Queen Paz: Never a Dead Star
Enter a world of sepia on this day, in the year 1894. It was a mere two years before the Philippine Revolution against Spain that spread afire in the Tagalog provinces and beyond. A baby girl was born in a prominent family in Lucena, Tayabas (now Quezon Province). In those turbulent times, the family, the Marquezes, named their new baby “Paz”, perhaps inspired by the Nuestra Señora de la Paz, or ironically translated “Our Lady of Peace.” The family struggled in those years of the revolution up to the coming of the Americans at Lucena. When she turned 7 years old, Paz, knowing Tagalog and Spanish, first grappled a strange new language she encountered while playing outside the American military encampment in the town. On a pinewood crate were black printed weird words she tried to pronounce. When the public school run by Americans were opened in Lucena, she learned quickly this new language–English. She grew up to become an excellent English writer in that colonial period, a Filipina writer in English whose depths of intellect and quiet strength characteristic of a Filipino woman would be laid manifest to those around her.
At the turn of the 20th century, Paz became part of that first generation of Filipino youth who were educated in the ways and inclinations of America–a whirlwind of traumatic changes and strangeness in the Philippines, a tidal wave of the English language and American culture. Unfortunately, this made her “Spanish ceremonial, her Tagalog utilitarian. English had become the language of her heart.” It’s a characteristic of her generation from those “Empire Days.”
Paz’s stint in the Philippine Normal School (now Philippine Normal University) in 1910 trained her as one of the “belles” of the old Manila high society. But don’t be taken by the word “belle.” She became the captain of the school’s basketball team, and in her biography, was purported to be “probably the only Filipina of her generation who knew how to drive, having learned by driving a tractor…” In the same school’s hall, she would meet her fiancé and future husband, Francisco Benitez (who would later become the first dean of the College of Education in the University of the Philippines). Paco Benitez was a young pensionado then, who went back from the United States. Paz immediately caught his eye.
In February 1912, the most awaited annual amusement event in Manila opened in Wallace Field, Luneta. The Manila Carnival, a great fanfare just before Lent, was sort of an aberration in a city where the “old” Spanish and the “new” American cultures clashed, and where the Filipino identity, struggling to find its own identity, drew water from both wells of culture. Paz was right smack in the middle of it, if not a product of this exciting but tensed time.
The Carnival invited visitors to forget their present problems for a while by Billiken merriment, nightly balls full of dancing, and confetti. It was a showcase of the Filipino gentry and a convenient American-initiated distraction from city life, where debutantes were expected to find fine young men to be their future husbands. That year, the Marquezes had the 5’4” “Pacita” as she was endearingly called, dress up as a queen, typical of pageants in the Carnival’s Coronation Night. The coronation was the highlight of the Manila Carnival. Among all the beauties of that night, despite insisting that she is “pangit” (ugly), “difficult and withdrawn,” she won the crown as “Queen Paz I,” the Manila Carnival Queen of 1912. Then and there, riding on a dais, she was given the title “Emperatriz de Carnaval”, and according to National Artist Nick Joaquin, “her court was composed of a Reina de Luzon, a Reina de Visayas and a Reina de Mindanao.”
*Queen Paz I’s court (1912), courtesy of Manila Carnival Blogspot.
That same year, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in the University of the Philippines, belonging to the first batch that graduated from the premier state university. She and Paco were also engaged that year.
Paco and Pacita eventually married in 1914, both of whom loved teaching and the written word. They had four children and a joyous marriage. Paz decided to join the faculty of the English department in the University of the Philippines in 1916. And because Paz had a mind of her own apart from her husband, and seeking to champion the mind of women in a very conservative society where Filipinas found strength in writing in English, she founded the Woman’s Home Journal in 1919, one of the most read English magazines of the pre-War Philippines. In the same year, she, and six other Filipina scholars of the Manila social elite, founded the Philippine Women’s College (now the Philippine Women’s University). I’m so sure that women like Pacita contributed to the eventual passage of the women’s suffrage in 1937, giving all Filipino women, not just men, the right to vote.
*April 3, 1937 editorial cartoon in the Philippines Free Press, courtesy of the Presidential Museum and Library.
Her quiet and steadfast writing, eventually led to her acclaim when the Philippine Herald, an English newspaper, published her poignant fictional short story, “Dead Stars” in 1925. It was the first ever modern Filipino short story. The words of that story just flowed as one reads them:
“Love—he seemed to have missed it. Or was the love that others told about a mere fabrication of perfervid imagination, an exaggeration of the commonplace, a glorification of insipid monotonies such as made up his love life? Was love a combination of circumstances, or sheer native capacity of soul? In those days love was, for him, still the eternal puzzle; for love, as he knew it, was a stranger to love as he divined it might be.”
“Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed–the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed–mortgaging the future–forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate.”
and the heartbreaking lines…
“So all these years–since when?–he had been seeing the light of dead stars, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in their appointed places in the heavens.”
In her long tenure in U.P., from 1916 to 1951, she was seen always in terno while teaching. In those years, Pacita taught a long line of Filipino literary luminaries who would greatly contribute to Philippine literature: Loreto Paras-Sulit, Paz M. Latorena, Bienvenido N. Santos, Manuel Arguilla, UP President Salvador P. Lopez and National Artist for Literature Francisco Arcellana.
Unlike her sad story of Dead Stars, where the protagonist sighed with regret at a lost chance at love, Pacita’s life even today shines as an inspiration for women and men who would articulate what every human being struggle for, through the art of writing. One indeed cannot write the things that she wrote if she didn’t live through it–the disappointments and triumphs that defines Life itself. The vigor of her words in the things she wrote, even with a language not her own, reflects a life lived to the fullest, and the ingenuity that defines the true Filipina.
In commemoration of Paz Marquez-Benitez’s 123rd birth anniversary and in celebration of the National Women’s Month!
Photo above: From the book Paz Marquez Benitez: One Woman’s Life, Letters and Writing by Virginia Benitez Licuanan, published by Ateneo de Manila University, 1995.
Great short stories of Paz Marquez-Benitez:
gamechangershow
gracieabrams
romaincrisis
discoholicmusic
2087
tangentwithtanner
amandla
areudirty
