Victoria G Smith

Author Victoria G. Smith shared Department of Foreign Affairs Republic of the Philippines's photo.

7 months ago

#Feature2 It is my honor and privilege to be chosen and featured among the notable "Filipinos Around the World" by the Republic of the Philippines Department of Foreign Affairs. Thanks much to Chicago Philippine Consul General Generoso Calonge and Cultural Officer Anna Liza F. Alcantara for their initiatives in this regard."What it is to be a Filipino is hard to define, as we are a people of mixed cultures and races—a true melting pot of humanity. As an immigrant Filipino writer in the United States, I tackled this complicated issue in my essay, “Gatekeepers and Gatecrashers in Contemporary American Poetry: Reflections of a Filipino Immigrant Poet in the United States”, which appeared in the 2015 Black Lawrence Press anthology, OTHERS WILL ENTER THE GATES: IMMIGRANT POETS ON POETRY, INFLUENCES, AND WRITING IN AMERICA, and in the Introduction to Preface to the First Edition of my first poetry collection, Warrior Heart, Pilgrim Soul: An Immigrant’s Journey. This is what I wrote:


“Do I see myself as a Filipino writer who only happens to reside in the United States? Or do I consider myself an American writer who incidentally has Philippine roots? Is the place in which I write determinative of who I am as a writer? Or is my identity determined by nationality roots, the dominant sociocultural construct that thereby becomes the frame of reference for my work? So many questions; so many layers of nuanced issues to explore! And the possible answers, equally complex.


To start with, the fact that I write mainly in English is enough for some Filipino writers to repudiate me as an authentic Filipino writer. For to them, language is the medium of identity, and failure to write in one’s native language is an affront to our culture, dismissing me, the suspect writer, as just another neocolonial agent.


So am I then simply an ‘American’ writer? Which begs the question, ‘Who is the American writer?’ While I am now a United States citizen, I doubt this is enough for me to claim that I have become an American writer. For I came to the United States at a later age, already immersed in the narrative and traditions that have shaped and inspired the literature of my native land. A writer’s identity cannot be based on mere citizenship, surely. While having been born and raised in the United States are certainly influential in shaping a writer, even persuasive to his sense of identity perhaps, this certainly cannot be exclusive. Just think of the descendants of some Muslim immigrants born and raised in the western world yet can’t seem to identify with the culture of their adopted countries. Thus, a writer cannot be referenced solely in terms of the location of the act of writing. Residing and writing within the United States may also be irrelevant if the cultural lens from which one sees and tries to understand his subject matter is so far removed from the cultural lens of the country in which he lives. But from which cultural lens should an American writer adopt a perspective? Indeed, what is American culture but a kaleidoscope of many varied cultures?" ... See MoreSee Less