Resil B. Mojares: Adventures and Itineraries in Philippine Cultural History

Resil B. Mojares, professor emeritus at the University of San Carlos and a member of the editorial board of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, was recognized as a National Artist for Literature in 2018. Born in 1943 in Polanco, Zamboanga del Norte, Mojares studied in public schools in Mindanao and then at Silliman University in Dumaguete City and the University of San Carlos (USC) in Cebu City. He started teaching at USC in 1965 and, ten years later, became the founding director of its Cebuano Studies Center. In 1979, he obtained a PhD in Literature from the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman. Except for stints as a visiting scholar in the United States, Japan, and Singapore, he is a homegrown intellectual.

Devoting his life to Philippine cultural and historical studies, he says in his response to the Tanglaw ng Lahi award conferred upon him by the Ateneo de Manila University in 2013, is a "natural, organic extension" of having public school teachers for parents, of growing up "in a town in northern Mindanao, at a time when civics was not just a lesson in class but part of the reality of community life; of dreaming very early on of becoming a writer, and then embracing a career as a teacher"; of being incarcerated when Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law in 1972 and subsequently leaving behind his earlier career as a short story writer and journalist; and "being impelled by a sense of urgency in understanding why the society of which one is a part is what it is; and then, finally and quite simply, of finding great joy in learning, in writing, and in sharing what one has learned" (Mojares 2013b).

He has authored more than twenty books and published numerous essays and articles in popular and scholarly publications. His books include such groundbreaking works as Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel (1983), Theater in Society, Society in Theater (1985), The Man Who Would Be President (1986), House of Memory (1997), Waiting for Mariang Makiling (2002), Brains of the Nation (2006), and Isabelo's Archive (2013a). He has received several "best book" awards from the Philippine National Book Awards and Book Development Association of the Philippines. His body of scholarship has been honored by the Cultural Center of the Philippines Centennial Awards, the Grant Goodman Prize in Philippine History, Hong Kong's Fok Ying Tung Southeast Asia Prize, and the Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi.

A most amiable and unassuming man, Resil Mojares (RM) agreed to write his answers to questions that Caroline Hau (CH) assembled and organized, based on her own set of questions and those coming from Patricio Abinales (PA), Filomeno Aguilar (FA), Lisandro Claudio (LC), Michael Cullinane (MC), and Michael Pante (MP).

A Literary Life

CH/MC:

You began your career as a writer of short fiction in English. Between 1966 and 1971, you published at least thirteen short stories, a number of them award-winning and critically lauded. But after 1971, you stopped publishing new fiction. Why so?

RM:

I wrote my last story, "In the Beginning of the War," in 1972. I was about to submit it for publication when martial law was declared in September that year. It did not appear in print until 1987, in Ani, the literary journal of the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

Several factors ended my "literary career." I was detained under martial law in 1972 and then released under certain conditions: I could not publish, give press interviews, or leave the province without permission from military authorities. I was officially under "provincial arrest," a condition I thought had been lifted after a year or two only to learn around 1977, when I applied for a passport (and after I was already traveling freely between Manila and Cebu for my doctoral studies), that I was still under "provincial arrest" because I had not applied for "absolute release."

In any case, I was already consumed by academic work and had lost...