“Filipino” Spec Fic: We’re Nowhere Near Done Talking About This

What I love about email and blogging is that you have enough time to talk, not like in real life where the one who talks the most wins, and winning means hogging everybody else’s air time. Here we can all present our sides and explain ourselves better.

So I’m going to try and explain some of the points I previously made, and analyze some of the trends I’ve noticed. Again, I’m not trying to represent a group or way of thinking here, I can only speak for myself. This is how I view the nature of Filipino spec fic, and I’m happy to know that some people share my views, but this doesn’t mean I’m imposing it on others. I just hate having words put into my mouth.

It seems that much was made of these paragraphs, where I confessed my personal bias – not of stories, but of the attitudes that some writers, in my experience, are prone to take:

[That said, please pardon me while I go off on a tangent: I do have trouble sympathizing with writers who call themselves Filipino, and yet are unwilling to (not can’t, but won’t) speak or write in Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilonggo, or any other native language, in addition to English. You can say your first language is English and it’s not your fault that’s all you know, and it doesn’t make you less Filipino, but you know what? Let’s get some perspective here. Not even trying to adopt any of the languages makes you less Filipino. That doesn’t make you not!Filipino, but certainly identifies you as not!the man-off-the-street Filipino (at least not the streets that most Filipinos commonly walk) who just happens to have a way with words.

It instantly gives you minus points as a cultural representative, because it makes you less able to communicate and interact with the people you’re supposed to represent. You miss a lot of the nuances off the bat, so you are unable to convert them into notions that are easily expressed and understood in other languages.]

Let me just please clarify this. What I am indignant about is not writers who do not write in a local language, but writers who refuse to learn a local language. And when I said this, I was not referring to spec fic writers in particular. I sincerely think a lot of modern Pinoy writers know how to converse intelligently at least in one local language besides English, so that automatically excludes most modern writers (and bloggers) from my angst list. They were never there in the first place!

But I believe such a linguistic barrier, such an unwillingness to learn, impairs the writers’ ability to see their environment in a broader scope. While they are of course entitled to write any story they want, I believe they run the risk of seriously misrepresenting Filipinos who are outside their social/cultural spheres of movement, in their Filipino stories. And unless you aim to write something exclusively about a social group, and is intended to be read only by that social group (to quote the now-infamous Malu Fernandez in her rebuttal: “I obviously write for the a [sic] certain target audience and if what I write offends you, just stop reading.”), I really think you have to be aware of whether or not you are doing this.

Incidentally, you are not obliged to write about carabaos and chickens, especially if you admit to not knowing anything about them. After all, there are plenty of other things that you have to write about that are more within your scope, and perfectly easy to identify with. There are Pinoy astronomers, chemists, physicists, geologists… as well as hackers, gamers and other potential spec fic characters who transcend socio-economic borders. They do exist, you know, so you don’t have to invent them. Of course you’re free to RE-invent them in your fiction, but that’s just where you’ll have to ask: Will you be misrepresenting them if you do?

I hope some will be open to the possibility that while characters like these may exchange technical terms in English, their use of regional language and their overall behavior may still seem foreign to someone who has lived in the Philippines all of his or her life. Also, no one is limiting the “Filipino” to rural elements only. Just because people are being challenged to step out of their comfort zones, doesn’t mean they’re being forced to write about anything specific, like farm life or tikbalangs and manananggals. Depende sa diskarte ‘yan.

In the future, I will thank people not to use our great realist prose writers like Nick Joaquin and NVM Gonzales as an excuse not to even learn a local language. Yes, the great realist writers of our past have chosen to write in English, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t conversant in Cebuano, Hiligaynon, Tagalog, or any other local language – in fact, they have incorporated their knowledge of local languages, histories and lore, into their English stories. They were journalists, researchers, folklorists and activists. They may have been inspired by Hemingway, Joyce and Steinbeck, but they used the English language and the storytelling techniques they imbibed to write stories about the Philippines of their time, in an attempt to bring Filipinos to the world, and to each other. True or false?

Actually, I don’t believe there is much call to compare the nationalistic bent of realist writing to speculative writing. And with all due respect to Sir Butch Dalisay: it may be true that all fiction is speculative, but if we’re going to interpret “speculative” as something akin to the dictionary definition of “theoretical, rather than practical,” it is evident that some genres are more speculative than others. Speculative writing does give freer rein to one’s imagination, even allowing a person to create a wholly different world that has very few parallels with this one. (It could be argued that many published builders of fictional worlds consciously seek to make social commentary with their work, but that’s a whole other ball game.) You can write something completely disconnected from any practical reality and it would still qualify as spec fic.

So when I replied to some other people’s blog posts, what I ended up asking was – how can you distinguish your speculative fiction piece as Filipino in the eyes of an international readership, if you don’t make an effort to include Filipino elements?

Consider example A:

Treehugger crouched low and examined the tracks. They were larger than the regular wolf’s. Werewolf, he said to himself. He took up his hunting knife and followed the tracks into the wood.

Vis-a-vis example B:

Enteng crouched low and examined the tracks. They were larger than the regular wild dog’s. Aswang, he said to himself. He took up his bolo and followed the tracks into the wood.

Think of yourself as an international reader. Can you easily ascribe a cultural reference to the passage in example A? What about example B?

…And before anyone calls me on this, no: I am not saying you need to convert every story into one that has Filipino references -_-; What I’m trying to point out is, it’s perfectly possible for a Filipino author to write a spec fic story without references to anything Filipino – cultures, traditions, mannerisms, anything – so it’s quite difficult for me to accept that one’s Filipino-ness will “naturally” come out in every. single. thing. one writes. It may be fairly easy to spot a writer who’s faking being British, but it’s tricky trying to fake an ethnicity that exists only in the realm of the imagination.

People may be proud of you for sharing their nationality and all, and your story may win awards left and right, but it may also tell nothing of Filipino history, culture, or traditions. At the most, it could only tell about you.

The “it’s too early to know the nature of Philippine speculative fiction” sentiment (which I have a question about, but will have to write that out in another post) has been going around, but I’m asking – what’s the harm in identifying right now which speculative stories are told with a Filipino angle and which aren’t? Where does it say that just because you write mostly speculative stories that don’t have a Filipino bent, you deserve to be looked down on as a Filipino writer, or the other way around?

It may be that for me, a Filipino story does not say “This is how we are all alike.” Rather, it says “This is how we are not like you.” We may write in your language but we have our own; we have our own versions of your story, and this is how it goes; we respect and even worship your storytellers but now it’s our turn.

But if what you prefer to say is “This is how we are all alike,” it’s good. In fact, it’s all good. “This is what I want to write and to hell with everybody else,” is all right too. It’s just that my personal definition of “a Filipino story” has less to do with my identity as a writer, and more with the identity of each individual story. Mileage, of course, varies.

One more thing: I never set out to say that just because you write in English, you’re not Filipino. Neither did I aim to say that just because you write in Tagalog/Pilipino, you’re more Filipino than other Filipinos.

There have been quite a few blog posts going around that seem to cry discrimination, as if someone was saying “If you don’t write like this, you’re not Filipino.” I’ve been trying to trace back the origins of the “extremes,” as it were, but frankly, I can’t find them.

Then again, as we have established, my powers of observation are unleet. I can’t build an entire argument out of guesswork. Was it inferred from anything I wrote? Then please do tell me so I can better explain myself.

I’m saying, again, that if you write in a local language, your work gains more points for authenticity as a Filipino piece, than if you write it in English. I mean anyone can write in English – Nigerians, Bolivians, Cambodians, Brits, Americans. They can spell or misspell words in similar ways and stereotype in similar ways – their ethnicity will not out by default (again, with all due respect to Sir Butch) just because the mimicry is obvious. It will only become obvious from the awkward prose that a writer has never been to Paris, not that the writer is Filipino or Nigerian… or even French.

Moreso for speculative fiction. I mean, if you’re certain there’s a way to use elves in a story that will seem Filipino to an international readership, without using overt Filipino elements or a Philippine language, by all means go for it! I’d love to read it. I’d love it if you could think of this as a challenge, not a prohibition.

On the other hand, our languages are unique to the Philippines. So if you’ve written a speculative fiction piece in Waray, say, it’s easier to identify as Filipino at a glance. Hence what I call superior Filipino-ness, is in no way an indicator of quality: it’s just an indicator of how closely tied a story is to specific cultural roots.

I’ll be honest: I religiously follow a few original webcomics on the web. They’re all in English with fantastic settings, and rendered in manga or manga-ish style. I didn’t even know that some of the writers of the stories I loved the most were Filipino, until I found it out with a bit of digging. Not even their real names provided clues as to their nationality.

Of course, these webcomic writers don’t seem to be especially keen on identifying their fiction as Filipino, or themselves as Pinoy artists – perhaps because they don’t want their names dragged into discussions like this one :P Still, I think that just proves my point: you CAN write good speculative fiction in English, without using Filipino elements. You can STILL be a Filipino artist writing good spec fic.

But without deliberate inclusion of Filipino references – and precisely because of our diverse literary and artistic influences – I don’t think it’s likely that the Filipino-ness of your story will show in your spec fic. Even if the story has gone on and on for many chapters.