Bienvenido lumbera autobiography vs biography

Did the professor ever regret imprisonment for the things he believed? May saya ako sa pagkakakulong. I was with people of the same mind. But life could never go back to its usual patterns. Even today, Lumbera says the violence of fascism is far from over, claiming lives of workers, farmers, and indigenous peoples. He manages a Facebook account and is easily reached via text.

The professor, even at his old age, refuses to return to the ivory tower he has long forsaken. He smiles at me, and I understand that it is a gentle reminder for hopeful writers like me. I smile in return and make a silent promise. Upon his release from prison during Martial Law, at the urging of Cynthia Nograles, whom he would marry a few months later, he taught at UP Diliman.

Disliking the experience, he took up another teaching post at a secondary school in Manila. He also took up Education units at the Far Eastern University. He also wrote for a Catholic publication. So he immediately went into hiding. He ran away but was eventually caught on the corner of Banawe Street. Fidel Ramos for his release, which pushed through in December Lumbera married Cynthia a few months later.

Few cultures in Asia have been so profoundly affected by contact with the West as that of Filipinos. Spaniards and Americans brought to the islands, among other things, their own languages and literary forms. While Filipinos rejected some foreign elements, they adopted others and formed a unique Asian culture of their own. Inevitably, perhaps, the higher arts came to be dominated by Western models.

Literature was written in Spanish, or English; everything else was mere Filipiniana. This was the view, at least, of the academic establishment and most members of the Spanish and English-speaking classes. The essay, in this sense, is an autobiographical metacommentary, a personal take on Lumbera by Lumbera.

Bienvenido lumbera autobiography vs biography

In his discussion Lumbera proposed a chronology that drew on his own training, assigning the periods before and after the completion of his dissertation to mark the growth of the topic. Before his dissertation, he argued by implication, the serious study of vernacular literature did not gain much headway until the first half of the s when the accelerating process of decolonization encouraged nationalist inquiry into the dynamics of cultural relations between the Philippines and its past colonial masters.

The resulting rediscovery of the hitherto neglected native tradition has led to a fresh and enlightened appreciation of the attempts of our vernacular writers to assert through their works a vision of their society and its future. For Lumbera, the marginalization of vernacular literature cannot be separated from the violence of colonialism, whose consequence is the devaluation, if not invisibility, of local cultural forms, including literature.

Writing in , not long after his rescinded expulsion from the Ateneo, Lumbera must have recalled the academic apartheid on Loyola Heights and how it perpetrated the racist notion of native incompetence as a justification for the white American domination of the Filipino institution. Such a memory must have strengthened his resolve to recuperate the native literary tradition from centuries of colonial denigration.

The subjugation of indigenous culture was to be expected in colonial times, but to see its persistence in the postcolonial present was beyond humiliating. There was no other choice but to assert the newfound legitimacy of native agency. To counter the denigration of vernacular literature, which Lumbera attributed to colonialism, particularly American, he proposed the decolonization of Western-oriented scholarship and methodology, which, he argued, were inimical to the recovery and appreciation of the native tradition.

First, he suggested the overhaul of scholarship and foregrounded the importance of the indigenous context. Filipino scholars, he wrote, were familiar with English and American literature but were woefully unprepared to study literatures in Philippine languages. Second, he argued for a methodology that took into account the specificity of local literary practices.

To view Lumbera as a radical nationalist intellectual whose ideas have proved crucial to the decolonization of Philippine literary studies, in particular, and Philippine studies, in general, is accordingly not unfounded. Did his brand of Filipinization cancel out American colonial logic? In Children of the Postcolony Veric , I have suggested that the emergence of Philippine studies, particularly at the Ateneo, whose humanities and social science research and publishing units enabled knowledge production in the postcolony, was complicit in the covert promotion of US interests in the Philippines during the Cold War.

Lumbera was one of the leading figures in this history of complicity where Filipino decolonizing visions melded, wittingly or unwittingly, with American neocolonial designs after At one level, for instance, his erstwhile Department of English at the Ateneo had been widely perceived as a hotbed of anti-Americanism in the late s.

This impression was borne by the fact that the department assisted in the founding of the Institute of Philippine Literature in , which launched lectures on vernacular writings. When I was writing my book, nothing allowed me to connect Lumbera directly to the CIA-backed foundation.