Sun.Star Essay: A library story

Saturday, July 2, 2011

THE Cebu City Public library is back in its place, have you heard?

I learned to love reading from my father. Unlike most children who’d start reading all about animal folk tales, or “Hansel and Gretel,” or in high school reading “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger, or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Scarlet Letters,” my father’s “whodunits” introduced me to the world of words and the imagination. These were books by Ellery Queen, Arthur Conan Doyle and, of course, those written by mystery female writer Agatha Christie, like her “Murder on the Orient Express.”

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Then, as book lovers do, I moved on to the rest of world literature in volumes, periodicals, and newspapers.

From there, I pushed on to the best readings in my life, into an experience of almost all aspects of life I wouldn’t have heard of nor seen with eyes closed, not reading. There was a time I’d mix ideas of book characters and actual life, standing back during a party happily to find someone sounding like one from the books, to no surprise.

Reading gives you breadth and width of vision, from simple acts to some feat—heroic, valiant, or stupid and brainless, but still helpful in life.

It’s no wonder that some people in the community would fight for the right of libraries to prevail.

So, have you been to the renovated Cebu City Public library lately? The statue of Dr. Jose Rizal fronting the old, renovated building, who has children seated on his lap reading a book, is still there. There’s the city library on the entire ground floor, it’s safe and neat, and still there, after all!

This first public library was put up in 1919 in the Parian district of the Cebu municipality. Through the years, the Cebu City library moved about, sort of, around the city, in the city fire department building as a start. Imagine you reading a book there with the fire department ringing the fire bell every quarter of an hour while the firemen talked out loud and laughed their work away, shaking the library area, so to say.

In the 1930s, the idea of a memorial building to honor Rizal occurred to the authorities, and why not put the library there, away from the sound of fire bells? The Rizal Memorial Library was inaugurated in 1939 on the hero’s birthday, Dec. 30.

During the war in the 1940s, the library building was used as Japanese headquarters while the books and all were dumped in a nook at the Capitol building. After the war, nobody thought of the library and, perhaps, there was no money for the renovation of the building.

The post-war fight to reopen the Cebu branch of the national library was then set, inspired by the USIS library in town put up in 1946. Editorials and columns spoke for a library’s right to be in our lives. No, a library doesn’t die just like that, media said.
It was then reopened but couldn’t go back to the old building since the place needed renovation after a part of it was bombed during the war.

So there was again the constant shift of venue for the library, first on the fourth floor of City Hall, then in a building on Juan Luna St.

When the Rizal memorial building could be used, the library moved back in, but with “neighbors” such as the health department, Food and Drug Commission, the Dental Clinic, Sanitary Engineer’s office, even a hospital, name it.

In 2008, there was talk about the library set to be closed since the building would entirely be a museum. This was supposed to be after the newest renovation of the building. The library would have to pack up and not come back, according to some official plans.
But you can’t put down a story like the library’s.

A Nigerian woman who heard the news in the Internet called up the Cebu City Public library to ask why anyone thought of closing a library. She said Nigeria is much poorer, but it has fought to keep a library.

And so, the city library is back in its old home—a smart, old and beautiful building for book lovers. Librarian Rosario Chua says they’re working on setting up a special room for books, periodicals, newspapers, records, tapes on Cebu, the Cebuanos, by Cebuanos.
Visit it, use it, or help its effort to get more books.

(ecuizon@gmail.com)