patronizing "Filipino" books

Music: The More You Ruv Someone from the Avenue Q soundtrack

This is unedited version of the article I submitted to Alerto Filipino, which came out last August. I am still miffed at the idea of having my complete name published for everyone to see, but I guess I should be thankful that my article actually saw print.

I'm choosing to look at the brighter side of things :)

(Is it working?)

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Patronizing "Filipino" Books

I have a confession to make: I’ve been partial to books by foreign authors for the better portion of my life.

I think this stems from the fact that I haven’t really been exposed much to Filipino authors and their works during my childhood, and what little exposure I have in high school—Francisco Baltazar’s Florante at Laura, Amado V. Hernandez’s Ibong Mandaragit and Luha ng Buwaya, Lualhati Bautista’s Dekada ’70 and Bata, Bata, Pa’no Ka Ginawa—were made uninteresting by boring group reports and long quarter exams. I do remember enjoying Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, but that’s about as far as my love for Filipino writing went. Come college I was introduced to the likes of Nick Joaquin, NVM Gonzalez, and Carlos Bulosan, but by then my hands were full with thick volumes of Shakespeare, Homer and Aristotle, that I had little time to indulge in side-readings of Butch Dalisay and Ninotchka Rosca.

Up until I graduated from college, I never made much of an effort to familiarize myself with works by Filipino writers, maybe except for children’s books, which caught my interest since I took an elective about writing for children back in third year college. I’d splurge on books every year at the Manila International Book Fair, a yearly event for book lovers in the Philippines, but I’d always buy fiction books by popular and not-so-popular American and English authors, very rarely by Filipino ones. My reasoning was the epitome of colonial mentality: surely works of American authors are better than their Filipino counterparts.

How wrong I was.

It is only later, when I started working with a publishing company, that I started to really appreciate the beauty of books written by Filipino authors. It is only when I was forced to read them (because I was required to write press releases and feature essays) that I understood why Severino Reyes and Sarge Lacuesta deserve the same amount of love that I give to C.S. Lewis and Dean Koontz. And it’s not simply because of the sudden need to be patriotic that I began to pay attention to books by the “locals,” if that’s one way of calling them. It simply occurred to me that Filipinos have what it takes to write well, sometimes even better than their foreign counterparts.

Take Smaller and Smaller Circles by F.H. Batacan as an example. More often than not, book lovers are familiar with the crime novels of Thomas Harris of the Hannibal fame. But in a craftily written 155-page book, Batacan took the commonly-used serial killer plot and turned it into a thrilling story about a Filipino priest caught in the middle of a series of brutal killings of teenage boys in the slums of Quezon City. Suddenly, the story hits closer to home. The places become familiar, the faces recognizable. The Filipino reading community is presented with the idea that serial killers could exist in the Philippines, that it is not merely a phenomenon that happens in episodes of the popular TV show CSI. Batacan won several prestigious awards for her work, and she mostly deserved to do so.

Books by Filipino writers are engaging not only because they can measure up against New York bestsellers, but also because the Filipino audience can relate to them better. Renowned historian Ambeth Ocampo, for one, has released volumes of entertaining but factual pieces about our beloved heroes—Andres Bonifacio, Emilio Aguinaldo, Antonio Luna—compilation of essays that we will never see in our high school textbooks. He has demythisized National Hero Jose Rizal, and presented funny and interesting trivia about historical events and places in our country. What makes his books so interesting is the flavor he adds to his essays—that distinct Filipino-ness that distinguishes them from other works written about the same subject.

The list of authors is far from being a short one. Names like Danton Remoto and RJ Ledesma may sound familiar to the non-reading community, but not as authors of gender-bender literature and dating essays, respectively, but because of their semi-celebrity status. The more popular Bob Ong and Jessica Zafra have large followings, and thus are less prone to anonymity. Others, such as Vince Simbulan and Yvette Tan, are excellent writers, but are only beginning to make waves for themselves in the literati community. The list goes on—aspiring writers who believe that they can make a difference, who aspire to make a name for themselves or share something they think is worth sharing, not recognized simply because the Philippines is not so much of a book-reading nation, more so a Filipino-books-reading one.

As penitence for my former “snobbishness,” I took it upon myself to invest more in books by Filipino writers. As such, I now buy works ranging from National Artists for Literature F. Sionil Jose and Bienvenido Santos, to the more contemporary ones like Benjamin Pimentel, Katrina Tuvera, and Dean Alfar. It is my hope that in time, I will be able to fill my already brimming-with-books shelf with as much volumes by Filipino authors as books written by foreign ones.