I have been reading some of Jose Rizal’s essays over the weekend, particularly The Indolence of The Filipino. My husband is an avid historian, and one of our favourite conversations of the past seventeen years has been on Philippine history. I frequently get dates and facts wrong, which always makes him scratch his head, so I keep doing it for the amusement.
In Rizal’s essay, there are frequent mention of how the world sees the Filipino race as the “inferior native.”
I’ve written an article before about how I feel like “Filipino fantasy” is a lot more complicated than I sometimes want to get into. You can take a person out of a culture, but it’s difficult to deal with deep-seated bias sometimes. One of my earliest ones involved thinking that I may not be the writer I want to be–that my language and background from the lower rungs of society may be seen as detrimental. How can I offer something that the rest of the world will love? Me, some Filipino kid from the slums of Taguig whose biggest advantage was only that I had no siblings and was bored all the time, and my only entertainment was writing? So for so many years, I wrote for fun, not really thinking I would ever pursue writing professionally. The thought of people reading my work went beyond the usual fear of people reading my work…I was scared of getting called out, of being told I should write only for people of my own race, in my own language. I mean, people get told to go back to their own country for less, aren’t they? (This, as an aside, is why I now run away from conversations about diversity, as this has been implied a few times–i.e. the good old, “If you want diversity, then read translated works from other countries.”).
For the longest time (until I discovered Le Guin’s Earthsea), I wrote about animals, or people from outside of my culture. I remember thinking that if I was going to be writing in English, I couldn’t write about myself. You see, a hundred or so years later, that “inferior native” mantra seems to be part of our identity. We look down on ourselves. We’re not worthy. “Local” is seen as bad. “World class” is apparently a term. Out here, surrounded by Filipino diaspora, I still see it all the time…too many of my people accept “less” because they think they’re not good enough for more. Smart, intelligent professionals with Bachelor degrees stop dreaming and take labour jobs because they think there is a glass ceiling they can’t shatter (“The English is different here,” I was once told). Way, way too many Filipinos still call their employers with a word that essentially means “Master.”
When I tell the people around me that I’m a writer, I usually get blank looks. Well, except the one time I was told not to focus on my writing because that can always be done “on the side.” Sometimes there is a smidgeon of interest, but most of the time I’m on the same level as a bum (which to be fair, given I earn very little, I am). Discussing the craft, discussing the very Filipino themes I’m trying to bridge between the wider world and my own culture, is a conversation that I can really only have with my husband in real life.
I know it’s something I want to tackle, and probably will, in the near-future. Even after all these years, I’m still trying to process my own thoughts about it. When I left the Philippines at 13 years of age, nostalgia and homesickness led me to understand my own culture more, and inferiority complexes aside, I love it more than I can say in one breath or even one article. So I think you have to see it between the lines of my work, in the way I’m trying to bring it to the world. You can’t imagine how relieved I am to learn, after the last year or so, how much people enjoy learning those nuances…how fascinated they were with the monsters, or how people went out of their way to do some research after they’ve read my books. People from all over the world, who speak all sorts of languages, are reading these books liberally sprinkled with the Filipino culture. It makes me happier than I could’ve ever imagined.
“Inferior race”? If there’s one thing I want to accomplish with my own writing before I die, it’s to put a chink on that once and for all.
