A mid-November treat

It won’t be the first thing that will come up when you Google the acronym “MILF” (and neither will certain secessionists down south), but for the second year in a row now, the Manila International Literary Festival (Nov. 16-18) has been a resounding success, proving that writing is alive and well in this country, and that we’re beginning to look outward for new readers to reach, even as we develop our local audiences.

Krip Yuson beat me to a recap of the MILF’s calendar of events last week, which is just as well, because I can now simply say thank you to National Book Development Board executive director Andrea Pasion and her indefatigable crew for organizing MILF2 and for inviting me to be a part of it, as panelist, moderator, and member of the audience. I have been to many literary festivals around the world — in New York, Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Shanghai, among others — and can say with certainty that while our fledgling festival may be smaller in scale, it was just as well-organized, as useful, and as lively and provocative as any I have attended.

What’s even more remarkable is that this was practically an all-volunteer event, with the local speakers and moderators all freely contributing their time and effort to ensure the festival’s success. The festival sponsors included the Ayala Museum, Philippine Airlines, the Filipinas Heritage Library, National Book Store, the Book Development Association of the Philippines, Penguin, Vibal Foundation, the Manila Bulletin, and CentralBooks.

My choicest assignment at MILF2 was a one-on-one conversation with the Dominican-American fictionist Junot Diaz, whose first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. (The other big name in MILF2 was the very affable Edward P. Jones, also a Pulitzer Prize winner for his novel The Known World.) I guess I drew this assignment because I had met and had it off well with Junot before, at the Sydney Writers Festival in 2008, where I shared the stage with him in one of the festival’s penultimate events (and I thought for a minute back there that the organizers had decided to do the pairings alphabetically, with Jose Dalisay landing the spot beside Junot Diaz).

Forget, for a minute, the Pulitzer and all the accolades earned by Oscar Wao — read the book for yourself, and see how he manages to wring a kind of tender hope and beauty out of the torturous experience of life under a dictatorship, the “Trujillato” in the postwar Dominican Republic that Filipinos will instinctively relate to their own subjection to martial law. “Rafael Trujillo makes Ferdinand Marcos look like an amateur,” I told Junot, as we marveled over the uncanny correspondences between the Philippines and the DR that his family left for New Jersey when he was a young boy. How many countries, after all, have been invaded by both Spain and the United States?

There’s a lot of street-level cussing in Oscar Wao — something that may be a turn-off for readers more accustomed to the lyrical fabulism of Salman Rushdie or the subdued elegance of Kazuo Ishiguro — but make no mistake: this novel is steeped in history and rich in articulation, from its very first paragraph onward: “They say it first came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fuku americanus, or more colloquially, fuku — generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.” How Diaz navigates from there to “fine-ass bitches” and “buttnaked punkboys” is an education in the deployment and modulation of language.

But that day at the Ayala Museum, Junot was not just a brilliant writer; he had a deep humanity that touched his audience, that encouraged them to see the fundamental commonality between Filipinos and other peoples elsewhere. From where I stood, I could see how the audience — a packed, SRO roomful of them —listened to his every word and appreciated the humility and the humor he projected (not at all, perhaps, what they had expected of such a renowned writer). I was especially impressed by the fact that, after his talk, he patiently stood in the hallway and signed books for a long line of readers, chatting amiably with every one of them, for at least another half-hour.

I don’t know how Andrea managed to do it, but bringing over Junot Diaz here was a real coup (and Edward P. Jones as well, who was also wonderful and generous in his own way). I hope she and the NBDB continue to bring over writers of his caliber and character, from whom even an old dog like myself can truly learn.

I was also glad to have been able to spend some time at the festival chatting —onstage and backstage — with the literary agents and publishers that the organizers had brought over to introduce Filipino authors to the intricacies of foreign markets. I moderated a panel on the topic, composed of Jayapriya Vasudevan and Priya Doraswamy from Jacaranda Press and Rachel Kahan and Ravi Ramchandani representing major publishers in the US and the UK, respectively. Jaya, who was also here last year and who has read a number of submissions from Filipino authors, was especially enthusiastic about the material she had received, and was looking forward to more. Ravi was impressed by the questions he got from the audience.

It was good for us to see that getting published abroad, even from here, is hardly an impossible task, for as long as we have what publishers are looking for (and for as long as we’re willing to play the game, which can’t be assumed of everyone). A few of us are now represented by reputable and capable agents internationally (and I’d like to thank mine, Jonah Straus, for recently securing Spanish and French publishers for Soledad’s Sister). But these are still baby steps for us — my advances have understandably been modest at best — and our hopes and estimates of self-worth have to be tempered by the reality check that international publishing provides.

Even as I thanked our guests, I had to remind myself, as I’ve often said, that I would be happier to be read by 1,000 Filipinos than by 10,000 New Yorkers; if we think it’s hard to penetrate the foreign market, try selling 5,000 copies of your book right here. I suppose the good thing about having agents is that you can leave the selling worries to them, and worry instead about writing and finishing your next book, as true writers have always done.

Indeed, let’s not forget, there was always that world of writers — perhaps a smaller and lonelier one, but no less productive — before writing programs, workshops, festivals, fellowships, and digital publishing came along. As Edward P. Jones said with a wry smile when someone asked him about MFA programs as a key to writerly success (both he and Junot have MFAs), “Why don’t you ask Will Shakespeare and Anton Chekhov about their time in Iowa? I hear the beer parties were great.”

Thanks again to Andrea and the NBDB for this mid-November treat!

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and check out my blog at www.penmanila.ph.