9/26/2020 Depicting Unapologetic Realities: An Interview With Author Elaine Castillo – Bookbed

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Depicting Unapologetic Realities: An Interview With Author

Elaine Castillo

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The first thing I told Elaine

Castillo when I met her for an
interview in a cozy corner of
Long Bar at the Raffles Hotel
was that I haven’t read her
novel yet. As a journalist, it’s
standard protocol to research
and read before going out for an
interview so I felt a little bad
but she was very understanding, nodding with a smile that seemed to glow
because of the tiny candlelight flickering in between us. Perhaps it wasn’t so
surprising given that we were there to witness her book launch.

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The event was presented by National Bookstore last April 21 and earlier that
day she was also swamped with work, meeting several fans at the Dia del
Libro 2018 event. Needless to say, I felt very lucky to be able to spend a few
minutes with her before the launch of America Is Not The Heart. Despite the
fact that I’ve only read reviews—all of which provided rich insight on what
the novel is about, as well as the nuances of the story and the author’s
writing—I told her that everyone at Bookbed is excited to delve into her
highly-lauded debut novel. It’s not every day that we get to see a Filipino-
American author coming out with a book that unabashedly talks about our
country and our culture, published no less by Viking, an imprint of Penguin
Random House. At Bookbed, we’ve always made it a point to champion
Filipino authors and as such, we were all looking forward to what she has to
say about her book and her heritage. Check out the interview below!

Hi Elaine! First question: why is the book titled America Is Not The Heart?

In a basic way, it stems from

the title of a foundational text
for a lot of Filipino-American
writers, Carlos Bulosan’s
America Is In The Heart. It’s a text
that if you’re Filipino-American,
sometimes it’s an assigned
reading in high school, a
mainstay of, like, ethnic
studies. I personally think it
should be a mainstay of
American history, [that] it
should be a required reading.
And it came out of that. It’s a
book about migrant struggles that are very similar to what Bulosan himself
experienced in the West Coast in the ’30s and ’40s. But for me, the reason I
chose the titles was not out of some sort of aspiration, really. It came out of a
private joke that I used to say to myself because I’m Filipino, I like puns. So
whenever I’d see the title America Is In The Heart, I would sort of chuckle to
myself and go “America isn’t the heart.” It was just something I would say to
myself, just like a little joke. But maybe sometimes I thought, “Oh maybe I’ll

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make that a title one day,” so that’s why the title of the last chapter of the
book is actually “America Isn’t The Heart” with a conjunction. But for multiple
reasons, we changed it to America Is Not The Heart. (Read our review of the
book here.)

We read that your parents were from Pangasinan and Ilocos, and we’ve
heard that the book is filled with a lot of Filipino dialects like Tagalog and
Pangasinense. What made you decide to use dialects in your novel and
why did you choose to keep it untranslated?

I, for example, am someone who grew up with these kinds of four sort of
languages floating around in fragments and that was just my reality, it’s the
reality of a lot of kids like me. The town that I grew up in was majority
minority town, something like over 60 percent of the inhabitants spoke a
language other than English. So for me, that was just kind of the basic
reality that is worthy of being depicted in fiction. For me, the idea that it had
to be translated or italicized to call attention to its otherness is completely
outrageous because it assumes then that the audience for that book is then,
what, like, white audience? English-speaking audience? It telegraphs a
certain way that that book is facing because it’s saying, “Oh well, all of these
words are foreign.” But I don’t experience that, that’s not how I experienced it
growing up and I don’t prioritize that type of reader. For me, what’s more
important is to depict something in fiction that is commensurate to the
realities that we actually live and that means, yes, sentences that are in
mixed languages, in which English is not prioritized over Tagalog or Filipino
or Pangasinense or Ilocano. And that just being sort of understood as
unapologetic and mundane and a reality that is worthy of being depicted.

We also read that before the debut of your novel you were writing X-Men
fan fiction and a lot of other literary pieces online. How did this help you
in your debut and in your novel writing?

To be honest, the reason I was writing all of that stuff was, in 2006 my father
passed away, and I was grieving fairly heavily and I was also very sick at that
time. So I basically stopped reading and writing. For the first time in my life, I
wasn’t really writing but I also wasn’t really reading. If you know me, there’s
never been a point where I haven’t read.

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I think it was sometime in 2009 that I slowly started in a way of teaching

myself how to write again, and it was [in the form of] X-Men fan fiction and
also online blogs. I was writing a blog for a literary journal called Pank where I
was just writing these very weird, digressive kind of essays that were also
autobiographical and also kind of a form of fiction. In a way, I was just
teaching myself how to write again and that I wanted to write again. I [was]
also probably mourning through writing in a way I didn’t allow myself to do
right in the aftermath. Without that, I would not have been able to write this
novel.

What motivated you to write about Filipino culture? What kind of

response were you hoping to get when you first released the book?

I am Filipino. It is the community that I come out of. It’s who I am, so for me
it’s quite a no-brainer to write about Filipinos. Personally, growing up, I would
have loved to see more Filipinos in literature—I mean, I’ve read a fair amount
of Filipino-American literature growing up but at the same time a lot of the
literature that I read was also about Manileños, about sort of wealthier,
middle class, urban centers. Actually, Carlos Bulosan was one of those, the
first book I ever saw someone from Pangasinan. Because the beginning of
the book has passengers in Binalonan, Pangasinan. So I think it was not just
important to write about Filipinos but to write in a particular way about
Filipinos, to write about provincial Filipinos, to write about class, to write
about inter-class dynamics within Filipino communities, to write about
gender as it’s applicable within Filipino communities because I think we all
understand that we live at these vectors. There’s a black feminist idea of
intersectionality—you know, the black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé
Crenshaw, she gave us that term—and it’s so vital for understanding that we
live at these crossroads. I’m writing about Filipinos, I’m writing also mainly
about women, I’m also writing about queer women. It’s about what kind of
lives do I want to depict and naturally then I do end up coming back to
Filipino lives.

If you could take Hero with you anywhere in the Philippines right now,
where would it be and why?

Oh, wow. I would probably take her to Isabela. At first, I thought I would take
her to Vigan, which is of course where she’s from but she has a very fraught

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relationship with her parents and with her family, and the idea of home is
not always a healthy or romantic place for us. Sometimes, you never wanna
see home again. And that’s also okay. So I would take her back to Isabela in
the hopes of finding the people that she left and never saw again because I
think that’s probably the only place in the Philippines that she’d want to be
in.

EXTRA, EXTRA

What’s your favorite book?

You can’t! There is no way! See, this is a human rights issue.

We kind of expected this *laughs* okay, how about book genres?

Well, you can probably tell from the book, I love manga. I really love manga. I
think I can say my favorite book of the moment is actually a manga it’s a
sort of gay yakuza manga by the artist Yoneda Kou and the title is called
Saezuru Tori ha Habatakanai, which basically means something like “Song
Birds Don’t (Can’t) Fly.” And for me, I think it is the most staggering work on
trauma and sexuality and intimacy and love. And it’s still ongoing so I’m still,
like, every chapter I’m like waiting for the next one that’s probably—I can’t
say favorite, but it’s the one that I’m most kilig [about].

Who’s your favorite author?

Oh, you can’t ask me that! *Laughs* But probably I would say, right now, it’s
her. Yoneda Kou.

Is there a quote from the books you’ve read before that you tend to live by
or remember?

Oh wow, that’s a good question I’m sure there are tons. I can’t think of a
quote off the top of my head. The only quote I can remember is the quote that
is the epigraph of the book. It’s from Carlos Bulosan and it’s

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“I knew I could trust a gambler because I had been one.”

Do you have any writing rituals?

Not so much. I think I have a standard structure of a day. I treat it like a work
day so I just, I don’t write every day if I feel a sort of writer’s block then I won’t
write. But if I’m not in a hardcore deadline mode I will try to stop at six to
have a kind of a decent life.

What’s next on your list?

Probably another novel. I’m a long-form person so I do consider myself a

novelist. And also a book of essays. I’m a non-fiction writer so I like to toggle
between the two.

SPECIAL THANKS TO HONEY DE PERALTA OF PENGUIN

RANDOM HOUSE, AND NATIONAL BOOK STORE.

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