Tag Archives: Singapore Writers Fest 2011

kultura

admitting to class differences, the dream of readers at home: Butch Dalisay and Phil writing

<…> if these two talks of Dalisay are any indication <…> what our texts have and what ails our texts by default given colonial history <is that> we are out of the Commonwealth loop <…> and while American colonization gave us the English that we use for our writing, we all seem to have forgotten that, and we’re like the bastard children that appear at the family Christmas dinner. There are no favors to be had from our colonial fathers here, and it can only be difficult to deal with expectations.

Such as what Dalisay sees to be the “mournful wail of oppression” as the one thing expected of work from the Philippines, the main thing a writer must be able to work against. But towards what? Again another bottomline: the problem is that even we don’t know what we’re about, so how do we even begin projecting ourselves to the world?

Maybe we begin with what is inescapable. As far as Dalisay is concerned, there’s no escaping class, not for any writer, not for any kind of writing. There’s no avoiding the divide between rich and poor, and in that sense it could be a trope, the one thing that we cannot ignore in the task of writing, especially in English, especially given that this means having very few readers where we come from. And it is a trope that encompasses even that which Dalisay considers to be the most important story for Filipinos of our time: the diaspora. 

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because literature IS serious business

It seems like a foregone conclusion: how else would Singapore do a writers’ festival but with seriousness and business-like professionalism? What’s striking about the first few days of the Singapore Writers’ Festival (SWF) though is this: while business sense would dictate the selling of books in relation to the event, there’s also a clear sense here of going beyond that. And the SWF does so by showing us how literature and writing might on the one hand be celebrated as creative endeavor, and on the other assessed as end product with goals of publication and readership, always with the possibility of the text affecting change.

This is to say that each of the panels I went to were done professionally at the SWF, where moderators had read the books of the writers they were to have conversations with, where they actually become credible points of reference for a discussion with the audience. My context obviously is the Philippines, where even international conferences suffer not just because of sloppy work by local scholars, but even more so unprofessional moderators who think that hosting à la talk show is what this role calls for.

But I digress, and I only do so because of envy: much might be said after all for professionalism especially when it comes to literature and writing, particularly because by our mere existence as writers and critics we demand that it be seen as important. At the SWF, the first thing that’s equated with its importance is a clear respect for writers, which begins with reading their work beforehand.

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