Being Brown... again

In 2002, I wrote an #essay for one of my Sun.Star columns titled "It Ain't Easy Being Brown". In March 2016, I suddenly got requests from university students in different parts of the #Philippines to interview me about this essay for their class. The essay wasn't online and they had to ask me for a copy, so I have no idea how their teachers thought to assign it as a text. In October 2017, I was contacted by students from yet another school telling me that they had chosen the same essay to make a #shortfilm on for a school competition. Again, no idea how they got hold of it. But since my essays are #autobiographical, it was basically a film based on my life. Sharing it now because it's just so hilarious 😂 especially their portrayal of my parents. It's so amazing what kids can do with the technology these days. This is the #poster they made for the film. You can read the (very short) essay first. And then watch the #trilingual film on YouTube here.

This reminds me of my very first published poem, pre-internet era in my university's literary journal,that has traveled the world mostly without my knowledge and certainly beyond what I could imagine. It was 1997, and I had written the poem as an exercise during a talk on poetry in school. This was the poem that switched on the light bulb in my head that I could actually write poetry. Before that, I didn't even like reading poetry.

Three years later, when Google first arrived in the Philippines, a nerdy friend of mine googled our names and found the poem on this website, except that some school in Mexico claimed it to be from one of their students (with my name). I emailed them saying that I was not from Mexico and that they got the line breaks wrong. It turned out that it was just the web version of an actual book published by UNEP that had been translated into so many languages. They sent me a French version of the book with the line breaks corrected :P But they never corrected the Mexico part.

Fast forward nine years later -- I am studying in Spain when my mother in New York says she saw my poem in a book published in the UK. Never got contacted by the author, didn't bother to contact him, either. Fast forward another five (?) years and now everyone is on Facebook. Someone from Singapore contacts me if I am indeed the same Jeneen Garcia who wrote this poem and if they can please use it in their science textbook. Of course I say yes, and we have a little back and forth because they are nice enough to let me approve the layout of the page (they originally proposed cutting the poem to make it fit better, but I said no). Never seen the book, but hoping thousands of Singaporean students are now benefiting from it ;) When I google this poem now, I see a few others that have used it in other countries as part of their school lessons

And that is the saga of one poem that was semi-plagiarized. I've spotted some of my poems published without my knowledge as well using Google, and one can only imagine where else some of them have ended up without my name. But this also shows the adventures that the written word can take once it's out there for anyone to do what they wish with it--hopefully, inspiring something in them that they pass on to create a ripple effect of light in the universe ;)