It is only with a firmly established textual mentality that many of our enduring problems as a country can begin to be addressed, for their solutions all presuppose, in its citizens primarily, the ability—actually, the habit—to think in categorical rather than provisional terms.

If only for this reason, the cultivation of literacy through the sponsorship of the arts may be seen as a uniquely nationalistic undertaking: it builds the Filipino nation as a matter of collective inclination and awareness—as an imaginative and ethical “inner” structure, first and foremost.

The University of the Philippines Press certainly plays a crucial role in this immense and unfinished task. In pursuing its mandate to advocate academic freedom it presents and disseminates local and important forms of knowledge—by publishing the very best creative and scholarly books by our country’s very best writers and scholars.

Because the arts are an exemplary form of heightened consciousness, they may be said to be the condition for, and evidence of, a mature and transformative literacy—of the visual, performative, and literary sorts. Hence, their continued production and distribution, through the medium of books, can only be in the interest of our country’s one and only national university to carry out.

We need to realize that the powerful orality that continues to permeate our lives is a cultural mode characterized by a fluid and variable memory.

While copious and valuable in its own tactile and immediate ways, the oral mind—with its makeshift and situational predisposition—has prevented us from remembering analytically and tenaciously about things. Sadly, this is precisely the kind of cognitive skill that we need in order to set a-right so much of what is wrong about our national reality, blighted as it is by exactly the kinds of clientelist ties—premised on personalistic logic—that orality propagates and requires.

UP must continue to champion profound forms of reading and writing not only because textual or categorical mentality is something our country vitally needs, but also because it is especially through these mindful acts that an ethical intuition can take root.

Literacy suspends us inside the consciousness of others—rendering us responsible for our ways of relating with them, who affirm our sense of self precisely by being irreducible to it, and with whom we must share this imperiled and perilous world.

Immersing themselves in the complexities of their formal practices, artists leave behind the safety of the familiar, the known, and the same, in order to confront, respect, and relate to strangeness, difference, otherness.

It is through the arts and their imaginative flights—their ability to endow us a point of view distinct from our own, to incarnate us, as it were—that we bring our sense of identity, our very self, to a state of beautiful crisis, from which we may emerge not only more aware and appreciative of the existence of others, but also, more importantly, as fundamentally different from or other to ourselves.

From this recontextualizing of the self—its de-centering and empathy across embodiments and locations—a sense of morality may hopefully, gradually emerge…

The UP Press is half-a-century old. It is only fitting that it should celebrate and share this milestone with its authors. Early last year we decided to honor and express our gratitude to the thirteen National Artists who have entrusted their books to our care.

Consummate “rememberers” and translators between the oral and textual realms, they stand as the vanguards of our people’s steadfast march toward the kind of profound and moral literacy underlying the grand and aspirational abstraction that is the nation.

And so, we are duly reminded: before it can be anything else, the Filipino nation must be a stable allegory, a powerfully enacted story with its set of rituals and cosmologizing symbols that can gather together the embodied and parlous differences of our country into the archipelagic unity that lies at the heart of our imagined community.

Of course, it is our artists who bridge the chasm between our present and our past, in order to provide us the brightest rituals, symbols, images, sounds, and narratives that collectively inspire—and perform into being—our national culture.

In the words of Frantz Fanon,

A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.

On behalf of the University of the Philippines, I would like to thank all our National Artist authors for entrusting to us, UP’s official Publishing House, their wondrous and irreplaceable books—the children of their best selves, bestowals of their giving consciousness.

As carefully shaped vessels of enduring memory, books are nothing if not invitations to the ethical life, gestures toward principled sociality, manifestos against the shame and impunity of forgetting.

Our country—as bodied forth by its one and only national university—shall forever be grateful to all of you.

I would also like to thank our partner institutions for this tribute program—namely, the College of Arts and Letters of UP Diliman (headed by Dean Amihan Bonifacio-Ramolete), and the UP Open University (headed by Chancellor Grace Alfonso).

Our heartfelt thanks also goes to the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and the Likhaan: UP Institute of Creative Writing, as well as all the speakers, resource persons, performers, emcees, visual and musical artists, and members of the production staff, who all worked tirelessly in the making of our tribute videos and installations, as well as our activity here today.

I would like, in particular, to thank Ms. Olive Nieto, special project coordinator of the UP Press. She and her team—that includes Alden Acosta, Angela Simbajon, and Opaline Santos—as well as members of the Press’ editorial, marketing, and administrative sections, have been unstinting and entirely committed to all our golden anniversary activities (especially today’s).

Finally, I wish to thank the administration of President Alfredo E. Pascual, especially my lovely and indefatigable boss, Vice-President for Academic Affairs Giselle Padilla Concepcion, for their unwavering support of all the projects and initiatives of the UP Press.

Thank you for coming. A pleasant evening to one and all.

—–

PAGPUPUGAY: A TRIBUTE TO THE NATIONAL ARTISTS OF THE UP PRESS
Ika-5 ng Pebrero, 2016, 5 n.h.
Claro M. Recto Hall, Bulwagang Rizal, Faculty Center, UP Diliman

I. PAMBANSANG AWIT NG REPUBLIKA NG PILIPINAS

UP Singing Ambassadors sa ilalim ng baton ni Maestro Ed Manguiat

II. INTRODUKSIYON

OJ Serquiña, Junesse Crisostomo

III. PAMBUNGAD NA PANANALITA

Dr. Amihan Bonifacio-Ramolete, Dekana ng UP KAL

IV. UP Singing Ambassadors sa ilalim ng baton ni Maestro Ed Manguiat

V. PAGPUPUGAY PARA KAY PAMBANSANG ALAGAD NG SINING F. SIONIL JOSE

Romancing Venus, Tagapagtanghal
Dr. Shirley O. Lua, Tagapagsalita

VI. PAGPUPUGAY PARA KAY PAMBANSANG ALAGAD NG SINING VIRGILIO S. ALMARIO
LIRA, Tagapagtanghal
Dr. Victor Emmanuel Carmelo D. Nadera, Jr., Tagapagsalita

VII. PAG-ALAALA
Amado V. Hernandez, Leonor Orosa-Goquingco,
Francisco Arcellana, Edith L. Tiempo, NVM Gonzalez,
Rolando S. Tinio, Jose M. Maceda, at Lazaro Francisco

UP Singing Ambassadors sa ilalim ng baton ni Maestro Ed Manguiat, Tagapagtanghal

VIII. PAGPUPUGAY PARA KAY PAMBANSANG ALAGAD NG SINING BIENVENIDO L. LUMBERA

Banaue Miclat-Janssen at Rigil Borromeo, Tagapagtanghal
Dr. Teresita Gimenez-Maceda, Tagapagsalita

IX. PAGPUPUGAY PARA KAY PAMBANSANG ALAGAD NG SINING RAMON P. SANTOS

UP TUGMA, Tagapagtanghal
Dr. Verne Dela Peña, Tagapagsalita

X. PAGPUPUGAY PARA KAY PAMBANSANG ALAGAD NG SINING CIRILO F. BAUTISTA

Nerisa del Carmen Guevara, Tagapagtanghal
Dr. Marjorie Evasco, Tagapagsalita

XI. PASASALAMAT

Dr. Jose Neil C. Garcia, Direktor ng UP Press

XII. UP NAMING MAHAL

XIII. COCKTAILS

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As the culminating activity of its year-long Golden Anniversary celebration, UP Press would now like to honor the five who are living as well as the eight who have passed on with an exhibit at the Gallery 1, Faculty Center on February 1-5, 2016; a re-launching of their UP Press titles; and an afternoon of special tributes from colleagues and friends entitled “PAGPUPUGAY: A Tribute to the National Aritsts of the UP Press” on February 5, 2016, 5 p.m. at the Claro M. Recto Hall, Bulwagang Rizal.

The thirteen National Artists are: Amado V. Hernandez (Literature, 1973), Leonor Orosa-Goquingco (Dance, 1976), Francisco Arcellana (Literature, 1990), Edith L. Tiempo (Literature, 1999), Nestor Vicente Madali (NVM) Gonzalez (Literature, 1997), Rolando S. Tinio (Theatre, 1997), Jose M. Maceda (Music, 1997), Francisco Sionil Jose (Literature, 2001), Virgilio S. Almario (Literature, 2003), Bienvenido L. Lumbera (Literature, 2006), Lazaro A. Francisco (Literature, 2009), Ramon P. Santos (Music, 2014), and Cirilo F. Bautista (Literature, 2014).

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