“Our sense ... of our country is a sustained act of imagination. From that vantage, it can be said that our writers and artists, who are men and women of imagination, create our country (italics mine). That is to say: they evoke those images of ourselves as we live life day and night, those images of ourselves which we share and by which we recognize our nativity. We are our own best interpreters of our history and culture because it is we who have lived through that history and created our own values by which we live.”
—National Artist for Literature Gemino Abad
War spares none, and forgives few... Japan learned this the hard way after Emperor Hirohito announced the country’s surrender in August 1945. Atomic bombs...
Mars Ravelo, the creator of Darna, Dyesebel, Bondying, Roberta, Jack and Jill and other fantastic characters that continue to people the pages of various comics, magazines, and entertain millions of Filipinos on the silver screen had very few frustrations in life.
The Philippine archipelago, with a coastline much longer than that of the United States, has some of the world’s richest and most diverse coral reefs. Of the 500 known species in the world, 400 are found in the country’s 7,100 islands—a fantastic collection even greater than that of the Great Barrier Reef of Australia.
An Asian Renaissance must involve cultural rebirth and empowerment, not simply cultural jingoism.
In 1886, a young Asian student wrote from Europe the following lines...
ONLY the very naive or the very cynical would try to predict the future course of Philippine literature. There are only the weekly magazines or the occasional books as signposts to indicate trends, and these signposts do not give very coherent directions.
