Eating the sinigang of words

September 24th, 2007

Let us put aside all questions of national and personal identity for a while and talk about food. Yesterday I was having lunch at a restaurant when the idea of literature as food came to me. It might have been the cheese or the wine, but for a while I sat dumbfounded by the simplicity of it all. Fiction for eating. Why didn’t I think about that before?

Given this crazy starting point there are several parallels I can draw. I am sustained both by eating and by reading. Food nourishes the body and literature nourishes the brain. I prefer writing that is rich and imaginative and undaunted by boundaries, the same way I adore very dark chocolate rolled in chili powder. I also try to read works that mean something, though I will occasionally dip into pulp fiction just for fun; for food I have ‘regular’ food, rice and viands and vegetables, and — of course — junk food.

So if literature is food what are writers? Why, chefs. And again it is interesting to look at the comparisons.

Personally, I am as much a chef as a writer, meaning that while I cook often it is mostly for family and friends; I’m not a professional restaurant-trained chef, nor someone who bakes and sells brownies for a living. When it comes to writing I enjoy the pleasure inherent in working with words and playing with sound and meaning, I believe in writing for something, but I am not a professional and probably never will be. Just as I am someone who eats everyday, often surprising people with the quantity and range of my gastronomic adventures, I read a lot when I read, devouring statistical mechanics texts and autobiographical tragicomedies with equal gusto (if not speed). I love food. I love literature! It must be destiny.

There’s another thing. When I eat I prefer food with flavor. The same thing applies to what I read. Oh, and guess what? I like Filipino food and Filipino fiction.

Which brings us to recent discussions on Filipino speculative fiction. I for one don’t believe Italian dishes prepared by a Japanese chef are in any way Japanese, unless of course the chef changes the recipe or his way of cooking it to turn it into a fusion of both cuisines: changing the herbs used, for example, or maybe switching to blowfish instead of meat. By that same logic Ukrainian chefs can prepare Peking duck without having a drop of Chinese blood in them and the Azeri detectives so often mentioned in various blogs these past few days are perfectly free to roll all the sushi they want, Japanese purists be damned. They may not do it well but then that possibility applies to just about anything anyone cooks. Or writes.

So — no, being a Filipino does not automatically gift you the privilege of appending “Filipino” to anything you write, whether it’s quantum mechanics horror or a series of biographies of obscure seventeenth-century crackpots or futuristic plant porn. What about writing in Filipino? Well, that’s debatable. You might write in Tagalog or Hiligaynon about nymphomaniac lovers in Siberia trying to discover tabletop cold fusion, but that doesn’t guarantee its being Filipino. However, you will I hope grant me the point that language is a factor and in terms of a story being written in Filipino, it does have a positive correlation with whether the story feels Filipino or not. And feel, or flavor, or whatever you choose to call it, is very important. Dare I say it is a major determinant when it comes to Filipino speculative fiction as opposed to American or Indian speculative fiction? Oh, I do.

Some may protest that this is a terribly ambiguous pronouncement, but I’m sorry to say ambiguity is a fact not only of life but of art as well. Bear with my vagueness a little while longer so we can examine what flavor is made of. The ingredients, of course; the order in which they are cooked; the method of cooking; the chef. Yes, the chef. Not only taste preferences but also the personality and heart of the cook affect the whole process, and I’m not saying that just because of Ratatouille. Whenever you do something you are naturally involved in that action, and there is a piece of you (large or small, unconscious or deliberate) in every meal you cook, every story you write.

It is therefore somewhat strange to speak of writing “as a Filipino,” especially in the context of being limited as a writer, when there is little one can do but write as oneself; if I’m a Filipino, then I write and eat and live and die as a Filipino, don’t I? –Unless I attempt to shed my being Filipino and turn my back on this country and everything it represents (or maybe everything representing it), in which case whether I write as a Filipino or not is definitely not what I should be worried about. I don’t think we should spend much time worrying about whether we’re writing as Filipinos or as global citizens, whether we eat as gourmets or gourmands. We are who we are, and trying to write as someone else would be a denial of identity. The question is whether we have identities in the first place.

Another question: do writers have a responsibility to their readers? I should hope cooks feel obligated not to poison their customers, and they probably want to make the food as good as it can be — so yes, writers are obligated to write as well as they can, to the best of their knowledge, about their chosen subject. (Let us leave propaganda writers and fast food chains out of this.) Of course if you are cooking for people you love you will use the best ingredients you can, cook food that’s as healthy and delicious as possible, and try not to burn the house down. And if you are representing the country at an international cooking competition, if you are a chef for a restaurant serving Filipino food, I hope you will not cook baklava or sukiyaki or pizza unless you do it in such a markedly Filipino way (mango and kasoy baklava! pizza with dilis and carabao cheese!) that the judges and your customers will be impressed not only by your skill but by the richness and diversity of your culture.

It should go without saying that writing always has a purpose and writers are always responsible for what they write. If people hate a certain writer for her inaccurate and misinformed portrayal of the martial law years, don’t say it’s not her fault, don’t excuse her because she’s Filipino-American. She wrote what she did and readers responded. If you must call your writing Filipino horror or Filipino fantasy then be ready to stand by it when people are criticizing you on all fronts and attacking your yuki-onnas. Also, know your purpose. If you want to write crack fic go ahead, if you want to write rural American fiction, sure, go you. But if you’re trying to help establish speculative fiction as a branch of Filipino literature, you have a responsibility to your readers and to Filipino literature to think carefully about what you’re trying to do and decide how to use your writing to describe, narrate, or further the Filipino experience. Show us our faces.

This is getting a little oracular, so let’s go back to food. We all agree, I hope, that food has flavor. Well, sometimes we identify that flavor with a certain culture — I for one will never be able to eat fragrant basmati rice or lamb stewed in pomegranates without thinking of Persia — and that is what I would like to see in speculative fiction that calls itself Filipino. It doesn’t have to be set in the Philippines, it doesn’t have to be about streetchildren or the oppressed masses or OFWs, it doesn’t have to have Filipino characters. But when I read it I want to taste my country as I eat its words, I want to feel the Philippines sliding in sentences down my throat. Filipino fiction doesn’t have to be pure in the sense of being without other cultural influence: look at our food, we have made pansit our own, we have adopted menudo and turon. And changed them, altering them according to our tastes, so that they become unique to us and our cuisine.

The problem of cooking that kind of literature, I leave to the people in the kitchen.

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Note: The title has been inspired by Robert Bly’s Eating the Honey of Words. Delicious book.

Entry Filed under: writing