Rediscovering the Bigger World in Frankfurter Buchmesse 2024

I cannot explain it, but it hits different. There is that impalpable quality that is simply best felt and cherished. It has that vibe of finding again what you have always had but have long forgotten. It is that unfamiliar though happy feeling that comes with an invitation to go on an adventure just when you thought you have already had enough.

In the FBM, I was given the task to meet with people and secure meetings for potential business partnerships. I also had the chance to moderate an event at the Asia Stage, in which we talked about Philippine mythological creatures and how they reflect culture. I have done these things in the past albeit not in the international FBM scale. One decision I made was to spend most of my time at the hall of Spanish-Speaking publishers. As English is a universal language, I was able to navigate the area just fine. Nevertheless, I got that some editors and businesspeople preferred to discuss business in Spanish.

Thus, I engaged them the language, which was a bizarre experience not least because I was barely comfortable with it, though I am eager to master it. One the one hand, I felt there were so many things I missed as I only had a limited proficiency in the Hispanic language. On the other, it felt like I was opening more doors by trying (with sincere intentions) to connect not just from a business but also cultural angle. Language transmits culture. As a student and instructor of literature, I have long been acquainted with this idea that culture moves through language as whales, turtles, and fish swim in the ocean. But it is a pleasure to get an actual, if personal, experience of how it happens. It is like watching a T.V. show you like and then one day finding yourself a part of that show.

People initially rediscover the bigger world through tangible things, like finding oneself surrounded by buildings engulfed in a temperature far removed from that back home. But a more subtle, if taken for granted, quest happens in the realm of intangibles—with ideas, of course, and vibe.

Fresh ideas catch people by surprise, and a larger universe opens. Just so, people can experience new emotions. Not new in the sense that one has to invent new words to express them. Sad, happy, excited, and surprised already encapsulate so much of what humans feel. What I refer to is how such feelings can be so unique that the joy we feel in being part of something will be distinctly apart from the joy we get from another. This person makes us feel calm. But certainly, that flavor of calmness is uniquely different from the tranquility received from another.

Going back to the talk I moderated—Dragon’s Haunting: Fantasy and Speculative Fiction from Asia—I found new ideas and rediscovered perspectives I have long forgotten or taken for granted. I enjoyed the event (hopefully the audience found it at least entertaining as well). And, surely, I have enjoyed it just like I found all the other events I have been part of in the past. But what makes it unique is that the fun I had in that approximately one hour of discussion is something I could never have experienced in any other program.

I do not suppose that what I have mentioned here is new. The ideas here are mostly rediscoveries of things you or I must have already known if only by instinct. But to go back to a rediscovered paradoxical insight from my panelists Allain Derain and Edgar Samar—we can only sometimes be most direct with our points by being indirect. To be home is to be away from it, to paraphrase a line from one of my favorite English journalists. In the same way, I had to go to Europe and join a grand book fair to see once more what I already had acquired, here, at home, and it was great to know that I was able to have them again, anew, at a different place.

(For more rediscoveries—read my review of Sining Killing by Randy Valiente.)