Alia Rasul’s first poetry collection is a powerful and irreverent reclamation of identity

June 14, 2021June 20, 2021 Arpita Ghosal

i didn’t choose to be filipina

but i didn’t fully live

until i embraced it

Alia Ceniza Rasul

Writer, producer, comedian and storyteller Alia Ceniza Rasul has been publishing one poem per day on her Instagram. At first, this was a confidence-boosting exercise intended to generate ideas freely and curb her tendency to self-edit. Along the way, it turned unexpectedly into Super Important Filipina Thoughts! The recently published collection of Rasul’s hilariously irreverent poems reflects her musings on identity, family, navigating relationships and friendships, and growing up Filipina.

Rasul’s origin is unexpected. Although best known for her comedy, Rasul arrived in Canada at the age of 19 with a corporate future already mapped out: “‘When I moved to Canada from Dubai, all I knew was that I’m going to go to McGill, get a degree from a really good school, get a job at maybe a bank, and then that’s going to be my life. I didn’t really think beyond that.”

Things started out according to plan. While pursuing her degree, she worked as a barista at a Second Cup coffee shop nestled in the McGill student neighborhood: ”That was my first job, and it was also my first interaction with community and community building. And that became really important for me.” After graduation, Rasul realized that she really loved Second Cup. So much so that she applied to head office, with the highly personal pitch of “please hire me because I know this coffee shop and I love this coffee shop and everything it can do for a neighborhood”.

The pitch worked. Second Cup hired her, and she moved to Toronto, eventually taking a position at the now-defunct Rich Tree as the company’s coffee expert. “Then they gave me a restaurant in Mississauga to run, which was wild because I’d never run a restaurant before, but again, it was all about community and really getting in touch with people,“ she explains. “When you’re a barista, you meet so many people that you have to be engaging. As a coffee expert, you can teach workshops to the new franchisee. And I had such a terrible fear of public speaking that I didn’t know how to do it. So I took improv classes for self-confidence.” While the nerves did not disappear overnight, Rasul learned some “tips and tricks” to manage them for performing.

At this moment in her life, she had still never imagined becoming a comedian. In fact, as recently as five years ago, Rasul’s goal was to become a director at a big retail food company, and enjoy comedy as a “thing to do outside of work”. But the comedy struck a deep chord with her, and she “just kept going”: She auditioned for The Second City Conservatory program, imagining “I’m just going to do it for fun” – and to keep a friend company. The friend didn’t get in, but she did. Following a year in the conservatory program, she continued to join comedy projects, including a group called Fusion with members of the Tallboyz. She was part of the NBC Universal Bob Curry program with Celeste Yim, (now a writer for SNL), and she founded the Tita Collective with five other Filipiinas.

“That’s been basically the last two years of my life: the Tita Collective and then this book,” she smiles. Rasul is chatting over Zoom from a sunlit room filled with plants and books – evidence that, even during her time in the corporate world, she always loved stories. Then, through her business and community work — and through food – she grew to love community. And “then I just sort of have found myself here. Did I always want to pursue comedy? No, I did not even imagine that in my future at all beyond, let’s say 2016 or 2017. Before that, I was just like, Nope, I’m going to be corporate, gonna buy a house; that’s it.”

“But then, here we are,” she laughs.

The Tita Collective in a sketch from Tita Jokes l-r: Maricris Rivera, Belinda Corpuz, Isabel Kanaan, Ann Paula Bautista, Ellie Posadas, Alia Rasul

As it happened, the more Rasul pursued her art, the more she realized that she had a block when it came to writing things down. “I’ve basically been doing comedy for about four or five years. One thing that never really went away was that, when I sat in front of a computer, I just kept editing myself all the time.” She wanted a way out of the creative block of needing to be perfect all the time. Rather than perpetuate her cycle of self-doubt, she wanted a way to “just really put things out there and not worry too much about it”.

A determined self-talk was in order: “I’m like, alright . . .well, girl, you got to build some confidence in yourself, and you need to put something out there, and commit to it, so that was my exercise. It was like Alia, just put two or three lines out there, and commit to it. Don’t delete it; just edit it.” With that impetus, Rahul began composing and posting poems on Instagram daily. People responded almost immediately, usually with affirmation: “Oh, I think that, too, or I can really relate to that”. The feedback bolstered her confidence: the more she posted, the more encouraged she felt. The collected volume of poems Super important Filipino Thoughts was released this spring by ANAK Publishing, and is now available in bookstores and online. The super-friendly Rasul will even take appointments on her website to sign it personally.

And the writing didn’t stop there. This May, she published an essay on CBC First Person called “What I discovered after 450+ family Zoom calls during the pandemic”. “These projects do seem to find me, honestly,” she smiles. “In the beginning…. I was putting things out there just because I personally wanted to start writing essays. So it’s funny because, before this exercise, I would not have been able to write something like that. It would have been awful. It would have been like pulling teeth. But because I taught myself how to craft a sentence, I realized, hey you know what? You’ve put a bunch of those sentences together. Figure out a direction for it, and that’s an essay. So for me, that essay was possible because I wrote, because I did this exercise.”

In addition to her writing and comedy, Rasul produces Tawa Comedy Festival, an all Filipinx comedy festival that started 4 years ago, the same year that Phillipine Heritage Month was recognized by Toronto. The festival’s first iteration was where The Tita Collective tried out their first four sketches. This year’s festival happens June 25 – 26 and will be presented virtually from Bad Dog Theatre, where Rasul has served as the Inclusion Director. Because it is an annual event, her goal — “until someone wants to take over” – is to encourage audiences to “enjoy live performance, live comedy so that us Filipinos can develop a Filipino comedy audience. It’s also a platform for young Filipinx storytellers. There are going to be four shows, which is the most that we’ve ever tried. We’ll see how that goes!” As soon as they are available, details will be posted on saludocanada.ca.

Our conversation reveals Rasul to be friendly and inviting, just a little shy, and deeply reflective about the intentions and impact of her work. And her love of community – born in the coffee shop and nurtured through her comedy – is clearly transcendent. Though Super important Filipina Thoughts! began as an exercise to process her own thoughts and feelings, she sees it as a gentle avenue to address the stigma around mental illness within her community. The first poem begins with the words “little one”, and reads like a letter to Rasul’s younger self.

It encourages her to do the thing that she did last year . . . only sooner: “just write them down, and really place importance on knowing what you’re thinking. Because you’ll find out a lot. You’ll get to know yourself better. And it’s going to be important. As a person who has been honest and kind of artistic, I think a lot of BIPOC artists are on this journey to reclaim identity and self. For me, of all the things that I’ve tried, this is the thing that helped me the most. So it’s like advice to my younger self – and maybe that’s like an analogue for advice to younger folks, younger Filipinas, who might be reading this.”