creative non-fiction – Page 2 – Katrina Stuart Santiago

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. over those introductory cups of coffee it was a lesson in first meetings: (1) choose a quiet(er) place, (2) remember to pee before it begins, the better to (3) prepare for a four-hour conversation. measure the time spent sitting across each other, compare it to the time spent in each others arms. get a ruler: how far is the distance between us as we walk the streets? how many minutes to walk from your building to the hole in the wall next door, the convenience store further down, the squatters area accessible on the other side of this street. how many minutes before they are comfortable with the image of us, distant but together, an arm’s length away, a table between us, chairs beside each other but apart, i settle on the couch for one. count the times the waiter gives us a sly a smile, the deaf-mute screams his high-five, the manongs we pass grin ear-to-ear, the guard at your building counts 24 hours. how many seconds does it take for the good friend to tease you about me, out of earshot, more of the pinoy macho thing, you say. more a measure of the distance we choose to keep: i sleep against your shoulder, you put your hand on my thigh. you look down the length of our arms as you hold my hand for the first time. absolutely ridiculous you say. i wonder about coffee as the sun streams into the room i am seeing for the last time.

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. there’s the limits of a text message, like a finish line i refuse to cross, so i stop right before it, and begin again. you call it eloquence. i edit myself. you call out to me through the tiny box that you complain is too small a space, appearing just above your right hand as we chat. the tiny box ain’t so bad i argue, and isn’t it above your left hand? it’s limitless, these silly conversations we have, where we make mountains out of molehills i say, where we know some molehills are actually mountains you say, where we must know that some of the latter aren’t really such. we pare down mountains with words. we cut the world in thirds: here’s what you think, here’s what i think, here’s where nothing can be said. as you put food on my plate before you put some on yours, with no romance for that mountain of your leaving in the backdrop, no love for the facts we do not speak of. for two people who get off on words, we hold impending conversations, a paragraph in your head, a sentence that trails off in mine. you look at me in the middle of a crowded noisy restaurant for the leaving and left behind, to say: we know that what matters is what we don’t say, yes? yes. here, take this box and watch mountains become molehills become nothing but ellipses. here, have a box and fill it words.

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. when it can be had about the billboards that riddle the streets, where capital and colonialism, consumption and crises, become par for the course, of that long stretch of EDSA that cradles the car from one city to the next two, as it shifts from quiet residential to sprawling Manila, the dip in the tone, the way that it sounds, onomatopoeic i say, a conversation you’ve been having with your brother you say. which moves us down other cities far from here: shanghai, islamabad, bangkok, and we stop at sin — singapore, towards which you are moving, not leaving, just taking a trip, you insist, i insist, we rationalize. there seems to be no reason to stay in this conversation of refusing to acknowledge the impending distance, from one end of the road to the next, one country to another, one long stretch of time between what we cannot say now and where it might lead next. much like you giving me directions in your part of the city, and i follow even as i might know a shortcut, an easier way, of laying cards on the table, letting it all hang. it’s too soon and sudden, striking but also surreal. and right now what is urgent is only: this stretch of road, a u-turn to make, a right, until everything’s left, you and me on that stretch of road, like the silences that surround roadkills, the swiftness, the transience, when a new set of cars and dangers, noise and victims, take our place.

it must have a lot to do with the conversations. but also the fact that as the evening ends with a quick goodbye, that split second that it takes you to unbuckle the seatbelt and give me a peck on the cheek, the swiftness of that moment is in slow motion: the wall of the squatters area further down sounds brighter, the lights of the korean plaza feel like an intrusion, the darkness of your building a foreboding. of this pending goodbye, the one that stretches to 5, 10, 40 minutes at a time, where the conversation is never about us as it is about the world outside. words suffice for what isn’t ours on that street: the deaf-mute understands what he sees as we are silent on his unsaid; the friend on the phone teases within hearing distance; the policemen behind your building surprised at our temerity/daring/guts to sit at the neighborhood bakery in front of the contained slums. we talk like we’re in front of expensive milkshakes, cups of coffee and pate, cheap banana bread, 15-peso footlong sandwiches, it’s all the same. as we have that same conversation in the car, right before you get off, as i need to get home, and that stretch of time that it takes for us to be uncomfortable, saying goodbye, not for the moment, but for a particular kind of distance, one we do not articulate. we talk like old friends even as this is farthest from the truth: the old, the being friends. here, take a conversation and run away with it. please take a conversation and run.

it was daunting more than anything else, though at some point all that operated was an amount of yabang: i’ve seen friends do this before, i’ve seen wonderful beautiful local books happen without a big publisher behind it, without press releases coming out in papers. and this book, i knew, deserved the major major effort of blood/sweat/tears because it is about family and history. because it is unconventional in form, an almost refusal to fall within the genres that are familiar, a straddling among creative non-fiction/historical essay/memoir. because it demanded a freedom from the standard limitations of publishing, given its refusal as well to deal with the ways in which things are usually written, how they usually look, what can usually be said.

and so Revolutionary Routes can be infinitely controversial, familiar as many of the personalities within its pages are, from former presidents Manuel Quezon to Ramon Magsaysay, Vicente Sotto to Artemio Ricarte to Tomas Mapua, yet here, more than anything they are revealed to be people. there should be no fear in that. there should be freedom in it.

because that is also what it means to family: a great amount of freedom. to be able to let go of these stories, and more than sharing it with the world, show the world how our Lola Concha, unnamed and anonymous, knew somehow to sit down and write, in long hand, about the life she lived. with no pretenses at publication, no grand narrative tying everything together, no effort at making saints out of sinners. in the process she left not just a narrative about family, but a history both local and national in the voice of someone who actually lived within it. Reynaldo Ileto’s Foreword to the book begins:

Revolutionary Routes is more than a family history across four generations. Author Angela Stuart-Santiago has deftly woven together the memoirs, clippings, correspondence and other traces of her family’s past into a microhistory that spans the late 19th century up to the 1950s. While this book is rooted in the specific experiences of a family that lived in Tiaong and its adjoining towns in southwestern Tayabas (now Quezon) province, it also tells us much, from the ground up, about everyday life in the countryside under the shadow of successive imperial and national regimes. This book can also be read as a modern history of the Philippines.

it seemed there was no other way to do this book, but to take it by the horns and make it walk a path we were making up as we went along. a kind of tribute to the way Lola Concha lived believing in hard work and with more heart — heart — than i can muster. a tribute to Lola Nena who could see most clearly even as she was blind, who inadvertently led me to reading beyond my years, whose sadnesses are a thread i find strength in. and really, ultimately, a glass raised to Angela, whose writing’s a gift in the most basic and complex of ways.

today these arrived in the house and home that Lola Concha and Lola Nena continue to provide us in Mandaluyong:

and i realized there was no other way, no other way at all, but to have taken the path we did, difficult/stressful/frustrating as it was. and today, i felt as close to this joy as i could, as in the end, this route could only be liberating, in all ways imaginable.

***

we’re launching Revolutionary Routes, on August 20 2011, 5 to 8PM at the Filipinas Heritage Library. come buy a book and have Angela sign it! we’re celebrating family and Tayabas, and Elias from Rizal’s Noli who we now know to be a crucial part of our story.

if at all, you’ll get to meet us beyond our blogs, with partying the only thing on our minds, no fangs included. do come!

Revolutionary Routes by Angela Stuart-Santiago

Revolutionary Routes, Five Stories of Incarceration, Exile, Murder and Betrayal in Tayabas Province 1891-1980 by Angela Stuart-Santiago

based on the memoirs in Spanish of Concepcion Herrera vda de Umali
as translated into English by Concepcion Umali Stuart

foreword by Reynaldo C. Ileto
book design and overall layout by Adam David
cover design and Elias illustration by Mervin Malonzo
official website by Joel Santiago

Katrina Stuart Santiago

Katrina Stuart Santiago

Tag Archives: creative non-fiction

considerations

composition

exigencies

egress

the path for Revolutionary Routes