The Halo-Halo Review is pleased to interview authors in the aftermath of a book's release. Our inaugural feature is Eric Gamalinda.
(Photo by Edric Chen)
What is your most recent book?
The Descartes Highlands, published by Akashic Books.
When was it released?
November 2014.
What has been the response?
Quite good for an
independently published book, I must say. I got a lot of support from indie and
web publications, and Granta Online featured an excerpt. Local institutions
here in New York have been supportive as well: the Asian American Arts Alliance
has been extremely supportive, and Asia Society hosted a staged reading
featuring actors Jennifer Betit Yen (who also happens to be president of Asian
American Film Lab), the amazing Fil-Am actor Alexis Camins, and Ben Mandell, an
exceptionally talented young actor I met when he was a summer intern at the
nonprofit where I work. Poets &
Writers featured my author video as its Clip of the Day last August (https://www.pw.org/content/the_descartes_highlands).
This December, the Asian American Writers Workshop will host another staged
reading. Even before the book officially came out last November, the Philippine
Literary Festival hosted a “pre-launch” in Manila in October and flew me over
and organized a Q&A and book signing. The Q&A session was packed, and the
best part was I finally got to meet a lot of young readers who had “liked” me
on Facebook. I did a full day of press interviews and photo shoots, and I got
to meet one of the other guests of the festival, Amy Tan. While I was boarding
the plane in San Francisco en route back to New York, a friend texted me to say
she had posted some really nice comments about my work on her Facebook page and
on Twitter. I thought her posting both on FB and Twitter was such a generous
thing to do, so I’m sharing them with your readers.
Here is a screen grab of her
Facebook post:
(click on image to enlarge)
And here is a screen grab of her tweet:
(click on image to enlarge)
What has surprised you by the response?
The Manila event was the
most memorable to me, because it was the first time I actually got to meet
people there—I had traveled to Manila three times before, but “incognito,”
since I wanted to spend time with my Mom and family. I never expected the book would
be so well received. Everyone in Manila was supportive and kind. I’ve figured
out, this late in my life, that I really write for them, for who else do you
want to connect with than your own people—those who matter most to you?
Here in the US, there have
been a few people who came up to me and wanted to discuss the book, and I like
that, because they sound like they’ve read the book closely—they understand the
characters’ internal conflicts, they understand the darkness, and they
appreciate the complexity of the narrative structure.
What I found really
interesting about getting this book out is that I’ve come face to face with
what Franco Moretti calls “the law of literary evolution,” and what he talks of
as the clash—and compromise—of foreign form and local material. Let me explain.
Moretti says that rather than just form and content, “world” literature is constructed
in a triangle, comprised of a foreign plot, local characters, and local
narrative voice. It’s an interesting, and quite obvious, way of reading, though
no one has ever articulated it before Moretti (and as you can imagine, it has
met so much opposition).
In the case of The Descartes Highlands, the characters
are global and multicultural, and looking back I think that was my way of
navigating this triangle. I don’t usually read my reviews, but when The Descartes Highlands and, a couple of
years before that, People Are Strange
(a collection of stories published by Black Lawrence Press) came out, my
publishers and some well-meaning people (friends and family who were thrilled
to see my name pop up in searches) often forwarded these reviews to me, including
some comments on the web. A number of comments I’ve seen have made me reconfirm
that as a “writer of color,” you are still perceived through the lens of
Western canonical form and content, and consequently, you are deemed strange,
imperfect, foreign, exotic, threatening, difficult—the string of racialized
adjectives can go on and on. Your narrative voice is never considered for what
it is, but is held up against the acceptable, mainstream Western voice; your
plot cannot explore other ways of narrative—“intrusive” narratives that may be
intrinsic to or necessary for your local voice; you cannot experiment with
structure; in other words, not only does “the foreign presence interfere with
the very utterance of the novel,” but with the reading of it.
Moretti focuses on the
author and the impact of interference in the creative process, but his idea
applies to the author’s reader as well, and nowhere is the inadequacy of
hegemonic reading so apparent as on the web. This being the web, that inadequacy
manifests itself most strongly in the casually tossed comments of a few
uninformed, lazy readers, with whom I simply have no appetite to engage. But
even some comments that appear thoughtful on the surface break apart when seen
through Moretti’s lens. One reader described People Are Strange as “an acquired taste,” as if literature were a
pair of chicken feet nestled in a bamboo steamer, or balut. Another wrote that The
Descartes Highlands had “a lot of anger…that could only be authorial.” How
could anger “only be authorial”? Should one presume that love, joy, excitement,
grief, etc. can be imagined, but anger cannot, and must necessarily be the
author’s self-projection? I find comments like these a little disconcerting,
because, perhaps unbeknownst to the persons who posted them, this all harks
back to the seminal years of “Asian American literature,” when Asian writers,
mostly diplomats, wrote autobiographical “pleas for understanding” aimed at a
mostly white, insular, culturally ignorant public, thereby perpetuating a trend
for generic autobiographical “pleas” that has lasted for decades in this our
small asteroid of the literary universe. So someone who makes an off-the-cuff statement
like that implies that we are still bound to that normative genre; or perhaps
he is simply unfamiliar with the creative process. Either way, it’s part of the
intellectual lassitude that has become common on the web, so common that we
have nonchalantly accepted it. There’s a walk-in character in The Descartes Highlands who spends all
her time posting negative comments on Amazon.com simply because she relishes
the misery she imagines the author would go through. If only she had read
Moretti. As for me, I have asked people to stop sending me reviews, but if they
do I just keep in mind what Andy Warhol once said: “Don’t think about what they
write about you, just measure it in inches.”
Tell me something about the book that may not be
obvious or known.
Many people have commented
on the sex and violence in the book, but I do wish they’d explore further how these
play into the narrative. They’re obviously there for a reason, and if they jump
out of the page, there’s a reason for that as well. Sex and violence are two
actions that only humans can ponder on, and it’s this intellection that
separates us from the rest of the animal species. Sadly, intellection is
largely absent in today’s market, where violence is entertainment and sex is
titillation. That makes us—mere animals? Filmmakers like Michael Haneke, Lars
von Trier, and Carlos Reygadas have tried to infuse deeper, darker, more
complex meanings into their use of sex and violence, but of course only a few
people are familiar with their work, much less understand what they’re trying
to do. I don’t like to state the obvious, but looking back, I wonder if I
should have had some of the characters explain what was going on in the book
and in their lives. But I hate it when writers abhor ambiguity, when they make
sure you *get it*. I put my trust in the reader who is intelligent and
perceptive; I have not lost hope that there are a few of them out there.
But to state the obvious: the
violence is mirrored in the life of the father, who experienced horrific scenes
during his incarceration in the Philippines, and the lives of his two sons, who
undergo a different kind of violence: from the violence of rightwing fanatics
to the more subtle violence of social indifference and co-dependent
relationships. For these trapped souls, I wanted to create an atmosphere of
pervasive, abysmal loneliness, because that’s what loneliness is, and to create
something short of that overpowering, disabling emotion, to romanticize or
candy-coat it, is to be deceitful. Even the sex is empty and unfulfilling; you
might say they are acts of despair. I wanted that to stand out as a comment on
our inability to make deep and meaningful human connections today. Especially
in the stories of the two sons, who eventually manage to contact each other
through the Internet, the absence of this human connection makes their
loneliness even more stark, and their search for love more desperate.
Geography, or space, also has
a symbolic significance in the book. Mathieu’s world is expansive and global,
Jordan’s is a bit claustrophobic although he does live in a sprawling, global
city, and the father’s is extremely small and limited; in fact his narrative is
told from a cramped jail cell. I intentionally created that stark contrast, and
I wanted the stories to zoom in and out from a tiny, claustrophobic cell to
expansive vistas, such as the view of the Mediterranean or the wild seascape of
San Crisostomo—here is a young man writing from a minuscule space, looking out longingly
at the moon thousands of miles away, and here are two men who in varying
degrees have a lot of space to move in, yet are imprisoned by their delusional ruminations
and sterile emotions. All three of them live in a cage that to a certain extent
is of their own making—the cyclical repetitions of the eternal return.
Finally, not many people
seem to notice that the novel—in fact all my works—have a lot of humor in them.
The humor is dark, dry, and deadpan, and often overpowered by other surrounding
emotions, so I’m not surprised that people tend to miss it.
What are you working on now?
I have a lot of ideas for novels
(and other stuff) and I’ve been churning out a bunch of first drafts as much as
I can. I am aware that writers burn out in their old age and I’m hoping I can stock
up on enough material to work on, to revise, polish and complete, when that
happens to me, as I know it will—that final, irreversible winter. Right now I’m
taking notes for what I consider will be my final book. I don’t want to talk
much about it yet but it’s a story about memory, identity, destiny and moral responsibility,
and it takes place across space and time, both in the real and virtual worlds.
This is the part I enjoy the most, when ideas are spinning in my head and the
characters are starting to take shape, and starting to talk to me and to one
another. This is the fun part before the difficult and lonely task of whittling
everything down with the hard chisel of language.
*****
ERIC GAMALINDA has previously published, in the Philippines, a collection of short stories, three poetry collections, and four novels, including My Sad Republic, winner of the Philippine Centennial Prize in 1998. Born and raised in Manila, where he worked as a journalist covering everything from politics to rock music, Gamalinda currently lives in New York City and teaches at the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Columbia University. is his latest novel.
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