Gantala Press is an independent, Filipina feminist press founded in 2015. It publishes essays, zines (see our previous entry), poetry, cookbooks and comix. Their work is beautiful, and also a beautiful example of how collective knowledge produced outside the big centers of power can help to build rhizomatic and transformative alliances. As they describe themselves here:
“We challenge literary standards by engaging in feminist work. Gantala Press began as a feminist, literary press that sought to respond to the lack of spaces for and about women. Eventually, feminist work lead us to the streets, to volunteer work and collaborations with mass organizations for peasant women. Feminist work is first and foremost political. We became political activists who recognize the role of women in the economy and in agricultural production, as mothers, farmers, laborers, and mass leaders.”
We had the pleasure to talk with Faye Cura, founding member of Gantala, who took her time to carefully answer all my annoying questions. I hope you enjoy the interview and if you want to support Gantala, there any plenty of ways to do it: https://gantalapress.org/support/ and https://gogetfunding.com/gantala-press-feminist-bookstore/
Nepantla: First of all, tell me a little bit about how Gantala Press started in 2015. On your blog you tell about how you were searching for a publisher for your poems but you found none. Then you had the idea of making your own women’s press and you started by making a call for contributions in facebook. Was it hard to get it printed? Where did you distribute it? Were you already interested in zines? Or zines came after?
Faye Cura: It was challenging to raise funds for printing the book and paying our contributors a small honorarium. But raise funds we did, by holding art and writing workshops and using some of our personal money as capital. From the very beginning, we’ve decided to distribute our books through small channels such as independent bookstores, and directly in small press fairs. We could not afford the consignment fees in the big bookstores or the booth fees in the large book fairs, not to mention that we were driven/are continue to be driven by ideological/political reservations against mainstream publishing.
In the beginning, we were interested in zines as readers, but not as creators. Our third publication, a cookbook of Meranao food, was a zine before it was printed offset as a small book, mainly because we lacked the time to have it printed offset. Now, we make all sorts — books which we register at the National Library, chapbooks in collaboration with other organizations, zines. We’ve even started to venture into making cloth books or embroidered zines.
N: You are working with fanzines and books. Books have sometimes a special status. They are more “sacred” than fanzines (this is for example what happens in philosophy). How do you move between these two spaces (we could call it “sacred”-“profane”)? It is important to get to be part of the establishment or the mainstream market? How do you deal with that paradox (to reach a big public you have to sell yourself to the mainstream industry and so on)?
FC: We don’t really distinguish between books and zines, except in practical terms such as: it takes longer & more money to produce a book while zines can be produced within a day. I think that moving outside the mainstream is precisely what gives us this creative freedom. No, it is not important to be part of the establishment. In fact, we are always careful to stay out of the mainstream and its trappings — mentorship/patronage, expertise/”mastery”/gatekeeping, capitalism/capitalist cooptation, things that exclude many people & communities from important discussions & historicizations. Besides, we literally could not afford to supply the mainstream market with our books. We can only afford to print a few hundred copies at a time.
N: Is there some specificity of Filipina feminism/s? I mean, what are for you the special features of those feminisms?
FC: Many of today’s generation of Filipina feminists are still able to identify with the different “schools” of (western) feminism, because that’s what’s prominent in social media & pop culture (especially liberal feminism). Meanwhile, the older ones seem tired. As for the collective, we are always trying to define & redefine what feminism is for us, always trying to find its place within the people’s movement and the women’s movement in our country.
But in a larger sense — if we’ll insist on using the qualifier “Filipina” — Filipina feminism, which includes the feminisms of Filipinas abroad, struggles against bureaucrat capitalism, feudalism, imperialism — which remain our biggest enemies as a people — and colonialism, which was what entrenched these enemies in our culture & history. Our long history under Spanish and then US rule has embedded our people firmly within the class struggle, which as we know, like most countries in the world, places a few forces in power at the expense of the majority. In the Philippine women’s movement, it seems that patriarchy has still not been identified as an enemy like the others. Of course, this is because people falsely equate patriarchy with men, rather than see it as a structure.
N: On the blog, you write:
“After all, to publish is, first and foremost, to make things public. With feminist publishing, as with exhibition making, we try to widen what we call spaces of representation, to create new subjectivities or empower them. We do this through direct participation rather than through mediation, which are both processes or approaches in creating art. Mediation will bring about statements like, “I will speak for the oppressed” or, “I am the voice of my generation.” We at Gantala Press try to directly engage with issues and not simply mediate.”
This is very interesting. I like that Gantala is also defined as “Small Press Activism”. In this sense, maybe “mediation” can’t be avoided, but at least it is a co-mediation. Because you also are transformed in this process. Can you tell us some of your favourite reactions of readers of writers after reading some of the publications?
FC: For us, the best feedback is receiving a new set of poems from a peasant woman whose works we had anthologized before. For her to entrust us with her writings, to let us publish them, is a great gift. The next best thing is learning that our books & zines are being taught in literature classes in universities. For the longest time, the curriculum &, by extension, the “literary canon” consists of writings by educated or professional writers, even if the texts are about the people’s struggles. Not to mention that most of these writers are men. So to really hear from the women workers or farmers themselves, to read their words, to have to ask friends from the other islands to translate their works in order to understand the texts, is quite disruptive of the formal educational system & thus, is full of possibilities.
We also always receive small gifts from fellow creators — a zine they made or a class paper they wrote about Gantala Press, or their own artworks or publications. Likewise, we were pleasantly surprised by the support we’ve received for the feminist library/bookshop that we plan to open soon. We continue to receive book & cash donations even now that everything is suspended!
N: There are many languages in the Philippines and Gantala does some multilingual editions. Tell me a litte bit about the relation between your activism and language.
FC: We have always been conscious of how language is power, how people or institutions control language & therefore control information & therefore, hold the power. In the Philippines, Filipino, which is Tagalog-based, became the “national language” because the government people who determined these things before were Tagalogs. But many Filipinos speak the other major languages too, such as Ilocano and Visayan. & there are many hi/stories & worldviews submerged in these languages, even in the languages of the minorities or the dying & extinct languages.
The recipes in the Meranao cookbook are written in Meranao because that was how the author learned the recipes. But it was also a way of documenting the language & culture that were truly on the verge of disappearing after the 2017 Siege that destroyed the city. There was also a glossary of Meranao terms & names, for documentation as well. For our next zines, we let the union workers from Mindanao and the peasant women in Cavite write their narratives in the language they were comfortable in. Some of the farmers also literally told their stories (they could not write), which we transcribed. Those were their worlds, their worldviews, which we had no right or business tampering with.
We collectively write our statements on social issues in English and Filipino. As language is shared, so is authorship & action.
N: I also wanted to ask about your next projects.
FC: We were really planning to open a feminist library/bookshop but the pandemic happened. We still hope to push through with this soon, & so are really grateful for the donations. We have a lot of things planned for the space: exhibitions by women artists, workshops, discussions.
Publications wise, we are helping a progressive female religious congregation document its history in the Philippines; putting together a casebook of gender-based violence narratives with the Commission on Human Rights; launching a poetry collection. We’re also working on several poetry & prose zines as well as preparing to join or organize a couple of art exhibitions.
N: Publishing something in the margins (I would say that in this regard, the case of Philippines and Argentina are probably similar) is a hard task. Do you have any advice for someone who would like to start a little Press somewhere in the world?
FC: It should be something that you love, so that you will never tire of doing it & never fear to make changes if changes need to be made. Like all things that are alive, publishing is a work in progress.
N: And an unavoidable question during these times: how are you dealing with the quarantine? What are you reading? The landscape that you describe in your blog (Durterte’s militarization and so on) is scary. Please stay safe!
FC: For now, we are strengthening ourselves under quarantine, cooking & eating healthy & taking the time to rest & doing our personal projects or spending time with our families. Our group shares fermentation & no-bake cake recipes, struggles with motherhood & questions on activism, & COVID-related links in our chat box on Facebook. We are also helping the Amihan National Federation of Peasant Women raise funds to provide relief to peasant families in the countryside. For a minimum donation of Php 500, you get a link to download the PDFs of five of our zines: one on the Marawi Siege, one on banana plantation workers, one on revolutionary women & their astrological signs, one on the so-called Drug War, & one on romance.
I am reading China Mieville’s October & Heidi I. Hartmann‘s classic essay, “The Unhappy Marriage Between Marxism & Feminism.”
Please stay safe, too! Thank you again for this interview, I enjoyed it a lot 🙂
N: Thank you a lot!
(All images are taken from https://gantalapress.org)
Mirar la maternidad a través de las fotografías de la serie New Mothers de Rineke Dijkstra
Una interacción entre -mostrar y no mostrar
Rineke Dijkstra. The encounter between the photographer, the sitters and the viewer in the Beach Portrait Series.
Brand New Heaven
Maniobras: las políticas internacionales que militarizan las vidas de las mujeres
I Can Only Wonder
Before Lockdown
Reseña poetizada de “Le Pont du Nord”, Jacques Rivette
