Editorial: The importance of being Ernest
ONE can write pulp, and then be forgettable or die famous.
Ernesto Lariosa didn’t write one, his writings sought serious reading, and he died quietly at dawn of Aug. 20, 2019. He was 74. He wrote his final verse “Kataposang Balak” (Last Poem) weeks ago for a poetry anthology set for public launch this Saturday, Aug. 24, at the Cebu Normal University. Although his liver got the better of him, Saturday’s big event will highlight just the kind of immortality the creative writer achieves for bestowing a book to a world rendered inarticulate, numb or dumb.
Lariosa was a Cebuano writer and wrote his poetry and fiction in Cebuano. That he was widely known as a newspaper columnist than as a creative writer illustrates just how much the Cebuano public is missing in the works of its own writers.
Fortunately, the thing about serious literature is that it does not have the ephemerality of pulp or the quick orgasm of a pop song. It is solid brick in the shelf of life, its weight handy through time, either against evil regimes or for one’s ache for clarity or joy.
Lariosa passed away, but we believe he will be read in proper light henceforth. He will be read because there will always be serious readers among us. The silly stuff get boring, we turn to depth, profundity.
In his younger days, Lariosa and his clique of poets and fictionists created the ragtag Albicarivi, which would soon evolve into the Bathalan-ong Halad sa Dagang (Bathalad), prime pool for stellar and promising writers in the Cebuano language. Incidentally, the group celebrates its golden jubilee tomorrow.
Lariosa was a prolific writer. He wrote 300 poems and 150 short stories from 1964 to 2019. For that hefty corpus, the Unyon ng Manunulat sa Pilipinas awarded him the Gawad Pambansang Alagad ni Balagtas. Other cultural institutions handed him similar recognition.
What should be highlighted in Lariosa’s works is that the environment was his most recurring theme.
The scholar Dr. Hope Sabanpan-Yu thus wrote in introducing Lariosa’s book of short stories “Crack Shot”:
“The stories collected here reveal that the celebration of human life as well as the degradation along with the desecration of the natural world is not simply a mistake—there are better alternatives and choices. For the reader to simply shrug them off is to become complicit in the very exploitation that the stories represent. The force of Lariosa’s narratives lies in bringing to public light the material conditions and underpinning relations that are often ignored, and giving them moral significance.”
In his short story “Bugti,” Lariosa wrote: “Kon makasudya pa ang kinaiyahan batok sa kasaypanan nga gihimo sa tawo kaniya, dugay na untang nanglipaghong ang iyang nawong sa tumang kauwaw.” (If only the environment could talk back to man about the wrong he’d done to it, he’d have long turned blue in utter shame).
A mentor to many young writers in Cebu, a friend to many, a loving father and husband, “Erning,” as he was fondly called, had written his last poem: “Dinhi na lang kutob ang paghandom/May gitisok kong utlanan.” (Memory ends here/I have marked an end.)
Ah, but the words outlive this great Cebuano.