Bulosan as National Artist

By Al S. Mendoza

HERE’S A GLASS to both Myrna Bell Uy and Francis Melville Tinio, vice mayor and councilor, respectively, of Binalonan. The duo had collaborated to finally make Carlos Bulosan truly an icon.
And who is Carlos Bulosan again?
The greatest writer Pangasinan has ever produced.
Sadly, though – but correct me if I’m wrong – not even a street, nor a sitio, bears his name in the land of his birth, which is Binalonan.
But still, thanks to Myrna and Francis, September 11, through Municipal Ordinance 2006-01, will henceforth be celebrated in Binalonan as Carlos Bulosan Day.
Myrna, as vice mayor, had overseen the passage of the Bulosan ordinance authored by Francis in a historic session of the town’s sangguniang bayan recently.
However, why Sept. 11, the day Bulosan died, to observe Bulosan Day, instead of Nov. 24, the day Bulosan was born?

 DEATH, NOT LIFE
What we did was in keeping with the tradition of a Jose Rizal, whose death on Dec. 30 we call Rizal Day, instead of June 19, his birthday?
Oh, well, this is a country that seems to love death more than life.
Anyway, back to Carlos Bulosan.
Born on November 24, 1913, he finished only 3 years of schooling.
At 13, he worked in a bakery shop and in an ice factory.
In 1930, at 17, he boarded a ship for the U.S., arriving in Seattle, Washington, at the height of the American depression.
There was hunger all over. Famine stalked the land.
A man of lesser stuff would have surrendered and taken the next ship back home.
Not Bulosan.
He bucked hunger, pain and suffering, picking apples and working in a fish cannery.

 VORACIOUS READER
He reinforced his knowledge by becoming a voracious reader, soaking it up in the children’s section of the Los Angeles public library when not working.
In 1936, barely 23, he started writing. That was outstanding, to say the least. You finished only Grade 3, and here you are, attempting to write – using the foreign tongue yet!
Here’s to confidence, if not finite self-reliance.
And yet, that same year, he earned his first publication when Poetry printed his first poem.
Six years later, in 1942, his first short story (The Laughter of My Father) was published in The New Yorker. That was no mean feat. The New Yorker was, still is, the magazine of literary giants. Wordsmiths. I have no doubt he was the first Filipino to be published there.
As if that wasn’t enough, Bulosan’s works also appeared in such prestigious publications such as Town and Country, Harper’s Bazaar, Arizona Quarterly, Mademoiselle, Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review of Literature, and others. One of his stories was reprinted in the Best American Short Stories of 1945.

 PRES. ROOSEVELT
It was at Saturday Evening Post that Bulosan’s “Freedom from Want” was published.
My fellow columnist here, Eva C. Visperas, wrote that American President Roosevelt had commissioned Bulosan to write “Freedom from Want” as one of the essays in “The Four Freedoms.”
I believe no other Filipino writer has earned the nod of an American president, sitting or otherwise, to write something on his behalf.
I wish I could soon shake hands with Myrna and Francis. People with deep feelings for the arts, for people devoted to arts, deserve our collective applause.
Light a candle for the art of paying homage to our cultural heritage.

 LIFE FPJ
Pangasinan has never been short of giants in arts and literature.
Rosales has F. Sionil Jose (literature), Dagupan Victor C. Edades (visual arts-painting) and San Carlos Fernando Poe Jr. (movies). National Artists all, FPJ being the last one feted posthumously. Of the three, only Jose is alive.
Like the three, Bulosan personified what an artist truly is.
In a sense, he was like FPJ: The absence of a college degree did not deter him to pursue his dreams.
Like FPJ, too, who always raged against oppression, Bulosan helped form labor unions to fight injustice and racial prejudice that soon, he would be weakened by fatigue and succumb to various illnesses.

LIMP
Spending almost two years in a hospital bed in California due mainly to a lung/rib illness, he was told by doctors upon his discharge that he will live “a life of pain” the rest of his life.
Because ribs in his left rib cage had been virtually all “sawed off,” he would soon walk with a limp up to the day he breathed his last.
The literary giant died a poor man on Sept. 11, 1956 in the land of aplenty; he was only 43.
Like the poet Jose Garcia Villa, another National Artist who lived and died in New York, Bulosan never became an American citizen.
I say Bulosan should also be named National Artist. Somebody from Binalonan should do the nominating.
Once more, will Myrna and Francis please rise before the altar of cultural heritage?
A good deed is never late. Or, as Eva C. Visperas wrote, “Better late than never.”

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