Year of reading dangerously

Before 2012, I had never been properly introduced to creative nonfiction. We would pass each other in bookstores and sometimes make eye contact in class, but nothing more than that. I was too enamored of fiction, too shy to try to get to know the genre, too settled in the fact that while I technically wrote nonfiction for a major daily, it was nowhere near the level of artfulness that deserved the title “creative.”

Before 2012, I had never really met the sage of Padre Faura, that prolific old man with a mind as sharp as a tack. One hot summer day in the heart of Manila, I was bequeathed a few back copies of The New Yorker, and told to go forth and read. It was like coming home from a quest.

Before 2012, I had never tried my hand at creative nonfiction. It was the most liberating feeling, ever. 

* * *

If creative nonfiction were a system of government, it would be a democracy. A genre of the writer, for the writer, by the writer. After all, no other genre puts quite as much premium on its author — giving her free rein within the narrative as a character, as the final authority behind each argument and exposition, as the firsthand purveyor of her own experiences — than creative nonfiction.

But like any democracy, where freedom of expression must be tempered by social responsibility, creative nonfiction must also be practiced by its writers in the same way. Because the genre distinguishes itself by its roots in factual accuracy, its practitioners are compelled to adhere even more conscientiously to this, than in any other form. For creative nonfiction, above all, is written in the service of truth(s). The truth that a writer puts forward as her own, the truth of a particular moment in history, the truth entrenched in the society where the writer moves.

 Apart from the diversity of its truths, however, creative nonfiction is also largely inclusive of the kinds of writing it encompasses. Travel accounts, memoir, literary journalism, essays, food writing; all of these fit neatly into the genre’s fold. Some might argue that this detracts from the identity of creative nonfiction, muddying the conceptual waters with so much variety — but I believe otherwise. Its tolerance for such diverse forms of literary expression only serves to enhance the strength of creative nonfiction as a genre, providing safe haven for all its practitioners even as it gives them the freedom to wander from port.

Of course, there’s the issue of craft. Undeniably, the artfulness and literariness of a work is essential to the “creative” aspect of nonfiction. The writing must be done primarily in service to its craft; otherwise, it sinks down to the level of normal nonfiction writing such as your daily journalism or magazine feature. Towering proponents of the genre have stressed the need for a storyteller’s touch, where one must invoke the full force of her stylistic technique and mastery of language, in order to be able to produce, well, a work of art.

And while I agree with the emphasis on artfulness in creative nonfiction, I don’t believe it defines the genre in its entirety. A simple comfort woman’s account of survival and rape by the Japanese, for instance, may not be a conscious effort at weaving a tale laced with any grand theme, and may not even be informed by any formal aesthetic. Yet the story itself is raw and honest; the experience, urgent and moving. Above all, it is timeless — a piece of marginalized history that would never have made it into any official record or schoolbook, and something that humanity can look back at with horror and reckoning. 

* * *

My favorite works of CNF I read in 2012. None of them published this year, all relatively short essays, all most likely to stand the test of time:

• “A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid. Kincaid writes of Antigua in the manner of a guide talking to a tourist, inserting bits about the exploitation and imperialist domination of Antigua, even as she talks about mundane observations such as the weather.

• “Revision” by Aurora Levins Morales. Morales uses the pronoun “we” to signify her affinity for the women of Puerto Rico, detailing the abuses and neglect of their own menfolk, and putting herself as a character that had lived and died with all the women of Puerto Rico’s history.

• “50 Years of Silence” by Jan Ruff-‘O Herne. ‘O Herne’s description of a single scene of rape as a comfort woman during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia was a speech prepared for an international hearing 50 years later.

• “Hateful Things” by Sei Shonagon. Shonagon’s work is a study in propriety and conduct, giving a glimpse of everyday life in feudal Japan through the meditations of one feisty court lady.

• “A [therefore] I” by Thalia Field. Field plays with the idea of silence as a form of resistance, creating a surreal rendering of the interaction between a shrink and his patient.

• “The Unbearable Heaviness of My Being” by Roselle Pineda. Pineda writes about beauty, her overweight body, and the lure of Barbie as the impossible woman, in the Philippines, and in any context.

• “Erato Love Poetry” by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Cha uses an experimental, postmodern style that utilizes space and gaps like a film reel, relays the confessions of a saint, and refuses any attempt at ordered reading.

• “A Generation Lost” (excerpt) by Zi-Ping Luo. Luo, writing from the United States, recalls her turbulent childhood as an ostracized youth during the Cultural Revolution of China.

• “Meatless Days” by Sara Suleri. Suleri subverts the idea of food through various key moments in her life, and offers a cultural critique of the unquestioned assumptions about, and fetishism of, food.

• “He and I” by Natalia Ginzburg. Ginzburg initially paints a blissful picture of domestic life with her husband, only later to overturn the details of submission that she had carefully planted at the beginning.

Yes, these are all works by women, because women fight the toughest battles, after all.

* * *

E-mail the author at sam_ala_carte@yahoo.com.