Gina Apostol: Having grown up under dictatorship, beset by the psychological scars of a history of colonization, I know my debt to Borges. I learn from him as an artist, but I also read him, unavoidably, as a luminous thinker about the politics and problems of the so-called Third World, and about the issues of engagement that confront us in America now. I keep wondering if my own response is idiosyncratic. But then, I realize, writers in The New Yorker and such who talk about Borges might not have the experience that Borges and I have — the postcolonial experience of that “divided self,” that “ontological double act.” Anyone who has grown up in a country where history has been created by the words of its occupiers understands this existential condition — the sense that who you are is a fiction, the result of texts constructed by others. […] Borges is the author of the essay “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” an amusing, deconstructive lesson on how to read and write a country. In anti-colonial poetics in Argentina, in the Philippines, and elsewhere, the question of “tradition” is dominant: what makes a literature “Argentine”? What makes a story “Filipino”? It’s a question that always drove me nuts — because the arguments always seemed at best foolish, and at worst dangerously essentialist. Anti-colonial critics at one point suggested that one must isolate “Filipino-ness” or “Argentine-ness” and find some pure, untrammeled state beyond history, when the “native” was pristine and untouched by the foreign, or even time. But the Filipino or Argentine or Kenyan or Indian is necessarily hybrid, condemned to deal with the past: history makes our identities irreducibly multiple. The Filipino is Western and Asian, European and Ifugao, animist and Christian, all simultaneously and vertiginously so. To isolate what is “Filipino” is to seek a chimera. And in such lucid essays as “The Argentine Writer and Tradition,” a quite polemical work that sends up these fantasies of our singular national identities, Borges dissuades people like me from seeking such illusions. The essay is a classic in deconstructive postcolonial thought, before Gayatri Spivak, before Homi Bhabha. The public intellectual Borges may not have directly wrestled with political stances and historical dilemmas in his passing interviews. But in his essays and his fiction, with clarity and logic, he sets up for the Argentine, or for someone like me, a template for how to think about our historical reality, and thus our art. That portal he provides is a political act. More here.