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 books. How prescient that is in the Internet age!
The characters you created are tragically enslaved and yet liberated both by circumstance and destiny, Pepe of the Mass and Carmie of "Ermita" are examples. Tony Samson, the academic, journo and illegitimate child, is also trapped and you gave the Deus ex machina, suicide.
Like you, I much do not agree with Ms Ressa's politics, but she is just like one of the characters in your books, someone deeply flawed, enslaved and wants to be free. The Nobel committee which deserves criticism for many of its choices, just recognized that fact.
I won't stop reading your books because of your politics. Everyone who writes, knows they are deeply flawed and like what Dr Rizal knew, the enemy is the writer himself. And the readers? They determine our salvation or damnation. Those who don't read are trapped by their echo chambers and won't be free and so we are damned.
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