Chapter 19
Nineteen
KIERAN
I’m on fire. I’d almost forgotten how it felt to lose myself in drawing, to sink deep in the flow and only come up for air hours later, a full sketch before me.
Isabel was right: there are plenty of scenes worthy of painting here.
I just hadn’t allowed myself to indulge in my muse and portray exactly what it is the world has been asking me to.
I mean, why not, right? Drawing her, painting her—these aren’t bad things.
They can be completely platonic. They’re not infringing on whatever it is she and Jaime are kindling, and I don’t mean for it to.
I’ll maintain a respectful distance, and if Jaime finds out and has a problem with it, we’ll cross that bridge then.
Plus, if he asks us to stop, it wouldn’t be his decision to make, or mine.
Isabel is her own person; if she wants to model for a portrait, who are we to stop her?
The world is speaking to me again. No, it’s singing.
I feel lighter than I have in days. She tells me about her boss, this badass woman who would have been the youngest recipient of the National Artist Award for Literature at forty-two, but who rejected it in protest against the padrino system in the Philippines, which is essentially patronage politics where powerful people, often politicians, give resources, jobs, or favors to supporters in exchange for their loyalty, votes, and backing, disregarding merit and often leading to corruption like nepotism or cronyism.
In the arts, she says, this can look like the whitewashing of corrupt individuals or organizations in exchange for accolades, funding, and prestige.
“I guess it’s who you know and how you know them that makes more of an impact than skill and merit alone,” she says.
“It’s probably the same everywhere else, but more so here than abroad.
That’s what Amparo always says. There isn’t even a thin veneer of meritocracy.
You have to be willing to play the game—or worse, be a crony—to get anywhere.
” She starts picking at a loose thread on the hem of her shorts. She’s silent, deep in thought.
“Go on, then,” I tell her. “Say what’s on your mind.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“I’m not,” I say. “You want to talk about art as resistance? I’m an Irishman. We were under British rule for over 700 years. I’m all ears.”
“Okay…” she says, eyeing me warily. “Well… so much of our culture and shared knowledge is gatekept from the general public. Even the word ‘masses’ has a negative connotation to it when you’re speaking of the Filipino people.
I mean—historically, power has just been transferred from one elite to the next: the Spanish, the American, the Japanese, back to the Americans, and then whoever the Americans approved of.
The dynastic elite. The oligarchs. Each one has looked down on the Filipino—Indio, we were called.
Filipino used to just mean a Spanish citizen born in the country.
“My boss said it helps to be wary of politicians who portray themselves as champions of the arts. There’s almost always a desire to exploit or co-opt our cultural work as a means of writing?
rewriting? history, you know? By way of investment.
I fund you so you can make art, and in return, you speak kindly about me.
And us artists, writers—we’re chroniclers of history.
So, if all we have left from the past are artworks and writings from our cultural workers, and they all said this politician was a great person, then…
there you go. No matter how terribly that person acted, their place in history has been cemented. ”
“The invention of a new history,” I tell her. “That’s what Milan Kundera called it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. You conquer a people by erasing its memory. You destroy their books, stamp out their culture, rewrite their history. The British—”
“It’s always the British,” she says with a laugh.
“Yeah.” I chuckle. “They imposed their language and culture on the Irish. There were English-only schools, so kids caught speaking Gaeilge in school were often singled out or ridiculed or punished, sometimes by beating them with this thing they called the ‘tally stick.’ It’s fucked up.
There were laws that made speaking Gaeilge punishable by death or forfeiture of land.
It wasn’t until 2022 that it gained full status as an official European Union language.
It was only recognized that same year in Northern Ireland. Can you believe it?”
She shakes her head.
“‘Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam.’ A country without a language is a country without a soul,” I tell her. “That’s what Padraig Pearse said. And so, you know what we say? Is fearr Gaeilge bhriste, ná Béarla cliste. Broken Irish is better than clever English.”
Isabel stumbles over her words trying to repeat it. I laugh and say it again and again until she gets the hang of it.
“But that’s exactly it, right?” she says after some time.
“There’s so much suppression and censorship and silencing.
Like only those in power are allowed to have a voice.
And I mean, that’s not even getting into the other gatekeepers, the people who champion the arts in search of self-glorification.
” She shrugs. “I can’t really explain it; art and politics in the Philippines has its own nuance, this flavor that’s almost an acquired taste; you can’t really make it out until you’ve been in it long enough. I guess it’s the same for the Irish?”
I nod. “I think there’s a lot more that colonized people share in common than what separates them.”
She’s getting excited now. There’s this glitter in her eyes that wasn’t there before.
“Amparo has this huge library in her home, and there are so many out-of-print Filipiniana books. Part of my job is to read at least one book there every week, and to submit a five-hundred-word review so she knows I’m studying my literary heritage and be a more effective employee.
She’s having her team reach out to the rights owners so they can digitize those out-of-print books to make them accessible online—that’s another thing, by the way: our literature is so frustratingly inaccessible that you’d have to know what you’re looking for and where to look to even find it, as opposed to just chancing upon the latest New York Times Bestseller list at a bookstore.
Our colonial history has taught us to value—” She pauses. “Sorry, am I rambling?”
I shake my head vigorously. I’ve never heard anything more interesting. “No. No, keep going. You were saying—”
“I was saying—we’ve been taught to value the foreign over the local.
I think the export of American media, you know, American soft power, over the years it’s become so ingrained in our culture that we view our own creations as poor attempts at reproduction.
More than any other country, I think it’s harder to divorce politics from art in the Philippines, because the ability to create and engage with art remains inaccessible to most down to the economic and educational level.
A room of one’s own, right? But not limited to women. To a whole populace.”
I sit quietly, letting her words sink in.
“I don’t know if I can expect you to understand,” she says.
“Not fully. At the end of the day, you’re still a white man from the West, and these days, save perhaps for economical—how do you say?
Handicaps?—there isn’t much of anything you’re barred from joining or doing.
Even in the Philippines, people are more likely to patronize your art than a Filipino who is more skilled than you. No offense.”
I always thought I understood my place in this world, as an artist, as an Irishman from Dublin living in America.
But listening to her speak, I recognize that there is still so much I don’t know, still so much I have to learn about all the intersections of our identities that shape our perspectives and our lives.
But so does she.
Isabel draws in a deep breath. She speaks before I can.
“I’m just saying. Art is one of the cornerstones of humanity.
And if you rob people of their access to it, their ability to create it, then you rob them of their humanity.
Why should only the privileged have art?
What has the accumulation of wealth got to do with any of it? ”
She glances at the curtained windows, then drops her gaze. “I didn’t mean to make things so serious. I just get so passionate about it.”
I resist the urge to touch her hand. “I like it,” I say.
“I’m learning so much. And—and it’s true.
I mean, I can’t speak to the Philippine context, but it’s true.
I had a classmate in uni. Best of our class.
She had to drop out because she was only on a fifty-percent scholarship.
She couldn’t afford the rest of her tuition.
She could have had an illustrious career; the connections we were all making in school almost guaranteed us of it.
But it’s pay to play, you know? Like, a certain amount of money in the bank is required before the gatekeepers of culture even look at you. ”
Isabel nods. “Fuck gatekeepers.”
“Fuck ‘em,” I echo. “And—I’m not trying to negate what you’re saying.
Just adding to it, really. But during the Famine, when half the population of Ireland died or emigrated—to America, or across the water to the UK, and especially in the UK, people would put up signs that said, ‘No Blacks, no Dogs, no Irish.’ In restaurants and in towns and letting places and all of that.
Just so much discrimination. I think xenophobia doesn’t care about the color of your skin, and I think the popular view on race as just being the color of your skin does us all a disservice.
Divides us more than connects us, when we have so much more in common.
” I shake my head. “It’s just something to think about.
How we’re kept from standing in solidarity with each other. ”
She frowns. “I didn’t know that,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“I got what you meant,” I say. “And I’m sure it’s still true. That the color of my skin would grant me privileges here that many others won’t get. But it’s just—it’s strange to wrap my head around how differently someone can be treated depending on which side of the world they’re at.”
We part ways at sunrise. It thrills me to know that I’ve found someone so much like me. That I’ve made a new friend, and even that the friendship itself feels like it could last a lifetime—or at least, that I’d work hard to make it so.
I drop her off at her bedroom door.
“Do you need me to come back tomorrow?” she asks. Come back every night. Stay forever.
“If you don’t mind?”
She shakes her head. “Okay, go get some sleep, Picasso.”
I clench my fists to fight the urge to kiss her cheek good night.
I always knew she was beautiful, but her beauty pales in comparison to her insight.
External beauty is so easily compressed, commodified.
A complex woman—a complex person with thoughts and opinions of their own, even if it goes against the grain, not so.
I feel stupid around her in every sense of the word, and fuck, do I love it.
I brush my teeth and climb into bed with a smile on my face. The beginning of a full collection forms in my mind. I know exactly what I want to paint, and I know the world wants it for me, too.