This is not a critique. This is a condemnation.

This is not a critique. This is a condemnation.

In May this year, Verity La, an Australian arts journal, published a creative non-fiction piece by Stuart Cooke, a white Australian writer and lecturer in creative writing and literary studies at Griffith University. In this piece, a white male narrator has sex with a Filipina woman in Manila and hits pretty much every square on the ‘Filipina fetishization, misogyny, colonialism, and racism’ bingo card. The piece angered people, and rightly so. In response, Verity La put a trigger warning on the piece, together with a statement from its board and a preface from the author:

Verity La aims to publish work that is strong, bold and provocative. At times, this approach runs the risk of us publishing pieces that some might find offensive. Two of our readers have communicated that the following piece, ‘About Lin’, may be considered offensive to women and to people of colour, particularly within the Asian community.

We’ve considered this feedback very carefully and, after extensive consultation with our Board, Advisory Board, Editors and a broad range of readers (particularly women of colour) have decided to keep ‘About Lin’ on Verity La, as we believe the piece addresses difficult issues relating to male white privilege in order to critique — rather than exploit—them.
— extract from the Statement by the Verity La Board, on Stuart Cooke’s About Lin 

One of my starting premises in writing ‘About Lin’ was that all white men — particularly those who are able to travel to countries like the Philippines — are participants in and perpetrators of patriarchal and colonial power. From this, it follows that there can be no innocent, white male narrator, and from this it follows that the behaviour of white, male narrators, however confronting, must be carefully scrutinised.

It is not my intention to provide some kind of false relief from these uncomfortable problems, either. ‘About Lin’ is not meant to be uplifting, and the narrator does not have an epiphany that could help to ameliorate our discomfort (by confining his behaviour to the past). In highlighting what are undoubtedly racist and sexist forms of power, I appreciate that I risk perpetuating such power in my own representations. Nevertheless, I believe that it’s important to talk about these issues, rather than edit them for the sake of portraying a more palatable form of masculinity.
— extract from Stuart Cooke’s preface on About Lin

As of this writing, Verity La has taken the piece down, and posted a Twitter thread about it:

Verity La, in light of new feedback from its community of readers, and in an effort to explore important conversations around the intersectional issues of racism, power and sexism, has today removed the creative nonfiction piece, ‘About Lin’ by Stuart Cooke, from its website. 1/2

— Verity La (@VerityLa) June 26, 2020

I do not believe that the response is good enough.

It is disingenuous of Verity La to try and control the narrative by selectively deleting tweets from people, many of them Filipinx, who have criticised the piece and Verity La’s publication of it. On its Twitter account, Verity La began blocking people, many of them Asian, who have spoken out against the piece’s publication, and their subsequent Twitter response.

What is bold or provocative about silencing your critics? It is unethical (to put it lightly!), and comes from a place completely lacking in accountability or regard for the damage done, to try and paste over the horribly harmful piece that was ‘About Lin’, and to then seek to silence the voices speaking about the harm done to them by reading it. Isn’t this simply piling wrong upon wrong?

I refuse to pretend that this piece never existed. I refuse to silence or temper my response.

“A more palatable form of masculinity” indeed. My palate does not need to be spared. I will call this piece what it is: writing that spits on people’s wounds, that exploits their trauma, and gorges itself on their pain.

♦

I will be told I was wrong to write this. I know this already. I will be told I read Stuart Cooke’s piece incorrectly; that I should simply have noted the trigger warning and foregone reading the piece; that I am lacking the skills to form the appropriate critique; that I have let my emotions run away with me—like I always do, here in Australia, where people do not often admit that they have hearts, where bleeding is a mark of shame instead of humanity—and because of this, that I do not, or cannot, understand.

That’s fine. I have heard all of this before; do you really think this is the first piece to wound me thus? Before you tell me I am too emotional or misinterpreted the author’s creative intentions, I invite you to listen to a story: a part of my story.

♦

Back when I lived in Metro Manila, the city of my birth, I often went to G___: one of my favourite shopping complexes. It was a network of buildings in glass and polished stone linked by bridges, water, plants. The city I love is a labyrinth of gold-sheened streets rimmed in refuse and dust raised by the sun hammering down, down, down. It is intense, unforgiving, it demands that you pace yourself, your breathing. G___ was a welcome escape from that. I, luckily, was allowed to enter that oasis. Not everyone is.

I would spend my afternoons in G___ looking through the shops, flitting from one building to another, letting food that was foreign to my daily experience numb me to the heat and my growing despair. As I grew more acquainted with the place, I began to notice certain things.

There was an in-between place between the buildings and the man-made water gardens where people gathered. It stood out because it was often frequented by white men. These men would sit on the stone borders ringing the landscaped plants, and chat with each other and smoke. Some of them had women sitting beside them, or on their laps: my fellow Filipinas, always much younger than these men, wearing makeup and dressed in tight clothes.

Some of these women were my age. Maybe even younger. I was barely eighteen.

My heart hurt when I looked at them. My sisters, I thought. I wanted to talk to them. I wanted to pull them away. When I saw a woman walking towards a white man, waving to him, I wanted so badly to say—

Stupid. Naïve. What could I have said that would have treated this poison? What could I have done that wouldn’t have made it worse?

When people passed this place, they treated the white men and the Filipinas with them as if they were invisible. This is a skill you learn quickly in the Philippines to survive: how to unsee without turning away. These passers-by hastened their steps, they held their children closer. They did not see these women. There was nothing to see.

Back in those days, I thought it would be better to look at these women, to see them, to try and pretend that their white lovers did not exist. To try and convey, with all the fury incandescent within me, that no matter what these white men did to them, they were still people. They could still be seen.

They would not meet my gaze. After some time, I, too, learned not to look. 

Google the query “filipina mail order brides”. The results will show something like:
Videos: “Beautiful Filipina Women Seeking Marriage”, “6 Reasons to Marry a Filipina”, “Top 5 Mail Order Bride Facts”
People also ask: “How much does a Filipina bride cost?”

Here is another thing you learn quickly in the Philippines. If you are to survive, if you are to live without going mad, you must endure your helplessness and your rage. By enduring you, too, become complicit. No one’s hands are unstained.

♦

“Of course it’s a shitty place, Mia,” my friend told me, when I mentioned this to her in passing. “You should know this already. Don’t go there. I know you’re bad with directions but there are other ways to get where you need to go…”

“Wait, why should I know this already?” I asked her.

“What are you, a child? They’re everywhere. There are spots you go to be picked up by foreigners. Like… haven’t you heard of E___, about the bars in R____? Everyone knows this. I can’t believe you’re this sheltered. Don’t your parents tell you anything? How did you get to this age without knowing?”

“But surely—” I said, and then stopped.

“They’re getting really shameless, you know. My friends and I, we’ve been approached several times. Some of them don’t know how to take no for an answer. It’s scary. Don’t walk through there if you’re alone.”

♦

I did not ask my friend why. Why our fellow Filipinas did this. We already knew. We knew, as well, that we were lucky to not need to do this, just as we were lucky to be allowed into G___ without much trouble. Our luck was to not be meat for monsters.

There is a monster in the Philippines, as there is in many places. Its name is poverty, and it lives in the bones of so many of my people, it crawls into our veins while we are sleeping. My parents were born to it and devoted their toil to ensuring that their children did not know its touch except through glass, distance, smoke.

The monster’s teeth drip madness. Its claws are made of murder; it is heat, and hunger, and hate; it is anger, always anger. And it drives us, so many of us, to escape—drives us day by day, because do you know how hard it is simply to survive and I can’t take anymore and yet I must and it hurts it hurts it’s so hard—until the sun is a whip and you despise yourself and your neighbour, you revile the person crammed beside you in the jeepney, you would kill them if you could, if it would ease your life a little, all you want is to not have to struggle so much, to breathe without suffocating, to get out, to get out, to get out—

To stay is to suffer. To leave is to suffer, only in a different way.

It is a choice that isn’t a choice, of course. Why wouldn’t you try to escape this monster?

Personal remittances received comprise 10.2% of the Philippines’ GDP.
— Data source: The World Bank, 2018.

I read Stuart Cooke’s piece and I see a monster, too. I see myself made monstrous, my city made monstrous; I see the desperation of my sisters made monstrous, and through it all, threaded in rusty wire and the guts of all the women who have died at the hands of their Western partners, the absolution of the white man, the price we continue to pay for his ‘enlightenment’, his fragile and cruel heart, his inescapably necessary ‘growth’.

♦

Yes: I too escaped. Through the same avenue as many of my fellow Filipinas, but in a very different manner. Like them, it was through a partner visa. Unlike them, my partner was a woman I loved so much I gave up everything for her. We are all subject to a high cost. The price is extracted from our flesh in different ways. I have been lucky. I am still lucky.

To migrate to Australia, the Philippine government required me to attend a seminar. This was for people who were migrating to Australia on the partner visa; upon completion of the seminar, we were given a document that we presented at the airport to get through immigration.

All of the people at the seminar were women. There were about thirty of us. Of the thirty, only two women there—myself, and a woman who had lived in Sydney for several years—had known their partners for an extended time period. I will be honest: the woman from Sydney and I were surprised when we saw each other, thinking we we would be the only ones there with  our particular relationship context.

“How old is your partner?” several women asked me. When I replied that my partner was my age (I could not say she, our pronouns are gender-neutral in Tagalog), they sighed and fluttered their hands to their throats. “How lucky! Is [he] handsome?”

“Yes,” I said, smiling through the hurt. They couldn’t have known.

The seminar was a workshop, bracing us for abuse at the hands of our presumptive white male partners. I was not shocked by this. I thought it was grimly practical, if morbid. Many of the women there expressed pleasant surprise at the ease of accessing help for victims of domestic violence. “Go get help,” the instructor at the seminar said. “People will help you.” Approving murmurs rippled through the attendees. I thought, at least now they know.

I have told this story to white Australians who were horrified and outraged. I suppose it must be my own gallows humour that argues, if people are going into danger, they might as well be equipped. It is my own despair that thinks their horror is misplaced. It is not that people choose danger that should horrify anyone; it is that escape is necessary at all.

A year or so after I migrated to Australia, I met R. Like me, R was a Filipina who had come to Australia on a partner visa. We met at a train station in a tiny regional town. She approached me and asked if I was Filipino; we exchanged stories of our lives. It turned out we lived in the same town, several suburbs over. We sat together on the way home.

R was working as a cleaner and gardener for an Australian couple; she was hoping she would get hired for the couple’s gardening business. In the evenings she went to school; she was working on a high school degree. I remember how proud she was of all the things she was learning.

R’s husband was twice her age. He was the designated carer for his disabled son, but now that R was living with them, she took on all those duties. “It’s fine, though,” she said. “He’s very happy with me.”

“Take care of yourself too,” I said when she told me this. R laughed. She wanted to set up a business and earn her way to an independent life. “Good,” I said.

I had wanted to tell R: be careful. But looking at the resolve in her face, her clear eyes, I could tell: she already knew.

Filipina “mail order brides” in Australia have been found to be at extraordinarily high risk for violence and murder—almost six times more likely than other women to be victims of homicide. Encyclopedia of Victimology and Crime Prevention, Volume 1, edited by Bonnie Fisher and Steven Lab.

♦

Do not tell me I am missing the point: that the narrator was meant to be unsympathetic and untrustworthy, that the core of the piece was the inherent inequality of his relations with Filipina women, and with the Philippines itself. Do you mean to make me laugh? If art is meant to critique an injustice, then it is heinously poor execution (to say the least) if it must do so by amplifying the trauma of people who live in the shadow of that injustice.

Or—again—must we relive our misery so that you may enlighten your fellow white literati with the brilliant insight of your critique?

Here is the reality you are mining for art. Here it is: take it, take it all, take our lives and our deaths, take our days full to the brim with pain. This is what you do, after all. This is what you have always done.

♦

I am tired, so tired. When white Australians tell me about my country (because of course they do; because they know it better than I do, because this is how one builds connection, isn’t it, tell the small Filipina woman that you know the beat of her blood more intimately than she ever will) here is what they say: it is beautiful. The best beaches, the friendliest people. Always smiling! But the traffic is horrible, how can you stand it? I clench my teeth and grin.

This is what my country is reduced to, in white Westerners’ eyes. But then again, my country is a reducible thing, after everything white people have done and continue to do to the Philippines. I suppose I should not try to, as Stuart Cooke says, “ameliorate my discomfort” with this.

Once I was sitting at a table for breakfast when a white man told me about Filipinx sex workers.To contextualise: I was at the table with this man and around a dozen other people, having breakfast in a hotel, because I was the guest of honour at a science fiction and fantasy conference in Melbourne. This table discussion was one of the conference events: a chance to have a close-up, more personal discussion with the guests of honour.

He told me he’d been to the Philippines, and the first thing that happened, he said, was that he was offered a sex worker. Several, actually—two or more, if he’d wanted. Wasn’t that awful, he said, wanting me to affirm him and his righteousness at refusing sex. Those poor girls, he tsked.

I think of Stuart Cooke as I remember that moment. Was this the same earnest delusion he felt, writing that story? The same righteous clarity, the same shedding of light? How nuanced, to “accept the risk of perpetuating such power”. How noble, to withhold “false relief”. How generous to share his ‘enlightenment’ with us, his target readership.

What I remember is this: my blood running cold in my veins as that man who had been offered several sex workers reminisced about his strange, strange time in my country. What right did he have to cast judgement on those women? What did he know of their lives, of their work, of their choices? What did he know except what he, the civilised and enlightened white man, brought to my ‘ignorant’ and ‘barbaric’ country?

Anger does strange things to your body. How lightheaded I felt. How distant. In that moment I was another person, trying to marshal words: it’s a fucked up situation. I didn’t clarify. What would it have done, to talk about the myriad dimensions of sex work and agency and abuse and poverty, to bring nuanced understanding to this man who saw the world in ‘hero’? I remember smiling at him to put him at ease. To make it clear he wasn’t the bad guy here. I remember laughing.

Later that day I went to my bed, and I tried to weep into my pillow but couldn’t. My tears have dried up. I have been in this country too long.

♦

You are reading this. You feel like you have been punched in the chest.

Good.

This is a fraction of what we live. Breath by breath, day by day.

And we are the lucky ones.

♦

What does it mean, when a white man with a voice says he wants to critique a power differential by using his voice to re-enact violence through that same gradient of power? What does it mean, when a publication affirms that this violence is, in fact, artistic critique or expression that’s important enough to defend? “May be considered offensive” —what does it mean when our pain and our anger and the lives of our people are reduced to mere possibilities for offense?

What does it mean when you can cause this much harm and simply dust yourself off, walk away, and paper over it as if it never happened?

What does it mean? Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this again and again, in a voice that you will not listen to, in an accent that you will pretend not to understand.

How much must we bleed before it will be enough for you?

How many wounds must I present to satisfy the critical demands of your eyes?

When will my pain matter as much as your education?

When will I be human enough?

About the author

Likhain

Likhain is a queer Filipina artist and writer. She migrated from the Philippines to Australia in 2013 and now lives in Euro-Yroke, on the colonised lands of the Yalukut Weelam clan of the Boon Wurrung people. Her artwork has won the Hugo, British Science Fiction Association, and Ditmar awards. Find her on Twitter as @likhain.