Dusk

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When people ask me which of my novels I like best, I always reply, you are asking me which of my seven children I love most.

My Japanese translator, Matsuyo Yamamoto, thinks Tree is the most evocative. The poet and critic Ricaredo Demetillo thinks My Brother, My Executioner is the most dramatic and Tree the dullest. It is really difficult for me to say which is what, but this I can say: Mass is the book I enjoyed writing most, because I wrote it straight from beginning to end in one creative spurt. Besides, I wrote it in Paris.

My daughter Jette, who is my editor, thinks Dusk (original title, Po-on) is the best. Po-on, which means “the beginning” or “tree trunk” in my native Ilokano, is the first in terms of chronology.

Of the five Rosales novels, Dusk took the longest to write — more than three decades. I had great difficulty, for it meant research into our past, the period from the early 1870s to 1898 and the Battle of Tirad Pass, the same period during which the Spanish regime was vanquished and the Americans took over. Dusk is simply the story of a family, or rather of a peace-loving man who led his clan in its flight from the narrow coastal plain of the Ilokos in Northern Luzon to the Central Plains. It is also a story of Spanish tyranny, and the Filipino response to it and to the American intrusion into our islands after the Spaniards left. The man who leads this hegira is the grandfather of Antonio Samson in The Pretenders, published in 1962, the first of the five Rosales novels. Four others followed: Tree; My Brother, My Executioner; Mass; and Po-on (Dusk).

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