The Balikbayan Artist
Country: United States
Author Name: Eileen R. Tabios
Publisner Name: Penguin Random House SEA
Original Language: English
SYNOPSIS: Farmer-turned-artist Vance Igorta returns to the Philippines as a balikbayan (‘one who returns’) after nearly five decades in the United States.
He is a member of the Manong Generation, the 20th century diaspora of Filipinos who worked physically demanding jobs, mostly in California’s agricultural fields.
With the Philippines about to become a dictatorship, Vance Igorta shifts his paintings from abstractions to didactic, political art to better reflect the rebellion that he joins.
Didacticism also facilitates his meditations on becoming a powerless Manong and then an impoverished artist of color in New York City.
The Balikbayan Artist—inspired by real-life Manong artist Venancio C.
Igarta (1912–2000)—moves from last century to the present day when Vance Igorta’s art is being discovered anew.
His legacy is validated for showing how, in circumstances where power corrupts, what makes anyone and everyone dangerous is love.
Advance Words: With The Balikbayan Artist, Eileen R.
Tabios innovatively imagines how Kapwa can be manifested in fiction.
Kapwa is an expression of the indigenous Filipino world view that speaks of the mythic depth and breadth of the Seen and
...the Unseen realms.
As with her first novel DoveLion (2021), a new classic for indigenous futurism, The Balikbayan Artist breaks out of the confines of a modern/colonial frame and returns us to the wondrous world of myth-making.
This is how Story becomes Medicine.
—Leny M.
Strobel, Editor, Babaylan: Filipinos and the Call of the Indigenous Eileen R.
Tabios has turned her ever-experimenting, intellectual mindset to the novel.
As she did in poetry, her fiction-writing is expanding the landscape of the genre.
—Sandy McIntosh, poet/editor Eileen R.
Tabios has redefined the word ‘Balikbayan’ to signify existential longing and fortitude.
She counsels, ‘Always, always: discern with compassion.’ —Aileen Cassinetto, Co-Editor, Dear Human at the Edge of Time
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