Our Endless Summer from Illustrado
By Krip Yuson
National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose, our most prolific novelist and internationally best-known writer, declared some years ago that there is no such thing as summer in the Philippines. That summer was a Western concept that had no business being assimilated in our own calendar and culture. Or words to that effect.
Now, Manong Frankie, as we call him, is known to affect such seemingly feckless pronouncements, with the obvious objective of pioneering in a provocative idea. Maybe he meant, oh so fundamentally, that we shouldn’t use the word “summer” in our country. Or that we shouldn’t equate it to the summer that visits temperate countries as one of four seasons.
Our Spanish colonizers broke down our tropical seasons into three: four months of dust, four months of rains, and four months of muddy hell, or something like that. On the other hand, we ourselves appear to bifurcate time in a characteristically pessimistic view of inescapable no-win conditions: “Sala sa init, sala sa lamig.” (Damned when it’s hot, damned when it’s cold.)
But to get back to Frankie’s dictum, we may counter: Lighten up, what’s in a word, especially if it’s in English? Our tag-init (as against tag-ulan) is our summer, and it does translate to summer in more ways than one. It’s that period of the year when torpor sets in, ushered in by dry heat by the middle of March, and stays with us till the first typhoons, commonly starting in June.
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