IT came as a shock to hear of the sudden death of Resil Mojares, National Artist for Literature, prominent and widely admired historian, essayist, short story writer, columnist and authority on the Philippine social scene, from rural areas to entertainment idols to cityscapes and visual perspectives of the original natural environment of urban areas.
Last June, I wrote an article about an important Philippine history book, “Brains of the Nation,” by Resil Mojares. This book first came out in 2006 and was reprinted in 2016 by the Ateneo de Manila University Press. It is now out of print and another edition is badly needed for students, for teachers, for academics, for Filipinos and for the world that is interested in this country.
Resil Mojares, as yesterday’s editorial in this paper described him, is an eminent Filipino scholar, historian, writer and academic. He has written, published and been commended with awards for his extensive body of work, including the establishment of the Cebuano Studies Center at the University of San Carlos in Cebu, which has produced an enviable body of work about the history of Cebu and the Visayas along with a contemporary set of researchers and historians. This is part of Philippine history and sociology that has been overlooked or rather only now added to Philippine studies. It is the vital and essential legacy of Resil Mojares to the Philippine canon.
I first encountered him in a simple book of essays, called “House of Memory,” published in 1997 by Anvil Publishing. It consisted of his columns published in a local Cebu paper over the years, which were, in effect, essays.
They were mostly about Visayan cultural topics like the words used in rural harvests, as well as the word and concept of time alongside agriculture and daily life, eventually a discussion of who coined “Filipino time” and why.
He wrote about everything Visayan from their inherent musicality to their expression of love. And how Cebuanos eat and drink, their rural and urban scenes.
He also wrote about popular and everyday subjects that were familiar which he took a lens to, to make them more than familiar, presenting them as logical, rational and worthy of an important place in the public consciousness.
One of these essays was about Gloria Sevilla, a prominent Visayan actress who led the stars of the Cebuano movie industry, a thriving film production business based in Cebu in the 1950s and early 1960s. These films were black and white movies featuring love stories and adventures from the Visayan perspective. Gloria Sevilla was eventually discovered by the based movie industry and starred in many Tagalog movies. But she was always a Visayan idol. In her later career, she returned to Cebu and put her efforts, including money, into bringing back the Cebuano movie industry which unfortunately eventually died out. Yet it lives on in Mojares’ essay.
Visayan legends are also one of his subjects. One of them is of the woman warrior, Hingyuon, who lived in prehistoric times. According to Mojares, women are mostly invisible in Cebuano history but there is the very visible and much-remembered legend of Hingyuon.
Mojares also says that judging from the Cebuano or Visayan language, it is the liver, not the heart, that is the most important organ not just in medical or physiological terms but as the seat of emotions, including love.
There is, too, a poignant essay about memory triggered when his 5-year-old daughter, while in the car taking him to the airport for a long trip of nine months, told him that she was looking at his face, noting his gestures and memorizing them because she would harken to the memory when he was gone. From that incident, he said that from the dawn of civilization, human beings clung to memories that they choose to build and keep in a lifetime of experiences. They are chosen, selected. It is not a matter of absorbing the universe of them that rises from experience. From selection of experiences is built what the classical writers called a “memory palace” that would be summoned from time to time in life. From this memory palace, Mojares says springs creativity and the pursuit of ideas, the expression of one’s higher humanity.
In sum, the essays of “House of Memory” are a veritable portrait of a social group that finds a universal echo anywhere else. Mojares’ columns, originally in a Cebuano newspaper (“Freeman”), make for his interesting introduction into why columnists write their columns.
He said that when Umberto Eco, the great Italian writer, was asked why he wrote a column, implying it was beneath him for being such a passing thing, Eco replied that everyday events propelled a comment from anyone who was affected in one way or the other and that the comment or the column was a way of reacting with force, with one’s own perspective and for one’s self-satisfaction. It is not that columnists are better than their readers, it is that they are more expressive and do so, understanding that their column is for today and not for tomorrow.
I would like to say that in the case of Mojares along with Eco, their columns have kept their relevance today because of who they were.
There are many other works of Mojares to be read. He has left such an erudite and scholarly legacy that is genuinely from the Filipino perspective that makes it both relevant and precious.
Let us all read him more and understand ourselves better.
