That is to say: they evoke those images of ourselves as we live life day and night, those images of ourselves which we share and by which we recognize our nativity. From that vantage, it can be said that our writers and artists, who are men and women of imagination, create our country. Our sense then of our country is a sustained act of imagination. Our country is in a deep sense how we imagine her. If someone should ask you, “What is your country?” you would answer, “The Philippines” if he should pursue his query, “What is your country like?” you would have to imagine our land and our people and the way we live. The recognition comes from the imaginative enactment of how we think, how we feel, how we live. Our writing in Spanish and English-as well as in our indigenous languages which have assimilated them-is part of the labors and the perils of working out of the monotony, the anonymity, of “our colonial subservience.” Such writing may be described as a labor of expression by which we overcome our invisibility to ourselves, by which we recognize who we are through our historical experience and take responsibility for the country we have lost and regained.

Somewhere I have never traveled I came upon what Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams: “In our youth, we witnessed the dull monotony of our colonial subservience in later years, we became part of the labors and perils of working out of it.” I was struck by the essential similarity with our own colonial struggle.

Man of the house rain dance