Writer in exile.

New York 

Novelist Ninotchka Rosca is still waiting for a revolution to happen in the Philippines.

Rosca remembers the 1986 People-Power movement, in which hundreds of thousands took to the streets in peaceful solidarity to overthrow the twenty-year dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. Although people realized the damage the Marcos regime created would not be erased overnight, millions of Filipinos are still being denied justice and relief from their impoverished conditions, says Rosca.

"I cannot find the words to express how deep my anger is," she says. "People like me spent practically our whole lives to get Marcos out. In the end we are betrayed, and nobody paid except for us and the poor people. They got away with it," says Rosca.

After graduating from the University of the Philippines with a degree in comparative literature, Rosca became the managing editor of Graphic magazine, and immediately decided that the only kind of news worthy of coverage was hard-core politics. She helped redirect Philippine media coverage toward women's rights issues. human-rights violations, and movements critical of the presence of U.S. military bases in the Philippines.

Rosca's political convictions are apparent in her stories--intricate narratives that address the long history of strained relations between the Philippines and the United States. An outspoken radical, she organized anti-Vietnam War protests in the Philippines that led to her six-month detainment at a military camp. A book of her short stories, The Monsoon Collection, came out shortly after her release.

Since then she has written three novels: State of War, Endgame, and Twice Blessed, which won the American Book Award in 1993. She's currently working on a new book called The Archipelago of Saint Lazarus, the original name Magellan gave to the Philippine Islands. One of the book's four novellas concerns a group of Filipinos who colonize an abandoned apartment building in New York City and run a pyramid scheme to support themselves.

"We're always trying to establish our culture wherever we go. There is never a distinct Filipino Town," says Rosca. "We don't hold our history in objects or signs. Memory is encased in languages--in something intangible like music."

Rosca recoils at being pigeonholed as a Third-World novelist, a position she frequently finds herself occupying on academic panels. She points out that novelists of European descent are not categorized on the basis of their ethnicity, or because they happen to be writing about their country of origin.

"We are always objectified as a distinct group," she says. "I am a citizen of the world."

She points out that in the Philippines, reading is still a leisure activity for the privileged. Books don't have nearly the collective audience that newspapers and magazines command.

Therefore, she maintains a commitment to journalism, which reaches people who might not read her stories. Now based in New York, Rosca sits on the board of directors for GABRIELA, a Philippine-U.S. women's solidarity organization that fights against the sex-trafficking of women from the Philippines to foreign nations, including the United States.

"The only thing we have left to retain a measure of dignity is to keep on struggling, resisting, and opposing," says Rosca, who calls the Philippines "one of the most humiliated nations on Earth. "

"Victory, defeat should not enter into our consciousness. This is the philosophy I live by."

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