The Cirilo Bautista Prize for the Novel
National Artist for Literature Cirilo F. Bautista was the special guest of honor at the opening of the “Chromatext Rebooted” art exhibit at the CCP’s Main Gallery and Corridor on Nov. 6. His fellow National Artists, Virgilio S. Almario a. k. a. Rio Alma, and Benedicto Cabrera a.k.a. BenCab, joined him in cutting the ribbon.
All are part of the grand exhibit. A line from one of Bautista’s poems is featured as the inspiration behind Christine Sicangco’s fine installation work. Two of Almario’s poems are given tribute by young artists Jeff Mendoza and Joey Diokno, while BenCab lent two of his portraits of writer- friends: those of Cristina Pantoja Hidago and Marra PL Lanot. Although it didn’t make it to the opening night, Cirilo also eventually loaned BenCab’s portrait of him to include in the show, which lasts till Jan. 17.
Two days after the opening, on Nov. 8, Bautista was once again a guest at CCP, this time for a public conversation as part of Performatura’s schedule of activities for its own three-day festival of the spoken word. Rockstar-poet Lourd de Veyra interviewed NA F. Sionil “Frankie” Jose two afternoons before. That Sunday, it was my turn to be tasked by Performatura conceptualizer Vim Nadera to engage good old friend Cirilo or “Toti” in a chat about the writing of literature.
We spoke for nearly an hour before opening the floor to the audience of some 80 mostly young people, who asked more questions of our premier bilingual poet and writer. He dwelled often on how he makes a choice between the two languages he has mastered since becoming an avid reader of Liwayway magazine in his early youth.
In effect, form follows function whenever Cirilo picks up his pen. Instinctively, he selects the language that is best to use depending on the topic or theme. An interesting admission was that he still has to write a love poem in his native tongue.
Our final questions was on what he would advise the next president with regards support for Philippine literature. This support certainly has to be strengthened, Cirilo said, before lamenting how he and his batchmates among the latest group to be declared National Artists still have to be honored with their medallions at the traditional ceremony in Malacañang.
Well, it does seem that President Benigno Aquino III will hold fast to his “dedma” stance on this matter, likely occasioned by the controversy over his disapproval of Nora Aunor’s inclusion in that batch.
Unfortunately, a few days after that public interview, Cirilo suffered a fall in his residence, and had to be taken to a hospital on the very day that he was supposed to confer a new and prestigious literary award in his name.
The Cirilo F. Bautista Prize for the Novel was organized and announced early this year by the DLSU Bienvenido N. Santos Creative Writing Center (BNSCWC). Co- sponsored by the Angelo King Institute for Economics and Business Research (AKI) and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Innovation (VCRI), the award offered P100,000 as cash prize for a novel manuscript in Filipino or English.
The judges — Cirilo himself, Dean Alfar, Katrina Tuvera, Rolando Tolentino and Joselito Delos Reyes — selected five manuscripts in English and three in Filipino for their shortlist. Emerging as the winner was “When Will This War End?” by Raymundo T. Pandan, Jr.
Of his 463-page manuscript, the board of judges remarked: “Set in an alternative Philippines just emerging from Spanish rule, the novel is more than a chronicle of war, but ultimately a look at how myth, memory and history mingle to render what is heroic.”
A Special Jury Prize of P50,000 in cash was awarded young writer Zeno Antonio Denolo for his entry, “Uberman” — which drew the following commendation: “The spectacular and the ludicrous are in ‘Uberman,’ a novel about a has-yetto-be superhero. The novel’s success lies on several factors: a painful but pleasing critique of society; readable and contemporary; and its ability to let the public read, be entertained, while pondering the follies of being a hero.”
The awards were given on Nov. 14 at Victorinos Restaurant in Quezon City, with the judges in attendance, joined in by Bro. Ray Suplido, FSC, president of DLSU Manila. Cirilo could only SMS his apology over his unexpected absence.
Raymundo T. Pandan, Jr., known as “Rayboy,” hails from Bacolod and has practiced law for 25 years. He served as dean of the college of law of the University of St. La Salle from 1998 to 2010, and continues to teach in the law school. He was the research director of the Supreme Court’s JURIS Project on mediation from 2004 to 2008. His poetry collection Illuminations and Sonorities (2006) and children’s poetry collection The Ocelot and Other Poems (2012) won the Palanca Awards, while his first book of poetry, Days of Grace: Selected
Poems and New, 1984-2002, was a finalist for the National
Book Awards.
Here’s an excerpt from Pandan’s acknowledgment speech:
“In keeping with the irony inherent in the title of my novel, which asks despairingly when a war that seems never to end will ever end, I now claim this richest of literary prizes while government funding merely in the thousands is set to be denied to, among others, young writers with aspirations to the craft. To heap irony on top of irony, earlier this year, upon her retirement, Dr. Elsie Coscolluela, famed writer and mentor to hundreds of writers, theater performers and students of stagecraft, asked me to become project director of the Iyas National Writers Workshop. Despite concerns at being unworthy of the job, I accepted the position as much for Elsie as for anything else. And when Marj Evasco, the workshop director, gave her blessings, I began dreaming that I was some rookie coach about to begin my first season with a truckload of Hall of Fame players. I might have jinxed the whole deal. A few months ago, we applied for the counterpart to help run the workshop, expecting the usual manna. Sadly, the combination of politics in my home institution and the onerous requirements of the funding grant may just have placed the Iyas in jeopardy. Over 15 years, the Iyas has produced a hundred published writers, prize winners and literary grantees in different genres, in several languages, both here and abroad. Through the years, its teaching panel has been nonpareil. Point in fact, the National Artist this prize honors, and in a larger sense, who honors this prize, had been for years, a mainstay of the workshop.”
He was referring to the new conditions for grants set by the National Commission for Culture & the Arts or NCCA — stringent conditions now increasingly being condemned by writers, artists and culture workers as onerous, with all the bureaucratic measures of incredible red tape adopted, that would require scores of vetting signatures from DSWD functionaries, among others. Our friend and colleague Butch Dalisay recently wrote on this ill-conceived arrangement between the NCCA and DSWD. Atty. Pandan continued: “My wish is that young writers (and aren’t we all young writers?) would come together to prevent ourselves from being jailed in government’s stultifying requisites.
“… To the sponsors, a hundred thousand thanks. I dedicate this prize to the Iyas workshop and all who have been part of it, and who will be part of it, perhaps long long into the future.”
Rayboy Pandan was a Fellow in the Silliman University National Writers Workshop in Dumaguete City way back in 1984. That was a very strong batch of young writers he was part of. Memory should serve me right in recalling that this included Connie Maraan as the lone female Fellow for Fiction, together with Pandan, Alex Lee (also for fiction), playwright Ed Cabagnot, and poets Victor Jose Peñaranda, the late lamented Clovis Nazareno of Bohol, and Fidelito Cortes and Ramon Bautista, both now in the US.
Pandan’s novel proper — after an introduction and an interview questionnaire addressed by a Simeon Paterno in 1962 — begins with a lengthy first paragraph that quickly establishes its tone, diction and ambition:
“Ciudad Man Santos, Early Afternoon, September 2, 1941.
“Had any of us been fortunate enough to espy Simeon Paterno marching on to the abandoned consulate where Pedro Man Santos was being held prisoner, we might have forgiven ourselves for presuming — a grave miscalculation, our historians have since officially assured us — that the war between them had finally ended. Paterno himself would have been oblivious to our error as he walked towards the bay (gilded even then by the myth of our century as Pax Americana, if only by reason of that lopsided scrape between our already crutch- carrying colonizer and the then-hatchling empirebuilder), even as he now slowed down to stuttering steps, permitting him to see the skies now drier and clearer than it had ever seemed during the almost halfdecade just ended, counting all the hours, minutes and seconds of unmitigated butchery and even the months, weeks and days of boredom in between. Only then did he attempt to corroborate the weather by peering at his finger bones for some sign they may have started to stiffen. As a child, every tumble in the thermometer had caused Paterno’s fingers to tighten, his carpal bones to click and finally, either of his hands to clatter horrendously, upsetting certain local breeds of dogs within his arm’s length. By chirps and whirrs, these same digits would religiously chronicle imperceptible rises and falls in some contiguous hygrometer, allowing him to pronounce, at the half-hour, how dry or humid the day was or was to become. These parts had even proclaimed minor earthquakes in the vicinity of the predictor, and once, a storm fomenting in another country. Years later, when he had confessed this curiosity to Man Santos, Man Santos offered to market the feat to the carnivals, before the three of them — including the incredulous Regina who had somehow sniffed out their scheme — decided that this ability was simply freakiness but by no means indicia of genius. Also, the bones had started to lose their tenor in his adolescence, convincing Paterno that what he had at hand was fakery all along. Now, even if his fingers would occasionally startle him with an unexpected frisson, the even rarer predictions had altogether missed their marks past his twenty-first year. But if Paterno was baiting himself into the hope that peace between him and Man Santos was forthcoming, it was because the disquiet hanging over his head would have fooled even the most forlorn into some such expectation. Now, likewise the cold, dim water on the bay was losing its fever. On its unreflecting surface, no late birds of whatever hue or cry disturbed his illusion. In the distance, the “unflappable” sun, as his English professor at the colegio, as that extraordinary Thomasite and amateur aviator-cum-aeroplane-crasher with the extraordinarily evil-looking not to mention evil-smelling armpits, might have “extricated,” as said sun-smelling O’Reilly on mornings half past seven might have extruded once provoked by his mid-morning habit of a quarter-liter of his favorite malt whisky, was starting to pancake, its yellow-ochre poaching on the earth’s darker seam. From where Paterno had stopped, whatever he could locate of the sea and the sky, whether shimmering surf or soft-skinned world above it, was becoming indistinct as the sea waves had closed up to misappropriate the hue of heaven.”
Hearty congratulations to our old buddy Rayboy, and thanks for the follow-up blowout of paella, tapas, wine and Kavalan single malt whisky enjoyed in the company of other old friends: Jimmy Abad, Danton Remoto, Susan Lara, Marjorie Evasco, Shirley Lua and Victor “Bimboy” Penaranda. We all look forward to the immediate publication of your Bautista Award-winning novel.
Well, it does seem that President Benigno Aquino III will hold fast to his ‘dedma’ stance on this matter, likely occasioned by the controversy over his disapproval of Nora Aunor’s inclusion in that batch.