Local-born writer searches for own voice

Saipan writer Andrew David Roberto reads his short story “The Talisman” to a crowd at the launch of the Festival of Pacific Arts literary anthology “Local Voices” last month. (Dennis B. Chan)

Graduating from college with a degree in English Literature and reading various kinds of fiction from different parts of the world throughout the years, Andrew David Roberto, a local-born writer, is still on the lookout for his “own kind of literature,” a literature that as a young person from Saipan, in the Northern Marianas Islands, can relate too.

He realizes, though, that he might have to be the one to write these.

Roberto, whose short story “The Talisman” is featured in the Festival of Pacific Arts literary publication “Local Voices,” which was launched this month, is primarily a writer for the stage, and had his play “Nobena Para San Jude,” which centers on a local man haunted by abuse, was produced as part of FestPac activities this month.

Roberto says in reading many stories during college he found “a universality” but also encountered a distinct “inability to see myself” in them. “How can I identify with the fall, the autumn season? How can I identify with rugged mountaintops, or just geography and histories that are just not anything of my own? So I had that real thirst for it,” Roberto told Saipan Tribune in an interview.

Roberto attributes a spark of insight to a class he took on Pacific literature when he was studying at the University of Guam.

Still, even though he was able to read a range of writing from fellow Pacific islanders, Roberto came away feeling there was a lack of Chamorro literature.

“There’s I want to say a dearth of Chamorro literature. But that’s not totally true because there are so many Chamorro poets—“Local Voices” is proof of that. But I wanted something that I could read in sitting that spoke to me in a genre that I was thirsting for. And it came to me that I would have to write these kind of things.”

Roberto believes the people that populate his stories are your real-deal everyday Chamorros. “I want to reflect on our own history. Because most of the time when there is Chamorro literature, they harken back to an ancient time. Or they harken back to a time before World War II. And that’s great and it has its place, but what about in a hundred years when they want to study who we are? The guy sitting on this bench in 2016. There isn’t too much literature like that. And I thought that’s pretty sad.”

Reading the short story “Talisman,” for one, a reader will encounter a young man soul-searching, but for what, it is not too clear. Like many young men out there, Beneficio navigates a lucid and self-anxious haze of self-scrutiny, spurts of academic and intellectual success, and rapport that is muddled with drugs, bars, inattention, and the ever-unattainable “Eve” or siren that linger in their dreams and pain their waking life. The item that anchors this trip of self-reflection is a relic from the past, a human bone dug up from an ancient Chamorro burial site, that Benefacio wears around his neck.

Speaking toward his FestPac play, which was performed by actors on Guam this month and leading up to FestPac, Roberto says it is about a man named Vicente Camacho, who puts on a novena for his patron saint, St. Jude, every year.

However, this year, things end disastrously for Vicente. And that sets him off on a downward spiral heavily explored in the play.

Roberto believes the play deals with the things he sees that perpetuate violence in the Chamorro culture.

“There is a machismo factor. There is a definite machismo that I feel sometimes that there are some family members, sometimes your uncle, sometimes your grandfather, who really want you to act in a strict narrowly defined masculine way. And I feel through the course of my play—that these things that some of these characters do to Vicente in the past—that we need to weed those out. So I chose the genre of tragedy because it allows of catharsis and purging of these anti-social behaviors. That’s why I chose to do it in tragedy. That’s why I chose to do it in this genre.”

Roberto, who has studied and worked in Guam for the last several years, calls Saipan his “root.”

“I live in Guam these days but I feel like I carry Koblerville in my heart wherever I go. It will never leave. In fact, it comes out of me in ways I don’t even think. So to adapt to the Guamanian audience I ask that they speak in the Guamanian Chamorro dialect. Here in Guam, there are different ways to say Saint Jude,” for example.

“I asked them to correct that and they did. But there is another word in my play, and it is actually derogatory. The word is palajuana. That’s a derogatory term on Saipan, for a homosexual man. Now in Guam, they don’t use that. They have their own derogatory term. I didn’t know that. That was part of my ‘Saipanese’ I guess that came out of me through my writing without even me having to think.”

Still, Roberto thinks the differences between Guam and Saipan Chamorro language and culture, though often highlighted and touted, are not that important.

In his next project, Roberto says he wants to address these “supposed differences.”

“There’s a lot of difference at the surface. But when you go into these things you are going to find that we are a lot similar. In a lot of ways, this machismo, this narrowly defined masculinity goes across all the islands. That I feel is an important way that we are alike. That’s why I feel I am Saipanese, but at the same time I am Guamanian, but at the same time, I am always Chamorro. And the Chamorro is, we are, very similar across the islands.

Roberto’s sources of inspiration? He lists Samoan poet Albert Wendt and Native American superstar author Sherman Alexie, among some of them.

“Alexie is huge inspiration for me because I didn’t know you could be an indigenous writer and have such strength and such love of your art form. And be highly regarded. So Sherman Alexie goes up there.”

Roberto is also inspired by Guam writer Michael Bevacqua, a UOG professor, poet, and activist, and also the playwright Tennessee Williams, famous for his classic plays A Streetcar Named Desire and The Glass Menagerie, among others.