Category Archives: Filipino American Literature

The “Race” Conversation: When we talk about expectations for “ethnic” writing/writers, whose expectations are we talking about?

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[Above is a "poem poster" I made many years ago as part of a Fil Am Lit project. The image is called "Bayanihan," by Mel Vera Cruz.]

I must live in a “bubble.”

I’ve read these three really great essays on ethnicity/”race” and writing:

“You Are The Second Person,” by Kiese Laymon

“Writer of Color,” by Zahir Janmohamed

“Some Thoughts on Biracialism and Poetry,” by Paisley Rekdal

All of these are excellent essays that I highly recommend reading, and not just for writers of color. Educators of color too. Writers and educators of all ethnicities really.

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“Why We Need to Read Filipino Literature”: Is this the question we need to be asking?

bulosan laughter of my father

“Why We Need to Read Filipino Literature” is a Google search that has, for the last few days, been leading to a couple of blog posts:

Revisiting Dogeaters and Other Possible Revelations in Filipino Literature

Filipino American Literature, Filipino American Lovers of Books

I am intrigued. Whose search? Is it for a class? Whose class? It’s summer break here, and the academic term has just started in the Philippines. This makes me wonder: How do Philippine students respond to this question. How does that differ from the responses of Filipino Americans.

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You Spitfire Girl

A nice image to think about as we forge ahead with the newly renamed manuscript:

gabriela silang philstar com

Progress and process on the manuscript! Some things (excerpted from my Pinay Narratives page):

If I could do it all over again, my questions would read more like this:

  1. Who is your mother? What is her story?
  2. Who are your women ancestors? What do you know about them? What do you remember about them?
  3. How do you mother? What are your thoughts on motherhood/mothering?
  4. Are you afraid of your own voice? Are you afraid to speak? Why are you afraid to speak?
  5. Are you afraid of your own body? Why are you afraid of your own body? What is there to fear about it?
  6. What is your language? What are your words?
  7. What are your dreams? What do you remember of your dreams?
  8. Where do you live? Where is home? What do you remember about home?

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Manuscript Process Notes: On the Line

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First, the damn manuscript needs a title. I don’t know what the hell is going on with me, that I can’t nail down a title for this thing. This thing, of course, is the Pinay narratives manuscript, and it’s been morphing, as some of you know. I am feeling much better about its newly taken on “shape.”

On the line. I had been getting really tight with those lines, which were becoming so compact, such little lines containing so much information in so few words, and such tight music. I’ve been thinking about what I try to remember to tell my students at the beginning of the semester, when we start read poems. I forget that poetry is intimidating to many, for too many reasons to get into here and now.

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Poem for the Pinay Manuscript: What Happens When a Pinay Howls 2

To Spend and Be Spent

Inay, I’m with you in this homelessness
Where you are more battered than I
I’m with you in this homelessness
Where your pedigree is a raging pheromone
I’m with you in this homelessness
Where we’re making it happen despite your terrible taste in lovers
I’m with you in this homelessness
Where lovers leave again and again, after leaving marks on our bodies
I’m with you in this homelessness
Where deadbeats reduce you to nobody but everybody’s ATM
I’m with you in this homelessness
Where you throw your money at me as if it were love
I’m with you in this homelessness
Where I piece together my gratitude, I am wounded but alive
I’m with you in this homelessness
Where Manila’s pleated private school skirts cover bruised knees
I’m with you in this homelessness
Where we sing Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis.
I’m with you in this homelessness
Where we cross the Pacific, dreaming our new American selves

Broken Record Stylee: MFAs and Writers of Color

villa gamalinda picture

Above is the best photograph ever, of Jose Garcia Villa, taken by Eric Gamalinda in 1993. This is a great sum up of how many of us think of Villa, his work, his feelings towards established literary bodies. I love this; it both emboldens me (as if I need more emboldening), but it also makes me quite sad, for as I’ve been told, after renaming himself and his country Doveglion, Villa silenced himself and then that was that. On so many levels, Villa always gives me a lot to think about as a Filipino American author, my relationship with American Literature/American Poetry, my relationship with Filipino American arts and letters, and Filipino American communities, but also, of course, the poetry itself.

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I Write To Stand My Ground: What Makes This Possible

dangerousmusic

I write to stand my ground. http://bit.ly/133HFmI (That’s from yesterday’s blog post.)

As tellers of story, use your creativity, perform generative and imaginative acts of storytelling, to counter the destructiveness, silencing, and invisibility ongoing in this world. Deploy your words, your voices, your talents and honor our stories — however difficult and painful, they are beautiful and necessary; craft stories that are brave, empathetic, compassionate, and true. http://bit.ly/12XshbG (That’s from my commencement address.)

The image above is Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn’s first book, Dangerous Music, published by Momo’s Press in 1975. I’ve got a first edition at home. It’s one of my treasures. I am able to be a writer and author because of its existence, and what must have gone into creating it and getting it into the world.

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What’s At Stake: That Damn Question Again

audre lorde women writing dangerous

Yeah, that damn question again. What is at stake? I’ve been somewhat engaged in some FB dialogue with other Pinay writers about this question. What’s interesting to me is how we approach this question, how we attempt to answer this question. Whether we believe we can adequately answer this question.

What if it’s too abstract, and if so, why? Can we take a few steps back from “what’s at stake,” and ask, “Why do I write?” “For whom do I write?”

So many Pinay writers I know are so preoccupied with the autobiographical “I.” Preoccupied, and then painfully self-conscious that they are so preoccupied with that autobiographical “I.” This is not a criticism as much as it is an observation. I get it. We grow up in this country, never encountering people like ourselves in books, on TV, in movies. We think we are invisible. We need to write in order to make ourselves visible, but then become so self-conscious of our visibility, and our attempts to be visible, and then dismissive of our own attempts to be visible.

Sometimes I think I must be invisible — I have lost count of how many times strangers in public spaces walk into me as if I am not there, as if I do not require space, as if the assumption is that I am the one who will always have to give way.

I think of Frances Chung in Crazy Melon and Chinese Apple: “the streets are so crowded with people/ that to walk freely I have to walk in/ the gutter.”

So then, at the core, I write to stand my ground.

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USF and SFSU: Syllabizing Next Semester

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One more class meeting at SFSU and then we’ve survived the semester. It’s rough, the pace at which I’m working, but I also really love it. Sometimes I think that teaching only/mostly Filipino Lit classes should bore me, but really, it hasn’t been.

As I blogged yesterday, I am really grateful that my students are an open minded bunch. This having to relate to the literature being presented, I don’t know if that’s something I was ever really given an opportunity to talk about when I was an undergrad. I did know that when I was reading canonical English literature for my classes, there was always this assumption and expectation that we should all read the literature and know its greatness, and that was enough to keep us engaged.

A lot of the canonical literature I did read long ago, I’ve come to understand now that I’m older, now that I’m a more mature human being and more mature reader. At the time, it was so easy to just feel alienated, “pushed out.” I thought perhaps I was deficient, that my upbringing was deficient, because in my mind, we were not one of those families whose dinner conversations consisted of Western high art. That because I could not go to my parents for help on my Lit and Humanities papers, somehow I was living in an uncultured culture, that somehow my language and reading was not as sophisticated as the language and reading of Americans around me.

Even though my sisters and I haunted the local libraries and bookstores during the summer. Even though we tackled our summer reading lists with a kind of voraciousness.

Call that whatever it’s called. No wonder a lot of us immigrant children are pushed by our parents into the sciences and more objective fields. No wonder people keep proliferating the flawed idea that Filipino Americans don’t read.

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End of Semester: Grateful.

fil books

Yes, I’m grateful.

On FB last night, one of my FB friends, who’s a professor, wrote that a student could not relate to a certain assigned work, because it took place in Oakland, and the student did not know where Oakland is.

A citizen of Oakland, I don’t take that personally! But it got me thinking that I don’t face resistance that way in my classes. So I am really fortunate, and I am grateful. My students seem so open and open minded already, which is something I think makes a great student, right? If you’re closed in your world view and assumptions, then you don’t think you have anything new to learn, any other perspectives to consider.

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