Isabel Roxas
Keynote Address
34th National Children’s Book Day
1. The Power of Story
Good morning mga maam/sir.
I am an illustrator. Most of my days are spent drawing pictures for children’s books.
This morning I would like to talk with you about the value of stories.
Let me begin with a story of my own:
When I was around 4 years old, I was not allowed to ride my Wonder Woman tricycle inside the house.
My mother was and remains an antique dealer specializing in Southeast Asian artifacts.
As such, our home was an Aladdin’s cave of treasures from the past.
Each object contained its own history, its own story.
This was particularly true of the limestone burial jar she brought home one evening.
ME: “Mom, What is a burial jar?”
KIT: “It’s a coffin, but a jar. They put skulls and bones in it. It’s possible a fierce tribal chief once lay in there. That jar is about a thousand years old. DON’T BREAK IT.”
Because one warning against careless tricycle-riding would never have been enough, our cook helpfully added:
“Mumultuhin ka niyan kapag binangga mo.”
Needless to say, the jar remained safe, and with visions of diaphanous warriors forever haunting my dreams, I encountered for the first time, the power of a story.
2. The story of Stories
Stories are not only central to my own career and life, but they are central to all of us.
They are, in many ways, what defines us, what makes people People.
As we celebrate National Children’s Book Day, I thought it would be appropriate and instructive to think about the The story of Stories.
Stories are old, so old that they have been a part of who and WHAT we are longer than anything else.
They are older, even, than the languages that we so often use to tell them to each other.
The Cave Paintings in Lascaux, France, are 20,000 year-old stories.
Being so old, they are visual instead of literary ones, and as an illustrator, this makes them all the more profound for me.
They show the story of the world our paleolithic forebears observed–of the animals and the environment that surrounded them.
Many of the pictures are benign–they are not stories of how humans conquered the animals, but mainly stories of the majesty of beasts, their mystical stature and power.
In other parts of the caves there are collections of hand-prints.
THEY are stories too.
Ghosts from the past shouting “ I was here once, I existed. This is the story that says I lived, I touched this rock, and I am here still. Do not forget me.”
From Gilgamesh to The Tale of Genji, from Little Red Riding Hood to the Tortoise and the Monkey, Si Malakas at Si Maganda, stories have been passed on from generation to generation like a long game of telephone played over the centuries.
They are stories that are less about I and more about WE, They are about the collective histories of people in a certain place, over time.
The oral tradition of storytelling was a democratic one, something that belonged to all people, rich or poor, young and old, and each generation was free to expand and add to the story, to breathe a little of itself into it.
These stories are of a People, reference points of an identity, of pride in our traditions, or explanations for why the world is the way it is.
3. An Illustrator’s Tale
Some of you might be wondering how I began to tell stories.
They say that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Each person’s own story begins with a singular action.
Mine began with drawing a cockroach.
Let me start from the beginning.
When I joined Ang INK it was an informal motley crew of artists who worked in various fields–academia, advertising, graphic design–and created children’s books on the side. I met them, while they were painting a giant mural of a flying dragon at a local bookstore.
I was a teenager with a flimsy portfolio and a whole lot of determination.
Every monthly meeting, I listened, observed and absorbed as much as I possibly could.
One day, author Carla Pacis came looking for someone to draw a cockroach.
ME: WHY?
CARLA: I’m writing a column for the Junior Inquirer that reviews books for children, and I wanted a character who loved books, but was not human. I’ve never seen a bookworm–have you? I see tiny cockroaches sandwiched between books all the time.
ME: Kadiri. Pero, sige, game.
And so, Iggy Ipis the opinionated, book-loving cockroach was born, and I started to believe I could be an illustrator.
Months later I became a regular contributor to the Junior Inquirer, and within a year I started making books for children.
Nearly two decades later I am still making books for children, shuttling between our lovely archipelago and the island of Manhattan.
My latest book from Disney-Hyperion, called Let Me Finish written by Minh Lê has just been translated into Korean and Mandarin.
I wonder what insects they will find in between the leaves of those books on foreign shelves?
I have no idea what I would have become had I not met the members of Ang Ink that fateful day at the bookstore. All I know is that they changed my life.
Ang Ilustrador ng Kabataan has nourished the careers of so many creators in the industry today. It is run by a tireless rotating cast of illustrators just hoping to keep doing what they love–drawing pictures and telling tales and helping others do the same.
To the founding members of INK present today, maraming, maraming salamat.
To my colleagues in the audience and new illustrators out there, in the words of the late Kuya Germs, “More Power to you!”
4. Laging bago ang mundo ng libro
BOOKS. They stir our imagination. They show us that the world is bigger than the small corner of it we find ourselves in every day. Reading shows us there are other nations, other worlds. They show us there are other ways to build a house, different ways to dress, different ways to worship, to speak, to be.
Reading teaches us to empathize with others and reveals aspects of a culture that we don’t encounter everyday.
Reading can also teach us to appreciate ourselves, our uniqueness our identity. Personal validation sometimes comes simply by understanding that you are not a sample of 1. I think this is most true for the children of the Philippine diaspora.
As Filipinos spread out across the globe, it makes a huge difference for our children to realize that while our hair, skin or name may be different from our peers, it comes from somewhere, somewhere special, somewhere they can be proud of.
I was born and raised in Manila. I was not an early reader, but once I started, I read voraciously. However, Most of what I was given to read were American picture books.
Many of the protagonists in these books had golden hair, porcelain skin and blue eyes. When my family and I would watch Miss Universe, my mother grew concerned that I was constantly cheering for Miss Sweden or Miss Norway rather than our own Binibining Pilipinas.
Fortunately, right around that time, Philippine children’s books were beginning to appear on my school shelves. Alongside Cinderella, there was the story of Elang Uling. I was introduced to Juan Tamad who taught me the perils of idleness and I cheered as Emang Enkatada punished the three slovenly Haragan.
Salamat Adarna House, you saved me from a lifetime of poor self image and skin whitening treatments.
This is NOT to say that we should only read books that reflect who we are, but Filipino books for and by Filipinos should be read, created and celebrated in addition to the stories from and about the rest of the world.
5. Telling stories is power.
At a time when so many are silenced without due process, the power of story is not to be taken for granted.
The Chinese have a saying: “It is better to be a dog in a peaceful time than a human in a chaotic one.”
These are chaotic times indeed.
It is said that the current U.S. president, leader of the free world, or he who shall not be named, does not read. He watches things and he reacts, tweets. His behavior tells us an awful lot about what a lack of reading does to the mind.
When people are the opposite of curious, the opposite of kind, and unimaginative, we get repression, violence, and fear masquerading as order and discipline.
In many places our identities are becoming lost, or twisted into a regressive misrepresentation of something that people never were.
This situation makes me think of the Brothers Grimm, and why they started to collect the stories and folktales we all know so well.
During a time of political and cultural upheaval, the Brothers Grimm sought to rekindle a sense of pride in their country. Stories like Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel: all of them were originally dark stories that were full of cultural signifiers, linguistic history and caution. By collecting them, albeit in a kinder, gentler way, they helped their country relearn its own sense of self.
The fact that these stories then went on to gain universal appeal tells us a lot about stories: they can be both very local and global at the same time.
In these dark times we need stories more than ever. Not only to create havens for the mind, or to provide distraction. But because stories provide HOPE.
Stories let us know that we do not suffer alone. That Storms pass. That wars end. They tell us that we are agents of our own destiny.
Stories are not only good for the heart and mind, but they have the power to buttress a nation as a whole, and heal old wounds.
6. The state of stories
It brings me a great sense of pride to see the recent elevation of stories and projects here in the Philippines that have highlighted what is so wonderful about our local culture and identity.
There is a great diversity to recent endeavors, in many different fields, but all have garnered a great deal of attention both at home and abroad over the last several years.
They take the form of Trese Comics, which have dynamic stories about life and mythological creatures from the Philippines that can be enjoyed by readers close and far afield.
They take the form of documentary films, like Sunday Beauty Queen, that highlight the beauty, industry and heartache of our Overseas Workers, and act as a mirror to reveal the dreams, and decency that is so central to the Filipino Spirit.
They take the form of books, like Mia Alvar’s In The Country, which brought an intellectual and literary semblance of our recent history to readers around the globe.
Our art, our books, our films, and our food are all finally claiming their rightful place in the global cultural library, and this makes my heart sing.
But our work is only just beginning.
7. Where do we go from here?
We need more stories, and more storytellers. We need to preserve our histories and expand our horizons.
We need to come together with our differences intact. We need to be candles in the dark unknown lighting the way for each other.
The German Philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote about A CHILD READING
“The child seeks his way along the half-hidden paths…
To him, the hero’s adventures can still be read in the swirling letters like figures and messages in drifting snowflakes. His breath is part of the air of the events narrated, and all the participants breathe with his life. He mingles with the characters far more closely than grown-ups do. He is unspeakably touched by the deeds, the words that are exchanged, and, when he gets up, is covered over and over by the snow of his reading.”
Because I am a child of books, I believe that I have a role in not just creating, but also sharing books, stories and ideas with others. There are ways that we can all participate in this. To this end, I have started the process of donating my collection of picture books to a library in the hopes that it will inspire other people to become writers, illustrators and storytellers.
With my colleagues at home and abroad I have dreams of organizing workshops to provide a cultural exchange and further hone our storytelling skills here in Manila and the rest of the archipelago.
Jake Verzosa’s photobook The Last Tattooed Women of Kalinga contains a Kalinga chant. To close this talk about stories, I’d like to read to you a translation of the last stanza of that chant:
“It is not only to follow or imitate
The tradition of our elders of yesterday.
But we are a living canvas of tradition,
And as living vessels of an art that speaks of
Beauty and strength
Hopefully it will not die with us.”
As we celebrate books this day, like our ancestors who put their handprints on the caves, let us all keep writing, keep drawing…and leave something Behind…WE lived. WE touched this rock.
Do not forget us.
Thank you.