AT FIRST, I could not believe my artist friend Art Geroche when he said that Hiligaynon magazine had died a natural death due to loss of lifeblood – its loyal readers.
“No,” I denied, “Not again!”
It had once stopped publishing during the martial law years but was revived in 1992, with the late Quirino “Quin” Baterna as editor.
Hoping to prove Art wrong, I checked the newsstand; he was right. The publication had indeed closed shop due to low, non-viable readership.
I checked further by reading an ad in the Manila Bulletin that had been reproducing the front covers of Liwayway Publications’ vernacular magazines – Liwayway, Bannawag, Bisaya and Hiligaynon – only to find that the last-mentioned was missing. I could only shake my head in disappointment.
My friend Quin Baterna, one of the veteran novelists of the weekly magazine, must be turning in his grave. Up to his last days 10 years ago, he had worked hard to keep the magazine and the written Hiligaynon language alive.
It grieves me to think that I had been a part of that endeavor to win wider readership for the magazine that had been in circulation since 1934.
In the 1970s, I was the showbiz tsismoso of the Manila-based Hiligaynon, writing a column on movie stars in mixed Ilonggo, Tagalog and English.
It’s not just Hiligaynon as a magazine but Hiligaynon as a print medium that has vanished. Oh, make that “almost vanished” because a sister daily of Panay News, Panay Balita, still prints news and features in Ilonggo.
As a child in the 1950s, I was aware that Hiligaynon was the most widely-circulated reading matter in Western Visayas, selling as many as 100,000 copies per issue. I remember that I would run a hundred meters to the corner store in our barangay to buy a copy for my mother every Wednesday. More often than not, late buyers would not catch up with the last copy.
In one of our coffee chats days before his death in 2009, Quin Baterna wandered down memory lane, extolling the late governor Conrado Norada and the late Ramon Muzones for their prize-winning Hiligaynon novels.
Quin, too, had worked hard to keep Hiligaynon literature alive. It was he who produced the first full-length Ilonggo movie in 1977, Ginauhaw Ako, Ginagutom Ako.
“I wish I could reverse the decline of vernacular literature,” he lamented, referring to the vanishing Filipino illustrated komiks, which used to be the outlets of talented short story writers, novelists and illustrators, most of whom had already lost their jobs by then.
Fortunately for one of them, Art Geroche, he still makes a living by painting historical events on canvas for government offices.
Quin, who had also been a broadcaster, said that because he could not make both ends meet in media and literature, one day he scanned the classified ads of a Manila paper.
One of them read, “You can make money in real estate.”
“I applied for a realtor’s job,” he enthused, “And got it.”
His success in selling homes and lots impelled his wife Gregoria and some of their children to adopt the same career.
It also enabled the grateful Quin to sponsor an annual short story-writing contest in Ilonggo for many years. The participants evoked mixed emotions in Quin. He was happy for them because they could write, but he knew they were also like flowers “blushing unseen in the desert air.”
Due to lack of writing mentors, broadcasters today unknowingly speak ungrammatical and incoherent Hiligaynon on the air. (hvego31@gmail.com/PN)
