S2E3 Bonus: Charisse Aquino-Tugade
Summary Keywords
Philippine literature, indigenous representation, cultural heritage, book publishing industry, reading access, cultural mapping, language diversity, indigenous communities, representation, book access, government support, Filipino authored books, children’s books, book distribution
00:02 Host, Loh Chin Ee
The Philippines has two official languages, English and Filipino, but has more than 110 other languages, including endangered languages such as Pangasinan and Bikol. Approximately 8 to 10% of the 117 million residents are Indigenous Peoples. With so many different people groups and languages, how does the country ensure that their voices and works are represented in the national literature?
I'm Loh Chin Ee and welcome to the How We Read podcast. In this bonus episode, Charisse Aquino Tugade, cultural worker and Executive Director of the National Book Development Board of the Philippines, explains how the NBDB spearheads reading access and representation.
00:54 Charisse Aquino Tugade
Hi, my name is Charisse Aquino Tugade from the Philippines, and I'm the Executive Director of the National Book Development Board, and it's a government agency. And what we do is we take care of the book publishing industry in our country, so that is both the trade book sector and the textbook sector.
01:12 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Can you tell me a little bit more about yourself and what your book journey has been like? How did you get to where you are now?
01:19 Charisse Aquino Tugade
I've been a cultural worker for the last 20 years. I work with indigenous communities. I do cultural mapping, promotion, all different sorts of things with all of the different indigenous communities in the Philippines. And so I work with education, I work with museums, just all different sectors, as long as it's promoting our heritage, documenting and kind of ensuring that the invisible is more visible, right? Promoting our identity and all of that. A couple years ago, I was actually appointed by our president, President Duterte, to run the National Book Development Board, and I actually didn’t know what it was about, I didn’t know the agency, it’s not very well known, and then when I entered, it was during the pandemic, it was 2021, and in the Philippines, the pandemic hit us, but also it hit the education sector, where our children didn't go to physical school for two years, and it devastated the publishing industry in the Philippines. So I had to work with that when I started off as executive director.
02:23 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Just now, you mentioned a word, cultural mapping.
02:25 Charisse Aquino Tugade
Yeah.
02:26 Host, Loh Chin Ee
What do you mean by that?
02:27 Charisse Aquino Tugade
So the Philippines is more than 110 ethnolinguistic groups. We speak so many different languages. So for example, I would say in Filipino or Tagalog, the language that I speak, Tagalog at home, I would say for good morning, “magandang umaga”, but in Tboli, another language, they would say, “hyu h'lafus”, right? It's so vastly different. So with cultural mapping, what we do, because the Philippines is so diverse, not everything is documented. It's something that we're still working on, like archives. So what we do with cultural mappings, we go into community and archive all of the intangible and the tangible culture. So it depends if you want to work on food or if you want to work on architecture, as long as you map it out and then you could do a publication, or you could do it for public programs, giving it back to the community. There's so many avenues that you could do with the research that is done with cultural mapping. So I've been doing that, working with communities from north to south.
03:25 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Tell me a little bit more about what NBDB does.
03:29 Charisse Aquino Tugade
Many people think that we develop books, but we don't. The agency really just takes care of the industry. What we do is we grow the industry by providing incentives and government subsidies. For example, for creatives, we give grants for manuscript, development, publication, translation to all the different Philippine languages. We also give grants for translation going out of the country as well. And we also provide education. We have a program called the book Institute, which I started in 2021 where we're upscaling all of our creators. In the Philippines, our book sector is dominated by imported books., about 80% of the books that we have and that we read are imported. And we don't really have representation of our own culture on our own heritage. So that's what I'm trying to expand make sure that we have that, and we do that through number one, we subsidise paper importation. We don't really produce paper in the Philippines. We produce like the newsprint type of paper, but we don't have paper mills anymore. So we provide incentives on that. We look for markets or create market spaces and connect publishers with large scale procurement. So if there is an organisation that wants to buy in bulk, then we connect them.
I put people together that won't necessarily be in the same room together, but I'll put them in the same room and try to leverage and see what people need. So the Department of Education, they needed books. The publishers needed to sell books. The readers all around the Philippines, they didn't have access to books. So we create programs that tries to solve those issues. Obviously, it won't solve the entire problem, but it could solve a part of it. So one program that we did is during COVID 2021 the kids didn't have any books, and the publishers had to unload their stock. They had so many books, and they didn't have a place to sell because everything was closed. So I set up a program called the book nook. And remember, I told you, I work with a lot of indigenous communities, and what I did is I set up reading centres from the really far, kind of remote areas where all these indigenous people lived. And we set up about 52 centres and filled them, and then we procured because then, you know, retail is quite difficult, and we're a government agency, we're able to procure so we decided to procure all of these Filipino authored books, and we set it up in these different reading centres, not libraries, we didn’t do it in libraries. Our libraries and museums are still seen as colonial spaces, and Filipinos don't like anything quiet, like we can't have a quiet space. We need it loud...we need and, you know, we have a lot of children, ok. It's not like other places where they have one child. So, you know, we have moms with seven children in the countryside. Seven children and they're all one after the other, so they won't enter a library. So I needed to put it in spaces that were accessible to people. So number one would be the marketplace. Not a grocery, but the outdoor markets where people would go and buy their vegetables and buy their fresh fish. So setting up reading centres there, looking for abandoned busses, looking for heritage homes, looking for kind of those communal halls where people like to go. So we set it up in those spaces, worked with the community, and then we started training on programming, on interpretation, arts management, all of this performance to just kind of reel the kids in. So now we have about 103 book nooks today.
06:55 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Can you describe one of these book nooks for me?
06:59 Charisse Aquino Tugade
So there's a book nook in a place called Tagum in Davao, where it's in a mobile bus, and this bus goes around, and they do programming so kids can come in and pick up their book. We also have a book nook in a place called Tawi Tawi, and it's kind of the furthest point. It's in the middle of nowhere. It's an island, right? And they speak a very different language. I don't even understand it, but the children are so happy to have these books, because there's some books that are in their language, and they don't really have representation. And it's really important for me to know that our children have representation, because when I was growing up, I didn't have that. All I had was Sweet Valley High, Sweet Valley twins and Archie and Shira, so everyone was blonde and blue eyed. But yeah, it's still missing in the Philippines. I remember there's an area called Bataan, and in this area there's an indigenous group called the Aeta, the Negritos, where Austronesian Filipinos now are like Austronesian, but they look a little bit Melanesian. They look a little bit like the people of Papua New Guinea, so they looked very different from us, and they've been traditionally marginalised, and they're darker than I am. They have, they're very, very curly hair. And I remember I was unloading books. We had these boxes of books. So excited with the book nooks, I'm thinking, “oh, we have it in Filipino, you have it in Ilocano and all these languages,” and she was looking, she kept on looking at the books and, you know, looking, looking, and searching and I said, “what's she searching?” Then she tapped me, and she's like, “where's my book?” And I said, “oh, here, here, this is all for you.” And she said, “no, but where's my book? I don't see one for me,” because there was no book that represented her. And it, oh, it broke my heart, because as much as we want to do this, you know, publishing is a business, and no business has invested in her, and it just makes me so sad because we have so many different cultures. I'm more than 110 so how do we do that? We have to do it one book at a time.
09:00 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So what do you see as the role of book festivals and maybe other community events?
09:05 Charisse Aquino Tugade
In the Philippines, a lot of the promotion, it's very commercial based, less programming. So we need to create community, and we need to kind of have programs that are around our books. In the Philippines, traditionally, we didn't really publish as much, so there was a lot of import. Today, when you go to a bookstore, our books are relegated to a small section called Filipiniana, and then you have everyone else. We've essentially othered ourselves, so it's a little bit sad, and that's something that we're trying to change, but we want to create more festivals, and I think AFCC is important because it's not just a Singapore Festival. It's a festival that celebrates Southeast Asian culture that really brings us together. I'll circle back to that in a bit, because I want to talk to you about a festival that we do, the Philippine Book Festival two years ago. Can I tell you this story? Is that okay?
09:56 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Yeah yeah, go ahead.
09:56 Charisse Aquino Tugade
Okay.
09:56 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Tell me anything you want to tell me.
09:58 Charisse Aquino Tugade
Okay, when I entered 2021, you know, we had all these issues, COVID, bla bla bla, drama, drama, but the Department of Education had called me because we're under the Department of Education, but yet we're an industry, so it's interesting. So they said, Charisse, you know, we have a policy, and we want you to look at it. We want to purchase books that you read for fun, trade books and put them in all of the public school libraries. And I was like, “wow, great. This is a wonderful initiative,” and it was initiated actually in 2016 or 2019, department order 35, I remember. And I had looked at the policy, and I was like, “wow, this looks good that you're going to go into purchase books finally, after like, 20 years of not purchasing books for your libraries. And then I saw at the end something that was really alarming, that you had to purchase from the list, a list. And I read the list, and it was a list of books, about 3500 titles. And as I was browsing, I noticed that most of the books were not Filipino. And I'm okay. obviously, we're a global world, and I'm okay with consuming all of this, anything that's global. But if there's such a huge disparity and there's problems with children reading or whatnot and not finding books in their own language or in their own kind of experience, that's not okay. And then, of course, the books were like Winter Spring Summer or Fall, Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Like what? We can't do this, you know? We have to start looking inwards, because we don't have winter, we don't have spring, right? We don't have fall, we have summer, we have an eternal summer, and then it rains a few months out of the year, but then it's summer the whole year round, right? So I had talked to them, and I did some research, I disaggregated all of the lists, and I found that it was mostly importers, and I wasn't okay with that, right? Because our publishing industry was almost essentially dying, because we have to have representation, right? There's so many people, and we're all leaving, one-fifth of our population live and work abroad, because they find that the other is much better. So what we did for two years, we worked on this policy to revamp it. Finally, we got this policy worked out, and the Department of Education would start purchasing books. Filipino authored books, which is great, and there would be no list. They are free to choose as they want. I was like, “yes, this is wonderful, this is great.” When you are purchasing something, you have to do market scoping, wherein you go to three different places, you look at the pricing and whatnot. But our bookstores don't carry our books. Most of them are imported books. So I said, “oh my gosh, you know what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna create a marketplace for you so you can buy these books.” So that gave birth to the Philippine book festival because the Department of Education, their largest procurer of books, they had to buy books they don't know where to find in the market. I'll put the marketplace together, put all the publishers together and do heavy programming, right? So I looked at all the festivals around the world. I looked at AFCC, the programming they were doing, looked at Frankfurt, looked at all these big book festivals, and it was just community building. So that's what we did. So we did that last year. So this year, the Department of Education downloaded funding to buy these books, to the tune of $22 million to buy our own book. So, ah, so exciting, the largest download ever for our trade books. So, so that's what we do. It's like bridging, you know, if the Department of Education needs something, if our readers need something. So we just try to bridge and try to formulate programs that will answer, you know, we try to look for solutions.
13:39 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Yeah, I'm just wondering, and just thinking about the role of technology, right? So how has technology supported you in sort of moving all these pieces...
13:49 Charisse Aquino Tugade
Together? Okay, I'll talk about distribution. So in terms of distribution, COVID actually played a big role. We were always brick-and-mortar. The Philippines, Filipinos like to see each other. They like to like touch everything, they like to mingle and meet. But during COVID, obviously we couldn't do that, and we couldn't purchase at the store. So there was a huge move for many of these brick-and-mortar stores to go online. Many of them didn't even have websites. They started developing their websites, and there were two kind of not Amazon, they were called Shopee and Lazada, they started selling through there, and that really helped the industry kind of move forward. Because now instead of having one interface, which is your brick-and-mortar, there are two interfaces to purchase books and to know about the books and all of that. So that's one thing that COVID really propelled the Philippines publishing industry to move towards that, they're selling hard copies. So unlike other countries where they're doing a lot of these ebooks, we do that in the Philippines, but people still prefer print over ebooks. You have the younger generation that are doing ebooks and subscriptions and all of that. But because the Philippines, internet is not the best in many of these areas. So you have you'll find it more in the cities, in big urban areas, Manila, Cebu, Dhaval, but if you go outward, they'll prefer print. For sure, it's difficult to just get online sometimes. You know the internet's better. There's no electricity.
15:15 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Between print and digital books. Do you think there is one that's better than the other?
15:21 Charisse Aquino Tugade
I think they both have value. But in terms of digital for very young children, this is my personal feeling. I don't think that it is a suitable model for children that are very young, because children that are very young need something a little bit more tactile and patience. So reading a physical book, it teaches you patience, it teaches you...there's so many things that a physical book can teach you, aside from kind of just having it digital, because what do we are we teaching our kids to scroll? Right? You know, if you have a two-year-old, it might not be the best, but for older kids, I think it's fine. But for my personal for my children, I really do the print book. I'm sorry for those of you that love ebooks, but we do print at my household.
16:11 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Thank you for listening to the How We Read podcast bonus episode. Swipe on the cover art to see show notes with links and references. We are available on all major podcast apps, please subscribe to be notified of new episodes, and for more information, please visit lohchinee.com.