Luis H. Francia introduces FLIPPIN':
Filipinos on America edited by Eric Gamalinda and Luis H. Francia
(Asian American Writers Workshop,
New York, 1996)
The Other Side of the American Coin
You think you know us, but our outward guise
is more deceptive than our history.
—Carlos
Bulosan
What makes this anthology both
appealing and necessary is the universality of its private histories: the
stories and poems here embody, elucidate on, allude to, the person at the
center of events, whether these relate to intensely intimate revelations or to
larger narrative and poetic frameworks. They remind us of the crucial role the
creative spirit plays in reclaiming what is never quite the past—because it
will always be with us—and in asserting an identity, difficult and perhaps
impossible to define, but one that is unquestionably distinct. More than the
grim landscape of ideology, beyond the dry discourse of academe, this
collection gives us flesh and blood in a communion of words, illustrates
history not as lesson but experience, and commands our imagination. Along the
way we realize how the notion/nation of America, a common thread linking
Filipinos in their diaspora, is full of paradoxes, cornucopia and Pandora’s Box
all at the same time.
I recall having heard someone say once that “America” was essentially a
catch-all term, a repository for ideas and races originating someplace
else—positing a limitless There as background to a limitless Here—the world swept
up in one word, a mantra that everyone on the planet was capable of uttering
and probably had at one time or another. Indeed behind its heroic
self-portraits, its dominant ethos, America notoriously appropriates on a
global scale, with the sweep of a humongous discount shopping mall (the U.S. as
K-Mart of the world) but where exactly, on what shelf, do we find particular
selves? With expedience in lieu of accuracy, with stress on mono- rather than
multiculturalism, various storekeepers excluded much in constructing a
paradigmatic New World that is a deconstructionist’s wet dream, with a fluidity
of identity possible only in a place that sans irony, simultaneously confirms
and denies the existence of borders even as it consumes them voraciously. Whole
histories, sensibilities, aesthetics, communities, most notably those of nonwhite
non-Eurocentric peoples, get chewed up. (Of course this trope of a New World
disregards Native Americans; try telling them, or African-Americans for that
matter, that this is a nation of immigrants.)
Because or in spite of our having been the objects of colonial and
imperial desire, many of us resist participating in this assimilationist trope.
Still, wherever we may have been born and wherever we choose to live, America
can never be a neutral subject for Filipinos. Dealing with Filipino-ness is to
deal with this condition, with a fall from grace, when the twin-headed snake of
Spain and America seduced us with the promise of boundless knowledge—we too
could be white gods!—even as we reposed in an unimaginably beautiful garden. So
it is that the West has insinuated itself over the centuries into the national
character. Hence, the continuing preoccupation, to distinguish between a
presumed utopian precolonial self and the confused dystopian mongrelized
nation-state that we have allegedly become. In the postcolonial world, however,
newer than the New World (what Guillermo Gomez-Peña terms the “New World
Border”) hybridity rules while purity, in a decade where ethnic rivalries have
been revived violently, has acquired a fatal taint. Unity Divides, Difference Unites,
could very well be the chant of the approaching millennium.
As Filipinos we move about easily, for the most part unself-consciously,
through this amalgam of borderlands; we’ve been hybrid so long we don’t usually
remark on it. Such calm self-recognition is often mistakenly interpreted as
passivity, an indifference to our status in the larger society. Make no
mistake; that status retains a largely neocolonial cast, abetted, it must be
said, by Pinoys, who reside in a “mental colony,” quick to yield for instance
to claims of primacy by other cultures, whether this be in the context of art or
marriage. And so it has been commonplace among Filipinos to talk resignedly
about being forgotten even in a secular “paradise.” But that tells only half
the story. To forget implies an unconscious process, absent volition. Our
insistence on forgetfulness lets America off the hook, as though we were making
excuses for a doddering but essentially benevolent uncle. Ignoring and denying:
not quite the same as forgetting.
Is it a surprise then that, consistent with its popular do-gooder
mythology, America denies an imperialist past? That denial goes hand in hand
with a deep-seated schizophrenia, eloquently described by Mark Twain (honorary
Filipino) in his powerful essay, satirically titled “To the Person Sitting in
Darkness.” When in 1898 President William McKinley wanted to Christianize a
country that had been Catholic for three hundred years running, Twain surmised
what Filipinos must have been thinking:
The Person Sitting in Darkness
is almost sure to say: There is something curious about this—curious and
unaccountable. There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and
one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel
with him, with nothing found on it; then kills him to get his land.
The truth is, the Person Sitting in Darkness
is saying things like that.
Half a century later, Carlos Bulosan and Bienvenido Santos, my spiritual
manongs and, I suspect, of other Filipino writers in America, quickly
recognized this malady in their writings. The young men they described in their
stories were handsome, cocky, naïve, hooked on a quasispiritual vision America
proffered, and wanting only the chance to prove themselves equal to any other
participant in the American enterprise. But the America they encountered, of
racism, exclusionary laws, of violence against people who were different,
ground these men’s spirits relentlessly. It is a tribute to them that at the
end they stood proud, sadder, yes, even bitter at times, but unrepentant in
their sense of being Filipino, hair still slicked back.
This book is for them as well as for us, their sons and daughters. It
asserts our existence, our history, our difference, our refusal to stand in a
light that wounds rather than heals. We insist on our redemptive darkness even
as we form part of that Rushdiean empire writing back. We return a borrowed
tongue, to use poet Nick Carbo’s apt title of his recent anthology of Filipino
poetry. This is about flippin’—getting out and flippin’ the pot over, about
taking “flip,” the slang, derogatory term for us who would insist on the
primacy of our selves, and yes, flippin’ it. This is about flippin’ out: losing
our minds and composure, in order to rediscover them.
Turn the page, fellow traveler, and find the Flip side of the American
coin.
Luis
H. Francia is a poet and a nonfiction writer. His latest volume of poetry is Tattered
Boat, released in 2014. His poems have been translated into several
languages. He has read at numerous literary festivals and most recently at the
XIth International Festival
of Poetry (2015), held annually in Granada, Nicaragua. His nonfiction works
include Eye of the Fish: A Personal
Archipelago, winner of both the 2002 PEN Open Book Award and the 2002 Asian
American Writers Award, and Memories of
Overdevelopment: Reviews and Essays of Two Decades. A collection of his most
recent nonfiction, RE: Recollections,
Reviews, Reflections, was just published this summer. He is on the faculty
of Asian American Studies at New York University and Hunter College. He teaches
creative writing at the City University of Hong Kong.
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