"Remembering NVM"
While waiting for the NUPL forum on the Writ of Amparo and Its Implications on Impunity the other day I visited the bookstore at the ground floor of UP’s Balay Kalinaw. There I saw a copy of the book “Remembering NVM” edited by my former professor Jose Y. Dalisay.
Memories then flooded me. NVM Gonzales was one of my old teachers at a UP graduate school. When I was younger I thought I’d be a book author while still in my 20s. To help my dream (delusion?) along I enrolled in NVM’s creative writing class for doctoral students though I was only trying to earn another bachelor’s degree.
I would have wanted to join the many writers who wrote about their fond memories of the late master in that book.
I would have written about how NVM would frown whenever a classmate of ours (a foreign student) would enter the room. My classmate stunk like hell and had this nasty habit of not changing his shirt for days. Nobody knew when was the last time a comb visited his tortured scalp.
I would have written about how NVM would be visibly piqued whenever a particularly argumentative student would defend his grammatical lapses already pointed out by the entire class.
But NVM wasn't always cranky, despite his already advanced age at the time. He was more of a grandfather gathering children around him for wise words on the difficult art of writing. When he turned his massive head toward a student’s direction, invaluable pieces of advice were about to be given to the student.
We were supposed to write a novel in English that semester. NVM gamely agreed to let me write in Filipino. He said a good novel is a good novel—in whatever language. In our first meeting, he said “Creative Writing” is redundant. Writing is already a creative process.
He once asked us to translate a chapter of a classmate’s work in whatever language we knew. I did, in Ybanag. He told me after, a thick index finger of his pointing directly at my chest, “You should write in Ybanag.” His advice remains to be a dream.
When NVM learned I already had a bachelor’s degree from another school, he told me to apply for graduate school instead. I asked him, “Sir, do you think I can make it?” “Do you want me to write an endorsement for you?” he replied. I could not, for the life of me, say no to that.
The next day, NVM handed me a hand-written letter addressed to the graduate school of UP’s Department of English and Comparative Literature. On it, he wrote I was “an honest writer” and that it was his “pleasure to endorse my application.”
Before he bid me goodbye, he whispered, “Did you know it was I who endorsed Joma when he applied for the graduate school?”
That semester’s end came swiftly. I got into graduate school and was tutored by more writing greats—Dalisay, Jing Pantoja-Hildalgo, Marra PL Lanot. A few of my classmates went on to finish what they started under NVM and are now getting some royalties as famous authors. The first few chapters of my Filipino novel gather dust somewhere at home. But whenever I bump into one of them they ask when will they see ‘Tibak” on the shelves.
We were the last few classes NVM taught. He died soon after and was made a National Artist for Literature. And all I’ve got to show since then are some poems in magazines and anthologies. I even failed to finish my graduate studies. Did I fail NVM? Am I betraying the promise he might have seen in me long ago?
It is not that I’ve stopped writing. Since I left UP I wrote hundreds of press releases for ACT. A good number of them landed in newspapers. I’ve written scripts for radio and video. And I still live off words I string together, figuratively and literally.
But whenever I visit a bookstore I always find myself looking for the Filipiniana section. There, I look longingly at the books that have been published since that semester with NVM. I dream of the day when a book bearing my name would have its own space alongside them.
bukaneg, NVM is proud of you, no matter what...
Posted by: - - nENe - - | October 23, 2007 11:17 PM