Category Archives: work

Tired of the party lines. Tired of the authenticity police.

4214010-Filipinos_chocoloate_cookies_Madrid

I’m tired of the party lines. I’m tired of the authenticity police.

I’m tired of people pushing their agendas in my face.

I’ve been trying to hang back, and to just focus on work. I know I am a human being of very strong opinions and beliefs. Whoever agrees with some of what I believe, that’s fine. And whoever doesn’t, that’s fine. My writing, essaying, reviewing, are places where I can voice these strong opinions and beliefs. I do not try to impose my opinions and beliefs on others. I put it out there, and if you’re not down with me and what I write, I’m good with that. I’m confident enough that my writing will resonate with others.

Continue reading →

Words Manifest: Why I Write

gangstarr-classic-covers2

It’s no big secret, that I am gaga over Eduardo Galeano. Since being introduced to his work some years ago, something has opened and has continued to open in me. The things he does in his work, those are the things I need in the world, in my writing and reading life — I have just found this: Galeano, “Why I Write,” posted a few days ago at The Progressive. It’s a brief thing, but it is certainly not lean, and it is more than enough; there’s no reason to be verbose in explaining oneself as an author. You let the work explain yourself:

* I tried and I go on trying, to say more with less, looking for words better than the wisest silence, naked words free of rhetorical clothes. Writing has been, and still is, quite difficult but frequently it gives me deep feelings and high pleasure, far away from solitude and oblivion.

You let language do its thing, you let words work cut, penetrate, linger, redirect/reorient, transform.

Continue reading →

USF and SFSU: Syllabizing Next Semester

100demons

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.

Continue reading →

Minding the Ethnic Artifact: Continuing Dialogue on Teaching and Writing “Ethnic” “Identity” Lit

A fellow Pinay writer and I have been engaged in some interesting and much needed conversation about teaching and writing “ethnic” “identity” literature — this comes about as a result of my previous blog post on Resisting Objectification and Cultivating Readers.

Another word to use here would be essentialism. How does that strip us of our agency as readers and as authors. How does that also strip our students of their agency as readers and critical thinkers.

A long time ago — eleven years ago, April 2002, to be nearly exact — I handed the first draft of my first book manuscript, Gravities of Center, in its first drafted iteration, to my editor Eileen Tabios. We were in a bar on Folsom Street, South of Market, SF, after having attended a Diasporic Poetics reading featuring Summi Kaipa and K. Silem Mohammad. It was such a good moment, as I’d never known I had a 72-page body of poetic work in me. (The book turns a decade old, this coming June, which is — holy shite! — next month.)

Who knows now, how “good” this manuscript draft was, but at the time, handing it over, Eileen had one of many words of advice for me, about the “ethnic artifact.” It’s not about the presence of the ethnic artifact in our work. It’s never been about the presence of the ethnic artifact in our work. It’s always been about what we are doing with the ethnic artifact, why and how we are doing what we are doing with the ethnic artifact.

How am I minding the ethnic artifact in my work.

Continue reading →

Resisting Objectification and Cultivating Readers: End of Semester Teaching Filipino Lit Thoughts

OK, what do I have to offer today to push forward any discussion of Filipino American Literature. How about a reiteration that we need to push past the identity politics and past theorizing the work into abstraction. Where is the middle ground, or the place where we handle the work not just as Filipino American cultural artifact, but as creative writing, as literary work. Literary work that is written by an author of Filipino descent (or maybe not!), that may be read within various traditions and contexts, that should resist objectification.

And how does a work itself resist objectification in the first place. Or is it the writer writing in an effort to resist objectification. Or is it the teacher teaching against objectification.

Continue reading →

Opening Filipino American Literature to Include Rafe Bartholomew, and a Pinay in Latino Poetics

Maybe it’s a strange thing for me to say, but I’m back at a place of ambivalence about identity politics. I know, I teach in Philippine Studies and Asian American Studies Departments, and I am active with PAWA, and maybe this time spent grinding and fielding material is what is contributing to my current (ongoing?) bout with ambivalence.

(Maybe ambivalence isn’t the word.)

I’ve written about this before, the opening of Filipino American literature and poetics, the inclusion of Filipino American poets within other literatures and poetics, a more critical look at our alignments, whether single-ethnicity based alignments are even necessary.

Fact is I am a Filipino American author. This is just a given, based upon my parentage. I write about stuff important to me and my world, though not only as a Filipino American, but as a woman of color, as a feminist, as a member of a multilingual immigrant family, as an American (really), as a human being in this world.

Continue reading →

Manuscript: Multivocal Poems

To Love as Aswang

With razorblade eyes 		The Filipina is most sincere
With too much water		And will make a very good wife.

With animal teeth		The Filipina is a loyal partner,
We sometimes kill		Deserving of all your love.

With splintered hands		The Filipina is the total package,
With too much life 		Much more than meets the eye.

With ribcage unlocked		The Filipina is not for you,
We wither your roots		If you cannot handle her claws.
To Be Prey

With sway, sashay		Blame the Filipina
The prancing paloma,		For being so attractive.

With hips and heart		Blame the Filipina
Cooing coquette.		Materialistic migrant woman.

With lips and lilt		Blame the Filipina
He sets his snares,		If he cannot help himself.

With swish and spunk		Blame the Filipina
He plucks his prey.		Surely, she asks him for it.

Some things I am building on, for now. Of course, the multivocal aspect of the manuscript. I can’t embed here the poems which contain baybayin text, but that’s also a growing part of the manuscript.

I’ve been tightening up on the lines to be little and taut, to appear simple, straightforward, to utilize (generally) simple, common words (“materialistic,” while common, is the exception to simple).

Text in the right column come from Google searches for “The Filipina is,” and “Blame the Filipina.” Rereading James Fallows’s “A Damaged Culture: A New Philippines?” in The Atlantic has something to do with it. Blaming, essentializing, quick to judgment.

Contradictions, Obligations, “Our” Authors?

I ask this as a question, because I am finding it harder and harder to answer. I’ve come across a few editorial pieces and writerly blog posts about whether or not readers owe writers anything. I’ll extend the parameters of the question and ask whether specific communities owe “their” or “our” writers anything.

Recently, a Fil Am author said that he had a specific audience and reader in mind when writing his novel. That audience he envisioned did not buy the book. The author decided, if that’s the way it was going to be, then to stop writing with a specific reader in mind.

A couple of things. This is already too complicated. As authors, we write. We write what we need to write. We do not hold focus groups to gather consensus from which we then create manuscripts.

Continue reading →

Breaking Open the Pinay Manuscript

[Of course, the conversation on this manuscript, and on breaking open the manuscript -- this is continued or extended in FB, though honestly, I wish, folks, that it was in an open space, that actually has space. Curse you, FB.]

Some great questions have come up. First, about writing, approximating that horror of which humans are capable, not descending into the gratuitous and pornographic, but really plumbing these dark territories. What are we capable of thinking and enacting upon one another.

As a Pinay, this should concern me precisely because these things can happen to the Pinay body in the world, where “the world” is not just “out there,” in foreign spaces torn apart by war and poverty and hunger, but right here, in our homes and quiet neighborhoods. I am potentially one of those bodies, and this is a tension that I believe has happened in my work for a long time now.

Continue reading →

More on Breaking the Manuscript

whitman manuscript

I understand why Suheir Hammad would write an entire volume of poetry on breaking, a necessary thing to do or have done when writing the book. After I blogged last time about breaking my manuscript open, I had some time to read it and sit with it. I had some time to think about what aspects of it I was disliking in a big way. Breaking is also a big theme in my manuscript. How do bodies break. How do Pinay bodies break. This breaking was not originally one of my concerns when I started outlining the questions I would ask other Pinays to answer.

Continue reading →