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Takuya Matsuda Interviews Cecilia Manguerra Brainard

March 15, 2020 by admin Leave a Comment

Inter­view of Cecil­ia Manguer­ra Brainard by Takuya Matsuda

Focus­ing on her nov­el, When the Rain­bow God­dess Wept

Takuya Mat­su­da is a PhD Can­di­date, Teach­ing Fellow

at the Eng­lish Depart­ment of the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Texas

This Inter­view was done in March 2020 by email

TM (Takuya Mat­su­da): My name is Tak Mat­su­da, and I’m a PhD can­di­date in Eng­lish at the Uni­ver­si­ty of North Texas. I’m from Japan and work­ing on my dis­ser­ta­tion that dis­cuss­es eth­nic Amer­i­can writ­ers’ lit­er­ary writ­ings on the Sec­ond World War in the Pacif­ic. I read your nov­el, When the Rain­bow God­dess Wept, and was impressed with your por­trait of the war and the his­to­ry of the Philip­pines in the novel.

I’m writ­ing this because I felt curi­ous that you seemed to use the term of “Fil­ipinos in Amer­i­ca,” instead of “Filipino/a Amer­i­cans,” in sev­er­al occa­sions. In one inter­view, you said, “Many are still bick­er­ing about who the true Fil­ipino Amer­i­can is. At some point, some said only those born in the US were the real Fil­ipino Amer­i­cans. Of course the immi­grants ignore this def­i­n­i­tion.” I won­der if, when you said this, you had in mind the his­to­ry of US col­o­niza­tion of the Philip­pines and the post-WWII neo­colo­nial pres­ence of the US in the Philip­pines. I think that many oth­er Asian immi­grants and their descents in the US, say Chi­nese, Japan­ese, and Kore­ans, accept the terms of “Chinese/Japanese/Korean Amer­i­cans,” as cat­e­gories deter­mined by nation­al­i­ty. But this is so per­haps because their expe­ri­ence is very dif­fer­ent from Filipinos’/as’ expe­ri­ence both at home and in the US.

I would be tremen­dous­ly grate­ful if you could elab­o­rate on your remark in the above inter­view. Again, thank you for writ­ing the great WWII novel.

CB (Cecil­ia Brainard) : To answer your ques­tion about my use of “Fil­ipinos in Amer­i­ca”, this choice has more to do with what went in my com­mu­ni­ty here in Amer­i­ca, than the his­to­ry of col­o­niza­tion, etc.

I will try to explain.

When I came to this coun­try as a grad­u­ate stu­dent there weren’t many Fil­ipinos here.  By the time I was writ­ing, there were more Fil­ipinos, but there some kind of cul­tur­al divide between the Fil­ipinos who immi­grat­ed here and the Flipinos born here.  In fact, some Fil­ipinos born here, used to make the dis­tinc­tion that they were the “true” Fil­ipino Amer­i­cans”  and the immi­grants were not. This used to annoy me. Instead of argu­ing with them, I start­ed using the term “Fil­ipinos in Amer­i­ca” to get past that “divide” and to find a term that encom­passed all of us here. In fact, there are many traits, cus­toms, and expe­ri­ences that bind us all.

Because of my bicul­tur­al back­ground (I vis­it the Philip­pine twice a year) I am com­fort­able refer­ring to myself in many ways: Fil­ipino, Fil­ipino Amer­i­can, Asian Amer­i­can, Amer­i­can.  Some have lift­ed their eye­brows about that, but many oth­ers under­stand where I’m com­ing from because they too have had to define them­selves in vary­ing occasions.

My hus­band and I vis­it­ed Japan last year and had a won­der­ful time.  I will always remem­ber the ceme­tery at Koyosan, the small Bud­dha fig­ures to help the dead babies in par­tic­u­lar.  And I loved Kyoto. There was a Ramen place near the Mall that I vis­it­ed sev­er­al times.

Thanks again for your inter­est in my work.

TM: Your three nov­els are set in wartime Philip­pines or/and refer to the wars in the Philip­pines, includ­ing the Philip­pine-Amer­i­can War, WWII, and the Viet­nam War, and they depict the ways these wars impact­ed the lives of Fil­ipinos. But WWII or Japan’s Occu­pa­tion came first since the Rain­bow God­dess was your first nov­el. Why do you think that WWII became the theme of your first nov­el and not the oth­er wars? In mul­ti­ple inter­views, you said that your par­ents had told you about the war, and is it okay to say that your par­ents’ sto­ries were so pow­er­ful that you remem­bered these sto­ries even after many years passed and the sto­ries drove you to write a nov­el? Are some episodes in the nov­el actu­al­ly what you heard from your parents?

CM: World War II was a col­lec­tive pain for Fil­ipinos espe­cial­ly to those who lived through it. Even though I was born after the war (1947), I still saw evi­dence of it, like the rub­ble of destroyed build­ings in my city.  The pres­ence of that War hung around like a silent ghost. Even as a lit­tle girl of 6 or so, I would over­hear sto­ries about that war from my par­ents and their friends:

— for exam­ple, the doc­to­ra was hacked to pieces by the Japan­ese up in the moun­tains of Min­danao where my par­ents went. (I fic­tion­al­ized this in the novel.)

—- my father owned a horse named Robi­no; (I used this in the novel.)

— my father was in the guer­ril­la move­ment and worked with the Amer­i­cans. My moth­er used to say that some­times he would go away for many days and they would not know where he went. I under­stood he went with the Amer­i­cans to Australia.)

— my moth­er had a mis­car­riage (a boy) dur­ing that War;

— my moth­er gave birth to my old­er sis­ter behind bush­es while a Japan­ese patrol walked by ( Used in the novel)

So yes, their sto­ries and oth­er Fil­ipinos’ sto­ries and the rub­ble of the war that I still saw post-war had a strong pres­ence in my mind and imag­i­na­tion so that even­tu­al­ly they found  form  in the novel.

To answer your ques­tion: I did not con­scious­ly decide on the theme of this first nov­el, but I would just say that it chose me. I will try to explain.

When I start­ed to write my first nov­el, I focused on hap­py mem­o­ries of my child­hood  (1950s) when my moth­er had a best friend (Mer­cedes, who was trans­formed in the nov­el into Angeling’s sis­ter) and my Mom’s best­friend had a niece (Esper­an­za, the cousin of Yvonne in the nov­el) who was my best friend.  In this first draft, I wrote about the times my moth­er and I vis­it­ed Mer­cedes and her niece, how the niece and I used to watch the Chi­nese Acro­bat­ic troupe at the the­ater etc.  When I fin­ished that draft, I sub­mit­ted it here and there and was con­sis­tent­ly reject­ed. It took me a while to real­ize I did not have a nov­el. I was depressed about this for a spell until I saw the movie “Hope and Glo­ry.” I had an epiphany that my work was some­thing like that War sto­ry. The idea fright­ened me because I was born after the War. But it was clear to me that the real sto­ries, the defin­ing moments, the moments with great­est con­flict for my char­ac­ters hap­pened dur­ing the War. Final­ly I rolled up my sleeves and moved my 1950s char­ac­ters back in time to just before the War began. In the begin­ning I was not sure if my nar­ra­tor should be Yvonne or Esper­an­za, but Esper­an­za was too strung out. Yvonne was calm, obser­vant and thought­ful. I wrote around 75 pages and had it cri­tiqued in a nov­el work­shop. As is the case, par­tic­i­pants picked on lit­tle things, this or that, but the teacher, Leonar­do Bercovi­ci, a well-known scriptwriter and nov­el­ist, stared at me and said, “You have only one job to do, and that is to fin­ish the nov­el.” And so I did.

While I men­tion some episodes that actu­al­ly hap­pened, the work is fic­tion and the snip­pets of “truth” have merged with my imag­in­ings to become the novel.

TM: In the Rain­bow God­dess, you refer to Fil­ipino mythol­o­gy gods, god­dess­es, and oth­er leg­endary fig­ures, such as Tuwaang, Mey­buyan, and Bongka­tolan. I won­dered if these fig­ures and their tales were already famil­iar to you when you start­ed writ­ing the nov­el. Mean­ing, if you learned these tales when you were a child from the elders, as Yvonne does in the nar­ra­tive, or if you did research and learned from books for your nov­el, or if it was the com­bi­na­tion of these two.

CM: Ah … I only learned about ancient Fil­ipino epics when I was grown woman in her 30s, here in the US. I was part of an Epic group that used to meet at UCLA. The oth­er mem­bers were folk­lorists and anthro­pol­o­gists and in that group I learned that the Philip­pines has these mag­nif­i­cent epic songs, and at that time and per­haps even now, epic singers actu­al­ly sang them still in remote parts of the coun­try (as Lay­dan’s Inuk did).  The actu­al translit­er­a­tions were dif­fi­cult to read and I turned them into chil­dren’s sto­ries. When I start­ed writ­ing the War nov­el, it came to me to exper­i­ment and pop in an epic retelling to see if it worked. I liked it there, and con­tin­ued doing so through­out the nov­el.  I had no real con­scious­ness while writ­ing that I was writ­ing the epic song of Yvonne.

I should add that while grow­ing up I heard many fan­ci­ful sto­ries about witch­es, enchant­ed beings, ghosts, and such, and I always loved these sto­ries. Some of these super­sti­tions and folk­lore also made their way into the nov­el and my oth­er writings.

This is an adden­dum, re why some of my oth­er writ­ings deal with the wars in the Philip­pines. As a Fil­ipino here in Amer­i­ca, I became very inter­est­ed in Philip­pine his­to­ry (and Philip­pine epics). Writ­ing about his­tor­i­cal events make these real in my head and give me an appre­ci­a­tion of what my fam­i­ly or the Fil­ipino peo­ple in gen­er­al went through.  I like to say: One needs to know where one came from in order to know where one is going.  (This is not an orig­i­nal thought. I picked that up somewhere.)

TM: The Rain­bow God­dess con­tains a Japan­ese fam­i­ly, Sumi, San­ny, and her hus­band, whose house is burned down and who thus are killed by the hand of a Fil­ipino in the midst of the anti-Japan­ese sen­ti­ment dur­ing the war. I know there were Japan­ese civil­ian per­sons and fam­i­lies in the pre­war and wartime Philip­pines, most of whom were labor­ers and small busi­ness own­ers. But if my under­stand­ing is cor­rect, the num­ber was not large, com­pared to the entire pop­u­la­tion of Fil­ipinos and to the num­ber of work­ers from oth­er coun­tries, like Chi­na. Did you include the Japan­ese fam­i­ly con­scious­ly? Or was it that there were a few or fair amount of Japan­ese fam­i­lies in your home­town? I think that although San­ny and Sumi are minor char­ac­ters, that episode, the death of the Japan­ese fam­i­ly, is very effec­tive in the nov­el, because it makes sure to read­ers that the nov­el does not aim at vil­lainiz­ing all Japan­ese and says that what is evil is war, Japan’s mil­i­tarism, etc.

CB:  I always heard that there were many Japan­ese shop­keep­ers and oth­ers in our com­mu­ni­ties. I do not know the exact count. Peo­ple said many were spies because they report­ed­ly dis­ap­peared after the war. In my small city, there was a Japan­ese woman (a wid­ow I believe) and her daugh­ter who went to the same school that I went to. I recall the moth­er helped dress me up in a Japan­ese kimono with wood­en shoes for some event. The moth­er was very kind, and the daugh­ter, who was old­er than me, was some­what naughty. Like Esper­an­za, she was fun to watch. (I think I envied the “naughty” chil­dren for their dar­ing but I did not have the nerve to be as naughty.)

So while it was not a con­scious attempt to include Sumi and San­ny in the nov­el, they did pop up in the nov­el, inspired per­haps by the woman and her daugh­ter I men­tioned above.

I knew/know that peo­ple are not all bad, nor all good. Real human beings have facets to their per­son­al­i­ties. We are com­plex. We show our “good” side, but we have our bad side too.  I was aware that many sol­diers on either side fought out of duty or because they had to, and that most of them just want­ed to be back home with their fam­i­lies lead­ing their own lives. Even though I can be quite angry at the atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by the Japan­ese mil­i­tary, I know that the Japan­ese peo­ple are just peo­ple. I tried to present this in my nov­el. Like­wise, there is also a “bad” Amer­i­can in the nov­el.  I did my best to cre­ate fleshed-out char­ac­ters in this and my oth­er writings.

(Recent­ly, when I con­sid­er what the US gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary have done, betray­ing the Kurds for instance, get­ting peo­ple killed, I can under­stand the dis­con­nect between ordi­nary peo­ple and gov­ern­ment policies.)

TM: This ques­tion is sim­i­lar to one of my last ques­tions, but I was inter­est­ed in the infu­sion of the seem­ing­ly two oppo­site ele­ments, war and mythol­o­gy, in the Rain­bow God­dess. The nov­el depicts the war “real­is­ti­cal­ly” (=Japan’s bru­tal­i­ty) and yet con­tains Yvon­ne’s fan­ta­sy or her “becom­ing the epic.” This is very much like a Latin Amer­i­can mag­ic real­ist nov­el and reminds me a lot of the works of Gar­cia Mar­quez, Jorge Luis Borges, etc. How did it hap­pen, your infus­ing of the oppo­site ele­ments into your “real­ist” nov­el? I know you men­tioned about Mar­quez as a favorite writer of yours in an inter­view, but do you see his influ­ence in your nov­el? I won­dered if mag­ic real­ism has been root­ed in Fil­ipino cul­ture, because I see a sim­i­lar tendency/approach in your oth­er nov­els (say, the pres­ence of ghosts of dead babies in The News­pa­per Wid­ow) and oth­er Fil­ipino (Amer­i­can) writ­ers’ sto­ries and nov­els as well, a ten­den­cy that departs from the real­ist ter­rain so eas­i­ly and in a great way.

CB: I think because of the Span­ish influ­ence and Catholi­cism, I find many sim­i­lar­i­ties between Fil­ipino cul­ture and Latin Amer­i­can cul­ture. I feel more at home walk­ing around a Span­ish colo­nial town in Mex­i­co than say Seoul or Bangkok. When I read the works of Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez and Isabel Allende, I fell in love with their writ­ings. I loved the worlds they cre­at­ed, worlds that seemed his­tor­i­cal­ly ground­ed but that were strange and dif­fer­ent. In fact the worlds they depict­ed seemed more like the world I grew up in.

As a child, we would talk about our dreams and spec­u­late what they meant; if some­one dropped a fork, that meant a man would vis­it you; if the birds were noisy, that meant rain would come; if the moon had a ring around it, that also meant rain; if a bird flew into the house, that was a bad sign and could mean death. You wore dia­monds and gem­stones because they pro­tect­ed you from harm.  Etc. All these things went on, even as we went to school or church and car­ried on. There was non-stop mag­ic-real­ism in our lives.

That’s were that “mag­ic real­ism” ele­ments came from .… from the way we lived.

While I had read oth­er writ­ers (Dos­to­evsky, Forster, Faulkn­er, Hem­ing­way, etc. etc.)  Mar­quez showed me that it was all right not to be left brain in one’s writ­ing, that in fact, adding these strange things can make it inter­est­ing. Fur­ther, these “strange” ele­ments were in fact more reflec­tive of my cul­ture and beliefs.

I did not intel­lec­tu­al­ize it and saw it only when the nov­el was com­plet­ed: the epic songs echoed my War nov­el. The epic songs had heroes and vil­lains; and so did my nov­el; the epic songs spoke of jour­neys and strug­gles and so did my novel.

I espe­cial­ly loved that the Fil­ipino peo­ple had our own ancient gods and god­dess­es, and that we had our own riv­er of the dead (like the riv­er Styx).

It was like cre­at­ing a tapes­try about the Fil­ipino peo­ple, and even while the main sto­ry line was about the War, it was great fun to add these oth­er inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion about Fil­ipinos and their culture.

Dit­to with my oth­er writ­ings: I like to weave in inter­est­ing infor­ma­tion, like the bit about lep­rosar­i­um in The News­pa­per Wid­ow, etc.

I hope these help.

TM: Thank you for your answer and advice. Please feel free to share this email inter­view in your blog, as I will use and quote some of it in my dis­ser­ta­tion. I will send it to you when I fin­ish writ­ing and defend­ing (maybe spring the next year). Sin­cere­ly, Tak Matsuda

~~~

When the Rain­bow God­dess Wept

by Cecil­ia Manguer­ra Brainard

pub­lished by the Uni­ver­si­ty of Michi­gan Press 

pub­lished in the Philip­pines in 2019 by the Uni­ver­si­ty of San­to Tomas Pub­lish­ing House

This Inter­view is also pub­lished in this link: https://cbrainard.blogspot.com/2020/03/takuya-matsuda-interviews-cecilia.html

Tags: Inter­view of Cecil­ia Brainard, Philip­pine lit­er­a­ture, World War Two, War nov­el, fic­tion, nov­el, Cebu, author, writer, #Cecil­iaBrainard  #When­theRain­bow­God­dess­Wept

Filed Under: Fiction, Uncategorized Tagged With: literature, Philippine literature, Philippines, World War II

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Welcome!

I am a daugh­ter of the Philip­pines and an adopt­ed daugh­ter of Amer­i­ca. I have also trav­eled to many places so I am also a daugh­ter of the Earth. My expe­ri­ences have found their way into my sto­ries, which try to depict char­ac­ters caught in impor­tant moments in their lives, sit­u­a­tions that force them to act, make deci­sions, change. I try to see the world from my own point of view, not the dom­i­nant West­ern one, thus my inter­est in his­to­ry, cul­ture, and set­ting. But my char­ac­ters car­ry my sto­ries; they are the most impor­tant in my sto­ry-telling. I have to dive deep into them to under­stand their human­i­ty – their good­ness as well as their bad­ness, their beau­ty as well as their ugli­ness. Just like us. Just like each of us. I need to know where they came from, where they are now, so I under­stand where they are going. Just like us.

Please read my full biog­ra­phy here

 

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