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Jessica Hagedorn

Filipino-American playwright, writer, poet, storyteller, musician, multimedia performance artist

Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn (born 1949) is a Filipino playwright, writer, poet, and multimedia performance artist.

Hagedorn in 1975

Quotes

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  • Defiant, naive, and passionate, we are sprouting up all over the Bay Area-artists of color who write, perform, and collaborate with each other, borders be damned. We are muralistas, filmmakers, musicians, dancers, painters, printmakers, small press publishers, playwrights, poets, and more poets. . . . San Francisco seems to be more a city of poets and musicians than anything else. Rock 'n' roll, R&B, the funk mystique of Oakland, the abstract seduction of jazz, and the glorious rants and chants of loup garous, gypsies, sympathetic cowboys, and water buffalo shamans: Al Robles, Ishmael Reed, Norman Jayo, Ntozake Shange, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Janice Mirikitani, Thulani Davis, David Henderson, Alejandro Murguia, Ed Dom, Alta, Serafin and Lou Syquia, Kitty Tsui, and on and on.... They are my teachers and peers, kindred spirits, borders be damned. A movement is afoot to assert ourselves as artists and thinkers, to celebrate our individual histories, our rich and complicated ethnicities.
    • Introduction to Danger and Beauty (1993)
  • It will never end, I hope-whatever "it" is. The gift, the quest, the visions, the dreams in secret languages. The songs and the storytelling. It will never end; it is still writing itself.
    • Introduction to Danger and Beauty (1993)

from Interviews

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  • We all need money to live and continue to make our art. And sometimes these prizes and awards can be a sort of validation. But money and prizes don’t mean that the work you produce is going to be any good. Sometimes those accolades actually get in the way. The lean times are often when the good stuff happens. So, let’s not get fixated on fame and money. Write like you’re on fire, be fearless, dream and explore. (2022)
  • (Is it important for Filipinx/Filpinx American storytellers to focus on Philippine culture and history in their work?) No. You should feel free to write whatever you want to write. We don’t make art to represent. That has to happen organically. Filipinos are not a monolith. Humans aren’t a monolith. We all have different experiences and need to write across the different identities we hold. As artists, we should be free to write about a wide range of complicated characters and subjects. Don’t limit yourself to only what you know. But definitely do your homework! Being a writer is hard work. (2022)
  • When I was a young activist writer in the Bay Area, I thought I had all the answers. Sometimes I was right, and a lot of times I was just plain ignorant and wrong. There were a few positive things that came from my impatience, energy and anger: I dared to do things with my artistic comrades that hadn’t been done before. We came together in writing collectives to make books because most writers of color were not being published at the time. We didn’t know how to publish, but we learned how to do it guerrilla-style. We organized readings, performances and concerts, made posters and came out to support each other big-time. We brought the noise. And got it done. It all boils down to that old cliche: believe in yourself. Trust in your creative vision and the power of your distinct writer’s voice. (2022)
  • My leaving was not of my doing; that was because of my parents’ breakup. But I was fortunate to be living in San Francisco. There was so much activity, so many activists, so many Filipinos fleeing, coming over. It was the perfect time for me to grow as an artist. I mean, we came in the ’60s—can you imagine? We hit the Summer of Love. There were all these political movements that opened my eyes. I met all these amazing young Filipino American poets who became my teachers. They were going to demonstrations, and I got involved. I was reading up on it, making connections. My God, my brain was vibrating! There was a coup d’état in Chile. There was war in El Salvador. People were making alliances, making connections, and I came to understand: It wasn’t just about us. It was about all these colonies—former colonies—that had the same people running shit, who were probably engineering all these coups. It was a harsh awakening for me and a lot of people like me. (2020)
  • Having access to all these languages and dialects enriched my already wild imagination and made me curious—about who I was, about the world, about the Philippines I knew and the many different ways I could tell a story. (2019)
  • Philippine literature—just like the Philippines itself—is complicated, and can’t be easily described or pinned down. Over 7000 islands make up the Philippines, and over a hundred languages and dialects are spoken!...(What common elements and themes do you see in Philippine writing? And what do you see in the pieces here?) JH: Yearning, and melancholy. Mordant humor, a certain kind of fatalism, love of the macabre and supernatural. A love of puns and a sense of irony. A reckoning with history and the colonial past. (2019)
  • What I try to share with younger artists, not just writers, is you have to not be afraid. You have to try it. It’s our job. And do your homework while you’re at it. But don’t squash your imagination. I mean, my imagination is all I have. I mean, it’s unique to me, unique to you, unique to my students. They have their own, and they have to learn to trust it. (2019)
  • …Research is always involved, to make sure details, language and atmosphere feel right. Then comes the hard work of a writer, which is the writing itself. One sentence leads to another and then another… You try to maintain focus and discipline, writing for as long as you can, everyday until you’re done with a draft. Then you go back and start revising and the mysterious creative process begins all over again. Each time you begin, you hopefully go deeper into your story and your characters and end up surprising yourself.
  • By saying that all my characters have a little bit of me in them, I mean that I try to be invested and empathetic in all my characters—whether they are principal or secondary, deeply flawed and not very “nice.” If you’re in tune with your story then the characters do come at you organically. There isn’t an order to how they might appear.
    • On how she invests part of herself in her characters in “JESSICA HAGEDORN” in TAYO Literary Magazine (2014)
  • Filipino writers who write in English should be at an advantage in terms of connecting with international readers, but the irony is that their work isn't really known to the rest of the world. As for me, writing in Tagalog has never been a real option. It's too complex. Just because I can speak the language (somewhat) doesn't mean that I can write in Tagalog with any eloquence or authority.
  • The work involved in writing a novel is completely solitary, unlike playwriting. And the struggle is often painful. There is no one to turn to but yourself. You confront your own demons in order to dig deep and come up with something risky and powerful. Playwriting is the exact opposite process for me because it's so collaborative. If you're blessed with a terrific cast, a visionary director, an innovative sound and design team, then your play has a ninety-nine percent chance of being realized in the best possible way. I think people forget -- even some of my most aware graduate students! -- that writing is hard work. Period.
  • you can never see any of your characters as monsters; I think then you'd write a really terrible book. Everyone is a complicated and flawed human being (Callaloo, Fall 2008)
  • I usually start with a character that interests me, or with some event that haunts me. I ask myself, "From whose point of view I am telling this story?" Some voice starts taking shape in my head, a certain way of talking, a tone. At its best the process is instinctive, organic, and musical. The story starts writing itself. (Callaloo, Fall 2008)
  • (KASJ: Could you have written this book in any other place? The whole thing is about the Philippines.) JH: Maybe the question is really: Why does a certain place have a pull on a writer? People probably do wonder that about me. I've lived in the US for over 30 years. Why do I keep writing stories that are largely set in the Philippines? C'mon! The culture is just so rich and has so much happening in it. To me it's a treasure trove. Lush, stark, abundant, untainted, polluted. The whole world has gone through there: Arabs, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Brits, Americans. The Philippines has everything. The supernatural, the superreal, and the surreal. It's about grim reality, too. It's about faith in a larger being, a deep, ingrained spiritual faith. It's about strength and courage, but also about corruption, humor and generosity. I mean, God! You almost don't have to make anything up...Everything there is rife with, you know, dramatic conflict, tension, and romance. It's an extravagant culture bursting with extravagant emotions. It also is the place where I grew up, so it will always have real and lasting meaning for me. (The Women's Review of Books, March 2004)
  • I don't write with "lessons" in mind. I just hope my readers are absorbed by the story, that they enjoy the read, and that the novel raises some provocative questions. (The Women's Review of Books, March 2004)
  • (KASJ: What kinds of real-life events are useful for fiction?) JH: All of it is useful. It's very personal what will move one artist and what will move another. I think you can find [art] in both the smallest thing and in the most horrific catastrophe. It could be something as simple as the mystery of seeing someone enter a room, down to a major historical event like the Tasaday controversy or the Vietnam War. Everything is fodder. (The Women's Review of Books, March 2004)
  • I always had dreamed of writing a novel set in the Philippines—what I knew of it. I struggled for years while I was writing poetry, thinking, one day I’m going to write this book. But in what voice? I read Malaysian writers and Chinese writers and Indian writers until I stumbled upon the Latin American writers and I realized that that was it: the humor, the fatalism, the passion and irony (1991)
  • if you get too specific the timelessness is lost. (1991)
  • It’s best if you go out in the world knowing more than one language, I don’t care what the language is. It’s good for your brain to dream in another language. It gives you a clue, another perspective, a way of understanding, some compassion for other people—even if it’s just because you know how to joke in another language. (1991)

with The Missouri Review (1994)

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included in Conversations with American Novelists (1997)

  • I'm not a writer who works off an outline. I don't do file cards. Some writers know where they're going when they sit down to write a novel. I know there are certain things I want to include, but I'm character driven and if the characters keep moving and living and growing on me, the story unfolds. It's like a puzzle which starts falling into place. But I never know where I'm going when I start.
  • If I were to write with that agenda in mind, then I'd destroy the writing. No, I write really because I have to and if the writing also destroys some of those myths and subverts forms and makes people question the very idea of the writer, the woman, the Filipino American, the whatever, great! (INTERVIEWER: Where does art have to come from to accomplish those kinds of ends? If you set out directly to accomplish them, you probably wouldn't have writing that is, in your opinion, worth reading? So, where does it have to come from?) JH: It has to come from the deepest, deepest, deepest insides of your soul. And it's got to be brutally honest. It's like pornography. You know it when you are doing it and you know when you're bullshitting. You know when you're being self-conscious and contrived and forcing something to be there because you want to make sure that people get the point. You know when that's happening. But if you just really listen to yourself and to your characters, you don't go for the easy stuff.
  • A lot of novels about the Philippines or set in the Philippines don't cut it at all because they don't capture the crazy quilt atmosphere and the hybrid ambiance that occurs twenty-four hours a day. Things happening all the time, and noise and crowds and beautiful animals and amazing flora. At the same time, pollution and urbanization and sophistication and, you know, the jungle. How do you do all that? You can't tell it in a traditional way because the language dies. And also the music of the language itself, the music of the streets. How do convey that chaos? So, once I decided to go with it as I found it, I relaxed because at the risk of alienating some readers, this was the way the novel had to be presented.
  • I have been definitely influenced more by Latin American writers than by any other type of writer. They are very close in terms of voice their humor, their fatalism, their... well, that overused term "magical realism." It's a wonderful term that's just been used so much we don't know what it means anymore. But the way they can use language and visions and surrealism without being corny, and the humor that's always there, is very close to a Filipino sensibility. More so than-now this is a completely personal perception-other writers from Southeast Asia.
  • What made me want to write a novel was reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Garcia Marquez. I was turned on to that by a friend from Mexico who gave me the book. It was like Holy Communion or something. I said, "Yes!" Here is a novel that reads so lyrically and so poetically, and yet is a novel. It's a wonderful story. You want to know what happens to these people. And at the same time I saw the connection for me. It was like the Philippines was something I was carrying around and I didn't know what art form it would take to convey the story I wanted to tell, and I read that book and said, "That's it. One day I'm gonna do it."
  • For other people perhaps it was something else that brought them to certain conclusions about their lives and their identities. But, for me, film was truly one of the more powerful sources of entertainment, enlightenment, disillusionment. So, I use it a lot. In the writing of Dogeaters, especially, the movies were there because they were absolutely part of the fabric of my memory. Once I found that key, all the doors started swinging open in my imagination.
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