Nick Joaquin

Also known as: Nicomedes Marquez Joaquin (full name) · Nicomedes "Nick" M. Joaquin · Quijano de Manila (journalistic pen name at the Philippines Free Press) · Quijano de Pacó (earlier pen name) · National Artist for Literature (title, 1976)

Society

Definition

Nick Joaquin, born Nicomedes Marquez Joaquin (May 4, 1917, Paco, Manila – April 29, 2004, San Juan, Metro Manila), was a Filipino novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, and journalist, and one of the most decorated writers in the history of Philippine literature in English. He was conferred the Order of National Artists for Literature in 1976 — accepting the honor, the record notes, on condition that the Marcos government release the imprisoned writer Pete Lacaba — and received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature, and Creative Communication Arts in 1996. His signature works span fiction, drama, and reportage: the novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961), the play A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, the essay “La Naval de Manila” (1943), and the heritage writing collected in Almanac for Manileños (1979) and Manila, My Manila (1990). (Wikipedia)

His working life divides between literature and journalism. Writing as Quijano de Manila, he chronicled Philippine politics, crime, and society at the Philippines Free Press — which he joined in 1950 and where he rose to associate editor — until his departure in 1970 during a labor dispute, afterwards editing the Asia Philippines Leader until the Marcos government closed it in 1972. The Magsaysay Award board honored him, in its 1996 citation, for “exploring the mysteries of the Filipino body and soul in sixty inspired years as a writer.” (Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation)

Identities

Authority	Value
Wikipedia	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Joaquin
Wikidata	Nick Joaquin (Q1977234)
DBpedia	https://dbpedia.org/page/Nick_Joaquin
ProductOntology	N/A
Wiktionary	N/A
Library of Congress Subject Headings	N/A
MeSH	N/A
NCBI Taxonomy	N/A
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Google Scholar	N/A
ConceptNet	N/A
OpenCyc	N/A

Also Known As

Nicomedes Marquez Joaquin (full name)
Nicomedes “Nick” M. Joaquin
Quijano de Manila (journalistic pen name at the Philippines Free Press)
Quijano de Pacó (earlier pen name)
National Artist for Literature (title, 1976)

Examples and Analogies

Reportage as a literary genre: under the Quijano de Manila byline, courtroom cases and crimes became essays with the architecture of short fiction — the body of work that later Filipino screenwriters mined directly, as when Lino Brocka’s Jaguar (1979) and Mike de Leon’s Kisapmata (1981) were adapted from Joaquin’s reportage.
The twin shelves of a writing life: Joaquin’s bibliography runs on two parallel tracks — the imaginative prose of Prose and Poems (1952) and The Woman Who Had Two Navels on one side, the topical journalism and cultural essays on the other — with each track feeding the other’s material.
An elegy for old Manila: A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, set in the Intramuros of October 1941 with the Marasigan sisters guarding their painter father’s last work, functions as a theatrical elegy for the prewar Spanish-Filipino city — the same sensibility that animates “La Naval de Manila” and Almanac for Manileños.

Usage Scenarios

1. Teaching Philippine Literature in English

Courses on the Filipino novel and drama anchor their syllabi in The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1961) and A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, the former the story of an elite Filipina who believes she has two navels, the latter the country’s most staged English-language play — works whose publication and staging histories (1952 in print, 1955 on stage) mark the maturation of Philippine writing in English.

2. Studying Manila Heritage and the Catholic Baroque Sensibility

Heritage writers and city historians use Joaquin’s essays — “La Naval de Manila,” Almanac for Manileños, Culture and History (1988), and Manila, My Manila — as the standard literary articulation of the old Manila calendar of processions, feasts, and family houses, a sensibility this wiki’s entry on the Cultural Center of the Philippines situates within the national culture institutions of the era.

3. Researching the Marcos-Era Press and Cultural Politics

Press historians trace through Joaquin’s career the arc of the independent Philippine press under authoritarian rule: the Free Press departure of 1970, the shutdown of the Asia Philippines Leader in 1972, and the 1976 National Artist conferment accepted on the condition that a jailed colleague, Pete Lacaba, be freed — a documented intersection of state honor and state repression.

Strategies

Read the two tracks together: the reportage (collected under the Quijano de Manila byline) and the fiction illuminate each other; students who read only the novels miss the journalism that paid for them and supplied their social detail.
Use dated texts for dated claims: works like The Aquinos of Tarlac (1983) are primary sources for the period of their writing — the last years of the Marcos era — as much as biographies of their subjects.
Follow the staging and adaptation history: a work such as Portrait exists in 1950 manuscript, 1952 magazine serialization, 1955 premiere, 1965 film, 1989 and 1997 Filipino translations and musical versions, and the 2017 film Ang Larawan — a chain that lets researchers date the shifting reception of a single text.
Handle the birthdate with care: May 4, 1917 is the date of record, but Joaquin concealed his birthday, and September 15, 1917 circulates in some accounts; both should be reported when precision matters.

Security and Safety Measures

The documented record against the concealed one: because Joaquin deliberately obscured his own birthdate, researchers should cite civil records and standard biographical authorities rather than the writer’s playful self-descriptions — a caution against laundering folklore into fact.
Preservation of the periodical record: much of Joaquin’s most-cited work appeared in the Philippines Free Press and other magazines now held in archives; the durability of his reputation depends on the preservation of, and access to, those runs.
State commemoration as a paper trail: the 1976 National Artist conferment, the 1996 Magsaysay Award, the 1997 Tanglaw ng Lahi Award, and the 2010 Philippine postage stamp constitute a verifiable public record of recognition that researchers can check against awards databases.
Estate and adaptation rights: the continuing adaptation of Joaquin’s work — from Jaguar and Kisapmata to Tatarin (2001), the docudrama Dahling Nick (2015), and Ang Larawan (2017), which won Best Picture at the 2017 Metro Manila Film Festival — makes the documented chain of rights and credits part of the factual record of his legacy.

Historical Context

Nicomedes “Nick” Marquez Joaquin was born in Paco, Manila, the fifth of ten children of Don Leocadio Joaquin — a colonel of the Philippine Revolution under Emilio Aguinaldo who became a lawyer — and Salomé Marquez, a public school teacher. He left Mapa High School in his third year and never completed a formal degree, receiving instead an honorary Associate in Arts from the University of Santo Tomas; at seventeen he was a proofreader at the Tribune, where his first published English poem, on Don Quixote, appeared, and his first short story, “The Sorrows of Vaudeville,” followed in 1937. The decisive apprenticeship came after the war: A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, written in 1950 and first published in 1952 in Weekly Women’s Magazine and in Prose and Poems, was aired on radio before reaching the stage at the Aurora Gardens in Intramuros in 1955, directed by Lamberto Avellana with Daisy Hontiveros-Avellana as Candida. (Wikipedia — A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino)

The novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels appeared in 1961 as the first recipient of the Harry Stonehill Award, and the succeeding decades brought Tropical Gothic (1972), A Question of Heroes (1977), Almanac for Manileños (1979), and the twin books of 1983 — The Aquinos of Tarlac, the family chronicle of the subject of this wiki’s entry on Benigno Aquino Jr., and the detective novel Cave and Shadows — followed by Culture and History (1988) and Manila, My Manila (1990). (Wikipedia — The Woman Who Had Two Navels) He translated Rizal’s Mi Último Adiós as “Land That I Love, Farewell!” and wrote the “Small Beer” column for the Philippine Daily Inquirer in his last years. Joaquin died of cardiac arrest at his home in San Juan, Metro Manila, on April 29, 2004, at eighty-six, days short of his eighty-seventh birthday.

Challenges and Controversies

The Hidden Birthdate

Joaquin concealed his birthday, and reference works accordingly diverge: the date of record is May 4, 1917, but September 15, 1917 appears in some accounts. The discrepancy is harmless in most contexts but consequential for centennial reckoning and for any claim about his exact age at publication — a standing reminder that even a national writer’s vital statistics require source-checking.

The 1976 National Artist Conferment

The award of National Artist for Literature on March 27, 1976 — conferred by the Marcos government four years after martial law — is recorded alongside the condition Joaquin attached: the release of the imprisoned writer Pete Lacaba. Later commentary has read the episode both as co-optation of the country’s leading writer and as an act of leverage within a repressive system; the documented facts support neither simplification, only the condition itself and the confinement that prompted it.

Literature Written Inside Living Politics

The Aquinos of Tarlac (1983) narrates the family of Benigno Aquino Jr. in the same year as his assassination, and its judgments of living political actors were read against the accelerating crisis of the Marcos regime. Works of this kind blur biography, reportage, and advocacy; researchers should treat them as dated interventions — evidence of what could be said, and how, in 1983 — rather than as settled accounts of their subjects.