Monica Macansantos
Oyster River Pages: How is your art or writing informed by current social and/or political issues?
Monica Macansantos: I find it easier to confront the politics of the past in my fiction, maybe because time and distance allow for greater perspective. However, I do think that the politics of the present motivate me to examine the past, since it helps me understand why we’ve gotten here. When I began writing the novel from which “A Visit to General Lim Street” is taken, the son of the late Ferdinand Marcos had just won a Senate seat in the Philippines, and I wanted to understand why I had friends and relatives who welcomed the return of the Marcoses to power. I wrote “A Visit to General Lim Street” a few months after Rodrigo Duterte was elected President in 2016, without being fully conscious of how his election was shaping my novel. I was probably trying to understand why my own countrymen would choose such a cruel, sociopathic person to lead us after our own experiences of autocratic rule. There are a lot of lingering traumas from the Marcos dictatorship that remain unaddressed, and I felt the need to examine my country’s past and how the mental habits we adopted to survive a dictatorship became difficult to cast off once democracy was restored.
Whenever present political issues make their way into my work, it’s usually less of a conscious choice on my part, since I find that these issues simply force their way into my work. Lately, I’ve found myself writing about the pandemic and how it has affected my daily life, but I still find myself returning to the past for guidance. I recently wrote an essay about how I found solace in Katherine Mansfield’s life and art during quarantine, which is also me going back to the past to understand the present moment.
ORP: We often think of ourselves as writing or making art, but the process often changes or makes us as well. How do you feel like your writing or art makes you?
MM: I usually retreat to my art to gain a better understanding of certain life experiences that confuse or bother me. Giving these experiences and observations a sense of order and form in my writing helps me gain insight into certain aspects of my life. I oftentimes find myself imposing a sense of narrative order upon my life as a result of my training as a writer, which makes me more keenly aware of how my life must be lived meaningfully. So in a sense, the craft of writing teaches me how to write the narrative of my life with a greater sense of purpose.
ORP: What do you hope readers or viewers of your piece take from it?
MM: History is inescapable, and it seeps into our daily lives and informs our choices for better or for worse. We are all part of history, no matter how inconsequential we imagine our lives and actions to be. History is also best understood through the lives of ordinary people, and you’ll be surprised at how ordinary people are capable of terrible things. The Marcos dictatorship was made possible by very ordinary enablers who simply went along, and this included many of us.
ORP: How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed your relationship to art and writing, either in the creation of it or the consumption of it?
MM: The COVID-19 pandemic has altered my sense of time—it has slowed things down, while making it a precious commodity. There hasn’t been another time in my life that I’ve been forced to directly confront my own mortality, so my writing has become driven by this sense of urgency, because who knows if I’ll die of COVID-19 before this pandemic is over? At the same time, since time seems to have slowed and I’m stuck at home, I find that I have a greater capacity to turn inwards and reflect. I’m not caught in the mad rush of pre-pandemic life, and I’m not as distracted as I used to be. I take more social media breaks, and being away from twitter has taught me that my writings have a better chance of effecting change and giving solace to people than my tweets. So I guess the pandemic has made me a more attentive artist.
ORP: Do you believe that hope is a luxury, a responsibility, a danger, or something else? Why?
MM: This pandemic has taught me that hope is a responsibility. We owe it to those who gave up their lives to save us from this virus, and to people like George Floyd who lost their lives due to our own failures to address systemic racism, to create a more just world. For that to be possible, we need hope. I pondered over this while writing an essay for New Zealand’s The Pantograph Punch about finding solace in Katherine Mansfield’s work during this pandemic. I wrote about the need to resist the temptation of giving in to the nihilism and antipathy of our leaders when confronting the tragedy of death:
It is indeed tempting to give in to a creeping sense of futility when none of us know when this pandemic will end, and when it continues to take the lives of the best and kindest among us. But I also think about the way Katherine Mansfield lived in the presence of death, and that a recognition of her own mortality allowed her to write honestly about death, even as life, and human kindness, continued to shine through her work. I find it difficult to ignore the light her stories have given me access to during this pandemic, especially when the alternative is to give in to the nihilism and callousness perpetuated by our President in his nightly speeches. I want to honor the lives of these doctors and nurses who have died fighting this pandemic, but I cannot give in to despair, because if their deaths are to have any meaning, this world for which they sacrificed their lives must contain some kindness in it, some light.
