Amador Daguio (1912-1966) grew up in the malarial regions of Mountain Province, in northern Luzon, where his constabulario father helped bring order to the non-Christian Kalinga tribes. However, his own love was for adventure of a different kind, and at the age of four he “ran away to school,” to dream the youthful idylls later included in his unpublished novel, The Cradle of Summer.
In 1924, when his father moved to Makati, Rizal, his lyric free verse made him class poet in high school. Later, to earn tuition for the University of the Philippines, Daguio worked as caddy, houseboy and street-car ticket seller. Nevertheless, he completed his Ph.B. in four years and still found time to win every important literary contest and the encouragement of his professor from Australia, T. Inglis Moore. When the seventeen-year-old boy had an offer from Poet Lore in America to publish a chapbook of his verses, it was Moore who advised him to work for perfection instead-but sponsored his appearance in the Sydney Bulletin.
During the early depression years, tubercular lesions forced Daguio to return to the Mountain Province, to heal. Then from the elementary schools of Lubuagan and Banko he was sent on assignment to the southernmost part of the archipelago, to Bukidnon Agricultural high school. Briefly he returned to Manila, as a textbook writer with the Bureau of Education; but in 1937 went south again to Zamboanga Normal School. There his first book of poetry was completed and he married a fellow teacher, descendant from Moslem royalty.
Just three months before the outbreak of the war, in 1941, Daguio moved to Leyte Normal School. Not only did he serve as intelligence officer under Colonel Juan Causing, but he also organized the Tacloban Theatre Guild which produced his plays Prodigal Son and Filipinas. The latter actually displayed the Philippine flag at a time when to do so was criminal. After the Japanese threatened execution unless certain patriotic lines were deleted, he merely put them into the mouth of a soldier suffering from combat fatigue who immediately was knocked down by another soldier. The show went on; the flag went up.
Out of the war years also came Daguio’s second volume of poetry, Bataan Harvest, and a novel, The House of My Spirit, which recounts in terms quite different from his Cradle of Summer the struggle of his parents to rear thirteen children.
Even while he taught at the Normal School, he helped to establish two private colleges in Leyte. Then, in 1951, aware that most Filipinos thought he had died during the war, he accepted a pensionadoship, in order to translate the epic harvest songs of the Kalingas, for his master’s thesis at Stanford, and to develop his craft as writer under Wallace Stegner.
On his return, he deserted the outer provinces where he had spent his youth and settled in Manila. In quick succession, Daguio served as chief of the editorial board of the Public Affairs Office, in the Department of National Defense; as Public Relations Officer for Magsaysay’s Huk resettlement commission, after passing the bar in 1954; and as assistant to the director of the Bureau of the Budget.
Between bureaucratic assignments he lectured at the state university; but ghost-writing political speeches prevented him from publishing more than a single book of poetry, The Flaming Lyre (1959), since the war. Most of his works are still unpublished and some, unwritten, although one small group of poems appeared in Six Filipino Poets and others in the Pacific Spectator and the Beloit Poetry Journal. “Wedding Dance” was included in Stanford Short Stories 1953.
But there were other childhood plans apparently just as pressing: to represent Mountain Province in Congress; to restore his father’s family farm (his main purpose in becoming a lawyer); and to record still-current tribal songs that retain the sound and dream of centuries ago.
Starting in 1958, he served as Chief Editor for the Philippine House of Representatives. He died in 1966.
