while attempting to intercede for the party, and Gonzales reflects: He was all the time building up bridges between us. Thinking, he even tried to put up a bridge to the wild savages, they killed him and you know we killed him, too. Because we did not want the bridge, you know we did not want it really, the bridge is both linking the wildness and the civilization. But it is understanding and safety too, he thought. Cesar Adib Majul, writing in 1960 in his study, Mabini and the Philippine Revolution, said: The relation of province to province, class to class, individual to society is the subject for careful study by historians, especially as the period of Philippine independence enlarges and the honest intellect is moved to admit that not all Filipino difficulties have been imported and not all importations have been harmful. In this act of self-discovery and assessment, fiction has its own responsible and difficult role. Enriquez is very mindful of this role and his considerable technical skill allows him to fulfil it more than adequately. In stories like Playing Soldier, My Soldier Boy, Pablo-Pedro and Sunburst Enriquez deals with the impact of western importations on Filipino life. In Pablo-Pedro the stubbornness of the rice-farmer in refusing to yield his independence and submit to the guidance of IRRI technicians is shown in all its destructive effect upon his family: "You've gone mad, hermano," says Isabel. "Giving up your eldest son for your foolish pride and individualism." The family starve and eat rats,

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their clothes are rags, the children cannot attend school, the unmarketable grain rots. Señor Larracochea is not condemned for failing to yield to the bait of being sent by President Marcos to study scientific methods in America, but his pride and individualism are not counted as virtues. The impact and pervasiveness of western and chiefly American influences on Filipino life have been the theme of much creative writing in the Philippines, the interpretation often varying with the political climate. Enriquez balances the responsibility for the harmful and the beneficial effects of these influences with a justice that enhances his work as art and as cultural analysis. The story Sunburst, in which the university lecturer and aspiring writer Ric Diaz idles and bitches away a day drinking in a cafe, sneering at American Peace Corps men with local girls, abusing the corruption of other Filipino writers, yet honestly appreciative of Proust, Kafka, Hemingway and Beckett, is a brilliant piece of satire. At the end of the story Diaz is drawn into a maelstrom of student demonstrators and campus security guards "like an acacia leaf in the eye of a whirlwind." The dilemma for the Filipino writer, said Miguel Bernad in 1963, is that he "may become an effective bridge between East and West, or he may become an outcast of both East and West." Already Enriquez has much to offer the Pacific and the Atlantic worlds in both hemispheres, and the more so because in theme, in mode of expression and in cast of mind he retains firmly his unique identity as a Filipino writer. Elizabeth Perkins James Cook University”

>>>>>> Dance a White Horse to Sleep and Other Stories. By Antonio Enriquez. (University of Queensland Press. Cloth $13.95, paper $6.95). This collection of short stories is cast in an unusual setting --- the island of Mindanao, its principal city of Zamboanga, and the rural and coastal areas. The stories are characterised by strength of atmosphere, a forceful fluidity of style, and a deep perceptiveness as they delineate the various types of people --- the simple, humble fishermen with their fears of superstitions, the struggling farmers, the city-bred types with their different problems --- all with their loves and hates, ambitions and, often, bitter memories. There is love, faithfulness and unfaithfulness, conflict and death in the stories, which have action, colour and commentary on a way of life not so very different from ours.

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The story from which the book's title is taken is an especially moving one of a family's death-watch beside the bed of a veteran of the wild old days of the Philippines. It deals with the subtle frictions and undercurrents of greed and strange likes-dislikes of members of the family. The author of these often stark tales of the Philippines is himself a Zamboangueño. A book of others of his short stories has already been published. The Chronicle Thursday, August 25, 1977 With the compliments of TOOWOOMBA NEWSPAPERS PTY. LTD. publishers of The Chronicle The Downs Star Telephone 32 2144 191 Margaret Street, Toowoomba. 4350

>>>>>>>>>>> ASAA REVIEW Vol. 1, No. 2, November, 1977 Antonio Enriquez, Dance a White Horse to Sleep and Other Stories, St. Lucia, University of Queensland Press, 1977. 330 pp. Cloth $13.95, paperback $6.95. This is a collection of eighteen short stories most of which evoke aspects of life in the island of Mindanao, in its main city of Zamboanga and in its seemingly unchanging villages. The arena of the short stories is the family within whose limits most of the action is confined and where one recognizes the hatred, boredom, loneliness, alienation, frustration (sic) and other agonies that boil incessantly at the core of many human lives. The stories show the author's fresh and inventive style as well as his gift for place. Enriquez accommodates himself to what is expected of him as a fictionist with skill and craftmanship.

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In "The Night I Cry," the incestuous relationship between a young boy's mother and his uncle is narrated with just the right amount of detachment and compassion to make the story haunting. The son cannot wholly blame his mother, convinced that she is a good woman, not a pampam (prostitute) as the villagers have labelled her. He senses only that the impulse and the passion that drive her into a life filled with a succession of lovers --- even into a relationship with her brother that drives the latter to suicide --- is the same passion that lead the men of the village to lust after her and their women to envy her. The turbulent drama in the "Iguana" is skillfully (sic) restrained. Chu is given a rifle so that he can make use of himself as a man. His father admonishes him that only hate propels a man into action and makes him want of himself. Chu could not find a prey for his rifle; the iguana that devoured his mother's hens lay concealed in the thickets and he could not bring himself to shoot any friendly or harmless animal. But he is a constant witness to his father's cruelty and constant deprecation of his mother. After an angry confrontation between his parents, the father is transformed into an ugly-snouted iguana in Chu's eye and he calmly pulls the trigger on his prey. The "Wild Boars" shows Enriquez's fine narrative eye. The atmosphere of suspense and terror created by his vivid description of the forest and the wounded bandit preparing to defend himself from a pack of wild pigs with a mere wooden club makes the story compelling reading. In "Dance A White Horse To Sleep," "Spots on Their Wings," and "Pablo-Pedro," which in this reviewer's opinion might be included among the highlights of the collection, the author smoothly and tactfully exposes the small hopes and large failures in the lives of ordinary men and women. The collection, however, could have stood some weeding out. Not all the stories are handled with the same craftmanship as the ones mentioned above. For example,Enriquez's handling of homosexuality in "Sunburst" is unconvincing; the story starts and ends lamely. This book is a quiet and unpretentious contribution to the University of Queensland's Asian and Pacific Writing Series and is a welcome addition to the growing number of books on fiction finally becoming available outside Southeast Asia. Hopefully, in the future, other outstanding Philippine fictionists also will be published in the series. Milagros C. Guerrero

>>>>>>>>>> Book Review:

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Christine Godinez-Ortega. “When Writing is in the Blood,” Inquirer Mindanao, December 11, 1999

Antonio Enriquez: Subanons, novel University of the Philippine Press, E. de los Santos Street, Diliman Quezon City, 131 pages The scion of a gobernadorcillo who helped carve the Zamboanga City we know we know today makes literary history with his third novel, “Subanons.” The 17-chapter, 133-page novel in English is the first to tell us about an upland tribe from Mindanao’s Zamboanga peninsula. No Filipino novelist, whether in Spanish, English or in the Philippine languages, has done it before for any of the country’s upland tribes. “Subanons” was released by the University of the Philippines Press in September. It won first prize for the novel in English in the 1993 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. It was sent to three publishers until the author settled for the UP Press but not before novelist Antonio Reyes Enriquez asked, “Why should writers beg?” Today’s university-educated Filipinos who prefer to read foreign novels may ask: Why read Enriquez? And why not? After all, the Filipino writer has not taken so easily to such a demanding genre as the novel, with perhaps the exception of, surprisingly, novelists in other Philippine languages, like Iloko, Tagalog, Cebuano and Hiligaynon---works that are not in the consciousness of the university readership. Now, if only to support a Filipino novelist, all Filipinos should read Enriquez. But then, this could be misinterpreted as mercenary, chauvinist even. Well, not only has Enriquez a story to tell, he also knows how to tell it. After four collections of short stories and two novels to his name and even as he is finishing his fourth, 800-page novel, “The Revolt of General Vicente Alvarez,” Enriquez’s important place in Philippine literature is secure. It is said that when a fictionist writes his first novel, he has arrived. And it has been a long road to success for this 63-yea-old Zamboangueño whose parents wanted him to be a doctor instead. After enrolling in several courses in various schools in Manila without getting a degree, he returned to Zamboanga and traveled to many places in the Visayas and Mindanao, doing odd jobs, becoming a journalist and joining a survey company in Cotabato---the basis for his first novel, “Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh,” a 1982 Palanca first-prize winner for the novel in English, published in 1981 by the University of Queensland Press in Australia. Enriquez’s love for writing is in the blood and his gift of imagination approximates the American novelist Henry James’s idea of a writer’s imagination to be like a sensitive spider at its web, catching “the very air we breathe” and converting “the very pulse of the air into revelations.”

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But like most writers, Enriquez has had his share of ups and downs in his 40-year writing career. His early short stories wee published by the Philippine Herald and Philippine Graphic in 1962. His first short story was rejected by the editor of the Sunday Times Magazine who could not believe that such a polished story could be written by an unknown Mindanaoan. That editor, who confessed to his error of judgment when Enriquez was already reaping prizes for his fiction in later years, is now a columnist for a daily in Cebu City. Enriquez, who is today based in Cagayan de Oro City, drove to Iligan City for an interview with the Inquirer Mindanao. He joked a lot about the writing craft in what was an incoherent interview because of the presence of Inquirer correspondent Bobby Timonera, the poet Tony Tan, the novelist’s ethno-musicologist wife Joy and grandson Julien Patrick contributed to that freewheeling mood. “Subanons” was easy to write, Enriquez confided. Some events in the novel, especially the atrocities committed against the Subanons, were witnessed by Enriquez. In the late ‘70s when he was still with the Ministry of Information, he accompanied Joy several times to Lapuyan, Zamboanga del Sur. Joy was doing research on the Subanon eight-episode epic, the unpublished, “Gambatetu.” But it was the piercing cry of a 15-year-old Subanon killed by soldiers on suspicion of being a communist that gave impetus to the writing of “Subanons.” No one really pays attention to the Subanons, they complained to Enriquez in the course of his data gathering. In fact, the Subanons are sore that their building of our national hero, Jose Rizal’s house in Dapitan has never been acknowledged. Not even a street is named after them. Enriquez learned much from the Russian writers, Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Nabokov. He admires them so much that he named his other grandson, Anton Vladimir, son of his only child Vanessa. From Chekov, Enriquez learned to describe scene’s vividly as well as the tricks in unraveling the story. From Nabokov, Enriquez learned good writing. Enriquez learned from other writers as well. He owes debts to N.V.M. Gonzales for local color. Nick Joaquin for his language and his understanding of Spanish culture, and, Graham Green for his profundity through simple language. Toward the end of the interview, Enriquez refused to name any promising fictionist writing in this decade. Although he acknowledged their “more polished use of language,” he said they “confuse him” for “sometimes they have no stories to tell.” His friendly advice is for them to learn from the masters by “reading more.” Enriquez asserts that Filipino novelists can hold their own among foreign novelists, adding that they are just as good in terms of technique and use of language, like Bienvenido Santos, Wilfredo Nolledo who “dazzles,” and Jose Dalisay and his “breathtaking prose.” As the conversation shifted to why Filipinos are reading the native speakers in English more than their own writers who have actually mastered English and made I their own, Enriquez quoted Nick Joaquin when they met during a workshop in Davao City: “Filipino writers in the ‘30s, in showing our grandfather’s world, made us look subservient because they only saw what the American language saw.”

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Of course, this is not true anymore of today’s writers for we only have to judge what Enriquez has achieved. Writing “Subanons” for Filipinos and presenting it in his own terms is, no doubt, Enriquez’s way of fulfilling their need for illumination about a Mindanao experience, thus enriching Philippine literature and contributing to its flowering in diversity as well as in maturity.

>>>>>>>>> Book Review The Philippine Star / Arts & Culture, p. e-4, Manila March 1, 2004 Heart of Light Francis C. Macansantos The Voice from Sumisip and Four Stories by Antonio Enriquez / Giraffe Book, Quezon City, 2003 / 124 pp. I was a high school sophomore, if memory serves, and getting my usual crew cut at Koken’s in Zamboanga City when I read my first Tony Enriquez. It was a story called “The Surveyor.” I found it in a copy of the Free Press (then edited by Locsin Sr.) that I had picked out of a stack of magazines provided by the barbershop. I found the story most refreshingly strange---indeed, exotic. But what made it especially interesting for me was the rather incidental fact that its realm was Cotabato, the province of my birth. That is, I had been born in Cotabato, but had no memories of the place. My father was a wanderer then, and the family tagged along. Thus, I was whisked off as an infant to Dumaguete, and then wrenched from there as a Cebuano-speaking toddler to return to Zamboanga, my father’s hometown, there to spend much of my childhood and early manhood. Cotabato was a lush, mysterious realm, distant, unknown, but still, in a sense, my homeland. Another thing that led me further into the dark interior of the tale was the delightful suspicion that the tale’s narrator, and, therefore, likely, the story’s author, was, like me, a Chabacano-speaking town-mate. I left the barbershop with the thrilling secret that a Zamboangueño had made it to the pages of the awesome Philippines Free Press, and thus had joined the ranks of such worthies as Bienvenido Santos, Gregorio Brillantes and Wilfrido Nolledo. This was a glorious thought, and hope stirred in my heart, for wasn’t I, even then, already writing

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poems, and short stories of my own? Someday, I said to myself, I, too, would make it to the pages of the Free Press. The first time I made it to the Free Press, it was post Edsa. Locsin, Sr., and even his old foe Marcos, were long gone. My literary output, under the new reign of Locsin Jr., was sluggish at best. But Tony Enriquez was more fecund than ever, coming up with evermore---new material. He had won national awards for his fiction, and some of his novels had been published abroad. “The Surveyor” I read again, in its revised form as a chapter in Enriquez’s first novel, Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh (University of Queensland Press, Australia, 1981). This book won for him his first of two Palanca grand prizes for the novel, the second being Subanons, that gut-and heart-wrenching portrayal of a tribal people’s agon[y] under martial rule. Surveyors is certainly sui generis, post-modern fiction long before the fashion hit the country. An uncannily powerful and poetic work, it defies realistic convention, but remains compelling and hauntingly real. It is early vintage, aesthete Enriquez: Unapologetically apolitical, and insouciantly, though despairingly amoral. Subanons manifested a significant change of ethical and political perspective. What changed it all was martial law, that “hidden war” whose heinous enormity has yet to be fully exposed. Antonio Enriquez provides us with a long-neglected key to our understanding of the Mindanao conflict. His work provides us with a valuable perspective. Simply put, Christianity and Islam are global, hegemonic ideologies, tending to a ruthlessness that destroys life-ways other than their own. When two behemoths struggle, those that happen to be in the way are destroyed---often deliberately. In the hidden wars, the lumads, because they were infidels to either worldview, were dispensable. The fact that some had converted to Christianity or Islam did not make them any less endangered. Conversion did not invariably confer respect from those who belonged to dominant ethnic groups. Worse, the lumads could become unwillingly participants in the war that, because it was hidden, was unforgiving in its atrocity. With Subanons, Enriquez moved into the realm of advocacy. Perhaps only the morally inform or the inveterately diabolical would not experience a moral rebirth from the fire of purification that was martial law. From any reading of Subanons, it is indubitably clear that the author was someone who had undergone that spiritual transformation. The novel is a shining moment in the heretofore-unknown aspects of the contemporary Subanon particularly their horrific and tragic experience under martial rule. With The Voice from Sumisip (Giraffe books), Enriquez leads us further on, deeper into the forest. The experience would invariably remind the reader of a wellknown and well-read journey into the wilderness, written by a world-famous writer to whom (as it is to Enriquez) English was not a first language. But any reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness yields for us almost nothing at all about the African region of the Congo---the tale’s purported setting. It lies, even as we write, in darkness. On the other hand, Enriquez, born (in 1934 [sic]) into a much later generation of writers---and thanks in no small way to his life-long partnership with his vivacious wife, Joy Viernes Enriquez, ethno-musicologist and cultural scholar, is better informed. That is to say, Antonio Enriquez speaketh not in darkness, but perhaps in that sacred space that T. S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, preferred to call “the heart of light.” In Voice from Sumisip, Enriquez’s tale takes us there, to the inner sanctum of tribal innocence and wisdom. Tony Enriquez, hunter, big-fisherman, cusser, drinker, and

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devotee of fictional art spent much of what he calls his “most beautiful years” in Basilan. That is to say, in Yakan country. Without Basilan, Tony might never have become the man of the great outdoors that he is. And, too, perhaps because of this, he is the odd man out of the corps of fictionists this country has produced. He is never at ease in the academic dispensation. And bully for him, too, because he writes about places untouched by the ennui and prosaic despair of the secular city. Should it be New York or Sumisip? A vote for either will be a vote based on values, and not merely on such questions as political and economic power, or high and low culture. Therefore, we must stop over in Sumisip to listen to its precious voice. More and more writers and scholar realize that what is true of nature is also true of culture---the destruction of any original ethnic way of life diminishes all of us, causing the loss of our artistic and cultural heritage. Enriquez takes us to Sumisip to listen to that voice. The narrative turns, swirls and wheels around that voice. It is robust, hearty story-writing you will find, for (if you don’t know yet) story is Enriquez’s sine qua non. And, like Conrad before him, he takes us there with English---but not as a means to dominate or malign. English here becomes a mode of empowerment, a means by which the writer may translate that voice into the language well understood by the oppressive center (call it New York, call it Manila.) And it is an especially expressive language, too, I think: sensitive, powerfully realistic, though sometimes magical: Facing Prof. Jose, his back to the door of his room, was Shaman Gamutang. In the corner of the circle flickered a small oil lamp, which, like all the others in Sumisip, was crudely made from an empty can, and from a discarded piece of old cloth came its wick. From this oil lamp, a small flame flickered and though sometimes it soared and disembodied itself from its wick, the flame would return to its wick---before reaching exposed ridgepoles and trusses, just as if it were ashamed to violate the roof’s nakedness. Not always then were the faces of the Shaman, Professor Jose, and the others illuminated by the flame; there were moments when their faces sank deep into shadows, boundless, and only the Shaman’s eyes shining among them with an after-glow glitter. Prof. Jose, an academic whose field of study is folklore, is the novella’s central intelligence. It is though his sensibility that we see the world of the Yakan. But it is our duty, as sensitive readers, to see through him. Imperfect human medium though he is, he is our guide into the still center of that world, a heart besieged on all sides by the forces of darkness---intolerant, self-important, violent hegemonic forces that come under the holy banners of religion. And, too, under the holy vestments lurks human cupidity. The entire apparatus of Marcos’ martial rule is infected by greed and vice. Prof. Jose is a creature of those dark times, and of his corrupt urban environment. Despite his education and involvement in cultural studies, he has not risen above his prejudices. In short, he is much like the average Filipino. The crucial question the narrative wants to resolve is this: Can Prof. Jose, with all his sins on him, as he passes through the spiritual center of Yakan country---that heart of light---be reborn in the light? Will he hearken to and learn from that voice in Sumisip? He discovers to his chagrin that he is caught between two worlds. Or, should we say two centers? The subject of his research invades his being as he struggles to break free from its control: He of all those present should be the last to give any weight to those signs (i.e., of “bad luck.”) But Professor Jose, in his heart, knew differently; shaken was

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the fiber of his Christian faith and the staunchness of his belief in science---his continuous exposure to rituals, pagan beliefs, folk-tales, myths, and epics had made it so. It had not unChristianized him, but had only scraped the surface of his prejudice, Dios mio! Such ethnic centers have a drawing power. They could very well be our connection to the life-force. They can be a source of spiritual energy. But this energy can also be deadly and ruthless, especially when mishandled. And Tony Enriquez is too much of an outdoorsman, too much of an elemental realist to be dewy-eyed about the consequences of such misuse or abuse. But there can no longer be any doubt about the vitality of such centers, especially when we see a pattern, national as well as global, where some of the best writers write from home---or, as in the case of Enriquez, every so often an adopted home, in the way that Eric Gamalinda adopted Negros and Alfred Yuson adopted Sagad. It has been more rule than exception to write from one’s own Yoknapathawpa, or to appropriate one. The need for such far-flung sources of soul-energy is undeniable. Even Nick Joaquin of Manila sought as a source of inspiration the distant past. But as ethono-culture-vultures, we must take sage counsel from Antonio Enriquez, that voice from Zamboanga and Misamis: Only the converted can make a difference. No more Dr. Joses need apply--unless they are reborn by fire. Some of Enriquez’s works were published in Australia. In the year 2002, he was our South East Asian Write awardee for fiction. Last year he went on a writing fellowship to Scotland where he forged warm ties with eminent Scottish writers. He has been offered fellowships in America. But for all these, he has not made that allegedly logical move to go to the center of centers, wherever that may be. He remains to this day a solid resident of his island, Mindanao, the happy hunting ground of his marvelous fictions. The four stories included in this book take us back to Enriquez’s own ethnic roots: Historical Zamboanga at the time of its founding. What makes these stories unique is that they read like eyewitness accounts of contemporary events, combining the horrific, the passionate, the humorous and the macabre---all vintage Enriquez. They are a whale worth reading in their own right. The stories revolve around Naawan (the ancient name of Zamboanga) and they seem so suspiciously to be the first powerful ingredients of another brewing novel. “And, by the way, for those among us who are still trying to cover up for that charnel-house called martial law, and endeavor, even this late, to perpetuate the turgid myth of Marcosian benevolence, mainly by taking advantage of the poverty---and consequence ignorance---or our people, I have only this to say: Read this book and be memorably, effectively, refuted. Francis C. Macansantos is a poet and resides in Baguio City with his wife and daughter.

>>>>>>>>>>>

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Oral Review: The Living and the Dead, novel, Giraffe Books, Quezon City, 1994. Pages 184 GLIMPSES OF ENRIQUEZ AS A REALIST (Delivered on the occasion of the launching of "The Living and the Dead" on 18 [sic] September 1994, at VIP Hotel, Cagayan de Oro City) Good evening everybody! I studied the anthology of short stories of Mr. Enriquez for my Masterial Thesis in 1991. And as a writer, I can say that Mr. Enriquez is a realist. His literary works portray contemporary and ordinary characters such as farmers, fishermen, laborers, bandits, prostitutes, countryside boys and girls, and harassed teachers. They are the pathetic but tenacious people who have struggled and endured varied trying circumstances which life offers and they are both good and bad, weak and strong, moral and immoral, disgusting and admirable, literate and ignorant characters of realistic literature. I believe Mr. Enriquez has achieved authenticity in portraying ordinary characters not just because they are real personalities but because they are convincing. As a realistic writer, Mr. Enriquez's plot is fraught with rich familiar details. Sometimes, I find it difficult to trace the details in one reading because of their rich- ness and intensity. His subject matter refers to poverty and ignorance, family altercation and disunity, prostitution and immorality, parental concern, overprotection and domi- nance, resistance to change, greed and deception and regionalism. He does not give so much emphasis on plot development and organization --- this means that he does snot normally follow the conventional plot structure in which the sequence of events always starts from exposition, and ends with a formal conclusion. And I an understand that because he is a realist who focuses more on sense impressions. But Mr. Enriquez is not an extreme realist who depicts man as having no freedom or freewill of his own. What his works emphasize is the attitude of the characters particularly their desires, disappointments, hunger, and struggles, in general. So this tone of his writings is somewhat serious because the plot portrays depressing situations, but Mr. Enriquez does not discard humor. Regarding Mr. Enriquez's style and language, his works reveal faithfulness in portraying objective realities because the reader is able to observe and listen to the characters in action through the prevalent use of the narrative objective technique. His occasional use of Chavacano makes the language authentic, and the show of badmannered characters who sometimes mouth the vulgar language intensifies characterization.

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Lastly, I find Mr. Enriquez's literary works deeply moving because his concern as a writer is more on the individual's struggle for self-understanding, for human dignity and acceptance amidst the harsh realities of poverty and moral decadence. Thus, with all these impressions of Mr. Enriquez's literary heritage, I am sure that his new book entitled The Living and the Dead will be another interesting adventure into the world of realism of Enriquez. I am confident that this book will be on its way to becoming a document of the development, if not perfection, of Filipino Realistic works which in turn will establish Mr. Enriquez as one of the pillars of realism in the Philippine literary world. Thank you. MA. LUISA S. SAMINISTRADO

>>>>>> {PUBLISHED

IN

PHILIPPINE STUDIES; VOL. 44 (1996) #4}

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES The Living and the Dead. By Antonio Enriquez. Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 1994. 184 pages. Novels provide us with an alternative source of history. They allow us to enter into a particular world and glimpse the worldview of a specific culture and time. The Living and the Dead, narrated from an omnipotent view point, brings the reader to an understanding of the culture of local aristocrats, particularly in the immediate post World War II Philippines. This ten-chapter novel narrates how the Gonzaleses, a prominent family in Zamboanga, deal with the illness and the death of their old patriot Don Flavio Gonzales y Villa, around whom the story revolves. Although, ironically, Don Flavio does not utter any single word in the whole novel, his legendary past is remembered and revealed to the reader by the entire Gonzales family. The exploits of the don are told and retold by his children in two generations. Other voices speak for him. The story unfolds in three phases: first, the homecoming of Alberto, the grandson of the patriarch, who upon learning that the latter has become bed-ridden, takes a leave from his work in Cotabato; second, the death of the Don Flavio, which although the family

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seems to have expected, still catches them in great sorrow; and third, the burial of the don, with all the discussions of the family on what is proper for a dignified final journey for the patriarch. Although the setting of the story is the compound of the Gonzaleses in Zamboanga, the author roams around places and time in his frequent use of flashbacks, usually to the time of the Japanese and American occupations. The flashbacks also give the reader the sense of history in which this novel is firmly rooted. If one is looking or action in the The Living and the Dead, he will be frustrated, for most of the action in the novel is on the level of emotions and disclosed through the characters' dialogues. It is in the emotions of the characters that the story moves even faster than the changes in setting and time. Ging-ging feels pity over the state of the bedridden old man crying "O, Papalolo is so pitiful ... Why don't you let him die! We must let him rest!" (p.94). There is Señorita Clara's angry voice: "You puñetero, sinverguenza! Mal criado!" That the narrative flows with detailed clarity should not surprise the reader if he knows something about the author, Antonio Enriquez. He is from Zamboanga and his great-great-grandfather was a gobernadorcillo himself. Like Alberto in the novel, Antonio had a stint with a land-surveying company in Cotabato. Undeniably, the details in the story are anchored deeply in his experiences in the hinterlands and in his old city of Zamboanga. But the universal appeal of the novel lies, in the end, in the reality of eventual physical incapacity and death. While reading it, one may be brought to a pause to consider one's own sense of preparation and attitude toward death itself. It faces practical matters like the concern of dividing the inheritance, what kind of coffin shall be used and how much the family can afford, and how the funeral procession shall be done, to more emotional ones that usually face us pointblank when a loved one dies. The allusion to and influence of James Joyce's classic story "The Dead" may be oblique, but it is there. This novel provides a window to the world of the local aristocrats, but in the end, it does not stop there. It opens for us a bigger window that shows the reality of the living, the dying, and the dead. Eric Z. Aragones, S.J.

>>>>>> A MASTER STORY-TELLER DOES IT AGAIN

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By Nene Pimentel (Comments given on the occasion of the launching of Antonio Enriquez's latest novel, The Living and the Dead, on September 17, 1994, at the VIP Hotel, Cagayan de Oro City) I HAVE A confession to make. When Joy Enriquez asked me days ago to do an oral review during the launching of the novel, The Living and the Dead, written by her husband, Tony Enriquez, I did not quite know how to respond. First because I have not done any review of any novel before. And second, because I haven't touched a novel for at least half a year now, having spent my leisure on reading history, biographies and the bible. And at that point when Joy talked to me, I did not have any intention of breaking that trend. On second thought, however, I remember that years ago, I had pored over Tony's Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh and had concluded that here was a first-rate Filipino author who definitely could hold his own against any writer of any nationality in English story-telling. In brief, I was impressed. And that first impression of Tony's ability as a writer won the day for Joy's request. And so, here I am attempting to do an oral review of Tony's second novel, The Living and the Dead. Incidentally, his third novel, Subanons, had won last year's Palanca Grand prize for literature while still in manuscript form. But to go back to The Living and the Dead, after having had the pleasure of reading it, I add my humble voice to the chorus of accolades heaped upon Tony Enriquez by foreign critics who find him a "consummate story teller" (Jacob Wu of Asiaweek) and one of the "two ... leading Filipino writers in English", the other one being the legendary Nick Joaquin (Alison Broinowski of the ASAA). The novel revolves around the death watch which a family of old time Zamboangueños, the Gonzaleses, keep over their dying patriarch, Don Flavio, and the struggle among members of the clan --- those who want to cling to the facade of wealth and preeminence of Don Flavio in the days of yore by giving him an elabo- rate burial against those who want to be practical and cheap in their preparations for his last trip to the cemetery. As the death-watch progresses into the inevitable hour, when the don breathes his last, one sees intrigue, duplicity, greed, plots and counterplots swirl around the characters which are in reality not merely true as truth is reflected in a work of fiction like the novel but, indeed, true as life is truth. One reads of Fernandito, a grandson of the don, now a lawyer, who proposes to his cousin, Alberto, to affix the dying don's signature on an extrajudicial document dividing

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Flavio's estate, even as the latter was already comatose. And of Alberto's reposte: "But what about delicadeza? That old tradition rooted in our family, that has kept it honorable and respectable, without which our family would have rotted and crumbled like a rotted coconut log?" This outburst coming from Alberto is ironic in the thoughts of Fernandito, who knows that Alberto had, himself brought shame to the Gonzales family "by fighting in the street, sleeping off his drunkenness in a public place like Plaza Pershing, and associating with that Moro outcast Oto and his gang of roughnecks ...." Then there is Gerardo intriguing against Cecilia whom he calls a "very crafty, guileful woman" who had rummaged through Don Flavio's old trunk while the old man was still warm." And Alberto's own suspicions, which turned out true, that his cousins, Gerardo and Cecilia and Tia Laura had stripped Don Flavio's room of his personal belongings without "waiting for the old patriarch's body to be taken away or left to rest in its grave ...." Although the book is in a sense ethnic and local (read the passage about giants and gnomes or kapri or manitianak as we Cagayanons would put it, on p. 62), because of the attention to detail that Tony puts into his characterization of the novel's protagonists, the fluidity of his style and the richness of his language that borders on the lyrical, the story gets rivetting. Look at Tia Margarita: "... her hair, thick, is almost of pure gold, and hairline threatening to join her eyebrows which rise as she peers at Alberto" (p. 27). Or Fernandito whose bum leg carries "a bullet hole which still had not totally dried so that one could insert a small stick through" (p. 31). Or the prayers for their safety with which the Gonzales womenfolk storm heaven while they are hiding in a bomb shelter from retreating Japanese troopers" "Rising in singular ripple, from the barrel of his bombshelter, the hum of prayers droned in a wavering pattern like a swarm of bees" (p. 35). Beautiful. Ole! I shout to myself seeing in my mind's eye Tony, the toreador gracefully evading the horns of a raging bull in a Spanish corrida. Bravo! the acclaim explodes in my brains as Tony intrudes into my view like a prima ballerina doing the dying swan in a bolshoi ballet. For even these passages alone make reading the novel a pleasure-trip, indeed. But I am getting ecstatic and long-winded. I am afraid that if I go on, I'd be using more words than the 182 pages of Tony's book. Having said that, let me stress that the novel also relates hilarious circumstances that are all so true --- even today. One reads of a fleeting character in the book who could very well be any village's or community's pompous ass --- Tony uses the more polite "a prominent citizen" --- who argues that "freedom of defecation in the streets was not a virtue of a civilized city, nor the right of a horse which had no rights in the city charter or the country's constitution." All he had really wanted to say was that horses drawing calesas or tartanillas, as we call them in this city should not be allowed to drop waste on city streets but should be provided with "flour-sack receptacles strung behind their rumps." And again, there is the Visayan casket-vendor, whose hard tongue "is unused to the Chavacano soft vowels" so that he changes the "I's into "e"s and vice versa and the

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"v"s to "b"s and who is chided by Señorita Clara for calling her "Siñora Clara". Or the village girl, who could be anyone's favorite aspiring yodeler, who sang: "Lab is a manysplendored think ... a reason to be livink, a kolden crown that mayges a man a kink" (p. 43). I won't tell you how the novel ends. It will deprive you of the delight and the excitement of discovering for yourself whether or not Don Flavio gets the funeral that he deserves. That would be cruel to do to you who still have to read the book and to Tony, who wants you to get a copy. As I wind up, however, may I mention in passing a very slight historical inexactitude in the novel which refers to Cagayan de Oro "during the war" (p. 87). The point may be perti- nent to me only because I am a Cagayanon. Cagayan de Oro is a post war terminology. We became Cagayan de Oro city only in 1950. During the war, Cagayan de Oro was simply Cagayan, Misamis Oriental. That all too minute lapse in historical reference, aside, I commend the book to all those who love good, clean literature in fluid, forceful English and to those who would like to peek at the living past in the pulsating present as lived by the characters in the novel. In sum, I see Tony Enriquez's book: The Living and the Dead as more than a novel. It is a historical commentary that bears a kernel of truth concerning the evanescence of wealth that, unfortunately, to this day, continues to define many a person's atti- tude towards life in purely mundane terms, forgetting that man is not only a body, he also has an immortal soul. Congratulations are due to the author, Tony Enriquez, for this enjoyable work of historical fiction which makes for very interesting reading. Cagayanons are particularly proud of him because we would like to think he is one of ours --- not only due to the ephemeral reason of his residing in our beautiful city now, but by reason of the eternal bond (or is it bondage?) he has willingly (I hope) assumed by marrying Joy who traces her roots to Cagayan de Oro city. Daghang salamat sa inyong pagpaminaw.

>>>>>>> Antonio Enriquez. Subanons, novel, University of the Philippines Press, Quezon City, 1999. 133 pages

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“You’re one of the great and fine writers that we have around and nothing I can say will change that. Offhand, I’d say novels have been written about persons, families, places, houses but this is the first time I encounter a novel (Subanons] about a tribe. Believe me when I say surely that isn’t its only distinction.” --- Letter, March 4, 2000: Franz Arcellana

>>>>>>> Author’s Note: The stories in this collection were taken from Dance A White Horse to Sleep and Other Stories, University of Queensland Press, Australia CRITICISM: Antonio Enriquez. The Night I Cry and Other Stories, New Day Publishers, Quezon City, 1989. Pages 131.

Book Reviews

The Night I Cry and Other Stories. By Antonio R. Enriquez. New Day Publishers, Quezon city, 1989. Pages 131. Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text (1975) defines a "text of bliss' as that which ... imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts ..., unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language. (p.14) The stories in Antonio R. Enriquez's anthology The Night I Cry and Other Stories are "texts of bliss," for they captivate the reader by disquieting her, by challenging deep-seated Amorsoloesque images of idyllic "country life," and by questioning still stubborn notions on the warmth and mutual supportiveness of Filipino family relationships. The stories, set in different regions of the Philippines, are peopled by characters who act on dark impulses or endure various injuries to the soul. The reader first encounters Chu and his father in the story "Asocena." In the coastal barrio of Labuan in Zamboanga, Chu's dog Leal is killed by dog-eating neighborhood

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toughs led by Tomas Dayrit. Chu expects his father to deal with the culprits somehow so, though hesitant, the father speaks with Tomas. The brief verbal confrontation ends, however, with the father backing down in the face to get a replacement for Leal, of Tomas's threatening manner. Although Chu's father takes him from a neighbor whose dog has just had puppies, Chu's grief has been compounded by disillusionment. In "Iguana," the exploration of the father-son relationship is carried a shattering step further. The narration enters into the boy's thoughts of the present and memories of the past, giving the reader access: I am sitting on the top rung of the kitchen steps with a .22-caliber rifle in my hands. I sit there waiting for the iguana to come out of the bamboo thickets across the ri- ver. It is morning, soft and light. (p.10) From this eeriness, the boy's thoughts shift like a movie camera to scenes of his mother constantly mocked and humiliated by his father. The ominous link between humiliation in the past and lying in wait for the iguana in the present is strengthened by the suppressed violence in the boy's silent taunting of the iguana: "Leche! Come on, iguana, I'm ready for you now! Leche, if I am not ready for leche y leche y leche!" (p. 14) ..." Come on out, iguana. You, lechery of your mother. Hen killer .... Come, iguana. This time I'll kill you. Come now, hen killer." (p. 21) His mother's humiliations build up in the boy's mind; tension builds up in the story. Then the father emerges from the house, crosses the river and climbs up into the bamboo thickets the boy is watching. The story ends explosively, suspicions about the real identity of the iguana finally confirmed. In "Pablo-Pedro," set in Labuan in the Marcos era, Pablo Larracochea is a rice farmer who staunchly refuses to join a government rice farmers' cooperative, insisting on farming his land his own way. This results in his losing his market, which the government controls through the cooperatives. He and his family are reduced to such poverty that they eat rats to survive. The increasing tensions within the family culminate in the eldest son's leaving home. "The Night I Cry," the title story, is a long, aching lament. Lito, who is deformed, lives with his mother in the home of his maternal grandmother and his Tio Felipe. Lito's inner torment comes from love for and loyalty to his mother, and his shame because of her casual sex affairs. One night his mother takes her own brother (his Tio Felipe) to her bed, with Lito in the same room: The bed is silent now, Lito was thinking. And I must not cry .... I cup my hands over my mouth and to the wind and the mat on the supple bamboo floor I cry, O, mi tio. Mi propio tio. (p. 51) His mother's indiscretions had been the subject of village gossip, but although Tio Felipe would berate her (out of jealous possessiveness, as it turns out) for being a "puta,"

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Lito's grandmother refused to face or deal with the situation. Tio Felipe dies the morning after, and the old woman finally confronts her daughter, who prepares to run away with still another man. Lito breaks his silence (and, for the moment, his loyalty), and warns his grandmother. The mourners at Tio Felipe's wake chase after the couple, and soon after, Lito watches as his mother is forced to run naked through the barrio by a mob, "sensing only the impulse and passion that drove his mother into the same pregnant passion ... that had led the barrio men and women to persecute her ...." (p. 65) "Dance a White Horse to Sleep," revolves around the relationships within a Spanish mestizo family as the old, once autocratic patriarch lies dying. Alberto, the dying man's grandson and the narrator, watches how his family and relatives comport themselves during the death watch, with one (a lawyer) talking of how the old man's property is to be divided. When the old man finally dies, Alberto again listens as his relatives discuss funeral expenses, and start moving the old man's things out of his room while keeping articles for themselves. At the funeral, Alberto impulsively hires a convoy of buses and a white horse to escort his grandfather, using the money one of his aunts kept inside her brass bed posts for emergencies. The horse suddenly runs wild, and the funeral is thrown into confusion. When things quiet down, Alberto walks to the end of the funeral line, enters the first bus and waits. The sixth story, "The Smell of Ilang-Ilang" focuses on a lonely man's difficulties in dealing with his little daughter's illness after his wife has abandoned them both. Flavio Larracochea's sense of loss and failure causes him to shrink so much into himself that he is barely able to get the dispensary staff to attend to his feverish daughter. When Dra. Sofronia Mananquil asks after his wife, Flavio lies, pretending that his family is still whole and prospering. His deceptions gain solicitude and sympathy but back at home, Flavio recognizes that "all those lies about his wife were an admission that he had completely and finally lost her: lies growing not out of unreality but of the grim truth of his loss!" (p. 105) "Spots on Their Wings," revolves around a group of engineers assigned to set up a watershed in the Cotabato interior, who find themselves embroiled in the complexities of the Muslim-Christian conflict. The story culminates in torture and murder, sparked by the men's having shouted obscenities at Muslim women bathing naked in a river. The differences between Muslim and Christian cultures are the most obvious elements of contrast in the story. More subtle are the contrasts woven into the narrative structure and setting. The core of the story is set in the mountains and jungles of inner Cotabato --lush, untamed, dangerous territory. The flashback is framed by the leader, Alberto, narrating the men's experience in the totally secure confines of a modern restaurant in Zamboanga City. There are as well moments of contrast told in lyrical, sensual language. In a dreamlike scene Alberto and his team cross a meadow in the early morning. Alberto, walking ahead, looks back and sees a captivating sight --- a swarm of tiny butterflies surrounding the group, covering them in a waist-high sea of spotted yellow wings (p. 109).

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The delicacy of this scene contrasts sharply with one scene on a boatride down a river. At twilight, in a strange, white, cloud-like mass in the distance, a roar arises from the cloud, a ripple runs over its surface, and the cloud becomes the wings of a flock of white catala parrots that had been feeding on the leaves of the trees growing along the bank. The parrots fly off, leaving ... the denuded trunks and boughs ... silhouetted against the sky like black skeletons. [Alberto] leaned back then, his mouth completely shut, appalled at the thought that underneath the awesome, white mass of great catala parrots certain death awaited the luxuriously green and thickly foliaged trees. (p. 110) There is power in this collection. Enriquez's skill with language and narrative structure; his ability to weave the Chavacano vernacular smoothly and naturally into his English narration (a glossary at the end of the book aids the non-Chavacano-speaking reader); his "seer's eyes" that delve into human souls and unearth the conflicts that torment them --- all come together to create stories that disturb in gripping, sensual and sensitive ways. One looks forward to reading more "texts of bliss" by Antonio Enriquez. —Ma. Teresa Wright Department of English, Ateneo de Manila University Philippine Studies 39, (1991) #3 pp. 399-401

>>>>>>

Book Review

Antonio Reyes Enriquez: The Night I Cry and Other Stories. New Day Publishers, Quezon City, 1989 131 pp.

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Stories to Tell Antonio Reyes Enriquez, Palanca awardee for his short stories and for a novel in 1982, after having written some 50 short stories to date, has finally published this distinguished slim volume of seven carefully selected stories which he calls The Night I Cry and Other Stories. These stories are, all seven of them, stories with fascinating stories to tell, already a rarity in this postmodern age where the belief is, if a short story is meant to mirror life, then it must not tell a story, because life does not tell stories ... it is chaotic, random, fluid. And telling stories becomes tantamount to telling lies, since writing can extract a story from life only by, well, falsification. This structural problem in fiction has always been a controversial one. As early as the 19th century, Flaubert commended stories with the least matter, no stories to tell. Anthony Trollope on the other hand, living in the same century, believed that a writer sat down to write because he had a story to tell. Henry James, of this century, calls the story "the spoiled brat of art." Whatever the past masters had said about the narrative element in fiction, I still agree with postmodernist Barth that plot is not really an anachronistic element. That one can still be concerned with plot, even the most baroque, and come up with good contemporary fare, the plot existing for the very aesthetic pleasure of complexity, complication, suspense, unraveling, and the rest. The trick is always of course for fiction to be entertaining, to afford pleasure. Needless to say, there are varying degrees and qualities of pleasure. Fiction is still and all basically artifice. If one were to lie or falsify to extract good stories from life, then let him. The Night I Cry ..., in this sense, is a good lie, pleasurable reading not only because Enriquez has interesting stories to tell but also that he writes them well. These are therefore not so much stories told as stories written, in an age where stories are supposed to be written, not necessarily told. One story for instance deals with more than just a boy's loss of his loved puppy. Its pathos lies in the boy's loss of faith in his father's capacity to stand up to his young need for reassurance and protection and courage in a ruthless world. And there is this movingly told tale of a boy's mounting anger toward his father which dramatically peaks into unexpected but well prepared for violence. Another quite as unnerving is this which explores the timeless conflict between personal will and social exigencies, a resounding statement in an age-old problem.

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One of the more poignant stories in the collection is the title story itself, "The Night I Cry," which speaks of pained chance discoveries, young nightmares, and this eventual young waking up to another "sunlight on the sun where stones make plop-sounds on the water." The Christian-Muslim conflict reflected in this eternal clash between tradition and change leads to a terrible lynching, its violence refined by the use of the removed narrative technique. The stories are rife with mythic possibilities, spiced with quaint cultural flavor, and written in the traditional way, replete with Chavacano phrases and manners for appropriate localisms and atmosphere. It is a heavily drawn, redolent atmosphere rendered in the right balance of sensitivity for sensuous details and proper control. One can almost hear the shhhlick of a curved bolo, the plopsounds of water, the whrrr-whrrr of the outboard motorboat, visualize the rumps of two naked women in the water, flashing white like the belly of a taraquito fish, smell the stench of fetid dried fish hung rotting with worms and gnats swarming over them, almost himself feeling like throwing up from water drunk with its surface teeming with decaying frogs, etc. Enriquez could tell them all with just the right spunk and punch, never mind if at times point of view gets a bit muddled and the voice of authority too prescient and sensitive for a boy narrator. The stories' below-the-surface-burning is achieved by symbols subtly, never arbitrarily, woven into the narrative fabric like: one father making dogmeat (asocena) of a boy's faith in him, the iguana stealing the chicks in their coop becoming less pernicious than a father's harassment of wife, certainly not less deadly than one boy's eventual retaliation, a rampaging white horse in a funeral procession externalizing the confusion of values and botching of family relationships most evident as the family patriarch is about to be laid to rest. (In Islam, the white horse is the symbol of the spirit's ascent to heaven: the horse being the Arabic symbol for mobility and grandeur, white for purity.---ED) This is definitely a book of short stories to read, among those written in 1989, written by a master hand who can spin tales with both truth and falsity, which is finally what art is all about. In the 60s, this tradition known as tale-and-yarn employs a distinct voice, a narrator who is not the writer, who fascinates not with truth and falsity but with straightfaced reality on the one hand, and extreme far out fabulation on the other. Which is not Enriquez's cup of tea. Not quite yet. His fictional fare simmers with the intensity of hidden forms of violations more lethal than outright violence, lies born of truths, deceptions, corruptions, early initiations, expressed in the usual linear progression, this arousal and fulfillment of pent-up desires (Burke), this resolving of tensions developed and generated within the story, truth and falsity celebrating life because affirming art's capacity to mean, art as mirror of life (what else), and life as an expression of a determinate, meaningful moral order. --- Ophelia Dimalanta

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Daily Globe "Book Review," ed. Jocelyn de Jesus Monday, April 16, 1990 p. 13

>>>>>> Oral Review: Antonio Enriquez. The Night I Cry and Other Stories, New Day Publishers, Quezon City, 1989. Pages 131 (Book-launching at Consuelo Restaurant, Cagayan de Oro City, April 20, 1990.) By Ametta Suarez Taguchi

WHEN BABY ESCUDERO asked me to speak on the latest work of Tony Enriquez, my first reaction was to say, "No." Whom am I to comment on somebody like Tony. Only a critic can do justice to the role of introducing the book we are launching tonight. "But Ametta," Baby said, "Tony wants you to be the one to do the job." Knowing Tony's stature in literary circles, I was touched by his humility, and so I said, "Yes." But because I am no critic, I will do the next best thing. I will make cultural chismis about Antonio Reyes Enriquez, the man behind The Night I Cry and Other Stories. We all know that Tony is a Zamboangueño who resides in Cagayan de Oro and owns Casa Hidalgo, the lodging house-restaurant. That he is a multi-awarded short story writer and novelist, this fact is written at the back of his latest collection. That he is a literary great in our country, this the experts won't argue. What many don't know is that Tony, unlike the eloquence of his writing, is a man of few words. This man whose writing style hypnotizes you is very unassuming in person. I am not saying I know Tony like a diary, but he is not a closed book either. However, there was a time when I did not know him at all, though I admired his writing. So when I came to Cagayan de Oro and learned that he lived here, I made inquiries right away, like a real fan. "Resident writer of Xavier University," somebody said. Since nobody could tell me in which room in Xavier he did his writing, I concluded that he was locked up in Loyola House by the Jesuits. "No," somebody said, "he does not do his

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writing in Xavier. He does it in Casa Hidalgo, the house the Palanca Awards built." But when I went there, I was told that he was in a forest somewhere in Zamboanga. "What is he doing there?" I asked his helper. "Typing," she said. "When will he return?" "Three short stories after," she said. After three months, I found out that he was already with the government. "Kapayasaon, he does not want to sign my autograph book," I thought. I don't know why I did not meet the object of my idol worship until last year. Maybe God intended this so I'll be in constant awe of His special creature. When I finally met Tony in a writing workshop hosted by him, the awe vanished. Or rather, it was replaced with deep respect. For Tony was neither kapayason nor insulated with self-drawn aura of importance. I expected him to act like a stereotype expert, you know, hugging the limelight and decorating his lecture with quotations from his works. All he did was share his writing problems and give tips in that soft voice of his. He seemed embarrassed to talk about his works. The next time I met him was a few weeks after the workshop when I dropped by Casa Hidalgo to drink calamansi juice. He mentioned during the workshop that he had a sort of ivory tower erected in the building where he did some writing, and I wanted to take a look. I expected to see him descend on a cloud, holding a mighty pen. Instead, he came down, holding a mighty hammer. "O, Tony, what are you writing now?" I asked. Holding up the hammer, he said: "Oh, a novel. But I can't go on because I have to fix the post nga gikaon sa anay." Then he spent fifteen minutes showing me the chairs in his restaurant, which he himself painted, a la Mexican art. To bring him back to the subject of his writing which he found boring, I asked an unboring question: "Tony, how is your financial situation?" "Oh," he perked up a little. "I still have to contact my agents in Hongkong and Australia." He said that casually, not in a kinapayas way. I mean, from someone else, it would have sounded like, "Hoy, look at me, I am so good, I can be exported already. How about you?" But from Tony, it was a reply to a rude question. Then, like a typical amateur, I advised him to send his forthcoming novel to the Palanca Awards contest. His cute answer was, "Really?" Period. He did not add: "For your information, I already won the grand prize for novel in 1982," something very "droppable" which he never drops. (It is "droppable" because in the Philippines, if a novel is written, it is cause for a national celebration.) Still, I was skeptical. Maybe Tony acted humble for effect. But I heard from a reliable source that he has a barkada of very close friends with whom he goes hunting. One time, after a week in a forest in Zamboanga, he excused himself. He told his wild friends, "I'll leave you here. I have to go to Manila because I was invited by UP to talk." "What will you talk about in UP --- how to shoot a wild pig?" "No," Tony answered, "I was invited to talk about my manuscript." His friends were dumbfounded. "Aw, importante diay na nga tao is Tony?"

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Now, what is the relevance of this chismis to the launching of The Night I Cry and Other Stories? There are two important points: first, Tony Enriquez has the universal, incontrovertible mark of greatness. He is humble. This is a sign that he is comfortable with himself, that he has gotten over the stage where one has to prove that the talent one is wearing is a diamond, not glass. Because his gift is a diamond, there is no need to feel anxious at being discovered that the carat is fake --- which is the case of the pseudo-talented. The second point: the interesting character that Tony is, is very much present in the book. It is the main ingredient that makes all the stories in the collection gripping, haunting, poetic, and funny. But mostly, the feeling that lingers is nostalgia. The feeling cannot be faked. The feeling must be experienced. And this is the feeling you get when you read Tony's stories, that you are going through what the characters are going through. In the first story titled "Asocena," in which a boy's pet dog is eaten by a bunch of drinkers and he discovers that his father is just an ordinary mortal, not a hero, the pain of loss and realization is palpable even to those for whom the experience is alien. In that same book we are launching is another story that would make a nice gift to those embarking on matrimony, and also for those who are already married, especially to men. The title of the story is "Iguana." There is a real iguana in the story, but there is also another iguana residing at home, and that iguana is the husband. Of all the characters in the book he is the most colorful and the best delineated by the author. You can almost touch him. His dramatic impact nearly makes you forget that Tony here exposes a hard reality which is, many marriages are cemented not with love but with cruelty. In "Iguana," the cruelty of the husband leads to his violent death. Also exploring the problems of marriage is "A Smell of Ilang-Ilang." Here, a single father takes care of his three-year-old daughter and comes to terms with his separation from his wife. Then we have "Pablo-Pedro" about a headstrong man who refuses to bend to modernity for fear of losing his identity. He is unmoved by the deteriorating condition of his family, to the point that they have to eat rotten rice, rat adobo, and rat sinigang on account of his refusal to avail of government assistance. The difficult first person point of view underlines his brittleness. You hate him, and yet the other people in the story don't, making you wonder why this is so even in real life with certain strong personalities. The last story, "Spots on Their Wings," depicts the relationship between Christians and Muslims. The hostility that develops culminates in violence. The hostility though appears to be civilization-based rather than culture-based.

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Of all the stories, my favorite is the centerpiece, titled, "The Night I Cry." This story is about a nymphoprostitute who is revealed to us from the point of view of her deformed young son. She is a hot patoosie of the first degree, she is totally shameless, she even goes off for a tryst with a John during her brother's wake, the same brother with whom she had relations just before his death, the whole town is generous with its P rating of her, but her young son makes all sorts of excuses in his mind to make her behavior forgivable, because he loves her. In contrast to "Pablo-Pedro" where we hate the central character while everyone else in the story does not, in "The Night I Cry," everyone passes judgement on the sinful woman except the boy and us, readers. I hope the synopsis will tickle those who do not have a Tony to get one. There are many layers to Tony's work that the seasoned critics will peel like an onion. As of now, this ordinary reader and fan is struck by four salient qualities: First, Tony is a fine storyteller. What's so unusual about that? Well, not all short story writers are good storytellers. Their craft may be worth a lot of prizes but could bore the reader who wants, on first reading, to be entertained. Thus, for sheer value, the Betamax can be given a much needed vacation and your light will bill go down if you own a Tony, side by side with a Sony. Second, Tony is unusual. Well, that is basic to qualify for the position of "great writer." What I mean is, Tony is very, very original. For example, he prefers to write about a nagging husband rather than a nagging wife, a man who fights against the acquisition of modern appliances offered to him on a silver pick-up rather than a man who would sell his soul to have them, a single father rather than a single mother, and a whore whose deeds are described in technicolor sinfulness and yet does not come out hateful. Third, Tony is at his best, in terms of rich images and mesmerizing narrative style, when he deals with rural Zamboanga, the mountains, the ways of the agricultural folks, and the forest he knows so well because it is the sanctuary of his literary gift. I think it is not mere idol worship to say that if Nick Joaquin is the literary prophet of Manila, Tony Enriquez is the literary prophet of Zamboanga. Fourth, Tony writes with love. You don't sense any cynicism in his writing, even if the situation is cynical, which is unusual in an age where the distinctive mark of the intellectual is distrust for humanity and a fashionable belligerence. For the Tony behind the book is one who is perfectly happy in his world and has no reason to hate. The Tony in the book and the Tony out of the book are one, the reason why the prevailing virtue that ties up the stories in The Night I Cry and Other Stories is harmony, even as the feeling of nostalgia keeps shaking underneath. To put it simply, what I'm trying to say is, The Night I Cry and Other Stories by Tony Enriquez is a good investment, entertainment-wise and art-wise. I guarantee it. Baby

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Escudero guarantees it. NMDB guarantees it. If you do not like the book after reading it from cover to cover, please sell it back to us and we will give you a steak dinner, with musical entertainment by Baby at the piano. We are confident though that we won't have to start saving or borrowing from NMDB is case we lose the bet, because I bet, we won't!

>>>>>>> CRITICISM: Antonio Enriquez. Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh, Asian and Pacific Writing No. 16, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Australia, 1981, 131 pages. $10.30 World Literature Today World Literature TodayWorld Literature Today Formerly Books Abroad (A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, 73019 U.S.A.) Summer 1982 issue South of the city of Cotabato lies the famed Liguasan Marsh, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. It is probable that the author, who worked for a time with a surveying company in the province of Cotabato, has taken his material from actual experience, but the episodes in the novel --- whether in the city or in the hinterland --depict less of the charm and hospitality of Zamboanga in particular than of the tensions and frustrations of people in that part of the world. A strong antagonism is seen between Christians and Muslims, and the novel --- while not at all sentimental --- reflects the point of view of the Christians. English is the medium used by the writer, but there are hints of Chabacano and Ilongo as well and colorful glimpses of the sector of society in focus. Americans with an interest in anthropology will doubtless find the content rewarding: from the point of view of storytelling, there is a certain monotony in the presence of violent death and sordid sexual encounters. The writer is a master strong situation and language, both of which impress the reader's mind indelibly. There are some inconsistencies and errors in mechanics: Dio, alternating with Dios, and a slip like "Because." But the book is attractive and easy to read. Its appeal is strong, though the audience may be limited. E.C. Knowlton

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>>>>>> Antonio Enriquez, Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh, Asian and Pacific Writing No. 16, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1981. 131 pp. Cloth: $14.95; paper: $7.95. Mindanao in the Southern Philippines is widely known for its long-running conflict between Muslim and Christian Filipinos and for little else. What is heard about it abroad and even the news that reaches Manila is mainly about ambushes and assassinations. Alfonso, the young Christian surveyor of Enriquez' novel, venturing in the line of duty into the Liguasan (sic) Marsh, regards Muslim Mindanao as another, heathen country. The hours's flight from Zamboanga to Cotabato is transportation from civilization to the jungle. The Muslims are "ignorant Moro savages." He makes no allowance for their defence of their land and religion against Christian depredations. Alfonso's racism is as unvarnished and credible as his culture shock and terror. Creeping through the marsh, the surveyors' violence and intolerance are honest responses to the situation they are all in, and Enriquez puts them through no high-minded ideological sieve. The result is a slight, but gripping and extraordinary tale. Enriquez and Nick Joaquin are two of the leading Filipino writers in English: their work and other contemporary Asian writing are included in the excellent University of Queensland Press series edited by Michael Wilding and Harry Aveling. Some are in English, others in translation. There is a newness of vision and interpretation, and a tangential approach to language, which justifies the series in literary terms. As well, it represents a sample of what Europo-centric Australians are missing. Alison Broinowski Vols. No. 3 April '82 ASAA

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>>>>>> "BOOKWATCH" National Times 21-27 November UQP's Asian & Pacific Writing series, edited by Michael Wilding, has been receiving plaudits. Antonio Reyes Enriquez's Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh has just won the top Philippines literary award, the 1982 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature. Further information from Anne Barkl on (07) 377 2452. Tom Thompson

>>>>>> BOOK REVIEW: Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh is a book about the adventures of a young Zamboangueo, Alberto Gonzales, who signs up as part of a surveying team in the jungles of Central Mindanao. The book portrays a world of violence and savage brutality which burns itself into the imagination of the reader, and may prove a little too much for those with weak stomachs. In the first part of the book, Alberto is a detached witness and participant in several instances of gang violence (reminiscent of Clockwork Orange), such as when his companion nonchalantly beat up a Visayan to death with their belt buckles, and again knocked down a drunk with a steel chain and kicked him with their boots, after which they went off to a tuba store to drink the night away and eat dog stews. It is because of one such incident that he flees Zamboanga and takes up a job as a surveyor and triangulation tower builder with the Cerdeza Surveying Company. In the jungles of Central Mindanao, he finds himself in another world of violence, but this time, he sees himself and his companions as the more likely victims.

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In a lot of ways, the book perpetuates the stereotype of the Muslim Filipino, the Moro, as a savage, bloodthirsty, cheating, stealing wretch. It betrays the prevailing attitudes of Christian Filipinos towards their Muslim brothers, which border on fear, distrust, and discrimination. The book gives us a clear picture of the situation in Mindanao, which for so long has plagued the conscience of the entire nation. It also paints a vivid and gripping portrait of the simultaneously hostile and seductive wilderness of the South. Alberto may be a brute in some ways, but he is not insensitive to beauty. The jungle may abound with leeches and giant mosquitoes which swarm all over people and suck their blood, but at the same time, it harbors thousands of yellow butterflies which "flit around them ... like a great wave of vibrant motion." Alberto appreciates the sight of the men "seemingly suspended above the meadow, the lower parts of their bodies hidden underneath the sea of butterflies." He is awed by the catala parrots, but he envisions "certain death for the once luxuriously green and thickly foliaged trees." Indeed, Alberto is haunted by death. He realizes that "there was nowhere to run away to from death in the mountains of Cotabato. For death was not the preserve of those savages; it was everywhere." As the story goes one finds that there is nowhere indeed to run away to from death. For Zamboanga is itself also a place of death. But Alberto wants to be a part of the world of the jungle, he is proud of the survival skills he has learned from his companions because it integrates his person with the primitive environment. He aches to commit himself to something, anything. In the early part of the book, we see that he is unable to commit himself for fear of being tied down, and perhaps trapped in an aimless life. He is unable to commit himself to women, even to the gang violence that his friends indulge in. He is seemingly always the observer, on the outside looking in. It is possible that he hopes to find a certain commitment in the jungle, if only it could be a commitment to his own survival. As the book ends, however, he fails even in this, for even as he imagines himself "part of them, as a clod of earth is part of the river," an act of violence is being perpetrated against a companion of his which was to serve as a clear message that his presence was neither accepted by nor suitable to the "savage, primeval land." The story being told in retrospect, we know beforehand that Alberto has ended up going back to "civilization," this time as an instructor in a university. However, we can only presume on whether he is finally at one with his environment or not. Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh is a well-written authentic book on the Mindanao wilds, the author, Antonio Reyes Enriquez, like his hero, having spent some time as a surveyor in Cotabato. His exploration of the Mindanao environment is certainly a great help in understanding the remote yet significant part of the Filipino nation. by Encarnita F. Gaviola

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Focus Philippines magazine Manila, September 26, 1981

>>>>>> BOOK REVIEW Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh, Asian and Pacific Writing Series, University of Queensland Press, Queensland, Australia, 1981, 131 pages. Not just another rite-of-passage novel. The novel is made even more powerful by the strength of the exodus symbols. The marsh that's the locus of this novel is a real place out there in the hinterlands of Central Mindanao where the proud Maguindanao Muslims are still the undisputed masters. And true masters they are for the towns that dot the marsh's edges and the mountains that rim it are only effectively peopled by them and their kind and theirs is hostile territory. Hostile, that is, to intruders such as Alberto Gonzales and his surveying team, out to set up triangulation towers around the marsh for a government irrigation project. This hostility is what frames the conflict in the narrative, and it comes in two forms: from the land itself and from the people who inhabit it, both seemingly impervious (at times even downright resistant) to the progress and change that the surveyors promise and symbolize. The general impression conveyed by the author, in fact, is that both land and people are sullen, their anger over the intrusion couched in mocking indifference, a mute challenge to the, yes, intruders to prove themselves capable of emerging as survivors in order to earn, at best, their passive tolerance. On this level the novel could simply be just another rite-of-passage adventure not unlike say, James Dickey's Deliverance. The challenges hurled up by the land, though, are different. They are of Mosaic proportions. That is to say, they are almost of the same intensity or indeed they even bring to mind, the plagues visited upon Egypt by the wrathful God of Israel, a reading that leads us to ask if they are not, possibly, exodus symbols.

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That possibility may not at all be farfetched if one considers such examples as the following: "Whenever they stood still, even for a second or so, at night or during the day in the tiny village or nipa hut, cooking breakfast or supper, even lunch while the fierce sun blazed over the nipa roof, the carabao mosquitoes relentlessly attacked their arms and feet. Unbelievably, a dozen, even more, would at one moment alight on them and sink their needles into any exposed part of their body. And then the men wrapped themselves in thick cotton blankets and wore long-sleeved shirts and socks and walked like mummies or zombies in the hut, but the mosquitoes sank their needles through any clothing. Alberto and the men clapped the mosquitoes between the palms of their hands or pressed them against their besieged flesh. There was no need to be quick with their hands; the mosquitoes were so relentless and fearless they would not fly off when the men lowered a hand or a rubber slipper and squashed them." The locust plague motif, apparently a favorite with Enriquez, is repeated in two other instances, once with butterflies and in another instance with flies. The multiplication of frogs upon the land and the diverging of the rivers, he however, juxtaposes as one: "Submerging their heads together in a cluster into the water, ignoring completely the foul stench coming from the rotten frogs floating on its surface, the men drank the water from the well. No one remembered to purify the water with the chlorine tablets they had taken along with their lunchboxes because the men felt that if they waited a moment longer they would all succumb to dehydration and die in this God-forsaken Moro land .... later, at the supper table, none of them touched their food because of the putrid stench round their mouth ... that night the men went about the hut smelling like dogs that had scavenged in the town's garbage dumps." The case for pursuing this exodus symbolism in the novel is also further heightened, I think, by the fact that Mindanao was, not so long ago, idyllically labeled "The Land of Promise." Did Enriquez perhaps, take this into context in order to effect a play of symbols? Or did he, as we suspect, develop this whole mosaic of Mosaic symbols independently, maybe even unconsciously? Intentionally directed or not, however, it's an interesting frame all the same, and not entirely without its own logic. Pursuing it, then, what we see is an exodus in reverse --- with the surveyors entering a hostile promised land, with them instead of their oppressors suffering the plagues and, in the end, achieving liberation by surviving and going back to the land of their captivity. Further, the Liguasan Marsh itself as center of this promised land is hardly an oasis in the desert and the author's description of it, therefore, a further argument in favor of considering the flow of reverse symbols logically: "Deep in the heart of Liguasan Marsh were dead things. All around Alberto and his men in the banca, the dark surface of the water stretched quiet and stagnant for a great distance. And driftwood and swamp trees rose from the bowels of the marshes without ruffling the stillness of the murky water. Without speaking, the men rowed out of the bowl-like expanse of water. The paddles fell softly and little ripples broke shyly alongside the banca. As it moved silently toward a

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narrow channel between tall, gnarled dead trees, not a single fish broke the surface of the dark water and not a bird flew or was to be seen on the leafless branches of the trees. No living things were seen or heard; there was not even the humming of flies and mosquitoes. It was indeed strange." Beyond this, the most terrible of the plagues --- the coming of the avenging angels here personified by the proud people of the marsh and of the great rivers and tributaries around it. As a second hostile force, they sow greater fear in the hearts and minds of the surveyors because they are unfathomable to them. And not just because they speak a different dialect; more because they're of a different mental and spiritual dimension. A recurring image in the mind of the main character is that of the traditional victim of Moro wrath, strapped to a tree, pierced by a lance, his penis cut off and stuffed in his mouth. Too violent, perhaps, for the world that lies outside the marsh, but entirely in keeping with the world within its boundaries: a hostile land and a hostile people, but only to intruders. And because violence is a way of life with them, so Enriquez insists, it can only be violence that can earn their grudging respect. This is made to happen in one instance --- when the surveyors gang up on one of their own, a laborer fired by a team manager and who threatens to kill his former boss in revenge. Seeing this, the Muslims break their silence and begin to mingle freely with them. Despite those instances, however, the fear remains throughout and that fear is what, in the end, Alberto Gonzales and his companions liberate themselves from in a grotesquely comic manner, as they leave the marsh. A powerful novel it certainly is and one made even more powerful by the strength of these exodus symbols. by Alfredo Navarro Salanga Weekend magazine May 16, 1982

>>>>>> Alien Encounters Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh by Antonio Enriquez

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University of Queensland Press, P.O. Box 42, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia. 131 pages. A$7.95 There is a hint, in one of this book's opening chapters, why protagonist Alberto Gonzales goes off to work with a surveying party in the hinterlands of Mindanao. Having fallen in with the wrong people, he has brought on himself serious trouble. It would be better, his father advises, that he went somewhere else and learned to be independent. So Gonzales leaves for the inhospitable, jungle-covered mountains of the southern Philippines. There, he helps to erect triangulation towers to map out the Liguasan Marsh, a petrified wasteland where "not a single fish broke the surface of the dark water and not a bird flew or was to be seen on the leafless branches of the trees." The surveyors intend to drain it and to build a watershed so that the surrounding land will always be irrigated. In the early part of his book, author Enriquez envelops the trouble-prone Gonzales in an atmosphere of foreboding. He also sets a tone of simmering violence for the rest of Surveyors by relating an incident in which a man is hanged from a tree by local Muslims, yet all the townspeople pretend nothing's amiss. Gonzales's party must contend with the savage elements and Muslim tribesmen whose hatred for Christians dates back to the time when the Spaniards first landed on Mindanao. Under such oppressive circumstances, the reader feels, all hell is likely to break loose. The surveying party shuffles from their gruelling work in the jungle for a respite in town, but no matter where they are, they remain constantly on guard against nature and the Muslims alike. In the end, both antagonists claim their prey. Sick with malaria, one of the men in the party is left in camp as the others go to work. The man is ambushed by Muslims and murdered. When the surveyors return and witness what has happened, they flee. The elements for a superb novella are here, ready to lend themselves to a dramatic, intricate plot: a confused young man who tries to find himself in an alien environment; the struggle to overcome the natural and human forces that conspire against the individual; the spiritually barren setting, with Muslims and Christians perpetually on the brink of war. Unfortunately, the super-charged atmosphere is dissipated by a dull progression of events, lacking in intensity and, at times, relevance. The ending of Surveyors trails off inconclusively and the characters do not come alive. Indeed, the personae, not vividly individualized, appear to be but fleeting, insubstantial images. Except Alberto Gonzales, none of them communicate their thoughts to the reader, and even the protagonist's moments of reflection seem to betray a certain shallowness. The author writes: "Many years later, working as an instructor in the university, [Alberto] would think: If I hadn't been young then ... I would have left next day ... and yet wouldn't my life have been empty, dry?" But he has not learned anything from his adventures. Enriquez adds: "[Alberto's] own skin seemed to be a repellent, a coarse covering, rejecting the feel of the atmosphere and the land."

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By and large, the Liguasan Marsh of the title, rendered important by its prominence, could have become a potent metaphor for the spiritual devastation that pervades the place and its people. Simply described and discarded, however, it only serves as a throughway for the group en route to setting up one of their triangulation towers. Moreover, to make up for the shallow sensibilities, the author tends to embellish his language. The descriptive passages in particular, imbued with confused imagery, neither propel the narrative forward nor enhance the theme of desolation that the work highlights. Fedrico Miguel Olbés

Fedrico Miguel Olbés Fedrico Miguel Olbés

ASIAWEEKASIAWEEK August 27, 1982August 27, 1982August 27, 1982August 27, 1982August 27, 1982

>>>>>> An Oral Review SURVEYORS OF THE LIGUASAN MARSH A novel by Antonio Enriquez University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Australia, 1981. 131 pages (Delivered at the book-launching ceremony held at Xavier University, Cagayan de Oro City on October 3, 1981) by Reuben R. Canoy The launching of a ship is usually done by smashing a bottle of champagne on its prow. Having thus been given the ritual alcoholic bath, it is then released down the slipways and into the water, to the tumultuous sound of a band and the cheer of thousands. I have often wondered why no such pomp or circumstance ever accompanies the launching of a book. My curiousity --- and personal pique --- stem from a long-held belief that our values are frequently misplaced. We make a big fuss over a ship that may end up carrying pigs or bananas, but seldom do we give importance to the launching of a book that could transport us to a world of adventure, ideas, or dreams.

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I remember some years ago when I attended the launching of a little book of poetry written by a friend. The guests, many of them celebrities in the literary and journalistic community, arrived at various times. Each had either come or were going to different parties that night, and for this reason were in various states of inebriation. The flow of clever talk and alcohol was generous; the lesser lights gravitated around the brighter ones; a starlet, very sexy and apparently well-nourished in her childhood, was sulking in a corner because her escort (an aging writer who had left his wife and children in the classic search of lost manhood) was paying too much attention to a woman columnist known for her liberal views and more liberal sleeping habits. Through all these, however, nobody talked about the book of poems that my friend had written, copies of which stood in another corner opposite the actress. At first, the author tried to circulate, clearing his throat and looking every inch the successful writer that he thought he had become, but still nobody seemed interested in him. Finally, when one of the guests mistook him for a waiter my friend decided that he might as well get drunk like all the others. I hope that this doesn't happen to Tony Enriquez tonight, especially because I know the circumstances in which he wrote his book. As a government information officer in his native Zamboanga, Tony became very unpopular with his bosses for trying to expose a case of corruption. The crusade resulted in his transfer --- or exile --- to Cagayan de Oro where the system for which the present regime is well-known also operated with the same vengeance. Soon he found himself grounded or frozen. The enforced idleness was intended to shame Tony into resigning, but he decided to turn adversity to an advantage. It was during this period that he was able to complete the novel that we have come to celebrate. If we could only be sure that oppression invariably leads to a burst of creative activity on the part of writers, musicians and artists, I might be less inclined to disagree with the present order. But Tony's case, alas, is more the exception rather than the rule. Despite the fevered efforts of the regime to compel the belief that we now live in a golden cultural age, one cannot fail to see that what we are witnessing is actually a contrived renaissance for which we have had to pay an incredible price in terms of poverty, malnourishment, and the "salvaging" of young men and women who themselves might have become the writers of finer books that any of us are able to produce. According to the program, I am supposed to give an "oral review" of Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh. Instead I have spoken at some length about the author and the conditions under which he has labored because, to me, it is important for us to realize that the creative process which results in, say, a novel such as Tony has done does not end with its publication.

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In the words of a critic, "the higher function of art is to revive the world, to bring justice, harmony and reason to social transactions." A book therefore comes alive and acquires significance only when it is read, and the reader becomes affected by it. This is the kind of success that all writers seek, for while the need to express may be great, greater yet is the need to share --- an emotion, a sliver of memory, a point of view, or perhaps an elemental experience. In the act of sharing, the creative process takes on a larger dimension, with the reader often perceiving more in the narrative than the author saw in his original material. In this sense, I consider Surveyor a real achievement. As an aspiring (as well as frustrated) novelist, I truly envy my friend Tony Enriquez for this achievement which represents a lot of hard work and attests to a certain vitality so surprising for one extremely self-effacing and physically diminutive. Even if he were to deny it, I would like to confront him with the accusation that Alberto Gonzales, the hero of his novel, is in fact Antonio Enriquez. There is much of the personality and experience of the writer that inevitably go into the shaping of a major character. Alberto, like the author, is from Zamboanga and works with a surveying company in Cotabato. However, I am not prepared to ask how much of Tony resides in the person of Alberto when the latter and the lusty members of the surveying team spend a warm and sticky Sunday afternoon in the company of prostitutes, in the red light district of Cotabato known as "the interior." I will not spoil your enjoyment of the book by describing in erotic and sinful detail incidents of this nature. But I must warn you that Surveyors is that kind of a book. Rather it comes closer to the attempts of Joseph Conrad to explore the murky depths of the human condition. In the hostile swamps and highlands of Cotabato, where life and love and death are manifested in their most primitive forms, Alberto Gonzales tries to come to terms not only with the harsh environment but with himself. Tony Enriquez refuses to tell us in the end whether Gonzales does. We can only presume the outcome from the fact that the story is told in retrospect, with the hero safely and comfortably settled in a university. But we see the hand of the artist in the way that Tony has subtly focused the narrative light on the process of self-knowledge and self-discovery, rather than on the knowledge or discovery itself. The reader thus becomes involved in the process and reacts to the strange and perilous Cotabato milieu as Gonzales does. Without realizing it, you undergo a subconscious experience that also brings your own fears, motives, attitudes and prejudices to the surface. I for one found that experience eerie, but it had a kind of liberating effect which I heartily recommend to others.

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Will the book stand the test of time? It would be presumptuous to make a prediction, for only the future can decide that. But for now, I should like to recall Alberto's words upon completing the building of a high wooden tower on which the surveying transits would be mounted. "`It is a beautiful tower,' said Alberto, standing before it, his head craned up, still sweating from climbing down some twenty parallel bars set about two metres apart and held firm by crossboards. `Is it not, Dante?' "`O, o,' said the rod man beside him. He stared up the tower, his eyes sweeping upward until the tower soared and came to a tapering point against the sky. `I hope the Moros don't destroy it before Alfonso comes to do the observation,' he said. "`But the tower is beautiful,' said Alberto, not listening, deaf to the words of the rod man. `It would not matter then, really, if it were destroyed. It is beautiful now.'" Alberto could have said the same thing about the book of which he is the hero. Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh also rises like a tower on the country's literary landscape, and indeed it is beautiful now. -

>>>>>> Antonio Enriquez. Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh, novel, Asian and Pacific Writing No. 16, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Australia, 1981. 131 pages. A$10.30 As I write, the town is celebrating, blasting off demons and driving harbingers of bad luck that might be found along the way; as it happens, I have emerged out of the mangrove forests of “Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh”. It is quite a country, indeed. As I was telling Narita at breakfast this monring, you have probably authored one of the most important novels of this generation. I had this impression already, years ago; but it is stronger now and I can justify it most objectively. Alberto [the protagonist] has not paused to question the altruism that inspired the planning and building of a watershed to benefit inhabitants of the area for many years to come. The symbolic meaning of this, while probably non-existent in the Moro mind nor significant enough in that of the Christian, cannot be lost to the intelligent reader. Basically, thus, the conflict is one of values. Deep down is the primitive, virginal, innocent represented by the fecund Moroland, to use the story’s own identification of it. While contemporary engineering knowhow, government as well as corporate bureaucracy and common labor and business practices are not actually intended to overwhelm and

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dehumanize the Moro and his datuism, the change brought on by these is considered but an extension of the age-old conflict which history, fundamentally, has not resolved nor probably will. For that matter, the watershed might not be the answer to the needs of the social order, unless understood as symbolic…. The novel’s reticence about other matters is justified by a self-imposed limitation, ostensibly the surveying project. But here, too, is yet another innocent cover for meaning; the story, in fact, invites us to engage in socio-cultural triangulations of our own. How this has been achieved will defy criticism, as will its forthright structure. What our dream reader will need to do is be attentive to the authorial authenticity which informs the novel while reigning in the intrusions of vernacular syntax and preserving the rhythm and color of the dialog even as precision and economy of language remain functional all throughout. I do not know of any Asian prose at this writing that works toward originality and power of this kind. —Letter, December 31, 1998: NVM Gonzales