A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown

Crown Publishing Group, February 2006
Review by Vanessa Dora Murray

It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over!

Cupcake Brown, an attorney who worked at one of the 25th largest law firms in the nation, has traveled all over the country to deliver a motivational speech. “My goal is to hopefully inspire as many people as I can and to let them know that no matter what challenges they may face in life, they’re not alone—and any challenge can be overcome,” she says in one of her many interviews since the writing of her debut book, A Piece of Cake.

A Piece of Cake is an awe-inspiring coming-of-age epic account—written in first-person and Brown’s own vernacular—of hope and survival.

At age 11 Brown finds her mother dead in bed. She is tossed into a sadistic foster home and her life spirals down into a world of physical abuse, rape, drugs, prostitution, and gang banging. By age 13 she finds herself pregnant by one of her johns but lose the unborn baby when she is brutally beaten by her foster mother’s daughter. By her 15th birthday she is told by doctors that she’ll never walk again after she is shot in the back with a 12-gauge shotgun by rival gang members in South Central Los Angeles. She does walk again. But her addiction to crack grows out of control. She hates her life and wants to die so she tries to contract AIDS. By her mid twenties, she walks past a window after living behind a dumpster for days, “And saw my reflection. My eyes were sunk in my head. My lips were burned and scabbed from the crack pipe. You could see my ribs. I had seen death before on other people. But I’d never seen it on me,” recalls Brown. That day was the beginning of her spiral up. She entered a drug rehab, got rid of toxic friends, and without a high school diploma or GED, Brown graduated college magna cum laude. In 2001 at the age of 37 Brown graduated nearly top of her class from the University of San Francisco Law School. Brown has received a slew of scholastic awards including the University of San Francisco School of Law’s Judge Harold J. Haley Award for Exceptional Distinction in Scholarship, Character and Activities, the McAuliffe Honor Society, the National Law School Dean’s List, and the San Diego State University’s Donald Leiffer Outstanding Alumni Award for Distinguished Service.

A brutally straightforward memoir, A Piece of Cake will have readers sniffling throughout this 480 page heart-wrencher sprinkled with a modest amount of humor.

Scholarship Girl by Lesley Wheeler

Finishing Line Press, 2007
Review by Rachel Dacus

Can memories be passed down through generations? This is the question at the heart of Lesley Wheeler’s fascinating new chapbook of linked poems on the theme of her mother’s World War II era Liverpool. The book begins with a poem whose title challenges ideas of thought and memory, and where memory resides. “Remembering My Mother’s Childhood” dares conventional ideas of memoir by giving it a twist: the concept of a parent’s experience transmitted through living language, full-blown and layered as if experienced by the child. That initial poem begins with definitions critical to the question:

When she says stove she means fireplace,
a great soot-blackened maw. When I say
Liverpool I mean an unreal city, purified
of reeking detail like a fairy tale

But this is no fairytale world that Wheeler’s poetry evokes in rich detail. With a startling authentic voice and “remembered” imagery, the poet layers the present day daughter and her questions about origins with cultural inheritance, even questioning the possibility of such questions being answered. She declares the ambiguity of memory in the poem’s last lines: “I invent this blitzed, hungry, smoke-thin world/ because it invented me, and lies/ are my birthright.”

The layers in Wheeler’s poetry are most deeply revealed in the book’s adroit crown of unrhymed sonnets, “The Calderstones.” The initial sonnet sets out its scope of history, making it as solid and yet mysterious as its subject, a ring of ancient stones. The poem ends by showing the destructiveness of time on culture and memory and even on megaliths: “Liverpool shrugs and shrines/ topple.” The callousness of history becomes part of history and culture.

Wheeler’s deeply rooted – if borrowed – sense of place pervades this collection. At times the poems reminded me of English poet Alice Oswald’s marvelous Dart, a book-length poem that traces the course of the river Dart from its source to the ocean, folding in all its people and occupations along the way. At other times, the idiomatic voices and terse commentary made me think of Eliot. Using a rich blend of artifact, dialect and rhythm, Wheeler points to the mysterious accretion of cultural patterning while simultaneously shrugging them off with the observer’s detached stance.

“No elegies here,” declares the last line of the last poem. Yet I felt in these poems a river of plaintive tribute to the power of language to transmit a deep sense of place. The final poem begins with lines that might be anti-ode, an elegy for memories that cannot completely cohere, but still resonate in the time capsule of verse:

There is no way to prove to you how
my mother’s Liverpool sounded,
the slosh, the rattle of it, the catarrhal
school girl recitations of “Daffodils”

there is no grooved disk, no file
to click, no black-and-white child
to stand on the chair for a song

me auntie Mary had a canary
up the leg of her drawers

In refusing to pen elegies, Lesley Wheeler has instead poignantly recreated another world and another time.

Voice of Ice by Alta Ifland

Les Figues Press, 2007
Review by GA. A. Banks-Martin

True Birth

Voice of Ice, a collection of prose poems, by Alta Ifland, an ambitious group of poems in which the speaker seeks to discover her true self. The poems are highly descriptive and many times highly surrealistic often leaving us with the sense that we have just been somewhere familiar but unfamiliar. For example, the first lines of Birth:

I was born in a lapse of time, my hand clinging to a
dandelion, my feet gripping a vine leaf, my nose on my
back, and eye on my ankle.
Of course, no one remembers being born but it is safe to say that this description is far from the truth. However, as the poem develops, so does an explanation:
My mother wasn’t present at my birth or maybe she was
there and her pain of being torn apart still throbs in my veins.
The idea that the infant was born with what seems to be several malformations is really a way of introducing the book’s primary theme: deconstruction of self. The narrator
must return to the point at which she is purest, the point at which all knowledge is innate, to be reborn and reopened to basic learning.

That learning includes discovering there is something worst than being unhappy: having been abandoned by your own unhappiness. As is the case of My neighbors, a couple who have tried to find contentment via plastic surgery and antidepressants only to find that those solutions lead to more plastic surgery and antidepressants. Surgery has left the wife’s face so distorted that it sounds as if her surgeon was really a cubist painter, the husband shows no physical signs malady but has the odd ability to discuss prescribing information and general concerns encountered while taking any antidepressant. They are so unhappy they no longer know they are unhappy; unhappiness has become a lifestyle.

The last lesson of the book is simple, we have been educated to understand everything, is recycled, thus, Even death is no longer final. While the poem Death illustrates this well, the basic thought was quietly developing along side all of the other ideas, as the poet has translated each poem into French, her native language, symbolically, the lost, and regaining of national identity.

Therefore, when we reach the end of Alta Ifland’s Voice of Ice, we have witnessed the fascinating rebirth of a human being, a being free of ego, preconceived notions of identity, national or otherwise, and formal learning. What we encounter about life and ourselves is funny, uncomfortable, familiar and difficult but refreshing and well worth struggle.

The poet, Alta Ifland, was born in Eastern Europe, studied literature, and philosophy in France, and lives in California.

Between Pen and Paper: The Poetry of Habiba Muhammadi

by Shannon K. Winston

I write
To shout
To live
You write
To shout
To live
But who will silence
The shouting between us?

-Habiba Muhammadi, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi

Habiba Muhammadi was born in Algeria and attended the University of Algiers where she studied philosophy. She then moved to Egypt where she earned a degree in Arabic literature. Now a permanent resident in Cairo, she works as a journalist and contributes regularly to a variety of literary and cultural magazines (Handal, The Poetry of the Arab Word, 339).

As the poem that opens this article suggests, Muhammadi’s poetry reflects on her personal relationship to writing. She turns to writing as a space where she can be heard or, in her own words, where she can “live,” “write,” and “shout.” Simultaneously, she also broaches the larger question of collectivity: in the final lines of this poem, there is a pronoun shift from a singular “I” to an “us.” While the reader is not given any definitive answers as to who the “us” includes, what is clear is that there is strife that divides the “us” that should be united rather than divided. When taking the larger historical and political situation of Algeria into consideration, the “we” could refer to Algerians and the Algerian War of Independence and, at the same time, it could also include women who have struggled for so long to be recognized.

The page is the central image that pervades many of Habiba Muhammadi’s poems. Her speaker continually reminds the readers of the writing process as the poem unfolds on the page, which assumes several significances. For example, Muhammadi writes: “This paper is our friend/ It holds ever steadfast/Against the repeated stabbings/Of our pens.” Here, not only is paper a place of familiarity but also one that withstands violence—the violence against meaning, language, and the literal violence that a writer recounts over her lifetime, as well. In another poem, paper links the speaker to her past when she states: “In my room far away/ I write the memory of dead paper/In a barren space/Loneliness speaks words of love/to me..” (231). Far from encouraging the creative process, here, paper represents a dearth of words and possibilities for communication.

Overall, Muhammadi’s poetic style is pithy and clear. Many of her poems are treat very complicated themes within a few short lines of verse. In her preface to The Poetry of the Arab World, Nathalie Handal explains: “North African women throughout their history have been heroes and legends, martyrs and resistance fighters, nationalists, and writers, participating in all aspects of their civilization historically, politically, socially, and artistically” (Handal, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, 30). Muhammadi grapples with the past (and all that it entails for her as an Algerian woman living in Egypt) within the confines of the page.

Asylum in the Grasslands by Diane Glancy

The Arizona University Press, 2007
Review by Kimberly L. Becker

The Greening

If, as Diane Glancy observes, “Writing is a conversation,” then we are fortunate to listen in on her latest collection of poems, Asylum in the Grasslands. Author of more than thirty books, Glancy is also novelist, essayist, and playwright. Her many literary prizes include an American Book Award, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Native American Prose Award and a Sundance Screenwriting Fellowship. In Asylum in the Grasslands she devotes her formidable talent to illuminating the history of the Cherokee.

There is movement in these poems: both forced removal and migrations to “the grasslands of the next world.” Spirits of ancestors come and go, since “Distance is no measure.” Women have traditionally been esteemed as leaders within the Cherokee community, so it is no surprise when the spirit of Great-grandmother stops by for a visit. Yet when she speaks in Cherokee, “I shrug in frustration. How do I tell her even the / words of her Cherokee language do not survive?” Glancy acknowledges that spiritual connection sustains even when native language wanes: “I watch the buffalo cross her / cheek. Under the buckskin there are grapevines for her ribcage. / In her pocket a map of pit stops on the large arc of her restless / migration.”

Glancy transforms the ordinary into the luminous. A snakeskin found on the lawn is first “A crackly robe. / Delicate. / Royal. / Something the children / would have played with” then “a robe Clytemnestra wore / after her daughter Iphigenia / was sacrificed.” The speaker rolls the snakeskin in her hand and thinks of “the sacrifice of women.”

Government boarding schools forced Indian children to sacrifice their own culture in the name of assimilation. “Boarding School for Indian Women” addresses the resultant sense of dislocation: “Now our world is taken, and we are / left with this shadow of our making. / The next world is far away.” Glancy’s poems access the past, yet one “beyond memory / into heritage / or ancestral levels of thought.” Her writing evidences what Gerald Vizenor termed survivance. She witnesses to loss, but also to “a power that transcends horror.”

These poems affirm a transcendent power. In the title poem she envisions the Savior as someone you meet “in the prairie grass / his face so full of light he’s milk-eyed / you let his ideas roll over you / you even forget the bitterness you learned / all your life.” In “Buffalo Medicine” the buffalo are at one with the Great Spirit: “…we would run through the prairie / with the wind in our ears. Our large heads pure with mind. The / Great Spirit great as he spoke. Yo. Were his. We grunted / his praises. Snorted and roamed in his will.”

Like wind through the prairie grass, Glancy’s poetry whispers insistently: listen. “Language is still enough,” she asserts in one poem. In this moving book, it surely is.

Dear Talula, a film by Lori Benson

2006, 34 minutes
Review by Nicolette Westfall

Lori Benson potently documents her abrupt transition from new mother to a patient with breast cancer. Although the work is only 34 minutes long, it is an emotionally charged film that reveals great insight into her struggle with a mastectomy and life afterwards.

Footage of peaceful time with her young daughter, Talula, is alternated with the cold reality of the sterile hospital setting, tests, chemo therapy, and doctors. She does not spare the viewer from the raw war cancer takes on her body. A surgeon notes the increased difficulty with reconstruction after the mastectomy, as opposed to a simply breast enhancement.

There is a photo shoot, baring her scar, done with integrity. Flowers go with her to the hospital. Soft lighting echoes the warmth her family and friends provide during the stressful times.

The stark, white lab coats of doctors and surgeons reveal the coldness of accepting life as it is. Benson is one of those women who inherit the grimness of higher chances of breast and ovarian cancer. Whether she will get cancer in her remaining breast is not known—all she can do is continue on with life, but the anxiety and worry is ever present. The majority of breast cancer cases are, however, random, and so, those women may live life thinking they won’t get cancer—until it hits—so live life instead of worrying over it.

Keeping strong for the camera, Benson tackles each stage in the process with as much energy as is physically possible, while taking care of her daughter. When she first comes back from the hospital, Talula is understandably distressed by the change and cannot be consoled. Cancer strikes to the core of not only the patient, but family and friends as well.

She wants to know whether her daughter will suffer the same tragedy. At one point, her father speaks about losing another family member to breast cancer. It is hard on men too. Life in Manhattan, however, goes on, much like the yellow taxis that stream along the streets, taking her back and forth to the hospital.

Recognizing that her own reaction to the situation is paramount to her recovery, she infuses the filming with humour. Jokes about her weight after her chemo therapy—a pound for her jeans—help everyone (including the viewer) cope with the process.

The end of the piece shows Benson swinging Talula around in a park, where there are no stainless steal scalpels or hospital gowns or IVs. They are, for the moment, safe from cancer.

Bruised Hibiscus by Elizabeth Nunez

Ballantine Books, 2000
Review by Mary Senior Harwood

Hidden Truths

The brutal murder of a white woman whose body washes up on the beach in the small village of Otahiti in Trinidad – the result of “man-woman business” say the men — sets this book in motion. Zuela, the Venzuelan wife of a Chinese grocer, meets Rosa, the daughter of a plantation owner, at the shrine to the Virgin in Laventille and acknowledge their shared past as childhood friends. Rosa’s fear is that this murder will be played out again in her own home by her black husband and Zuela finds herself drawn to the shrine to fight thoughts of retribution to her harsh husband who took her from her family and married her as a mere girl.
As playmates, the two girls witnessed the rape of a girl behind a hibiscus bush. Rosa is haunted by the rapist’s repeated mantra, Beg. I know you want it. Beg. When she hears her own husband uttering the same phrase, she fears for her own life. The image of the bruised hibiscus, whose brilliant flowers fade to the same purplish blue as a bruise, recurs throughout the book.

The cast of characters reflects the multi-hued Caribbean society. Rosa is the daughter of a plantation owner, but unknown to all (because of her pale skin and hair) except her mother and nanny, her father was a black man. Cedric, Rosa’s husband, is the son of a black woman and an Indian laborer whose father was sexually abused by Rosa’s father and who committed suicide when rejected by the plantation owner. Cedric’s marriage to Rosa is in part retribution. Zuela represents the population that migrated from South America and her husband, Ho Sang, the Chinese influx, many of whom became merchants like her husband.
Nunez uses the universal theme of violence toward women to echo the violence and injustice of the colonial era. Several events during the years Trinidad worked toward independence from the British Commonwealth frame her story and intensify the dual message of the immediate violence done to the two virtually enslaved women and the history of a country raped and enslaved by colonial masters. When the people revolt, they lash out at any symbol of that power – including Rosa, who they perceive as white.

It is also a book about secrets – the secret of Rosa’s father’s homosexuality, her mother’s affair, Rosa’s heritage. About the crimes that haunt Ho Sang and drive him to opium to forget. About secret passions of love and hatred.

If It Be Not Now by Natalie Miller

Athena Press, 2007

For lovers of Russian Literature.
- By Cheryl A Townsend

Natalie Miller’s story of Demetrius Ulyanov is a heart wrenching saga of most unfortunate events, beginning in youth and continuing to his painful death.

After his mother dies giving birth to his sister, who also dies, Demetrius’ grief-stricken father commits suicide. Demetrius, a young lad, is then left alone and utterly devastated. His interrupted attempt to hang himself leaves him forever marked and ashamed.
In young adulthood, Demetrius opens a tailor shop, living a quiet, simple existence until his childhood friend invites him to his wedding. Giddy with anticipation, he packs up for the big city of Moscow, entrusting his business and home to a close acquaintance and begins another chapter of despair.

Demetrius is Ukrainian and unable speak or understand Russian. Debarking the train, lost and confused, he asks simply for directions. No one understands him, nor he they. He is assumed an insane lunatic and subsequently becomes a scapegoat for the killer of a local doctor. A judge hurries the untried Demetrius off to life in prison where he is at a loss for the reason or anyone able to enlighten him. For 6 years, he is continually humiliated and beaten. Pathetic and meek, he wanes. On one of his trips to the infirmary, an opportunity for escape arises and he takes it.
\
Demetrius’ run for freedom ends with him collapsing in exhaustion and ironically waking up in the yard of the very friend he initially came to see. I really hoped for the happily ever after here, but it’s just not in his fate.
Fairly soon after, the man who had initially framed Demetrius confesses his guilt in a suicide letter, leaving Demetrius officially a free man. A free man that still suffers his untreated prison beatings of broken bones and a final rendering of Tuberculosis.

Recouping at his friend’s home, Demetrius is contacted by a grandfather he never knew of and learns he is now an extremely rich Baron. Knowing his own impending death, Demetrius asks only for a simple cottage in the country to live his remaining days contentedly. His grandfather allots for all Demetrius’ expenses to be paid, including a new doctor that becomes his only friend there.
Demetrius finds work at a tailor shop, meets Sofya, falls in love and marries her as soon as she’s free of her parents planned arrangements. Sofya tends to Demetrius through his fevers, weakness, and hauntings. They conceive a child and Demetrius is delirious with delight, albeit also remorse that he will not live to know it. I leave Demetrius’ final devastation for you to suffer on your own. And you will. It is impossible not to care about a man so giving in spirit and forgiving in nature. An extremely compassionate story just waiting for Adrian Brody to turn into an Oscar winner.

Mz Miller writes with incredible emotion and depth. I’ve never felt so compelled, so sorrowful for a character than here. I fell in love with Demetrius…and I miss him.

A Spoonful of Sugar Helps Literary Progress Go Down

by: Mayra David

ANNA FELICIA SANCHEZ ISHIKAWA or Anna Ishikawa, as she is known professionally, was born in August 1981 and graduated from St. Scholastica’s Academy High School in 1998. She gained admittance to the top University of the nation – the University of the Philippines, Diliman – where she majored in Creative Writing, eventually earning her BA in English Studies. She has won numerous grants and local and national awards for her fiction and placed second for a full-length play in English in the 2004 Palanca Awards – which is regarded as the Philippines most prestigious and longest-running literary contest. Over the past few years, she also participated as a fellow for fiction in English in the UP, Dumaguete, and Iligan National Writers Workshops, some of the most selective in the country.

Some Americans who identify themselves strongly by their ethnic origins might wonder at the surname Sanchez (Anna’s maiden name). Many might assume this is because of her ancestry; the country was after all a Spanish colony for over three centuries. But in fact, a large majority of Filipino families have Spanish names without having Spanish ancestry. The quick answer to this is that during the colonial period, the Claveria Decree of 1849 required all Filipino families to select a Spanish surname name from an approved list. Ishikawa, of course, is a distinctively Japanese name and is the name she adopted from her husband who is Japanese-Filipino. With a name that practically contains the history of the world, is it any wonder that she writes in the universal language and for a universal audience?

Given that it is not even the official language of the United States, it might surprise some Americans to hear that in addition to Filipino, or Tagalog, English is the other official language of the Philippines; it is considered the (lingua franca) throughout most of the nation. Most Filipinos, particularly in the urban areas, are not only completely fluent in speaking it but some are even more comfortable writing in English than in their native tongue. It may even be that, as any students of a language are apt to be more attentive to grammar than its native speakers, Filipino writers who write in English are likely to write more correct, albeit sometimes more self-conscious, prose than the average native English speaking pupil. Certainly it is also conceivable to posit that the Philippines, and perhaps other postcolonial nations as well, is done being a student of English as foreign language. That is, they no longer consider it “foreign” but rather the operating language of the international community, as well as a natural second tongue, beyond it being officially so. We maybe entering the era of global cultural homogenization. If so, what does that mean for the future of Filipino literature?

The Philippines is often viewed as a matriarchal society, perhaps due to the fact that in the past two decades, two of the three presidents have been women, including the two-term incumbent. Though not strictly speaking a matriarchal society, the cultural history of the country does demonstrate a balance in political and cultural contributions from both genders. In the literary history of the country, there is no prominent history, at least no significant movements, to promote female writers over males writers. Perhaps, this is because of their common struggle to promote any sort of literary endeavors by Filipinos that the gender issue had to be relegated to a secondary position. At least for now.

A filipino writer might get mired in a state of limbo if she were to endlessly ponder who she is, or should be, as a writer. Anna Ishikawa and her contemporaries know there is more pressing work at hand: Get the nation to start reading again in the first place. At a close second place is to get the country to produce more written work - any language will do.

According to a survey sponsored by the National Book Development Board (NBDB) the number one book most read in the Philippines today is the Bible. The second genre of books read are romances. What is a young literary writer – scion of the nation’s literati - to do? A smart person and accomplished writer in tune with all trends of the industry, would supply the demand. And Anna is nothing if not a smart and accomplished writer. Publish or perish, as they say. Anna’s first book ODD GIRL OUT is a romance novel. Unapologetically ‘chick lit’ as a matter of fact. The story, simple and auspicious enough, is about a modern Filipino woman trying to find out what kind of love she is looking for, after her perfect one fell apart.

As Anna told the Manila Bulletin upon the book’s release, “It’s the theme of despair, escape, recovery and redemption.” The story could be boiled down to those broad themes, but the book itself, represents more than that. Her heroine, Cerisse, is a very independent young woman with a very “modern” lifestyle: living on her own, starting her business and being sexually very active.
Anna continues: “It also explores female sexuality as popularized by the likes of Sex and the City and Bridget Jones’ Diary, and the realities and stereotypes of the modern woman… you also have elements like the gay friend and issues of being a single mom.”

This may seem like nothing new to readers of the genre but even for a fictional Filipino life, it is quite controversial considering that the Philippines is a staunchly conservative society with over 81% of the population belonging to the Roman Catholic Church. The president, a devout catholic woman, once “admitted” to using the contraceptive pill as a young mother, but said it made her feel so guilty she had to go to confession. She has announced her intentions to withhold public funding for contraceptive programs, pushing for natural birth control (i.e. abstinence) which is the only method sanctioned by the church. Issues of homosexuality, pre-marital or promiscuous sex are clearly not issues open to discourse.

The dichotomy between modern Filipino mores and the peoples’ inextricable symbiosis with the United States is most evident in the contemporary literature the country has been producing in recent decades.

To say there is an exilic nature to the English writing by Filipinos – insofar as that distinction can still be drawn between what is deemed “Filipino” and “Filipino in English” writing – is a subjective matter. However, what many of the nation’s most prominent writers agree on – and often promulgate in their work – is the notion that Filipino writers are caught between two languages and two cultures. As renowned Filipino writer Nick Joaquin has declared, “the identity of a Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.”

And in his book Authentic Though Not Exotic: Essays on Filipino Identity, Dr. Fernando N. Zialcita, suggests that “many Filipinos question the “authenticity” of their identity. They are uneasy about the heavy Spanish influence that came in with colonialism. They wonder if their culture is but a mixture of conflicting traditions. Moreover, they fear that the Hispanic presence seems an oddity in a Southeast Asia that defines itself as non-Western.”

Oddity or not, the Filipino experience on display in its literary works, is certainly unique in the South Asian region. When Anna Ishikawa references shows like Sex and the City, or has characters that demonstrate an affinity to the lifestyle depicted in such shows (controversial even by western standards), is she representing the modern filipino woman? Or urging her to be more liberated, to own her sexuality? Her main characters are pointedly atypical Filipinos from the main character who lives alone in her condo, to the single mother supported by a family of friends instead of actual kin. Is this lifestyle a trend in the younger generations? No, not really. She is providing escapism and at the same time exploring these themes as a writer even as the entire country is exploring them as a society. Perhaps the fact that such novels serve as a vehicle for escapism is most indicative of the existing social polarity.

Imagine this: You have always wanted to be writer and have been writing stories since time in memoriam; Short stories, poems, and plays. Maybe you even have a comic strip with your very own made up super hero that you continuously develop for the fun of it. You do very well in school (bookish ones always do) Among your favorite books you count Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, Jane Eyre by Bronte, as well as books by Nick Hornby and Terry Pratchett. You gain acceptance to the nation’s most prestigious University where you join ranks with other literary scions of the country. And what do you major in but English Studies and creative writing, of course. You publish your first three books before the age of twenty-seven; even greater things still ahead.

All these things are true for Anna Ishikawa. But in terms of livelihood and prestige, what does it mean for her? Especially when for decades bookstores have been flooded with American and European publications, From TigerBeat magazine to the latest by James Patterson.

Fox Literary House was founded by Anna’s former university classmates. They have just published her third book “Where Your Dreams Come True” about a young woman who sees the man of her dreams in, well, her dreams, and starts looking for him in real life.

Sarah Grutas, a friend of Anna’s and editor of Fox books, seems to feel it’s time to move ‘Filipiniana’ out of its niche and squeeze it in next to the Sweet Valley High books on the store shelves. The most direct way to do this, is to offer Filipino stories in the same vein, same language, as the competition. The lack of language barrier has made this possible and necessary. Especially when your young Filipino writers grew up reading and being educated on Dostoevsky and Austen.

As editor, Sarah says her main goal for Fox Literary House is to heighten the Filipino people’s level of awareness of great literature. “Yes, we want to earn money. Yes, we want to provide entertainment. But the most important thing for us is for the Filipino people to have something that will stimulate their creativity and [sense of] cultural excellence.”

Another goal, apparently, is to cheat. “With our own horror anthology which are very popular in the country, our writers tried to incorporate issues that are not usually addressed, like homosexuality. How do you write a story about a gay ghost? Most of the stories are about homosexuality, prostitution, militarization, and domestic violence – issues that abound in the country but people keep quiet about….not many Filipino readers care about these things anymore. They’d rather watch Pinoy Big Brother or a telenovela or something they won’t have to process.”

Not many publishers in the Philippines offer advances or give royalties. Fox books does both. If a publishing house does offer any monetary compensation, the highest incentive pay a writer will get is Fifteen thousand pesos ( about 356 US dollars). Fox Literary House is one of the only two publishers in the country that will offer that fifteen thousand pesos to writers. Houses that do pay will, at most, give “known” authors eight thousand pesos. New writers can settle for compensations in the three to five thousand peso range. Actually, some larger companies do not give any monetary compensation for any written work. She explains that oftentimes, the only incentive larger companies will offer is the “prestige of being published by a big-time publisher.”

Fox Books also has three options on copyright ownership for writers to choose from: in perpetuity and five or ten year options – they do not claim copyright ownership on the book as an idea or concept only on the book as Object. Sarah says they are the only publisher in the Philippines who has this kind of “copyright-ownership-(ewan).”
It isn’t the competition, then, that has pushed Fox Literary House to offer writers like Anna such a liberal “copyright-ownership-thingy”. What they are doing is creating a platform for expression in written works. They are bringing more Filipinos to writing and are promoting the arts as a profession, and not just an extracurricular activity. Almost unheard of in large publishing markets abroad, Fox books accepts unsolicited manuscripts. In fact, they have an open submission policy and advertise for manuscripts on the internet.

Revolution by chick lit? Probably not. Still, one can at least hope for a little social discourse. After all, the Philippines is a nation whose national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal, was a writer. His written works – the novels Noli Me Tangere (Touch Me Not) and El Filibusterismo (The Subversive) – have been credited with igniting the revolution against the Spanish empire which ruled over the Filipino people for over 333 years. True, the legacy of the colonial period is not only manifested in politics and language but in literature as well. Writings on the subject of the trauma due to imperialism has brought us illustrious works by the likes of J.M Coetzee and Salman Rushdie. Should it then follow that the trauma be accompanied by obligations for Filipino writers – or any other writer who originates from a former colony or commonwealth nation – to explore the weath of “material” available to them due to colonization?

Anna and her colleagues do not presume this task is incumbent upon them. Of course, as the literary progeny of internationally recognized literary luminaries such as Lualhati Bautista, Nick Joaquin and Ninotchka Rosca, they balance the future of the nation’s literature on the tip of their pens.

But the task they are taking on is the promotion and development of a fledgling market: Filipino literature for the global masses. Having been weaned on western literature and tastes, who can be better entrusted to poise Filipino writers – particularly since they are already free of any linguistic encumbrances – for the international market? Their works donot seek recognition, but universality and establishment. The past is precious, but the future is at risk. Much in the same way national bookstores and overseas markets do not discriminate in the literature they import into the country, it seems the philosophy of the new generation of nationalistic Filipino writers is to produce work that transcends their regionality.

Femme au Chapeau: Poems by Rachel Dacus

David Robert Books, 2005
Review by LouAnn Muhm

If I were to define an overarching theme of Rachel Dacus’ 2005 poetry collection, Femme au Chapeau, (David Robert Books), I would use the title of a poem describing her reaction to seeing an x-ray of her broken fibula , Elegance of the Hidden. So many of the poems in this collection reveal just that, whether it is in the daily maternal and domestic tasks in “Apple Pie Order” with its focus on the mother’s hands “above [whose]industry I feel the tears,” or the ways in which a husband and wife reveal their differences in their grooming rituals, where “one augments, the other minimizes” in separate mirrors, “one…wiped of distracting fog/ The other [making] a cheek moon-size/for probing a follicle or pock.”

Over and over again, these poems bring us into tight focus on the things we walk past every day but don’t see: the hummingbird pausing on a branch, the single perfect apple in a litter of windfalls, or the daily tasks that women perform unnoticed as they “Scrub the crud from crevices/…Neaten the chaos of the night/and bake a loaf of innocence.”

Not all of the hidden elegance examined here is pleasant. There are poems exploring the losses inherent in involuntary childlessness, in family rupture, and in death. These poems avoid sentimentality, however, employing clear-eyed reportage that lets us as readers come to our own conclusions and judgments of the father whose self-portrait “points to the harrowing/ his future wives will take,” or whose “mouth becomes ocean/[and] turns his family into rocks with eyes.”

Throughout this excellent collection, Dacus brings a sharp and humane eye to the world around her and within her, and allows her readers “To stand together/ in the light that streams/ from a hidden source in this world.”

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