Hey. Still remember me? I’m back (for now) – and serving three proofs of life. 😆
I swear I’ve made every possible joke about being a neglectful book blogger. Life happened. I got too busy. SSCD and writer’s block keep hobbling me. I forgot about this blog. Blogging/Writing here doesn’t interest me anymore. I took a long mental health break. Maybe I should officially retire from this. So on, and so forth. I didn’t lie; all these things happened, and some still happen.
I have a pettier reason for coming back this time around. I’m more active on Instagram and Substack now. The writers and creators I follow there are always enthusiastic about their books, bookshelves, and ✨ aEsThETiC ✨. I was OK with lying low and not yucking anyone’s yum. Until one day, when I randomly missed sharing my enthusiasm for books. I haven’t been reading as much as I used to, but at least I’ve started again. Plus my reviews, bookstore visits, and brain farts still pop up on legitimate searches and get clicks.
Turns out my old book-related opinions retain their value. Maybe my newer ones have value, too. So here I am for my annual cameo. 👋
Today, I’ll talk about three books by Filipino authors. One is a short-story collection, and two are nonfiction books (a historical essay collection and a non-linear and experimental narrative).
They all got me to sit in one place for an extended period and just read. I didn’t check my phone, do small chores or other life things in between chapters, or entertain any other distractions. Instead, I sat down and read until I truly had to stop. I take that as a sign of sharp and engaging writing. It could also be my subconscious desire to ditch doomscrolling and daily tedium.
Also noteworthy is that these books and their authors don’t come from the mainstream Philippine presses. More micro/small presses and independent bookstores have become active and popular in recent years. Their authors and publishers are also consistently vocal about the dire need for new voices in national literature. Specifically: voices beyond the academic/MFA system or the literary awards and journal publication circuits, or without prominent institutional backers.
As always, keep scrolling, or click the links below to skip around.
- Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period, 1565-1946, Lio Mangubat
- Lies All Lies, Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon
- Unbecoming, Angeli Lacson
The untold life stories
I’m not a big history nerd, but I love little-known stories about past people, places, and events. So I was curious when Lio Mangubat’s Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period, 1565-1946 made the online rounds before its official launch.
I also know Mangubat’s name from his magazine work. He’s a longtime writer and editor at Summit Media, and is the current editor-in-chief of Summit Books. I contributed to Summit’s men’s titles for a long time, and I often checked the titles’ mastheads and bylines.
Additionally, he runs a podcast called The Colonial Dept., which I followed on Spotify months before I learned about his book. I don’t know if the stories in this book are lifted from the podcast. But I know they share the same subject area, and this book goes deeper than the podcast’s short episodes.
Mangubat’s editorial background was obvious to me while reading. He’s used to fact-checking, working with tight word counts, and killing countless darlings. The result? Amazing word economy per chapter, extensive footnotes and author’s notes, a detailed bibliography, and citations for virtually everything. Even ideas!
Damn. Yuval Noah Harari could never. 🤣
The 13 chapters talk about rarely known events in the Philippines during our colonial (a.k.a. “White master”) times, and weave several and seemingly unrelated stories together. For example:
- Before basketball, the Filipinos were all over baseball during the American occupation
- Gods old and new + Hollywood and surfing in Aurora
- The gang scene in Manila and Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s
- Otter skins, trading-turf wars, the Galleon Trade, and the Transpacific Slave Trade. Yes, we had a slave trade on our shores. We were the slaves
- The Spanish colonizers’ boat ride into Luzon via Batangas, and how Taal Lake came to be
- Nazis in Manila and the Fuerza Aérea Expedicionaria Mexicana (or Aguilas Azteca)’s activities in the Northern Philippines during World War II
- The Sultan of Sulu as a Broadway satire of the American colonial empire.
Aside from their word economy, the chapters are written in casual English and easily understood. There aren’t any highfaluting or filler words, complicated concepts, or pseudo-intellectual droll. No wonder I kept reading; I have zero tolerance for all of those right now.
✋ WAIT LANG! ✋
This makes me think about how writing styles evolve and what’s deemed acceptable across audiences. Today, we have academic vs. casual vs. WattPad-ish writing, and using one language throughout a book vs. code-switching, among other questions. 🤔
More importantly, I wonder if writing in layman’s terms risks simplifying things too much. I’m not saying Mangubat writes for idiots or that simplification isn’t effective. It’s just that vital information and contexts could be lost when the priorities are mass appeal and basic comprehension.
At the end of Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves, Mangubat says that his late uncle (a history professor, writer, and inventor) and the books he passed down are his primary inspiration for his projects. Life and official world history are indeed shaped by the ‘victors’. But we must also look at the untold stories and help tell those, too.
Also: Mangubat’s grandfather was a WWII soldier and Bataan Death March survivor, and that bit reminded me of my grandfather’s autobiography. That one’s kept within my extended family and not meant for mass publication. Back then, people sat down and wrote their life stories. Today, bits and pieces are scattered all over social media and elsewhere. I’d hate to be a historian in the 2100s onward. ☠️
Title: Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves: Lost Tales from the Philippine Colonial Period, 1565-1946
Author: Lio Mangubat
Publisher: Faction Press, Singapore
Edition: Kindle Edition, 2024
True lies
One of my favorite Philippine fiction authors is back… with a rage baby.
That’s what Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon calls her second short-story collection, Lies All Lies. That rage comes from the aforementioned literary gatekeeping and padrino system, and how she felt creative writing is now:
…a competition, or as beholden to a puritanical process of creation and approval, nor did I want to write so that a very small, specific group of people could pat me on the back and say I belonged with them. I didn’t start writing when I was a little girl to be a better writer than someone, or to subscribe to someone else’s idea of what was best to write.
I’m all for that rage. Partly because I feel the same in my writing life, and partly because de Leon used her rage to bring a form of resistance to life. Like her prior collection People in Panic and zine A Corpse, A Party, and a No-Good Nobody, Lies All Lies is self-published and 100% within her control. And as of August 2024, she’s made it available for free download.
There are more ways to consider this collection a continuation. It contains three of the stories in A Corpse, A Party, and a No-Good Nobody, with a few minor edits:
- “Dietary Restrictions for the San Diego Death Party”
- “The Last Living Pick-Up Artist”
- “Zombie Raul Roco”.
It also showcases more of the fun, feminist, and weird/absurd stories I now expect from her, complete with third-act twists. And, like Mangubat, de Leon is in the media business (as a desk editor at Rappler). So she’s also spare with words and unsparing with her darlings. ✂️
But she deviates from her pattern in some ways, too. Her past works took more from universal experiences and events, and occasionally from Philippine culture and events. With this one, readers can easily guess when she wrote the stories based on her plotlines or her source materials:
- “I Think My Dog is Pro-Du30” pulls from her Duterte-era journalism work + ‘furbabies’ taking on humans’ more monstrous traits
- “Zombie Raul Roco” is literally from every Philippine election campaign season
- “On the 30th Anniversary of Mark and Gela’s Same-Day Edit” echoes the late-’00s same-day wedding video edit craze
- “The Jesus Rocket” reminds me of the rise of religious cults (should we name names?)
- “The Wat” reminded me of my backpacking years, which peaked for most in the ’00s and ’10s. Travel is an educational privilege, but you’ll also ultimately see the same tourist traps everywhere else. It sometimes isn’t the life-changer it’s often made out to be.
Not all the stories resonated with me, though. “State of the Art” was the least engaging and more preachy. Sometimes, I like seeing my politics in the books I read. Sometimes, I’d rather immerse myself completely into something unfamiliar. Seems I was the latter when I read it.
My must-reads here are “Dietary Restrictions for the San Diego Death Party”, “The Last Living Pick-Up Artist”, “Zombie Raul Roco”, “On the 30th Anniversary of Mark and Gela’s Same-Day Edit”, and “Impulse Buy” (which also reminds me of a CNA documentary on the Indonesian Death Riders):
Title: Lies All Lies
Author: Marguerite Alcazaren de Leon
Publisher: Self-published, Metro Manila
Edition: PDF, free download, 2020
A nonlinear life narrative
Life stories often follow a template:
- The origin story
- The inciting incident
- The obstacles and trials
- The ‘overcoming’
- The resolution (preferably in a neatly tied bow 🎀).
The harder the life lived, the sweeter the triumph and wisdom. The goals are to educate and inspire, and to signify that things are ‘better’ now for the subject(s).
Through her debut book, Unbecoming, Angeli Lacson says “Fuck that formulaic Maalaala Mo Kaya bullshit.” OK, she didn’t say this; I just did. 😆 But Unbecoming‘s body speaks it all over.
The first example of this is in its format. The book contains super-short ‘chapters’ of notes, slightly longer notes, footnotes, and actual margin notes; quotations; redactions; and anecdotes and poems playing with structure. Each page contains just a few lines serving as snapshots of specific moments in Lacson’s life, situation, and mindset; but all form critical parts of a whole.
I’ve seen these margin notes before…
The late Anthony Bourdain’s bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly (Insider’s Edition) has its main text alongside extra comments and handwritten margin notes by Bourdain many years later. It was like having an older Bourdain interject as his younger versions ran their mouths.
Are there any other books that use margin notes for added contexts and author’s notes? Tell me. 😃
Next is how Lacson approaches her story. She discusses her disability and mental health – and all of its subtopics, connected issues, and complications in the Philippine setting – in a very nonlinear way. This is also much like how we live and describe life. We’d talk about one thing and then suddenly jump into another, with side comments and deviations here and there.
Disability and mental health are also often described in media (including books) from an onlooker’s point of view. They’re a mere afterthought or synonymous with death for able-bodied people with happy lives. Rarely do we get first-person stories in the form that Unbecoming has. Even rare is the disability story that isn’t a soap opera! Lacson isn’t competing in the Victimhood or Oppression Olympics; she’s telling parts of her life as they are, without melodrama or embellishment.
It’s also quite interesting to see what Lacson avoids and withholds. Some chapters use censorship bars and invisible text, creative ways to open up and keep privacy at the same time. But the biggest question people will ask is how she became paralyzed and a wheelchair user. Most life and disability stories will use inciting incidents as anchors and will keep pointing readers to them for reference. Lacson mentions hers in passing, then dodges it until more than a third through. Even then, she doesn’t address it directly until she’s forced to. I can imagine her writing herself into a corner and forming a tiny exit with enough word crumbs to satiate the Mariteses.
✋ WAIT LANG! ✋
This makes me wonder exactly how to write and read a first-person narrative, memoir, autobiography, or autopathography. Do we demand information from the author, in the forms we’re used to seeing? How much information are we entitled to? How vulnerable must a disability narrative be? And should authors not even try discussing something unless they bare their uncomfortable truths from the outset?
Otherwise, Lacson is upfront with other topics. She delves into the importance of care work and the tough situations our healthcare workers are in. She’s also unflinching about the difficulties of working or finding stable employment in a capitalist system while disabled, the indignities of both visible and invisible disability in the Philippines, and how social class and privilege dictate your life choices as a disabled person.
That last point highlights something crucial for people like me who suffer from invisible disabilities. Lacson acknowledges that she was able to write and publish Unbecoming because she’s cared for and supported by her family, friends, and private nurses. That’s a boon in life that I and others don’t have; many aren’t gainfully employed and have been left with zero carers or funding. We yearn for that wide support, and we certainly won’t fit the ‘perfect’ and polite disabled-person template.
The only complaint I have (if you can call it that) concerns this book’s jarring tonal shifts. Lacson goes from academic and formal to reticent and guarded. Then the chapters on her suicide attempt and its aftermath are deeply personal and head-on, almost clinical. Then it returns to the academic tone. I’d pin this on its various formats and (again) how discussions in real life often jump timelines and perspectives. But it takes time to get used to these wild swings in Lacson’s writing style, and I liken it to (re)learning a new language or dialect.
I bought Unbecoming to see another approach to autobiography or autopathography. It certainly did its job, and then some.
Title: Unbecoming
Author: Angeli Lacson
Publisher: Paper Trail Projects, Quezon City
Edition: First, signed, 2023