The Literary Review

“Am Here”: Am I? (I, hope, so.)

Personal Notes on Contemporary Filipino Literature in English

Bino A. Realuyo

Fil-lit in English: Who’s reading?

Nobody reads Filipino books, a literary agent told my author friend. The statement left him wordless
for a minute but once recovered, he realized some truth in what the agent said. Interestingly
enough, e-mail has allowed Filipino writers from the Philippines and the U.S. to begin a tradition of
sharing lists of books they are reading. Unfortunately for them, they weren’t reading each other’s
books. Similar occurrence in the Philippines among readers of literature: a grand preference for
books published outside the Philippines, by non-Filipino authors. Bestseller lists in the Philippine
bookstores rarely have Filipino novels.

In the United States, publishing a Filipino author is synonymous to saving an endangered

species from extinction. After all, in the past two decades, there were only seven Filipino novelists
published by mainstream American publishers. They were not the only ones writing about the
Philippines, of course. There were also six non-Filipino authors, some of whom were British. I have
not failed to share this issue with many Filipino writers I know. They gasped for a few minutes then
the subject was changed. I wish I could tell them that my agent couldn’t sell my novel in Great
Britain. Too exotic, the publishers there said. But could I at least vouch for authenticity?

So goes a hundred years of Philippine literature in English. The new century will also mark
Filipino-Americans as the largest Asian American population in the United States, two million
strong. When ethnic writings are becoming a familiar wave in American and world literature,
stories about the Filipino experience are almost never heard of. Publishers blame lack of
readership. Two million Filipinos who have no interest in their own stories?

My friend’s reaction to his agent was familiar, because I had been told the same. Filipino
books don’t sell, a mainstream publisher told me once I was selling my first novel. But now I wonder
– whose responsibility are we?
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As English as Hollywood

For Filipinos, the past few years were heavily laden with anniversaries, most of which were about
wars – the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War (strangely labelled as the
Philippine Insurrection in American history books), and the Philippine Revolution.

Even a hundred years later, one of these wars, the Spanish-American war of 1898 – the
country’s ridding of its 350-year colonizer – is still the most cherished moment of the anti-colonials.
It was indeed that ear when Spain ceded its colonies to the United States that was in the mind and
hearts of Filipinos when they celebrated the country’s centennial anniversary in 1998. However, in
1898, the Philippines was hardly independent. Spain left the country lost, distraught, and in the
hands of yet another colonizer, the United States.

English.

Credit or blame the one hundred American teachers who arrived via the USS Thomas in
1901, if you will, but what a hundred years of education can do to a country! English soon became
the medium of communication. The friars’ Spanish, forgotten. English is spoken in all the thousands
of islands in the Philippines. When islanders fight over regional differences; enter English for
conflict resolution. And Taglish, of Tagalog and English extraction, is the perfect middle ground for
the colonially-minded English speakers and the nationalistic P ilipinos.

Traveling through Latin America is for me going back in time, but also recognizing that in
these countries, we have what the Philippines could have been, a Spanish-speaking country. What
our culture has kept, our tongue has not. While Spain colonized the Filipino spirit, she never quite
convinced the Filipino tongue. But America would eventually leave the country lost, distraught yet
forever in the hands of its eternal obsession: Hollywood.

Enter Hollywood English.

A song and dance culture, such as the Philippines, could not help but emulate the glitter of
Hollywood. Filipino politics has since been a never-ending soap opera, with an all-star cast. It comes
as no surprise that in the year 2000, the most visible politicians in the country weren’t trained in
academic institutions and communities, but by the silver screen.

The late Manuel A. Viray, the editor of the first Philippine issue of The Literary Review forty
years ago, said in his introduction:
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“ . . . [W]e Filipinos carry our history and our burdens wherever we are, abroad or at home.
Caged in some kind of a strange, exotic display – our children with brown skin but American
accents – we started other people; for they do not fully know us as we expect them to.”

They do not know us.

Here in America, the Filipino diaspora has created a healthy literature of Filipino writing in
English as well. The post-1965 wave of immigrants has now come of age and is choosing
professions in the arts, including literature. The better, because most Americans don’t know who
we are. Knowledge of one’s national history might as well be a prerequisite before living in the U.S.
because one is very likely to be bombarded with the most ignorant questions. Even Latinos in the
Americas don’t know that Las Filipinas was one of their sisters. When I speak Spanish to them, they
ask why I speak Spanish. When I tell them our names, they ask why we have Spanish last names. I
often narrate a brief account of Philippine history, the basics: history like Puerto Rico’s. So why do
you look Chinese?

Sometimes we do not know ourselves.

We forget the power we hold over language. Three hundred fifty years of Spain, fifty years
of America, three of Japanese, we have managed to keep over 700 dialects in the Philippines.
English might be the language of communication, yes. But there are languages in every island in the
Philippines today, spoken loud, written gracefully. My mother speaks four of them, including her
native Chabacano. Filipinos growing up in the Philippines are most likely going to be at least
bilingual. In Latin America, Spanish is the only living language. The Indian languages, if they exist
and continue to survive, are spoken under their breaths. They are taught in schools for those
interested. In the Philippines, in the shadow of English, the giant, are hundreds of languages and
dialects spoken at home, in the streets, in war and in peace. While in the English tongue Filipinos
become global, in their home languages, they become Filipinos.

Identity and Revolutions

The hundred years of Philippine writing has birthed a contemporary Filipino identity. The
Spaniards, during their colonial reign, feared the education of Filipinos. This resulted in four
hundred years of illiteracy among the natives except among the upper class mestizos who could
afford to leave the country and attend foreign schools. For Spain, educated subjects would
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eventually find a way to be rid of their colonizers. Indeed, Jose P. Rizal, the Philippine national hero,
proved their fear, writing two novels that inspired the most successful revolution against Spain.

But literature for many generations, be it in Spanish or English, was the domain of the
cultural elite. Who else could afford to read and write but rich Filipinos whose families could afford
to send them abroad for their education? Many of them returned to the Philippines becoming
writers indeed, but heavily influenced by American literature.

In the Philippines to speak English well is an identity in itself. It marks one’s educational
level, one’s intelligence. Being schooled there, I had classmates whose English was so fluent they
were feared. Their social status was immediately raised to altar level. The way Hollywood is, in
Philippine society, an altar of gods and goddesses of half-white descent. Unfortunately, the problem
it presented is precisely that: English as a language of literature is emulated, a subdivision of
American English. It is not revolutionized, left unquestioned, yet raised to the Hollywood level, god-
like.

The birth of Filipino-American literature came like a whirl-wind of spears. In the United
States, where language is a living form, Filipino-Americans take English as an opportunity to
profess their cultural identity. English became Filipino. In many books published by Filipino-
Americans, English became less pure, less anglicized, more prone to code-switches, almost as if in
the mind of the writers, English was a translated version of their native tongue.

This new vibrancy in language has travelled far. Like the way Americans and South Asian
Indians moved away from British English to create their own model, contemporary Filipino writers
in both the U.S. and the Philippines are taking ownership of the English language. With that comes
many changes, on the economic level as well. Now, Philippine literature is both egalitarian and
colonial, both immigrant and national. Writing in English no longer chooses the economic
background of the gifted. A great writer in English can rise from the lower classes. The well-
traveled, American-bred Filipino writer can return to the Philippines and claim it as his homeland
as well. And the Internet generation Filipinos in Manila can bravely take on the world, without
leaving their country at all.

The new generation of Filipino writers will increasingly reflect these changes. Filipinos have
experienced “globalization” before the word went mainstream, but now they will understand more
the advantages of being of a chameleon culture. There will be more Jose Rizal types, more poets and
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writers: well-educated, globally-oriented, culturally-aware, political and most of all, with the ability
to communicate through literature what it means to be Filipino today.

“Am Here”: Filipino writer, lost and found

“Am Here” is the title of one of Jose Garcia Villa’s books. I chose it for this collection because Villa
was one of the most important Filipino writers in English, and was the first to make his mark in the
American canon. He won many grants and awards during his prime. He, invented, the comma,
poems. Yet the new generation of Filipino writers does not know him. Worse, in this country where
he made it, many American poets don’t know he even existed.

The Spanish poet Juan Ramon Jimenez said, “oblivion is the biggest fear of the poet.” The
disappearance of Jose Garcia Villa is more than a case of literary amnesia. It represents what we
Filipinos face in world literature today. If we decide to claim our seats in the global gathering of
writers, it is necessary to understand what has happened in the past one hundred years. Beyond
that is where we are. But understanding the appearance of literature in English in the Philippines
and its migration to the West is essential in our growth and recognition. Oblivion can indeed be our
biggest fear. It shouldn’t be our fate.

The Internet century will bode well for the Filipino writer. As represented on the cover of
this collection by Christina Quisumbing Ramilo, in her conceptual “powerlines,” poems and stories
are being exchanged through cable wires. The Internet has allowed many Filipino-American writers
to access literature in their home country. Writers based in the Philippines are now able to have
regular dialogues with their expatriate colleagues. Reports on literary events in different islands in
the Philippines are being reported via e-mail. I personally have met many writers in Manila through
the hours I spend on-line. I am learning about their struggles there. History is being exchanged
through modems. But it is just as quickly being absorbed, and from this process, a literary
revolution will take root.

This anthology of writers was largely collected through e-mail. Here, you will find a new
generation of writers from the Philippines and the United Sates. Without reading their bios, you will
not know where they are from. The influences of American literature on Filipino writers in the
Philippines are apparent in their pieces. They write English with ownership. English was our
colonial language. It is now our language by choice, the language which unites us. In this collection,
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each writer has something important to share. Each one will profess, whether you like it or not. I
am here.

Manhattan, February, 2000