Art in the service of peace
I do not want a peaceful and stable world; I want meaningful change, where there is no apathy and acceptance of misery, oppression and hypocrisy.
Iwas asked recently by La Salle professors Leni Garcia and Raymond Girard Tan to address a group of academics and graduate students on “how art can promote and nurture peace not only in national and global contexts but in daily life.” In other words, what are the strictly utilitarian purposes of art?
I have always looked at La Salle with great affection for it is here where I found fulfillment as a teacher. Remember, I did not take any course in pedagogy. I merely have been taught by wonderful teachers and their methods and their example are now deeply embedded in my consciousness.
For several trimesters in the ‘80s, in those instances that I had no scheduled trips abroad, I taught at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels — this at the behest of the late Brother Andrew Gonzalez.
My first teaching experience was actually not in La Salle but in the University of the East. This was in the late ‘60s. By then, I was no longer active in journalism — that is to say, I had left the old Manila
Times, but I still wrote for international publications and, for a few years, was the Philippine correspondent for the London
Economist.
I was with the late Antonio Isidro, president of the University of the East, at a dinner and I was telling him about my experiences with culture change here and in the Asian countries that I had visited. Dr. Isidro said that with my background, I should be able to teach.
My first teaching job was at, of all places, the Graduate School of Education of the University of the East where I also refined my syllabus — the same syllabus that I used at La Salle, the University of Santo Tomas, and the University of California at Berkeley.
At one time, I was with the writer Mauro Avena at the counter of McDonald’s on UN Avenue. The girl serving at the next counter said to the girl who was serving us that she wanted to serve me instead. She said she was my student at La Salle; she was in the graduating class and that of all the teachers at La Salle, it was from me that she learned the most. That same year, at the beginning of the trimester, I was going over the class cards and I noticed that two students — they were from the college of engineering — were repeating the course. I asked why they were in my class again when I did not flunk them.
Both smiled and said they were repeating the course because they learned so much and they were sure, considering my teaching style, that they would get to know more in that trimester.
I have been tasked to speak about how art ( especially, in my area, literature) can nurture and promote peace. Let us define our terms — “art,” “nurture” and “peace.” Art has many definitions, depending on geography, culture, etc. We are concerned with the arts as we know them — meaning literature, music, architecture, drama, etc. — in other words, the creative arts.
The next word is nurture and there are many definitions too, depending so much on the artist when he asks himself “What is the purpose of my being an artist?” There are those who believe in the absolutism of art and there are those utilitarian artists who believe art has noble purposes.
I believe that art is not just for entertainment, or something to decorate a room and please the eye. Art is to ennoble life itself, to sustain the genius of the individual, to promote virtue even in its depiction of evil, to validate humanity though it may depict wars and man’s inhumanity to man.
Before I go into the definition of culture and the arts and, in this particular case, literature, let me first make some important clarifications about culture. Here, we must make several clear distinctions; while we are in Asia, culturally we are not Asians because the two great religions, Buddhism and Hinduism, did not come to us. Christianity did and, therefore, we are Westerners. This is most visible in our culture, meaning the arts. It is vastly derivative from the West. Our indigenous folk art did not develop into classical forms. One of the major challenges of the creative Filipino artist today, therefore, is to give these derivative forms a Filipino and perhaps an Asian face. This requires further discussion.
Like all art forms, much of our art began in the service of religion.
As for literature, we have a tradition in our vernacular that our writers in English have carried on. As the literary critic Bienvenido Lumbera stated way back, our vernacular literature is characterized by “intense social criticism.”
Literature unites us, not language. History unites us, too. But most important, literature teaches us ethics. Which is perhaps our single greatest need today, faced as we are with corruption in the highest niches of power and in business as well. Remember always that the poverty which pervades this country is not an economic or social issue; it is moral.
Must literature nurture peace? Again, let us define this elusive term.
Peace means the absence of conflict, the withering of contradictions, the laying down of arms. It could also mean acquiescence and even surrender. “Peace in our time.” That’s what the English Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared in 1939 to appease Hitler. It is that vital ingredient that assures individuals as well as nations a respite from violence and carnage, the basic condition that will assure development.
For us, it could mean the acceptance of the Bangsamoro Basic Law so that there will be peace in Mindanao, or as the anarchic conditions in 1972 warranted, the precondition for the martial law that was declared by President Marcos. Peace is such an alluring tonic, a panacea, a cure-all that will usher us all into the kingdom of God. But is this peace really what we need? I do not want a peaceful and stable world; I want meaningful change, where there is no apathy and acceptance of misery, oppression and hypocrisies.
I want our authors to write novels like Noli Me Tangere — not all of them for sure, for I would like to see those novels too, that entertain, that bring laughter to the sorrowing, and dreams to those who faltered and failed.
I want artists to be concerned with their time and place, to depict reality and how the ills of this society can be banished. If they need to paint ugliness or narrate tragedies — let them, so that those who see their work or read their thoughts will be stirred from their lethargy, not just to think, but most importantly, to act.
I want Filipino art to be proactive and freed from the compulsions of the market. As we see today in art, it is the market that dictates direction. Not society’s needs.
It is not peace that should guide our creative genius. It is truth, it is justice.
Who are the Filipinos today denied justice? The thousands upon thousands who were jailed, tortured and killed by the Marcos dictatorship; the farmers who were massacred in Mendiola in 1986 because President Cory refused to see them; in more recent memory, the 50 who were killed by the Ampatuans five years ago in Maguindanao; the 44 policemen who lost their lives in Mamasapano; the thousands cheated by Napoles; and the millions who are poor, who eat only once a day because a powerful and tyrannical oligarchy has taken over the economic wherewithal of this nation.
Peace — it is such an elusive word and peace itself continues to elude, too, so much of mankind for the simple reason that peace can mean the status quo, the tyrannical rule over a docile people lulled into apathy or even acceptance of their serfdom. Peace can mean the serenity that reigns in the dungeon because all those who are in it are chained, unable to act.
Peace could also mean the status quo, the preservation of the privileges of the high and the mighty. Peace can be translated then as the quietude of the cemetery. Confrontation, struggle, yes — and only when that struggle is won will peace be attained. There are, of course, so many who interpret peace as that inner condition, the solitude of repose and quiet, which lulls the mind into inaction and equilibrium. This is not peace at all, but a kind of escape into religion, spirituality, which are the sole preserve of those who are comfortable. They can afford it, but not the very poor, the victims of human rapacity who have to fight the inhuman conditions that have debased them.
Christ said in Matthew 10:34, “Think not that I come to send peace on earth. I came not to send peace but a sword.”
This is so explicit — it cannot be reinterpreted in any other way. It is the inevitable use of violence as an instrument for seeking redress or justice. This is what we should aim for: a society that is just and not necessarily at peace. Peace — but only as a result of it being nurtured by justice. Not the other way around. Justice, then, is the guiding light, the purpose of societies that will not only thrive but endure in peace.