The struggle for form: a conversation between Nick Carbo and M. Evelina Galang.(Panel Discussion)

Editor's Introduction:

This email conversation between poet Nick Carbo and fiction writer M. Evelina Galang took place during a ten-month period from September 2002 to June 2003. I invited Carbo and Galang to discuss issues that Filipino American writers have to encounter because I thought that a dialogue between two writers would provide enriching glimpses into highly individual creative processes and allow them to speak more openly in context. From their positions as talented writers concerned with the state of Filipino American writing and actively motivating the publication of diverse work--both Carbo and Galang have co-edited groundbreaking anthologies of poetry and prose--they are singularly well-suited for this reflexive exercise. The writers agreed to "talk" this way because, as they affirmed, it allowed them time to reflect on the questions they asked each other and provide the exact details often left out in hurried person-to-person interviews. This conversational form created a personal and intimate space without an outside voice directing the questions with a specific agenda in his or her mind.

In this conversation, Carbo and Galang uncovered hidden memories and exposed details of their lives that shaped much of what they are as Filipino American writers today. Though much of their dialogue centers on their writerly processes and experiences, many of their insights may be easily used to comprehend the process that occurs in other texts. Their views allow us to see behind the texts, to the complex itineraries of creative choices and positions that Filipino American writers make and occupy, respectively. Further, the writers engage many of the questions that the authors of the critical articles in this issue negotiate, primarily the intersection between aesthetic choices and thematic concerns in Filipino American writing.

--Rocio G. Davis

NC: I grew up in Manila in the seventies and early eighties during the height of the Marcos dictatorship. I attended the international School in Makati, which was the former American School established by the Americans during the Commonwealth period of the Philippines. Only the very rich families of Manila could afford to send their children to the International School. Among my classmates were sons and daughters of the Filipino elite with names like Tantoco, Benedicto, Elizalde, Araneta, Soriano, and Tan. There were even Filipino movie industry teen stars in attendance like Sharon Cuneta and Pops Fernandez. Even though the school was educating the children of some of the most powerful families in Filipino society, there was still a hierarchy based on nationality and race. In one of my early poems "Civilizing the Filipino" (from El Grupo McDonald's) I document an incident where I was accused by a white American classmate of stealing his gold pen. In the white American Principal's office I was slapped, picked up by the front of my shirt and thrown against the wall in an effort to make me confess to the crime. The words "dirty, lying Filipino" never left my mind because I realized that no matter how hard I protested, or pleaded my innocence, the American Principal believed down to his Florsheim shoes that the white kid was telling the truth. All American things (and people) were privileged over anything Filipino. I can look back now and say that it was the perfect example of a neocolonial existence. I learned to speak with an accent straight from California's Long Beach, I wore Nikes and Jordache jeans to school, and I read American books like The Catcher in the Rye and the Hardy Boys. My experience at I.S. was not the typical education most middle class Filipinos had growing up in the Philippines, who went to local private schools like De LaSalle, Ateneo, Assumption, San Agustin, and Xavier, where there was more homogeneity among the students.

How different or similar was your high school experience in Milwaukee? Was your sense of being Filipino formed that early?

MEG: As an adult looking back, it's easy to see issues of race and class, but I wonder how cognizant you are when the incidents are happening. I know I spent my youth going through these issues without processing them until I was well into grad school. My awareness and my identity of being an American-born Pinay came in slow and subtle ways. I grew up in the sixties and seventies. ...