9 - The Great Carlos Bulosan

Carlos Sampayan Bulosan, born on November 24 1913, was an English-Filipino language novelist and poet who spent most of his life in the United States. His best-known work today is the semi-autobiographical America is in the Heart, but he first gained fame for his 1943 essay on The Freedom from Want.  Bulosan was born to Ilocano parents in the Philippines in Binalonan, Pangasinan. There is considerable debate around his actual birth date, as he himself used several dates, but 1911 is generally considered the most reliable answer, based on his baptismal records, but according to the late Lorenzo Duyanen Sampayan, his childhood playmate and nephew, Carlos was born on November 2, 1913. Most of his youth was spent in the countryside as a farmer. It is during his youth that he and his family were economically impoverished by the rich and political elite, which would become one of the main themes of his writing.   

Although little is known about his childhood, Bulosan recalled:

I lived in Mangusmana with my father until I was seven years old. We lived in a small grass hut; but it was sufficient because we were peasants. My father could not read or write, but he knew how to work his one hectare of land, which was the sole support of our big family.

Here’s an excerpt from one of his poems which is entitled “If you want to know what we are”

If you want to know what we are who inhabit

forest mountain river shore, who harness

beast, living steel, martial music (that classless

language of the heart), who celebrate labor,

wisdom of the mind, peace of the blood;

If you want to know what we are who become

animate at the rain's metallic ring, the stone's

accumulated strength, who tremble in the wind's

blossoming (that enervates earth's potentialities),

who stir just as flowers unfold to the sun;

If you want to know what we are who grow

powerful and deathless in countless counterparts,

each part pregnant with hope, each hope supreme,

each supremacy classless, each classlessness

nourished by unlimited splendor of comradeship;

We are multitudes the world over, millions everywhere;

in violent factories, sordid tenements, crowded cities;

in skies and seas and rivers, in lands everywhere;

our number increase as the wide world revolves

and increases arrogance, hunger disease and death.

This is such a nice yet epic poem. It’s obvious that Carlos Bulosan is revolting. Revolting against injustices. What is natural is now gone. Our society is now corrupted.  Those people who revolts are the people who is trying to redeem the lost history.  They are the living dream of the dead heroes who tried to save the corrupted society. They revolt because they want to renew what was already broken. They never lose hope. I am glad to search and know more about Carlos Bulosan. I don’t actually have knowledge of who he really is. But knowing all of these things makes me proud to all Filipinos that are just like him.

(Information credits to Wikipedia)