WRITERS' MINDS Candy Gourlay (Part 1)
Wild Song is the companion novel to your award winning YA Bone Talk. Did you plan to write a further historical novel when you were writing Bone Talk? Did you want to go back to that point in history again?
It was the other way around! I was trying to write Wild Song. I started it, I plotted it, I knew what was going to happen, I had planned the ending. Then I began to research it and slowly, I began to question whether I had the right to write this story. It was the time when #ownvoices was ascendant – when questions were being raised about WHO had the right to tell certain stories. And looking at my own work-in-progress, I realised that I had not earned the right to tell this story. I was not a member of the indigenous people who were my characters. And I didn’t properly understand the history behind it.
My critique group will tell you they looked at some chapters 10 years ago of what eventually became Wild Song. The title back then was The Invention of the Hotdog. I had discovered that the hotdog was invented in St Louis, along with the ice cream cone. I had this middle grade idea which was of a young character coming from the Philippines who was put on exhibit in St Louis, where all kinds of things were being invented. Using the theme of invention, he would reinvent himself because he went to St Louis. But the real history of the Fair made me realise the story would be entirely different.
The enormity of the story made me realise I needed to deserve to write Wild Song. You know how editors will ask you – have your characters earned that scene? I asked myself how do I earn the right to write about the World’s Fair? So I wrote Bone Talk and taught myself the part of Philippine History that I had not learned in school.
Tell us about how Wild Song introduced you to history that you previously had not known.
I realised early on that 1904 was just a heartbeat after the United States declared that they had won the Philippine-American War, in which Filipinos were resisting a US invasion. It was a very unequal war. Every Filipino would have experienced a death in the family. The war had dragged on in the countryside from war started in 1898 to 1903 – it must have been similar to the grinding horror of the Ukraine War.
So what were Filipinos doing at the World's Fair in 1904? Were they willing participants? Could they say no? Did they see themselves as being in a human zoo, as contemporary commentators now call these fairs?
The enormity of the story made me realise I needed to deserve to write Wild Song. You know how editors will ask you – have your characters earned that scene?
Researching, it seemed all the history was written down by American historians. It was hard to find Filipino voices. I searched the JStor website (you’re allowed 100 free academic articles a month!). I searched all the research about Bontok, about the World’s Fair, about the Philippine American war, I went down every rabbit hole.
I was shocked to discover that the World’s Fair happened during a time called the ‘Progressive Era’. In the United States, women were waking up to their inequality, working men were fighting for justice, thinkers were debating socialism and capitalism, even animal rights were beginning to be recognised, with the creation of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. This era led to Prohibition, when alcohol was made illegal. People were trying to be good. And in so doing, perhaps they felt there had never been a time when Americans were more civilised.
Growing up, my history teachers didn’t tell us much about the American colonial era – you memorised a few dates and then moved quickly on. Maybe it was because we lost the war?
And then they turned their sights on the Philippines. President McKinley justified colonising saying it was America’s responsibility to Christianise Filipinos, even though we’d been Catholics for 300 years. The primitivism of the Igorots created great excitement.
The most shocking realisation to me was that the World's Fair was a time of backlash against the Civil War that abolished slavery – Jim Crow, blackface, and lynchings. Many of the American generals who fought in the Philippine American war served in the Civil War. So did many of the Jefferson Guards (the Fair’s policemen). Reading newspapers of the time, you would have an article about the Fair in one corner and then a report about a lynching just a few inches away. Many of the Jefferson Guards served in the Philippine American War.
Going into Luki’s character background, she was expected by her community to become a wife and mother. She defied it all and stuck to the dream that she had always had to be a warrior. What message did you want your readers to go away with?
Luki’s journey is perhaps a reflection of my own experience in the Philippines. That there was one way of being a Filipino girl and that wasn’t the way I wanted to be. I got frustrated to see that people just seemed to accept this. It was easy for me to imagine an indigenous girl who wanted to resist the path she was expected to follow.
One of the other characters, Sidong, is a little girl who likes to draw. I really, really wanted to have a character like that because as a girl, I loved drawing and art
One of the other characters, Sidong, is a little girl who likes to draw. I really, really wanted to have a character like that because as a girl, I loved drawing and art and I thought I would grow up to become an artist. I could not imagine that someone who was not like me would love drawing too. One day one of my architect Dad’s workmen showed me a wooden box he had made to put his tools in. The box was decorated with ball point pen drawings. It was beautiful. I was so astonished at the elaborate and intricate drawings that covered! After that I would watch people on the street and wonder, can that person draw?
I thought nobody would imagine that an indigenous child growing up in a place with no paper or pencils would be able to draw. Sidong draws with pieces of charred wood from the fire. When she arrived in St Louis, I wanted to get her better tools. And then I discovered that Crayola was launched at the World's Fair!
*Look out for part 2 in May!
*Header image courtesy of Candy Gourlay
Candy Gourlay was born in the Philippines, grew up under a dictatorship and met her husband during a revolution. Her books range from Greenaway-nominated Is it a Mermaid illustrated by Francesca Chessa to Carnegie-shortlisted novel Bone Talk. The sequel, Wild Song, transports its characters to the 1904 World Fair in America. “Wild Song is a stunning achievement” The Bookseller.
Sarah Broadley writes for children of all ages and lives in Edinburgh. She is a member of SCBWI Scotland, the Society of Authors and the Scottish Book Festival Network. Sarah is also a trustee on the board of Cymera — the UK's only sci-fi, horror and fantasy writing festival. She chats with creatives on her Words & Pictures feature Writers’ Minds and is a children’s book reviewer for on-line resource My Book Corner.
Françoise Price is deputy editor of Words & Pictures magazine. Contact deputyeditor@britishscbwi.org
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