Slim pickings at Manila’s lit fest 2011
Let me begin with a confession: I take festivals and conferences, no matter how big or small, seriously. Regardless of whether I pay to get in or not, whether it’s here or elsewhere, whether it’s an art fest or a literature conference, I go in on that first day, knowing I will go the rest of the days, always ready to get involved in discussions and prepared to be blown away by the brilliance of artists who are ready to discuss their work and the landscape of creativity that they are necessarily part of. These gatherings after all carry the weight of diversity and difference, rendering us all—participants and panelists alike—uncomfortable to some extent, and rightfully so. We prepare to be questioned, we prepare for discussions. The Manila International Literary Festival (MILF) 2011 deserved this expectation. Organized by the National Book Development Board (NBDB), this is a measure of what government thinks important in light of literature and publishing in the country; happening in posh Makati with a P2000-peso price tag, its exclusivity was clear. But I paid. Despite my gut telling me I shouldn’t need to—I’m a working writer after all, and I was flown in by the National Arts Council (NAC) of Singapore for their Singapore Writers’ Fest after all. But I’m not one to throw my weight around. Besides I thought this would be a venue for some intelligent discussions on literature and publishing as they happen in these shores, and I thought this was something I couldn’t miss because it will inform the kind of writing that I do. Given the changing landscape of publishing and literature, at the very least I thought the conversations to be had here would be new. A sinking feeling I thought wrong. A day in, and after the tone was set for more critical discourses on literature and writing by both plenary speaker Resil Mojares and Pulitzer Prize Winner Junot Diaz (both of whom deserve essays all their own), I began to have a sinking feeling that this wasn’t a literary fest as it was a writers’ fest; that this wasn’t even a writers’ fest, but a how-to-be-a-writer fest. Because there were one too many panels with the international literary agents and book editor who were invited to speak; there were also by-invitation-only meet-and-greet sessions with them for “chosen writers”—that should’ve been a sign that this was not for those of us who are not chosen. Later it becomes clear that the goal was to bring together our writers and these international literary agents; had I known this was the point, I wouldn’t have attended the MILF at all. But of course there were other panels here, and surely steering clear of the how-to-get-published-elsewhere and how-to-write talks should’ve meant some intelligent discussions with our local writers? Surely the brilliance I was looking for, the reason for these international agents to even want to be here, must come from our own writers? But our local writers could only be found wanting. Granted I could only go to one panel out of three parallel sessions at any given time, and experiences will differ (check out Carmela Lapeña’s write-up), but for a government-organized international festival, at a price so steep even middle-class-earner-me had to think twice about paying up, every darn panel should’ve been brilliant. Or at the very least honest about the creative task, with a great dose of self-reflexivity about the literary system in these shores, with a sense of what needs to change especially if the goal is global competitiveness. No such luck. If there’s anything the MILF 2011 proved, it’s still this fact: the literary world in this country remains a very small circle made up of older writers who have cared for and to whom a set of younger writers are indebted. Here was literary patronage like no other, nepotism lives, uncritical participants included. That the last time I was a Comparative Literature major was in the year 2000, and that a decade since things remain within the same bubble, is just tragic. Of false notions and shamelessness In the panel with the international literary agents, instead of the Pinoy audience honestly answering questions about why there’s no editing process in place for local books, the response was about a lack of funds instead of the truth: in the land of sacred cows, established writers would get offended were they told they needed editing. In the panel on writing away from home, the representative for Filipino American writing, Gemma Nemenzo, categorically said that the Filipino-American question has “long been settled.” I wanted to ask: pray tell, since when? In truth when you talk about Filipino writing that happens elsewhere in the world, you must also know that it’s only as unstable as an economy that’s dependent on foreign remittances. In truth if we are to talk about Filipino writing in America, we must only raise two names and right there see how false notions of settling and celebration are: Carlos Bulosan and Miguel Syjuco. The former was a migrant worker, an apple picker who published books on the migrant Filipino experience in America in the 1940s, and a writer of fiction in English who rarely studied in the academe, rarely honored with inclusion in seminal anthologies and studies on Filipino writing, much less Filipino writing in America. The latter is celebrated by the local literati, and in an interview with The New York Times decided to talk about being part of the elite in Manila, with no apologies in sight. We might say that this is shamelessness reserved for someone like Syjuco, elite in Manila, expat in Canada—far from being a Filipino apple picker. But there is shamelessness in our shores too, and it’s the kind that we reveal when we decide that we can sit in a panel to talk about writing and not prepare for it. It’s a shamelessness that’s about resting on one’s laurels—in fact, a shamelessness that’s about even imagining laurels to be true. Not prepared