Writing Amid the Babel of Books by Vicente L. Rafael - How I Became a Writer 2

The book, How I Became a Writer : Essays by Filipino and Filipino American Writers 2 (Edited by Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, published by Vibal 2026) will be released in September of this year. The book will be launched in Cebu and Manila; details are forthcoming.

I am sharing this essay by Professor Vicente L. Rafael who unfortunately passed away last February 21, 2026.  He had sent his essay soon after I put out the Call in December 2025. Dr. Rafael is one of 25 contributors to the collection, How I Became a Writer 2 ~ Cecilia Brainard, Editor

VICENTE L. RAFAEL (1956-2026)

BIO:  VICENTE L. RAFAEL was Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. His research and teaching focused mostly on the comparative political and cultural history of the Philippines, the United States and Southeast Asia.

He wrote The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (2022). The rest of his books include Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (1988/1993), White Love and Other Events in Filipino Histories (2000), The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (2005), “Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation (2016), all published by Duke University and co-published in the Philippines by Ateneo University Press.

He also edited Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays in Filipino Cultures (1995) and Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines and Colonial Vietnam (1999).  Rafael also wrote the Introduction to a collection of Nick Joaquin’s stories, The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic published by Penguin Classics (2017). 

Rafael also writes op-ed columns for Rappler, The Daily Inquirer in the Philippines, and has written for The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books in the US. He waw the recipient of numerous awards both abroad and in the Philippines, including a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, Social Science Research Council Fellowship, a Ford Foundation fellowship, and residencies at the Stanford Humanities Center, Univ. of California, Irvine Humanities Center, East-West Center in Honolulu, and several others. After graduating with a PhD in History and Anthropology from Cornell Univ., he taught at the University of Hawai’I at Manoa, the University of California at San Diego, Stanford University and the University of Washington, Seattle.

Vicente L. Rafael passed away on February 21, 2026, five days after his 70^th birthday. He was married to Lila Ramos Shahani. He submitted the following article in December of 2025. Copyright 2026 by Vicente L. Rafael. Reprinted with his permission.

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WRITING AMID THE BABEL OF BOOKS

My practice and habits of writing have always been shaped by my reading. And most of the books I have read come from my explorations of various libraries. I could not imagine writing without the sheltering space of libraries and the enabling generosity of librarians. So let me start with an account of how libraries have been important to my writing.

 

Books in all shapes and forms make up libraries, and since language makes up books, then libraries are built on the limitless expanse of language. Wandering around shelves, one feels caught in a linguistic maze where there is only an entrance but no exit. One apprehends more than one can comprehend, as one book leads to another, referencing and cross-referencing authors and topics, indexing moments and movements. A sublime simulacrum of Babel, the library, as Borges once pointed out, is the materialization of the power of language to create vast worlds, not merely signify them. One goes to the library and one plunges into a roiling ocean from which there is potentially no escape. Libraries are aporetic sites that entreat only to entrap the unsuspecting reader.

But that experience of sublime overcoming is held in check by a very simple device: the Library of Congress classification system. A grid guides you from one collection of books to another, pointing the way out of a bibliographic babel. Classification systems impose order that allows you to surf the waves of books and find your way to safer shores: back at your desk, or out in the café, recuperating that part of yourself that got tangled up and lost in the bookshelves.

Such is the strange thing that is the library. It is as much a place for containing, in all senses of that word, collections of books and papers, as it is a structure of feeling that stirs the senses and mobilizes thought towards uncharted directions. Lost in the library, one needs a guide. And librarians, of course, play that role. Every collection requires a collector who can tenderly accumulate, yet rigorously organize, what would otherwise be a hopeless heap of unrelated things into sets of historically coherent and aesthetically recognizable gatherings of objects. Recently, much has been written about archives as vectors of power relations, especially as they concern empire. Certain sources by the colonizers are privileged over those of the colonized, and archivists act as gatekeepers to maintain the power relations that these imply. Yet, an astute reader can read against as much as with the grain of such archives. They can listen to the voices that have been repressed and through their writing recover the forces and relations that have been silenced. Indeed, some of the best historical writing consist of such attempts at recovery. And again, the same librarians that might act as gatekeepers also provide the means for alternative readings.

Hence, libraries need librarians to guide us through the forest of stacks, across the seas of special collections, into the caves of diaries, periodicals, and letters. And inasmuch as reading requires communing with authors who are absent, and in many cases, dead, librarians are the caretakers of the remains and relics of writers, modern shamans able to locate their wandering spirits. It is for this reason that librarians as collectors par excellence, as expert guides, caretakers and modern-day shamans exercise considerable power over the production of knowledge. For without libraries, there would be no hope of saying anything more, anything new, or anything different. Without the archiving power of libraries, the past would simply pass, lost to memory, and thus lost to the future. And without librarians, libraries would cease to exist. All we would be left with would be the barbarians of glibness: the advertisers and the late-night TV hosts, the know-nothing politicians of hate and the religious fundamentalists, the gun nuts and the ayatollahs of real estate, the self-help gurus and the slimy shysters with pyramid schemes, and reality shows substituting for reality itself. This would be the hell from which only libraries and their vast collection of books offer escape.

Thinking about the crucial importance of libraries in any kind of civilized life, I’m led to think of my own life with libraries, indeed of how my life was shaped by libraries. Growing up in Manila in the 1960s, my father was the first librarian I knew. He taught freshman English and composition at night at a local university, but for his day job worked as an accountant for a large construction company. He had always harbored dreams of becoming a journalist or a novelist, and for this reason kept a very modest collection of books. It was from this tiny library that I first discovered modernist literature, reading Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, D.H. Lawrence, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as well as a host of Anglophone Filipino writers, such as Jose Garcia Villa and Nick Joaquin.

When I was twelve, my father bought us an encyclopedia set—an expensive purchase in those days—that came with a bonus: a 10-volume collection of the History of Western Art. Here was my first archive, where I could dive in and learn about the range of what counted as “art” in the West, from cave paintings to Picasso, from Andrea Mantegna to Andy Warhol. Looking back on those days, I learned less about art as such as I did about the way it was governed by the rules of art history: the dating, the classification into schools and influences, the ruptures and the charting of innovations. I came to know something of the narrative power of archives to lead you to think in a certain way, while limiting, even repressing, other associations and possibilities. All this I sensed, but could not as yet fully understand nor express. But thanks to my father’s library, I began to experience the pleasures of getting lost in a collection, entering into a rabbit hole of texts and then returning to the humid surroundings of our middle class home with other ways of tuning into and deciphering the noise—political, cultural, and social—that surrounded that world.

It wasn’t until I went to graduate school in 1979 that I encountered my first major research library. This was the fabulous collection at Cornell University. Stuck in the middle of tundra-like conditions in upstate New York, amid the solitary splendors of the Finger Lakes region, the libraries at Cornell offered refuge amid the company of books and people. During my first two years, I supplemented my fellowship by working at the acquisitions desk of the Wasson-Echols Collection of Southeast Asia at Olin Library. Under the supervision of a kindly and knowledgeable Indonesian scholar, Giok Po Oey, I spent several hours of my week in his tight small office cataloguing new titles and typing letters to acknowledge gifts. The rest of the time I divided between the bowels of the library where much of the Southeast Asian materials were located and the top floor where I had a carrel and a commanding view of Cayuga Lake, past the bell tower and the tiled roofs of the buildings on the quad.

In an earlier, more innocent analog age, I spent quite a bit of time riffling through card catalogs, noting down call numbers in a notebook, and haunting the stacks in search of books. It was, however, common enough to find not only the book one was looking for, but also the book next or above or below it, then realizing that this was an even more interesting title. Indeed, much of my experience in the library consisted of finding things by happenstance. Curiosity about a title led to unexpected finds. Accidents led to distractions that diverted you from the titles you were hunting for, only to open up in new lines of inquiry you did not anticipate. Lingering in the stacks proved to be unavoidable but also productive: you were enfolded in the contingent connections that led you to re-think what you were doing, or confirm what you vaguely suspected but could not confirm. Like meeting strangers who end up becoming friends, found books proved to be intimate companions even though they spoke of things that had little to do with your dissertation project.

Aside from being a dream world of texts, both actual and possible, the library was also a dense social space. It was a site for meeting classmates, exchanging ideas, discussing assignments, and learning about each other’s projects. Over coffee in the lounge, one gossiped and joked, forging deep friendships, at times even love affairs. The library was thus a vibrant center in the intellectual and affective life of the university. You didn’t just go to the library, you inhabited it, or better yet, it came to inhabit you. It was not exactly home—though some found sleeping there far more comfortable than in their apartments. It was rather an extension of your mind, or what you wished your mind could become. The library contained an unending feast from which you were invited to eat, nourishing you, yet always leaving you hungry for more. It was a vast space of hospitality, a kind of harbor from which to shelter body and mind but also from which to launch them anew into the world.

When it was time to do research for my dissertation, I found myself traveling to other libraries. First was the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, where I camped out in the special collections to pore over sixteenth- to nineteenth-century Spanish accounts of the conquest and colonization of the Philippines. Located appropriately enough in an avenue called Colon, the Biblioteca had different ways of governing their collection and those who used it. As in most European libraries and as in special collections in the US, the stacks were off limits, as librarians zealously guarded access to their books. They were more like clergy keeping watch over the sacred possessions of a vast monastery. You filled out your request for books or boxes of records, then sat patiently as they brought them out. Unable to Xerox the pages, I was left to copy passages on my notebooks by hand, tracing out the words on one side of the notebook’s margin, while glossing them with extended commentaries on the other side. In this way, I began to develop a style of close reading that was also a form of textual commentary, tracing a hermeneutic circle that began with the pages of the original, then making its way to my handwritten transcription before looping back towards my critical translation and transposition of the text. I tried to convert the physical constraints of the reading room into a rough methodology for analyzing and writing. Much of this research style, of course, was improvised. It was cumbersome and slow, but no less productive. It forced me to readjust the tempo of my reading and the rhythm of my thinking to follow as closely as possible the syntactic and semantic drift of whatever I was reading. That these texts were for the most part in Spanish led me to inspect more closely their tropological construction, that is to say, the rhetorical force of certain recurring phrases. It also allowed me to excavate the etymological secrets of certain key words. Such a process was even more useful insofar as my project concerned the relationship of translation and Christian conversion of Tagalogs during the early period of Spanish rule.

Later, I found an analogy for what I was doing in Walter Benjamin’s observations that writing was akin to traveling: that copying a text by hand was like walking down the road rather than driving through it. One notices things that otherwise would be lost to sense and the senses. Walking allows one to linger, stepping into another temporal zone, thereby coming into contact with life worlds otherwise repressed or ignored. Copying as walking meant listening more deliberately to what a text was saying, while also opening oneself up to distractions and distortions, to hearing the whisper of that which was left out or the noise of what could’ve been written but was instead suppressed. It is a method that, thanks to the unflagging vigilance, as well as unfailing generosity of the stern librarians at the Biblioteca Nacional, I learned to develop and continue to use to this day. (I should mention in passing that the Biblioteca has a café on the mezzanine where you could order coffee and drinks as well as tapas. It was a convivial spot to meet other researchers, and it was there that I was lucky enough to connect with Doreen Fernandez who was then doing research for her book on fiestas. We would take breaks and head out for out of town trips. Such meetings were the unintended and welcome joys of library work).

It is this practice of physically visiting and inhabiting libraries that has, of course, changed dramatically over the last decade and a half, if not more. The spread of digital technologies, while it has not totally usurped analog forms, has transformed the terms in which we encounter the library’s collections and interact with librarians. From just about any place, I can search the library’s catalog and request books to be delivered to the front desk. This convenience brings with it a certain loss. For one thing, the visit to the stacks now seems to be increasingly a thing of the past. And with that, the chances for accidental encounters with other books seems drastically diminished. Librarians themselves have receded from view, reachable by email or phone, but rarely ever by way of face-to-face conversation.

Without doubt, digital access to the library’s collections have been a boon to faculty and students, especially those who may have difficulty coming to campus. As a single graduate student in the 1980s, I had few responsibilities other than my academic work and could afford to spend lots of time inhabiting the library. But the nature of academic work has since changed, and pressures of domestic life and careers have made it more difficult to go to the library. Rather, digital technology has meant that the library now comes to you. Entire stacks of books can be downloaded as ebooks, while physical copies can be retrieved by student workers to be picked up the next day, like pizza or pad Thai. While the role of the library as an archive of knowledge has not changed, its social character has, and so, too, the structure of feeling that it generates among those who use it. Increasingly, the library is something that one goes through, like an airport, rather than a place that one lingers in and inhabits. No doubt, its rooms and lounges continue to be filled with students studying, and its special collections are still visited by researchers. But it does not seem to engender the kind of fierce attachment it used to among its patrons. Perhaps, I’m wrong and that I’m merely generalizing from my own experience. More likely, I’ve allowed my memory from my graduate student years to distort the historical realities of libraries, librarians, and their patrons. From my own skewed and highly partial perspective, the university library—and let me emphasize that I am talking here only about the general collections rather than special collections—something seems to have changed. It has morphed from a kind of sublime space of intellectual immersion into a more corporate and antiseptic setting. It is perhaps a transformation that is consistent with the growing corporatization of higher education at the North American university itself: the budget cutbacks, the managerial approach to collections, the customer-service vibe you get at the front desk.

I want to end with a note about the future of libraries, or at least what I hope that future might bring given the conditions of the present. First, with regard to digital technology, the possibilities for expanding the limits of the library seem endless, reaching out to students and faculty who may not have direct access to the physical collection. Just as photography, cinema and radio in the early twentieth century brought distant scenes and far away figures into the midst of the masses to forge new kinds of communities, so digital technology can bring forth new readers and writers around the ready availability of library collections—all of which, of course, are dependent on a good internet connection.

Second, the physical space of the library will increasingly continue, I suspect, to be important sites for staging exhibits and holding events—from academic conferences to community meetings—that draw from the strengths of existing collections.

There are other areas where one can see libraries playing increasingly important roles—for example, the development of online classes which I’ve been involved in for the last five years, providing digital readings, streaming videos, and other resources for research. Such efforts will, I hope, allow us, especially in public universities, to reach non-traditional students, who are anxious to complete their degrees. As I alluded to above, digital technologies have been indispensable in making library materials accessible for online classes, benefitting non-traditional students such as returning veterans, stay-at-home moms, caregivers and full-time workers, and many others who otherwise would not be able to pursue a college education. But these are matters for another, longer discussion.

 Addendum:

Walter Benjamin, From “Post No Bills” in One Way Street, 1928:

THE WRITER’S TECHNIQUE IN THIRTEEN THESES

1.      Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

2.      Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

3.      In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

4.      Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

5.      Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

6.      Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

7.      Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

8.      Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

9.      Nulla dies sine linea [‘No day without a line’] — but there may well be weeks.

10.  Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

11.  Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

12.  Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style. .  The work is the death mask of its conception.

Read also: 

Book Review of How I Became a Writer: Essays by Filipino and Filipino American Writers by Elfren S. Cruz   

How I Became a Writer - Cecilia's site

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