NAKEM Centennial Conference

Writing consumed me—and I allowed myself to be consumed by writing and with pride, in Ilokano writing. Plus or minus, I have put in more than forty years to this craft, much of it in the language of my people, Ilokano, and I have not regretted in doing so, not a bit. I find fulfillment in writing as it forces me to articulate the sieved experiences of an Ilokano in exile, which is my particular case even if even before my immigration to Hawai`i I had already taken the pen and pursued that path less traveled as it is the path of those who have to sit down and make merry with solitude and aloneness and come to terms with the demands of the art and the craft. For me, the pursuit of selfhood—the pursuit of exilic identity—is at the same time the pursuit of writing. In this land of exile, I have talked about Hawai`i—of Oahu and the other islands, of the American experience, of the Filipino American experience, of the Ilokano American experience. In this difficult act of naming our experiences as a people, I have met the muse—but this muse is the memory and magic of the land we left behind and the land we have come to, both lands colliding in my mind and coming into a synthesis and fusion as well.