NOVELIST WROTE ABOUT FILIPINO HEROISM; DEVOTED TO SOCIAL JUSTICE
F. Sionil Jose, author of a dozen socially engaged novels and countless short stories and essays who was sometimes called the grand old man of Philippine letters, and even the conscience of his nation, died Jan. 6 in Manila. He was 97.
Jose’s family said he died at Makati Medical Center, where he had been awaiting an angioplasty operation.
Passionately committed to social justice, Jose often wrote of his anguish over what he saw as his country’s failure to overcome centuries of Spanish colonization, followed by further domination by the United States.
His novels, rich in themes and scenes drawn from his own peasant beginnings, amounted to a continuing morality play about the poverty and class divisions of the Philippines, a nation seemingly in thrall to fiefs, oligarchies and political dynasties.
He said his heroes were “the common people, the foot soldiers who die in the hundreds so that their generals may live.”
Jose wrote more than 35 books, all in English, spinning off political commentary and blog posts along the way. He was a public figure in the world of letters, traveling often to lecture and to attend writers conferences, and was bursting with energy even into his 90s.
He founded the Philippine chapter of PEN, an international writers association. He opened and ran a well-stocked bookshop in Manila, Solidaridad, which published his work and offered books and magazines that were hard to find elsewhere in the Philippines. He also published Solidarity, a monthly journal of “current affairs, ideas and the arts.”
Jose collected a score of awards, grants and fellowships from abroad as well as in the Philippines, where the government named him a National Artist for Literature. His works have been translated into at least 28 languages.
He was not shy about voicing strong opinions, as in 2018 when he criticized some of the work at the National Museum of Fine Arts. “I have lived for 93 years — some say that is already too long,” he wrote, “but for this tired old man the time has not yet come for me to be silent.”
At the core of Jose’s prolific output was a set of five interconnected novels that he called the Rosales Saga, published over a span of 20 years. Beginning with “The Pretenders,” published in 1962, they chronicled the lives of poor migrant farmers, not unlike his own family, as they struggled against the oppression, land-grabbing and corruption of the country’s entrenched elite. Jose also wove in themes and characters from the works of the great Philippine nationalist writer Jose Rizal, whose novels influenced him from an early age.