Laughter at the Fringes of Sanity

Blog EntryWrite Something Filipino, ManOct 1, '07 3:48 AM
for everyone
Strangely enough, while I strongly feel that Philippine Speculative Fiction writers should be free to write whatever the hell they want and create new genres and sub-genres that could only have come from the Philippines, I am, on the other hand, am the member of the LitCritters who is probably most sympathetic to the "hey, let's include something Filipino in this story" ethic.

In my struggles to get good stories out and hopefully published, it has not escaped my fellow LitCritters that nearly all of my experiments in SpecFic writing explored some aspect of Pinoyness in them.

What Qualifies You To Write About Filipinos?

Nothing. I'm no expert on the Philippines and on Filipinos. Then again, few people are. Many think they are just because they were born here (hey, I was born here), and lived here for some time (hey, I've lived here most of my life), but haven't actually studied it (hey, I've studied a little). They haven't read up on the history, learned the cultural dances, studied the martial arts, traveled to the deep north or sojourned to the far south.

Does interest and actually being Filipino count? Does having spent a length of time abroad disqualify me?

My own belief is that my time abroad actually sparked my interest in Philippine History and Philippine Culture. I consciously tried to find out more about the Philippines (and learned more about it) during my time in the U.S. I hung out with 1st Wave, 2nd Wave, and 3rd Wave Filipino immigrants as well as Filipino visitors to the Land of the Free. I bought books there concerning our country that I never even though of looking for here. I learned first hand that things we take in stride here can shock foreigners - and here I trot out the story about how my sister and I communicated wordlessly about how to arrange things in her dorm room using the "point with the lips" technique - and even amaze them. ("Yes, Donald, you've discovered a terrible secret. My sister and I are telepathic. All Filipinos are.")

And yet, including these things in stories - bits of history, bits of cultural habit and national character, bits of trivia - are they enough?

What about bigger things? Like our sensitivity to status and social prestige and our desire for a better country? What about darker things, like the sex trade and institutionalized graft and the destruction of our natural resources and extrajudicial killings?

And if I write about them, will I do them justice? Should I do more research so that I can understand the issues better? Like journalists, should I examine all the sides of an issue so that I don't come across as biased, or worse, wilfully ignorant? Should I take a stand or will I just come across as preachy? How do I create characters that are believable and not just mouthpieces for a particular side of an issue?

ANGST! (angsty pose)

All these thoughts and more were swirling in my mind even before the recent outpouring of opinions, and sadly, few answers have been put forward that have been satisfying and none have been very enlightening.

Ultimately, I believe that we should just write stories and get them published to see if this is the kind of fiction that people are looking for - hopefully a fresh take on topics and themes and experiences that we have learned to ignore as part of the grey buzz of "being Filipino".

OFWs and the Uniquenss of the Experience

Bhex mentions, in response to Charles's OFW question, that

i don’t think the OFW experience is unique to filipinos. if you’re going to write a speculative story that serves as a metaphor to an underprivileged class/race selling themselves into servitude for a shot at a better life, i don’t think you’ll be symbolizing something that’s unique to the philippines, even if that was your intention. without using clearly defined filipino elements, you may as well be symbolizing the exodus of the chinese, the indonesians, the mexicans… it has nothing to brand it as uniquely filipino.

I must respectfully but strongly disagree with the statements made here. I believe that while there are similarities to the experiences of other people who work abroad to improve their own living standards or the living standards of their families back home, there is something inherently unique to the OFW experience: the involvement of Filipinos and Filipinas. The way they deal with the trials and tribulations of living and working abroad is shaped by the culture and the nation they group up in and cannot help but be unique to the Philippines. And there are fantastic little bits of detail that are just waiting to be mined - how we deal with loneliness, how we skirt around the rules and authorities, how we are taken advantage of by our own people, how determination and ingenuity allow us to extract little joys from the stresses of overseas work, how the mini-communities that we form to protect ourselves from an unfamiliar land can foster miracles and tragedies.

If we eliminate this experience just because there are some broad commonalities with SOME other nationalities, then we must eliminate other situations that we share in common with ALL other nationalities from our fiction (such as growing up, going to school, falling in love, etc.).

Celebrating the diversity of the Filipino experience

What is "something Filipino"? The Filipino and the Filipina have many different faces and lives. There are the rich and the poor, the lazy and the hardworking, the good-looking and the ugly, the fashionistas and the fashionless, the inarticulate and the verbose, the hope of the future and the treasures of the past, and so on and so forth.

We're the 12th most populated country in the world - there are millions of us, each life a unique story. (Hey, does the European Union count as its own country?)

Shouldn't our fiction be as diverse?
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northwolf wrote on Oct 1, '07
amosias said
Ultimately, I believe that we should just write stories and get them published to see if this is the kind of fiction that people are looking for - hopefully a fresh take on topics and themes and experiences that we have learned to ignore as part of the grey buzz of "being Filipino".
I hear you man. I agree with everything that you've said so far.

Let's not split hairs on what is and what is not Filipino. Just write and pour everything that is in you to pour into the story. The fact that you ARE from the Philippines should be enough to classify it as Filipino writing.
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chemicalsunset wrote on Oct 2, '07
Hi, Alex. This is Bhex. I haven't logged into my Multiply account for so long, but I enjoyed reading your posts and I felt like responding to this one :)

And if I write about them, will I do them justice? Should I do more research so that I can understand the issues better?

Actually I believe in the value of research. I think everybody who wants to write about the Philippines, or Japan or England or another country, may do so if they wish - but if they want their work to be taken seriously, research is a must.

I think that being careless with your stories about a people you're not intimately familiar with, even if you admire it so much that you spend nearly all your free time thinking about it, borders on insulting. I believe a writer who can't be bothered to research faces the threat of romanticizing the culture or lifestyle that he or she wants to present - or represent, as it were. You can probably get away with it in fanciful writing like fanfiction? But from serious writers, I personally want a lot more responsibility.

Occasional lapses are okay - in all, admiring another culture or people so much that you would want to write about them gets you "good intention" points, but not enough to validate your work. You don't even have to be a foreigner, you just have to be an outsider. For example - I can't say that just because I'm Filipino, I can write well about the Philippines. As everybody else has pointed out, the "Filipino experience" is diverse. But the thing is, if I'm writing about Filipinos living in other regions, or in social strata that are different from mine, I still have to do my research.

One of the better writeups I've seen about this issue comes from a blog post about an issue of a comic I've never seen ^^ To quote the writer: "The issues raised by the use of insider language in this comic book are complex and sensitive [...] my anger surrounding this comic centres on the lack of thought I perceive is being placed on representing the Asian immigrant experience. The writing of Ryan Choi doesn’t have to be perfectly authentic, but nor does it have to be so disproportionately inauthentic."

I believe that in a highly liberal publishing environment like that of the United States, you can get away with saying anything. This means you run the very real danger of misrepresenting the things that you love if you're careless. Here in the Philippines we have very limited venues for publication, which means (I believe) that critics, fiction editors and literary gurus here are much stricter about presentation - they can tell by your writing alone if a concept is obviously foreign to you. No matter where you intend to be published, though, it certainly wouldn't do any harm to be diligent.

Re: the OFW experience:

And there are fantastic little bits of detail that are just waiting to be mined - how we deal with loneliness, how we skirt around the rules and authorities, how we are taken advantage of by our own people, how determination and ingenuity allow us to extract little joys from the stresses of overseas work, how the mini-communities that we form to protect ourselves from an unfamiliar land can foster miracles and tragedies.

These things seem very general to me. Many other migrant workers have to deal with these things, I think. But I'd like to put what I said back in the context of what Charles was saying - let's say you're using aliens to describe the OFW experience. Can you really make the aliens seem Filipino to an international readership without using ANY Filipino terms and without using ANY direct references to Filipino living?

I'm not so sure. Of course, anything's possible, but I'm having trouble seeing it.

I mean, for example - do you make it so the aliens' corrupt government is making money out of pimping their people off to servitude in other planets? Well I suppose that would work, although I think a corrupt government feeding off a remittance economy would be similar to what Mexico is going through - only the barefaced pimping is absent. What about the aliens who are already working in other planets? What could they go through that would make a foreign reader say "Filipino!" off the bat? I'd like to know what you and Charles have in mind.
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amosias wrote on Oct 2, '07
Hi Bhex,

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Regarding the first part, I also believe in research. As my fellow LitCritters know, I do a lot of research for stories like "Inhuman" (which appeared in Digest of Philippine Genre Stories) not so much to avoid being insulting, thought that's usually a good thing, but for verisimilitude. I look for details that give believability, like the "telling detail" a term used to refer to a specific fact or bit of texture that suggests to people familiar with the subject matter that the person writing has personal experience or at least has done his research.

As far as the OFW experience - well, those are general statements based on my own personal experience as an one (plus talking to them on airline flights and interviewing a few when a couple of OFW-oriented periodicals were being put together for them) - and I'm loathe to give out too many details because they may make their way into some upcoming stories.

Is it possible to use aliens to describe the OFW experience - yes, I believe it's possible to do, but I'm not particularly interested in writing that at this point, so it will have to be an "agree to disagree" situation between us.

The reasons I'm not interested in writing it are:
(1) as mentioned in the above post, I'm a bit of a fanatic about having direct Filipino references in my writings - I spent 9 years in the U.S. and I can tell you that it made me hungry for things Pinoy, even if I was not the most "culturally aware" Filipino when I left;
(2) if I put in all the little details that make OFWs unique, why bother making them aliens? I have a real issue in Science Fiction where an alien race is essentially "Samurais with funny foreheads" or "Filipinos with blue skin" - it's lazy and ultimately useless writing.

You seem to be talking about the macro level of OFWs however. I'm talking about the difficulties of communicating with your family back home, despite trying to save your money, the huge chunks taken out of legal remittances, the vultures that are waiting at the post office (who know that people illegally send back money in the mail and sometimes take the money and BURN the actual letters which could arguably have more value). I'm talking about the sidelines that OFWs take to make more money, the friendships that are borne from the stress from being in a strange land, the economic differences between different types of OFWs and the joys of running into another kababayan when you're abroad.

As for foreign readers - haha, good luck. Maybe if they actually knew someone Filipino they might recognize the details (which could be considered in-jokes), but frankly, our culture is not as prominent as Mexican or American culture. Some of them might actually be able to find us on a map!
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