Philippine literature

Philippine literature is the body of literary works from the Philippines. Literature in the region began with the oral storytelling traditions of the people who lived there before European colonization. Literature in the area was dramatically influenced by traders and colonizers who controlled the area for hundreds of years and forced cultural changes, including changes in religion, language, and art. The history of literature in the region has also been influenced by the different native languages and cultures of the people who live on the islands. Philippine literature is often broken into various time periods to distinguish different literary styles and traditions. Most often, people recognize the precolonial period, the Spanish colonial period, the American colonial period, the World War II (1939-1945) and post-war period, and the modern period. Each period is marked by different styles of storytelling, the use of different languages, and different themes and topics.

Background

The Philippines is an archipelago nation in the Pacific. The country includes more than 7,000 islands, and it is home to people who speak many different languages and have different cultures. The tropical islands are located in a geologically active area of the Pacific Ocean, and the region is prone to powerful storms and weather activity. Humans have lived in the area that is now the Philippines for nearly 700,000 years. Different cultures and languages developed in the area, particularly because the region is broken into thousands of islands. The various islands and island groups developed unique attributes, which would go on to influence the culture and literature of those areas.

Overview

The people who inhabited the Philippine archipelago before colonization developed their own syllabary (which is different from an alphabet because each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single speech sound). Although the inhabitants of different parts of what is now the Philippines may have had different syllabaries or alphabets, the one known to scholars today is from the Tagalog people and is called baybayin. This form of writing was a type of inscription similar to Sanskrit. Spanish colonizers destroyed much of the baybayin writing that was done when they arrived on the islands in an attempt to force their own language and culture on the people there. However, some baybayin survived on pots, coins, and other surfaces. Since the late 1900s, the baybayin style of writing has had some resurgence in the Philippines.

During the precolonial period in the Philippines, most storytelling was done orally, though some literature was written in the script. Songs and poems were popular forms of storytelling on the islands. The Tagalog people had different types of songs they would sing for different occasions. For example, they sang a uyayi or hele as a lullaby to put children to sleep. They sang the panambitan as a courtship song and the pamanhikan as a way of proposing marriage. Other groups of people in the islands also had traditional songs and poems that they used to celebrate or commemorate important moments in life. For example, in the northern part of the Philippines people sang love songs called the dallot and the duayya. People in the mountains sang the bagbagto during the harvest. In the Batanes islands, people sang folk songs such as the kanta and the kalusan. The people of the islands also told traditional riddles, proverbs, and aphorisms. These traditional sayings were important for passing along cultural values and expressing behavioral norms.

The early inhabitants of the Philippines also shared poems. One type was a seven-line poem created by the Mangyans called the ambahan, which was told for entertainment and for teaching lessons about life. The people of the Philippines also had many different epics. The people of Maranao had the darangen, and the people of Ifugao had the hudhud. People often told epics to music and sometimes performed dances to them. Many of these epics and other indigenous stories dealt with magic and fantasy. Modern studies have discovered roughly 100 different epics. Some scholars believe that these are the real roots of the Philippine literary tradition.

Starting in the fourteenth century and lasting through the beginning of the twentieth century, traders and colonizers changed the culture and influenced the literature of the Philippines. In the fourteenth century, Muslim traders reached the Philippines, and the culture of the islands began to change. The new religion and culture of the traders spread through various parts of the islands, and Muslim leaders began their own governments in places too. The traditional songs and sayings of the islands were influenced by these newcomers. The kissa, a narrative song, told about a Muslim hero who dies when battling a non-Muslim.

In the sixteenth century, Spanish colonizers arrived in the Philippines and took control. This cultural takeover transformed the islands and their culture. The first book printed in the Philippines was Doctrina Christiana (1593), which was a Christian prayer book written in Spanish and translated into Tagalog. Spanish missionaries, who attempted to convert all the people they could on the islands, read the book aloud to the people of the Philippines. As the Spanish attempted to forcibly convert indigenous people to Christianity, they tried to stop the indigenous people from sharing their oral epics, songs, riddles, and stories. They also destroyed whatever written literature they found, which nearly eradicated the existence of the Tagalog syllabary. The Spanish also tried to eliminate the native literature by spreading their own stories, especially religious ones. Although these stories, especially the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection, became popular, many parts of the islands were difficult to colonize, allowing traditional stories and songs to persist in some areas.

The Spanish used native speakers of the indigenous languages to translate Christian stories and Catholic doctrines from Spanish into the native languages. Eventually, these native translators learned to read and write in both Spanish and their native languages. In the 1700s, some nonreligious Spanish literature also became popular in the area. Medieval ballads and other forms of Spanish poetry became popular, and they inspired native storytellers to create their own poems including the poetic-drama form called the komedya. Jose de la Cruz (1746–1829) was a famous creator of the komedya. His works were printed and shared orally so they were popular with many different types of people, including those who could not read. Spanish missionaries maintained control over printing presses until the late nineteenth century, so most of the books printed in the region were Spanish religious texts. By the nineteenth century, printed language began to overtake the traditional way of sharing oral stories, songs, and poems. The first Filipino novel was Ninay (1885) by Pedro Paterno. The novel, which was written in Spanish, was eventually translated into English and Tagalog.

In 1898, war between Spain and the United States again greatly influenced the future of the Philippines. The United States emerged victorious against Spain, and took control of the Philippines in 1898. Although the Spanish colonizers had established Spanish as the dominant language, the American colonizers started to spread English throughout the islands after they took over. This language shift was evident in the books and stories being printed in the Philippines in the early twentieth century. Literature was also greatly influenced by the introduction of public education. Soon, many educated Filipinos were publishing works in English. In 1924 the first English-language poetry anthology from the Philippines—Filipino Poetry, edited by Rodolfo Dato—was printed. Soon afterward another anthology—The English German Anthology of Poets, edited by Pablo Laslo—was published. Some of the famous Filipino poets of the era included Teofilo D. Agcaoili, Salvador P. Lopez, Angela Manalang Gloria, and Jose Garcia Villa.

The American takeover of the Philippines not only influenced education and language, but it also influenced the writing styles that were popular in the region. The short story, which was a popular form of fiction in the United States, became popular. Filipino writers such as Francisco Arcellana and A.E. Litiatco wrote such stories. In 1926, the U.P. Writers club was established, and it continued to spread the influence of English-language literature in the Philippines. Yet native Filipino writers, such as Icasiano Calalang and Paz Latorena, added their own cultural influences to the craft. Major Filipino novels of the time were also important as many of them reflected on the complicated history of the Philippines and the identities of the people living there.

In December 1941, following the raid on Pearl Harbor, Japan invaded the Philippines, and soon overwhelmed the US and Filipino forces defending the islands. During the occupation, which lasted roughly three years, many Filipinos remained loyal to the United States, due to existing cultural ties and the brutal behavior of the Japanese military By the time a combined US and Filipino force liberated the country in 1945, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos had lost their lives.

In the late 1930s, Wilfrido Maria Guerrero became a popular playwright. He toured with one-act plays in a mobile theater that became popular around the Philippines. Poetry also remained popular, though much produced at the time had an American influence. The war itself influenced the literature produced in the country at the time, with the novels Without Seeing the Dawn (1947) by Stevan Javellana and Watch in the Night (1953) by Edilberto Tiempo telling about experiences in the war.

In 1946, the United States signed the Treaty of Manila, which granted independence to the Philippines. Much of the literature produced in the post-war period was published in English and written by authors who studied in the United States or England. Writers such as novelist Edilberto Tiempo, poet Edith Tiempo, and short-fiction writer Francisco Arcellana returned to the Philippines after studying abroad, and many such writers also taught literature and writing in the region. Some of these writers were criticized for their adoption of the style and language of different countries, and also occasionally ran into issues with government censorship. The fiction created during the post-war period also tended to focus on social issues and have a realist outlook. This was very different from epics that were popular in the indigenous oral tradition, which were often focused on magic and fantasy.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, Tagalog poets generated a great deal of work, including works in which they confronted political and social upheaval of the time, including the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, who ran the country as either president or dictator from 1965 until 1986. Around the same time, the oral tradition was still practiced in some parts of the region. Poetry forms such as the Balak and the Balagtasan were still told by traditional storytellers, though these traditions continued to fade. Some younger poets became inspired by the fading oral tradition and penned epics and other poems that were similar to those that were told traditionally. Magical realism, a form of fiction that was popular in the Americas and elsewhere in the 1960s and 1970s, was also common in the Philippines.

By the end of the 1900s, modern cultural forces such as feminism that had impacted literature in the United States and other parts of the West had also influenced some Filipino writing. Such changes also forced a cultural change in the Philippines in which readers began to read more works, even those from the past, of female writers. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was also a continued focus on writing that told about real-life as well as writing about magic and magical realism. In the modern period, novels were one of the dominant forms of literature, though short fiction and poetry also remained important forms.

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