AFRICAN AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN THE PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION

AFRICAN AMERICAN SOLDIERS  IN THE PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION (1899-1903):

SOLIDARITY IN PRACTICE AGAINST THE U.S. EMPIRE

by E. San Juan, Jr.

2009 Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University

Let him never dream that his bullet’s scream went wide of its island mark,

Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the dark.

–WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY, “On A Soldier

Fallen in the Philippines” (1901)

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in American and the islands of the sea.

–W.E. B. DU BOIS, The Souls of Black Folk

(1903)

God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles.

–WILLIAM JAMES (1899), Anti-Imperialist League Records

Unless news of a disaster grabs the headlines—the eruption of a volcano that drove the US military forces from Clark and Subic bases two decades ago, or of American missionaries kidnapped by the Muslim separatists, the Abu Sayyaf (labeled a terrorist group by the US State Department in 2003), the Philippines scarcely figures in the U.S. public consciousness. Not even as a tourist destination, or as the source of mail order brides and domestic help. Some mistake the Philippines as islands in the Caribbean, or somewhere near Hawaii or Tahiti; others wondered then if “them Philippians were the folks St. Paul wrote the epistle to.”

September 11, 2001 changed this somewhat. When U.S. occupation troops in Iraq continued to suffer casualties every day after the war officially ended, pundits began to supply capsule histories comparing their situation with those of troops in the Philippines during the Filipino-American War (1899-1902). A New York Times op-ed summed up the lesson in its title, “In 1901 Philippines, Peace Cost More Lives Than Were Lost in War” (2 July 2003, B1)). An article in the Los Angeles Times contrasted the  simplicity of McKinley’s “easy” goal of annexation with George W. Bush’s ambition to “create a new working democracy as soon as possible” (20 July 2003, M2). Immediately after the proclaimed defeat of the Taliban and the rout of Osama bin Laden’s forces in Afghanistan, the Philippines became the second front in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, with hundreds of US “Special Forces” re-invading the former colony.

Necrological Rites

Few Americans know about the Spanish-American War of 1898—school textbooks allow only a few paragraphs for this “splendid little war.” After Spain’s surrender in the Treaty of Paris, December 1898, the US Empire began with the military rule over Cuba, and annexation of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and later on, Hawaii and parts of Samoa.  Fewer know about the Filipino American War which began in February 1899 and lasted until 1913, with the Filipino Muslims sustaining the heaviest casualties in publicized massacres. This chapter in US history is only now beginning to merit some attention in the wake of the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan (Boot 2002; Kaplan 2003).

My story of African American soldiers in the Philippine revolution—US officials called it “an insurrection”—might begin with President William McKinley.While there was public support for the war against Spain, pitched as a crusade to liberate the Cubans from Spanish tyranny, there was fierce debate over acquiring the Philippine Islands. This expansionist zeal of the “yellow journalists,” commercial houses, and militarists was opposed by an organized nation-wide group called the Anti-Imperialist League. It counted Andrew Carnegie, former president Grover Cleveland, George Boutwell, co-founder of the Republican Party; and numerous personalities such as Mark Twain, William James, William Dean Howells, Jane Addams, George Santayana, and others. Besieged by such a crowd, McKinley confessed to a visiting delegation of Methodist church leaders how he sought the light of “Almighty God” to advise him what to do with the Philippines, and God told him that, among other things, “there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace to do the very best we could by them….and then I went to sleep, and slept soundly” (quoted in Schirmer and Shalom, 1987, 22-23). It was this sound sleep and McKinley’s policy of “Benevolent Assimilation”  that led to US casualties of 4, 234 soldiers killed, about 3,000 wounded, and anywhere from 250,000 to 1.4 million “new-caught sullen peoples” of the islands forever silenced.

With the 1898 Treaty of Paris, Spain agreed to cede—that is, sell—the Philippines to the United States for $20 million, even though it had already lost control of the islands except for its Manila garrison. But the Filipinos, as William Blum puts it, “who had already proclaimed their own independent republic, did not take kindly to being treated like a plot of uninhabited real estate.  Accordingly, an American force numbering initially 50,000 [126,500, all in all] proceeded to instill in the population a proper appreciation of their status,” gaining for the US its “longest-lasting and most conspicuous colony” (2004, 39). Admiral Dewey himself, the hero of the battle of Manila Bay, reflected on how the Peace Conference “scarcely comprehended that a rebellion was included with the purchase.” Henry Adams wrote Theodore Roosevelt to express his alarm that the US was ready “to plunge into an inevitable war to conquer the Philippines, contrary to every professor or so-called principle in our lives and history. I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year’s warfare in the Philippines where…we must slaughter a million or two of foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways” (Ocampo 1998, 249).

While postmodern scholars today expound on the need then of Americans to assert manhood, moral superiority, and so on, material interests were indubitably paramount in the turn-of-the-century discourse on progress and civilization. U.S. policy decisions and consequent practices were framed in a “regime of truth” based on the now well-known politics of colonial representation. Roxanne Lynn Doty (1996) describes this discursive economy that has since framed North-South relations, in Foucaultian terms, as the denial of the transcendental international signifier, sovereignty, to Filipinos and other newly conquered indigenes; that is, the denial of the capacity to exercise agency. Force is justified because the annexed or colonized are unruly, undisciplined, rebellious, disposed to resist the laws established by the civilizing missionaries . What stood out in the cry for colonial possession is the need for a naval port and springboard for penetrating the China market and demonstrating American power in the Asia/Pacific region. This ideological legitimacy for the occupation was voiced by Senator Alfred Beveridge, among others. After rehearsing the profits to be gained from trade and natural resources, he repeated a familiar refrain from past conquests of the Native Americans, the Mexicans, and other indigenes:

They [natives of the Philippines] are a barbarous race, modified by three centuries of contact with a decadent race. The Filipino is the South Sea Malay, put through a process of three hundred years of superstition in religion, dishonesty in dealing, disorder in habits of industry, and cruelty, caprice, and corruption in government. It is barely possible that 1,000 men in all the archipelago are capable of self-government in the Anglo-Saxon sense (Schirmer and Shalom 1987, 25)

This was echoed by General Arthur McArthur who thought the natives needed “bayonet treatment for at least a decade,” while Theodore Roosevelt felt that the Filipinos needed a good beating so they could become “good Injuns” (cited in Ignacio 2004). The “barbarous” natives, however, resisted for a time longer than anticipated, offering lessons that still have to be learned, even after Korea and Vietnam, and the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite neoconservative revisionists that the US “savage war of peace” in the Philippines was humane, humanitarian, and honorable under the circumstances, US intervention to annex the Philippines continues to haunt the conscience of some humanists and historians of international relations.

Counting the Victims

Current controversy among scholars surrounds the tally of Filipino victims of US pacification. Journalist Bernard Fall cited the killing three million Filipinos in “the bloodiest colonial war (in proportion to population) ever fought by a white power in Asia,” comparable to the carnage in Vietnam. Describing it as “among the cruelest conflicts in the annals of Western imperialism,” Stanley Karnow, author of the award-winning  In Our Image, counts 200,000 civilians and 20,000 soldiers (1989, 194), while others give 600,000. Filipina historian Luzviminda Francisco arrives at the figure of 1.4 million Filipinos sacrificed for Uplift and Christianization—in a country ruled by Christian Spain for three hundred years. While Kipling at the outbreak of the war urged the US to “take up the White Man’s burden” and tame the “new-caught sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child,” Mark Twain wrote some of his fiery pieces denouncing “Benevolent Assimilation” as the “new name of the musket” and acidly harped on the “collateral damage” of the US “civilizing mission”: “Thirty thousand [US soldiers] killed a million [Filipinos].  It seems a pity that the historian let that get out; it is really a most embarrassing circumstance” (1992, 62). Recently Gore Vidal stirred up the hornet’s nest when he wrote in the New York Review of Books:

Between the years 1899 and 1913 the United States of America wrote the darkest pages of its history. The invasion of the Philippines, for no other reason than acquiring imperial possessions, prompted a fierce reaction of the Filipino people… 400,000 Filipino “insurrectos” died under the American fire and one million Filipino civilians died because of the hardship, mass killings and scorched earth tactics carried out by the Americans.  In total the American war against a peaceful people who fairly ignored the existence of the Americans until their arrival wiped out 1/6 of the population of the country….Our policy in the Philippines was genocide. We were not there to liberate or even defend a ‘liberty-loving’ people, we were there to acquire those rich islands and if we had to kill the entire population we would have done so. Just as we had killed the Indians in the century before (some of our best troops in the Philippines were former Indian fighters) and as we would kill Southeast Asians later in this century (1981).

In Search of the Dissenter

Whatever the exact figures of the dead, this landscape or theater of war was surely surveyed and closely inspected by one corporal David Fagen, an African American soldier, after he landed in June 1899. The Filipino revolutionary army was beleaguered and on the defensive, having suffered several defeats in Manila, Caloocan and Malolos, and the US was on the way to winning the war. It was only a matter of time that superior force would reign supreme.

Fagen was one among fifteen to thirty deserters from four regiments of “Buffalo Soldiers”—the 9^th and 10^th Cavalry, and the 23^rd and 24th Infantry– dispatched to the Philippines in July and August 1899. Seven thousand African Americans were involved in the war. After fighting the Native Americans as “Buffalo Soldiers,” these four regiments were mobilized for the Spanish American War. As the New York State Military Museum reminds us, the use of black soldiers by the War Department conformed to the belief that black soldiers were “naturally adapted to survive the tropical climate.” In fact, the 7^th, 8^th, 9^th and 10^th US Volunteer Infantry were later formed in response to the government need for soldiers “immune to tropical diseases.” Incidentally, it was members of the 10^th Cavalry that used its “Indian fighting skills” to save Theodore Roosevelt and his “Rough Riders” from certain extermination. But they never received recognition equal to Roosevelt’s. When the Philippine resistance proved tougher than the officials estimated, the War Department recruited two regiments of black volunteers, the Forty-Eight and Forty-Ninth Infantry and sent them to the Philippines in early 1900 to stay up to the official end of the war.

We know the names of  seven of about twenty-nine African Americans who deserted—their names have been expurgated from ordinary historical accounts. Deserters from the military are never mentioned in official histories, much less in approved textbooks and government documentaries. Only Fagen of Company I of the 24^th Infantry seems to have survived in civic memory because he joined the revolutionary army of General Emilio Aguinaldo, the beleaguered president of the first Philippine Republic. Fagen’s courage and skill as a guerilla leader earned him the trust of his Filipino comrades. As captain of his unit, Fagen led skirmishes against the pursuing troops of General Funston who offered a $600 reward for his head. A report of his “supposed killing” failed to convince even the U.S. Army, so Fagen continues to live on, at last arriving at his niche in the American National Biography (Oxford University  Press, 2000).

Before describing the circumstances surrounding Fagen’s defection, I should state at the outset that my interest is not so much in the personal life and biographical circumstances of  Fagen as in his position as an indexical sign, a pedagogical signifier ( if you like) of intersubjective or interethnic relations. It would of course be useful to have complete biographical details about Fagen and his other companions, and a full disclosure of all government documents on all the incidents of the war in which the soldiers participated. My interest, however, is in the political, ethical, and philosophical—dare one use the term “ideological”– issues. What I am concerned with in this historic event in which Fagen and seven other African American soldiers were involved, is its potential as an allegorical trope, an exemplary figure (for some, an exemplum), of the politics of self-determination for enslaved and subjugated communities.

From the conventional optic, Fagen’s decision to join the Philippine anti-colonial revolution was a treasonous act, a violation of his oath of loyalty to the US military and government. But given the situation of African Americans at that time in US post-reconstruction history, in the context of what some describe as an apartheid caste-system sanctioned by the 1896 Plessy versus Ferguson judgment and other laws, one might ask: Is Fagen’s status that of a full citizen whose word to uphold the authority of the state is uncompromised? Is Fagen’s decision to fight the invasion (under Filipino leadership) simply that of a soldier citizen, or could it not be read as an allegory of the black nation’s struggle for self-determination?  If the United States’ war against the Philippine republic that had virtually wrested power from colonial Spain a war of colonial conquest, within this framework, can we not regard Fagen’s refusal to be part of the State’s violence a quintessential act of political dissent and his joining the enemy as an act of rebellion against the racial State?

Given the domination of white-racial supremacy, Fagen’s act may be taken as a complete repudiation of that juridical-political order.  His refusal to surrender confirms his choice as a moral and political act of self-determination—both on a personal and collective dimension. To commit oneself to join a revolutionary movement resisting a colonial power and its history of slavery and racialized subjugation of African Americans, is to reaffirm the right of collective self-determination. It is to reaffirm a long durable tradition of revolt against a slave-system. Further, in contradistinction to the maroon revolts of the past which sought to restore a pre-capitalist or pre-feudal order in an isolated place, Fagen’s decision to join the Filipino anti-colonial struggle—a struggle comparable to Haiti’s revolution against the French, with the qualification that the U.S. in 1899 was a fully industrialized capitalist power–is to reaffirm a new level of dissent which, at the threshold of the era of finance-capital and wars for the division of the world into colonies and imperial metropoles, acquires a global transnational resonance. This concrete universality of Fagen’s individual revolt taken as a symbolic act at the beginning of the century of revolutions and intercontinental wars, is what I would like to explore further in connection with a quite distinct strain in African American political thought, dating back to Frederick Douglass and earlier reflections on slave revolts up to W.E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, C.L. R. James, Harry Haywood, Harold Cruse, Nelson Peery, and others. This is a modest exercise in a transformative critique of cosmopolitan, possessive individualist—shall we say, neoliberal– reason.

Historical Panorama

Before focusing on the figure of Fagen as an African American rebel-soldier, it might be useful to paint him against the historical landscape of the time. The war against the Spanish Empire was quite brief—indeed, “a splendid little war,” in John Hay’s terms. After Theodore Roosevelt’s “fabled” storming of San Juan Hill and the surrender of the Spanish forces in Santiago, Cuba, followed by the passage of the Teller amendment, that episode might have concluded with the Treaty of Paris in December 1998. But strong opposition to colonial annexation of the Philippines delayed  its Senate ratification.

Why would the United States want to acquire a colony?  The major reason is the need of the ascendant commercial, industrial and military interests to penetrate the markets and natural resources of Asia. The initial desire (as expressed by Senator Beveridge, among others) was for a gateway to China. The Philippines offered a strategic location for a naval base, a military launching-pad,  in addition to the immense value of its raw materials, above all mineral deposits. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge emphasized the potential market of the Philippines’ ten million inhabitants, thus carrying out McKinley’s adherence to “the great American doctrine of protection to American industries.” President McKinley—whose wife was obsessed in converting the pagan “Igorottes”– pushed for colonization under the slogan of “Benevolent Assimilation” of the colonized subjects under US sovereignty (for a summary of the historical context, see Constantino 1970, 67-91).

By the time Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in May 1998, the Filipino revolutionary forces under General Emilio Aguinaldo had practically liberated the whole country and was besieging the Spanish garrison in the Walled City of Manila. Dewey held Aguinaldo at bay with false promises of US support. The Spaniards, after a mock battle already agreed upon, decided to surrender to General Merritt on August 13. Earlier, on June 12, General Aguinaldo formally proclaimed the independence of the Philippines from Spain; and on June 23, a revolutionary government was formed with provisions for administration of the entire country. Thus before the arrival of the first US expeditionary troops on June 30, there was already a functioning Philippine government operating nationally and locally, which commanded the loyalty of the people. But despite Aguinaldo’s desire to negotiate some kind of compromise with the U.S., McKinley and his military officials proceeded to build up the occupation forces until fighting broke out on February 4, six months after the Spanish surrender, and a few weeks after the inauguration of the Philippine Republic on January 23, 1899.

From June 29, 1898, McKinley’s policy sought to enforce “the absolute domain of military authority” on people who had just won their freedom with arms. He knew that Aguinaldo and his followers, the bulk of which came from the landless peasantry and impoverished middle strata, would never surrender their newly won independence. Fifty to seventy troops were needed to pacify and “benevolently” assimilate the islands. The Filipinos resisted in frontal battles from February to March, 1899. Meanwhile, in July 1899, the first of 6,000 segregated African American soldiers arrived in the Philippines. The US began to occupy Jolo and other Muslim povinces once guarded by isolated Spanish forts in the southern Philippines.

On November 13, 1899, after losing the capital of Malolos and substantial fighters, Aguinaldo disbanded the regular army and switched to guerilla warfare. Military governor General Otis did not understand this new strategy and believed that the insurrection was suppressed with the capture of Malolos, the headquarters of Aguinaldo’s government. Before he was replaced by General Arthur McArthur, father of General Douglas McArthur, who was forced to abandon Bataan and Corregidor to the invading Japanese forces in 1942, Otis wrote to the War Department in April 1900 that we are no longer dealing “with organized insurrection, but brigandage,” which would require police action by a quarter of a million soldiers (Pomeroy 1970, 86), Mark Twain’s suspicion, shared by a large majority, was that “we do not intend to free, but to subjugate, the people of the Philippines” (Putzel 1992, 52). On May 2, 1900, Otis was replaced by General McArthur who imposed martial law on December 20, 1900.

Waterboarding and Other Gory Business

There is general consensus that the pacification of the Philippines is one of the bloodiest wars in imperial history. After two days of fighting, the Filipinos on Manila’s perimeter and nearby provinces sustained a casualy of nearly 10,000. Aguinaldo’s officers schooled in European manuals followed positional warfare along classic military lines; but they were forced to resort to mobile warfare, utilizing their knowledge of the countryside and universal support from the populace in the face of vastly superior US firepower. The inaugural model of anti-colonial “people’s war” may be found here, as well as its ruthless antidote, “low-intensity” warfare.

As we saw, Otis and his officers thought that the insurrection would be over in a matter of weeks. Mobile tactics and eventually guerilla strategy reduced the US garrisons to easy targets, with the US troops finding themselves ill-suited and ill-equipped to confront their enemies lacking adequate firearms, often fighting with bolos—long bladed knives—and spears. The Filipino insurgents resembled the proverbial fish swimming in the ocean of their sympathizers so that by subterfuge and hand-to-hand combat, the rebels overcame the odds against them. After protracted fighting with unconscionable losses, the US army began to treat all the “niggers” as enemies, whether armed or not; it resorted to destroying villages and killing civilians. In the second year of fighting, 75,000 troops escalated the war against the Filipino masses, not just the sporadic guerillas in the “boondocks”—the term adopted from the Filipino word, “bundok,” contested mountainous terrain.

General MacArthur observed that guerilla warfare was contrary to “the customs and usages” of civilized warfare,” hence those captured are no longer soldiers but simple criminals, brigands, etc. They are “are not entitled to the privileges of prisoners of war.” This accords with the US Army “Instructions” (General Order 100) issued during the Civil War, defining “war rebels” who “rise in arms against the occupying or conquering army” as “high robbers or pirates” (Pomeroy 1970, 87).  Those rebels would be today’s “unlawful combatants” not deserving of Geneva Convention guidelines. By placing Filipino resistance outside the bounds of recognized warfare, William Pomeroy notes, “the American military authorities in effect and in practice gave sanction to barbarous methods,” among them the infamous “water cure,” rope torture, and others (1970, 88).  Such atrocities flourished in the racialist ethos of the conduct of the war.

The US pacification campaign against the insurrectos, argues Jonathan Fast, “degenerated into a grisly slaughter of non-combatants” (1973, 74). From April 1901 to April 1902, four successive “depopulation campaigns” were carried out.  The first occurred in Northern Luzon, described by one American Congressman: “Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country and wherever and whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him” (quoted in Wolff 1968, 352).  Then in August 1901, in Panay island, the same procedure was adopted. US troops cut an area 60 miles wide from one end of the island to the other, burning everything in their path.  In September and October, US troops swarmed into Samar, with orders from General Jacob Smith to burn and kill everything over ten,” as a reprisal for the ambush of 48 American soldiers in the town of Balangiga. His subalterns fulfilled his vow to make the whole island “a howling wilderness.”

The climax is rather unsurprising. In December, the entire population of Batangas (about 500,000) was forced into concentration camps.  Frustrated by Filipino perseverance in resisting US sovereignty, General J. Franklin Bell who masterminded the Batangas campaign stated that he intended to “create in the minds of the people a burning desire for the war to cease—that will impel them to join hands with the Americans….” For this purpose, it was necessary to keep the people “in such a state of anxiety and apprehension that living under such conditions will soon become unbearable” (Storey and Codman 1902, 71-73). Due to the brutal conditions in the detention camps, to hunger and diseases, over 100,000 died in Batangas alone. Later on, General Bell calculated that over 600,000 Filipinos in Luzon alone had been killed or died as a direct result of the pacification campaign. This estimate made in May 1901 does not take into account the victims of the other four campaigns listed above.  The extermination of almost the entire population of Samar remains emblematic of how the US administered the stick without the carrot. General Jacob Smith wiped out the town, summarily executed prisoners, and devastated the whole province–probably the longest and most brutal campaign on record. His method could not be considered exceptional, as Linn and others argue, because it had been repeated many times. Although Roosevelt declared the war over on July 4, 1902, the fighting lasted until 1910 when the last guerilla leader was captured in Luzon; and Muslim uprisings continued until 1916, punctuated by the massacres of Bud Dajo in 1906 and of Bud Bagsak in 1913.

Orientalist Theater of Cruelty

Harsh measures such as “reconcentration” or hamletting of civilians became official policy in fighting Aguinaldo’s guerilla forces. The most notorious practitioners were Gen. Bell who inflicted it in Batangas and southern Luzon and Gen. Jacob Smith who turned Samar into a “howling wilderness.”  Recently, in the controvery over the use of torture such as “waterboarding,” Paul Kramer rehearsed again what a British witness called “the murderous butchery” of the US “pacification” campaign.  Except for such apologists of the McKinley and Roosevelt policies, such as Brian McAllister Linn (whose claim to neutrality in his book, The Philippine War 1899-1902, is quite a feat of Olympian hauteur), the general consensus is that the atrocities committed by the invading US army is out of proportion to the resistance of the revolutionary guerillas of the Philipine Republic, even allowing for the desperate measures Filipinos took to retaliate in kind. Of course, it is easy to say that both are guilty. But that is to abandon the search for historical clarity if not some measure of provisional objectivity. Kramer recounts some of the findings of the Senate committee that inquired into the reports of “cruelties and barbarities” earlier revealed through letters sent to newspapers. At one hearing, the testimony of Charles Riley of the 26^th Volunteer Infantry described in detail a scene of “water cure” that he witnessed, but after the ritual of a court martial, the guilty officer Capt. Edwin Glenn was suspended for a month and fined fifty-dollars; in 1919 he retired from the army as brigadier general.

At one hearing. William Howard Taft, head of the second Philippine Commission sent to the islands and first Civil Governor of the Philippines, was forced to admit that “cruelties have been inflicted” and the “water cure” administered, but countered that military officers have condemned such methods. Elihu Root, Secretary of War, excused the cruelties because the Filipino insurgents were guilty of “barbarous cruelty, common among uncivilized races.” One stark leitmotif in this narrative centering on Fagen is the question of civilization. Filipinos were not only an “uncivilized race,” they were savages, barbarous, treacherous, wild devils, and so on. In one Senate hearing, Senator Joseph Rawlins asked General Robert Hughes whether the burning of Filipino homes by advancing US troops was “within the ordinary rules of civilized warfare,” to which Hughes replied curtly: “These people are not civilized” On January 9, 1900, Senator Beveridge already reminded the U.S. public not to worry about the cruel conduct of the war because “We are dealing with Orientals.” This strain appeared again in Senator Lodge’s ascription of “Asiatic” cruelty to all Filipinos. Harvard U philosopher William James accused McKinley’s camp of hypocrisy and cant and said: “God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles” (Zinn 1980, 307).  Systematic extermination of homes and inhabitants occurred in the destruction of Caloocan before Aguinaldo switched from positional to guerilla warfare. The general sentiment of the occupying army was captured by one volunteer: “We all wanted to kill ‘niggers’…beats rabbit hunting…”In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported: “The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog…” (Zinn 1980, 308).

Were it not for a persisting amnesia or selective forgetting in the national psyche, the catalogue of gruesome facts would be a perverse imposition. Aside from Twain, Vidal and others, Gabriel Kolko rendered one of the most cogent reflections on the “enormity of the crime” of force and chicanery accomplished by officers most of whom were veterans of the Indian campaigns:

…Against the Indians, who owned and occupied much coveted land, wholesale slaughter was widely sanctioned as a virtue. That terribly bloody, sordid history, involving countless tens of thousands of lives that neither victims nor executioners can ever enumerate, made violence endemic to the process of continental expansion. Violence reached a crescendo against the Indian after the Civil War and found a yet bloodier manifestation during the protracted conquest of the Philippines from 1898 until well into the next decade, when anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos were killed in an orgy of racist slaughter that evoked much congratulation and approval from the eminent journals and men of the era who were also much concerned about progress and stability at home.  From their inception, the great acts of violence and attempted genocide America launched against outsiders seemed socially tolerated, even celebrated (1976, 287).

Race War

One might venture the proposition that even before the Filipino American War started, it was already a thoroughly racialized conflict. This is no longer news. Historian Richard Welch observed that the attitudes of the invaders then demonstrated “colorphobia,” and the Filipinos to be subjugated were considered “monkey men” and “niggers” (1979, 101). A recent book by Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government, elaborates on what W.E.B. Du Bois observed about the “race questions” of the United and those of the world becoming tightly “belted” together by imperialism. Du Bois identified the US “ownership of Porto Rico, and Havana, our protectorate of Cuba, and conquest of the Philippines” as constituting the “greatest event since the Civil War,” confirming how the space between America “and the islands of the sea” was dissolving, and with it, the former boundaries between the “race questions of the United States, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. He urged the unity of “Negro and Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and Hawaiian,” to struggle for “an America that knows no color line in the freedom of its opportunities” (1997, 102).

Kramer’s book is one of the most sustained exposition of how race and imperial ideology coalesced to produce the exceptionalist politics of US global hegemony, with the conquest of the Philippines as a kind of experimental laboratory for its invention. It rehearses what many previous historians have noted: the racial formations in the US were exported and renegotiated anew in the Philippine scene, with the Filipino savages labeled “niggers,” “gugus” (forerunner of “gooks”), Indians, etc., but with a difference in function. The racial imaginary justified extermination of the enemy race. Though self-limited in its focus on “race” as an amorphous, protean concept, Kramer convincingly demonstrates that on all sides, the US conquest of the Philippines was a “race war” with profound implications that resonate up to today’s thinking about ethnicity, racial relations, and a viable multicultural democracy.

Let us situate Fagen in the context of a “race war” that initially claimed to be a civilizing, benevolent project, but no longer a mission to liberate the Philippines from Spanish tyranny. The US, as Du Bois says, seized this “group of colored folks half a world away….[to rule] them according to its own ideas” (1970, 184). It is certain that Fagen experienced the bitter race hatred that black soldiers experienced when they were in Tampa, Florida, where a race riot began; black soldiers retaliated against drunken white soldiers. Twenty-seven African American soldiers and three whites were severely wounded. The chaplain of a black regiment in Tampa asked: “Is America any better than Spain?…Has she not subjects in her own borders whose children are half-fed and half-clothed, because their father’s skin is black…Yet the Negro is loyal to his country’s flag.” That loyalty was severely eroded and dissolved in Fagen when he landed in the Philippines in 1899 to help carry out a “regime change.”

From the start, African Americans in the media and the leadership of civil-society groups demonstrated strong opposition to the colonial intervention. The ambivalence toward the war in Cuba was replaced with vigorous opposition to the war in the Philippines. As part of the Anti-Imperialist League (founded on October 17, 1899), Du Bois condemned the war as an unjust imperialist aggression, the slaughter of Filipinos a “needless horror.”  The League recalled Fredrick Douglass’ view, enunciated sixty years earlier, that the interests of the Negro people were identical with that of the struggling colonial peoples: “We deny that the obligation of all citizens to support their government in times of grave national peril applies to the present situation” (Foster 1954, 415). In Nov. 17, 1899, the American Citizen, a black paper in Kansas City, Kansas, stated that “imperialist expansion means extension of race hate and cruelty, barbarous lynchings and gross injustice to dark people.” Bishop Henry Tuirner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church called the US occupation of the Philippines an “unholy war of conquest” (Welch 1979, 110). Another newspaper (Broad Ax, Sept. 30, 1899) called for the formation of a “national Negro Anti-Expansionist, Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Trust, Anti-Lynching League.”

On July 17, 1899, a meeting of African Americans in Boston protested the “unjustified invasion by American soldiers in the Philippine Islands.” They resolved that “while the rights of colored citizens in the South, sacredly guaranteed them by the amendment of the Constitution, are shamefully disregarded; and, while the frequent lynching of negroes who are denied a civilized trial are a reproach to Republican government, the duty of the President and country is to reform these crying domestic wrongs and not to attempt the civilization of alien peoples by powder and shot” (The Boston Post, July 18, 1899). Whether Fagen knew or was aware of this sentiment, can not be ascertained for now. But he certainly was aware that in general US troops treated Filipinos as “niggers” who were “therefore entitled to all the contempt and harsh treatment administered by white overlords to the most inferior races,” as a correspondent of the Boston Herald wrote (Schirmer 1971, 21).

Fagen no doubt shared many of the sentiments expressed by black soldiers who felt they were sent to the Philippines to take up “de white man’s burden.” One of them wrote in a letter of 1899: “Our racial sympathies would naturally be with the Filipinos. They are fighting manfully for what they conceive to be their best interests.”  A black infantryman wrote from Manila in June 1901 to an Indianapolis paper: “This struggle on the islands has been naught but a gigantic scheme of robbery and oppression.”  Amid the burning of villages and massacre of supporters of the insurgents in Batangas and Samar, African Americans in Massachussetts addressed a message to President McKinley about how Negroes in Wilmington, North Carolina, “guilty of no crime except the color of their skin and a desire to exercise the rights of their American citizenship, were butchered like dogs in the streets;” and how black men were hunted and murdered in Phoenix, South Carolina,” while McKinley catered cunningly to Southern race prejudice” (Zinn 1980, 312-13).

Lifting the Veil

It was in this environment suffused with racialized exterminist sentiments that David Fagen enters the scene. I cannot describe all the varied and forceful sentiments expressed by African American soldiers and other participants in the war found in letters compiled by Willard Gatewood,”Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898-1902—an extremely valuable primary sourcebook.  As a sample, I cite an anonymous black soldier complained that white troops, after seizing Manila, began “to apply home treatment for colored peoples: cursed them as damned niggers, steal [from] them and ravish them” (Gatewood 1987, 279).  Patrick Mason, a sergeant in Fagen’s 24^th Infantry regiment, wrote to the Cleveland Gazette: “I feel sorry for these people and all that have come under the control of the United States. I don’t believe they will be justly dealt by. The first thing in the morning is the “Nigger” and the last thing at night is the “Nigger”…You are right in your opinions. I must not say as much as I am a soldier”(Gatewood 1987, 257). A black lieutenant of the 25^th Infantry wrote his wife that he had occasionally subjected Filipinos to the water torture (Dumindin 2009). Capt. William Jackson of the 49^th Infantry admitted that his men racially identified with Filipinos but stated that “all enemies of the U.S. government look alike to us…hence we go on with the killing.” Fagen occupied the same position, but he drew a necessary demarcation between his being a soldier for the Empire, and his being an insurgent for an occupied community on the defensive, struggling for national/communal self-determination.

Most often quoted is the statement of Sgt. Maj. John W. Galloway who accused whites of “establish[ing] their diabolical race hatred in all its home rancor in Manila.” He wrote about how white soldiers told Filipinos of “the inferiority of the American blacks—[their] brutal natures, cannibal tendencies” (1987, 253); and speculated that “the future of the Filipino, I fear, is that of the Negro in the South.” As a reprisal and warning to African Americans, the US military accused  Galloway of sympathizing with the insurgents. He was jailed, deported, and discharged dishonorably.

Completely informed of the history of racial conflict in the U.S., the Filipino resistance used what one black soldier called “affinity of complexion,” revealed, for example, by a comment made by a Filipino lad: “Why does the American Negro come…to fight us when we are much a friend to him…Why don’t you fight those people in America who burn Negroes, that make a beast of you?” The Filipino resistance claimed to speak as “black brothers” of African Americans, distributing pamphlets addressed “To the Colored American Soldier” with the appeal:

It is without honor that you are spilling your costly blood. Your masters have thrown you into the most iniquitous fight with double purpose—to make you the instrument of their ambition and also your hard work will soon make the extinction of your race. Your friends, the Filipinos, give you this good warning. You must consider your situation and your history; and take charge that the blood of…Sam Hose proclaims vengeance (Gatewood 1997, 258-59).

Another soldier wrote on Christmas Eve, 1900, to Booker T. Washington: “These people

are right and we are wrong and terribly wrong.” One African American enlisted man learned from his experience that “Filipinos resent being treated as inferor” and thus set “an example to the American negro.”  After surveying the archive of sentiments expressed by numerous participants,  Anthony Powell concludes that throughout the war African American soldiers would be continually plagued by misgivings about their role in the Philippines…Their racial and ideological sympathy for colored people struggling to achieve freedom seemed always to be at war with their notions of duty as American citizens and their hope that the fulfillment of that duty would somehow improve the plight of their people at home” (1998).

One might interpolate here that during the war years, an epidemic of anti-black violence

swept the South. Howard Zinn notes that between 1889 and 1903, “on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs—hanged, burned, mutilated” (1980.  308). In Lakeland, Florida, during that same period, black soldiers confronted a white crowd because they were refused service by a drugstore owner. Du Bois described the outburst of racist violence, such as the lynching of Sam Hose in Newnan, Georgia, in 1899. These and other incidents were known to the Filipino revolutionaries. Despite the Filipino appeal of racial solidarity against white oppressors and the offer of commissions to defectors, there were only twenty-nine desertions among the four regiments of African American regulars; and only nine actually defected to the rebels (Robinson and Schubert 1975, 73). Other researchers cite 20 defectors, seven of them blacks (including Fagen). Various reasons dissuaded them, among others, their long-standing loyalty, the hazards of war, severance of cultural/social ties, the threat of long imprisonment, capture and certain death. Why and how David Fagen surmounted these risks and dangers, remains a persistent subject of speculation, speculators attracted to the personality rather than to the convictions or collective meanings invested in his actions.

Journey to the Liberated Zone

Born in 1875 in Tampa, Florida, Fagen’s early life is unknown. Described as a “dark brown young man with a carved scar on his chin, standing five feet six inches tall,” Fagen  worked then at Hull’s Phosphate Company. At the age of 23, on June 4, 1898, Fagen enlisted in the 24^th Infantry, one of the four black regiments based in Tampa at that time, and was sent to Cuba. Upon its return, Fagen accompanied the regiment to Fort Douglas, near Salt Lake City, Utah, where he was discharged. After his father died, Fagen re-enlisted on February 12 at Fort McPherson, Georgia, where his character was validated as meeting “all requirements.” He trained at Fort D.A. Russell, near Cheyenne, Wyoming, before behind shipped to the Philippines from San Francisco in June 1899.  Immediately after his arrival, he was engaged in a major campaign in the fall of 1899. General Samuel Young led the northeast thrust to Central Luzon, fighting the insurgents near Mount Arayat and then garrisoning key towns in the vicinity. Fagen’s Company 1, together with three others, occupied San Isidro, the principal town of Nueva Ecija province, from which President Aguinaldo fled.

It is said that Fagen encountered difficulties with his superiors. But the cause could not be incompetence since he was promoted to corporal in the months after his arrival at Fort Russell. Reports indicate that he could have been court-martialled for refusing to do all sorts of “dirty jobs.” While a person does not form important decisions based simply on personal discomfort, this adversity may have reinforced that sharpened awareness of how thoroughly racist the war was conducted, with Filipinos regarded as “black devils,” “niggers,” thieves, and other insults. All these converged in that “particular solution” to a dilemma that Fagen selected on November 17, 1899. There is no doubt that his decision to defect was prepared and planned in advance. Assisted by a rebel officer with a horse waiting for him at the company barracks, Fagen cut off his ties with Company I and headed for the guerilla sanctuary.

Subsequent reports describe how Fagen wreaked havoc on the invading army. One veteran recounts how Fagen, in the midst of raging battles, would taunt US solders; during one encounter, he   reportedly shouted, “Captain Fagan’s done got yuh hite boys now” (Ganzhorn (1940,  191). But there was more to it than getting back at white supremacists. Instead of simply escaping to an isolated native community and withdrawing from the conflict, Fagen embraced the revolution with such boldness and energy that no one could be blind to the depth of his commitment to the Filipino cause, especially in the light of  George Rawick’s reminder that Afro-American slaves “do not make revolution for light and transient reasons.”

From November 1899 to September 1900, we have no record of Fagen’s activity as a leader of the Filipino resistance. On September 6, 1900. General Jose Alejandrino, commander of the Republic’s army in Nueva Ecija, promoted Fagen from first lieutenant to captain “on account of sufficient merits gained in campaigns.” His valor and audacity, as well as popularity, were acknowledged by his soldiers who referred to him as “General Fagen.” The New York Times (October 29, 1900) deemed Fagen important enough to cover his exploits, remarking that Fagen was a “cunning and highly skilled guerilla officer who harassed and evaded large conventional American units and their Filipino auxiliaries. From August 30, 1900 to January 17, 1901, Fagen figured in eight clashes with the US army. In one daring raid, he led 150 rebels in capturing a steam launch loaded with guns on the Rio Grande de la Pampanga river and escaped unhurt into the forest before the American infantry arrived.  In two of the skirmishes mentioned, Fagen clashed with General Frederick Funston, the US army’s famous guerilla hunter. John Ganzhorn, a member of General Funston’s elite scouts, recalled confrontations with Fagen whose shrewd tactics led to successful ambushes (Ganzhorn 1940, 190-92; Funston 1911, 380).

A new development alarmed the US military. In February 1901, six members of the 9^th Cavalry regiment deserted and joined the insurgents in the province of Albay: John Dalrymple, Edmond DuBose, Lewis Russell, Fred Hunter, Garth Shores and William Victor. Except for Dalrymple, who died of a fever, the five others surrendered with the other Filipino insurgents. All were court-martialled, only DuBose and Russell were publicly hanged before a crowd of three thousand people on February 7, 1902. Records prove that their execution was deliberately agreed upon by the military to serve as a warning to soldiers not to emulate Fagen. The Judge Advocate General reported to the Secretary of War that the execution of the two black soldiers was necessary because “great injury has been done the United States by deserters from the service, chiefly of foreign birth or of colored regiments, who have gone over to and taken service with the enemy” (quoted in Brown 1995, 171). The other soldier, Fred Hunter was killed while trying to escape; Victor and Dalrymple were sentenced to life imprisonment in Leavenworth. Shores and another soldier from the 25^th Infantry regiment were sentenced to death for entering “the service of the insurrectionists,” but President Roosevelt commuted their sentence to dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay, and imprisonment at hard labor for life (Powell 1998). In May and June 1901, two volunteer regiments of African American troops were shipped home.

Of some twenty deserters sentenced to death, only these two black privates were executed (Robinson and Schubert 1975, 78).  While the insurgency continued for more than a decade, Roosevelt had to terminate that “dirty war” (Boehringer 2008) on July 4, 1902 to allay public sentiment against the war and prevent further desertions.

Birth of a Legend

In March 1901, Funston captured Aguinaldo by devious means, thus emerging as one of the few heroes of the ugly and brutal war. As recorded in his memoirs, Funston’s frustration at his failure to capture or kill Fagen became an obsession, contributing to the rise of a collective phantasy.. Throughout 1901, Funston continued to pursue Fagen around Mt. Arayat—sightings of him were reported by the Twenty Second Infantry in February and April. Rumors of his exploits, stories of his cunning and audacity, led to the creation of a public image, a myth larger than the man—not unlike Nat Turner’s. While the infantry was chasing him in Nueva Ecija, a Manila Times report narrated his visit to a brothel in the capital city, with the following account:

[Fagen] wore a crash blouse, similar to those of the native police, with a broad white trimming such as officers wear. The insignia on the shoulder straps were a paid of Spanish bugles. His trousers were dark in color, neat fitting, and topped a pair of patent leather shoes.  A brown soft felt hat completed his apparel (Feb. 26, 1901).

When two civilians approached him, Fagen supposedly “rose from the chair, placing his foot upon it, and grasping his concealed revolver in his right [hand] and a small sword or bolo in his left.”  His escape from the military cordon around the city is considered “as daring as he is unscrupulous,” He is even reported to have recklessly boarded a troop ship headed back to the United States.

American prisoners of Fagen also repudiated the charges of atrocities and brutalities. At least two of them, George Jackson, a black private of the Twenty-fourth Regiment, and white Lieutenant Fredrick Alstaetter, testified that they were treated kindly by Fagen. Nonetheless, Funston and other officers called him “a wretched man,” “a “rowdy soldier,” “good for nothing whelp,” lacking intelligence because of his “unusually small head,” and so on. Belying these rather malicious dismissals is the gravity with which senior officers like General Adna Chafee (veteran of the ferocious and brutal suppression of the Boxer rebellion in China) expressed grave concern about black turncoats and defectors.  Of the twenty defectors, black and white, who were condemned to death, only two were actually executed: the two black privates noted earlier.  President Roosevelt supported these executions while commuting all other death sentences for other guilty soldiers. The other victim of this drive to persecute disloyal soldiers involved Sergent Major Galloway (already mentioned earlier), also from Fagen’s regiment.  His letter to a Filipino acquaintance condemning the war as immoral was captured in a raid on the Filipino residence and used to judge him as “exceedingly dangerous” and a “menace to the islands,” for which he was jailed, demoted to private, and dishonorably discharged.

Fagen operated as a guerilla commander, persisting in a relentless and protracted struggle against the US army, even when his immediate superior, General Alejandrino, surrendered on April 29, 1901. During the negotiation for his surrender, General Alejandrino asked an American officer if Fagen and two other deserters would be allowed to leave the islands; the answer was negative.  When Alejandrino’s successor, General Urbano Lacuna himself surrendered to Funston on May 16, 1901, General Lacuna also sought amnesty for Fagen.  Funston’s response was not surprising: “this man could not be received as a prisoner of war, and if he surrendered it would be with the understanding that he would be tried by a court-martial—in which event his execution would be a practical certainty” (1911, 431).

Prophecy of An Ending

On March 23, 1901, General Emilio Aguinaldo was captured by Funston.  He accepted US sovereignty and called on his followers to do so. His generals, Lacuna and Alejandrino, soon followed. But not Fagen. It was reported that he left the revolutionary camp with his Filipino wife and a small group of nationalist partisans for the mountains of Neva Ecija. Throughout the year, Fagen was hunted as a bandit, with a reward of $600 for his head, “dead or alive.”  Funston rejoiced over Fagen’s branding as a common criminal, “a bandit pure and simple, and entitled to the same treatment as a mad dog.”  Civilian bounty hunters and civilian law enforcement agencies joined forces in pursuing Fagen.

On December 5, 1901, a native hunter Anastacio Bartolome turned up at the American outpost of Bongabong, Nueva Ecija, with a sack containing the “slightly decomposed head of a negro,” which he claimed was Fagen’s. He also produced other evidences, such as weapons and clothing, Fagen’s commission, and the West Point class ring of Fagen’s former captive, Lt. Frederick Alstaetter. But the military officers who reviewed the report were not convinced, and called the official file “the supposed killing of David Fagen.” And there is no record of payment of a reward to Bartolome. There are two explanations for what happened:  Either Bartolome found Fagen’s camp and stole the evidence he presented, together with the head of an Aeta, a tribe of black aborigines; or Bartolome colluded with Fagen in order to fake his death and thus get relief from further pursuit.  Fagen could then have fled further to live with the natives in the wilderness of northern Luzon where Jim Crow could not pester him.  Shrouded in mystery, Fagen’s “death” becomes the birth of his legendary career in academic minds. On October 30, 1902, a Philippine Constabulary unit recounted their pursuit of Fagen and other insurgents ten months after he had allegedly been hacked to death by Bartolome. The most plausible explanation, assuming Bartolome’s story as fabricated, is that Fagen survived and remained for the rest of his life with the aborigines and local folk with whom he identified.

Our pioneering biographers,  Michael Robinson and Frank Schubert, conclude that Fagen’s rebellion is significant in revealing the “intensity of black hostility toward American imperialism,” a militant act of self-determination that can cross boundaries and seize opportunities anywhere:

[Fagen’s] career illustrates the willingness of Afro-Americans to pursue alternatives outside the caste system when such options become available. Militance does not distinguish him from the civilians who razed Tiptonville, Tennessee. The difference is in the circumstance. The Philippine insurrection offered him a choice similar to the one Nat Turner gave Southampton slaves  and the Seminole wars gave escaped slaves like Abraham (1975, 82).

The editor of the Indianapolis Freeman supplied an obituary to Fagen’s supposed death on December 14, 1901, by attempting to extenuate the “traitor’s death” with the plea that he was a man “prompted by honest motives to help a weaker side, and one to which he felt allied by ties that bind.”

Indeed, the specific historical circumstance inflected individual choice. Unlike the slaves who revolted from the plantations in South America and the Caribbean and formed runaway communities—maroons, cimmarones, quilombos—Fagen joined a community already up in arms against an invading and occupying power. In that process of affiliation, his rebellion from a white-supremacist polity mutated into a revolutionary act. His decision exemplified what Eugene Genovese calls (in his study of how Afro-American slave revolts helped fashion the modern world) a visionary emblem of dialectical transformation: “Ignorant and illiterate as the slaves generally were, they grasped the issue at least as well as others, for their own history of struggle against enslavement in the world’s greatest bourgeois democracy led them to recognize and to seize upon the link between the freedom of the individual proclaimed to the world by Christianity and the democratization of the bourgeois revolution, which was transforming that fateful idea into a political reality” (1979, 135).

Subaltern  Testimony

Before returning to the socially symbolic and prefigurative value of Fagen’s act, I want to cite here the testimony of the Filipino general under whom Fagen served. General Jose Alejandrino wrote a memoir in Spanish entitled La Senda del Sacrificio (The Price of Freedom, published in 1933). He recounts how when he confronted Funston to discuss the terms of his surrender, Funston brusquely demand that his surrender cannot be accepted without his first delivering Fagen, otherwise he remains a prisoner. Alejandrino refused because it would be an infamy since (as he told Funston) if you catch him, “you would be capable of bathing him in petroleum and burning him alive” (1949, 173).

General Alejandrino met Fagen around August 1899 when Aguinaldo was in full retreat.  Alejandrino provides us ingredients for a portrait of Fagen that might flesh out the legend, tid-bits loved by the spinners of our mass media infotainment industry:

Fagen was a Negro giant of more than six feet in height who deserted the American Army, taking with him all the revolvers that he could bring, and who served in our forces with the rank of captain. He did not know how to read or write, but he was a faithful companion. He was very affectionate and helpful to me, going to the extent of carrying me in his arms or on his shoulders when I, weakened by fevers and poor nutrition, had to cross rivers or to ascend steep grades.  The services which he rendered to me were such that they could only be expected from a brother or son.

I had heard narrations of the feats of valor and the intrepidity of Fagan, but his most outstanding characteristic was his mortal hatred of the American whites.….

They told me that when Fagen went with his guerillas, whenever he was on horseback, it was a sign of advance or resistance, but when he got down from his horse, his soldiers already knew that it was the sign to retreat. I asked him the reason for this custom and he answered me that, while advancing in search of the enemy or while fighting he did not want to tire his legs unnecessarily, but when it came to retreating, he had to leave the horse behind because his feet are faster than those of his horse. Besides, he could squeeze himself into and pass places which a horse could only go with great difficulty.

Fagen was very fond of carousals and drinking. In one of his escapades he arrived in a small village on the banks of the Rio Chico of Pampanga. He looked for a guitar and, with some members of his guerilla, be began to drink and to serenade the women of the place.  When the night was already very late, he went to bed in a small hut, sleeping with a companion. After a short while his companion woke him up, telling him that he was hearing footsteps and voices of Americans. Fagen, who was half-asleep, answered him that he was dreaming and that his fear induced him to hear and see visions. Inasmuch, however, as his companion insisted, Fagan reluctantly stood up to peep out of the window, and there he really saw that the hut was surrounded by Americans.  He lost no time in jumping out of the window and, taking advantage of the circumstances that the Americans could not fire for fear of wounding their own men in the dark, he selected the site nearest to the forest and with a revolver he shot his way out and escaped.

Fagan spoke Tagalog very vividly and lived in the camp with a woman. One morning this woman presented herself to me crying and showing one cheek bitten off and saying that Fagen had done it.  I sent for Fagan and asked him what happened.

“I was only dreaming,” he answered.

He related to me that he had dreamed that he was being surprised by the Americans and, not having the intention to be caught alive, he resisted as much as he could with punches, kickings and bitings, but his fury against the enemy had been rained on his woman companion.

When our surrender was effected, I really felt very sorry in having to leave Fagen. I left him some twelve rifles for his defense. Later on, I learned that the Americans put a price on his head and he was assassinated, according to versions, in the mountains of Bongabon ( 1949, 174-76).

After Fagen’s “supposed death” in December 1901, he was still being blamed for inflaming the Filipino resistance, as in the Balangiga, Samar, disaster in September 1901, and the renewed fighting in the other islands. His legendary figure begins to haunt popular memory and civic conscience. We might encounter Fagen again in the persons of African Americans who found themselves in the Philippines when the US army returned to “liberate” the colony from the Japanese occupiers, with the son of Gen. Arthur McArthur leading the forces to liberate the colonized from Japanese tyranny. Their sense of affinity was no longer based on complexion but on shared ideals and political solidarity.

Alternative Interventions

After a hundred years, the situation of David Fagen and six other African Americans who were labeled by the Manila Times as “vile traitors” still await understanding and judgment by the peoples in the United States and the Philippines, as well as by the international community. This topic is still a tabooed subject, too dangerous to handle. Ngozi-Brown reminds us again of their  “extremely difficult situation,” serving as “foot soldiers for a racist ideology in which white Americans characterized Filipinos as they did African Americans as inferior, inept, and even sub-human. When the United States military occupied the Philippine islands, it installed a racist society which alienated Filipino and African American soldiers” (1997, 42).  The official authorities of course have pronounced them traitors and renegades, though one novelist, Robert Bridgman (author of Loyal Traitors) believed that their commitment to American ideals compelled them to resist the immoral course of their country and that a “higher patriotism” prompted them to commit treason (Powell 1998). Can such ambivalence of judgment be maintained? After the war, over 1,200 African Americans opted to stay in the Philippines. One soldier explained why those soldiers preferred to make the Philippines their home and explains why: “To an outsider or one who has never soldiered in the Philippines the question would perhaps be a hard one to answer, but to the initiated the solution is easy and apparent at once… They found [the Filipinos] intelligent, friendly and courteous, and not so very different from themselves” (1901).

World War II gave the opportunity for African American soldiers to “return,” as it were, to the Philippines as part of MacArthur’s “liberation” army.  In his autobiography, Black Bolshevik, Harry Haywood mentions his brief sojourn in Manila, Philippines, where he met a group of revolutionary students and intellectuals with ties to the Hukbalahap, Communist-led anti-Japanese guerillas.  He was told how American troops disarmed these peasant guerillas in the underground who helped in the capture of Manila. Writes Haywood: “They were bitter and sharply critical of MacArthur’s hostility toward the popular democratic movement. His clear intention was to return to the status quo of colonialism” (1978, 526), a return to the days of his conquering father, General Arthur MacArthur, and his notorious “stringent” and “drastic” measures under General Order 100, punishing non-uniformed guerillas as criminals (Linn 2000, 213).

During the same period, Nelson Peery, bricklayer and political activist, participated in World War II as a soldier in the all-black 93^rd Infantry Division. He details the momentous political awakening that he experienced in the Philippines in the first volume of his autobiography, Black Fire (1994). Peery made contact with the same groups and confirmed Haywood’s observation.  The entire apparatus of the US State, its intelligence agencies and armed forces, had mounted a ruthless plan to crush the national liberation movement as they did forty-five years before.  Peery noted that MacArthur quickly moved to re-establish a fascist, privileged officer corps in the Philippine army to protect the investments and control the islands for the United States.”  Peery recalls how the activists knew the story of David Fagen and how the “US army would never have allowed this talented black soldier to become an officer. Captain Fagen, with his black comrades, fought to the death for Philippine independence” (1994, 277).

Peery goes on to indict the hundred thousand US  mainly Southern white soldiers, who slaughtered over a million Filipinos, introduced the water cure, burning of villages, killing of civilians as part of the “scorched earth” tactics, while they “routinely brutalized the black troops.” Nevertheless, he goes on: “the black Twenty-fourth and the Twenty-fifth Infantry murdered right along with them. The Philippine people would not surrender. In 1914, black troops were sent in to crush the Moro rebellion. This time, however, the black soldiers refused to fight their black Filipino brothers. The people of Mindanao never forgot that” (1994, 278).

Peery’s testimony arrives at this eloquent judgment that, in my view, delivers a powerful rhetorical thrust that is quite unforgettable and prophetic at the same time in terms of what is going on right now in the Philippines:

If the Americans had never committed genocide against the Indian; if they had never incited wars of annihilation between the native peoples of this land; if there had never been a Trail of Tears; if America had never organized and commercialized the kidnapping and sale into slavery of a gentle and defenseless African people; if it had never developed the most widespread, brutal, exploitative system of slavery the world has ever known, if it had never held carnivals of torture and lynching of its black people; if it had never sundered and fractured and torn and ground Mexico into the dust; if it had never attacked gallant, defenseless Puerto Rico and never turned that lovely land into a cesspool to compete with the cesspool it had created in Panama; if it had never bled Latin America of her wealth and had never cast her exhausted peoples onto the dung heap of disease and ignorance and starvation; if it had never financed and braced the Fascist dictatorships; it if had never pushed Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the jaws of hell—if America had never done any of these things—history would still create a special bar of judgment for what the American people did to the Philippines (1994, 276-77).

Although Peery did not join the Huks (the Filipino communist guerillas) then, he may be said to have traced Fagen’s footsteps in forging solidarity with Filipino revolutionaries opposing US neocolonialism, imperialism mediated through the native client oligarchy. A politics of linkages and reciprocity afforded a new internationalism, a global perspective, a synthesizing”double-consciousness.” Kevin Gaines observes that the Spanish-American War and the Philipine campaign accomplished little in the way of improving African American social conditions since political disfranchisement persisted, culminating in the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906. However, Gaines believes that African American soldiers, even within their contradictory position in an imperialist war and within a segregated army, provided symbols of heroism and “a boost of morale” (Interview PBS). The fusion of the struggle for civil rights at home and self-determination for colonized peoples abroad constitutes a paradigm-shift from the dualistic polarity of isolationism and messianic nation-building, from the social-Darwinistic and evolutionistic stance of Anglo-Saxon, Eurocentric triumphalism.

Theorizing Elective Affinities

The most incisive formulation of this transformation may be found in Harold Cruse’s reflections on his passage through World War II as a soldier radicalized by contact with the anti-colonial movement in the French colony of Algeria.  Chiefly responding to Albert Camus’ existentialist theory of metaphysical rebellion in a 1966 essay published in Sartre’s review, Le Temps Moderne, Cruse’s project of conceptualizing the black “idea of revolt” germinated from his part in the war effort. It was a unique catalyzing experience that connected fragments of his world picture into some kind of concrete universality. Cruse’s perception of the global arena pervaded by revolution and counter-revolution crystallized from a reflexive rationality:

The Army was the beginning of my real education about the reality of being black. Before the war, being black in America was a commonplace bore, a provincial American social hazard of no particular interest or meaning beyond the shores of the Atlantic. It was simply a national American disability—a built-in disadvantage to us all that we had to put up with, similar to a people that has to endure the constant imminence of droughts, floods, famines, or native pestilences. Race in America is her greatest “natural calamity,” but it has today become internationalized into a global scandal because she is so rich in everything else, including democratic pretensions. A global war has made all this a global fact. But it is also a fact that it took this global war to initiate a personal metamorphosis that has culminated in what I am in 1966, as an American black (1968, 169).

Cruse’s metamorphosis parallels Fagen’s, except that Fagen and his fellow African Americans were plunged into a war of colonization, while Cruse was engaged in the fight against fascism and reaction. But Cruse’s realization of his collective plight and the ethico-political imperatives required to resolve the division between his abstract citizenship and his humanity, between his racialized self and his potential species-being, resembles Fagen’s. It approximates what Frantz Fanon would refer to as the passage from the racial/national sensibility to a liberatory social consciousness transcending national boundaries and other socially constructed differences. This is not the occasion to elaborate on this Fanonian theory of collective self-determination.

I would like here to add the insight of C.L. R. James on how the revolt of the colonized subalterns in Africa, Latin America and Asia, joining the insurrection of the racially oppressed peoples/nations (African Americans, indigenous communities, etc.), could act as the “bacilli” or ferment that would mobilize the proletariat and usher the beginning of world revolution against capitalism.  Whether this is still applicable today or not, remains to be discussed. In any case, Fagen’s metamorphosis prefigured what Cruse and others went through as their minds entered the stage of world-history, in a moment when the Owl of Minerva (to use Hegel’s worn-out trope) has not yet awakened from the night of the problematic, duplicitous Enlightenment and its  contradiction-filled “civilizing mission.”

From Solidarity to Community

After more than a hundred years of Americanization, however, the attitude of the “natives” would no longer be hospitable to Fagen, or even to Haywood, Peery, and their kind. Filipinos have chosen to be on the other side of the Veil, have exchanged their identity for that of their erstwhile colonizers. That is, they have chosen to be “white” in body and soul, a testimony to a century of McKinley’s not-so-“Benevolent Assimilation.”  The majority of Americanized Filipinos seems to confirm the fructifying power of what scholar David Joel Steinberg called “the U.S. policy of self-liquidating colonialism, in which the ‘little brown brother’ [Taft’s patronizing epithet] was permitted to achieve independence when he grew up, a maturation process that took forty-five years” (1982, 50).  Nonetheless, Filipinos have celebrated some other personalities of foreign descent, including two Spaniards who served as generals of the Philippine army (Generals Manuel Sityar and Jose Torres Bugallon), and a Chinese (Gen. Jose Ignacio Paua), but Fagen has so far eluded such recognition. The reason is simple: the Philippine elite, vulnerable to blandishments, corruption, and patronage, has absorbed American Exceptionalism and perpetuated the Veil, fearing that to elevate Fagen to heroic stature would offend the fabled “special relations” with Washington and stir up the guardians of White Supremacy. Maybe the presidency of Barack Obama will begin to change this century-old prejudice and finally give proper homage to David Fagen and his comrades who, even in the face of certain defeat, cast their lot with their brothers and sisters in the Philippine revolution.

Allow me to quote, in conclusion, two sentences from W.E.B. Du Bois “Address to the Nations of the World” issued in 1900, about the time when Fagen together with the Philippine insurgents were resisting the US military’s relentless advance in the plains of Northern Luzon to capture General Aguinaldo, the moment when Fagen separated himself from this occupying army. Du Bois wrote: “[T]he modern world must remember that in this age when the ends of the world are being brought so near together the millions of black men in Africa, America, and the Islands of the Sea, not to speak of the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere, are bound to have a great influence upon the world in the future, by reason of sheer numbers and physical contact… Let the nations of the world respect the integrity and independence of the free Negro states of Abyssinia, Liberia, Hati, and the rest, and let the inhabitants of these states, the independent tribes of Africa, the Negroes of the West Indies, and America, and the black subjects of all nations take courage, strive ceaselessly, and fight bravely, that they may prove to the world their incontestable right to be counted among the great brotherhood of mankind” (Bresnahan 1981, 193-94).

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Haywood, Harry.  1978.  Black Bolshevik.  Chicago: Liberator Press.

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Colophon Books. -###

_______________________

Copyright 2009 by E. San Juan, Jr.

Prof. E. San Juan, Jr.

117 Davis Road, Storrs, CT  06268

<philcsc@gmail.com>

MELISSA ROXAS’ AFFIDAVIT ON HER TORTURE BY ARROYO MILITARY

A FFIDAVIT ON THE TORTURE OF MELISSA ROXAS, U.S. CITIZEN, BY STATE SECURITY AGENCIES IN THE PHILIPPINES REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES) QUEZON CITY……………………) s.s.

 

I, Melissa C. Roxas, of legal age, a Citizen of the United States of America, and temporarily residing at Quezon City, Philippines, after having been sworn to in accordance with law, do hereby depose and state that:

1. I am a graduate of the University of California San Diego with a BS in Animal Physiology and Neuroscience and a BA in Third World Studies with a Minor in Health Care and Social Issues;

2. I applied for an exposure program in the Philippines being the home country of my parents with Bayan – USA of which I am a member for the purpose of gathering materials for my writing project being also a member of Habi Arts, a community based artist organization based in Los Angeles, California;

3. Bayan – USA endorsed me to Bayan –National and Bayan – National endorsed me to Bayan – Central Luzon which toured me around the provinces and towns of Central Luzon and on April 2009, Bayan – Central Luzon endorsed me to Bayan – Tarlac where I was to join with their members at La Paz, Tarlac to conduct an initial survey of the place for a future medical mission;

4. I brought along with me my camera with a memory card, an external hard disk, a laptop, an Ipod, a journal, a blood pressure sphygmomanometer, a stethoscope, thermometers, medicines, my watch, and a wallet with money in the amount of Ps. 15,000.00;

5. On May 19, 2009, while resting from a survey at a friendly house, the owner of which gladly accepted our request that we rest at his house and while watching a noon time Television program, at around 1:30 p.m., I and my two companions, John Edward Jandoc and Juanito Carabeo, heard a banging on the front door and a voice asking that the door be opened. I immediately went to see what was going on and found about 15 men in civilian clothes armed with high power rifles and wearing ski masks or bonnets surrounding the house and in a little while, the door was forcibly opened and armed men swarmed into the house coming from the front door and the back door and ordered us to drop face flat on the ground;

6. I did not obey them and I wanted to stand up to protest the intrusion but an armed man held my head and forced it down pushing me to a squatting position then pushed me on the ground. I asked them why they were doing this to us and I saw that everybody in the house was on the ground flat;

7. They attempted to tape my mouth but I was able to wrench it and they wanted to handcuff me but I resisted and about five of the armed men were ganging up on me, holding my hands and my legs but I continued resisting them and shouting to the owner of the house, “Kuya, help me.”

8. I then started to shout my name, repeating it again and again, I was punched repeatedly at my right rib cage while my two companions who were already blindfolded and taped at the mouth were herded to a blue van about 15 meters from the house door and I with all my strength tried to stop the armed men from putting me into the van and they instead started to drag me bruising and wounding my arms and my legs wounding severely my left knee cap while I continued shouting my name;

9. When they started to force me inside the van via the side door, I locked my feet on the door sidings and they needed more than 5 men to push me. But then, they finally were able to push me inside the van; I was made to sit between two of the armed men and was immediately blindfolded and handcuffed to the back. But they could not tape my mouth because I was already retching and vomiting;

10. When the van started moving, my head was put down so that I could not be seen from the outside;

11. After more than an hour, we stopped and we were told to step down and because I was still retching, they made me sit or half lie on a kind of lounging chair made of bamboo slats and at that point, I did not know where my two companions were;

12. After more than 5 minutes sitting down in that bamboo lounging chair, I was brought into a room with a screen metal door and the room sounded like it had a kitchen as there was running water and I could hear cleaning activities but I was still vomiting and I heard a command was made to a woman to clean my vomit and a man asked me whether I was pregnant but I did not answer him;

13. Another man who I felt was in command asked me if I knew why I was there and I answered him that I knew my rights and that I demanded for my lawyer and he laughed telling me that in the said place there was no availing of a lawyer (walang abogado-abogado dito) and told me that “malinis ka naming nakuha at alam mo naman bakit ka nahuli?” (we got you smoothly and you know why you were captured?)

14. Then he told me that I was a member of the CPP-NPA and I retorted that I was not and I demanded for my lawyer again and I felt that there were other men inside;

15. I was made to enter a room which I felt was a jail cell because as I entered the room, they had to open a door with iron bars and for my two days stay inside that cell, I sensed that my bed was a single wooden bed without mattress, with a length of 6 feet and I was always made to lie down with my head positioned on the wall where the iron barred door was located and at my foot was a low partitioned space where a toilet bowl was and after it was a wall where there were holes serving as windows. I discerned that in the room before entering the jail cell was a bunk but I do not know the whole contents of that room;

16. When I was made to enter the jail cell, I was still blindfolded and handcuffed to the back and I remained in such position until the dawn of the next day when they changed the position of my hands to be handcuffed to the front and because of which my wrists were severely cut and bruised;

17. It must be stated here that throughout my abduction, I was always blindfolded and handcuffed even in my sleep except for those few times when I was made to take a bath;

18. During my two days there, I heard construction activities – blowtorching, hammering and the construction bustle – and these stopped in the late afternoon and I also heard gunfiring as though in a firing range and planes taking off and landing and it was loud and I could also hear goats bleating;

19. Later in the evening, I was brought out of my cell and I was confronted by two burly men in ski mask or bonnet and they shone their flashlights on my face and after a short while, they put me back into my cell and said, “ punta tayo sa kabilang gate.” (let’s go to the other gate); 20. I slept light that first night, determined to always know the time, and when morning came, I was interrogated and no breakfast nor lunch was given to me and I was asked repeatedly if I knew why I was there and was told by them that I was abducted because I was a member of the CPP NPA and I also repeatedly told him that I have rights and that I demanded for my lawyer and then he told me that even a year will pass, no lawyer would be seeing me and told me repeatedly that it was because of people like me who are the costing the government so much money and people like me are the ones who are making it difficult for the government, so that they are resorting to what they are doing and asked me who my lawyer was and I told him that it was Atty. Romy Capulong and he seemed to be stymied by my answer;

20. He continued asking me questions which I was not listening to and I was not answering and after 30 minutes of that he stopped and left;

21. After a while, another person entered and interrogated me along the same lines of questions and I did not listen and did not answer but instead told them that I knew my rights and that I wanted my lawyer and about 15 minutes of that, he left and I was already feeling hungry but no food was forthcoming and in the afternoon, many people were going in and out of the room and in and out of my cell and in the evening, I was made to eat and I ate little and then one of the men asked me if he could bathe me and I of course refused but there was this woman who was kind of assisting the men in attending to me and who I came to know later as Rose and she directed me to take a bath and brought me to another building (passing through a sometimes grassy and sometimes graveled pathway) where I saw through my blindfold two double decked beds and I assumed that it was a female barracks and there was a bath room with a jalousie typed window and I took a bath with one hand free from its cuff but with a hanging cuff on the other and my eyes free from the blindfold;

22. I was brought back to my cell blindfolded again and handcuffed at the front and I was made to lie down and after a short while, the iron barred doors were banged making clanking sound and I was taken aback and two men entered my cell with one of the man calling the other, “Tatay”, and a man pulled my cuffed hands up raising me on a sitting position and then a fist struck me at my upper sternum and it hurt and then a thumb was pressed strongly to my throat (I heard somebody saying “huh!…huh…huh.” ) choking me, making me suffocate for quite a time and when he released the pressure I gagged and I coughed and then he struck me with his fist on my left jaw ringing my ears and numbing my jaw and they were telling me, “Ang tigas ng ulo mo. Sasagot ka na sa mga tanong.” He kept repeating the questions and his pressure on my throat and fists to my jaw. An hour after, they left. But before they left, he said, “matigas ‘to. Barilin na lang natin” and I prepared for the worst;

23. It must have been very late night or early dawn, when he came back to me and he dragged me to the first room and I sensed that there was a kind of leader of the group who kept on whispering on that person who was manhandling me and two other men and the man who got me from my cell asked me, “handa ka bang mamatay?” and I answered, “Opo” and then he told me, “bago namin patayin ang isang tao, mapapaihi at mapapatae muna namin siya”;

24. The whispering man kept whispering questions to be asked and the manhandling man kept asking the questions and I told him that I have rights and that I was demanding for my lawyer but when he asked me about my name, I told them but when they asked other questions, I did not answer and he would hit me on the chest strongly and I would lose breath and gasped for air after and then he would press my throat with his thumb and say “Huh…huh…huh!” and I would gag and then he would hit me on my jaws, ringing my ears and numbing my jaws and he repeated this and added another one by holding my head with his two hands and banging the back of my head repeatedly and each time it hit the wall, I would see a flash of white bright light and ringing in my ears and again the pressure to my throat with the “Huh … huh…huh.” And saying to me, “ayaw mo pa din magsasalita” and then punched me in my rib cage and I crumpled but the other men forced me up. This torture continued and every time I crumpled the other men would force me up.

25. I was having a streaming thought that I was going to die there and then, they held my feet and my hands down and doubled up plastic bags were pulled down on my head and face and closed on my neck and I started to suffocate and I could not breath anymore and I was seeing white and thinking I was going to die and then he released the hold and I could breath but I was faint and weak (lantang lanta) and he patted me in the back and several men carried me to my cell;

26. Several hours later and when it was light, a person entered and although I was still very weak and lying down he started to interrogate me again and I said that I was tortured and I knew my rights and he told me that it was not his responsibility if there were other men who would torture me but I forced myself to sit up to face him and he was asking me what was my position in the organization and I was not answering and he told me, “akala mo ba may magagawa ang Canadian Government sa iyo?” and he called me, “Maita” and I told him that I was not Maita;

27. This was May 21, 2009 and the interrogation continued non-stop with one interrogator replaced by another after every hour and I was not given lunch although, there was a brief respite from the questions during lunch but it continued after lunch with that man who kept on his way of threatening me by saying, “Huh…huh…huh.” and this interrogation continued to the night and I remembered one interrogator who introduced himself as Dex and he talked about religion and asked me to return to the fold (“bagong buhay”) telling me that they were “kasangkapan ng Diyos para mag-bagong buhay ang mga rebelde” and I told him that I do not believe him and told him that the God I knew did not condone torture and violence and I was tortured and he gave me 24 hours to decide whether I would return to the fold;

28. After Dex, the religious interrogator, the next interrogator had a Visayan accent and talked about the evils of communism to me and kept on banging the glass on the table and after an hour of lecture, he told me, “maghintay ka na lang mamaya,” and I expected then for the worst to happen and I anticipated that I would be tortured physically again and I called for Rose with the plan that I would talk to her to delay the expected torture they would do to me and I talked to her long into the night and thinking that the only way to mitigate the torture was to play that I was returning to the fold, I told Rose that I would like to return to the fold but despite that after my talk with Rose another interrogator came in and it was this time I heard that there were other units who would like to borrow me and there was no dinner given to me;

29. I had again a light sleep and on May 22, 2009, at the break of day, the interrogation started and intensified and I was brought to another building to what I perceived to be opposite of the female barracks with the jail cell as the fulcrum and I was given some breakfast and a late lunch at the building, I felt I was in a room used as an office and I was facing a panel of interrogators and I sensed that Dex was one of them and that beside me was Rose and another man and aside from the questions and the lecture on anti-communism and religion, they were asking me to sign a document but which I refused but I asked for Dex and went along with the Religion talk;

30. Because of my refusal to sign, I was brought into another room (I heard the voice of Juanito Carabeo when I entered the room) where a bright and hot light was shone on my face and the interrogator started to ask me questions and while asking questions he gripped and pressed my right shoulder hard and it was very painful because there was a dislocation and he knew I had that dislocation and when he was telling me that I was hardheaded he pounded his pointer finger on my forehead and it hurt and then suddenly, he changed his tone and tune and told me he believed that I wanted to return to the fold and we started talking about literature and asked me about magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and he even gave me a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, Love in Times of Cholera, and the Bible of the King James Version and I told him that I was in the area because I was looking for and gathering materials for my novels and that was why I joined the Bayan – USA and applied for an exposure program with Bayan – Central Luzon and Bayan – Tarlac volunteered for that initial survey at La Paz, and that I believed in God and I have to insist on that to go along with the Religious talk of Dex and he told me that they were interested in knowing how I got involved;

31. I was made to drink an orange soda and after a while I started to become groggy and another interrogator came to replace the literary interrogator but Dex was coming in and out of the interrogation and I started to talk about my family, my parents and my address in the United States and I was told that my name was in the Order of Battle and that I told them that I wanted to cooperate in order to return to the fold and later, Dex was again the interrogator and talked to me about religion and it was there that I felt so sleepy and before I could fall asleep I was transferred to the female barracks and was made to sleep in the floor but I was now given a mattress, a blanket and a pillow and I slept heavily and woke up when the light was already bright;

32. This was May 23, 2009 and I got angry with myself for losing control of the time and by sleeping long and deep and the interrogation continued trying to pry from me information of people I visited when I was with Bayan Central Luzon and Bayan Tarlac but I refused saying that I don’t want to put other people in harm’s way and an interrogator who introduced himself to me as RC took over and he talked about religion like Dex and said that they were merely tools of God for making rebels return to the fold and I told him that my God do not torture people and he told me that those who tortured me came from the SOG, the special operations group, and they were responsible for the “pagdukot” and for what happened to me and he asked me, “let us start from zero, ha?…ha? …ha?” and I realized he was the one who was torturing me and he continued to ask me how I came to get involved with Bayan – USA and I told him about my interest in the third world and poverty therein and I started to search the internet and I came to the site of Bayan – USA and that got me started. Sometime in the afternoon, they forcibly took a photo of me and looked for the mole on the left side of my face;

33. On this day, the interrogators were Dex and RC and they rotated between themselves interrogating me and I was playing along the religion line and finally I was told that their boss would be making the final evaluation of whether I was really returning to the fold and I slept lightly on the night of the 23rd and in the morning of the 24th, I was interrogated by the a person whom they called Boss and addressed as “Sir” and the interrogation lasted for the day and I answered their questions about me but not about other people and the Boss told me that if I did not cooperate I would be borrowed by other units whose personnel wouldn’t be as nice as Dex and RC and this interrogation and conversations continued until the night; the Boss also said to me that if I saw him, I’d be surprised and that he knew a lot about me and who I was;

34. At night, RC approached me and told me that I would be going home the next day but I did not believe him and I slept lightly on the night of the 24th; at early dawn of the 25th, I was awakened by Rose who told me to bath and I was given a sim card for use in contacting them and I was given a slip of paper where a new email address RC created for me was written with the password __________and I was given a bag where biscuits were placed and the books that were given were also placed and also the handcuffs used on me and Rose gave me her blouse and shoes for me to use in going home and RC told me that, “hindi tayo magkaaway, gusto ko magkaibigan tayo, ha” and he told me to beware of Karapatan because it will tell you to go against us and will talk with your family and that I should not let Karapatan talk with their family, otherwise, something will happen and that they would like to talk with my uncle and after which, I boarded a different vehicle than that of the van that brought me there as it was more spacious and I was seated on the center with Rose on my left and RC on my right with the driver and a passenger on the passenger side of the front seat and I sensed that there were about more than two people at the back and that I could hear communications with another car which was in convoy with us ordering not to drop me in front of our house in Quezon City as there was an activity but the car I was riding passed by and stopped in front of our house and I was asked to lift my blindfold to take a look at the house and to affirm whether it was my house and I confirmed and my blindfold was placed back and the car turned around and finally I was dropped at the corner nearest the house and I was told to face where I was dropped and to count up to one hundred before walking to my house and RC told me that they will be monitoring all my actions and something bad will happen to me if I do not cooperate that made me more afraid and I did what they told me after they took off my blindfold and I was dropped on the sidewalk and I was facing a wall and I did not move around even just to turn my head as I was very afraid that they would get me again and I did not move even after a count of a hundred until my phone rang and it was RC who instructed me that I could already walk which I did and arrived home to my uncle’s warm and relieved welcome;

35. But my travails did not end there, RC continued to talk to me through the phone where the Sim card he gave was inserted and I was so afraid to go out believing that they were just around monitoring me that I just stayed inside the room not even going out of that room and because of that my cousin bore upon me to throw the bag and the sim card to the trash which I did but the books, the clothes of Rose, the handcuffs, the slip of paper containing the email address RC created for me and the password I retained thinking of filing a case against them;

36. I was traumatized and the fear is still in me and I execute this affidavit to state the truth of the foregoing facts and for purposes of filing a Petition for a Writ of Amparo and Habeas Data to protect me and my family and my uncle and his family now and in the future and for possible other legal cases. IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I hereunto affix my signature this 2th day of May 2009 at Quezon City, Philippines. MELISSA C. ROXAS SUBSCRIBED AND SWORN TO BEFORE me this 29th day of May 2009 at Quezon City, Philippines by affiant who showed to me her U.S. Passport no. 443307364, with expiry date on June 1, 2018 and issued at the US Embassy Manila.-##

DEMAND THE INVESTIGATION OF THIS OUTRAGEOUS AND TERRIBLE CRIME! THE ARROYO MILITARY RECEIVES MILLIONS OF TAXPAYERS’ DOLLARS EVERY YEAR. DEMAND OBAMA AND THE US CONGRESS AND JUSTICE DEPARTMENT TO RENDER JUSTICE TO MELISSA ROXAS BY PUTTING THE CRIMINALS ON TRIAL.–Philippines Cultural Studies Center

NICK JOAQUIN: An Introduction

Celebrating the Virgin and Her City:
AN INTRODUCTION TO NICK JOAQUIN

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

What, then, is revealed in the quarrel between Remus and Remulus is the way in which the city of man is divided against itself, whereas, in the case of Cain and Abel, what we see is the enmity between the two cities, the city of man and City of God.
-St. Augustine

Life should be changed because the state of the world will be changed . . . . We shall not be what we have been, but we shall begin to be other.
-Joachim of Floris

Justice cannot exist where all the best things in life are held by the worst citizens; nor can anyone be ham where property is limited to a few, since those few are always uneasy and many are utterly wretched.
-St. Thomas More

WRITING AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY his now classic autobiography (The Education of Henry Adams, 1900) where the Philippines is a place from which he was, in a manner of speaking, “glad to escape,” Henry Adams marvelled at the dynamo in the Paris Great Exposition of 1900 as a “moral force,” a “symbol of infinity.” In that incandescent metropolis, Adams “had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound attention, yet he could not apply them,’ leaving him perplexed, “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.” He reflects that in America the dynamo of the classical and medieval past—Venus and Virgin—neither “had value as force—at most as sentiment.” The author of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1913) muses further:

The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely assentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? . . . She was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies . . . this energy was unknown to the American mind….
All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres . . . . Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn men’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done.1

Eighty-three years later, Adams’ compatriot Harvey Cox, theologian at Harvard University, upholds anti-Virginal secularization as “the unappreciated offspring of the prophets, including the prophet of Nazareth, who railed against religiously sanctioned injustice with as much fervor as any anticleric.”2 But since times have changed, Cox appreciates more than other postmodernist thinkers the persistence of the female image of the divine in a culture such as Mexico where Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Christian version of the Aztec fertility goddess, Tonantzin, becomes the site of a raging battle between the Church hierarchy and the masses of the faithful. Popular and learned consensus testifies that the Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, “La Vida,” continues to radiate a dynamic force replicated in liberation theology and in the fiestas of popular religion in Latin America and the Third World at which Henry Adams would have marvelled today even as he becomes anxiously sensitized to the tremors of an impending nuclear apocalypse. Without in any way adducing direct influence or indirect acquaintance, Nick Joaquin uncannily offers an inverted, more precisely, dialectical refraction of Henry Adams’ historicist schizophrenia.

On first reckoning, Joaquin’s world view is polarized into two apparently divergent but ultimately complementary tendencies. First, the mythologizing and intrinsically aestheticizing tendency to reconcile opposites and to explain complex historical events by a metaphysical and idealizing schema whose most densely charged chronotopic figure is the Virgin of the Rosary enshrined at Sto. Domingo church. Practically the entire thematic and symbolic strategy in Joaquin’s fiction and drama gravitates around, and is permeated by, the figure of the Virgin Mother. This is the realm of utopian extrapolation. Second, the crudely mechanistic and technological determinism that informs such discourses as “Culture as History,” “History As Culture,” “Technology: The Philippine Revolution,” and numerous magazine articles. Of course, this is a synoptic view made up for exigent analytic purposes, ignoring the chronology and circumstantial matrices of each text. Logically, if the proposition expressing the first tendency means what it says, then we can characterize the organizing principle, the controlling vision, of Joaquin’s art at its best as a postmodernist reaffirmation of utopian desire, taking the term “utopian” here to signify the collective social project of humanizing and naturalizing Henry Adams’ dynamo by establishing its organic linkage with the feminine dimension of the psyche and cosmic life; and at its worst, an apologia—that is what the inaugural key text in the Joaquin canon, “La Naval de Manila,” essentially is—for patriarchal institutions and hierarchic power.

I submit that “Nick Joaquin” as the authorial simulacrum generated by an ensemble of texts embodies the multiple historic contradictions of contemporary Philippine society, reproducing these contradictions, inflecting and conjugating them in highly idiosyncratic ways, modifying and altering them, in the same process that the class divisions and the multilayered mode of production—that is, the social relations of production in the total Philippine formation—powerfully shape and overdetermine the ideas, forms, conventions, metaphors, and language structured in the body of texts ascribed to “Nick Joaquin.”

Contextualized thus, “Nick Joaquin’ is both an aesthetic problem to be posed and analyzed, and equally an ethicopolitical problematic reflecting our own national predicaments, sufferings, traumas, struggles, dreams and aspirations: what Filipinos are, have been and will be, insofar as beauty and freedom—following Schiller’s insight—share a common destiny and are inseparably linked in praxis.

From his first important essay “La Naval de Manila” written in October 1943 to the most recent dramatic piece The Beatas dated 1975 and Cave and Shadows published in 1984, the central figure of the Virgin (and mother-daughter combinations) deciphered as the symbolic condensation of the utopian and unconscious stands out with all its contradictory implications and resonance. In Christian mythology, as Alan Watts and Mircea Eliade point out, Mater Virgo signifies “the Prima Materia prior to its division, or ploughing, into the multiplicity of created things.” As Stella Maris (Star of the sea; mare = Mary), the Sealed Fountain, “the immaculate womb of this divine font,” she is the water over which the Spirit moved in the beginning of time.3 She takes on the identities of the Axle-Tree of the World, with the serpent at its roots and bearing alike the fruits of death and life (see “The Legend of the Virgin’s Jewel”); the Rose and the Lily, flowers symbolic of the receptive aspect of man’s spiritual transformation; as the Chalice or Grail which receives Christ’s lifeblood; as moon-goddess; as Space, “the Womb in which the Logos comes to birth”—a process captured by the breathless periodic and hypotactic syntax of Joaquin’s style; and in the thick, embedded phrasing of the conclusion of “La Naval de Manila.”

So the Virgin then stands for matter, elemental substance (matria, matrix, mater); maternal womb of the universe, chaos, abyss of dark and formless matter cognized as feminine in contrast to Spirit symbolized by air and fire cognized as masculine. The Virgin is the original womb of creation, analogous to Maya in Hinduism and Buddhism; that “no-thing” which, when divided by the Logos, becomes separate things.4 The theme of the imagination acting on matter (the body, earth, water) ramifies also into the necessity of sacrifice so as to give birth to the new, with the new “fallen” creation redeemed in turn by a repetition of the sacrifice-history as cultural ritual ingeniously rendered in A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, in the two novels, The Beatas, and elsewhere:

Thus it is prophesied of Mary, “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,” since in all the great traditions creation is always through a sacrifice; the multiplicity of things is the One dismembered and divided. By yet another sacrifice the One is remembered—“Do this in re-membrance (anamnesis) of Me”—for the original Unity is restored when the sacrifice is repeated, because the repetition is a recollection of what was done “in the beginning.”5

In that brief description of the myth by Alan Watts is secreted Joaquin’s conception of history illustrated in 0 his writings. Sacrifice, dismemberment and mutilation of what is whole, denoting the power of the Word or Logos, is what leads to the primal Mother’s emergence, thus subordinating her (by “the Child on one arm”) to the masculine Creator. History consequently appears as a manifestation of male power.

What has happened in actual history is the suppression of this thoroughgoing materialism, so dangerously heretical to the imperial post-Constantinian faith, by the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin (distinguished from Eve the sinner) since she is “the Servant of the lord,” her Son. Simone de Beauvoir comments on this fateful reversal: “For the first time in human history the mother kneels before her son; she freely accepts her inferiority. This is the supreme masculine victory, consummated in the cult of the Virgin—it is the rehabilitation of woman through the accomplishment of her defeat.”6 That treacherous circle—a virtual overthrow of the primacy of the body, matter, production—is marked by Joaquin’s ethical dualism in “La Naval” between matter (tribal custom and taboo entailing “dreaminess, “ “our incapacity for decisive thought or action”) and consciousness, in this case the medieval Christian military fanaticism in subduing heretics, Calvin, Islam.

Founded on the assumption that the pre-Spanish aboriginal inhabitants of the archipelago had no “history” for the simple reason that they had not benefited from the saving impact of Christianity, deprived of “this awakening of the self, this release and expansion of the consciousness, “Joaquin’s thesis posits that Spanish colonial domination is responsible for our national identity: “The content of our national destiny is ours to create, but the basic form, the temper, the physiognomy, Spain has created for us.”7 Note, however, that not only the form but also the significance and content are supplied by the traditional paradigm epitomized here by the exemplary cult of patron saints. How is this tradition formed? By the commemoration of events such as the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and the Spanish naval victory of 1646 against the Dutch, both epochal successes attributed to the intervention or intercession of the Virgin. A sleight-of-hand maneuvering occurs here when those two events are juxtaposed so that by spatial contamination and shift, the Queen of the Most Holy Rosary traverses chronological distance and geography to save the “tiny Rome growing up by the Pasig” from “Calvin’s shadow.’ The content of Philippine destiny is predicated on the Spanish military victories to safeguard the colony from other European powers, sacrifices marked by feasts such as La Naval, “which is purely ours,” says Joaquin. While the text argues that Spain imbued the Filipino nation with self-consciousness, a sense of history and autonomy, that consciousness depends on its sacrifice to a perpetual repetition of an originary, archetypal event: “There is indeed no Philippine town or village, however humble, that does not feel peculiarly itself, as belonging to that spot of ground and no other, because of some patronal cult traditional to the locality, some holy image there venerated and investing the site with legend and association.”8 This mode of spatializing reflections dictated by the submerged or suspended materialism of the Virgin cult refutes Joaquin’s thesis: “If Lepanto was its last act, our colonial history may be termed as oriental epilogue to the miracleplace of the West.’ Here rears the head of rampant “Orientalism” (Edward Said’s term) that dogmatically affirms Western primacy by subordinating/marginalizing the Other: where are the natives who are supposedly creating the content of their national destiny?9

In describing the Image, Joaquin states that she “is arrayed as a royal lady at the court of the Felipes’ unlike the dark Virgin of Guadalupe; her majestic queenly bearing, however, conflicts with the subsequent detail: “the face is individualized, is warmly human, and was surely chiseled by the Chinese catechumen.” Surrounding this image, by metonymic exfoliation, is a wealth of childhood memories rendered in sensuous imagery evoking communal solidarity so that, on closer analysis, it is not the ethicopolitical and ideological stakes—the war between heathen fate and Christian freedom—that haunts the text but time and death itself, the “despair” coincident with self-consciousness, that very same isolated free will that threatens to shatter the unity of time and space. And when we recall Joaquin’s fear of the “blood’s memories of the communal tribe-house” encroaching and predetermining all action, his fear of “those submerged longings for the tight, fixed web of the tribal obedience” as contrasted with “the pain and effort of responsible and personal existence,” then we see how the ironic twist of textual labor unleashes the political unconscious and releases the repressed in those intensely remembered tribal feasts and celebrations of the two Navals as an evocation of childhood innocence devoid of the “pain and effort of responsible and personal existence,’ more poignantly visible in the ecstatic surrender of a self-possessed Cartesian rational ego to the tumultuous mind-blowing music of the procession and the fiery blaze of vision, the conscious discrete self dissolving utterly in that amorphous oneiric space on which is inscribed the Prima Materia undercut here at the last moment by the idealizing phallic will: “Oh, beautiful and radiant as an apparition! — the Presence at Lepanto, Lady and Queen and Mother of Manila, the Virgin of the Fifteen Mysteries.”

That the text of “La Naval” and its technique of montage splicing metaphor, synecdoche and metonymy distorts the more fluid and plastic reality of the historical past, homogenizing the Dionysian materia in an Apollonian structure (to adapt Nietzsche’s terminology), and ironically subverts its thesis of unveiling the truth, is now more familiar to a contemporary audience rehearsed in the deconstructive theoretical play of Derrida, Foucault and other poststructuralist critics. In The New Science, Vico suggests that “men are naturally impelled to preserve the memories of the laws and institutions that bind them in their societies.”10 Opposed to Nietzsche’s nomadic impulse, however, is Vico’s insight into history as shaped and reproduced by human actions, not by intervention of a sacred transcendental power; actions which are repeated, filiative and genealogical. Such repetition coalescing reason with raw experience provides the means whereby humans represent themselves, disclosing in the act an objective, supraindividual rationality: “Men mean to gratify their bestial lust and abandon their offspring, and they inaugurate the chastity of marriage from which the families arise. The fathers mean to exercise without restraint their paternal power over their clients, and they subject them to the civil powers from which the cities arise.”11 This historical-materialist purposiveness, the dialectic of consciousness and mode of production, may be said to animate the tensions in all of Joaquin’s fiction and also situate the ironic discrepancy of form and intention I have briefly alluded to in “La Naval’ in its roots: the actual lived contradictions of class, gender, race, etc.

Unfortunately it is not Vico’s problematic of repetition and of mind as historical memory capable of infinite articulation and change that has instigated Joaquin’s excursions into pop anthropology but the reductive technicism or scientistic determinism of Marshall McLuhan, abetted by the obscurantist fatalism of Oswald Spengler. And this is the hyperbolic irony of all, considering Joaquin’s quite correct insistence in rejecting the notion of “timeless” essences and his positive though somewhat ambiguous emphasis on existential becoming, on a dynamic and creative view of cultural appropriation, on metamorphosis, in his treatise “Culture as History.”

Although now changing the rhetorical tactic of “La Naval” into a more empirical and outwardly scientific recasting of the basic argument that the Spanish introduction of tools and the Faustian spirit (strange epiphenomenon of sixteenth and seventeenth baroque!) in 1521 and 1565 forged the “basic outlines” of Filipino identity, Joaquin’s essay “Culture as History” reduces “culture” into tools and technological sophistication which, rearticulated via McLuhan as “communication,” makes possible not only the Asianization of the Filipino but also his maturation as citizen of the modern world. The birth of the Filipino is categorically dated to 1565 after which “we can be nothing but Filipino,” and by Filipino is meant adobo, pan de sal, ati-atihan, Moriones, tropical gothic and baroque—in other words, an aggregate total or accumulation of practices empirically observed in specific times and places.12

With this massive accumulation of media—the wheel, plough, road, etc.—Joaquin finally locates the “sense of history” in the mediating institution of craft guilds or communities of technicians and artisans sharing the same knowledge, skills; such craft mastery, he speculates, “may have contributed to the formation of a national consciousness.” So it is this “sense of social solidarity” that Joaquin postulates as the mediating agency or vehicle of our unification as a nation composed of various regional and ethnic groupings, allowing him in a subsequent essay, “History as Culture,” to rehash the now fallacious contention that it was the elite or educated middle strata (ilustrados) and their ilk, who were singlehandedly responsible for creating a distinctly Filipino culture—an embarrassingly naive chauvinism anathema to the multiethnic and multiracial nationalist movement today involving Igorots, Moros, atheists, naturalized Filipinos, and others.

What remains disguised in Joaquin’s idiosyncratic program of rearguard apologetics for the Christianization of the native, notwithstanding appreciations of the heathen elements syncretized in folk festivals zestfully described in “The Santo Nifio in Philippine History,” “A Theory on the Sinulog,” and especially in Almanac for Manilenos, is the fundamental episteme or problematic which, as I have suggested above, is prefigured by the symbolic richness of the Virgin cult.

Confronted with the profound temporality and alienation of modern existence, Joaquin realizes that the devaluation of the Goddess-technical knowledge, Logos, cannot but be masculinist will-is temporary; her disappearance is explained by Orthodox doctrine as a falling asleep (dormitio) and by Roman Catholic teaching as the Assumption of Mary-her elevation to heaven, bypassing death. She has temporarily relocated in another space, temporarily exiled if you will, but engaged in frequent incursions, showing forth in unexpected sites, speaking and communicating. This Marian figure of space lays the groundwork for conceiving a modality of time which has been ascribed (by Julia Kristeva and others) to a specifically female subjectivity: “repetition” as experienced in gestations, natural cycles of recurrence; and “eternity” or monumental duration, cosmic temporality. The two modalities conjoined trigger a hallucinatory jouissance that drowns linear consecutive clock time. Kristeva notes how the Virgin incarnates and sanctions this experience of cosmic, mystical time which in essence can only be textualized in space: “One is reminded of the various myths of resurrection which, in all religious beliefs, perpetuate the vestige of an anterior or concomitant maternal cult, right up to its most recent elaboration. Christianity, in which the body of the Virgin Mother does not die but moves from one spatiality to another within the same time via dorrnition (according to the Orthodox faith) or via assumption (the Catholic faith).”13

One can elucidate the narrative and parabolic function of Nenita Coogan’s body and her mysterious death vis-à-vis the epiphany of the earth-goddess and her avatars in Cave and Shadows, and the mother-daughter polarity in The Women Who Had Two Navels in the light of Marian temporality characterized by the experience of time metamorphosing into space. In a note to “The Art of Ancient Egypt,” Joaquin betrays this antinomic consciousness when he mistakenly equates Egyptian art’s urge to deny mortality by equating “the will to endure” with “history.”14

The most elaborate virtuoso performance ofjoaquin’s diacritical sensibility where a precapitalist epistemology of space and time operates to program the style and structure of the text is Almanac for Manilenos. Using the calendar convention of amalgamating discordant facts and incompatible topics for utilitarian purpose, Joaquin superimposes a cross-referential analogical unity on a vast encyclopedic catalogue of material through the device of astrology. Immediately the empirical and the supernatural are yoked together in a metaphysical conceit reminiscent of baroque poetics, each planetary or astral sign lending intelligibility to the montage of otherwise discrepant, incongruous, trivial or indifferent data. Thus, for the month of January, the commentary opens with a headnote detailing the physiognomy of people born under the horoscope sign—such headnotes serving as a figured bass, or dominant chord, to the composition. Time is filled with a succession of information: iconography of Janus, the primitive rites of passage, the chimera as oxymoronic emblem, the event of the Japanese occupation in January 1941, descriptions of downtown Manila in the past, the feast of the Nazarene in Quiapo followed by the feasts of the Sto. Niiio in Tondo and elsewhere, a meditation on the etymology of place-names, a note on the 1872 Cavite uprising tied,,N,,ith a fiesta for La Virgen del Carmen, and finally a retrospective lament on the decline of Bilibid Viejo. Take another example, the month of May which begins (after the astrological headnote) with an account of the Battle of Manila Bay in May 1898, followed by notes on May Day festivals in England, May fiestas in various city districts, a note on the emerald, the legend of the Santacruzan, the fall of Corregidor, followed by Bonifacio’s execution, a description of Sta. Ana and then of Marikina, of Chinese Mandarins in Manila, and finally a description of indigenous Maytime rituals centering on the earth-goddess and the Virgin cornucopia, anatomy, Borges’ Library, Joycean palimpsest-the Almanac codifies for Joaquin the semiotics and grammar of the quintessential Filipino experience.

Unlike its genre, this almanac suspends the utilitarian and fetishizes the simultaneous. Addressed specifically to Manilefi6s, it intends to synthesize past and present happenings under the hegemonic sign of the city, a city vaporized into impressions, auras, fashions, cliches and personified by folk heroes and celebrities, a metropolis (no longer Intramuros but sprawling Metro Manila) that Joaquin celebrates less as locus of events than as a figure of the conjunction of linear/chronological time and cosmic/repetitive time—a symbol then of what for him is a project addressed to the Other: the always deferred sacramental constitution of Filipino subjectivity.

But what is fascinatingly unique and symptomatic in the contrivance of this project is the experimental handling of the almanac as a religious calendar of festivities crossed with that typically modernist invention, the newspaper and illustrated weekly with their unrelenting, rigorous flattening out of everything—the petty, the accidental, the numinous—into exchangeable counters. But in Joaquin’s almanac, old news is always new; and the recent never gets obsolete as it oscillates in the general circulation of the ephemeral and the cosmic, all the antipodes and contraries fused in the simultaneity of a frozen mosaic. This experience of reading the almanac, subtly effecting a decentering of the subject, corresponds to Joaquin’s notion of the world citizen in “Culture as History’: “Shouldn’t we rather recognize that each person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all the epochs of man; and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different epochs?”15

Now, the model of the unintentionally oxymoronic and levelling effect of the newspaper exercises its appeal for Joaquin because it is the unprecedented textualization of the modern city in the age of industrial capitalism, a textualization comparable with the polysemous and analogical texture of Christian art and philosophy but only insofar as it can be subsumed within an ideology already surpassed by the logic of the expanded reproduction of capital. Can the Virgin and the Dynamo be wedded together in fruitful coexistence, as Joaquin strives to do in the Almanac and elsewhere? Can the Faustian spirit (Goethe’s symbol of the ruthless hustler of capitalist property-values) which Joaquin idolizes as the legacy of 1565 (another bizarre hybridization!) bejoined as the loving consort of the Great Mother Goddess hymned in the entries for May and October in the Almanac?

Such questions Joaquin has probably answered when, at the end of his discourse “The Santo Nino in Philippine History,” he apostrophizes the Holy Spirit as “the heavenly dynamo.” One extraordinarily illuminating Approach to this pervasive antinomic temper of Joaquin’s art and thought, which I have tried to formulate elsewhere as the inescapable predicament of the organic intellectual of the backward-looking but fiercely independent Filipino petty bourgeois class crushed by U.S. monopoly business but horrified by the resurgent masses of workers and peasants, can be derived from the incisive distinctions between the classical/feudal matrices of time and space and those of industrial capitalism proposed by Nicos Poulantzas
in State, Power, Socialism.

Poulantzas explains that the spatial matrices of ancient and feudal societies share common features stemming from precapitalist relations of production and the social division of labor: continuous, homogeneous, symmetrical, reversible and open.  Instead of differentiation and hierarchy, the geometric topographical orientation reproduced in the political organization of the polis allows slave and master to share the same space:

The points at which power is exercised are replicas of the sovereign’s body. In fact, it is this body which unifies space and installs public man within private man: it is a body with no place and no frontiers. All roads lead to Rome in the sense that Rome is at every point of the sovereign’s moving around…. [What is outside, the barbarians, belongs to a non-site or no-land.]
Both the towns and feudal demesnes or fiefs were open and turned out, through a number of epicentres, towards that umbilical centre, Jerusalem. As Marx pointed out, the relations of production were such that religion played the dominant role in feudal social formations; it was directly present in the forms of the exercise of power and it patterned space by setting the seal of Christianity upon it…. As in Antiquity, people do not change their position: between the fiefs, large villages and towns, on the one hand, and Jerusalem and its diverse earthly incarnations on the other, between the Fall and Salvation, there is no break, fissure or distance. Frontiers and such intermediary points of demarcation as walls, forests and deserts refer not to a distance that has to he crossed in order to pass from one segment to another (one town to another), but to crossroads of a single route. The pilgrim or crusader—which is what every traveler is after a fashion—does not actually go to the holy places and Jerusalem, because these are already inscribed in his body. (This is also the case with Islam.) The body -politic of each sovereign incarnates the unity of this space as the body of Christ-the-King, and space is marked out by the paths of the Lord.16

In contrast, the spatial matrix of capitalism produces “the serial, fractured, parcelled, cellular and irreversible space which is peculiar to the Taylorist division of labor on the factory assembly line.” Thus a territory like the Philippine archipelago can only become national by means of, and in consonance with, the power of the capitalist State apparatus.

Following Poulantzas’ characterization of these two opposed spatial matrices, we can see that underlying the textual strategies of Joaquin’s fiction and drama is the organizing category of the medieval/feudal spatial matrix colliding or interpenetrating with that of the capitalist spatial matrix, an occurrence typical of the unevenly developed Philippine formation. To put it another way, the figure of the Virgin as the harmonizing principle of the city is made to reconcile what is reversible and homogeneous with the successive fracturings, gaps, breaks, closures, frontiers and segmentations of modern urban experience.

In a previous article, “From Intramuros to the Liberated City: Salvaging the Aesthetics of the Polis” (included in my book Crisis in the Philippines), I attempted a sketchy mapping of Joaquin’s use of the city as thematic content and organizing technique based on the binary rhetorical antithesis of metonymy and metaphor, the paradigmatic and synchronic. Let me offer supplementary qualifications here. In The Women Who Had Two Navels, the experience of the city is dispersed, symmetrical, reversible, ultimately equated with the polymorphous feminine. The situation of Paco Texeira, the object of the agon between the Vidal women and the outsider, exemplifies this production of space: “By the time he met the senora de Vidal he had become deeply interested in Manila and was ready to be interested in any woman who most piquantly suggested that combination of primitive mysticism and slick modernity which he felt to be the special temper of the city and its people” (p.27). Opposed to elevated Hong Kong, the’lerusalem’of Aguinaldo’s exile and the site of Connie Vidal’s hallucinatory redemption (her virginal “assumption”), the city opens out to the countryside which it incorporates as overlapping utopian prefiguration: “the mountains, and the woman sleeping in a silence mighty with myth and mystery—for she was the ancient goddess of the land (said the people) sleeping out the thousand years bondage: but when at least she awoke, it would be a Golden Age again for the land: no more suffering; no more toil; no rich and no poor.” What the novel superbly enacts is the fabled dialectics of Christian “free will” and politicogeographical determinisms in a surface where all movement unfolds with reversible directions, so that the spiritual impasse and psychological blockages dissolve when the old Monzon experiences a rapturous home-coming—he has not really moved his place or position because history is inscribed in his body—where the city and the Virgin (now indigenized) occupy the horizon and fulfills time: “Here he was, home at last. Behind him were the mountains and the Sleeping Woman in the sky, and before him, like smoky flames in the sunset, the whole beautiful beloved city” (p. 223).

In the post war years when Joaquin conceived and wrote his first novel, the national territory had just been formally separated from the U.S. empire but the weakness or false autonomy of the State as well as the dependent nature of the comprador-landlord-bureaucratic ruling bloc did not promote deterritorialization: the separation of the direct producer from his means of labor (peasantry; petty commodity and artisanal production), the persistence of personalistic bonds and kinship/familial ties, archaic religious practices. These material conditions, coupled with the 1949 victory of the Chinese workers and peasants which serves as the terminus ad quem of the 1899 Filipino-American War (Battle of Tirad Pass, etc.), underpin the expressive-realist structuring of the novel and its nostalgic clinging to the voice of the authoritative narrator still anchored to a stable, mythical world view.

By the eighties, when Joaquin completes his second novel Cave and Shadows, the peripheral underdeveloped formation has entered a crisis in which the great urban insurrections called “First Quarter Storm” of 1970 serve as prelude to the liberation of the city by the solidarity of individual solitudes (the people) and a new reterritorialization. Authoritarian manipulation of space and time now mocks feudal practices and fosters the duplicities of transnational domination. In ideology and program, the fascist dispensation shows all the traits that Poulantzas attributes to modern totalitarianism: “separation and division in order to unify; parcelling out in order to structure; atomization in order to encompass; segmentation in order to totalize; closure in order to homogenize; and individualization in order to obliterate differences and otherness.”17 What is at stake are certain liberal institutions and Enlightenment principles justifying laissez-faire enterprise now grown obsolescent with the avid transnational drive of profit accumulation and made precarious with the internal competition among the developed nations and the intensified rivalry between the U.S.-led bloc and the “socialist” sphere in the era of late capitalism.

With the collapse of the traditional liaisons and fraternizing between outsiders and insiders (between Paco and the Monzons, between Macho and the Vidals, and the adversarial ethos they represent)-a mutation dramatized in “Candido’s Apocalypse” and “The Order of Melkizedek”—the traditional categories and norms suffer a cataclysmic upheaval so that the conceptual coordinates of reversibility, homogeneity, symmetry, continuity and repetitiveness lose relevance. The ideals of national self-determination and the possibility of real historical change, and the question of who is going to articulate them, now occupy center stage in the struggle of class and sectoral forces, of the national-popular will against the moribund power bloc and imperialist hegemony.

In this light, Cave and Shadows may be read as a belated response to the crisis in its structuring of time shifts and the choice of a detective-mystery thriller convention, contraposing the temporal-spatial matrices of the ancient and medieval order to the capitalist transformation of psyches, lifestyles, criteria of values and tastes, and traditions. The symptoms of the city’s displacement are clear with the deterritorialization of the mag’or protagonists: Jack Henson resides in Davao and returns to it after his ordeal and pilgrimage, Alfonso Gatmaitan is mayor of a suburban town where the cave is found, the Manzano mansion “collapses” with the breakup of the clan. These comprise so many telltale signs that the capitalist temporal matrix consubstantial with its social division of labor and relations of production is overthrowing the archaic and feudal, a transitional moment in which the conflict between the Manzanos and Gatmaitans (representing distinct social classes or fractions thereof) may be read as representations of the former, and the mythical-historical archive projecting the goddess in her various manifestations (Nenita Coogan and the Ginoong Ina as dei ex machina?) serve as a poetic figure for the latter. In parts 2, 4, 6 and 8, time moves backward and forward in a reversible and continuous sequence, so that whatever privileged moments occur in those flashbacks are absorbed in eternity (Christianity) or chance (archaic societies). Governed by a concept of time as eternal recurrence, the unfolding chronicle of the legendary fertility goddess contains no events in the strict sense, and moves in a circular direction; the past is always reproduced in the present, the essence is manifested in the here and now: “The present is included in the origins, chronology remaining a repetition of the genesis, if not actually a genealogical transfer.’ One can say that this novelistic drive to trace the origin of a sequence or progression testifies to a scheme to wrest an original omniscience belonging to God.

Once again, Poulantzas offers us a heuristic anatomy of feudal ideology applicable to our critical analysis of Joaquin’s literary mode of production:

Over and above the dependence of temporalities on the “natural time” peculiar to essentially agrarian societies (seasons, work in the fields, and so on), what matters is the temporal matrix underlying the agricultural, artisan, military or clerical times, that appear as so many singular times. While each of these involves certain datings, the various chronologies are not ordered throughout times that are divisible into equal segments; and nor do the various moments have a numerical frame of reference. These chronologies refer instead to a continuous time which, placed under the aegis of religion, appears as a time of eternity punctuated by second meanings, acts of piety, and belfry-chimes inserted into the rhythm of the mass. Rooted in this temporal matrix, a linear materiality of time does, of course, come forth as distinct from the cyclical materiality of Antiquity: history now has a beginning and end, located between the creation and the Last judgment. But it is still a present time: beginning and end, before and after are fully co-present in the constant essence of the Divine. Whether it is a question of immutable truth or of progressively revealed truth, and whether individual salvation is predetermined or not, all that is ever involved is a repetition or bringing-up-to-date of the origins. Here where the irreversibility of time is a mere illusion, to reach for the end is always to regain the beginning.18

Simultaneity of before and after, past and future distilled in the present, is what exactly characterizes the Almanac’s textualization of time and the city, the reversibility of scenes in “Guardia de Honor,” “May Day Eve,” “Three Generations,” A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino; the knowledge or enigma that crystallizes in Jack Henson’s mind as he tries to pursue the origin of his dilemma; the entrance/exit to the labyrinth where Nenita Coogan’s body or its simulacrum lies entombed, etc. Finally, the present and future rejoin the mythical past when the renegade Christian and the pagan priestess reenact their roles through their “degraded” surrogates Pocholo Gatinaitan and Ginoong Ina in Cave and Shadows.

When the city in this second novel is eclipsed by the deterritorializing process in which the revivalist impulse and nationalist activism begin to challenge the centralizing function of the church itself and its rituals, Joaquin is compelled to draw on the Virgin figure and her chthonic energies (expressed in the popular religion surrounding Ginoong Ina) to counter the atomized, fracturing and reifying forces of bureaucratic capitalism and its differential, cumulative, irreversible temporality. This compensating mechanism seeks to enforce a conception of history as something not made but commemorated, the present as reconcretization of the past; history as recollection or unfolding of genealogies, the past spreading like an echo into the present while it unceasingly foreshadows that future which will meet up with the beginning in an endless circulation. There is no history for Joaquin in the sense of progressive evolution, an inherently bourgeois perspective. Likewise, as Poulantzas states, “pre-capitalist territories have no historicity of their own, since political time is the time of the prince-body, who is capable of extension, contraction, and movement in a continuous and homogeneous space.” For the prince-body, substitute the Virgin Mother and the earth as fields of inscription, of textualization and hermeneutics for Joaquin.

It seems that to preserve and sustain the archaic and feudal matrices of time and space in a period, especially after the Second World War, when the classic function of the city as “the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship,” as the historian Lewis Mumford explains; where “the mind takes form” has become eroded, Joaquin in Cave and Shadows, felt the need to reconstruct the subject-positions for Filipinos that he had outlined in his previous writings and, in Jack Henson’s decentered or “castrated” position, broach the possibility of recovering a primordial but now lost symbolic site of community and authentic existence. I believe that Joaquin is in general conducting a futile salvaging operation, a rearguard battle against the powerful forces of the consumer capitalist market and its “specular” Faustian individualism that he sometimes extols. These forces, according to Mumford, effectively destroyed the time-space episteme or frame of reference incarnate in the medieval city: “The Protestant doctrine of justification by Faith and the doctrine of Divine Election came in with credit finance and the rise of the self-perpetuating urban patriciate: the visibly elect, the manipulators of intangible values…. The validity of the universal Church was denied; the reality of the group was denied; only the individual counted on earth as in heaven: nominalism or social atomism.

Assuming that historical mutation of urban function, the Manila of Cave and Shadows can be interpreted as the space where phallocentric will has driven the feminine underground, exiled the Virgin into myth or the archives, and now desperately tries to manipulate the tortuous course of events. But the narrative undermines that order, subverts the sequential, arrow-flight time of the plot and the ratiocinative detective-knower, and eventually opens the masculinist logic of the proairetic code to the pressure of feminine modalities: repetition, cyclic rhythms, recurrence, cosmic sense of unboundedness, the vertigo of hallucination, dreams, rage and the shock of terror unleashing jouissance. Think, for instance, of the disorienting textual “madness” and dislocating carnival excess found in the description of Connie Vidal’s car accident in chapter 4 of The Woman Who Had Two Navels (pp. 183-84), or the freakish weather and the fury of the elements in Cave and Shadows. The repressed returns avenging …

Caught in roughly the same inexorable antagonisms between the secularizing traffic of business and the archaic structures in our psyches, Charles Baudelaire, regarded by all as the greatest lyric poet of urban modernism, acutely grasped the desanctification process in the “moving chaos” of everyday life in the city. His response of cosmic irony (in Paris Spleen, for example), however, does not validate orthodox piety or a fashionable bohemian aestheticism. As Marshall Berman and others have demonstrated, Baudelaire perceived the possibility of heroism and discovery of pleasure in the modernization of public urban space, delineating primal scenes of poetic vision amid dangerous traffic whence works of art characterized by the modernist style of “undulations of reverie, the leaps and jolts of consciousness” are born.20 Baudelaire’s counterpastoral modernism, unlike Joaquin’s, embraces the city as a locus of contradictions bereft of myths, into which the poet hurls himself to be renewed by its anarchic energies, by the sudden leaps and swerves of life in its labyrinth of kaleidoscopic streets and boulevards.

This is not to deny that Joaquin also exhibits a profound Baudelairean fascination for the city, for its mixture of beauty and despair, terror and ecstasy; but his interest focuses not on its perpetual novelty-the endless metamorphosis of market values in a commodity economy but on what is repeated, reversible, continuous and symmetrical. The so-called baroque texture of Joaquin’s language results from the deep inner contradiction in his art between the ‘Faustian” (a term misapplied to acts of free will) hero and the Virgin, between archaic-medieval and bourgeois orientations. While the closures of the earlier texts show a bias for a traditional orientation (first announced in “La Naval,” “Popcorn and Gas Light” and reworked in recent anthropological excursions), I would stress that the resolutions in “The Order of Melkizedek” and Cave and Shadows betray an uneasy, troubled, bifurcated sensibility. Could it be that this mythopocic almanac-maker has been affected by that exuberant outburst of the Filipino people in 1970 reclaiming the streets of “the ever loyal and noble city,” an explosion that evokes scenes of the “festival” of the oppressed: the Paris Commune 1871, Petersburg 1917, Barcelona 1936, Paris 1968, and so on? This “festival” of the subalterns, the denizens on the edges and margins, the underclasses, erupted in Philippine history only once for joaquin: in the 1896 revolution and the subsequent war against U.S. imperialist aggression. But in Cave and Shadows, for the first time, the people-as-nation surfaces through the cracks and fissures of mythical and Establishment reality, a multitude of urban-rural solitudes that seem to presage a long-awaited regenerating apocalypse. In approximating Baudelaire’s allegorical vision of “the heroism of modern life” in his essays and fiction, Joaquin assumes at last a genuinely prophetic stance which can be and ought to be integrated into a libertarian, ecumenical cultural politics. On the other hand, I think it remains a debatable issue whether or not Joaquin’s exaltation of the Virgin’s aura (”aura” connoting utopian plenitude and wholeness) can justly be appreciated only as a form of commemoration which Walter Benjamin defines as “the secularized version of the adoration of holy relics…. In commemoration there finds expression the increasing alienation of human beings, who take inventories of their past as of lifeless merchandise …. Relics come from the corpse, commemoration from the dead occurrences of the past which are euphemistically known as experience.”21 The succeeding chapters hope to contribute to a more dialectical analysis and interpretation of Joaquin’s mimesis of that aura and commemoration in his short stories, poetry, plays and two novels.

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NOTES

1  The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 383-89.
2  Religion in the Secular City (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 170. See also Cox’s earlier books, The Secular City (1966) and, for a revaluation of festivity and fantasy, The Feast of Fools (1969).
3 3  Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (Boston: Beacon, 1968), pp. 107-13. See also Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (New York: Harper, 1960), pp. 155-230.  Joaquin evinces knowledge of “Mariolatry” in Almanac for Manilenos (Manila: Mr and Ms., 1979), pp. 118-20.
4 Watts, p. 108.
5 Ibid.  On the notion of history and the sacred, see Michael Harrington, The Politics at God’s Funeral  (New York: Harper, 1985), pp. 132-37.
6 The Second Sex (New York: Grove, 1952).  De Beauvoir is seconded by Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1973), pp. 90-92.
7 La Naval de Manila and Other Essays (Manila: Alberto S. Florentino, 1964), p. 30.
8 Ibid., p. 28.  Of relevance are these historical resumes: Carmen G. Nakpil, “A History of Maynila,” The Philippines Quarterly (March 1976), pp. 3-5; Teodoro Agoncillo, “The Last Years of Intramuros,” Archipelago (1975), pp. 15-22.
9 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon 1979).  A critique of U.S. “Orientalist” discourse on the Philippines may be found in my Crisis in the Philippines: The Making of a Revolution (South Hadley, Mass: Bergin & Garvey, 1985).
10  Quoted in Edward Said, Beginning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 203.
11 Quoted in Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 111.
12 Nick Joaquin, “Culture as History,” The Manila Review 3 (1975), p. 13.  Except for the elaborate enumeration of tools, etc., inspired by McLuhan’s reductive technologism, this long essay conflates the basic ideal of “La Naval de Manila” and other later pieces collected in Discourses on the Devil’s Advocate and Other Controversies (Manila: Cacho Hermanos, 1983).
13 Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” Feminist Theory, ed. Nannerl O Keohane, et al (Chicago, 1982), p. 35.
14 “The Art of Ancient Egypt,” The Philippines Quarterly (December 1960), p. 25.
15 Joaquin, “Culture as History,” p. 25.
16 Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power and Socialism (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 101-3. Cf. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 1-12.
17 Poulantzas, p. 107. On spatial politics, see Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 239-56.
18 Poulantzas, pp. 108-9.
19 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, 1970), pp. 71-72. See Gideon Sjoberg, The Pre-Industrial City (New York: The Free Press, 1960), pp. 327-28: “The periodic religious ceremonies, in which a large segment of the community may participate, are one of the few mechanisms the city possesses for integrating disparate groups in an otherwise segmented community.”
20 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 142-66.  On the city as fesival, see Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Harper, 1971), pp. 122-24, 20506.
21 Quoted in Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 73.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

E. SAN JUAN  heads the Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA He was recently visiting professor of literature and cultural studies at the National Tsing Hua University and Academia Sinica fellow in Taiwan. He was 2003 professor of American Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Among his recent books are RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press); WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell University Press); US IMPERIALISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES (Palgrave);  IN THE WAKE OF TERROR (Lexington); CRITIQUE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: LESSONS FROM ANTONIO GRAMSCI, MIKHAIL BAKHTIN AND RAYMOND WILLIAMS. A new book, TOWARD FILIPINO SELF-DETERMINATION, is due for release this August from State University of New York Press.

This essay is Chapter I of San Juan’s out-of-print book SUBVERSIONS OF DESIRE: PROLEGOMENA TO NICK JOAQUIN published in 1988 by the Ateneo de Manila University Press. It is still the only substantial materialist reading of Joaquin’s oeuvre up to now; its scope and depth remains unparalleled.

ASIAN AMERICAN DERELICTION, SELF-DECEPTION, SERVILITY

ASIAN AMERICAN DERELICTION & SERVILITY:

With reflections on Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle and Bienvenido Santos’  What the hell for you left your heart in San Francisco

By E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University

The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a poduct of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory, therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.

—ANTONIO GRAMSCI, Prison Notebooks

After the precipitous collapse of financial giants like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Merrill Lynch and other US banks and the October carnage in the global stock market,  US finance-capitalism’s substance seems to dissolve rapidly into shadows. US finance capital, once unimpeachable, is suffering a rapid slippage not into Derrida’s vertiginous abyss of textual undecidability but into bankruptcy. How are the humanities and literary studies, specifically that “peculiar institution” called Asian American Studies, impacted by this epochal and now traumatic event? Before we can answer our individual progressive community’s challenge of how to “understand imperialism as a haunting presence,” post-9/11 and in the “age of Obama”– indeed, the “history of the present” shock-and-awe of an unprecedented crisis, we need to review why Asian American literature–to refer tentatively to a discursive fabrication–seems unable to transcend its paralyzing conceptualization as a plural unstable ethnic identity, despite its imagined or hypothetical foundation in centuries-old civilizations (China, Japan, Korea). This paper rehearses and evaluates the key theoretical schematics and initiates a pedagogical critique of two Filipino American novels as an example of an alternative to the status quo.
For this modest academic exercise, it is not necessary to invoke the legacy of the pre-Columbian past to revitalize “the exhausted tropes of solidarity and coalition” because such tropes–except for a brief period during the popular-democratic upheavals in the sixties–never appealed to the “political unconscious” of each specific “Asian” group undergoing the “labor of the negative,” by which I mean the ordeal of their normative and routinized exclusion, exploitation, inferiorization, stigmatization, and destruction by the white-supremacist polity and its hegemonic apparatuses in the domain of the State and civil society. The rubrics of transnationality, citizenship, immigration and globalization are the symptomatic indices of our contemporary predicament under the shadows of Empire.

Orientalizing the Buffer Race

As the Vietnam quagmire deepened in 1966, sociologist William Petersen declared the Japanese Americans “a model minority,” rescuing them from the trauma of the internment years. A decade after, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior appeared in 1976, hailed as a breakthrough for Asians. After the US debacle in IndoChina and the eclipse of the Civil Rights struggles, Newsweek  in 1982 headlined a leading story “Asian-Americans: A Model Minority” (Kitano and Daniels 1988, 51). This is the year when Vincent Chin, a Chinese American mistaken for a Japanese in Detroit, was killed by two white workers. The gospel of neoliberal globalization, also known as “the Washington Consensus,” took off with a retooling of methodological individualism in “rational choice theory” and officially sanctioned Establishment multiculturalism. To maintain the hegemonic common-sense of a racial hierarchy, the U.S. dominant bloc requires a “buffer race” to split the toiling majority, keep blacks visible but subordinate, and thus deflect class conflict by preserving the civil-society consensus of white color privilege (Gran 1999). To preserve the status quo, the identity of the white working class needs to be defined by race, not by class consciousness.
Before the ascendancy of the global village of multinational corporations and its administered pluralist ethos in the 1970s, the U.S. elite under Nixon reinforced the racial hierarchy by its attacks on radical trends among people of color; soon, covert and open repression encouraged religious separatism, national chauvinism, and the consolidation of the underclass(chiefly, African Americans). At this conjuncture, East Asians on the West Coast in particular were instrumentalized to breathe new life into the assimilationist syndrome. Later on, with the return of finance capitalism in the Reagan-Bush years and the influx of Irish and Mexican immigrants after 1965, modernism as an ideological disciplinary complex and structuring habitus (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s [1993] category) is displaced by postmodernist tendencies–subaltern studies, deconstruction, postcolonialism, Foucaultian modalities of suspicion, etc. Asian American cultural production, with its scholastic authorities and texts, finds its niche in this new tri-polar world (U.S., Europe, Japan as leaders in the G-7 bloc) characterized by the rise of Japan as a peer partner in global hegemony, with Asians as “no longer ’second class citizens’ ” (Gills 1993, 212).
With ethnicity today as the equalizing mechanism of conformity, we rarely hear special pleas for the plight of “the model minority.”  In Taiwan-born Eric Liu’s provocative brief for “model minoritism,” The Accidental Asian, we find a rather nostalgic diagnosis of the madness labeled “ Mongolphobia, “an archaic but insidious” belief that Asians threaten the American Way of Life. Liu ascribes this primal terror, the “fear of a yellow planet,” to yellow journalism—The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, the Evil Genius—and to the annals of early psychoanalysis. A history of collective psychosis is recounted: the riots and lynch mobs against Chinese in the 1870s leading to  the infamous 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; the internment of Japanese Americans in the concentration camps of the 1940s; and, with the Wen Ho Lee scandal, the conspiracy theory of China as the new source of the “yellow peril.”
But Liu believes the “last judgment” is on the horizon. From “perfect Manichean scapegoats,” or subhuman creatures to superhuman monsters or machines, Asians have multiplied and “breached the mainstream,” with the “advance guard” reaching “the commanding heights of power,” while a resurgent Asia is profoundly altering American language, manners and dreams. Liu prophesizes the third possibility that reconciles extreme aversion and extreme idolization: “Asians are, in fact, human; that they have left our imagination and arrived in our lives. Soon we may have to admit: We have already met the East, and it is us” (1998, 135).  Welcome to/from Disneyland, gated Asians!  In this sleight-of-hand version of Hegelian dialectics (unwittingly parodying Francis Fukuyama), Liu has ironically collapsed the heterogeneous Other into the banal Same. This passage from the thesis of the wholly Other into the worshipped “model minority”–still being resurrected by Helen Zia and other tokenizing gatekeepers–may serve as an allegorical figure for the vicissitudes of the Asian presence in the landscape of the United States in the era of globalization and the post 9/11 war of terror and the crisis of a retrenchingneoliberal dispensation.

E Pluribus, Unum? /  Out of Many, One?

The neoconservative triumphalism of “free market” Weltanschauung from the Reagan administration up to the collapse of Lehman Brothers marked a decisive
turn in the way white-supremacist hegemony operated. The Cold War required a pretense or premise of defending the “Free World” from the evils of Soviet and Chinese communism. While the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration and Naturalization Act opened the floodgates to more immigration from Asia, abolishing the “national origins” quota, it was the Vietnam War and its aftermath that dissolved the Chinese/Japanese monopoly of the cultural field of Asian America. In 1975, over 130,000 refugees from Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos were allowed into the U.S. It is at this point when formalist New Criticism in literary and humanistic studies, already battered by the Civil Rights demand for revising the Western canon, had to be overhauled in order to allow the implementation of a new mode of racial hierarchization. Since the old narrative of assimilationism and adaptation (retooled as the cyclic pattern of suspicion and adjustment) has lost purchase, in anticipation of finance-capital’s ascendancy over a de-industrialized America, a new paradigm had to be invented to preserve the myth of consensual democracy. This is summed up in Lisa Lowe’s (1991) triple shibboleths of “heterogeneity, hybridity, multiplicity.”
With the advent of the IndoChinese and the heightened influx of Filipinos, Asian America–by which I mean the Chinese/Japanese monolith–had to confront changing reality. This is not what Lowe had in mind despite her claim of recognizing the material contradictions among Asian communities in the US (see the synoptic analysis of those contradictions by Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich and Lucie Cheng [1994]). For her, asserting ethnic multiplicity was a means of disrupting Eurocentric hegemony, quite a novel revision of Gramsci’s original use of the concept as a political strategy of a proletarian-led historic bloc to overthrow capitalist power. But aside from intra-ethnic differential relationships and hybrid mixings, multiplicity serves as the theoretical wedge to displace the organizing category of class, founded on the unequal division of social labor and therefore unequal power, as the ordering principle of US capitalism. Asians are now contingently determined by “several different axes of power,…by the contradictions of capitalism, patriarchy and race relations” (2000, 429). This may be useful in explaining the cycle of acceptance and abuse that historian Iris Chang observes in the history of the Chinese in the U.S. (2003). But in effect it merely replicates the repressive teleology of mainstream functionalist empiricism and its coercive agencies.
We no longer dream of the pleasures of victimhood, to be sure, at this late date. In the age of cosmopolitan self-help and cyborgean bootstraps, we want agency. Deploying Spivak’s “strategic essentialism,” Lowe claims that privileging this socially constructed uneven cultural terrain will enable Asian subalterns to contest and disrupt the discourses, laws, norms, rules and practices of racial prejudice, exclusion, discrimination, scapegoating, oppression, etc. She also invokes Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity as a matter of “positioning.” Consequently, she rejects class solidarity because it erases ethnic particularity. This then becomes a theory of politics as social movements moving in parallel lines, diverse alliances and coalitions striving to transform hegemony–to be sure, not only capitalist but also scattered racist and sexist hegemonies.

Essentialism of the Signifier

The eighties and nineties witnessed the propagation in the US academy of the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, etc. following the decline of Althusserian Marxism. This was signaled by the revised Gramscianism of Stuart Hall, the founding father of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. One offshoot is Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the scriptural testament for “new social movements,” whose anti-totalizing obsession resonates in the theory of “minority discourse” sponsored by David Lloyd and Abdul JanMohamed in Cultural Critique (Spring-Fall 1987). At the same time, the intervention of Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s  (1986) “racial formations” approach reinforced the vogue of cultural relativism and voluntarist idealism that conceives of society as a random collection of social practices lacking any necessary integrating structure (Callinicos 1982; see San Juan 1992; 2002). Philosophical adventurism and Nietszchean metaphysics of “the will to power” began to prevail in Asian American literary studies. Recycling the Althusserian motif of “multiple articulations” to counter the ideology of pseudo-universal humanism, Lowe follows these revisionists in firming up the deconstructive-anarchist trend in Asian American criticism.
With this linguistic/culturalist turn, criticism becomes solipsistic and uncannily tendentious. Amy Tan’s sensational blockbuster, The Joy Luck Club (1989) and its movie version, may have sealed the fate of Asians as potentially subversive agents of social change. As soon as the Asian American canon began to be institutionalized in the eighties as part of the “cultural war” maneuvers, teachers/scholars in this peripheral region needed to justify their scholastic anti-legitimacy. By 1995, Lowe herself had to shift gears by instructing us that the Asian American canon (Bulosan, Okada, Kogawa, Cha) is really a defiance of the reigning Western canonical tradition since it upholds unevenness, indeterminacies, inassimilable alterity, nonequivalence, irresolution–all against unification, reconciliation, development, linear narrative, uniperspectivalism, ethical formation, etc. that constitutes American imperial nationalism. She concludes her thesis: “The teaching of racial, ethnic, and postcolonial texts decenters the autonomous notion of Western culture by recentering the complexities of racial, ethnic, and postcolonial collectivities, and unmasks the developmental narrative as a fiction designed to justify the histories of colonialism, neocolonialism, and forced labor and to erase the dislocations and hybridities that are the resulting conditions of those histories” (1995, 66).

Postmodernity’s Revenge

The exorbitant addiction to Derridean maxims and post-structuralist doxa has continued unabated. As one of the Establishment gatekeepers, Shirley Geok-lin Lim prefaces her widely used 1992 anthology Reading the Literatures of Asian America with an essay on the “ambivalent American,” meaning herself as a “new new American.” She resents the habitual tokenism inflicted on fellow poets like the Polish Czeslaw Milosz, rejects Lynn Cheney’s Eurocentric universalism, and invokes Werner Sollor’s notion of symbolic “multiple choice” ethnicity as the way out and into the majoritarian consensus.  Unfortunately she succumbs to the lure of the immigrant paradigm and all its insidious implications (including the belief that American English is a life-line for the pariah’s salvation). Her idea of a dialogic identity, “identity on the cusp,” as it were, construed as a compromise between a Utopian American future and the ancestral golden past of the native folk (as in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, and in other authors such as Kingston, Chin, etc.) exudes a pathos of wish-fulfillment that undermines the realism of her initial polemic.
Aestheticist individualism overrides the constraints of historical structure and other social determinants. With the shift from the white majority nation to a multiethnic nation of minorities, Lim hopes that the paradigm of conflict and ambivalence in Asian American texts “will be transformed into a productive multivalence: ” ‘Valences’ speak to the abilities to integrate, combine, fuse, and synthesize different elements. Conflict is almost always a product of dualities; perhaps synergisic commonalities will be the product of pluralities of ethnic figures, pluralism which we know is already on its way” (1992, 28-29). This may be an improvement over Elaine Kim’s (1982) inaugural configuration of Asian American literature as modeled on the ethnic immigrant success story; but, in actuality, it reinforces the pluralist/multiculturalist dogma of neoliberal globalized capitalism.
“Pluralism” may be an exhausted idea, but it can be refurbished disguised as “transnational” or “diasporic.” Arjun Appadurai and Theodor Adorno are called in by Susan Koshy to rescue entropic US hegemony. In an attempt to inflect Lowe’s standpoint into something contestatory, and “ambivalence” into something contingent or aporetic, Koshy posits the notion that the inferential value of “Asian America” resides in “the catachrestic status of the formation” (2000, 491). Agreed that there is no objectively verifiable referent to “Asian America,” Koshy’s agnostic and complaisant response is that we should resign ourselves to “the limits of its signifying power.”  Do we need another exhibition of crippling Derridean discourse whose purpose is to shift our concern from the analysis of the political economy of production relations to the metaphysics of sliding and floating signifiers?  Ludic semiotics, to be sure, does not threaten the profit-making machine of the “free market.” Nor does it question the ethics or morality of ruthlessly extracting surplus-value from the super-exploited peoples of the world. This cultural/linguistic turn can only hide, if not obfuscate, the material contradictions that our critics claim to confront; rather, as Teresa Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh points out, “it generates an imaginary re-patterning of the social by displacing class with ‘difference,’ ‘performativity,’ and ‘desire,’ thereby remaking the social: erasing it as an effect of labor and rewriting it as an effect of meanings, affects, hospitality, and the unrepresentable” (2008, 29).

Discombobulated and Compromised

This labor of decentering the Western bourgeois standards of truth, beauty and goodness was the primary task of Marxist ideology-critique before the Nietzschean/Heideggerian vogue. Despite the brief renaissance of Marxist thought in the 1968 May uprisings and the popularity of Marcuse and the Red Book, the heavy weight of Cold War repression aborted a full-blown mobilization of the working masses. Within the Asian communities in the United States, youth re-discovered their ethnic roots and impelled the composition of linear narratives now anathema to Lowe and postmodernist epigones.
The histories of the “tribe” by Sucheng Chan and Ronald Takaki, however, recontextualized the protracted agon of the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Korean workers, their suffering punctuated by collective insurrections and solidarity actions with other groups. This perception of a multilayered narrative seems to have registered the significant theoretical intervention made by Robert Blauner which, for me at least, exploded the myth that all Filipinos were immigrants and thus could not but follow the venerable itinerary of European immigrant success. Blauner distinguished colonized from immigrant minorities in the pluralist order; metropolitan nations incorporated “new territories or peoples through processes that are essentially involuntary, such as war, conquest, capture, and other forms of force or manipulation” (1972). The case of the Philippines and Puerto Rico are the obvious examples. Colonization–this time, the “internal colonialism” (Allen 2005) of racialized groups–and immigration of ethnic Europeans represented two ideal-types or polar ends of a continuum that explains the peopling of the US social formation. Takaki understood this, but he could not hold on to and elaborate this crucial distinction in his 1989 opus, Strangers from a Different Shore. His world-view was still imprisoned within the mystified ideal of American Exceptionalism, as attested to by his 1994 comment on the “culture wars” then raging at the end of the Reagan era.
Takaki  locates the problem in the linkage of “democracy to national identity” (1994, 299), not to capitalism. Consequently, his solution to economic and racial inequality, including the intensifying exploitation of ethnicized or racialized workers, is the extension of rights and citizenship to everyone. There is a rich, flourishing archive of scholarly texts and discourses by Asian American lawyers (especially those engaged in “critical race theory”) and activists devoted to this reform-minded approach, none of which has prevented the worsening inequality and anomic decay among Chinese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Laotians, Kampucheans and Hmongs, since the liberalization of entry in 1965 (Hing 1998). The prophylaxis of citizenship rights offered by Lowe, Takaki, Okihiro and others should be laid to rest by Natsu Taylor Saito’s (2002; 2003) cogent argument that such belief in citizenship as the cure can only reinforce the state’s systematic “plenary power” over the others, especially in cases of immigrant persecution, dating back to the 1882 Exclusion Law. So we are back to the analysis of the capitalist mode of production and reproduction as the enabling principle and legitimizing guarantee of the racial polity (Meyerson 2001).
An affliction of similar proportion may be discerned in Gary Okihiro’s apologetic, if not opportunistic, mode of historicizing the vicissitudes of Asian American existence in late-capitalist United States. Okihiro intends to denounce the crimes of white-supremacist America on Asians, but at the same time he doesn’t want to be seen as an angry ideologue, an uncouth left-wing doctrinaire scholar; his tone varies, at once serious but complacently ironic; he strives to distance himself from the anecdotal Takaki and the more schematic style of Sucheng Chan by gestures at once hedging and temporizing, almost verging on a defense of McKinley’s “Benevolent Assimilation” policy eventually administered with Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick. Okihiro may be the authentic by-product of Lowe’s hybridized discourse-deconstructing machine.
At the end of the Cold War, the bombing of Yugoslavia, and the inauguration of a more fiercely predatory pax Americana with the impending US invasion of Iraq, Okihiro’s confession of partisanship for the mystique of “multicultural America” speaks volumes, rivalling Eric Liu, and provides the key to the current stagnation and malaise in the discipline:  “But class has never, I believe, been central to our analysis. We persist in our belief in the push-pull (or some variant thereof) hypothesis of Asian migration, we see articulation as a racial encounter, and we present our work and subject matter as yet another aspect of multicultural America” (1998, 32). Okihiro and other functionaries in the academy cannot resolve the impasse of duplicity, not ambiguity, while negotiating between the old panethnicity model based on racial formations (see Espiritu 1992; San Juan 2002) and the siren song of incommensurable discrepancies and undecidabilities. This may be due to an Orientalized “cunning of history” missed by Edward Said.

Therapy or Exorcism?

On this emergence in the nineties of the Asian American penchant for schizophrenic inquiry, the best diagnosis is, to my mind, the insightful and wide-ranging treatise of David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Palumbo-Liu comments on the schizophrenic symptoms found in three texts, among others: Daniel Okimoto’s American in Disguise, Yoshimi Ishikawa’s Strawberry Road, and Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker. Just as Lowe manifests symptoms of the process of transnationalism and transmigrancy that forces into crisis the once sacrosanct notions of citizenship and nationhood, the protagonists of those texts, in particular that of Lee’s novel, testify to the splitting and disintegration of social and political subjectivity in the age of globalized finance-capitalism. Palumbo-Liu notes: “If the 1970s named Asian Americans as dual personalities, the 1980s and 1990s have produced a particular vision of the schizophrenic, one intimately linked to transnationalism” (1999, 320), who may no longer be amenable to the programmatic techniques of healing, reconciliation, and adaptation beloved by pragmatic social scientists and technocrats of the Cold War era.
Faced with the civilizationalist racism of post-9/11 Homeland Security State, Vijay Prashad for his part attempts to revive a moribund Ethnic-Studies institution by replacing the epistemology of identity with that of polyculturalism. Comparative ethnic studies, for him, is the way out of the deterministic, vulgar optic of class exploitation. One would think that this hegemonic apparatus of mis-representation has already been rendered inutile long before the actual bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and so on. But not for Prashad. This refurbished version of the old cultural pluralism may be discerned also in current historiography where, for example, the United State’s “calibrated colonialism” (Kramer 2006) becomes a dynamic interactive field where the colonizer and colonized transact the business of politics as equal partners. The fallacy of equating exploiter and exploited in order to ascribe agency/humanity to the subjugated but emotionally appealing victim vitiates many empirical studies of Filipino overseas migrant workers (e.g. Tung 2004). Supposedly novel in inventing agency for the colonized, this new epistemology in the disciplines of history and sociology interprets colonial domination as consensual negotiation between rulers and ruled, reducing hegemony into an exercise in Habermasianesque rational communication. Polyculturalism thus becomes the alibi of imperialism suddenly capable of “bad faith.”
It is thus not surprising to find Prashad nostalgically enthused with the obsolete panethnicity nostrum and the anti-totalism of Lowe’s Immigrant Acts, unwittingly generating an aporia that is both paradoxical and unintelligible: for him, “ontological incompleteness” fetishized by Lowe, Koshy and others “need not obscure for us the social completeness of identity and identification” (2006, 169). This rhetorical contortion may be an instance of what Fredric Jameson (1991) calls “schizophrenic nominalism,” a postmodern malady in which the traditional markers of  identity and historical progression, coherence and continuity have disappeared so that everything now is characterized by fluidity, disjunctures, aleatory slippages, nomadic drifts, and other symptoms that defy thought and logocentric reason. We enter a realm of ludic terra incognita about which we cannot speak, much less intuit and reflect.

Malays Running Amok?

At this juncture, it would be useful to explore how Filipino writers in the United States responded to the shift from racialized pluralism to globalized differentiation. As everyone knows, Carlos Bulosan’s problematic exemplum, America Is in the Heart, has become an ever contentious object-lesson. The reason lies in the fact that practically all readers ignore or choose to elide the historical singularity absent from textbooks and mass media: the Philippines was violently subjugated by US imperialism in the Filipino-American War (1899-1902) at the cost of 1.4 million Filipino lives (San Juan 2000; 2008). This is the submerged text of the first part of America, whose revolutionary impulse surfaces intermittently in the stories and essays, but more fully in the novel of the McCarthy/Cold War period, The Cry and the Dedication. Because of the persisting amnesia about this ugly truth in monumental US history, only dredged up recently when apologists of the Iraq War invoked the “humanitarian” occupation of the Philippines by the US military at the beginning of the twentieth century; or when the recently reported practice of “waterboarding” on Iraqi and Afghani prisoners was discovered to be a common form of torture against captured Filipino insurgents, Bulosan remains unread, or inadequately appreciated, up to now.
Almost equal if not surpassing the total population of Chinese Americans, the Filipino community (more than three million of 12 million Asians) in the US exists due to the political instability and economic underdevelopment of the Philippines (Hing 1998). Perhaps one should really define the Philippines from 1898 to 1946 (when the US granted formal independence, with many strings attached) not as a classic colony but as a dependency, thus an internal colony like the Native American territories. Virtually a neocolony today, the Philippine social formation cannot be understood by means of postcolonial concepts of hybridity, in-betweeness, interstitiality, and so on. Nor can decolonization of Asian American Studies’ paradigms of cultural nationalism, identity politics or national assimilation be carried out by using the phenomenon of the global diaspora to expunge anti-imperialist liberation struggles that mobilize the sedimented nationalist traditions of peasants and workers in the neocolonies. The durable recalcitrance of Filipino subjectivity saturated with nationalist memory-traces explains why, unlike the relatively assimilated Japanese, Korean and Chinese middlemen strata, Filipinos who have been disenfranchised and demonized for a long time cannot function as the “buffer race” between the white majority and the castelike black underclass. This remains the case until today, even though these colonized “nationals” were not locked out in 1882, nor banned by the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907-08, nor by the 1924 Immigration Act which favored  “desirable” Europeans and denied citizenship to Asian “aliens.” Nonetheless, all Filipinos are Americanized to one degree or another, in more ways than one; and if what Arif Dirlik says is correct, that Americanization is synonymous with racialization, then all Filipinos have been thoroughly racialized, “not just fitting into a racially organized society but also thinking racially” (2008, 1367).
A few years ago I pointed out how the postcolonial notion of transnational citizenship, fluid and flexible, originated from the dynamics of circulating use-value whereby all goods and services (as health care given by Filipino domestics) are commodified and made equivalent , translated or quantified into exchange value via the cash-nexus (San Juan 2005). The Philippines to this day remains a neocolony, formally independent but politically a client-state of Washington and the Pentagon. It functions as a strategic testing laboratory for US Special Forces fighting the proxies of Al Qaeda (shadowy Abu Sayyaf bandits some of whom work for local politicians and the government military) was long prepared by more than a hundred years of trying to preserve the oligarchic rule of a corrupt and murderous elite whose subservience to the “Washington Consensus” guarantees the accelerating Filipino “warm body export” part of which services the US military bases in Iraq, Europe, Guantanamo, Hawaii, Guam, and elsewhere, including the secret “launching pads” of CIA clandestine operations in the Philippines itself (Mahajan 2002).
During the thirties and forties of the last century, Filipino workers exposed to the insurrectionary and seditious milieu of the islands were considered nasty trouble-makers, aside from being perceived as a threat to the purity of  Caucasian women. They collaborated in strikes with Japanese, Mexicans, and other ethnics in the Hawaii plantations and West Coast farms. From the outset up to 1946, Filipinos were legally considered “nationals” without any rights but only the “duty of permanent allegiance” to the U.S. nation-state (Hall 2002, 101).  They were not allowed to vote, own property, start any business or marry Caucasian women. However, Filipino surplus labor as a rule were Americanized enough to warrant their candidacy for model-minority status; migration is thus valued as “an opportunity and mechanism for upward social mobility,” according to functionalist sociologists (e.g., Carino 1996).
With the post-9/11 racial profiling, the Filipino re-entered the target-vision of the alarmed racial polity, i.e. “white supremacy… as a political system in itself” (Mills 1999, 25). In August 2002, for example, 63 Filipinos were herded into an airplane for a direct flight to the Philippines, all the deportees manacled during the flight. In December, a second batch of 84 Filipinos were deported under the same humiliating condition, legitimized by the Absconder Apprehension Initiative Program of the US Dept of Justice (effective since Jan. 13, 2001) and other laws which criminalized the Filipino for being undocumented workers (Mendoza 2003).  From October 2001 to April 2002, 334 Filipinos were deported through authoritarian executive orders, justified by legislative actions (including the USA Patriot Act) under the Bush administration. This is quite unprecedented: Filipinos have never been deported in this brutal way in such large numbers. With the discovery of terrorists in their country of origin, Filipinos are now doubly marked as a “brown peril” of sorts, with affinities to Muslim Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Afghanis, and so on. The old somatic/physical markers of race as well as the ethnic/cultural signifiers have now become either amalgamated or sublimated into the prevailing computerized “terrorist” profile.
How does a novelist like Jessica Hagedorn, for instance, respond to this new regime of “civic nationalism” engaged in a “just war” to defend “civic order and democratic liberties”? How does this post-Cold War “insecuritization” (Thornton 2002) under the aegis of the “global war on terror” provide an opening for Hagedorn’s volatilization of the old formal properties of mimetic art which foreground versimilitude of character and plot?

Hagedorn’s Untamed Flicks

As though afflicted with a severe attack of “repetition compulsion,” Hagedorn does a reprise of her 1988 Dogeaters in her new production, Dream Jungle. We encounter here a postmodern repertory of combining parts and suturing disparate fragments.  This technique of collage/pastiche may be viewed as imitation or copying without laughter. And since there is no original common language of bourgeois individualism and its attendant metanarrative, parody is ruled out. If the real, assuming there is some agreement that reality is out there, can no longer be captured or expressed by language and its resources, what is there to write about? What is striking in this setup, despite the postmodernist obsession with  the materiality of the sign as image, not a vehicle of meaning, is that readers and reviewers refuse to give up summarizing, decoding, and making sense of bits and pieces somehow stitched together in Hagedorn’s artifice.
Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle weaves two constellations of events. The first  centers on the wealthy playboy Zamora Lopez de Legaspi who discovers a tribe of Stone-Age cave dwellers (alluding to the Tasaday tribe found in 1971 before Marcos’ declaration of martial law). The second gravitates around a servant girl, Rizalina Cayabyab, daughter of Zamora’s cook, who flees to Manila, becomes a go-go dancer, and meets an American actor, Vincent Moody. Moody happens to be working on the crew of Napalm Sunset (alluding to Apocalypse Now), a Vietnam-war movie being filmed in Mindanao, Philipines, where the indigenous Tasadays were discovered. These two event-networks, for one reviewer, function as semantic indices to convey what Hagedorn feels are the effects of Spanish and American colonialism. They are decipherable signifiers that convey the novel’s major themes, making this bricolage intelligible: “explorers [Magellan; Coppola; other foreigners] turn out to be conquerors, Westerners are still bending Philippine destinies and lechery continues to bind colonizer and native” (Ramzy 2003). If so, then Hagedorn has wasted time and energy on banalities. At best, she has distracted our mind from the toxic and barbaric disasters inflicted by US power on the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
What strikes our critical intelligence is the standard by which Hagedorn can be said to represent a Filipino response to the historical conjuncture I have addressed here. Tentatively we can say that this schizophrenic mode of fabulation is actually both the form and substance of Hagedorn’s attempt to make sense of the historical period from the end of the Vietnam War to the 9/11 terror attack. Pastiche, variegated points of view, alternation of episodes, may indeed achieve what The New York Times reviewer suspects is Hagedorn’s singular intent: to engage with the “unreliability of the realities it depicts” (Upchurch 2003). But then we have to ascertain if the realities–among others, for example, Secretary Manda Elizalde/Marcos’ abuse of power on all levels, and the corruption of Filipinos by Coppola’s filming of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines–have been convincingly presented, and scrupulously documented, as claimed by clever reviewers.
Metropolitan taste demands more than humdrum anecdotes. It turns out that Hagedorn’s real concern–to zero in on “the societal repercussions of heavily staged-managed creations,” such as the alleged anthropological findings, or the publicity surrounding that and Coppola’s representation of the Vietnam War experience–was achieved by simply intuiting or insinuating “her way around a dozen memorable characters and milieus, letting her concerns swarm beneath the busy surface of her narrative” (Upchurch 2003). Granted; but this technical experimentalism itself relies on a dense texture of surface details, an incoherent assemblage that reproduces the illusion of an interminable present without depth or resonance.
As Shelley Jackson acutely puts it, Hagedorn’s is “a scavenger aesthetic, choosy but eclectic” (2003). It chooses, yes, but in a rather brusque, self-conscious, astutely exhibitionistic fashion. Given the fact that Hagedorn (since Dogeaters) has rejected the typifying realism of the bourgeois narrative for the abstract, psychologizing mannerism of high modernist art (Lukacs 1995), which is the ideological aura of finance capital in the age of globalization, we can conclude that Dream Jungle serves precisely the agenda of the racial polity caught in an emergency : namely, human existence is a matter of individuals with arbitrary experiences, society an accidental collocation of idiosyncratic characters, and history a wild, arbitrary and ultimately chaotic iteration of scenes for which there is no overarching vision or framework that can make sense of the whole. Isn’t this a version of the fluid, heterogenous, border-leaping Asian American creature fashioned by Liu, Lowe, Lim and their disciples?

Homecoming Trajectory

Let us now turn to Bienvenido Santos, a Filipino writer whose career spans two generations: the Manongs of the forties and the immediate postwar period, and the post-1965 immigrant community of professionals and exiles from the Marcos dictatorship. Now, the vintage Santos beloved by anthologists, the author of You Lovely People (1955) and Villa Magdalena (1965), can certainly be aligned with the “model minority” scheme that could not resist the inroads of alienating bureaucracy, consumerism, utilitarian standardization, and the predatory Social Darwinism of the seventies and eighties. Santos’ novel What the Hell For You Left Your Heart in San Francisco (1987) may be regarded as the melodramatic and at times self-ingratiating response of the petit-bourgeois stratum of the Filipino community to the shock of its continued marginalization, subordination, and exclusion.
One peculiar feature of Santos’ life may be contradistinguished from Hagedorn’s. While Hagedorn’s sensibility was shaped by the “Beat”generation of the sixties and the trendy cosmopolitanism of New York, Santos’ world-view emerged from his forced stay in the US when World War II broke out in 1942, and from his voluntary exile from the Philippines when his novel The Praying Man was banned by the Marcos authoritarian regime in 1972. By circumstance and choice, Santos aligned himself with the fate of the Filipino community in a period when the pressures of fascist power and reactionary ideology impacted heavily on the daily lives of his compatriots, pressures registered in the episodic but chronological unfolding of his 1987 narrative. It serves as the inchoate national allegory of Filipinos in the interregnum between World War II and the Iraq War.
Santos’ attempt at a totalizing narrative may be conceived as an emergent national allegory, or if you like, a national allegory-in-the-making. I believe Fredric Jameson’s theory of “national allegory” is more useful in describing the situation of Asian American writers trying to represent their group for the racial polity. The reason is that the personal and political for the Asian writer is always intertwined, given their reification and subjection to the dominant norms; hence the logical distinction between the spheres in Asian experience is not as rigid or fixed as European aesthetic doctrine since Kant and Coleridge would have prescribed. Jameson defines his concept of national allegory: “Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic–necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (2000, 320). In the perspective of “internal colonialism,” the Asian communites resemble the underdeveloped “third world” of the sixties and seventies. What a world of difference it would have made if the canonical texts by Kingston, Bulosan, Okada, Villa, Theresa Cha, Frank Chin and others were read as allegories of their specific nationality formations and not one-sidedly as emanations of individual psyches reacting to hostile environments. Parenthetically, I urge that Kingston’s three major works, The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey,  be read as national allegories of a kind, critical articulations of Asian American feminism wrestling with racialized patriarchy and class exploitation. I nominate two powerful examples of a “national allegory” that elaborates a metanarrative of multiethnic solidarity: first, Yuri Kochiyama’s autobiographical assemblage, Passing It On, which resists Derridean or Foucaultian subsumption; and second, Marilyn Chin’s shrewd recasting of the dramatic monologue genre in “A Portrait of the Self as Nation, 1990-1991″ (1997, 159-163).
Realism and the Cartesian ego have been jettisoned together with all kinds of nationalism–except the unmarked one of U.S. Herrenvolk patriotism, and the equation of its national interest with democracy and liberty (of the “free market”) everywhere. And so the hegemonic ideology continues to prove tenacious and instrumental for careerist ends. Otherwise, we could have easily liberated ourselves a long time ago from the corrupting spell of the “model minority” myth inflected in postmodern ambivalence, multiculturalism, and compensatory postcolonial mimicries. National allegory requires a dialectical method that would mediate historically specific experiences and establish their coherence in a meaningful totality, a unifying meta-narrative of historical development anathema to our current orthodoxy. With finance-capital dictating the parameters of globalization, Asian America remains locked up in a world of virtualization where an emergent configuration of wholeness, autonomy, and unity dissolves in simulacra, spectacles, and illusions of alterity regurgigated from the mechanical reproduction of the commodified Same, and finally assimilated in the absolutist Leviathan corpus.

Adumbrations of Pinoy Existentialism

Conventional wisdom has recycled platitudes about the Filipino community in the US: family- and clan-centered, regionalistic, with unique resources drawn from the cultural heritage (barangay, plaza complex) such as the “bayanihan” (cooperation) spirit and “balikbayan” (returning to the homeland) practice, which allegedly harmonize the native-born Pinoys/Pinays from the interfacing Philippine-born immigrants (Guyotte 1997). Santos’ novel dramatizes those stereotypes and cliches only to satirize them tactfully, as shown by the choreographed behavior of the circle around Dr. Vicente Sotto, the employees and bureaucrats of the Philippine Consulate, the Filipino-American organizations at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, and Dante’s students and colleagues at City College.
David Dante Tolosa’s journey, ostensibly a hunt for his lost fugitive father, turns out to be an education/initiation plot, a learning process. Although filled with a menagerie of character types, whose relatives inhabit Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle, Santos’ narrative revolves around the writer Dante’s search for a viable community. He pursues solidarity linkages with American lost souls (Judy), enigmatic survivors (Cesar Pilapil), and anti-”model minority” derelicts like Professor Arturo Jaime’s family. Right from the start, Dante moves to settle the issue of ambiguity by identifying himself as typical Americanized colonial subject: born in 1938 “on the outskirts of the American naval base near Subic Bay in the Philippines. An oriental with broad hints of Malay-Indonesian, perhaps Chinese, strain, a kind of racial chopsuey, that’s me.  Better yet, for historical and ethnic accuracy, an oriental omelette flavored with Spanish wine” (1987,1). Well-meaning pastiche breaks down here into culinary grotesques.
In Dante’s search for support for his project and his vocation, Santos allegorizes a whole nation’s struggle for genuine sovereignty, for recognition as a singular nation. Not so much the character of Dante as the itinerary of the quest for solidarity, the deracinated individual’s need to communicate and connect with others (the priority of audience and context for the Filipino artist) and thus unify the fragmented collective psyche–that is ultimately Dante’s over-riding motivation.  It is none other than to articulate the dream of nationhood, to imagine the birth of national self-determination. It is not so much the solitary artist’s agon for self-fulfillment that we see in Dante’s comic if pathetic maneuvers for self-recognition, but the Filipino organic intellectual’s dilemma of deciding whether to succumb to self-indulgent anarchist gestures–the fate of Jose Garcia Villa, a contemporary exiled artist, and kindred compatriots–or to mediate the shipwrecked psyche’s anguish and craft with the suffering and oppression of the larger community to which, by descent or consent, he belongs. Dante confronts this ethical imperative during his sojourn in America.
Hegemony in politics and art is a matter of calibrating the ratio of force and consent. Dante was driven into exile by geopolitical forces beyond his control. His reservoir of “consent,” fueled by conscience or naivete, is what explains Dante’s sympathy for Estela, the invalid in a wheelchair in a mansion on Diamond Heights–the child whose inability to control the psychosomatic symptoms of her life symbolizes the existential plight of the Filipino community. Estela’s fascination with the blazing lights of San Francisco from the Heights is the general Filipino enchantment with the surface glitter of industrialized America as the incarnation of the mythic “City on the Hill,” the promised land of freedom and equality and redemption. The scene epitomizes Bulosan’s enduring fantasy of a fabled America, innocent and virginal before the Puritans’ bloody errand in the wilderness.
This theme of fantasy and disillusionment is recapitulated by Santos for this period of “colorblind” racism and brutal fascist violence in the Philippines and other U.S. imperial outposts before the advent of a “global apartheid” (Marable 2006). Unfortunately, this doctrine of American Exceptionalism–a Messianic ideology embodied in the policy of “Manifest Destiny” and affiliated slogans of the Cold War and Bush’s “war on terrorism” (Pease 2000)–appears as a healing trope, even though ironically fused with a horribly diseased, helpless Filipina child. Ultimately, the “American Dream” evaporates in the flood of sordid disenchantments that hound Bulosan’s characters, a lesson not lost to Santos’ protagonist. Dante survives owing to a peculiar mixture of native resources: susceptibility to seduction, intellectual naivete, convivial will-power, sensuality, and strong animal instincts. At times, he manifests the DuBoisian virtue of double-consciousness. For the mass audience of the global North,  however, Dante serves to personify the model citizen of  impoverished, underdeveloped “third world” countries vulnerable to the temptations offered by the World Bank/International Monetary Fund, US Agency for International Development, and transnational corporate investors hungry for super-profits.

Asian America: A Utopian Project?

What I find somewhat disconcerting, though in hindsight perfectly understandable, is Santos’ resort to a tired humanistic formula to resolve his protagonist’s problems. Having gone through the grotesque and painful ordeals in his search for some mooring (emblematized by the lost father) in a chaotic consumerist milieu, Dante settles for an ending to his existential search. The novel’s closing scene with his final goodbye to Estela may be read as an attempt to transpose to this vacant placeholder the old Jamesian “central intelligence,” a scene that emits somehing like the “Great Gatsby” intuition that would reconcile all contraries and pacify everyone. Dante imagines Estela watching the landscape before her as her limbs twist, eerily crying and frothing, the convulsions of “wounded beast” that operates as Santos’ “objective correlative” for the diseased body politic and the metropolitan wasteland at the end of the Vietnam War and the onset of deadly Reaganite repression and missile warfare against the unruly “third world” subalterns in Libya, Nicaragua, Grenada, Philippines, etc. (Blum 2005):
There are no stars blinking at our feet, no encrusted jewels, such as you might imagine, winking over our heads.  We are flesh and blood, tired before the day is over, seeking to find after the rains, a welcome door, a smiling face, both the familiar and the strange. Surrounded by strangers, we look for friends in a continuing search against despair.
We have left native land but our hearts are still there, not here, Estela, not in this golden city by the bay. We like to think we gain a lot from day to day in hope, that we are not as we often suspect we are, sentimental fools.  But we believe in love, that’s all we live for, love. But what the hell is that? And like you, Estela, we carry our own deformities as nobly as we can, but unlike you, we hide them well. (1987, 191).

Unlike Hagedorn’s slyly cynical if proprietary distance from her creations, Santos’ empathy is, to my mind, somewhat patronizing and even excessive for the real worth of the problems his characters are grappling with. Perhaps Santos senses this danger of pathos-becoming-bathos so that he catches himself and asks rhetorically: “What the hell for you left your heart in San Francisco”?  The colloquial register seems to offer a fitting denouement to a memorable verbal performance, analogous to how the Chinese artist Zhang Huan incarnates genealogy in his theatrical art. In enacting “Family Tree,” Zhang asked three Chinese calligraphers to write directly on his face and shaved head until all his skin was covered. Not the substance (Chinese folktales, poems, names) but the form soon becomes legible: the ink-brushed characters gradually darkened his entire head. In the last of a sequence of nine photographs of this unrepeatable happening, Zhang’s face is completely black “as if erased by, or completely absorbed into, language” (Cotter 2007). This may apply to Hagedorn’s art, but not to Santos’ stylized realism and his stubborn drive to articulate the tale of the “tribe.”
In any event, Santos’ performance values signifiers but not at the expense of the signifieds and their sociohistorical grounding. References to public conduct and speech-acts are not manipulated simply for a psychological reality-effect; they index the kaleidoscope of scenes and characters to specific embodiments, to concrete historical contexts: Marcos’ authoritarian rule and the suspended state of animation of the Filipino pettybourgeoisie in California.  In a time when “Only English” became the latest outburst of the racial polity(San Juan 2005b), with de-industrialisation, outsourcing, and cutbacks wrecking middle-class lives; with the abject failure of Brown vs Board of Education to remedy de facto discrimination; and when the gains of the Civil Rights struggles have been coopted or eviscerated by right-wing assaults on social services and public programs–long before the Katrina disaster will demonstrate that equality and freedom for people of color remains a hope or dream–Santos dares to write in Tagalog and other vernaculars with English words. Maxine Hong Kingston praised Santos for this miraculous feat, for his being “a master at giving the reader a sense of people speaking in many languages and dialects” (Cruz 2005, 36). This dialogic, more exactly polyphonic or heteroglossic (after Bakhtin), method of constructing the scaffolding of a particularized “national allegory” is, I contend, a much more subversive and radically transformative strategy for thwarting finance-capital’s attacks on immigrants, ethnic minorities, and internally colonized peoples than the calculated ruses and panaceas of multiplicity, leveraged ambivalence, transnational cosmopolitanism, and other new-fangled nostrums sold in the now bloody, turbulent marketplace.

On the Eve of the Collapse

Meanwhile, history unfolds as we engage in our Wittgensteinian language-games. We are informed by a New York Times op-ed piece (March 31, before the present crisis) that the era of the white man and woman has ended, with the “baton” passing to Asia: soaring growth rates in China, India and Vietnam; 450 million cell phones in China; with Hong Kong’s “efficiency and high-speed airport” making “New York seem third-world.” Postmodernist motifs overflow in this passage: “These alternate faces of globalization–fluidity and tribalism–define our frontier-dissoling world….Everything passes.  In the 17th century, China and India accounted for more than half the world’s economic output. After a modest interlude, the pendulum is swinging back to them at a speed the West has not grasped” (Cohen 2008). And so, inscribed in this cosmic panorama, the unfortunate episode involving CalTech aerodynamics professor Dr. Tsien Hsue-Shen who was deported at the start of the Cold War, or the somewhat comic refusal to allow Congressman David Woo to enter the Dept of Energy hall in Washington DC to deliver an invited speech celebrating Asian History Month, need not deter us. Nietszche’s Eternal Recurrence or some updated version of Kierkegaard’s “Repetition” may appear more “sexy” than this challenging project of national allegory. We beg to dissent.
This is a modest proposal.  What I am proposing here in this brief survey of critical theories is the need to shift our attention away from the current nihilistic and cynical impasse. Instead of privileging the “free play” of discourse released from any contextual anchoring, we need to focus on the whole intellectual formation of Asian organic intellectuals (instanced in Peter McLaren’s interview of Lisa Chin [1994]). We need to examine the structure and dynamics of specific cultural modes of production in each Asian collectivity within the systemic constraints of late capitalism. In the process, we move beyond the now routinized genealogy of power/knowledge to the inventory of concrete historical limits and possibilities for radical transformative praxis.
For an effective counterhegemony against the disingenuous and ingenious weapons of the racial polity sustained by a protofascist State–the Homeland Security State of Bush and the neoconservatives–which has gutted Constitutional rights and international law (practising torture, “renditions,” preemptive bombings, unwarranted surveillance, and other abuses of power), it is obligatory for progressive scholars to draw up an inventory of our resources derived from both the native cultural legacy and the Western Enlightenment, however ridden with “orientalizing” traits, in order to forge a synthesizing plot of collective emancipation of working peoples across color-lines and ethnic boundaries, as well as across class, gender, and religious barriers. We need to collaborate together in a struggle that will destroy the basis of the racial polity in the unjust division of social labor and the unequal power stemming from that exploitation, which is the overarching narrative of all communities fragmented and divided among themselves, under the shadow of a dying Empire.

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For queries, write to: <philcsc@sbcglobal.net >  <philcsc@gmail.com>

BERTOLT BRECHT, THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, AND THE PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION

BERTOLT BRECHT,     THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, and REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES: Reflections on “Senora Carrara’s Rifles”

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

The changeability of the world insists on its contradictoriness.  There is something in things, people, events, which makes them what they are, and at the same time something which makes them different…. The demolition, explosion, atomization of the individual psyche is a fact,…the strange centerlessness of individuals.  But absence of center does not mean absence of substance.  One simply faces new entities which must be newly defined.

–BERTOLT BRECHT, Arbeitsjournal

A recent sojourn in the Philippines for a year (circa 1990) has confirmed for me Brecht’s usefulness (his favorite epithet) in revitalizing the moribund naturalistic-cum-Broadway theater in metropolitan Manila, particularly in the productions of PETA, The Philippine Educational Theater Association, based in Manila. Progressive colleagues in theater, after local adaptations of Galileo and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, are rehearsing the only play Brecht classified as one of “empathy,” that is, one which seizes the spectator’s predisposition for identification with illusionary events and characters in an “opportunistic” way. We know of course that Brecht’s intention is not to delude the audience but to educate or enlighten it by cultivating and legitimizing a participatory mode of aesthetic involvement. When he completed the first version of Galileo, he noted in his journal on February 25, 1939 that it was “technically a step backward just like Senora Carrar’s Rifles.  Too opportunistic… Aristotelian (empathy-) drama” (1964, 115). Given the dreaded stigma attached to the term “Aristotelian,” what can Third World revolutionary artists find in the play that would not simply exacerbate the ever-present temptation to indulge in ultra-leftism–the simple negation of art for immediate political action? Would exploiting the didactic potential of Brecht’s play be opportunist, or simply an attempt to use one tool for the same ends Brecht privileged in the Organum: to historicize life, “to treat social situations as processes” (1964, 193) so as to alter them? Since I have not seen any discussion of this play from a Third World radical perspective, I venture to submit the following speculative reflections to explore possibilities in the terrain of Brecht’s “fall,” perhaps a felix culpa, into empathy drama.1

Essentially, Senora Carrar’s Rifles intends to exhibit a specifically contextualized dialectics of choice: how a traditional mother in a semifeudal Spanish village during the Civil War, while opposed to violence, performs her task of maternal care and civic responsibility.  Opposites eventually coincide, resolving tensions on a higher plane. Her basic conflict is not one between opposing violence and preferring peace, but one between the desire to maintain the status quo of precarious abstention to preserve the life of her two sons, and the temptation to fight the inhuman (Franco’s fascist military) forces threatening her still tolerable condition. Her apparent neutrality in a time of civil war is one replicated in Third World peoples (peasants, workers, petty bourgeoisie, indigenous minorities) long inured to having no control over their destiny, obsessed with guarding or defending what little they have, bargaining with the powers-that-be.  This claim to neutrality is precisely what the play questions.  (Of course, Brecht was really addressing the “neutral” allied powers at the time even as he critiqued pacifist liberals.)  In a conjuncture where the contradictions are sharply defined, where friends and enemies can be neatly demarcated (loyalist Republican forces versus Franco’s religious “nationalism” supported by Hitler and Mussolini), Senora Carrar’s dilemma and its resolution provides an exemplum for those hoping to mobilize those morally paralyzed by setbacks–Brecht anticipated this when the democratic allies failed to rally to the beleaguered Republicans–or those who find an attitude of temporizing or compromise as a shrewder policy, a tactic of cutting one’s losses. The lesson is that the mother loses what she has been desperately trying to keep. What she should have learned is the reverse, the precept from the Gospel: Only if the seed dies will it bear fruit.

Senora Carrar learns the fatal mistake of delaying or wanting to compromise, and therefore reaps the opposite of her intention.  Through a non-commital agnosticism, one sacrifices what one holds dear; thus, armed intervention is necessary in self-defense, self-interest thereby fusing with the survival and freedom of the community in which one’s private worth finds ultimate validation. This urgent message–if one may put it too programmatically–is what, I think, appeals to our anti-imperialist compatriots faced with a population (as in the Philippines) where the religious ethos of the institution of the family resists involvement in projects of radical social transformation because of a conservative dogmatism and rigid particularistic ethos derived from a residual tributary formation.

One should note that this thematic mapping of the play stresses the polemical and pragmatic thrust since it focuses on the strategy of exposing the folly of anyone assuming a position of neutrality while everyone in the community suffers. In a context of total war, neutrality becomes acquiescence to the dominant force or a submission to the ascendant trend. All engagements are complicitous with one side or the other; partisanship is all. Seen from this perspective, the mother’s plight and her conversion evoke the need for the spectator to participate in the ongoing collective project of resisting what is experienced as evil, destructive forces, provided the knowledge and recognition of such forces have become identical with a consensus of the popular alliance–that is, that such knowledge has become a transformative material force when translated into praxis.

But what this interpretation leaves out is not, as I’ll argue in a moment, the historicizing or alienating element–note how Senora Carrar intermittently stands back to demonstrate/narrate herself with highly nuanced defamiliarizing effects–but the problematic of ressentiment in which the revenge motif and the more fundamental question of the gender division of labor find themselves eclipsed.  Unless the son killed by the military is construed as symbolic of the socialist project, the mother’s decision to fight may be taken simply as a reassertion of the subaltern will, the maternal urge to project the offspring (the usual essentializing stereotype), in this instance, against the patriarchal mandate of generals and priests. In other words, the mother is not motivated by any radical principle except that of affirming the dignity of the poor and their right to strike back.  We conflate here a humanist and an aristocratic motivation to elucidate the general direction of a whole pattern of behavior.

In his essay “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” (circa 1935), Brecht first enunciated the function of Verfremdungseffekt or alienation-effect as a historicizing of incidents portrayed on the stage. This mode of representation is geared to exposing the temporality of any social situation and the unfolding of what is natural or normal as artificial and constructed, the product of a process of contrivance. Experience conceived as process implies mutability, a continuum of mutation. It signifies contradiction, heterogeneity, and sedimentation: “…the image that gives historical definition will retain something of the rough sketching which indicates traces of other movements and features all around the fully-worked-out figure” (1964, 191).  Consider in this passage how Senora Carrar’s position alternates between dependency and mastery:

DIE MUTTER:  Du bleibst!
DER JUNGE:  Nein, ich gehe! Du kannst sagen, du brauchst Juan, aber mich brauchst du dann nicht auch noch.
DIE  MUTTER:  Ich halte Juan nicht, weil er fur mich fischen gehen soll. Und ich lasse dich nicht weg! (Sie lauft auf ihn zu und umarmt ihn.) Du kannst rauchen, wenn du willst, und wenn du allein fischen gehen willst, ich werde nichts sagen, und auch einmal in Vaters Boot!
DER JUNGE:  Lass mich los!
DIE MUTTER:  Nein, du bleibst hier!
DER JUNGE (sich losringend):  Nein, ich gehe!–Rasch, nimm die Gewehre, Onkel!
DIE MUTTER: Oh!  (Sie lasst den Jungen los und hinkt weg, mit dem Fuss vorsichtig auftretend.) (1967, 1224)

[Wallis translation]
THERESA: You’re staying here!
JOSE: No. I’m going. You can say you need Juan, but then you don’t need me too.
THERESA: I’m not keeping Juan here just so he can go fishing for me.  And I will not let you go. (She runs to him and throws her arms around him).  You can smoke if you want to, and if you want to go fishing alone I won’t say anything, and you can even go in father’s boat.
JOSE: Let go of me!
THERESA: No, you are staying here!
JOSE (Struggling to free himself): No, I am going!  Quick, get the guns, Uncle Pedro!
THERESA (With a cry of pain): Oh!  (She lets go of JOSE and limps away, stepping very carefully as if one foot hurt her badly.)

Senora Carrar then acts out the role of the hurt and resentful mother who, in a fit of casting out Jose as a disobedient child who refuses to acknowledge her “patriarchal” assumption, invokes the brother to chastise him. The dynamics of ressentiment thwarts any impulse of sympathy from the spectator even as we discover the deception or imposture this seemingly helpless woman has been foisting on us. Pity and terror, and their catharsis, are neglected here, thus making the drama’s putative original, John Synge’s Riders to the Sea, its parodic and sentimentalized version.

While it is generally conceded that the instructive crux of this play coincides with the turn of Senora Carrar’s judgement when she condemns the murderers of her son as “not human beings” but small-pox that “must be stamped out,” such a sudden reversal of thought may strike those already identifying with the unfortunate mother as a “tour de force.” This in itself generates a discordance in the audience’s effort to establish consistencies and probabilities.  At first, Senora Carrar could not believe that her son would be killed by “just fishing.” That defied logic, but then immediately she falls sick as she kneels beside her son’s body. While the women mourners pray aloud (an incongruous importation of Irish piety into the milieu of Andalusian anti-clericalism), Senora Carrar arrives at her “moment of truth” –she holds out the “ragged, worn-out” cap of her son as proof that he was identified as “a gentleman” and therefore executed. (This allusion to the positional effect of apparel has been foreshadowed by Jose’s earlier donning of a militia cap.)  Such a peripeteia may seem forced if we don’t observe that the long speech she delivers before the son’s body is brought in demonstrates the necessary distancing from this empathy-inducing funeral rite.

Ostensibly a harangue against Pedro and the partisans for scheming to lure Juan to the frontline, the mother’s reflections enact the loss she would soon confront. Applying post-structuralist terms, the impact of this utterance hollows the plenitude of her subsequent pathos. In this way, character or ethos (in the sense meant in Aristotle’s Poetics) is fissured into a play of rhetorical Gestus:

Wenn er mir das angetan hat und zur Miliz gegangen ist, dann soll er verflucht sein! Mit ihren Fliegerbomben sollen sie ihn treffen! Mit ihren Tanks sollen sie ihn niederfahren! Dass er merkt, dass Gott sich nicht spotten lasst. Und dass ein Armer nicht gegen die Generale aufkommen kann. Ich habe ihn nicht dazu geboren, dass er hinter einem Maschinengewehr auf seine Mitmenschen lauert. Wenn da Unrecht ist in der Welt, habe ich ihn nicht gelehrt, daran teilzunehmen. Ich werde ihm meine Tur nicht mehr offnen, wenn er zuruck-kommt, nur weil er sagt, er hat die Generale besiegt! Ich werde ihm sagen, und zwar durch die Tur, dass ich niemand in meinem Haus haben will, der sich mit Blut befleckt hat. Ich werde ihn mir abhauen wie einen kranken Fuss. Das werde ich.  Sie haben mir schon einen gebracht.  Der meinte auch, er werde schon Gluck haben.  Aber wir haben kein Gluck.  Das werdet ihr vielleicht noch begreifen, bevor die Generale mit uns fertig sind. Wer zum Schwert greift, wird durch das Schwert umkommen (1967, 1226).

[Wallis translation]:
If he has done that to me, and gone to the militia, I curse him. The air bombs can hit him.  The tanks can run him down.  He’ll see that there is no joking with God, that a poor man can’t beat the generals.  I didn’t bring him up to shoot his fellow men.  I never taught him to take a part in the injustice of this world.  I will not open my door to him when he comes back, not if he says he has whipped the generals!  I will tell him, through the keyhole, that I won’t have anybody in my house who is covered with blood.  I pluck him out like an eye that offends.  My husband was carried in and laid down right over there.  He thought he could win us happiness by fighting.  Where’s our happiness?  Where’s it going to be when the generals get through with us?  You’ll see.  They that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

The cathexis of the mother’s attachment dissolves when she curses her son even as she embodies the opposite of what the truth of her son’s sacrifice implies. The son returns indeed “covered with blood”–his own and not those he was meant to destroy. This ironic fulfillment of the mother’s prophecy–a Brechtian director can anticipate this through slides or announcements to undercut suspense–can be made to function on stage as the answer to the mother’s question: “Where’s it going to be when the generals get through with us?” The speech thus performs the Gestus of affirming what it ostensibly denies.

Class allegiance and maternal instinct intersect in the mother’s exteriorizing of her positions, an act generating a contradiction which is resolved at the end when the mother’s role of provider (bread baker/domestic caretaker) is sublimated and fused with her urge to avenge her son.  Earlier she demonstrates her partisanship and sense of civic duty when she nurses the wounded militia soldier Pablo, a scene where the boundary of the family coincides with the solidarity of the village. Though she is in a sense responsible for positioning her son as innocent sacrifice, she suppresses any feeling of guilt; her psyche channels the aggressive impulse toward the users of violence against her son. It is only with the son’s loss, and the ressentiment of conceiving the Other (fascist soldiers) as polluted, that the mother recovers her class identity and reaffirms the community of producers. The sacrifice of the son gives birth to subaltern solidarity.

While the dead son awakens Senora Carrar to what Pedro has been insisting, namely, the impossibility of being neutral in a world where violence and injustice implicates everyone, it may be experimentally heuristic to examine how the dead or absent father (whose metonymic extension, now the Senora’s rifles, signify the locus of libidinal investment as well as collective utopian desire) looms insistently in the background. The father’s return is narrated by Jose to his uncle Pedro in the beginning and functions in retrospect as a rehearsal for the son’s funeral: “Died at the station here. All of a sudden, in the evening, door flies open, and here come the neighbor women, the way they do when a drowned fisherman is brought home; file in without a word, take their places around the room up against the wall and pray all together as the body is carried in.” In this context, can we really consider Senora Carrar aloof, unconcerned, non-violent in principle? When she hears General Queipo de Llano’s voice on the radio condemning the “misguided rabble,” she reacts as follows:

Wir sind keine Aufruhrer, und wir bieten niemandem die  Stirn.  Wenn es nach euch ginge, tatet ihr vielleicht so etwas. Du und dein Bruder, ihr seid leichtsinnig von Natur. Ihr habt es von eurem Vater, und ich wurde es vielleicht nicht mogen, wenn ihr anders wart. Aber das hier ist kein Spass: horst du nicht ihre Kanonen? Wir sind arme Leute, und arme Leute konnen nicht Krieg fuhren (1967, 1199).

[Wallis translation]:
We’re not rabble.  We’re not rioters.  We haven’t had anything to do with agitators.  You and Juan probably would if I didn’t look after you.  You’re just like your father–and maybe I’d despise you if you weren’t.  But this is a terrible business.  Hear those cannons?  We are poor people.  Poor people can’t run a war.

Senora Carrar sees the father’s impulsiveness (ultimately, her own willfullness) in the sons and strives to control that; her pacifism results from the discipline of her feelings and her belief that “nobody knows what’s going to happen these days,”  a mark of canny marginality. Such fatalism, however, masks a powerful will held temporarily in abeyance, biding the time for the felicitous opportunity.

We begin to sense at this point that the husband Carlo joined the fighting with the full complicity of his wife, in fact, at her instigation. In the middle of the play, when Manuela insinuates that “she helped her husband get to Oviedo” where he was fatally wounded, the widowed wife counters in a muffled tone: “Don’t say that. I did not help him. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I know they all try to put the blame on me, but it’s a lie, a dirty lie. I’d like to see anybody prove it.” Our suspicion is that the father’s figure here turns out to be a function of his wife’s calculation of the odds, her prudential cunning. In effect, the mother combines what Darko Suvin calls the plebeian (Schweyk) point of view and the rationalist (Diderot) outlook in Brecht’s sensibility (1972, 94-98).

The concepts of property and genealogy are interrogated in the exchange between brother and sister. Pedro insists that the guns “aren’t things that belong just to you,” and by extension the sons are not merely the mother’s possessions. Senora Carrar’s response to her brother’s desire to persuade Juan in releasing the father’s guns from the mother’s clutches affords us a poignant Geste of questioning reality and the dominant ideology. Her thinking aloud unfolds a psychic cleavage symptomatic of the stranglehold of religious belief manifest in suicidal guilt and self-pity:

Lass meine Kinder in Ruhe, Pedro! Ich habe ihnen gesagt, dass ich mich aufhangen werde, wenn sie gehen. Ich weiss, dass das vor Gott eine Sunde ist und die ewige Verdammnis nach sich zieht. Aber ich kann nicht anders handeln. Als Carlo starb, so starb, ging ich zum Padre, sonst hatte ich mich damals schon aufgehangt. Ich wusste ganz gut, dass ich mit schuld war, obgleich er selber der Schlimmste war mit seiner Heftigkeit und seinem Hang zur Gewalttatigkeit. Wir haben es nicht so gut, und es ist nicht so leicht, dieses Leben zu ertragen. Aber es geht nicht mit dem Gewehr. Das sah ich, als sie ihn hereinbrachten und ihn mir auf den Boden legten. Ich bin nicht fur die Generale, und es ist eine Schande, das von mir zu sagen. Aber wenn ich mich still verhalte und meine Heftigkeit bekampfe, dann lassen sie uns vielleicht verschont. Das ist eine einfache Rechnung. Es ist wenig genug, was ich verlange. Ich will diese Fahne nicht mehr sehen. Wir sind unglucklich genug (1967, 1219-1220).

[Wallis translation]:
Leave my boys alone, Pedro.  I told them I would kill myself if they went. I know that that is mortal sin and I’ll go to hell if I do it.  But that’s all I can do.  When Carlo died–that way–I went right to the priest, or I’d have killed myself then.  I knew very well that I was partly to blame, though he was worse, because he was so emotional, and struggle came natural to him.  We haven’t such a good thing of it in this world, and this life isn’t so easy to bear.  But violence won’t do.  I learned that, when they brought him in and laid him on the floor in front of me. I am not for the generals, and it is a dirty lie to say I am.  But if I keep quiet and conquer my own headstrong nature maybe they will leave us in peace. That’s a simple bargain. It’s mighty little I ask. I don’t want to see this flag again. We’re unhappy enough.

The rhetoric of this passage is a mutation from the immediate present, the hortatory mode, to a narrated past and an impersonal commentary on the unbearable nature of “this life.”  It reveals the void on which her claim to pacifism and resignation rests. Senora Carrar also expresses a conditional wish based less on her experience as on a folk/peasant instinct toward the precarious nature of everyday life. Throughout, the detachment of the speaker is sustained by the simplicity and directness of her idiom (inspired by the Synge model), and also by the deliberate avoidance of any mawkish nostalgia for “the good old days.”

While the task of reversing the play’s “opportunist” use of the mother’s suffering largely depends, as I’ve suggested earlier, on the manner of staging and presentation–Brecht in fact hoped to cancel the empathy stimulus by projecting on the stage a documentary film on the historical causes of the Spanish Civil War–the alternating registers of the utterances I have quoted suffice to indicate the self-deconstructive possibilities of theatrical spacing demanded by epic/dialectical imperatives. Cues abound in the text for exteriorizing or distancing, the unmasking of representational illusion as conventional practices or socially authorized production. Brecht himself formulates the aesthetics of the reversals in the play through the Philosopher’s comments in the Messingkauf Dialogues: “Lamenting by means of sounds, or, better still, words, is a vast liberation, because it means that the sufferer is beginning to produce something. He’s already mixing his sorrow with an account of the blows he has received; he’s already making something out of the utterly devastating. Observation has set in” (quoted in Eagleton 1986, 172)

In the end, like Shen Te, Anna Fierling, and other fractured female protagonists, Senora Carrar ultimately shatters the spell of ressentiment, the vindictive personal impulse, and unsheathes the dialectical edge of that ambiguous Biblical injunction which justified her non-resistance–”They that take the sword shall perish with the sword”–as the collective judgement of the people against the militarist usurpers.

If the peoples of the Third World (a convenient generalization, not a homogenizing category) have suffered and continue to suffer the abuses of bourgeoise dictatorships and authoritarian regimes sustained by patriarchal/religious codes, then perhaps the “rifles” of the mothers whose sons and husbands have been tortured, killed or disappeared (as in Chile and elsewhere), can be mobilized to reveal the instability of imperialist hegemony vis-a-vis the psyches and praxis of the oppressed, especially women (to just barely touch on the feminist impulse). Brecht’s play can be profitably read, and performed, as an allegory of such possible transformations. It endows the old Horatian maxim of prodesse and delectare with exuberance and conviviality.

In June 1941, Brecht made a stop-over in Manila, Philippines, then a colony of the United States, on the way to exile in California. His return via Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar may herald a new way of utilizing the still popular empathy drama (on both the stage and screen) in a neocolonial formation for subversive pedagogical and pragmatic ends. In short, alienation-effect and epic distancing can only acquire their power because they are the diacritical reverse of empathy drama, just as the colonized and subjugated indigenous subjects exist because they are the necessary desiderata on which the power of imperialism is predicated.
So Brecht commemorated his passage (on July 21, 1941, from Vladivostok, USSR, with a short stopover in Manila, to Los Angeles, USA; see Volker 102) through this contested terrain in his poem “Landscape of Exile” whose second stanza I excerpt here:

The little horsecarts with gilt decorations
And the pink sleeves of the matrons
In the alleys of doomed Manila
The fugitive beheld with job.

REFERENCES

Brecht, Bertold.  Brecht on Theater.  Translated by John Willett.  New York: Hill & Wang, 1964.
—–.  Gessamelte Werke 3, Stucke 3.  Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1967.
Eagleton, Terry.  Against the Grain.  London: Verso, 1986.
Suvin, Darko.  “The Mirror and the Dynamo.”  In Brecht.  Edited by Erika Munk.  New York: Bantam, 1972.  80-98.
Torres, Maria Luisa.  “Anticipating Freedom in Theater.”  In Brecht in Asia and Africa.  Edited by John Fuegi et al.  Hong Kong: The International Brecht Society, 1989.  134-54.
Volker, Klaus.  Brecht Chronicle.  New York: A Continuum Book, 1975.

NOTES
1. John Willet (1959, 45-46) gives the production history of this play which he thinks  is a work that “seems truly to suit the Party line.”

2. I have also used the English version of the play by Keene Wallis published in Theatre Workshop, April-June 1938, pp 20-31.
For a more detailed elaboration of how Brecht has been appropriated locally, see Torres (1989).
_________________________________

E. SAN JUAN is director of the Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA He was recently visiting professor of literature and cultural studies at the National Tsing Hua University and Academia Sinica fellow in Taiwan. He was 2003 professor of American Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Among his recent books are RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press) and WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell University Press). Recent works are IN THE WAKE OF TERROR: CLASS, RACE, NATION, ETHNICITY IN THE POSTMODERN WORLD (Lexington Books); US IMPERIALISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES (Palgrave Macmillan); TOWARD FILIPINO SELF-DETERMINATION SUNY), and CRITIQUE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: LESSONS FROM ANTONIO GRAMSCI, MIKHAIL BAKHTIN, AND RAYMOND WILLIAMS (The Edwin Mellen Press). An E. SAN JUAN READER entitled BALIKBAYANG SINTA was published last year by Ateneo University Press.  He is currently a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.

THE FILIPINA FEMALE GAZE: A review of MARISOL, a film by Hella Wenders

AFTER MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA, A TESTIMONY TO THE UNCANNY FILIPINA GAZE

Or, Anticipating the Revenge of the Balik-bayan Cargo Cult

A Review of MARISOL (2009)—a film directed by Hella Wenders; cinematography by Merle Jothe; produced by Barbara Mutschler and Florian Gerstenberg ; German Film and Television School, Berlin, Germany

by E. San Juan, Jr.,
Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University

We live in the era of the global commons, but very few have actually met their neighbors—except as subalterns: household maids, hotel service-workers, nannies, most likely college-educated women from the Philippines. The ubiquitous phenomenon of Filipina domestics and overseas contract workers (almost ten million), known also as Overseas Filipino workers (OFW), has become a tedious and soporific topic for cynics and skeptics. Scholars have categorized them as modern indentured servants of the global ecumene. If you mention that at least five OFW cadavers/coffins arrive everyday at the Manila International Airport, a big yawn greets you: “So what else is new?” Those still awake may prod: “Why? How did this happen?”

Like millions around the world devastated by global capitalism’s meltdown, the lives of migrant Filipinas/as have become redundant or disposable. This began in the 1970s. The Marcos dictatorship, supported chiefly by the United States and the IMF-World Bank, institutionalized the export of “warm bodies” to the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. In the neoliberal global market, the nationality label “Filipino” quickly became equivalent to “servant” or “maid” in Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan and elsewhere. After 9/11, the terrorist Abu Sayyaf in the southern Philippines may have eclipsed the OFWs. But with the continual brutalization of Filipinas in Okinawa, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the “Nicole” scandal (“Nicole” is the Filipina raped by an American soldier subsequently convicted but “kidnapped” by the US Embassy while his case is on appeal), with hundreds in jail or awaiting execution, their plight will continue to haunt the conscience of “the pillars of society.” It may even disturb the sleep of State functionaries whose salaries depend on OFW remittances.

Marisol’s Sister: The Hanged Woman

One example is Flor Contemplacion whose case is well-known in the Philippines, but not in the global North. Accused of killing a fellow worker and a Singaporean child, and despite witnesses testifying to her innocence, Contemplacion was hanged in March 1995 by the Singaporean government. Instantly she became a national heroine. She continues to symbolize the unconscionable plight of Filipinas abused, raped, and killed by their bosses. Then president Fidel Ramos, threatened by a groundswell of sympathy for the victim, intervened; but given the historic subservience and bankruptcy of the Philippine nation-state, OFWs will continue to endure barbaric humiliation and exploitation. The fate of Flor Contemplacion stands as a haunting sign of what awaits Filipinos–unless they organize, refuse this intolerable status quo, and help liberate the country from imperial oppression and poverty.

The current Arroyo regime and its predecessors have survived chiefly due to the $12-14 billion OFW remittance. That is more than enough to cover the huge foreign debt and subsidize the obscene privileges of the tiny local oligarchy and the corrupt military/police. At least 1.3 million families, 7.9% of the total 16.5 families of 90 million Filipinos (most of whom survive on $2 a day), rely on OFW earnings for their survival. With the global economic downturn, a small drop in their household incomes will produce extreme hunger, criminality, and untold social upheavals. At least half a million OFWs work in Europe today, with at least 54,000 in Germany alone. The European Union’s new immigration policy will target undocumented migrants by penalizing their employers. What happens to OFWs in Europe and in the diaspora around the world, will deliver an impact with profound consequences. This is why this film about the agonizing plight of a Filipina domestic in Berlin, Germany, serves as an emblematic alarm-signal, a wake-up call, a portentous omen of things to come.

Marisol, the protagonist of Hella Wender’s short film, easily proves herself the uncanny half-sister of Flor Contemplacion. We wonder how a film can depict the structural situation of Filipino poverty driving thousands of wives/mothers to seek work abroad and preserve their integrity/sanity amid abuses, isolation, and uncertain future. One way is to condense the complex total social situation into the experience of a typical individual, into one or two representative episodes. It’s a challenge that Hella Wenders takes up, with intriguing success.
Her film is itself a “balikbayan” box we have to unpack. It uses the predicament of an illegal Filipina domestic in Berlin struggling to support her family (Luis, her husband, and two children, Jason and Lizelle). She thinks of them everyday and wants to go back home—she even orders a plane ticket under a false name. She holds up chiefly because her sister Wena, a domestic in Hong Kong, reminds her of their dream of one day becoming free, owning a store back home.

The normal routine is disrupted. One day Marisol’s husband calls to tell her that her sister Wena is dead. We expect Marisol to collapse, but except for one traumatic instant of abjecthood, she holds up. What happens to her dream of rejoining her family? She is undeterred. We saw her earlier taking care of two German children and cleaning windows. The film then focuses on Marisol—wife, mother, sister, family provider–filling her “balikbayan” box with commodities, gifts lovingly itemized as though they were fragments cut off from her body. Somehow she succeeds in paying for the shipping of her dead sister Wena: a “balikbayan” with a cruel twist. At the end, together with German friends and compatriots, Marisol vicariously participates in the burial of her sister via the computer’s Internet screen.

Media Seduction Vs. Aura of the Balikbayan Box

Will the dead rest in her grave? Is everyone pacified then, assured that Marisol will eventually realize the dream she shared with her “sacrificed” sister? Having hurdled this ordeal, will she move on to dare take other moves? What are her alternatives? These are a few questions aroused by Wender’s film. How about us, the audience: Do we learn anything? While OFW families are disrupted by their country’s neoloconial underdevelopment, migrants re-imagine their community/fictive family with the help of prosthetic devices such as cellphones and electronic mail, satellite TV, internet, that help sustain identities and lifestyles across shifting or porous boundaries. Technology extends and trains the human sensorium for survival in a dis-integrated anomic world, or in contested terrains. In postmodern jargon, these fluid and hybrid identities of OFWs inhabit the crucible of global ethnoscapes; presumably their psyches, if not their bodies, are able to elude bureaucratic definitions and traditional judgments. Do they?

The theme of a Filipina mother working abroad, without valid documents, is one pregnant with sentimental and melodramatic possibilities. No messianic guardian comes to the rescue. Wenders is able to deepen this figure by sophisticated camera work and nuanced framing of scenes and their calibrated sequencing. On first acquaintance, we are impressed by Marisol’s lively but sober demeanor. The upbeat foreward looking tonality of the film is conveyed by the introductory shots: sailors/workers gracefully doing gymnastics, smooth transition from ship to flowing traffic overlapping with Marisol’s buoyant address to her sister: “Dear Wena….” Her voice-over evokes the dominant affect of the film. It centers on motherhood indexed by the “balikbayan” box. The leitmotif of sending/receiving packages, plus the recollection of two sisters over their mother’s love, sutures the montage of departure/removal, a transition from Manila to Berlin that easily folds us into the cinematic narrative.

Throughout the film, the “balikbayan” box operates as the central unifying trope: it connects dispersed family members, like the umbilical cord. Though separated, Marisol and Wena are united by memory of their mother and a dream of freeing oneself from serfhood to take up an independent pettybourgeois life—the dream of millions. Marisol is shown cleaning windows, symbolizing both aspiration and blockage; she cooks and minds the German children, a surrogate fulfillment of what her family and society expects. Unlike the child in the theme-song “Anak,” Marisol did not disobey her parents by indulging in wicked vice only to repent later. No pathos here, no melodrama, no tears—except shouting at the vacant urban landscape, a protest against some existential injustice or malice sprung on her from above. The film is very quiet, disturbingly reticent. Is this a deliberate provocation, a Brechtian estrangement-effect, challenging us to complete the film which ends with a medium-shot focus on Marisol’s face?

Dialectic of Speaking and Listening

One alternative is offered by the film: utterance. And access to the facilities of communication. Language unites and divides, but here the Filipino/Tagalog sutures episodes of loneliness and painful endurance. We soon discover that Marisol’s sister Wena lives a double-life: her poetic efforts overshadow her bondage to household chores. Through a phonecall, Wena transmits her prophetic message of a monsoon outburst veiled by the overheated afternoons, allowing them to “fly to the moon.” The power of poetic language supplements, more exactly prescinds, electronic media. Their conversations dissolve the physical and temporal distance that separates them, compensating for their drab alienating circumstances. How long can this last? And can illusory relief by art/communication—the talking cure in which Wena becomes the analysand, Marisol the mute analyst–resolve material, historically structured adversities in our everyday life?

For OFWs, despite kinship networks, the danger of individualist solutions always proves seductive in a competitive global marketplace. There are now organizations like MIGRANTE that provide support (emotional, legal) to make up for government apathy or hostility. However, Marisol and many others are exposed to hazardous psychic injuries on top of physical harms. How do we handle sudden turns of fortune—actually, what’s more horrible than death are marital infidelities–allegorized by interruptions of phone calls, sudden Internet fadeouts, silence? Unexpectedly Wena dies—not an accident but a homicide. No one else can help pay for her return home except Marisol whose precarious status exposes her to possible arrest and deportation. Will she resort to extreme, law-breaking measures? Marisol is already a lawbreaker. But her plight encapsulates risk, alienation, and hope. Her contact with her German employer is defined solely by the money-wage (captured by a brief scene). In Berlin, Marisol’s life-world is inhabited by children, women friends, cellphone, computers, and money. She seems never to engage in any pleasurable leisurely act—except videoke conviviality with other Filipinas and their German friends in a club. Apparently she has no one to replace Wena, someone with whom she can regularly communicate or confide to, linking past and present with the future.
Of course there is the ubiquitous Filipino priest who represents the absent family, homeland, parents. He is shown consoling an illegal OFW (Rica Santos), betrayed by another Filipino, jailed and about to be deported. She personifies the possible future of Marisol and countless others. It is Rica Santos to whom Marisol later confides outside “Gigi’s Meeting Point,” their common predicament establishing their fictive kinship, while other Filipinas and their German friends sing the song “Anak” about a child who repents for having ignored her parents and strayed from the straight and narrow path. Should Marisol repent being an OFW?

Using “Anak” seems a deftly ironic choice here. Providing continuity to several scenes in the film, this popular song underscores the importance of parents and the need of children to heed their counsel lest disaster overtakes them. It warns children not to strike on their own without the guidance of authority, esp. the father. But the father in the film is starkly undercut, glimpsed only in the unstable computer-screen, eclipsed by the strong mother-figure of Marisol, the lawbreaker. The film interrupts Marisol’s conviviality with the news of Wena’s “suicide” (several Filipina maids who fell from buildings in Hong Kong were really murdered by their employers). Marisol protests, suggesting that Wena should be put in a “balikbayan” box—a fulfillment of her mother’s desire cited at the beginning. Fast foreward and we see Marisol confiding in Rica the sister-surrogate, reflecting on their own somehow intertwined, “weird” fates: one wants to stay but cannot, and the other wants to go home but cannot.

Jump-Cuts and Syncopations

Marisol is a parent without power. Her reliance on electronic media—cellphone, computers, Internet—as a way of preserving contact with her husband and children is contingent on her budget, her free time, and access to such prosthetic devices. Despite this electronic prophylactic, Marisol’s distance from her family is underscored by the fact that she cannot really maintain long exchanges with her children—in one scene, the scream of the German child cuts off her connection with her family. Moreover, her customary deference to the husband insures that she will always be at the receiving end of the line, unable to initiate action except as a response to his call for help. In short, Marisol’s agency seems undercut, annulled, diminished. When her sister Wena, at the start of the film, reminds her of their dreams, based on their mother’s sacrifice as an OFW herself, Marisol is unable to release pent-up feelings except by shouting to the anonymous space outside, to blank windows facing her apartment—a poignant image of frustration and helplessness.

Where or who is the Other who can listen to Marisol? In the process of grappling with this crisis, Marisol is driven by an imperious need to express herself, defying external law or inner prohibition. It is this need to communicate that the film foregrounds, an emergency appeal. This, I submit, is the film’s over-riding purpose: to compel us to listen, to understand. It’s a powerful challenge hurled to cyberspace and the open market, in quest of a responsive audience/viewers.

Solitude is conceivable only because of its opposite: community, solidarity. After the news of Wena’s death, Marisol is faced not only with the tragic deprivation of her other self. Wena incarnates Marisol’s submerged speaking self, the poet-rhetor, who reminds her of their common dream. It is the erotic Other that is sacrificed so Marisol can go on. The reality-principle dictates that she defer her return so that the sister can return—literally, Wena’s homecoming in a coffin as the other “balikbayan box.” Marisol rhetorical question to the empty urban space: “What do you want me to do?” is really addressed to the audience, the others who care. She demands from Luis (via cellphone) to talk to her sleeping children; but her “load” aborts communnication. The camera switches to Marisol walking the Berlin thoroughfare like a somnambulist, one of the few close-up shots—except for the cellphone/computer screen faces of her sister and family. She counts and wraps the money to send, via her friend, as though praying in her kitchen-sanctuary.

In one of the most dramatic moments of the film, with images of gleeful playing children alternating with shots of the WESTERN UNION office, Marisol runs in front of two policemen whom she served earlier. She wants to be arrested, interrogated. Her muteness is a desperate appeal for help—to be deported and sent home. However, her friend suddenly intervenes, wresting her away before the police can demand her ID and thus authenticate her identity: Marisol the mother/outlaw. Fast forward and we see Marisol repeating Wena’s poetic utterance—“Where did you come from? Where are you going?….bruised, struggling, crawling on all fours out of the abyss, craving for bliss without end,” demanding more from her compatriots, from those who are watching and witnessing this film.

The film itself offers German women’s solidarity. It concludes with prayers for Wena’s soul by Marisol’s friends, via computerized tele-screens attending Wena’s burial. A gesture to acknowledge Filipino mores is made: the Filipino priest, smiling, consoles Marisol with the remark that Wena has been bumped “first class” on her flight to heaven. This quasi-religious ceremony in secular Europe, the quiet camaraderie and unobtrusive solidarity, the calculatedly subdued ending—all these displace our anxiety about the crime, leaving us with Marisol’s thoughtful, handsome face. We surmise that she will resume her normal life with possibly more awareness of the injustice and danger that lurk behind the civilized facades of the wealthy employing nations. Is there surplus vision or needs accumulated in her consciousness that calls for collective action?

The Dreamer Sacrificed

More questions are triggered by the film’s somewhat abrupt end: Is Marisol, as shown in this film, a pathetic example of the helpless OFW? Postcolonial scholars are anxious to counter the stereotype belief that subalterns like female domestics don’t have agency. They disagree with the view that OFWs are totally victims of patriarchal discourse and masculinist violence. They argue that Marisol has agency: she invents a fictional person, “Olivia Flores,” that orders one-way ticket. She shouts that one day she will reveal her real name, fulfill her dream of doing what she wants (as the song “Anak” hints, without repentance). Her maternal and nurturing power is fully demonstrated by her ability to calm the screaming German child in her care, even though that task also confirms her distance from her family.

Here are the partial answers. When the film opens, we see sailors and workers exercising in harmony in front of a ship about to embark. City landscape smoothly blends with the recollection of Marisol’s mother and her balikbayan box peppered with kisses, imagining herself contained in the box sent to her children. This “balikbayan” box that holds gifts, token commodities, etc. functions as the chief synthesizing trope, the allegorical synapse or synergistic node of the film. While we observe Marisol packing her “balikbayan” box, ensuring the safety of its delivery, we also keep in mind what is not shown—the absent montage of her sister’s body being deposited as in a cargo container for shipping home, paid for by Marisol’s savings. We never see Marisol’s own box being shipped, but we see the coffin of her sister being laid to rest in her grave, surrounded by her mourning relatives—“bumped first class” in a flight to heaven. Our last image is of Marisol’s melancholy, thoughtful face, as the camera focuses on her, somewhat distanced from her community, replicating her earlier pose at the food-shop as she ponders giving up to the police. The solitary domestic is left bereft of companionship, isolated, even though we remain aware that it is there in the margins. Do we allow the priest to have the last word, the last “joke”?

Probably not. The film’s intent is to arouse questions and disturb our peace. The film’s style of articulating closed and open spaces succeeds in dramatizing Marisol’s dilemma between “risk-taking” and “security-maximizing,” to use sociological jargon. The arrangement of the scenes is meant to stage the dilemma all OFWs face: one between striking on your own, daring to struggle against customary prohibitions—as the theme song “Anak” warns against—or opting for safety behind law, patriarchal authority, and the opium of religion. It’s a classic existential situation.

What stands out, however, is a nexus of loaded signifiers. Marisol’s situation of risk and maternal resolve is a play on the motifs of the homely and the unhomely, both condensed in the German word “heimlich” which Freud made famous in his essay, “The Uncanny.” Marisol’s homeland (embodied in the electronic images of husband, children, Wena) becomes a cyberspace mirage, fading in and out, charged with frightening possibilities, destroying the bourgeois ideology of privacy and monogamous, heterosexual normativity. Meanwhile, Marisol’s network of friends/compatriots serves as a linkage to the emergent community of Migrante International, allowing the sisters of Gabriela Silang and of Rosa Luxemburg to meet. In this sense Marisol’s female gaze becomes uncanny, answering the misogynist question—“What does a woman want?”—with the threat and promise of slaying the patriarchs: the capitalist State, Hong Kong criminal employers, predatory transnational agencies, and the entire corrupt, unredeemable Filipino bureaucracy/oligarchy parasitic on OFW remittances, colluding with U.S. imperialism in keeping the country impoverished and subservient since the end of the Filipino American War of 1899-1913.

Marisol, stricken with anxiety and desperation, nearly surrendered to authority. That trauma-filled episode in which Marisol’s identity was at stake, dissolved quickly with her friend’s swift snatching of her body from the clutches of the State. Marisol is the mother who displaces the absent father—subaltern fathers have been emasculated by the neocolonial Arroyo state, obeisant to the imperial behest of the U.S. and predatory finance capital. While the paternal German welfare-state harbors threats such as the police and alienated employers, it permits temporary escape from enclosures such as the workplace (bar, house with German children to attend). It is also outside Gigi’s restaurant/bar where Wena’s poems are recited–a cry for help, an assertion of the right to happiness with loved ones, the right to self-fulfillment with others. In antithesis, some enclosure are hospitable: Gigi’s Meeting Point, the church-like place where balikbayan boxes are stored and confidential exchanges with the Filipino priest takes place, Marisol’s bedroom, her friend’s car. The Filipino priest serves as the index of the traditional homeland, accessible as listener to illegal migrants, a native counterpart to the Western psychiatrist/psychoanalyst, filling in for the absent authoritarian Filipino State.

For Whom the Bells Toll?

Art, cinema, surely cannot take the place of everyday working life or dominate it. But it’s useful for understanding oppressive institutions and imagining alternatives. Without it, we will remain victims of commodifying capital, money, and consumer goods dictating the content of our souls. Is it enough to be thankful to Hella Wenders and her co-workers for this richly compressed film and take pleasure in the character of Marisol, in her quiet fortitude, her patience, her dignified forbearance amid such paralyzing ordeal? After all, it is her sister, not her children or her husband or mother, who dies in this film.

As I have suggested earlier, Wena symbolizes Marisol’s authentic self, the exuberant twin-soul, who articulates her dreams and the future for her, as well as for millions of OFWs—for the whole dispossessed and diasporic Filipino nation. There is no chain migration here, only the extended family held together in a web or network of virtualized kinship and solidarity, enabled by modern means of communication, specifically cellphones, computerized television, etc. Despite geographical dispersal, communal and familial bonds are precariously maintained, affections sustained despite interruptions and reifying noises. Wena’s transmission is sometimes delayed, so that the unfolding of time is never linear, often recursive, sometimes anachronistic. This message of the film concerning the unpredictable dialectic of proximity and distance, past and future, open and closed spaces, necessity and accident, which escapes commodification by commercial establishments represented here by WESTERN UNION/ASIA IMBISS, is perhaps the most profound lesson to be inferred: organization and political consciousness-raising are needed.

Perhaps we can rescue Wena from the dead and make her speak to her sister again. She might say to Marisol that she needs to break out of her routine and question the condition of her life together with others, such as the OFW group, Migrante International, is doing. We do not need the cheap consolation of evangelical religion, the escape that Sarah Balabagan, the OFW flogged in Saudi Arabia, has chosen. We have other models: for example, Connie Bragas-Regalado, the fighter for migrant rights, or the women in Migrante Europe who attend to the needs of undocumented kababayan. This film is directly a critique of such packaged evasion. It is an oblique critique of individualist self-help. It sharply poses the limits of such solitary claustrophobic efforts even as it partly celebrates Marisol’s courage, resourcefulness and strength, knowing that her family and community (in the interstices of the film-shots) are with her in the struggle. She becomes Olivia Flores, the incommensurable trickster-figure.

As the film unfolds, Wena the domestic emerges in the network of communal exchanges as Wena the poet, inventor of images and figures that transform barriers into opportunities, unleashing the energies of dream for advancing the concrete projects of everyday life. This film succeeds in enabling our discovery of this poetic voice within the domestic serf, the insurgent dreamer, who may be suppressed now, but will always haunt us, especially those vampires and parasites who feed on the remittances of these postmodern indentured servants, even “modern-day slaves,” as Bridget Anderson aptly describes them.

In the process of inventing the correct praxis, Marisol draws sustenance from Wena’s words. Maintaining tactful aesthetic distance, the film allows us to empathize with that sacrificed voice whose words penetrate windows and walls (the Berlin Wall seems to have metamorphosed into a Chinese ‘Great Wall” in Hong Kong) to open up a gap, the revolutionary break, not only for reunion with her family but also re-possession/liberation of the ravished homeland where bodies and souls, bloodied from fierce global class wars, can once again be reunited, nourished and fulfilled in collective sharing. Mabuhay kayong lahat, Marisol!
______________

E. SAN JUAN, Jr. is director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center, Storrs, Connecticut, USA. He has taught at various universities in the US and around the world: University of Connecticut, Washington State University, Brooklyn College (CUNY), University of the Philippines, Leuven University in Belgium, and Tamkang University/National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan, among others. His latest books are US IMPERIALISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES (Palgrave), IN THE WAKE OF TERROR (Lexington), TOWARD FILIPINO SELF-DETERMINATION (SUNY Books), and CRITIQUE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: Lessons from Antonio Gramsci, Mikhail Bakhtin and Raymond Williams (Edwin Mellen Press). He is currently Spring 2009 Fellow of the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.

WHO’S AFRAID OF SLAVOJ ZIZEK IN THE PHILIPPINES? OF LACAN AND FREUD?

ON ZIZEK’S POPULARITY IN DILIMAN, PHILIPPINES, AND THE FREUDIAN SPECTER INVADING THE PHILIPPINES

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

Friends from U.P. Diliman have continually informed me that the most popular author among students and teachers today is Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian exile, now residing in London, UK. Not Ambeth Ocampo nor Jessica Zafra. Of course, Joma Sison is still around; but he has become trivialized, if not banalized, not less by his detractors now shooting polemical missiles from Japan, Australia, and Europe. Joma may have become the victim of an insidious repetition-compulsion (embodied in the habitus/ethos of megamalling/consumerism and migration) which has also wreaked havoc on the cult-groupie adherents of sikolohiyang Pilipino and its more exclusivist offsprings: pantayong pananaw, regional sectarian enclaves, etc. etc. If Mao and Joma are fading, will Che Guevara and Fanon—not to mention Antonio Gramsci, W.E.B.Du Bois, and Renato Constantino–be coming up soon in a revivalist trend, side by side with ‘Pareng Barack, Beyonce and Rihanna? No, Zizek has taken over!

Aside from his books on Lacan (applied to Hollywood films) and Hegel, Zizek has suddenly become a kind of Leninist after migrating to the UK where he heads a think-tank for the floating and eclectic intellectuals of the global North, including the not-so-mighty USA. The pragmatic US elite act like bricoleurs in raiding new ideas anywhere and commodifying them. (Except maybe for the original hypotheses of Charles Sanders Peirce, the real founder of pragmaticism, since then vulgarized by his epigones.) In the “belly of the beast,” academics are still looking to the French and the German thinkers (after Habermas, Derrida and Foucault, the Italian Agamben and the French Badiou are trying to catch up, jousting with Adorno, Bakhtin, and Walter Benjamin) for needed sustenance. They cannot get it from the late Rorty, nor the Hardt and Negri of Empire; much less from postcolonialists like Bhabha, Spivak, Appadurai, etc. Of course, the anarchists and neo-marxists proliferate, but they are impotent in affecting public discourse and institutional practices. As for the U.S.left, one hopes that someone will come to revive this dead Lazarus. Meanwhile, third-world immigrants are mobilizing….

Meanwhile, Zizek is still alive and functioning. From his launching-pad in London, and his video self-promotions in YOUTUBE and the Internet, Zizek has achieved some kind of hegemonic status among elite pundits and public intellectuals in the metropoles and hinterlands like the Philippines. My colleagues are not reading Chomsky, Zinn. Charles Taylor, or The Nation—they are perusing the humor and humours of Zizek.

Zizek’s entire corpus is based on Lacanian axioms, with heavy allusions to Freud, Marx, Hegel of course, and the anti-Cartesian and Nietzschean archive. This Lacanian foundation has never been questioned, presumably because it is obscure and highly speculative. Not the least daunting is the fact that there is a breed called Lacanian feminists (Kristeva may be one), just as there used to be Freudian feminists (Juliet Mitchell comes to mind). Aside from the linguistic orientation of Lacan, the whole Freudian apparatus of the analytic situation and its metapsychological implications are fully invested in the Zizek utterance-machine. Lacan in fact boasted that he restored the original Freud, or rescued him from the perfidious revisionists. Lacan’s logocentrism informs the wide-ranging applications deployed by Zizek in his commentaries on current issues and quotidian happenings. Zizek’s eclecticism appeals to the pedestrian scholars and practitioners of mainstream cultural studies all over the world, afraid of socialist or other utopian alternatives to the status quo.

One commentator in the field, Jean Laplanche, in his Essays on Otherness, has acutely provided illuminating distinctions in the levels of theoretical sophistication found in Freudian discourse.
Among his many shrewd insights, I offer for readers Laplanche’s view that “the theory of seduction” (which underlies Freud’s transference theory, the key lesson of the “talking cure”) is not a reading language one can use universally for all communication situations. Rather, it is chiefly an attempt to understand the analytical practice of Freudian therapists. To apply it elsewhere is a gross imposition bound to generate misreadings and misrecognitions. In fact, Laplanche emphasizes, what is known as “psychoanalytical reading” is “a direct means of repression.” This is an ironical finding that seems to rival the “shock and awe” of Bush’s infamous “global war on terror.”

In this context, the British philosopher Peter Osborne aptly comments on the “repetitive structure” of Zizek’s work: “’Psychoanalytical readings are a means of repression to the extent that they shield the reader from the productive enigma of the text/object/practice by imposing a standardized narrative interpretation: the Oedipal reading, the ‘depressive position’ reading, the Real reading…. Such readings offer the comfort, not of strangers, but of all-too-familiar codings of strangeness which serve to reinforce the interpreting subject’s existing formation. As such, they offer a theoretical version of the pleasure in repetition which is an essential part of all cultural experience” (Philosophy in Cultural Theory, London, 2000, pp. 114-15). Who would want to reject repetition if it gives pleasure? The obsession with affects, the body, Butler’s performative and ludic exhibitions, and of course sexual/erotic fantasies, is still universal.

It is, I think, precisely this pleasure in repetition of now familiar Freudian/Lacanian strategies of reading that we find in Zizek.Take, for example, a typical performance illustrated by his article “The Not-so-Quiet American” in IN THESE TIMES (Feb. 14, 2005). This is vintage Zizek. Here he criticizes U.S. imperial policy in Iraq as a perfect illustration of Graham Greene’s satiric portrayal of the “quiet American” who, in spite of or because of humanitarian, altruistic motives produce enormous disaster and death, the opposite of his good intentions. The Freudian paradigm of the libidinal unconscious wrecking all the master plans of the rational ego is obvious here. Lacan observes that the Iraqi people react ungratefully to the U.S. gift of democracy and freedom—“they look at the proverbial gift horse in the mouth, and America then responds like a sullen child in reaction of the ingratitude of those it selflessly helped.” Lacan follows this up with the method of double reading, one that looks backward in a genealogical fashion to what lies behind appearances (the hidden motive) and one that looks forward to the eschatological effect (the result that validates the discovery of what’s hidden). After excavation, then an allegory of anticipation and, if there’s no transference, repetition. This formula is applied to the excavation of the U.S. motive. Zizek diagnoses further: “The underlying presupposition is that under our skin, if we scratch the surface, we are all Americans. That is our true desire—all that is needed is just to give people a chance, liberate them from their imposed constraints and they will join us in our ideological dream.” Hence, US feminists’ self-righetous crusade against clitoridectomy in Africa, the Middle East, and everywhere.

Zizek tries to complicate his rather conventional Freudian/Lacanian reading by inscribing in his text the authoritarian/totalitarian binary introduced by Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a neoconservative policy bureaucrat during the Reagan administration. Semantic and ludic discriminations take over. Kirkpatrick approved the pragmatic authoritarian dictators supported by the US in the seventies and eighties (Marcos,Pinochet, Saddam Hussein, etc.) but disapproved the totalitarian rulers modeled after Soviet and Chinese communist teachings. Zizek seizes on the irony of the U.S. overthrowing the pragmatic authoritarian Saddam Hussein, thus proving that its real and authentic desire—yes, the hidden subterranean drive—is for totalitarian domination, the exercise of absolute power over everyone. In effect, Zizek has revealed the real motive, the source of the imperial drive, in analyzing the process of transference by using Saddam Hussein, and the US policy in Iraq, as the enigmatic signifiers whose binding and unbinding can produce the cure. But by confining himself to the discourse of the texts he reads, its concepts and assumptions, Zizek reproduces all the ironies and ambiguities he is trying to resolve. We thought everything was clear, we include in the “overall picture the ideological and political effects” of US occupation, but the Iraqis remain the victims. Iraq remains occupied with at least a million Iraqis dead and thousands of Americans killed. And the redeeming Gospel of Zizek has not changed the picture. (Recently, the African American political commentator Melissa Harris-Lacewell cogently argued that what changed the picture, at least within the US consensus, is the Katrina-New Orleans disaster and its erosion of support for Bush’s unilaterialist, war-mongering racialist policy.)

Armed with Zizek’s apercus disseminated in numerous books and articles circulated all over the world, are we any wiser or more fully informed of the total picture of the world today after his brilliant disclosure? Are we more adequately mobilized to confront Obama’s imperial mission in Afghanistan and all over the world, including the Philippines, via the subservient neocolonial Arroyo regime? Can the Lacanian-Freudian theoretical framework clarify the root and solution to the unprecedented global economic crisis started by the financial collapse of 2008? Is US hegemony still standing after the powerful Zizek diagnosis of self-deception, seduction, and traumatic cathexes?

The problem is our uncritical acceptance of Freud’s flawed premises and fundamentally complicit world-view. Despite the heroic efforts of Marcuse, Fromm, Wolfenstein, Reich, Ollman, and others, Freud remains a seriously misleading explainer of what is wrong with Western civilization, and the human psyche in general. The Freudian doctrine has of course been repudiated by psychologists and psychiatrists trained in scientific positivism, as well as by social scientists in general. However, Freud’s metapsychology (as elaborated in Civilization and Its Discontents and The Future of an Illusion, for example) continue to exercise a profound and pervasive influence on humanists, writers, artists, and so on. This is not the space for an extended critique of Freud, or even a review of everything wrong and counterproductive in Freud if we are concerned with advancing a revolutionary, socialist project. Allow me to quote Richard Lichtman’s concluding judgment in his important but neglected book, The Production of Desire (Lichtman’s caveats on Freud complement Christopher Caudwell’s critique of Freud in Studies in a Dying Culture):

…This is precisely Freud’s weakness; he lacks an understanding of social relations and therefore of the social nature of ‘individual’ existence. Consequently, his efforts at the demystification of personal experience always reproduce some critical aspect of that mystification., for he never escapes taking the consequence of capitalist individualism for its cause. The framework through which he reveals the reality of the human condition is limited by the inhumanity of the capitalist condition which is then mistaken for the human condition itself. So, while Freud eschews any assertion of the significance of social structure, he reproduces this very structure in his uncritical acceptance of the deepest aspects of the capitalist world view” (1982, 258).

I think Lichtman’s analysis and evaluation of Freud’s whole psychoanalytic cosmos are solidly grounded on a historical-materialist critique and seems to me irrefutable; and, mutatis mutandis, they apply also to Lacan and Zizek. May it reach our friends in Diliman, “sitting in darkness,” to use Mark Twain’s ironic epithet of the U.S. civilizing mission, the brutal “Benevolent Assimilation” conquest of the islands that led to 1.4 million dead Filipinas/os and its other toxic consequences. –##

JOSE GARCIA VILLA: REPETITION COMPULSION, TRAUMA, AND THE HAUNTING OF PATRIARCHAL POETICS

JOSE GARCIA VILLA:

A POST-MORTEM REPORT (Revised and Expanded)

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

A single motive underlies all my work and defines my intention as a serious artist: the search for the metaphysical meaning of man’s life in the Universe–the finding of man’s selfhood and identity in the mystery of Creation.

—JOSE GARCIA VILLA (1955)

Both Hegel and Kierkegaard wrote about the “beautiful soul” of the “unhappy consciousness,” an adolescent stage in the development of the human psyche. Hegel foresaw its dialectical supersession in a more concrete historical understanding of life; whereas Kierkegaard, repudiating Hegel, wanted to sacrifice the aesthetic sensibility to a higher ethical mode of existence. Villa rejected the Hegelian alternative, but instead of moving on to the ethical stage, he opted for a permanent aesthetic beatitude. The publication of Jose Garcia Villa’s Doveglion: Collected Poems by Penguin Books in 2008, edited by his literary executor and introduced by a devotee, clearly shows the itinerary of the poet from the colonial adolescence of rejection of the “Name of the Father” (to use the Lacanian term) and the ethical dilemma to a preference for erotic bliss in semiotic indeterminacy. But this rejection of symbolic differentiation also equals death, the repetition-compulsion of a mannerist style. The “beautiful soul” of infantile repetition self-destructs into a dead-end: the cutting and splicing of commodified prose, an ironic parody of the comma poems and reversed consonance. Thus, the publication of this volume of Doveglion’s corpus may be said to mark not “a growing revival of interest” in Villa’s work—as Luis Francia claims—but rather the final nail on his coffin. It may, however, arouse antiquarian interest and nostalgia for the posthumous return of the repressed.

Villa died in Feb. 1997, literally unknown. His last volume, Selected Poems and New, was published in 1958, in which he preserved (as though he were a museum curator) those poems he wrote in the twenty years (1937-1957) that saw his maturation in New York City. No resurgence of interest greeted that last collection. Its centerpiece was “The Anchored Angel,” selected by feudal-vintage impresarios Osbert and Edith Sitwell for inclusion in a 1954 issue of the London-based The Times Literary Supplement. From then on Villa ceased to be a publicly acknowledged creative writer. In fact, even when he was actively publishing, his recognition was quite limited and confined to a narrow circle of friends and patrons. Except for Conrad Aiken’s 1944 anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry, no anthology of significance—not even of minority or ethnic writers—has included Villa’s poems. In effect, Villa remains an unknown writer for most Americans, let alone readers of American or English literature around the world. In the country of his birth, today, only a few aficionados and college-trained professionals are acquainted with Villa’s writings.

A Peer Among Equals?

Where is the Villa file in the Western archive? Francia celebrates Villa’s arrival to the New York literary scene dominated by white writers with the famous 1948 Life magazine photograph. The photo is a palimpsest or tell-tale rebus in itself. Aside from patricians Osbert and Edith Sitwell, whom Villa courted slavishly, we see left-wing or Marxist-inspired poets such as Delmore Schwartz, Horace Gregory, W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Marya Zaturenska, Randall Jarrell, and certainly non-conformist writers like Tennesse Williams, William Rose Benet, Richard Eberhart, Marianne Moore, and Gore Vidal–Vidal would eventually prove to be the most anti-imperialist maverick of them all. There are no African Americans or other person of color except Villa. E.e. cummings, Villa’s model and idol, is remarkably missing.

In the photo, one may discern some allegorical innuendo which may be happenstance: Villa is sandwiched between the young Vidal and the mature Auden, whose anti-fascist sympathies explicit in his eloquent attacks against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini were quoted and broadcast around the world. In short, the major American and British writers in the photo were mostly veterans of the global campaign against fascism in Europe and also against Japanese militarist aggression one of whose main victims were millions of Filipinos in the only U.S. colony in Asia, the Philippine Commonwealth. Villa was and remained a Filipino citizen throughout his life, and was the only colonial, subaltern subject in the photo.

Villa became a resident of New York City beginning in 1932-33. How did Villa manage his life so that he was able to surface in this rare photograph (taken by e.e. cumming’s common-law wife, Marion Morehouse) of a particular place in New York City? I want to enter a parenthesis here concerning this venue of Villa’s “appearance” preceding his “disappearance” in the sixties: the Gotham Book Mart, now bankrupt. Founded by Frances Steloff (1887-1989) in January 1920, this bookstore became a fabled rendezvous for avant-garde writers, an international literary haven for experimental art. It served as the meeting place of the James Joyce Society. Steloff was a friend of Anais Nin and other oppositional and dissident artists. Steloff challenged State censorship by purchasing shipments of the banned Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence in the late twenties, and ordering smuggled copies of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in the 1930s. Steloff’s bookstore was visited by Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, H. L. Mencken, Eugene O’Neil, Charlie Chaplin, and others. While the Sitwells were not necessarily oppositional, much less critical, of the Establishment, they were friends of Auden, Spender, and other exiled anti-fascist writers at that time. The Sitwells, and Villa himself, would surely not want to mix with Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and their ilk—Sitwell was notorious for dismissing the Beatniks as repugnant for their odor. This may explain why Villa, then sponsored by e.e. cummings, found himself in the middle of this gathering—the only ethnic, third-world writer who seemed to have lost his way in the subterranean labyrinth of the city and fortuitously emerged here in this exclusive coterie. Fame (not guilt) by association, one would quip, while still preserving a mock naivete, a proverbial innocence, often ascribed to the Filipino emigrant from the province, from the seductive languorous village of Mir-I-Nisa and other grotesques inhabiting Footnote to Youth.

The Penguin Classic biographical note on Villa cites Villa’s employment as a cultural attaché to the Philippine mission to the UN from 1952 to 1963, at the height of the Cold War, and his position, from 1968 on, as adviser on cultural affairs to the dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Indeed, Villa was made a National Artist for Literature in 1973, the year after Marcos imposed martial law and began 14 years of bloody and ruthless rampage. This may be merely a trivial footnote to worshippers of Villa’s aura. But it is cynical not to document this connection of the National Artist to the neocolonial state and its oligarchic retainers/clients for the U.S. imperial power.

The Gotham Book reception for the Sitwells, however, already took place in the second year of the Cold War, which Churchill and Truman inaugurated in 1947 with their shrewd incarceration of the Soviet Union in a fabled “Iron Curtain.” The Philippines counted itself America’s most trusted ally in the “Free World” crusade against world communism. The next year, 1949, witnessed the victory of Mao Tsetung against Chiang Kai-shek in China, the outbreak of the Korean War, and the ferocious repression of the Huks in the Philippines led by Col. Edward Lansdale of the CIA, adviser to then President Ramon Magsaysay. Lansdale used the Philippines as an experimental laboratory for the systematic “Phoenix” assassination of communists in Vietnam in the sixties and seventies.

None of these historical contexts is mentioned by Francia. Villa’s itinerary of success, traced by Francia from the beginning of the poet’s migration to the US in 1930 up to his death in 1997, follows an evolutionary and teleological scheme. There seems to be no real break or interruption in the route to fame. Villa ends in fact “belonging to the pantheon of Asian American literature,” despite minor violations of Eurocentric norms and even though excluded by the gatekeepers of the Asian American canon. Villa received prestige-granting awards from Establishment sources: Guggenheim, Bollingen, Rockefeller, etc. But such prizes did not result in the class-defined distinction only reserved for EuroAmericans for the greater part of the twentieth century.

Now monumentalized, however, Villa—Francia continues his accolade—was “a creature of his age.” In other words, he conformed to the conventional, standard pattern—Villa’s models were all European, traditional, and respectable. In what way then did he demonstrate his originality, his bold deviation from the norms, so as to earn or deserve admission to the mausoleum of modernism? Aside from his technical innovations, not always appreciated or accepted by the arbiters of the Anglo-American mainstream canon, in what way was Villa a rebel, a dissident writer, who challenged the standards of his day and initiated a new, radically innovative aesthetics and world-view?

Technician of the Sacred

As time has proved, the technical innovations of “reversed consonance” and “comma poems” were too idiosyncratic and problematic to stimulate much concern among younger writers or academic scholars. Unlike sprung rhythm or Ezra Pound’s imagist movement, they were not associated with a substantial body of work that has social and historical breadth and resonance. Villa’s themes of angelic rebellion, the solitary genius, and artistic exceptionality that have also preoccupied contemporary poets such as Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Charles Olson, and others, have proved too rarefied or linguistically constricted as to appeal to readers who expect more elaboration in terms of concrete determinations and cultural or social exemplification.

For this occasion, I will not dwell on the rather familiar and tedious recitation of Villa’s debt to the canonical texts of the Western literary tradition, from the Bible to the Metaphysicals, Hopkins, e.e.cummings, etc. This has been thoroughly explored by numerous essays by American critics, including Villa’s sponsors, from Edward O’Brien to Babette Deutsch and Mark Van Doren. In my previous essay on Villa in The Philippine Temptation and elsewhere, I surveyed the ambivalent and often duplicitous tenor and implication of the existing commentary on Villa. Many of them are actually ironic or back-handed compliments, either subtly or openly condescending and certainly patronizing in a rather sly and coy manner. No Filipino critic is acknowledged as contributing worthwhile knowledge about Villa.

In any case, Francia quotes Timothy Yu, a Chinese-American scholar at Stanford University, as an authority on the poet. Yu argues that while Villa was heavily Orientalized by his critics and patrons—Sitwell’s insulting portrait of Villa as a “green iguana” is certainly unprecedented—and thus fixated or reified, Villa resisted this placing of his work in the Western canonical hierarchy. In fact, Yu contends that Villa “threatens to overturn the Orientalist hierarchy at the heart of modernism.” After much specious and speculative argument, Yu suggests that Villa is not really Asian American but a transnational writer, one bridging the Philippines and the U.S., a transmigrant artist belonging to several continents, in effect a writer with universal or global appeal, such as that exerted by Salman Rushdie or V.S. Naipaul, by the authors of Sargasso Sea and The English Patient.

Francia contends that Villa is that kind of universal writer, despite his critics’ praise of his command of English as a foreign language to him, because he resembles Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov in his mastery of the “imperial language.” This is quite a plea. First of all, like Yu, Francia commits the fundamental mistake of ignoring the colonial and neocolonial status of the Philippines in the international hierarchy of nation-states and national cultures. Conrad’s Poland and Nabokov’s Russia are not in the same subordinated position as the Philippines, nor are they exactly identical as socioeconomic formations with specific modes of production. Like most of the proponents of transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and kindred neologisms, Yu and Francia do not really understand the historical and political subordination of a U.S. colony to the quite complex and subtle strategies of a U.S. imperial hegemon distinguished for claiming “exceptionalism.” If they have some inkling of it, it is superficial and not integral to their evaluation of Villa.

In fact, Yu and Francia have willy-nilly, without being aware of it, endorsed “American exceptionalism,” despite their gestures of being against imperialism or colonialism as such. Why? By equating Villa with Conrad or other postcolonial writers now in vogue, they convert the Philippines into an independent entity, if not equal partner, with the colonizer. It is as if Conrad and Nabokov were natives of Puerto Rico, or Guam, or even Hawaii. Transnationalism is the alibi of special pleading for a subaltern poet who made good in the metropolitan center, who proved an exceptional pupil of colonial tutelage and demonstrated agency for postcolonial mimicry.

Francia’s exorbitant claim that Villa was fluent in all three languages, Tagalog and Spanish and English, makes his other judgments suspect. Without even alluding to the deeply subjugated position of the Filipino body-soul after centuries of Spanish, U.S. and Japanese domination, and the ideological utility of English as a weapon of colonial manipulation, Francia ends up mystifying the situation of Villa as a Filipino subject, ascribing to him the identity of a “prophet” and an “unusual man,” thus belonging to no country or culture—in effect, a universal creature for all or none. This rescue of Villa strikes us as a hubristic act of “salvaging,” as the term is used during the dark days of the Marcos “martial law” regime.

Yu is to be credited with analyzing the covert and patent mode in which American and British patrons or handlers really colonized and neocolonized Villa without scruples. Yu aptly focuses on Edith Sitwell’s heavily racialized depiction of Villa as “this presumably minute, dark green creature, the colour of New Zealand jade, spinning these sharp flame-like poems” some of which are bad in Sitwell’s view. Yu also notes that apart from the Orientalizing distortion, his patrons reduced or inflated Villa into an alien mystic, a foreign body, an outlandish race. As Sitwell emphasized, “But Villa is a Filipino” to excuse the unacceptable nature of his comma poems.

Yu, however, overestimates Villa’s proto-transnational status. He completely ignores the political and cultural changes that have occurred in the Philippines from the time of Marcos’ despotic rule to the present, believing that Chua’s volume marks a nationwide resurgence of interest in Villa.

There is some legitimacy in noting that Villa’s work and its reception is a “trans-Pacific phenomenon.” But that is not a simple geographical placing but a geopolitical one that the equalizing and leveling inference borne by the prefix “trans” occludes and even expunges from our critical intelligence. In short, Yu is ignorant of the profound anti-colonial and anti-imperialist history of the Filipino people from the time it resisted U.S. invasion in 1899 at the outset of the Filipino American War through the peasant uprisings in the first twenty years, to the Sakdal and Huk rebellions in the thirties, forties and fifties, up to the New People’s Army and Communist resurgence in the sixties up to the present. That is, Yu is blind or insensitive to the long durable history of revolutionary action that has formed the physiognomy and cultural tradition of the Filipino people from the time of Magellan up to the present.

Lacking this historical trajectory of the political-cultural transformation of a whole people, its national-popular habitus and sensibility, it is unwise to calculate Villa’s current worth—both his use-value and exchange-value as a producer of cultural artifacts such as books like the Penguin Classics—and future value, if any. It is unwise, that is, to measure Villa as a Filipino poet worthy of the national-popular tradition of asserting national integrity and autonomy.

Problems of Valorization

Villa can indeed be used for cosmopolitan exchange, but his use-value remains unknown or hypothetical so far. Now that I have introduced the twin sides of value—use and exchange—I want to quickly delineate the historical contexts necessary to appraise Villa’s writings as produced carriers or bearers of value. Such value is necessarily social and implicated in the multilayered social, political and cultural conflicts of his time.

The hypothesis often posited by devotees of Villa, as illustrated by Francia’s allegation that “Villa had no fashionable cause to advance or defend except that of poetry itself” is no doubt self-serving and apologetic, to say the least. It is meant to justify Villa’s naïve aestheticism. But what it does is to eviscerate whatever surviving element of worth remains in these highly mannered, stylized and deliberately antiquated poetic discourse. It fails to contextualize Villa’s calculated and reflexive essentialism and aesthetic purism.

To say that Villa is concerned only with art or poetry is to say nothing much, unless you compartmentalize culture in a Byzantine fashion and artificially exaggerate the division of social labor and products of that labor into really specialized niches. In that case, poetry is a freakish and weird sport, a disease whose etiology is unknown or an accidental product of labor which nobody really understands and appreciates. What is poetry in itself? Can one define an essence by itself without locating the totality from which it is distinguished? From Plato up to Hegel, metaphysics never postulates an essence without the intermediary surroundings and the whole structure from which it acquires its status/definition as an essence, or a distinctive if distilled element. I want to call attention again to Theodor Adorno’s essay, “Lyric Poetry and Society,” and also to Pierre Bourdieu’s genealogy of European aestheticism in The Rules of Art to demonstrate how “art for art’s sake” is a historical symptom of the bourgeois artist’s alienation from a commodified, reifying milieu.

I suggest a historical-materialist appraisal by situating Villa’s labor as part of social labor occurring at definite periods of history. Of course, it is assumed that such labor is artistic—the shaping of materials into a concrete formally-specific product, its formal characteristics being already given as a distinctive quality of his work. But the hermeneutic process does not end at the level of formal analysis; rather, that serves as a point of departure for further empirical and functional analysis and theorizing. I suggest the following large contexts, what might be described as “conditions of possibility,” lived collective situations that can frame Villa’s work and allow the further specification of its qualities and possible effects. What Villa’s response to these contexts were, remains unknown, and what has been documented need to be further specified by class analysis of Philippine and US society and the cultural and intellectual formations in which the texts and the circumstances of their production and reception are inscribed.

Look Homeward, Angel, Now

The Philippines into which Villa was born may be described as a tributary socioeconomic formation produced by three hundred years of Spanish colonization. The Filipino nation was in the process of being born from the collective endeavors of Filipino propagandists and agitators in the nineteenth century, an offshoot of numerous peasant-worker revolts and indigenous insurrections throughout the islands culminating in the Katipunan revolt of 1896. This process was aborted by the US imperialist intervention in 1898 as part of the Spanish-American War and the defeat of Spanish imperial forces in Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Villa’s father was a high military officer and adviser to General Emilio Aguinaldo, the president of the first Philippine Republic, who succumbed to US military and political power. Villa welcomed the invaders and in fact assimilated to US metropolitan culture, despite weak oppositional or disrespectful impulses and tendencies.

When Villa was born in 1908, the US military and civil administrators were in the process of stifling the survivors of Aguinaldo’s revolutionary army. Macario Sakay, one of Aguinaldo’s officers, and his comrades were hanged a few years earlier; but the insurrectos would continue up to the second decade, with the Moro resistance proving the most resilient and formidable. Villa grew up in this milieu of cruel terror against seditious, recalcitrant natives. Later on, with strong nationalist protests, Villa saw the accomodationist and conciliatory policies of the Americans winning over Quezon and the oligarchs. Villa left before the Commonwealth was established in 1935.

When Villa was an adolescent, Filipino nationalism smoldered in the organizing efforts of workers in Manila and peasants in Central Luzon, primarily those involved in the Colorum insurrections of Tayug and other towns in the twenties, and later the Sakdalista uprising in the thirties. By the time Villa was a medical and law student in 1929, just a year before his move to the U.S. in 1930, the Communist Party of the Philippines had already been founded after years of agitation, propaganda and mobilization of union workers and peasants. This occurred even as Manuel Quezon, Sergio Osmena and other members of the Filipino oligarchy, through parliamentary and legal means, continued to demand immediate independence from the colonial power. Villa left at the time of heated debates on how that demand was to be articulated locally and in the metropolitan heartland.

Meanwhile, Filipinos have struck an autonomous path in the U.S. They have been organizing and agitating in the Hawaii plantations, and later in the West Coast and Alaskan salmon canneries, since their advent in the first decade of this century. Carlos Bulosan narrates their odyssey in his 1948 chronicle America Is in the Heart. Their efforts culminated in bloody strikes together with Japanese and other ethnic workers in the first two decades of the twentieth century, through the Bolshevik revolution of 1918 and the fascistic Palmer raids before and after World War I. Pedro Calosa was expelled from Hawaii only to lead the Tayug revolt in Pangasinan a few years later.

Villa Agonistes

The era of the “Great Depression” in the US after the 1929 Wall Street collapse, up through the Communist-led organizing of workers in the thirties and early forties, to the beginning of World War II—this is the main arena in which Villa found himself struggling for recognition as a serious poet. The Depression was symptomatically recorded in the experiences of his deracination and isolation in New Mexico represented in epiphanic episodes in his 1933 short stories collection, Footnote to Youth. By 1933 he was residing in New York City where he experienced the nadir of the Depression. None of his works indicates that he registered any visible sustained response to the massive mobilization of American writers and artists in support of Republican Spain, against Franco’s fascist military supported by Hitler and Mussolini. His compatriots, Salvador Lopez, Manuel Arguilla and others in the Philippine Writers League, were active in that worldwide solidarity campaign, just as Auden, Spender, Orwell, Malraux, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and others were contributing their share to that united front of democratic, anarchist, and socialist partisan resistance of the proletariat. Arguilla and other Filipino intellectuals, Villa’s contemporaries, sacrificed their lives to free the Philippines from brutal Japanese oppression.

One can also submit that the Depression years and the mobilization of Filipinos against Japanese invasion and occupation of the Philippines constitute the time period in which we should judge Villa’s major works found in Have Come Am Here (1942) and Volume Two (1949). It is interesting to speculate how e.e. cummings, with his exploits in World War I and its aftermath, might have influenced Villa by his erasure from Villa’s texts; and how the New York critics and their dissident or leftist inclinations might have aroused in Villa either negative or positive reactions. This is a project for future Villa scholars.

Meanwhile, I would underscore a salient contextual parameter for appraising Villa’s intellectual genealogy. It was this period of Villa’s apprenticeship in New York City (circa 1933-1940) that, across more than 6,000 miles of the continental-Pacific divide, witnessed the most fertile dissemination and cultivation of radical, socialist, Marxist-inspired ideas in the Philippines. This decade culminated in the founding of the Philippine Writers League on February 26, 1939, and the institution of the Commonwealth Literary Award by President Manuel Quezon on March 25, 1939. Unprecedented in the annals of Filipino cultural life, the debates sparked by these two events (recorded in a slim volume entitled Literature Under the Commonwealth edited by Manuel E. Arguilla, Esteban Nedruda, and Teodoro A. Agoncillo) need to be juxtaposed with Villa’s reflections on art and its place in society and its humanistic horizon.

Villa’s absent presence, as it were, functions as the subtext of those exchanges. It may be inferred from the ideological conflict between the partisans of the “art-for-art’s sake” camp and the socialist or left-wing group of A.B. Rotor, Salvador P. Lopez, Federico Mangahas, Jose Lansang, M. De Gracia Concepcion, and others. While Villa’s aestheticism was indirectly defended by A.E. Litiatco and J. Lardizabal, the majority of participants in the exchange subscribed to a committed and ethically conscientious stand, even though personalities like Carlos P. Romulo, Leopoldo Yabes and R. Zulueta da Costa expressed mediating, reformist or conciliatory views in response to Rotor’s call for a populist, worker-oriented literature (invoking the authority of Plekhanov and Gorki).

Lopez’s essay on “Proletarian Literature: A Definition” laid out the classic and more dialectical perspective than Rotor’s programmatic appeal for partisanship. But Rotor’s citation of Thomas Mann, who was an exile in the U.S. (like Brecht and countless European artists), stressed the need for writers removed from their homelands to join in active struggle against anti-humanist terror. The author of such masterpieces as The Magic Mountain and “Death in Venice” stated that “it is not enough today to concern himself with Right, Good and Truth only within the limits of his art. He must seek these qualities in the politico-social sphere as well, and establish a relation between his thought and the political will of his time” (1973, 21).

Sacrifice Without Redemption

The beginning of World War II and the entire period of Japanese occupation of the Philippines saw Villa either employed or in close contact with the exiled government of the Philippines Commonwealth, via writers connected with the government (Carlos Romulo, Bienvenido Santos, and others). Villa’s contemporaries in the Philipppines either fought with the American colonizers in Bataan and Corregidor, and later in the underground resistance to Japanese occupation; while others in exile, such as Carlos Bulosan, described Filipino anguish at the plight of their families back home and Filipino eagerness to join the US army to help liberate the homeland from the misery and oppression of the Japanese aggressors.

How did Villa interpret this agonizing interregnum between US colonial rule and the second Philippine Republic emerging from the ruins and rubble of Manila, the city of his birth and of his ancestors? His rebellion against god and surrogate authorities, against literal and symbolic patriarchs, and his refusal to belong to any physical/real country may be an expression of his fear, dreams and hope of liberation from all family entanglements and sociopolitical constraints. It is not clear whether Villa married Rosemary Lamb during this period, whether he raised his children during these years of the beginning of global pax Americana and the Cold War, and what particular ordeals of his personal life configured and contoured his cultural politics. The impact on Villa of the Cold War vicissitudes remains a blank in the critical commentary on his career.

It is also curious to note that Francia and other commentators are silent on Villa’s 1955 autobiographical statement found in Stanley Kunitz’s edited reference work, Twentieth Century Authors. While confirming certain facts about the author’s career, no one seems to want to quote Villa’s own ventriloquial characterization of his general artistic, philosophical creed embodied in the last paragraph of the entry. While I used this previously in The Philippine Temptation, let me quote it again for those not familiar with it:

Recently someone remarked to Villa that he found Villa’s poetry ‘abstract,’ contrary to the general feeling for detail and particularity that characterizes most contemporary poetry. Villa comments: “I realize now that this is true; I had not thought of my work in that light before. The reason for it must be that I am not at all interested in description or outward appearance, nor in the contemporary scene, but in essence. A single motive underlies all my work and defines my intention as a serious artist: The search for the metaphysical meaning of man’s life in the Universe—the finding of man’s selfhood and identity in the mystery of Creation. I use the term metaphysical to denote the ethic-philosophic force behind all essential living. The development and unification of the human personality I consider the highest achievement a man can do (1955, 1035-1036).

Actually, if one examines carefully Villa’s 1940 essay “Literary Criticism in the Philippines” or the 1953-54 essay “The Condition of Philippine Verse,” one will easily find abundant recurrent motifs about essence, unity, synthesis, etc. For example, he contrasts the “essence of prose” as substance, inferior or secondary to poetry’s essence, which is “magic and magic of utterance” (2002, 291). Antithetical to a dialectical mode (as in Aristotle or St. Thomas Aquinas), Villa’s thought exhibits close affinities to an Augustinian dualism (positing binaries such as sacred intellect versus profane body), which manifests a Manichean tendency that leads to a Gnostic conception of life and a Neoplatonic cosmology. If only the soul can transcend or do away with the body without so much “expenditure of the spirit”—that was Villa’s devoutly wished consummation.

Another way to elucidate the Villa problematic, the articulation of the dialectic of possibility and necessity in the poet’s life, may be performed by way of a symptomatic reading of Mir-I-Nisa, adjudged the best short story of 1929 by the Philippines Free Press. A reading of the story will reveal the pre-Oedipal ground of Villa’s aestheticism and its anachronistic conservatism premised on the artist’s superiority. It is said that the prize money of P1,000 from this story enabled Villa to escape his father’s tyranny and leave for Albuquerque, New Mexico. The story exploits Moro/Muslim ethnographic folkways and artifactual material to dramatize an allegory of clan arbitration and moral judgment. Distant, exotically strange, alien yet somehow familiar, the paraphernalia of Moro family structure, kinship, courtship ritual and martrimonial arrangments revolve around the political economy of fishing and pearl-diving, which is concealed in order to foreground the ethos of male supremacy. On the surface, the patriarch determines love-choices and the distribution of sexual power. In the contest to determine who is the more worthwhile husband for his daughter Mir-I-Nisa, the father Ulka plays the trickster and rigs the game: Achmed falls into the trap of conventional expectations, coming up with the pearl that was never thrown into the sea by the father, while Tasmi confesses failure. Achmed who follows the conventional pattern loses, while the feminized Tasmi who yields to masculine pride wins the contest and becomes the father’s choice for surrendering/exchanging the reproductive power of his daughter. What actually happened was not revealed to the community of Wawa-Ojot, the scene of mystification and Moro enigmatic behavior, nor was it also disclosed to the father, Tasmi. Villa’s psychic investment seems to privilege the mother/the maternal/the feminine.

But there’s more below the surface of the text. Villa the poet sympathetically aligns himself with Jakaria, the son of Mir-I-Nisa and Tasmi, who concludes the story with the revelation that the father, Ulka, did not drop the pearl but only an illusory copy: a small ball of salt. This fooled both suitors as well as the whole community. The mother confesses the secret to her son, reinforcing the umbilical tie between mother and child, and re-enacting the scene of seduction. She enjoins her son not to reveal the secret to the father: “She said it very softly, and her face was radiantly sweet and beautiful. And because I have always loved my mother, I promised her never to let my father know” (“Mir-I-Nisa” 381). The father, also known as the Symbolic name-of-the-father (in Lacan’s scheme), antithetical to the Imaginary (the mirror-phase tied to the pre-Oedipal mother), is cancelled and negated in favor of the maternal complicity between creator and created. Ironically, the mother’s duty is meant to preserve the honor and authority of her father, the patriarch, who estimates honesty (obedience to the prevailing hierarchical order) as a preferable virtue compared to masculine prowess/deceit undermining conventional rules. By analogy, the artist (Villa) seeks to preserve that love (fulfillment, jouissance, artistic integrity) by privileging an arcane linguistic game whose pleasures and benefits are confined exclusively to a select circle of cult-followers and an elite audience with access to education and the cultivation of refined tastes. But the supreme irony is that Villa’s revolt against his father, and by extension the dominant norms of conventional art and taste, together with the ostensible privileging of the mother—the mother’s body offering pleasure from the polymorphously perverse erotic target of desire objectified into the poetic art-object, the ludic verbal fantasy–results in the affirmation of the patriarchal order: the Philippine neocolonial setup, U.S. imperialist hegemony, white male supremacy in the global system.

In a sense, Villa proved himself honest and faithful to his “mother,” embodied here in a neoromantic, anti-commercial conception of an artisanal kind of art/poetry struggling to survive amid the forces of deceit, pretense, fraud, hypocrisy, etc. that pervaded the petty-bourgeois world of Filipino mimicries of Bouvard and Pecuchet (in Flaubert’s novel). Such honesty, however, only maintained the status quo as usual even though it gave the illusion that a dialectical twist had occurred, with modern art redeeming the fallen world of commodity-fetishism, alienated labor, and brutal colonial subjugation. By extension, Villa’s modernity became possible by underwriting the aristocratic tributary enclave (in “Mir-I-Nisa, the pre-Christian, Muslim-ordered village economy) of the metropolitan cultural milieu made possible by the labor of millions of Filipino colonial subjects and other subalterns in the crisis-ridden, decadent U.S. empire.

There is thus no doubt that Villa remained uncannily faithful to his earliest fundamental insights or convictions about art and poetry. His belief in some essential property of language that is inherently “poetic” resembles the belief of romantic poets in some divine or supernatural inspiration. This is an old notion already proved fallacious by modern linguistics. In the early decades of the last century, the famous linguist Roman Jakobson laid to rest both the romanticist and Russian formalist’s search for the poetic essence of language as something separate from its communicative and expressive functions. Nonetheless, the continuity of Villa’s error is premised on a habitus or entrenched mentality of aristocratic individualism sprung from a tributary feudal social formation, a belief that some incommensurable virtu or thaumaturgic mana inheres in the poet’s soul or spirit that the human body and worldly reality cannot fully realize, hence the singular identity of the poet transcends time and space, biographical particulars, sociohistorical specificity. It floats as a monadic presence, angelic in cast but parasitic on the immanent forms that somehow fail to achieve rising to the level of transcendence. This, together with the concrete facts about Villa’s location in Philippine society and his U.S. situation, contributes to explaining the roots of Villa’s dogmatic stance in his criticism and peculiar views about society and ordinary life. Further research into the influences and crucial turning-points of Villa’s life is needed to confirm this hypothesis.

Negative Beatification?

Finally, we are left with the marked stagnation of Villa’s poetics, its fixation in the ludic verbal experimentation modeled after e.e. cummings, whose own career suffers a traumatic paralysis after the experience of the Soviet nightmare in Eimi (1933). The other model, Sitwell, exacerbates the claustrophobic, incestuous narcissism of a Cartesian nominalism underlying Villa’s world-view. What is more crucial is the historical conjuncture that defines the parameter of closure. Indeed, the framing sequence of the Cold War from 1947 to Villa’s death in 1997 is a fifty-year enclosure that spells the exhaustion of Villa’s style and idiom of mystical lyricism and theatrical self-dramatization. Note that in the fifties and sixties, New York witnessed the beginning of the Beat generation (Allen Ginsberg, Frank Ohara, etc.), aside from the profound and radical influence of Charles Olson and diverse new American poetics that replaced Eliot and Pound’s New Critical formalism.

One may hazard the guess that the influence and support of e.e.cummings and other formalist New Critics may have reinforced Villa’s insulation/distance from movements such as objectivism, the narrative and historical epic experiments of William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane, the populist drive of the Beatniks, and the more expressionistic work of Robert Lowell, John Ashberry, and their epigones in the sixties and seventies. Villa seemed detached or removed from the actualities of the New York cultural milieu, not to speak of the whole North American continent and Europe. Note that Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, and others were deep in surrealism and cubism and resourceful cinematic innovations in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

Villa’s 1949 book Volume Two and his 1958 Selected Poems and New were all produced in the shadow of the Cold War, the Korean War, and the raging civil war between the puppet Republics of Roxas, Quirino, Magsaysay, and Garcia against the Huks and their millions of sympathizers. With the relatively stabilized world of the fifties under Eisenhower, Villa virtually terminates his active career and lapses into the typographical doogles and games of the “Adaptations” and “Xocerisms.” It is indeed the distinctive impulse of modernism to “make it new,” in Ezra Pound’s terms; to break the traditional pattern, disrupt the conventional mold, and strike out on new ground. But Villa’s innovations, whether the comma poems, reversed consonance, or adaptations, are superficial attempts to mimic the novelties of Mallarme, Rilke, e.e. cummings, or Marianne Moore. The Cold War created the vacuum of universalized exchange-value in which Villa’s use-value—his dialogue with god and angels—became superfluous or fungible. It became mere paper not acceptable as legal tender because its use-value evaporated.

It is in the era of neoliberal globalization, the unchallenged reign of commodity-fetishism and global finance’s “free market” (now undergoing serious meltdown), that Villa finally becomes a “classic” author. One of Villa’s Xocerisms may provide a clue to the exhaustion of his linguistic register, poetic lexicon, and mannered style: “To reinvent God is unnecessary; all He needs today is a designer name.” Indeed, Villa may have been reduced by his editor and devotees as a “designer name” useful to build prestige, firm up a reputation or aura, and promote status-conscious careers.

It is indeed ironic to find a poet obsessed with uniqueness, singularity, essence, genius, angels, exceptionality, gods, now being swallowed up in the homogenizing universe of cultural commodities and the culture industry. But perhaps this is a fitting and appropriate end: the dissolution of genius, the angelic imagination, in the totality of exchange whose value, while pretending to be absolute, is also absolutely zero. Nihilism may be the authentic vocation of Villa, a nihilism that may abolish art and all poetry, as well as nations, identities, etc. If so, then Villa has finally succeeded and conquered the last bastion of meaning and intelligibility: language that means and signifies nothing. Is our conversation about him also null, nada, devoid of sense or import? If so, then the only logical alternative (to follow Wittgenstein) is silence.

REFERENCES

Adorno, Theodor. 1974. “Lyric Poetry and Society.” Telos 20: 64-74.

Arguilla, Manuel, Esteban Nedruda and Teodoro A. Agoncillo. 1940;1973. Literature Under the Commonwealth by Manuel Quezon, Carlos P. Romulo, Salvador P. Lopez, et al. Manila: Philippine Writers League, 1940; rept. Alberto S. Florentino, 1973.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 2002. The Rules of Art. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Kunitz, Stanley, ed. 1955. Twentieth Century Authors. First Supplement. New York: H. W. Wilson.

San Juan, E. 1998. “Salvaging the Disappeared Poet: The Case of Jose Garcia Villa.” Unpublished lecture at the University of Michigan, 1989. Accessible in the Website, “The Philippines Matrix Project” <http://www.philcsc.wordpress.com>

—-. 1996. The Philippine Temptation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.

—–. 1995. “In Search of Filipino Writing: Reclaiming Whose America?” in The Ethnic Canon. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Villa, Jose Garcia. 2008. Doveglion: Collected Poems. Ed. John Edwin Cowen. New York: Penguin Books.

——. 2002. Essays in Literary Criticism. Ed. Jonathan Chua. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press.

—–. 1955. “Villa, Jose Garcia” [autobiographical statement]. In Twentieth Century Authors (First Supplement), ed. J. Stanley Kunitz. New York: H. W. Wilson.

—–. 1950. “Mir-I-Nisa.” In Encyclopedia of the Philippines. Ed. Zoilo Galang. Vol. 1. Manila, Philippines: Exequiel Floro.

Yu, Timothy. 2004. “The Hand of a Chinese Master: Jose Garcia Villa and Modernist Orientalism.” MELUS 29. Accessible at http://www.stanford.edu/-tyu/cv.htm

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WAR AND PEACE IN KINGSTON’S NOVEL, THE FIFTH BOOK OF PEACE (Expanded Version)

DIALECTICS OF AESTHETICS AND POLITICS IN MAXINE HONG KINGSTON’S

THE FIFTH BOOK OF PEACE

By E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

Fellow, W.E.B.Du Bois Institute, Harvard University

After the end of the Cold War at the beginning of the new millennium, September 11, 2001 exploded and kindled a “hot” war on global terrorism, preemptive and seemingly endless, until the election of Barack Obama in November 2008 as the first African American president. This did not signify the end of U.S. imperial global hegemony, as witnessed by the fighting in Iraq and the accelerated interventions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Colombia, the Philippines, and elsewhere. The “shadow of Empire” still darkens humanity’s horizons. The lessons of the Vietnam War, and earlier, the orgy of genocidal racist slaughter during the U.S. conquest of the Philippines (1899-1902), have not been learned. The trauma of the Vietnam disaster lingers in the collective psyche of the body politic, as Maxine Hong Kingston diagnoses it in her 2003 novel, The Fifth Book of Peace. In this essay, I argue that Kingston’s etiology and anatomy of the trauma combines the analytic mode of an oppositional mass-line politics with the synthesizing logic of her astute Asian American sensibility to shape a narrative of reconciliation with a difference. Her aesthetic achievement foregrounds the contradictions inherent in the alienated and reified social structures of capitalist society, underscoring the racial, gendered, class-inflected differences among her personages. The material differences among her characters are not erased or obscured by “the shadow of Empire”; rather, they are accented, sharpened, and sublated so as to situate them in the totality of the sociopolitical system which reproduces them, without whose radical transformation the syndrome of war trauma and all the symptoms of social decay will persist. Kingston’s art conveys a radical politics of personal redemption through communal change, with her narrative serving as a dialectical mediation between manifold layers of polarities and contradictions endemic to class-divided, commodified, militarist order.

Peace, for Kingston, is not passive assent to the reigning consensus. Peace for her means a vigilant and militant concern for safeguarding people’s rights to liberty, equality, ethnic integrity, and communal self-determination.

Postmodernist Conformism

My historical-materialist perspective is antithetical to the dominant critical orthodoxy in literary studies of the last three decades. In 1992, a postmodernist critic pontificated on the dispersed and disjunctive text of Kingston’s 1989 novel Tripmaster Monkey, postulating the axiom that henceforth the author’s authority is now fragmented, disavowed, erased. [1]This model of decentered ethnographic writing would now refuse any finality or permanence in text, truth or representation—a refusal that the burning of Kingston’s 156-pages sequel to her novel in the Oakland fire of October 1991 may have uncannily fulfilled. The page proofs of Tripmaster Monkey also went up in flames, spurring the author to center herself and compose the third chapter of her new book which recreates the gutted “fourth book of peace.” That 156-pages manuscript described how Wittman Ah Sing (a fifth-generation Chinese-American playwright) and his family sought sanctuary in Hawaii during the Vietnam War. In trying to gather the damaged fragments of her life after the loss of her house and writing, Kingston seems to repudiate the notion of the author having sacrificed her authority (as alleged by James Clifford, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) in favor of a trickster persona, for she now strives to demonstrate self-mastery in continuing what was interrupted by chance and accident.

This new book is less post-al or ludic ethnography than an experimental meditation on the fraught interface between the real and what is possible. It disturbs our habitual expectations, hence reviewers feel bewildered and disappointed. Kingston intends here to re-write or re-create her burned manuscript—which she accomplishes in the fictional part entitled “Water.” But in the process she reconstructs the whole panorama and context of the events surrounding her life before and after the Oakland fire. In effect, she fashions five chapters of this hybrid, collage-like artifice consisting of her desperate attempt to rescue her work during the fire (labeled “a true story”), a recounting of the history of the lost Books of Peace” and her quest to find them, with speculative excurses on the craft of story-telling. This is followed by her attempt to help war veterans to regain psychic health through participation in a Community for Mindful Living (begun in 1993) comprised of writers groping their way to peace. The long middle chapter entitled “Water” holds the quasi-picaresque narrative of Wittman Ah Sing and his wife Tania trying to make a home in Hawaii; these episodes seem pointless until we sense the impact of the local anti-war resistance to which they contribute and the effect of the native mores on their son Mario Ehukai.[2]

The next bulky chapter, “Earth,” details Kingston’s efforts to establish a basis of solidarity for Vietnam War veterans through writing workshops, culminating in their reunion with the Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh in Plum Village, France, all captured in film by a BBC crew. Synthesis is sought through suturing diverse life-experiences of war veterans (of Vietnam, Korea, and Gulf Wars) suffused with feelings of doubt, remorse, and recrimination. This section ends with Kingston celebrating her mother’s death, supplying a closing parenthesis to the funeral of her father which opens the book, together with Kingston’s recursive fantasy of emulating Fa Mook Lan, the legendary “woman warrior,” who inspired Kingston’s historic first novel, Woman Warrior. Fire, death, birth and community—these themes bind what to some appear a hodge-podge of heterogeneous raw materials for imaginative alchemy.

What is revealing is the 5-pages Epilogue that occurs after 9/11: on the tenth anniversary of the Oakland fire, Kingston describes a meeting between Barbara Lee, the only Congressperson who voted against giving the President unlimited war powers, and a sister-in-law of a victim of the Pentagon bombing. After alluding to Peaceful Tomorrows, an organization formed by families of the victims of the 9/11 attacks who had urged Congress and the President to make financial restitution to Afghanis who lost relatives and homes to American bombing, Kingston concludes with the report of her arrest, together with two dozen protesters, in front of the White House during International Women’s Day, March 7, 2003, in sympathy with massive spontaneous demonstrations around the world against U.S. aggression in Iraq. War is considered an interruption of peace, hence the book ends with the beginning of a period of wholesale “devastation” even as she exhorts us, the readers, to collude with her in unremitting acts of creation.

The final two paragraphs may be read as an affirmation of Kingston’s reinstated authority in the mode of aphorism and pedagogical advice:

The images of peace are ephemeral. The language of peace is subtle. The reasons for peace, the definitions of peace, the very idea of peace have to be invented, and invented again.

Children, everybody, here’s what to do during war: In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment (492).

Because of the frequency of comments like this that would be deemed inappropriate editorial intrusions if the book positioned itself entirely within a fictional domain, reviewers like Polly Shulman of the New York Times (Sept. 28, 2003) faults Kingston for “unreal utopianism” compounded by “the need to sanitize and happify.” Confusion about what kind of text we have prevails. Quotations about the horrors of war and the urgent need to restore harmony through meditation in a Buddhist sangha in the making, are lifted out of context to prove that Kingston can no longer offer coherent talk-stories as in her previous performances.

Media Commodity-Fetishism

Can we expect more from reviewers who are creatures of habit? The failure to apprehend correctly the architectonic shape of this work and the inability to appreciate the novelty of Kingston’s achievement can easily be explained. Kingston’s first book Woman Warrior puzzled readers unfamiliar with exploratory ethnic fabulation. Deploying the method of “talk-story,” Kingston blended anecdotes of her youthful growing up with historical accounts, folklore, testimonies, diary impressions, official records, etc. to produce a new wayward genre of narrative that easily lends itself to orthodox academic categorizing. Indeed, like Tripmaster Monkey, Woman Warrior is a postmodern text that supposedly destabilizes identity discourses instanced in autobiographies, memoirs, etc.[3]

In order to escape the task of analytically configuring the new generic pattern invented by this Chinese-American author grappling with unprecedented historical predicaments, the critics fall lazily into the habit of following what’s in vogue. When a literary text challenges the standards of conventional literary typology, it is considered a mixed or indeterminate specimen, ignoring the fact that it is the historicity of the writer’s situation, together with Kingston’s response to new altered conditions for Chinese Americans, that have posed new questions and doubts about the efficacy of the old canonical grids of articulating the experience of communities of color that have been excluded, marginalized, or inferiorized.[4] In short, it is both a crisis of literary convention (aesthetic form) and the hermeneutic process of interpretation (audience reception) that we find crystallized in the phenomenal appearance of Woman Warrior or China Men and, again, in this politically astute, antiformalistic rendering of a Chinese American woman’s critique of U.S. imperial power in this new book. This is what constitutes Kingston’s singular achievement here.

A clue to the radical historicizing, anti-mythical motive of the book may be gleaned from the second chapter, “Paper, which reflects on the nature of writing. After the knowledge of “devastation” gained from her painful effort to save her manuscript from the firestorm, Kingston recovers from the trauma when she reflects on a recurring dream: “I can prevent the bombing by finding the Three Lost Books of Peace.” She was writing this during the U.S. siege of Iraq, the constant bombing and killing of women, children, and their accompanying ideological mystifications. A friend encourages Kingston to replace the burnt “Fourth Book of Peace” with this new fifth one: “And the fire’s aftermath also gave me the method of how to write it—with others, in community.” What every reader will remember as she pores over every line in the first chapter, “Fire,” is the frenziedly agonized solitary individual trying to find a way back to her house amid the destruction and the firefighters’ campaign to save houses. This is what she would seek to avoid, to exorcise, in the rest of the work.

Shocked and traumatized, the berserk property-owner is saved by Oakland Fire Captain Ray Gatchalian’s suggestion that the landscape of horror in Vietnam (and, by extension, the ongoing Gulf War) resembled that of Oakland. Kingston is impressed by this witnessing testimony: Gatchalian would tell everyone that when we (the U.S.) “decide to send our military and our bombs into a country, this is what we’re deciding to do.” This decision to link local catastrophe with imperial havoc underlies the search for the lost books of peace in chapter two, “Paper” (the element of regeneration). Kingston allegorizes her individual plight by invoking the Chinese Books of Peace “lost in deliberate fires.” Her visit to China intimates that the fabled books are integrally bound with oracle bones, the origin of writing and civilization, with the I Ching, Gwan Goong, god of war and literature, the Buddhist Heart Sutra, and the lore of the untutored masses. “Peace begins in thought…Thought becomes body. Sudden fast change is a method of war. The logic of peace has to be spoken out at length.”

Personal calamity awakens the bourgeois self to the prior claims of the community. Before she concludes on thoughts about the art and craft of writing, Kingston confesses to having stolen her mother’s immigration scroll and genealogy book—both gutted by the fire. The fetishism of writing is exposed and the cult of the individual negated as Kingston discovers the dialectic of the monadic ego and the community:

After the fire, I could not re-enter fiction. Writing had become a treat for my own personal self…. Say any manner of thing. For my own benefit. Retreat into the Yin mother darkness. Oh, the necessity and comfort of writing. “I…I….I….I….,” the selfish first person, author, narrator, protagonist, one. Freedom, to write diarylike, okay to be formless, no art, no good English.

Fiction cares for others; it is compassion, and gives others voice. It time-travels the past and the future, and pulls the not-now, not-yet into existence.

The garret where I wrote, which was just my height, burned. A sign. I do not want the aloneness of the writer’s life. No more solitary. I need a community of like minds. The Book of Peace, to be reconstructed, needs community (61-62)

Radical Signifying Monkey

Writing, then, is the discovery of the dialogic self, the Other as a necessary identifier. I submit that this is the pivotal point where Kingston articulates the ethico-political matrix of this book, a summing-up of her task and responsibility as an ethnic writer in the U.S.: the existential suffering of loss (burned house, death of her father and mother) intertwines with the suffering of millions (both Americans and their victims) during the Vietnam War and, subsequently, the Gulf War, the 9/11 attacks, and the Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Confronting this carnage, the personal injury and social damage wrought by imperialist wars, the Chinese-American writer begins to understand that individualist aestheticism is bankrupt. Only a militant, self-critical sensibility, a committed artist conscious of one’s responsibility to people, can connect the fragmented and alienated experiences of life in late-capitalist society with the struggles, hopes and torments of peoples and nations around the world. This is the vision that empowers Kingston to proceed with re-constituting Wittman Ah Sing’s sojourn in Hawaii—the total impression one gets here is how Hawaiian history, indigenous rituals, and natural surroundings reveal how insignificant, and somewhat tragic-comic the lives of self-centered individuals are against the geopolitics of collective life and the continuity of ecological existence. She proceeds to dramatize the tensions, paradoxes, and conflicts among veterans and peace activists when they gather in the writing workshops and in the spiritual community guided by the Venerable Thich Nhat Hang, Zen master in exile from Vietnam.

After the harrowing ordeals of “Fire” and “Water,” readers expect some kind of resolution and equilibrium when we arrive at this chapter with the telling title, “Earth.” Earlier, the philosophical stance was still metaphysically egotist or mind-centered, as when Wittman Ah Sing believes that “Only change onself, and the world will change” (143) or when he instructs his son: “Create one good human being—yourself. And you don’t have to love everybody” (235). This idealism is battered by Wittman’s own concrete experiences in Hawaii, particularly the internal ruptures in the Crossroads Sanctuary and the overwhelming institutional power of the military Establishment. A materialist outlook overshadows the tendency to idealist and intuitive aestheticism. So that when “Earth” opens, Kingston is reminded by her mother in her dreams to address the imperative for social transformation: “What have you been doing to educate America?”

Contrary to the hegemonic practice of individualist self-help, the pedagogical process for Kingston is defined by participatory and collective sharing of stories. The accounts of Jimmy Janko, Roman “Hopper” Martinez, several woman Vets, Bob Golling, Robert Landman, Clarence Mitchell, John Wike, John Mulligan, and many others, serve as examples of variegated modes of engaging with the past. Kingston insists on meditation, a practice of silence, an attempt to control time and self-serving sentiments. Kingston finally has to bring in Thich Nhat Hanh for the healing act—but he disappoints by giving soporific lectures on “Fifty Verses on the Manifestation of Consciousness.” Kingston is probably reminded of how, in Hawaii, the AWOL GIs united in the spirit of ho’oponopono (meaning “to put to rights,” spiritual balance among self, family and community)–the ethos of an egalitarian community, “one in relation to the others” (204). But Kingston could not do it despite her heroic effort at safeguarding the Bell of Mindfulness. The problem, I think, lies in Kingston’s liberalism and inclination to let-go, evinced in her effort at allowing each individual to heal or cure herself. What then is her function in this writing conferences?

No one is questioning Kingston’s sincerity, her generous and compassionate attention to the veterans. She becomes a compassionate boddhisatva, a disciple of Kuan Yin. Her view of writing as therapy fits in with her understanding of her role as educator. At one of their first meetings, Kingston expounds on the value of writing: “Write things out, and you won’t need to carry memories in your body as pain. The paper will carry your stories. We, your readers, will help you carry your stories. See how light paper is?” (266). But this sounds more like a Zen koan than a logical inference from the therapeutic exercise of sublimating feelings into words. One evidence of Kingston’s let-be attitude, a kind of buddhist nonchalance as it were, may be seen in her reponse to veteran Sherdyl’s written confession: “I only personally killed one man.” Kingston wryly remarks: “How few words it takes to say it, the fact—I killed a human being. One sentence gets it out. The telling is as short as the doing” (341). Here is Kingston’s rationale for this writing session: “This communication is what I live for. I am accomplishing the purpose of my life: to get each to communicate with each, and all with all. If nothing more happens, today is culmination enough” (340). The problem is that this desire is not entirely fulfilled, as evidenced by some women veterans being unable to forgive the draft resisters. In spite of the gaps and silences, Kingston struggles to bring back Thay Nhat Hanh and Sister Khan Chong to kindle the spirit of reconciliation and the practice of mindfulness. Thay’s lecture on America as an “open society” and the importance of learning from suffering may be Kingston’s way of signalling that her authority as educator has yielded to the Vietnamese sage and his pacifist liberalism: “Plum Village is a product of the Viet Nam-American War. Vietnamese in diaspora settled here. A city of peace has resulted from war” (390). Yin and yang, war and peace—they comprise the polarities of life and thus cannot be separated, so each one needs to make peace with this ineluctable dualism and ambivalence. If this is the lesson learned by the community, why protest wars?

From Fantasy to Reality

Questions linger as we reach the ending. If communication is not completely achieved, what is gained? While it is clear that Kingston chose to end this “book of peace” with her anti-war protest against the imperial state, we are left with the impression that the veterans will not so easily settle accounts with the past by means of the “hugging meditation.” Some continue to accuse the peace activists with “betrayal.” And Kingston’s reiteration of the Fa Mook Lan story of the woman warrior returning to civil society and her judgment that “Viet Nam” is “a war, a state of mind, now just another place” may not so easily appease her mother’s ghost. Finally, what can we make of this somewhat wish-fulfilling if ambivalent statement that closes the rich compilation of Vietnam veterans’ stories and the reference to the start of the second Iraq war?

If the world, time and space, and cause-and-effect accord with my mother’s teachings—her Tao—then we have stopped wars years hence. We made myriads of nonwars. We have ended wars a hundred years from now. The war against Iraq, which began the same year as the Oakland-Berkeley fire, is still occurring. But peace we make also continues, and fans, and lives on and on (397-98).

The publisher’s blurb can serve as a point of departure: it calls this “stream-of-consciousness memoir” a convoluted quest to elevate “a personal search to a cosmic quest for truth.” It portrays Kingston as agent provocateur with “Buddhist-inflected wisdom and humorous self-doubts” as she tries to reorient herself after the fire and her father’s death, interpreting her loss as a “kind of shadow-experience” of the Gulf War and her project of re-creating what was lost as a demonstration of the regenerative virtue of peace. In effect, art functions as the most effective healer, reconciling personal pain with the critical distance engendered by a historical imagination. Kingston validates this when she replies to an interview in Sept. 24, 2003 on how she was able to recover from the personal disaster: “I thought that ‘I can’t do this alone, I need a community of writers.’ And I decided that those writers would be war veterans. And I had this theory and my hope that, through writing, that we could all get over the trauma of fires and wars and losses…I learned and affirmed my ideas and hopes about art. And I know that through putting our experiences into words, it is possible for people to come out of war and learn peace.”[5] Mediated through the community of veterans, Kingston the artist strives to transform war into an instrument of peace: she tells the veterans to “put that war into words, and through language make sense, meaning, art of it.” This then leads us to defining the genre of this book as an ars poetica analogous to Aristotle’s Poetics, Longinus’ On the Sublime, Horace’s Art of Poetry, or Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria—all of them formulating the social significance of art in specific historical situations. In terms of Asian treatises, it resembles Lu Ki’s Wen Fu, the rhymeprose on literature; or, more precisely, Brecht’s organon for the theater drawn up as Hitler’s army successfully ravages European civilization.

This discourse on art and its contingent situation is in itself a unique type of exploring reality and its possibilities. While the focus is on the process of creating art and achieving the proper aesthetic effects, this type of reflection on writing extends to an analysis of the social, political and ethical contexts of the imaginative process, including prescriptions and proposals on the formation of the character or sensibility of the artist and the attendant audience. In the process of inferring the “recipe” for the production of art-works that would manifest not only beauty but also truth, not only the psychological effects but also the philosophical insight or knowledge necessary for a virtuous life relative to the consensus of the community, the artist may shift emphasis on themes such as “war” or “peace” as a point of departure for elaborating on art. Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace is a lively, idiosyncratic medley of various techniques and materials that deals with the problems of loss, destruction and war, and the need for peace, acceptance of fate, recovery. Peace is the trope for sublimation, for dialectical transformatioin. Underneath this, the subtext and the genuine concern of Kingston is how art, writing, may serve as the means of comprehending the problems and satisfying the need; the form derives from the substance of writing as the creative life-process that informs the experiences derived from war, exile, etc. By construing Kingston’s book as a treatise on the social function of literature and art in general, we can avoid the antic malice of bewailing its failure to approximate the qualities that we found pleasurable and meaningful in Woman Warrior, China Men, Tripmaster Monkey, and the exuberant delights one can may sample in her essays in Hawai’i One Summer and To Be A Poet. A rectification of names or labels is the first step in an intelligent if not correct judgment of this book’s worth and import.

Applying Peircean Semiotics

One way to perform this rectification is by deploying Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of the triadic sign. Peirce’s semiotics may be used as a speculative instrument of cognition for exploring the complex nature of representation and its role in knowledge- and meaning-production. Its value may be demonstrated in the analysis of propositions (interpretants) with certain truth-claims (Eco). From this perspective, how do we read a singular text like Kingston’s The Fifth Book of Peace? We might begin from one interpretant of this work, the publisher’s summary, already an interested or motivated representamen connecting the art work, a rhematic symbol (composed of signs of immediate qualities, rhemes) with its “subject” in terms of a ground we can easily discern:

The Fifth Book of Peace opens as Maxine Hong Kingston, driving home from her father’s funeral in the early 1990s, discovers that her neighborhood in the Oakland-Berkeley hills is engulfed in flames. Her home burns to the ground, and with it, all her earthly possessions, including her novel-in-progress. Kingston, who at the time was deeply disturbed by the Persian Gulf War, decides that she must understand her own loss of all she possessed as a kind of shadow-experience of war; a lesson about what it would be like to experience up close its utter devastation. Thus she embarks on a mission to re-create her novel from scratch, to rebuild her life, and to reach out to veterans of war and share with them her views as a lover of peace.

In the middle section of this remarkable book, Kingston reconstructs for us her lost novel, the lush and compelling story of the Chinese-American Wittman Ah Sing and his wife, Tana—California artists who flee to Hawaii to evade the draft during the Vietnam War. Wittman and Tana help to create an official Sanctuary for deserters and GIs who’ve returned devastated by their experiences in Vietnam—not unlike, as it turns out, the metaphorical sanctuary Maxine creates, back in her real world, by inviting war veterans to participate in writing workshops. As the vets share their stories, she teaches them both the value of writing—the accurate transcription of what is in the heart—and the value of community.

Paradoxically, the stories of war and its terrors become for her and the vets a literature of peace—words that enable them to achieve peace, at least within themselves. Moving among the vets with her Buddhist-inflected wisdom and at times humorous self-doubts, weaving their stories together with her own struggle to reorient herself after the fire, Maxine Hong Kingston is at times a kind of sprite, an almost weightless spirit, who guides others toward a better place, and at times a challenging teacher, who will not let us turn from the spetacle of a world so often at war.

This passage is composed of propositions, thought-signs, designed to unify the massive structure of words and sentences constituting Kingston’s text. Connecting the art-object (made up of feelings and statements of events, etc.) with signs purporting to be what the work is about, this interpretant arises from the ground of portraying a sagacious but sensitive artist whose plight can offer an exemplary consolation to many readers in search of relief in a time of war and social unrest. Obviously the publishers want to sell another product by an artist familiar to many whose earlier works, Woman Warrior and China Men, brought pleasure and some comfort especially to immigrants and inferiorized ethnics.

The publisher’s argument is composed of symbols expressing habits of associative regularity, convention, law. It interprets the diverse materials—rhemes, dicent signs, icons and indices—from the viewpoint of a conception of the artist as a verbal alchemist who tries to meld heterogeneous impressions and events, converting loss into an occasion for creation and rebuilding. Rhetorically, it invents an index, an existential connection between two existents, in the figure of the sprite or “almost weightless spirit” who can magically re-create what was destroyed and also empathize with victims of war and alienation. In addition, an icon or figure of similarity is invoked when the author’s suffering is described as “shadow-experience” of real war. Finally, the fiction she re-creates out of qualisigns and sinsigns becomes a legisign: we witness the formation of a community of writers, a sanctuary founded on sharing acts of sign-production. Mediated by Buddhist rituals and the camaraderie of exchanging talk-stories, Kingston fulfills her mission of personal recovery while aspiring to realize her vocation as “a challenging teacher” committed to critical realism and the responsibility of mobilizing her readers for social transformation.

In the triadic interaction of icon, index and symbol, this particular reading suggests a frame of intelligibility premised on grasping meanings as the product of a community of inquirers who use signs for diverse social purposes. This is the semiotic frame for learning and cognition, as Peirce suggests: “The very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception essentially involves the notion of a community, without definite limits, and capable of an increase in knowledge” (Philosophical Writings 94-95) . Meaning generated from triadic signs testifies not only to the social principle in thinking (logic) but to the continuity of the universe (Peirce’s “synechism). Kingston’s text becomes a kind of allegory for the communal production of meaning carried out through experimenting with the pragmatic maxim as a methodological presupposition condensed in Pierce’s aphorism: “The final upshot of thinking is the exercise of volition.”

Didactic versus Mimetic

This understanding of Kingston’s work is premised on the ground of a definite conception of the function of the artist as a moral guide and pleasure-giving performer (the Horation axiom of dulce et utile). Driven by a belief in the priority of mimetic realism, Polly Schulman’s review in The New York Times raises two objections: first, Kingston fails to integrate the sections of her book, a departure from her earlier work when she mixed fiction and memory; and second, Kingston’s “utopianism” forces her to describe an “incredible paradise of peace” in chapter 3, where Wittman Ah Sing’s vocation of observing life leads him to speculate that “Mind creates what’s out there…See the world peaceful and the war will end.” Shulman certainly differs in precisely choosing a ground to connect the representamen of the book and their objects with an interpretant that cannot accept a medley of different techniques and styles.

On one hand, we confront here a specimen of what Pierce calls the “emotional” interpretant which reacts to qualisigns or immediate apprehensions without critical distance. Through this level, however, Shulman moves to the level of the “energetic” interpretant, which Peirce describes as one displaying mental effort, “an exertion upon the Inner World.”This interpretant springs from a tension or conflict arising from the habit of valuing Kingston’s early performances—those “sadder, fiercer, deeper stories she used to tell so bravely”—over what she construes as the “unreal utopianism” of happy endings (not factually correct) and “optimism that feels forced.”

What is clearly evident here is a shifting of ground and a recasting of argument: Shulman assumes that Kingston is driven to “sanitize and happify” because she could not face any more pain. No convincing proof is adduced to support this contention. This hypothesis, it seems to me, is based on a highly selective focus on quotations that highlight moments of reconciliation, reunion, and festive solidarity interspersed in scenes of violence, futility, and anguish. It does not do full justice to the recognition of problems, conflicts and tensions (such as those among the writing veterans or the Sanctuary participants) that thwart any facile utopian escapism. Shulman upholds the first chapter as the iconic model that the author failed to emulate, for it is “the most intimate and moving section [where] she allows subtle and conflicting feelings to wash through her onto the page.”

Numerous other occasions replicate that moment, but this is not noticed, hence the judgment that this book is “a strange, scarred thing, pieced from fragments, smelling of smoke and anguish. Its power lies in its pain….” The rheme and qualisigns found in the first chapter, the realm of qualitative possibility (through which we can access the knowable reality) are translated first into iconic objects (“scarred thing”) of similarity,which then becomes an index of actualities and existents (dicisigns), finally emerging into legisign or law. Shulman’s interpretant remains at the energetic level, cognizant of disparity and contradiction, unable to evolve into what Peirce calls the final logical interpretant: “The deliberately formed, self-analyzing habit,” a “form of experimentation in the inner world.

Meanwhile, a reviewer for In These Times takes a wholly eulogistic view of Kingston’s variegated discourse. Gary Gach starts with a reconstructive response to the diverse materials and styles which, like war and peace, cannot be separated so easily: “Fittingly then, the book defies categorization, combining memoir, fiction and journalism, with each clearly delineated. The net effect calls into question not only division of genres but the very concept of separation.” Here the ground that connects the rhematic symbol and the object (the events and characters rendered in the narrative) is the belief that things change and the interaction of events and experiences lead to “a grander cumulative design.” The interpretant combines the emotional and energetic levels of response as it seizes on the event that presaged the release of the book: “In February 2003, massive spontaneous demonstrations broke out across the planet, preemptively decrying the war in Iraq as an interruption of peace. Unprecedented.” In effect, historical events confirm the habit or disposition of opposing what is to what can be changed—this logical interpretant predicates a relation of antecedent-consequence between the sign (text) and its object (memoir of self-transformation).

This interpretation then understands the structure of the book as a carefully planned transition from themes emblematized by the various elements of “Fire,” “Paper,” “Water” and “Earth.” The section on “Water” conduces to the creation of a community of resistance which is sustained in the writing workshop for veterans. Choosing the ground of conceiving the book as a prophetic symbol of a better future arising from the painful past, this reader highlights the “liberation of Kingston from the customary isolation of writing” by way of the spiritual community practices of Buddhism led by the exiled master Thich Nhat Hanh. The stress on change, on imagining something not present or recognizing something not yet manifest, allows Gach to concentrate on the sequence of selected scenes and episodes, construing them as indices to the argument concerning the function of writing in a community mediated through Buddhist principles: “ Fifth Book shows how war trauma can be healed in a community by making it conscious (through words), and by becoming conscious of being conscious (through meditation). And by seeing our common humanity, in our shared capacity for peace, love and understanding.”

Peirce’s concepts of truth and reality are all future-oriented, the end result of pursuing the logic of inquiry to wherever it will lead. However, we can all agree on a plausible if not valid reading of Kingston by grasping her characteristic sign-usage—that is, the chosen ground or frame of intelligibility. The triadic sign and meaning are indivisible: every sign embodies the relation of its representamen to its object and interpretant according to some ground or language game. I propose locating the distinctive dynamics of sign-usage that makes Kingston’s book unique in these two passages, the first from the section on “Paper”:

At kingdoms’ rise and fall, the new king would cut out the historians’ tongues. Writers had to set fire to their own books, and be burned to death in the book fire. Historians whose tongue stumps were cauterized lived on. They made dumb gestures that could not express subtle, complex ideas, such as descriptions of the way the world has never been but might be.

And here is the second passage from the “Epilogue”:

The images of peace are ephemeral. The language of peace is subtle. The reasons for peace, the definitions of peace, the very idea of peace have to be invented, and invented again.

Children, everybody, here’s what to do during war: In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment.

Architectonics of the Sign

Peirce argued that meaning-production springs from the relation of a sign to its object “in respect to a Quality in such a way as to bring a Third Thing, its Interpretant, into relation with the same object. To generate meaning, there are four requirements three of which involve Peirce’s categories: the sign, like everything else, has some form or ground of intelligiblity (Firstness); the sign stands in relation to something (Secondness); and the sign is comprehended or translated by something else (Thirdness). A fourth requirement is stipulated by Peirce: “The whole purpose of a sign is that it should be interpreted in another sign and its whole purpose lies in the special character which it imparts to its interpretant. When a sign determines an interpretant of itself in another sign, it produces an effect external to itself.” Given the dynamic relation between the three constituents of the sign (representamen, object, interpretant), the sign’s power resides in its efficacy to represent something to a collectivity of inquirers, thus establishing a frame of meaningfulness (Peirce, Selected Writings).

The various representamens here offer a variety of possibilities, but the question is how they are translated in other signs based on what chosen ground, linkages, connections (Peirce On Signs). We can foreground the burning of historians and their books; the cutting of their tongues to prevent them from articulating complex ideas of alternative worlds. Can these signifiers simply be translated into a signified like “State power suppresses truth by killing the recorders, and even if some survive, they are so mutilated that they cannot envision a world different from their own.” The tone and syntax of Kingston’s sentences convey facts with resignation, exemplifying one approach to the existing order. This dyadic pair, “signifier/signified,” does not take account of who is connecting sign and object, the interpretant; the interpretant is not the signified but the entire process of signification, the experience of intelligibility that unifies communicating speakers/sign-users and produces comprehension.

The interpretant we seek goes beyond the Immediate Interpretation (which Peirce calls an abstraction or a possibility) to the Dynamical Interpretant, the single actual event of making sense which differs for every occasion, and eventually to the Final Interpretant to which all interpretations converge “if the Sign is sufficiently considered” (Moore; Merrell). Let us assume here that Kingston is not interested simply in summarizing in a nominalistic or positivist manner what happened—the thrust of the first passage, although a large part of the book is an attempt to witness, transcribe or report what happened (the historical burden of a memoir).

The concluding passage then gives a clue to the nature of the Final Interpretant if we read it as an argument that peace, the desired and obsessive topic/theme of Kingston’s discourse, is something fashioned, the fruit of repeated acts of invention, an ephemeral and subtle object that can only be represented by an imperative sign consisting of icons and indices: poem, parade, community, school, vow, moral principle—equivalents of “one peaceful moment.” Understood in this way, Kingston’s book as argument produced by diverse modalities of representation in order to fix a belief. It embodies a semiosic process outlined by Peirce, one (to quote Leroy Searle) “always concerned with and embedded in a real historical context, aware of consequences, without becoming systematically entangled in linguistic issues that are always indeterminate when considered apart from pragmatics.”

In the final analysis, interpretations vary. And their legitimacy, plausibility, or validity depend on what beliefs they lead us to and how effectively this goal of persuasion is reached. Given such beliefs fixed by a certain interpretation, what ensemble of acts and practices do they instigate, arouse, or solicit? I think that is the next step in pursuing Peirce’s logic of inquiry

Provisional Conclusion

Given its nuanced sublimation of real-life conflicts into fictional praxis, it is not legitimate to conclude that Kingston’s aesthetics is a surrogate Freudian therapy, or an ill-concealed polemic for pacifist religiosity. It signifies by mobilizing the architectonics of reference/denotation and allusion/connotation—Peirce’s First (iconic) generating the Second (indexical) and, by dynamic synthesis, the Third (symbolic) sphere of meaning. We need a theory of social transformation before revolutionary praxis in many forms can be engaged on a mass scale. Kingston’s anti-imperialist aesthetics is a contribution to forging such a theory. It is rooted in the long intricate history of Asian struggles for justice and equality in racist America, and so disrupts the model-minority narrative of accommodation and color-blind integration. Her postmodern disruption of the fictional and the empirical in mixed generic forms such as The Woman Warrior and China Men testifies to a robust commitment to abolishing class-dictated disparities in culture and social life. At the least, this innovative syncretic narrative impels us to move forward from the predatory “shadow of Empire” to the light of collective sharing and civic participation. At best, it is a prophetic challenge to racialized finance-capitalist terrorism and a weapon for a woman-centered popular-democratic artistic praxis appropriate for the twenty-first century.

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Sheriff, John. The Fate of Meaning. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

1989.

Shulman, Polly. “Out of the Ashes.” The New York Times 28 September 2003.

<http://www.nytimes.com>

Shuster, Mike. “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston.” Public Radio broadcast “All

Things Considered,” National Public Radio, Sept. 24, 2003.

E. San Juan, Jr.

117 Davis Road, Storrs, CT 06268, USA

<philcsc@gmail.com>

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[1] Patricia Lin, “Clashing Constructs of Reality: Reading Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book as Indigenous Ethnography,” Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philaldelphia, PA:Temple University Press, 1992), pp. 333-348.

[2] It would be instructive to compare the recollection of Kingston’s stay in Hawaii during this time, included in Hawai’i One Summer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998), pp. 15-19.

[3] Shirley Geok-lin Lim, “’Growing with Stories’: Chinese Americann Identities: Textual Identities,” Teaching American Ethnic Literatures, ed. John Maitino and David Peck (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1996), pp. 273-292.

[4] I discuss Kingston’s various novelistic strategies in dealing with the U.S. racial polity in my chapter on “Symbolic Trajectories of the Asian Diaspora” in After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-United States Confrontations (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 23-34.

[5] Mike Shuster, “Interview with Maxine Hong Kingston” in the public broadcast ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, National Public Radio, Sept. 24, 2003.

NICOLE STRIKES BACK! from inside the “belly of the beast”

TESTIMONYO NI MS. NICOLASA, ALIAS “NICOLE”: “THIS BODY MY PROPERTY”

–E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

[Mensahe para sa mga Kababaihang Nakiramay at Nagmalasakit]

“Yankee go home, but take me with you” –Sign on a placard during the anti-bases demo in 1991 in Subic Bay, Philippines

Tinuligsa ako’t tinusok ng madla

Tinuhog akong parang baboy Ay, Inay ko, walang-hiya raw ako

Tinumbok at tinadyakan tinigpas hinalay inupakan

Nilait minura dinuraan Wala raw akong puri o hiya

Anong alam nila?

Tuloy-tuluyan tagus-tagusan sa ‘king katawan

Sagad-butong gahasa’t alipusta

Lahat pinakialaman

Labis pa sa lamuyot lamusak kubabaw ni Daniel Smith

Malayo na ako ngayon sa mura’t tungayawan

Malayo na sa Zamboanga at Subic Bay

Inagaw binawi ko na ang kaluluwa ko sa dahas at titig ng madla

Inangkin ko muli ang pag-aari ko ang pagkatao ko

Wala silang pakialam Sumpa ko sa ‘yo– Pangako ko sa ‘ting pagsasamahan–

Akong mananagot sa kasarinlan ng kasarian:

“This body my property… Keep off!

Walang VFA dito, salamat, Diyos ko, malaya na ako

Sa hustisya ng Inang Bayang nakapailalim pa rin ….”

Kailangan bumangon na, Darlin’

[transcribed somewhere in U.S.A. territory]