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Schools

Filipino-American Author Shares Her Culture of Writing

Filipino-American author talks about her craft and homeland.

Cecilia Maguerra Brainard knew a strong woman like Angelina, one of the main characters in her book, “When the Rainbow Goddess Wept.” She also knew a civil engineer like the character Nando, and a little girl like her 9-year-old narrator, Yvonne.

The three characters bear striking similarities to her parents and her young self, said Brainard, who spoke Monday at . Her appearance was part of the observance of “Coming Together in Skokie,” a cultural awareness program that this year is focusing on the Filipino community.

Among the sponsors are the Village of Skokie, the Skokie Public Library and . Students in some classes at Niles West and Niles North have read Brainard’s “When the Rainbow Goddess Wept” and “Growing up Filipino: Stories for Young Adults.”

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The books were featured in several discussions open to the community earlier this year.

Brainard moved to California in 1979 to pursue a master’s degree in filmmaking, but did not finish. Instead, she married a law student she had first met as a Peace Corps volunteer in the Philippines, had three sons and, while she was raising them, worked at starting a writing career.

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After becoming a published author of short stories, she decided to try writing a novel.

“I wanted to write something that was long and coherent,” she explained to students at Niles West.

But after writing about 250 pages, based loosely on her growing-up years in the Philippines, she faced rejection after rejection and finally concluded that “I didn’t have a book.”

After putting it aside for some months, she reread the manuscript and noticed that the older characters were always talking about the war, World War II, and concluded that the book wanted to be a World War II story.

“That scared me, because as a writer, you always want to write what you know, and I was born after World War II,” she said. But she knew plenty of family stories about the war, whose remnants shaped the environment where she grew up in Cebu.

That first book became “When the Rainbow Goddess Wept,” first published in the Philippines as “The Song of Yvonne.”

Brainard read passages from the book to two groups of students and members of the public, focusing on a chapter in which one character chooses to be crucified – a practice that still happens in the Philippines – in order to expiate his guilt over the massacre of his family. That, she said, was the central image of the book.

“It was almost like a diamond, and I was trying to set it somewhere,” she said.

Following her talk, she and several guests enjoyed a Filipino lunch prepared by students in the school’s commercial cooking class.

During the talk, Niles West principal Kaine Osburn asked about the seeming prevalence of strong women in the Philippines, which has had two female presidents.

Brainard said there do seem to be many strong women, and folklorists have said the islands had a matriarchal society until the Spaniards came in 1521. After that, “the women just let the men think they were in charge,” Brainard said. “In many Filipino households, the women control the purse strings. The men are out there acting macho, but the women give them their allowance.”

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