NAKEM Centennial Conference

The talk is my way of revisiting the creation and writing one of the first novels in Ilokano published in a book form, a book that was a product of an age in Ilokano writing when there was not yet the onslaught of internet technology on the literary arts. The making of the novel and the creation of the hero of that novel, Alvaro Cortez, is as much a product of the sensibilities of the 60’s and the aesthetics forms predating this period: an Ilokano aesthetic sensibility informed by what was available in those times as ‘artistic sources’ such as the serialized way of writing a long narrative, often on a weekly basis, and informed as well by a certain understanding of the academic sources of what would constitute a certain work ‘literary.’ In a way the novel Puraw a Balitok—White Gold—is my way of keeping pace with the commencement of the renewed exodus of Filipinos for strange, unfamiliar, and foreign places for many reasons, one of which was that proverbial need to improve their economic lot. We see this in Alvaro Cortez, a prototype, I would say, of many of the contract workers that the Philippines would send abroad and whose sacrifices—in economic terms, their dollar remittances—are the fundamental reason why the country has remained afloat today. I will revisit the making of this novel and connect it with the condition of exile in the United States today.