Writer in exile.

• Author: Manalo, Isabel
• Position: Filipino novelist Ninotchka Rosca - Interview

New York

Novelist Ninotchka Rosca is still waiting for a revolution to happen in the Philippines.

Rosca remembers the 1986 People-Power movement, in which hundreds of thousands took to the streets in peaceful solidarity to overthrow the twenty-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Although people realized the damage the Marcos regime created would not be erased overnight, millions of Filipinos are still being denied justice and relief from their impoverished conditions, says Rosca.

"I cannot find the words to express how deep my anger is," she says. "People like me spent practically our whole lives to get Marcos out. In the end we are betrayed, and nobody paid except for us and the poor people. They got away with it," says Rosca.

After graduating from the University of the Philippines with a degree in comparative literature, Rosca became the managing editor of Graphic magazine, and immediately decided that the only kind of news worthy of coverage was hard-core politics. She helped redirect Philippine media coverage toward women's rights issues. human-rights violations, and movements critical of the presence of U.S. military bases in the Philippines.

Rosca's political convictions are apparent in her stories--intricate narratives that address the long history of strained relations between the Philippines and the United States. An outspoken radical, she organized anti-Vietnam War protests in the Philippines that led to her six-month detainment at a military camp. A book of her short stories, The Monsoon Collection, came out shortly after her release.

Since then she has written three novels: State of War, Endgame, and Twice Blessed, which won the American Book Award in 1993. She's currently working on a new book called The Archipelago of Saint Lazarus, the original name Magellan gave to the Philippine Islands. One of the book's four novellas concerns a group of Filipinos who colonize an abandoned apartment building in New York City and run a pyramid scheme to support themselves.

"We're always trying to establish our culture wherever we go. There is never a distinct Filipino Town," says Rosca. "We don't hold our history in objects or signs. Memory is encased in languages--in something intangible like music."

Rosca recoils at being pigeonholed as a Third-World novelist, a position she frequently finds herself occupying on academic panels...