‘Salamat’ Poe June 13, 2006

I DISAGREE strenuously with those who criticize the Poe family for spurning the National Artist Award for Fernando Poe Jr. I disagree even more strenuously with those who lament the injection of “politics” in art, accusing the Poes of the crime.

The people who say those things forget their history, specifically the history of the National Artist Award itself. That Award has been steeped in politics, and I do not mean by that, simply the intramurals that go into its choice of artists. I leave that to the people in the arts to debate, as they have done so furiously over the decades. All awards will always be fraught with politics in that respect. I know because I have been a judge in various writing competitions for many years. Decisions are an engraved invitation to controversy, some more than others.

But far than that, when it first arose, the National Artist Award had both a laudable and un-laudable function. The laudable one was to give artists the importance due them, and not quite incidentally the wherewithal to pursue their Muse without having to worry where the next rent money would come from, a vexation artists are especially prone to.

The un-laudable one was to legitimize an illegitimate government. Though the Award was established months before martial law, in April 1972, it wasn’t until May the following year that the Cultural Center of the Philippines Board of Trustees was constituted by a Marcos proclamation and mandated to administer the Award.

The Award wasn’t just meant to make the artist look good, an intention writ in elegant language; it was also meant to make martial law look good, a motive left unarticulated but was plain for everyone to see. Certainly, that motive wasn’t lost on Nick Joaquin, who was the obvious and unanimous choice for National Artist for Literature from the start. As people would later recall, it was a unique situation where the Award was desperately seeking the awardee and not the awardee the Award. For years, despite the intercession of fellow artists who had joined the regime, Joaquin stood pat on his refusal to accept the Award.

He finally relented in 1976, in an act that gave the public new insights into the meaning of art and life. He agreed to accept the Award on the condition that writer-activist Pete Lacaba was released from Bicutan. Aware of Joaquin’s stature and the gaping hole left in the Award by his absence in it, the regime conceded to his demand. Later, at a ceremony in Mt. Makiling that had former first lady Imelda Marcos for guest, Joaquin delivered a speech about the inseparable connection between art and freedom. He was never invited to any official function after that. You can’t get more political than that. You can’t get more artistic than that.

That was pretty much the same situation last Friday. The Defender of the Faith, Mike Defensor, said before the awarding ceremonies that it was unfortunate that the Award should be tainted by politics. He should have told that to his boss. Clearly, as in martial law days, the citing of FPJ (Poe’s initials) as National Artist wasn’t just meant to make FPJ look good, it was meant to make President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo look good. It wasn’t just meant to recognize FPJ’s contributions to film, it was meant to recognize Arroyo’s claim to the presidency. It wasn’t just meant to legitimize FPJ as a genuine artist, it was meant to legitimize Arroyo as a genuine president.

None of this is to say that the others shouldn’t also have accepted their awards. Why in hell, or heaven, shouldn’t they? The Award also had the completely meritorious function of recognizing their work and reminding this country -- especially the “Material Girl” who handed out the awards -- that (wo)man does not live by bread alone. All this is merely to say that FPJ’s kin had special and compelling reasons to reject it.
At the very least, why should they have agreed to receive the award from the one person who not only robbed the awardee of another award -- though a much inferior one compared to being National Artist -- which was to be President of the Philippines, but also did her very best to cast doubt on FPJ’s nationality? Lest we forget, that was the issue Arroyo or her minions first raised against Poe to scare off his possible backers -- that he was not a Filipino. Which, as I said then, was monumentally ironic given that, for good or ill, Poe had helped mightily to define what being Filipino -- or at least being a Filipino male -- was. He was the quintessential hero a whole generation of Filipinos tried to emulate. For him to have been cast off from his tribe would have voided an entire chapter of Philippine cultural history.

For him now to have been proclaimed National Artist by the one person who sought to becloud his being a national, if not his being an artist, that was consuelo de bobo (fool’s consolation) of bubonic proportions, and Poe’s kin are anything but bobos, bubonic or otherwise.

At the very most, what is the essence of art really but the true, the good and the beautiful? That phrase, of course, was Imelda’s favorite, a thing she raised to a battle cry in her time, which was memorable only for being a satirical commentary on her and her husband’s rule. The Poes had every reason to see in it the same ironic commentary on Arroyo’s rule -- the proposition that the current occupant of Malacañang had any right to preside over an activity dedicated to the true, the good and the beautiful rubbing salt on their wounds. Truth was the last thing they could possibly associate with her. Goodness, well, Susan Roces did say she had looked into Arroyo’s eyes and found no contrition there. And as to beauty, you could not blame them if they found her very existence an aesthetic assault to body and soul.

I personally would like to thank them for reminding us of some of the things that matter in life, love and art. Salamat Poe.

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