LitWit Profiles: Krip Yuson on his Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe
Beginning our monthly series of Q&As with Filipino writers
Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe, first published in 1988, has been reissued by Anvil. Available at National Bookstores, Php375.
Alfred A. Yuson a.k.a. Krip has authored 26 books thus far, including novels, poetry collections, short fiction, essays, children’s stories, biographies and coffee table books, apart from having edited literary anthologies. He has gained numerous distinctions, including the 2009 Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas from UMPIL the Writer’s Union of the Philppines, the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan award from the City of Manila, a Rockefeller Foundation grant for residency at Bellagio in Italy, and the South East Asian Writers Award from Thai royalty for lifetime achievement. He has also been elevated to the Hall of Fame of the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature. He co-founded the Philippine Literary Arts Council, Creative Writing Foundation, Inc., and Manila Critics Circle.
Krip Yuson can also be counted on to find paying jobs for underemployed writers, and is the social director of the Philippine literary scene.
Random excerpt
The natives called the mountain Talinis for its sharp peaks. The Spanish came and saw the twin peaks as home. They named the mountain Cuernos de Negros, Horns of the Devil, thinking it funnily appropriate that the island the mountain belonged to had itself earlier been named Negros for its dark-skinned aborigines.
If you look at the island on a map, fair chances are you’d recall sometime in your boyish past you bent from the waist and peered between your legs at your Aunt Rita, she of the jutjaw and the well-coiffed chignon and string of pearls almost as large as your marbles, an a scent that drew attention even while you nursed your year’s prized cold.
The outline of Negros Island much resembled an inverted silhouette of a lady with a powerful neck and a high bun on her head. Where the lady’s eye would be, the taller peak of Cuernos de Negros rose to a craggy cloud-capped height.
When Pedro Saavedra, Spanish surveyor and heir to a brewery fortune in Galicia, stood on this peak in 1765 and thus came to the crowning culmination of seven months of geodetic cum geologic work on the island, he took one long sweeping look at the curving coastline to the south, where the island’s head widened to the sea’s hairdressing hands, and breathed deeply the way Galicians of high birth do before their swig of malt at sundown.
Q&A with Krip Yuson
Jessica Zafra (JZ): A publisher has described The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café as the first magical realist novel of the Philippines. Did you consciously set out to write a magical realist novel?
Alfred A. Yuson (AAY): Uhh, I don’t think so. I’ve never really been into labels identifying literary genres, often eschewing academic terms and trends. It just happened to be the kind of genre that appealed to me, that I was enjoying reading, then and maybe even now. It wasn’t until much later I think when the term magical realist, or metafiction or post-modern for that matter, became familiar. I was reading and enjoying Borges, Cortazar, eventually Marquez (whose work popularized the label for some Latin American fiction), but I was not aware that Nick Joaquin had already tried his hand in it with a few of his stories, written in the early 1950s. So much so that when I began attending literary fests/conferences abroad by the 1990s, and some smart-ass Aussie would question why Philippine fiction in English seemed to be enamored with magic realism, my reply would be to issue a challenge for him to come to Manila, live for a week in Quiapo, and look out the window, so he could witness the Black Nazarene procession as well as some street vendor hawking a tabloid with the headline: “Woman gives birth to fish!”
The subject matter I played with also reeked of fantasy or magical realism, so the story had to be told that way, especially since I was aware that it was a virtual burlesque of Philippine revolutionary history that I was attempting.
JZ: Tell us about the writing of the novel. Did you follow a work routine (Get up at 4am, write from 5-11am, etc) with a daily quota or did you just write whenever you felt like writing? Did you have a regular job at the time? And how did you find time away from your busy social life to write?
AAY: No. It was on and off for over a year, if I recall right. I had submitted the first chapter/s for a competition for a CCP grant for the writing of a novel, as engineered by Adrian Cristobal. It won and I think I was given a year to complete it to receive the rest of the grant prize. When I completed the draft, it went to Francisco Arcellana for evaluation. He wrote a glowing report, so the manuscript was published by the Book Development Association of the Philippines or BDAP in 1987, as stipulated in the grant. I think I handed a copy of the manuscript to Nick Joaquin. He wound up previewing the work in a column he wrote for the Inquirer, I think. I asked permission to use the (p)review as the second of the Intros (the first was Arcellana’s report) that ushered in the novel in book form, for that first edition. It also eventually or simultaneously (can’t exactly remember now) won the Grand Prize for the Novel in English in the Palanca Memorial Awards. I think that was also in 1987.
I couldn’t observe a regular work routine at the time since I was a free-lancer dabbling in movie reviews and sports articles for newspapers, and securing special work assignments with the DOT related to travel (AVPs and docus). I was also scripting for film and documentaries. So, the writing of the novel manuscript was touch and go, done sporadically, in stretches or little bits, often under the influence of something or other.
JZ: Do you write longhand, on a typewriter, or on a computer? Or dictate pages to a serf?
AAY: At the time, I used a portable typewriter. It wasn’t until the 1990s that I started using a laptop. Before that, some poems were being drafted in longhand.
JZ: When you write a novel, do you start with an outline? And what percentage of your fiction actually happened?
AAY: The outline and structure were in my head, but shifted or were altered frequently. For that first novel, parts of it were personal stuff, meaning some incidents actually transpired — such as the narrated contemporary protest march from Sto. Domingo Church down España to Luneta that had to do with Tita Cory Aquino’s protest over being cheated in the snap election of 1986. My son Aya and I joined that march. He was renamed Mitchum Tikboy in the novel.
JZ: Is there anything about TGPJEC that you would change? How do you feel today when you read stuff that you wrote decades ago?
AAY: It’s actually GPJEC. There’s no “The” in the title. (Eric Gamalinda initially had it as “The Empire of Memory” — his novel. I questioned the need for “The.” He took it out.)
No, I don’t think I would change anything now. I’m not much into revising any of my stuff that’s already been published. Poetry or prose. Live with it; die with it. If only because there is always something else to write afresh.
When I read now what I had written decades ago, honestly, not too often do I find myself wincing. I understand the process of maturity in rendering literature, that some stuff one wrote earlier were at best stepping stones to what came after. Of course if and when I have to re-anthologize a collection of poetry, or offer a selection, even of prose, there would be particular poems or prose excerpts that I know I was and still am satisfied and happy with.
JZ: Do you read reviews of your books? What was your favorite? Your least favorite?
AAY: Yes, whatever comes out. Kinda too many to recall. On GPJEC, not even Tita Sicat’s misreading (for an academic paper), claiming it was sort of a travesty of history I had rendered, since it wasn’t serious and that I had wasted the opportunity to approach the material with a sense of gravitas — something like that — I can’t say it was my least favorite. I was very amused by it. And told her so. Or wrote a rejoinder — that what she had in mind wasn’t what had occupied mine. Years later, yet another UP academic wrote another paper in defense of GPJEC, in particular quashing the arguments raised by Sicat. I think this was Ruth Pison’s thesis, which also amused me no end.
JZ: You’re a big sports fan. Would you write a sports novel?
AAY: I suppose I could, and would, if such a notion led to an inclination. But I have other novels in mind for now, and can only hope that the demands of having to keep a family afloat would ease up to award me the time to do more personal creative work: poems, stories, novels, criticism …
JZ: Who are your greatest influences, literary and not?
AAY: In the earliest days, as a teener of a reader, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, Jose Garcia Villa, Nick Joaquin, W.H. Auden, W.B. Yeats, then Wallace Stevens, Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, William Kotzwinkle, Ian MacEwan … Non-literary: Pancho Villa (our boxer) Carlos Loyzaga, Flash Elorde, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Muhammad Ali, Michael Jordan, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart …
JZ: What is the connection between literature and alcohol? Is there any hope for aspiring writers who do not drink at all?
AAY: I’m sure there is. I believe I know fewer writer-friends who are associated with regular or prodigious intake of alcohol than those as inclined as I am to a tipple or wee drams.
JZ: Pundits say the book is dead. What does Krip Yuson say?
AAY: I say pundits die a thousand deaths each day, maybe with every pun or pronouncement, premature or otherwise. Unless it were wry, or very dry.
November 12th, 2015 at 11:28
this book made me win my first litwit challenge :)
thank you krip yuson! and jz.