DAVAO CITY, Philippines – Aida Rivera-Ford, a fictionist, playwright, and educator, died five days before her 100th birthday which is on January 22.
Rivera-Ford is described as a “trailblazer in Philippine literature” by Silliman University’s literary journal Sands and Coral, the first student literary publication in the Philippines, which she co-founded and was its first editor in chief in 1948. She graduated cum laude in the Dumaguete-based university with a degree in Bachelor of Arts in English in 1949.
She was born in Jolo, Sulu. Her father, Pablo Rivera, was a judge who was assigned to various places, from Sulu to Dumaguete, until they settled in Mindanao.
She earned a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Michigan where she earned her master’s degree in English and Literature in the University of the Michigan in 1954. She also received the Hopwood Award in 1955 for her five short stories. These are included in her later collection, Now and at the Hour and Other Stories published in 1958.
She is most remembered for her celebrated short stories, The Chieftest Mourner and Love in the Cornhusks, which are included in literature textbooks in high school and college, as well as in anthologies of Filipino stories. The latter story has also been recreated by students into short films.
Her published books include another short story collection “Born in the Year 1900 and Other Stories” (1997) and a compilation of plays “Heroes in Love: Four Plays” (2012).
Rivera-Ford also taught in Ateneo de Davao, where she chaired the Humanities Division from 1969 to 1980. She wrote and staged plays for the Ateneo students and was moderator of its student publication, the Atenews.
In the commemorative book on Ateneo de Davao’s 70th anniversary, she wrote that her fondest memories as an Ateneo educator was defending students who were detained during Martial Law, including her student who was an Atenews writer and a summa cum laude candidate.
“What greater shock than this: The Atenews office was raided and because of an article entitled “Portrait of the Filipino student as an activist,” (two students) were incarcerated at the Philippine Constabulary (PC) barracks… Since I did not want to jeopardize Tiny’s summa cum laude prospect, I got permission to bring my whole literature class to the bunks at the PC barracks,” she wrote.
She also joined co-teachers and students who attended what she described as a “kangaroo court” that held trials against the detained students, teachers and priests.
“A group of us from academe were uninvited observers who stood outside the cyclone-wire high fence. As each prisoner was called in, we would burst into thunderous applause,” Rivera-Ford recalled.
The trials were discontinued weeks later and all detained suspects were released.
After her stint in Ateneo, Rivera-Ford co-founded Ford Academy of the Arts in 1980, the first Fine Arts school in Mindanao. The school produced Mindanao-based artists in visual arts, theater, music and dance.
“A writer, educator, and theater artist, Aida Rivera-Ford’s work and leadership helped shape the cultural and academic life of Ateneo de Davao University and Mindanao,” a statement from Ateneo de Davao wrote.
The Davao Writers Guild, which she was a founding member in its creation in 1999, remembers Rivera-Ford for shaping regional literature.
“She belonged to a generation that shaped Philippine postwar writing and helped establish regional literature as a vital part of the national imagination,” the Guild wrote in a statement after her passing. “She also co-edited the Mindanao issue of “Ani (Harvest),” the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ quarterly literary journal.”
The Guild also praised Rivera-Ford’s deep involvement with the Philippine Theatre Davao and composed the operetta “Datu Bago”, a chieftain of the Davao Gulf that resisted the Spanish occupation.
Rivera-Ford established the Riverford Nature Park at Catalunan Grande, where she installed two statues of National Artists for Literature who had inspired her – Nick Joaquin and NVM Gonzales.
She has been conferred Davao City’s Bago Awards in 1982 for her contribution to Mindanao arts and culture, and the Parangal for Writers of the Post War Years in 1991.
She is also a Gawad CCP awardee in 1991, an awardee of the Outstanding Sillimanian Award for Literature and Creative Writing (1993), and national fellow for fiction by the University of the Philippines Creative Writing Center (1993).
“Aida Rivera-Ford’s legacy lives on through her stories, her students, and the countless lives she touched through her art and generosity of spirit. She will be deeply missed,” the Davao Writers Guild wrote.
A mass and memorial tribute is set in the late afternoon until evening of January 22, which would had been her 100th birthday, at the Ateneo de Davao’s Our Lady of Assumption Chapel in Jacinto campus.(davaotoday.com)
