The Spy in the Sandwich

Tracking Sandwich Eaters

Thursday, August 27, 2020

1:27 PM | Gilda Cordero-Fernando, 1930-2020

One of my favorite writers, Gilda Cordero Fernando, has passed on. So saddened by this. Her storied life—so eclectic, so creative, so stylish—was one for emulation, and I don’t know why she has not been declared National Artist for Literature when others of lesser accomplishments have been accorded the honor. [And we do need another female writer in that pantheon, aside from Edith Tiempo.] Later today, I will be teaching her short story “A Wilderness of Sweets,” a personal favorite, for my Fiction Workshop class. It will be strange. She will be remembered.

Gilda Cordero-Fernando was a writer and publisher. She was also a newspaper columnist, fashion designer, playwright, visual artist, curator, and producer of pop pageants, fashion shows, and plays. Born on 4 June 1930 in Manila, she obtained her B.A. from St. Theresa’s College in Manila, and later earned an M.A. major in English Literature from the Ateneo de Manila University. She would spend some years teaching in high school and has also worked for radio. Her collections of short stories included The Butcher, The Baker, and The Candlestick Maker (1962) and A Wilderness of Sweets (1973). Both would later be reissued in 1994 under the title Story Collection. The Ateneo Library of Women’s Writings would describe her stories as prose that “ring in the reader’s ears in well-turned English and fill the mind with curious characters—people in the war, sunburned Filipinos with the American twang, queer designers in the world of high fashion, the humble folk cooped in a bus, a Dust Monster, even the Anti-Christ.” Philippine Food and Life, which she co-authored with Alfredo Roces, was published in 1992. She has also written and illustrated children’s books, and worked on Filipino Heritage: The Making of a Nation, a 10-volume study on Philippine history and culture published by Lahing Pilipino in 1978. She founded GCF Books, which published acclaimed titles that dealt with various aspects of Philippine culture and society, including Streets of Manila (1977), Turn of the Century (1978), Philippine Ancestral Houses (1980), Being Filipino (1981), The History of the Burgis (1987), Folk Architecture (1989), and The Soul Book (1991). As a visual artist, she completed a series of portraits of women, which she then packaged as a card set. In 2000, she also produced Luna, An Aswang Romance, the Palanca-winning play by Rody Vera directed by Anton Juan that, according to theatre critic Gibbs Cadiz, “became a conversation-piece production melding together Cordero-Fernando’s lifelong pursuits: theater, literature, fashion (specifically Filipiniana), Pinoy melodrama, and mythology.” In 2001, she produced Pinoy Pop Culture, the book and the show, for the Bench Corporation. Fr. Miguel Bernad would write of her: “Women are the best writers in the Philippines. In 1957, when the judges for the Palanca Awards submitted their individual choices of the three best stories, it was found that all three lists were completely different in one respect: each list contained a story—a different story in each list—by Mrs. Gilda Cordero-Fernando. In the end, two of her stories were dropped and one (‘Sunburn’) served to dramatize the fact that a young woman writer had become the outstanding storyteller of that year.”

Labels: obituary, philippine literature, writers