CP Goes to the Philippines: Featured author Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra

LOURD ERNEST H. DE VEYRA by NOEL KING

Lourd Ernest H. de Veyra is a Filipino poet, musician, novelist, journalist working in radio and TV, blogger, and activist. He graduated in Journalism from University of Santo Tomas and his first volume of poetry, Subterranean Thought Parade was published by Manila’s Anvil Publications in 1998, in a dual edition book with fellow Filipino poet, Ramil Digal Gulles, whose section was called The 25^th Fly. De Veyra’s second volume of poetry, Shadow Boxing in Headphones, appeared in 2001, from University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, as did his third volume, Insectissimo!, in 2011. His first novel, Super Panalo Sounds!, about a rock band and the Pinoy music scene more generally and mythically, came out in 2011 from University of Santo Tomas Publishing House. Two collections of his blogging at Spot.ph.blog have been published, both from Summit Press in Mandaluyong City, The Best of This is a Crazy Planets (2011) and This is a Crazy Planets 2 (2013). In 2014 Summit published Lourd de Veyra’s Little Book of Speeches and in the same year Anvil Press published his book on drinking and food, Espiritu.

He has won the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for Literature, the Free Press Literary Award, and the inaugural National Commission for Culture and the Arts Writers’ Prize for Poetry. In 1999 he formed the jazz-rock band Radioactive Sago Project, which blends spoken-word poetry, bebop jazz and punk.

We are reprinting de Veyra’s poem ‘Fat Elvis in Kamias’ as the final installment of our Contrappasso Goes to the Philippines online special. And here is a gallery of book covers:

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CP Goes to the Philippines: World Publishing Today by Noel King

WORLD PUBLISHING TODAY by NOEL KING

This text is based on a presentation given by Noel King at the Sixth International Philippine Literature Conference held in Davao, Mindanao, on September 20-21, 2015. This version includes some material added after that presentation.

“Most trends in the book industry are accompanied by countervailing ones. As the conglomerates get bigger there is a new optimism among enterprising independent houses … who believe that they can offer distinctive titles that the giants, with their concentration on the mass market, overlook.” – Nicholas Clee, “End of the Book Postponed,” Prospect Magazine 135 (June 2007).

“Sales of physical books rose in the UK for the first time since 2007, with Nielsen BookScan figures for January-November up 5.4 per cent on the previous year. Add to this the British chain Waterstone’s pulling unwanted Kindles from its shelves and Amazon opening a bricks and mortar bookshop and it did seem like the future might not be entirely digital after all. The stuff of fantasy? We will see.” – Lorien Kite, “Books of 2015,” Financial Times Weekend (28-29 November, 2015).

I

First, it’s both an honour and a pleasure to be participating in the Sixth Philippine International Literary Festival, the first to be held outside Manila, here in Davao, Mindanao. This admirable, conscious attempt to shift a little the Manila-centric literary-cultural viewpoint to include other, more distant regions of the Philippines certainly resonates with me and my presentation today.

“I come from the land down under,” Australia, with a population of 24 million, most of whom are clustered in capital cities on Australia’s coastline, or if somewhat inland, on a river. In Australia the publishing industry is concentrated in our largest city, Sydney, where I live, and in our second-largest city, Melbourne. Sydney is said to be the home of international, conglomerate publishing while Melbourne is said to have more small-independent presses (Rosenbloom, 2007). The one exception to that account of Melbourne is that Penguin Australia is located in Ringwood, an alcohol-free suburb of Melbourne.

There is a history of cultural rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne whereby Sydney, with its warmer weather, lovely beaches, its obsessive relationship with real estate and money, is regarded as some kind of aspirational L.A. whereas Melbourne – quite recently voted the “most liveable city in the world” – is regarded as more intellectual, more cultural, certainly possessed of more venues for live music. At one point this civic rivalry was cast in terms of “St Petersburg vs. Tinseltown,” and I will leave it to you to decide which designation goes where.

A few weeks ago Sydney was listed as the third most expensive city in the world to live in, coming up a couple of places from its fifth place of several years ago. Real estate prices are very, very high, as accordingly is rental accommodation, and the everyday cost of living is very expensive. All for no particular reason, beyond opportunity and avarice. Even so, a former Labor Party Prime Minister, Paul Keating, once said, “If you’re not living in Sydney, you’re camping out.”

Further afield from this Sydney-Melbourne duelling capital city duo are three other capital cities, each of which has a significant role to play in Australia’s literary-cultural life. Adelaide, South Australia, now home to South African Nobel Prize Winner, J. M. Coetzee, likes it made known that its original settlement included no convicts, unlike the rest of Australia’s white settlement origins as an English penal colony. Frequently described as a “city of parks and churches,” it boasts a longish tradition of being very cultural, with an International Writers’ Festival, a Fringe Arts Festival, a World Music festival, film festivals, and the South Australian Film Commission, which was a crucial part of Australia’s revived feature filmmaking industry in the early 1970s, producing films such as Sunday Too Far Away, Gallipoli, and Storm Boy. It also has a history of enlightened political lawmaking. It was the first Australian state to legislate against rape in marriage. And it was at the University of Adelaide that Miguel Syjuco completed the PhD that would result in his 2008 Man Asian Prize-winning novel, Ilustrado (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010).

Stepping further westward, across the long expanse of the Nullarbor, we reach Perth, Western Australia. Perth is a four and one half hour plane ride for those people who aren’t camping out, who are living in Sydney, and is home to celebrated Filipina Rose Hancock and also to Janet Holmes à Court. It is the home state of former Labor Party Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and the Labor Party Education Minister, John Dawkins, who introduced profound changes to Australia’s tertiary education system; home also to the late Alan Bond, disgraced businessman who spent some time in gaol and who will forever be admired by Australians for having, in 1983, wrested the America’s Cup yachting trophy from the US after it had spent 132 years in the New York Yacht Club’s possession. Those races were won to the tune of Men at Work singing “Land Down Under,” and this historic victory obliged the US to challenge – successfully, as it turned out – to regain the Cup by sailing in the waters just off Fremantle, near Perth. Fremantle is home to Fremantle Arts Centre Press, and is where one of Australia’s most commercially and critically successful writers, at a national and international level, lives – Tim Winton.

Fremantle Arts Centre Press was established in 1976 and has as its mission the publication of only those writers who are connected to W.A., either by having come from there, having once lived there, currently living there, or by having moved there to live. In the 1980s this proudly regional, small-independent press surprised itself by publishing two books that went on to sell a million copies apiece. First came A. B. Facey’s A Fortunate Life, a memoir of a hard-scrabble life in Australia in the first part of the twentieth century, published in 1981 and adapted for television in 1985, the money from which enabled FACP to build a warehouse to store their various titles. This TV adaptation came about when a local freelance film-TV worker, Ken Kelso, approached FACP to see if they would allow him to pitch the Facey book to TV people he knew. On the basis of the fact that he was a local they agreed and this encounter with Kelso proved doubly beneficial, leading not only to a goodly sum of money on the first day of principal photography but also to a meeting with a friend of Kelso’s who was struggling to complete her first book. Her name was Sally Morgan and the book this Western Australian Aboriginal artist-writer eventually finished with the help of FACP, My Place, published in 1987, became the press’s second million-copy seller.

The writer who got away from them, through no fault of their own, was Tim Winton whose first novel, An Open Swimmer, won the 1981 Vogel Book Award (for an unpublished manuscript by a writer under the age of thirty-five) which brings with it publication by an east coast press, Allen & Unwin in Sydney. Otherwise, it is quite likely that FACP would have published Winton, much as they published Elizabeth Jolley, who taught Winton briefly in some creative writing courses he took at Curtin University. And speaking of distances from margin to centre, it was always a delight throughout the 1980s and later to see Elizabeth Jolley, from a city deemed the most remote capital on earth, reviewing books in the Gotham-centric New York Times Book Review.

A sixty minute plane ride north of Sydney is Brisbane, capital of Queensland, and home to an important Australian press, the University of Queensland Press, which began in 1948. For many years UQP was lucky to have on its books two highly-regarded, strong-selling authors: Brisbane-born Lebanese Christian David Malouf and Melbourne-born Peter Carey. Carey used to spend time in Byron Bay, writing very successful commercial jingles for Australian television, so perhaps it was Byron Bay’s proximity to Brisbane that saw him fetch up at that press. Certainly, when he took himself elsewhere, to Balmain in Sydney, then to New York, and found other publishing outlets, UQP’s bottom line dropped dramatically, a minor version of the fluctuations experienced by London’s Bloomsbury Press in a non-Harry Potter year.

In the 1970s and 1980s, I taught at universities in Brisbane and Perth and got to know a little of the cultural-political life in each place. When it first opened in the late 1970s, Griffith University in Brisbane had an artists-in-residence scheme which saw Australian writers spend some time on the campus. Two such writers-in-residence were Steve Spears – at that time enjoying international success with his play, The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin – and Helen Garner – whose novel Monkeygrip (which was adapted into an Australian film) brought her a cultural prominence she has maintained for several decades with an output of fiction and non-fiction works. The arts section of the Sydney Morning Herald of March 2, 2016, announced that Garner had received a Yale University Windham-Campbell Prize of US $150,000 “in recognition of her non-fiction writing.”

In Perth one can still buy postcards that depict only the vast landscape of Western Australia and indicate all space east of W.A. as “unknown territory.” And W.A. and Queensland share some similarities, at least in the way they are regarded by Sydney and Melbourne as wilder, more cowboy, frontier environments than the trio of genteel states that separates them: South Australia, Victoria, N.S.W. For example, Queensland has a political history of folksy right-wing rural populism roughly analogous to the career of Huey Long in 1930s Louisiana when he was regarded, until his assassination, as a serious possibility for a tilt at the White House. Long was immortalised as Willy Stark in Robert Penn Warren’s great novel, All the King’s Men. As it happens, the favourite book of Brian Burke, disgraced politician and former Labor Premier of Western Australia, was a biography of Huey Long, so you can appreciate that the broad comparison between W.A. and Queensland and the American Deep South has some purchase. For a few years, in his early time as Premier, Burke’s manipulation of the media to convey, very successfully, his Labor party’s policies and programs made him the envy of east coast Labor Party politicians like Neville Wran, Labor Party Premier of NSW, and Paul Keating.

I’m well aware that no Filipino needs to be advised about the ways of political corruption, connivance, and compromise. Suffice to say that you are geographically proximal to Malaysia, the nation said to have perfected the first instances of credit card fraud. But as you ponder how best to establish important cultural infrastructural works in your country, from Manila to all your regional capitals and beyond, you might like to file away a remark from Huey Long, a line which so far as I recall, did not make it into Penn Warren’s novel, nor did it appear in either of the film versions: “We got graft, but we got roads. The other states, they just got graft.”

II

All I mean by this lengthy preamble is to impress upon you the fact that all Australians are well aware of what one of our historians, Geoffrey Blainey, once called “the tyranny of distance” – and that phrase describes the internal distances within our “wide brown land,” coast to shining coast, as much as it does Australia’s physical distance from its initial northern hemisphere coloniser, England (Blainey’s original point), and its later soft-power coloniser, the US, with whom we share various trade and military alliances.

For the remainder of my talk I will hurry through some features of the international publishing scene as it seems to me to be configured at the moment. I speak here as a non-expert but rather as someone who has, over the last twenty years, interviewed a number of publishers in Australia, London and the US, trying to determine how a series of small-independent presses whose books I liked, managed to survive and thrive in an industry that increasingly conducted itself in a Hollywood, conglomeratised fashion. When I was doing my interviews, probing the idea of “cultures of independence,” I used an analogy that works well up to a point: a comparison of mainstream presses and smaller-independent presses along the lines of contrasting mainstream Hollywood films, blockbusters, to smaller-independent films.

By the 1990s US trade publishing had been completely Hollywoodised. Eighty per cent of book profits came from twenty per cent of the books published. Imagine a Dickensian spread sheet along the lines of “Annual income, one pound, annual expenditure one pound and sixpence, result misery,” as we consider the fact that most films and books don’t make money. In the 1990s, as the chains – like Barnes & Noble – edged towards “superstore” status, it cost $10,000 a month to have your book displayed in the front window of the store, hoping to attract the literary gazes of passers-by. It also cost $10,000 a month to have one’s book placed within an oh-so-casually-and-carefully-disordered array of books placed in the bin just inside the store as one entered (see Lauren J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists). The somewhat dismaying term for this act of purchasing publicity was “co-op,” a short hand term for “Co-operative advertising dollars.” Terminology aside, these strategies seemed to me very close to Hollywood’s practice of buying saturation TV ads to build what they ridiculously called “pre-awareness” of the blockbuster film about to be released.

André Schiffrin’s memoirs, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (2001) and Words and Money (2010), both published by Verso, and Jason Epstein’s The Book Business (2001) from Norton, reveal how, for quite a long time, US trade publishing functioned in a manner that seems to me very close to the model of the mature Hollywood studio system as it operated from the 1930s until the late 1950s and early 1960s. The so called Classical Hollywood studio system practised cross-subsidisation on films such that the profits on a Rin Tin Tin movie would allow the studio to make a historical drama with Bette Davis.

For much of the publishing lives of Schiffrin and Epstein, bestsellers and fastsellers by authors whose names not many of us now remember permitted a trade press to publish a big ‘L’ literary writer who would sell in vastly fewer numbers but who would be an excellent advertisement for the press’s commitment to ambitious, challenging literary writing. Think of an author like William Gaddis in the several decades of, and between, The Recognitions in 1955 and JR twenty years later.

In his pamphlet A Life With Books, Julian Barnes extols the printed book over the e-book, while acknowledging the economic lure of the latter, using the instance of his own most recent novel which was five pounds or so cheaper as an e-book. Barnes recalls a period from the late 1960s to the late 1970s when he was an avid book collector and frequenter of second-hand bookshops and storehouses with job-lots of used books, a time very different from contemporary circumstances with “the ferociously fast turnaround that modern central management imposes,” an insistence that creates a context in which “the average shelf-life of a new hardback novel – assuming it can reach a shelf in the first place –is four months.”

When those publishing conglomerates alluded to above arrived, so did an army of bean counters working out precisely how many copies of front, middle, and back-list titles were being purchased. The patrician, gentlemanly, amateur days of trade publishing were swept aside and when BookScan arrived in January 2001, to do to the book business what SoundScan had done to the record industry back in March 1991, it really was game over for earlier understandings of mainstream trade publishing.

III

US artist-essayist-writer-publisher Russell Chatham lived just outside Livingston, Montana, for almost forty years, having left California in the 1970s when it became too expensive, heading up to Montana to visit his friend Thomas McGuane. In the early 1990s Chatham founded Clark City Press, initially simply to keep in print some of his own books but soon enough he started publishing works by some of his writer friends in Montana, like Jim Harrison and James Crumley. Chatham’s press had very high-end production values and after a while found itself deeply in debt. Rather than go bankrupt or offer one cent in the dollar to his creditors Chatham interrupted Clark City’s publishing side for several years as he slowly sold enough of his backlist to pay off his creditors, and then started publishing books again.

Clark City’s debt had been incurred in part by overly optimistic claims for potential sales from sales representatives and by what Chatham called “very irresponsible buying” from the big chains, safe in the knowledge that they would be protected financially courtesy of a practice developed by Alfred A. Knopf in the Depression era of the 1930s which allowed impoverished bookstores to acquire stock with no initial upfront financial outlay, on the understanding that they would sell whatever number of books they could, and return those not sold. When this practice became industry-standard Knopf is alleged to have said, “This is insane. I call it, gone yesterday, here today.” (Chatham, 2005). (As an aside, having just finished Mia Alvar’s wonderful collection of stories, I’m very confident that the ghost of Mr Knopf will rest easy as In the Country generates very healthy sales, or “moves a lot of units,” as later locutions might put it). Hearing Russ Chatham’s reference to the hyper-optimism of his sales reps caused me to think of an excruciating scene in the Maysles Brothers great documentary, Salesman, where one of the bible salesmen stands up at a group meeting and announces how much better he will do in the coming year, how many more sales he will make. It truly is a cinematic version of the Conradian “fascination of the abomination.”

At a talk he gave in Missoula at the 2005 Montana Book Fair, Chatham provided his gloss on the Knopf “gone yesterday, here today” adage: “So you have 8,000 orders and you send out 8,000 books and you think, wow, we got it, and then a year later, 7, 999 of them come back and you’re done.”

By way of contrast England had a Net Book Agreement in place for almost one hundred years from the 1890s to 1995, and across that historical period also resisted any notion of a “sale or return” deal for booksellers. This “made for cautious ordering by bookshop managers,” as John Sutherland puts it in his little book, Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction. Since 1995 the English and U.S. systems have become very similar, as the following remarks made in 2007 by Francois Von Hurter make clear:

It’s the only business in the world where a sale isn’t a sale. You’re paying the author, let’s say, or the translator, 5,000 in advance, you’re doing this and that, and a year later your book comes out, then three months later it’s in the store, and then two years later half of the books come back, and you kind of think, who’s financing all of this? A Martian would say, you guys are nuts, and if you really look at the cash immobilised, you end up realising it’s a silly business model, but you have to do it out of love. You know what you know, and occasionally you might be lucky with a blockbuster, but it’s a work of love, it’s not a work in which you make your fortune. The only good publishing business model is that of scientific journals. There, people subscribe to very expensive journals, you don’t pay the authors anything, everyone wants to get in Nature or Science. So it’s the opposite of us. The publisher gets the money in advance from subscribers, and has source material at zero cost. That’s how those guys get rich. Michael Heseltine, he’s in that business.

IV

I will now move in a leisurely manner toward my conclusion by saying why I think the codex book will survive during the era of the e-book and the i-book, and why examples of very impressive literary work will continue to come from marginal, eccentric, unanticipated-by-the-majors areas.

First, the arrival of the e-book and the threat it posed to the codex form seems to have abated. 2014 figures report that hard-copy book sales are on the rise. The tech-head excitement that greeted the 2007 moment of Japanese cell-phone novels (keitai shousetsu) – novels composed in that medium to be read in that medium – was followed by the information that when those cell-phone fictions were published in conventional book form they accounted for 50% of Japan’s best-selling titles. And many here would remember that Stephen King’s e-book venture failed because people chose to pirate it rather than pay him the one dollar he was requesting.

So it is not self-evidently the case that a new publication medium necessarily obliterates an older medium, and writer-publisher Peter Ayrton of Serpent’s Tail press in London is sceptical about drawing too close a comparison between what has gone on with music downloads and what might happen in the book industry. In 2006, Ayrton said:

I think people in publishing are quite lucky because a book isn’t like a CD, where people will just download a couple of tracks. The concept of a CD is almost alien to my kids and their friends, they just want a couple of tracks! I can’t see people who are into books just reading a couple of chapters. They’ll want to read the whole book. So I don’t think we have to worry about the Ipodisation of reading. I think e-books will develop slowly but it will be best sellers and classics. So if you are publishing Jane Austen you might be in trouble, but I don’t think it will be the latest book by Gary Indiana or Lynne Tillman, because the kind of people who are into those books want to be able to put them into their bag or their backpack, they want to hold them, fold them, read them in bed.

The following are some relatively recent examples of critically-commercially successful books that have come from unpredicted, unanticipated spaces.

Paul Harding’s novel Tinkers won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize after having initially been published by Bellevue Press, a small press associated with New York’s oldest public hospital, attached to NYU’s Department of Medicine (this hospital is mentioned in one of the stories in In the Country). Harding’s next book, Enon (2014), was sold to Random House and here we might remember that Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain was published in 1997 by a small press (Atlantic Monthly Press), won the National Book Award in the year Don DeLillo’s Underworld was up for that award, was adapted into a big budget Hollywood film, and sold 3 million copies. After this independent success Frazier’s second book, Thirteen Moons, went to auction based on a one-page outline and fetched $8.25 million from Random House, and $3 million for the movie rights from Scott Rudin. Did we mention earlier some of the consequences of the Hollywoodisation of US trade publishing?

A second instance of eccentric publishing success concerns Melbourne-based Greek-Australian gay writer Christos Tsiolkas who published his fourth novel, The Slap, which was adapted very successfully to Australian television. The book sold 300,000 copies in Australia, where a best-seller is 30,000 copies but no UK buyer wanted the book. So Tsiolkas’s friend, the multi-talented gay Irish writer Colm Tóibín, published The Slap in his boutique press, Tuskar Rock, set up by Tóibín, his friend Peter Strauss, and Hannah Westland in 2011, and now housed with Profile books alongside Serpent’s Tail Press. Tuskar Rock had published “collectors’ editions” of some novels – Tim Winton’s Breath, 350 copies at $850.00 a pop – and Tóibín had said that Tuskar Rock was trying to tap “into the same phenomenon as people listening to vinyl records” in a digital age. At the time Tóibín said Tuskar Rock did not expect to make a lot of money from Tsiolkas’s novel: “Let’s just say that we don’t think we’ll make much money, but it’s not about losing lots of money either.” The Slap went on to sell 1.2 million copies and win the 2009 Commonwealth Writers Prize, at which point the larger London presses that earlier had knocked the book back, came looking to secure it, wondering how they had missed it in the first place. They had also missed another Tuskar Rock success story, Don Patterson’s volume of poetry, Rain, which sold very well. This is not quite of the order of picking J. K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter manuscript out of a waste paper basket but it is a nice example of why small, marginal, alternative publishing spaces continue to be important contributors to international literary-cultural life.

Third, a few days ago I read in The Guardian that a first-time book, The Loney, by Andrew Michael Hurley, was first published by Tartarus, a small Yorkshire Press in a print run of 300 copies. After that it moved to a larger press, John Murray, and went on to win the 2015 Costa Award for First Novel.

These few examples encourage me to believe that small print runs, small-independent presses, small bookstores – that fragile coalition that constitutes such a valuable culture of independence – will continue to exert a positive cultural influence around the world. In respect of small bookstores, think of how one of your diasporic own, Jessica Hagedorn, honed her poetry-writing skills by hanging out in San Francisco’s City Lights bookshop, the book enterprise begun by Lawrence Ferlinghetti that sits a hundred yards or so up a slight street incline from Francis Coppola’s pizza/pasta restaurant that stocks Coppola wines. The restaurant is the street level part of a beautiful, old, triangulated building whose upstairs rooms once housed people like Wim Wenders when he and Coppola were making Hammett (1982) for an early iteration of Coppola’s Zoetrope film company, which, you would be aware, publishes Zoetrope: All Story. In the issue of All Story “designed” (they prefer that word to “edited”) by Wim Wenders, one finds a wonderful story from Vietnamese-Australian writer Nam Le, “Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” that was later included in his best-selling, prize-winning collection, The Boat. Readers who long have been awaiting a second collection or a novel from Nam Le have been delayed by his having discovered a way to make $200,000 a year from casino gambling and since that money would be tax-free it is the equivalent of an annual income of $400,000. Why teach at Harvard?

V

Speaking very much as an outsider it seems to me that three clear publishing opportunities exist either for a university press or a trade press in the Philippines. Each is based on an existing overseas format that simply needs to be modified to suit the Philippine situation. The British Film Institute’s series of small, 96 page books devoted to films deemed classics and/or modern classics was devised by Edward Buscombe in 1992 with a view initially to having the books connect with an archival film restoration project then being undertaken by the BFI of 365 films deemed classics of world cinema.

BFI Film Classics

The BFI classics volumes were written by novelists like Salman Rushdie and Alberto Manguel, journalists, TV presenters (Melvyn Bragg), film critics and film academics, and were pitched at that famously nebulous entity, the “non-specialist but educated, interested reader.” Eventually Buscombe thought that when, across the course of a year, a screening of the 365 restored films would see the history of cinema flow in front of spectators’ eyes on London’s South Bank, many copies of the supporting volumes would be sold. It was an idea that was quickly ripped off by other countries that duly produced series called ‘Australian Film Classics,’ ‘Canadian Film Classics,’ and ‘Hong Kong Cinema Classics.’ It also generated a range of other iterations of the small format film analyses of a single film. In the ‘Deep Focus’ series published by Soft Skull Press (which includes books on Heathers and Death Wish), Jonathan Lethem writes about John Carpenter’s They Live, while Arsenal Pulp Press in Vancouver publishes its ‘Queer Film Classics’ with books on Death in Venice, Strangers on a Train, I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. Cult cinema is targeted by Wallflower Press’s ‘Cultographies’ series which includes books on Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Donnie Darko, Blade Runner. A ‘Pop Classics’ series from ECW Press has a book on Showgirls, while Auteur Publisher’s ‘Devil’s Advocates’ series has titles on Witchfinder General, Suspiria, Carrie and many others, and a ‘Controversies’ series from Palgrave Macmillan has books on Straw Dogs and Basic Instinct, among others.

The BFI later expanded its original format to publish analyses of celebrated UK and overseas television series (Edge of Darkness, Boys from the Blackstuff, Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

Why not adopt this format here to generate a series of similarly packaged volumes devoted to Philippine cinema? And why not unashamedly define the reach of the series to include films made here by, say, US filmmakers as well as your own acts of filmmaking? For your first volume, contract an appropriate Filipino writer to write on Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. You would be aware that this film already is the subject of some film classics series (it was the first volume in Bloomsbury Press’s excellent but short-lived series), along with coverage in studies of Coppola and Zoetrope. Eleanor Coppola’s diary of her husband’s film shoot, Notes, became the documentary Hearts of Darkness, which could be addressed in your putative volume as well. Once published, this volume automatically connects your fledgling series with international film publications and film courses whose libraries certainly would order copies of this distinctively national take on a modern classic, and would link with the fan base that follows writing on certain cult films and television series (UK examples would be Dr Who and The Avengers).

You could also commission a volume on Weng Weng’s pint-sized James Bond activities, as in For Your Height Only (1980: Dir: Eddie Nicart), currently available on DVD in the UK and US, and that volume could also address the documentary made by Australian Andrew Leavold, The Search for Weng Weng (2015). And why not include a volume or two on some of the Roger Corman films shot in the Philippines?

Another small format series could imitate the 33 and 1/3 series – initially published by Continuum Press and now published by Bloomsbury Press – in which a small volume is devoted to an iconic or cult pop album (Pet Sounds, Let it Be, Highway Sixty-One Revisited, Exile on Main Street, The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society) and once you started publishing your Filipino versions of these, they could circulate within the Philippines wherever music and cultural studies courses were taught and obviously would attract interest from overseas fans, musicologists and music teachers. Maybe Freddie Aguilar’s “Anak” could be the opening volume.

And there seems no reason a university or trade press in the Philippines shouldn’t publish a version of U.S. Random House’s Crown Journeys series of little books that have a writer talk about a town or a locale. Sometimes the writer is strongly associated with a city or a neighbourhood – Kinky Friedman writes about Austin, Texas, Ishmael Reed writes about Oakland, Chuck Palahniuk writes about Portland – while on other occasions a prominent writer will write about a locale that means something to them: so former head of the Iowa Writing School and author of Stop-Time, Frank Conroy writes about walking around Nantucket, and Michael Cunningham (The Hours) writes about Provincetown. In Australia we have “borrowed” this idea by having local writers write about our capital cities. As yet, we have not ventured into the “neighbourhood” level of the Crown Series, but it surely cannot be too long before some press asks Tim Winton to take a walk around Fremantle and commit it to paper. Why not ask ‘Butch’ Dalisay to write a similar volume on Romblon and why not approach an appropriate local writer to do a volume on the city in which we now find ourselves, Davao?

One final suggestion. Even allowing for what I sense is a very strong Philippine tradition of privileging high literary forms, poetry, the literary novel, serious historical non-fiction, the fact that you also have a strong tradition of comix – comics or graphic novels – and of late have started to produce very strong contributions to international crime and noir fiction, makes me think you should organise a special Philippine section of the next available Bouchercon crime fiction conference. Bouchercon 2016 takes place in New Orleans from September 15^th to the 18^th, and in 2017, it occurs in Toronto from October 12-15^th. In 2018 it travels to St Petersburg from September 13^th to 16^th, and in 2019 returns to the US, to Dallas, from October 31^st to November 3^rd. In 2020 it shifts to Sacramento from October 15^th-18^th.

Bouchercon delivers you a huge, ready-made audience, much like the Frankfurt and London Book Fairs, so it would be easy to work out suitable representatives from here in the Philippines and from Filipinos living and working overseas, and you would be guaranteed to make a splash as the latest new thing. As you all well know, literary festivals and film festivals are endlessly in search of the new entity, the new hot thing to showcase. There is no reason for the Philippines, with its great range of writers, graphic novelists, filmmakers and musicians, not to benefit from that.

Works Cited

Julian Barnes, A Life With Books (London: Jonathan Cape, 2012)

Geoffrey Blainey, The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966)

Russell Chatham, “Gone Yesterday, Here Today”: Presentation on Clark City Press, Montana Festival of the Book, Missoula, 23 September, 2005 (unpublished paper)

Nicholas Clee, “End of the Book Postponed,” Prospect Magazine 135 (June 2007): 72-74.

Frank Conroy, Stop-Time (New York: Viking, 1967)

Michael Cunningham, The Hours (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998)

Jose Dalisay Jr., Soledad’s Sister (Manila: Anvil Publishing, 2008)

Jason Epstein, The Book Business (New York: Norton, 2001)

A.B. Facey, A Fortunate Life (Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1981)

William Gaddis, The Recognitions (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955)

William Gaddis, JR (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975))

Helen Garner, Monkeygrip (Melbourne: McPhee-Gribble, 1977)

Paul Harding, Tinkers (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2001)

Noel King, “’I Can’t Go on, I’ll Go On’: Interview with Ray Coffey of Fremantle Arts Centre Press” Westerly, 51 (November 2006): 31-54.

Noel King, “’Independent, Emerging, and Satisfying’: Interview with Publisher Henry Rosenbloom of Scribe Press, Melbourne,” Metro 152 (2007): 154-158.

Noel King, ‘’The Main Thing We Book Publishers have Going for us is the books themselves: An Interview with Pete Ayrton of Serpent’s Tail Press, Islington, London 12 July 2006,” Critical Quarterly 49, 3 (Autumn 2007): 104-119.

Noel King, “A bridge between all these literatures that we love: Interview with Francois von Hurter, Bitter Lemon Press, London 10 July 2006,” Critical Quarterly 49, 1-2 (Summer 2007): 62-80.

Lorien Kite, “Books of 2015,” Financial Times Weekend (28-29 November, 2015): 1-2. Also available at:

Malcolm Knox, “The Interview: Colm Toibin,” Sydney Morning Herald (May 15, 2010).

Nam Le, The Boat: Stories (New York: Knopf, 2008)

Lauren J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007)

Sally Morgan, My Place (Fremantle, W.A.: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1987)

Robert Penn Warren, All The King’s Men (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co, 1946)

Andre Schiffrin, The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way we Read (London: Verso, 2001)

Andre Schiffrin, Words and Money (London: Verso, 2010)

Steve Spears, The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin (Sydney: Currency Methuen Press, 1977)

John Sutherland, Bestsellers: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: OUP, 2007).

Christos Tsiolkas, The Slap (Tuskar Rock, 2010)

Wim Wenders, Zoetrope All-Story 10, 2 (Summer 2006)

[Header image: ‘Book’ by Sam @Flickr republished unmodified under this CC Licence.]

CP Goes to the Philippines: Featured author R. Zamora Linmark

R. ZAMORA LINMARK was born in Manila. He is the author of the poetry collections Prime Time Apparitions (Hanging Loose Press, 2005) and The Evolution of a Sigh (Hanging Loose Press, 2008) and the novels Rolling the R’s (Kaya Press, 1995) and Leche (Coffee House Press, 2011). His next poetry collection, Pop Verite, is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press. He also recently completed a third novel titled These Books Belong to Ken Z. He has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor in Creative Writing at the Universities of Miami and Hawaii.

Linmark has been a regular contributor to Contrappasso. Some of his poems were reprinted in our special issue Writers at the Movies (2015). Here Linmark  introduces and reads his poem A Letter to Claire Danes from a Fan in Manila:

Two other poems appeared in Writers at the Movies:

After Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind

Twelve Short Takes on Montgomery Clift

***

Linmark’s short story ‘Dear Jesus’ appeared in Contrappasso #6 (2014). It begins:

Dear Jesus:

My worst nightmare is about to come true. Yesterday, the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Labor approved the same-sex marriage legislation bill. 20 to 4. And now it’s up to the House of Representatives to kill the bill. But what if they, too, flew over the cuckoo’s nest? That’s why I’m flying there tomorrow. I’m going to withdraw whatever money I have left in my checking account, take the first flight to Honolulu and give these loonies a piece of my mind. That’s right. Hold on, Jesus, I’m now on the line with a Hawaiian Airlines ticketing agent from, of all places, Philippines. Dear Lord, Honolulu is only half hour away by plane from here and I have to call someone in the Philippines to book it…. Just got off the phone. They’re charging me four arms and six thousand legs as if I’m Imelda Marcos. What a rip off. And they don’t offer Senior Citizen discount. So much for Aloha Spirit… Calm down, Marie, calm down… Screw it. I’m willing to overlook the astronomical cost of this ticket due to the gravity of the matter. Otherwise, I’d tell them too to go choke on my monthly SS! I’d rather go hungry for the next couple days than allow this bill to be passed. I don’t care if I have to testify three, four, five thousand times. I won’t stop until these so-called progressive legislators wake up and realize that they’re doing more harm than good. This is not in the best interest of the peoples of Hawaii. I know it. The majority knows it. Come tomorrow, they will know who Marie Machado is and what she stands for.

Marie Machado, Hana, Maui.

*

 Dear Jesus:

I have two mommies. Am I greedy?

Alexander Rosales, 3^rd grade, Kapalama Elementary.

*

Dear Jesus:

Did I wake up in the wrong state? Is today Halloween, October 31, 2013? It is, right? All this talk of gay marriage makes me want to puke. That’s what I want to do right now. Puke the bowl of kim chi chigae I ate last night all over the grounds of State Capitol. This Senate Bill 1 makes me sick to the bone. I should call in sick. But I can’t afford to miss a day’s worth of work. I already got written up twice for being late. But this is more important than ushering losers to their seats or telling them to get their toe jams off the seats or picking up their trash or shining the flashlight on their faces to shut their snoring up. If that fat cow Shawna fires me, so be it. I’ll miss the free movies and fifty percent off of popcorn and hot dogs. Fuck it. This is not the only job in the world. There are a thousand more out there I can get fired from. My sick call is legit. It’s an act of sacrifice, me as the lamb willing to sacrifice his bread and butter just for you, Jesus, because I love and believe in you. All I ask is that you help me write the most convincing testimony, because I’d hate to make a fool of myself in public, especially since Olelo cable TV is live-streaming the entire hearing.

Charles Kwon, McCully.

[TO READ THE REST OF THIS STORY, CLICK HERE]

CP Goes to the Philippines: Mia Alvar’s In the Country (review)

BRINGING IN THE EVIDENCE by NOEL KING

Mia Alvar, In the Country (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015). 347pp.

“I actually didn’t know I was writing a book about class and labor until almost every review described it that way.” – Mia Alvar quoted in Sophie Nguyen’s Conversation with Mia Alvar ‘00 in Harvard Magazine (7^th August, 2015)

*

Reading through this hugely impressive debut collection of stories set variously in the Philippines, Bahrain, and the USA, I found myself recalling a moment in the mid-1960s, from my early teens in Newcastle, NSW, Australia, when my mother was driving me to a Saturday morning football game in our 1950 F.J. Holden. The car had come with my stepfather, a carpenter-joiner whom my mother had married in 1961 after raising two boys as a single, widowed, working mum over a period of eight years.

For whatever reason, aged twelve or so, I had suddenly become strongly aware of class difference and social status while living a very happy, working class life, safe, carefree, sporty. I said to my mother that morning that since we were a bit early there was no need to drop me exactly at the sports oval (where much newer cars would be dropping off my teammates), just somewhere nearby would be fine. Of course she wouldn’t hear of that and drove me precisely where I needed to be.

A few years later we acquired a second-hand 1964 Holden E.H. Hydramatic, a much more impressive vehicle, and from then on I was very happy to be dropped off anywhere in our car. Years later the F.J. Holden would become a collectors’ car (as would the E.H. in a later period) but that retro-fetish moment had yet to arrive and the F.J. was just a very old car.

In the Country caused me to wonder, at what age do these debilitating class and status attitudes set in? Alvar’s stories explore, in superb prose, sundry awkward emotional moments of embarrassment and evasion, difficult issues concerning social class, the value and dignity of one’s occupation – whatever form of work is entailed – and one’s sense of self, with legitimate senses of pride and achievement coming up against overweening delusional pride and misconceptions of self. The stories probe questions of honour, respect and filial duty and the precise circumstances under which a person’s presumed constant attitude of obligation to family might reasonably be expected to be normative, and under what circumstances it might be withdrawn.

The stories are totally accomplished at all levels, from the micro ‘level of the sentence,’ as practitioners and some literary critics like to phrase it, and at the more macro level of narrative through-line, deft complications of plotting, gradual revelations of back-story, astute temporal shifts, all concerning an array of utterly engaging characters from all social levels. Alvar’s stories show her to be a perfect deployer of what Roland Barthes once called “le petit fait vrai,” the small, emblematic, quotidian detail that results in what we used to call “the realistic-effect” (to prove that we knew writing was a representational system composed of various codes and conventions that had various ways of luring us in to a fictional world.) As they bring to life their varied characters and locales, the stories also recall the great phrase Jean-Luc Godard once used to describe what he felt was the obligation of film, whether fictional or documentary, an act of “bringing in the evidence.”

Among the wonderful array of characters and narrators on offer in In the Country are: a US white Wonder Bread model visiting the Philippines for a photography shoot, recalling her time with a half Filipino fellow model flatmate who has died; male overseas Filipino workers in Bahrain; a prominent political Filipino figure working in the US as a public service official. In every story sharp dialogue exchanges see confrontations played out and invidious truths told, but equally often we encounter a character’s private, unstated thoughts, reproaches, observations. Accusations are held back out of a given character’s sense of family loyalty and remembered rules of “bienséance.” In these cases, the reader becomes the only person privy to a character’s capacity for self-control, and ability to grudgingly bite the tongue in order to allow a social milieu’s traditional protocols of respect, deference, and politeness to be upheld. In these instances devastating moments of critique and revelation are not uttered to another character who monumentally deserves a serve for delusional, self-obsessed behaviour. In “The Virgin of Monte Ramon,” the mother self-presents as a Filipino version of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, or perhaps the Maggie Smith character in Gosford Park, that familiar image of someone who has known better, more wealthy, fêted, beautiful days, and has absolutely no interest in cutting her cloth to suit her current straitened economic circumstances. In this story, the heart-breaking revelation of the real circumstances that caused the condition of the wheelchair-confined young male narrator, the tragic, distant, historical event that has blighted this family and which underpins the grotesque daily household façade, comes from the long-suffering, selfless G.P. Dr Delacruz who, for decades, has tried to help this household and its occupants. All his young life our narrator has recognised that “it was not so easy to name my status. How should I explain the fine house, and the servants who were sometimes paid in bowls or jewels to maintain it?” Of Dr Delacruz, he says, “I felt sure that he knew the truth but was too gallant to expose my mother.”

Into this lonely boy’s compromised life comes an angel named Annelise, the daughter whose mother, also named Annelise, has been doing domestic work in his house. The Annelise family comes from a nearby ravine shantytown, which has no electricity. Young Annelise saves the young lad from his loneliness and provides him with a vision of how to survive in the face of everyday jokes about his crippled body. She also surprises him and all their classmates by not bowing to Sister Carol’s chastising of her for her classroom behaviour: “I’d never heard a child speak to adults with such boldness, or stand almost with pride while being disciplined.” This image of a strong, young female whose courage and eloquence seem way beyond her years, is reported to us by this more demure, infinitely less self-assertive male friend. And, come story’s end, their friendship endures.

 

Mia Alvar. Photo by Michael Lionstar

If in some of these stories it is the reader alone who learns the true shape of diegetic events by eavesdropping on the heroically repressed, exasperated thoughts and musings of thoroughly honourable, hardworking souls, happily, on other occasions these same Filipino rules of politesse are challenged forcefully, often by feisty young women who have no time whatsoever for unearned expectations of the continuance of inter-generational power relations, familial or non-familial, nor for the domineering, even abusive, expectation that an institutional arrangement (as in the classroom teaching situation alluded to above) should always prevail on its own terms. History has taught this younger generation that there is nothing to be gained from continuing obeisance, as this remark from “Shadow Families” indicates: “Our mothers’ sad, hard lives had taught us just how much a man’s good looks and silky voice were worth.”

“Legends of the White Lady” tells the story of two flatmate friends and models, alluded to earlier, who travel from New York to Manila on a job. The Manila setting allows all kinds of conversations working from the white female US model’s perspective that presumes anyone living in Manila would jump at the chance to blow that town and go Stateside, only to find these unthinking first-world expectations contradicted at almost every point.

Each of Alvar’s stories establishes some sort of dialogue – muted or explicit – between the Philippines and an overseas setting (Bahrain, US). Where is the right place to be? If you go to the US, as so many university educated Filipinos have done on various US scholarships (Fulbrights, etc), what is your relation to the politics and culture of the land you have left? “Old Girl” presents a portrait of a supportive, indulgent, clear-eyed wife of a Filipino public servant who has been given a job in the US, far from the political uncertainties of the Philippines. While they and their children clearly benefit from the privilege and safety of this first-world posting, a conversation with the home country remains, stated and unstated, about the thought of return, a wondering whether any authentic Filipino cultural-political life could be lived outside one’s country of origin. For much of the story the husband is training to run a marathon at an age when he shouldn’t be running anywhere and eventually he is diverted from this self-imposed grand-standing desire, but not before all the family has been drawn into this vanity, prompting the wonderful wife to muse, “She’s thinking how a marathon is like a marriage: the long haul, the ups and downs, the tests of endurance and faith, the humbling, undiscovered country.”

Among the other stories we have a terrific, sad scrutiny of a Filipino male’s situation working in Bahrain, a man whose sexual drive and slightly reckless way of being in the world is always threatening his safety anywhere, but certainly in a country which has strict rules about such matters. “Esmeralda” is a beautiful story, told in second-person against the tragedy that was 9/11. It outlines a brief encounter, an equal exchange of erotic, emotional, intellectual simpatico-ness achieved in an unequal context where a Filipino cleaning woman is working in the Twin Tower offices of a businessman whose wife is dying of cancer. The two find a brief and profound tenderness together. Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City was told in second-person and I suspect McInerney got that idea from the start of Don DeLillo’s Running Dog as much as from any then-contemporary beer commercial. McInerney reviewed some of DeLillo’s early novels, up to the publication of White Noise and so he would have been drawn to the opening sentences of Running Dog: “You won’t find ordinary people here. Not after dark, on these streets, under the ancient warehouse canopies. Of course you know this. This is the point. It’s why you’re here, obviously.”

The title story of In the Country visits one of the major topics and challenges of contemporary Philippine writing, the era of the Marcos regime, martial law, student protests, arrests, imprisonments, deaths. Alvar’s story focuses on the question of the extent to which one can always oppose all things tyrannical and draconian, continuing to act on the lifetime-held, second-nature convictions of a male investigative journalist when such political activism could put one’s wife and child at risk. It was precisely this political-investigative-journalist persona that initially attracted the young female Communications student, leading to their living together and having a butterball son, and later a daughter, together. Alvar’s perfectly orchestrated temporal shifts back and forward move the reader around different years (1986, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1985) from this defining moment in Philippine political history and across this couple’s long relationship until an absolutely devastating conclusion is handed down.

New York writer Jane DeLynn once said the way she worked her way into a new novel was by experimenting with phrases and word clusters until she eventually found “sentences that can lead me someplace.” In Mia Alvar’s collection of stories we encounter beautiful sentences that have enabled this writer to range across a compelling array of locales pertaining to Filipino experience as overseas workers, as diasporically displaced, as economic migrants/émigrés, and as Filipinos who did not leave, who stayed on, stayed at home. With these sentences Alvar has found, abundantly, a way to take her readers to some very confronting psycho-geographical places, unflinchingly presenting the myriad difficulties – personal, social-political, sexual, economic – of life in these locales.

French historian Michel de Certeau once used the phrase, “arts de faire,” which carried the two meanings of an art or craft of making-creating, and also an art of getting by/making do. It is as if Mia Alvar has created a fictional universe in which those two meanings occupy the centre of the everyday lives of her characters. But the final miracle of this collection is that, while always respecting the realities of these oftentimes hard, sad, troubled lives and their social contexts, the author does not allow the last word be one of despair and miserablism. Instead we encounter an array of beguiling, admirable characters who have found ways of surviving and prevailing.

This compelling debut so fully displays the writer’s remarkable talents for all aspects of storytelling that readers of In the Country will really be hanging out for Alvar’s next collection of stories or her first novel.

See also: Noelani Piters, The Rumpus Interview with Mia Alvar, The Rumpus (July 29th, 2015)

*

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOEL KING has worked in many Australian universities, in a variety of media and cultural studies contexts: at Griffith University (1977-1980), the South Australian College of Advanced Education (now the University of SA, 1980-1886), Curtin University (1986-1989), UTS (1989-2001), the University of Tasmania (2002-2003), and Macquarie University (2003-2012). He has co-edited two special issues of Contrappasso on Noir and Writers at the Movies.

 

CP Goes to the Philippines: Manila Noir (a review)

MANILA: A WOMAN OF MYSTERY, A FEMME FATALE

by NOEL KING

 

Manila Noir ed. Jessica Hagedorn (New York: Akashic Books, 2013)

WHILE THINKING about what to mention in this review it occurred to me to contact Akashic Books much as, a few years ago, I had contacted a number of small-independent presses in Australia, the UK and the US (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Scribe, Serpent’s Tail, Bitter Lemon, Steerforth Press, Dennis McMillan Publications) to try to get a sense of how they managed to continue, even thrive, in a much-changed world of conglomerate publishing. In the case of Akashic, their sequence of City-Suburb Noir books was a sub-series among their various other publications. Already fifty-six Noir titles had been published, with a further fifteen announced on the inside cover of Manila Noir. So far, twenty-nine US cities or places within cities (e.g. New York has Wall Street Noir, Manhattan Noir, Brooklyn Noir) were represented. Some cities or suburbs had generated two volumes (Los Angeles, DC, San Francisco) while Brooklyn had generated three volumes, perhaps because of the number of writers who live there rather than the amount of noirish activity. And so far eighteen non-US countries had figured.

So I emailed Akashic Books’ Johanna Ingalls and asked if she could provide any information on how the series was going, more specifically, what size the print-runs were, and whether any particular titles were doing better than others. Her kind response outlined aspects of Akashic’s strategy with this series:

The better selling anthologies in the series have sold to date (and continue to sell) in the range of 20,000—35,000, including Boston Noir edited by Dennis Lehane, Los Angeles Noir edited by Denise Hamilton, Brooklyn Noir edited by Tim McLoughlin, DC Noir edited by George Pelecanos. To date not one volume has lost any money which is pretty remarkable from a series of short stories published by a small, independent company. Print runs vary greatly depending on size of market and also if there are some famous authors and/or editor. The low end would be about 3,500 for a first print run, though many start out several thousand higher and we often do multiple printings—Boston Noir is in its 6th printing. We sometimes solicit editors to work on an anthology with us (i.e. we approached Dennis Lehane and asked him to edit our Boston volume as we couldn’t think of a more perfect person for the job!), but at this point, many of the editors approach us as fans of the series and with ideas for their home city/state/region. We do hope to add additional Asian and African cities.

FOR MANILA NOIR, let’s start with malls or shopping-towns, those social spaces described so superbly by Don DeLillo in White Noise (1984), locales that seem distinctly American, especially when we remember how well Minnesota’s “biggest mall in America” worked to attract Japanese tourists to come to shop, play golf, and have an entire holiday in a quite circumscribed venue. Cultural analysts see such malls as continuing the tradition of the grand nineteenth century European arcades identified by Walter Benjamin as perfect locales for the flâneur to stroll around and practise his arts of observation. It is well known that the flâneur has a direct line to the role of the detective, so perhaps we should not be surprised to find malls, crime and noir fitting together.

Former Adelaide-based sociological researcher of youth, subcultures and crime, the late Mike Presdee, coined the phrase “proletarian shopping” to characterise the way young people accessed shopping towns in Elizabeth, Adelaide, a working class suburb to which a great many English migrants (“ten pound poms”) were sent upon arrival in South Australia. In his participant-observation-Birmingham-School-of-Contemporary-Cultural-Studies-style-work, Presdee observed how unemployed youths managed to spend lengthy periods of time in these vast social spaces, occasionally being moved on by shopping centre security officers when it became apparent that they were not a demographic with the kind of discretionary income hoped for by shops in such centres. It’s one thing to deliberately construct a system of moving people up levels in such a way that they must walk past endless arrays of shops in order to reach the next escalator to take them to the next floor, it’s quite another to know what to do with people who are being so moved with no money in their pockets, who are there to be in air conditioning on a blazing hot Adelaide day, or for warmth in winter.

Two stories in Manila Noir are set in malls, one—the terrific opening story, ‘Aviary,’ by Lysley Tenorio—is set in Greenbelt Mall in Makati, and the other—Gina Apostol’s ‘The Unintended’—is set in Ali Mall, Cubao, that mall’s name a legacy of the famous 1975 Ali-Frazier ‘Thrilla in Manila’ boxing match. In ‘Aviary’ a group of poor, disenfranchised youths go “proletarian shopping” as their way of protesting about a sign that allegedly says, “poor people and other realities” are not welcome at the mall. Dressed in their best possible clothing—black “Polo shirts and corduroys, our only good clothes, the outfits we wear to baptisms and funerals”—they roam the mall, amazed at the prices of even the least expensive items, and ask storekeepers where are the heads of headless mannequins, always being told to move on. Having “heard that an aviary once stood on the land Greenbelt now occupies,” they have brought with them dead birds found in the suburb where they live and, in one of the mall’s expensive bag shops, they “drop a dead bird into the smallest compartment of each travel bag, one by one.”

Their non-shopping continues. “We leave Louis Vuitton behind, continue through Greenbelt 4, passing stores with nonsensical names—BVLGARI, BOTTEGA, VENETTA—and others that sound like a sneeze—GUCCI, Jimmy Choo,” and having “breathed enough of the Greenbelt air,” they exit only to encounter “a domelike structure resembling the top half of a UFO.” The structure is the Greenbelt Chapel. “A place for worship between shopping.” Adventitiously encountered, it provides the perfect spot for them to leave their final mark. Under a church pew they carefully place “a segment of metal pipe wrapped with blue and red wire, with a cell-phone duct-taped to it.” The bomb is fake and will not detonate but upon discovery its effect will “have created unease here, severe emotional distress, a disturbance they will not soon forget.”

In ‘The Unintended,’ Gina Apostol runs together an exploration of “the first multilevel shopping mall in the Philippines,” a structure “that rises in tribute to Muhammad Ali’s victory” over Joe Frazier on October 1st, 1975. Two female characters engage warily with one another, Magsalin, our ostensible narrator, and Chiara, daughter of a filmmaker father who made, also in 1975, a cult film whose description runs together bits of Apocalypse Now and The Godfather films with aspects of Philippine history. The story entails parent-child relations, cinephilia, ideas of translation, but always the looming presence of the mall presides. Its first description is unflattering: “During the best of times Ali Mall is a decrepit, cramped cement block of shops hosting Rugby glue sniffers, high school truants, and depressed carnival men on break. It was built in 1976, a paean to the Thrilla in Manila, which took place directly across the street at the Araneta Coliseum in Cubao.” As a result we learn that Cubao now carries the trace of Frazier’s destroyed boxing career at the same time as it offers “the omen of Ali’s shambling shadow. Cubao heralds an incommunicable fall.” As Magsalin wanders the mall “in a daze” she notices that it is “now quite modern, practically Singaporean,” yet there is “a schizoid confabulation between the new upscale fixtures, such as the gleaming escalators and neon in the food court, which now looks like a strip club, and the ratty hair accessories wrapped in dusty plastic that seem to have been in the Cardam chain of shoe shops since they opened in 1976.” Since a central “motif of the renovated Ali Mall is a series of commissioned portraits of a boxer framed in glass at strategic points, like altars,” Magsalin seeks out all the Ali images in the mall and while recognising that “the corporate intention of co-opting the Greatest in order to shill shoes is obvious,” still, all these “reflexive signifiers, most of them tacky, are not tongue-in-cheek. They are serious gestures of veneration.”

In his most recent novel, Others of Our Kind (2013), Phoenix-based James Sallis (Drive) creates a central female character who was abducted as a child, kept in appalling circumstances by her abductor-abuser until one day she escapes into the secret spaces of a shopping mall where she lives many years as a kind of wild child. Eventually she is returned to what for her will never be “normal life,” studies successfully at university, and later proves to be a brilliant news editor at a small-town TV station. One day a cop comes calling, possessed of knowledge of her past, to ask if she will help with a case of a shockingly abused young woman they have just found. And so the story moves along and we get more information about this kind of child-kidnapping and abuse.

At the same time as he pursues this narrative line Sallis explains that the era of the “biggest mall in America” alluded to above is now past: “Malls, a long piece in today’s Washington Post makes official, are on their way out, have been so for some time, in fact… High vacancy rates, low consumer traffic, a shift toward renovation of the central city, big-box stores such as Fry’s Electronics and Walmart, all have taken their toll.”

Hundreds of malls lie “empty, gutted, abandoned.” Roofs are “ripped off, sidewalks, canals, and palm trees laid in, town houses or apartment blocks added, select malls are being reworked by developers into quirky small villages. Interestingly enough, the first American malls were intended to resemble just that.”

As depicted in Manila Noir, Manila’s malls have yet to reach this historical point; they still inhabit a time of refurbishment, expansion, of building newer, larger malls. To this extent they resemble the Bangkok malls described by Lawrence Osborne in Bangkok Days (2009), his wonderful account of many years spent in that city:

I often went wandering through the neon of Wireless Road or the electronics market at Pantip Plaza—a fine place to stroll around at night because it retains the energy of the daylight hours… the intensity of the neons stacked around several floors stung the eyes, and the words they projected meant nothing: Kensington, Epson, Zest Interactive, Hardware House. The plaza (actually a vertical mall in which the floors are stacked on top of one another) is a hip hangout for the young, who flock there at night to see and be seen…

In another mall where youth collect at night, the Siam Center—which is devoted to the cause of fashion—I noticed that the illuminated English ad panels were even more textual. It was as if the present age needed to bring certain thoughts and expressions to the surface, and that these needed to be as aphoristic as possible. Like the strange assertions that might adorn a temple or church, these were lit up like holy text, and were just as enigmatic.

In her excellent introduction to Manila Noir, editor-contributor Jessica Hagedorn describes Manila as “a woman of mystery, a femme fatale.” Lest we think this characterisation too cute or too pat, she expands on the analogy: “Sexy, complicated, and tainted by a dark and painful past, she’s not to be trusted. And why should she be? She’s been betrayed time and time again, invaded, plundered, raped, and pillaged, colonized for nearly four hundred years by Spain and fifty years by the United States, brutally occupied from 1942 to 1945 by the Japanese army, bombed and pretty much decimated by Japanese and US forces during an epic, month-long battle in 1945.” Shorter than a travel guide, and spot on.

Six of Manila Noir’s fourteen contributors are women and they provide some of the strongest pieces in this impressive collection of stories. Most of the contributors have a publishing presence beyond this collection, many have published other books or graphic novels, in some cases very many. In addition, many contributors are multiply nominated for literary awards and several are multiply awarded, so it’s a strong team assembled here. Several contributors blend meta-fictional strategies (offering alternative endings to the “same” story, shifting across different point-of-view perspectives within the “one” story) with the inherited, enabling conventions of noir, but in this case noir realised in a city beautifully described by Hagedorn as “one of the wildest cities on the planet.” Her comment finds support in some words from Manila-based novel The Tesseract by Alex Garland (author of The Beach): “Manila changed most of the people it touched… Nothing to do with coming of age or prices paid. Just the dark city.”

Mention of Garland’s novel reminds me that many Anglo-Australian readers might be familiar with some other non-Filipino fiction set in Manila, such as William Marshall’s Manila Bay (1986) and Whisper (1988), and the eminent non-fiction writer James Hamilton-Paterson’s novel Ghosts of Manila (1994). One immediate function of Manila Noir is that readers like me, who have no expertise whatever in respect of Philippine fiction, will become acquainted with a batch of indigenous (even if sometimes diasporic) Filipino writers.

Hagedorn’s contribution touches many noir bases, exploiting tropes that come with the turf of ‘Old Money’ (the story’s title) such as fallen circumstances, a bed-ridden matriarch, and the next generation with their contemporary clubs and drugs. Characters are permitted nice lines of metaphor mixed with historical summary. We are offered two endings (consistent with the ambiguity, “openness” and multiplicity exhibited elsewhere in the collection) and the final line returns us to quintessential noir terrain as rain comes.

Another female contributor, F. H. (“Ichi”) Batacan, wrote a terrific short first novel called Smaller and Smaller Circles. Published by the University of Philippines Press, it won the 1999 Carlos Palanca Grand Prize for the English novel, the National Book Award in 2002 and the Madrigal-Gonzalez Award in 2003 and is regarded as “unique in the Philippine literary scene—a Pinoy detective novel.” Purely in terms of analogy and orientation towards a national writing unfamiliar to most Australians, not at all meaning to indicate imitation, think of the start of Gorky Park plus something from Brazilian Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza in one of his “Espinosa” books plus perhaps a touch of Henning Mankell, and you’ll have some sense of how the novel lures you in. The main investigative character is compelling, a fifty-something Jesuit priest who is also a forensic pathologist (Father Augusto Saenz) who has a younger, equally engaging Jesuit priest working alongside him (thirty-seven year old Father Jeremy Lucero), as they investigate a series of deaths of young boys, each death accompanied by facial disfiguration. Batacan’s story in Manila Noir, ‘Comforter of the Afflicted,’ finds Father Saenz investigating a different type of death, and it is a delight to encounter him again. Batacan has been contracted by New York’s Soho Press to deliver an expanded version of Smaller and Smaller Circles. The manuscript is completed (the original 155 pages or so now extended by more than half) and will be published in the US in 2014. It’s nice to know that soon a wider readership will encounter these beguiling Jesuit priest-investigators.

Two other contributors, Jose Dalisay and Rosario Cruz-Lucero, hold Professorial positions at the University of the Philippines, where they teach, respectively, English and Creative Writing, and Philippine Studies and Creative Writing. Dalisay’s personal-political history saw him caught up with the vicissitudes of politics in the Philippines. He was arrested and imprisoned for seven months in 1973 after participating in student politics in the early 1970s. Ferdinand Marcos imposed Martial Law from 1972 to 1981 as a tactic to protect his own rule rather than protecting the situation of his people. Many Filipinos were killed, imprisoned or sent into exile during this period.

Dalisay has published several other novels and has received many awards and nominations. For many years he wrote screenplays for various Philippine filmmakers, but especially for Lino Brocka. His second novel, Soledad’s Sister (2008), opens with a casket arriving at Manila airport, allegedly containing the body of a certain woman, one of more than six hundred overseas Filipino workers who come back to the Philippines as corpses each year. “On a cloud-curtained evening, one Saturday in August, a corpse arrived in a zinc casket in a wooden crate at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, 237 kilometres west of Paez.” Of course the woman in the casket is not the woman in question and so Walter, a suitably morose, put-upon police officer who goes methodically about his daily routines, sporadically recalling details of how his wife and child left him to go to England four or five years ago—his son was then only nine years old—is called upon to initiate routine administrative work that later will become investigative adventure. Dalisay has a sure grasp of the mechanics of noir-investigative fiction and uses it deftly to interlace aspects of Philippine reality, whether it concerns the down-side of the fact that overseas Filipino workers (overwhelmingly female) contribute tens of billions of dollars to the basket-case Philippine economy, or the crucial presence of music in Philippine culture, or the distinctiveness of regional places and spaces outside metropolitan Manila. Dalisay’s contribution to Manila Noir, ‘The Professor’s Wife,’ is a “campus story” and it too has a great opening: “Someone died in this car I’m driving. That’s why I got it so cheap.” A postgraduate I chatted with briefly at the Diliman campus of the University of the Philippines, where Dalisay’s story is set, told me that Dalisay, in his capacity as Professor of Creative Writing, once set that first sentence—”Someone died in this car”—as an exercise in one of his Creative Writing classes.

Cruz-Lucero’s work combines oral history, feminism and socialist perspectives. She has done a lot of research into the history of labour, struggle and storytelling in Negros. She is soon to embark on a history of Philippine Noir. Her story in this collection draws on the Imelda Marcos period of building various kinds of “cultural projects,” one of which is Casa Manila in Intramuros, a kind of Disney-post-modern structure that offers a “replica of a nineteenth century Hispanic House” built in 1979. Tourist-visitors can see the grandeur of this house and also see shantytowns, thereby experiencing “the cross-section of Manila without the muck and stench and danger.” Cruz-Lucero’s story figures the past of plantations and exploitation, and a contemporary moment of ruined buildings or buildings altered to become offices and schools to cater to a transient population. Isabella and Elias, childhood friends, encounter one another again in this Disney world, and revisit the moment from their childhood involving the Davao Death Squad assassination of Isabella’s father, for which act Elias was a suspect.

One contributor to this volume, Sabina Murray, has an Australian connection, having been raised here and in the Philippines, although she now seems very settled in the US, like several other contributors to Manila Noir, six of whom work or hold teaching positions in San Francisco, New York, or elsewhere on the US East Coast. Murray has published several acclaimed novels since her initial novel, Slow Burn (1990) which applied some lessons from Jay McInerney and Tama Janowitz to a contemporary Philippine context of wealthy young things angsting, drinking and drugging and hanging out in night clubs. Her contribution here is stylish and elusive in all the right ways.

In short, this excellent collection has something for every reader’s interest. Kajo Baldisimo has a “day job drawing storyboards for Manila’s top TV commercial directors” and he combines with Budjette Tan (“creative director by day, copywriter by night, comic book writer after midnight”) to create Trese, a fetching and feisty graphic novel heroine. Trese won the Best Graphic Literature Award at the 2009 and 2012 Philippine National book Awards and there are now five books in the series. Other Manila Noir contributions involve tender tales of transvestites, manic-edgy stories involving car crashes, long-delayed familial revenge killings, murder by eye piercing after arguments about whether someone is scamming/skimming while dealing shabu (meth). So there is plenty of Philippine Noir to go around.

[This review originally appeared in Contrappasso: Noir Issue (2013)]

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

NOEL KING has worked in many Australian universities, in a variety of media and cultural studies contexts: at Griffith University (1977-1980), the South Australian College of Advanced Education (now the University of SA, 1980-1886), Curtin University (1986-1989), UTS (1989-2001), the University of Tasmania (2002-2003), and Macquarie University (2003-2012). He has co-edited two special issues of Contrappasso on Noir and Writers at the Movies.

from issue #8: ‘Love in Mini Stops’ by Andrea Pasion-Flores

LOVE IN MINI STOPS by ANDREA PASION-FLORES

SHE FELL IN LOVE WITH HIM during the monsoon season when she went out to get a bite from a Ministop store.

Even if the rains battered the glass walls of our 21st floor office, even if the winds sang a howling protest against the wisdom of their insistence to huddle under a black golf umbrella, they still went out for short orders of pork siomai, asado pao, and fried dumplings, crossing the street even if the umbrella could only keep their inner halves dry. In a storm, puddles aren’t really puddles but streams of water overflowing from the gutters to be leapt over with gingerly grace. Pia kept her hand tucked under the arm of her man as she skipped over streams on their way to, what one officemate referred to with snickering glee, their “dim sum delights.”

During monsoon weather in Manila, the skies turn a brackish grey and the southwest winds blowing from the Pacific turn potted palmeras, trees that are not quite trees, irregularly dotting the center island of Emerald Avenue, into fluttering fronds, like hands desperately calming the beating heart of a nervous bride. The Philippines is the only country in the world with no divorce, thus the words “till death do us part” sound ever so permanent. But at thirty-one, Pia was still unmarried though she was dating a man who was. Sean, the guy, was a stockbroker and a consultant for a holding company a couple of floors above ours. He was in his late forties with, I would guess, a couple of kids. But Pia doesn’t like talking about that.

Pia and I work for a call center and I used to be the one who lived on steamed or fried dim sum with her. We both have degrees from “reputable universities,” as the ad in the papers required, with Pia having the distinct advantage of a couple of semesters towards an MA in comparative literature. But degrees from reputable universities, even with units towards an MA, don’t guarantee people high-paying salaries in places like banks and multinational corporations—except in BPOs, like the one we work for, where units towards an MA actually impressed the manager, who thought Pia would naturally speak English well, which was probably why I was hired too. Who else would she have her flawless conversations in English with?

But really, it’s Pia who is the epitome of call center excellence. She very quickly perfected the friendly, impersonal tone that placates irate callers in New York—the worst of them with their hurried speech and their demanding-to-speak-to-the-supervisor tones. She counters with her I-understand-your-concerns or I-know-how-you-feel said in a melodious voice. To sound convincing, Pia speaks slowly, with an envied twang that remembers that a U has an “uh” sound and not the “ooh” of Filipino. And that, for Pia, was a lot considering she has never been to the US.

I was a June bride and, unlike the seasons in the West where June brides walk down aisles of flowers in garden weddings, I married during the monsoon. No garden wedding for me, just the one where the groom anxiously waited at the end of a church aisle, his inability to smile giving the impression that he was forced by circumstance to be where he stood. Unlike Pia, I believed in fairytale endings even if I did have a child growing inside of me that negated my happy ending and forced me to marry in a month of bad weather. At twenty-five, old enough but not quite ready to be a bride, I said the dreaded till-death-do-us-part vows. I do wonder, sometimes, if the words had not been heard through the din of rain drumming on the galvanized iron sheets of the church’s roof, do they count?

That was four years ago when, despite my misgivings, marriage and everything I thought it stood for beyond the white dress, the walking down the aisle, family crying in the pews, overshadowed all the doubts I had. With a love-conquers-all attitude eager to overcome the vastness of infinity that could not have been comprehended in a single moment, I clung to the stubborn belief that my new husband and I could weather everything till death do us part. Of course, we didn’t succeed. At least, I consoled myself, it was a slow parting; after about a year of mutual torture, he didn’t bother to come home at all.

But I’m fine. I tell myself that I can raise my son on my own, that I am strong, that I’m an I-don’t-need-a-man-to-define-me kind of girl, and so what if I do dial his number and hang up before his phone rings? And I still remember things like our anniversary, June 9. We chose the number nine because nine is a lucky number, the largest single-digit Arabic number, lucky because of love potion number nine. Many people thought I was lucky when Jason became my husband. The guy was a catch. He was tall and good looking, fairly well off with a condominium unit he was paying for, and a car to his name. He seemed decent, the kind of guy I hoped wouldn’t let a girl he got pregnant go it alone in the world. And, for a while at least I thought I had it made: I got the guy.

I’m two years younger than Pia, but I do feel older and wiser, capable of counseling her on matters such as falling in love in bad weather. Of course she doesn’t listen. I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t listen if I were in her shoes. Thus, despite my warnings and in the pouring rain, Pia fell in love over an order of fried siomai and a large Coke in a convenience store, a thirty-five-peso meal. I forgot to ask her if Sean had at least paid for her dim sum that day she thought he was the one but it would have been tragic had he not, so I didn’t ask.

All she said was that she noticed when he strode into the Ministop. She was standing in line to pay for her food as he made a beeline for the beverage refrigerators at the back before stopping by the siopao steamer to help himself to an asado pao. She knew it was an asado pao because that was the only variety that was ready that afternoon; the others, though already in the machine, were fresh from the freezer and still frozen. There were two cashiers open that day because it was relatively busy, and there were a few people who went inside to shelter from the rain, milling about the aisles of snacks, petite-sized toiletries, and magazines. He happened to line up at the other cashier and their elbows grazed each other. She doesn’t know if that was intentional on his part, but it was the moment she looked up and their eyes met. She looked away quickly only to look back up again, noticing that he had large brown eyes and thick bushy eyebrows and that he had not looked away.

“Nice weather we’re having.” He had a deep masculine voice, strong and in control, and it made her heart flutter. She noticed how thick his neck was, like it was straining out of his collar, fighting with a button and the knot of his tie that was begging to be loosened.

“The best,” she said. Then they were at the counter, where candies, chocolate bars and bananas fought for space with cigarette lighters and condoms. They didn’t leave right away because the rain was pouring in sheets and someone had wondered, she can’t remember who, whether work would be called off that day. So they stayed.

There is a smell that permeates every store, every single one within walking distance from our office. Some people are unable to place it, but those who frequent a Ministop would know that it’s the stink of used oil, of cooking balled up meats that might’ve qualified as street food except they’re not in the open polluted air of the city. The odor seeps into walls, suits, shirts, bags and even into a person’s skin so that there really is no denying having come from a Ministop. Like a tryst in a drive-in motel room that reeks of the smell of forbidden sex that can’t be hidden beneath swipes of Zonrox bleach or sprays of Lysol, the Ministop smell can’t be disguised with spritzes of Nenuco, which Pia keeps in her Louis Vuitton Speedy 30, an irrational purchase to be sure but it’s iconic, she assured me. I guess it complements her woman-of-the-world façade and the I-can-handle-casual-sex attitude, a persona she seems to be trying hard to perfect. It’s there and can’t be denied. I knew from the odor of used cooking oil when Pia had been downstairs on a break with Sean—just like when a fruity-floral smell accompanied her, it meant she had showered in her apartment with him.

When I used to come home somewhat regularly at 5:00 or 6:00 AM, I used to wonder if the excuses I made to my parents of having worked the night shift could cover the hours I spent with Jason in Pasig’s motel area. The eyes of the motel employees never meeting mine, speaking in whispers only to Jason of the room choices we had for a three-hour tryst, or a twelve-hour overnight special. I thought then that I could mask my guilt with dabs of cologne, or pretenses of being too tired to stay awake for breakfast. But then again, it doesn’t matter now because I have a four-year-old boy named JJ, after his father, a “junior.”

There is a kind of vanity to naming a child after a parent, I know. But I had another motive for agreeing to this arrangement. It’s as if the act of naming him after his father would compel the dad to make a commitment to the child, to the relationship. A child, after all, becomes more than the I-dos, more than the ceremony, more than the eternity symbolized by the ring. Sometimes, as in my case, it is the reason for being a couple after all, for a marriage. But even if that is argued as a flimsy excuse, then the naming of a child after the parent should be another reason to commit. Isn’t it an acknowledgment of paternity? The clichéd promise of continuity?

I had JJ in December, the real wedding season in the Philippines when the weather is cooler, the streets are lit with festivity, and people are filled with the hope of eternity. The cool dawn air is chilly enough for a light sweater and, if I wake up early, I can see my breath form a cool fleeting mist in the air, and I can pretend to be in the places the calls I process come from: Washington, New Jersey, New York, or California.

Pia’s dad lives in Los Anjeh-leez, Cal-fornya. When taking a call, we’re supposed to speak English with an American twang so that customers don’t suspect that their calls are taken by someone in a third world country. But they know. I hear it in the disdainful tone they use when they enunciate every syllable. If they didn’t like sending the call center business our way, they should just opt to hire the cheap labor found within their shores, like Pia’s dad for example. He left the country as a tourist and could not return to the Philippines unless he was ready to leave the US forever, armed, as was his promise to Pia, with enough money to live comfortably in Laguna where he had a plot of land to turn into a thriving business. But that was eight years ago. And, even if he worked as a supervisor at Home Depot, where he put his talent for carpentry and furniture-making to some use, there seemed to be little hope that he could turn an hourly rate into wealth to convert idle family land into a living, especially since, being an illegal, he wasn’t supposed to be working in the first place.

I know that, for a while, Pia had hoped her dad would get his green card and petition for her so that she could go to America and leave her dead-end love life behind; at least, that was how I thought her relationship with Sean was. But that was just my opinion because, according to Pia, it wasn’t like that, and Sean wasn’t like Jason. That would shut me up.

At first her dad’s calls were filled with promises of bringing her over. When that plan didn’t seem possible, it became the promise of returning home with enough money for everyone to live a comfortable life. Now, even that line seemed hollow. These days, when it comes to the topic of her dad, Pia just says she doesn’t care if he doesn’t come back as long as he sends her some money, which he does, albeit erratically: three hundred dollars this month, two hundred when he’s a bit hard up, like when his rent, car, and credit card payments are due, which is all the time. Once, however, she received five hundred dollars for her birthday, brought over by an aunt on holiday. And that seemed to make up for everything, while the money lasted—all of three weeks. It doesn’t matter I guess because, before long, our earnings were more than what Pia’s dad was sending.

Her mom apparently had long known that her dad had abandoned them. So she had taken up with another man, whom I thought had the decency to tell her up front that he had a wife and two kids he was never leaving. But then again Pia’s mom wasn’t exactly single, so that worked out, unlike Pia’s guy Sean, who was non-committal, who just had a lot of “Soon, I promise,” or “I am leaving her as soon as the kids are okay.” I would look at Pia with my you-know-better-than-that look but she would just look at me as if to say who was I to give advice? End of argument.

Sean’s wife was a salesperson in a company that sold everything from makeup to dishwashing soap, so was always traveling. According to Pia, it didn’t feel so wrong when the wife wasn’t in town. Sean would show up at her studio unit on Sapphire Street, a couple of blocks from Emerald, with a bottle of wine, a box of garlic and herb boursin and a loaf of French bread. And when he did that, Pia said it felt a little like being in a restaurant where they had real tablecloths with cushioned layers under the toppers so that the dishes and the wine glasses wouldn’t make offending clinks when the waiters set them on the table—and not a cold, quick snack in a Styrofoam box laid out on a printed paper menu on a laminated table. Sometimes he also brought jars of moisturizing cream that were the new products of his wife’s company, and that seemed to make things feel special.

Sean wasn’t like the guys at work, Pia said. He held the car door open instead of just lifting the automatic locks. He reached out for her hand across the table, rubbed her knee in the movie house, said he admired her independence and, well, maybe her legs, too. Jason actually told me that, that he liked my legs during one of those motel trips, during the part when he should’ve said I love you. But I might have equated it to mean the same thing so I believed him, the way Pia might have been convinced of Sean’s feelings for her by the moisturizing creams he brought her, though she shouldn’t have counted those because he got them for free, from his wife.

I didn’t have it that bad, Pia always liked to remind me. At least Jason still gave money for some of JJ’s necessities, even if it was only when I’d ask, of course. Never voluntarily. I would have to text him something like, “Need stff 4 JJ, cn u dep 3k in my acct?” He responds at least, even if they were digital grunts, like a “k,” or a “nxt wk.” It was enough. Well, not really, but if that’s this millennium’s idea of fatherhood, I’d best take what I can. This didn’t happen often enough to be called real support, but it did happen now and then. No complaints about how much he had to deposit, I only needed to ask and he would give it, as if to say, “Here’s the money, take it, and be gone.” At least he doesn’t complain, and if he doesn’t complain, it seemed incumbent upon me to do the same. Jason never visits, never asks about his child, never asks about anything, period. It’s just as well.

I know I should have reminded myself not to be too invested that day I told Jason I needed to meet him to get money from him personally because the need was urgent. I didn’t know what I was thinking. Maybe I thought there might still be a spark I could rekindle so that we might find our way back together instead of just ongoing messages about depositing the money in my account. Tomorrow night, if he didn’t mind. Ortigas area, I said, suggesting Florabel’s at the Podium where the food was a bit pricey but not that expensive. If Jason wasn’t going to foot the bill, I could whip out my Mastercard and think about the money later.

I wore a camel-colored jersey dress with a V-neck to show a little cleavage, making sure I do not look too desperate. The dress was ruched at the hem, and I paired it with black strappy shoes and a red clutch. I thought I looked sexy in a way that wasn’t trying too hard. It was a dress that was suitable for work, too, looking like I just threw it on in a rush and not like I tried on five dresses before I settled on it.

I was five minutes late for our seven o’clock. He was thirty minutes late, striding in in blue jeans and a blue T-shirt that had the insignia of San Miguel beer, Crocs shoes, looking, for all intents and purposes, like he just came from a car wash.

“Sorry, I’m late,” he said as he sat down, signaling the waiter for the menu. “Had to pass by Honda to have my car checked. What’s good here?”

“They have Angus beef burgers, steaks…” I answered, trying to calm the nervousness in my voice. The waiter stood silently, patiently waiting to take our orders.

“What are you getting?” He said, his eyes scanning the menu, his voice calm.

“I’m having the grilled lapu-lapu.” The waiter scribbled quickly. At 475 pesos, the dish was medium-priced and would not break my budget, I thought.

“I think I’ll have the foie gras burger,” he said. I looked quickly at how much the burger costs and noted that it was P780. With drinks, our meal would cost around P2,000 if we skipped dessert.

“Anything to drink?” the waiter asked.

“Just water for me,” I replied.

“A regular Coke, please,” Jason replied, folding the menu and pushing it towards the waiter.

I must say that I didn’t know what I wanted to happen, only that I wanted something to. So I asked him about his job, his family, and even his car. He grunted his answers and kept things politely moving along.

He ate fast but not too fast for me to think he couldn’t stand to be with me another second, which was probably why, in the middle of his sentence talking about his boss, I swallowed my lemon-buttery fish heavily seasoned with my pride and the fear of rejection that had me frazzled during the whole meal, and dared to stretch out my hand to cover his, lying brown and non-committal against the white linen. He stopped in mid-sentence and looked at me, first with a puzzled expression on his face, then something similar to a smile.

“So, you need some cash for JJ again?”

“Let’s not talk about that,” I said, hoping I conveyed in my voice and with the fingers gently rubbing the back of his hand that I wanted to communicate more than just through text messages. He must have gotten the message because he took my insistent hand, held it and leaned forward to say gently, almost like a promise, that we should get out of here.

I grabbed my purse to reach for my wallet. But he waived it away just like the old days and called the waiter for the check. When that was dispensed with, he grabbed my hand and, like kids who couldn’t get to the playground fast enough, we headed for his car. He drove towards the motel area in Pasig, picking one of the places we had gone to in the past.

It was awkward at first, like kissing for the first time. Then it was like a drink after walking the sidewalks of the city during a particularly hot and humid afternoon. It was frenzied and desperate and over quickly. We were both on the bed staring up at our images in the ceiling’s tacky mirror, where I could see our bodies separated by a foot of space I was wondering how to bridge. The blanket was up to his waist. I turned on my side to look at his face, his disheveled hair, his thick eyebrows, his nose in profile. His phone sounded: a message. He reached over to the side table to take it and started texting back a reply.

“Who is it?” I asked. I reached over to trace his face with my finger.

“My girlfriend, Linda.” It was probably the truth because the reply came fast and without hesitation. He looked at me sideways, like he realized his mistake. I laid on my back and stared at the ceiling telling myself not to make an embarrassment of myself by starting to cry. And I am your wife, I wanted to yell but didn’t.

“I’d like to go home now,” I said. I stood up, throwing the blanket behind me, looking around for my clothes, trying to put them on as fast as I found them. He got up, too, looking for the words to erase the awkwardness.

“Hey,” he said, as if trying to begin an explanation. “It’s not like we’re still together, right?” He was right. Before bringing me home, he stopped by an ATM machine. Then he dropped me off in front of my building.

“Umm, here’s the money for JJ,” he said, handing me a wad of 1,000-peso bills. I had the mind to refuse it, really. I know now it would have made me feel better if I did and made him feel worse, I’m sure. But I took the money and stuffed it in my bag and got off the car without counting it. He gave me 20,000 pesos in all, which wasn’t much, but it was much, much more than the usual. At least, I tried to console myself, he said the name of his child, which means, even if he was with someone else, that there might be that chance that he would come back for his son. Right?

Once I was in a store with JJ, buying a pair of rubber shoes when Jason came in with a girl. She wasn’t pretty, that much my own low self-esteem acknowledged as a fact. She also looked older than he did, which would mean she was older than I was. He was talking, distracted, and didn’t seem to have seen us before it was too late not to be noticed. It took him a few seconds to feel that I was staring at him. He looked at me and, for a moment, we stared at each other before his mouth hardened. He saw the child marching around the store trying out his new shoes. He feigned this look, as if assessing whether the salesperson had time to assist him, given the number of customers. Then, acting as if he saw that there were two too many, he steered his lady friend out the door. And that was the last time I saw Jason. I now always buy JJ’s shoes from that shop, hoping to bump into Jason again. It never happened. Unlike me, he seemed to consider the encounter a mistake never to be repeated, like the mistake of agreeing to see me that one time.

Then it came one day in the mail, a notice to answer a petition for the declaration of nullity of a marriage—mine. The law office where I brought the document was on the 28th floor of Winston Tower on Emerald Avenue. The air was thick with the smell of cigarettes. The glass walls met in a corner that pointed to Manila Bay in the smoggy horizon, the bright sun descending into the gray-blue waters in the distance created swathes of red and orange. Good thing Jason filed the petition in Mandaluyong, the lawyer said. Mandaluyong had judges who still granted annulments as a matter of course, he said, and everything would be okay if I just followed the path of least resistance—which was not to contest it.

An annulment, I came to learn, is the Philippine equivalent of a divorce. It can only be applied when one spouse (or both!) is declared “psychologically incapacitated,” nice legal mumbo-jumbo to mean the person is crazy. Of course the lawyer qualified this, saying that the “incapacity” may have shown up during the marriage even if a person seemed perfectly normal before the wedding. He explained that incapacity is essentially the inability to perform the duties of a spouse—give respect, support and love—which is a disease, apparently, a medical condition that is incurable. Thus, the lawyer said, his voice now slightly booming in the office, there was the necessity of an annulment. Having been fooled into a marriage with a spouse incapable of fulfilling these duties was an important factor—as if Jason had been duped into thinking that I was the kind of person he could spend the rest of his life with, and somewhere along the way towards this happy-ever-after I had failed him. Or vice versa, depending on who was willing to be the fall guy. This incapacity, the lawyer’s voice seemed to grow louder in anticipation of an enumeration of incapacities, could be seen in how the spouse may have acted like a mama’s boy or how he refused to support his child or if he used drugs or was an alcoholic or other signs of immaturity slash incapacity I might be able to think of. Choose your own adventure.

I was silent for a moment, wondering if I was about to ask an intelligent question: How about if he just didn’t come home one day? Isn’t that a manifestation of Jason’s psychological incapacity to perform the duties of a spouse?

“Well, not really,” the lawyer said, somewhat disappointed. He grabbed a pack of cigarettes on the table, making a show of pulling one out and reaching for the lighter, but he thought better of it and didn’t light up. “That’s just abandonment,” he told me, “and the legal remedy for that is just legal separation.” Being left alone holding the proverbial bag, in this case the wailing child, meant only that—being left alone. There must be something more than being abandoned, the lawyer insisted, like “a manifestation that something was wrong with him psychologically.”

“Wasn’t leaving enough?”

“No. You don’t want that.”

“I don’t?” Legal separation, the lawyer explained, his voice with its condescending tone, sounded more and more like a call I was processing, didn’t allow either of us to remarry. And marrying again, he presumed, was the option I most wanted. I must have nodded at this point, thinking to myself that, to the world, Jason must have had all his marbles intact when he decided to leave. In any case, the lawyer droned, having lost interest in the particulars of my case since Jason was the one filing for an annulment, not contesting might be the smarter thing to do.

“Let him pay for it,” the lawyer declared smugly. “You’re young. You will find someone again.” He seemed to consider that statement to be the best advice he had given the entire duration of our one-hour conversation. Getting married a second time, he said, unable to emphasize it enough, was something to consider after all.

Thus, even if I was raising our child, even if I wasn’t the one who left, even if I thought myself up to the challenge of being able to give respect, support and love, I resigned myself to the fact that I was the psychologically-incapacitated spouse because Jason was paying for the annulment. Going by the petition, my being a spoiled brat, overly-dependent, and scheming (having used our child to secure a marriage with him, not to mention how I deviously continue to use our child to extort money from him) all pointed to the fact that I was not okay in the head. Of course, this incapacity showed itself in telltale signs like my propensity to lie and my domineering behavior and of course, unfortunately for him, all this became apparent only after we were married. This said, he could not have known of my mental state before that rainy day in June. Worse, continued his complaint, I had become an unreasonable person, making demands on him for luxuries his meager salary couldn’t sustain.

“It’s not so bad,” Pia told me over her cappuccino at Figaro’s after browsing the 12-page document. “Says here he is willing to support your child, right? So, just let go, move on.”

I am all for moving on. So I kept an open mind as best I could while Pia changed the subject to talk about her dad. “He’s getting married.”

“I thought he already was.”

“He’s going to file for a divorce, marry a US citizen, get a green card and petition for me.”

I thought for a moment how seemingly simple that plan was, but I knew Pia’s dad needed a lawyer, like I did. And that lawyer might tell him that, because he’s Filipino, he should get an annulment like what I was doing so that he could marry a US citizen, as divorce applied to everybody else in the world but us. But I didn’t say that. Instead, I asked a stupid question. “Who’s the lucky girl?”

“He’s arranging something with a Suzanne, who is willing to get hitched for twenty thousand dollars up front and another twenty when he gets his green card. Then there are lawyer’s fees, expenses and all sorts of other fees.”

“How is he supposed to pay for all this?”

“Well, he asked me to help him sell our land in Laguna. Everything will be okay when he gets his green card, he promised. He’ll get a better job, a house, and all that, and he’ll be able to petition for me. As long as I stay single, he says.”

“Why do you have to stay single?”

“Because if I get married, silly, it’s as if I broke away from my parents to be on my own and I’ll have to do all this by myself. I mean it’s hard enough that I’m no longer a minor. Now that I’m an adult, the petition will take much longer.”

By which time, if it were even to happen, I thought, no one would want to marry you. But, instead of saying that, I just nodded my head and said, “Okay. And Sean?”

She shrugged her shoulders and looked at her coffee, perhaps the only clue she was willing to concede about the uncertainty of their relationship. “It doesn’t matter,” she finally said. “It’s not as if we were rushing to get married in the first place.” And she tossed her hair like she didn’t care.

“How is Sean?”

“He’s fine, I guess.” Pia shrugged. “Says it’s the time of year when he’s busy at work. He hasn’t been passing by in a while, actually.” Again, she tossed her hair, her fingers taking one end of hair to twirl.

I looked at Pia, wondering if I should probe deeper. It would be Pia’s birthday in two weeks. The other day she said she had asked Sean to get her a Louis Vuitton Neverfull GM bag. The large one described on the website was worth $900, she said with a giggle. She dropped subtle hints, like an email with a link to the website.

“That’s the spirit,” I told her. “Finally, a step above siomai!”

I told her it was as if she had given a long-time boyfriend an ultimatum: let’s take the next step or break up. Why keep at it if it seemed to be going nowhere, right?

She agreed. A LV bag might be considered this era’s equivalent of an engagement ring for relationships that do not fall within the till-death-do-us part category. She’d asked for the style that featured the trademark monogram of the brand. “It’s a classic,” she told me. “It’s like jeans or a Chanel 2.55 quilted bag.”

“Huh?”

I just didn’t get it, Pia said. “The LV will age beautifully, with the vachetta of the handles and seams developing a honey-brown patina that will make it look more beautiful over the years.”

“It reminds me of a diaper bag,” I told her back in the office when she clicked on the link to show me the bag. “And why is the name Neverfull? I can fill that up easy.” I bristled at a promise that would easily be broken.

“That’s because you’re a mom, everything is babyfied. But it’s a practical purchase,” she said. “I can put everything in it and use it every day.”

I wondered how practical it would be for Sean to bring almost forty thousand pesos in cash to the LV store in Greenbelt because he couldn’t risk his wife catching the item on his credit card bill. After which, he would have to find a way to hide his purchase from the wife and deliver it to Pia.

Two weeks later, Pia was waiting for Sean to pick her up from her apartment. For her birthday, they were going to have dinner, he said, at the Top of the Citi, a restaurant with a stunning view of the Makati skyline. It was managed by Le Soufflé and did French cuisine well. She already knew what she wanted, she told me, as she had looked up the menu online. She didn’t want to seem like she didn’t eat in proper restaurants or that all she knew of her food was spelled out on the lit menu boards of convenience stores. She would get the French onion soup, slow-cooked onions topped with a slice of baguette and smothered with Gruyere cheese. She would also order the duck confit served with the échalote sauce reduction, with blanched veggies on the side. She would suggest he get the charbroiled rack of lamb in a garlic-rosemary jus, accompanied by blanched spinach and mashed potatoes. For dessert, they would share the sugar-free chocolate decadence, drizzled with caramel sauce. The dinner would be long and intimate, and they would talk about things that matter. So she told me she had dressed up for it: a silver, sequined dress and blue high-heeled shoes with rhinestones covering the knots of delicate bows at the peep toes. She was excited and giggly, and I imagined she looked like Christmas. I was happy for her.

She had been waiting an hour before finally deciding to call me. He’s late, she said. But she tried to sound cool about it. She kept the conversation light, talking about our new supervisor who replaced the one that didn’t last six months. She tried to sound like she didn’t notice that it was way past eight, but I can imagine her nervously twirling her hair while she spoke. It was apparent that Sean was not going to come through with his promise of a Le Soufflé dinner. I wanted to tell her that it was useless to hold on to this guy who might have another girl, someone he might’ve met in another Ministop. I wanted to tell Pia to move on. Instead, I told her to hang up since he might be calling and we weren’t helping the situation in any way by holding up the phone, as if mobile phones were yet to be invented.

She might have known the futility of carrying on with the dinner, and maybe even carrying on with Sean because when Sean’s call came past the hour of nine, she was still trying to be cool and worldly like a Speedy 30.

“I’m really sorry, baby.” He said he got caught in a meeting and would be a little late. Would it be okay if they ordered in instead? He was thinking of Pizza Hut’s stuffed crust barbecue pizza. It looked really delicious on the billboard, he said, and wondered out loud if she wanted to try it with him, in bed. He playfully made his voice hoarse and sexy, in a way he knew could make Pia tingle all over. I’m not sure if she finally smartened up, or if she just looked at her sequined dress and the strappy shoes with the little rhinestones and decided that, at thirty-two, when it was almost ten in the evening, she felt a little bit tired. So she told him it was late.

“I have a surprise for you,” he insisted.

“I’m not feeling up to it,” she said.

“Another night?”

“Oh, you sound sick.”

“Yes, that’s it,” Pia said.

“Do you want me to get you something?”

“No, thanks.”

“I’ll drop off my gift at the lobby, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Happy birthday, baby. See you next week? I’ll drop by your office.” His voice sounded casual, like he had no intention of walking out of her life permanently. So she tried her best not to sound too disappointed. If someone were there watching her, she might have made a big show of saying it was nothing. But she just said okay, like everything was okay, the way people say okay when it’s really not okay.

Of course he didn’t drop by the office the week he said he would, or the week after that. It may not have been intentional, I told her, just a gradual forgetting that became a habit. This seemed to be the manner of telling that seemed most kind at the time, the way I might have wanted the truth about Jason told to me in lies because I would’ve waited just the same.

Sean, predictably, just stopped showing up. He didn’t call either, despite the many text messages she sent his way that did nothing to bolster her battered pride. After a few months, Pia and I slipped into the habit of going down for a snack together. Eventually, we stopped talking about Sean and, without having to say it, we avoided Ministop stores and found other places to spend our breaks.

But that evening when the guard knocked on the door carrying the brown paper bag with the name Louis Vuitton printed on it, I think Pia might’ve thought everything was indeed okay. And I thought so too when she called to tell me about his gift. She had carefully opened the soft dust bag that contained her new bag. The bag’s handles felt smooth and had a subtle new-leather smell. The body of the bag had the monogrammed canvas design she liked, sturdy enough to be impenetrable in the rain, and beautiful, she added, as she held it in her hands admiring the way the light reflected the hues of brown and yellow of the bag’s surface. It was a practical bag, a classic she could use forever.

*

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ANDREA PASION-FLORES was born in Manila. She is a graduate of the University of the Philippines where she received her degrees in Journalism, Law, and her MA in Creative Writing. Her fiction has appeared in the Philippine Graphic, Philippines Free Press, the UP Institute of Creative Writing’s Likhaan and Silliman University’s Sands and Coral journals. Her story collection For Love and Kisses was published by UST Publishing House, Manila, in 2014.

Writers at the Movies: ‘A Letter to Claire Danes from a Fan in Manila’ by R. Zamora Linmark

Manila. Photo CC Ree Dexter @ Flickr

A Letter to Claire Danes from a Fan in Manila

“The place just fucking smelled of cockroaches. There’s no sewage system in Manila,and people have nothing there. People with, like, no arms, no legs, no eyes, no teeth. We shot in a real psychiatric hospital…”
—Claire Danes to Premiere magazine

Dear Claire—
It is ghastly indeed: this city
crowded with cockroaches and people
who walk without legs, drive long
chrome-plated coffins without arms,
and stare imperiously at you
without eyes. Not to mention
squatters sleeping on stilts,
island panhandlers, again without arms
and legs, highway beggars,
again without eyes and hair,
and sidewalk dwellers whose walls
are painted with huge signs
reminding people not to dump trash,
piss, shit. By the way,
how was San Francisco? Are you now
back in the East, Boston or Manhattan,
that is? I am forever still in Manila,
writing you with much concern
because the City Mayor has called
an emergency meeting to ban
the showing of all your movies,
including Les Misérables. The papers
and glossy fashion magazines are
christening you “Unknown,” “Uncouth,”
“Uncultured,” “Unconscious.” Word
has it that Brooke Shields is here, too,
gambling at Heritage Casino on Roxas
with fishermen and politicians.
Is it true? Is she with André?
Are they still together? But
what you said about this city
of roaches and missing extremities
are bold impressions I cannot hold
against you, for first time travelers
from First World countries all undergo
cultural seizures here; tics
of the mind responsible for setting
off a series of generalizations
and assumptions about bugs,
blindness, and amputation. Not
excluded from this list are Filipinos
in America, like cousin Jennifer
from Daly City, Tito Bert in Wichita,
and Tita Joan in Pasadena. Claire,
I would like to invite you back
to Manila. Make another movie.
A romance, and not one filmed in a psycho
ward. Do it with Matt—Damon or
McConaughey or Broderick, but
preferably Dillon. Or Why not
Matt Mendoza, Manila’s own
achy-breaky heartthrob? And bring
with you, once more, your dollars,
your talent and, this time,
crutches and roach spray.

***

Hear the poet introduce and read this poem for the launch of Contrappasso: Writers at the Movies (April 10, 2015).

***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

R. ZAMORA LINMARK‘s latest poetry collection, Pop Verite, is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press. He has just completed his third novel titled These Books Belong to Ken Z. He is the Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor in Creative Writing at University of Miami and is currently working on a sequel to his first novel Rolling The R’s which, in 2016, will be twenty years old.

from issue #6: An Interview with Jose Dalisay

MUCH OF MY OWN FICTIONAL WORK HAS DEALT WITH LOW LIFE:

An Interview with Jose Dalisay

Noel King

JOSE DALISAY is an English professor and director of the Institute of Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines. He is the author of more than twenty books, including novels, story collections, plays, and essays; a recipient of the National Book Award from the Manila Critics Circle; and was named by the Cultural Center of the Philippines Centennial Honors List as one of the top 100 most accomplished and influential Filipino artists of the past century.

Noel King caught up with Dalisay at the Pan Pacific Manila on 19 August 2013.

KING: Jose, you are a professor here at the University of the Philippines in Manila and a writer of more than twenty books of fiction and non-fiction. How did you come to be involved in this Manila Noir anthology, how were you approached?

DALISAY: I was asked to do a story for this book by its editor Jessica Hagedorn, with whom I’ve had an email conversation of sorts over the past ten years or so, but we have never actually met. I’ve read some of her work and she’s read some of mine, and so when this project came up, I suppose I was one of the first authors she approached to write a noir story. This must have been more than a year ago. And the idea appealed strongly to me because much of my own fictional work has dealt with low life, shall we say, and I’m fascinated by the idea of Manila as a noir or noir-ish city, it’s always had that appeal for me. And so I thought, this isn’t going to be too difficult a concept to execute, and I thought Jessica would have a number of possibilities to work with depending on the authors she approached. She asked each contributor to choose a district of the city that we were familiar and comfortable with and my natural choice was my residence, my corner of Quezon City called Diliman, which is where the University of the Philippines is located. I live on campus, in campus faculty housing. And so I thought, all right, I’ll do a noir story based on campus and involving a professor. So that’s how it began.

KING: That trope of suburb-city-story applies across all of the books in the series so far. When you say you are familiar with noir, do you have any particular noir writers you admire?

DALISAY: Not prose writers in particular, it’s really noir film that’s interested me all these years, because as a graduate student in the United States many years ago I was a Teaching Assistant for a professor who taught film, and many of the movies that he chose were the noir genre, like Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai. And so that stuck in my mind.

KING: Where was this?

DALISAY: This was at the University of Michigan, in the mid to late 1980s, and since we were doing Orson Welles that film came up. I liked that whole idea of something being black and sinister, but also with profoundly human motives behind its workings, not something supernatural. I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of the darkness within people, and how people might seem utterly normal but when pushed to a certain limit that black side of them will emerge. And there’s something very stylish about noir. It’s really an angle or a way of looking at things, and I thought that for me this would be a fun exercise, and that’s the spirit in which I took this invitation from Jessica.

KING: And how was the commissioning process? You were the first writer approached, and the book happened within a year, which is quite fast.

DALISAY: Yes. Actually, we had much less than a year to write our pieces. If I recall correctly, I had about three months or so within which to come up with a story, and I delivered on time. I like deadlines. If I had been given a year I might have done it in the eleventh month! So I recall that I liked it so much that I drafted a story pretty quickly, and there was a back and forth between me and Jessica about some things that had to be edited here and there. That was perfectly fine by me, she is a very capable, sensitive editor. I stood my ground on a couple of points which had to do with how a man looked at a woman. I remember, and I told her, trust me on this, this is how we males see, this is how I would see this woman. And to her credit she accepted my explanation for that.

And we didn’t even talk about whether or how much I was going to get paid. We all did get paid, $200 for each contributor. To me that was really just a bonus, and I suppose I can speak for the others when I say that this was really more of an honour for us, especially having learned that so many world cities already had their own noir books. And we all thought, hey, Manila should have been right up there on that list much, much earlier, like Mumbai and Mexico. I can’t think of a city that reeks of noir more than this place.

KING: So you were familiar with some of the other titles in Akashic’s series?

DALISAY: Just the titles. I’d never actually seen the books. As it happened, last year on a visit to New York, I did stumble on some of those books at the Strand Bookstore, and it was amazing just how many there were, which amplified again the pleasure for me of being part of Manila Noir.

KING: And were you familiar with Johnny Temple, the founder of this independent press?

DALISAY: Not at all, I knew nothing about the publishers. I liked the name, Akashic Press. And the name, Johnny Temple, I mean how much more Hollywood-ish does it get? Johnny wrote to us and he was very nice about everything. The whole project was done very professionally, and with Jessica being on top of it, she made sure that everyone delivered. Some authors, at least one I knew of, were late for delivery and so didn’t make the cut. Jessica was very strict, didn’t care who you were, if you didn’t come up with your story on time, you were out of the project.

KING: I have the US edition of Manila Noir but since arriving here I notice that there is a Philippine edition of the book.

DALISAY: The Philippine edition was produced by Anvil Books, the country’s leading literary publisher. They are a subsidiary of the National Bookstore, which is the country’s largest bookstore chain, so the book was in good hands here. They made sure that we had a kind of splashy rollout for the book, they invited as many authors as they could round up, and we had the launch a couple of months ago at the newest National Bookstore branch in Makati, at a mall called the Glorietta. There was a pretty big crowd. I have been to a lot of book launchings here, and this was pretty sizeable. That particular day, we signed about 250 books, like an assembly line. The launch was advertised to take place from 4 pm to 6 pm and we were there until 8 pm signing books. Many of the people who attended were in their twenties and, as you might already have gathered, the main crowd-draw was the graphic novel aspect of the anthology.

KING: Yes. Well, I imagined that would be the case: Budjette Tan and Kajo Baldisimo.

DALISAY: I’d never met them, I’d heard about their work, so it was a great pleasure to meet them. They are very pleasant, unassuming people.

KING: And that’s not their day job, it’s their night job.

DALISAY: Yes. Actually, there are very few people in this country whom you might call ‘professional writers.’ I might be considered one of those although officially my full-time job is that of a professor at a university. But in terms of my income, most of it really comes from independent or commissioned work, work done outside of the university. I write biographies and histories and that sort of thing. So, like the other contributors, this project was a pleasant diversion for me. There were maybe six of us at that launch, and we all read very short excerpts from our pieces and there were a lot of questions asking how we’d conceived of our particular stories, what were our inspirations?

KING: In your case, you as a young man.

DALISAY: Yes, along those lines. I’m not sure that even half the audience really knew what noir was about, as a concept, but they were willing to discover and learn. The choice of bringing different authors together to bear down on the same general subject probably made the book quite marketable. And also, I think everybody wanted to read what their favourite authors had written for this particular anthology.

KING: I’m guessing it might also have been a little bit to do with specific urban locales. For example, if some young hipsters are hanging out in particular areas of Manila, they might want to find out how that locale is depicted.

DALISAY: Yes. And like I said, a couple of those authors, the graphic guys, and Lourd de Veyra in particular, have strong followings. Lourd has become something of a media celebrity here, partly because he’s on TV, he’s on radio, and he also has a rock band. So aside from being a serious novelist, he’s a huge draw for any kind of cultural event like this.

KING: Which could explain the demographic at the book launching?

DALISAY: Yes. I think this project was very well conceived and of the people they put together, I wasn’t exactly the oldest guy there. But I think it shows in the work too. I haven’t read the whole book, I’ve read about three-fourths of it, and from what I gather, my piece is rather different from many of the others in its sensibility.

KING: It’s also interesting that they chose to use the classical term of noir, rather than get caught up in neo-noir, post-modern noir, and so on.

DALISAY: That’s true. I think if you talked about noir in a Manila context, the first thing that will occur to people is just crime. And it’ll be crime in a very gritty, realist sense. Of course some of the other guys did their own takes on that, the graphic novel piece was notable in that respect. But that’s still, in a sense, hard-core crime.

KING: The description in a couple of stories in the collection of what we in Australia call ‘shopping centres’, and you guys and the US call ‘malls’, intrigued me. The Greenbelt Mall in Makati depicted in Lysley Tenorio’s opening story reminded me of an old friend who died recently, Mike Presdee. Many years ago in Australia, he coined the term ‘proletarian shopping’ to describe the way young people in a suburb called Elizabeth in Adelaide, South Australia, would move around the shopping town there, to be in air conditioning in a very hot summer, or warm in winter, and when it became clear to the security guards that they were not going to purchase anything, they would be moved on. So there was a resonance for me in that respect. And as a boxing fan from way back I loved reading, in Gina Apostol’s story, about the currently run-down state of Ali Mall, Cubao, whose origin dates from the Ali-Frazier “Thrilla in Manila” bout in the 1970s.

Ali Mall, Manila. Photo: When Owel Plays

DALISAY: Yes, Ali is part owner of that mall. He invested in it, and recently it’s been refurbished. It had gone down the tubes over the many years since its beginnings, but now it’s like a brand new mall. This is a city of malls. I don’t know if you’ve been to the Mall of Asia yet, which is a five-minute taxi ride from here.

KING: No. Yesterday I walked through Robinson’s Mall, on my way to Solidaridad Bookshop but the bookshop was closed, so I’ll go there tomorrow.

DALISAY: Yeah, well, that would be a teeny weeny mall compared to the Mall of Asia, which is one of the world’s biggest. And Filipinos love malls, because of the air conditioning, it’s literally just a matter of going in there to cool off, you don’t have to buy anything, but of course inevitably you do buy something.

KING: I’ve been to Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur recently for the first time, and it’s the same thing, a story of malls, the presence of famous European brands and local Asian high-end brands and people drifting around. And of course there is the famous US example of the “biggest mall in America” being in the Midwest where at one point Japanese tourists would come to play golf and shop and use it as a sort of one-stop tourist destination. Don DeLillo writes wonderfully about malls in his book White Noise.

DALISAY: But particularly in the Philippines, what sustains our malls is the fact that this is a consumption-driven economy. We don’t actually produce anything much, we just get all this money from our overseas workers, and that’s all to be spent at the malls.

KING: The Lonely Planet guide mentioned that, all those (mainly) female Filipinos working overseas and sending billions back to your economy. To shift to a genuinely productive domain, what do you teach at UP?

DALISAY: Creative writing, Philippine literature in English, and the short story. And when they are short-handed I teach American literature, again particularly the short story, but it’s really mainly creative writing, fiction and non-fiction.

KING: Can you give me a sense of your student cohort, who comes to your university, and whether they do a three year undergraduate degree and then a discrete fourth honors year à la England and Australia, or is it more like the States?

DALISAY: It’s the US system, four years. The University of the Philippines is the largest government university in the country. It’s a university system much like, say, the University of California system, with many campuses, and the English Department is one of the university’s largest departments. I think we have about sixty people full-time on staff, and we also have a large number of creative writing majors. We offer creative writing from the bachelor’s to the PhD level.

KING: How does it work at the PhD level? Do you have an exegesis to go alongside a creative work?

DALISAY: Yes, they are required to produce a substantially comprehensive critical introduction to their own work, locating themselves within a certain tradition and so on. So the doctoral creative writing thesis or dissertation would be a book-length work accompanied by that exegesis, and a slightly smaller version of that for a master’s thesis. Since UP is a rather difficult school to get into, I tend to get pretty good students. Of course, when it comes to creative writing, the whole ball game changes. You might all be good at some basic level, but some of you will be much better than others. That said, at the graduate level, typically I will teach a class of eight to ten people, and about half of them will produce work that is worth publishing.

KING: How many have gone on to publish works as a result of having done the master’s or doctoral degree, turning their dissertations into published books?

DALISAY: Well, I would say that out of about ten thesis projects, eventually three to five are published as books, so it’s not bad at all. This is a country with some talent, and at the moment it’s not all that difficult to get a book published, although ironically nobody really earns much from book sales here except for textbook writers. And the scale of publishing is still horribly low as a ratio to the general population. Let’s say we have a population now of 95 million, close to 100 million, and for most authors, a typical initial print run will still be 1000 copies.

KING: And what number of sales would constitute a best-seller or fast-seller?

DALISAY: Maybe 10,000 books. That would probably be some so-called inspirational book, or a cookbook, not a novel.

KING: In Australia it might be sports anecdotes, or gardening books. An Australian novel is seen as a best seller if it achieves sales of 30,000. And our population is only 25 million. Is there an issue here, a real question, involved in universities continuing to think of creative writing as the novel, novella or short story, when you might now be encountering a generation that wants to do graphic novels, film and TV scripts, music or some hybrid-combination of things? Some years ago I read about the first novel that was composed to be read on an iPhone, a mobile or cell phone, and it did very well, it attracted a readership of 300,000 or so; I think it was Japanese. If those sorts of forces are in the contemporary world, and therefore informing the kinds of subjectivities that you get as aspiring writers, how do you deal with all that?

DALISAY: Well, all I can say is that it hasn’t worked its way backwards far enough to affect the way I write, or my purpose for writing. But I know for some people it does. You might write shorter pieces for the Net and so on. We’re definitely aware that that’s the way the market is going, and many of us have embraced that. I’m kind of protecting myself from it.

KING: Yet your cell phone says you’re available 24/7!

DALISAY: I was the former chairman of something called the Philippine Macintosh Users Group, so I like these new technological things. More and more of our work is being made available in the e-book format and this can only be good for us, if that provides more numerous and more convenient distribution channels. Of course the romantic in me says I’d still like a book that smells, has pages, a cover and that sort of thing. But the kids these days all come to class with iPads, and that’s how I distribute my own reading material. I just have them go to DropBox and use PDFs.

KING: I like the fact that in the wake of Baz Luhrman’s film of The Great Gatsby, not only were there huge flow-on sales of Scott Fitzgerald’s book, but also enormous numbers of e-book sales.

DALISAY: Yes, I think that’s fantastic, that Hollywood was creating this kind of backlash that brings people back to the original material!

KING: I actually liked the film. Once you got past the shift of making Nick Carraway Scott Fitzgerald—which gave an acting gig to iconic Australian actor Jack Thompson—things went along very well.

DALISAY: I liked it too, I enjoyed the film.

KING: Though I did wonder why so many hundreds of thousands of people in the US needed to be reminded of The Great Gatsby by way of Baz’s film!

DALISAY: Luhrman did a great job with that film.

KING: To return to the Manila Noir collection I see there’s another writer in there whose name is F. H. Batacan.

DALISAY: She was my student, at university.

KING: Her story in here involves the two characters that she earlier set loose in a short novel, Smaller and Smaller Circles. I really liked that book.

DALISAY: That book was begun as a project in one of my writing classes years ago.

KING: Well, it was in manuscript in 1999, received awards, was published in 2002, so it must have been a project with you even earlier than 1999.

DALISAY: Possibly. I hadn’t seen Ichi, as we call her, that’s her nickname, for some years, because she was based in Singapore and only recently came home. She was there at the launch, so I was glad to see her there. There were a few people I had known from way back, she was one of them, I had also known Lourd de Vera for some time, and R. Zamora (‘Zack’) Linmark is a frequent visitor to the Philippines, and several others.

KING: It’s really nice to see that people are, variously, graphic novelists plus poets plus playwrights, novelists, non-fiction writers. Another question I wanted to ask concerns publishing in the Philippines; do you have subsidies, is there a sort of nationalist interest in subsidising work by Filipino writers?

DALISAY: Well, there are grants, yes. We have the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, and they release grants on a competitive basis to applicants, authors, who apply to them directly. But mostly the support comes in the form of grants for workshops, for gatherings, for the teaching of writing and of literature.

KING: Does any funding go to publishers?

DALISAY: Not that I know of.

KING: I only ask that because back in the 1980s Ken Worpole in London, long before New Labour, in the time of ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, wanted the freedom to start funding publishers directly rather than writers. He felt that would be a better way of getting books moving about the culture. I have no idea what happened to that initiative, whether it was adopted and, if so, whether it was successful.

DALISAY: I’m not aware of that being done here. Nothing substantial for sure. The National Book Development Board has recently been very active in pushing, in supporting both publishers and authors. Andrea Pasion-Flores—herself an excellent writer of fiction and also a lawyer—just left the job of Executive Director for that body. It used to be pretty much dormant, and she made a very dynamic intervention. So I think things are looking up, from the Filipino perspective.

KING: Could you briefly say something about how you came to be imprisoned during the Marcos years? Decades later it generated your first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place, which I see recently has been republished in an edition with your second novel, Soledad’s Sister, becoming In Flight: Two Novels of the Philippines. I should add here for readers unaware of this time in Philippine history that Martial Law was introduced not to protect the people, as one might usually think of its use, but rather to protect the Marcos dictatorship.

DALISAY: Well, I entered university in 1970, and very quickly got involved in the student activist movement, which was both anti-Marcos, anti-dictatorship, and also to some extent Marxist. For all these reasons I got imprisoned in 1973 for a little over seven months, and yes, that experience formed the basis for my first novel that was published in 1992, almost twenty years later. My experience is shared by many others of my generation, coming out of that Martial Law period. I didn’t get back to university until ten years later, so I graduated with my bachelor’s degree pretty late, but as soon as I did, I decided that the university would be the best place for me, to write, study and teach. It’s a great place for writers I think. I’ve done work in both fiction and non-fiction, I actually started out as playwright and as a screenwriter.

KING: You wrote screenplays for Lino Brocka. The Internet Movie Database lists twenty or so stories and screenplays for which you have been responsible.

DALISAY: I did maybe about twenty-five movies from the 1970s until the early 2000s, quite a few of them with Lino Brocka, about fourteen I think, but mostly they were forgettable movies. We had to churn these out. I used to write a script in three weeks, the shortest was three days.

KING: That great old classical Hollywood B movie thing! And in this region you would also have the example of Hong Kong cinema’s mode of production, the Shaw Studios.

DALISAY: Oh, yes, Run Run Shaw, that whole scene.

KING: No union, no overtime paid as shooting days extend.

DALISAY: Exactly, sometimes I’d get paid and sometimes I wouldn’t.

KING: Well, you are in distinguished company. Bernardo Bertolucci tells of how in his early filmmaking days he didn’t get paid properly for his scriptwriting on some spaghetti westerns, one of which involved Sergio Leone!

DALISAY: Basically, I’ve always been writing for a living, and the academic side of me is really just the icing on the cake. I had to do an MFA and a PhD to validate my university credentials.

KING: Were they both done at Michigan?

DALISAY: No, I did my PhD in Wisconsin, at the Milwaukee campus, because they didn’t have creative writing in Madison at that time.

KING: Did Milwaukee have their Centre for Twentieth-Century Studies running then?

DALISAY: I think that was just getting started when I was there, although we didn’t have too much to do with it. When I did my MFA at Michigan, I had a great time, working with people like Charles Baxter. I had very good mentoring there, and I’m grateful for that. I would have been writing anyway, but going to university gave me deadlines to meet, and that was good. I was like a house on fire in my twenties and thirties, that’s when I produced much of my best fiction. Then in my forties and fifties I kind of tapered off into doing basically commercial work, although I’m always at work on one novel or other. And at the moment I’m working on my third one, which again is about low life. It features a call centre agent, call centres being the thing of the day here in Manila.

KING: Can you elaborate a bit more on that, because I see stories in newspapers saying that X spent some time working in a call centre, graduated from somewhere, and went on to become a successful writer; I think in that particular case, the writer was Indian.

DALISAY: Well, we’re right next to India, if we have not actually overtaken them, in the call centre business. Filipinos are fairly proficient at English, so it’s a huge plus for us. Over the past ten years or so the call centre industry has been one of the fastest growing industries in the country. Call centres here service western clients on the other side of the world. Most call centre people work at night, and that in itself is very noir-ish, because it’s created what I call a ‘vampiric culture.’ These kids are up and about, wired at 3 in the morning. They get off work and look towards the nearest open bars, and a whole economy has grown up around these call centres: bars and shops, and little strip malls that cater to nothing but these night-time work agents coming out after their work finishes. And for many young Filipinos, it’s a logical next step after graduation. You make good money quickly until you settle on what you really want to do. My sole remaining vice is poker and I play in all-night binges a couple of times a week, and it’s always 3 or 4 in the morning when a crowd from the call centres comes into the poker room, so that’s the milieu I’m working with in this novel-in-progress.

KING: And how close are you to finishing your version of The Cincinnati Kid?

DALISAY: I’m about a third of the way through, it’ll take me another couple of years to get this done.

KING: It sounds like a great example of what Godard was up to when he was trying to persuade Diane Keaton and Robert de Niro to do a movie with him, a movie about Las Vegas, casinos, the Mob, Bugsy Siegel. Colin MacCabe’s book, Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (London: BFI/Macmillan, 1980), has a couple of pages where Godard has collaged some images of the two stars, and there is a great sentence where Godard says, in effect, “People have been working all day long for the industry of day, in factories and offices. Now they’re going to work for the industry of night: the money earned during the day will be spent on the night of sex, of gambling, and of dreams.” So why not call your book The Industry of Night and toss in Scott Fitzgerald’s much-quoted remark that “in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.” That could be your epigraph.

DALISAY: There you go, there you go. I am fascinated by that 3am crowd at the poker room. Because you’ve got these call centre agents, you’ve got off-duty cops, you’ve got female impersonators, I mean transvestites, also coming from their shows, and all kinds of, you know, the strangest birds, and you see them gathered in that place at that time.

KING: On this matter of poker and gambling, is Filipino culture as fanatical about gambling as Chinese or, at least, Hong Kong culture?

DALISAY: Not that fanatical. It’s hard to match the Hong Kong people. Here I probably should add that there are many new young Filipino writers coming up, and what we have begun to discover is the international market. I keep telling my younger writer-friends that they really should start looking at finding agents, and going through that whole process, because we’ve been writing in English for over a hundred years now, and surprisingly, in terms of making our presence felt in the international literary market, we have been left behind by the Chinese, the Vietnamese, the Koreans, the Indians of course. And I suspect that in some strange way the fact of our writing in English is actually pushing us back rather than forward, because it’s a suspect English. I think people would rather find something in Chinese and then translate that, and that would be more saleable than something written by a Filipino in an English that sounds neither American nor British. So that Filipino proficiency in English could actually be a liability. In any case, I think we have very interesting material here.

KING: Were the Marcos years leading up to Martial Law the defining experience of your generation?

DALISAY: For my generation, born in the early ‘50s, yes, but the defining experience for the Filipino of today is the diaspora of our workers, about a million of whom now work overseas. That’s why I wrote my second novel, Soledad’s Sister (Manila: Anvil, 2008) about that experience. And I think that is also changing Philippine society and Philippine politics in a very strategic way. Some of that experience will be negative in the sense of the social price to be paid for all of these absentees, fathers and mothers, but of course economically it’s a boon. I think in the long run politically that will be a positive thing in the sense that all these people will come home with raised expectations. They’ll say, you know, that if trains run on time in Germany or wherever, then we expect things to happen here like that.

KING: As a Filipino male who is hard working, clearly very industrious, could you, as a closing comment, give me some indication of why the Filipino male enjoys the status of being pretty much a wastrel, dilettantish, in respect of a whole range of Filipino women who do all the work?

DALISAY: The Filipino male is a pampered creature. We all like to think of ourselves as macho men, but actually we are all babies here. And it’s fun if you are a male. I think we are all somewhat ashamed of the fact that we rely so much on our women to do the heavy lifting for us. That’s also a message I try to put through in my own writing, that when push comes to shove, the women take care of the important things in this country, and we Filipino males should be thankful for it.

from issue #6: ‘Dear Jesus’ by R. Zamora Linmark

DEAR JESUS by R. ZAMORA LINMARK

for Ku’ualoha Ho’omanawanui

Dear Jesus:

My worst nightmare is about to come true. Yesterday, the Senate Committee on Judiciary and Labor approved the same-sex marriage legislation bill. 20 to 4. And now it’s up to the House of Representatives to kill the bill. But what if they, too, flew over the cuckoo’s nest? That’s why I’m flying there tomorrow. I’m going to withdraw whatever money I have left in my checking account, take the first flight to Honolulu and give these loonies a piece of my mind. That’s right. Hold on, Jesus, I’m now on the line with a Hawaiian Airlines ticketing agent from, of all places, Philippines. Dear Lord, Honolulu is only half hour away by plane from here and I have to call someone in the Philippines to book it…. Just got off the phone. They’re charging me four arms and six thousand legs as if I’m Imelda Marcos. What a rip off. And they don’t offer Senior Citizen discount. So much for Aloha Spirit… Calm down, Marie, calm down… Screw it. I’m willing to overlook the astronomical cost of this ticket due to the gravity of the matter. Otherwise, I’d tell them too to go choke on my monthly SS! I’d rather go hungry for the next couple days than allow this bill to be passed. I don’t care if I have to testify three, four, five thousand times. I won’t stop until these so-called progressive legislators wake up and realize that they’re doing more harm than good. This is not in the best interest of the peoples of Hawaii. I know it. The majority knows it. Come tomorrow, they will know who Marie Machado is and what she stands for.

Marie Machado, Hana, Maui.

*

 Dear Jesus:

I have two mommies. Am I greedy?

Alexander Rosales, 3^rd grade, Kapalama Elementary.

*

Dear Jesus:

Did I wake up in the wrong state? Is today Halloween, October 31, 2013? It is, right? All this talk of gay marriage makes me want to puke. That’s what I want to do right now. Puke the bowl of kim chi chigae I ate last night all over the grounds of State Capitol. This Senate Bill 1 makes me sick to the bone. I should call in sick. But I can’t afford to miss a day’s worth of work. I already got written up twice for being late. But this is more important than ushering losers to their seats or telling them to get their toe jams off the seats or picking up their trash or shining the flashlight on their faces to shut their snoring up. If that fat cow Shawna fires me, so be it. I’ll miss the free movies and fifty percent off of popcorn and hot dogs. Fuck it. This is not the only job in the world. There are a thousand more out there I can get fired from. My sick call is legit. It’s an act of sacrifice, me as the lamb willing to sacrifice his bread and butter just for you, Jesus, because I love and believe in you. All I ask is that you help me write the most convincing testimony, because I’d hate to make a fool of myself in public, especially since Olelo cable TV is live-streaming the entire hearing.

Charles Kwon, McCully.

*

Dear Jesus:

My church says if gays free to marry in Hawaii, I going have to pee in one gender-neuter toilet. What that mean?

Jonathan, 8, Island Paradise Nursery.

*

Dear Jesus:

Deep in my heart, despite my break from the Catholic faith at age twelve, a separation I attribute to this day to my parents who showed me step-by-step how to shatter love in fifty-plus ways, I still believe that you never really left me, that, through all these years of more downs than ups, you were here all this time to witness my faults and flaws, guiding me in your own peculiar way out of my bleakest hours and reminding me over and over how infinite and powerful love is, how it goes beyond borders and limitations regardless of who we choose to love and grow with.

Brendalyn Chadwick, née Brandon Terada, St. Louis High alumni, class of ‘86.

*

Dear Jesus:

Same-sex marriage is not right. It’s not pono. It’s not Hawaiian. It’s pilau. I repeat: IT’S NOT PONO! It’s PILAU!

Joshua, Papakolea.

*

Dear Jesus:

Why is Governor Abercrombie making such a big fuss over this bill? What’s the rush? Are we on fire? Why is he insisting on resurrecting a dead bill? This SB1 hearing is unconstitutional. It’s undemocratic. A similar bill was already passed, favoring civil union among same-sex couples, back in 1998. Senate Bill 232. It went into effect in 2011, February 23, to be exact. It was amended in 2012 by the House and, as Act 267, was signed into law by Abercrombie himself. July 6, to be exact. I know that date very well because that’s the birthday of my daughter Caprice. If this is what they really want, then they should open it to the public and let us, the people of Hawaii, decide.

Atty. Amy Chun-Goldstein, Kailua.

*

Dear Jesus:

Tell the bitches to stand in line because once this bill passes, I’m proposing to Rep. Kaniela Ing. What a fox! What a babe! And what’s more—he’s a Christian!!! He had me when he quoted the great philosopher Macklemore. In case you were busy listening to the gang of dumb and dumber, this is what he said during the televised interview: “To me, this bill is about love and acceptance. In Hawaii, we call it aloha. One person in the audience stated that it’s the wrong love. I don’t agree. I agree with Macklemore: It’s the same love.” Triple sigh, Jesus. Lead the way, Kaniela. I’m right behind you.

Kendrick Shibata, Kapahulu.

*

Dear Jesus:

Same-sex marriage in Hawaii? OMG, OMG. It’s going to happen, isn’t it? It better not. But it might, oh, shit, it might. Then again, I might be wrong. I still have an ounce of faith left in the local government, like my representative for Ewa Beach and Iroquois Housing, Mataele Mataele. But what if I’m right? What if they pass this godawful bill. Oh, Jesus, prove me wrong. I’ve been wrong many times. I’m a walking mistake, so let me be wrong again. Go give ‘em hell, Rep. Mataele. We got your back.

Kapono Lum, Ewa.

*

Dear Jesus:

What more do they want? We’ve already included them in the Hawaii Civil Union Law. They already have the same rights, benefits, and protections granted to married couples in Hawaii. Talk about G-R-E-E-D-Y. No surprise, considering many of them are capitalists, hold several college degrees, and lead lascivious lifestyles. They’re not outcasts like you, Jesus. No, siree! They’re Sodom and Gomorrah in Mini Coopers and designer labels.

Braddah Billy Jo Cruz, Waianae.

*

Dear Jesus:

Please, pretty please, pass the same-sex marriage bill already so my Uncle Jimmy and Uncle Arnold can get married. Twenty years they’ve been together. Don’t you think that’s long enough to be living in sin? Uncle Jimmy said that if Hawaii wakes up to equality, they will definitely move back from Glacier View, Alaska. Population: 249.

Carlton Cho, Roosevelt High, alumni of Bruno Mars.

P.S. I think I may be like my two uncles.

*

Dear Jesus:

Please remind your homophobic believers that the Civil Union law that went into effect two years ago is a law that “makes same-sex AND OPPOSITE-SEX COUPLES eligible for civil union recognition.” I put “AND OPPOSITE-SEX COUPLES” in bold because I think you need to yell it into their deaf ears.

Iwalani Aweau, Waipahu.

*

Dear Jesus:

If you love your children, you would make Governor Abercrombie stop being a hippie and see the light. Not broad daylight but the real light, like yours, you know, the kind that makes you blind but shine.

Sandra Watabayashi, Washington Middle School.

*

Dear Jesus:

This whole legal is so complicated so confusing I no understand why anybody in their right state of mind like be one lawmaker. I watching these guys on TV right now and I feel like I watching one kung fu movie without subtitles or David Carradine in it. But I a curious human being. I like know what the heck is going on so these guys no can pull their wool over my eyes, you know what I mean? Plus I a responsible kamaaina. I voted in the last election. I even made my own bumper sticker. NOBAMA. Yup, that was me. Anyway, let me see if I understand what the heck is going on so far. Feel free to stop me if I wrong, okay? Okay….Yesterday, the state Senate approved the SB1 bill 20 YES to 4 NO. This bill is now in the hands of the House of Representatives. Apparently get all sorts of committees in the House, which I never knew until now but which also kinda make sense if you see these committees as bedrooms in one big house. So for this bill get two committees in charge—House Judiciary and House Finance. This part I not going even attempt to ask why them and not the other bedrooms. I figure these legislators know what they doing. I pray so. That’s why they on TV and I not. If the majority of the two committees vote NO, then it’s as good as a mongoose trapped in a highway of road rage drivers. If they pass this bill no mean it’s a done deal. The rest of the House members gotta vote, which is kinda like back to square one. It also give previous committee members a second chance to change their vote. If the majority of the House gets the YES vote, then the bill go back to the Senate, where it all started. So kinda like full circle, except circle not perfect, is never perfect.

Mako Tokioka, Haiku Valley.

*

Dear Jesus:

My Uncle Russ is very good looking and can score any wahine he wants. But he wants a man. He said so himself. I’m gay, Cedric, he told me, gay as the rainbow on the U.H. football helmet. But hard to believe because he’s more butch than Auntie T.J. Yet he insists. Gay as a shoe-tapping senator in a toilet stall of a Minnesota airport, he said. Not European, not bisexual, not even Chinese or samurai, but gay, he said. Gay as a Brokeback shepherd. Confusing as it is, I have no choice but to believe him, because if he were into wahines or if he were European, bisexual, Chinese or samurai, I won’t be so confused with this prayer. Where was I?

You see?

Lost again, Cedric.

*

Dear Jesus:

As you already know, my ancestors fought in the American Revolution. Most of them died for the sake of religious freedom. It was this war that led our forefathers to create the U.S. Constitution. And now, these so-called legislators are treating it as if it’s nothing, as if it’s inconsequential, irrelevant, and therefore, replaceable. Who are they, anyway? It’s not up to them to mess with our Bill of Rights. They are only representatives, not gods. Their job is to uphold it, not defy you.

Martha Dudley, Punahou.

*

Dear Jesus:

Why are so many gorgeous guys gay? I thought you were on my side.

Lana Fukunaga, Sacred Hearts Academy.

*

Dear Jesus:

Please procreate my mommy and daddy. They need it badly.

Love, Carver, 1^st grade, Lanakila Elementary.

*

Dear Jesus:

This bill is going to harm the Hawaiian people. This is only going to divide us further, like the Great Mahele. Divide and conquer. That’s what these lawmakers want to do to us Hawaiians. They already stole our aina, imprisoned our queen, ravaged our natural resources, desecrated our heiaus, our sacred temples. And now, they want to deprive us of our religious rights too? Hell, no.

Kawehi Aui-Johnson, Makakilo.

*

Dear Jesus:

If not for you, my daddy will have no one to turn to after he black-and-blues my mommy. Thank you for being there.

Always, Melissa, Kindergarten, Queen Ka’ahumanu Elementary.

*

Dear Jesus:

Some of these Representatives should be stand-up comics. They crack me up. The bestest one so far is Rep. Mataele Mataele. He said if the legislature insists on NOT letting the people vote on this issue, he’d have no option but to bring a riding whip, a bag of Purina, and Lysol spray to the State Capitol. “The riding whip and the dog food is for the dog and pony show we been made to participate in,” Rep. Mataele Mataele said. “And the Lysol spray is to kill the stink coming from this bill.”

Michael Maliglig, Lower Makiki.

*

Dear Jesus:

We don’t need another Sin City. We already have Vegas, our ninth island. We practically fly there at least once a month. Given this fact of a matter, do we really need to bring our sins closer to home?

Ronald Hayashida, 67, Pearl City.

*

Dear Jesus:

I would just like to enlighten my Hawaiian brothers and sisters, as well as the kama’ainas, Asian settlers, and Hawaiian wannabes on the topic of aikane, which is the Hawaiian word for today, Friday, November 1, 2013. Aikane is loosely, if not lazily, defined as the Western counterpart to a homosexual or bisexual. Native Hawaiian scholars, however, argue that, although aikane involved men engaging in same-sex or bisexual relations, this accepted ancient Hawaiian practice refers more to the power-and-class-based relationship rather than to sexual identity or activity. In such relationship, the aikane referred to the lover/beloved who belonged to the lower class or nobility ranking, while his lover/beloved was part of the ali’i, or nobility. A popular example of an aikani-based relationship is between that of Kamehameha the Great, our first king who was responsible for unifying the islands, and his aikane partner, the high chief Kuakini who also served as his important adviser. Aikane. The Other as the Lover/Beloved/Subject of Desire.

Samuel Beamer, Assoc. Professor in Hawaiian Studies, University of Hawaii, Manoa.

*

Dear Jesus:

Aloha, J.C. It’s me, Chang Hae Park, 2^nd generation Korean American Christian, as you can tell by my name. I’m 20 years old and currently attending University of Hawaii at Manoa, majoring in Electrical Engineering. As a young and healthy heterosexual, I hope to someday marry and start a family. But if this bill passes, it won’t be healthy to bring up children in such an environment. I don’t want my children to think it’s OK to be lesbian or gay because it’s not. I don’t want my son to know about the birds and the bees before he hits puberty, or for my daughter to learn about pregnancy prevention before she has her first period. We are not in Canada!!!

Chang Hae Park, 20, Moi’ili’ili.

*

Dear Jesus:

I blame all this trash talk of same-sex marriage on pop artists like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. Just because homosexuals and lesbians were born that way doesn’t make two wrongs a right. Just because Katy’s “I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It” is upbeat and easy to dance to doesn’t make lesbian sex something to roar about too. Why not light up our Top 40 lives again, Jesus, and bring back the one-hit wonders, like Debby Boone? I’ll take Amy Grant over Amy Winehouse any day.

Loretta de los Reyes, Kapalua, Maui.

*

Dear Jesus:

It’s me, Marie Machado, remember me? Yes, the one and only Marie from Hana, Maui. Well, as you can see, I made it. I took the first flight out of Lahaina this morning, only to be turned away. That’s right, Jesus. I, Marie Machado of Hana, Maui, seventy-eight-years of age, and of Portuguese and Okinawan descent was denied her right as a tax-paying retiree to testify against same-sex marriage. Well, almost denied had I not put up a fight. The reason given to me was that I missed the midnight deadline. I told them how the heck was I supposed to know about the midnight deadline? I don’t live in Honolulu. I am from Hana. I spent my entire life savings to fly here so I can put a stop to this madness initiated by Abercrombie and Company. Luckily, Representative Sharon Har—a beautiful Hapa lady (who reminded me of myself when I was her age)—overheard my boiling words and came to my assistance. I explained to her my situation. She told me not to go anywhere, that she’d be right back. I told her I was staying put and solid as the statue of Father Damien outside the Capitol. She returned in a matter of minutes and told me she’d secured a two-minute slot for me to give my testimony. Bless her heart, I am testifier #4,786.

Marie Machado, still pissed off as Pele.

*

Dear Jesus:

Same-sex couples are currently missing out on 1,100 Federal benefits by not being legally married. Need I say more?

Dominic Cortez, Lunalilo Heights.

*

Dear Jesus:

On this Saturday morning, 2^nd of November, I will open the day with a prayer to you, knowing the entire state is probably at this very minute doing the same, i.e., competing for your attention, telling you that their prayer is more unique and far from the usual boring ask-and-then-ignore-once-it’s-been-answered… Jesus, there are certain things about this SB1 bill that I think you should know, and that extremely anxious and religious parents and teachers are not telling you. Before I proceed, I want to give you a brief introduction about myself, just so you know where I’m coming from. I’m an educator for 27 years. I received my M.A. in Sociology from Berkeley and my doctorate in Education from the University of Hawaii of Manoa. Regarding the concerns many parents have surrounding this bill and its effects on public education, I’d like to inform you that: 1) there’s no portion in this bill that advocates for change in education curriculum. Such issues are handled by the Hawaii Board of Education and Department of Education, and their policy states that all curriculum must be standards based. 2) As for sex education, Hawaii is an abstinence-based state, meaning we teach our students about abstinence as the best prevention and protection from pregnancy, infections, and diseases. And 3), should this bill pass—and most likely it will—parents will have the option, as they do now, to have their children not participate in such class discussion.

Amalia Buenaventura, P.Ed, Leeward Community College.

*

Dear Jesus:

“Love is an illusion created by lawyer-types to perpetuate another illusion called marriage to create the reality of divorce and the need of divorce lawyers.” Andrew McCarthy’s character in St. Elmo’s Fire.

Gordon Wong IV, a former Jehovah’s Witness.

*

Dear Jesus:

The Hawaii Attorney General David Louie is for gay marriage. Twenty members of the State Senate are for it. The Department of Taxation and the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission are for it. The Department of Health, under Director Loretta Fuddy, is ready to issue marriage licenses to gay and lesbian couples. Is the fight over? No, for outside the Capitol I hear the clamor of my brothers and sisters. “Let the people vote! Let the people vote!”

Charmaine Iwalani Vargas, Temple Valley.

*

Dear Jesus:

I’m anxious about the future of Proverbs 22:6—”Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.” If SB1 passes, there will be no way but to turn gay. Jesus, kill SB1 bill now before this gay plague kills us.

Sharlene Ogawa, Aiea.

*

Dear Jesus:

Whether this bill gets passed or not, I cannot, I repeat, I cannot honor such law. I don’t care if they have to arrest me, Jesus, or fire me from my state job. I love my job. The records show I excel at it. I love the law. I protect the law. But over my dead body if I have to abide by one that is imposed on me and my children and nieces and nephews and grandchildren, a law that results to nothing except to disrespect and dishonor my Almighty Father in heaven.

Albert Broadbent, President, State of Hawaii Organization of Police Officers.

*

Dear Jesus:

Why are there no lipstick lesbos or butchies with mullets or scandalous mahus in the Bible? Just whores, pricks, assholes and war-lovers. What happened to us being all equal in God’s eyes? Not fair. Not fair.

Trinity, homeless.

*

Dear Jesus:

Knock knock?

Who’s there?

Ima.

Ima who?

Ah, you mahu.

I not mahu. Maybe you the one mahu.

I no suck dick.

That’s not what Kerwin tole me.

Bull-lie.

After school. Behind Portable C. Five times Kerwin said.

So? He wen’ suck me too.

See? I knew it.

Knew what?

Tell you tomorrow.

No. Tell me now.

Meet me behind Portable C. Five minutes.

Four minutes.

K.

*

Dear Jesus:

I was tired of being an astronaut, so I told my mother I wanted to be a lesbian, just like my Uncle J.R. So guess what she did? She took me straight to Fantastic Sam’s and ordered the barber to make a mullet out of me. I cried the whole day, Jesus. I looked so ugly, so white trash, like Miley Cyrus’s father—and I’m not even Haole. I’m Okinawan. I’m still crying, Jesus, and today is already the third day. I begged my mom to shave it off, just shave it off, please, Mom. She said no, because she said I looked good as a lesbian, especially with my mullet. Jesus, if you love me, please shave my head bald while I sleep. I promise I’m never going to wish to be a lesbian again. Ever.

Previn Higa, 9, Prince Kuhio Elementary.

*

Dear Jesus:

Is Mercury in retrograde again? Or is Venus in Uranus?

Just kidding. Marty, Moanalua.

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Dear Jesus:

I open today’s Sunday paper to read about a teen who woke up covered in flames. He had dozed off on the school bus when his classmate, also sixteen, had set him on fire. When asked why, he said it was because the boy, after repeated warnings, continued to attend school in a skirt. Welcome to the future!

Julie Tadayashi, Kaimuki.

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Dear Jesus:

I don’t like the new blue M&M’s. Can we let the people of Hawaii vote to abolish it?

Kelly Pacheco.

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Dear Jesus:

In case the same-sex marriage equality bill no pass, can I, Bully Kupihea Jr., still be head cheerleader for the Kapa’a Warriors and wear my hot pants and do my Shakira-waka-waka dance routine during halftime?

Love u 4-eva, B.K.J., Kapa’a High.

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Dear Jesus:

I’m beginning to sound like a broken record. SB1 is not about what gets taught in classrooms. It’s about the thousand-plus Federal benefits that, at present, are denied to same-sex couples. But since we’re back on the topic of pedagogy, students discussing gay and lesbian characters in novels and short fiction don’t turn them into raging fags and dykes, as someone argued in their testimony, just as learning about drugs won’t turn you into an addict or a prostitute.

Amalia Buenaventura, P.Ed, Leeward Community College.

*

Dear Jesus:

Why don’t they listen to me? I’m a millennial. My opinion matters the most. I am the future—bright, promising, full of hope. But this bill, if it passes the House, is going to turn Hawaii into another Canada, where all public bathrooms are unisex. The thought of sharing toilets with the opposite sex is frightening. Worse, if it’s with the same sex. Oppose SB1 bill NOW and save Hawaii from becoming the next Canada.

Linda, New Hope, Farrington High.

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Dear Jesus:

When I grow up, I want to start my own ministry and be the first gay minister. I’ll call it “New & Improved Hope” or “Hopelessly Devoteds.”

Michael/Michelle, 14.

*

Dear Jesus:

Okay. Here goes. Please no mine my grammer, Jesus. I jus like share wit you my testamoney dat I goin’ give at the State Capitol tomorrow. Like my Repretensative Mataele I only wen’ go up to Turd World edumacation. But dis mo impotant. Now, you know me, Jesus, you know I no mo nutting agenst gays. Lesbiyans I get plenny, but not mahus. Watever dey like do in da privasy of der own home, well, das der kuliana. I get plenny mahu freinds and I goin be a liar if I tole you I never explored der dark side of life. You alredy know dis I’m sure. My wife Marlene know too. As your Fada is my witnes, I no mo nutting for hide. My life just like one open book alredy. Stay short but true. If you read ‘em, everything goin be right der on da first page. Wat gets my goat is dat dem mahus and wahines who stay stiring up all dis cantroversy is sending one false mesage to our kekis. Dey argyu dat to be gay and lesbiyan is not a choise. I agree. Das why leopards get spots, yeah? I know hard for dem to be like dat. I know not easy for dem to put up wid discremanation. But wat I like know is if dey know dat alredy den why stoke da fire even more? Why even bring up kekis in dis world? Besides, the world alredy made in China! Dont dey know dat wats hard for dem going only be harder for der children? But dey no can see wat I see becuz dey not part of da lite. In regardless, dis dey should tink about real hard. Sending dem my prayurs, Jesus. Peace. Love.

Willy from Maunawili.

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Dear Jesus:

Shame on Mataele. Does he even know what “conscientious objectors” mean? Or is he just quoting phrases from the Constitution, Chapter 5, Verse 33.6? Didn’t he flat-out told the molecular biologist Dean Hamer that he should be spoken to in lay lingua because he’d only received a Third World education? Does he know—or is he even aware—of the repercussions of such remarks? Which Third World is he referring to? Hawaii? Brigham Young University? Or his worldview?

Kaipo Williams, Waimanalo.

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Dear Jesus:

I been waiting since Thursday to give my testimony. It’s now Monday, November 4. I already missed two days of work. Might not seem much to the average Joe Blow, but that’s still gas money to a North Shore guy like myself who has to drive 15 miles into town just so I can afford to eat at McDonald’s three times a day. And it’s not like I can just up and leave the State Capitol because if I’m not here when they call my number—3,405—they’ll just skip me as if I never paid my annual taxes, which means I’ll have to get another number and miss more days of work, and if that’s how it’s going to be, then the State should make up for my lost income because they’re the one who called this special session from out of the blue, I mean, everything was quiet on the North Shore front until they pulled this stupid stunt on us.

Marlon, Sunset Beach.

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Dear Jesus:

Janina here. Freshman lipstick lesbo from Kahuku High. Just found out Cover Girl discontinued their Bistro Burgundy line. SOS.

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Dear Jesus:

Did I hear it right? Did he or didn’t he—a cop AND the President of the Organization of Police Officers—just swore that if this bill gets passed, he is willing to lose his job, get arrested or be killed, as it would turn him from a law enforcer to a lawbreaker? Talk about shooting one’s self on the hoof!

Joni Chinen, Ala Moana

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Dear Jesus:

Many homos believe we at New Hope hate them. Please. The world doesn’t revolve around them. There are more crucial issues in this world than seeing two men or two women exchanging vows at the altar, like organ trafficking and global child prostitution. Plus, it’s not as if they were born-again yesterday! Spare us the melodrama.

Moses Cabral, Moanalua.

*

Dear Jesus:

Do you think James P. Kealoha who sits behind me in Algebra and copies my homework is bi-curious? If you think so, tell him my over-the-shoulder-look means that I think he’s jalapeño-hot and that I wouldn’t mind losing my divine virginity to him. Tell him I can host from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., which is when my mom comes home from her second job. Jesus, if only I had a va-j-jay.

Anonymous, 13, Damien High.

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Dear Jesus:

Tell Hawaii to hurry it up. Illinois just beat us as the fifteenth state to legalize gay marriage. Plus General Motors is extending marriage benefits to spouses of same-sex employees. Not that I’m gonna quit my City & County job as liquor commissioner and go work for GM in Michigan or wherever their factory is. I’m not gay, lesbian, transsexual, or bi-curious. I can’t even recall the last time I had sex. And this is not by choice either. Sad face to be placed here.

Peace, Nolan Kimura, C&C of Honolulu, Liquor Commissioner.

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Dear Jesus:

Kauikeaouli, or Kamehameha the III, who was the son of King Kamehameha I, also had several aikanes. From what I hear, he and his lovers, like Kaomi and Keoniana, put the cowboys in Bareback Mountain to shame. The king was so taken by Kaomi’s good looks—he was part-Tahitian and part-Hawaiian, that he was willing to make him co-rule his kingdom. Chief Kaomi died suddenly—cause: unknown—shortly before their conjugal governance could be realized. Another lover of King Kamehameha III was Keoniana—or John Young II—whose father, John Young I, was a Scottish military advisor who also happened to be an aikane of Kamehameha I. Talk about a lineage of kings and their male lovers. Irony of ironies: although King Kamehameha III practiced aikane-ship, he was the first king in the Hawaiian monarchy to reject polygamy and follow the Christian tradition of marriage to only one woman.

Mililani Silva, curator, Bishop Museum.

*

Dear Jesus:

I am a girl who loves other girls but the commercial with you in it says it’s wrong. What if I ask for another vagina? One for the right reason and the other for the wrong. That way, it’s fair and square, as my teacher says. So please give me another vagina. I’ll be waiting by the Likelike overpass.

Yours truly, Sam(antha), 3^rd grade, Kalihi Elementary School.

 

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Dear Jesus:

Kindly convince the seven UNDECIDED legislators to vote YES to same-sex marriage so that my Aunt R.J. can finally marry Tita M.C. who’s living in the U.S. illegally. They’ve been together for five years. Tita M.C. is Aunt R.J.’s caregiver. Yup, they’re old but not old enough to, you know, enjoy each other, if you know what I mean. Anyway, five years of togetherness is more than all the years of marriages combined in our family. If this law doesn’t get passed and if this prayer winds up with INS, then Tita M.C. will most likely be deported back to the Third World. Turd World, that’s what she calls the Philippines. I don’t know. I’ve never been there. But if you end Third World now, then it will be okay, I guess, for Tita M.C. to be deported, though it would mean breaking her and Aunt R.J. up and you don’t want to be called a homewrecker, right? Thought so.

Lois Cabradilla, Hilo High.

*

Dear Jesus:

My traditional parents change religion faster than their underwear. In one month, we went from New Hopeless to Word of Lifeless. Then we switched to Catholicism b/c my mother found out from my Auntie Eileen that the new pope wears Prada and Gucci, then we switched to Pentecostal because my parents think they can sing and faint at the same time. Now, my father wants to be a Mormon b/c, he says, a traditional father should have five desperate wives per household. Vote YES to traditional family.

Jonah Asuncion.

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Dear Jesus:

Why they picking on my cop cousin, calling him any kind names, like his brain is one major pain in the ass. Excuse me, anatomically speaking, the brain stay way at the top, while the pain is a bottom. And for your information, dumb and dumber are two people, my cop uncle, who heads the union, get only one mind and one body! Besides, everyone is entitled to his and her opinion, right? My cop uncle/union leader only exercising his. To those who don’t like it, I say: WHATEVS!

Princess, La’ie.

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Dear Jesus:

I so embarrassed, so humilahated. My faddah wen’ State Capitol yesterday and gave his testimony. He waited 11 days cuz he was number 10,348, which was an exaggeration. He a member of New Life in Leeward. Before that, New Word in Windward. And before that—he was incarcerated at OCCC. 2 years for aggravated assault and chronic road rage. He said he not proud of that but he said everybody get skeletons. If gays have their walk-in closets why shouldn’t he. He told all this on Olelo LIVE STREAMING. He also said he pro-traditional family. He told the legislators he been w/ my maddah for 16 happily years. He was in 11th grade and she, 8th. That they been happily married for 7 years since they joined New Life. That he get three happy children ages 16 (me), 13 (brother), and 12 (sister). Jesus, do the math; it ain’t gonna add up. That means my maddah is not my maddah and the maddah I have now got pregnant soon after she met my faddah.

Diane Carvalho, Kapahulu.

*

Dear Jesus:

I failed you. I’m sorry. After waiting for what seemed like hours, I was finally asked by Rep. Sylvia Luke to approach the mic and begin my two-minute testimony. “Aloha,” I said. “Aloha,” the committee members answered back. Next thing I knew—nothing. I couldn’t get a word out. It was as if my tongue had been chopped off. A minute went by and not a single sound or syllable. I held my palm out. I tried to tell the committee members through my facial expression that something was happening to me, that the god of scissors had entered my body and cut off my voice. Look at me! Can’t you tell something is wrong? my face was shouting at them. But I got no reaction. They probably thought that I was just another lolo old lady who’d gone to the State Capitol to waste two minutes of their time, like the woman who used up her time shouting “Let the people vote!” or the Born-Again singing “Amazing Grace.” It was not until tonight, when I tuned in to watch the news and saw myself as one of the highlights from today’s testimonies. Apparently, I could not only muster a sound out of my big Portuguese mouth, but I was also denied the right to emote. On my face was a huge blank, like I had been injected with a gallon of Botox. Only after my two-minute was up was I able to hear my voice and make all sorts of faces. That was when I lost it. I started shouting uncontrollably “Maluhia, maluhia”—which means “peace.” I was so far gone that I had to be escorted out of the building by three bodyguards to the jeers of my Christian brothers and sisters.

Failure Marie Machado from Hana, Maui.

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Dear Jesus:

Feels like day 357 of same-sex equality debate. Shet, this freakin’ bill feels like a trial that’s taking longer than O.J. Simpson’s and Roe Versus Wade’s put together. Even Jeffrey Dahmer’s case was shorter than this, only two weeks. And by the way it’s going, it might go unresolved, like the murder of JonBenet Ramsey. I just hope that the HPD is going to be there again, not just for body count but peace of mind as well. That they’re there to protect the people and maybe, this time, step up and arrest those disturbing the legal proceedings. Would like to see that Samoan cop doing his job, too, that is, protecting everyone, including those law-abiding same-sex loving tax-paying citizens he abhors, who are helping pay his salary.

‘Til Tomorrow, Lex.

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Dear Jesus:

Today, Tuesday, November 5^th, has got to be the most depressing day of the year. The joint House committee just voted 18-12 in favor of this same-sex marriage bill. I don’t know how these 18 legislators can go to sleep tonight, knowing the majority of the people are against this bill. Now, this bill goes to the rest of the House to vote.

Richard, Maile.

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Dear Jesus:

No let this stupid bill pass. I no like be edumacated about mahus and lesbos. Get enough of them on TV, like Kirk and that black tranny on Glee. Neil Patrick Harris, the Doogie Howser guy, I know he gay in real life but he okay because he play straight guy and one womanizer in How I Met Your Mother, plus he get one star on the Hollywood sidewalk. So, yea, no allow teachers for edumacate us about Adam and Steve in the classroom. And about Eve and Liv too. Mahalo.

J.T., Hawaii Baptist Academy.

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Dear Jesus:

My testimony was short and simple. I just wen’ read them my tattoo on my right arm. Leviticus 18:22. “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.”

Jeremy, Papakolea.

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Dear Jesus:

Before we continue our relationship, I only want one thing cleared up. Exactly which side of hope are you? Are you with New Hope or the old one, because if you converted to the new one, then I want to know what was wrong with the old one? Because if the old hope is no good because it’s old, then that means that, sooner or later, this new one will eventually be no good too, right? And if this is the case, then are you telling me that hope is like a loaf of bread: it has an expiration date? That once it expires, it will grow moldy, rot, disintegrate, etcetera—and then what? Newer Hope? Redux Hope? Get back to me soon because I would still like to be hopelessly devoted to you.

Alice Pacheco.

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Dear Jesus:

Representative Sam Knight, who is part of the Finance committee and who, as everyone in West Oahu and Club Rose knows, is an out-and-proud lesbian (if her mullet isn’t a dead giveaway then I don’t know what is). Anyway, she voted NO on this bill. I repeat: a lesbian lawmaker voting against gay marriage. Isn’t that saying something? There is hope at the end of the rainbow.

Jesus loves you Rep Sam no matter who you are.

Virgie Lacaran, Waianae.

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Dear Jesus:

My name Xian Lim. I Chinese defective now living in Hawaii five years. In Guangdong, China, where I from, we no allow this kind marriage between same sex. If civet cats, okay, because they full of SARS, but not humans, especially lady to lady. It’s not right. I not hateful type, but it’s not Christian. Peace Always.

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Dear Jesus:

Can you please tell those brainiacs like that chromosologist from Harvard for stop picking on Representative Mataele and making him look like one laughing stock? He ain’t one baboon, babooze, he one human being! So what if he only went to a third world community college and you gotta talk to him in 3rd grade layman-Pidgin for explain that homosexuality is hiding in the genes? My pastor disagrees, ergo I disagree with him. Of course, a gay can be an ex-gay if he like. It’s called “choice” people, and it’s nothing but one gift from heaven, and they come in A, B, C, D, or E. That’s why it’s called “multiple”! Hello?! At least now, he representative of Iroquois Housing, which he wen’ achieve through hard work, perseveration, and prayers. Remind them that, Jesus. Choice before institution.

Braddah Al, Ewa Beach & Iroquois Housing.

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Dear Jesus:

When you get a chance, please pass this message on to that man who read a Leviticus verse from his shoulder. Leviticus 19:28: “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves. I am the LORD.”

Rabih Nassir, Salt Lake.

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Dear Jesus:

For days, Mary, I was at the State Capitol today for check out the drama. Mary, was so nails, like one C-rated camp. But guess who I saw making all that “Let the People Vote” noise pollution and disturbing Father Damien’s statue? Efren Lopez, the biggest Filipino bakla in the history of Waipahu High. I remember Muffyrella used to wear choke obake cosmetics and went around saying he hapa. Well, I guess he had a bad case of epiphany because he was acting all straight at the State Capitol (more like scared-straight). He was so convincing I almost never recognized him if not for the facial-induced craters. He was tongue-twisting with the other drama-sci-fi-comedy queens. For days. For real kind, Mary. If that’s what tickles his okole, then let him. I just waiting for that day when all these self-hating mahus come out of the closet. This island probably going sink. So maybe they better not, yeah?

Trixie, Hotel St/Bethel.

*

 

Dear Jesus:

We have one more chance to kill this bill. Please persuade the remaining twenty-one representatives to vote NO on this bill tomorrow, which is Wednesday. The pro-gay marriage only needs 26; they already got 18. That’s only 8 votes shy from making our nightmare their reality. Jesus, time to walk on water.

Kenneth Pang, Kalama Valley.

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Dear Jesus:

Oh, my god, what is happening to our dyke from Waianae? Has she gone back to the closet? Hope not. We have our reasons, but we hope our sister Sam will change her mind and vote YES tomorrow. Jesus, please do not let her make the wrong decision that will affect her future relationship with the gay and lesbian community in Hawaii, especially with the 500 active members of LOVE, Lesbians Organizing Vanguards of Eros, which she is a part of. Guide her, oh Lord, in these next twenty-four hours as she re-evaluates her position on this crucial bill and remind her to base her decision not just on whom she is representing but on what she stands for and believes in. We pray she will reverse her NO to a YES. Hoping, 500 members of LOVE.

*

Dear Jesus:

We did it. The House just voted 30-18 in favor of Senate Bill 1. Three abstained because they want to be re-elected by their constituents. Tomorrow, the House is taking a day off from the public, then resume on Friday for the final history-making vote. But I shall always remember today, Wednesday, November 6, 2013 as the first step to a history worth making. I don’t know if you have anything to do with this victory, but thank you anyway. Sorry to take up so much of your time. I’m sure you’re up to your neck with prayers and complaints.

Maxwell, Waikiki.

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Dear Jesus:

Tell your ministers they got no business meddling in the same-sex marriage bill because their churches aren’t paying taxes. In fact, they’re abusing their non-profit status. Bad enough they’re holding their ministries in public school grounds, where Church and State should not be coupling. And until they start paying taxes, like the rest of us citizens, including those who have been denied rights that should be afforded to everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, gender, and race, then these religious organizations have no say in this bill nor in any legislative bill, for that matter. We gays and lesbians have put up with bullying from your (make) believers for too long and are tired of being victims and sacrificial lambs. No more. Discriminate us, don’t marry us in your churches, we don’t care. Push comes to shove, we all know money will speak faster than faith.

Isaac, Makiki.

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Dear Jesus:

If Hawaii becomes the next state to legalize same-sex marriage, terrible consequences will follow such as global warming, widespread meth use, more power plant explosions such as that in Fukushima, extinction of endangered species, killer viruses, etc. etc.

Pastor Paolo, Whitmore Village.

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Dear Jesus:

Another major dilemma-rama. For tomorrow’s big event at the Capitol: 6-inch stilettos or slippers? Slippers, yeah? Easier for kill the roaches. But for sure, I going wear my Kermit-the-frog-rainbow-connection-inspired tube top and the jurassic organic hibiscus I bought for choke dollars at Wholefoods that going be tucked behind my left ear cuz I already taken. I going force myself back into my 35-year-old Calvin Klein jeans cuz I no like nothing come between me and my you-know-what, except Russell (and maybe Shawn). I going decorate my kino with body glitter for that Lucy-in-the-sky-with-diamonds effect. And, last but not the leastest, Love’s Baby Soft perfume cuz innocence is sexier than you think (unless you getting harrassed on the bus by freakin’ psychos and etes). Going be so retro, going be so all about aloha and ohana tomorrow. Cannot wait.

Heavenly yours, Janice Kawehionalani Lee.

*

Dear Jesus:

Who cares about the final vote on Friday, the 8th? The end of the world is already here, and it’s heading towards the Philippines. Forget us, Jesus, we can manage. They need you there more.

Librado Encarnacion, Waihawa.

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Dear Jesus:

If you’re not going to let the Representatives let us, the people, vote, then we’re not going to pray for you. Fair? Deal? The Mob-ettes outside the Capitol.

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Dear Jesus:

“Let the people vote! Let the people vote!” Uhm, they already did, and they’re called general and primary elections. What a bunch of nimcompoops! This is an issue of minority civil rights. It cannot be decided by the majority. If it were up to them, U.S. History would be a blank slate. Women wouldn’t be voting right now. Schools and public restrooms would remain segregated. Rosa Parks would still be riding at the back of the bus. African American slaves would, well, still be praying someday for their freedom. Inter-racial marriages would be banned. So, yes, let the people vote and let’s return history back to the black hole.

Gary Kurishege, History Professor, U.H. Community College, Diamond Head Campus.

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Dear Jesus:

First, I just want to tell You how truly remarkable You are for putting up with all the BS and other blasphemous things that are being said about You lately, especially from the other camp. I wish I had Your patience and tolerance. Second, You are probably aware of this individual (local? Haole?) who is currently collecting letters addressed to you and posting in on his (her?) FB page. His/Her FB page is “Dear Jesus.” It’s the one with the profile pic of a Hawaiian monk seal. These letters, notes, and messages are either in support of or against same-sex marriage. According to him/her, no alteration was done, that they were posted immediately upon receipt. I don’t know what his/her objective is but, to me, these postings achieve nothing except to mock those who are fighting to protect their faith and their constitutional right to freedom of speech. I am also concerned with his/her inclusion of letters from children, many of them expressing their pro-stand on the issue. These children are lost, Jesus. They have fallen out of touch with You. They will grow up on the margins of society, be cast aside and treated like lepers, even prostitutes, addicts, and terrorists. They will lead undesirable lifestyles, participating in unhealthy activities that will certainly lead to their demise. Guide them back to Your temple, Jesus. Let them know hope is inextinguishable. It’s not too late. It’s never too late.

Sincerely, Anna D.

P.S. I have a strong suspicion that this letter collector is a disgruntled kamaaina (Haole?) who used to be a minister or an active member of our ministry.

*

Dear Jesus del Mar:

I am a stovepipe sponge of the phylum porifera, meaning “pore bearer”. To the majority of sea creatures, we are nothing but pores and channels and have been repeatedly accused of making waves because of our phallic shape: thick, long, and open to whatever the tide brings. I am praying because I have fallen in love with a Portuguese from Waimanalo, a man-of-war, that is, also asexual like myself and could reproduce. But I am afraid that the majority of sponges and jellyfishes who have converted to the Kingdom Hall of Animalia are against such union and will want to rob us of our sea-given right. Please do not let them decide.

Praying and poring, S, off of Hanauma Bay.

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Dear Jesus:

We are now officially back in pre-1954 segregation era. At the Capitol, the mauka or mountainside of the rotunda is for supporters of same-sex marriage; on the makai or seaside is for opponents. Along Beretania Street, supporters can wave at motorists from the left half of the Father Damien statue towards Downtown; the anti from the right half of the Molokai saint’s statue towards Punchbowl. Both sides also have their own entrances to the gallery, as well as separate elevators, Fire Exits, water fountains, and soda vending machines. Likewise for trash cans. Those painted with pink triangles are for pro-equality, and those against it are marked with crosses. During recess, McDonald’s have been kind enough to accommodate both sides. Those in support can dine at the McDonald’s in Fort Street Mall, and those against it can go to the one on Beretania, past Honolulu Academy of Arts. As for parking, those in favor of same-sex marriage can use any metered parking along Richard Street and those opposing it along Punchbowl. Metered parking along South King Street is on a first-come first-serve basis. Do not park at the post office or at the State Building as meters there tend to be unreliable and your cars will be towed. Sadly yours, Dominic Corpuz.

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Dear Jesus:

2 much H8 n da 808. Peace. Luke.

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Dear Jesus:

So many frigging drama queens on this island. Old and new, out of and in the closet. Feels like a bad soap opera without a cliffhanger, like Dynasty without Alexis Carrington Colby Dexter. No wonder none of this is televised on MSNBC. With all this drama, bordering on B-rated, we should all take a box of Dramamine (or Ambien) with Kool-Aid and give our legislators a break for once. If Rep. Gene Ward can equate the passing of this bill to 9/11, saying Hawaii would never be the same just as the U.S. was never the same again after 9/11, then I can compare this exhaustive drama to the Jim Jones Guyana tragedy, except we’ll be RIP just for couple days. The one good thing is that we can give our beloved officials some peace and quiet and open air to duke it out amongst themselves. After all, we elected them for this very reason. Who knows? By the time we wake up from our deep slumber, Hawaii might be in for a big surprise. Or not. Marty, Mililani Mauka.

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Dear Jesus: Kindly thank Speaker Emeritus for taking us on a meandering excursion to Jerusalem, the doctrines of Jesus, the bus stop of silence that’s been installed specifically for him. Mahalo.

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Dear Jesus:

Just requested Rep. Chris Lee (hunk times ten, and those six-pack abs!) to be my friend on FB. Hope he confirms.

Charlene Kobayashi, 35.

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Dear Jesus:

Are you behind—or an accomplice to—the creation of some of these Hawaii representatives? Please say no. Some of them make the twisted characters in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, and John Waters’ early flicks starring Divine sane and saner. One just out-channeled Ann Coulter, another used the platform to poorly imitate Glenn Close in Damages. Then there’s the wonder duo who should just deactivate: the Hawaiian version of Palin and the Pacific Islander who “received a Third-World education” (his exact words, not mine) who confused democracy with anarchy. Not to forget the legislator who sounds as if he was born out of a bar in Koreamoku. Please say you had no role in their genetic and psychological make-up. Awaiting your YES or NO reply, Allan (two “L’s” followed by an “A.” Allan, not Allen. Allen is Woody, mine is African-American, like Allan Houston, no relation to Whitney, no relation to Eli. The world is small but we’re not all related, you know).

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Dear Jesus:

Regarding Representative Lulu Mae Kahele from the Big Island. First, teach her the proper use of symbolism or metaphor. Her use of a bag of rice to signify a Hawaiian cultural staple is just wrong and an insult to the Hawaiian people she claims to belong to. Shouldn’t it be a bag of poi, kalua pork, pipikaula? And, correct me if I’m wrong, Jesus, but isn’t this bill about same-sex marriage equality? What theft for the Hawaiians is she talking about? Is she operating on Hawaii Standard Time or still trapped in the vog zone of Kona? If my friend Ku’ualoha, who is Hawaiian, goes into convulsions because of Rep. Lulu Mae Kahele’s convoluted definition of Hawaiian culture and identity, I’m going to blame it on her. Also, remind her to stop saying she supports equality and the LGBT community, because, obviously, she doesn’t. And if I can just make one last suggestion, remind her she is a representative in Hawaii State Capitol and not at the Kodak Theater attending an Academy Awards ceremony. She turned her argument into a tireless Oscar “thank you” speech. Was she even nominated? For what film? “A Day in the Life of Sam, the Spam?”

Just my two cents, Lucky Machado, Ph.D, English Renaissance Lit.

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Dear Jesus:

Please take Representative Sam Judas with you. Each and every silver strand of her mullet. We never asked her to be our poster child. Instead, she has turned her back on us to favor what she calls her “conscience”. Did her conscience tell her to deny people like us equal rights, too? Obviously and, obviously, she was trying to cater to the hysterical group disrupting the legal proceedings from outside the Capitol. Well, we don’t need her, and people like her, in our community and in our struggle for equality. So wish her the best of luck from us, as she starts her equality-robbing existence in her new community. She can rest assure she won’t be invited to any of our ceremonies, celebrations, and cookouts.

Signed, 500 members of LOVE, Lesbians Organizing Vanguards of Eros.

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Dear Jesus:

END OF THE WORLD x 2, 30 YES’s, 19 NO’s, 2 CHICKEN SHITs.

Lala Bushwell, E.R., Queen’s Medical Center.

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Dear Jesus:

I have been up since midnight, watching and listening to lawmakers vote yes or against a bill that will determine a part of my future. It is disturbing and infuriating to have what should’ve been my right in the first place be questioned, weighed, supported, divided, even manipulated. Fortunately, there were more than enough representatives who voted (a few with reservations) to grant me that right for the first time tonight. It is now 3:30 in the morning. There is still time left to pick up the remains of a dream and let it roam with other mysteries before it returns back to me to whisper, “There, there, almost there, you and I.” Goodnight for now.

Yours Truly.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

R. ZAMORA LINMARK‘s latest poetry collection, Pop Verite, is forthcoming from Hanging Loose Press. He has just completed his third novel titled These Books Belong to Ken Z. He is the Distinguished Visiting Associate Professor in Creative Writing at University of Miami and is currently working on a sequel to his first novel Rolling The R’s which, in 2016, will be twenty years old.

[Header Photo: ‘Aloha’ (CC) Robert Couse-Baker / @ Flickr]

Contrappasso, Issue #6 – launching in September 2014

Cover image “DSC02603” (CC) Vincent Lou @ Flickr, altered from original

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New Issue. New Authors. Contrappasso 6 is launching soon! This issue explores still more possibilities in international writing, bringing together work from nine countries in four languages, by more than twenty authors who are appearing in the journal for the first time.

Their work leads from snowy streets in Montana to packed train stations in Tokyo, from Hong Kong horse races to Sicilian passion-plays, from the Coal River Valley to Manila shopping malls, and from an iron lung to The Raft of the Medusa.

This issue features interviews with Australian poet Judith Beveridge, veteran American crime writer Lawrence Block and Filipino novelist Jose Dalisay. It presents new fiction by Japanese novelist Mitsuyo Kakuta (translated by Aoi Matsushima), Chilean Álvaro Bisama (translated by Megan McDowell) and from the USA, Jon A. Jackson and R. Zamora Linmark. The poets are Elizabeth Smither, Iain Britton and Stephen Oliver (New Zealand), Flora Delalande (France), Penny Florence (UK), Ouyang Yu (China/Australia) and Richard James Allen, Stuart Barnes, Jamie Grant, Siobhan Hodge, Frank Russo and Les Wicks (Australia).

Watch this website to sample the work this all-new ensemble of writers. They travel far.

The Editors