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“CRITICISM & REVIEWS:

Dance a White HorseTo Sleep and Other Stories, short story collection

Antonio Enriquez. Dance a White Horse to Sleep

Asian and Pacific Writing No. 16, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia,
Brisbane. 330 pages including 13-page glossary. Cloth A$13.95, paperback A$6.95

Library Journal

R.R. Bowker Company

1180 Avenue of the Americas

New York, New York 10036
212 764-1500

Enriquez, Antonio. Dance a White Horse to Sleep.

Univ. of Queensland Prs. dist. by Technical Impex Corp., 5 S Union St., Lawrence, Mass.
01843. (Asian & Pacific Writing). 1977, 330 p. $17; pap. $9.95.

This is the eight volume in the excellent series edited by Michael Wilding and Harry
Aveling. The Filipino author works for the Department of Public Information in
Zamboanga city. The stories are varied, from a tale of a fisherman pitted against the sea
to a complicated story showing the shifts within a family when the father dies. They are
all set in a variety of locations on the island of Mindanao, giving the reader a full
impression of the place and of the fishermen, farmers, teachers, natives, and
newspapermen who live there. The best in the collection --- "Dance a White Horse to
Sleep" and "Spots on Their Wings" among them --- transcend the anecdote and illuminate
general verities in a clear and absorbing way. An interesting collection even if read only
for its lush, harsh, exotic setting.
Page Edwards, Jr.
Haverhill P I .. Mass.

January 15, 1978

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Southern Man
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Dance a White Horse to Sleep

By Antonio Enriquez
University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Brisbane. 330 pages including 13-page
glossary. A$6.95

Even for many Filipinos, the differing religious and social mentalities at work in the
simmering Zamboanga region remain a mystery. Antonio Enriquez is a sensitive
observer who has grown to know the area with a sympathy and understanding which
transcends the pettiness of a family disagreement or the flashing anger of inter-village
rivalry. Time and again in this excellent book of short stories, vague feelings and
interested outsider might have about underlying tensions, the sudden, savage displays of
communal temper or the vivacity and charm of an individual met and well-liked, are
identified and explained with economy and clarity.

Himself a Zamboangueño, Enriquez has travelled extensively throughout the

Philippine south in his capacity as an officer of the Department of Public Information.
His work has caused him to meet countless people: the landed aristocracy, the farmer for
whom a 10-mi. journey might as well be a trip into a foreign land, fishermen whose
livelihoods depend on superstition, elders in countless barrios with time aplenty to spin
tall and wondrous yarns, the cynical and devout city dwellers, young soldiers left
confused and abused after they have fought for the cause, been wounded, decorated and
then allowed to fade away.

No feeling is too slight and no detail is too small to escape the eye of this consummate
storyteller. In the title story, Dance a White Horse to Sleep, a son witnesses how relatives
make off with all his grandfather's worthiest possessions ("... his shaving instrument, box
of medals, the canes and his carpentry tools ...") within hours of his last great struggle to
breathe. In The Wild Boars, a badly wounded old bandit named Etoka is deserted by his
followers in a jungle hut to await the Philippine Constabulary. Instinctively, he knows
they will never catch him because the sharp-tusked, meat-eating pigs will first fight with
him and then over him. "Etoka fought them with his bare hands, fighting them fiercely,
roaring like a beast himself, fighting as though he was not wounded at all, as though
death had not earlier lain so close with him on the bamboo pallet." Later the P.C. patrol
comes across his body, the head half-eaten by the puercos de monte.

Apart from the skill with which he weaves his stories, Enriquez often becomes
melancholy when describing the small, individual cruelties of ethnic misunderstanding or
stupidity. The barrio of Labuan is the setting for the story Asocena (dog supper). A
Zamboangan (sic) boy named Chu witnesses the end of his innocence as a group of
Ilocano fishermen steal his farm dog and then use it for one of the casseroles much loved
by them but regarded by dog-loving Zamboangueos as a meal for savages.

And yet, any sadness within the eighteen stories chosen for this book is diffused with
the tenderness and compassion Enriquez so obviously feels and wants to convey to others
--- others who merely see his home as a troubled place. And the publishers have sought
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to perpetuate his original intentions by leaving Tagalog and Spanish expressions, too
difficult to explain in English, as they were written by the author.

It is a technique which works well in Enriquez' stories. With the aid of a short but
well-compiled glossary, sentences are allowed to remain fluid and concise, and in their
correct context. Rather than disrupt the economy of style which seems to come so
naturally to the author, his publishers have left him as he is. With Southeast Asian writers
now sowing the seeds of greater regional understanding and interaction, and even
discussing the possibility of an A.S.E.A.N. language, this book represents a workable
and eminently readable compromise through the use of English.

Jacob Wu

ASIAWEEK
December 9, 1977
Vol. 3 No. 49

>>>>>>

Kabar Seberang
Series 4

Antonio Enriquez - Dance a White Horse to Sleep and Other Stories

Asian and Pacific Writing 8, University of Queensland Press, 1977

Writing in 1953 on the future of Philippine literature, Leopold Yabes allowed that
Philippine literature in English had already achieved some technical excellence but he
found much of it "largely escapist and two-dimentional." Its future, he said, depended on
how closely writers would express the hopes, fears and aspirations of their own people
and on the greatness of soul which alone would invest their writing with the stamp of
greatness.
It is difficult to claim greatness of soul for any man until his life's work is known, but
there is a breach of understanding, a depth of insight, a sensitivity and a flexible
creativity in the work of Antonio Enriquez that give his short stories already an intimation
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of greatness. Enriquez is a generation younger than the better known Nick Joaquin and
Francisco Sionil Jose, but already his work invites comparison with theirs, and in none of
these writers is it possible to find the escapism and flatness that Yabes complained of
twenty-five years ago.
If conflict and balance of tensions are the elements of all art, the Philippines today
supply an infinite variety of these in the subtlest degree as the raw material for literature,
and the short story form is an excellent vehicle for conveying their essence. Enriquez'
stories are set on the island of Mindanao where the conflict between the barrio and the
city, the old and the new, and the Muslim Moros and Christians supply bases of the
stories. But some of the stories also transcend race and region and time, being concerned
with the bewilderment, rebellion and the insights of childhood as in Son, Asocena, Iguana
and The Night I Cry. But even here the universal themes are grounded in a specific
Filipino culture and depend upon the sensitive presentation of mores for their true value
as art.
There is no deliberate evocation of the exotic, no suggestion of rendering local thing
curious or attractive for the literary tourist, in Enriquez' work. He has as a writer a high
sense of delicadeza, of honour and tradition, which seems to make absolute fidelity to the
truth as he sees it his first compulsion. But while the delicadeza of the Spanish Filipino
tradition maybe his personal moral guide as a writer, he seems also to comprehend the
adat, the unwritten customary law and respect, the interior moral imperative that governs
the conduct of Filipino minorities like the Moros. It is because he writes first for his own
people, and is exploring for them the subtleties and complexities of their lives, and of
their past, present and possible future, that his work is valuable to foreigners. The title
story, Dance a White Horse to Sleep, introduces the young surveyor, Alberto Gonzales,
descendant of a proud Spanish ruling family of Zamboanga, the chief city of Mindanao.
Gonzales returns home for the funeral of his grandfather, an aristocrat who before the war
and the Americans kept always three or four white riding horses. Alberto's determination
to have the hearse drawn by a white horse, incongruously followed by a fleet of fifty
motor buses for the mourners, results in the death of the tenant Ciano, when the horse
takes fright and bolts. The story, like many others, can be read as an allegory without
doing violence to its reality. For the work of the surveyor is to travel the land and map it
for the future, and as he gets to know the land he must learn more about himself in
relation to the land. Alberto, the first of his family to require a science and move out to
the uncharted province of Cotabato, also learnt his sense of delicadeza and the story of
the white horses from his family. In bringing together the noisy mechanical buses and the
white horse to support the traditional respect paid to a former gobernadorcillo, he brings
about the death of Ciano. But the tenant, in whose veins flowed "the servile blood of one
who is a tenant himself, but now among the few living on land remaining from the
original vast Gonzales holdings of the Spanish era" conspires in his own death, for
although Ciano protested, "This horse is crazy ... I won't be responsible for him
tomorrow," he yields his better judgment to the demands of his traditional master.
Three more stories, The Surveyor, The Old Bridge and Spots on Their Wings, follow
Alberto Gonzales into Cotabato where he is in charge of a team of men setting up
triangulation towers and surveying for the erection of dams and irrigation systems in the
hill country of the primitive and proud Moros. In Cotabato Gonzales treads more
delicately than in the city where his way was more than half determined by the paths of
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his ancestors. His actions are not destructive as in Dance a White Horse to Sleep. Here
Gonzales is a stranger, exploring the territory of others and acutely sensitive to the
respect owed to their customs and mindful of his obligations as the leader responsible for
the safety of his men. His work is made more difficult because the Moros themselves
have their own internal conflicts and brigands, because his men comprise a mixture of
Tagalogs, Ilocanos and Visayans, and because the Moros believe that the surveys are for
taxation purposes rather than to benefit themselves. Almost over-whelmed by the beauty
and strangeness of the country, Gonzales moves quietly and respectfully, yet with
authority and responsibility, and while adapting to the provisions of the people he retains
his own standards.
In Tacurong Gonzales and his men stop at a half-completed hotel whose "outhouses,
roofless, and patched with flattened cans and cardboard, squatted in the middle of the
stream in front of the hotel: incongruous and obtrusive." The surveyor, descending after
weeks in the mountains, and ignored y the indifferent Moros, settles for the
accommodation. Nevertheless "in his native tongue, in Chavacano, unable to segregate
entirely his Zamboangueño heritage and ancestry from his mind in all these years living
and working with Tagalogs, Ilocanos, and Visayans, though he would never use his own
dialect when speaking to any of them: Me cago con mala gana!" (I defecate unwillingly.)
Enriquez is not the kind of historian who estimates civilizations by the sophistication of
their plumbing but neither does he sentimentalize the nobility of savagery.
His stories are greater, too, because he does not yield to the zeal of crusading
nationalism which sets a duty to concentrate on the social group rather than on the
individual. The Old Bridge, one of the most clearly allegorical tales, is also a fine study
of the outsider Teng, loud, humiliated, a constant embarrassment to and snubbed by the
surveying team whose friendship he desperately courted. Ambushed at the old bridge by
Moros, Teng is killed while attempting to intercede for the party, and Gonzales reflects:
He was all the time building up bridges between us. Thinking, he even tried to put up
a bridge to the wild savages, they killed him and you know we killed him, too.
Because we did not want the bridge, you know we did not want it really, the bridge is
both linking the wildness and the civilization. But it is understanding and safety too, he
thought.
Cesar Adib Majul, writing in 1960 in his study, Mabini and the Philippine Revolution,
said:
The relation of province to province, class to class, individual to society is the subject
for careful study by historians, especially as the period of Philippine independence
enlarges and the honest intellect is moved to admit that not all Filipino difficulties have
been imported and not all importations have been harmful. In this act of self-discovery
and assessment, fiction has its own responsible and difficult role.
Enriquez is very mindful of this role and his considerable technical skill allows him to
fulfil it more than adequately. In stories like Playing Soldier, My Soldier Boy,
Pablo-Pedro and Sunburst Enriquez deals with the impact of western importations on
Filipino life.
In Pablo-Pedro the stubbornness of the rice-farmer in refusing to yield his
independence and submit to the guidance of IRRI technicians is shown in all its
destructive effect upon his family: "You've gone mad, hermano," says Isabel. "Giving up
your eldest son for your foolish pride and individualism." The family starve and eat rats,
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their clothes are rags, the children cannot attend school, the unmarketable grain rots.
Señor Larracochea is not condemned for failing to yield to the bait of being sent by
President Marcos to study scientific methods in America, but his pride and individualism
are not counted as virtues. The impact and pervasiveness of western and chiefly
American influences on Filipino life have been the theme of much creative writing in the
Philippines, the interpretation often varying with the political climate. Enriquez balances
the responsibility for the harmful and the beneficial effects of these influences with a
justice that enhances his work as art and as cultural analysis. The story Sunburst, in
which the university lecturer and aspiring writer Ric Diaz idles and bitches away a day
drinking in a cafe, sneering at American Peace Corps men with local girls, abusing the
corruption of other Filipino writers, yet honestly appreciative of Proust, Kafka,
Hemingway and Beckett, is a brilliant piece of satire. At the end of the story Diaz is
drawn into a maelstrom of student demonstrators and campus security guards "like an
acacia leaf in the eye of a whirlwind."
The dilemma for the Filipino writer, said Miguel Bernad in 1963, is that he "may
become an effective bridge between East and West, or he may become an outcast of both
East and West." Already Enriquez has much to offer the Pacific and the Atlantic worlds
in both hemispheres, and the more so because in theme, in mode of expression and in cast
of mind he retains firmly his unique identity as a Filipino writer.

Elizabeth Perkins
James Cook University”

>>>>>>

Dance a White Horse to Sleep and Other Stories. By Antonio Enriquez. (University
of Queensland Press. Cloth $13.95, paper $6.95).

This collection of short stories is cast in an unusual setting --- the island of Mindanao, its
principal city of Zamboanga, and the rural and coastal areas.

The stories are characterised by strength of atmosphere, a forceful fluidity of style,

and a deep perceptiveness as they delineate the various types of people --- the simple,
humble fishermen with their fears of superstitions, the struggling farmers, the city-bred
types with their different problems --- all with their loves and hates, ambitions and, often,
bitter memories. There is love, faithfulness and unfaithfulness, conflict and death in the
stories, which have action, colour and commentary on a way of life not so very different
from ours.
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The story from which the book's title is taken is an especially moving one of a family's
death-watch beside the bed of a veteran of the wild old days of the Philippines. It deals
with the subtle frictions and undercurrents of greed and strange likes-dislikes of members
of the family.

The author of these often stark tales of the Philippines is himself a Zamboangueño. A
book of others of his short stories has already been published.

The Chronicle
Thursday, August 25, 1977

With the compliments of

TOOWOOMBA NEWSPAPERS PTY. LTD.

publishers of

The Chronicle
The Downs Star

Telephone 32 2144 191 Margaret Street, Toowoomba. 4350

>>>>>>>>>>>

ASAA REVIEW
Vol. 1, No. 2, November, 1977

Antonio Enriquez, Dance a White Horse to Sleep and Other Stories, St. Lucia,
University of Queensland Press, 1977. 330 pp. Cloth $13.95, paperback $6.95.

This is a collection of eighteen short stories most of which evoke aspects of life in the
island of Mindanao, in its main city of Zamboanga and in its seemingly unchanging
villages. The arena of the short stories is the family within whose limits most of the
action is confined and where one recognizes the hatred, boredom, loneliness, alienation,
frustration (sic) and other agonies that boil incessantly at the core of many human lives.
The stories show the author's fresh and inventive style as well as his gift for place.
Enriquez accommodates himself to what is expected of him as a fictionist with skill and
craftmanship.
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In "The Night I Cry," the incestuous relationship between a young boy's mother and
his uncle is narrated with just the right amount of detachment and compassion to make
the story haunting. The son cannot wholly blame his mother, convinced that she is a
good woman, not a pampam (prostitute) as the villagers have labelled her. He senses
only that the impulse and the passion that drive her into a life filled with a succession of
lovers --- even into a relationship with her brother that drives the latter to suicide --- is the
same passion that lead the men of the village to lust after her and their women to envy
her.

The turbulent drama in the "Iguana" is skillfully (sic) restrained. Chu is given a rifle
so that he can make use of himself as a man. His father admonishes him that only hate
propels a man into action and makes him want of himself. Chu could not find a prey for
his rifle; the iguana that devoured his mother's hens lay concealed in the thickets and he
could not bring himself to shoot any friendly or harmless animal. But he is a constant
witness to his father's cruelty and constant deprecation of his mother. After an angry
confrontation between his parents, the father is transformed into an ugly-snouted iguana
in Chu's eye and he calmly pulls the trigger on his prey.

The "Wild Boars" shows Enriquez's fine narrative eye. The atmosphere of suspense
and terror created by his vivid description of the forest and the wounded bandit preparing
to defend himself from a pack of wild pigs with a mere wooden club makes the story
compelling reading. In "Dance A White Horse To Sleep," "Spots on Their Wings," and
"Pablo-Pedro," which in this reviewer's opinion might be included among the highlights
of the collection, the author smoothly and tactfully exposes the small hopes and large
failures in the lives of ordinary men and women.

The collection, however, could have stood some weeding out. Not all the stories are
handled with the same craftmanship as the ones mentioned above. For
example,Enriquez's handling of homosexuality in "Sunburst" is unconvincing; the story
starts and ends lamely.

This book is a quiet and unpretentious contribution to the University of Queensland's

Asian and Pacific Writing Series and is a welcome addition to the growing number of
books on fiction finally becoming available outside Southeast Asia. Hopefully, in the
future, other outstanding Philippine fictionists also will be published in the series.

Milagros C. Guerrero

>>>>>>>>>>

Book Review:
 9

Christine Godinez-Ortega. “When Writing is in the Blood,” Inquirer Mindanao,

December 11, 1999

Antonio Enriquez: Subanons, novel

University of the Philippine Press, E. de los Santos Street, Diliman Quezon City, 131
pages

The scion of a gobernadorcillo who helped carve the Zamboanga City we know we know
today makes literary history with his third novel, “Subanons.”
The 17-chapter, 133-page novel in English is the first to tell us about an upland
tribe from Mindanao’s Zamboanga peninsula.
No Filipino novelist, whether in Spanish, English or in the Philippine languages,
has done it before for any of the country’s upland tribes.
“Subanons” was released by the University of the Philippines Press in September.
It won first prize for the novel in English in the 1993 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial
Awards for Literature.
It was sent to three publishers until the author settled for the UP Press but not
before novelist Antonio Reyes Enriquez asked, “Why should writers beg?”
Today’s university-educated Filipinos who prefer to read foreign novels may ask:
Why read Enriquez?
And why not? After all, the Filipino writer has not taken so easily to such a
demanding genre as the novel, with perhaps the exception of, surprisingly, novelists in
other Philippine languages, like Iloko, Tagalog, Cebuano and Hiligaynon---works that are
not in the consciousness of the university readership.
Now, if only to support a Filipino novelist, all Filipinos should read Enriquez. But
then, this could be misinterpreted as mercenary, chauvinist even.
Well, not only has Enriquez a story to tell, he also knows how to tell it.
After four collections of short stories and two novels to his name and even as he is
finishing his fourth, 800-page novel, “The Revolt of General Vicente Alvarez,”
Enriquez’s important place in Philippine literature is secure.
It is said that when a fictionist writes his first novel, he has arrived. And it has
been a long road to success for this 63-yea-old Zamboangueño whose parents wanted him
to be a doctor instead.
After enrolling in several courses in various schools in Manila without getting a
degree, he returned to Zamboanga and traveled to many places in the Visayas and
Mindanao, doing odd jobs, becoming a journalist and joining a survey company in
Cotabato---the basis for his first novel, “Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh,” a 1982
Palanca first-prize winner for the novel in English, published in 1981 by the University of
Queensland Press in Australia.
Enriquez’s love for writing is in the blood and his gift of imagination
approximates the American novelist Henry James’s idea of a writer’s imagination to be
like a sensitive spider at its web, catching “the very air we breathe” and converting “the
very pulse of the air into revelations.”
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But like most writers, Enriquez has had his share of ups and downs in his 40-year
writing career.
His early short stories wee published by the Philippine Herald and Philippine
Graphic in 1962. His first short story was rejected by the editor of the Sunday Times
Magazine who could not believe that such a polished story could be written by an
unknown Mindanaoan.
That editor, who confessed to his error of judgment when Enriquez was already
reaping prizes for his fiction in later years, is now a columnist for a daily in Cebu City.
Enriquez, who is today based in Cagayan de Oro City, drove to Iligan City for an
interview with the Inquirer Mindanao. He joked a lot about the writing craft in what was
an incoherent interview because of the presence of Inquirer correspondent Bobby
Timonera, the poet Tony Tan, the novelist’s ethno-musicologist wife Joy and grandson
Julien Patrick contributed to that freewheeling mood.
“Subanons” was easy to write, Enriquez confided. Some events in the novel,
especially the atrocities committed against the Subanons, were witnessed by Enriquez.
In the late ‘70s when he was still with the Ministry of Information, he
accompanied Joy several times to Lapuyan, Zamboanga del Sur. Joy was doing research
on the Subanon eight-episode epic, the unpublished, “Gambatetu.”
But it was the piercing cry of a 15-year-old Subanon killed by soldiers on
suspicion of being a communist that gave impetus to the writing of “Subanons.”
No one really pays attention to the Subanons, they complained to Enriquez in the
course of his data gathering. In fact, the Subanons are sore that their building of our
national hero, Jose Rizal’s house in Dapitan has never been acknowledged. Not even a
street is named after them.
Enriquez learned much from the Russian writers, Anton Chekhov and Vladimir
Nabokov. He admires them so much that he named his other grandson, Anton Vladimir,
son of his only child Vanessa.
From Chekov, Enriquez learned to describe scene’s vividly as well as the tricks in
unraveling the story. From Nabokov, Enriquez learned good writing.
Enriquez learned from other writers as well. He owes debts to N.V.M. Gonzales
for local color. Nick Joaquin for his language and his understanding of Spanish culture,
and, Graham Green for his profundity through simple language.
Toward the end of the interview, Enriquez refused to name any promising
fictionist writing in this decade. Although he acknowledged their “more polished use of
language,” he said they “confuse him” for “sometimes they have no stories to tell.”
His friendly advice is for them to learn from the masters by “reading more.”
Enriquez asserts that Filipino novelists can hold their own among foreign
novelists, adding that they are just as good in terms of technique and use of language, like
Bienvenido Santos, Wilfredo Nolledo who “dazzles,” and Jose Dalisay and his
“breathtaking prose.”
As the conversation shifted to why Filipinos are reading the native speakers in
English more than their own writers who have actually mastered English and made I their
own, Enriquez quoted Nick Joaquin when they met during a workshop in Davao City:
“Filipino writers in the ‘30s, in showing our grandfather’s world, made us look
subservient because they only saw what the American language saw.”
 11

Of course, this is not true anymore of today’s writers for we only have to judge
what Enriquez has achieved.
Writing “Subanons” for Filipinos and presenting it in his own terms is, no doubt,
Enriquez’s way of fulfilling their need for illumination about a Mindanao experience,
thus enriching Philippine literature and contributing to its flowering in diversity as well
as in maturity.

>>>>>>>>>

Book Review

The Philippine Star / Arts & Culture, p. e-4, Manila

March 1, 2004

Heart of Light

Francis C. Macansantos

The Voice from Sumisip and Four Stories by Antonio Enriquez / Giraffe Book,
Quezon City, 2003 / 124 pp.

I was a high school sophomore, if memory serves, and getting my usual crew cut at
Koken’s in Zamboanga City when I read my first Tony Enriquez. It was a story called
“The Surveyor.” I found it in a copy of the Free Press (then edited by Locsin Sr.) that I
had picked out of a stack of magazines provided by the barbershop. I found the story
most refreshingly strange---indeed, exotic. But what made it especially interesting for me
was the rather incidental fact that its realm was Cotabato, the province of my birth.
That is, I had been born in Cotabato, but had no memories of the place. My father
was a wanderer then, and the family tagged along. Thus, I was whisked off as an infant to
Dumaguete, and then wrenched from there as a Cebuano-speaking toddler to return to
Zamboanga, my father’s hometown, there to spend much of my childhood and early
manhood. Cotabato was a lush, mysterious realm, distant, unknown, but still, in a sense,
my homeland. Another thing that led me further into the dark interior of the tale was the
delightful suspicion that the tale’s narrator, and, therefore, likely, the story’s author, was,
like me, a Chabacano-speaking town-mate.
I left the barbershop with the thrilling secret that a Zamboangueño had made it to
the pages of the awesome Philippines Free Press, and thus had joined the ranks of such
worthies as Bienvenido Santos, Gregorio Brillantes and Wilfrido Nolledo. This was a
glorious thought, and hope stirred in my heart, for wasn’t I, even then, already writing
 12

poems, and short stories of my own? Someday, I said to myself, I, too, would make it to
the pages of the Free Press.
The first time I made it to the Free Press, it was post Edsa. Locsin, Sr., and even
his old foe Marcos, were long gone. My literary output, under the new reign of Locsin Jr.,
was sluggish at best. But Tony Enriquez was more fecund than ever, coming up with
evermore---new material. He had won national awards for his fiction, and some of his
novels had been published abroad. “The Surveyor” I read again, in its revised form as a
chapter in Enriquez’s first novel, Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh (University of
Queensland Press, Australia, 1981). This book won for him his first of two Palanca grand
prizes for the novel, the second being Subanons, that gut-and heart-wrenching portrayal
of a tribal people’s agon[y] under martial rule.
Surveyors is certainly sui generis, post-modern fiction long before the fashion hit
the country. An uncannily powerful and poetic work, it defies realistic convention, but
remains compelling and hauntingly real. It is early vintage, aesthete Enriquez:
Unapologetically apolitical, and insouciantly, though despairingly amoral.
Subanons manifested a significant change of ethical and political perspective.
What changed it all was martial law, that “hidden war” whose heinous enormity has yet
to be fully exposed. Antonio Enriquez provides us with a long-neglected key to our
understanding of the Mindanao conflict. His work provides us with a valuable
perspective. Simply put, Christianity and Islam are global, hegemonic ideologies, tending
to a ruthlessness that destroys life-ways other than their own. When two behemoths
struggle, those that happen to be in the way are destroyed---often deliberately. In the
hidden wars, the lumads, because they were infidels to either worldview, were
dispensable. The fact that some had converted to Christianity or Islam did not make them
any less endangered. Conversion did not invariably confer respect from those who
belonged to dominant ethnic groups. Worse, the lumads could become unwillingly
participants in the war that, because it was hidden, was unforgiving in its atrocity.
With Subanons, Enriquez moved into the realm of advocacy. Perhaps only the
morally inform or the inveterately diabolical would not experience a moral rebirth from
the fire of purification that was martial law. From any reading of Subanons, it is
indubitably clear that the author was someone who had undergone that spiritual
transformation. The novel is a shining moment in the heretofore-unknown aspects of the
contemporary Subanon particularly their horrific and tragic experience under martial rule.
With The Voice from Sumisip (Giraffe books), Enriquez leads us further on,
deeper into the forest. The experience would invariably remind the reader of a well-
known and well-read journey into the wilderness, written by a world-famous writer to
whom (as it is to Enriquez) English was not a first language.
But any reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness yields for us almost nothing at all
about the African region of the Congo---the tale’s purported setting. It lies, even as we
write, in darkness. On the other hand, Enriquez, born (in 1934 [sic]) into a much later
generation of writers---and thanks in no small way to his life-long partnership with his
vivacious wife, Joy Viernes Enriquez, ethno-musicologist and cultural scholar, is better
informed. That is to say, Antonio Enriquez speaketh not in darkness, but perhaps in that
sacred space that T. S. Eliot, in Four Quartets, preferred to call “the heart of light.”
In Voice from Sumisip, Enriquez’s tale takes us there, to the inner sanctum of
tribal innocence and wisdom. Tony Enriquez, hunter, big-fisherman, cusser, drinker, and
 13

devotee of fictional art spent much of what he calls his “most beautiful years” in Basilan.
That is to say, in Yakan country. Without Basilan, Tony might never have become the
man of the great outdoors that he is. And, too, perhaps because of this, he is the odd man
out of the corps of fictionists this country has produced. He is never at ease in the
academic dispensation. And bully for him, too, because he writes about places untouched
by the ennui and prosaic despair of the secular city.
Should it be New York or Sumisip? A vote for either will be a vote based on
values, and not merely on such questions as political and economic power, or high and
low culture. Therefore, we must stop over in Sumisip to listen to its precious voice. More
and more writers and scholar realize that what is true of nature is also true of culture---the
destruction of any original ethnic way of life diminishes all of us, causing the loss of our
artistic and cultural heritage.
Enriquez takes us to Sumisip to listen to that voice. The narrative turns, swirls and
wheels around that voice. It is robust, hearty story-writing you will find, for (if you don’t
know yet) story is Enriquez’s sine qua non. And, like Conrad before him, he takes us
there with English---but not as a means to dominate or malign. English here becomes a
mode of empowerment, a means by which the writer may translate that voice into the
language well understood by the oppressive center (call it New York, call it Manila.) And
it is an especially expressive language, too, I think: sensitive, powerfully realistic, though
sometimes magical:
Facing Prof. Jose, his back to the door of his room, was Shaman Gamutang. In
the corner of the circle flickered a small oil lamp, which, like all the others in Sumisip,
was crudely made from an empty can, and from a discarded piece of old cloth came its
wick. From this oil lamp, a small flame flickered and though sometimes it soared and
disembodied itself from its wick, the flame would return to its wick---before reaching
exposed ridgepoles and trusses, just as if it were ashamed to violate the roof’s nakedness.
Not always then were the faces of the Shaman, Professor Jose, and the others illuminated
by the flame; there were moments when their faces sank deep into shadows, boundless,
and only the Shaman’s eyes shining among them with an after-glow glitter.
Prof. Jose, an academic whose field of study is folklore, is the novella’s central
intelligence. It is though his sensibility that we see the world of the Yakan. But it is our
duty, as sensitive readers, to see through him. Imperfect human medium though he is, he
is our guide into the still center of that world, a heart besieged on all sides by the forces
of darkness---intolerant, self-important, violent hegemonic forces that come under the
holy banners of religion. And, too, under the holy vestments lurks human cupidity. The
entire apparatus of Marcos’ martial rule is infected by greed and vice.
Prof. Jose is a creature of those dark times, and of his corrupt urban environment.
Despite his education and involvement in cultural studies, he has not risen above his
prejudices. In short, he is much like the average Filipino. The crucial question the
narrative wants to resolve is this: Can Prof. Jose, with all his sins on him, as he passes
through the spiritual center of Yakan country---that heart of light---be reborn in the light?
Will he hearken to and learn from that voice in Sumisip?
He discovers to his chagrin that he is caught between two worlds. Or, should we
say two centers? The subject of his research invades his being as he struggles to break
free from its control: He of all those present should be the last to give any weight to those
signs (i.e., of “bad luck.”) But Professor Jose, in his heart, knew differently; shaken was
 14

the fiber of his Christian faith and the staunchness of his belief in science---his
continuous exposure to rituals, pagan beliefs, folk-tales, myths, and epics had made it so.
It had not unChristianized him, but had only scraped the surface of his prejudice, Dios
mio!
Such ethnic centers have a drawing power. They could very well be our
connection to the life-force. They can be a source of spiritual energy. But this energy can
also be deadly and ruthless, especially when mishandled. And Tony Enriquez is too much
of an outdoorsman, too much of an elemental realist to be dewy-eyed about the
consequences of such misuse or abuse.
But there can no longer be any doubt about the vitality of such centers, especially
when we see a pattern, national as well as global, where some of the best writers write
from home---or, as in the case of Enriquez, every so often an adopted home, in the way
that Eric Gamalinda adopted Negros and Alfred Yuson adopted Sagad. It has been more
rule than exception to write from one’s own Yoknapathawpa, or to appropriate one. The
need for such far-flung sources of soul-energy is undeniable. Even Nick Joaquin of
Manila sought as a source of inspiration the distant past. But as ethono-culture-vultures,
we must take sage counsel from Antonio Enriquez, that voice from Zamboanga and
Misamis: Only the converted can make a difference. No more Dr. Joses need apply---
unless they are reborn by fire.
Some of Enriquez’s works were published in Australia. In the year 2002, he was
our South East Asian Write awardee for fiction. Last year he went on a writing fellowship
to Scotland where he forged warm ties with eminent Scottish writers. He has been offered
fellowships in America. But for all these, he has not made that allegedly logical move to
go to the center of centers, wherever that may be. He remains to this day a solid resident
of his island, Mindanao, the happy hunting ground of his marvelous fictions. The four
stories included in this book take us back to Enriquez’s own ethnic roots: Historical
Zamboanga at the time of its founding. What makes these stories unique is that they read
like eyewitness accounts of contemporary events, combining the horrific, the passionate,
the humorous and the macabre---all vintage Enriquez. They are a whale worth reading in
their own right. The stories revolve around Naawan (the ancient name of Zamboanga)
and they seem so suspiciously to be the first powerful ingredients of another brewing
novel.
“And, by the way, for those among us who are still trying to cover up for that
charnel-house called martial law, and endeavor, even this late, to perpetuate the turgid
myth of Marcosian benevolence, mainly by taking advantage of the poverty---and
consequence ignorance---or our people, I have only this to say: Read this book and be
memorably, effectively, refuted.

Francis C. Macansantos is a poet and resides in Baguio City with his wife and daughter.

>>>>>>>>>>>
 15

Oral Review: The Living and the Dead, novel, Giraffe Books, Quezon City, 1994.
Pages 184

GLIMPSES OF ENRIQUEZ AS A REALIST

(Delivered on the occasion of the launching of "The Living and the Dead" on 18 [sic]
September 1994, at VIP Hotel, Cagayan de Oro City)

Good evening everybody!

I studied the anthology of short stories of Mr. Enriquez for my Masterial Thesis in
1991. And as a writer, I can say that Mr. Enriquez is a realist. His literary works portray
contemporary and ordinary characters such as farmers, fishermen, laborers, bandits,
prostitutes, countryside boys and girls, and harassed teachers. They are the pathetic but
tenacious people who have struggled and endured varied trying circumstances which life
offers and they are both good and bad, weak and strong, moral and immoral, disgusting
and admirable, literate and ignorant characters of realistic literature. I believe Mr.
Enriquez has achieved authenticity in portraying ordinary characters not just because they
are real personalities but because they are convincing.

As a realistic writer, Mr. Enriquez's plot is fraught with rich familiar details.
Sometimes, I find it difficult to trace the details in one reading because of their rich- ness
and intensity. His subject matter refers to poverty and ignorance, family altercation and
disunity, prostitution and immorality, parental concern, overprotection and domi- nance,
resistance to change, greed and deception and regionalism. He does not give so much
emphasis on plot development and organization --- this means that he does snot normally
follow the conventional plot structure in which the sequence of events always starts from
exposition, and ends with a formal conclusion. And I an understand that because he is a
realist who focuses more on sense impressions. But Mr. Enriquez is not an extreme
realist who depicts man as having no freedom or freewill of his own. What his works
emphasize is the attitude of the characters particularly their desires, disappointments,
hunger, and struggles, in general. So this tone of his writings is somewhat serious
because the plot portrays depressing situations, but Mr. Enriquez does not discard humor.

Regarding Mr. Enriquez's style and language, his works reveal faithfulness in
portraying objective realities because the reader is able to observe and listen to the
characters in action through the prevalent use of the narrative objective technique. His
occasional use of Chavacano makes the language authentic, and the show of bad-
mannered characters who sometimes mouth the vulgar language intensifies
characterization.
 16

Lastly, I find Mr. Enriquez's literary works deeply moving because his concern as a
writer is more on the individual's struggle for self-understanding, for human dignity and
acceptance amidst the harsh realities of poverty and moral decadence.

Thus, with all these impressions of Mr. Enriquez's literary heritage, I am sure that his
new book entitled The Living and the Dead will be another interesting adventure into the
world of realism of Enriquez. I am confident that this book will be on its way to
becoming a document of the development, if not perfection, of Filipino Realistic works
which in turn will establish Mr. Enriquez as one of the pillars of realism in the Philippine
literary world. Thank you.

MA. LUISA S. SAMINISTRADO

>>>>>>

{PUBLISHED IN PHILIPPINE STUDIES; VOL. 44 (1996) #4}

BOOK REVIEWS AND NOTES

The Living and the Dead. By Antonio Enriquez. Quezon City: Giraffe Books,
1994. 184 pages.

Novels provide us with an alternative source of history. They allow us to enter into a
particular world and glimpse the worldview of a specific culture and time. The Living
and the Dead, narrated from an omnipotent view point, brings the reader to an
understanding of the culture of local aristocrats, particularly in the immediate post World
War II Philippines.

This ten-chapter novel narrates how the Gonzaleses, a prominent family in

Zamboanga, deal with the illness and the death of their old patriot Don Flavio Gonzales y
Villa, around whom the story revolves. Although, ironically, Don Flavio does not utter
any single word in the whole novel, his legendary past is remembered and revealed to the
reader by the entire Gonzales family. The exploits of the don are told and retold by his
children in two generations. Other voices speak for him.

The story unfolds in three phases: first, the homecoming of Alberto, the grandson of
the patriarch, who upon learning that the latter has become bed-ridden, takes a leave from
his work in Cotabato; second, the death of the Don Flavio, which although the family
 17

seems to have expected, still catches them in great sorrow; and third, the burial of the
don, with all the discussions of the family on what is proper for a dignified final journey
for the patriarch.

Although the setting of the story is the compound of the Gonzaleses in Zamboanga,
the author roams around places and time in his frequent use of flashbacks, usually to the
time of the Japanese and American occupations. The flashbacks also give the reader the
sense of history in which this novel is firmly rooted.

If one is looking or action in the The Living and the Dead, he will be frustrated, for
most of the action in the novel is on the level of emotions and disclosed through the
characters' dialogues. It is in the emotions of the characters that the story moves even
faster than the changes in setting and time. Ging-ging feels pity over the state of the
bedridden old man crying "O, Papalolo is so pitiful ... Why don't you let him die! We
must let him rest!" (p.94). There is Señorita Clara's angry voice: "You puñetero,
sinverguenza! Mal criado!"

That the narrative flows with detailed clarity should not surprise the reader if he
knows something about the author, Antonio Enriquez. He is from Zamboanga and his
great-great-grandfather was a gobernadorcillo himself. Like Alberto in the novel,
Antonio had a stint with a land-surveying company in Cotabato. Undeniably, the details
in the story are anchored deeply in his experiences in the hinterlands and in his old city of
Zamboanga.

But the universal appeal of the novel lies, in the end, in the reality of eventual physical
incapacity and death. While reading it, one may be brought to a pause to consider one's
own sense of preparation and attitude toward death itself. It faces practical matters like
the concern of dividing the inheritance, what kind of coffin shall be used and how much
the family can afford, and how the funeral procession shall be done, to more emotional
ones that usually face us pointblank when a loved one dies. The allusion to and influence
of James Joyce's classic story "The Dead" may be oblique, but it is there.

This novel provides a window to the world of the local aristocrats, but in the end, it
does not stop there. It opens for us a bigger window that shows the reality of the living,
the dying, and the dead.

Eric Z. Aragones, S.J.

>>>>>>

A MASTER STORY-TELLER DOES IT AGAIN

 18

By Nene Pimentel

(Comments given on the occasion of the launching of Antonio Enriquez's latest novel,
The Living and the Dead, on September 17, 1994, at the VIP Hotel, Cagayan de Oro
City)

I HAVE A confession to make. When Joy Enriquez asked me days ago to do an oral
review during the launching of the novel, The Living and the Dead, written by her
husband, Tony Enriquez, I did not quite know how to respond. First because I have not
done any review of any novel before. And second, because I haven't touched a novel for
at least half a year now, having spent my leisure on reading history, biographies and the
bible. And at that point when Joy talked to me, I did not have any intention of breaking
that trend.

On second thought, however, I remember that years ago, I had pored over Tony's
Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh and had concluded that here was a first-rate Filipino
author who definitely could hold his own against any writer of any nationality in English
story-telling. In brief, I was impressed. And that first impression of Tony's ability as a
writer won the day for Joy's request.

And so, here I am attempting to do an oral review of Tony's second novel, The Living
and the Dead. Incidentally, his third novel, Subanons, had won last year's Palanca Grand
prize for literature while still in manuscript form. But to go back to The Living and the
Dead, after having had the pleasure of reading it, I add my humble voice to the chorus of
accolades heaped upon Tony Enriquez by foreign critics who find him a "consummate
story teller" (Jacob Wu of Asiaweek) and one of the "two ... leading Filipino writers in
English", the other one being the legendary Nick Joaquin (Alison Broinowski of the
ASAA).

The novel revolves around the death watch which a family of old time
Zamboangueños, the Gonzaleses, keep over their dying patriarch, Don Flavio, and the
struggle among members of the clan --- those who want to cling to the facade of wealth
and preeminence of Don Flavio in the days of yore by giving him an elabo- rate burial
against those who want to be practical and cheap in their preparations for his last trip to
the cemetery.

As the death-watch progresses into the inevitable hour, when the don breathes his last,
one sees intrigue, duplicity, greed, plots and counterplots swirl around the characters
which are in reality not merely true as truth is reflected in a work of fiction like the novel
but, indeed, true as life is truth.

One reads of Fernandito, a grandson of the don, now a lawyer, who proposes to his
cousin, Alberto, to affix the dying don's signature on an extrajudicial document dividing
 19

Flavio's estate, even as the latter was already comatose. And of Alberto's reposte: "But
what about delicadeza? That old tradition rooted in our family, that has kept it honorable
and respectable, without which our family would have rotted and crumbled like a rotted
coconut log?" This outburst coming from Alberto is ironic in the thoughts of Fernandito,
who knows that Alberto had, himself brought shame to the Gonzales family "by fighting
in the street, sleeping off his drunkenness in a public place like Plaza Pershing, and
associating with that Moro outcast Oto and his gang of roughnecks ...." Then there is
Gerardo intriguing against Cecilia whom he calls a "very crafty, guileful woman" who
had rummaged through Don Flavio's old trunk while the old man was still warm." And
Alberto's own suspicions, which turned out true, that his cousins, Gerardo and Cecilia
and Tia Laura had stripped Don Flavio's room of his personal belongings without
"waiting for the old patriarch's body to be taken away or left to rest in its grave ...."

Although the book is in a sense ethnic and local (read the passage about giants and
gnomes or kapri or manitianak as we Cagayanons would put it, on p. 62), because of the
attention to detail that Tony puts into his characterization of the novel's protagonists, the
fluidity of his style and the richness of his language that borders on the lyrical, the story
gets rivetting.

Look at Tia Margarita: "... her hair, thick, is almost of pure gold, and hairline
threatening to join her eyebrows which rise as she peers at Alberto" (p. 27). Or
Fernandito whose bum leg carries "a bullet hole which still had not totally dried so that
one could insert a small stick through" (p. 31). Or the prayers for their safety with which
the Gonzales womenfolk storm heaven while they are hiding in a bomb shelter from
retreating Japanese troopers" "Rising in singular ripple, from the barrel of his bomb-
shelter, the hum of prayers droned in a wavering pattern like a swarm of bees" (p. 35).

Beautiful. Ole! I shout to myself seeing in my mind's eye Tony, the toreador
gracefully evading the horns of a raging bull in a Spanish corrida. Bravo! the acclaim
explodes in my brains as Tony intrudes into my view like a prima ballerina doing the
dying swan in a bolshoi ballet. For even these passages alone make reading the novel a
pleasure-trip, indeed.

But I am getting ecstatic and long-winded. I am afraid that if I go on, I'd be using
more words than the 182 pages of Tony's book.

Having said that, let me stress that the novel also relates hilarious circumstances that
are all so true --- even today. One reads of a fleeting character in the book who could
very well be any village's or community's pompous ass --- Tony uses the more polite "a
prominent citizen" --- who argues that "freedom of defecation in the streets was not a
virtue of a civilized city, nor the right of a horse which had no rights in the city charter or
the country's constitution." All he had really wanted to say was that horses drawing
calesas or tartanillas, as we call them in this city should not be allowed to drop waste on
city streets but should be provided with "flour-sack receptacles strung behind their
rumps." And again, there is the Visayan casket-vendor, whose hard tongue "is unused to
the Chavacano soft vowels" so that he changes the "I's into "e"s and vice versa and the
 20

"v"s to "b"s and who is chided by Señorita Clara for calling her "Siñora Clara". Or the
village girl, who could be anyone's favorite aspiring yodeler, who sang: "Lab is a many-
splendored think ... a reason to be livink, a kolden crown that mayges a man a kink" (p.
43).

I won't tell you how the novel ends. It will deprive you of the delight and the
excitement of discovering for yourself whether or not Don Flavio gets the funeral that he
deserves. That would be cruel to do to you who still have to read the book and to Tony,
who wants you to get a copy.

As I wind up, however, may I mention in passing a very slight historical inexactitude
in the novel which refers to Cagayan de Oro "during the war" (p. 87). The point may be
perti- nent to me only because I am a Cagayanon. Cagayan de Oro is a post war
terminology. We became Cagayan de Oro city only in 1950. During the war, Cagayan
de Oro was simply Cagayan, Misamis Oriental. That all too minute lapse in historical
reference, aside, I commend the book to all those who love good, clean literature in fluid,
forceful English and to those who would like to peek at the living past in the pulsating
present as lived by the characters in the novel.

In sum, I see Tony Enriquez's book: The Living and the Dead as more than a novel. It
is a historical commentary that bears a kernel of truth concerning the evanescence of
wealth that, unfortunately, to this day, continues to define many a person's atti- tude
towards life in purely mundane terms, forgetting that man is not only a body, he also has
an immortal soul.

Congratulations are due to the author, Tony Enriquez, for this enjoyable work of
historical fiction which makes for very interesting reading. Cagayanons are particularly
proud of him because we would like to think he is one of ours --- not only due to the
ephemeral reason of his residing in our beautiful city now, but by reason of the eternal
bond (or is it bondage?) he has willingly (I hope) assumed by marrying Joy who traces
her roots to Cagayan de Oro city.

Daghang salamat sa inyong pagpaminaw.

>>>>>>>

Antonio Enriquez. Subanons, novel, University of the Philippines Press, Quezon

City, 1999. 133 pages
 21

“You’re one of the great and fine writers that we have around and nothing I can say will
change that. Offhand, I’d say novels have been written about persons, families, places,
houses but this is the first time I encounter a novel (Subanons] about a tribe. Believe me
when I say surely that isn’t its only distinction.”

--- Letter, March 4, 2000: Franz Arcellana

>>>>>>>

Author’s Note: The stories in this collection were taken from Dance A White Horse to
Sleep and Other Stories, University of Queensland Press, Australia

CRITICISM: Antonio Enriquez. The Night I Cry and Other Stories,

New Day Publishers, Quezon City, 1989. Pages 131.

Book Reviews

The Night I Cry and Other Stories. By Antonio R. Enriquez. New Day Publishers,
Quezon city, 1989. Pages 131.

Roland Barthes in The Pleasure of the Text (1975) defines a "text of bliss' as that which

... imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts ..., unsettles the reader's historical,
cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories,
brings to a crisis his relation with language. (p.14)

The stories in Antonio R. Enriquez's anthology The Night I Cry and Other Stories are
"texts of bliss," for they captivate the reader by disquieting her, by challenging
deep-seated Amorsoloesque images of idyllic "country life," and by questioning still
stubborn notions on the warmth and mutual supportiveness of Filipino family
relationships. The stories, set in different regions of the Philippines, are peopled by
characters who act on dark impulses or endure various injuries to the soul.

The reader first encounters Chu and his father in the story "Asocena." In the coastal
barrio of Labuan in Zamboanga, Chu's dog Leal is killed by dog-eating neighborhood
 22

toughs led by Tomas Dayrit. Chu expects his father to deal with the culprits somehow so,
though hesitant, the father speaks with Tomas. The brief verbal confrontation ends,
however, with the father backing down in the face to get a replacement for Leal, of
Tomas's threatening manner. Although Chu's father takes him from a neighbor whose
dog has just had puppies, Chu's grief has been compounded by disillusionment.

In "Iguana," the exploration of the father-son relationship is carried a shattering step

further. The narration enters into the boy's thoughts of the present and memories of the
past, giving the reader access:

I am sitting on the top rung of the kitchen steps with a .22-caliber rifle in my hands. I
sit there waiting for the iguana to come out of the bamboo thickets across the ri- ver. It
is morning, soft and light. (p.10)

From this eeriness, the boy's thoughts shift like a movie camera to scenes of his
mother constantly mocked and humiliated by his father. The ominous link between
humiliation in the past and lying in wait for the iguana in the present is strengthened by
the suppressed violence in the boy's silent taunting of the iguana: "Leche! Come on,
iguana, I'm ready for you now! Leche, if I am not ready for leche y leche y leche!" (p.
14) ..." Come on out, iguana. You, lechery of your mother. Hen killer .... Come, iguana.
This time I'll kill you. Come now, hen killer." (p. 21)

His mother's humiliations build up in the boy's mind; tension builds up in the story.
Then the father emerges from the house, crosses the river and climbs up into the bamboo
thickets the boy is watching. The story ends explosively, suspicions about the real
identity of the iguana finally confirmed.

In "Pablo-Pedro," set in Labuan in the Marcos era, Pablo Larracochea is a rice farmer
who staunchly refuses to join a government rice farmers' cooperative, insisting on
farming his land his own way. This results in his losing his market, which the
government controls through the cooperatives. He and his family are reduced to such
poverty that they eat rats to survive. The increasing tensions within the family culminate
in the eldest son's leaving home.

"The Night I Cry," the title story, is a long, aching lament. Lito, who is deformed,
lives with his mother in the home of his maternal grandmother and his Tio Felipe. Lito's
inner torment comes from love for and loyalty to his mother, and his shame because of
her casual sex affairs. One night his mother takes her own brother (his Tio Felipe) to her
bed, with Lito in the same room:

The bed is silent now, Lito was thinking. And I must not cry .... I cup my hands over
my mouth and to the wind and the mat on the supple bamboo floor I cry, O, mi tio. Mi
propio tio. (p. 51)

His mother's indiscretions had been the subject of village gossip, but although Tio
Felipe would berate her (out of jealous possessiveness, as it turns out) for being a "puta,"
 23

Lito's grandmother refused to face or deal with the situation. Tio Felipe dies the morning
after, and the old woman finally confronts her daughter, who prepares to run away with
still another man. Lito breaks his silence (and, for the moment, his loyalty), and warns
his grandmother. The mourners at Tio Felipe's wake chase after the couple, and soon
after, Lito watches as his mother is forced to run naked through the barrio by a mob,
"sensing only the impulse and passion that drove his mother into the same pregnant
passion ... that had led the barrio men and women to persecute her ...." (p. 65)

"Dance a White Horse to Sleep," revolves around the relationships within a Spanish
mestizo family as the old, once autocratic patriarch lies dying. Alberto, the dying man's
grandson and the narrator, watches how his family and relatives comport themselves
during the death watch, with one (a lawyer) talking of how the old man's property is to be
divided. When the old man finally dies, Alberto again listens as his relatives discuss
funeral expenses, and start moving the old man's things out of his room while keeping
articles for themselves. At the funeral, Alberto impulsively hires a convoy of buses
and a white horse to escort his grandfather, using the money one of his aunts kept inside
her brass bed posts for emergencies. The horse suddenly runs wild, and the funeral is
thrown into confusion. When things quiet down, Alberto walks to the end of the funeral
line, enters the first bus and waits.

The sixth story, "The Smell of Ilang-Ilang" focuses on a lonely man's difficulties in
dealing with his little daughter's illness after his wife has abandoned them both. Flavio
Larracochea's sense of loss and failure causes him to shrink so much into himself that he
is barely able to get the dispensary staff to attend to his feverish daughter. When Dra.
Sofronia Mananquil asks after his wife, Flavio lies, pretending that his family is still
whole and prospering. His deceptions gain solicitude and sympathy but back at home,
Flavio recognizes that "all those lies about his wife were an admission that he had
completely and finally lost her: lies growing not out of unreality but of the grim truth of
his loss!" (p. 105)

"Spots on Their Wings," revolves around a group of engineers assigned to set up a

watershed in the Cotabato interior, who find themselves embroiled in the complexities of
the Muslim-Christian conflict. The story culminates in torture and murder, sparked by
the men's having shouted obscenities at Muslim women bathing naked in a river.

The differences between Muslim and Christian cultures are the most obvious elements
of contrast in the story. More subtle are the contrasts woven into the narrative structure
and setting. The core of the story is set in the mountains and jungles of inner Cotabato ---
lush, untamed, dangerous territory. The flashback is framed by the leader, Alberto,
narrating the men's experience in the totally secure confines of a modern restaurant in
Zamboanga City.

There are as well moments of contrast told in lyrical, sensual language. In a dreamlike
scene Alberto and his team cross a meadow in the early morning. Alberto, walking
ahead, looks back and sees a captivating sight --- a swarm of tiny butterflies surrounding
the group, covering them in a waist-high sea of spotted yellow wings (p. 109).
 24

The delicacy of this scene contrasts sharply with one scene on a boatride down a river.
At twilight, in a strange, white, cloud-like mass in the distance, a roar arises from the
cloud, a ripple runs over its surface, and the cloud becomes the wings of a flock of white
catala parrots that had been feeding on the leaves of the trees growing along the bank.
The parrots fly off, leaving

... the denuded trunks and boughs ... silhouetted against the sky like black skeletons.
[Alberto] leaned back then, his mouth completely shut, appalled at the thought that
underneath the awesome, white mass of great catala parrots certain death awaited the
luxuriously green and thickly foliaged trees. (p. 110)

There is power in this collection. Enriquez's skill with language and narrative
structure; his ability to weave the Chavacano vernacular smoothly and naturally into his
English narration (a glossary at the end of the book aids the non-Chavacano-speaking
reader); his "seer's eyes" that delve into human souls and unearth the conflicts that
torment them --- all come together to create stories that disturb in gripping, sensual and
sensitive ways. One looks forward to reading more "texts of bliss" by Antonio Enriquez.

—Ma. Teresa Wright

Department of English, Ateneo de Manila University

Philippine Studies 39, (1991) #3 pp. 399-401

>>>>>>

Book Review

Antonio Reyes Enriquez: The Night I Cry and Other Stories. New Day Publishers,
Quezon City, 1989
131 pp.
 25

Stories to Tell

Antonio Reyes Enriquez, Palanca awardee for his short stories and for a novel in 1982,
after having written some 50 short stories to date, has finally published this distinguished
slim volume of seven carefully selected stories which he calls The Night I Cry and Other
Stories. These stories are, all seven of them, stories with fascinating stories to tell,
already a rarity in this postmodern age where the belief is, if a short story is meant to
mirror life, then it must not tell a story, because life does not tell stories ... it is chaotic,
random, fluid. And telling stories becomes tantamount to telling lies, since writing can
extract a story from life only by, well, falsification.

This structural problem in fiction has always been a controversial one. As early as the
19th century, Flaubert commended stories with the least matter, no stories to tell.
Anthony Trollope on the other hand, living in the same century, believed that a writer sat
down to write because he had a story to tell. Henry James, of this century, calls the story
"the spoiled brat of art."

Whatever the past masters had said about the narrative element in fiction, I still agree
with postmodernist Barth that plot is not really an anachronistic element. That one can
still be concerned with plot, even the most baroque, and come up with good
contemporary fare, the plot existing for the very aesthetic pleasure of complexity,
complication, suspense, unraveling, and the rest. The trick is always of course for fiction
to be entertaining, to afford pleasure. Needless to say, there are varying degrees and
qualities of pleasure.

Fiction is still and all basically artifice. If one were to lie or falsify to extract good
stories from life, then let him.

The Night I Cry ..., in this sense, is a good lie, pleasurable reading not only because
Enriquez has interesting stories to tell but also that he writes them well. These are
therefore not so much stories told as stories written, in an age where stories are supposed
to be written, not necessarily told.

One story for instance deals with more than just a boy's loss of his loved puppy. Its
pathos lies in the boy's loss of faith in his father's capacity to stand up to his young need
for reassurance and protection and courage in a ruthless world.

And there is this movingly told tale of a boy's mounting anger toward his father which
dramatically peaks into unexpected but well prepared for violence.

Another quite as unnerving is this which explores the timeless conflict between
personal will and social exigencies, a resounding statement in an age-old problem.
 26

One of the more poignant stories in the collection is the title story itself, "The Night I
Cry," which speaks of pained chance discoveries, young nightmares, and this eventual
young waking up to another "sunlight on the sun where stones make plop-sounds on the
water."

The Christian-Muslim conflict reflected in this eternal clash between tradition and
change leads to a terrible lynching, its violence refined by the use of the removed
narrative technique.

The stories are rife with mythic possibilities, spiced with quaint cultural flavor, and
written in the traditional way, replete with Chavacano phrases and manners for
appropriate localisms and atmosphere. It is a heavily drawn, redolent atmosphere
rendered in the right balance of sensitivity for sensuous details and proper control. One
can almost hear the shhhlick of a curved bolo, the plopsounds of water, the whrrr-whrrr
of the outboard motorboat, visualize the rumps of two naked women in the water,
flashing white like the belly of a taraquito fish, smell the stench of fetid dried fish hung
rotting with worms and gnats swarming over them, almost himself feeling like throwing
up from water drunk with its surface teeming with decaying frogs, etc. Enriquez could
tell them all with just the right spunk and punch, never mind if at times point of view gets
a bit muddled and the voice of authority too prescient and sensitive for a boy narrator.

The stories' below-the-surface-burning is achieved by symbols subtly, never

arbitrarily, woven into the narrative fabric like: one father making dogmeat (asocena) of
a boy's faith in him, the iguana stealing the chicks in their coop becoming less pernicious
than a father's harassment of wife, certainly not less deadly than one boy's eventual
retaliation, a rampaging white horse in a funeral procession externalizing the confusion of
values and botching of family relationships most evident as the family patriarch is about
to be laid to rest. (In Islam, the white horse is the symbol of the spirit's ascent to heaven:
the horse being the Arabic symbol for mobility and grandeur, white for purity.---ED)

This is definitely a book of short stories to read, among those written in 1989, written
by a master hand who can spin tales with both truth and falsity, which is finally what art
is all about. In the 60s, this tradition known as tale-and-yarn employs a distinct voice, a
narrator who is not the writer, who fascinates not with truth and falsity but with
straightfaced reality on the one hand, and extreme far out fabulation on the other. Which
is not Enriquez's cup of tea. Not quite yet.

His fictional fare simmers with the intensity of hidden forms of violations more lethal
than outright violence, lies born of truths, deceptions, corruptions, early initiations,
expressed in the usual linear progression, this arousal and fulfillment of pent-up desires
(Burke), this resolving of tensions developed and generated within the story, truth and
falsity celebrating life because affirming art's capacity to mean, art as mirror of life (what
else), and life as an expression of a determinate, meaningful moral order.

--- Ophelia Dimalanta

 27

Daily Globe
"Book Review,"
ed. Jocelyn de Jesus
Monday, April 16, 1990
p. 13

>>>>>>

Oral Review: Antonio Enriquez. The Night I Cry and Other Stories, New Day
Publishers, Quezon City, 1989. Pages 131

(Book-launching at Consuelo Restaurant, Cagayan de Oro City, April 20, 1990.)

By Ametta Suarez Taguchi

WHEN BABY ESCUDERO asked me to speak on the latest work of Tony Enriquez, my
first reaction was to say, "No." Whom am I to comment on somebody like Tony. Only a
critic can do justice to the role of introducing the book we are launching tonight. "But
Ametta," Baby said, "Tony wants you to be the one to do the job." Knowing Tony's
stature in literary circles, I was touched by his humility, and so I said, "Yes."

But because I am no critic, I will do the next best thing. I will make cultural chismis
about Antonio Reyes Enriquez, the man behind The Night I Cry and Other Stories.

We all know that Tony is a Zamboangueño who resides in Cagayan de Oro and owns
Casa Hidalgo, the lodging house-restaurant. That he is a multi-awarded short story writer
and novelist, this fact is written at the back of his latest collection. That he is a literary
great in our country, this the experts won't argue.

What many don't know is that Tony, unlike the eloquence of his writing, is a man of
few words. This man whose writing style hypnotizes you is very unassuming in person.
I am not saying I know Tony like a diary, but he is not a closed book either. However,
there was a time when I did not know him at all, though I admired his writing.

So when I came to Cagayan de Oro and learned that he lived here, I made inquiries
right away, like a real fan. "Resident writer of Xavier University," somebody said. Since
nobody could tell me in which room in Xavier he did his writing, I concluded that he was
locked up in Loyola House by the Jesuits. "No," somebody said, "he does not do his
 28

writing in Xavier. He does it in Casa Hidalgo, the house the Palanca Awards built." But
when I went there, I was told that he was in a forest somewhere in Zamboanga. "What is
he doing there?" I asked his helper. "Typing," she said. "When will he return?" "Three
short stories after," she said. After three months, I found out that he was already with the
government. "Kapayasaon, he does not want to sign my autograph book," I thought. I
don't know why I did not meet the object of my idol worship until last year. Maybe God
intended this so I'll be in constant awe of His special creature.

When I finally met Tony in a writing workshop hosted by him, the awe vanished. Or
rather, it was replaced with deep respect. For Tony was neither kapayason nor insulated
with self-drawn aura of importance. I expected him to act like a stereotype expert, you
know, hugging the limelight and decorating his lecture with quotations from his works.
All he did was share his writing problems and give tips in that soft voice of his. He
seemed embarrassed to talk about his works.

The next time I met him was a few weeks after the workshop when I dropped by Casa
Hidalgo to drink calamansi juice. He mentioned during the workshop that he had a sort
of ivory tower erected in the building where he did some writing, and I wanted to take a
look. I expected to see him descend on a cloud, holding a mighty pen. Instead, he came
down, holding a mighty hammer.

"O, Tony, what are you writing now?" I asked. Holding up the hammer, he said: "Oh,
a novel. But I can't go on because I have to fix the post nga gikaon sa anay." Then he
spent fifteen minutes showing me the chairs in his restaurant, which he himself painted, a
la Mexican art. To bring him back to the subject of his writing which he found boring, I
asked an unboring question: "Tony, how is your financial situation?" "Oh," he perked up
a little. "I still have to contact my agents in Hongkong and Australia." He said that
casually, not in a kinapayas way. I mean, from someone else, it would have sounded like,
"Hoy, look at me, I am so good, I can be exported already. How about you?" But from
Tony, it was a reply to a rude question.

Then, like a typical amateur, I advised him to send his forthcoming novel to the
Palanca Awards contest. His cute answer was, "Really?" Period. He did not add: "For
your information, I already won the grand prize for novel in 1982," something very
"droppable" which he never drops. (It is "droppable" because in the Philippines, if a
novel is written, it is cause for a national celebration.)

Still, I was skeptical. Maybe Tony acted humble for effect. But I heard from a
reliable source that he has a barkada of very close friends with whom he goes hunting.
One time, after a week in a forest in Zamboanga, he excused himself. He told his wild
friends, "I'll leave you here. I have to go to Manila because I was invited by UP to talk."
"What will you talk about in UP --- how to shoot a wild pig?" "No," Tony answered, "I
was invited to talk about my manuscript." His friends were dumbfounded. "Aw,
importante diay na nga tao is Tony?"
 29

Now, what is the relevance of this chismis to the launching of The Night I Cry and
Other Stories?

There are two important points: first, Tony Enriquez has the universal,
incontrovertible mark of greatness. He is humble. This is a sign that he is comfortable
with himself, that he has gotten over the stage where one has to prove that the talent one
is wearing is a diamond, not glass. Because his gift is a diamond, there is no need to feel
anxious at being discovered that the carat is fake --- which is the case of the
pseudo-talented.

The second point: the interesting character that Tony is, is very much present in the
book. It is the main ingredient that makes all the stories in the collection gripping,
haunting, poetic, and funny. But mostly, the feeling that lingers is nostalgia.

The feeling cannot be faked. The feeling must be experienced. And this is the feeling
you get when you read Tony's stories, that you are going through what the characters are
going through.

In the first story titled "Asocena," in which a boy's pet dog is eaten by a bunch of
drinkers and he discovers that his father is just an ordinary mortal, not a hero, the pain of
loss and realization is palpable even to those for whom the experience is alien.

In that same book we are launching is another story that would make a nice gift to
those embarking on matrimony, and also for those who are already married, especially to
men. The title of the story is "Iguana." There is a real iguana in the story, but there is
also another iguana residing at home, and that iguana is the husband. Of all the
characters in the book he is the most colorful and the best delineated by the author. You
can almost touch him. His dramatic impact nearly makes you forget that Tony here
exposes a hard reality which is, many marriages are cemented not with love but with
cruelty. In "Iguana," the cruelty of the husband leads to his violent death.

Also exploring the problems of marriage is "A Smell of Ilang-Ilang." Here, a single
father takes care of his three-year-old daughter and comes to terms with his separation
from his wife.

Then we have "Pablo-Pedro" about a headstrong man who refuses to bend to

modernity for fear of losing his identity. He is unmoved by the deteriorating condition of
his family, to the point that they have to eat rotten rice, rat adobo, and rat sinigang on
account of his refusal to avail of government assistance. The difficult first person point
of view underlines his brittleness. You hate him, and yet the other people in the story
don't, making you wonder why this is so even in real life with certain strong personalities.

The last story, "Spots on Their Wings," depicts the relationship between Christians and
Muslims. The hostility that develops culminates in violence. The hostility though
appears to be civilization-based rather than culture-based.
 30

Of all the stories, my favorite is the centerpiece, titled, "The Night I Cry." This story
is about a nymphoprostitute who is revealed to us from the point of view of her deformed
young son. She is a hot patoosie of the first degree, she is totally shameless, she even
goes off for a tryst with a John during her brother's wake, the same brother with whom
she had relations just before his death, the whole town is generous with its P rating of her,
but her young son makes all sorts of excuses in his mind to make her behavior forgivable,
because he loves her. In contrast to "Pablo-Pedro" where we hate the central character
while everyone else in the story does not, in "The Night I Cry," everyone passes
judgement on the sinful woman except the boy and us, readers.

I hope the synopsis will tickle those who do not have a Tony to get one.

There are many layers to Tony's work that the seasoned critics will peel like an onion.

As of now, this ordinary reader and fan is struck by four salient qualities:

First, Tony is a fine storyteller. What's so unusual about that? Well, not all short story
writers are good storytellers. Their craft may be worth a lot of prizes but could bore the
reader who wants, on first reading, to be entertained. Thus, for sheer value, the Betamax
can be given a much needed vacation and your light will bill go down if you own a Tony,
side by side with a Sony.

Second, Tony is unusual. Well, that is basic to qualify for the position of "great
writer." What I mean is, Tony is very, very original. For example, he prefers to write
about a nagging husband rather than a nagging wife, a man who fights against the
acquisition of modern appliances offered to him on a silver pick-up rather than a man
who would sell his soul to have them, a single father rather than a single mother, and a
whore whose deeds are described in technicolor sinfulness and yet does not come out
hateful.

Third, Tony is at his best, in terms of rich images and mesmerizing narrative style,
when he deals with rural Zamboanga, the mountains, the ways of the agricultural folks,
and the forest he knows so well because it is the sanctuary of his literary gift. I think it is
not mere idol worship to say that if Nick Joaquin is the literary prophet of Manila, Tony
Enriquez is the literary prophet of Zamboanga.

Fourth, Tony writes with love. You don't sense any cynicism in his writing, even if the
situation is cynical, which is unusual in an age where the distinctive mark of the
intellectual is distrust for humanity and a fashionable belligerence. For the Tony behind
the book is one who is perfectly happy in his world and has no reason to hate. The Tony
in the book and the Tony out of the book are one, the reason why the prevailing virtue
that ties up the stories in The Night I Cry and Other Stories is harmony, even as the
feeling of nostalgia keeps shaking underneath.

To put it simply, what I'm trying to say is, The Night I Cry and Other Stories by Tony
Enriquez is a good investment, entertainment-wise and art-wise. I guarantee it. Baby
 31

Escudero guarantees it. NMDB guarantees it. If you do not like the book after reading it
from cover to cover, please sell it back to us and we will give you a steak dinner, with
musical entertainment by Baby at the piano. We are confident though that we won't have
to start saving or borrowing from NMDB is case we lose the bet, because I bet, we won't!

>>>>>>>

CRITICISM: Antonio Enriquez. Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh, Asian and

Pacific Writing No. 16, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Australia, 1981,
131 pages.
$10.30

World Literature Today World Literature TodayWorld Literature Today

Formerly Books Abroad

(A Literary Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma, 73019 U.S.A.)

Summer 1982 issue

South of the city of Cotabato lies the famed Liguasan Marsh, on the southern
Philippine island of Mindanao. It is probable that the author, who worked for a time with
a surveying company in the province of Cotabato, has taken his material from actual
experience, but the episodes in the novel --- whether in the city or in the hinterland ---
depict less of the charm and hospitality of Zamboanga in particular than of the tensions
and frustrations of people in that part of the world. A strong antagonism is seen between
Christians and Muslims, and the novel --- while not at all sentimental --- reflects the point
of view of the Christians.

English is the medium used by the writer, but there are hints of Chabacano and Ilongo
as well and colorful glimpses of the sector of society in focus. Americans with an interest
in anthropology will doubtless find the content rewarding: from the point of view of
storytelling, there is a certain monotony in the presence of violent death and sordid sexual
encounters. The writer is a master strong situation and language, both of which impress
the reader's mind indelibly. There are some inconsistencies and errors in mechanics:
Dio, alternating with Dios, and a slip like "Because." But the book is attractive and easy
to read. Its appeal is strong, though the audience may be limited.

E.C. Knowlton
 32

>>>>>>

Antonio Enriquez, Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh, Asian and Pacific Writing No.
16, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, 1981. 131 pp. Cloth: $14.95; paper:
$7.95.

Mindanao in the Southern Philippines is widely known for its long-running conflict
between Muslim and Christian Filipinos and for little else. What is heard about it abroad
and even the news that reaches Manila is mainly about ambushes and assassinations.

Alfonso, the young Christian surveyor of Enriquez' novel, venturing in the line of duty
into the Liguasan (sic) Marsh, regards Muslim Mindanao as another, heathen country.
The hours's flight from Zamboanga to Cotabato is transportation from civilization to the
jungle. The Muslims are "ignorant Moro savages." He makes no allowance for their
defence of their land and religion against Christian depredations.

Alfonso's racism is as unvarnished and credible as his culture shock and terror.
Creeping through the marsh, the surveyors' violence and intolerance are honest responses
to the situation they are all in, and Enriquez puts them through no high-minded
ideological sieve. The result is a slight, but gripping and extraordinary tale.

Enriquez and Nick Joaquin are two of the leading Filipino writers in English: their
work and other contemporary Asian writing are included in the excellent University of
Queensland Press series edited by Michael Wilding and Harry Aveling. Some are in
English, others in translation.

There is a newness of vision and interpretation, and a tangential approach to language,

which justifies the series in literary terms. As well, it represents a sample of what
Europo-centric Australians are missing.

Alison Broinowski

Vols. No. 3
April '82
ASAA
 33

>>>>>>

"BOOKWATCH"

National Times 21-27 November

UQP's Asian & Pacific Writing series, edited by Michael Wilding, has been receiving
plaudits. Antonio Reyes Enriquez's Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh has just won the
top Philippines literary award, the 1982 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for
Literature. Further information from Anne Barkl on (07) 377 2452.

Tom Thompson

>>>>>>

BOOK REVIEW:

Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh

Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh is a book about the adventures of a young

Zamboangueo, Alberto Gonzales, who signs up as part of a surveying team in the jungles
of Central Mindanao. The book portrays a world of violence and savage brutality which
burns itself into the imagination of the reader, and may prove a little too much for those
with weak stomachs.

In the first part of the book, Alberto is a detached witness and participant in several
instances of gang violence (reminiscent of Clockwork Orange), such as when his
companion nonchalantly beat up a Visayan to death with their belt buckles, and again
knocked down a drunk with a steel chain and kicked him with their boots, after which
they went off to a tuba store to drink the night away and eat dog stews.

It is because of one such incident that he flees Zamboanga and takes up a job as a
surveyor and triangulation tower builder with the Cerdeza Surveying Company.

In the jungles of Central Mindanao, he finds himself in another world of violence, but
this time, he sees himself and his companions as the more likely victims.
 34

In a lot of ways, the book perpetuates the stereotype of the Muslim Filipino, the Moro,
as a savage, bloodthirsty, cheating, stealing wretch. It betrays the prevailing attitudes of
Christian Filipinos towards their Muslim brothers, which border on fear, distrust, and
discrimination.

The book gives us a clear picture of the situation in Mindanao, which for so long has
plagued the conscience of the entire nation.

It also paints a vivid and gripping portrait of the simultaneously hostile and seductive
wilderness of the South. Alberto may be a brute in some ways, but he is not insensitive to
beauty. The jungle may abound with leeches and giant mosquitoes which swarm all over
people and suck their blood, but at the same time, it harbors thousands of yellow
butterflies which "flit around them ... like a great wave of vibrant motion." Alberto
appreciates the sight of the men "seemingly suspended above the meadow, the lower parts
of their bodies hidden underneath the sea of butterflies." He is awed by the catala
parrots, but he envisions "certain death for the once luxuriously green and thickly
foliaged trees."

Indeed, Alberto is haunted by death. He realizes that "there was nowhere to run away
to from death in the mountains of Cotabato. For death was not the preserve of those
savages; it was everywhere." As the story goes one finds that there is nowhere indeed to
run away to from death. For Zamboanga is itself also a place of death.
But Alberto wants to be a part of the world of the jungle, he is proud of the survival
skills he has learned from his companions because it integrates his person with the
primitive environment. He aches to commit himself to something, anything. In the early
part of the book, we see that he is unable to commit himself for fear of being tied down,
and perhaps trapped in an aimless life. He is unable to commit himself to women, even
to the gang violence that his friends indulge in. He is seemingly always the observer, on
the outside looking in. It is possible that he hopes to find a certain commitment in the
jungle, if only it could be a commitment to his own survival. As the book ends, however,
he fails even in this, for even as he imagines himself "part of them, as a clod of earth is
part of the river," an act of violence is being perpetrated against a companion of his which
was to serve as a clear message that his presence was neither accepted by nor suitable to
the "savage, primeval land."

The story being told in retrospect, we know beforehand that

Alberto has ended up going back to "civilization," this time as an instructor in a
university. However, we can only presume on whether he is finally at one with his
environment or not.

Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh is a well-written authentic book on the Mindanao

wilds, the author, Antonio Reyes Enriquez, like his hero, having spent some time as a
surveyor in Cotabato. His exploration of the Mindanao environment is certainly a great
help in understanding the remote yet significant part of the Filipino nation.

by Encarnita F. Gaviola
 35

Focus Philippines magazine

Manila, September 26, 1981

>>>>>>

BOOK REVIEW

Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh, Asian and Pacific Writing Series, University of
Queensland Press, Queensland, Australia, 1981, 131 pages.

Not just another rite-of-passage novel.

The novel is made even more powerful

by the strength of the exodus symbols.

The marsh that's the locus of this novel is a real place out there in the hinterlands of
Central Mindanao where the proud Maguindanao Muslims are still the undisputed
masters. And true masters they are for the towns that dot the marsh's edges and the
mountains that rim it are only effectively peopled by them and their kind and theirs is
hostile territory. Hostile, that is, to intruders such as Alberto Gonzales and his surveying
team, out to set up triangulation towers around the marsh for a government irrigation
project.

This hostility is what frames the conflict in the narrative, and it comes in two forms:
from the land itself and from the people who inhabit it, both seemingly impervious (at
times even downright resistant) to the progress and change that the surveyors promise
and symbolize. The general impression conveyed by the author, in fact, is that both land
and people are sullen, their anger over the intrusion couched in mocking indifference, a
mute challenge to the, yes, intruders to prove themselves capable of emerging as
survivors in order to earn, at best, their passive tolerance. On this level the novel could
simply be just another rite-of-passage adventure not unlike say, James Dickey's
Deliverance.

The challenges hurled up by the land, though, are different. They are of Mosaic
proportions. That is to say, they are almost of the same intensity or indeed they even
bring to mind, the plagues visited upon Egypt by the wrathful God of Israel, a reading
that leads us to ask if they are not, possibly, exodus symbols.
 36

That possibility may not at all be farfetched if one considers such examples as the
following:

"Whenever they stood still, even for a second or so, at night or during the day in the
tiny village or nipa hut, cooking breakfast or supper, even lunch while the fierce sun
blazed over the nipa roof, the carabao mosquitoes relentlessly attacked their arms and
feet. Unbelievably, a dozen, even more, would at one moment alight on them and sink
their needles into any exposed part of their body. And then the men wrapped themselves
in thick cotton blankets and wore long-sleeved shirts and socks and walked like
mummies or zombies in the hut, but the mosquitoes sank their needles through any
clothing. Alberto and the men clapped the mosquitoes between the palms of their hands
or pressed them against their besieged flesh. There was no need to be quick with their
hands; the mosquitoes were so relentless and fearless they would not fly off when the
men lowered a hand or a rubber slipper and squashed them."

The locust plague motif, apparently a favorite with Enriquez, is repeated in two other
instances, once with butterflies and in another instance with flies. The multiplication of
frogs upon the land and the diverging of the rivers, he however, juxtaposes as one:
"Submerging their heads together in a cluster into the water, ignoring completely the foul
stench coming from the rotten frogs floating on its surface, the men drank the water from
the well. No one remembered to purify the water with the chlorine tablets they had taken
along with their lunchboxes because the men felt that if they waited a moment longer
they would all succumb to dehydration and die in this God-forsaken Moro land .... later,
at the supper table, none of them touched their food because of the putrid stench round
their mouth ... that night the men went about the hut smelling like dogs that had
scavenged in the town's garbage dumps."

The case for pursuing this exodus symbolism in the novel is also further heightened, I
think, by the fact that Mindanao was, not so long ago, idyllically labeled "The Land of
Promise." Did Enriquez perhaps, take this into context in order to effect a play of
symbols? Or did he, as we suspect, develop this whole mosaic of Mosaic symbols
independently, maybe even unconsciously? Intentionally directed or not, however, it's an
interesting frame all the same, and not entirely without its own logic. Pursuing it, then,
what we see is an exodus in reverse --- with the surveyors entering a hostile promised
land, with them instead of their oppressors suffering the plagues and, in the end,
achieving liberation by surviving and going back to the land of their captivity.

Further, the Liguasan Marsh itself as center of this promised land is hardly an oasis in
the desert and the author's description of it, therefore, a further argument in favor of
considering the flow of reverse symbols logically: "Deep in the heart of Liguasan Marsh
were dead things. All around Alberto and his men in the banca, the dark surface of the
water stretched quiet and stagnant for a great distance. And driftwood and swamp trees
rose from the bowels of the marshes without ruffling the stillness of the murky water.
Without speaking, the men rowed out of the bowl-like expanse of water. The paddles fell
softly and little ripples broke shyly alongside the banca. As it moved silently toward a
 37

narrow channel between tall, gnarled dead trees, not a single fish broke the surface of the
dark water and not a bird flew or was to be seen on the leafless branches of the trees. No
living things were seen or heard; there was not even the humming of flies and
mosquitoes. It was indeed strange."

Beyond this, the most terrible of the plagues --- the coming of the avenging angels
here personified by the proud people of the marsh and of the great rivers and tributaries
around it. As a second hostile force, they sow greater fear in the hearts and minds of the
surveyors because they are unfathomable to them. And not just because they speak a
different dialect; more because they're of a different mental and spiritual dimension.

A recurring image in the mind of the main character is that of the traditional victim of
Moro wrath, strapped to a tree, pierced by a lance, his penis cut off and stuffed in his
mouth. Too violent, perhaps, for the world that lies outside the marsh, but entirely in
keeping with the world within its boundaries: a hostile land and a hostile people, but
only to intruders. And because violence is a way of life with them, so Enriquez insists, it
can only be violence that can earn their grudging respect. This is made to happen in one
instance --- when the surveyors gang up on one of their own, a laborer fired by a team
manager and who threatens to kill his former boss in revenge. Seeing this, the Muslims
break their silence and begin to mingle freely with them.

Despite those instances, however, the fear remains throughout and that fear is what, in
the end, Alberto Gonzales and his companions liberate themselves from in a grotesquely
comic manner, as they leave the marsh.

A powerful novel it certainly is and one made even more powerful by the strength of
these exodus symbols.

by Alfredo Navarro Salanga

Weekend magazine
May 16, 1982

>>>>>>

Alien Encounters

Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh

by Antonio Enriquez
 38

University of Queensland Press, P.O. Box 42, St. Lucia, Queensland, Australia. 131
pages. A$7.95

There is a hint, in one of this book's opening chapters, why protagonist Alberto Gonzales
goes off to work with a surveying party in the hinterlands of Mindanao. Having fallen in
with the wrong people, he has brought on himself serious trouble. It would be better, his
father advises, that he went somewhere else and learned to be independent.

So Gonzales leaves for the inhospitable, jungle-covered mountains of the southern

Philippines. There, he helps to erect triangulation towers to map out the Liguasan Marsh,
a petrified wasteland where "not a single fish broke the surface of the dark water and not
a bird flew or was to be seen on the leafless branches of the trees." The surveyors intend
to drain it and to build a watershed so that the surrounding land will always be irrigated.

In the early part of his book, author Enriquez envelops the trouble-prone Gonzales in
an atmosphere of foreboding. He also sets a tone of simmering violence for the rest of
Surveyors by relating an incident in which a man is hanged from a tree by local Muslims,
yet all the townspeople pretend nothing's amiss. Gonzales's party must contend with the
savage elements and Muslim tribesmen whose hatred for Christians dates back to the
time when the Spaniards first landed on Mindanao.

Under such oppressive circumstances, the reader feels, all hell is likely to break loose.
The surveying party shuffles from their gruelling work in the jungle for a respite in town,
but no matter where they are, they remain constantly on guard against nature and the
Muslims alike. In the end, both antagonists claim their prey. Sick with malaria, one of
the men in the party is left in camp as the others go to work. The man is ambushed by
Muslims and murdered. When the surveyors return and witness what has happened, they
flee.

The elements for a superb novella are here, ready to lend themselves to a dramatic,
intricate plot: a confused young man who tries to find himself in an alien environment;
the struggle to overcome the natural and human forces that conspire against the
individual; the spiritually barren setting, with Muslims and Christians perpetually on the
brink of war. Unfortunately, the super-charged atmosphere is dissipated by a dull
progression of events, lacking in intensity and, at times, relevance. The ending of
Surveyors trails off inconclusively and the characters do not come alive.

Indeed, the personae, not vividly individualized, appear to be but fleeting,

insubstantial images. Except Alberto Gonzales, none of them communicate their
thoughts to the reader, and even the protagonist's moments of reflection seem to betray a
certain shallowness. The author writes: "Many years later, working as an instructor in
the university, [Alberto] would think: If I hadn't been young then ... I would have left
next day ... and yet wouldn't my life have been empty, dry?" But he has not learned
anything from his adventures. Enriquez adds: "[Alberto's] own skin seemed to be a
repellent, a coarse covering, rejecting the feel of the atmosphere and the land."
 39

By and large, the Liguasan Marsh of the title, rendered important by its prominence,
could have become a potent metaphor for the spiritual devastation that pervades the place
and its people. Simply described and discarded, however, it only serves as a throughway
for the group en route to setting up one of their triangulation towers. Moreover, to make
up for the shallow sensibilities, the author tends to embellish his language. The
descriptive passages in particular, imbued with confused imagery, neither propel the
narrative forward nor enhance the theme of desolation that the work highlights.

Fedrico Miguel Olbés

Fedrico Miguel Olbés Fedrico Miguel Olbés

ASIAWEEKASIAWEEK
August 27, 1982August 27, 1982August 27, 1982August 27, 1982August 27, 1982

>>>>>>

An Oral Review

SURVEYORS OF THE LIGUASAN MARSH

A novel by Antonio Enriquez
University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Australia, 1981. 131 pages

(Delivered at the book-launching ceremony held

at Xavier University, Cagayan de Oro City on
October 3, 1981)

by Reuben R. Canoy

The launching of a ship is usually done by smashing a bottle of champagne on its

prow. Having thus been given the ritual alcoholic bath, it is then released down the
slipways and into the water, to the tumultuous sound of a band and the cheer of
thousands.

I have often wondered why no such pomp or circumstance ever accompanies the
launching of a book. My curiousity --- and personal pique --- stem from a long-held
belief that our values are frequently misplaced. We make a big fuss over a ship that may
end up carrying pigs or bananas, but seldom do we give importance to the launching of a
book that could transport us to a world of adventure, ideas, or dreams.
 40

I remember some years ago when I attended the launching of a little book of poetry
written by a friend. The guests, many of them celebrities in the literary and journalistic
community, arrived at various times. Each had either come or were going to different
parties that night, and for this reason were in various states of inebriation.

The flow of clever talk and alcohol was generous; the lesser lights gravitated around
the brighter ones; a starlet, very sexy and apparently well-nourished in her childhood,
was sulking in a corner because her escort (an aging writer who had left his wife and
children in the classic search of lost manhood) was paying too much attention to a
woman columnist known for her liberal views and more liberal sleeping habits.

Through all these, however, nobody talked about the book of poems that my friend
had written, copies of which stood in another corner opposite the actress. At first, the
author tried to circulate, clearing his throat and looking every inch the successful writer
that he thought he had become, but still nobody seemed interested in him. Finally, when
one of the guests mistook him for a waiter my friend decided that he might as well get
drunk like all the others.

I hope that this doesn't happen to Tony Enriquez tonight, especially because I know
the circumstances in which he wrote his book.
As a government information officer in his native Zamboanga, Tony became very
unpopular with his bosses for trying to expose a case of corruption. The crusade resulted
in his transfer --- or exile --- to Cagayan de Oro where the system for which the present
regime is well-known also operated with the same vengeance. Soon he found himself
grounded or frozen.

The enforced idleness was intended to shame Tony into resigning, but he decided to
turn adversity to an advantage. It was during this period that he was able to complete the
novel that we have come to celebrate.

If we could only be sure that oppression invariably leads to a burst of creative activity
on the part of writers, musicians and artists, I might be less inclined to disagree with the
present order. But Tony's case, alas, is more the exception rather than the rule.

Despite the fevered efforts of the regime to compel the belief that we now live in a
golden cultural age, one cannot fail to see that what we are witnessing is actually a
contrived renaissance for which we have had to pay an incredible price in terms of
poverty, malnourishment, and the "salvaging" of young men and women who themselves
might have become the writers of finer books that any of us are able to produce.

According to the program, I am supposed to give an "oral review" of Surveyors of the

Liguasan Marsh. Instead I have spoken at some length about the author and the
conditions under which he has labored because, to me, it is important for us to realize that
the creative process which results in, say, a novel such as Tony has done does not end
with its publication.
 41

In the words of a critic, "the higher function of art is to revive the world, to bring
justice, harmony and reason to social transactions." A book therefore comes alive and
acquires significance only when it is read, and the reader becomes affected by it. This is
the kind of success that all writers seek, for while the need to express may be great,
greater yet is the need to share --- an emotion, a sliver of memory, a point of view, or
perhaps an elemental experience.

In the act of sharing, the creative process takes on a larger dimension, with the reader
often perceiving more in the narrative than the author saw in his original material. In this
sense, I consider Surveyor a real achievement.

As an aspiring (as well as frustrated) novelist, I truly envy my friend Tony Enriquez
for this achievement which represents a lot of hard work and attests to a certain vitality so
surprising for one extremely self-effacing and physically diminutive. Even if he were to
deny it, I would like to confront him with the accusation that Alberto Gonzales, the hero
of his novel, is in fact Antonio Enriquez.

There is much of the personality and experience of the writer that inevitably go into
the shaping of a major character. Alberto, like the author, is from Zamboanga and works
with a surveying company in Cotabato. However, I am not prepared to ask how much of
Tony resides in the person of Alberto when the latter and the lusty members of the
surveying team spend a warm and sticky Sunday afternoon in the company of prostitutes,
in the red light district of Cotabato known as "the interior."

I will not spoil your enjoyment of the book by describing in erotic and sinful detail
incidents of this nature. But I must warn you that Surveyors is that kind of a book.
Rather it comes closer to the attempts of Joseph Conrad to explore the murky depths of
the human condition.

In the hostile swamps and highlands of Cotabato, where life and love and death are
manifested in their most primitive forms, Alberto Gonzales tries to come to terms not
only with the harsh environment but with himself. Tony Enriquez refuses to tell us in the
end whether Gonzales does. We can only presume the outcome from the fact that the
story is told in retrospect, with the hero safely and comfortably settled in a university.

But we see the hand of the artist in the way that Tony has subtly focused the narrative
light on the process of self-knowledge and self-discovery, rather than on the knowledge
or discovery itself. The reader thus becomes involved in the process and reacts to the
strange and perilous Cotabato milieu as Gonzales does.

Without realizing it, you undergo a subconscious experience that also brings your own
fears, motives, attitudes and prejudices to the surface. I for one found that experience
eerie, but it had a kind of liberating effect which I heartily recommend to others.
 42

Will the book stand the test of time? It would be presumptuous to make a prediction,
for only the future can decide that. But for now, I should like to recall Alberto's words
upon completing the building of a high wooden tower on which the surveying transits
would be mounted.

"`It is a beautiful tower,' said Alberto, standing before it, his head craned up, still
sweating from climbing down some twenty parallel bars set about two metres apart and
held firm by crossboards. `Is it not, Dante?'

"`O, o,' said the rod man beside him. He stared up the tower, his eyes sweeping
upward until the tower soared and came to a tapering point against the sky. `I hope the
Moros don't destroy it before Alfonso comes to do the observation,' he said.

"`But the tower is beautiful,' said Alberto, not listening, deaf to the words of the rod
man. `It would not matter then, really, if it were destroyed. It is beautiful now.'"
Alberto could have said the same thing about the book of which he is the hero. Surveyors
of the Liguasan Marsh also rises like a tower on the country's literary landscape, and
indeed it is beautiful now. -

>>>>>>

Antonio Enriquez. Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh, novel, Asian and Pacific
Writing No. 16, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Australia, 1981. 131
pages. A$10.30

As I write, the town is celebrating, blasting off demons and driving harbingers of bad
luck that might be found along the way; as it happens, I have emerged out of the
mangrove forests of “Surveyors of the Liguasan Marsh”. It is quite a country, indeed. As I
was telling Narita at breakfast this monring, you have probably authored one of the most
important novels of this generation. I had this impression already, years ago; but it is
stronger now and I can justify it most objectively.

Alberto [the protagonist] has not paused to question the altruism that inspired the
planning and building of a watershed to benefit inhabitants of the area for many years to
come. The symbolic meaning of this, while probably non-existent in the Moro mind nor
significant enough in that of the Christian, cannot be lost to the intelligent reader.
Basically, thus, the conflict is one of values. Deep down is the primitive, virginal,
innocent represented by the fecund Moroland, to use the story’s own identification of it.
While contemporary engineering knowhow, government as well as corporate bureaucracy
and common labor and business practices are not actually intended to overwhelm and
 43

dehumanize the Moro and his datuism, the change brought on by these is considered but
an extension of the age-old conflict which history, fundamentally, has not resolved nor
probably will.

For that matter, the watershed might not be the answer to the needs of the social order,
unless understood as symbolic…. The novel’s reticence about other matters is justified by
a self-imposed limitation, ostensibly the surveying project. But here, too, is yet another
innocent cover for meaning; the story, in fact, invites us to engage in socio-cultural
triangulations of our own.

How this has been achieved will defy criticism, as will its forthright structure. What our
dream reader will need to do is be attentive to the authorial authenticity which informs
the novel while reigning in the intrusions of vernacular syntax and preserving the rhythm
and color of the dialog even as precision and economy of language remain functional all
throughout. I do not know of any Asian prose at this writing that works toward originality
and power of this kind.

—Letter, December 31, 1998: NVM Gonzales