Writing as Tourist or Tourist Guides

Here's my guide to the talk I gave two weeks ago in UP Baguio in front of literature teachers. To make up for my incompetence, I also made a PowerPoint presentation. He he he

In 2009, Baguio City will be having its Centennial and I was planning to come up with an anthology of poems on Baguio. What I realized was that there are so many poems on Burnham Park, pine trees and strawberries.

I, who consider himself a Baguio poet, do not have a poem on Burnham Park, pine trees and strawberries. What is wrong with me?

There were some instances when friends who became judges in Palanca or whatever told me that they thought a poem, essay or short story came from me because it was about the Cordillera. I am not saying that they made the piece win because of that.

My early poems really weren't about Cordillera. I wasn't really into "poetry of place" then and now, more about "poetry of time." I was writing poems on Pugo and Tugo and Katy dela Cruz. If I wrote about Baguio, it was about the "pageantry of the past.' I was writing about Chainus Guirey, the Carnival Queen from the Cordillera.

I think I only became conscious about the relation of Baguio to my poems when the poet Francis Macansantos asked me about it. He was writing about the young Baguio poets in the late 1990s and I casually mentioned that I can only write my poems in Baguio. It was just satori, a lightning thought. It wasn't something I imposed on myself then. It just dawned to me that I have not written my poems anywhere else.

But after saying that, I believed in it or I have to believe in it. Everyone has a ritual in writing. That has to be mine. I can find the "germ" of my poem anywhere but the writing, at least the first draft, had to written by longhand in Baguio. I should be sober, although the spark often comes after drinking beer. And usually I write in the so-called small hours, 2 to 4 in the morning when everybody else are asleep.

That is why my blog is unholyhours.blogspot.com.

That said, the poem would be there waiting.

If only, it would be that easy.

A Baguio writer has a whole knapsack or pasiking of things to consider before he can write his first word.

First, Baguio, Cordillera or highland? My parents were all born in Ilocos Norte but I was born here. They were the only ones who decided to migrate to Baguio. Some of my cousins, even those who decided to migrate to Hawaii joined the "Samahang Ilocano" fraternity but I wasn't really up to it.

I worked for ten years for a left-leaning NGO concerned with indigenous peoples rights and yet I encounter some shallow people reminding that I am Ilocano and not Igorot.

I thought of myself as a Baguio boy. In the 1980s, "Cordillera" became a byword here. Many were like are migrants from the lowlands and not Igorots but many of my classmates, playmates and friends are. "Cordilleran" was seen as a compromise.

Then there was the question of language. Baguio is seen as the "Little America." We grew up with John Hay and AFRTN. We were dollar-ispokening in High school and were not allowed to speak in Ilocano and Filipino. And yet, when I joined the UP Writer's Workshop, I was in the category of "poetry in Filipino."

I used to say that I write in Filipino when I have a problem with my country and English when I have a problem with myself but I myself don't believe that.

I used to write Ilocano poems but Baguio Ilocano is so hybrid compared to the Bannawag Ilocano.

Then, of course, there is the problem of subject matter. Should I write about Burnham Park, strawberries, pine trees and Banaue Rice Terraces?

Ten years ago, I was also invited to talk here about "Writing in the Cordillera."

I talked about Sinai Hamada, the founder of Baguio Midland Courier. But before that, Sinai was known as one of the best fictionist in the 1930s. He was winning awards for his short stories then. Why did he turn to journalism?

I said then that maybe because there were a lot to explain about the Cordillera and maybe Sinai wanted to be of service with his people by educating them first. I always liked to believe that "Tanabata's Wife" was his Igorot mother because he described her so sensitively and lovingly.

The ghost of Sinai is like Mount Sinai to many writers here. Many journalists in Baguio started as poets but they have their own reasons for shifting as I have mine.

Many of course did not go back to being creative writers. Three years, a dying Peppot Ilagan asked me to read his poem on lost love and Teachers Camp for a poetry reading one Valentines Day.

I can not bear to do it and resolved on his grave that I will go back to writing poems or at least come out with my own book of poems.

There are still a lot to explain about the Cordillera now but should we, supposedly the creative writers of Baguio , relegate ourselves as tourist guides?

But then it was Jorge Luis Borges who said that that "writing is nothing more than a guided dream."
We are all essentially tourist guides of our dreams. In another instance, Borges said, "In my dreams, I am always in Buenos Aires."

In journalism, we have what we call "parachute journalists.' These are journalists from outside who come to our area, stay for a few days and then write like they are experts.

Fortunately, there are no "parachute poets or fictionists." How else do you explain Borges' dictionary of imaginary beings? Or Tolkien and Middle Earth?

I have nothing about poems on strawberries and Burnham Lake. But I don't want to be labeled as a "regional writer" just because I live outside Manila. Also I do not know everything about Cordillera. I am still learning, just like all of you here.

Margaret Atwood in her "Lives of the Poets" said:

"Everyone thinks writers must know the inside of the human brain, but that is wrong. They know less, that's why they write. Trying to find what everyone else takes for granted."

Write about Baguio after the tourists come. Write about Lakandula St. instead of Burnham Park. Write about Burnham Park. Write like a tourist or a tourist guide. But the main thing is to write.