MGA MUMUNTING PANANAW SA PYESTA NG MGA LIBRO: PAMBUNGAD SA SERYE

May post si Toni Tiu ng celebrated Wifely Steps blog kung saan tinukoy nya ang aklatan ng kanilang high school na nagsilbing refuge nya sa tuwing sya'y nagnununi-nuni. Dun sa comments sa post, halos lahat ng bumisita ay kapwa nag-echo na ang aklatan din sa kanilang school bukol ang nagsilbing sanktwaryo ng kanilang taimtim (o maitim) na pagninilay-nilay.

Count me in. Wala akong ipinagkaiba kay Toni at sa kanyang commenters sa pagtutukoy sa library (sorry sa Filipino purists; sagwa kasi ng aklatan, o aklat, parang olat, o peklat) bilang isang refuge na di naiiba sa simbahan. Ako man, library din ang aking pinagkatalagahan ng aking pagkabata; iba nga lang siguro ang rason ng aking pagpupunyagi.

Nung bata pa ako (at bata pa din si Sabel), public elementary school teacher si Inang. Tuwing summer, ang job description nya sa school ay property custodian at sya ang one-woman army sa school library. E di syempre ginagawa nya e binibitbit nya kaming magkakapatid sa library for various reasons: para ma exspose kami sa libro, para may katulong sya sa pagkakatalogo at pagsasalansan ng imbentaryo, at para din hindi kami maiwan sa bahay kung saan ang tangi naming gagawin ay ang magsapakan lang.

Isang summer dun sa library, habang abala si Inang sa pagkwenta ng mga titulo at nagsisipagbasa ang mga utol ko, panay ang buklat ko ng mga libro. Sabi nung isang ate ko, ambilis mo namang magbasa, bubuksan mo lang ang libro tapos ka na agad. Sabi ko, tange, hindi ako nagbabasa, may hinahanap ako. Sabi nya, anong hinahanap mo, alikabok? Sabi ko, hindi, eto, sabay pakita sa kanya kung ano ang tinutukoy ko.

Limang piso.

Nakakita ako ng limang piso dun sa isang libro, at inisip ko na baka may iba pang tatanga-tangang pupils na pinagkamalang piggy bank ang libro.

Wag kayong matawa. Nung nasa elementary pa ako, kaya akong buhayin ng limang piso sa loob ng isang buwan. (Syempre ngayon hindi na. Nung umuwi ako sa Pinas last December, binigyan ko yung 6 na taong pamangkin ko sa pinsan ng 20 pesos. Tiningnan nya lang ako ng "I can't believe you're doing this to me" na tingin. Sabi ng pinsan ko - nanay nya - wala nang halaga sa bata yang binibigay mo.)

Fast forward to now. Syempre dahil sa training ko mula kay Inang at sa mga kapatid ko na mahilig magsipagbasa, naging voracious reader din ako. Sa Borders o iba pang bookstore, panay ang buklat ko sa iba-ibang libro hindi dahil naghahanap ako ng five dollars kundi dahil binabasa ko ang mga intros at prefaces.

Yung idea ko nung bata ako na may yaman sa libro, ganun pa din ngayon. Iba nga lang ang kanilang ipinagkahulugan.

Itutuloy po.

MAGIC SATURDAY

Four years ago in about the same time of the year as today, I was in downtown Miami for the Miami International Book Fair. I bought a lot of good books, some rare, at very cheap prices, but the blessing of the day came in late afternoon when I listened to the concert of Dave Barry, Amy Tan and some of their writer-friends who formed this swaggering band playing 60's tunes. While I was scrambling for space to get close to the stage, there was this guy wearing a fake afro who was somewhat shoving me so he too could get closer to the stage. As it turned out he was with the band. Like the other band members, he was also a famous writer, and his forte was legal thrillers. His name's Scott Turow.

Three years ago in the same fair, I bought another stack of books and one of them - The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty - came out to be one of the greatest short story collections I have read in my long life.

Two years ago, again in the same fair, I listened to Barack Obama's lecture at the Guzman Theatre in a SRO audience. I got his autographed book after that, but neither his lecture nor his book made me envision that he was going to be the first African-American president of the United States; it was the number and composition of people who lined up for a long time and in a long queue just to be able to listen to him speak. (Quick note: in front of me in that line was Chris Darden, remember him?)

Then last year, yet again in the same fair, I was sitting on this bench under a canopy, enjoying the radiance of a poem from the anthology book I just bought, when I noticed an interview going on right next to me. It turned out to be Edwidge Danticat's - whose book that year, Brother, I'm Dying, was shortlisted for The National Book Award. After her interview, I pulled enough gut to chat with her, and when I got a copy of her book, she wrote a pretty cool dedication for me. Then in the afternoon I listened to the lectures of South African poet Breyten Breytenbach and Chinese novelist Ha Jin (one attendee even thought I was Ha Jin!)

This year's will be today. In an hour I will bring my butt to the Wolfsson Campus of Miami Dade Community College in downtown Miami to listen to, among others, Russell Banks, Junot Diaz, Joyce Carol Oates and Francine Prose, and will be on a spending spree for books for my development and others' (and when I speak of development, I mean literary development!)

After that I will head off to the Trinity Episcopal Cathedral to watch the Mendelssohn's Elijah concert of the Master Chorale of South Florida, Joshua Habermann, Artistic Director.

Life.

VISIBILITY CLEAR

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison is one of my favorite books, and over William Faulkner's The Sound & the Fury and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn I consider it The Great American Novel. I read this book many years ago, but in the light of the current political headlines I might as well re-ruminate on its greatness now.

Ellison was African-American, and one of the reasons that pushed him into writing the book was to curve through words the image of an intellectual African-American - some kind of a discourse against the then notion that an intelligent black is an oxymoron - and the book, as he says in a latter Introduction, was fashioned as a "raft of hope, perception, and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course towards and away from the democratic ideal".

What, then, is the democratice ideal? More significantly, What, or who, is an Invisible Man?

Ellison, through his alter-ego narrator, explains the metaphor right at the outset of the novel's Prologue:

"I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me."

The invisibility factor springs from the mind of the black narrator who seemingly argues that white America was morally blind to his black predicament, and that his constantly being taken for granted caused him to doubt his very own physical existence - a sad allegory to the breaking down of his self-confidence.

Ellison knew, first-hand, the intensity of the black people's social struggle, but in his readings of literature by and about the blacks, he was astounded by the black-protagonists' lack of intellectual depth - and so he rebounded from this stereotype by making his narrator possess a very intelligent persona. It is no surprise then that the narrator's politics is centrifugal, a thinking that clings towards the left.
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Many years forward and the Invisible Man has evolved into a Barack Obama, a liberal intellectual whose win the last presidential election not only kept the raft of black hope afloat but enabled it to veer towards the democratic ideal - an ideal that transcends the literature of Faulkner and Twain, an ideal that bespeaks of true political equality, an ideal world in the realm of a new American society where the blacks and the whites, the reds, the yellows, and the browns, are visible to one another, one hundred per cent, an ideal where all people regardless of color are capable of kindling and fulfilling the great American ambition.

And so indeed, The African-American Man is now, emphatically, a truly Visible Man.

today i am blue

down with racism, ignorance, world bullying, religious hypocrisy, and bush.

the time is now. we are what we are waiting for!