MISTAKEN FOR AN EMPIRE

A Los Angeles–based Filipino American writer meditates on the meaning of living in a country that never fully acknowledged its status as an empire.

In this extended, innovative prose poem written at the intersection of English and Tagalog, Imperial explores the challenges of dealing with the legacy of colonialism. She begins with a memory of reading Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” which encouraged the U.S. to assume the “burden” of governing the Philippines. She hated Kipling’s work and its racist sentiments about the “half devil and half child” Filipino people. Yet the poem haunted her enough that as an adult, she attempted what no one else had done: translating it into Tagalog. These efforts led Imperial to reflect on her many (often disorienting) moves between the U.S. and the Philippines as well as the pain that translating the poem, alongside her own fractured experiences, represented. The author’s American citizenship offered her privileged status, especially in the eyes of Filipino relatives, but at the same time, Imperial realized that that status meant a kind of collusion with a power that had actively worked to discourage or suppress liberation movements in the Philippines and elsewhere, including Mexico. It also meant enduring White supremacist mistrust of the kind she saw in Department of Homeland Security arrests of Philippine nationals overstaying visas and on billboards in LA that reminded Filipino residents—in their own language—to “report suspicious behavior to the FBI.” Kipling’s “burden,” Imperial suggests, is far more nuanced than many believe. For the U.S., it represents the accumulated weight of its own, unacknowledged racism; for the author, it represents the weight of living with a profound ambivalence about being an American citizen. This highly experimental work will appeal primarily to readers who enjoy the challenge of bilingual literary experiments or to Filipino American readers interested in digging further into their heritage.

An intriguing and provocative book.