Priming up the Pinoy pen

If there's one thing we Pinoys can suck sweetly off the imperial toes of our American heritage, it’s how we’ve come to colonize the English language. Really, we've appropriated it in our tongues like second skin. Go listen to the chorus of Call Center agents, and agree.

Imagine the taste of sewer between gnashed teeth, therefore, when I eagerly got hold of The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry (edited by J.D. McClatchy) more than a decade ago. Ethnocentric subjectivity be damned, but not only me believes the best of our wordsmiths can hold water with the world’s best.

What a wet blanket (a hanky is not enough) for my face hot with dismay to discover that the seemingly ample anthology featured poets from Vietnam, among others, but none from the Philippines!
Over the years, I guess many of our kabayan can only gaze green-eyed in envy at other Asian writers, particulary the Indians, whose inkwells have swept the shore of world literature with the sheer tidal wave of genius: Salman Rushdie, Rohinton Mistry, Vikram Seth, Anita Desai and her daughter Kiran, Arundhati Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri, etc. Oysters in their open palms, all that Bookers and Pulitzers. So much so that I sometimes wish to shake hands even with a beggar in the streets of Mumbai.

A few weeks ago, another Indian made a splash as 33-year-old Aravind Adiga’s debut novel The White Tiger clawed out the competition in this year's Man Booker Prize, which honors the best fiction written in English by an author from the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth. Now, two Indians are again among the five candidates culled from a long list of 21 semi-finalists for the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize.

But, whoopee, two Filipinos also made it to the top five. Alfred Yuson's Music Child and Miguel Syjuco's Ilustrado (the Grand Prize for the Novel at this year's Palanca Awards) will slug it out with the works of Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi (India), Kavery Nambisan (India), and Yu Hua (China).

In last year's inaugural of Man Asian Literary Prize, the new Olympics for Asian literature in English, Jose Dalisay had the honor of hoisting the flag of Philippine writing with his entry Soledad’s Sister, but eventually bowed to Chinese writer Jiang Rong for his novel Wolf Totem. This time around, hope bobs up twice for the announcement of the winner next month.

Fingers crossed for Yuson and Syjuco, and all hands as well for Carlos Bulosan, Jose Garcia Villa, Nick Joaquin, Bienvinido Santos, NVM Gonzalez, F. Sionil Jose, Eric Gamalinda, Ninotchka Rosca, Jessica Hagedorn, Luisa Igloria, Rick Barot, Nick Carbo, etc. for rippling up the Filipino imagination around the globe. Mabuhi ang Pinoy!