Lives Away from Home and Precarious Writing as Life: Reading Bienvenido Santos’s Postscript to Saintly Life

• Main Author: Labayne, Ivan Emil A.
• Format: text
• Published: Animo Repository 2023
• Subjects: Philippine–American relations; pensionado system; diasporic writing; autobiography; post-colonialism; Creative Writing; Pacific Islands Languages and Societies; Race, Ethnicity and Post-Colonial Studies; South and Southeast Asian Languages and Societies
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/akda/vol3/iss1/2; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/akda/article/1046/viewcontent/1_Labayne.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

Towards the end of his writing career, Bienvenido Santos published two autobiographies, Memory’s Fictions and Postscript to Saintly Life—a departure in a writing life mostly devoted to penning fictional works. This paper focuses on the last autobiography which mainly looks at Santos’s experiences as a pensionado in America. It pays attention to how Santos writes about his Philippine home while in exile, taking part in a program that is part of the American colonial period. The range of Santos’s emotions—with shame and pride on both ends—while abroad is also examined. How these emotions were manifested in the book served as springboard to analyze Santos’s thoughts about his pensionado experience and locate hints of his insights regarding the fraught post-colonial relationship between the host-land America, and his homeland Philippines. The paper takes off from, and engages the postulations of Timothy Bewes about shame in postcolonial writing, and of Dylan Rodriquez about the violence inhering in the US–Philippine relations. The paper concludes by highlighting how Santos reaffirms the material force of writing, especially in the context of an exiled writer ceaselessly conjuring his native land, and pining for his return.