“I am trying to develop my own distinct English through negotiation”: Rogelio Braga in Conversation
Rogelio Braga sits down with editor Kashif Sharma-Patel to talk about the politics of language, migrant bodies and the authoritarian regime in the Philippines in their book of short stories Is There Rush Hour in a Third World Country (The87press).
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Kashif Sharma-Patel: Your stories in Is There Rush Hour in a Third World Country pack in daily strife, intimacy and pain that are evocative of a society in crisis. There are also labour problems and problems with language as related to class. Tell me about what drove you to writing these in the first place, and what are the strengths and limits of the short story form.
Rogelio Braga: The book was originally published in the Filipino language in 2015. These stories were written and published in various literary journals between 2000 and 2010 except for one story which was published in 2015. I wrote these stories in my early twenties after university, so most of the characters' concerns are about looking for work, escaping poverty, relationships, and starting a career in the corporate world. These are concerns of a young adult navigating a country that at the core of its existence is the hatred of the poor, Muslims, and the working class. The original intent in writing these stories was to document the lives of Filipinos closer to my own lived experience as an offspring of working-class parents in Manila in the first decade of the 21st century. The Philippines was a country in transition and I was young, so I was looking at the country from a very personal point of view and the world in general as both were in transition.
Like most Filipino writers, I grew up reading many books from the West, such as James Joyce's Dubliners and translations of European and South American writers. As someone from Manila, I was interested in the psychogeography of the city that I inhabited and the spaces that I occupied. My position as a young writer who came from a working-class and, from what we call in Manila, an ‘urban poor’ family was always to repel, resist, and reject the system to change my world through writing stories and plays–a belief I no longer hold to this day. Given the context of the world today, I no longer think that writing, literature in general, could change the world. The only way to change the world now is to organise; writing is just an extension of concrete political action. In Is There Rush Hour in a Third World Country, I wanted to document that changing world. The stories talk about globalisation because during the latter part of the 1990s there were widespread conversations about liberalising the Philippine economy, Filipino liberals mostly from the middle class were trying to convince the public of the fantasy of trickle-down economics. Now we can see what happened to the Philippines because of that: the widespread poverty due to privatisation of supposed public services, the destruction of the environment, the labour export policy still sending Filipinos abroad as migrant workers, the rise of fascism during the Duterte regime, and the return of the Marcoses to power—the poor become poorer. People were very optimistic then; the world was shrinking, borders were being removed, and wealth and opportunities would be distributed and accessible for everyone but it turns out it was the other way around. And much of this tragedy in the Philippines right now is a product of the decisions made at the turn of the century.
KSP: You mention the Dubliners, what of other influences? Is the short story a popular form in Filipino literature? How is it situated in your context?
RB: In the Philippines in that first decade it was easier to publish short stories. There were university-based literary journals and mainstream journals that were taking submissions. I started to write stories as it was a way to get published easily in Manila. It was very practical as a starting point for my writing career. I read a lot of short stories in my teens at the university while I was studying and getting acquainted with the craft of writing. I was reading works from the West and from Filipinos writing in Tagalog; it was only in my early 20s that I started to read works by Filipinos writing in English because they’d become my acquaintances. I was always fascinated by Joyce in my teens and then by the works of Tolstoy when I decided to take writing seriously as a vocation. I read War and Peace when I was sixteen from a challenge posed by our literature professor and I thought then after reading the book that this is how a novel should be written. I read a lot of Tolstoy at the university. When it comes to storytelling as a craft, both in my fiction and in my works for theatre, I always look at the films of Almodóvar and Kieślowski as sources of inspiration to continuously improve my craft and to keep on pushing that pen.
KSP: And how does the language work in the Philippines? As I understand there are several layers working at once.
RB: Yes, the Philippines is an archipelago of nations, we have several languages including English. But there is a lingua franca called ‘Filipino’, taken from one of the major languages of the archipelago, Tagalog. To have a lingua franca is a 20th-century nationalist project, if we could not understand each other then, the default was to shift to Spanish or English. To have a national language was started during the American occupation of the country. It started with the Americans. It was easier for the coloniser to centralise power if we could all understand each other as a homogenous nation, a colonial subject, an archipelago of a monolithic infrastructure. A national language, a national hero, a national tree, and national flowers were all introduced. After WWII we would shift to English if we could not understand each other, but during the 1970s, the time of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., nationalist Filipinos advocated that we should start shifting to a lingua franca, which became now the Filipino language. There is a huge and exciting literary production in the archipelago beyond English and Filipino.
KSP: For sure, in India something similar is happening with the current regime pushing Hindi as a lingua franca, whilst others prefer English as it remains somehow more neutral in contemporary politics.
RB: I was from Manila so I use the language of the capital, and I use the language easily accessible to Filipinos across the whole archipelago. I always look at English as present in the Philippines as the language of the economic, political, and cultural elites. The language of the middle-class Manila and urban-centric intelligentsia from the far left to the far right. So I didn't write in English as I did not see the point in writing in the language of the former coloniser and practically, as a playwright, who would watch a play in the English language? Our respected playwrights in the Philippines would usually translate or adapt a play from the West in the Philippine setting. But writing in Filipino has challenges and is problematic also, as I was writing from the language of the capital. I was always on guard that I would not replicate the same system of exclusion and misrepresentation when writing in the language of the capital.
The difference, perhaps, for my language, is that I learnt that my language is accessible to Filipinos everywhere as I use conversational, street Filipino in my writing. It is easily accessible, even to Filipinos living further away from Manila. I was surprised when I found out that my novel could reach readers as far as Bongao, in Tawi-Tawi, in the southernmost part of the Philippines. Also, I grew up in a household in Manila where the languages spoken were the languages of my parents: Waray and Hiligaynon.
KSP: And now that you have had to move – you are in exile, in asylum, and in a great colonial hub where English dominates, where you must study and write in English. I am wondering what that has that done to you psychologically and has it shaped your new works of literature?
RB: There are several layers to that. Firstly, my English is a Filipino English. Its root is not from the British but from the American English. Secondly, I never wrote anything creatively in English until 2020, this is very new to me. But now living in the UK, in England, I am surrounded by British English. It is a big challenge and struggle, but I think it is helping me also as a writer as I’m not adjusting, or assimilating, to the local English language to fit in; it is more of a negotiation. And I am excited with the process. At the end of the day, I want to write novels or plays that are still accessible to readers and audiences in Britain, but I want my English to be something distinct. If you are a native speaker of English, you will still get into the story and you will enjoy it but you will know that the one telling the story is a foreigner. I am trying to develop my own distinct English through negotiation between my background as a writer who just started to write in English by compulsion of migration and the hegemonic culture that determines what is and what is not the ‘standard’ English. And not to copy and become like other English or British writers.
Negotiation is a very important concept for me both as a writer and as an activist. Negotiation always requires that power is evenly distributed between me and the other structures. It is changing the way I write, the way I look at things and significant human experiences closer to my attention, how to constantly examine my politics, and more importantly how to make use of this complexity of my migration to become a better person, writer, and member of a community that adopted me. I am very confident in building a community of readers of my works here, or elsewhere, similar to what I have done in the Philippines.
KSP: To go back to the stories and the activism you mention, I am very interested in how you manage to balance and negotiate individual desires, individual actions with these wider surrounding structures which can be both very violent and very chaotic. The way you are speaking right now about your negotiation with language also speaks to that, that you are situating your own individual subjectivity as existing in a wider context.
RB: It relates to my background. I came from a poor family in the Philippines. My mother was, and still is, a fishmonger, and my father was a migrant construction worker who went to Iraq in his twenties to work when the country was at war in the 1980s, and then spent his remaining time as a migrant worker in the West Asia until his death. We lived in these squats, shanty town style in Manila; that was the environment I grew up in. My writing in a way influenced by my idea of what it was to live in the Philippines during the Martial Law and after the Marcoses were removed from power and another kind of elite replaced them, the struggles as an individual, alongside the political movements of the Philippines. I am conscious that there is a struggle to overthrow this type of government, this system that constantly aims to maintain the status quo: that there is always a hierarchy among Filipinos, and class is one of those. You have to take your side while also accounting for your own personal experience as someone with your own particular background.
This influenced the way how I craft a character, and how a character responds to an environment. The characters are usually from working-class backgrounds as they are the closest to my experience. By working class people here I mean the economic labouring people, those who have no other options in society but to subject their labour power to exchange for survival, not the ‘identity’ working class you often find in the West—here in London’s theatre and writing communities, for example. And I was interested in how these characters are responding to the environment, especially in a world transitioning to globalisation at that moment. My background enormously influenced my writing, and the output shows that you see people resisting the system differently. You do not see main characters marching in the streets in these stories, joining an armed struggle, but you know these are ordinary people who are resisting constantly, fighting back against the system in pockets of opportunities they found in their situation, young highly educated Filipinos who would throw a Molotov bomb at the Establishment if given the chance and could get away with the crime. It is like what Hemingway said about a man in constant conflict with his environment, you can defeat me but you can never destroy me.
In the Philippines, real progressive Filipinos believe that the only solution needed to completely change our situation is a revolution, a complete overthrow of the existing system by any means necessary. But the path leading to that state is very different now, after the non-stop killings of activists and impoverished Filipinos during the term of populist president Rodrigo Duterte and the return of the Marcoses to power as a signal to all the elites to consolidate their positions to maintain and protect the status quo. If you are going to read this book from the first page to the last it is all about forms of resistance. But all these stories were written in a time when the Philippines was still a space that I could still recognise as the country where I spent almost my lifetime; they were written at a time when I could still identify who were my good neighbours from my enemies. It’s very different now.
KSP: And tell us what is next for you. What are you working on?
RB: I always classify my writing both in theatre and in my fiction as political. When I say political, I mean my work addresses a very specific political problem. And as a writer and a playwright, I am always expecting a very political response from my audience, and hoping that this response will lead to a very concrete political action to change the system. I call this as my baseline. And of course after that the form, the language, aesthetic, and so on take shape. Writing for me is always a very simple enterprise. Since I am here in the UK, I am experiencing a different struggle as a migrant, as a refugee, and as someone who was exiled because of my works and politics. I am working on a research project for my PhD at Birkbeck on the Filipino migration narratives in London and its engagement with the British nationalist civic identity formation, I am also finishing my first novel in the English language as part of the research project. Earlier this year one of my recent works in English was presented at the Royal Court Theatre, and I am still developing that script. Honestly, I am still trying to figure out if I would subject my works for theatre to the ‘industry’ or to continue keeping my stage away from the demands of the market and the state. Just this year, I started to work on a collection of personal essays about my experiences as an asylum seeker in the UK and my love for work, life, and ideas of the French playwright Jean Genet as ancient as my love for theatre. The direction of my current works in general is to rigorously examine the intersection of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ and the rise of fascism in the Philippines as present in my brown migrant body.
KSP: Do you think your experience as a racialised migrant subject helped you understand the wider situation of the Philippines?
RB: In the Philippines, we have this standing labour export policy introduced in the 1970s by the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos, Sr., the father of the current president. So as a Filipino, before you are even born, you are expected to work abroad. From cradle until your adulthood, your mind and body are being conditioned to be exported as workers. It is systematic because it is a policy, now a tradition, and part of Filipino life. The reason for this is the remittance being sent back to the Philippines.
When you see a Filipino working in the UK as a nurse, a teacher, a cleaner, or a nanny you should know that this Filipino body has been subjected to another form of oppression before it has even arrived in the country. And this same migrant body is subjected to the UK’s hostile environment. My experience is an aberration as I did not come here as a worker. This ‘aberration’ created a space for me to look at the process without being subjected to its demands. It helped me to understand how a Filipino body was being reduced to an object for export as a commodity while being transformed into a cultural marker necessary for Filipino nationalist identity formation. My refugee body on the other hand is an interesting object of conversation for some liberals, a source of income for some politicians and their business partners who profit from the asylum and refugee industry in the UK, to create a society, and a cultural marker for British civic nationalist identity formation. There were several instances that my refugee body was even attempted to be reduced into a cultural capital for some artists who took advantage of my situation. It’s not just an understanding of the Philippines in general but of how the process of dehumanisation of Filipino bodies abroad happens right before my eyes, with the elites back home as cogs in the wheel to keep the oppresive system moving.
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Rogelio Braga is an exiled playwright, novelist, essayist, publisher, and human rights activist from the Philippines. They had published two novels, a collection of short stories, and a book of plays before leaving the archipelago in 2018. Braga was a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council in 2016 for research on political resistance in theatre and performance across Southeast Asia. Their works were read and performed at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Manila, Mercury Theatre in Colchester, National Theatre Studio, Soho Theatre, The Royal Court Theatre, and St. Paul’s Cathedral as part of the 50 Monuments and 50 Voices. 'Miss Philippines' is their first play written entirely in the English language was recently awarded by the Writers' Guild of Great Britain in their inaugural New Play Commission Scheme. Braga currently lives and writes in London as a refugee under the Convention.
