Filipinos don’t read

“Filipinos don’t read.”

This statement would stop most of you up, and for some, it may shock. When these words were first spoken to me in Los Angeles some 3 years ago, I was shocked. In fact, my shock was so great that it eclipses most everything that happened before and after it was said.

I only remember a broad sketch of the surrounding context: I was conversing with one of my favorite Filipino-American authors, all of whose books I had read and loved, at a writing event. He had been talking about poor sales for his latest novel and had used the statement – “Filipinos don’t read” – to segue (at the brisk pace of a Segway) into how I should oh, basically give up my dream of being a Filipino writer.

His pitch or (anti-pitch – what should it be when you’re trying to convince someone not to do something?) rested on financial grounds. Given that “Filipinos don’t read,” I would essentially be cosigning myself to a life of poverty, according to his estimates. I would be equal to a priest, minus the cassock.

Thus, I should get out now, before I commit to the study and creation of more Filipino writing, while I still have a chance. I could drop out of my creative writing program and go study something lucrative, like “accounting,” he said, leaning in conspiratorially.

What had brought us together had left me completely and suddenly: I was at a loss for words. Did he want me to agree? Filipinos indeed don’t read, sir. Did he want me to argue? Filipinos might actually do read, sir.

Unable to decide, I excused myself to go to the restroom. In a stall, I gathered my composure (picture me rubbing my face a few times, as though trying to clear the thought away). The next thing I knew I was driving home – just me, the road, and my doubts, which, like the dotted yellow line, followed me home with every twist and turn.

Michael Jordan had told me that basketball was worthless, just a ball through a hoop, a game with no point in the end.

Gentlemen’s club

It was not until I moved to the Philippines that I learned that he had been right all along. Only it wasn’t that “Filipinos don’t read,” it was that “Filipinos don’t read the kind of books I write.” This epiphany came to me in – fittingly enough – a National Book Store.

Filipinos read just fine. The rest of the bookstore was heavy with foot traffic. The section that I stood in, like some brave soul on the top of a mountain peak – Filipino literature – was empty.  

During my 30 or so minutes of scanning for a book to buy, the only people who passed through were those who used it as a shortcut to romance. I could erect a sari-sari store here for National’s employees.

I began to wonder: Why? Why did Filipinos flock to other genres (romance, science fiction, young adult, biography, literary), but ignore the one that seemed like it should be the one most important to them by name alone – Filipino?

You could, as I did then, thumb through any of the books to find your answer. In their style, in their language, and in their very ideas, these books were gatekeepers: They chose to keep many people out rather than invite all people in. To even have a chance at enjoying one of them, you needed to have a certain high-level literary and creative education.

And if you didn’t, tough luck. You could try to read all you want, but the only feeling you would get is that of being on the outside looking in. At what exactly? At some grand inside joke between the author, his writer friends, and his old professors. In this sense, Filipino literature is not only a category – it is a club, membership of which I wanted no part of as it currently stood.

I left the store that day bookless but dignified. By not buying anything, I was refusing to support a literature which excluded the vast majority of people it was said to represent. But then with a twinge – first of cynicism, and then, much more rightly, of sadness – I wondered whether it was possible to boycott something that was already largely ignored.

Filipino literature as one man’s dreams

If you will indulge one man his dreams, let me share with you mine. During the hours that are said to be ungodly, I will sit at a glass desk facing a glass window that takes up a whole wall. It gives me a view of Metro Manila as it sleeps. The view stretches into the distance, but into which township exactly, I’m really not sure.

I will be writing. It may be on my MacBook Pro. It may be in my journal with the penguin on each paper. It may be on the index cards that I like to use so I can easily shuffle around paragraphs. No matter the medium, I will be trying to put words together, one after the other, to try to reach at least one person somewhere out there, in God’s good time.

In case I am unable to, a sign nearby – made of a page with a penguin in the corner, his face now pointing floorward – casually reminds: All creative failures your own! This is a philosophy that is nothing, if not cultural. There is nothing inherent in the Filipino – as the author had once suggested – that goes against reading or literacy.

If I live the life of a starving artist – I tell myself, as part of internal monologue that follows a glance at the sign – it’s only because our country has a starving readership. The blame falses squarely on my shoulders, hunched as they already always are over the page. It is but my responsibility, as a writer in the Philippines, to cross the lines that our culture has haphazardly drawn in the sand.

How do I wish to do this? I’ve started to write imaginative sketches based on inspirational stories that I find in newspapers and magazines. I’m trying to get better as a writer, my pace alternating between frustrating and fulfilling, and back again, this time for what seems like whole months of crunching paper.

Eventually, when I am good enough, I want to lovingly craft a collection of intimate profiles on modern Filipino heroes – everyone from Maria Ressa and Mikaela Irene Fudolig to Paul Rivera and Manuel Velez Pangilinan – that detail how each overcame a problem that made them into Who They Are Today.

It will be written in a language that will invite Filipinos to read, understand, and enjoy, and ultimately, if all that goes well, to be moved, inspired, provoked. This sounds simple in theory, but it’s difficult in execution. With the Philippines being so diverse – culturally, ethnically, religiously, and so on – how do you write your books targeted toward the average Filipino?

Shared future

Even as I merely hone my writerly craft, this question haunts me. What carries me onward, through my bouts of insomnia and droughts of inspiration, can be likened to levels of a city, not unlike the one that I write with, and to, at night. I call on anyone who wishes for a better Philippines to dream right here along with me.

On the eye level of God, I bask in the full landscape of the city. In a corner of it previously empty, I see skyscrapers rising into view. They are publishing houses. They will be built on the strength of books that appeal to you and make you aspire. The literary industry, as a whole, will be robust, capable of supporting the number of novelists, essayists, and poets that a country the size of the Philippines ought to support.    

Diving downward, into the city’s streets and stores, I see Filipinos, who were once proclaimed not to read, doing the very opposite. They’re not only reading on park benches and in crowded cafes – they’re discussing the books with friends, strangers even – but then again, in time, everyone becomes friends over a good book.

They’re analyzing the latest books over coffee, or in the spirit of many who wrote them, drinks. Ideas that can uplift our country onto the world’s stage are shared and broken down and made whole again, before being put into action by our inspired countrymen. Repeat this process over and over again, and our nation will – in more ways than one – be richer.  

If you follow one such countryman home to his house, you will find my greatest motivation to continue writing during the dead of night. Though his room is a much smaller space than the city or the cafe, it touches upon, but does not grasp, an infinitely larger idea, one that holds everything together: the role of the artist in our modern culture.

Greatness

This sounds like the stuff of pretentious conversation, but bear with me. I ask that you consider my answer to this topic. It’s important that you do because our literary future, and in turn, our entire country’s future, is influenced in some large part by the books that we read and the authors who write them. As a society, we must hold them accountable should they aspire for anything less than greatness.

Greatness as an artist – or in our case, a writer – is predicated upon the ability to break the very bounds of physics. He must be able to be in more than one place at once, and he must be able to do this well. In this sense, he must be both widely popular – projecting himself via his books across time and space – as well as deeply intimate – he must tingle you to the very atoms of your humanly being.

The latter feeling – which I feel so rarely as a Filipino reader and which I aim to make more common as a Filipino writer – takes work, work again, that I’d like you to demand that all our writers undertake. We must wring our heartstrings by the neck and write the kind of writing that hurts to write, where every sentence feels like a sacrifice of immeasurable magnitude that could keel us over at any point like our exhaustion did at every morning’s approach.    

The end product – the collection of words we call a story or a book – must appear effortless. Its construction must show none of the strokes that made it, or none of the scars that went into its making. Its appearance must belie all of these things, so that when you, the reader, open the book, you get the equivalent of a ceramic ballerina that twirls to song: something beautiful that speaks to you. – Rappler.com

Rappler business columnist Ezra Ferraz graduated from UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California, where he taught writing for 3 years. He now consults full-time for educational companies in the United States. He brings you Philippine business leaders, their insights, and their secrets via Executive Edge. Follow him on Twitter: @EzraFerraz