Dear all,
Please check out my new book from Anvil Publishing, “I Do or I Die! RJ Ledesma’s Imaginary Guide to Getting Married and Other Man-Made Disasters (As Told to him by his Yaya” now available at National Bookstores and Powerbooks nationwide! Please buy a copy and help me pay for my baby’s diapers!
I am reprinting the foreword to my book written by my former Creative Writing professor and mentor Dr. Isagani Cruz. Thanks again Dr. Cruz for the great foreword!
The forgettable 1921 novel Scaramouche opens with these unforgettable lines: “He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” All Filipinos were born with a gift of laughter, but very few realize that the world is mad.
For the world – at least the world that Filipinos live in – is mad, not in the American sense that It is a Mad Mad Mad Mad World nor in the African sense that The Gods Must Be Crazy nor in the Latin American magic / magical / marvelous realist sense, but in a distinctively Filipino, laugh-while-your-house-is-burning sense, the only sense that has made Filipinos treat a coup d’état as a revolution and a fiesta at the same time, enjoying junk food while kicking out an acknowledged dictator or a perceived degenerate, later forgiving and forgetting all personal and political hurts, grinning while posing for photos with record-breaking thieves and erstwhile objects of collective hatred, lying down and enjoying being literally or figuratively raped and boasting about it.
You cannot get any weirder than in the Philippines, and RJ Ledesma (http://rjledesma.net/) knows it. Using the oldest trick in the literary book, which is to create a character who is a character, he has raised his nanny (called a yaya in the Philippines, with a complete subculture built on the name, including a language codified by professional linguists as “Yaya English”) to the level of an icon.
All this sounds much too serious in an introduction to a book that calls out not to be taken seriously, but comedy is much too funny to be left to people with a sense of humor.
Aristotle, the great brain that he was and even with his too-valued two-valued logic, could not make heads or non-heads out of comedy. He wrote some random notes, realized that his reputation two centuries hence would be ruined if the notes would be discovered, and promptly ate the notes. Yes, ate them. (Since everything he wrote was preserved by his followers, it is safe to say that, to prevent his fans from overzeal, he himself ensured the non-survival of his notes on comedy by eating them. It was the only way to frustrate those wishing to sink their teeth into everything he wrote. It was also a way not to have to eat his words in the future against his will. To prove me wrong, you would have to build a time machine and, even then, you would have to catch Aristotle at the very moment he was composing the missing treatise on comedy. I could have painted a more probable scenario, but it would be toilet humor, quite unbecoming a professor.)
A number of otherwise sober people have since pontificated about comedy, among them Henri Bergson, who famously quipped that man is the animal that laughs, conveniently ignoring the loud laughter of women at such a sexist, exclusivist, anti-feminist, politically incorrect outburst. Real-life life-and-death medical doctors, led by Robin Williams’ fictional Patch Adams (not the real Patch Adams, born Hunter Campbell Adams, who set up a very serious clinic in West Virginia that is leading a very serious war against very serious medical insurance but, yes, is better known for traveling around the world with his doctor-friends dressed up as clowns healing children just by looking silly), have also been continually coming up with evidence that laughter, as Reader’s Digest discovered zillions of issues ago, is the best medicine.
There is no end to writers that attempt to write comedy. Many comics are funny, but few are hilarious. Ledesma is, well, hilarious.
What makes him even more hilarious than most writers of comedy (and there are not, sadly enough, too many of them in the Philippines, at least not as many as the grim-and-determined, anti-feudalist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-Manila, anti-English, anti-Malacañang constipated types) is that he finds even things familiar to us funny.
Ledesma was my student in creative writing at De La Salle University. In the beginning, he fancied himself an economist, taking up an undergraduate degree in economics. I like to flatter myself by saying that I snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by making him go the route of underpaid, unpaid, unappreciated, unwanted creative writers instead of the yellow brick road leading to, perhaps, a reign as the country’s economic czar or even a small-but-terrible economics-major president (as you read the book, you will see how many times the most unliked president in the history of the nation gets ridiculed). Of course, Ledesma is not really small, unless you believe everything he says about himself.
In my creative writing classes, despite my having been educated as a poststructuralist, postcolonial, postfeminist, postmarxist, post-post-something or other, I revert back to formalism and recite as my mantra the underrated dictum of the Russian Formalists, namely, that creative writers should make the familiar unfamiliar (there’s even a long, coined word for it, but it smacks of pretentiousness, so I only whisper it to my students when I catch them texting or doodling or otherwise not paying close attention to every profound syllable I utter). “Defamiliarization” is a word guaranteed to make even the dumbest basketball player in class sit up and pretend to listen, if only because it sounds obscene.
Ledesma makes everything seem unfamiliar, from the conventional rituals of getting married to going on a foreign trip to realizing that one is balding. That is the secret of his humor: he makes his fellowmen (yes, men as in male gender, not men as in all men are created equal or are mortal) laugh at themselves. Not being a woman nor even inclined to become one, despite that being the fashion among macho men these days, I cannot even guess at how a woman will react to the continuous ribbing aimed at what we unreconstructed males used to regard as the gentle sex before a decidedly ungentle widow accused an even more decidedly ungentle woman of stealing the presidency not once, but twice. Hell hath no fury and all that, but why, in heaven’s name, can men no longer talk about women in disdainful terms without being hauled to court for sexual harassment, political discrimination, misogyny, or whatever? I am sure women, when they are alone, have all kinds of nasty things to say about men, but men, being the denser sex, do not have an inkling of what is really going on. But I am only guessing.
Ledesma is also always only guessing. His ribbing is never not in jest, but where there is comic smoke, there is bound to be tragic truth. Or so the philosophers say, or should say, or should have said. In any case, it will not pay to take Ledesma too seriously, though it makes perfect sense to pay for this book you are reading, in case you just borrowed it, or are just browsing through it in a bookstore, or stole it at gunpoint from someone not willing to give up a cellphone but willing to give up what gives much more pleasure than the latest ringtone or the received message “I love you too,” which happens to be a template on many cellphones (and like most templates, totally meaningless).
Not at all meaningless is the love that these pages clearly reflect, a love not three removes from reality (as that other Greek philosopher without a sense of humor liked to characterize anything he disliked) but very, very real, even more real than a reality television show. Ledesma’s love for his significant other oozes out of the laughter, exactly like the Tagalized Spanish “karinyo brutal,” a bit like imported, expensive chocolate that melts in your mouth and surprises you with some kind of nut inside. Not that Ledesma is a nut, though I suppose he himself would not hesitate to call himself that. As my student, he cannot not be a non-nut, since I always pride myself on being better than my students at anything, even in being a nut.
At the end of the day, I am very proud of RJ Ledesma, one of the best students I have ever had in my creative writing classes. I do not mean that in terms of grades; I do not even remember if he got a good grade, though he must have or he would not have invited me to write this foreword. What I mean is that he has parlayed the little he learned from my class into something I myself would never be able to accomplish – a set of lovely essays bordering on creative nonfiction, classic comedy, and – to use the L word – literature. Needless to say, I am sick with envy. I mean, I would do anything to have written this book, which is about how to live happily before, during, and even after a fairy-tale wedding.
Now that I am old and bald and living in surrealist Philippines, I still laugh out loud, and I laugh loudest when I encounter the comic spurts of genius that Ledesma exhibits in this book, as well as in his earlier book, in his columns, and in his blog.
What more can an aging professor want? Now, let me show you the first two hundred items in my bucket list, beginning with writing a book like this one you are holding in your hands …
Isagani R. Cruz
Professor Emeritus
De La Salle University
Tags: Anvil Publishing · Guide to Getting Married · Henri Bergson · humor writing · I do or I die · Isagani Cruz · La Salle · National Bookstore · Patch Adams · Powerbooks · RJ Ledesma's new book · Scaramouche · yaya
