From myth to religion
While the Negritos and Austronesians (recognized by some as the world's first navigators!) are perhaps the two best-known peoples of the archipelago, many other tribes have also left an important cultural legacy. We might mention the Ilocanos, from the Ilocos region (north-east of Luçon), who composed an epic: Biag ni Lam-and(The Life of Lam-ang) which was transcribed during the colonial era, thanks to the poet Pedro Bukaneg (c.1592-1630) who dictated it from memory, but was undoubtedly much earlier than this. Passed down orally from generation to generation, some scholars have pointed out that the story evolved, incorporating elements reminiscent of the Hindu Ramayana as well as references to the Catholic religion. The story continues to adapt to modern times, having been brought to the big screen in 2012! A second epic poem is just as invaluable: theHandiong (named after the main character), which originated in the Bicol region. Saved and translated into Spanish by the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Melendreras (1815-1867), this unfortunately fragmentary tale is estimated to describe the region as it was 4,500 years ago. Without claiming to be exhaustive, we could also mention the Hudhud, a corpus created by the Ifugao (Luzon) community, which was classified as a UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Site in 2008, or Twaang, the recurring hero of the songs of the Bagobos living in southern Mindanao. The island's significance is not insignificant, for while it was here that Magellan landed in 1521, it was also here that the fighting between Muslims and Spaniards took place, a conflict that inspired Tomás Pinpin to publish the archipelago's first newspaper, Sucesos Felices, which appeared twice, in 1637 and 1639. This printer, born in Aubucay around 1585, also published the first book in Tagalog (the endemic language now known as Filipino), Arte y Reglas de la Lengua Tagala, written by Francisco Blancas de San Jose.
In its early days, Filipino literature was largely confined to practical works, but it also devoted a great deal of attention to religion, as demonstrated by Gaspar Aquino de Belen's rhyming poem Pasyon (16th century), which evokes the Passion of Christ, and the plethora of dramatic plays that followed very precise typologies, from the Moriones, performed in disguise and masks, to the Senákulo depicting the death of Jesus, not forgetting the Salubong (performed at Easter) or the Pangangaluwa (preferred for All Saints' Day). Lighter entertainments are not forgotten, but are confined to tales or songs (corridos, awit), comedies extolling courtly love, or verbal jousting (duplo).
From the oral to the written word
Orality therefore constitutes the DNA of early Philippine literature, but it was from this that one of its founding poets was born: José de la Cruz, known as Huseng Sisw (1746-1829), a nickname (which can be translated as José the Poussin) he earned because he used to get paid in birds for the love poems he was commissioned to write. He never saw his works printed, but they have become classics(Awa ng Pag-ibig, Clarita, La Guerra Civil de Granada, etc.).), he also left behind the image of a self-taught scholar, equally at home in Tagalog, Spanish, Greek and Latin, who began his career on stage, pursued it by declaiming unsurpassed verse and ended it by training Francisco Balagtas y de la Cruz (1788-1862), one of the fathers of Philippine poetry. Balagtas wrote in his mother tongue, Tagalog, which was far from self-evident at a time when the colonial government even imposed Spanish-sounding names on native Filipinos. Balagtas had other run-ins with the powers that be, receiving several prison sentences, the first of which, following a love rivalry, inspired his masterpiece, Florante at Laura. Fate was to be his undoing until after his death, when his manuscripts were destroyed in a fire. Only Florante at Laura, previously published, escaped destruction, and it was only thanks to the memory of his children that five of the ten comedies he had composed could be reconstructed. On his deathbed, however, he had made them promise never to become writers..
The story of Remigia Salazar (1805-1860), whose birth name was Talusan and who was also a victim of the 1849 decree, is a good illustration of the tensions that prevailed at the end of the 19thcentury between the natives and the colonists. The first official periodical(Del Superior Gobernio, 1810) ignored anything that might have aroused the slightest patriotic feeling or desire for independence. Nevertheless, from the 1930s onwards, a protest movement was born, led mainly by women, "las mujeres fuertes". In 1845, Remigia Salazar became the first woman publisher, having taken over the printing works of her husband, Cándido López - who himself was the first to publish a native woman writer, Luisa Gonzaga de Léon - when he died suddenly. Although her publications were mainly religious, 10 of the 29 works she published were in her native language, Hiligaïnon. Above all, she gave birth to Manila's first free newspaper, La Esperanza, which was published from 1846 to 1850, a considerable feat given the pressure she was under. She was followed by Leona Florentino (1848-1884), who was banished and exiled by her husband for her feminist ideas. Her poetry nevertheless received posthumous recognition, as she was the first Filipina to be included in theInternational Encyclopedia of Women's Works in 1889.
Commitment thus marks this pivotal period in Philippine history, and it was her fight for independence that earned José Rizal a premature death at the age of 35. In fact, he was condemned and executed by the colonial authorities in 1896, thus achieving the status of national hero and leaving behind him a body of work that we are fortunate to be able to discover in French thanks to Classiques Garnier, who have reissued Noli me tangere in 2019 : a Tagalog novel, written in Castilian and originally published in Berlin in 1887. In the same revolutionary vein, Aurelio Tolentino wrote an anti-imperialist play, Kahapon, Ngayon at Bukas(Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow). Performed on the stage of Manila's Teatro Libertad on May 14, 1903, it cost its author his arrest by the American forces who had invaded the Philippine political scene and bought back the archipelago in 1898, in accordance with the terms of the Treaty of Paris. Tolentino was not pardoned until 1912, at which point he returned to writing plays. As for the Philippines, it would not achieve semi-autonomy until 1935.
20th and 21st centuries
As a new occupier took over the archipelago, Spanish, until then the predominant language, was banned in favor of English. Tagalog was not officially recognized until 1937, and it was not until 50 years later that it became the national language (under the more generic term Filipino). This linguistic melting pot led to a certain confusion - or enrichment, depending on one's point of view - in the literature. Thus, Fernando María Guerrero (1873-1929) and Antonio Abad (1894-1970) remained fervent defenders of Spanish - the former being the local representative of the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language in Madrid, the latter one of the first recipients of the Premio Zóbel (twice, in 1928 and 1929) for his novels(El último romantico, El Campeon, La Vida secreta de Daniel Espena). In contrast, Zoilo Galang (1895-1959) chose to write in English, and in 1921 published the first Philippine novel in that language, A Child of Sorrow. He went on to write a collection of folk tales, Tales of the Philippines, and above all a vast encyclopedia devoted to his native country.
Once this relative period of hesitation was over, English-speaking writers began to mature, both in form and content, and dared to follow bolder currents. Villa José García (1908-1997), nicknamed Doveglion (contraction of Dove, Eagle, Lion: pigeon, eagle, lion), caused a sensation with his modernist style: in addition to experimenting with inverted rhymes, he made it a habit to follow each word with a comma. Novelist Manuel Arguilla won the Commonwealth Literary Competition in 1940. Four years later, he was captured and executed by the Japanese, becoming one of the symbols of a new, extremely deadly conflict that would haunt the work of feminist author Estrella Alfon (1917-1983) for a long time to come. Bienvenido Santos (1911-1996), who during the Second World War had followed the American government into exile, dealt extensively with the question of diaspora in his many novels, including The Man who (thought he) looked like Robert Taylor and What the Hell for You Left Your Heart in San Francisco? But history was not yet finished with the Philippines, which would have to endure another long period of dictatorship in the 1970s. The past became a favorite subject for writers such as Francisco Sionil José (1924-2022), who in five volumes recounts the history of a family from 1880 to the present day in La Saga de Rosales, available in French from Fayard; Lualhati Bautista, who evokes the Marcos government in Dekada '70, winner of the Palanca Prize; and Ambeth R. Ocampo, who will revive the tutelary figure of José Rizal in several dozen essays.
