Writer Weaves Bits of Her Culture, Herself Into Stories

Cecilia Manguerra 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 younger self, said Brainard, who spoke Monday at Niles West High School. Her appearance was part of  , a cultural awareness program that is focusing on the Filipino community this year.

Among the sponsors are the Village of Skokie, the Skokie Public Library and Niles Township High School District 219.

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. The books were also featured in several public discussions earlier this year.

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

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 told students at Niles West.

But after writing about 250 pages, based loosely on her childhood 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 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, a provincial island southeast of Manila.

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 noted that folklorists said the islands had a matriarchal society until the Spaniards first arrived in 1521. After that, “the women just let the men think they were in charge,” Brainard quipped. “In many Filipino households, the women control the purse strings. The men are out there acting macho, but the women give them their allowance.”

Brainard was scheduled to give a similar presentation at 10:30 a.m. Tuesday at Niles North High School, 9800 N. Lawler St. in Skokie.