Nick Joaquin

Joaqun was born in Paco, Manila, one of ten children of Leocadio Joaqun, a colonel under General
Emilio Aguinaldo in the 1896 Revolution, and Salome Mrquez, a teacher of English and Spanish. As a
boy, after being read poems and stories by his mother, Joaqun read widely in his father's library and at
the National Library of the Philippines. By then, his father had become a successful lawyer after the
revolution. From reading, Joaqun became interested in writing.

At age 17, Joaqun had his first piece published, in the literary section of the pre-World War II Tribune,
where he worked as a proofreader. It was accepted by the writer and editor Serafn Lanot. After Joaqun
won a nationwide essay competition to honor La Naval de Manila, sponsored by the Dominican Order,
the University of Santo Tomas awarded him an honorary Associate in Arts (A.A.) and a scholarship to St.
Albert's Convent, the Dominican monastery in Hong Kong.

Poet, fictionist, essayist, biographer, playwright, and National Artist, decided to quit after three years of
secondary education at the Mapa High School. Classroom work simply bored him. He thought his
teachers didn't know enough. He discovered that he could learn more by reading books on his own, and
his father's library had many of the books he cared to read. He read all the fiction he could lay his hands
on, plus the lives of saints, medieval and ancient history, the poems of Walter de la Mare and Ruben
Dario. He knew his Bible from Genesis to Revelations. Of him actress-professor Sarah K. Joaquin once
wrote: "Nick is so modest, so humble, so unassuming . . .his chief fault is his rabid and insane love for
books. He likes long walks and wornout shoes. Before Intramuros was burned down, he used to make
the rounds of the churches when he did not have anything to do or any place to go. Except when his
work interferes, he receives daily communion." He doesn't like fish, sports, and dressing up. He is a
bookworm with a gift of total recall.

He was born "at about 6:00 a.m." in Paco, Manila, on 04 May 1917. The moment he emerged from his
mother's womb, the baby Nicomedes--or Onching, to his kin--made a "big howling noise" to announce
his arrival. That noise still characterizes his arrival at literary soirees. He started writing short stories,
poems, and essays in 1934. Many of them were published in Manila magazines, and a few found their
way into foreign journals. His essay La Naval de Manila (1943) won in a contest sponsored by the
Dominicans whose university, the UST, awarded him an A.A. (Associate in Arts) certificate on the
strength of his literary talents. The Dominicans also offered him a two-year scholarship to the Albert
College in Hong Kong, and he accepted. Unable to follow the rigid rules imposed upon those studying for
the priesthood, however, he left the seminary in 1950.

He is included in Heart of the Island (1947) and Philippine Poetry Annual: 1947 - 1949 (1950), both
edited by Manuel A. Viray.

The following are Joaquin's published books:

Prose and Poems (1952)

The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961)

Selected Stories (1962)

La Naval de Manila and Other Essays (1964)

From the jacket of A Question of Heroes: "Along with the author's recent 'culture as History,' [this book
is] a gentle polemical inquiry into thecharacter of the Filipinos' national culture, these essays constitute
perhaps the most coherent picture of the revolutionary heritage most Filipinos claim for themselves
today."

After the death of his father, Joaquin went to live with his brother Enrique ("Ike"). With the
encouragement of his sister-in-law, Sarah, he submitted a story to the Herald Mid-Week Magazine and it
was published. He soon sent out more stories to other magazines. In 1949 "Guardia de Honor" was
declared the best story of the year in the Philipines Free Press.

He was designated manager of his sister-in-law Sarah's dramatic organization after WWII. Later he
joined the Philippines Free Press as proofreader and subsequently became a rewrite man. He wrote
feature articles he bylined as "Quijano de Manila." They were a great hit. Soon they appeared regularly
and Quijano de Manila became one of the most famous journalists in the country.

Because of labor problems in the Free Press, he left and edited Asia-Philippine Leader. He had been with
the Free Press for 27 years (1950-77). Nicomedes "Onching" M. Joaquin, today just "Nick," who came
into the world howling, lives quietly in San Juan del Monte writing, among others, kiddie books. And "he
survives on sheer genius," remarks one admirer of his.

Nicomedes Mrquez Joaqun (May 4, 1917 April 29, 2004) was a Filipino writer, historian and
journalist, best known for his short stories and novels in the English language. He also wrote using the
pen name Quijano de Manila. Joaqun was conferred the rank and title of National Artist of the
Philippines for Literature. He has been considered one of the most important Filipino writers in English,

After returning to the Philippines, Joaqun joined the Philippines Free Press, starting as a proofreader.
He soon attracted notice for his poems, stories and plays, as well as his journalism under the pen name
Quijano de Manila. His journalism was both intellectual and provocative, an unknown genre in the
Philippines at that time, and raised the country's level of reportage.

Nick Joaquin is interred at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.

After being honored as National Artist, Joaquin used his position to work for intellectual freedom in
society. He secured the release of imprisoned writer Jos F. Lacaba. At a ceremony on Mount Makiling
attended by First Lady Imelda Marcos, Joaqun delivered an invocation to Mariang Makiling, the
mountain's mythical maiden. Joaqun touched on the importance of freedom and the artist. After that,
Joaqun was excluded by the Marcos regime as a speaker at important cultural events.

Joaqun died of cardiac arrest in the early morning of April 29, 2004, at his home in San Juan, Metro
Manila. He was then editor of Philippine Graphic magazine, where he worked with Juan P. Dayang, the
magazine's first publisher. Joaqun was also publisher of its sister publication, Mirror Weekly, a womens
magazine, and wrote the column Small Beer for the Philippine Daily Inquirer and Isyu, an opinion
tabloid.

He was the greatest Filipino writer of his generation. Over six decades and a half, he produced a body of
work unmatched in richness and range by any of his contemporaries. Living a life wholly devoted to the
craft of conjuring a world through words, he was the writers writer. In the passion with which he
embraced his countrys manifold being, he was his peoples writer as well.

Nick Joaqun was born in the old district of Pac in Manila, Philippines, on September 15, 1917, the feast
day of Saint Nicomedes, a protomartyr of Rome, after whom he took his baptismal name. He was born
to a home deeply Catholic, educated, and prosperous. His father, Leocadio Joaqun, was a person of
some prominence. Leocadio was a procurador (attorney) in the Court of First Instance of Laguna, where
he met and married his first wife, at the time of the Philippine Revolution. He shortly joined the
insurrection, had the rank of colonel, and was wounded in action. When the hostilities ceased and the
country came under American rule, he built a successful practice in law. Around 1906, after the death of
his first wife, he married Salom Mrquez, Nicks mother. A friend of General Emilio Aguinaldo, Leocadio
was a popular lawyer in Manila and the Southern Tagalog provinces. He was unsuccessful however when
he made a bid for a seat in the Philippine Assembly representing Laguna.

Nick Joaquns mother was a pretty, well-read woman of her time who had studied in a teacher-training
institute during the Spanish period. Though still in her teens when the United States took possession of
the Philippines, she was among the first to be trained by the Americans in English, a language she taught
in a Manila public school before she left teaching after her marriage.

Leocadio and Salom built a genteel, privileged home where Spanish was spoken, the family went to
church regularly, had outings in the familys huge European car (one of the first Renaults in the city), and
the children were tutored in Spanish and piano. Salom (who sings beautiful melodies and writes with
an exquisite hand, recalls a family member) encouraged in her children an interest in the arts. There
were ten children in the family, eight boys and two girls, with Nick as the fifth child. The Joaqun home
on Herrn Street in Pac was a large section of a two-story residential-commercial building the first
such building in Pac that Leocadio had built and from which the family drew a handsome income
from rentals. In this home the young Nick had an extremely happy childhood.

Leocadio Joaqun, however, lost the family fortune in an investment in a pioneering oil exploration
project somewhere in the Visayas in the late 1920s. The family had to move out of Herrn to a rented
house in Psay. Leocadios death not long after, when Nick was only around twelve years old, was a
turning point in the life of the family.

Reticent about his private life, Nick Joaqun revealed little about his father. In the manner of fathers of
his time, Leocadio must have been a presence both distant and dominant. He was already an
accomplished man when Nick was born. One has a glimpse of him in the character of the proud Doctor
Chvez in Joaquns short story After the Picnic, the father who lives by a strict patriarchal code and
yet is all at once remote, vulnerable, and sympathetic. In an early poem, Joaqun vaguely alluded to
what in his father was somehow beyond reach (the patriot life and the failed politician buried with the
first wife). Yet he mourned the void his fathers death left: One froze at the graveside in Decembers
cold, / childhood stashed with the bier. Oh, afterwards / was no time to be young, until one was old.

The young Joaqun dropped out of school. He had attended Pac Elementary School and had three years
of secondary education in Mapa High School but was too intellectually restless to be confined in a
classroom. Among other changes, he was unable to pursue the religious vocation that his strictly
Catholic family had envisioned to be his future. Joaqun himself confessed that he always had the
vocation for the religious life and would have entered a seminary if it were not for his fathers death.

After he left school, Joaqun worked as a mozo (boy apprentice) in a bakery in Psay and then as a
printers devil in the composing department of the Tribune, of the TVT (Tribune-Vanguardia-Taliba)
publishing company, which had its offices on F. Torres Street in Manilas Santa Cruz district. This got him
started on what would be a lifelong association with the world of print.

Through this time he pursued a passion for reading. Sarah K. Joaqun, Nicks sister-in-law, recounts that
in his teens Nick had a rabid and insane love for books. He would hold a book with one hand and read
while polishing with a coconut husk the floor with his feet. He would walk down a street, on an errand
to buy the familys meal, with a dinner pail in one hand and an open book in the other.

Both his parents had encouraged his interest in books. When he was around ten, his father got him a
borrowers card at the National Library (then in the basement of the Legislative Building in Luneta) and
there he discovered Bambi and Heidi and the novels of Stevenson, Dumas, and Dickens (David
Copperfield was his great favorite). He explored his fathers library and the bookstores of Carriedo in
downtown Manila. He was voracious, reading practically everything that caught his fancy, from the
poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Vachel Lindsay to the stories of Anton Chekhov, to the novels of
Dostoyevsky, D. H. Lawrence, and Willa Cather. He read American magazines (Saturday Evening Post,
Cosmopolitan, Harpers Magazine) and discovered the fiction of Booth Tarkington, Somerset Maugham,
F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway.

Joaquns choice of early readings was not exceptional. Joaqun and other writers of his generation who
were schooled in the American era discovered Dostoyevsky and Hemingway before they did such
Tagalog writers as Lope K. Santos and Rosauro Almario. Yet, it can be said that Joaqun never really lost
his sense of where he was. He read Manilas English-language newspapers and magazines for what
Filipinos themselves were writing. (He had read the Jos Rizal novels in the Charles Derbyshire
translation before he was thirteen, Joaqun said.) He always had a strong sense of place, a virtue that
was to become a hallmark of his body of work. When I started writing in the late 1930s, he would
recall many years later, I was aware enough of my milieu to know that it was missing from our writing
in English. The Manila I had been born into and had grown up in had yet to appear in our English fiction,
although that fiction was mostly written in Manila and about Manila.

His first short story dealt with the vaudeville of Manila, The Sorrows of Vaudeville, and was published
in Sunday Tribune Magazine in 1937. (The editors changed its title to Behind Tinsel and Grease.)
Earlier, in 1934, he published his first poem in English, a piece about Don Quixote. The story is told that
when this poem appeared in the Tribune, Serafn Lanot, the Tribunes poetry editor, liked the poem very
much and went to congratulate the poet when he came to collect his fee, but the shy and elusive
Joaqun ran away.

Very early, Joaqun was set on crafting his own voice. Writing in 1985 on his early years as a writer, he
said that it appeared to him in the 1930s that both an American language and an American education
had distanced Filipino writers in English from their immediate surroundings. These young writers could
only see what the American language saw. It was modern to snub anything that wore the name of
tradition and, for the boys and girls who trooped to the American-instituted schools, Philippine history
began with Commodore Dewey and the Battle of Manila Bay. The result was a fiction so strictly
contemporary that both the authors and their characters seemed to be, as I put it once, without
grandfathers. He recalled: I realize now that what impelled me to start writing was a desire to bring in
the perspective, to bring in the grandfathers, to manifest roots.

This was Nick Joaqun recalling in 1985 what it was like in the 1930s. Back then, the young Joaqun was
just beginning to find his way into a literary life. He was gaining notice as a promising writer, publishing
between 1934 and 1941 a few stories and over a dozen poems in the Herald Mid-Week Magazine and
the Sunday Tribune Magazine. The literary scene was vibrant in the Commonwealth years, as writers
and critics debated the role and direction of Philippine writing and formed feuding groups such as the
Philippine Writers League and the Veronicans. Joaqun stood at the periphery of this scene. He probably
had little time to be too reflective. He was already trying to fend for himself while quite young. He was
also growing into a world that was marching toward the cataclysm of a world war.
The period of the Japanese occupation was a difficult time for the Joaquns who, at this time, had moved
from Psay to a house on Arlegui Street in the historic San Miguel district of Manila, where Malacaang
Palace is located. Like other residents in the enemy-occupied city, Joaqun scavenged for work to help
support the family. The Japanese had closed down the Tribune and other publications at the onset of
the occupation. Joaqun worked as a port stevedore, factory watchman, rig driver, road worker, and
buy-and-sell salesman. Seeing corpses on the street, working for a wage in rice, demeaned by fear and
poverty, Joaqun detested the war. He later said in an interview that the experience of the war so
drained both his body and spirit that when it was over, he was filled with the desire to leave the country
and go somewhere far. He dreamed of pursuing a religious vocation by going to a monastery in Spain or
somewhere in Europe, somewhere where you could clean up.

Through the war years, he continued writing when and where he could. He finished The Woman Who
Felt Like Lazarus, a story about an aging vaudeville star, and the essay La Naval de Manila. Both
appeared in the wartime English-language journal Philippine Review in 1943. A monthly published by
the Manila Sinbun-sya and edited by Vicente Albano Pacis and Francisco Icasiano, the Review also
published Joaquns story It Was Later Than We Thought (1943) and his translation of Rizals Mi Ultimo
Adios (1944). Readers were beginning to take notice. He cultivated a persona inaccessible and
mysterious. When he was asked to fill up a biographical form for the Review, he simply wrote down: 25
years old, salesman.

La Naval de Manila tells of a Manila religious celebration built on the tradition that the Blessed Virgin
had miraculously intervened in the Spanish victory over a Dutch invasion fleet in 1646. Already it sets
forth a major theme Joaqun would develop in the years ahead: that the Filipino nation was formed in
the matrix of Spanish colonialism and that it was important for Filipinos to appreciate their Spanish past.
He wrote: The content of our national destiny is ours to create, but the basic form, the temper, the
physiognomy, Spain created for us. The article triggered an angry response in a subsequent issue of the
Review from Federico Magahas, then a leading intellectual, who testily inquired why the Review was
building up this young writer who would have readers believe that precolonial Philippine society was
just a primeval drift of totem-and-taboo tribes and that Catholic saints can be the countrys unifying
national symbols. Joaqun declined to reply but he had raised an issue that would continue to be
debated after the war.

After the Americans liberated Manila in FebruaryApril 1945, Joaqun worked as a stage manager for his
sister-in-laws acting troupe and dreamed of getting away. In the meantime, he continued writing and
publishing. He obviously did not sleepwalk through the years of the war but was writing out stories in his
head. In heady years right after the war, he published in rapid succession such stories as Summer
Solstice, May Day Eve, and Guardia de Honor. These stories have become Nick Joaquns signature
stories and classics in Philippine writing in English.

The opportunity to leave the country came in 1947 when he was accepted as a novice at Saint Alberts
College, a Dominican monastery in Hong Kong. The story is told that the Dominicans in Manila were so
impressed by his La Naval de Manila that they offered him a scholarship to Saint Alberts and had the
Dominican-run University of Santo Toms award him an honorary Associate in Arts certificate so he
would qualify. His stay at Saint Alberts schooled him in Latin and the classics. He enjoyed the pleasant
diversions of the scenic port city and the occasional company of his brother Porfirio (Ping) who was in
Hong Kong on a stint as a jazz musician. It seemed, however, that he was too restless for life in a
monastery. He stayed less than two years and returned to Manila.
Back in the Philippines in 1950, he joined the countrys leading magazine, Philippines Free Press, working
as a proofreader, copywriter, and then member of the staff. At this time, Free Press was so widely
circulated across the country and so dominant a medium for political reportage and creative writing, it
was called the Bible of the Filipinos. Practically all middle-class homes in the country had a copy of the
magazine.

Joaquns Free Press years established him as a leading public figure in Philippine letters. In its pages
appeared the stories and essays that made him known to a wide national audience. The publication of
Prose and Poems (1952), a collection of short stories, poems, a novella, and a play, cemented his
reputation as an original voice in Philippine literature. He mined a lode of local experience that no one
had quite dealt with in the way he did. He summoned ancient rites and legends, evoked a Filipino
Christianity at once mystical and profane, and dramatized generational conflicts in a modern society
that had not quite come to terms with its past. His was a vision that ranged through a large expanse of
history in an English so full-bodied and a style sensuous and sure.

In 1955, his first play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes, was premiered on
stage at the Aurora Gardens in Intramuros, Manila, by the Barangay Theater Guild. He had written the
play sometime around 1950 upon the urgings of Sarah Joaqun, who was active in Manilas theater
circles. Though it had been published in Weekly Womens Magazine and Prose and Poems in 1952 and
had been aired on radio, the play was not staged until 1955. It proved to be an immense success. It was
made into an English-language movie by the highly respected Filipino filmmaker Lamberto V. Avellana in
1965, translated into Tagalog, adapted in other forms, and staged hundreds of times. No Filipino play in
English has been as popular.

Joaqun enjoyed his travels. He traveled all over Spain, lived in Madrid and Mallorca, visited France,
stayed a year in Manhattan, went on an American cross-country trip on a Greyhound bus, crossed the
border to Laredo, and had fun exploring Mexico. Spain and Mexico fascinated him (my kind of country,
he says). He would, in the years that followed, take trips to Cuba, Japan, China, Taiwan, and Australia.
Yet he was clearly in his element in his homeland and in Manila, the city that has been his imaginations
favorite haunt.

From the time he rejoined Free Press in 1957 until he left it in 1970 (during which time he rose to be the
magazines literary editor and associate editor), Joaquin was as prominent in his persona as Quijano de
Manila (a pseudonym he adopted for his journalistic writings when he joined the Free Press in 1950) as
he was the creative artist Nick Joaqun. He churned out an average of fifty feature articles a year during
this period. He wrote with eloquence and verve on the most democratic range of subjects, from the arts
and popular culture to history and current politics. He was a widely read chronicler of the times, original
and provocative in his insights and energetic and compassionate in his embrace of local realities.

One of his contemporaries remarked: Nick Joaqun the journalist has brought to the craft the sensibility
and style of the literary artist, the perceptions of an astute student of the Filipino psyche, and the
integrity and idealism of the man of conscience, and the result has been a class of journalism that is
dramatic, insightful, memorable, and eminently readable.

He raised journalistic reportage to an art form. In his crime storiesfor example, The House on Zapote
Street (1961) and The Boy Who Wanted to Become Society (1961)he deployed his narrative skills
in producing gripping psychological thrillers rich in scene, incident, and character. More important, he
turned what would otherwise be ordinary crime reports (e.g., a crime of passion in an unremarkable
Makati suburban home or the poor boy who gets caught up in a teenage gang war) into priceless
vignettes of Philippine social history.

As Free Press literary editor, he virtually presided over the countrys literary scene. Free Press was the
standard in Philippine writing in English because of its wide circulation and Joaquns editorship. Its
weekly publication of short stories and poems was avidly followed. Joaquin was generous in
encouraging young writers and exerted an influence on writers not only in English but in the Philippine
languages. In a Filipino generation that had seen outstanding fictionists (N. V. M. Gonzlez, F. Sionil Jos,
and others), he was fondly spoken of as primus inter pares.

Since he joined the Free Press, he had been a full-time writer. The only other job he took was an
appointment to the Board of Censors for Motion Pictures, from 1961 to 1972, under both presidents
Diosdado Macapagal and Ferdinand Marcos. He took the post because, in large part, he loved the
movies and practically did no cutting or banning of films, believing in the intelligence and good sense of
moviegoers. He described this stint: I was non-censoring.

Philippine society was going through a period of deepening social crisis. The high hopes engendered
during the popular rule of Ramn Magsaysay began to dissipate after Magsaysays death in 1957, as
corruption, factional politics, and economic crisis buffeted the administrations of presidents Carlos
Garca, Diosdado Macapagal, and Ferdinand Marcos. The Vietnam War politicized the Filipino
intelligentsia, the economy floundered, a new Communist Party was established in 1969, and a new
wave of militant nationalism swept through such institutions as universities and the media.

In the highly charged days leading up to the declaration of martial law on September 21, 1972, Joaquin
maintained his independence as an autonomous voice in Philippine media. He wrote articles that were
current, stayed close to the events, and were deeply fired by liberal sentiments. In a time polarized by
ideological conflict, he continued to speak in his own voice and not in those of others. This
independence had always been a signal virtue of his writing career.

In the 1930s, when he started writing, he was already a writer apart. At a time when the United States
was viewed as the very measure of all goodness, and history and civilization in the Philippines
seemed to have begun with the advent of America, Joaquin invoked a deeper past. At a time when to be
contemporary was to be secular, Joaqun evoked the countrys Christian tradition. At a time when
proletarian literature was the correct line for young writers to follow, Joaqun was the skeptic who
felt it was one more instance of local literary hierarchs parroting the Americans, among whom
proletarian was then the latest buzzword. He wrote: I can see now that my start as a writer was a
swimming against the current, a going against the grain.

He had always been a writer engaged but apart. Part of the explanation resided in his character.
Engaged in a public profession, with a very public name, he was a very private person. His reclusive
character was formed early. In a rare, affectionate piece his sister-in-law Sarah Joaqun wrote about him
in Philippine Review in 1943, she spoke of the young Nick as a modest and unassuming young man who
was ill at ease with public praise and shied away from being interviewed or photographed (he hadnt
had any taken for fifteen years). Even then he lived his days according to certain well-loved rites. He
loved going out on long walks (a tall, thin fellow, a little slouched, walking in Intramuros, almost always
hurriedly), simply dressed, shoes worn out from a great deal of walking (which helped him cogitate),
observing the street life of the city, making the rounds of churches. He is the most religious fellow I
know, Sarah wrote. Except when his work interferes, he receives Holy Communion everyday. He was
generous with friends and devoted to the family with whom, even in his teens, he shared what little
money he earned.

A person of habit, he scribbled about himself many decades ago:

I have no hobbies, no degrees; belong to no party, club, or association;

and I like long walks; any kind of guinataan; Dickens and Booth Tarking-

ton; the old Garbo pictures; anything with Fred Astaire the Opus Dei

according to the Dominican rite Jimmy Durante and Cole Porter tunes

the Marx brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Carmen Miranda; Pauls

Epistles and Marks; Piedmont cigarettes my mothers cooking

playing tres-siete; praying the Rosary and the Officium Parvum I dont

like fish, sports, and having to dress up.

Though he cut the image of one gregarious with his loud, booming voice; his love for San Miguel beer (a
product that turned him into an icon for Filipino beer drinkers); and his joy in belting out Cole Porter and
Frank Sinatra songs in intimate gatherings in his favorite Manila cafs, he stuck close to the company of
a few friends and hated making formal appearances in public. He grudgingly gave interviews and
revealed such scant detail about his personal life that there are many gaps and contradictions in his
published biographies. He was not above making mischief on unwitting interviewers by inventing stories
about himself. He refused to give the exact date of his birth (May 4 and September 15 in 1917 have
been cited) because, he said, he hated having people come around to celebrate his birthday.

He had zealously carved out private space in his home where he wrote reams in longhand or on a
typewriter. Though he gave strangers the impression of someone careless and even dissolute, Joaqun
was a very disciplined writer. He woke up early to read the newspapers, took breakfast, and, from 9:00
a.m. to 12:00 noon, retired to his library on the second floor of his house where no one was allowed to
disturb him. In his clean and spare study, with books on shelves lining the walls and, in the center, a
chair and a table with a manual typewriter, Nick did his work. From 1:00 to 3:00 p.m., he took a siesta
and, often, his second bath of the day, and then from around 4:00 p.m. onward, he was out of the house
to go to the editorial office or explore his favorite haunts in Manila.

The turbulent days of political activism, as the 1960s came to a close, did not leave this very private
person unaffected. In 1970, he joined a labor union organized by the workers of Free Press and agreed
to be its president. This was the first union to be organized in the sixty-two-year-old publishing company
that was widely regarded as a beacon of libertarian ideas. Organized at a time when Manila was
seething with civil unrest, the appearance of the union sparked a bitter fight in the company. When
management cracked down on the union, Joaqun resigned. With Free Press editor-writers Gregorio C.
Brillantes and Jos F. Lacaba, artist Danilo Dalena, and close to thirty personnel of the administrative
and printing departments, Joaqun launched the weekly Asia-Philippines Leader in 1971 and served as its
editor-in-chief. In the pages of the magazine he wrote a regular column, This Weeks Jottings, where
he continued his trenchant commentaries on the Philippine scene.
Martial law closed down Philippine media, including Free Press and Asia-Philippines Leader. The Marcos
government subsequently allowed the publication of a few favored periodicals controlled by the
Marcoses and their cronies. Joaqun refused to contribute. Among many intellectuals, silence became a
form of protest. Joaquns irrepressible pen, however, could not be stilled. I was never silent during
martial law, Joaqun declared in an interview in 1980. Ive never been silent. He continued to write,
worked independently, and contributed to both the underground and aboveground alternative press,
the small newspapers and news sheets that came to be referred to as the mosquito press during the
martial-law period.

He translated Spanish works into English, something he had done intermittently for years. His most
important in this field was The Complete Poems and Plays of Jos Rizal (1976). Nick also returned to
theater. He adapted the stories Three Generations and Summer Solstice as the plays Fathers and
Sons (1977) and Tatarn (1978), respectively. In 1976, he wrote The Beatas, the story of a seventeenth-
century Filipino beguinage, a religious community of lay women, repressed by a male-dominated,
colonial order. The subversive message of the play, in the particular context of martial rule, lent itself to
a staging in Tagalog translation in the highly political campus of the University of the Philippines in 1978.
These plays later appeared in the volume, Tropical Baroque: Four Manileo Theatricals, published in
Manila in 1979 and in Australia in 1982.

In 1972, the University of Queensland Press in Australia published a new edition of his fiction under the
title, Tropical Gothic. An important feature of this edition was the inclusion of three novellas that
originally appeared in Free Press, Cndidos Apocalypse, Doa Jernima, and The Order of
Melkizedek. These novellas are powerful, historically resonant narratives that probably best represent
the inventiveness and depth of Joaqun as fictionist. They are among the most outstanding pieces of
Philippine fiction that have been written.

He went back to writing poetry, something he had not done since 1965. El Camino Real and Other Rimes
appeared in 1983 and Collected Verse, the authors choice of thirty-three poems, was published in 1987.
Ranging from light verse to long narrative pieces, these poems robust, confident, expansive, elegant
are markers in the development of Philippine poetry. They demonstrate, says the poet-critic Gmino H.
Abad, a level of achievement in which the Filipino is no longer writing in English but has indeed
wrought from English, having as it were colonized that language.

That the Filipino writer wrote in English was a virtue that seemed self-evident when Joaquin started his
career in the 1930s. English was the language of government, the schools, and the leading publications.
It was, for young Filipinos, the language of modernity and the future. In the late 1960s, however, the use
of the English language in such fields as education, literature, and publishing came under serious
question as a Marxist-inspired nationalism sought to establish a radical, popular basis for the national
culture. Those who wrote in English either switched languages or felt called upon to defend their use of
a foreign tongue. Arguing out of his favorite thesis that the Filipino is enriched by his creative
appropriation of new technologies, Joaquin extolled the fresh values of temper and sensibility that
English had brought into the national literature. As for his own writings, Joaquins response to the issue
was more blunt: Whether it is in Tagalog or English, because I am Filipino, every single line I write is in
Filipino. In a more jocular vein, he had written about how the local milieu was irrevocably present in his
works: I tell my readers that the best compliment they can pay me is to say that they smell adobo and
lechn when they read me. I was smelling adobo and lechon when I wrote me.

In 1976, Nick Joaqun was named National Artist of the Philippines in the field of literature, the highest
recognition given by the state for an artist in the country. Conferred in Manila on March 27, 1976, the
award praised his works as beacons in the racial landscape and the author for his rare excellence and
significant contribution to literature.

Joaqun had reservations about accepting an award conceived by the Marcos government as part of First
Lady Imelda Marcoss high-profile program of arts promotion in the country, but he decided to accept it
on the advice of family and friends. He also felt the award would give him leverage to ask Malacaang
Palace to release from prison Jos F. Lacaba, a close friend of his and one of the countrys best writers,
who was imprisoned for his involvement in the anti-Marcos resistance. Lacaba was released in 1976.

The fact that government had conferred on him the honor of National Artist did not prevent him from
criticizing government. In 1982, he put himself at the forefront of a public demonstration to protest
governments closure of the oppositionist newspaper We Forum and the arrest and detention of its
publisher and editors. The newspaper had just published a series of articles exposing Ferdinand
Marcoss fake war medals.

Polemical rather than academic, he simplified the terms of the debate, drew dividing lines much too
sharply, and couched arguments in hyperbolic terms. He was impatient with the either/or rhetoric of
indigenists and nationalists. Why isnt it enough to be just Filipino? Quoting James Joyce, he declared
of his own work: This country and this people shaped me; I shall express myself as I am. He was, as
always, the writer apart but passionately engaged.