Munich-based Axel Timo Purr Interviews Cecilia Brainard - Podcast

 

Axel Timo Purr's interview of Cecilia Manguerra Brainard is now in the podcast of his Munich-based LITERATUR REVIEW.

https://literatur.review/en/podcast/between-old-and-new-home

Between Old and New Home

By Axel Timo Purr 

IF I HAD ONE MAGICAL WISH, I would give an old-school anthropologist like Fedor Jagor the chance to travel back in time to our present day. How would he deal with the encounters of this literary journey that followed his geographical traces, and how would he understand the concept of our globalised world today, which also involves people and authors leaving their country and becoming part of another culture? Like Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, who started writing as a young girl from an educated middle-class family in Cebu City and went to California as a young woman to study film - but ended up sticking with writing and becoming one of the most successful authors of the Filipino diaspora in the US. I reach her via a Zoom call at her home in Santa Monica, and despite the distance, the conversation is as close and intimate as with any author I've met on my trip.

Despite the graphical distance, Brainard is always a Filipino author; she visits the country regularly. And her stories are always stories from Cebu - albeit written in English because she was brought up in English and not in Cebuano. Nevertheless, she is certain that she would be a very different author if she had stayed in the Philippines. She may not share the fate of Thomas Mann, whose time in exile had a lasting effect on his writing and thinking, but she is also a "PhilAm" author whose novels such as The Newspaper Widow interweave memory, colonial history and female self-determination and who has also had to deal with the blessings and curses of the American publishing world: sometimes wanted, then rejected again if the sales figures are not right. She is now at peace with this; her books have also been translated into numerous other languages. She is more concerned about the decline in "high literature", even if she herself acknowledges that the new, "fashionable" genres and their authors are certainly doing their best. But like Bebang Siy, Brainard says that the Philippines needs more "serious" literature in order to get a grip on the present and future with all its crises.

And perhaps also - as Justin, a student at the Polytechnic University, told me on my last day in Manila, in the legendary bookshop Solidaridad - a new concept of culture that could hark back to the pre-colonial era, when music and lectures were still free and open to all."

Axel Timo Purr - Literatur Review 

Read also

Press Release about foreign Translations of Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's Fiction 

Publishers of Cecilia Brainard's Foreign Translations 

Filip Batkoski (Bata Press) 

Leonardo Garzaro (Editor Rua do Sabao) 

Senja Pozar - Literary Agent

Dimitris Tsoukatos (Lemvos Editions) 

Mohamed Radi (Egyptian Office for Publishing and Distribution

Dejan Trajkoski (Prozart Media)

 Nenad Saponja (Agora)

Jale Memmedova (Qanun Publishing House)

Dr. Takuya Matsuda (Genki Shobou)

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