Art offers one way for people to share their stories and connect. This episode of the BOSFilipinos Podcast features two pinay artists, who share their inspirations and creative journeys.
First, we sit down with Magdalena Dolorico, a 15-year-old artist in Massachusetts. Magdalena shares how she learned to draw and what role her culture plays in her approach to art.
Then, we step outside of the Bay State to hear from Malaka Gharib, an artist based in Nashville. Malaka discusses her graphic novel, I Was Their American Dream. Released in 2019, the comic explores her identity as an Egyptian, Filipino American.
Listen to the full conversation below, or subscribe to our show on Apple Podcast, Google Play, Stitcher, and Spotify.
Transcript
[MUSIC]
Kaitlin Milliken: Hello, and welcome to the BOSFilipinos podcast. I'm your host, Kaitlin Milliken. This show is obviously made by BOSFilipinos.
On this podcast, we highlight a different aspect of Filipino life in the Greater Boston area. Today, we’ll take a deep dive into one form of self expression: art. Drawing, painting, digital art — even just doodling — are all great ways to share stories. Art also brings people together. You might see a painting of someone who looks like you and feel a connection or be reminded of a familiar situation. Maybe they have an opportunity to escape into a fictional world for a few short moments.
In this episode, we’ll sit down with two artists who will talk about their work. First, we’ll chat with Magdalena Dolorico. Magdalena is a young pinay artist living in Massachusetts. She’s 15-years old and a student.
During the conversation, Magdalena talks about how she learned to draw, what inspires her and advice for other young artists.
Thanks so much for joining us today.
Magdalena Dolorico: Thanks so much for having me.
Kaitlin Milliken: So to get our conversation started, I'd love to learn when you started doing art and what you like to draw.
Magdalena Dolorico: So art has always been a thing I've enjoyed. I've always loved to draw. When I was little art class was always my favorite class. What really made me get seriously interested in art is probably seeing my older cousin Celine do art. She's an incredible artist. I first met her when I was like eight or nine, and she came to visit my house. And she brought with her a self portrait she was working on and also some of her materials. And I was really just awe. I saw that and I was really just like, “I want to make something like that.”
As for what type of art I make, it really varies. And it's definitely going to change more, as I do more art. It's definitely been more kind of cartoony stuff. Like, that's what I started out with. But right now I'm really into realistic stuff, like trying to draw faces and realism, that kind of stuff I really love.
A lot of my interest started from reading, because I love to read, and I would draw characters from my books and stuff like that. So that's how it kind of started also.
Kaitlin Milliken: So you mentioned that art class was always your favorite. Did you learn through classes or did you teach yourself?
Magdalena Dolorico: I would really self teach myself, especially when it comes to the realism part, because that wasn't really in any of my art classes. Because like art class as a kid is mostly just like doodling stuff. And I learned a lot from the internet, and watching YouTube videos is really helpful for me.
Kaitlin Milliken: I always love to hear how people are building their skills, what helps you grow the most as an artist?
Magdalena Dolorico: I think just knowing that it's okay to make mistakes and just going for it and giving it a shot and knowing it's not going to be perfect. And then just learning from whatever I take from that experience into what I take into the next experience. It’s what I do when I'm learning something new, and I'm trying to get better. That's always always what I keep in mind.
Kaitlin Milliken: So we always ask questions about culture, because the show is sort of about that. So can you talk a little bit about your relationship with being Filipino?
Magdalena Dolorico: So I'm half Filipina, my mom is Filipina. She was born and raised here. But she's 100 percent Filipina. So I'm half, and my dad is white. It's always been interesting growing up, like being mixed also, just because it’s something I think about all the time. Like, “Do I really count as a Filipina?”
Also, just learning about my culture has been something I really love to do, especially when I visited the Philippines, when I was 12 years old. That really like opening my eyes to so much that I don't know. When I was little, it was something like I was just kind of indifferent about it. I was just like, “Whatever. I'm half Asian, I guess.” [Laughs] But when I first visited there, and I met all these cousins, I never met before, and I tried new foods. I grew up with Filipino foods that my mom would make, but I definitely tried a lot more when I visited there.
That's when I really started getting interested in my culture a lot more, and I tried to teach myself as much as I could about it and asked my mom about all these things that I hadn't asked her about before. It's something that's a really important part of my identity.
Kaitlin Milliken: That's really cool. I also understand how it feels to be half. I'm also half. So my dad is white and Japanese and my mom is full Filipina. So it was always, like, “Where do I fit into that bigger picture?” I totally understand that.
Magdalena Dolorico: And I also think it was a little different here too, because at least where I grew up, where I am growing up, there's really not many Filipinos at all. There's one restaurant all the way out in Quincy. So um, and there's one Filipino market out there. And that's really far away. So, we really didn't get much exposure to that growing up. And it's something that's kind of made me a bit sad before because I felt like I missed out on some things that I would have wanted to know and experience about Filipino culture. And it's also just been a bit weird because there's nobody around me. Especially at my public school, my elementary school, there wasn't a single Filipino there like not one.
There was maybe two Asians there, like that was it. So I didn't know a lot of people who shared my culture. So there was nobody, I can really bond with over it and stuff like that. So it's definitely different from like, growing up with everybody around you.
Kaitlin Milliken: Yeah, it's great that you got to visit I'm sure that that was like a really good experience.
Magdalena Dolorico: It was like life changing.
Kaitlin Milliken: I love that. Does your cultural connection ever play into the art that you make?
Magdalena Dolorico: So I was thinking a lot about that question. It was kind of hard, because if I'm going to be honest, I don't really try anything that relates that much to Filipino culture. I think one thing I thought of is the fact that Filipino culture and Filipino people are just very underrepresented. I wrote my experience being Filipino, and also being mixed, made me understand what that felt like to be, for me and my family to not really have a lot of stories out there that resembled ours. So I think that's made me very aware of that when I'm making my art — to try to make sure I'm including lots of different types of people in my art. Do I have characters with different skin colors and hair types and body types, etc.? I wouldn't want anyone to look at my art and feel like I don't draw people who look like them. So I think being Filipino helped me be more aware of that.
Kaitlin Milliken: Great, thank you so much for taking the time out to chat.
Magdalena Dolorico: Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity. It was so cool.
[MUSIC]
Kaitlin Milliken: Our next guest, Malaka Gharib, comes to us from outside of the Bay State. Malaka is a Deputy Editor for NPR in Nashville. She’s also an artist, author, and creator of many zines. She released her graphic novel, I Was Their American Dream, in 2019. The comic explores her relationship with her identity as a Filipino, Egyptian American throughout her life. I read the novel in a day, it was so good. And it takes the reader to the many places that shaped Malaka’s life — from Cerritos California, to Syracuse New York, to Washington DC.
During our conversation, Malaka shared her story and why she chose to share it through her art.
Thank you so much, Malaka. I just wanted to see if you could introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about I Was Their American Dream.
Malaka Gharib: Sure. My name is Malaka Gharib. I'm a journalist, a writer and an artist. And the author of I Was Their American Dream, which is a book about the first generation Filipino Egyptian American, and figuring out what my dreams were compared to my family's dreams, and the burdens of being a child of immigrant parents.
Kaitlin Milliken: So what inspired you to begin working on your graphic novel?
Malaka Gharib: So I was inspired to write this in 2016, after I just heard so many one-dimensional views about immigrants in this country, and it made me want to share some of the more nuanced stories of my own family. So there is this idea that immigrants are like clamoring to come into this country. But my mom, for example, never wanted to leave Manila. She was perfectly happy with her job there, but the family was moving. so she had to come and she didn't really want to do that at all.
And my dad is Muslim — Egyptian and Muslim. And we always hear these very common tropes since 911, probably before that, that Muslims are terrorists. And I just thought of my dad as this very harmless man who loved Tom Hanks and gardening. So I tried to course correct those narratives by making these illustrations and those illustrations became the foundation for a book deal, which became I Was Their American Dream.
Kaitlin Milliken: So you talk a lot about your parents in the book, your mom was born in the Philippines, as you mentioned, and your dad in Egypt, what did it feel like balancing both of those cultural identities, especially as you were growing up?
Malaka Gharib: Even though I was a kid, I knew that there was a definite code of conduct that was to be followed when I was around each of my parents. So in Filipino culture, you take off your shoes, when you're in the house. As a kid, you're not too loud, you're not the center of attention, and you tend to be quiet, as a way to show deference. You kiss only on one side of the cheek. You eat with a spoon and fork, and I knew to just do those things in front of my mom.
In front of my dad, I knew that in Arab culture, we kiss on both sides of the cheek. We eat with bread, or fork and knife and not with a spoon and fork. And, you know, even like using the bathroom, my dad used a bidet. So I knew to use bidet at my father's house, and my mom didn't have a bidet. So there's just so many different things that I just picked up as a young person that in mom's house, we do this. In dad's house, we do this. And then there was the American way, which I didn't even... I knew wasn't part of my immediate life because I lived in an immigrant community in Southern California. But I knew that other people, Americans who, I didn't consider myself one, that other people did that, like our family.
Kaitlin Milliken: You mentioned that you grew up in California, and eventually moved to the east coast for school. Did that move, shift your perspective on how you viewed yourself and your relationship with your culture?
Malaka Gharib: When I moved to New York, upstate New York to go to Syracuse, I sort of was suddenly surrounded by many white people who at this point, in my life as an 18-year-old like really saw on television, or movies and books and things like that, but never really had spent much time embedded with a lot of white people. And I fell into a sort of like culture shock. I realized that a lot of things I've learned about what people were just sort of wrong a nd were also like stereotypes.I had this idea for some reason that like, white people were very rich. And that was definitely not the case. I don't know where I had gotten that idea from. I also thought that all of them were like, really hot. And that's not the case as well.
And I was actually sadly disappointed to find that people weren't interested in talking about culture. I feel like in Southern California where I grew up in Cerritos, because there were so many people from ethnic backgrounds, it was very common to ask people, but you were. Because heaven forbid that you get it wrong, that someone was from El Salvador and not… Say, somebody from El Salvador or Mexico or like some say, somebody from Pakistan or India. It was really important in a very diverse place to know those distinctions. Because those distinctions defined you, and they defined your immigrant parents life.
And so, I was actually pretty shocked that nobody asked me what my cultures were. And for the first time in my life, it made me think about, why does that matter? Why does it matter that somebody asked me? And it's because I realized at the time as an 18-year-old, that that was my identity, My Filipino life and my Egyptian life that was how I grew up. And to not be interested in my culture means that you're not really interested in who I am as a person. And they were not trying to understand the full me.
A lot of times I had heard, “Oh, well, I don't see color.” At the time, I didn't know why it made me so frustrated that “I don't see color.” But now in retrospect, after reflecting on it in the book, but when you say that you don't see color, if you're saying that you don't acknowledge these parts of me. And these parts in which I see myself. It's erasure. And it's very confusing at the time.
Kaitlin Milliken: So when you had those experiences, what did you do to sort of process them and connect with your culture when there were so many folks who said they didn't see color or didn't have that type of interest in your background?
Malaka Gharib: I actually didn't, didn't even try. I thought I erased myself further. Before I went to college, my Tito Marro who grew up with me, we lived in the same house with my mom, he told me that the reason that we're sending you to Syracuse, even though it's so expensive, the whole family's pooling money together to send you there, because we want you to learn the way of the American and become like them so that you can succeed in their world. We can’t teach you these things. So you need to take what you can get when you're at Syracuse, at a place that has a lot of white people. Try to dress like them. Try to listen to how they talk, how they communicate, and that will prepare you for the real world.
And at the time, I remember thinking that, “Yes, I think it's stupid.” And I mean, it's sad to say that he couldn't be more, right. And that lack of interest in my culture — that “I don’t see color” — it just sort of further validated that. “Maybe to succeed here in America, I need to make myself as American as possible. I need to pass as much as possible as a white person”. And I think I had known that in high school that I adored, and was obsessed with American culture, which really was shorthand for white culture. At Syracuse, it made me plunge even deeper into that.
I was so busy in my in college in my early-20s, in my mid-20s, trying to succeed as a passing American so that I could succeed in my career and my life, that I didn't think about culture only until I started working on the book, which is in 2016 — very late, that I started. I tried to reconnect again with my roots.
Kaitlin Milliken: So throughout the book, you talk a lot about art, which has been a really important part, it seems like, to connecting with your roots. Can you talk about your relationship with art and what encouraged you or got you started in pursuing that creative passion?
Malaka Gharib: I've been drawing and writing in my journal since I was a little kid. I had a Hello Kitty notebook that Tita Jean gave me for Christmas when I was eight. And that was the beginning of writing in my diary. Every day I would write in my diary. And in American Girl books, the characters are always writing in a diary as well as Harriet the Spy. So I wanted to be like the characters I read in my books. And I would write a lot and draw a lot.
And it turns out, I started making these little magazines. And by the time I was 14, I lived in Los Angeles. So there's a lot of rich culture, and I went to an independent bookshop, Skylight Books, and they had a zine section. I bought a zine. And in that zine — in 1999 — that zine has directions on how to make your own zine. And I started since I was 14, to make my own magazines. I'd always been making things out of paper, since I was very little.
Kaitlin Milliken: I loved how interactive that element of your book is, with cutting things out and instructions, also on how to make your own zine. I thought that was just a really cool addition to get the reader involved in the process as well.
Malaka Gharib: Yeah, I wanted people to enter my world. And the only way that I felt like they could enter my world was to interact with me to make decisions as have I. If I was, you know, a paper doll, what would you do? If you were me in college, what would you wear?
Kaitlin Milliken: So I think one of the really cool things about having that multicultural background is that it exposes you to a lot of values. Are there any values or elements of your Filipino identity that you carry very close to you into today?
Malaka Gharib: I think one of the things that I learned from reading the book is, and this is something that one of my editors, Cat Chow, who is writing her own book right now. She used to work on code switch at NPR, but one of the things I learned is that food is often used as a shorthand for me, a person expressing their culture. But there's so much more about your culture than food. And she encouraged me to dig deeper and think about how my culture manifested itself in me. I think that probably in the things that have been instilled in me by my family is a sense of familial obligation. Putting family first. This is very common in Philippine culture. If your family needs money, you like to give it to them you like without thinking. All the generosity, like the things that are mine are that if you like my shirt, I would literally just take it off myself and give it to you. It's things and money don't mean anything. If you need it. We share it. We share everything together.
I think just like the desire to, I think gusto. You know that word in Tagalog? It’s this idea that this passion for life, it's this passion, this lust for life. Like, when you eat, it's like, “Oh, it's so good!” And like when you, you know, when you're like having a beer like, “Oh, this is so refreshing!” This is ability to enjoy life, I think that I have a lot of gusto. And I think that's something that my family instilled in me as well.
Kaitlin Milliken: Awesome. So I have a couple more questions. One is one of the takeaway questions. So what do you hope people learn as they read, I Was Their American Dream?
Malaka Gharib: I think for POC people, it's like your experience of growing up in America was definitely weird. And you're not alone if you felt like a total outsider. And all the conflicting feelings you have, it's completely normal. I think that's the first thing.
The second thing is for non-Filipinos, it's like everything I ever wanted to tell you about me. I think for a lot of my white friends who have know me for decades, this is like the first time that they're hearing this part about my life that they probably didn't know about, because they never asked about it, because they didn't think about asking about it, because talking about race is awkward, and hard, and weird, and difficult. And these are all the things that I'd like for them to know.
Kaitlin Milliken: Definitely. And my final question is sort of, if you could go back in time and talk to your younger self, or other young people who are the children of immigrants living in America, what words or advice would you leave with them?
Malaka Gharib: I think the thing that I always write in when I'm like signing books is like, always be yourself. Yourself is so awesome. I wish that somebody would have just told me that from the beginning that like, “It's very cool to be a Filipino Egyptian American and you should be very proud.” Instead of trying to like shun that and try to favor American culture, white culture over the rest of it.
It's cool to be yourself. I even feel that imposter syndrome sometimes working in the workplace. Sometimes I feel like “Oh, I don't deserve to be here. Like, I'm just like a lowly junior writer.” And then I think to myself, “Wait, they should be so happy that they have this wonderful multicultural perspective on the team. Like that's, that's an honor. They should be honored to have me here.” That would have just changed my outlook forever.
Kaitlin Milliken: That's all they have in terms of questions for you, Malaka. Thank you so much for taking the time.
[MUSIC]
Kaitlin Milliken: This has been the BOSFilipinos Podcast. I’m your host, Kaitlin Milliken. Music for this episode was made by Matt Garamella. Special thanks Magdalena and Malaka for taking the time out to chat.
Before you go, happy Filipino American History Month! This month really focuses on remembering the past and gaining a better understanding of how Filipino people shaped America. I’ll be spending some time this month reflecting about my racial identity, and researching a lot. Because knowing our history helps us better understand ourselves. The team at BOSFilipinos will be posting Filipino American History month content on our website bosfilipinos.com.
One final plug, If you haven't already, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcast, Stitcher, Spotify, and Google Play. For more profiles and other great content, follow us on Instagram @bosfilipinos. Thanks for listening and see you soon.