San Francisco—Over the weekend, I attended the sixth Filipino American Worldwide Ebook Pageant, the place I used to be one of many invited authors from the Philippines, alongside the youngsters’s e-book writer Ani Rosa Almario and baybayin calligrapher Ian Lucero. Apart from the possibility to share my very own e-book, “The Philippines Is Not A Small Nation,” I noticed my participation as a chance to study extra about Filipino American literature and the experiences that they convey.
Held on the San Francisco Public Library and arranged by the Philippine-American Writers Affiliation, the competition featured over 40 writers representing genres that vary from younger grownup fiction (e.g., Randy Ribay, Laurel Flores Fantauzzo), graphic novel (Bren Bataclan, Isabel Roxas), and youngsters’s literature (Sweet Gourlay, Erin Entrada Kelly) to novel (Gina Apostol, Reine Arcache Melvin, Lysley Tenorio), crime/thriller (Mia P. Manansala), memoir (Meredith Talusan), tutorial writing (Vicente Rafael, Robyn Rodriguez), quick story (Lara Stapleton), and poetry (Joi Barrios, Barbara Jane Reyes). Fittingly, the two-day affair ended with a dialog between Maria Ressa and Inquirer.internet’s Boying Pimentel.
Just like the meals and drinks we partook all through the competition—e.g., lechon kawali, bibingka, calamansi juice—a number of the matters and themes have been drawn from the Philippines. As an example, in her highly effective keynote speech, Gina Apostol straight addressed our political conundrums by reflecting on the thought of revolution, and a few of her traces are price quoting at size:
“Just a few lead comfy lives within the Philippines … it’s a small minority whose lives are threatened with change. However it is usually they whose myth-making and golden guarantees manufacture majority consent to their violence and their greed … It’s satisfying in charge the voters, however is a problematic response to fascism’s energy. I lay the blame unequivocally on the structural oppression that has produced the voters’ financial situation, which leads them to the determined hope that Marcos will, along with his absurd and unimaginable lies about his household’s Tallano gold, elevate them out of despair.”
For her half, Meredith Talusan—who delivered her speech in Tagalog—underscored the significance not simply in taking satisfaction in our native languages, however in educating it to the subsequent generations: an attraction maybe extra poignant right here in America, however no much less related within the Philippines.
However like lumpia that has turn into extra of a Filipino American than Filipino meals, there are additionally themes which can be distinctly Fil-Am. For one, questions of racial id and marginality understandably suffuse their writing, as when Barbara Jane Reyes laments, in her “Letters to a Younger Brown Lady”:
They are going to say, your language lacks finesse, your phrases low.
They are going to kind air quotes with their white fingers,
say one thing intelligent about shade. Previous struggles and activisms come to life via the members and their performances—from the legacy of Larry Itliong, who alongside Cesar Chavez led Filipino and Mexican farm staff in combating for his or her rights within the Nineteen Sixties, to the reminiscence of Amado Khaya Canham Rodriguez, an Oakland-born activist who lived and labored with the Mangyan communities in Mindoro earlier than his premature demise at age 22 throughout the top of the pandemic in 2020. Their tales remind me that Filipinos have truly been within the Americas a minimum of since 1587, and have confronted every kind of injustice all through the centuries, just like the anti-Filipino riots in California within the 1920-Thirties, and the anti-Asian violence at present, at the same time as their struggles don’t determine a lot within the homeland’s imaginary of its diaspora.
After which, there’s the theme of pagbabalikbayan, of returning to the Philippines to (re)uncover one’s roots and reconnect with one’s household, which is each a private expertise and a literary trope in a few of their works (e.g., Jay Reguero in Ribay’s “Patron Saints of Nothing” and Magsalin in Apostol’s “Insurrecto,” each of whom discover themselves grappling with Duterte’s conflict on medication).
We have to hear extra of one another’s tales, at first as a result of, within the phrases of competition co-organizer Edwin Lozada, “These are Filipino writers and artists, however their messages aren’t particularly Filipino. It’s common.”
However on the similar time, these tales are a part of our personal story as a folks, and we have now a lot to study if we’re to embrace them amid all our divergences, and if this embrace is to steer not simply to pagkakaisa, unity, however pagkakapit-bisig, solidarity, and certainly, to hark again to the competition’s theme: hiraya, emergence. We might determine with totally different demonyms (Filipino/a/x), hyphenations, time zones, and citizenships, but when we are able to all partake in one another’s experiences as in a pagsasalo-salo, we might but acknowledge ourselves in a first-person plural, through which our pronouns are we, tayo, atin.
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