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Flippin': Filipinos on America
MELUS, Fall, 1999 by Leonard Casper
Flippin': Filipinos on America. Edited by Luis H. Francia and Eric Gamalinda. New York: Asian American Writers' Workshop. 1996. 377 pages. $14.95 paper.
In "Culturally We Are All Mestizos" (Budhi, II, 1998) Fernando N. Zialcita argues that Filipino identity is neither schizophrenic nor bastardized, as it is sometimes carelessly described, but simply crossculturally complex. As the second largest archipelago in the world, the Philippines already was habitat for linguistically discrete tribes never nationally unified until Spanish, then American, colonization. Furthermore, even though both colonial powers were Western, the influences they had on the islanders were not only varied but occasionally diametrically opposite. The resultant confused/enriched efforts at coexistence (including not just Hispanization or Americanization of Philippine society but Filipinization of the "invaders/intruders" as well) justify Zialicita's description of the Philippines' culture, in Southeast Asia, as similar to the development of Mexico's mestizaje.
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When to all of these mixed origins one adds the complicated overseas attempts to define what is Filipino-American (or American-Filipino), one is prepared to recognize the rich contents of Flippin' whose apparently flippant title really means to suggest the two-sidedness of the "currency" that connects American-born Filipinos, those F.O.B. ("fresh off the boat"), those with kindred and therefore welcoming homes in both worlds, as well as those of different generations and classifications: those writers established and those emergent. Each "side" of the coin is itself many-sided; and this collection of stories and poems, happily, is only one of a slowly increasing number offering partial representation and definition of "the" Filipino-American. (One may recall, for example, Luis Francia's larger anthology, Brown River, White Ocean--Rutgers, 1993--which he continues to misrepresent as "seminal," despite major precedents in this country as long ago as the sixties, from which a number of entries in Francia were borrowed--without acknowledgement.)
Among the most venerable authors presented are N.V.M. Gonzalez (declared National Artist in 1998, after spending decades on the faculty of California State University-Hayward), Sionil Jose (whose epic series on the Ilocanos of Rosales is gradually appearing under the Random House imprint), Linda Ty-Casper, and poets Carlos Bulosan and Carlos Angeles. The arrivistes include Ninotchka Rosca, Jessica Hagedorn, Eric Gamalinda, and Alfred Yuson; the "emergents," Marianne Villanueva, Eileen Tabios, Nick Carbo, and Fatima Lim-Wilson. Perhaps the poetry, though given nearly one-third of the collection's total space, tends in general to seem like snapshots when compared to the narrative scope and substance of the stories. Yet the reader sometimes experiences not the poems' brevity but the intensity of perception allowed by their tight forms and textures which can epitomize whole histories. This is especially true of the late Alfrredo Navarro Salanga, Gemino H. Abad, Jeff Tagami, Jaime Jacinto, and Ricardo M. de Ungria.
The moments of attentiveness or the movement of bodies with different velocities described in these stories and poems rarely come unexpectedly. In persons with multiple heritages, regardless of which aspect or which combination those persons choose to embrace--and whether the result is immobilization or the feverish flexibility of a fast yo-yo (a Filipino invention!)--the attitude expressed is rarely surprising: loneliness; yearning to "have it all" or guilt for not being able to share the good with those less fortunate; the realization that "being accepted" is often just another form of the traditional patron-client syndrome; the loss of a once secure, if undesirable, identity because of the enormous mass of bodies competing for space, careers, recognition.... But however familiar the emotional matter (natural to an American culture based on diverse immigration), it is the admirable lack of political agenda (unfortunately so common in critic E. San Juan) and instead the concentration on craft, artistic integrity, which provide these relationships with their passionate intensity--remarkably, a Filipino voice in an assimilated but still "richly other" English language.
It is often argued that only in one's own national language can true Filipinism be heard (N.V.M. Gonzalez now says he will write only in Tagalog, or at least translate his volumes originally in English, the rest of his years). Yet it is the Filipino-American's (the Americanized Filipino's?) experience of "flipping," of having a flip-side, to a coin still spinning aloft--neither heads nor tails, but potentially all the coin's conceivable facets, altogether--that genuinely describe the Filipino-in-America's otherwise indescribable experience.
Leonard Casper is Professor of English Emeritus at Boston College, and author of nine books on the Phillipines; he is also Humanities editor of Pilipinas.
COPYRIGHT 1999 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
