Jose Garcia Villa, Filipino Poet in the “New World”
JOSE GARCIA VILLA, R.I.P.: Post-mortem and Autopsy Report on the Death and Resurrection of a Filipino Poet in the Imperial Metropole (Lecture given on 7 Jan 2009, at Ateneo University, Loyola Heights, Quezon City, Philippines)
by E. SAN JUAN, Jr. Fellow, W.E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University
1. The publication of Jose Garcia Villa’s Doveglion: Collected Poems by Penguin Books in 2008, edited by his literary executor and introduced by a devotee, may be said to mark not “a growing revival of interest” in Villa’s work—as Luis Francia claims—but rather the final nail on his coffin. It may, however, arouse antiquarian interest and nostalgia for the posthumous return of the repressed. Villa died in Feb. 1997, literally unknown. His last volume, Selected Poems and New, was published in 1958, in which he preserved (as though he were a museum curator) those poems he wrote in the twenty years (1937-1957) that saw his maturation in New York City. No resurgence of interest greeted that last collection. Its centerpiece was “The Anchored Angel,” selected by feudal-vintage impresarios Osbert and Edith Sitwell for inclusion in a 1954 issue of the London-based The Times Literary Supplement.
From then on Villa ceased to be a publicly acknowledged creative writer. In fact, even when he was actively publishing, his recognition was quite limited and confined to a narrow circle of friends and patrons. Except for Conrad Aiken’s 1944 anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, no anthology of significance—not even of minority or ethnic writers—has included Villa’s poems. In effect, Villa remains an unknown writer for most Americans, let alone readers of American or English literature around the world. In the country of his birth, today, only a few aficionados and college-trained professionals are acquainted with Villa’s writings.
2. Where is the Villa file in the Western archive? Francia celebrates Villa’s arrival to the New York literary scene dominated by white writers with the famous 1948 Life magazine photograph. The photo is a palimpsest or tell-tale rebus in itself. Aside from patricians Osbert and Edith Sitwell, whom Villa courted slavishly, we see left-wing or Marxist-inspired poets such as Delmore Schwartz, Horace Gregory, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Marya Zaturenska, Randall Jarrell, and certainly non-conformist writers like Tennesse Williams, William Rose Benet, Richard Eberhart, Marianne Moore, and Gore Vidal–Vidal would eventually prove to be the most anti-imperialist maverick of them all. There are no African Americans or other person of color except Villa. E.e. cummings, Villa’s model and idol, is remarkably missing.
In the photo, one may discern some allegorical innuendo which may be happenstance: Villa is sandwiched between the young Vidal and the mature Auden, whose anti-fascist sympathies explicit in his eloquent attacks against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini were quoted and broadcast around the world. In short, the major American and British writers in the photo were mostly veterans of the global campaign against fascism in Europe and also against Japanese militarist aggression one of whose main victims were millions of Filipinos in the only U.S. colony in Asia, the Philippine Commonwealth. Villa was and remained a Filipino citizen throughout his life, and was the only colonial, subaltern subject in the photo.
Other articles by E San Juan Jr
- Overseas Filipino Workers: The Emergence of an Asian-Pacific Diaspora - November 10, 2009
- Jose Rizal Traversing the United States of America - February 27, 2009
- Filipinos Writing in English / Through English: Reconaissance and Revaluation - December 18, 2008
- Returning from the Diaspora, Re-discovering the Homeland - December 10, 2008
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