blackshama's commentary on Philippine issues

  Dear Mr F Sionil Jose As someone who has read ALL your books (and essays), it was right for you to offer your condolences to me in a US embassy event, more than a decade ago. The role of the writer is to "expose our grievous faults" as Steinbeck said, in his 1962 Nobel Prize banquet speech. You have done that, to a nation, to our tragedy as writers, that nation does not read. And this nation is expected never to read. Ask any of the candidates for the elections when they have recently read a book? Reading all your books is both enslaving and liberating at the same time. Books should enslave us to ideas and paradoxically should liberate us too. The Book is where enslavement and liberation start. John Steinbeck the socialist, noted that in Stalin's Russia, people did not ask for arms, or food (the Russians being hungry because of Stalin's collectivization), but books! And Steinbeck too, predicted that the book in the hand is the weapon and people will never abandon bo