Feeling a lot of emotions while reading my previous reblog... It managed to articulate the frustration I feel whenever I visit local bookstores.
One time, I went to a Fully Booked branch and found their entire Filipiniana section dumped on the tiled floor. All of the shelves were filled with foreign titles, and there was even an entire table displaying copies of a foreign YA book. An entire table, full of more than a dozen copies for just one, foreign book, while literally every book that had been penned by Filipino hands was in a messy pile on the ground.
I don't know what to call it. A case of colonial mentality, maybe? I just know that this isn't an isolated case. This same disrespect is echoed in other local bookstores too.
For example, the large Fully Booked branch in BGC is a three-story building with multiple shelves for Japanese manga, American books, and other books by foreign publishers and writers. Where's the Filipiniana section, you may ask? They used to have 1-2 shelves of it on the 2nd floor, but when I visited September this year (2023), the entire Filipiniana section had been moved to smaller, half-shelves that are only as tall as your waist. Interested readers have to kneel just to browse their entire Filipiniana section—and to add salt to injury, these half-shelves are sectioned away from the taller, more visited shelves chockfull of foreign titles, right by the benches where people aren't looking to browse but are looking to rest for a minute while shopping.
They don't even care enough to organize the Filipiniana half-shelves properly. During my September visit, I asked for help in finding "Alon and Lila's Last Summer Before Doomsday" by Ingrid Valenzuela. The kuya who helped me was kind, don't get me wrong, but he went to the wrong section of the 2nd floor and then told me that he couldn't find it. Asked another kuya, he went to a different section of the 2nd floor and also couldn't find it.
I had to kneel for a solid 20 minutes by the half-shelves of the Filipiniana section to find the book, which, BTW, was buried behind books that weren't even of the same genre. It's the same for most of the other books too. They're all mixed together! They're considered an afterthought of the store!
"But OP, doesn't that Fully Booked branch have a display of Filipino books on the first floor?" Yes, but notice the larger displays right by the entrance. One large table full of nothing but copies of (for example) Malibu Rising, followed by an equally big display of copies for yet another book written by a white author.
Then after around 3-4 iterations of this Kano lineup, we get a shelf called "Asian Bestsellers," filled with various books from Japan, Korea, etc. but not a single Filipino book. (Are we not Asian enough, even in our own territory?!) Where is the Filipino display, you may ask? Right across from it. From the front entrance, it is invisible because it is blocked by the Help Desk / Cashier. From every other angle in the 1st floor, it is dwarfed by bigger displays. It is the smallest and one of the most neglected displays in the 1st floor.
This is just with Fully Booked. Imagine how bad it is with National Bookstore. Or with any other bookstore. The Filipino is sidelined in their own bookstore not because of lack of published material and certainly not because of lack of interested readers, but because we design our our own fucking spaces to cater to books from our colonizers!
