Eileen R. Tabios presents the Author's Note to
The Balikbayan Artist by Eileen R. Tabios
(Penguin Random House SEA, 2024-2025)
Author’s Note
As historical fiction, The Balikbayan Artist presents alternate histories to actual events. While this occurs through setting up a fictional country (Maharlika) as a neighboring country to the Philippines, elements are also inserted out of their real-life timelines. For example, Netflix is referenced in a time before its real-life creation in 1997 and Volodymyr Zelenskyy is mentioned despite not becoming Ukraine’s president until 2019. These time-based anomalies reflect the novel’s manifestation of “Kapwa,” the Filipino indigenous trait which values the interconnection of all beings across all of time. In what I consider to be “Kapwa Time,” there is no difference between past, present, and future since one is connected to everything in the universe in all time periods. This Kapwa interconnection is also reflected in how the novel symbolically erases the barrier between fiction and reality by incorporating as a character the poet Eileen Tabios who is obviously myself, and the poems I wrote outside of this novel’s parameters.
My thoughts on Kapwa Time were inspired by an image from precolonial Philippine times of a human standing with a hand lifted upwards; if you happened to be at a certain distance from the human and took a snapshot, it would look like the human was touching the sky. Filipino National Artist and novelist N. V. M. Gonzalez mythologizes this human as a creature who, by being rooted onto the planet but also touching the sky, is connected to everything in the universe and across all time—the human is rooted to the past and future so that there is no unfolding of time. This reflects N. V. M. Gonzalez’s notion of the Filipino as a “mythic [hu]man,” as noted by scholar Katrin de Guia: “Gonzalez points out that Filipinos are a people whose past is rooted in the cyclical time of their ancient myths…. These were… times of primordial oneness with the world, where the sky was so near that people could touch it with their hands. The ancient ones were able to connect to anyone and everything at all times.”
“From the wholistic perspective of the mythic [hu]man,” de Guia says, “the world was just created. No divisions separate the past from the now, the adults from the children, the [humans] from their myths and their dreams,… [humans] from their fellow beings. There is no need for walls to separate the creator and the created. Microcosm and macrocosm are but one—a continuity. Some people call this ancestral Filipino outlook Kapwa (the shared Self).”
The Balikbayan Artist seeks to present Kapwa through a book whose fiction is not separate from reality, and not just offer present reality but also the past and future concurrently.
*****
Eileen R. Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, essays, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent publications include a children’s book Tata Efren’s Forever Laughter (with Mel Vera Cruz and Jeannie E. Celestial); the novels The Balikbayan Artist and DoveLion; the poetry collections Engkanto in the Diaspora and Because I Love You, I Become War; an autobiography The Inventor; the short story collections The Erotic Space Around Art Objects and Getting To One; and an art monograph Drawing Six Directions. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
No comments:
Post a Comment