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Artistic creativity, form, and fictional experimentation in Filipina American fiction
MELUS, Spring, 2004 by Helena Grice
Stories by Filipina American women often use metaphors of art and creativity as a language in their own right, in a manner that not only disrupts established generic forms, but that actually engenders specific Filipina American forms. In this essay I will explore three contemporary Filipina American writers' experimentation with different modes of narrative signification. Each of these examples demonstrates the manner in which artistic creativity and alternative modes of discourse by women come to be validated as a form of cultural and personal expression in a uniquely Filipina American way. Each writer blends feminist and/or historical writing with experimental and transformative modes of narration, which are themselves sources of creative and oppositional energy.
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M. Evelina Galang's short stories often make use of images of artistic creativity, as well as other forms of non-verbal communication, to make a whole lexicon of signification, one that sometimes runs counter to verbal understanding. In the story "Figures," which appears in her 1996 collection, Her Wild American Self, Galang pits the language of color against the verbal mis-communications that occur between the central protagonist, Ana, and her fiance, Harold. The story tracks the development of the couple's relationship from fledgling lovers to married-couple-to-be, and simultaneously traces Ana's growing unease with the gradual restrictions that her new life inflicts upon her creative existence as a portrait artist. When her attempts to communicate her discomfort to her fiance fail, she almost unconsciously begins to speak to him in the language of paint colors. "Cobalt. Cobalt blue, cobalt green, cobalt violet. Purple" (103), which metaphorically articulate her distress to both reader and character, where verbal understanding fails. The short story's movement through the color spectrum becomes the very means by which the narrative itself progresses.
Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's novel, When the Rainbow Goddess Wept (1991), makes use of a tradition of "talking-story" as a structuring device. "Talking story," as its name suggests, is a female practice of telling stories, often from one generation to the next. In relation to Maxine Hong Kingston's use of this device in The Woman Warrior, King-Kok Cheung notes: "[the] recourse to talk-story--which blurs the distinction between straight facts and pure fiction--accomplishes two key objectives: to reclaim a past and, more decisively, to envision a different future" (120). Here, Brainard uses this method as a means of imagining both different kinds of writing and the experiences that writing communicates. Brainard's historical novel, set during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, sharply contrasts the horrors of guerrilla warfare and the hardships of itinerant existence with the quasi-dreamworld inhabited by the ancient cook, Laydan, as it is communicated via "talk-story" to the young protagonist, nine-year-old Yvonne. In this manner, Laydan's "talk-story" functions as both an escape from reality and also offers the young girl stories to live by. "Talk-story" becomes almost a counter-narrative as it cuts across the historical narrative with more whimsical and optimistic versions of life experience at strategic moments in the text.
Jessica Hagedorn draws upon gossip as a central resource, in her depiction of Filipino society during the Marcos regime, in her well-known novel, Dogeaters (1991). Although Hagedorn's novel tells the stories of a whole range of characters, representing the class spectrum of society in the Philippines, she favors the stories of the disenfranchised fringes. Hagedorn experiments with the form and function of her novel through explorations of different ways of representing her characters. She juxtaposes the discourses of history with popular genres like radio melodramas and movies, and the discursive form of gossip, in order to destabilize established generic and discursive registers. In Hagedorn's writing, tsismis (Tagalog for "gossip," sometimes spelled chismis), in its very leakiness as an uncircumscribed narrative (it is described in Dogeaters as a form that "ebbs and flows," 101), and as a narrative that is often exaggerated, comes to typify the discursive transgression of much Asian American women's writing. Gossip in the text is ultimately posited as a valid genderlect and is pitted against official versions of events. In this sense, rumor, gossip, dreams, and fictional forms like film, become the central medium of understanding in the novel, and Hagedorn blends together what has been called "reel/real life." (1)
The Art of Silence/Speaking Creatively/Re-visiting History
These three Filipina writers intersect with a wider Asian American women writers' tradition of foregrounding the artistic and creative as metaphor. R. A. Sasaki's short story, "The Loom" (in which the central character "speaks" through her knitting), Hisaye Yamamoto's famous short story "Seventeen Syllables" (in which the female protagonist articulates herself via her composition of haiku), and the edited collection The Forbidden Stitch, to name but three examples, all posit creativity as a female language of resistance and self-validation. (2) King-Kok Cheung has written of women's narratives:
