Beyond the Classroom: Essays on Living

By Asuncion David Maramba

A collection of essays as testament to a teacher’s many-sided engagement with the world.

Every page is filled with wisdom and awe for the things we take for granted.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9789712729102

Book preview

ESSAYS ON LIVING

BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

ASUNCION DAVID MARAMBA

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Copyright to this digital edition © 2006 by

Asuncion David Maramba

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ISBN 9789712729102 (e-book)

Version 1.0.1

To my husband and children

TABLE OF CONTENTS

FOREWORD

TEACHER ASUNCION WRITES

EUGENIA DURAN APOSTOL

•

When a teacher speaks, her words go into the ear of her pupil and resonate in that pupil’s mind and heart. The teacher’s listeners, though, are confined to the classroom.

When a teacher writes, her words enter the eye of the reader and resonate in the reader’s mind and heart. Her readers are multiplied endlessly through the newspaper or magazine where her writing can be found.

In a newspaper or magazine, the teacher’s writing competes for attention with other writing minds, mostly those of non-teachers.

In a book by a teacher, however, the teacher’s thoughts are all there, competing for attention only with one another. And if a teacher’s thoughts are brilliant, you have a diamond in your library.

Such a diamond is this book by Asuncion David Maramba. The facets of this diamond, as the table of contents attests, are seven in all, each one sparkling with literary gems gathered from a scholarly life.

Teacher Asuncion learned to appreciate literature and history from the nuns of St. Theresa’s College, Manila. But she had natural talent to start with—imagination, love of language, the ability to share thought and feeling. That certainly helped the appreciation acquired in school to grow wings.

Her talent impelled her to share her love for life and literature not only with her classroom audience but also with students outside the classroom. That is why we find her essays in this book and in an earlier volume.

I am personally proud that many of Teacher Asuncion’s essays first saw print in magazines and newspaper that I published. She never got a rejection slip from us— in fact, we looked forward to every piece she sent.

How could we reject her review of the movie The Piano, entitled Pianissimo, Fortissimo, in Section I?

Or quarrel with her piece on the Pinoy, the Tsinoy, and the Tisay in their sociological leveling off in Section II?

Or not take her side in defense of Benny Tan and his family in Section III?

Or disagree with her that OCW’s are heroic victims rather that heroes in Section IV?

Or gloss over her nine suggestions for a better pilgrimage to the Holy Land in Section V?

Or ignore her thoughts on the Catholic Church’s edifice complex in Section VI?

Or trivialize her senior moments in Barrio Gatid, where she has built the resthouse she describes in Section VII?

The last section contains some of my favorite pieces because they bare very personal sentiments. I am sure they will gladden your heart as well because through them, Teacher Asuncion provides a positive answer to the question: Why keep one’s life to oneself?

Why, indeed, when one has a sparkling diamond worthy to be shared?

PREFACE

LIVING—BEYOND THE CLASSROOM

•

A classroom can literally enclose a teacher within its four walls. Such an insidious closetting can happen to any teacher. That unforseen effect is to blame for cruel adjectives given to the teaching profession—narrow, insular, parochial, bookish, and inflexible.

Without even trying, remaining in the classroom comes almost naturally. There is so much work to do. Let the world outside take care of itself. The classroom can get to be a comfort zone where a conscientious teacher can feel good about doing a good job. What’s more, the psychic income of students learning through her and regarding her with affection and esteem can be exceedingly rewarding.

I was not exempt from the temptation of staying within the four walls. I shunned administrative positions. The farthest I got was that of English Department Head. All I wanted to be was a Classroom Teacher, and that is what I was for forty years.

But the classroom can also open wide its doors and lead teacher and student out into the world of life and living; having planted the seed that will germinate and grow to behold the world at large and to connect with whatever the world has to offer; propagating itself and spreading, without getting crushed by harsh and wild elements.

At first the teacher’s travels are vicarious peregrinations, fruit of her classroom readings and her faint connections with the outside world. Then the forays outside turn physical and real and venture further. The teacher is on her way.

The latter case, I hope, is what has happened to me—not by the way that I caused it to happen. In my younger days I was the blandest person on earth, too timid to set foot on foreign shores. I opted for a local MA at the then Ateneo Graduate School, while many of my contemporaries and both my siblings joined the race abroad on Fullbright, Smith-Mundt, and other scholarships. Since that was the trend of the day, I held the application forms myself but that was as far as I went.

But get beyond the classroom, I managed to do—deep thanks to the lynchpins of my eventual engagement with the world.

In Grades I and II, Sister Beata and Sister Robert Marie and the rest of the warm American nuns at Maryknoll gave me the English language. No apologies to xenophobists but English opened the world to me.

At St. Theresa’s College, Manila were two unforgettable college mentors par excellence. Mother Ignatia, philosophy and literature professor, set and sent me traveling into the past and the present, around the world and not just for eighty days but for the rest of my life. I exaggerate not, for those units of philosophy, literature, and history made me recognize western culture and Europe like an old friend when I finally got there. And there was Mother Anunciata, education professor who established the terms and the character of my teaching career.

They, plus the fact, that literature, my major, is so all-encompassing, embracing history, sociology, culture, psychology, philosophy, etc., that I could not help but get out of a classroom cocoon. Imperceptively the journeys of literature must have translated into my life. Even before I set foot outside my country, I was, in a sense, already traveling.

Speaking of traveling and of literature, someone once told me that no one can teach literature well unless he or she has traveled. I found the remark unkind because scores of literature teachers including myself in the first decades of my teaching had not or could never ever go abroad. Secretly I thought of wide-visioned poet Emily Dickenson who hardly left home.

But thanks to my husband who enabled me finally to travel beyond the Philippines, for who can do so on a meager teacher’s salary. The travels confirmed and enriched everything that the classroom taught me, delicious dessert to a full meal—tasted for the first time, relished in memory, renewed and repeated with every trip of discovery, recall, and recognition.

And decisively, a historical event pushed me and countless others beyond the classroom to engage the world and do what had to be done. The shot on the tarmac on August 21, 1983 that felled Benigno Aquino Jr. and the brief historical stretch in 1983 to 1986 made sure that four walls would not a classroom make. The country had become the classroom.

An even more adventurous kind of traveling which can be done right where one is, is the forever-journey of mind, soul, and spirit which can be challenging, disturbing, bolder, and quite without limit. To a great extent, the classroom started it all, whose walls by this time had tumbled down.

To this day the learning and unlearning continue. Forty years a teacher and a student longer than that; the looking and the listening, the changing and the growing, the asking and the answering, the unsettling and the quieting, continue. It surprises and annoys me no end that all this seems to go on day to day, even accelerated in my senior citizenship after the classroom teaching was rudely ended by two long episodes of double vision. It’s not just books. And it’s not go-go-go, as you might think. It’s also stopping-pausing-resting and at this stage, even that, especially that, is not only learning, it’s living.

HERE THEN is my second and probably last collection of essays, for my columns are essays; a sampling of a life beyond the classroom.

As in View from the Middle, the first collection of my columns in 1991, everything within these covers is still middle except for middle age which I no longer am. I am now a bonafide senior citizen. To quote myself I’m very firm about my being middle: middle class, middle force, middle age (no longer), middle generation (now edging to end generation), middle way—one who makes a fetish of moderation, an eclectic who pulls out from any system what she likes to believe in or live by. This is the life I am most familiar with and the only life I dare write about.

I have always made a case for the middle. The very poor is democracy’s burden; the unmindful super-rich, its embarrassment. It’s the middle, struggling as it is in this country that will carry this democracy. What one would do to improve the prospects of this emasculated and emigrating middle. Who can just stand by and watch it swallowed by poverty or disappearing in diaspora.

But this is a book to enjoy. Even the earnest and endangered middle is entitled to make its life lighter and brighter. I hope the topics and the selections between these covers will do so.

ADVENTURES with The Word in language, literature, teaching, writing, reading, media; what it is to be Pinoy and what it is to be human, joined in the section called "Being Pinoy, Being Human; Going Places, Watching People" in spellbinding trips—these topics have continued to engross my journalistic eye.

With a bite on my lips, I found out that this last decade I hardly wrote on the family, quite prominent in the first book in a section all by itself. This was not surprising for in the seventies and eighties, my husband and I were still surrounded by our children and their friends; but now the nest is empty.

Suffering the same fate are politics and governance, such high-profile and hope-filled topics in the eighties that they took the very first section of that book. This time I have put together a few articles on politics and history in Checkered History and Politics. In Some Men and Women, I have joined the few persons I have written about with some columns on women.

But riveting for me lately is the Institutional Church under The Church—Changing and Unchanging. I must be trying to say something.

An entirely new section is Very Personal which is practically autobiographical in a probing sort of way.

THE ARRANGEMENT of the articles within their respective sections are generally chronological except in some cases where two or more columns on the same topic as for examples: on EDSA, on language or on teaching, or on Church and State, are better juxtaposed. There is also a sprinkling of dated pieces, in which specifics, if updated, as in What Do Young People Read These Days and Culture at No Cost, could as well be talking of now.

Most of the columns here included appeared in Commentary in the op-ed pages of the Philippine Daily Inquirer in the last decade up to the present and in my six-year column, Humanly Speaking in the Manila Chronicle from 1986 to 1991. A few earlier ones were printed in my On Living column in Veritas Newsmagazine and in Philippine Panorama. First publication data are printed below every essay.

I’ve never written a line of poetry or of fiction or of drama, but I’d like to be remembered as an essayist whose articles happened to be printed as columns, an offspring, you might say, of literature in a felicitous union with journalism.

A very special feature and bonus of this book are the cartoons used to illustrate the section divisions. Drawn by no less than the late Nonoy Marcelo, Jose Tence Ruiz, and June Aquino, most of the cartoons illustrated several of my columns in the Manila Chronicle and Veritas Newsmagazine in the eighties. I thank these renowned cartoonists for allowing the use of those cartoons again.

And now I most sincerely thank Eugenia Duran Apostol for writing the Introduction to this book

THANK YOU to all the persons responsible for my writing career since I first wielded the pen in the fifties in the Orion, the news and literary magazine of St. Theresa’s College, Manila. Perhaps Elenita Corpus Bolipata and Erlinda Villamor have forgotten that it was through them that I first saw print in the outside world.

I wish to thank:

Eugenia Duran Apostol who printed my earliest articles in Women and Home back in 1964 and then Mr. and Ms. in 1983 after a hiatus of child-rearing.

Ambassador Bienvenido Tan of Bookmark who published the anthology, Philippine Contemporary Literature, my first textbook now on its way to its forty-fifth year.

The brothers Benjamin and Alfredo Ramos who brought me into the world of National Bookstore, Solar Publishing, and Cacho Hermanos.

Felix B. Bautista who sight unseen accepted my manuscripts for Cor Manila and then Veritas Newsmagazine where I began regular column writing.

Lorna Kalaw-Tirol for my column, Humanly Speaking in the Manila Chronicle.

Jorge V. Aruta, Opinion Editor of Philippine Daily Inquirer for printing me, sight unseen, since 1992.

Karina A. Bolasco of Anvil Publishing for the books I have conceptualized and edited in the past decade.

HAPPY READING!

Asuncion David Maramba

2006

June Arvino

I

THE WORD

From Veritas, May 12, 1985

Adventures with the word have taken much of my life. Written in books, magazines, periodicals; spoken in the classroom; heard in seminars and conferences; watched on stage, on TV, and in movies—words have indeed surrounded me.

My affair with words has filled forty years of teaching, almost two decades of column writing, a long stretch of book editing; nurtured on a bedrock of reading, studying, play-going, movie-going, and all kinds of conversations: sensible, inconsequential, erudite, entertaining.

Especially enriching and humanizing for me has been the teaching of literature, so all encompassing that it gathers into its embrace history, sociology, culture, psychology, philosophy—name it. Pardon the bias, but the views and viewpoints, the visions and values that inhere in the very stuff of literature are hard to equal.

Alas, the reading, the play-going, and the movie-going have been greatly reduced. The eyesight is no longer what it used to be. Unfortunately, much of what is left of words for an aging eyesight comes through television, the one vehicle of words that can turn out trash like a vending machine. Otherwise the lifetime experience with words has been a romance.

The columns here deal with language and literature, teaching, reading, writing, journalism. There is a clutch of book reviews, a play review, and a movie review. My words may not transport you as far afield as the words of the masters have carried me, but if they knot your forehead or bring a smile on your face, then they shall have given you some pause and pleasure for the moment—and that’s good enough for me. That’s what the familiar essay is supposed to do. And that’s what I really am—an essayist turned columnist.

THERE’S A NEED TO KNOW LITERATURE

•

To even suggest that a knowledge of literature could help the state of the nation would elicit a big laugh.

Literature is one of the most maligned subjects in school and out of it. It is especially maligned for its uselessness and irrelevance. But let us take just one tiny point in which the mechanics of the conventional short story could be useful to government matters.

If people in Government just had a sense of plot—of rising action, crisis-climax, falling action—they would realize that the story of our country is way past the rising action. The build-up of the various plots of our story has been taking place since decades ago.

They would also realize that our story is far from being a grade school story with a single plot. Ours is a knotty story composed of several plots, simultaneously moving, horizontally, vertically, and cyclically. We’ve got the poverty plot, the landlord plot, capital and labor, the insurgency, the American presence, the ideological cauldron, the minorities plot, etc.

And like a well-constructed, albeit difficult story, these plots are mercilessly intertwined with one another. You can’t unravel one without getting entangled with another. Unplug the human rights plot and you get a short circuit in the military. Dismantle feudalism and the landlords so easily transfer their allegiance.

But most importantly, people in Government would realize that most of our major plots are now at crisis point in varying degrees of seriousness. Tingling at the very peak is our long tale of poverty—59 percent of Filipino families are poor; three million families out of 9.5 million families subsist below the poverty line; there are seven million squatters in urban centers; much of labor which makes up a third of the population or approximately 21.5 million receives wages below the poverty line; 10 million children and youth are in especially difficult circumstances. Flowing from that major plot and as constant as it is are sub-plots like redistribution of wealth, unemployment, and land reform.

Ideologically, the country is also at peak, with ideologies of different shades linking up with the poverty plot, linking up with labor, linking up with the insurgency, linking up, too, with the American presence, and with economic recovery. Chronologically, the climax of the bases question is 1991, but we’re in crisis about it now.

After building up for centuries, our cultural communities in the Cordilleras and the Muslims in Mindanao are at the highest point of political and cultural awareness. So are we here in Metro Manila.

The plot has more than thickened. It has jelled in a very palpable and explosive crisis. Any literature teacher will tell you that this is the most delicate and sensitive stage in a story. She will also tell you that you cannot dilly-dally too long at this point.

You can stretch the crisis only so much and survive it for only so long, but like a boil or an overflowing dam, it has got to burst. She will also tell you that crisis points to climax which must come to break the suspense. In fact, the military plot (there’s a pun for you) burst wide open last August 28.

The story of our country has been in crisis too long already. The suspense and tension are more than enough to make Cassandras of us all or send us off to Australia or Canada. The situation is aching for the climax, or the structure will crack up. In Philippine literature, Nick Joaquin has been known to sustain suspense longer than is normally possible. Can the architects of our story do a Nick Joaquin?

If people both in and out of Government had a sense of plot, they would not keep misreading our story and insist on aborting the inevitable climax. Panicking landlords would not cling to their land. They could hold on to it for a while in the manner of an anti-climax but a falling action determined by what came before is bound to come. And historically, feudalism, the wealth of a few, the poverty of the majority, inexorably point to redistribution of wealth.

Some congressmen too would not behave as if we were just at the beginning of our story rather than at its climax. And some businessmen who hold their profits close to their hearts would loosen up a bit.

As seen in the last pastoral letter supporting land reform, the Church reads our story better than some public officials; so has the U.S. embassy that has started inviting our congressmen to sound them out; so have some progressive people in Government.

We have already had too many melodramas. This story at hand can turn out to be a tragedy or a comedy (in the sense of something that ends happily). There is no resisting the natural course of events. A credible story will seek its own ending. Life is no exception.

Humanly Speaking, Manila Chronicle

September 21, 1987

MORE ON THE LANGUAGE PROBLEM

•

ONE of the hottest non-political issues in the country that can trigger an argument anytime is the language problem. Many of us don’t even have to budge to get into one such discussion. The preferred language—English, Pilipino, Spanish, the vernaculars—depends on whom you happen to talk to.

If you talk to business executives who regularly go off to conferences abroad, you’ll know what language they’ll be batting for—as if everybody including farmers and fishermen go to conferences abroad and show off their English.

If you talk to persons born prewar and educated on the English-speaking rule, they will rave over how that honed their English to world-class standards and opened all of western culture to them.

If you’re a teacher like me, all you have to do is chat with co-faculty members and you’ll hear the following: Says the Spanish teacher with a rueful shake of his head. Imagine, schools all over the world are boning up on their Spanish and we’re dropping ours.

Says the English teacher: I tell you, how can we hope to keep up with the rest of the world if we drop our English. Says the Pilipino teacher, "Ako, I conduct my classes in Pilipino and I don’t have any of your comprehension and communication problems. Okay sila."

Throw in one rabid xenophobic nationalist who will argue nationalism and you have a full-blown, irresolvable debate on your hands. Admittedly, the nationalist angle is getting lamer, or how do you explain Rizal who wrote in Spanish and to a certain extent, thought European; and how explain the nationalistic modern African writers who wrote in Portuguese, or French, or English, depending on who conquered them?

But all right, let’s assume we go Pilipino. I further assume that we’re not so narrowminded as to believe in cultural isolation; nor so backward as to accept professional and scientific stagnancy.

One very concrete matter should bother us. How do we get to translate even a minimum must-list for every field of study just so we catch up with the tremendous backlog and keep up with new publications; just so we remain literate and reasonably up-to-date?

Narrow the field further by considering only translations from English to Pilipino and not vice-versa. Even on such modest goals, the numbers are mind-boggling.

Do we have a plantilla of translators, well-trained, well-funded, professional, full-time, with expertise in the two languages and the two cultures concerned?

Let’s focus on one discipline—literature. Before me is Vida Madrigal’s translation of Manuel Bernabe and Jesus Balmori’s 700-line Man-Woman: A Poetic Debate from Spanish into English. Ms. Madrigal took two full months for basic translation and final refinements and polishing excluding familiarization with the authors’ culture and styles. How about the rest of Philippine literature written in Spanish, English, and the vernaculars?

The most publicized translations into Pilipino are Rolando Tinio’s translations of Chekhov, Arthur Miller, Moliere, Shakespeare; and former senator Soc Rodrigo’s translation of Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac. How about the rest of a minimum list of plays, of novels, poems, etc. from Asia, Africa, Latin America, Anglo-America, and the rest of Europe, from Classical Times or even earlier Folk Periods to Modern Times, lest our literature majors become literary morons?

It will take eons to catch up and to keep up with even a marginal list. I submit that this condition in literature obtains in the rest of the disciplines from astronomy to veterinary medicine.

Last December, Philippine PEN’s annual conference dealt with Translating Philippine Literature.

Translated to or from English, Pilipino, Chinese, Japanese, and the vernaculars were names like NVM Gonzalez, Jose Garcia Villa, Bienvenido Santos, F. Sionil Jose, Celso Carunungan, Paul Stephen Lim, Mars Foronda, Isagani Cruz, Teodoro Agoncillo, Liwayway Arceo, Nick Joaquin, Cristobal Cruz, Rogelio Sikat, etc.; titles like the Noli and Fili, Without Seeing the Dawn, Distance to Andromeda, Sa Mga Kuko ng Liwanag, Of Cock and Hens, the Ifugao Hudhud, Ibong Adarna, Doctrina Cristiana, etc.

Juan Hidalgo, editor of Gumil aptly described the situation. Active as this association of Ilocano writers is, the output has been katiting, considering the vastness of the field.

A paper by Fe Aldave Yap showed no lack of seminars, workshops, conferences (we’re exceedingly fond of these activities), no lack of GOs and NGOs who do translations (eight government agencies in bureaucratic tangles of subcommissions and committees, upwards, downwards and sidewards; and three national organizations of language translators), no lack of words of encouragement from government officials (a vigorous translation program shall be encouraged, supported, and rewarded).

But the bottom line is there are very few translators, no money and no lead agency like say, a National Translation Center. Efforts look dissipated and uncoordinated.

Meanwhile, let’s go multilingual if we can hack it and be enriched by the cultures carried by those languages; or struggle along and suffer the schizophrenic effects of bilingualism; or settle with one language and accept its limitations.

Humanly Speaking, Manila Chronicle

March 4, 1991

A CASE FOR TEACHING TEACHERS

•

As school opening nears, my thoughts turn not only to students but also to teachers—especially to the 72,981 teachers in the college and university levels, very many of whom recoil at research.

A school is only as good as its teachers. There is no word about researchers. Even as technology marches by—radio, movies, audio-visual aids, TV, tape, computer—a good teacher has never yet been rendered obsolescent. A well-financed