F Sionil Jose: “No Filipino writers in their reading lists” | Hindsight

Filipino author F. Sionil Jose is one of the Philippines' most popular writers. He wrote a series of books based on the time of the American occupation of the Philippines, as well as the provocative novel Ermita , named after Manila's notorious red-light district. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Thank God, De La Salle professor Elfren Cruz and his wife Neni, who heads the Book Development Council, had several Filipino books on their Christmas gift list. Otherwise, if those celebrities and personalities are to be believed, we have no authors worth reading. Their lists of the books they like best do not include our writers, not Rizal, not Nick Joaquin, not Ben Santos. I’d like to mention more who are still alive, but naming the dead raises no controversies.

For decades, as literary editor, I have followed the growth of our creative writing in English. In my Solidaridad Bookshop, half of my stock consists of Filipino books written in English and in the native languages. I just went through our 2013 catalogue. In it are discoveries of great academic and creative writing.

Why don’t our celebrities read Filipino authors? Is it colonial mentality that has afflicted them? Or intellectual snobbery which concludes that Filipino writers are incapable of intellectual and artistic excellence? I’ll be charitable and say it’s ignorance, aggravated by an educational system that diminishes reading, of bookshops which tuck Filipino titles in inaccessible corners called Filipiniana.”

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Barbara Jane Reyes on Creating or Destroying Readers in Filipino-American Literature 2

“I was talking to one of my grad students last night about the place of art in our political and cultural movements. What is art supposed to be “doing” there? Is the expectation of pragmatism what cripples the art by making it have to be didactic and dogmatic? Or is there something deeper we need to look at? I think about claiming to be disconnected from great literary traditions as a community, such that we get to a point that we feel we have no great literary traditions, which leads to the sentiment that great literary traditions have nothing to do with us. This is fallacious logic.

I keep thinking of an introduction to a volume of poetry by Nobel Prize winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, in which it is mentioned that one can move through the Indian countryside and hear workers in the fields reciting Tagore’s verses from memory. Similarly, I think about the Latina custodial workers in a nearby Oakland school, who know and remember the poems of Nicolás Guillén. And I think of Philippine poet Emmanuel Lacaba, the “Brown Rimbaud,” whose poems that I know best (from Salvaged Poems) recognize complexity, irony, contradiction, and the artist as warrior and tightrope dancer…”

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Barbara Jane Reyes on Creating or Destroying Readers in Filipino-American Literature 1

Recently, another Pinay writer said to me that I have more non-Filipino American readers than Filipino American readers. I agreed with her, and thought about how telling her observation about me was.

Here’s something that’s been coming up in a lot of discussions and interactions I’ve been having re: teaching Filipino/a American Literature. Are we creating/cultivating readers? And how does one go about creating/cultivating readers? To add: does our popular American culture cultivate readers? Or does it destroy readers? So then in addition to what we’re doing within our community, there’s that larger battle to fight.

I can tell you that my freshmen students do come into the classroom enthusiastic and curious; they come with questions, and they come with a need to understand something about themselves. They want to learn something about their families and their lives. They’ve come to a literature class thinking this is a good place to ask those questions. This tells me they are already readers. As I’ve also written before about my Fil Am Lit students in general, they want to be visible, to see themselves and something familiar about their lives and families in the literature.

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