When I first talked to Robin Alvarez about bringing her on to Bookish Brews, I knew this post was going to be wonderful. We had such an insightful chat about how silence perpetuates violence and the power of making your voice heard. How our voices carry power and when we don’t use them, we allow violence to continue and grow. When Oceans Rise takes the time to explore this concept and I had the privilege of picking Robin’s brain about it and the even greater privilege to be able to share this with you. Everyone please welcome, Robin Alvarez!

Interview with Robin Alvarez

Amanda: Hi Robin! Thank you so much for joining us, I’m so excited to chat with you about the power of making your voice heard, how silence perpetuates violence, and a little bit of magic. But first, can you introduce yourself and your debut novel When Oceans Rise?

Robin Alvarez: Hello! My name is Robin Alvarez, and I’m a mixed-race Filipina American author who writes YA Contemporary Fantasy. When Oceans Rise is a young adult Filipino folklore twist on The Little Mermaid sans the mermaids. My main character, Malaya, is also a mixed-race Filipina American girl, and she is in an abusive relationship. 

To escape that violence, she trades her voice to a sea witch in exchange for a new life. Only when she gets there she finds out that she traded places with an alternate timeline version of herself who is now in danger of her ex. Even worse, the sea witch saw power in her voice when she did not, and uses it to unleash Filipino mythological creatures into both worlds. Now Malaya must take back her voice to save both timelines. 

Amanda: I can’t wait to read When Oceans Rise! How do the themes of silence as a perpetuation of violence and the power of making your voice heard intersect in your novel?

Robin: Oh, that means so much to me! Thank you!

When Oceans Rise is a social commentary on how some Asians respond to violence with silence. This is evident when Malaya willingly gives up her own voice in the face of violence, believing it will give her peace, only to eventually understand that the way to have the life she wants is to harness the power of making her voice heard.

In fact, the sea witch that Malaya gives her voice to saw the power of her voice before Malaya ever did because she uses it to unleash mythological creatures into the world. 

Amanda: How can we draw parallels between these themes in When Oceans Rise and the world we live in today?

Robin: The silence is so loud. There was a huge increase in anti-Asian hate crimes shortly after the pandemic started as people blamed Asians for the Coronavirus and the lockdown, and yet even those willing to speak out against the violence were met with such resistance. But it brought up this even bigger issue which is that, even before this huge uptick in violence, many Asians were often too silent about racism, hate crimes, and discrimination.

When addressing the major theme of violence being met with silence, I took this major issue of anti-Asian hate crimes and showed it on an individual level. That’s where a lot of anti-Asian hate crimes live—on the individual level. So there aren’t masses of anti-Asian hate crimes happening in When Oceans Rise, but there is a girl who falls victim to gaslighting and physical abuse who is willing to silence herself for peace—for what she feels will be a better life.

The real issue is that when one voice is silenced, it perpetuates violence. It allows other anti-Asian hate crimes to occur because the crimes either go unpublished, or the punishments are not harsh enough to deter people from committing the crimes again. In this new “better” life, when Malaya’s voice is used to unleash Filipino mythological creatures into the world and people start getting attacked the result is people hating Filipinos. There is this blame because these are “your monsters.”

And the line of thought here is that if the monsters are Filipino, then Filipinos are to blame, right?

But one character in the book makes an excellent point. We believe the monsters are Filipino because we recognize many of them from that folklore. It was easy, once a small group of people said the monsters were Filipino, to run with that fear and hate–a parallel to the fear and hate people felt for Asians during lockdown. But so many of these same monsters can be found in other cultures by different names. The public in the novel chose to believe they were Filipino, but that character essentially asks: couldn’t these monsters very well come from other cultures?

And what I’m really saying here is that hate and violence often occur based on general assumptions that are fueled by fear and misconception.

There is so much power in Malaya’s voice, and it’s actually used against her to harm many people. She has to go through this journey to realize that in order to save many, she has to save herself and that comes—not from doing things all by herself—but from speaking up.

Amanda: I know there are a million answers to this and none are perfect, but why do you think that meeting violence with silence is so prominent among Asian American people? 

Robin: Politeness and respect are words I’m going to throw around here to explain meeting violence with silence, but I am not using these words in the typical sense of what these words mean or what Asian American people deserve.

In my own experience with my culture, there is this ingrained politeness above so much else. In Filipino, we have an honorific particle to show respect for anyone older than us (po). There is a word for older sister (Ate) and older brother (Kuya), but they are not used for younger siblings. In my circle of Filipino Americans, everyone your mother’s age is your Tita or Tito and everyone your grandparents’ age is your Lola and Lolo. We are deeply connected by family and by age hierarchy as a way of showing respect. We are fantastic hosts when people come to our homes and equally stellar guests when we visit others’ houses.

I think some Asian Americans may come to this country feeling like guests to the status quo. We tip toe because we don’t want to be ejected or rejected. We do not represent the majority, and perhaps we are too polite to speak out against injustices out of respect for the house (America) that doesn’t feel like our home.

Amanda: Lately, we’ve seen more awareness about how silence perpetuates violence, especially through phrases like “silence is violence” but we still have a long way to go. Why is it important to continue pushing for awareness about this?

Robin: Silence is dangerous because it is too easy to ignore and too easy to take advantage of. We must keep pushing for awareness because when we allow silence to happen, others continue to be harmed. We think that by letting things go, we aren’t making waves–but that’s exactly the problem. Other people might drown in that wake if we aren’t there to put a stop to the violence. Other people might not be as strong. It’s scary. 

Amanda: I love the way you describe it as feeling like a guest to the status quo. Why do you think this feeling may not go away after spending so much time in the house (America)?

Robin: Because it’s not meant to go away. The status quo has power because they control perception. They push ideas of what is right and/or better through politics, religion, beauty, media, even entertainment, etc. Think about the controversy with a certain big bookseller whose CEO said they would stock books based on “taste” while completely ignoring that their practice would affect marginalized authors most. The struggle to be equally seen and heard in spaces as seemingly unimportant as a bookshelf absolutely controls the narrative that only people within the status quo are worth seeing and hearing.

As long as the status quo has the power to push their perceptions, we will continue to feel like guests no matter how much time we spend here or how much we contribute to society.

Amanda: What are ways in which we can push back on that status quo through stories? How did you try to do that in When Oceans Rise? 

Robin: TikTok stands alone at this moment as one of the best ways to organize the people to push back against the status quo. Never has the American public been so united. This is because TikTok is not infected with the narrative that politicians feed through the media. 

Consider the TikTok hearing that CEO Shou Zi Chew faced. Millions of Americans watched that hearing live on TikTok, and we saw and interpreted for ourselves what the issue of banning TikTok was really about. Not surprisingly, what we saw was not what the media portrayed. Creators on TikTok were stitching videos together showing “Mocking bird media” in which all of these news outlets were parroting the exact same turns of phrases of how TikTok was “plaguing our country” with false news biases when nothing could be more inauthentic than that many stations being fed the same lines. 

If anything, it showed so many people how deeply we cannot trust the media for the way they serve the status quo agenda. 

In When Oceans Rise, news outlets actually report the sightings of these mythological creatures and (damagingly) label them as Filipino because of a few very small claims. The true issue with this is that the magic system is built in such a way that people who believe in the beasts will see them materialize, and this in turn gives our villain–the sea witch–more power. So by talking about the mythological creatures and inspiring fear, the media actually causes more harm to the public.

Malaya and her family combat this by creating their own web series, Debunking the Aswang, which is untouched by the media. They used this series to disprove that the creatures exist in order to save people from these mythological beasts. This is also meant to help Filipinos from the hate that had been stirred up by the media announcing the creatures as Filipino mythos rather than simply and unbiasedly calling them mythological creatures that may come from anywhere. 

Amanda: What are some of the dangers of letting these harmful narratives go unchallenged? Both in When Oceans Rise and the real world? 

Robin: When I think about how these narratives going unchallenged is harmful, I always go back to my own experience with gaslighting and abuse which fueled me to write When Oceans Rise. 

As a teenager, I was old enough to know so much about the way the world worked, and at the same time I was still unprepared for the gaslighting and abuse I experienced in that relationship. I want to strongly emphasize that you can be any age if this ever happens to you, and you can know the world and still face this slow-burn, psychological attack which strips you of autonomy.

In “The Sociology of Gaslighting”, Paige L. Sweet connects the interpersonal issue of gaslighting to the much broader social issues we’ve been discussing when she says, “Gaslighting should be understood as rooted in social inequalities, including gender, and executed in power-laden intimate relationships.”  

It is these harmful narratives within our societies, directed at those who are diverse and marginalized, but executed within relationships on a personal level that inflicts harm. If we let these issues go unchallenged, these people might simply see themselves as victims of abuse rather than victims of a much larger social and political issue that then causes abuse on an individual level. 

In When Oceans Rise, we experience the story entirely on Malaya’s personal plane of existence, and yet there is still this undercurrent of the way the world is affected by her personal narrative because of her decision to silence herself.

Amanda: How can we inspire people to continue pushing back against the status quo when things are looking grim? How does Malaya learn to push back? 

Robin: I have very few regrets in my life, but one of my regrets is not reporting my abuser. I wish I’d created a public record of what he’d done so that I could protect others. In this way, I’ll always wonder if anyone else was ever hurt at his hands because they simply couldn’t look him up and see his crimes. I am safe but are others? This haunts me.

Simply reporting abuse can help push back and protect. However, one of the reasons people don’t report their abuse, outside of fear of their attacker, is because of the terrible social stigma of being an abuse victim. Society is still filled with people who say, “I would never let that happen to me.” I still have people disappointed that Malaya knows how bad things are and struggles to leave her abuser. I strongly feel that this comes from this stigma, and I fear for those people because they lack the knowledge of what is truly happening and may themselves become victims.

We can continue to inspire people to push back against the status quo by fighting to get our marginalized stories–through all mediums–out there. Fiction, especially, humanizes us because you get insight into the characters’ minds. We cannot speak to every individual in the world, but our experiences can be empathized with through the worlds we create. 

On an individual level, Malaya faces this internal struggle to see her own self-worth. There was a strong shift in the prologue where she is a healthy individual with strong ties to her family and friends, and how she loses those connections and her identity over a year in her relationship in the chapters that follow. She has to remove him entirely from her life and connect with family and friends before she feels strong enough to return to her old life and take back her power.

This book is so emotive because I want people to see that she is as human as anyone else and doesn’t deserve what happens to her just because she is a girl or multiracial. 

Amanda: Thank you so much, Robin! Is there anything else you’d like to share before you go? 

Robin: Thank you so much for having me! If TikTok is still around, it is my favorite social media to connect with people. My handle is @robiiehood 

When Oceans Rise is on preorder right now through major retailers and indie bookstores! The book will be published on May 23, 2023!

Find out more about When Oceans Rise (there’s even a playlist!)