E SAN JUAN, MAELSTROM OVER THE KILLING FIELDS — A review

A Book Review

Maelstrom over the Killing Fields: Interventions in the Project
Of National-Democratic Liberation By E. San Juan, Jr.  

[Published by Pantas Press, 2021, distributed by Popular Book Store, Quezon City]

By Paulino Lim, Jr.
Emeritus Professor of English California State University, Long Beach 

______

From one who has written innumerable books, this volume may be viewed as an “anthology of San Juan’s best essays.” It has a powerful voice that stirs the maelstrom over “the killing fields,” a metaphor that came out of the Vietnam War (1955-1975), and most apt for the Philippines, where the first killing fields took place when the U.S. military fought and conquered the insurgents and proceeded to colonize the country (1899-1912). 

The anthology presents an “agenda for change and social transformation.” It focuses on particular themes, situations and personages, e.g. the diaspora, pandemic, Jose Rizal and Nick Joaquin. (Was Rizal gay? How do you account for Joaquin’s “tragic-comic consciousness?) In each essay San Juan goes deep into the subject, deploying various analytical tools drawn from history, philosophy and literary criticism, and synthesizes the findings into a coherent “knowledge” or information about the subject. The new information may add, amplify, or revise previously known “facts,” but does it constitute Truth? Is the latest interpretation analogous to the self-portraits that the artist paints in the course of his life? It is up to the reader to decide. 

A critical tool that San Juan includes in the analysis is the “structure of feeling” that informs not only the interpretation or criticism itself but also the attitude of the critic himself–a technique he adopted from Charles Sanders Peirce credited in the. Acknowledgements. In fiction, laying the feelings of a narrative is the equivalent ofs scoring a film with music. 

A simple exercise is to define the feeling of some elements of the Preface. San Juan calls in awe the pandemic as a “planetary upheaval”; condemns the exploitation by “rapacious” capitalists–with the aid of Karl Marx. (i) He mourns the death in 2020 of 67 Filipino nurses ministering to Covid-19 patients. He recalls with 

muted pride the militant Filipino presence in the U.S. that marked the four-day riots in Watsonville, California, in December 1929. The event prefigured the violence against Asians, Filipinos included, being blamed for importing the virus from Wu Han. 

What convinces the reader as in the case of Rizal and Joaquin, for instance, , is San Juan’s close reading of the author’s works (poems, essays and novels) and tracing the development of his “sensibility” reflected in the work. San Juan’s final word on Rizal is that he was “not a messiah, only a prophetic intellectual of colonized peoples “ San Juan recalls James Michener’s remark that Rizal’s novels were “directly responsible for the author’s death.” San Juan sums up Rizal’s challenge for Filipinos to “fight and win their independence by their own sacrifices.” The essay ends with a passage from “Mi Ultimo Adios.” 

I die when I see the dawn break,
Through the gloom of night, to herald the day;o And if color is lacking my blood thou shalt take Pour’d out at need for thy dear sake,
To dye with its crimson the waking ray. (89) 

What entertains the reader are the human-interest and gossipy details, embellished by San Juan’s often sardonic comments. Rizal’s Austrian correspondent Ferdinand Blumentritt tries to console him: “. . . but you are one of the heroes who conquer pain from a wound inflicted by women. (64) He met in 1888 a 22-year-old O-Sei-San, a samurai’s daughter, “may have experienced carnal bliss.” (65) The historian Ambeth Ocampo has interpreted the recurrence of snakes as phallic symbols in Rizal’s dreams, suggesting that Rizal may have been a closet gay. (66) Rizal performed a common-law marriage ceremony with the “wandering swallow” Josephine Bracken by holding hands together and marrying themselves. The Catholic priest Father Obach refused to marry them. (67) 

Of particular interest to me is the discourse on the Filipino diaspora. I write as an OFW (overseas Filipino worker/writer), the largest segment of the Filipino diaspora. (The discourse provides a prospectus for M.A. and Ph.D., defining six “theses” to pursue.) I am glad I am not writing in Myanmar (I am three-fourths Malayan) or in Hong Kong (one-fourth Chinese). I read Maelstrom during Advent anticipating the birth of Christ. What we got instead was the “second coming” of Covid-19. Nonetheless, I took Communion to celebrate the presence, and the 

booster shot to ward off the pandemic. The pandemic has introduced new modes of learning, done away with SAT and college entrance exams, re-examined Ethnic and Women’s Studies, as Delia V. Aguilar explores in the Afterword. (201) 

San Juan’s review of the colonization and decolonization of the Philippines has been a welcomed corrective to my naive reading of the country’s history. The structure of my feelings was centered on gratitude. Gratitude to Spain for bringing the Roman alphabet and the Catholic Religion; to America for introducing democracy, public education, and English–the lingua franca of the world and the Internet; and to Japan, after repulsion by the atrocities the military inflicted in the Bataan Death March, for Buddhism, calligraphy, and the films of Ozu and Kurosawa. 

In San Juan’s capsule review, “The history of the Philippines may be read asseculaone long chronicle of the people’s struggle against colonialism and imperialism for the sake of affirming human dignity and universal justice. 

Gratitude still centers my feelings toward the U.S., despite the white supremacy movement and the “Big Lie” of the 2020 Presidential Elections being. Stolen. UCLA exempted me from paying the $600 out-of-state tuition fee; now it runs to about $32,000. San Juan earned his bachelor’s degree in English at the secular University of the Philippines, modeled after the U.S. state university system. I attended the Dominican University of Santo Tomas, Manila, with its compulsory Scholastic curriculum requiring courses in Ethics, Cosmology, . And two semesters of Logic. This prepared me for writing term papers in my UCLA graduate courses in Linguistics, Drama, and American, Romantic and Victorian Literatures. (I did my Ph.D. dissertation on Byron). 

Teaching at California State University, Long Beach, gave me time to research and write. I wrote four interrelated novels dealing with the Marcos Dictatorship that I call, perhaps inordinately, “The Philippine Quartet.” It is an homage to Lawrence Durrell whose Alexandria Quartette fascinated me as an undergraduate. In the first novel Tiger Orchids on Mount Mayon, the protagonist Mark is a surrogate for Marx. Mark studied at U.P., joined the teach-ins conducted by the Marxist professor Saldivar and read Mao Tse Tung’s
Red Book. 

In Maelstrom over the Killing Fields, San Juan persuades Filipinos in the homeland and in the diaspora to act on an agenda for change and social transformation. No other Filipino approaches his scholarly output and world-wide 

stature as an intellectual. I honor him, as I do the journalist Maria Ressa–the first Filipino to win a Nobel Peace Prize. There is so much love in what he writes, so much light in what he says —###

THE FILIPINO DIASPORA

philippine studies

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The Filipino Diaspora

E. San Juan, Jr.
Philippine Studies vol. 49, no. 2 (2001): 255–264

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Now the largest cohort in the Asian American group, Filipinos have become the newest diasporic community in the whole world: 7 million Filipino migrant workers, mostly female domestic help, work in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe, North America, and elsewhere. Diasporic groups are historically defined not only by a homeland but also by a desire for eventual return and a collective identity centered on myths and memories of the homeland. The Filipino diaspora, how- ever, is different. Since the homeland has been long colonized by West- e m powers (Spain, U.S.) and remains neocolonized despite formal or nominal independence, the Filipino identification is not with a fully defined nation but with regions, localities, and communities of lan- guages and traditions. Where is the nation alluded to in passports and other identification papers? How do we conceive of this “Filipino” nation, given the preemptive impact of U.S. colonization and now, on top of the persistent neocolonizing pressure, the usurping force of glo- balized transnational capital?

According to orthodox immigration theory, “push” and “pull” fac- tors combine to explain the phenomenon of Overseas Contract Work- ers. Do we resign ourselves to this easy schematic formulation? Poverty and injustice, to be sure, have driven most Filipinos to seek work abroad, sublimating the desire to return by remittances to their families; occasional visits and other means of communication defer the eventual homecoming. If the return is postponed, are modes of adap- tation and temporary domicile in non-native grounds the alternatives?

The reality of “foreignness” cannot be eluded. Alienation, brutal treatment and racism prevent Filipinos’ permanent resettlement in the “receiving societies,” except where Filipino communities (as in the U.S. and Canada, for example) have been given legal access to citizenship

The Filipino Diaspora E. Sun Juan, Jr.

, PHILIPPINESTUDIES

rights. Individuals, however, have to go through screening and tests. During political crisis in the Philippines, Filipino overseas workers mobilize themselves for support of local and nationwide resistance against imperial domination and local tyranny. Because the putative “Filipino” nation is in the process of formation in the neocolony and abroad, overseas Filipino workers have been considered transnationals or transmigrants-a paradoxical turn since the existence of the nation is problematic. This diaspora then confronts the central issue of racism and ethnic exclusion or inferiorization: can Filipino migrant labor mount resistance against globalized exploitation? Can the Filipino diaspora expose also the limits of liberal notions of citizenship? In what way can the Filipino diaspora serve as a paradigm for analyzing and critically unsettling the corporate globalization of labor and the reification of identities in the new millennium? The following reflec- tions are offered as a heuristic point of departure for further inquiry into this unprecedented historic event.

Diaspora

I might begin by situating the Filipino diaspora within its Asian American configuration-since I am based here in the United States and my intervention proceeds from a concrete historic milieu. In David Palumbo-Liu’s substantial volume Asian / American, the concept of “diaspora” performs a strategic function. It probably endows the slash in the rubric “Asian/American0 with an uncanny performative reso- nance. Palumbo-Liu contends that diaspora affords a space for the reinvention of identity free from naturalized categories but (if I may underscore here) not from borders, state apparatuses, and other worldly imperatives. Although remarking that the concept of diaspora as an “enabling fiction” affords us “the ideological purchase different articulations of the term allow,” Palumbo-Liu doesn’t-if I’m not mis- taken–completely succumb to the rebarbative postcolonialist babble about contingency ruling over all. I want to quote a passage from his book that might frame or provide parameters for the random remarks I will make here apropos of the theme and discourse of Filipino diaspora:

“diaspora” does not consist in the fact of leaving Home, but in having that factuality available to representation as such-we come to “know” diaspora only as it is psychically identified in a narrative form that dis- closes the various ideological investments. . . . It is that narrative form that locates the representation of diaspora in its particular chronotope.

THE FILIPINO DIASPORA

This spatiotemporal construct approximates a psychic experience par- ticularly linked to material history. It is only after the diasporic comes into contact with the material history of its new location that a particu- lar discourse is enabled that seeks to mark a distance,-a relation, both within and outside that constellation of contingency. (1999, 355)

Like the words “hybridity,” border crossing, ambivalence, subaltern, transculturation, and so on, the term “diaspora” has now become fash- ionable in academic conversations. A forthcoming conference at the University of Minnesota on “Race, Ethnicity, and Migration” lists as first of the topics one can engage with, “Diaspora and diasporic iden- tities,” followed by “Genocide, ethnic cleansing, and forced migra- tion..’.’ One indeed dreads to encounter in this context such buzzwords as “intersection” and “otherness” and “difference” now overshadowed by “globalization” and “transnationalism.” In fact I myself used the word “diaspora” as part of the title of my book From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino Experience in the United States (1998b)—only to find that there is another book in the Amazon.com list by a certain Jonathan Okamura with a title longer than mine: imagining the Filipino American Diaspora: Transnational Relations, Identities, and Communities (Asian Americans, Reconceptualizing Culture, History). Does anyone know more echoes, sirnulacras or simulations of these titles?

Okamura argues that Filipinos should be conceived not as an eth- nic minority in the United States but as a diaspora. Not because they are dispersed, as the Jews were from their original homeland by the Roman imperial legions; but because overseas Filipino communities have “significant transnational relations” or linkages to their home- land. Okamura states that “a diaspora is a transnational social con- struction, that is, it is transnational in scope and is socially constructed through the individual and collective actions of immigrants/migrants.” Okamura explains how he became interested in “diaspora” as “an exciting concept to capture [Filipinos’] transnational relations with their homeland as evident in balikbayan returnee visits, the sending of remittances and consumer goods, and long-distance telecommunica- tion.” Based in Hawaii, Okamura met Filipinos all over the world-not only in Manila but also in Hong Kong, London, and Belau.

An Autobiographical Aside

Let me interject a personal note: I have lived in the U.S. for about 40 years now (the greater part of my life), with frequent visits to the Philippines without too many balikbayan boxes, unfortunately. And in

PHILIPPINE STUDIES

my various travels I have encountered Filipinos in many parts of the world. In the early eighties I was surprised to meet compatriots at the footsteps of the Post Office in Tripoli, Libya, and later on in the streets and squares of London, Edinburgh, Spain, Italy, Tokyo, Taiwan, and other places. Have I then stumbled onto some global enigmatic phe- nomenon known as a “Filipino diaspora”? Or have I socially and transnationally constructed this, dare I say, “reality” and ongoing ex- perience of about 7 million Filipinos around the planet? Not to speak of millions of displaced indigenous peoples in the Philippines itself, an archipelago of 7,100 islands, “one of the world’s most strategically irn- portant land masses,” according to geographer George Demko.

For those not familiar with my other writings critical of postmodemist and poststructuralist approaches (San Juan 1996, 1998a), I want to state outright that I consider such views about the Filipino diaspora half-truths closer to rumor, if not sheer mystifications. Spu- rious distinctions about cognition and perception concerning ethnic identity will remain vacuous if they do not take into account the real- ity of imperial world-systemic changes. Lacking any dialectical histori- cal analysis of the dynamics of colonialism and imperialism that connect the Philippines and its peoples with the United States and the rest of the world, conventional studies on Filipino immigration and re- settlement are all falsifications, at best disingenuous exercises in chau- vinist or white-supremacist apologetics. This is because they ‘rely on concepts and methodologies that conceal unequal power relations- that is, relations of subordination and domination, racial exclusion, marginalization, sexism, gender inferiorization, as well as national subaltemity and other forms of discrimination. Lest people be misled by academic gossip, I am not proposing here an economistic and de- terministic approach, nor a historicist one with a monolithic Enlight- enment metanarrative, teleology, and essentialist or ethnocentric agenda. Far from it.

I might state at the outset a fact known to all observers: the annual remittance of billions of dollars by Filipino workers abroad suffices to keep the Philippine economy afloat and support the luxury and privi- leges of less than one percent of the people, the Filipino oligarchy. Since the seventies, Filipino bodies have been the No. 1 Filipino ex- port, and their corpses (about five or six return in coffins daily) are be- coming a serious item in the import ledger. In 1998 alone, according to the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, 755,000 Filipinos found work abroad, sending home a total of F7.5 billion. Throughout the nineties,

THE FILIPINO DIASPORA

the average total of migrant workers is about a million a year; they remit over five percent of the national GNP, not to mention the millions of pesos collected by the Philippine government in myriad taxes and fees. Hence these overseas cohorts are glorified as “mga bagong bayani” (modem heroes), according to Cory Aquino, the most famous of whom are Flor Contemplacion and Sarah Balabagan.

This is an unprecedented and mind-boggling phenomenon. Over one thousand concerned Filipino American students made this the central topic of the 1997 FIND CONFERENCE at SUNY Binghamton where I was a keynote speaker. These concerned youth were bothered by the reputation of the Filipino as the “domestic help” or servant of the world. How did Filipinos come to find themselves dispersed and scat- tered to the four comers of the earth? What are we doing about it? In general, what is the meaning and import of this unprecedented traffic, Filipinos in motion and in transit around the planet?

Retr~spectiveMarginalia

Let me refresh readers’ memory with some textbook commonplaces. Some compatriots in the United States, eager to preempt the Pilgrims in New England, cite the fugitive “Manillamen” of the seventeenth century who escaped from the galleon trade, fled their Spanish mas- ters in Mexico, and found their way to Louisiana, as one of the first Filipino Americans. But their settlement disappeared quickly in a few years, blown away by fortune and ill winds. There was no .significant group of inhabitants from the Philippine Islands in the North Ameri- can continent or anywhere else-except for a few student enclaves in Spain in the latter half of the nineteenth century-until the annexation and colonization of the Philippines by the United States in 1898 as part of the spoils of the Spanish-American War.

With the exclusion of Chinese and Japanese workers by various immigration laws from 1882 to 1924, the recruitment of Filipino labor for the Hawaii plantations began in earnest in 1907 and continued without letup until 1935, when immigration was cut to fifty a year. From the twenties to the thirties, Filipino contract labor in the U.S. totalled about half a million. Most of these workers eventually settled in the U.S.mainland rather than return to their native villages. If there is a collective trauma or primal scenario of loss to which postcolonial scholars and cultural critics would gesture, it would be nothing else but the destruction of the institutions of Filipino sovereignty estab-

PHILIPPINE STUDIES

lished by the Philippine revolution of 1896-1898, the suppression of Filipino revolutionary bodies by the United States military forces, in the Philippine-American War (1899-1903) that cost over a million lives. We are still living with the legacy of this defeat and occupation, this time in a neocolonial consumerist dependency.

There was no real Filipino diaspora before the Marcos dictatorship in the seventies and eighties. It was only after the utter devastation of the Philippines in World War 11, and the worsening of economic and political conditions in the neocolonial setup from the late sixties to the present, that Filipinos began to leave in droves. During the Marcos martial law regime, the functionality of Overseas Contract Workers was constructed and/or discovered by the elite and its hegemonic patrons as a response to both local and global conditions. From the Aquino to the Estrada regime, OCW productivity serves to keep the rotten system afloat. Overseas Filipino Workers is now a category of citizens in the Philippines and in so-called “receiving” societies like Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Middle Eastern kingdoms, and assorted European states-including Yugoslavia.

It is now a banal truism that globalization has facilitated the mobil- ity of goods, services, information, ideas, and of course people-and maybe assorted cyborgs. The postmodernist anthropologist James Clifford has invented the idea of contemporary travelling cultures-a version of the cargo cults–borne by nomadic or diasporic intellectu- als. Globalization has proceeded to the extent that in our reconfigured landscapes, according to the experts in liminality and interstitial spaces, boundaries have shifted, borders disappeared, and everyone has become transculturized. Americanization, or Disneyfication, has spread physically and in cyberspace. There is also the parachuting transnationals or transmigrants that Aihwa Ong has described, as well as mutations of expatriates, refugees, and exiles-including our own Filipino TNTs (an indigenized form of hide-and-seek, according to some wits), our Filipinized version of “undocumented aliens.”

Given these transformations, the reality and idea of the nation, of national sovereignty, have become the subject of theoretical specula- tion. Linked to that are concepts of identity and their attendant poli- tics of difference, notions of citizenship, nationality, cosmopolitanism, belonging, human rights, and so on. It is in this milieu of globalization, where ethnic conflicts and universal commodification coexist in a com- pressed tirne-space locus within the postmodem dispensation (Harvey 1989), that we should pose the question of the Filipino diaspora.

Instead of pronouncing here my obiter dicta on this topic, I would like to engage readers briefly with questions on the historical and ideo- logical specificity of the Filipino diaspora. One way of doing this is by interrogating certain themes and notions presented by James Clifford in his essay on “Diaspora” (in Current Anthropology 1994).I offer the following “talking points” for exchange. Clifford dissents from Safran in proposing “an ideal type” of diaspora based on the Jewish para- digm. The main features of this ideal type are: 1)dispersal from an originary habitat, 2) myths and memories of the homeland, 3) alien- ation in the host country, 4)desire for eventual return, 5) ongoing sup- port for the homeland, and 6) a collective identity defined by the relationship to the homeland. Responding to the globalization process I mentioned earlier, Clifford espouses a decentered or multiply-cen- tered diaspora network. He rejects teleologies of origin and return because he perceives multiple transnational connections that provide a range of experiences to diasporic communities; these experiences depend on the changing possibilities, the obstacles, openings, antago- nisms, and connections in the host countries.

Given the various histories of displacements none of which coin- cide, diaspora is for Clifford the site of contingency par excellence. He envisages a “polythetic field of diasporic forms” articulating multiple discourses of travels,homes, memories, and transnational connections. Clifford conceives of diaspora as a “loosely coherent, adaptive constel- lation of responses to dwelling-in-displacement.” Hence, his ideal is that of a tribal cosmopolitanism, a modem version of the old cosmo- politanism of tribal groups shaped by travel, spiritual quest, trade, exploration, warfare, labor migrancy, and political alliances of all kinds. Can Filipinos be conceived of as tribal cosmopolitans in that context?

Filipino Diaspora

Let us examine the Filipino genre of diaspora, its tendencies and idiosyncracies. My first thesis is this: Given that the Philippine home- land or habitat has never cohered as a genuinely independent nation- national autonomy continues to escape the nation-people in a neocolonial formation-Filipinos are dispersed from family or kinship webs in villages, towns or provincial regions first, and Ioosely from a neocolonized (some say “refeudalized”) nation-state. This dispersal is primarily due to economic coercion under the retrogressive regime of

THE FILIPINO DIASPORA

PHILIPPINE STUDIES

comprador-bureaucratic (not welfare-state) capitalism; migration is seen as freedom to seek one’s fortune, experience the pleasure of ad- venture, libidinal games of resistance, etc. So the origin to which one returns is not a nation or nation-state but a village, town, or kinship network; the state is viewed in fact as a corrupt exploiter, not repre- sentative of the masses, a comprador agent of transnational corpora- tions and Western (specifically U.S.)powers.

Second thesis: What are the myths and memories of the homeland? They derive from assorted childhood memories and folklore together with customary practices of folk and religious celebrations; at best, there may be signs of a residual affective tie to national heroes like Rizal, Bonifacio, and latter-day celebrities like singers, movie stars, athletes, and so on. Indigenous food, dances, and music can be ac- quired as commodities whose presence temporarily heals the trauma of removal; family reunification can resolve the psychic damage of loss of status or alienation. In short, rootedness in autochthonous habitat or soil does not exert a commanding influence, or it exists as a faint nos- talgic trace. Meanwhile, language, religion, kinship, family rituals, and common experiences in school or work-place function invariably as the organic bonds of community..

Third thesis: Alienation in the host country is what unites Filipinos; a shared history of colonial and racial subordination, marginalization, and struggles for cultural survival through hybrid forms of resistance and political rebellion. This is what may replace the non-existent na- tion/homeland, absent the liberation of the Filipino nation. In the thir- ties, Carlos Bulosan once observed that “it is a crime to be a Filipino in America.” Years of struggle in inter-ethnic coalitions, of union orga- nizing, have blurred if not erased that stigma. Accomplishments in the civil rights struggles of the sixties have provided nourishment for eth- nic pride. And, on the other side, impulses of assimilationism via the “model minority” umbrella have aroused a passion for neoliberal multiculturalism. But compared to the Japanese or Indian Americans, Filipino Americans as a whole have not made it; the exceptions prove the rule. Andrew Cunanan is the specter that continues to haunt “melt- ing pot” Filipino Americanists who continue to blabber about the “for- gotten Filipino” in the hope of being awarded a share of the obsolescent welfare-state pie.

Through strategies of community preservation and other schemes of defining the locality of the community in historical contexts of dis- placement, the Filipino diaspora defers its return-unless and until

THEFILIPINO DIASPORA

there is a Filipino nation that they can identdy with.Thiswill continue in places where there is no hope of permanent resettlement as citizens or bonafide residents (as in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and elsewhere).

Fourth thesis: Some Filipinos in their old age may desire eventual return only when they are economically secure. In general, Filipinos will not return to the site of misery and oppression-to poverty, ex- ploitation, humiliated status, unemployment, hunger, and lack of dig- nity. OCWs would rather move their kin and parents to their place of employment in countries where family reunification is allowed: in the United States, Italy, Canada, and so on. Or even in places of suffering provided there is some hope or illusion of future improvement.

Fifth thesis: Ongoing support for nationalist struggles at home is sporadic and intermittent. Do we see any mass protests and collective indignation here at the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA), for example, and the recent invasion of the country by several thousand U.S. Ma- rines? During the Marcos dictatorship, the politicized generation of Filipino Americans was able to mobilize a large segment of the com- munity to support democratic mass struggles, including the armed resistance, against the U.S.-Marcos authoritarian rule. Filipino nation- alism blossomed in the late sixties and seventies, but suffered attenu- ation when it got rechanelled to support the populist elitism of Aquino and Ramos, and now the lurnpen populism of Estrada. This aspect is subject to political organization and calculation; hence, the intervention of Filipino agencies with emancipatory goals and national democratic principles is crucial and strategically necessary.

Sixth thesis: In this time of emergency, the Filipino collective iden- tity is in crisis and in a stage of formation and elaboration. The Fili- pino diasporic consciousness is an odd species, a singular genre: it is not obsessed with a physical return to roots or to land where common sacrifices are remembered and celebrated. It is tied more to a symbolic homeland indexed by kinship or particularistic traditions which it tries to reconstitute in diverse localities. So, in the moment of Babylonian captivity, dwelling in “Egypt” or its modem surrogates, building pub- lic spheres of solidarity to sustain identities outside the national time/ space “in order to live inside, with a difference” may be the most vi- able route (or root) of Filipinos in motion-the collectivity in transit, although this is subject to the revolutionary transformations emerging in the Philippine countryside and cities and other radical changes in the geopolitical rivalry of metropolitan powers. There is indeed defer-

PHILIPPINE STUDIES

ral, postponement, or waiting–but history moves on in the battlefields of Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao where a people’s war rooted in a durable revolutionary tradition rages on. This drama of a national- democratic revolution will not allow the Filipino diaspora to slumber in the consumerist paradises of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Seattle. It will certainly disturb the peace of those benefit- ing from the labor and sacrifices of Overseas Filipino Workers who experience the repetition-compulsion of globalized trade and endure the recursive trauma of displacement and dispossession.

Finally, a very provisional and indeed temporizing epilogue-if I may beg leave from those Filipina bodies (at least five a day arrive at the Manila International Airport) in coffins heading home: Filipinos in the United States (and elsewhere, given the still hegemonic Western dispensationhif I may quote the concluding lines of my article in the cyberspace on Filipino Americans-are neither “oriental” nor “hispanic,” despite their looks and names. They might be syncretic or hybrid subjects with suspect loyalties. They cannot be called fashion- able “transnationals” because of racialized, ascribed markers (physical appearance, accent, peculiar non-white folkways) that are needed to sustain and reproduce Eurocentric white supremacy every day. Ulti- mately, Filipino agency in the era of global capitalism depends not only on the vicissitudes of social transformation in the U.S. but, in a dialectical sense, on the fate of the struggle for autonomy and popu- lar-democratic sovereignty in the Philippines where balikbayans still practice, though with increasing trepidation interrupted by fits of amnesia, the speech-acts and durable performances of pakikibaka, pakikiramay, at pakikipagkapwa-tao.

References

Clifford, James. 1997. Diaspora. In The ethnin’ty reader, edited by Montserrat Guibemau and John Rex. Cambridge. UK: Polity Press.

Demko, George. 1992. Why in the world. New York: Anchor Books.
Garcia, Fanny. 1994. “Arrivederci.” In Ang silid na rnahiwaga, ed. Soledad

Reyes. Pasig: Anvil Publishing Co.
Harvey, David. 1989. The condition of postmodemity. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Palurnbo-Liu, David. 1999. Asian / American. Stanford, California: Stanford

University Press.
San Juan, E. 1998a. Beyond postcolonial theory. New York: St Martins Press.

. 1998b. From exile to diaspora: Versions of the Filipino experience in the United States. Boulder: Westview Press.

COMMODITY FETISHISM & ART

Commodity Fetishism and the Crisis of Contemporary Art

E. San Juan, Jr. University of Connecticut

Only through the objectively unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness of subjective human sensibility…either cultivated or brought into being…The forming of the five senses is a labour of the entire history of the world down to the present.

— KARL MARX

The smell of impending death rose from these avantgardes. The future was no longer theirs, though nobody knew whose it was.

— ERIC HOBSBAWM

It is no longer news anymore, at this late date, to declare that art, in our marketized planet, is deemed a precious commodity. Considered as property, artworks are bought and sold, circulated, forged, stolen, recovered, auctioned everyday. Profits are made for artists, merchants, smugglers, consumers, and anyone involved in trading/ merchandising. It’s banal or trivial to observe this fact. So intense was this commercialization from the mid-1950’s that Ian Burn complained how it spelled “corruption and the prostitution of the artist” (1999, 397). A few recent examples can be cited as prolegomena to our discourse.

In Sotheby’s contemporary art auction in November 2013, avant-garde art confirmed its absorption by the market with the $104.5 million sale of Andy Warhol’s 1963 “Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster).” In 2007, his “Green Car Crash” sold for $1.7 million, a proof that the aura of the name dictates market value, with the subject or content of the artwork adding enough differentia specifica to mark its historical period or milieu. In the past, Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Lucien Freud” was sold for $142.4 million while Gerhard Richter’s abstract,

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“A.B. Courbet” was sold for $26.4 million and Cy Twombly’s “Poems to the Sea” (1959 drawings) was sold for $21.6 million (New York Times 2013). Recently, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 painting, Warrior,” a work which is said to symbolize the struggles of Black men in a white- dominated world, was sold in a Christie auction for $41.9 million, which does not rival a Basquiat painting sold for $110.5 million in 2017. The earlier commodification of cubist art (Picasso, in particular) has been diagnosed by John Berger (1965; see also Raphael 1980). Together with Warhol and Picasso, Basquiat continues to be a key player in the blue- chip art market even in this crisis of globalized neoliberalism.

Commodification seems to have climaxed in a species of trading rituals involving postmodern art, including both “conceptual” and “post-conceptual” species. Exchange-value (embodied in money as cause) has displaced use-value (now conceived as effect). At the outset, the term “conceptual” art offers a conundrum since it is not clear what concept is referred to, or whether the term designates the artist’s intention not necessarily fulfilled or carried out (Smith 1974; Godfrey, 1998). Indeed, Sol LeWitt states that “the artwork may never leave the artist’s mind” (1999,107), though how we can verify or ascertain this remains a mystery. In any case, a metalepsis seems to have occurred. Art generates the concept (telos; universal significance) instead of the concept (vision or intuition) engendering the performative, linguistic/ discursive, visual practices that followed expressionism and cubism: constructivism, abstract expressionism, kinetic art, fluxion happenings, pop art, minimalist art, op art, conceptual art, etc.

A historic, epoch-making event occurred at the threshold of postmodernity. In 1973, the “dematerialization of the art object” from 1966-1972, was documented by the critic, Lucy Lippard. It was inaugurated by Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades.” With this gesture, Peter Osborne asserts, “art changed its focus from the form of language to what was being said,” changing the nature of art by focusing not on morphology, structure, or medium, but on function—from “appearance’ to conception. Osborne further notes that “all art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually” (2002, 13). The idea/intention/concept preempts its hypothetical realization and its physical embodiment or actualization.

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The epochal transformation initiated by Duchamp abolished the categorical distinction between creative artifice and found objects/ incidents in nature and everyday life. Minimalism further destroyed traditional barriers and conventions. Performance art reconceptualized the art-object as an act or event constituted through and disappearing into time, sustaining itself at the level of its motivating agenda. No longer can art be confined to its visual or spatial experience and pleasure attached to the medium or vehicle. Following the break-up of formalist modernism, minimalism followed after with Sol Lewitt’s 1967 manifesto, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.” Osborne summarizes the lineages of negation characterizing conceptual art and its aftermath:

1. The negation of material objectivity as the site of the identity of the artwork by the temporality of ‘intermedia’ acts and events.
2. The negation of medium by a generic conception of ‘objecthood,’ made up of ideal systems of relations.
3. The negation of the intrinsic significance of visual form by a semiotic, or more narrowly, linguistically based onceptual content.
4. The negation of established modes of autonomy of the artwork by various forms of cultural activism and social critique (2002, 18).

It is the last negation that generates art-oriented activities intervening into everyday life in order to transform sociopolitical structures. In this process, alternative or subaltern ideological positions are explored, analyzing, and defining the relations of power at play in all cultural institutions, in particular the appropriative mechanisms of the museum and the market. Social and political critique ensues from the practice of diverse forms of conceptualist experiments, procedures, and historically defined forms.

Consequences of Dematerialization

As early as 1970, Mel Bochner, one of the practitioners of “conceptual art,” questioned the epithet’s ambiguity and lack of precision. In any case, the rubric “conceptual art” has been used to cover the works created by artists such as Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, Bruce Naumann and others during its

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apogee and crisis in the years 1966-72 (Godfrey 1998). While Kosuth proposed that conceptual art defines itself by questioning the nature of art, Lewitt posited its essence to be found in “the idea or concept” which becomes “a machine that makes the art” (1967), the concept itself subsuming the planning and decisions that enable the execution of the art-work.

LeWitt’s pronouncements have become so scriptural that a popular Dictionary of Theories ascribes conceptual art as a “cerebral approach” championed by Lewitt in 1967 as a reaction against post-war formalistic art. Since the concept or idea becomes paramount in the artistic process, “the planning and concept are decided beforehand, but the end result is intuitive and without recognizable purpose” (Bothamley 1993, 108-09). Why and how do we explain this shift of aesthetic concern from the material embodiment of art-ideas to the ideas/notions themselves? One answer is provided by Marx’s theory of commodity-fetishism and its further elaboration in Marxist-Leninist thought (for expositions of the Marxist approach, see Arvon 1973; Laing 1978; Johnson 1984).

Reification and Alienation

In the initial chapters of Capital Volume 1, Marx delineated the two aspects of that mysterious entity, the commodity. Its use-value refers to the utility of the product, its realization in the act of consumption. Its twin aspect, the exchange-value, is only manifest in the process of exchange in the market where the deposited quantity of labor-time expended in producing the product—the form of value—is recognized. Its “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” inheres in the fact that “the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour” so that the social relations among producers appear then as relations among the products/commodities. In short, “definite social relations between men…assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things” (Marx 1978, 320-321). That insight serves as the matrix of social alienation in a profit-centered political economy (for further elaboration, see Meszaros 1970; Ollman 1971).

What lesson is conveyed by Marx’s insight? In producing any useful thing that is exchanged, the objective value of that thing is ideal,

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a suprasensible notion translated into price, whereby private labor appears as part of social total-labor. However, the commodity’s abstract ideal property (exchange value) appears as if it were an objective, socio-natural property of the object itself, embedded in the product. Thus, social relations between people assume a phantasmagorical form of relations between things, “social hieroglyphs” (Osborne 2005, 15). Something purely social, exchange value, conceals itself in the product, generating social illusions found in religion, ideologies, and various mystifying practices: the rationale of the hegemonic neoliberal order now in crisis but still devastating the world today.

How do we escape from this fetishized world based on historically varied exploitation of labor-power? Marx responds: “The religious reflections of the actual world can vanish only when the practical relations of everyday life between people, and between humanity and nature, present themselves in a transparent and rational form. The social life-process, which is based on the material process of production, does not strip off its mystical veil until it becomes production by freely associated men and women, and stands under their conscious and planned control” (Marx 1976, 173). Art as a form of religious thinking draws its power from the exchange-value it commands, as illustrated earlier. In order to suppress this potential, conceptualists strive to eliminate the concrete embodiment (various media or performance) of the artists’ intention, including the situations or places where they customarily occur (museums, galleries, etc.). Those sites/situations are transvalued, negated, sublimated.

“Almost anything goes” as art today from the art-criticism point of view, Cynthia Freeland remarks. She writes: “Even shocking art like Serrano’s Piss Christ can now count as art, an object with the right sort of idea or interpretation behind it…It communicates thoughts or feelings through a physical medium” (2001, 39). Conceptualists claim that a physical medium is not obligatory. Paradoxically, despite this theoretical claim, their activity does not create transparent, rational arrangements since the whole transaction of learning, judging, and appreciating the art-idea still transpires in a capitalist, profit-dominated society. Ironically, the motivation-idea becomes a value to be communicated or exchanged. While art-as-commodity may be intentionally transcended, the artist remains anchored and circumscribed in a world of alienated institutions and practices governed by the profit-motive, by capital

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accumulation. The conceptualist remains a victim of this illusion, his desire for knowledge free from object-attachment was left unsatisfied due to the inescapable reality of his reified, commodified milieu (Wood 1996). This epitomizes the irony of commodified de-materialized art.

Aesthetic Discipline

Allow us to offer a brief historical parenthesis at this juncture. Before venturing further into nomenclature and further inquiry, it might be illuminating to review the traditional field of aesthetics and, with it, the theory of art. Art and aesthetics need to be differentiated, the former dealing with the object produced or created and the latter with the experience and knowledge of the art-object. Ultimately, however, with the postmodern interrogation of the concept of art (in both the ontological and phenomenological senses), the two aspects coalesce in the conceptualist revision. Whether such a result is helpful in clarifying both remains to be resolved. Meanwhile, a historical investigation into the status of the art-object as a distinctive category might be instructive and heuristic.

Foregoing a complete history of the origin of aesthetics from classical antiquity up to the Renaissance, we may begin with German philosophical idealism. Aesthetics (from the Greek aisthesis, “perception, sensation”), aesthetics was first theorized by Alexander G. Baumgarten in 1750 as “the science of sensory knowledge or cognition” whose aim is beauty, not truth. It was later elaborated by Kant as “the science of the rules of sensibility in general,”chiefly concerned with the a priori principles of sensible experience. In Thomistic aesthetics, the intuitive knowledge of the sensible is grounded in intellectual judgment as a knowledge of the universal. The artistic criteria of integritas, consonantia, and claritas are abstract ideas mediating the comprehension of the sensibles (Eco 1988).

In his Critique of Judgment (1790), Kant posited aesthetics as involved with the subjective feeling of pleasure and pain, hence aesthetic judgments pertain to the subject, not the object represented. What is beautiful is tied with disinterested pleasure, a judgment of taste based on immediate intuition without a concept. Kant argues that “Beauty is the formal aspect of purposiveness, insofar as it is perceived in the objectified without the representation of purpose…[T]hat which is

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generally pleasing, without a concept, is beautiful” (quoted by Guttman 1963, 18). In effect, conceptualists reject this aesthetic speculation about beauty as meaningless. Formal purposiveness without purpose– this axiom established the privileged autonomy of art which prevailed up to Clement Greenberg’s pontifications on abstract expressionism.

Two additions to Kant may be cited here. First, Schelling proposed the romantic theme of beauty as “the Infinite infinitely presented,” while Hegel is said to have summed up the classic traditional thinking in his view that Beauty equals Idea, beauty as the sensuous manifestation of the Idea. However, the beautiful is nothing unless it is externalized or mediated in the work of art in which the beholder and the artist’s mind encounter each other. The idea then is the content of the art-work in its dynamic historical evolution. In the nineteenth century, the psychological approach dominated the investigations of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Herbart and Fechner, the latter inaugurating the empirical-experimental approach to aesthetics. This was followed by Theodor Lipps’s notion of empathy, with esthetic enjoyment conceived as “objectivized self-enjoyment,” an inner imitation of artistic creation. With Benedetto Croce, this idealist line of speculation culminates in art as intuitive activity, an expression of inwardness, eluding the screen of formal mediation.

Hegelian Articulation

To the rationalist-idealist line of speculation, Hegel introduced a historicizing orientation. He emphasized the philosophical function of art as a vehicle of reason in quest of universals realized in history. While Hegel believed art to furnish “the sensuous semblance of the idea,” for Croce, universals and history disappear. Croce reduced art to lyrical intuition, separated from the phenomenal contingent world, subsisting in pure intuition whose modes of expression germinate in the artist’s mind. The actualization of this intuition is secondary; expression and communication do not affect the value of the unreflected intuition. Unconcerned with the play of imagination or the immediacies of feeling, Croce absolutized intuition as a complex blend of idea, image, and expression whose singularity, however, resists philosophical generalization (Richter 1994, 145). Croce’s expression theory complements the formalist stress on essential form in Clive Bell, Roger Fry, I.A. Richards, and their American counterparts in the

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New Criticism. Whether the naturalism of John Dewey’s theory of art as intense experience can be reconciled with Croce, is still a debatable proposition.

Aesthetics as an inquiry into normative concepts and values regarding beauty may have given way to the modern interest in a descriptive and factual approach to the phenomena of art (production and reception) and aesthetic experience. Beauty is now construed as an effect of form, of discursive signifying practice. One can mention Charles Morris’ idea of art as iconic symbol of value, as well as Susanne Langer’s conception of art as the symbol or expressive form whereby emotions are rendered apprehensible in their formal embodiments or styles. Both thinkers are anathema to conceptualism. More congenial to postmodernist aesthetics would be the semiotic approach of Charles Sanders Peirce. He proposed an innovative approach in which a constellation of signs (icon, index, symbol) in the art-work becomes the bearer of meaning and significance. These signs generate a dynamic network of interpretants that encompass form and its organic links with lived experience, exploring virtually all the mimetic and expressive possibilities of art that we have so far summarized here (for elaboration, see San Juan 2022).

Historicizing Form

Together with beauty and the sublime, the ideal of autonomy and artistic genius dissolved with the age of mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin dealt a fatal blow to the norm of authenticity intrinsic to the romantic idea of imagination. In capitalist society, the Here and Now of the original is constantly being destroyed by the commodification of labor and practically all domains of human life. Besides the formal properties that authenticate the art-work, the contents of art (idealistic content-aesthetics) have suffered the impact of contingency, chance or accident, entropy, the inexorable incursions of the unpredictable. Art is not timeless but changeable, subject to the process of becoming. Hegel’s “bad conscience” implies that art is never for itself but requires, in fact demands, the exegesis and interpretation of others outside the artist. Art’s truth-content cannot be fully exhausted by any single hermeneutic organon. Since interpretations are open and endless, all art is subject to historicity and the mutability of standards and criteria of judgment (Morawski 1974).

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Alas, have we finally entered the forbidden zone of undecidability, relativism, antifoundationalist skepticism, and cynical reason? So if anything goes, what is the point of argument, dialogue, inquiry? Bitcoins, derivatives, simulacra, expungible fantasies previously called “the sublime” now dominate exchanges, making precarious or unfeasible any agreement or consensus on purposes, motives, intentions, goals. Only the process of everyday living compels us to proceed as though we are all on the same page, using a lexicon and code understood by all participants in the interminable conversation.

In this new catastrophic period of triumphalist globalism, the issue of materialist aesthetics appears not only anachronistic but also a perverse joke. Except those fashioned for immediate use- value (for therapy, etc.), all art in capitalism has become a commodity (exchange-value), as attested to by the auctions enumerated earlier. And since Marxist revolutionaries have allegedly become obsolete if not rare today, aesthetics has become the preserve of museum curators, academic experts/shamans, and pseudo-theologians attached to art galleries and auction houses. Except for Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson, John Berger, Adolfo Sanchez Vazquez, and the late Polish philosopher Stefan Morawski, no serious Marxist thinker has devoted a wholesale engagement with the theory of art, with aesthetic criticism and inquiry in our late-capitalist stage. This is a conjecture, obviously open to future correction.

Indeed, in a 1983 international conference on “Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,” Michelle Barrett bewailed the lack of adequate discussion of aesthetic pleasure and value among various tendencies in the left. Given the vogue of poststructuralist textualism and postmodernist nominalism, aesthetics was overshadowed by or subsumed in discourses on ideology, representation, and the deconstruction of the subject. Nature and objective reality have been cancelled out to give room to the floating signifier, differance, liminality, and contingency. Henceforth, the “free play” of the liberated signifier would call the shots. Subjectivity, or subject-positions, become reduced to simulacra, aporia, or undecidables wholly vulnerable to infinite semiosis,that is, interminable sequence of interpretations without any conclusion.

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Ironically, this putative chaos did not discourage Barrett from giving self-confident judgments. She nonchalantly dismissed vulgar concerns about art’s “truth” and social relevance because the meanings of art-works are not immanent but constructed “in the consumption of the work” (1988, 702). Readers/spectators actively co-create the meaning and significance of the art-work. Contrary to the orthodox ideas about typical characters and organic form, Barrett holds that ideological content and political implications are not given in the art-work but are effects or constructions by readers/audiences, an assertion justified within the framework of a reader-response/reception aesthetics. This position is clearly symptomatic of the move of Barrett’s cohort toward a more open-ended, adventurist, experimentalist stance, rejecting not only reflectionist theory (Lukacs; Goldman) but also interventionist approaches (Gramsci; Sartre). But what exactly do we mean by a Marxist approach to aesthetics as a mode of distributing the sensible (Ranciere 2004)?

Interrogating the Messenger

In the wake of the post-structuralist transvaluation of texts as the ceaseless play of differance, of the unchoreographable dance of signifiers, which one may interpret as a historically specific reaction in the Western milieu to dogmatist leftism in its various manifestations- -economistic, sectarian, mechanical, empiricist, etc.–I would like to reaffirm once more the occluded yet irrepressible matrix of art in the Marxist concept of praxis and political struggle based on Marx’s insight into commodity-fetishism. Enunciated by Marx in the “Theses on Feuerbach” and The Eighteenth Brumaire in particular, this inscription of the aesthetic in transformative action I would call the “Leninist moment,” the hegemonic or ethico-political crux in Marxist critical theory. Let us explore its relevance to understanding the politics of conceptualist writing as propounded by its main theoreticians (Alberro and Stimson 1999; Dworkin and Goldsmith 2011).

The original intent of conceptual artists was democratic, subversive and revolutionary. Not only were art and its institutions converted by them into a field of negotiation in order to link it with the everyday politics of bourgeois society; they rebelled against the fetishizaion of art and its systems of production and distribution. But as Benjamin Buchloh (2006) observed, Pop art, and other postconceptualists

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achieved a “liberal reconciliation” and compromise of high art and mass culture. A test-case can be offered here in the controversial performance of canonical “uncreative” writer Kenneth Goldsmith.

The Goldsmith Incident

On March 13, 2015, in the program Interrupt3 sponsored by Brown University, Goldsmith performed a 30-minutes reading of the official St. Louis County autopsy report on “The Body of Michael Brown.” Brown is the 18-year old black man fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. The first report stated that Goldsmith introduced his poem as “something to do with quantified self,” but an artist Faith Holland remarked that Goldsmith had re-arranged the original text, focusing on the description of the Cranial Cavity in the line “The weight of the unfixed brain is 1350 gm,” with the poem ending in the line “The remaining male genitalia system is unremarkable” (Steinhaven 2015). The hands of the “uncreative” poet displayed itself quite obtrusively. He was no innocent bystander or naive witness. Immediately came an avalanche of negative responses, such as: “Goldsmith appropriates Michael Brown’s murdered body, reframed as his poetry, and retweets the angry reactions. A troll with tenure,” with even more violent condemnation mounted a few days later.

Death threats ensued, prompting Goldsmith to apologize for the pain he had caused, asking Brown University to withold the video of his performance. C.A.Conrad summed up the outrage in quoting the poet Anne Waldman’s comment: “What was Kenny Goldsmith thinking? That it’s okay to self-appoint and perform the autopsy report of murdered black teenager Michael Brown and mess with the text, and so ‘own’ it and get paid for his services? No empathy no sorrow for the boy, the body, the family, ignorant of the ramifications, deaf ear to the explosive demonstrations and marches? Reeks of exploitation, of the ‘racial imaginary.’ Black Dada Nihilismus is lurking on the lineaments of the appropriated shadow of so much suffering” (Conrad 2015).

Anatomy of an Inquest

We have been ushered into the domain of ethico-political judgment. What seems on trial here are the central techniques of the allegorical gsture of appropriating a pre-existing object or text, and

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the procedure of montage. Is the artist free to do whatever he wants, at any time and place? True to his previous practice of copying and reproducing raw materials—eyewitness reports from radio/television broadcasts, as shown in his 2013 book, Seven American Deaths and Disasters, Goldsmith tried to prove that inflammatory material, handled in a certain way, can “provoke outrage in the service of a social cause.” His Facebook entry reveals the “idea” or motivating principle behind the import of information:

I took a publicly available document from an American tragedy that was witnessed first-hand (in this case by the doctor performing the autopsy) and simply read it. Like Seven American Deaths and Disasters, I did not editorialize; I simply read it without commentary or additional editorializing… The document I read from is powerful. My reading of it was powerful. How could it be otherwise? Such is my long-standing practice of conceptual writing: like Seven American Deaths, the document speaks for itself in ways that an interpretation cannot. It is a horrific American document, but then again, it was a horrific American death…

I indeed stated at the beginning of my reading that this was a poem called The Body of Michael Brown; I never stated,”I am going to read the autopsy report of Michael Brown’… That said, I didn’t add or alter a single word or sentiment that did not preexist in the original text, for to do so would be to go against my nearly three decades’ practice of conceptual writing, one that states that a writer need not write any new texts but rather reframe those that already exist in the world to greater effect than any subjective interpretion could lend. Perhaps people feel uncomfortable with my uncreative writing, but for me, this is the writing that is able to tell the truth in the strongest and clearest way possible…. Ecce homo. Behold the man….(quoted in Flood 2015)

Evidently, in quest of the truth via reframing, the poet’s ethics became muddled in defending his habit. His mendacity exceeds the boldness of his disingenuous apologia. Contradicting his testimony that he did not editorialize, Goldsmith added that he “altered the text for poetic effect; he translated medical terms into plain English and

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narrativized the words “in ways that made the text less didactic and more literary.” The qualification sounds pathetic. Goldsmith claimed that he acted normally for an artist: “People behave very badly in the art world, but it’s what pushes boundaries and makes discussion” (Wilkinson 2015). A group called Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo called Goldsmith’s conceptual poetry “building blocks of white supremacy.” The repartee that persisted for quite some time provides lessons in how postmodern aesthetics, despite its claims to go beyond conventional ethics and morality, cannot elude public criticism if they are staged in public, paid by the sponsors, with the sanction of institutional legitimacy. Poetry has become a commodity too even in the groves of non-profit academia.

Despite the conceptualist’s emphasis on context, sites, situations, Goldsmith failed to recognize the sociopolitical parameter of his performance and the institutional constraints of the information being moved. Concepts are historically grounded and mobilized/ immobilized. Instead of animating the fragments of copied texts, or satirizing them as quantifying modes, Goldsmith in “The Body of Michael Brown” evoked the “rigid immanence of the Baroque” devoid of any anticipatory, utopian sense of historical time,” fixed by an attitude of melancholic, awed contemplation—a deliberate theatrical gesture. His montage technique of fragmenting and juxtaposing depleted signifiers mimicked the fabrication of sold commodities. Thus, instead of rescuing the possible elements of communicative value in the report (for example, the excessive shooting inflicted on the victim’s body), Goldsmith allegorized his act of “uncreative” composition by accentuating the ethnic/racial resonance of the anatomical catalogue. Walter Benjamin presciently described the collage/montage aesthetics underlying conceptualist works: “The devaluation of objects in allegory is surpassed in the world of objects itself by the commodity. The emblem returns as commodities” (Buchloh 2006, 29). Goldsmith repeated and reinforced the instrumentalist devaluation enacted by the State, repudiating the classic avantgarde practitioner’s anti-conformist, anarchist stance.

Revenge of the Immaterial

Marx’s concept of commodity-fetishism exposes the irony in the post-Duchampian, conceptualist program of dematerialization. Goldsmith’s “uncreative” alteration of the “ready-made” did not issue

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into “immaterial” creativity; on the contrary, it materialized a racialized foregrounding of semantic features otherwise buried in scientific, empirical discourse instrumentalized by the State. As Boris Groys noted, the conceptual artist’s submission to the art institution (usually under academic patronage) and its commodifying hegemony is symptomatic of the failure of avant-garde movements in their avowed aims. What happens is the triumph of alienated abstract labor over non- alienated creative work so that, as Groys notes: “It is is this alienated labor of transporting objects combined with the labor invested in the construction and maintenance of art spaces that ultimately produces artistic value under the conditions of post-Duchampian art. Other concrete, historically specific examples, such as the artistic labor of Vito Acconci, Yoko Ono, Bruce Nauman, Lawrence Weiner, and others, may be scrutinized in Peter Osborne’s graphic documentation, Conceptual Art (2002).

The crisis of conceptualism originates from the stoic acceptance of a unity of opposites: marketed art produced by the culture industry enabling the sophisticated elite culture of the oligarchy. In 1979, Adrian Cristobal, a bureaucrat-spokesman for the Marcos authoritarian regime argued that mass culture serves profit-making big business, while the State sponsors its opposite, humanist culture. Amid widespread human- rights violations committed by State agencies, Cristobal pays homage to the dictator and his wife: “One sees and one appreciates the role of the First Lady in her sponsorship of such ventures as the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Folk Arts Theater, the Metropolitan Theater and all other similar ventures. For these are, in the main, institutions which are designed to deliver that redeeming humanist culture to the people. A point of view no doubt shared by the President himself who is, in his own right, a competent writer and more than this, himself a contribution to the development of a truly national culture” (1979). Today, the conjugal dictatorship’s “humanism” has been exposed as euphemistic alibi for barbarism, with the brutalization of thousands of victims by the Marcos “martial law” regime (1972-1986; see McCoy 2001).

Provisional Epilogue

In the new millennium, the Philippine neocolony deteriorated further with the neoliberal rampage of the U.S. crusade against global “terrorism.” The “humanist” culture so highly extolled here coincides

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with the religious imagination, the realm of illusions, which is the antithetical reflex of the world of commodities in “the heartless world” invoked in Marx’s double-edged praise and rejection of the people’s opium: “Religion is, in fact, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet gained himself or has lost himself again….It is the fantastic realization of the human being because the human being has attained no true reality….The wretchedness of religion is at once an expression of and a protest against real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people….The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is a demand for their true happiness. The call to abandon illusions about their conditions is the call to abandon a condition which requires illusions…(1970, 131). Here, Marx grasps the superstructure (religion) not as phenomenon but as an integral element of an all-pervasive social practice. Religion, like art, subsists on the fixation with illusions. In conceptualizing the contradictory relation between intellectual objectification and social reality, Marx laid the groundwork for the active, dynamic and creative intervention of transformative agents such as artists and intellectuals fully cognizant of the power of fetishized objects, beliefs, practices, and institutions.

In a recent inventory of “the ideology of the aesthetic,” Terry Eagleton distinguishes Marx’s singular theory of art from Romantic humanism, “with its expression/repression model of human existence” (1990, 219). Marx’s vision of an “all-round human self-actualization” is premised on the establishment of socialist relations of production, with a communist ethic where mutual or reciprocal self-realization of persons is cultivated. Eagleton argues that Marx resolves the Kantian dilemma of the noumenal/phenomenal split—the problem that aesthetics/art endeavors to dissolve—by locating “the unity of ‘fact’ and ‘value in the practical, critical activity of men and women—in a form of understanding which is brought to birth in the first place by emancipatory interests, which is bred and deepened in active struggle, and which is an indispensable part of the realization of value” (1990, 226).

Thus, the moment of “revolutionary practice” posited in Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”(1978) is essential to fully appreciating the dialectical-materialist theorizing of art/aesthetics as a mode of the

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realization of human powers, capacities, virtues for the sake of universal happiness and well-being (see Lifshitz 1973; Solomon 1973; Williams 1977; Johnson 1984; Eagleton and Milne 1996). We have noted earlier that conceptual art-practice vitiates its radical impetus due to its nominalist tendency, “an essential scepticism about the existence of an objective reality, or the possibility of arriving at an agreed understanding of it by rational means,” as Eric Hobsbawm diagnosed the postmodernist malady. But an antithetical tendency exists within it of engendering a “socialist art practice” if it returns to its original inspiration in Russian art following the October Revolution (Burgin 2002, 256-58).

One evidence of a hopeful revitalization of the anti-commodity impulse in postmodern art may be found in Yoko Ono’s recent intervention, a billboard in New York’s Times Square inviting people to read its message: “Imagine Peace.” It appeared on a screen at Broadway and 45th Srreet. The message was spelled out in black letters on white, lasting three minutes; it appeared every night in March 2022 in public areas in London, Los Angeles, Milan, Melbourne and Seoul (Smee 2022). Before being overshadowed by Beatle John Lennon, Yoko Ono was acknowledged as one of the most sophisticated and bold artists of post- World War II, inventing the Event performance (such as “Cut Piece”) as part of the Fluxus art-movement in the fifties and sixties (Higgins 2002; Menand 2022). Her timely peace activism somewhat vindicates the flaws and inadequacies of conceptualists and other anti-Establishment projects over-determined by their disparate historical situations.

One conclusion emerges from this brief survey of the nodal stages in the vicissitudes of our brief reflection on the politics of aesthetics, with special reference to conceptual art. A fallibilistic proposition can be offered here: without the focus on the moment of praxis–the artist’s or critic’s intervention in the concrete arena of political struggle for hegemony, any reflection on the nature of art and its function will compulsively repeat the metaphysical idealism (Kant, Hegel, & Croce) it seeks to overcome. It is in the arena of political and ideological conflict that consciousness is grasped in its overdetermined trajectory as a complex of material practices functioning in conserving or disintegrating a determinate conjuncture, a lived situation. The problematic dialectic of conceptualist art that was previously discussed is an example of such a conjuncture. Without positing this moment of rupture or opening for intervention, we shall reproduce the predicament

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of the bourgeois intellectual that progressive thinkers such as Brecht, Lukacs (San Juan, 1972), Gramsci, Caudwell, Berger, and others (Arvon 1973; Laing 1978), acutely diagnosed: the division of mental and manual labor; the antinomy between subject and object, society and individual, nature and history, which revolutionary practice hopes to gradually and eventually resolve, despite the mistakes that were made by avant-garde artists who lack the totalizing vision and dynamic praxis of intellectuals working in the socialist tradition.

REFERENCES
Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson. 1999. Conceptual Art: A Critical

Anthology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Arvon, Henri. 1973. Marxist Esthetics. Ithaca: Cornell.

Barrett, Michele. 1988. “The Place of Aesthetics in Marxist Criticism.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Eds. Lawrence Grossberg and Cary Nelson. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Berger, John. 1980. The Success and Failure of Picasso. New York: Pantheon Books.

Bothamley, Jennifer. 1993. Dictionary of Theories. London: Gale Research International Ltd.

Buchloh, Benjamin H.D. 2006. “Allegorical Procedures: Appropriation and Montage in Contemporary Art.” In Art After Conceptual Art. Ed. Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann. Vienna: Generali Foundation.

Burn, Ian. 1999. “The Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath (or the Memoirs of an Ex-conceptual artist).” In Conceptual Art: A critical anthology. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Caudwell, Christopher. 1937. Illusion and Reality. New York: International.

Conrad, C.A. 2015. “Kenneth Goldsmith Says He is an Outlaw.” Poetry Foundation.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/06/kenneth- goldsmith-says-he-is-an-outlaw

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Cristobal, Adrian. 1979. “Mass culture also means big business.” The Sunday Times Journal (Nov. 25): 12.

Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.

________ and Drew Milne, eds. Marxist Literary Theory. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

Eco, Umberto. 1988. The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Flood, Alison. 2015. “US Poet Defends Reading of Michael Brown autopsy report as a poem.” The Guardian (March 17)L 7-8.

Freeland, Cynthia. 2001. Art Theory. New York: Oxford University Press.

Godfrey, Tony. 1988. Conceptual Art. London: Phaidon.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1957. The Modern Prince and Other Writings. New York: International.

Groys, Boris. 2010. “Marx After Duchamp, or The Artist’s Two Bodies.” e-flux journal # 19 (October).

Guttmann, James, ed. 1963. Philosophy A to Z. New York: Grosset & Dunlap.

Higgins, Hannah. 2002. Fluxus Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hobsbawm, Eric. 1994. Age of Extremes. London: Abacus.
Jameson, Fredric. 1971. Marxism and Form. Princeton: Princeton

University.

Johnson, Pauline. 1984. Marxist Aesthetics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Laing, David. 1978. The Marxist Theory of Art. New Jersey: Humanities Press.

Lenin, V. I. 1967. On Literature and Art. Moscow: Progress.

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LeWitt, Sol. 1999. “Sentences on Conceptual Art.” In Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology. Eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Lifshitz, Mikhail. 1973. The Philosophy of Art of Karl Marx. London: Pluto Press.

Lukacs, Georg. 1970. Writer and Critic. London: Merlin.
Macherey, Pierre. 1978. A Theory of Literary Production. London:

Routledge.

Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, Volume 1. Tr. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin.

________. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert Tucker. New York: Norton.

McCoy, Alfred. 2001. “Dark Legacy: Human Rights Under the Marcos Regime.” In Memory: Truth-telling and the Pursuit of Justice. A Conference on the Legacy of the Marcos Dictatorship. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University.

Menand, Louis. 2022. “The Grapefruit Artist.” The New Yorker (June 20): 24-29.

Morawski, Stefan. 1974. Inquiries into the Fundamentals of Aesthetics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT.

Mulhern, Francis. 1974. “The Marxist Aesthetics of Christopher Caudwell.” New Left Review, No. 85 (May 1974): 37-58.

New York Times. 2013. “Grisly Warhol Painting Fetches $104.5 Million, Auction High for Artist.” (November 14). http://www.newyorktimes.com.

Osborne, Peter, ed. 2002. Conceptual Art. New York: Phaidon Press.

________. 2005. How to Read Marx. New York: W.W. Norton.

Raphael, Max. 1980. Proudhon Marx Picasso. New Jersey: Humanities Press.

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Richter, David H. 1994. “Croce, Benedetto.” In The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 174-176.

San Juan, E., ed. 1973. Marxism and Human Liberation Essays by Georg Lukacs. New York: Delta.

________. 2022. Peirce’s Pragmaticism: A Radical Perspective. New York: Lexington Books.

Smee, Sebastian. 2022. “That’s been Yoko Ono’s message all along.” The Washington Post (March 26): C1.

Smith, Roberta. 1994. “Conceptual Art.” In Concepts of Modern Art. Ed. Nikos Stangos. New York: Thames and Hudson.

Solomon, Maynard, ed. Marxism and Art. New York: Alfred Knopf.

Steinhauer, Jillian. 2015. “Kenneth Goldsmith Remixes Michael Brown Autopsy Report as Poetry.” Hyperallergic. <https//hyperallergic.com/190954/kenneth-goldsmith- remixes-michael-brown-autopsy-report>

Wilkinson, Alec. 2015. “Kenneth Goldsmith’s Controversial Conceptual Poetry.” The New Yorker (October 5).

Williams, Raymond. 1977. Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

Wood, Paul. 1996. “Commodity.” In Critical Terms for Art History. Ed. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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RIZAL –2023 anniversary; looking back.

A HOMAGE TO JOSE RIZAL, REVOLUTIONARY NATIONAL HERO, on the occasion of his birth anniversary 2011

By E. SAN JUAN, JR.
Philippines Studies Center

On the occasion of Rizal’s 150th birth anniversary in 2011, the Paciano Rizal Family Heritage released for sale replicas of an exquisitely handcrafted book devised by Rizal when he was in exile in Dapitan (1892-96). The improvised fortune-telling kit bears the title,  “Haec est Sibylla Cumana”/ “This is the Sibyl of Cumae,” a book of oracles (Yuchengo 2015). The figure referred to is the priestess/prophetess presiding over the Apollonian oracle at Cumae, a Greek colony near Naples, in ancient times. She played a pivotal role in Virgil’s Aeneid,  helping guide Aeneas in his journey to the underworld to visit his dead father Anchises. Bridging the realms of the living and the dead, the old and the new, she reminds us of her sisters (the most famous being the Sibyl of Delphi) who also offered to help smooth the passage of the traveller from regions of the past to the present and future (on six other sibyls, see Benjamin 2015, 303-08). 

Ancient oracles served to appease the gods, revealing what secret messages are hidden behind visible occurrences and natural phenomena. During the medieval age, the Sibylline books (like Virgil’s Eclogues) were thought to prophesy the birth of Christ and the ultimate salvation of humankind. Thus, worldly time acquired import and a direction, everyday life found a specific gravity in the chartered chronicle. So would the time Rizal spent in exile—a dragging duration which he filled with socially rewarding accomplishments—bear significance, charged with still unravelled purport and portentous meanings. 

Divining Incommensurables

What motivated the deported filibustero to spend his time and energy in inventing this game? Was it simply to while away the boredom of exile? Or does it suggest the artist’s preoccupation with fate, temporality, the hazardous passage from past to future? Rizal did not foresee his forced removal to Dapitan when he left his mother and relatives in Hong Kong in 1892. He formed the Liga Filipina on July 3. On July 6, he was arrested for allegedly transporting subversive material in his sister’s luggage, and summarily deported. During those years of exile, he appealed several times for a change in his situation, but to no avail. Chance, luck, happenstance,  accident—was he the plaything of unknown mischievous forces?
Fortune-telling was no stranger to Rizal. In the festivities described in Chapter 24 of Noli Me Tangere, men played cards and chess while the women “curious about knowing the future, preferred to ask questions of the wheel of fortune” (2006, 202). Denouncing their games as if they induced fornication, Padre Salvi wrenched their sinful book and tore it to shreds. As for the matter of chance, Elias may be allowed to speak for the free-thinking spirit when he replied to Ibarra’s query whether he believed in chance—an apt response also to skeptics of the Sibylla Cumana game:  “To believe in chance is tantamount to believing in miracles; both beliefs assume that God does not know the future.  What is chance or contingency? An event that absolutely no one has foreseen.  What is miracle?  A contradiction, an upsetting of natural laws.  Contradiction and lack of foresight in the Intelligence which controls the world’s machinery signifies two great imperfections” (2006, 300). The Deist Cartesian persona of Rizal is surely ventriloquizing here to dodge censorship.

Whatever the wager of this ludic exercise, Rizal’s parlor-game is delightfully provocative. It offers the player 52 questions and 416 answers (each question has 8 possible answers) all cryptic, ambiguous, vague enough to trigger wild speculation. You roll a wooden top with 8 sides in order to pick your answer from an elaborate table; chance decides which answer you will receive. One answer may be gambled here: “A mother-in-law is not just a mother-in-law; she is also a mother—and you are an enemy of mothers?” A symptomatic query. Overall, the game is user-friendly, advising us not to be afraid of the future. But whether we like it or not, we are thrown into our common lot, guessing, suspicious, left in the lurch. 

According to the Rizal clan, this precious heirloom was preserved by generations of safekeepers and descendants, foremost among them Narcisa Rizal Lopez. It survived the disasters of the 1896 revolution, the Filipino-American War, the Japanese occupation, and MacArthur’s horrific “liberation” of Intramuros where millions of Filipinos perished (Yuchengco 2015). Its survival presages the hero’s fortuitous intervention into our  humdrum shopping/consuming affairs in this new millennium.

Deciphering Origins in Oak Leaves

Three years before his Dapitan sojourn, Rizal was engaged in some kind of reasoned guessing, specifically in conjuring the future of the islands from the vantage-point of the Madrid-based La Solidaridad.  This time it’s not divination via a wooden top or roulette-wheel. Using hi knowledge of the past and intuition of the character of nations, Rizal tried to predict the vicissitudes of the islands in the judicious calculations of “The Philippines A Century Hence.” It would be a search for what’s genuinely autochtonous, motivated by the historian’s quest “to make known the past so that it may be possible to judge better the present and measure the path which has been traversed during three centuries” (cited in Cushner 1971, 224).. 

Noli Me Tangere demonstrated the protagonist’s chief malady, Ibarra’s temporary loss of roots after seven years abroad. His family’s victims would reanimate his atrophied memory. To proceed in his journey of rediscovering his homeland, Rizal had to retrace its original condition. On his return to Europe, in 1888-89, he rescued Antonio de Morga’s 1609 chronicle, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, from the London Museum and had it published in Paris with his annotations. 

Armed with testimonies of a flourishing pre-conquest civilization, Rizal dares to foretell the fate of his country a hundred years from the close of the 19th-century. Note that the extrapolation is based on a continuing dialectical movement in which potent unused qualities persist, transmuted but preserved by the forces that seek to destroy them: “Religious shows, rites that caught the eye, songs, lights, images arrayed with gold, worship in a strange language, legends, miracles and sermons, hypnotized the already naturally superstitious spirits of the country but did not succeed in destroying it altogether, in spite of this the whole system afterwards developed and operated with unyielding tenacity” (1984, 366). Given elements of the pristine past transmigrating to the fallen present, Rizal hypothesizes what may occur:

…Will the Philippine Islands be separated from the mother country to live independently, to fall into the hands of other nations, or to ally themselves with neighboring powers?
    It is impossible to reply to these questions, for to all of them both yes and no may be answered, according to the time desired to be covered.  When there is in nature no fixed condition, how much less must there be in the life of a people. being endowed with mobility and movement! So, it is that in order to deal with those questions, it is necessary to presume an unlimited period of time, and in accordance therewith try to forecast the future (1984, 367).

Geopolitics of Circumvention

Notice Rizal’s accentuation of “mobility and movement,” a sign of global modernity foregrounded in his 1889 article, “On Travel” (1962, 22-28). Other signs highlighted what’s relative, arbitrary, and undecideable where circumstances prevailed over all. In his essays, Rizal historicizes geography, connecting Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations with newly opened China and India via commerce and migration. He attributes all the advances in modern societies to the movement of bodies, ideas, perceptions and impressions.  This compression of time-space is hinted by his pen-name, “Laong Laan,” “ever ready,” prepared for any comeuppance, as he confessed to his associate Marcelo del Pilar after dreaming of dead relatives and friends: “Although my body is very strong and I have no illness and no fear, I am preparing myself for death and for any eventuality. ‘Laong Laan’ is my true name” (quoted in Zaide 1984, 172).

Whatever the epochal contingencies involved, Rizal anchors his prediction on a constant factor: the Malayan “delicacy of sentiment,” sensitive “self-love,” readiness to sacrifice everything “for an aspiration or a conceit.” He has “all the meekness and all the tenacity and ferocity of his carabao.” Moreover, “brutalization of the Malayan Filipinos has been demonstrated to be impossible,” nor can they be totally exterminated. He concludes that “the Islands cannot remain in the condition they are without requiring from the sovereign country more liberty. Mutatis mutandis. For new men, a new social order.” Self-determination of Indios looming in the horizon cannot be ignored, given the emergence of novel productive forces bursting the integument of the repressive, decadent social order.

It is only a matter of time. Sooner or later, Rizal asserts, a natural law dictates that the colonies will declare themselves independent. When the country secures its independence “after heroic and stubborn conflicts,” no other power will dare to take up what Spain has been unable to hold, not even the United States whose traditions will not allow it—a seriously misleading oversight. Rizal closes with an eloquent hymn to a vision of a bountiful, free, convivial homeland reminiscent of the naturalizing invocation of the 1882 essay, “Amor Patrio” / “Love of Country” (1962, 15-21).

      Very likely the Philippines will defend with inexpressible valor the liberty secured at the price of so much blood and sacrifice.  With the new men that will spring from their soil and with the recollection of their past, they will perhaps strive to enter freely upon the wide road of progress, and all will labor together to strengthen their fatherland, both internally and externally, with the same enthusiasm, with which a youth falls again to tilling the land of his ancestors so long wasted and abandoned through the neglect of those who have withheld it from him (194, 391).

A mood of exultant self-confidence pervades the landscape of blood-soaked, scorched fields where zealous tillers appear, poised to strike with plow and harrow. To be sure, Rizal cannot indulge in probabilities. He ventures to chart a destiny vulnerable to random, haphazard incidents. But immediately he assures us, with nonchalance, “It is not well to trust to accident, for there is sometimes an imperceptible and incomprehensbie logic in the workings of history.  Fortunately, peoples as well as governments are subject to it.”  Soon Rizal will render transparent this dystopic conspiracy of history.

Indeed, Rizal cannot allow the gratuitous and the aleatory from taking over, for he discerns a hidden pattern under surface contingencies. There’s more hidden behind appearances. He interpreted his dreams as enigmatic forecasts of the future.  Does this mixture of law and luck, decorum and delirium, capture Rizal’s own strategy in confronting his relations with women, not just with his mother and sisters, whose feelings and sensibility somehow gravitated to his orbit?

Scandalous Missing Object

We may now segue, with “fear and trembling,” into the perilous domain of sexual politics. Benedict Anderson’s meticulous catalogue of European influences on Rizal’s thought in his book Under Three Flags analyzed Rizal’s susceptiblities. Rizal absorbed omnivorously the heterogenous colors, valence and savors of European culture.  But was he gay? Or was he secretly an anarchist, a closet nihilist? Anderson sought to anatomize Rizal’s psyche and its bizarre libidinal permutations. It’s an intriguing detective itinerary that unfortunately succumbs to smug Eurocentric vainglory. 

However, we need to focus our discourse on “the woman question.” Since our task here is limited to investigating the situation of Sisa as a metaphor for the problem of gender inequality, the fraught issue of Rizal’s sexual identity is entangled with the position of the Others—the outcasts, lunatics, profane flunkeys, perverse guardians of “the sacred,” etc. In this context, it might be profitable to survey the aleatory as well as reiterative performance of his erotic disposition and disclaimers. His go-ahead signal for this inquiry was sounded at the end of his prognostication: “The masks have fallen…” We no longer see through the glass, darkly.

Earlier, in his 1884 speech praising the painters Juna Luna and Felix Hidalgo, Rizal announced: “The patriarchal era in the Philippines is waning…The furrow is ready and the ground is not sterile” (2011, 18-22). Nature has been historicized; the androcentric cosmos needs to yield to the nurturant, generative principle of the cultivators, fisher-folk, artisans, women, indigenes or ethnic minorities—the exploited Indio workers seeds of tomorrow in cities and countryside.

Biographers have eagerly inventoried the fabled targets of Rizal’s affections, with their varying if incalculable pressure on his political and ethical pursuits. Ultimately, the aesthetic/hedonistic level of engagement would be surpassed, shifting the burden of responsibility to the ethical and eventually political field of symbolic violence. We owe this angle of interpretation to the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) who lived before Rizal was born, his writings unknown to the Filipino exiles in Madrid and Paris.  So far we can trace the critical moments of evasion in all encounters with the desired subject/object of cathexis and its fetishistic resonance, including the two eccentric cases: the Japanese companion and the Irish paramour.

Trauma of Counter-Identity

In Either/Or and other texts, Kierkegaard defined the alternative modalities of living with Others endowed with the power of recognition or refusal. They are inscribed in the tortuous passage from the aesthetic to the ethical and then to the religious domains characterized by “the baptism of the will” (1946, 107-08; 129-30).  For Rizal, however, the leap into faith is circumvented by his rationalist disposition acquired during his European schooling. Aside from frailocracy’s stranglehold, the path of orthodox piety is blocked by the commitment to the mother/nation, a universal category, in which immanent martyrdom aborts mystifying transcendence. The ideal of honor, self-esteem (pundonor or amor propio), grounded in his appreciation of native practices, also thwarts subservience to dogmatic absolutism. The Kierkegaardian concept of repetition, the recollection of past experiences superimposed on a future trajectory of conduct, has distinguished Rizal’s handling of his affairs with women. Nostalgic retrospection marks all his letters from Europe, syncopated with dreams of retrieving the years of childhood innocence and customary family/clan solidarity.  

But Rizal was not a naive idealist habitually looking backwards. He was always forward-looking, given to utopian speculations (for his Dapitan experiments, see Craig 1913; Zaide 1984; for the Borneo scheme, see Rizal 2011, 321-28).  One way of implementing this existentialist orientation is to foreground Rizal’s development as a versatile artist-thinker, his gradual maturation by force of circumstance from a quasi-romantic reformist public intellectual to a radical-democratic revolutionist, as Fr. John Schumacher has suggested (1987). After completing the Noli, Rizal was already a revolutionist, confident that “the peaceful struggle shall always be a dream, for Spain will never learn the lesson of her former South American colonies” (letter to Blumentritt dated  26 January 1887, cited in Cushner 1971, 225). The discordant vortices of natural 

endowment and historical opportunities converge in this metamorphosis of Rizal’s world-outlook.

The inaugural moment of the psyche’s reflexivity, as we have 

discussed earlier, is the aborted affair with Segunda Katigbak, circa 1878-79. Rizal was 16 years old when he met her in Trozo where his maternal grandmother resided at that time. He found the “sylph” alluring, Her engagement to a townmate in Lipa, Batangas, may have deterred Rizal from proposing. But he blamed his shyness when he failed to detain her carriage as it passed by for the imagined tryst he had carefully prepared in his mind. In his Memoirs, she is represented as a swift ”floating shadow.”

At the time when Rizal’s mother was losing her eyesight and could not recognize her son, the son remembers his first love’s expressive eyes, ”ardent at times, and drooping at other times, a smile so bewitching and provocative,” while her entire self “diffused a mysterious charm” (1984, 308). Rizal was  paralyzed, saying nothing. And so, later on, he drew this painful lesson of disenchantment that would haunt him for a long time:

[Segunda Katigbak]  bowed to me smiling and waving her handkerchief, I just lifted up my hand and said nothing. Alas! Such has always happened to me in the most painful moments of my life. My tongue, profuse talker, becomes dumb when my heart is bursting with feelings… In the critical moments of my life, I have always acted against my will, obeying different purposes and mighty doubts. I goaded my horse and took another road without having chosen it, exclaiming: This is ended thus. Ah, how much truth, how much meaning, these words then had! My youthful and trusting love ended!  The first hours of my first love ended. My virgin heart will forever weep the risky step it took in the abyss covered with flowers. My illusion will return, indeed, but indifferent, incomprehensible,  preparing me for the first deception on the road of grief” (1984, 317).  

The montage of illusions would unfold quickly. After this traumatic wound whose scars would rankle for a long time, Rizal slowly recovered via the phantoms of Miss L. of Calamba with “seductive and attractive eyes,” and of Leonor Valenzuela of Pagsanjan, Laguna. A recharging station on the way to his sacrifice for the motherland was Leonor Rivera of Camiling, Tarlac, who attracted him as a tender “budding flower with kindly, wistful eyes.”Again, the beloved’s enthralling eyes, surveillance without relief. Leonor’s mother objected, so Rizal’s parents advised him not to visit her in Dagupan when he returned from Europe. It was the ultimatum to abjure the local femme fatale and circumvent residual elective affinities with previous acquaintances.

Occlusions and Disclosures

Goodbye, Leonor, and welcome our other sisters who beckoned, mournful sirens languishing in moribund Europe. In 1890, while attending a play in Teatro Apollo, Madrid, Rizal lost his gold watch chain with a locket containing the picture of Leonor, a weird omen. Remember Maria Clara’s locket given to the leper, then owned by Juli, and finally claimedby Simoun? Subsequently, Rizal received Leonor’s letter announcing her forthcoming marriage to an Englishman (the British engineer Edward Kipping), her mother’s choice. 

In contrast, Maria Clara (modeled after Leonor) lost her mother early, so it was another father (Padre Damaso) who dictated her choice, her quarantine in the convent “safeguarded” by the cagey Padre Salvi.  Leonor asked for forgiveness, but Rizal broke down, agonizing for weeks, comparing himself to an immense volcano exploding and “putting an end to everything living and breathing.” His Austrian correspondent Ferdinand Blumentritt tried to console him with folkloric, homegrown platitudes:  

…but you are one of the heroes who conquer pain from a wound inflicted by women, because they follow higher ends. You have a courageous heart, and you are in love with a nobler woman, the Motherland. Filipinas is like one of those enchanted princesses in the German legends, who is a captive of a horrid dragon, until she is freed by a valiant knight….I am grieved with all my heart that you have lost the girl to whom you were engaged, but if she was able to renounce a Rizal, she did not possess the nobility of your spirit. She is like a child who cast away a diamond to seize a pebble….In other words, she is not the woman for Rizal (quoted in Zaide 1984, 180).

Is it possible that Blumentritt had in mind Rizal’s 1882 essay “Amor Patrio”?
Rizal affirmed this love of “patria” (motherland) “just as the child loves its mother in the midst of hunger and misery.” We follow the procession of the children in his fiction: Basilio, Crispin, Elias, Juli, Tano, Placido Penitente, Isagani, and other nameless orphans.

Before Leonor’s confession of infidelity in 1890, Rizal seemed to have been bewitched by Consuelo Ortiga y Perez. It was shortlived; he had to give way to his rival, Eduardo de Lete. It was only in Japan on his second trip to Europe in 1888 when he met 23-year-old O-Sei-San, a samurai’s daughter, that he may have experienced carnal bliss. With a geisha’s simulacra? It is impossibe to test the veracity of his record of intimacy in this quite exceptional liaison.

Rizal’s testimony can be taken as sincere, unless he is pretending to be the victim of Orientalist fantasies: “O Sei-San, Sayonara, Sayonara! I have spent a happy golden month; I do not know if I can have another one like that in all my life…No woman like you has ever loved me. No woman like you has ever sacrificed for me. Like the flower of he chodji that falls from the stem fresh and whole without falling leaves or without withering—with poetry still despite its fall—thus you fell.  Neither have you lost your purity nor have the delicate petals of your innocence faded…Your name lives in the sight of my lips, your image accompanies and animates all my thoughts. When shall I return to pass another divine afternoon like that in the temple of Meguro?” (quoted in Zaide 1984, 132).

Rizal’s apostrophe extolled his Japanese companion as the “last descendant of a noble family, faithful to an unfortunate vengeance….”  What the last two words signify remains a puzzle. Is it simply an extravagant cliche to compensate for an unresolved aporia of doubts, virile pride and intractable premonitions? Or is it a vow to fulfill a long-forgotten promise?

Deterritorializing Interlude

We follow Rizal in his peregrination. Next in line was Gertrude Beckett with brown hair, blue eyes, and rosy cheeks, the oldest of three sisters in his boarding house at Primrose Hill, London, near Frederick Engels’ residence. But though the flirtation became hot and heavy, as it were, Rizal quickly realized that he could not marry Gettie. It was at this time (22 February 1889) when Rizal composed in Tagalog his provocative “Letter to the Young Women of Malolos.”  

We may pass over the episode with Petite Suzanne Jacoby who pursued him with her letters in French when he fled to Madrid in July 1890. Rizal confided to his sister Soledad: “In my love affairs, I have always acted with nobility, because I myself would have felt humiliated had I behaved otherwise. I have despised and considered unworthy every young man I have seen hiding himself, prowling in the dark…” Earlier he expressed the reason for his temporizing and diffidence: “I cannot deceive her; I can’t marry her, because I have other affections to remember in our country…. (Palma 1949, 130, 133). What are these other affections? 

Neither ascetic nor hedonist, Rizal did not isolate himself, vowing chastity and performing rituals of self-purification. The next challenge was posed by Nellie Boustead. In romantic Biarritz, Rizal  courted Nellie who supposedly reciprocated. But Nellie’s mother registered objections, and Nellie herself required Rizal to become a Protestant, which he shrugged off. His friends Tomas Areola and Antonio Luna encouraged Rizal to choose the matrimonial path, to no avail. it was only when Josephine Bracken came to Dapitan, accompanying the blind Englishman George Taufer, that Rizal recovered, with due qualifications, the unrepeatable experience he recorded with his Japanese muse. That was also the year, 1893, when Rizal received the news of Leonor Rivera’s death.        

The historian Ambeth Ocampo psychoanalyzed the recurrence of snakes as phalllic symbols in Rizal’s dreams. A trivializing suspicion. He speculated that Rizal may have been a closet gay: “It dawned on me that the fact that Rizal had many women [“had” is arguably a masculinist hyperbole] was probably an indication that he was incapable or perhaps had difficulty in maintaining a stable relationship with one woman” (2011, 67-68)—except with patria, which, for Ocampo, was too lofty, too inhuman. No one has claimed that Rizal “possessed” any of his female acquaintances except perhaps O-Sei-San and Bracken. 

Finally, Ocampo contends that given the unresolved Oedipus complex, Rizal could have been a homosexual. But his yearning for his Nanay, Rizal’s idolizing his mother, was “very Filipino,” Ocampo concludes, so that could not serve as a proof of homosexuality. But why deflect the inquiry to this topic, obscuring the gendered division of social labor (including reproductive/sexual behavior) that undergirds the  androcentric system? 

Encountering the Irish Sibyl

The coming of Josephine Bracken, a “wandering swallow” for Rizal, disrupts this maneuver to dismiss “the woman question” as superfluous if not irrelevant. To return to Anderson’s aside on Rizal’s sexuality, the scholar’s tactic is to demonstrate that the milieu rendered in the novels witnessed gay and lesbian practices thriving without any overt stigmatization, as in Chapter  21, “Manila Characters,” and Chapter 22, “The Performance.” It’s all very entertaining if not distracting. So what? 

In truth, Anderson does not have anything worthwhile to say about Sisa, Juli, Salome, Dona Consolacion, nor about Segunda Katigbak, O-Sei-San, Leonor Rivera, etc.  His references to Bracken are a summary of inferences made by Coates, Guerrero, and Ocampo regarding her spurious progenitors. Since she was not of authentic Irish provenance—her mother was alleged to be a Chinese laundress, the father unknown, and therefore Bracken could not be evidence of Rizal’s heteronormal disposition. Anderson devotes three pages to Rizal’s Dapitan exile but ignores any role Bracken may have played in the martyr’s struggle to endure his punishment.

Only Dolores Feria, among a plethora of feminist scholars, succeeded in defining the role of the 19-year-old Bracken as the “missing menber. ” While sutured to the Rizal narrative by fortuitous circumstance, she could not eclipse the formidable Teodora Alonzo. The stern mother and her daughters objected to Bracken’s rejoining Rizal in Dapitan after Tauffer’s ailment was somehow relieved. The Catholic priest Father Obach who refused to marry them was scandalized when the two held hands together and married themselves. 

Rizal’s mother resigned herself to this unorthodox arrangement—the authorities tolerated the hybrid Bracken as a  legitimate phenomenon within the querida system. Alonzo opined that it was better to “live in concubinage in the grace of God than to be married in disgrace” (Palma 1949, 254). Due to an accident, Bracken prematurely delivered an eight-month old baby boy whom they christened “Francisco” (in honor of the hero’s father) before burial (Zaide 1948, 240; Craig 1913, 123-25). Rizal thus vanquished both the ancestral totem taboo, the archaic fetish of the virgin bride, and the myth of his indeterminate sexuality.

Visionary Swerves

So many nearly Faustian accomplishments transpired in Dapitan. We can only cite here one fulfilling act: Rizal proved the value of his medical studies when he successfully operated on his mother’s eyes. His education was not wasted; he was already earning a doctor’s income in Hong Kong before his fateful return to Manila. A few days before he left for Spain as a medical volunteer for the beleaguered Spanish army in Cuba, the plebeian Andres Bonifacio fired the first volleys of revolution on August 26, 1896. Rizal was impicated and brought back to Manila, imprisoned in Fort Santiago, and condemned to death by a military court which had already agreed on its verdict before the trial.   

Before his execution, Rizal bequeathed his copy of Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ to Bracken, with the dedication “To my dear and unhappy wife.” She was also memoralized in Rizal’s “Ultimo Adios” in the penultimate line: “Farewell, sweet stranger, my friend, who brightened my way.” This “dulce extranghera” later marched and fought with the Katipunan detachment together with Rizal’s brother Paciano, fighting Spanish soldiers in Cavite, Laguna, and the surrounding hinterland before she was finally persuaded by her fellow partisans to return to Hong Kong and assist the revolution from that relatively secure vantage point.

As cited earlier, Feria paid homage to Bracken’s participation in the armed struggle against imperial Spain. Bracken’s role as Insurrecta offers the direct antithesis to the iconic Colegiala, the model for the Maria Clara character-type. Feria compares her with Salome, the polar opposite of the convent-bred woman, recalling for us the legendary figure of the earth-goddess Maria Makiling, naturally generous, an emancipated spirit. Her power to give joy to Elias, her beloved, may be deemed “an act of grace, with its own moral justification.” Feria elaborates further: 

The orphan Salome…anticipates the twentieth-century woman’s frankness and sexual freedom and the pre-Spanish Filipina’s ignorance of original sin…Josephine, like Salome, was an outsider…[She] has been successively portrayed as Magdalene, Mata Hari, Kitty O’Shea, Sadie Thompson, and Joan of Arc; but her own preferred image of herself was as Insurrecta. In fact our last really detailed glimpse of her, provided by the memoirs of General Ricarte, shows Josephine fleeing from barrio to barrio after the Spanish capture of San Francisco de Malabon, hungry, and the soles of her feet bleeding, but refusing to lag, as the long retreat moves across the Maragondon mountains to Laguna…Josephine signifies more in the experience of Rizal than simply an imprudent infatuation or the eroticism of pity…For Rizal, Josephine Bracken was a breath of fresh air; and in her he found an expression of freedom from class restraints, conventionality, and a practical impertinence which his own original environment, the conservatism of his family and friends had so long denied him. Indeed, Josephine was Rizal (1968, 110-20).

This substantial homage to Josephine Bracken as an integral part of the Rizal saga may neutralize all suspicions regarding the hero’s performative sexuality. He could live with strangeness, even the phantasm of Bracken’s enigmatic past, because he knew her before in the volatile conduct and catalyzing disguises of Segunda Katigbak, Leonor Rivera, Consuelo Ortigas, and the foreigners O-Sei-San, Petite Jacoby, and Nellie Boustead, not excluding the veiled countenance of the “hospitality” lady of Vienna.

Articulating the Excess/Exclusion

At this juncture, I would call attention to the previously excluded chapter on “Salome and Elias,” now restored by Soledad Lacson-Locsin in her expert translation of the novel. This episode rounds out Elias’ character as more than a capable, intelligent peasant victimized by adverse circumstances. In contrast to the naive Ibarra (in the Noli), Elias personifies the cunning “labor of the negative” by claiming that he loves his native land because he owes her so much pain and misery” (Agoncillo 1969, 39). He is adored by a mature, sensitive woman who respects him and allows him the final decision to leave her for her own sake so that she won’t be persecuted as his accomplice. We hear Rizal’s parting words to his intimate acquaintances in Europe: “Take advantage of your youth and beauty to look for a good husband whom you deserve.  No, no, you still do not know what it is to live alone, alone in the midst of humanity” (Noli 2004, 216). 

In effect, Rizal knew himself thoroughly as a marked protagonist, soon to be a dangerous dissident.  This dates back from the time he penned Amor Patrio, “A La Juventud Filipina,” his annotations to Morga, the incendiary diatribes and polemics in La Solidaridad, and certainly the two explosive novels that no doubt contributed to inciting his countrymen to organize the Katipunan and launch the national uprising of 1896, morphing into the stubborn resistance to U.S. imperial aggression and its ferocious genocidal onslaught. 

As for the controversy over Rizal’s alleged retraction and marriage to Bracken, which Zaide dismissed as immaterial to the hero’s achievement (1984, 255-56; for a different view, see Pascual 1962), I refer students to ponder on the various perspectives explored in the scripts of two screenplays by Clodualdo del Mundo, Jr. and Mike de Leon, Rizal/Bayaning 3rd World (2000). A rigorous study of Rizal’s writings in the context of the historical specificities of their appearance, as well as their impact, would be the most judicious way of appraising the worth and pertinacity of the controversy (San Juan 2000).

Constellation of Motives

     Initially conceived as an extended metacommentary on Rizal’s message to the women of Malolos, this essay has exceeded its intended goal. But one thing leads to another, as they say. Not only because one cannot really grasp the totality of Rizal’s impact on the popular consciousness, including ilustrado and plebeian interlocutors. But with “the woman question,” every element in the fabric of his discourses and their purport counts as an integral factor/force in determining their reality-effects, their consequence in action. Past melancholia and future hopes converge in his reflections on the harsh present. 

Rizal pursued a mode of inquiry similar to that of Rosa Luxemburg who applied Marx’s logic of crises and ruptures. Frigga Haug describes how Luxemburg’s method of appealing to the masses rejects empathy with the wretched situation of the oppressed: “Instead of empathy, she seeks the germs of the future in the defects of the present. This approach is disconcerting because it is alien, familiar only in the form of hope. But by presenting hope as sadness about being torn free and dispossessed, her criticism becomes truly radical…Her route goes out into the world, not back into the home….This politicization of experience, the political articulation of everyday experience, the transformation of the wish to endure into the will to change—these things are indispensable for women’s politics” (1992, 230-43). From the wish simply to survive to “the will to change”--that formulation captures quite aptly the Desire called “Rizal” parlayed into this current project.

In this perspective, Rizal was not simply a moralist endeavoring to educate the minds and dispositions of his compatriots. Nor was he simply deploying a conscienticizing agency whose efficacy transcends the aesthetic reach of his novels. He was instilling hope by politicizing everyday experience, transmuting the instinct of self-preservation into “the will to change”—precisely his message to the women of Malolos, a dynamic conatus (to use Spinoza’s concept) embodied in the barbed insinuations and innuendoes of the Noli and Fili.

Benedict Anderson begs to differ. He faults Rizal for being a short-sighted moralist. In contrast, Austin Coates contends that Rizal’s novels are essentially political, not literary, artifices (Ocampo 2011, 97). While elucidating the sociopolitical context of Europe in which Rizal’s ideas germinated, Anderson finds Rizal limited in depicting the brutal exploitation of natives and their social misery: “There is nothing in Rizal’s

voluminous writings like Luna’s horrified description of the Parisian iron foundry, the painter’s naively expressed, but telling remark that the Filipinos were fortunate compared with the industrial workers of Paris seems utterly outside the novelist’s frame of reference” (2005, 108).

The remark is incredibly wrong-headed and rebarbative.  It pointedly ignores the quite discrepant economic and social reality of feudal/agrarian Philippines. The colony’s chief production consisted of export-crops abaca, sugar, indigo, hides, etc. Its sole industry of textile weaving in Iloilo was quickly destroyed by the importation of cheap cotton from England (Arcilla 1991, 134-46). Labor organizing in the cities in the form of gremios and embryonic cooperatives for mutual aid in the countryside only started in the first decades of U.S. colonial rule. 

The colonial reality of 19th-century Philippines, its historical specificity, eludes Anderson’s optic. As already suggested, Rizal matured quickly in the aftermath of his mother’s imprisonment and the 1872 Cavite Mutiny together with the execution of Fathers Burgos, Gomez and Zamora. His disillusionment with his compatriot’s reformist program intensified in 1890 with the eviction of his parents from their Calamba farm and the persecution of relatives (see the articles, “On the Calamba Incident” and “Justice in the Philippines”; 2011, 296-99; 317-20).

But even before that, Rizal already expressed complete disenchantement on many occasions, as evinced in the 1884 article, “Reflections of a Fiipino,” and in a letter from Madrid, dated November 1884: “Studying at Madrid disillusions me. [Filipinos are] dishonored, entrapped, debased, opposed and tyrannized. I was also there [in the mass demonstrations of students and faculty]. I had to disguise myself three times…”(Zaide 1984, 76). 

Circumscribing a Paradigm-Shift

Mimesis, following Aristotle, seeks to render the configuration of experience in a plotted sequence of events. But the modern naturalistic representation of incidents could not by itself register the nuances of feelings and sentiments of the Indios undergoing the symbolic and actual violence of the colonial system.  To do that, Rizal had to politicize their experiences in both domestic/familial sphere and public space. Thus we observe the heteroglossic rendering of social gatherings and the focus on concrete locations: busy homes of notable personages, the plaza, church, market, theater, cockpit, urban/village festival sites, prison, transport vehicles, farms, schools, leisurely retreats, graveyards, offices of bureaucrats and officials, streets and remote trails, domestic interiors, and the liminal zones between rural and urban settings. The massive repertoire of events and the spectrum of particulars marshaled are meant to produce a plausible, veridical reality-effect.

Without doubt, the milieu transcribed by the artist is labyrinthine, multilayered, enticing and bewildering at the same time. One example is the arrangement of sensorily vivid crowd scenes in Makamisa, including the ribald, mock-heroic tuktukan game, which testifies to the writer’s virtuoso gift. Rizal’s dialogic imagination encompassed a wider range of themes, motifs, dramatis personae and their ramifications than those found in Eduard Dekker, Galdos, de Larra, Baudelaire, or Malatesta’s pseudo-sophisticated ruminations (for further evidence, see the compendium of Rizal’s Tagalog texts in Ocampo 2002)..

Granted, Rizal may have been influenced by European intellectuals such as Bakunin, Proudhon, Dostoevsky, and others during his two sojourns in Europe. Anderson, in fact, credits those myriad influences as the real sources of Rizal’s creativity, the templates for his plot and characters. He cites, for example, Rizal’s casual conversation with two Russian women nihilists in Paris in the lodging of Trinidad Pardo de Tavera. 

Ferreting similitudes between European events and personalities, and the gothic/baroque furniture of the Fili, Anderson pronounces on the derivative quality of the novel: “The prolepsis is mostly engineered by a massive, ingenious transfer of real events, experiences, and sentiments from Spain to the  Philippines, which then appear as shadows of an imminent future….El Filibusterismo was written from the wings of a global proscenium on which Bismarck and Vera Zasulich, Yankee manipulation and Cuban insurrections, Meiji Japan and the British Museum, Huysmans and the Commune, Catalonia and the Carolines, Nihilists and anarchists, all had their places. Cochers and ‘homeopathists’ too” (2005, 120). 

Indeed, we are served a mindboggling potpourri of leavening substances to yield a buffet of exotic dishes for further meditation!  At one “Soiree at the Home of Mr. B.” in Berlin (circa 1886), Rizal reflected how one “young barbarian from the Philippine Islands” exchanged pleasantries with the blonde, blue-eyed “granddaughters of ancient barbarians…who astonished the patricians of Rome,” an encounter proving how the world “turns round and round” (1962, 216).

      Anderson’s comparativist mind-set can be praised for encyclopedic erudition. But he seems too self-satisfied with his cosmopolitan bravura. He disingenuously insists on a mistaken assumption, spiced with a racist innuendo. Surely Rizal is not vying to be an epigone of Huysmans, Bakunin, Malatesta, Nietzsche, Herzen, etc. In his 1908 prologue to an edition of the Fili, Wenceslao Retana performed a similar autopsy of European influences and putative mimicry. But, unlike Anderson, Retana (despite his imperial hauteur) buttressed his assessment with allusions to the concrete experiences of the wretched subalterns. He also accentuated the singular predicament of the native intelligentsia seeking reforms. 

Moreover, Retana underscored the specificity of locations and the constellation of incidents shaping Rizal’s sensibility: “During his very first years he hardly witnessed anything around him except human misery pictured on a landscape replete with melancholy and mysterious poetry; and stimulated by an exquisite nervous sensibility, the child Rizal, on the shores of the great lake which gives its name to the province (la Laguna) asked whether there was beyond, any social state better than the one he saw in his hometown, in the urban part of which he knew the dominant despotism of the friar-landholder; and the suburban part of which the bandits govern” (1979, 33-34). 

The “bandits” noted here would epitomize the numerous Indio victims with their load of grievances against colonial authorities (both civil and religious) in that period. Filibusteros included women protesting their brutalization by their husbands or confessors, beggars who became outlaws (tulisan), and heretics labeled infidels or savages by the theocratic regime.

In the lifetime of Rizal’s parents, filibusterismo was already rampant. Examples are the1815 Sarrat rebellion, the 1823 Novales revolt, the 1832-41 uprising of the Cofradia followers of Apolinario de la Cruz, the 1872 Cavite Mutiny, to cite only the most dangerous or threatening to the status quo (Constantino 1975, 132-44). In his “Data  for My Defense” written in Fort Santiago, Rizal enumerated some of those separatist movements (2011, 342). A sampling of native grievances can be gleaned from the satirical articles such as “A Freethinker,” “A Pompous Gobernadorcillo,” “The Vision of Fray Rodriguez,” “By Telephone,” “The Lord Gazes at the Philippine Islands,” “The Religiosity of the Filipino People,” aside from the more widely influential diatribes such as “The Indolence of the Filipinos,” “The Philippines a Century Hence,” and other relevant documents in Tagalog (see Ocampo 2002).

Apocalyptic Reverberations

One can argue that Retana’s journalistic sensorium was better adjusted to apprehend the historically specific conflicts and crises that informed Rizal’s worldview.  Retana recorded the ethos of the rural countryside, the predatory feudal monstrosities, and one native response to the regime’s barbarism that Rizal may have condensed in the following paragraph: “When a people is gagged; when its dignity, honor, and all its liberties are trampled; when it no longer has any legal recourse against the tyranny of its oppressors; when its complaints, petitions, and groans are not attended to; when it is not permitted even to weep; when even the last hope is wrested from its heart, then….it has left no other remedy but to take down with delirious hand from the infernal altars the bloody and suicidal dagger of revolution! Caesar, we who are about to die salute thee!” (2011, 129; see also Retana 1979, 146-47). Echoes of Padre Florentino’s farewell prayer to the dead Simoun? 

The concept of the Kantian sublime predominant in Rizal’s melodramatic staging animates the conclusion of the essay “The Sense of the Beautiful” in which the ancestors shed their tears on the child’s cradle “so that the sacred plant of liberty and progress may bloom” (1962, 32). Friedrich Schiller, author of the play William Tell which Rizal translated into Tagalog, once declared that one encounters and actualizes freedom/autonomy through the creation of beauty as “living form” via the calibrated, nuanced play of instinct and reason(1952, 407-08). Rizal was thoroughly acquainted with this solution to the quandary of the artist grappling with the recalcitrant, refractory materials of quotidian existence.

Aesthetics mediates the ethico-political burden of Rizal’ s narrative craft. It is Intriguing how the image and voice of the Roman slave-gladiators acknowledging the glory of the Emperor (quoted earlier) recall Juan Luna’s masterpiece, El Spoliarium. The painting depicted in sombre tone the gory gladiators’ corpses, their sacrificial tribute, dragged from the arena of combat in the Roman amphitheater. Rizal celebrated Luna’s evocation of the carnage as a sign of resurrection—a prelude to the planned fireworks of Simoun/Ibarra, this double agent of a repressed community, passionately envisaging the apocalyptic triumph of his cohort of avengers. 

In Luna’s painting, according to Rizal, “can be heard the tumult of the multitude, the shouting of the slaves, the metalllic creaking of the armor of the corpses, the sobs of the bereaved, the murmurs of prayer, with such vigor and realism as one hears the din of thunder in the midst of the crash of the cataracts or the impressive and dreadful tremor of the earthquake” (2011, 19). 

Rizal’s celebration of Luna’s art is instructive. Notice the naturalization of a historical occurrence, as if the phenomenon has been providentially decreed, at the same time that nature functions as figural presentiment of what is bound to happen. It is Rizal’s diacritical gesture of temporalizing space and spatializing duration, collapsing the past into the present and future to generate the stage for the fulfillment of Sisa’s “vengeance.” It also posits the hypothesis that what appears as fate or destiny is nothing but a sociopolitical construction, a social practice or a wholly human contrivance open to alteration, reversal, change. The social order is mutable, contingent, subject to unpredictable transformations. The future is open for our choices and actions. 

We then enter the realm of possibilities, of necessity converted to freedom, and the principle of self-determination as a guide to collective action, with the collaborative subalterns acting as rational-natural subjects and impassioned, mobilized communities. We behold the awakened nation-people forging at last their common destiny in mass insurgency.

The issue concerns the subtlety, depth, and sharpness of artistic rendition of the lives of the major protagonists and their doubles. Certainly, one can construe Simoun’s unconscionable scheme of killing government officials and innocent associates as one inspired by the European anarchist propaganda of the exemplary deed. Further, his scheme of rescuing Maria Clara from the nunnery replicates certain motifs and themes in canonical European texts. 

But the inventory of the horrendous torment and anguish endured by Elias’ family, the suffering of Sisa and her children, and the intolerable ordeals that afflicted Cabesang Tales, Tandang Selo, and Juli (reminiscent of Rizal’s family evicted from Calamba), as well as Capitan Pablo and his band of rebels (see the Noli, Chapter 46, “The Fugitives”), would be more than enough carnage to surpass the hardships of the Parisian workers singled out by Anderson. 

Actually, the issue is more embroiled and vexing. In my view, it is not a question of comparing the veracity or scale of one kind of misery against another. Rather, it is a question of selecting which scenes of conflict and struggle can synthesize the distinctive gravity and resonance of an entire people’s experience of centuries of colonial domination and the durable intensity of their resistance to it. Can art simply be reduced to a narcotic coaxing the audience to submission, or apathy? Can postmodern cynical reason be recruited to make us indifferent to this classic dilemma? Can the deconstructionists be summoned to arbitrate the merits of the case between a voluntarist artist serving the cause of the oppressed masses and a determinist critic enforcing reactionary norms and regulations for the sake of upholding high standards and refined tastes? We can imagine various scenarios and hypothesize multiple endgames and warring consequences by way of dialectical sublation or Kierkegaardian repetition.

Anatomy of the Terrorizing Sublime

Notice has been made earlier regarding Rizal’s predilection for melodrama tempered with Rabelaisian farce. Whatever sophistic qualifications may be offered, I submit that aside from the poignant rendition of Sisa’s agony and the Tales’ family’s seemingly endless punishment (analogous to Elias’ family’s tribulations), Rizal’s artistic shrewdness may be discerned in such episodes as the slow torture of Tarsilo Alasigan in Chapter 58 of the Noli and the hideous plight of the prisoners in Chapter 38 of the Fili, among others. 

At such moments in the Fili, the montage of horror is framed and distanced by an explicit cut in the narration. This can be quickly ascertained in a few instances. Take the episode where, after the report of the assassinated landgrabbers (Chapter 10), the narrator abruptly shifts to addressing his readers by dissolving the illusion: “Do not be alarmed, peaceful citizens of Calamba…” For another instance, consider the freezing of the camera-eye in Chapter 23 when Maria Clara is reported dead, stupefying Simoun, at which point the narrator interrupts to perform a pacifying invocation: “Sleep in peace, unhappy child of my unfortunate motherland….” These are just samples of the obvious defamiliarizing semiotic device of the narrative designed to reconcile on the imaginary plane painfully lived contradictions energizing the plots and characters of Rizal’s fiction (Balibar and Macherey 1996).

By themselves, spectacles of misery and human degradation do not by themselves trigger anger leading to sustained mass agitation and insurrection. In fact, as the historical precedents show, they often lead to the emergence of a populist demagogue whose authoritarian violence serves as catharsis for moral panic and mass hysteria. Were the proletarian viewers of Luna’s El Spoliarium, or the readers of Zola’s portrayals of brutalized workers, stirred up enough to demand immediate action? Can literary artifice serve as an effective tool to improve the victims’ wretched condition? Other contingencies and variables involving  audience reception, their race/gender/class-defined dispositions, and attendant institutional constraints have to be taken into account. Needless to say, political propaganda like commercial advertisements can employ artistic means; but their effects are dependent on imponderable contingencies, so that intentions and motives are not always realized.

Nonetheless, one can venture the proposition that the aesthetic level of response cannot really be measured and judged apart from their ethico-political ramifications. We can pose the following questions: what conceivable sequence of conduct can be inferred logically arising from such scenes as the encounter between the sanctimonious Dona Victorina and the feral Dona Consolacion in Chapter 48 of the Noli? Or what effect is intended to be produced by the last chapter of the Fili? 

 I have in mind specifically Padre Florentino’s impassioned appeal for the youth “who would generously shed their blood to wash away so much shame, so much crime, so much abomination” even while he condemns Simoun’s call for sacrifice, for blood, to guarantee their “rights to social life.” The priest’s appeal does not exactly block a sanguinary path to extremist purification.

One is disquieted, if not disconcerted, by the ambiguous resolution of the Fili. A sequel did not materialize with the author’s demise. The final chapter is charged with the purpose of satisfying readers’ expectations, but the scene is invested with contradictory ideological implications, just like the Noli’s closure. When an official representative of the government visits the convent of Santa Clara (where Maria Clara was confined) to speak to the abbess and meet all the nuns, we are suddenly confronted with this shocking spectacle, a cryptic intervention from the author’s buried past: “It is said that one of the these appeared with her habit soaking wet and torn to shreds; weeping, she asked for the man’s protection against the violence of hypocrisy, and revealed other horrors. It is said that she was very beautiful, that she had the loveliest and most expressive eyes that were ever seen (2004, 565)

Again, we confront those “expressive eyes” gesturing to the missing object! We have encountered this scopic insignia before, first underscored in the “Memoirs of a Student in Manila by P. Jacinto,” where the transgressive coupling of love and death, of desire and its perversions, configured the first twenty years of Rizal’s life (for the interplay of eros and thanatos, see San Juan 2011, 37-50). The surveillance of a patriarchal nomos continues in the world of make-believe. And this is where Rizal’s reflections on women’s surbordination, the sexual division of labor, and gender inequity, becomes fraught with radical, ultimately subversive political consequences when translated into either spontaneous or organized mass action--filibusterismo on the rampage.

Signposts of Deliverance

Rizal’s heroic achievement is generally identified with the ideas and actions enacted in the two novels. For schools and official functions, the “Ultimo Adios” serves as a precis of the hero’s credo. One can assert here that, by a formidable consensus, Rizal’s novels have been judged as the foundational scripture of the republic, a national allegory of our collective experience as colonized object-become-emancipated subject. In effect, they constitute the epic of our ethnogenesis, of becoming ideally a nation-state with popular-democratic sovereignty. They operate as the paradigmatic exemplum of our acquiring a historic national identity. And by “national allegory,” we allude to Frederic Jameson’s thesis on the peculiarity of political-didactic romances fashioned in colonial terrain. He reflects on this topic: “Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamc, 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). Embattled up to now, even beleaguered, given the insidious neocolonial bondage we continue to suffer.

In Rizal’s unconventional allegory, the hero’s situation is cast as a microcosm of the body politic, the historic predicament of the majority writ large. As synedochic figure, Ibarra’s plan to improve schooling (inflected later in the students’ demand for a Spanish academy) fuses private and public spheres. Both attempts are foiled. The conflicting sides mirror the asymmetry between lord and slave (in Hegel’s famous tableau). But through agonizing labor and initiative, the slave acquires self-consciousness, elicits recognition, and liberates herself as an emblem of transcending the syndrome of contradictions. The pathos of awakening--the recognition of the totality of the situation after the reversal and catharsis of repressed emotions--initiates us to enter, at last, the threshold of national-popular revolution.

Argued from another vantage-point, we engage with the disruption of assemblages, compromises, and temporizing unions. Diremptions prevail over fusion and linkages. What the novels strive to convey, among other aims, is the break-up of the matrimonial market and its cognate family structure, the basis of masculine domination. Sisa’s plight and Elias’ genealogy condense this trajectory. Its aftermath coincides with the swift disintegration of the decaying tributary structure and its supernaturalist legitimizations. Sexual difference comes to the foreground in Rizal’s counter-metanarrative and exfoliates into pathetic submission, serial tragedies, or into the fury of nihilist rage (for an argument against gender dimorphism, see Butler 2000, 143-79).

In the Beginning: Exchange of Women

In this context, Pierre Bourdieu’s insight into the role of women in the economy of reifying commodity exchange yields heuristic pertinence: “The principle of the inferiority and exclusion of women, which the mythico-ritual system ratifies and amplifies, to the point of making it the principle of the division of the whole universe, is nothing other than the fundamental dissymmetry, that of subject and object, agent and instrument, which is set up between men and women in the domain of symbolic exchanges, the relations of production and reproduction of symbolic capital, the central device of which is the matrimonial market, and which are the foundation of the whole social order—women can only appear there as objects, or, more precisely, as symbols whose meaning is contributed outside of them and whose function is to contribute to the perpetuation or expansion of the symbolic capital held by men” (2001, 42-43). 

Responding to this crucial question cannot be shirked: what can abolish this market and the salient role of symbolic capital in organizing social relations? Victimized women’s rebellion and the sympathy or solidarity it elicits, is one answer. Rizal, of course, responded within the given opportunities of his time and place, cognizant of the hierarchies of power and knowledge limiting his agency, resources, and reflexivity. 

Changes in the mode of production are bound, sooner or later, to modify the reproduction of the whole power-arrangement, including the distribution of wealth and symbolic capital. With the changes in the family structure and domestic/household set-up, plus opportunities for remunerative work outside, women gained more autonomy. They were gradually freed from strict parental control and the burden of rigid traditional mores regulating kin-network (Goody 1998, 79-95). 

From this point of view, we can appreciate the shattering of masculine domination in the wreckage of Ibarra’s courtship of Maria Clara, the sundering of families and murder of daughters (Sisa’s case), the farcical rigmarole of Dona Victorina and Dona Consolacion, estrangement among relatives and friends, as well as the interruption of Paulita Gomez’s wedding and the heart-breaking separation of Elias and Salome. Such reversals transpired in the process of disclosing the truth behind appearances, alongside satiric lampoons, sardonic interior monologues, and tragicomic interludes.

Let us rehearse Rizal’s attitudes and sentiments touched on earlier. The curse of patriarchal ascendancy is over. It has been exorcised, and a new epoch of indeterminacy and dicey possibilities glimmer in the horizon. The dice have been cast. Shall we greet the new age of hope convulsed in its bloody birth-pangs? Whatever the reader’s response, this advent of a new epoch is welcomed by the hero on the eve of his execution:

Mis suenos cuando apenas muchacho adolescente,
Mis suenos cuando joven, ya lleno de vigor,
Fueron el verte un dia, joya del Mar de Oriente,
Secos los negros ojos, alta la tersa frente,
Sin ceno, sin arrugas, sin manchas de rubor,...

Mi patria idolatrada!  Dolor de mis dolores!
Querida Filipinas, oye el postrer adios!
Ahi te dejo todo; mis padres, mis amores,
Voy donde no hay esclavos, verdugos ni opresores,
Donde la fe no mata, donde el que reina es Dios!

My dreams, while yet merely a child, or when nearing maturity,
My dreams, when a youth full of vigor at length I became,
Were to see Thee one happier day, O jewel of the orient sea,
Thine ebon eyes dried of their tears, thine uplifted brow clear and                 free
From the frowns and the furrows, the stains and the stigma of               shame....

My idolized motherland, whose grieving makes me grieve,
Dearest Filipinas, hear my last farewell again!
I now leave all to thee, my parents, my loved ones I leave.
I go where there are no slaves, a brute’s lash to receive;
Where faith does not kill, and where it is God who doth reign.

            (Tr. Frank Laubach; Palma 1949, 321-22)

Frame of Intelligibility

Our meditation on the sexual politics of Rizal’s allegory is nearly over for now. We have concentrated on the representation and elaboration of his ideas on “the woman question,” broadly construed, in his fiction and in various speech-acts. It will take another treatise to explore further the transformation of Rizal’s artistic project via complex dialectical mediations to a fully fleshed ethico-political program of action. We have witnessed its initial outline in the constitution of the Liga Filipina. We can also glimpse the concept of the “general will” adumbrated  in “The Rights of Man,” “By-laws of the Association of Dapitan Farmers,” and the proposal for the development of north Borneo by Rizal’s family and relatives. 

The principles enunciated in the documents of the French Revolution can be extrapolated from Rizal’s manifestoes or public statements drawn up before his trial and execution, such as “An Address to the Spanish Nation” and “Data for my Defense” (2011, 309-91). Those discourses contain both negative/critical insights combined with positive/utopian projections and their corresponding affects. They are impregnated with a totalizing vision of the whole imperial system--Spain/Europe vis-a-vis Philippines/Asia--where History appears as pivotal events of confrontation between lords/bondsmen, colonized and colonizers. 

We can assert that those events are also moments of decision in which heritage (the past), including its barbarism and lethargy, are dialectically converted by agents into destiny via group praxis. We offer the following semiotic diagram spelling out agencies and other thematic strands and their interweaving in the novels to supplement an earlier schematic tabulation found in Rizal in Our Time (2011, 94):

[PLACE DIAGRAM AFTER THIS PARAGRAPH]

Toward.a Radical Architectonic

Suffice it for this occasion to suggest the direction for a future 

critical negative/positive hermeneutics of Rizal’s life-work to discover hitherto unexamined aspects. Almost all his biographers concur that Rizal’s self-formation diverged from the usual pattern of a linear evolution due to the impact of sociohistorical circumstances. The planned course of his studies was interrupted in 1882, then in 1888, followed by the Depitan exile in 1892-1896. The itinerary of his thought unfolded in ironic or paradoxical ways. Sometimes Rizal argued for revolutionary change only to back-track with the usual qualifications about means and methods. But when faced with extreme urgent situations, Rizal committed himself to dissidence, remonstrance, protest, intransigent resistance.

The vicissitudes of Rizal’s speculative adventure, its “structure of feeling” (to use Raymond Williams’ rubric), may be tracked in his narratives.  Adopting the genre of gothic melodrama popular in Europe, Rizal reworked the reversal of fortunes (including peripeteia and anagnorisis) caused by institutions into naturalistic scenes where the charismatic or supra-empirical tendencies predominate, Scrutinize, for instance, the chapters portraying Mr. Leeds’s Imuthis, the mummified Egyptian talking-head; the ghostly phantom on the convent roof; crocodiles in the lake; the philosopher Tasio’s uncanny intuitions; Dona Jeronima’s escapades, and other seemingly bizarre phenomena. They all problematize the intrusion of forces beyond one individual’s control, suggesting the pressure of structures and received group mores or folkways--the power of Necessity circumscribing people’s will and choices, the ruses of Spirit (in Hegel’s philosophy) to determine individual/group fates immanent in the antagonism between the advancing forces of production and the inherited social relations that inhibit progress.

With the onset of global commerce, the exchange of commodities and ideas in the second half of the 19th-century, a new landsape of urban speed and technological mobility began to erode the inertia of old rules and habits. Anomie and alienation began to unsettle the normal modes of perception and social behavior, opening gaps for intervention. Crisis actually presents us with the twin moments of danger and opportunities. Perspective is gained by people wrestling with these sudden unexpected turns, allowing the larger horizon of the social drama to surface. In the novels, the texture of the social landscape seems saturated by disappointments, miscarriage, delays, failures, aborted schemes, remorse, melancholia, flailing anger, fits of delirium. 

The Sibyl of Cumae seems to be beckoning from the edge of the crossroad. Fate and capricious fortune are invoked, beseeched, and denounced. Tragic and comic affects blend in contrapuntal rhythm as when, for instance, we juxtapose the legend of Dona Jeronima with the painful trials of Maria Clara, Dona Victorina, Paulita Gomez, Juli, and other women. Sisa’s agony punctuates this lanscape with an abject experience impossible to categorize or normalize. In brief, the course of alienated existence in the colony was utterly precarious and the outcome of plans could not be fully extrapolated, hence the accidents, the exigencies, the dizzying variety of contingencies and constraints that defy the conjectures about the future offered by any number of SIbylline oracles awaiting at the wings.

Regrounding Our Agenda

 We have now traversed the zone of dead quotidian space/time, coming from the Empire’s petrified duration, to the Now-time: the settling of accounts. Sisa’s torment precipitates kairos, the ripeness of all that King Lear proclaimed. By existentialist retrieval/repetition, the gaps and silences of the staus quo have been exposed. The sacrifices of Elias, Cabesang Tales, Capitan Pablo, and Sisa have been staged and witnessed by all. So now we can understand how Rizal’s preoccupation with individual lives (veridical as well as fictional) was dictated by the sheer pressure of turbulent occurrences. The imperative of family-kinship solidarity and the claim of Indio-tempered honor compelled him to move away from the customary analysis of the ego-centered psychic dimension to the more demanding ethico-political inquiry into purposes, ideals, and principles lived by communities and regions. Acquisitive individualism and instrumentalist beliefs have to be re-evaluated against the wider socio-political background, together with the ideological apparatus of Empire that legitimized extraction of surplus-value/profit, as well as feudal tribute (rent, exorbitant landlord credit), from the natives based on church/state-sanctioned inequities of race, gender, religion, and class.

The memorable dialogues of Ibarra-Elias and Simoun-Basilio, among other exchanges, illustrate Rizal’s grasp of the unity of opposites, the role of contradictions, in all social processes. Of prime importance is the dialectical reflections of the phliosopher Tasio who appied the logic of negation on all experience, thus counseling Ibarra that failure always yields a measure of success: “...Lay the first stone, sow; after the storm is unleashed, some grain of wheat will perhaps germinate, survive the catastrophe, save from destruction the species which would later serve as seed for the sons of the dead sower” 2004, 231). 

Unlike the either/or stance of his townmates, Tasio’s mediation seeks to resolve antinomies, aporias, and the one-dimensional thinking validated by church/state metaphysics. As antithesis, we note the personalistic indecisiveness and temporizing abstractions found in the thoughts and deeds of the youthful Basilio, Isagani and other characters (including Don Custodio, Padre Fernandez, the opportunist lawyer Pasta, and many more) which are tested and proved inadequate, forcing one to assume more distancing, suspicious, critical, self-estranging, interrogative stances.

One standpoint for further examination is the equivocal role of Simoun, Ibarra’s double or shadow (Elias functioned in the Noli as Simoun’s avatar). His self-righteous judgment of defending the oppressed is undercut by his obsession with a frozen past, a petrified ideal (Maria Clara’s purity now compromised in the convent). This turn of events seems predestined by the middle of the narrative. In demonstrating the futile idealism of Simoun’s plan (arguably a cynical inversion of Ibarra’s pedagogical meliorism) to stir up mass unrest and chaos for the sake of salvaging his beloved--a surrogate for the dishonored father whose corpse iwas ordered disinterred and thrown to the lake, Rizal’s twin narratives evince the transition from an aesthetic exercise to an ethico-political engagement, a movement from the anomie/barbarism of Capitan Tiago and the friars to the stage of an existential leap to judgment, passing through Sisa’s and Elias’ sacrifices, the most pregnant gifts to patria. 

Subterranean Mobilizations

We have been prepared for such a transition. Even before his execution, Rizal always affirmed his convictions about freedom and rights and his obligation to perform his duty to patria regardless of costs. This testifies to the inherently contradictory mechanism of the ilustrado sensibility and intellect in dealing with the crisis. The solitude of Simoun and Padre Florentino’s piety converge at the end, not without generating contradictory, extravagant impulses--other lives are on the move outside the remote retreat, advancing toward the fortified metropolis. 

At this conjuncture, the emergence of a counterhegemonic bloc is not far from the scene. The ilustrado’s seemingly irresolvable predicament can only be remedied by class suicide, fulfilling its tendency to dissolve its vacillating status into that of a nomad operating as an integral component of the proletarian-peasant, united-front formation so long held dormant in the process of slow germination. With Elias’ death and the tell-tale absence of Isagani and Basilio (youth as hope of the motherland), as well as the vigil of Cabesang Tales and other insurgents surrounding Intramuros, we are left suspended in that pregnant interregnum occupied by Sisa as synoptic emblem (see the semiotic diagram in a previous page) before the quiet smuggling of “Ultimo Adios” from Fort Santiago and the tumutuous cry of Balintawak--a passage of rebirth and redemption for the subjugated multitude.

 We arrive at this temporary station of our journey of interpreting and understanding Rizal’s achievement. We have compressed all the issues of gender, class and nation into the metaphor of “Sisa’s vengeance.” This may now be conceived as a symbolic labor of negation and secular transubstantiation, converting the people’s blood into the wine of redemption. The process of narrativizing routine time, everyday life, into the twists of the plot (modeled on the quest, ordeal, mission, etc.) transforms abstract theory into concrete praxis. In this context, the couple Simoun/Elias incarnates all the victims of patriarchal, frailocratic power. Meanwhile, Padre Florentino mourns over the dying Simoun confessing his real identity, The good priest implores the Christian God with His juridical wisdom to provide the weapon of retribution. He appeals to this metaphysical providence to rescue someday the treasures that he consigns to nature’s oceanic womb. 

Padre Florentino’s “ultima razon” for getting rid of gold/money/commodities may be Rizal’s paramount message overriding others. The die is cast. This gesture of sacrificing merchant capital, labor/wealth stolen from the masses, is a promise of compensation for the fidellity, patience and trust of those praying for the last day of judgment—in this case, for an imaginary resolution of real-life contradictions, which is art’s socially redeeming vocation. The destruction of Simoun’s treasure (the sweat and blood of human labor turned to waste) reawakens Sisa’s muffled cry of grief and protest. 

Wanting to reconstitute the lost aura of her home and children, “Sisa’s vengeance” functions as the trope of that confluence of all the energies desiring change that were blocked, sublimated, or repressed. It heralds the emergence of a popular counterhegemonic agency designed to carry out to the end the program of anticolonial, national-democratic liberation. On the whole, Rizal’s narrative of mayhem, withdrawal, defeats, arrests, torture, murder, and generalized chaos may permit the grassroots messiah, the bathala of the boondocks, to intervene in sabotaging and eventually terminating for good the hitherto tolerated, but now bloodied, barbaric, wasted march of imperial history. 

    Yo muero cuando veo que el cielo se colora
    Y al fin anuncia el dia, tras lobrego capuz;
    Si grana necesitas para tenir tu aurora,
    Vierte la sangre mia, derramala en buena hora
    Y dorela un reflejo de su naciente luz!

    I die just when I see the dawn break,
    Through the gloom of night, to herald the day;
    And if color is lacking my blood thou shalt take
    Pour’d out at need for thy dear sake,
    To dye with its crimson the waking ray.

                    (Craig 2010, 148)           

                -###

SURI ng nobelang BULAKLAK SA CITY JAIL ni Lualhati Bautista

Pagsalubong sa Mesiyas/Messiah

Diyalektika ng Katarungan, Parusa, at Politikang Seksuwal sa Bulaklak sa City Jail ni Lualhati Bautista

journal doi https://doi.org/10.31944 issue doi https://doi.org/10.31944/20239602 article doi https://doi.org/10.31944/20239602.01

University of Connecticut

Abstract

Lualhati Bautista’s narrative of women’s experience in the notorious Manila City Jail endeavors to fulfill a realistic and allegorical intent. Viewpoint and dialogic plotting are designed to articulate realistic scenarios with typical characters representing class mores. With a historical background on the evolution of the penal institution, this critique argues that the reformist trajectory of the modern prison cannot escape its sociopolitical determinants. The neocolonial City Jail embodies the ambivalence of both rehabilitation and retributive punishment: while prisoners in general are monitored by bour- geois criminal law, female inmates suffer gender discrimination and masculine barbarity. Suicides and riots are symptoms of the unjust punishment inflicted on impoverished victims. The narrative process shows the versatile resistance of women prisoners when they abandon anarchistic modes and acquire group self-consciousness. Angela, the chief protagonist, serves as the mediation

to the dialectic of self-recognition. Her pregnancy awakens solidarity and collective action, forcing the authorities to allow the advent of the child in a public hospital. Realism yields to quasi-documentary testimonies on hospital and court as chronotopes of social antagonisms. The hospital then operates as an ambivalent counterpart to prison and the alienating orphanage. Returned to the City Jail, Angela (mother-child) serves as an imaginary locus of recon-

SAN JUAN: PAGSALUBONG SA MESIYAS UNITAS 1

E. San Juan Jr.

ciliation. Women’s cooperative agency becomes subordinate to the maternity principle. Nature’s temporality inflects the novel’s didactic telos expressed in defining the jail as a microcosm of a hypocritical corrupt society. Despite this tendentious naturalism, the symbolic action of projecting the mother-child duo as the unifying principle of the chaotic jail is emphasized in the closing chapters. It functions as a critique of the deceptive ambiguity of the carceral system. Rebirth to a new life (for Angela and the proletarian inmates) is midwived by the sublimation of individual desires and misfortunes. Is Angela a scapegoat-become-savior?

The novel transcends the conventional melodrama of sacrificial victim redeemed by empathy through its rhetorical use of demotic idiom and erotic tropes. This is reinforced by the historical allusions to the Irish prison revolt and the martial-law/Marcos authoritarian regime. The mother- child icon (the pathos of Pieta) appeals to indigenous or folk religious habitus. It is invested with a prayer-like motive of invoking revolutionary action to abolish the conditions that legitimize unjust penalization of the marginalized. But catharsis is postponed because Angela’s prison- sentence remains unexpunged; the querida-system remains in place, with male supremacy obliquely vindicated. Notwithstanding this ironic undercurrent, Bautista’s novel is distinguished
as a feminist invocation for systemic change to benefit all, not just women, affirming in particular the liberation of future generations emblematized by Joy, the child (the flower or bulaklak) born amid the misery and squalor of the Metro Manila City Jail.

Keywords

City Jail, bilanggo, parusa, kerida, hustisya, kontradiksiyon, diyalektika

SAN JUAN: PAGSALUBONG SA MESIYAS UNITAS 2

Sapagkat ang pagkilala sa katutubong karangalan at sa pantay at di-maikakait na mga karapatan ng lahat ng nabibilang sa angkan ng tao ay siyang saligan ng kalayaan, katarungan at kapayapaan sa daigdig . . .

Sapagkat mahalaga, kung ang tao ay di-pipiliting manghahawakan bilang huling magagawa, sa paghihimagsik laban sa paniniil at pang-aapi, na ang mga karapatan ng tao’y mapangalagaan sa pamamagitan ng paghahari ng batas . . .

—Sipi sa “Pandaigdig na Pagpapahayag ng mga Karapatan ng Tao, United Nations” (Universal Declaration of Human Rights, United Nations)

My experience at the hands of the military was a horrible nightmare. I would always shiver at the memory of torture The scars of that terrible ordeal are so deep I do not know if I can ever erase them from my memory.

—Angie B. Ipong, Political Prisoner, Philippines, 2005-

Upang mas makaugat sa masa, sinakyan ng mga prayle ang mataas na pagpapahalaga sa kababaihan ng sinaunang lipunan sa pamamagitan ng pagpapalaganap ng mga ritwal at kulto ni Birheng Maria . . . Panakang sumusulpot sa mga panahon ng kaguluhang panlipunan ang pananaw sa papel ng kababaihan bilang tagapagligtas ng komunidad kung may problema . . . tulad ng iba’t ibang bersyon ng Birheng Maria na sumasaklolo sa . . . panahon ng kagipitan.

—Adora Faye de Vera

Sinumang nais malaman kung gaano kakilakilabot ang impiyerno, di na kail- angang maghintay pang pumanaw. Mungkahi naming dumalaw na lamang kahit sandali sa Manila City Jail (o sa iba pang sangay ng Bureau of Jail Management and Penology). Tanyag ang Manila City Jail sa pinakamasikip na bilibid sa buong mundo. Dating kilalang Cárcel y Presidio Correccional sa Kalye Oroquieta, Santa Cruz, Maynila, nakapuwesto ito sa mismong sentro ng lumang siyudad malapit sa Quiapo, Escolta, at Morayta).

Nakamamangha ang presong ito: ang kapasidad nito ay 1,000 tao, ngunit sa taong 2020, 4,800 bilanggo ang laman (5,000 noong 2005 ayon kay Alfaro). Sa isang dormitoryong dapat 200 tao lamang ang nakatira, 800 detenido ang nagsisiksikan. Kaya kamakailan, di- kagulat-gulat na pumutok ang madugong sigalot kung saan dalawa ang patay at 32 ang sugatan, sa impiyernong

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naging eskandalo para sa gobyerno (Alfaro). Kaawa-awa ang sitwasyon ng mga taong binansagang kriminal o mapanganib sa madla, ngunit tila hindi makatarungan ang sinapit ng mga biktimang hindi pa takdang mamatay.

Karimarimarim ang kapalaran ng mga nakabimbin. Nang dumagsa ang pandemya ng COVID-19, umabot na sa 4,800 ang detenido, apat na porsiyentong higit sa kapasidad na itinakda. Grabeng pinaghalo ang mga taong delingkwente, mga siraulo, bata, matanda, yaong maysakit, cold-blooded killers, atbp. Walang espasyong sapat para sa bawat bilanggo; anumang puwang ay marumi, mabaho, pugad ng mikrobyo ng iba’t ibang sakit: tuberkulosis, sakit na venereal, atbp. Hindi kamangha-mangha na sa gitna ng salot, gutom (ang pagkain ay tulad ng inihahanda para sa mga baka o iba pang hayup), siksikan, walang malinis na tubig, walang medikong tutulong sa anumang sakuna o pinsala, biglang sasabog ang gulo. Sa gitna ng ganitong kadahupan at kakulangan, huwag tayong umasang hindi mag-aapoy ang galit, bugnot sa pagkabigo, ngitngit, siphayo, patayan. Kontra sa tangkang repormahin ang moralidad ng mga nakulong ang nangyari.

Prologo: Dayuhang Imbestigasyon

Dinalaw ni Karishma Vyas, reporter sa Al Jazeera, ang Manila City Jail noong Disyembre 2018. Ibinalita niya ang salaulang kondisyon. Dapat 1,100 lamang ang bilang ng inmates, ngunit 6,300 tao ang nakapiit—sobrang lampas sa kapasidad. Natutulog silang tabi- tabi, nakaupo o nakalupasay. Laganap ang sakit, maraming nagpapakamatay. Pagmuniin din na siyamnapung porsiyento ng detenido ay naghihintay ng bista, hindi pa nasasakdal sa anumang krimen. Tumatagal ang kaso nila ng kung ilang taon—si Rogelio Reyes, limampu’t walong taong gulang, ay walang pang paglilitis sa loob ng labing-apat na taong nakapiit (Vyas). Karamihan sa mga bilanggo ay pinaghihinalaang mga drug user lamang na nasumbang o natokhang, mga inosenteng sibilyan na walang-awang biniktima ng 2002 Dangerous Drugs Act. Maraming sawim- palad ang walang ibayad sa piyansa at walang kamag-anak na mag-aasikaso o tutulong upang malunasan ang kanilang paghihirap.

Maaaring akalain na ang bilibid ay matris ng kapahamakan, kapinsalaan, pagdurusang walang kahihinatnan. Ngunit bawat bagay ay may dalawa o

SAN JUAN: PAGSALUBONG SA MESIYAS UNITAS 4

tatlong mukha na kapupunan sa isa’t isa. Ito marahil ang balak ipaunawa ng reporter.

Sa ganitong masahol na kalagayan, binalewala na ng gobyerno ang mga tratadong pinirmahan, halimbawa ang United Nations Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, at Covention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (tingnan ang kaso nina Angelina B. Ipong, Marcelino Marata, May Rodriguez, atbp. [de Vera; Burgos]). Sa pagyurak sa karapatan ng mga bilanggo (bata man o matanda, baliw, o maysakit, atbp.), ang sistema ng bilangguan sa Pilipinas ay tiyak na barbariko, malupit, kasuklam-suklam.

Nakakasulukasok na katotohanan ang matutuklasan. Bunga ng masinsing pagsisiyasat sa kondisyon ng bilibid, naipagtibay ni Maria Rita Alfaro ang pagbihag din nito sa karapatang-pantao habang diumano’y nagsisilbing- proteksiyon sa lipunan:

A prison system facilitates punishment, retribution or retaliation, expiation, deterrence, and reformation . . . But in many cases, these aims are not served. The prison system is constrained to punishment and retribution per se; with little regard for the reformation and rehabilitation of the offender. With the indifference to the plight of the prisoners, society yet creates more monsters out of them.

Paninindigan din ito ng American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sa Estados Unidos at iba pang dalubhasang mananaliksik (Monthly Review Editors; Davis; Wacquant). Naglalayon ang disiplina at rehimentasyon ng bilang- guan na dulutan ng rehabilitasyon at reformang moral ang nakapiit. Ayon kay Anthony Giddens, ang preso ay isang modernong laboratoryo, “an envi- ronment in which social organization and change are reflexively engineered, both as a backdrop to individual life and as a medium for the reconstitution of individual identity” (158). Ngunit hindi natupad ng sekwestrasyong ito ang magandang layunin.

Katugma ng kuro-kurong binitiwan ni Dostoevsky, ang bilangguan ay salamin ng buong lipunan, isang mikrokosmong indeks ng buti o sama ng

SAN JUAN: PAGSALUBONG SA MESIYAS UNITAS 5

ugnayang umiiral. Sinumang kumatha ng obhetibong deskripsyon ng bilibid ay nagbabadya ng tangkang umusig at tuligsain ang mga nangangasiwa ng aparatong komplikado (Cloke 8–10). Kung tutuusin, sinumang mag-uulat ng buhay-buhay ng mga bilanggo, huwag umasang kapana-panabik na romansa ang ihahapag sa iyo. Malamang makaengkwentro sa salaysay ang mga halimaw, ang malagim at kagimbal- gimbal na sagupaan at madugong pakikihamok. Ito kaya ang inihanda ni Bautista sa kaniyang nobelang hango sa matagumpay na pelikulang Bulaklak sa City Jail (1984)? Pumatok sa madla ang sinematikong hulmahan ng nobela, pero wala pang seryosong komentaryong kumikilatis sa masimbuyong damdami’t pagsusuring nakapaloob sa danas ng mga bilanggo.

Pasakalyeng Babala

Umani ng masigabong parangal ang pelikula ni Mario O’Hara batay sa iskrip ni Bautista. Hindi nakabulabog sa pamahalaan o burukrasyang binatikos doon. Nailathala ang nobela noong 2006, ngunit ngayon, wala pang masigasig na diskusyon tungkol sa usapin ng hustisya at diskriminasyong pangkasarian o diskusyon ukol sa politikang seksuwal ng awtor. Siguro, maselan o peligroso ang paksa at baka sumabak sa peligrosong kontrobersiya. Ngunit himala nga na ang pangit o masagwa ay pinapaganda ng sining—paggiit ng klasikong estetika mula pa kina Aristotel hanggang Kant at John Dewey. Senyas ito ng pamagat ng nobela: humahalimuyak ang bulaklak sa masikip/mapangam- bang sulok ng siyudad. Balisa, alinlangan, at linggatong ang sumusubaybay sa sinomang maliligaw sa pook na ito. Sa pusod ng hilahil at pighati ng mga biktima, umuusbong at lumalago ang buko ng magkasalong lugod, saya, at luwalhati.

Magkasundo ang halos lahat ng kritiko na mahusay ang sinematikong bersiyon, na di maikukumpara sa nobela. Ayon kay Joel David, umabot na ang konsiyensiya ng direktor sa pamantayan ng kaniyang sining: “The objective significance [of the film] resides in the depiction of a realistic social condition in high cineliterary style” (Urian Anthology; Salud). Natukoy din ni David ang zoo na isang masisilungang taguan kumpara sa bilibid na isang “macrocosm of big city brutality.” Nakapupukaw rin ang pagluwal ng anak

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kasiping ng mga hayup (isang metaporang anti-Bethlehem) at pagsaklolo ng mga pulis sa paraan ng paghuli sa tumakas na ina—isang ironya o parikala.

Naitampok din sa pelikula ang birtud ng baryasyon ng karakter at insidente. Halimbawa ang natuksong guwardya na iginapos ni Juliet sa isang kama sa mawsoleo at ang pagtakas ni Angela at panganganak sa Manila Zoo imbes na sa ospital. Subalit ang genre ng sosyorealistikong nobela ay hindi eksaktong maitatambal sa modernistang sinema; lubhang malaking agwat ang naghihiwalay sa mga kategorya. Lalong tanyag ang pelikula dahil sa galing ng mga artistang gumanap, lalo na sina Nora Aunor, Gina Alajar, Celia Rodriguez, atbp. Mahigit na isang dekada’t kalahati ang lumipas, walang huntahan tungkol sa tema ng nobela sa gitna ng ilandaang bilanggong pulitikal at ilan libong inaresto’t tinortyur sa piitan noong diktadura ni Marcos at sa kasagsagan ng pandemiko’t gera laban sa droga (San Juan, “Brutalizing Women Political Prisoners”).

Tila hindi tinatablan ang publikong kamalayan sa mga nakababagot na katampalasang nangyayari. Naibalita na sa buong mundo na maraming Pilipinang ibinilanggo’t pinarusahan, kabilang na sina Melissa Roxas (noong 19–29 Mayo 2009) at Angie Ipong (anim na taon sa piitan, 2005–11). Sagad- butong pagpapahirap ang dinanas ni Ipong at marami pang biktima ng rehimeng Marcos (hinggil kina Josefina Salas, Benigna Rivera, Consolacion Buscayno Arcilla, Arcilla Mallari, Adora Faye de Vera, atbp.; tingnan ang ulat ni Leonard Davis; Ipong). Nakaririmarim ang danas ng mga babaeng dinukot at nilapastangan, kaya tiyak na aayawan o maasiwa ang marami sa mapanganib na paksang tila walang katarsis o mahabaging resolusyon.

Pangkaraniwang karanasan na sa mga aktibista ang mabilanggo simula sa panahon ng diktadurang Marcos—ilanlibong detenido noon at hanggang ngayon ang saksi rito. Ang kondisyon ng mga taong pinarusahan ng Estado sa bilangguan, detention center, o himpilan ng pulisya at militar (Philippine National Police [PNP]; Armed Forces of the Philippines [AFP]) ay ibinulgar na sa maraming publikasyon (Burgos; hinggil sa pagtrato sa mga nahuling Huk noong dekada 1950, konsultahin si Pomeroy). Ang pinakamaigting na pagsasalaysay ng pagkapiit bilang makabayang unyonista ay matatagpuan sa mga akda ni Amado V. Hernandez. Hitik sa dokumentasyon ng mga

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biktima ang arkibo ng Karapatan, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, UN Human Rights Council, atbp. Ikinalat ang mga masahol na kaso ng pagpaparusa kina Karen Empeno at Sherlyn Cadapan, ang mga hinuli’t inilagak sa Camp Bagong Diwa, ang patuloy na pagdurusa ng mga babaeng bilanggo sa iba’t ibang kulungan ng Estado.

Kalkulus ng Pighati, Abakus ng Dalamhati

Kumpara doon, ang danas ng mga proletaryong detenido sa nobela ay pang- karaniwan. Namumukod si Angela, weytres-kerida na sa pagkabuntis ay nasabak sa huwarang ideolohiya ng maternidad. Umangkas din ang kaso niya sa usaping feminista hinggil sa pag-aasawa, panganganak, at pag-alaga sa musmos sa pamilyang tradisyonal (Aguilar). Naibansagang “ghetto” ang sistema ng bilibid sa paglipol doon ng mga pulubi (Wacquant). Bagamat hindi tuwirang politika ang sakdal sa mga babae sa bilibid, ang mismong sistema ng pag-akusa’t pagtrato ng Estado sa kanila ay nakasandig sa poli- tika ng burgesya/oligarkiya, pulitika at di-makatarungang paghahati ng lipunan. Sinusuportahan ng sistema ng bilangguan, korte, at pulis/sundalo ang pagsikil sa nakararaming anakpawis at kababaihan ng uring may kontrol ng kapital, lupa, at dahas ng Estado.

Laging tagilid at may kinikilingan ang kategorisasyon ng kasarian ayon sa pamantayang pyudal-komprador-kapitalista. Kongklusyon nina Elizabeth Eviota, Lise Vogel, Angela Davis, at iba pang teoristang feminista na tandisang politikal ang pag-aresto’t detensiyon ng mga babaeng pinaratangang kriminal. Ang sakdal sa kanila ay nabahiran ng kanilang pagkakaiba/diperensiyang pisikal kaugnay ng kanilang reproduktibong gampanin. At ayon kay pilosopong John Locke (tagapagtatag ng demokrasyang liberal), ito ang likas na kahinaang kung bakit nakapailalim sila sa posisyon ng patriyarkong puno ng pamilya (Clark). Umiiral pa hanggang ngayon ang paniwalang ito bagamat nabigyan na ang kababaihan ng karapatang bumoto at pumasok sa propesyong hinihingi ng kalakal sa lakas-paggawa.

Batid na ng madla na hindi na pambihira ang paghihirap ng babaeng bilanggo sa atin. Subalit mahirap makatagpo ng masustansiyang testimonya. Buhat pa nang sugpuin ng Estados Unidos ang rebolusyonaryong tropa ng

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Republika noong 1899 hanggang ngayon, di mabilang na babae ang naging biktima. Noong sakupin tayo ng Hapon, karumaldumal ang nangyari sa mga ipiniit na comfort women. Dinaliri ni Bautista ang kawawang kapalaran ng mga babae sa librong Hinugot sa Tadyang at mga nobelang ’Gapô; Dekada ’70; Bata, Bata, Paano Ka Ginawa? at Desaparesidos (San Juan). Maaaring purihing “timeless” ang nobelista sa dokumentasyon at realistikong pagdibuho sa bidang ina/asawa. Sadyang napapanahon ang pagtalakay sa karahasang ipinapataw sa mga babae na nalugmok sa domestikong larang at sa publikong lugar ng pamilihan, sa loob o labas ng mga aparatong mapaniil ng Estado. Nireplika ng City Jail ang estruktura ng pagkalugami ng ina/asawa sa domestikong pagkatakda at tungkulin sa pamilyang tradisyonal, kung saan nakakulong ang babae sa tungkuling reproduksiyon ng puwersang manggagawa para sa pagpapatuloy ng sistemang mapagsamantala.

Sipat sa Konteksto ng Kontradiksiyon

Sa pakiwari ko, ang nobelang Bulaklak ang pinakamakahulugang larawan ng mga babaeng ginipit ng sistemang makauri’t maskulinista. Sa kuwadrong ito madarama ang pinakamabalasik na pagtistis sa anatomiya ng tusong pagsikil sa mga sawimpalad, lalo na sa buhay/katawan at kapasidad ng kababaihang maralita at sinalya sa gilid. Nailagom sa ilang kataga ang aral ng talambuhay sa bibig ni Colonel Cipriano, ang repormistang hepe ng City Jail: “they [guwardiya; opisyal] too are products of a very rotten social system, just like you and me” (103).

Kung ang City Jail ay mikroskosmo ng bulok na lipunan. maisususog na ang Manila Zoo ay isang daungan o puwerto ng kaligtasan. Sa pelikula, tumakas si Angela’t nagluwal ng kaniyang anak sa gitna ng ilanlibong uri ng hayup at halaman, kabilang na ang isang White Siberian Tiger, isang elepante, at pinakamatandang hipopotamus sa mundo, si Queen Bertha (Harper at Fullerton). Bagamat mabangis ang mga hayup, kung tutuusin, ang ulirang etika ng mga chimpanzee sa pagtutulungan at pakikibahagi (Goodall) ay ipinahiwatig na sa damayan ng mga bilanggo. Ano bang klaseng hayup ang tinaguriang Homo sapiens? Sa halip na zoo, ang ospital sa nobela ay matalinghagang espasyo ng kooperasyon sa pagitan ng mga doktor/nars

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at pasyente; mga ina’t mag-anak at katulong sa institusyon, kabaligtarang imahe kumpara sa City Jail.

Nakakintal din ang analisis na iyon sa hinuha ni Viring, babaeng pumuksa sa asawa. Para sa kaniya, ang buong daigdig ay isang piitan kahawig ng City Jail na kaniyang santuwaryo (118). Walang espasyong ligtas sa korupsiyon. Bawat tanawin ay hinabi sa espesipikong perspektiba, pero nagsalikop ang tanawin ng karaniwang bilanggo at burukrasyang buktot ng institusyon. Nakabigkis ang partikular at unibersal sa itinayang kondisyon ng mga bilanggo. Ang katayuan ng kababaihan ay mikrokosmong emblematiko ng sitwasyong sosyopolitikal ng buong bansa. Samakatwid, napakahalaga ng mga usaping binusisi dito sa mga damdamin, kilos, pasiya, at aksiyon ng mga bida sa nobela na dapat pagnilaying maigi ng mambabasa.

Madaling ipahayag sa mambabasa ang banghay. Hinuli si Angela Gutierrez sa tangkang pagpatay sa asawa ng kinakasamang si Crisanto, ang pangunahing karakter ng nobela. Nang manganak siya sa City Jail, naging problema ang pananatili niya roon hanggang mapalaya siya sa tulong ng mapagkandiling abugado at suporta ng madlang napukaw sa pagdating ng sanggol/anak. Ang pangkabuntis at panganganak ng isang kerida ay nagbunsod ng pagbabago. Ang sakdal na pagpatay ay maitatayang pagtatanggol sa sarili, na nagbunga ng “physical injury,” o pinsala sa katawan ng asawang inaagawan—isang bagay na dapat nangyari sa nawaglit na inquest (FLAG). Palpak ang paghawak sa kaniyang kaso. Ang parusa sa binansagang krimen ay dalawang taon, isang buwan, isang araw, hanggang tatlong taon, isang buwan, isang araw (304). Paano nakalkula ito? Paliwanag ng huwes sa sentensiya na ang paglabag ni Angela ay sanhi ng “instinct to survive . . . ayon sa pagsunod sa instinct ng tao na makaigpaw sa mga gipit na sitwasyon” (304). Dapat ituring iyon na isang “crime of passion.” Makatuwiran kaya ang retribusyong ipinataw o haka-haka lamang ng utak ng isang hukom?

Upang mailinaw ang isyu ng sitwasyon ng kababaihan sa bilangguan— institusyong itinatag ng kolonyalistang Estados Unidos, kailangan ang isang maikling tala kung bakit nagkaroon ng institusyong ito sa larangan ng sosyedad sibil. Paano naitatag ang institusyong penal, at paano pinili ang ikukulong at hatulan alinsunod sa anong pamantayan?

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Palasak nang sagutin iyon na kailangan ang lugar para sa mga kriminal upang mapangalagaan ang kaligtasan ng buong lipunan. Sinumang lumabag sa panuto o kodigo ng lipunan, ng moralidad na naisaad sa batas, ay ituturing na kriminal at parurusahan. Noong panahon ng barbarismo hanggang monarkiya, kagyat na pinapatay o tinotortyur ang sinomang lumabag sa regulasyon/batas na saligan ng kaayusang pampubliko, kaakibat ng awtoridad na inatasang ipasunod ang mga batas. Alinsunod iyon sa kontrata sosyal at karapatang abstrakto ng bawat tao na ipinaglaban ng mga paham (Voltaire, Rousseau, at Kant) ng Kaliwanagan. Iniulat ni Michel Foucault at iba pang dalubhasang sosyolohista ang paglagak sa mga baliw, bagamundo at hinalang suspek sa mga bahay-asilo at klinika/ospital pagkaraan ng rebolusyon sa Pransiya sa huling dako ng siglo 1700.

Magkalakip ang hangaring makaalam at hangaring makapamatnugot sa makabagong rehimen ng bilangguan. Ang reporma ng preso pagkatapos ng yugto ng Kaliwanagan ang nagpatigil sa ligal na torture at publikong pagbitay. Ngunit hindi dapat isipin na iyon ay “humanitarian” o mapagkawangga. Kabaligtaran ang resulta: nagpasinaya iyon sa rehimen ng Panoptikon. Lumalabas na ang kapangyarihan/poder ay hindi tuwirang pagsupil kundi palagiang pagbantay, pagmamanman, at pagmamatyag sa lahat. Naging suheto ng Estado at obheto ng diskursong pang-agham (sikopatolohiya) ang mga baliw at kriminal.

Sa librong Discipline and Punish, inilahad ni Foucault ang lohika ng bilangguan bilang institusyon at praktikang kasangkot sa isang “network” ng kaalaman, kapangyarihan, at katawan ng tinaguriang kriminal. Sinubaybayan niya ang mga susing ideya nina Beccaria, Hegel, Nietzsche, Bentham, atbp. Pinalitan ang parusang pisikal ng disiplina ng katawan/isip sa pamamagitan ng pagmamatyag o pagtiktik at pangungulinig (“surveillance”). Kinatawan ito ng rehimen ng kapangyarihan sa ospital, kuwartel militar, at eskuwela (naungkat ito ni Bautista sa kuwentong “Buwan, buwan . . .”). Ang operasyon ng magkatambal na kaalaman at kapangyarihan ay ikinabit ni Foucault sa pagkontrol sa katawan kung saan iba’t ibang teknolohiya at modernong tipo ng parusa ang inilapat at sinanay (Smart). Sa kasalukuyan, lalo na sa Estados Unidos, ang bilangguan ay instrumento sa digmaan laban sa krimen ng mga

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walang ari-arian kundi ang kakayahang magtrabaho—sa dalawang milyong nakabilanggo, mayorya ay Aprikano-Amerikano’t Latino mula sa uring proletaryado (Federici at Caffentzis).

Sumpa ng Kalakaran

Ang kuwestiyong kritikal na dapat paglimiin ay nakasentro sa hustisya at batas, at anong timbang ng karapatang-natural ng kababaihan. Di maibu- bukod sa usaping ito ang konsepto ng krimen sa kasaysayan at kaayusan ng mga grupong bumubuo sa lipunan. Mahalaga rito ang antas ng moda ng produksiyon ng kasangkapang materyal at reproduksiyon ng ugnayang panlipunan (Reiman). Sa hurisprudensiya ng ordeng liberal/kapitalista, ang depinisyon ng krimen ay kaugnay ng masamang intensiyon ng indibidwal na suwayin ang batas/normatibong tuntunin.

Halos lahat ng batas ay proteksiyon sa pag-aari (property) at kumikiling sa may-ari ng kapital, salapi, na laging idinidiin ni Colonel Cipriano at litaw sa danas ng mga bilanggo. Ang walang ibayad sa piyansa o multa ay sapilitang ikukulong. Sa sosyalistang ekonomiyang pampolitika, walang krimeng batay sa salapi o pag-aari na siyang bukal ng diskriminasyon (Crockett; Davis).

Sa pag-unlad ng sibilisasyon, nabuo ang sistemang administratibo at korte at ahensiyang magpapatupad sa pagsunod sa batas na pormalisasyon ng publikong moralidad. Naitayo ang Estado at aparato ng sapilitang puwersa. Alyenasyon at dualistikong porma at laman ng batas ang batis ng tiwaling paghuhusga at pagpapahalaga sa bawat tao (Meszaros). Ito ang pundasyon ng bilangguan.

Walang pasubali, ang kaalaman ukol sa krimen ay isang konstruksiyong sosyopolitikal (Monthly Review Editors). Depende iyon sa kultura, sa konstelasyong moralistiko at responsibilidad ng bawa’t indibidwal, ng relihiyon, atbp. Samo’t saring tipo ang diyagnosis hinggil sa pinagbuhatan ng krimen, depende sa siyentipikong kaalaman ng bawat panahon. Mungkahi ng ilang bihasang antropologo “. . . Adopting a definition of crime derived from law, legitimated by the state, and administered by a bureaucracy, is ethnocentric and narrow, and that a wider consideration of the breaking of norms and the exercise of social control in simpler societies without formal

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law is illuminating” (Marshall 126; konsultahin ang turo ni Hegel sa Inwood 232–35).

Iginiit din ni Ken Cloke ang argumentong ito: “The major purpose of jurisdictional questions is the maintenance of established order” (7). Sa nobela, dalumatin na sa ganang mag-asawang Pagtalunan, ang palaisipang monogamiya-versus-kerida ay isang banta sa awtoridad ng patriyarkal na poder. Samakatwid, kailangang ilagay sa konkretong kondisyong pangkasaysayan, sa isang takdang yugto ng lipunan, ang problema hinggil sa pagsusuri sa katuturan at punksiyon ng espesipikong batas, krimen, parusa, pati aplikasyong pangkasarian nito.

Pagkilatis ng Ebidensiya

Maiging mahihimay ang palaisipang nabanggit kung ang imbestigasyon ay nakapokus sa nobela at sa partikular na sitwasyon ng mga tauhang gumag- ampan. Mauunawaan ang konseptong nailahad sa paglimi sa mga tauhang makakasalamuha at partikular na kaabalahan nila.

Sa unang kabanata pa lamang, nakatanghal na ang relasyon ng indibidwal (si Angela) at Estado (administrador/pulis), ng kapangyarihang publiko at saloobing mapanuri ng isinakdal na babae. Iniluklok tayo ng nobelista sa kamalayan ng dinakip: “Naitanong ni Angela sa sarili kung ano kaya ang layon nila para iangat ang mesa, at pulis, sa paraang mao-obliga ang kausap na tingalain ito” (2). Sa ayos ng opisina ng pulisya, sa disenyo ng plataporma, naipahiwatig na ang salungtan ng dalawang puwersa: mamamayan versus gobyerno/publikong awtoridad, patriyarkal na kapangyarihan laban sa kababaihang galing sa mababang-saray—mga taong maramdamin, matapang, maingat sa pagpapakita ng saloobin. Pati amoy, kilos ng mga bilanggong lalaki, madilim at masikip na selda, atbp.—isinampa ang mga detalyeng nagpapasingaw sa realistikong atmospera, kalakip ang entabladong pumupukaw sa maselang mambabasang hindi sanay sa maigting na komprontasyon.

Interpelasyon ang isinadula rito. Naitambad sa bukanang eksena ang kuwestiyon ng identidad—ang unang salita ng nobela ay tanong: “Pangalan?”—at pagkilala sa tao batay sa tahanan, okupasyon, at pangyayaring

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kinasangkutan ng sakdal na frustrated murder. Pati ang away ni Angela sa asawa ni Crisanto—senyales ng domestikong problema ng pamilya, pagkakasal, seksuwalidad, pagkakaroon ng kerida, karapatang ipagtanggol ang sarili, dignidad, atbp. Sumagi sa isip ni Angela ang eskema ni Crisanto na bigyan siya ng patalim para patayin ang asawang si Adela—isang pakana ng lalaking agrabyado o talunan.

Bagamat nag-umpisa sa mapanuring sipat sa kalooban ng pangunahing protagonista, ang oryentasyong historiko-materyalismo ni Bautista ay malalim at masaklaw. Pagkilala at pagkakilanlan ng tunay na pagkatao ang inaasinta. Sumisingit ang indibidwalistikong pananaw, sagad sa neo-Darwinismong hibong manatiling buhay, bagamat abala pa ring arokin ang determinasyon ng mga kategoryang pang-uri at pangkasarian.

Sa kabila nito, nakalikha ang salaysay ng mga karakter na sadyang tipikal, sintesis ng partikular at unibersal. Angkin nito ang mimetiko’t simbolikong kalidad na katangian ng modernong nobela (Scholes at Kellogg). Pansinin ang paglipat ng dalumat ni Angela (“Ito ang trahedya ng mga nahuhuli. Huhubaran ka nila sa iba’t ibang paraan, hindi man ng damit ay ng dignidad” [10]) tungo sa pagdamay niya sa danas ng mga aktibistang dinakip at sinalvage noong panahon ng batas militar:

Niluluto nila si Angela’y nagsasalimbayan sa isip ng babae ang mga kuwento tungkol sa mga suspetsadong pinapirma daw ng release papers pero pagkaraa’y sinalvage. Kung sa bagay, sa babae raw ay mas makatao ang pagyari. Sasalatin lang daw ang isang parte ng dibdib mo, palilingunin ka sa kanan, saka mabilisang tutusukin ng icepick do’n sa parteng sinalat nila, ‘yong siguradong tuhog ang puso. Wala ka raw mararamdamang sakit. Ni hindi mo raw makukuhang magulat (11).

Dahil sa pagtanggap ng realidad (sa guniguni), kusang-loob na inamin ni Angela na sinaksak niya si Adela. Iyon ay pagpapatibay ng kaniyang malayang desisyon. Malabo ang isip niyang nagulumihanan, lugmok sa pagkabalisa. Mula rito, alam na natin ang komplikasyon ng banghay: ang pag-inog ng personal na damdamin at isipan sa kolektibong kamalayan, sensibilidad, hinuha, at hinagap ng mga bilanggong pakikitunguhan at pakikisamahan

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ni Angela. Malinaw ang trajektorya ng mga pangyayari: mula suliraning personal tungo sa kolektibong pakikibaka.

Sa umpisa pa lamang sa presinto, itinampok na ang predikamentong isasadula: ang pangingibabaw ng awtoridad ng Estado/kalalakihan, kawalang- patas ng dalawang panig (babae/lalaki) at magkahiwalay na daloy ng kamalayan. Bakas ito ng kaayusang pyudal sa kostumbre’t ugaling nakabatay sa patriyarkal na herarkiya. Sa susunod na mga kabanata, ibubunyag ang iba’t ibang ayos ng palitan (exchange) o komersiyo ng diwa at saloobin. Sintomas ito ng moda ng produksiyong kapitalista na bagamat nakasuot ng maskarang pyudal ay siyang mabisang umuugit sa relasyong kapitalista. Iyon ang saligan ng abstraktong ideya ng karapatan at batas. Mapipisil din dito ang rason kung bakit nagtatagisan ang kolektibo’t indibidwalistikong tendensiya na iniresolba sa ambiguwidad ng wakas: mula sa kolektibong perspektiba, bumalik ang aninaw ng pagsasalaysay sa pagkatao ng protagonistang tipikal.

Nakasalig sa komersiyo (ng bagay, muni, kilos) ang malayang pakikipagkapwa ng mga tao sa loob at labas ng bilangguan, ang lakas na lumulundag sa bakod at pader. Diyalektikang proseso ng kamalayang- pansarili at pakikibakang makakomunidad ang mapapanood natin sa masalimuot na tunggaliang sumasagitsit sa loob ng City Jail. Ang karanasan nina Angela at mga kasama ay di lamang personal kundi pangkalahatan, tulad ng mga pasakit ng mga migranteng OFW (overseas Filipino workers) na inilarawan sa maraming pelikula ukol kay Flor Contemplacion. Ayon kay Bliss Cua Lim, “the violence endured by the individual, once it has been made public, becomes a collective social experience” (66).

Proyektong Damayan

Laganap ang alyenasyon sa buong bansang sinakop ng kapitalistang imperyo. Unti-unting binuwag ang lumang ordeng pyudal at pinalitan ng sistemang nakasalig sa abstraktong ugnayan ng mga taong may pag-aari: kapital/yaman. Kaniya-kaniyang kayod, salapi, o komoditi ang motibo sa paghahanap-buhay. Mas matindi ito sa bilangguan, isang institusyong nagtataglay ng sariling reglamento’t seguridad, bagamat umaayon sa ordeng komersiyal at akmang magbawal ng anumang radikal o anarkistang kilos.

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Pagkatapos maharap sa piskalya’t maisakdal sa kasong “nabigong pagpatay,” inilipat si Angela sa City Jail, tirahan ng samot-saring kategorya ng suhetong huridikal/tagadala-ng-karapatan sa imbentaryo ng may-akda:

. . . ang lahat ng klase ng babae na sa iba’t ibang paraan ay lumabag sa linyang itinakda ng batas at puminsala sa katiwasayan ng lipunan: mga putang tulad nina Sheryl, Brenda at Candy, mga mananayaw ng bold shows, mga may kasong theft at estafa, mga babaing nakiagaw pati sa mga kasong pinupuhunanan ng tapang at lakas ng loob at sa gano’n ay aakalain mong tatak-lalaki lang: holdap, arson, multiple murder, kidnap…at child molestation. (22)

Sa burges na sukatan, may dalawang kategorya ang lohika ng pagpaparusa: utilitaryan at retribusyon (Adler 184–85). Labag sa moralidad ang mga puta, labag sa pribadong pag-aari ang nagnakaw, nanunog at pumatay. Paano ang kerida na tanggap daw ng lahat dahil ang lalaki ay pinapayagang magkaroon ng “mistress with whom he usually starts a second family,” ayon kina Alfredo at Grace Roces (212)? Nabigo si Crisanto na maging ama; ipinagkait iyon dahil mas makapangyarihan ang salapi ng asawa. Pero ang negasyon ng negasyon (maskulinismo) ay keridang lumahok sa pakikibaka ng mga babaeng bilanggo.

Ibinabala na ng tagapagsalaysay ang balak na ungkatin ang katwiran sa kategoryang pangkasarian—ang binaryong babae–lalaki, ang duwalistikong dibisyon ng gawain. Nakasalang dito ang mas maselang paghahati ng mga sabjek sa lilim ng Estado—kriminal o masunuring mamamayan, inosente o nanindigan sa kagustuhan, malinis o marumi. Sa wakas, ang hatol ng hukom ay nakasandig sa prinsipyong utilitaryan (kaysa retribusyon)—nasuspende ang parusang kamatayan, o ang lumang kodigo ng pagpaparusang “mata sa mata,” sapagkat nais ireporma ang kriminal.

Makatwiran sa punto-de-bista ng modernong Estado na kilalanin ang indibiduwalistikong karapatang iligtas ang buhay (instinct to survive). Ito ang saligan ng pag-aari ng lakas- paggawa—sa kaso ng ina, lakas-reproduksiyon na siyang susing garantiya sa feministang paninindigan (sang-ayon sa saliksik nina Vogel, Martinez). Pananaw ng negosyante ang naisatinig ng hukom:

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ang ginawa ni Angela ay “pagtatanggol sa sarili, ayon sa pagsunod sa instinct ng tao na makaigpaw sa mga gipit na sitwasyon” (304).

Sa gayon, hindi sakuna ang maging kerida dahil isa rin siyang mamamayan na may likas na karapatan. Argumento ba ito na makatarungan ang Estado at dapat laging sumunod sa panuntunang makaburges? Ito ang mapaghamong palaisipang dulog ng nobela sa mambabasa.

Sinira ng anak na si Joy ang ideolohiya ng pribadong pag-aari na pundasyon ng ordeng mapangamkam. Nakaligtas ang inang may-ari—aring lakas-sa-reproduksiyon sa bisa ng katawang nagdudulot ng aliw-karnal, kakawing sa anak na inangkin ng mga kabilanggo. Kolektibong ina ang lumusaw sa indibidwalismo. Di kailangang mangimi; iyan ang rason ng palitan-ng-komoditi sa pamayanang neokolonyal/kapitalista. Bukod dito, ilakip ito sa masaklaw at mapanuring obserbasyon ng komunidad ng mga inalipin at pinagsamantalahan.

Mula Kabanata 3 hanggang sa katapusan, mabubuo ang kasaysayan ni Angela bilang inang isinilang ng pakikibaka’t damayan. Sa daloy ng mga pangyayari, naibunyag ang tunay na dinamikong proseso ng tunggalian ng mga puwersa sa ating lipunan. Malikhaing paglaban ng komunidad ang susi sa mabisang transpormasyon ng walang katarungang sistema at liberasyon ng mga kababaihan na sumasagisag sa buong sambayanan. Upang suportahan ang argumentong ito, pipili lang tayo ng ilang makabuluhang pangyayari sa loob ng mahigit isang taong paninirahan ni Angela sa City Jail. Nasiyasat na natin ang lohika ng institusyon ng bilangguan sa loob ng utilitaryanismong liberal. Ang problema ni Angela at ng mga kasama ay nakaumang pa: paano makakatakas sa kaniya-kaniyang interes at makalaya bilang responsableng taong makatwirang umasal?

Halungkat at Saliksik

Bagamat limitado ang punto-de-bista ni Angela, mapagmalasakit ang sensi- bilidad ng awtor. Sumasalisi ang birtud ng tagapagsalaysay sa bawat pagka- kataong kailangan ang masaklaw na perspetikba at distansiyang estetika’t pampolitika. Ito ang sopistikadong metodo ng nobelista. Ginamit ang intu- wisyon, dunong at galing ng kababaihan. Halimbawa, sa pagbabasa ni Tonya

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ng diyaryong People’s Tribune at Bulletin, nailakip ang reperensiya kay Bobby Sands at ang hunger strike ng mga bilanggong politikal sa Hilagang Irlanda noong Mayo 1981. Malimit din ang reperensiya sa mga bilanggong politika noong yugto ng Batas Militar. Importante ito sa unibersalisasyon ng usaping lokal o partikular na siyang birtud ng nobelista.

Bukod sa kongkretong isyu ng kondisyon sa City Jail, masisinag ang implikasyong unibersal ng pakikibaka nina Angela at mga kababaihang lumahok sa pagtutol sa interbensiyon ng awtoridad at bahay-ampunan. Ipinagunita sa atin ang kolonyalistang gamit ng preso, alusyon sa orihinal na karsel ng kapangyarihang Espanya at Estados Unidos. Sa pagsakop ng Estados Unidos, nalikha ang tinawag ni Alfred McCoy na “imperial panopticon.” Ang konstabularyong katutubo (Philippine Scouts), nakabalatkayong tropa ng espiya, at penitentiary ang itinatag sa panlulupig at pagsugpo sa rebolusyonaryong masa. Minana ng City Jail ang praktika at ideolohiya ng pagpaparusa ng kolonyalistang Estados Unidos

Iniulat ni dating Gobernador W. Cameron Forbes ang imitasyon ng Panopticon na imbento ni Jeremy Bentham, ama ng utilitaryanismo:

A high wall commanded at intervals by stone towers, enclosed a tract of land, commanding which was a central tower mounted with a Gatling gun. From this tower radiated the prison barracks like the spokes of a wheel, each barrack having its own yard, the walls of which ran in a direct line toward the central tower, leaving no portion of the yards free from observation (221; natukoy ito mula Kabanata 6 hanggang 8).

Ito ang padron ng panghihimasok ngayon, cyberspace surveillance na naki- kialam sa buhay ng bawat tao sa mundo. Ito ang mentalidad karseral na itina- guyod ng neoliberalismong globalisasyon upang maniig ang panlulupig sa mga lahing di-puti, ang masang anakpawis sa buong planeta.

Mahabang tala ng mga reporma sa sistema ng bilangguan ang makikita sa The Philippine Islands ni Forbes (1928, nirebisa 1945). Bukod sa utilitaryanismong pangkasangkapan sa lakas-paggawa ng mga bilanggo (edukasyon sa iba’t ibang arte, pagsasanay sa galing sa pagyari), ginamit din ang tusong eksperimento sa Iwahig Penal Colony na modelo sa pagbuo ng

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isang “self-governing republic” sa ilalim ng Bureau of Prisons. Sa pagsusuma ni Forbes: “The insular prison system was conducted in the belief that an opportunity to work in the open air, to care for animals or plants, or to give expression to inherent creative talent has a most curative and helping influence” (233). Hindi tinukoy ni Forbes ang malupit na paggamit sa mga bilanggo bilang sapilitang trabahador sa konstruksiyon ng kalsada sa Albay at iba pang lugar, o kaya sa mahigpit na reproduksiyon ng kolonisadong ugnayang panlipunan, tulad ng sinagisag ng kondisyon sa City Jail.

Kaugnay nito, masinop na sinuri ni Michael Salman ang genealohiyang karseral. Ang presong ipinagmalaki ni Forbes ay nagsisiwalat ng “colonialism’s totalizing propensities, its boundaries (the walls) of classification and influence, and also to the possibility of resistance within even the most claustral social settings. The prison . . . highlights the alienating quality of colonialism as a project of cultural disparagement, rejection and reformation” (114). Paano maibubunyag ito? Paano maiguguho ang bakod at pader ng imperyo upang makalaya ang mga inaping katutubo?

Katalagahan Kontra Pagbabalat-kayo

Mahinahon at regular ang takbo ng bilibid—nakaraos din ang mga bihag sa kalamidad ng baha (Kabanata 6)—hanggang sa pagbigti ni Yolly at dumagsang imbestigasyon at publisidad. Sino ang sisingil sa inutang na buhay? Ang pagpapatiwakal ay isang indibiduwalistikong paraan ng pagtakas mula sa piitan ng Estado. Ang isyu—sa opinyon ni Polly Cayetano, kilalang “tagapagtanggol ng moralidad at dignidad ng babaing Pilipina”—ay hindi pagkait sa karapatan nila, kundi ang pagluwag at pagpapalayaw sa mga bilanggo ng warden, Colonel Andres Cipriano. Sinisi ang repormistang liberal na inaruga ng mersenaryong Hukbong Sandatahan.

Kumakatawan sa patriyarkal na herarkiya, si Colonel Cipriano ay simbolo ng retrospektibo at prospektibong mukha ng sistema. Sa unang banda, ang ganting parusa ay nararapat dahil sa nagawang kamalian, kaya dapat magdusa ang nagkasala. Sa huling banda, puwedeng magamot ang sakit o maiwasto ang kamalian sa edukasyon at repormasyon ng karakter ng nagkasala. Retribusyon at utilitaryong prinsipyo ang umuugit sa mga

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patakaran ng warden. Makulay ang karera niya, hindi ulirang malinis o masama, manapa’y nagpakita ng talino sa pagtatasa ng realidad. Taglay rin ng warden ang damdaming tumulong sa kabila ng istereotipikong opinyon na bayolente’t mapusok ang mga kriminal—inilarawan sa nobela ang kabaligtaran. Magalang at sensitibo ang mayoryang nakapiit. Naghahain sila ng reklamo pero pambihira ang malisyosong awayan.

Sinikap ni Colonel Cipriano na gawing makatao ang kondisyon ng mga nakapiit. Nabigo ang paghingi niya ng pondo para sa mga proyektong tulad noong isinakatuparan ng mga Amerikanong administrador sa Muntinlupa, ang pambansang piitan. Naipabago ang dating lumang kapilya, napalitan ang dating bugnuting pari, at nagawang “Luneta” ang dating masukal na backyard. Waring naibalik ang utopikong eksperimento ng Iwahig Penal Colony (sadyang tinukoy sa pahina 153 ang “guinea pigs” ng bilibid), ngunit hindi tuwirang maiaalis ang limitasyon ng galaw at pagtatamasa ng mga ordinaryong pangangailangan.

Hindi bulag ang tagpagsalaysay. Sa kabila ng personal na kabutihan ni Colonel Cipriano o ng burukrasya, inatasan ang bilibid na tumupad sa papel na dapat gampanan nito: ang sistematikong paghihiwalay ng mga tao batay sa uri at kasarian, paghahati ng gawain, at bunga nito, ang di-patas na distribusyon ng yaman at kapangyarihan. Iyan ang parametrong nagpapasiya kung ano ang krimen at kung ano ang normatibong kilos/gawi. Nabanggit na ito sa unahan at itinanghal sa kategorisasyon ng mga bilanggo.

Katumbalikan ang bunga ng limitasyong naghahari sa bilibid. Sa bisa ng reporma ng warden, nagkaroon ng puwang magkatalik sina Yolly at Karding Mata. Sa paglipat ng lalaki sa Muntinlupa, natulak na magpatiwakal ang inulilang babae. Sumisipot ang di-akalaing darating. Ironikal ang nangyari, subalit isang pagpapatibay na sa likod ng pagpupunyaging gawing normal ang buhay sa bilibid, lalong naisiwalat ang kabulukan ng sistemang nagbubukod sa mga tinaguriang “kriminal.” Hindi napigil ng bilibid ang bighaning seksuwal, ang erotikong simbuyo, at humaliling desperasyon ng babae; hindi napigil ang karapatang kitlin ang sariling buhay sa harap ng bantang wala siyang kinabukasan.

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Balighong talab ng mga pagbubuting naisagawa ang sumaksi. Ang sakripisyo’y lumigtas sa tiwaling status quo: ang walang tunay na walang kapantayan sa pagitan ng mga mahihirap (walang ari kundi ang ipinagbibiling lakas/katawan) at mariwasang uring kumokontrol sa lupa, pabrika’t kagamitan sa produksiyon, at kapital. Sa katunayan, ang bilibid ay hindi “koreksiyonal” o humanitaryang institusyon kundi instrumento ng pagsasamantala ng naghaharing uri. Dagdag ni Foucault na kailangan ang kilabot ng “kriminal” at mga delingkuwente upang masuportahan ang badget ng pulisya, bilibid, at monopolisadong dahas ng Estado (42–47).

Sumabog ang riot sa Kabanata 16 na diumano’y pumawi sa lahat ng repormang ginawa ng warden. Napatay ang isang bata. Hindi kataka-taka na palitan si Colonel Cipriano, na nakuhang pagtiwalaan ng mga bilanggo (Kabanata 9–10), habang nagparatang na “Mas maraming kriminal sa labas kaysa sa loob” (97). Humalili ang isang disiplinaryong ahente ng Estado, si Colonel Ambrosio Esteban (155), na di-magluluwat ay papalitan din— ng dating warden. Sirkulasyon ng personnel lamang ito, hindi pagbabago ng tungkulin sa Estado, tulad ng People Power Revolution noong Pebrero 1986. Kaiba ang pagdating ni Joy, orihinal na likha ng lakas-reproduksiyon ng kababaihan—isang mesiyanikong pagsubok sa pagkakasundo ng mga nagtatagisang puwersa.

Pagsalok sa Batis ng Biopolitika

Pinawalang-saysay ng kalikasang makatao ng mga bilanggo ang mina- pakturang bakod at pagpigil ng Estado. Nasubok ang bisa ng katawan ng kababaihan. Sa pagpapatiwakal ni Yolly, at pagbubuntis at panganganak ni Angela, hindi mapipigil ang pagsulong ng kalikasan at metabolikong inter- aksiyon nito sa buhay ng bawat nilalang. Adhika ng pag-inog ng salaysay na maibalik ang pagkawalang-sala ng mga pinaratangang kriminal sa paraan ng pagsilang ng anak, sagisag ng puri at dangal ng sangkatauhang taglay ang lakas-birtud na makalikha ng bagong kaayusan. Kalikasan ang ultimong nagpapasiya.

Pagliripin sa okasyong ito ang isang leitmotif sa nobela: ang kaligtasan ng mga kabaro ni Angela ay nagmula sa pagtatalik na labas/labag sa

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normatibong ugali. Lumilitaw na ang kerida ay siyang Ina ng Aliw ng mga biktima ng Estado, simbolo ng pagbabanyuhay. At sa bisa nito, ang kaniyang inisyatibang nagawa ay pagtatanggol sa sarili, isang karapatang likas ng bawat nilalang. Naturol din na iyon ay pananalig sa instinct o udyok na manatiling nakikipagtulungan sa loob ng komunidad, nagdiriwang sa biyaya, lusog at ligayang dulot ng kalikasan—ang diyalektikang proseso ng suheto/ahente at kapaligirang minana sa tradisyon.

Sa pagpasok pa lamang ni Angela, nahubaran na siya ng dating identidad (“katinuan at pride” [60]) ng barkada ni Barang, at ginawang bandera ng piitan ang kaniyang pulang panty. Nadisiplina ang damdamin at sensibilidad ni Angela sa sapilitang pagsunod sa rutina ng buhay sa bilibid. Bukod sa pagkakaibigan ni Nora, ang lapit/dating ni Viring na pumatay sa asawa (santuwaryo ang bilibid para sa kaniya) ay nagsilbing epektibong paraang iwaksi ni Angela ang parasitikong kapit niya kay Crisanto. Unang hakbang ito sa pagbuwag ng ilusyong sumusuhay sa pagkalugami ng kababaihan. Hindi mapigil ang paglaki ng tiyan ng babae, ang ganting tugon ng kalikasan laban sa artipisyal na limitasyon ng espasyo sa bilibid. Panahon at espasyo ang magkatuwang na lakas sa medyasyon ng sapin-saping kontradiksiyon.

Matapos na ikumpisal ni Angela sa doktor na buntis siya, sumagi sa isip niya ang kolektibong reaksiyon sa istigmatang dumagdag sa kaniyang pagpapaubaya o pagsuko sa kalalakihan: “ang mga pagtuya’t paglibak at kabastusan na aabutin niya. ‘Puta!’ Itatawag sa kanya . . . Bababuyin nila ang relasyon na no’ng pasukin niya’y inakala niyang malinis at sagrado pa rin sa kabila ng lahat” (123). Sa testimonya ni Marilyn Buck, ang bilanggo ay talagang “needy . . . It’s emotionally, psychologically devastating” (49). Sa halip na malapastanganan, sinaklolohan si Angela at sinagip ng kabilanggo at kinalinga patungong destinasyon ng pagkaina at pagkauliran sa pagtataguyod ng sariling dangal, galing, tapang. Mahimalang diyalektika ang mababanaagan sa daloy ng mga pangyayari.

Paggising sa Kamalayan

Sa unang bistahan, nabatid ni Angela ang kontradiksiyon ng karanasan niya. Sinuway niya ang payo ni Atty. Panlileo (libreng abogado para sa walang

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ibayad) na tanggapin ang palsipikadong sakdal upang gumaan ang sentensiya niya. Natutuhan ni Angela ang mapagkunwaring sistema ng hurisprudensi- yang nananaig. Nagpasiya siyang sumalungat sa iminungkahing hakbang na talikuran niya ang katotohanan upang lumaban: “Sa ngalan ng Diyos, isinu- sumpa niyang ipinagtanggol lang niya ang kanyang sarili” (146). Karapat- dapat lamang na tinanggihan niyang aminin ang sakdal. Pagkatapos nito, sumiklab ang riot na ikinasawi ng isang batang ipinagtatanggol ng ama. At bago humupa ang lahat, sumambulat ang galit ni Angela pagkatapos marinig ang mga kasinungalingan ni Crisanto sa pangatlong bistahan—sintomas ng pagsuko ng lalaki sa maperang asawa, at masaklap na pagtanggap ni Angela sa katotohanan.

Tumiwalag na si Angela sa mistipikasyon ng querida system, isang uri ng piecework ng sinaunang yugto ng merkantilismong ekonomiya. Nang marinig ang sentensiya ng hukom, “nagawa pa rin niyang magpakahinahon” (170). Pagmuniin na ang susunod na eksena ay alegorikong pagpapahiwatig sa sitwasyon ng pagkulong (tulad ng sanggol sa sinapupunan/bahay-bata) at reaksiyon ng babae sa di-makataong inhustisyang ipinataw sa kaniya: “Sumaksak sa isip ni Angela kung ano kaya’t ipitin niya hanggang sa mangisay ’tong batang ‘to? Tinangka nga niyang ipitin ang tiyan niya pero sa unang pagkadagan pa lang ay sumipa na ang lokong bata” (171).

Pagtuonan ng pansin itong tagpong nakapupukaw. Metapora ng pag-aklas ng nasusukol ang ipinamalas dito, sagisag ng sitwasyon ng mga bilanggo. Matutukoy din ito na maniobra sa isang transisyon: ang pagsabog ng galit ni Angela at pagtaboy sa anomang sagwil o balakid na gumigipit: “Pahagis na inalis ni Angela ang kumot na nakatakip sa kanya. Pabalikwas na biglang bumangon. . . .Itinulak niya ang mesa, sinipa ang tarima. Inihagis ang unan, kumot, banig . . . tampipi, lahat. Putang-ina nila! EEEEEE” (172–73).

Maisisingit sa okasyong ito ang pandaigdigang pananaw ng awtor. Iniulat ni Lualhati Bautista, sa isang panayam, na dahil “free spirit” siya at claustrophobic, ilag siyang makulong sa isang opisina, iskeydul, o anupamang disiplinang hindi siya ang pumili (Torres-Yu 116). Kahawig niya ang sanggol sa preso ng tiyan ng ina—rebelde, nais makahulagpos at kagyat lumaya. Kaugnay ng pagkakulong kina Amanda Bartolome at Lea Bustamante,

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inadhika ni Bautista na imbentuhin ang kaganapan ng ina/asawa sa isang “real citizen . . . [dahil] committed” (“From Rocking the Cradle” 90). Ipinaglangkap niya ang mapagpalayang politika (“emancipatory politics”) at makabagong “life-politics,” distilasyon ng lumang islogan, “the personal is political” (Giddens 214–15).

Bago pa man dumating sina Angela at sanggol, nagkaisa at nagbagong lubos ang kababaihan sa paghahanda sa mag-ina. Hinagap na nilang makibahagi sa pag-aalaga ng sanggol: “Putang’na, Barang, h’wag ka nang magmumura mula ngayon! Baka ang unang matutunan ng bata, putang ina! . . . At may kasabay ng tawanan . . . Excitement na magdamag nilang pinigil pero sa wakas ay nakaalpas din!” (216), “Nakaalpas din!”—pahiwatig ng mapamaraang pagpupunyagi ng kababaihan. Di ba kakatwa o balighong bulalas ang ordinaryong mura nina Barang at iba pa na halaw pa sa hijo de puta ng Kastila, o sa son of a bitch, na pinaiksi sa putang ina?

Maimumungkahi rito na ang rehistro ng wika ay hindi mapait na sumpa kundi masuyong kasabikan. Signos ito ng lugod at saya sa pagdating ng “Birheng Mariang” dala ang sanggol. Lumapag ang “aura” ng sakramentong ritwal. Tumiwalag ang mga nag-uusap sa normatibong diskurso at tinangkang baliktarin ang kaayusang mapanglupig. Ibang orden ng komunikasyon at panibagong ayos ng pakikipagkapuwa’t pakikitungo ang inadhikang maitatag ng kababaihan kahit na sa lugar at panahong malagim at mabalaho. Kaipala’y lumapag na ang Mesiyas ng Kababaihan.

Sekularisasyon ng Kumpisal

Nabanggit na sa una ang pagtatakip ng aktuwal na motibasyon—ang reporm- istang hakbang ni Colonel Cipriano, ang pagsisinungaling ni Crisanto, atbp. Kaalinsabay nito ang paghubad ng katotohanang nilambungan ng mga nang- yayari sa bilibid. Tumataginting ang matalas na kritika ng dating warden sa Kabanata 26: ibinulgar niya na salapi ang tunay na lakas na nagpapalakad sa buong sistema, pati suhol sa hukom. Walang maibayad na piyansa ang mga pulubing bilanggo. Hinikayat ng konsiyensiya ang warden, patuloy na ibinilad ang tunay na nangyayari sa reporter ng People’s Journal: “Masasalansang n’yo ba ang katotohanan nitong sinasabi ko sa inyo?” (247). Nauna pa rito ang

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pagbukas ng mga kalooban ng mga bilanggo sa kapuwa, ang pagtatapatan, awtentikong komunikasyon: “Natuklasan nilang magagawa rin pala nilang magsabi sa isa’t isa ng kahit pinakatagong isipin at pakiramdam, magbukas ng puso at pati kaluluwa” (224). Sa gitna ng kapaligirang sinukat ng mga bakod, pader, muralya, ang prangkang dayalogo’t pakikibahagi ng isip at kapasiyahan ang paraang sumupling at nagpasigla sa nanlulumong ispiritu ng mga kasambahay sa bilibid.

Naabot na natin ang denouement. Naisantabi ng panahong dumadaloy ang espasyong mapagkupkop. Naisiwalat din sa wakas ang mga sekretong nakaluklok sa likod ng mga namatyagan ng Panoptikon. Uminog ang balangkas ng mga intriga hanggang sa hindi na mailihim ang pagbubuntis ni Angela. Saan patutungo ito kundi sa ospital—sa pelikula, sa zoo/kulungang pang-exhibit ng mga hayop, talinghaga ng mabangis na lipunan—kung saan ang nakatagong katotohanan ay nakatambad?

Ang mga Kabanata 20 at 21 sa ospital ay tanawing inihambing sa katayan: parang mga hayup ang nakatiwangwang sa pagmamasid ng mga nars, doktor at iba pang katulong—kwalipikasyon sa talinghagang Madonna/Pieta, kumbensiyonal na mekanismong pang-akit sa madlang lubog pa sa lumang pananampalataya. Ibang eskema ng Panopticon ang ospital; pagmamatyag at kontrol ng katawan at kilos ang intensiyon din.

Ang charity ward ng Fabella Hospital ay simetrikal sa pagtrato sa mga katawan na dapat disiplinahin. Sa kabilang dako, antitetikal o umaayaw ito sa paglapat ng repormistang kabatiran hinggil sa panganganak. Bagamat ang awtoridad ng doktor ay kahalintulad ng warden, dulot nito ay kalusugan at kaligtasan ng mga ina, kaakibat sa payo ukol sa paano makatutulong sa pagkontrol sa panganganak sa kapakanan ng pampamilyang pagtitipid. Sa ibang pagkakataon, hihimayin natin ang mga simbolo’t retorikang mapapag- aralan dito sa eksena ng ospital na hinabi rin sa modelo ng sistemang penal/ karseral.

Samantala, naghihintay ang kasukdulang antas ng pagsilang ng bilanggo bilang ina. Matiyagang pagnilayin ang kaso ni Angela—na bagong tao na, sa pakiwari niya (206)—na naipasa kay Atty. Evangeline Jacob sa pamamagitan ninaMrs.PerezatPadreEusebio.Anggampaninngmgakursilistaatsimbahan

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ay tagapamagitan, medyasyon, sa diyalektika ng nagtatagisang puwersa: ng kinagisnang ugali at espontaneong enerhiya, rasyonal na repleksiyon at libidong simbuyo, paniniwalang tradisyonal at rebolusyonaryong mithiin.

Mahihinuhang isang metamorposis ang paglipat ng antas ni Angela mula dalaga hanggang ina. Unawain natin ang implikasyon nito. Pumapatnubay sa lahat ang hangaring malutas ang problema ng kasariang dinikta ng pamilihan at petisismo-ng-kalakal (commodity- fetishism): ang diktadura ng patriyarkal na awtoridad sa representasyon ng bilibid at pasistang operasyon nito sa neokolonya. Nakataya ang husga sa simbolikong diskurso ng maternidad.

Nagsimula ang kumpisal-sekular ni Angela kay Atty. Jacob. Hinimok niyang ikuwento sa abogado ang talagang nangyari, “walang labis, walang kulang . . . ang retrato ng relasyon” ni Angela kay Crisanto (208). Sinalat ang udyok ng pagkalalaki ni Crisanto bagamat “namamanginoon” sa asawang kumokontrol ng hanapbuhay. Salapi ang nagbibigay-halaga sa tao sa sistemang kapitalista. Ang karapatan ni Angelang ipagtanggol ang sarili ay kinulapulan ng unang hukom ng malisyosong intensiyon: planong pumatay kay Adela. Nasakyan ni Atty. Jacob ang katotohanan: na “Pinagusot ng mga kasinungalingan at tusong pagliligaw ng ilang may kinalaman sa pakiwal- kiwal na takbo ng mga pangyayari” (209). Nadalumat ni Atty. Jacob na sa ilalim o likod ng penomenang nakikita ay gumagalaw ang mga puwersang nagbabaluktot sa harapang pakikitungo ng mga tao sa tiwaling pamamalakad ng oligarkiyang pangkat na minorya sa lipunan.

Kontra sa alyenasyon at anomalyang namamayani sa korte at labas ng kuta ng gobyerno ang pagkakasundo ng mga bilanggo. Nabanggit na natin ang pagkakaibigan at tapatan ng mga babaing binuklod ng isang tadhana. Ang kumpisal-tapatan ay gumanang metodo/paraan na maisiwalat ang kontradiksiyong panlipunan na naliliman ng kumbensiyonal na representasyon sa wika/salita. Ang naikintal na sintesis ng mga kontradiksiyon ay tumingkad sa tunggalian ng kababaihan at patriyarkal na awtoridad ng mapinsalang Estado at oligarkiyang umuugit nito. Pinakamasidhing mithiin ng nobelista ang maipakita ang galaw at direksiyon ng nasabing kontradiksiyon sa mga eksenang pinagdugtong- dugtong sa nobela.

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Balik-Aral sa Praktika ng Pagdisiplina

Hindi kalabisan ang repaso ng mga proposisyong nailatag sa umpisa. Dumako tayo sa matalinong estratehiya sa paglalantad ng institusyon ng bilangguan bilang mabisang instrumento ng makapangyarihang bloke sa propaganda nitong ito ay demokratiko, makatarungan, at walang kinikilingan. Nasipat na natin ito sa legalistikong metodo ng paghahati ng tao sa dalawang kategorya: kriminal o normal na mamamayan. Sa ultimong pagtimbang, lumilitaw na pamumukod iyon ng mariwasa at salat.

Tunay na makauri ang hustisya. Kailangan ang bilibid upang maihiwalay ang uring may- ari at uring dalita, uring may salapi/kapangyarihan at uring subordinado sa kanila. Natatakipan ito ng sistema ng batas, korte, pulisya, hurisprudensiya, at kostumbreng minana sa lumang orden. Nang tumiwalag si Colonal Ambrosio at muling hinirang ng Mayor si Colonel Cipriano, sa bisa ng demanda ng mga bilanggo, dulot nito ay ilusyon ng pagbabago. Subalit ang bunga nito ay hindi inaakala: naipagtibay ang katotohanan ng kabulukang itinatago ng nakatambad na madayang kaayusan ng gobyerno at pamamalakad nito na ibinunyag sa digmaang nangyayari araw-araw sa City Jail.

Samantala, tinanggap ang apela para sa retrial. Malabo’t alanganin pa rin ang sitwasyon ni Angela at anak; nagbabanta ang mga ahente ng bahay- ampunan, isang bilibid para sa mga sibol ng delingkuwenteng magulang. Tutol si Angela na isuko ang anak na parang tutang iniwan sa lansangan, mga hayop na walang memorya o pangarap. Magkasaklob ang sanggol at pagkatao ng ina, tila kaluluwa at katawang magkakapit. Nasiyasat na natin ang halaga ng pag- aari sa sistemang kapitalismo: walang pribadong pag-aaring mapagtutubuan ang manggagawa kundi lakas-paggawa (domestikong trabaho sa tahanan ng babae), na binibili ng kapitalistang nakamana o nakaipon ng pambayad (Figes; Davis).

Sa makabagong milyu natin, nakakulong pa rin sa domestikong rehimen ang babae, kahit na may hanap-buhay sa labas. Naiulat ni Bautista sa akdang Hinugot sa Tadyang na ang babae ay pambayad lamang sa utang habang ang lalaki ay tagadala ng pangalan ng ama at ng dangal ng pamilya o angkan (8–9). Sa kamalasan, ang problemang naisadula rito ay konektado sa karapatang panatilihin ang pagsasama ng ina’t anak. Hindi pag-aari ang anak, sa tingin

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ng publiko. Subalit ayon sa batas, hindi dapat mamalagi ang anak sa bilibid sapagkat walang serbisyo at kagamitan para alagaan ang anak doon. Hindi maganda ang impluwensiyang masasagap doon sa loob. Idiniin ito ng warden at lalo na ng social worker, si Ginang Juanica Bartolome, at isang madre sa Hospicio de San Jose bilang testigo sa panig ng Estado (259–60). Sinalungat sila ni Colonel Cipriano na mas mapanganib sa labas kaysa sa loob ng bilibid. Dagdag niya, mahirap uling maibalik ang anak kung ilalagak na sa ampunan dahil sa masalimuot na burokrasya at mabangis na kapaligiran. Muli, nawasak ang artipisyal na hangganang itinayo ng awtoridad at hurisprudensiyang burgis.

Dambuhalang suliranin ang binalikat nina Angela at mga kabilanggo— sina Nora, Viring, atbp. na nagsusog ng iba’t ibang alternatibong solusyon. Napagpasiyahan ni Angela na ang pagmamahal ay hindi sapat na magpalaki at magturo sa anak. Himala na si Joy ang puwersang di lamang nagpasigla kundi nagpahinahon at nagpatino sa lahat sa solidaridad at damayang naranasan nila sa hunger strike at pagkalinga sa mag-ina. Tila mesiyas na lumapag sa entablado ng City Jail. Likas na simpatiya at pagmamalasakit ang nasaksihan natin.

Panata sa Pagbaklas at Pagtakwil

Sumukdol sa krisis ng tanong: kanino ang anak? Sino ang makikinabang sa reproduktibong lakas ng kababaihan? Nasadlak sa krisis ang lahat kung saan mapupunta si Joy—sa ampunan o sa mga kaibigang nag-aalay—nagkaroon ng pagkakataong malutas din ni Angela ang pag-estima sa sitwasyon niya bilang “kalaguyo” o kerida lamang at hindi babaeng taglay ang kasarinlan (self-de- termination). Alyenado sa ama at walang pera o ari-arian, lumagpak na si Angela sa saray ng pinakadukha.

Sa Kabanata 30, nang ibalita ni Joanna na handang sustentuhan ni Crisanto ang anak nila sa pribadong ampunan, hindi sa charity, kinutya ni Angela si Crisanto na sa mag-asawa, si Crisanto ang “naka-panty” (287) dahil hindi niya matanggap na nakiapid siya. Hindi katakataka: maka- lalaki pa rin ang istandard ni Angela. Hindi sapat ang tumira sa bilibid ng isang taon lamang. Natuklasan din niyang gahaman si Joanna’t hindi niya mapapagkatiwalaan. Tuluyang naibulgar na kapalit ng pekeng “kabutihang- loob” ang pagsuko ni Angela upang matapos ang eskandalo ng sistemang

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kerida. Sukli niya sa alok ni Crisanto: “Hindi pa tapos ang laban namin . . . Madali lang kamong maging ama! Maski aso, nagiging ama!” (289–90). Hindi ang ina.

Ang suliranin o dilema ni Angela bilang kerida ay nailahad ng abogado ni Adela Pagtalunan, ang asawa ni Crisanto. Sinalungguhitan niya na si Angela “ay kalaguyo ng asawa ng nagsasakdal. Alam ni Angela mula’t sapul na may asawa ang kanyang katipan at sino mang babaing nasa ganitong kalagayan ay tiyak na nakaaalam din sa peligrong sugurin siya ano mang oras ng asawa ng kanyang kalaguyo” (295). Labanan ito ng mga babae sa pag-angkin sa isang lalaking obheto na sa tingin nila’y makapupuno sa kanilang kawalan o kakulangan. Isang palaisipan ang naibunsod dito. Sa diskurso ng nobelista, ang kerida ay babaing tumutukso at humahatak sa lalaki sa pagkakasala. Narito ang kuro-kuro ni Bautista sa institusyong halaw sa Kanluran:

Ang salitang kerida, binasa ko sa internet, ay may Spanish origin na ang kahulugan pala ay beloved, bukod sa ito ay pangalan ng babae. Pero ang kahulugan sa atin ay other woman. Kabit. Mang-aagaw ng asawa. At dahil sila ang kontrabida sa buhay ng isang mag-asawa, karaniwang walang simpatiya sa kanila ang mga tao. Ang kerida ang inaaway, ang minumura, minamasama at sinisisi sa kaapihan ng kapwa babae at pagkasira ng isang pamilya (Hinugot 124).

Isang enigmatikong papel ang ginagampanan ng kerida: mahalay, taglay ang masamang bisyo (alak, sigarilyo), glamoroso ang buhay kaya nakaeenganyo— kung mayaman ang lalaki—pero kung mahirap, “cheap.” Walang pagkutya si Bautista sa kalagayan ni Angela dahil “iisa lang ang kalagayan ng asawa at ng kerida, nagkaiba lang ng tawag sa kanila…Pareho lang silang naghahangad na sa kanya na pumirmi ang lalaki . . . Pero lagi na, sa lalaki lang kahanga-hanga ang magkaroon ng kerida, o mga kerida . . . pero ibang usapan pagdating sa babae” (134–37).

May bahid ng romantikong aura ang kontrabida, isang bayani rin sa digmaang pangkasarian. Nabanggit ni Bautista ang kaso ni Senador Leila de Lima na binastos at nilapastangan ni Presidente Duterte sanhi ng diumanong pakikipagrelasyon niya sa drayber na sinuportahan niya. Samakatwid, ang

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kategorya ng uring panlipunan, ang lugar sa herarkiya ng mayroon at wala, ang nagpapasiya kung kahiya-hiya o tanggap ang relasyong nasabi.

Maipapalagay na sa patriyarkal na pananaw—saksi na ang lalaking warden, guwardiya, doktor, huwes, atbp.—tinuturing ang kerida na pag-aaring maidi- display o magagamit na isang bagay o instrumento sa negosyo, karera, o anupamang mapagtutubuan. Hindi kahiya-hiya dahil simbolo ng tagumpay, ngunit hindi ibinabandila bilang aristokratikong idea ng pagkalalaki.

Maipapalagay na ang proyekto ni Angela ay pamumuhay na kagalang- galang—isang respetableng burgis. Ang pagpupunyaging maging bagong tao, isang taong may pagsasarili’t dignidad, may dunong at galing, ay tanging hangaring umugit sa pagpupursigi ni Angelang maging mahinahon, sensitibo, at mabuting makitungo sa mga kasama sa bilangguan. Hindi siya nagpabayang maakit sa gilas nina Barang, o magpaubayang maging kalunos- lunos na biktima. Sinikap niyang ipagtanggol ang sariling dangal sa harap ng tukso, iringan, kabastusan sa bilibid, sa ospital, sa tanggapan ng mga opisyal, sa bulwagan ng hukuman. Walang pasubaling natural iyon sa babaing nagbuhat sa uring manggagawa, o mababang antas ng panggitnang-uri (ang ama niya ay OFW sa Saudi). Konsekwensiya ito ng ordeng mapagsamantala, tagibang na ugnayan ng mga grupo sa kapitalistang lipunan.

Tipikal na burukratang burges ang huwes sa nobela. Hindi ako sang- ayon na ang kilos ni Angela ay sanhi ng “instinct of survival,” ng pagdepensa sa sariling buhay, isang indibidwalistikong pagtataguyod ng sariling kapakanan. Sumilang na bagong tao si Angela bilang ina—si Joy, ang sanggol, ang nagdulot sa kaniya ng okasyon upang magpundar ng bagong ayos ng pamumuhay (206). Hindi na siya kontento sa dating sitwasyong nakubakob siya ng lalaki. Nakasentro na siya ngayon sa pag-aruga sa sanggol at pagkalinga sa kaniyang bagong personalidad.

Pagtawid sa Sangandaan ng Krisis

Mahihinuha na ang pagsiyasat natin sa dalawang panig ng mundo—ang nasa loob at nasa labas ng bilibid—ay nagbunsod sa pagtalakay sa tema ng pagbabago, transpormasyon, at pag-iiba. Resulta ito ng mga hidwaan at oposisyon ng mga paniniwala’t damdaming nasipat na natin. Mapagmumuni

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na ito ang simbuyong lumaganap sa tuwa ng lahat na mabalitaang magaan ang parusang ipinataw kay Angela “on humanitarian grounds.” Ang nirebisang parusa kaipala’y umaayon sa repormistang pananaw na bukal sa pagtatayo ng asilo sa mga baliw at repormatoryo (bilibid) sa mga lumabag sa batas— paksang nagalugad na sa pambungad ng diskurso. Maitanong natin: Bakit hindi multa lamang ang ipinataw ng hukuman? Sino ang talagang nag-ayos ng sirkunstansiyang nagtungo sa pananakit?

Gayunman, nakasilid din dito ang utopikong pagnanais makatakas sa impiyerno ng kasalukuyang kaayusan. Mababanaagan ang masugid na mensahe ng pista ng Pasko at Bagong Taon. Pakiramdaman ang tagubilin o pagsamo sa talatang pangwakas ng nobela na nagpapaalala ng di-patas na sitwasyon ng kababaihan at kalalakihan—hanggang hindi nangyayari ang radikal na pagbabanyuhay ng lahat:

Libong salamat. Madali lang maging ama, tulad ng sabi ni Angela. Pero hindi gano’n sa kaso ng isang babae. Kasabay ng pagsilang ng isang anak. masasabing isinisilang din ang isang ina. Sa iba’t ibang paraan. Madugo’t masakit. Mahapdi’t makirot. Na nagsisilbing simula ng isang bagong papel sa buhay. Bagong direksiyon. Bagong pag-asa.

Bagong pagkatao. (307)

Nauwi ang lahat sa simpleng pagdakila sa maternidad. Sayang kaya ang masalimuot na pakikibaka ng mga sawimpalad sa loob at labas ng bilibid? Ilang tanong ang dapat pagtuunan ng malalim na pagsusuri kung importanteng maliwanagan sa hiwaga ng kasarian sa neokolonyang bayan. Maipapalagay kaya ang pagkiling na ito’y pagdakila sa pagka-ina o maternidad? Ito ba’y pahiwatig na hindi desbentaha ang mamalagi sa domestikong larang na mababa ang pagtimbang?

Ayon sa pagsasaliksik ni Delia Aguilar, ang subordinasyon ng kababaihan ay nagbubuhat sa depinisyon ng babae bilang ina’t maybahay, limitado sa paglilingkod sa pamilya at patriyarkiya. Iyon ang domestikong bilibid na dapat takasan. Tiyak na ang kasarian ay relasyong sosyal, ugnayang panlipunan, na kaakibat ng moda ng produksiyong umiiral. Sa gayon, nakatakda ang sitwasyon ng kababaihan sa di-pantay na dibisyon ng gawain, samakatwid,

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paghahati ng kapangyarihan at yaman (tingnan ang puna ni Torres-Yu; hinggil sa “social reproduction feminism,” sangguniin sina Martinez, Vogel, Haug).

Lagom at Tagubiling Proposisyon

Palasak nang ituro sa makabagong silid-aralan na huwag maghanap ng turo sa gawang-pagpapakahulugan sa panitikan. Hindi kailangang humanap ng leksiyong moral mula sa pagkilatis at pagtarok sa halaga ng anumang likhang- sining. Huwag maghinuha na ito ang pakay ng interpretasyong nailahad dito. Hindi rin ito ang mapupulot sa progresibo’t postmodernong ermenyutika. Gayunpaman, sikapin nating ibuod sa ilang proposisyon ang pangunahing tema sa banghay ng nobela, na kaugnay ng adhikain ng may-akda sa paghabi ng mga karakter, pakiramdaman, usapan, pangyayari, at kaganapan sa hugis at ayos ng talambuhay. Balak nating tiyakin ang “interpretant” (sa depinisyon ni C. S. Peirce na nag-uugnay sa salita at reperensiya) na iminungkahi dito sa proseso ng pagsusuri sa mga tauhan at kaganapan kaakibat ng sari-saring aspekto ng ideolohiyang nasasangkot (San Juan, Peirce’s Pragmaticism).

Muli nating analisahin ang itinakdang lugar, ang sistemang penal ng bilibid at estruktura ng rehimeng nagpapaandar dito. Alinsunod sa disenyo ng bilibid na dokumentado sa kasaysayan, layon nito ay hindi parusa sa katawan o pagbitay kundi repormasyon ng kriminal at pagpigil sa krimeng binabalak pa lamang. Ngunit di maikakaila na parusa pa rin at retribusyon ang motibasyon. Kaipala, walang inosenteng nabilanggo; nagkasala lahat. Puna ng ACLU: “Reformation and rehabilitation is the rhetoric; systematic dehumanization is the reality” (Rudovsky 11; Day). Iba ang nakaharap na napapanood kaysa sa nakatagong realidad.

Sa radikal na pagtatasa, ang silbi ng aparato at teknolohiya ng bilibid ay magparusa sa katawan at diwa, sa pagpataw ng takot, pighati, poot, matinding pananakit, pagkalugami, kawalan ng pag-asa. Hindi pagwawasto o panggagamot ng sakit ang mapapala (Foucault 42– 43; Davis). Tratong busabos o alipin ng Estado ang mga bilanggo, hawak ng mga administrador ng bilibid ang kapangyarihang abusadohin ang mga bilanggo—talagang binawian ng anumang karapatan sila at mahigpit na kontrolado. Trato silang

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mga bagay na puwedeng lapastanganin kailanman. Walang pasubali na ang kolonyang “koreksiyonal” ay institusyong totalitaryan. Siguro masahol pa ito kaysa sa impyiernong ginuguni natin. Walang dapat gawin kundi buwagin at sunugin ang institusyong ito na sadyang buktot at inutil.

Natunghayan natin na uminog ang buhay ng mga bilanggo mula alitan ng barkada, indibidwalistikong paligsahan, pakikihamok, atbp., tungo sa pagmamalasakit sa kapuwa at pagkakapalagayang-loob. Nasaksihan natin ang pagtutulungan, simpatiya, damayan, at pagsasanib ng mga bilanggo upang makamit ang kaunting kaluwagan at kahilingan. Sinagisag ng organikong pagkabuntis ni Angela ang daloy ng panahon; hindi na walang laman ang espasyo ng bilibid kundi napuno’t umapaw sa kalinga’t pagmamahal. Dumanas ng metamorposis ang pakikitungo ng isa’t isa—nina Barang at Tonya, nina Viring at Nora. Naging kolektibong organo ang lahat, nagkadaupang-palad ang marami, pati mga guwardiya, sa pagdating ni Joy—isang sakramentong kaganapan.

Ang presensiya ni Angela ay inilarawan na isang Birhen sa prusisyon; ang anak ay nagmistulang avatar ni Kristo. Isang himala ang pumukaw at gumising sa buong larangan: umaklas ang madla, naibalik si Colonel Cipriano, naging maunawain sina Padre Eusebio at peryodista; naging tagapamagitan ang mga kursilista; pumasok si Atty. Evangelina Jacob, at nagdaos ng retrial. Sa mga tinahing eksena, naging krusada ang kaso ni Angela para maisalba ang anak sa lagim ng paghuli nito’t paglagak sa bahay-ampunan, isang tipo rin ng bilangguan.

Sa dagling balik-tanaw, mapupuna na multidimensiyonal ang balangkas ng mga pangyayari. Baka makatulong ang diyagramang kakabit dito, eskematikong lagom ng mga gampanin ng mga tauhan at kontradiksiyong konseptuwal na siyang gumagana bilang nakabaong lohika ng narasyon. Baka mapakinabangan ito bilang gabay sa pag-urirat ng mga nagsalabat na figura, imahen, retorika at talinghaga na salik ng kaayusang simbolikong pangkasariang itinanghal sa nobela (tingnan ang larawan 1).

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Lar. 1. Diyagrama ng simbolikong daigdig at konstelasyon ng ideolohiyang ugat ng teorya- praktika ng nobela.

Kalikasan ang nag-udyok ng pagbabagong-buhay ni Angela mula sa pagkasawi bilang kerida/kabit ng patriyarkal na orden. Balintuna o balighong ikot ng pangyayari sa kamalayan ni Angela: “Siya, si Angela Gutierrez, isang karaniwang tao lamang, isang taong kokonti lang ang pinag-aralan at hindi mo papansinin pag nasalubong mo sa kalye, isang miserableng tao, na sa buong buhay niya’y walang binatbat, nakagawa ng tao?” (198). Oo, pero siya lang mag-isa? Natural, hindi lamang siya—ang panganganak ng tao ay isang pangyayari o pagkakataong makahulugan sa loob ng lipunan (Vogel; Aguilar, “Questionable Claims”). Ang pagbubuntis at panganganak ay isang pangyayaring tigib ng signipikasyong sosyo-politikal at pangkasaysayan.

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Hindi hayop ang nagsilang kay Joy. Tiyak na isang ilusyon ang pag-angkin ni Angela na siya lamang ang responsable doon. Sa pag-iisa niya sa ospital, sumibol ang ilusyon na siya lang ang may kagagawan ng lahat. Alam na natin ang pakikipagtalik niya kay Crisanto, ang tulong ng mga kasama sa bilangguan, ang tungkuling ginanap ng ospital at mga guwardiya, atbp. Gayunman, ang anak at ina ay produkto ng kaayusang historiko-politikal. Sila sa pusod ng kalikasan ang tumupad ng paraan upang maunawaan ang saysay at katuturan ng mga pangyayaring hinuhubog ng mga puwersang lingid sa kaalaman ng tao—mga puwersang sosyohistoriko tulad ng bilibid, ospital, sistemang kerida, batas at hukuman, operasyon ng negosyong Bits and Pieces, trapik sa lansangan, atbp.

Postscript at Memorandum

Laruin natin ang ilang ideya. Si Joy ang ipinanukalang Mesiyas na inaasahang lulutas sa nagsalabit na kontradiksiyong natunghayan na natin. Matagumpay kaya ito sa pagsasanib ng sindak at awa, takot at habag, na magkasalungat na damdaming napukaw sa mambabasa? Makahulugan o makatuturan ba ang kinahinatnan?

Binigyan ni Susan Sontag sa kaniyang Regarding the Pain of Others ang paksang ito tungkol sa dating o talab ng potograpiya at diskurso ng kapahamakan. Akma rito ang kuro-kuro niya:

People can turn off [TV, media] not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid . . . Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence . . . To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may . . . be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful stirring images supply only an initial spark. (100–03)

Magkakaugnay ang lahat sa totalidad ng ating pagsusuri’t pagtimbang sa mga karakter, tagpo, at tema ng nobela.

Naiugnay ang mga kontradiksiyong tematiko sa prosesong diyalektikal. Nagbunsod ang balangkas ng pagkikipagsapalaran ni Angela sa transpormasyon

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ng bilangguan at ng kaniyang katayuan. Hindi lamang naipakita na may sariling lakas/kapangyarihan ang mga bilanggo bilang mga taong may isip, sentido komun, damdamin, at katutubong galing. Naitampok na taglay din nila ang kakayahang mangatwiran, maghusga, magpasiya, umaksiyon. Bagamat kontrolado ng Estado at naghaharing-uri ang kabatiran at teknolohiya ng regulasyon hinggil sa katawan, kaisipan at damdamin na kinasangkapan upang yumari at diktahan ang suheto/ahente, masasabing taglay pa rin ng suhetong naikintal ang abilidad at lakas na sumalungat, tumutol, tumanggi, lumaban. Bawat opresyon ay may katugmang rebelyon. Iyon ang masining na alegoryang mensahe na naisaayos at nadulutan ng integrasyong masining sa bawat episodyo ng nobela.

Sa huling pagtatasa, ang patalastas ng nobela ay imbokasyong ipagpatuloy at paunlarin ang programa ng pakikibaka. Sa muling pagdalaw natin sa institusyon ng bilangguan, dapat nating isaulo na ang binansagang krimen o delingkuwensiya ay malabo’t balintuna. Iyon ay sintomas ng malubhang sakit ng ating kapaligiran at senyal nga iyon ng pagsisikap nating malutas ang mga malubhang problemang sumisikil sa potensiyal ng buong sangkatauhan.

Ang degradasyon ng uring anakpawis, kompetisyon/awayan sa paghahanap-buhay sa lipunang nakapako sa akumulasyon ng kapital/tubo, ay nagpalala sa egotistikong gawi at digmaan ng mga imperyalistang Estado.

Sa Kanluran noong nagdaang siglo, lumaganap ang krimen sa industriyalisadong bansa. Sa Pilipinas, sa malalaking lunsod pagkatatag ng aministrasyong Amerikano noong 1900 hanggang 1946, lumago ang krimen laban sa pribadong pag-aari (Agoncillo at Alfonso). Katambal nito ang paghigpit ng kontrol sa lakas-paggawa (lalo na sa katawan ng mga babaeng maralita), na tuloy nagbunga sa diskriminasyon laban sa mga babaeng sinamantala ng mga lalaking nawalan ng trabaho at dignidad. Imperatibo sa ordeng ito ang programang ibalik ang totem ng angkang patriyarkal at igupo ang Karapatang-Ina (Mother-Right), at ang feministang kilusang sumupling dito.

Napuna ni Marx na sa punto-de-bista ng burgesya, sanhi sa pangangailangan ng mas epektibong institusyong penal, sumulong ang teknolohiya at pagkatarok na ang batas— ideolohiya at kaakibat na praktika—

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ang nagpapasiya kung ano ang normal na ugali at kung alin ang lihis o lisyang gawa (Foley). Sino ang lumihis sa normatibong gawi at sino ang maghuhusga? Isang matinik na problema, paalaala ng nobela, ang proyektong pagbuwag sa bilangguan at pagpundar ng makataong kaayusan—isang komunidad na walang pribadong pag-aari, walang mayaman at pulubi, patas ang ugnayan, magkakatuwang ang lahat ng miyembro ng komunidad kung saan lahat ng bagay ay nagsisilbing tuwa, lugod, aliw, kaligayahan para sa lahat. Ito ang di-matatakasang hamon at tagubilin ng Bulaklak sa City Jail.

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Sanggunian

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Aguilar, Delia. Toward a Nationalist Feminism. Giraffe Press, 1998.
———. “Questionable Claims.” Women and Globalization, inedit nina Delia Aguilar at

Anne Lacsamana, Humanity Books, 2004.
Alfaro, Ma. Rita Arce. “Human Rights Behind Bards: The Manila City Jail

Experience.” Focus, blg. 39, Mar. 2005.
Bautista, Lualhati. “From Rocking the Cradle to Rocking the Boat.” Sarilaya: Women

in Arts and Media, inedit nina Sr. Mary John Mananzan et al. St. Scholastica’s

College, 1989.
———. Buwan, Buwan, Hulugan Mo Ako ng Sundang. Anvil Publishing, 1991.
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Komentaryo tungkol sa nobelang NANGALUNOD SA KATIHAN ni Faustino Aguilar

file:///Users/epifaniosanjuan/Desktop/View%20of%20POLITIKA%20AT%20ETIKA%20SA%20PILIPINAS:%20Diyalektika%20ng%20Tradisyon%20at%20Modernidad%20sa%20Nobelang%20Nangaluno.webarchive

https://journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/dilimanreview/article/view/7400

KOMENTARYO SA NOBELANG “DESAPARESIDOS ni LUALHATI BAUTISTA–E. San Juan, Jr.

Gunita, Pagsusumakit, Pagkilala, Katubusan: Isang Pagbasa’t Suri sa Sining ng Desaparesidos ni Lualhati Bautista

San Juan, Jr. / Gunita, Pagsusumakit, Pagkilala, Katubusan 29

GUNITA, PAGSUSUMAKIT, PAGKILALA, KATUBUSAN
Isang Pagbasa’t Suri sa Sining ng Desaparesidos ni Lualhati Bautista

E. San Juan, Jr. University of Connecticut philcsc@gmail.com

Abstrak

Sinikap ng hermenyutikang suri rito na ilahad ang politikang seksuwal na nakapaloob sa karanasan ng mga aktibista sa panahon ng diktaduryang Marcos at kapaligirang sirkumstansya. Sa sakunang sinapit nila, nakatambad ang barbarikong dahas ng sistemang patriyarko’t piyudal at imperyalismo. Sa paghahanap sa nawalang anak, at nawaglit na pagka-magulang, naisagisag dito ang pinsalang dinanas ng marami, di lamang ang mga desaparesidos. Nakapagitna rin ang dangal ng ama/kalalakihan sa krisis na sumira sa ritwal ng kasal at partido, naipagsanib ang kapalaran ng mamamayan at kapalaran ng bansa. Nalikha sa partikular na danas ang isang pambansang alegorya mula sa testimonya ng mga biktima, kung saan ang trauma o hilakbot ay simbolo ng krisis ng buong bansa. Naging talinghaga ang tungkulin ng gunita sa sitwasyon ng mga anak, na magpapatuloy sa napatid na historya ng mapagpalayang pagpupunyagi— pahiwatig na malulutas ang kontradiksiyon ng panahon at lugar sa kolektibong pagsisikap ng mga salinlahi upang makamit ang pambansang demokrasya at soberanya ng bansa.

Susing Salita

Batas Militar, desaparesidos, ina, neokolonya, rebolusyon, sakripisyo

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Abstract

This hermeneutical critique seeks to articulate the sexual politics submerged in the experiences of selected activists during and after the period of the Marcos dictatorship. In the disasters they suffered, we find revealed the barbaric violence of imperialism and the patriarchal- feudal system. In the quest for the missing child and their own kidnapped self-recognition, the narrative symbolized the damage suffered by whole communities, not just the forcibly disappeared. The plot center-stages the ordeal of oligarchic honor in the crisis that destroyed the rituals of marriage and party discipline. In the process, the fate of individual citizens and the fate of the nation coalesced. Embodied in manifold experiences, the interwoven testimonies of the families involved function as a national allegory in which the traumatic terror of the Martial Law regime becomes a concrete universal for all. Memory/recollection as protagonist becomes a key mediation for the children’s predicament, serving as an analogical figure for the disrupted dialectic of the historical project for the people’s liberation. It serves as a trope that the contradictions of time and space, body and soul, ethics and geopolitics, will be resolved by the collective effort of organic people’s agencies to achieve the goals of national democracy and sovereignty.

Keywords

Martial law, desaparecidos, mother, neocolonialism, revolution, sacrifice

About the Author

E. SAN JUAN, Jr., emeritus professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Ethnic Studies, was previously a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, and Fulbright professor of American Studies, Katholieke Universitat Leuven, Belgium. He also taught recently at Polytechnic University of the Philippines and the University of the Philippines, Diliman, Quezon City. His recent books are Faustino Aguilar (UST Press), Maelstrom over the Killing Fields (Pantax Press), Kontra-Modernidad (UP Press) and Peirce’s Pragmaticism: A Radical Perspective (Lexington Press). His critical study of all the novels of Lualhati Bautista is scheduled to be launched this year 2023.

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INTRODUCTION

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or

punishment.

—United Nations, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 5

Hahanapin kita sa angil ng punglo/ Sa tinik ng gubat silahis ng sulo /Ipagtatanong ka sa libong kamao /Sa kawa’y ng bandera’t dagundong ng maso/ Hahanapin kita sa lunting bukirin / Sa ngiti ng sanggol, sa ihip ng hangin/ Kung sa paglaya na ang inyong pagdating /

At wala ka roo’y hahanapin pa rin.

—Adora Faye de Vera

Hangga’t maaari, makisama kayong mabuti sa lahat ng tao. Mga minamahal huwag kayong maghiganti; ipaubaya ninyo iyon sa Diyos. Sapagkat nasusulat, “Akin ang paghihiganti, ako ang gaganti, sabi ng Panginoon.” Kaya “Kung nagugutom ang iyong kaaway, pakanin mo; kung nauuhaw, painumin mo; sa gayon, mapapahiya siya sa kanyang sarili.”

—Ang Sulat ni Pablo sa Mga Taga-Roma, 12:17-19 Ang Bagong Tipan

Ang malikhaing pagbasa ng panitikan ay isang pagpapakahulugan, isang sining o agham ng interpretasyon na tinaguriang hermenyutika. Mula pa sa klasikang siglo ng Antiquity, nina San Agustin at patristikong komentarista, mga exegesis ng Koran at Lumang Tipan ng mga Hebreo, napagkayarian ang wastong teksto at pag-unawa sa apat na aspekto ng Scripture: 1) anagohikal (kolektibo at politikal na kahulugan ng historya); 2) moral (sikolohiyang pagtarok sa indibidwal); 3) alegorikal (susi sa kodigo ng kahulugan); at 4) literal (reperensiya sa karaniwang danas). Kahit magsimula sa literal na antas ang pagtunton sa sirkulo ng hermenyutika, maiintidihan natin ang ugnayan ng lahat ng dimensiyong nabanggit sa isang makabuluhang totalidad.

Nilinaw ni Fredric Jameson na ginamit ito ng mga pantas ng Simbahan upang mabigyan-katuturan para sa mga di-binyag ang kulturang minana sa mga Hebreo: habang nakasalig sa obhetibong datos ng kasaysayan, bukas ito sa pagdulot ng sistema ng metapora o alegorikong pagpapakahulugan. Pahayag ni Jameson:

“Allegory is here the opening up of the text to multiple meanings, to successive rewritings and overwritings which are generated as so many levels and as so many supplementary interpretations” (29-30). Batay sa perspektibong ito, susuriin natin ang ugnayan ng pigura at ideya, sagisag at konsepto, penomena at hiwatig na umuugit sa mga tauhan at pangyayari, na siyang bukal ng masusing “kritisismo ng buhay” ng nobela bilang likhang-sining.

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Isang halimbawa ng estratehiyang gamit dito ay mapapansin sa diskurso ni Mary Aileen Diez-Bacalso, pangulo ng International Coalition Against Enforced Disappearances. Inihahanay niya ang dawalang pangyayari: ang pasinaya ni Pangulong Bongbong Marcos, anak ng diktador Ferdinand Marcos, at pagdiriwang sa ala-ala ng mga biktima noong panahon ng “martial law” sa Bantayog ng mga Bayani noong Hunyo 30, 2022. Walang imik si Marcos Jr. ukol sa mga biktima ng kaniyang ama, habang itinampok ng mga kamag-anak ng mga biktima ang kilabot ng diktadurya (1972-86). Nirepaso ang malupit na paglapastangan at pagpaslang sa ilan-libong aktibista nina Loretta Ann Rosales at Bonifacio Ilagan. Ipinaaabot nila sa anak ng diktador na “we do not absolve you of historical responsibility” sa mga naturang krimen, at tinambuli ang sumpa nila na “to continue to sacrifice our lives to destroy the distortions” na lantad sa pagbibida ni Marcos Jr. ng mga di- umano’y kabutihan at kaunlarang dulot ng malagim na yugto ng ating kasaysayan (Diez-Bacalso).

Nakasiksik sa pagtatambal sa dalawang tagpo ang apat na kategorya ng pagpapakahulugan: mula sa realistikong pangyayari (pagdurusang pisikal ng mga biktima), alegorikong pahiwatig (kasalanang hindi makakalimutan), hanggang sa moralidad (responsibilidad ng nagkasala) at analohikal na kahulugan (impak ng nangyari sa kapalaran at kinabukasan ng bansa). Masasalamin sa nobela ang pagsasanib ng mga kontradiksiyong kalakip sa kahirapang dinanas ng mga magulang, ang magkatunggaling reaksyon ng mga anak, at pagkakatahi ng katotohanan at kabulaanan sa pakikipagsapalaran ng mga kapanalig sa panahon ng batas militar at sumunod na pagsusuma nito.

Hanggang ngayon, ang sugat o trauma ng “martial law” ay hindi pa naghihilom. Patunay rito ang babala ng United Nations Human Rights Committee ukol sa “widespread practice of torture and ill-treatment in places of detention” (2022

Meeting). Pananagutan ng lahat na makialam sa eskandalong ito. Noong 2018, naging tanyag ang pagsasalin ng nobela sa teatro ni Guelan Luarca—walang espasyo rito upang asikasuhin ang pagkakaiba nito sa sining ni Bautista (konsultahin ang rebyu ni Tariman). Sa ngayon, tangka nating mailahad ang halaga ng pagsisikap mahulagpusan ang sakripisyong naisadula sa paraang pasalaysay. Nilunggati ng nobelista na maipadama sa bagong henerasyon ang kumplikadong buod at responsibilidad ng kanilang pagka-Filipino na nakaugat sa madugong bahagi ng ating kasaysayan.

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KRONIKA NG BANSAG AT KONTEKSTO NG PAGLAPAT

Halaw ang salitang “desaparesidos” mula sa Kastilang “desaparecidos,” o mga taong nawala. Naimbestigahan na ito ni Bautista sa naunang nobela niyang Bata, Bata… Pa’no Ka Ginawa? at Dekada ‘70 (San Juan, “Paano Ginawa”; San Juan, “Lakas”). Noong panahon ng “dirty war” sa Argentina noong dekada 1970, inilapat ang etiketang ito sa 10,000-30,000 dinukot at pinatay ng mga kawal ng sandatahang militar ng Estado, pulisya at mga galamay ng Estado. “Operation Condor” ang tawag sa sistematikong pagsugpo sa mga aktibistang estudyante at unyonista sa Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay) ng Latin Amerika suportado ng U.S. tulad ng pag-suporta kay Ferdinand Marcos.

Maraming patalastas noon ay nakulapulan ng bansag na “sapilitang pagkawala”— hindi kusang nawala, o nagtago lamang—ng mga biktimang tinortyur at pinatay upang patahimikin sila o pigilang makapagsalita. Sinugpo ang karapatang pantaong lumahok sa pampublikong aktibidad (San Juan, U.S. Imperialism 163-80). Ang pagbabawal na ito ay tandisang paglabag sa doktrina ng mga karapatang pantaong pinagkasunduan sa UN Charter. Pinagkayarian iyon ng lahat ng bansang kasapi sa U.N., kabilang ang Pilipinas, kaya obligadong sundin lahat ng nagpatibay dito.

SUBAYBAYAN ANG BAKAS

Ngunit alam ng lahat ang kabalintunaan: iba ang nakasulat sa papel at iba naman ang masasaksihan sa realidad. Ang pinakaunang desaparesidong natukoy ay si Charlie del Rosario, estudyante sa Polytechnic University of the Philippines, na dinukot noong 13 Marso 1971, sa loob ng Lepanto Compound. Sinapantahang Task Force Lawin ng Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) ang responsable. Bago pa ito ipataw ang proklamasyong 1081 ng batas militar noong Setyembre 1972 (Javate-de Dios, Daroy, Kalaw-Tirol; McCoy). Paunawa ng sigwang umaalimbukay sa panganoring abot-tanaw ang kudetang lumansag sa republikang sistema ng politika at administrasyon.

Sa panahon ng batas militar nangyari ang pinakamasahol na sapilitang pagkawala, ang Southern Tagalog 10, mga aktibistang dinukot, tinortyur at pinatay. Pagkaraan ng ilang taon, apat na labi ng mga bangkay ng sampung biktima ang nadiskubre, na napagkilala, na sina Rizalina Ilagan, Cristina Catalla, Gerardo Faustino, at Modesto Sison. Dalawa pang mga buto nina Virgilio Silva at Salvador Panganiban ang nahukay sa Tagaytay, Cavite. Bago pa sa kanila, tatlong aktibista ang unang sinalvage

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(“salvage” ang idyomang nauso upang ipahiwatig ang pagpaslang, kabaligtaran ng ibig sabihin sa Ingles): sina Rolando Federis, Flora Coronacion, at Adora Faye de Vera—pinatay sina Federis at Coronacion, ngunit si de Vera ay nakaligtas (sa anong himala!) at nakapagsalaysay ng pagtampalasan sa kaniya. Iyon ang isa sa basehan

ng testimonya nina Anna at Roy sa nobela (Ilagan 18-28).

Sa panahong sumunod, ang mga bantog na desaparesidos—sa ilandaang nakalista—ay sina Jonas Burgos, Karen Empeno, at Sherlyn Cadapan. Ang matinding kahirapang dinanas ng dalawang babaeng estudyante ay nakatala sa testimonya ni Raymond Manalo (294-314). Matingkad na alingawngaw o pag-uulit iyon ng mga nangyari kina Anna at Roy, protagonista sa nobela. Naging tunay ang katha. Subalit mapaglilimi na hindi naman tahasang “desaparesidos” ang mga pangunahing tauhan—sila’y dinakip at pinarusahan ng militar. Makahulugan ang pagkawala ng magulang, laluna ang ina, sa buhay nina Lorena at Malaya, na maituturing na manaka-nakang pagliban o kawalan. Iyon ang dobleng hiwatig na “desaparesidos,” na nawalan ng magulang ang dalawang anak (Mendiola). Nagsalikop ang literal at alegorikal na kahulugan sa interpretasyon ng karanasan ng mag-asawa, hindi nawaglit ang masaklap na realidad sa likod ng metapora o sagisag na nagpasiwalat ng matining na katuturan ng mga penomenang puwedeng isaisantabi kung walang kaagapay na figurang retorikal.

Hindi lang isang dimensyon ang masisipat sa talinghaga ng pagkawala. Idagdag pa natin ang mahuhugot na analohiya: ang pagkawala sa sarili nina Roy at Anna. Ito ang aspektong moral at anagohikal. Naturol ni Roy na “gusto niyang umuwi sa kanyang sarili” (Desaparesidos 209). Umuwi sa pinanggalingan? Nawala ang anak ni Anna, kambal ng sarili bilang ina. Parikala nito’y nabiyak ang mga sarili, nahati o nasibak, kaya kailangang pagkabitin at itahi muli ang mga pragmentong nahiwalay upang mabuo ang pagkatao at kilalanin ang dalisay na sarili o identidad. Gayundin ang pamilya at ang partidong naging kapalit ng iniwang pamilya ng mga aktibista. Ito ang temang sentral: ang paghagilap ng koneksiyon ng nakalipas at ngayon upang makabuo ng mas makatotohana’t makatuwirang hinaharap. Tinahi at tinuhog ng nobela ang sumabog at nagkawatak-watak na kabuuan ng buhay ng mga protagonista.

Ano ba talaga ang umuukilkil sa malay ng mga protagonista? Pagbabalik sa dati o paghahanap sa nawalang bahagi? Ang buong naratibo ay pagpupunyaging isalaysay ang proseso ng pagsasanib ng sabog na sangkap ng pagkatao nina Roy at

Anna, ang mga kontradiksiyong nagpasalimuot sa pakikipagsapalarang ito, sampu ng kontekstong sosyo-politikal. Isinalig ang partikular na buhay ng mga karakter dito sa kasaysayan ng sambayanan ng panahon ng batas militar ng diktaduryang Marcos at humaliling rehimen nina Aquino, Ramos, Estrada, at Arroyo (tungkol sa mga katampalasang naganap ng rehimeng Cory Aquino, konsultahin si Maglipon;

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Nemenzo). Ito ang anagohikal na palapag ng ating pagdukal sa sapin-saping kahulugan ng nobela.

PATAWID SA LUBAK AT BANGIN

Mapanghimasok ang sinumang magsusuri sa signipikasyong etikal-politikal ng mga tagpong nagbunsod sa pagkawala ng anak. Sino ang responsable sa mga desaparesidos? Mapagbirong palaisipan ba ito?

Sa pangkalahatang tanaw, ang nawalang bagay o tao rito ay si Malaya, ang anak ni Anna, na iniwan kay Karla, buntis na asawa ni Jinky, isang kasama sa kilusan. Nawala ang mag-ina. Nakatira iyon sa tahanan ng pamilya ni Roy na pinatay ng militar sa isang raid, ngunit nakuhang itakas ng ama. Hindi malaman kung saan napunta sina Karla at Malaya sa gitna ng ligalig at gulong bumalot sa mga nayong sumiklab sa labanan. Iyon ang naging obsesyon ni Anna mula nang sila’y mapalaya nang pumutok ang Pebrero 1986 People Power Revolution. Isang sindak na puminsala sa kaluluwa, higit pa sa pagtorture sa kaniya, dahil ang sugat noon ay hindi gagaling hanggang hindi bumabalik ang nawalang sanggol. Sa alegorikal na paghulo, ang tinutugis ay ang nawaglit na damdaming nagbubuklod sa mag-asawa at mga anak dahil sa pakikisangkot sa rebolusyon, sa isang dakilang adhikaing may layong higit pa sa pansariling kaabalahan ng karaniwang mamamayan.

Isang lunas ang nakuhang mapursigihan. Humilig si Anna sa kulto ng mga ina, wangis babaylan ng mga balo o nasawing asawa. Kaakibat nito ang sakripisyo ng anak bilang alay upang malunasan ang pagkakasala: ang paglabag sa totemikong awtoridad ng kalalakihan. Sa ilang kababaihan, ang babaylan ay naging sentro ng kulto sa paniniwalang senyas iyon ng sinaunang matriyarkal na lipunan. Sa kritisismo ni Paula Webster, mito o mistipikasyon iyon. At bagamat isinuob at sinamba ang mga diyosa sa altar, sa kongkretong kondisyon, inilagak lang sila sa tahanan na walang kapangyarihan (Webster 141-56). Mapanlinlang at mabighani ang maternidad at domestisidad, na siyang haligi at pundasyon ng patriyarkong paghahari ng kalalakihan. Subalit sa pagkawala ng rebolusyonaryong aktibidad (sinagisag ng pagkawala ng anak), ano ang alternatibong solusyon upang malunasan ang trauma?

Kung ama (diktadurya nina Marcos at mga heneral) ang bumuwag sa katarungan, sino ang liligtas sa mga nabiktimang mamamayan? Sa maternidad ng ina, na lumikha ng pagkatao ng komunidad, nakasalalay ang kaligtasan ng mga

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makatarungang bayani. Sa baligho’t ironikal na pag-ikot ng banghay, nakataya ito sa pagsulong ng mga pangyayaring di lubos na mapangangasiwaan. Ang tema ng nobela ay kalakip ng pagsisiyasat sa anong kahulugan ng paglalarawan ng inang tanging layon sa buhay niya, na ibinuhos sa rebolusyonaryong kilusan, ang hanapin ang nawawalang anak. Iyon ay pagtuklas sa kabuluhan at halaga ng kanilang rebolusyonaryong sikap at pasakit.

Pagtunton din iyon sa kabuluhan ng pakikisangkot. Bakit mahalaga iyon? At ano ang ipinahihiwatig nito sa konteksto ng krisis ng bayan mula nang bumagsak ang diktadurya at humalili ang rehimeng Aquino na kalauna’y higit pang mabagsik at malupit kaysa sa pinalitang halimaw? Bakit itinampok ang problema ng ina, kalakip ang linggatong ni Lorena, bilang sentro ng ulat tungkol sa kapalaran ng mga miyembro ng Partido Komunista/Bagong Hukbong Bayan, at kanilang kamag- anakan? Bakit pinagtuunan ng pansin ang pagkagulumihanan, ang pinsalang gumagambala sa kamalayan nina Anna at Roy, na sadyang nakakahilakbot at lubhang kalunos-lunos?

Sa ultimong pagsusuri ng kritiko, salungat ba o sang-ayon ang daloy ng mga pangyayari sa mapang iginuhit ng mga lider ng rebolusyonaryong kilusan? Ano ang relasyon ng ideya at aktuwal na pangyayari? Tumanggi ba ang karanasan na makatas sa hulmahan ng konsepto ng simbolo at talinghaga? O ipinagkanulo ba sila ng metapora’t palamuting retorikal? Matutugon ito sa diskursong idudulog.

PALIGSAHAN NG PANUNTUNAN AT PRAKTIKA

Sa dokumento ng partido (Communist Party) hinggil sa “On the Relations of the Sexes” na nirebisa sa “On Marriage,” walang patakaran sa pag-aalaga ng anak o pamamahala sa pamilya. Mabusisi ang dokumento tungkol sa panliligaw, pagtatalik, diborsiyo, atbp. Pinuna na ng maraming iskolar ang konserbatibo’t “androcentric” na pananaw ng dokumento na di-umano’y tinalaban ng “sexual panic” (Abinales 282). Sa pakiwari ko, lihis ang dogmatikong panukalang nabanggit sa tradisyon ng Yenan sa Tsina. Iyon ay bukas sa mga peministang tulad ni Ding Ling, na nabigyan ng inspirasyon nina Clara Zetkin at Rosa Luxemburg (Duyanevskaya 108-09). Kung sabagay, maski itong dalawang babaeng nagpasimuno ng peministang daloy sa kilusang sosyalismong pang-internasyonal ay limitado rin sanhi sa historikong pangangailangan (Zaretsky 96-97).

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Palibhasa’y nasa buntot tayo, batid natin ang mga kamalian ng nasa una, kaya hindi matino o matapat ang paghusgang mali o wasto ang kaisipan ng mga kontemporaneong kalahok sa pakikibaka. Ibitin natin ang ating pagtatasa muna.

Dagdag pang tanong: trahedya ba itong mga nangyaring puwedeng makapagbunsod ng katarsis o kaluwagan? O masokistang paglalarawan ng nakaduduwal na gahasa ni Anna at lalong nakaririmarim na pagpapahirap kay Roy? Hindi tuwa kundi alibadbad, hindi galak kundi hilakbot at suklam, ang ihahain nito sa dalumat ng mambabasa. Umabot sa naturalistikong estilo ang pagtatambad sa ritwal ng torture nakulayan ng banal o mala-sakramental na “aura” tulad ng mga hayup na kinakatay sa altar ng mga paganong bathala. Sa kabilang dako, mungkahi ni Susan Sontag, mapagmumuni ang obserbasyon ni Edmund Burke na lapat sa modernong kultura ng espetakulo: “I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others” (97). Alalaong baga, walang inosenteng mambabasa o kritiko.

Pagnilayan natin ang ilang proposiyong ito at mga konsekwensiyang mahihinuha mula rito. Paghahanap sa anak ni Anna, si Malaya, ang litaw na motor ng mga pangyayaring sumunod sa pagkapuksa ng pamilya ni Roy kung saan inilagak sina Karla at Malaya. Kalangkap nito ang torture ni Roy at karanasan pagkatapos. Ngunit ang motibasyon ng mga ideyang nakapaloob sa mga tauhan at relasyon nila ay sangkot sa kasaysayan ng bansa noong dekada 1970-1990. Ang motibasyon ng krisis ng mga tauhan ay kalakip sa sitwasyong nagbunsod sa pakikibaka (tungkol sa dramatistikong konseptong ginamit dito, tingnan si Burke 3-120). Paano masisilo at maiintindihan ang ugnayan ng kahapon at kinabukasan, ang mapait na mga nangyari at inaasahang lunas at kakamting ginhawa?

Sa ibang pagsasaayos ng ungkat natin, ano ang kahulugan at katuturan ng mga nangyari noong panahon ng karahasan bago ipataw ang batas militar at pagkaraan? Paano matatarok ang padron, iskema, o estruktura ng mga pangyayaring naganap simula mapatay si Nonong, unang asawa ni Anna at ama ni Malaya, hanggang sa magkatagpo muli ang mag-ina sa huling kabanata? Taglay ba ng mga hinabing pangyayari sa buhay ng ilang aktbista at kamag-anak nila ang makahulugang balangkas ng kasaysayan ng bansa, sampu ng panghihimasok ng U.S. sa diktaduryang Marcos at humaliling rehimen ni Corazon Aquino?

Sa maikling tugon, ang aral na mahuhugot ay walang absolutong kontrol ang tao sa takbo ng mga pangyayari. Ang pagkatuto sa paniwalang ito ay inilarawan ni Bautista sa mga katha sa Bayan Ko! (“Giyera,” halimbawa). Pag-angkop o pagtugma ng ninanais at pinapayagan ng nesesidad ang masasaksihan, partikular sa kuwentong “Ang Pag-ibig ay Isang Tula” (Bayan Ko! 1-118), o sa nobelang Sixty in the City at Sonata. Sa ibang parirala, pangangailangang gawad ng kasaysayan—sa

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mga relihiyoso, ang Diyos o mga bathala—ang nagdidikta ng kapalaran ng tao, ang tadhana ng mga lipi, lahi, at bansa. Ang kalayaan ay malalasap sa pagkilala at pagdalumat sa nesesidad (Marx 84).

Ngunit ang nobela ay may hain na natatanging kasagutan: nasa ating kolektibong pagpapasiya ang interpretasyon ng kahulugan ng mga pangyayari sa ating buhay na nagdudulot ng kalayaan sa gitna ng tadhana. Ayon kay Marx, dalawang magkatambal na panig (aktibo at pasibo) ang dapat pahalagahan: “Man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being—and because he feels what he suffers, a passionate being. Passion is the essential force of man energetically bent on its object” (Manuscripts 182). Sa pakiwari ko, ang Desaparesidos ay pagtatampok sa maigting na sagupaan ng mga “passion” o masimbuyong damdamin ng mga tauhang nakikilahok sa isang pangmatagalang proyekto ng pagbabago’t liberasyon ng buong sambayanan.

PAGTALOS SA MITHI NG LIKHANG–SINING

Ang sumusunod na kuro-kuro ay puna sa mga pangunahing karakter at kanilang sikolohiya—lalo na, ang masimbuyong damdamin—na mahigpit kalangkap ng kanilang kilos at ugnayan sa kapaligiran. Higit dito, ilalapag ang isang komentaryo tungkol sa kung paano ang motibong nagpapagalaw sa mga tauhan ay nagkukubli sa lohika ng patriyarkong ideolohiya at nagsisiwalat ng limitasyon ng burgesyang pananaw sa pagtuklas ng ugat ng mga suliraning sumaklot sa buhay nina Anna at Roy, Jinky at Karla, Lorena at Malaya. Mula sa “katayuang “desaparesidos” (Karla at Malaya), lumitaw at lumabas ang katotohanan: ang “reunion” o pagsasama muli ng ina at anak ay nakapupukaw na paalala na ito ay alibi o pansamantalang lunas sa mahapdi’t malalang krisis ng buong bansa. Senyal ang balita sa huling pahina ng nobela ng Proklamasyon 1017 ni Arroyo, “martial law” muli. Hindi pa man nailibing si Marcos, bumabalik na ang multo ng nakalipas na dapat mapurga sa sikmura ng kaluluwa at lubos na mapalis, mapawi, mapanaw. Malikmata ba o bigwas ng katotohanang hindi pa tapos ang pakikibaka?

Tambad na ang nobela ay pagsaliksik sa karanasang historikal ng bayan noong panahong humantong sa batas militar at kinahinatnan. Isinakatawan iyon sa mga pakikipagsapalaran ng mga taong kalahok sa pakikibaka at kanilang mga kadugo’t kasama. Iniulat ni Leonard Davis ang papel ng kababaihan sa pag-ugit at pagsulong sa kasaysayan ng buong Filipinas—samakatwid, hindi matatarok ang papel ng kababaihan tiwalag sa krisis ng sambayanan (San Juan, Between Empire 167-93;

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Aguilar 42-58; Santos Maranan 42-50). Karamihan sa bagong henerasyon ay halos walang alam tungkol sa diktaduryang Marcos at pagdurusang inihasik nito sa buong bayan. Patibay ang positibong opinyon ng marami kina Marcos, at ang di umano’y popularidad ng kandidatong Bongbong Marcos Jr. sa halalang Mayo 2022. Tiyak na bunga ito ng maling ulat o propaganda ng panig ng mga dinastiyang oligarkong kasabwat ng diktador, lalo na ang rehimeng Arroyo at Duterte. Hindi lahat ay sanhi sa mahinang gunita o makalimot na gawi ng millennials.

Biro-biro ba ang bantang bumalik ang mga anak ni Marcos upang maningil ng ganting-pabuya sa bayan? Bakit tayo muling nabingit sa ganitong kapahamakan? Ito ba’y malisyang laro ng tadhana, o bunga ng kolonisadong mentalidad ng nakararami na lubog sa pagkaduhagi, sa konsumerismo at pagkaalipin sa kapitalistang kultura ng egotismo’t pag-iimbot? Tinugon ito ni Bautista sa pag-inog ng predikamento ng mga tauhan sa nobela.

PAGKINTAL NG HILAHIL AT BALISA

Kasaliw din ang sumaryo ng dekada ng batas militar sa gitna ng nobela, sa pagitan ng Kabanata 9 at 10, pahina 85-104. Ang unang siyam na kabanata ay nagtapos sa pag-iisang-dibdib nina Anna at Roy; ang kasunod na mga kabanata ay nakapokus sa pagsisiyasat sa problema nina Lorena, Roy, Karla, at Malaya. Makatutulong kung sisipiin natin bilang saligang plataporma ng akda ang repaso ng awtor hinggil sa kapaligiran noon. Sa pagunita ng nobelista:

Tumindi nang husto ang mga protesta laban kay Marcos at sa U.S. imperialism. Naging magulo ang kalagayan. Naganap ang tinatawag na first quarter storm, January 1970, na nilahukan ng libu-libong kabataan. Pinagbabaril ng tropa ng gubyerno—PC (Philippine Constabulary) at Metrocom (Metropolitan Command) ang mga nagrarally sa Mendiola, apat na estudyante ang patay. Sinundan ng Labor Day massacre kaugnay ng rally noong May 1, 1971; pinagbabaril ng Metrocom ang mga nagra-rally, anim ang patay. Bukod pa ito sa mga nauna nang dinukot at hindi na nakita pa. Habang sa mga kanayunan, nagkakaroon na ng armadong sagupaan sa pagitan ng tropa ng gubyerno at New People’s Army, ang military arm ng Communist Party. [Sumunod ang deklarasyon ng batas- militar noong Setyembre 21, 1972, ang pagpataw ng pasistang dahas na pinalamutiang

“awtoritaryanismong konstitusyonal”]
Gulantang ang taong bayan (pero ‘yung mga aktibista, hindi; expected na nila iyon.)…

Naglipana ang mga sundalo, rumonda sa kalaliman ng gabi, nagsona sa mga komunidad… Tumago ang mga aktibista. Ilang buwan din silang nagpalipat-lipat sa bahay ng mga

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kamag-anak at kaibigan habang inaayos kung saang larangan sila pupunta at kung ano ang kanilang magiging gawain—sa propaganda ba o sa armadong pakikibaka?—marami sa kanila ang itinulak mismo ng martial law sa tuluyang pagpaloob sa kilusan at paglaban sa rehimeng Marcos. (Bautista, Hinugot 190-94)

Sa dalawang kabanatang nagbukas sa nobela, saksi na tayo sa resulta ng digmaang “people’s war,” giyerang sibil, na kung saan ang Estado ay suportado ng imperyalistang U.S. Bakit inuungkat pa ito? Hinihingi ng kaso ng mga biktima ng batas militar ang paglilikom ng maraming testimoniya na isasama sa “class suit” laban kay Marcos upang makakuha ng indemnity. Isinuma ni Alfred McCoy ang kaso ng 9,541 biktima na ginawaran ng $2 bilyon bayad-pinsala ng Honolulu U.S. District Court noong Setyembre 1992 (129-44). Ilan lamang iyong nagkaroon ng tentatibong “closure” sa 79,000 inaresto, 30,000 pinahirapan, at 1,000 desaparesidos (Pforr). Napilitan ang mga biktimang yumari ng imbentaryo ng kanilang pinsala at iba pang kahirapang

maibibintang sa diktadurya kakawing sa kalamidad na tiniis ng buong sambayanan.

Ang eksena ng imbestigasyon tungkol sa paglabag sa “human rights” ng Amnesty International at iba pang organisasyon, kaugnay ng “class action suit,” ay siyang naging pretext sa pangangalap ng testimoniya. Pagtuklap ito sa sugat na hindi pa lubos na naghilom, paghiwa sa pilat ng kapahamakan at di-maibsang trauma. Sindak tayo sa larawan ng dalagitang ginahasa ng vigilante, winarak ang dibdib upang kainin at magdulot ng “virility” o maskulinistang lakas. Patungkol ito sa Alsa Masa na pinamunuan noon ni Col. Franco Calida, ang “Rambo” ng Davao, kung saan sumibol ang mahilakbot na poder ni Rodrigo Duterte.

Tinutukoy din ito ng Amerikanong peryodistang si Stanley Karnow: “In 1986, when I visited Davao, the Communists controlled a slum district called Agdao. Calida cleaned out the area within two years with his three thousand men, numbers of them Communist defectors. But his and other groups, acting without official supervision, summarily killed suspects and settled old feuds. Some, like the Tadtad, which means ‘chop,’ were mystical cannibalistic cults that beheaded their victims and ate their livers” (427). Kakila-kilabot na paghulog sa barbarismo ang nasaksihan ng buong mundo. Gayunman, sapin-saping kahulugan ang masisipat sa pangyayaring iyon.

PAGHIMAY SA SINDROMA NG HILAKBOT

Bumalik tayo sa masaligutgot na suliranin ng mga pamilya. Wala pang kaganapan sina Roy at Anna. Bumalong sa alaala ni Anna ang nakalipas sa itinambad na

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bangkay ng kaniyang asawang si Nonong, gerilyang napuksa. Hindi siya makakibo. “Kaya na ba talaga niyang magsalita nang hindi nagsisikip-nagsisiklab ang loob? Dalawampung taon na—kaya na ba niya talagang ikuwento kung paano ibinilad ng mga sundalo sa plasa ang bangkay ng kanyang asawa, kasama ng bangkay…ng tatlong iba pa na pawang napatay daw sa engkuwentro? Mag-aanak lang iyon ng mahabang-mahabang kuwento na kakabit ng kanyang kasalukuyan” (Desaparesidos

3).

Nang pahintulutan si Anna ng kaniyang yunit sa New People’s Army (NPA) na patunayan kung asawa nga niya ang naibilad sa plasa, naipakita ang bigat ng pagpigil sa bugso ng damdamin—ang disiplina ng mandirigma—na mananatili habang hinahanap ang nawawalang anak na si Malaya: “Kailangan niyang magpakabato, timpiin ang sarili, mag-isip ng masaya. Sa harap ng bangkay ng kanyang asawa, sinikap niyang ilipad ang isip sa masayang sandali ng kanilang kasal, sa alaala no’ng unang gabi…” (Bautista, Desaparesidos 5). Isinalin niya ang realidad sa palapag ng alegorya at etikal-politikal na pagpapakahulugan—isang paraan sa unibersalisasyon ng partikular na bagay. Magugunita ang mga pinagbuhatang karakter ni Anna sa panitik ni Bautista: sina Amanda Bartolome sa Dekada ‘70 at Lea Bustamente sa Bata, Bata… Pa’no Ka Ginawa?—dumanas ng metamorposis at naging Anna o Karla (tungkol sa metodolohiya ng representasyon sa kababaihan, konsultahin sina Siapno, Libed, San Juan, Maelstrom 157-83).

Balighong pihit ng kapalaran! Ang payo ni Anna sa magulang na angkinin ang bangkay ay nagresulta lamang sa pagkapatay kay Tatay Dencio. Naging pahamak ang magandang intensiyon. Sa maniobra ng gunita, sinugpo ni Anna ang simbuyo ng matinding dalamhati. Sinawata niya ang lungkot at pinagpilitang lusawin iyon sa galit at ala-ala ng pangalan ng berdugong Tinyente Balmaceda “para sa araw ng pagtutuos.” Nakatutok sa kinabukasan ang pagsusulit ng lahat, ang pagpataw ng parusa sa mga malupit na sukab na umalipusta sa mga kasama. Ang sukling ganti ay babala sa mga buhong na lumigpit na at huwag tumulad sa mga taksil at palamarang kasama. Magbubunga ng mabuti ang pagpaparusa sa mga berdugo.

Masahol ang nakagigimbal na pagmasaker sa pamilya ni Roy, pati mga musmos na halos ikinasira-ng-bait ng lalaki. Hindi mapalis ang ulit-ulit na sumpang “Putang ina nila!” na tanda ng pagkapoot ng mga gerilya. Ay naku! Lalaking sundalo ang mga berdugo, pero ang mga ina ang sinisisi! Kahit ibulyaw na gaganti sila, mga pulang mandirigmang di-umano’y disiplinado, “hindi na sila kumbinsido sa sarili nilang mga salita. Hanggang sa kinalimutan na nila ang diwa ng pagganti. Kinalimutan na nila ang diwa ng pisikal ng paghahanap sa nawalang mga magulang, anak, kapatid. Patuloy na hinahanap na lang nila ang mga iyon sa loob ng kanilang mga duguang puso. Hinahanap sa pagod na isip nila…kahit na lang ang libingan ng kanilang mga mahal” (Bautista, Desaparesidos 29). Umiinog ang mga iba’t ibang palapag

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ng hermenyutika sa kanilang ulirat. Sa hangaring hanapin kung saan napadpad sina Karla at Malaya, bumaba sina Roy, Anna, at Jinky na nagbunsod sa kanilang pagdakip at pagtorture. Magandang balak at pakay, kay lupit na resulta.

Sa Kabanata 5 naikintal ang kinagawiang paghalay sa mga babaeng biktima ng militar. Lahat ng paglapastangan ay nagsulsol sa ganitong isip ni Anna: “Hindi niya mapapatawad ang pag-aglahi sa buong pagkatao niya. Higit kaysa pisikal na pagpapahirap sa kanya, mamamatay siya’y hindi niya mapapatawad ang pag- aglahi sa pagkatao niya. Years later, paulit-ulit pa ring dadalaw sa isip niya ang mga pag-aglahing ito at hindi pa rin siya makatugon gaano man kasuyo at kalambing ang pakikipagtalik sa kanya ni Roy” (Bautista, Desaparesidos 44). Naibsan lang itong malalim na sugat sa hinagap na buhay pa ang kaniyang anak sa kabila ng paglapastangan ng mga barbarikong sundalo: “Hindi magsisinungaling, hindi lang ang kitib ng suso niya, kundi higit sa lahat, ang tibok ng kanyang puso.” Pagmamahal sa anak ang bumura sa poot, sa di-masukat na pagkamuhi sa mga sundalo ni Marcos. Hindi biyaya o paumanhin iyon sa nagkasala kundi regalo ng inang taglay ang kapangyarihang maglunsad ng panibagong ugnayan, isang malasakiting transpormasyon ng kalikasan at santinakpan.

Ang sakripisyo ni Anna ay organikong dagok na bumiyak at halos dumurog sa rasyonal na personalidad. Nagkapira-piraso ang ulirat ng babae: sa isang panig, ang aglahing tanda ng pagtrato sa kaniya bilang isang bagay o gamit lamang; sa kabilang panig, ang pag-asam na nakaligtas ang kaniyang anak. Maipapasok dito ang mga kaso nina Trinidad Herrera (Bonner 191-93) at Angie Bisuna-Ipong, kapuwa nilapastangan ng militar ng Estado. Napako ang isip ni Anna sa unang anak, na ginawang simbolo ng lahat ng mabuti at maganda sa panahong bago bumagsak ang lagim, na hindi makasasapat ibuod. Kaya walang patid ang pauli-ulit ng nakaraan sa isip ni Anna, isang sintomas ng neurotikong pighati. Gayunman, kahanga-hangang hindi kumpletong naagnas ang kaniyang bait at budhi.

Walang pasubaling trauma nga sa depinisyon ni Richard Crownshaw ang idinulog sa atin ng predikamento ni Anna: ang tinawag na trauma ay insidente “that which defies witnessing, cognition, conscious recall and representation—generating the belated or deferred and disruptive experience of the event not felt at the time of witnessing” (167). Lumipat sa birtud ng katawan ang pagsuko ng isip. Saklob pa rin ng ideolohiya ng maternidad ang dalumat ni Anna, na nakatuon sa katawan (suso, tiyan, at matris). Batay ito sa anatomiya ng sanggol na kailangan ng mahabang aruga ng ina, o sinomang tutupad ng responsibilidad ng pagkalinga sa musmos. Itinakda ng biyolohiya ang panganganak na papel ng kababaihan, kaya ang pagiging ina at pangangalaga sa anak ay itinuring na esensiya ng pagkababae (sangguniin ang talakay sa paksang ito ni Torres-Yu; Aguilar; Eviota). Iyon ang tradisyonal na

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paniwala, ang ideolohiya at praktika ng maternidad, na may positibo at negatibong bisa.

HAMON SA PATRIYARKONG DANGAL

Sa Kabanata 6, nailarawan ang kahindik-hindik na torture ni Roy. Kapansin-pansin na hindi si Malaya ang bumabalisa sa ama kundi ang pagkawala ng kaniyang dangal. Kalunos-lunos ang kaniyang tinig na nagmamakaawa, humihingi ng atensiyon mula sa mga kasama o sinumang dudulog: “Kukumbinsihin na lang niya ang sarili na may naiiwan pa rin naman siyang dangal, meron pa naman siyang maipagmamalaki. Dahil at least hindi siya nagturo, hindi siya bumigay…Kasama, may dangal pa rin ako. Dahil kahit ano ang ginawa sa akin, hindi ako nagturo at hindi ako bumigay” (Bautista, Desaparesidos 33). Masalimuot ang danas sa mahapding pagdurusa. Nabusisi ng antropologong si Talal Asad ang paksang ito: “The instability of the concept of physical suffering is at one and the same time the source of ideological contradictions and of strategies available for evading them” (118). Sa isang anggulo, eksplorasyon ng paksang ito ang nobela ni Bautista.

Kamangha-mangha ang saloobin ni Roy. Maiintindihan iyon bilang palatandaan ng masalimuot na paglalangkap ng barbariko, piyudal, at mala-burgesyang sensibilidad sa isang neokolonya na walang matatag na industriya at nakasadlak pa rin sa agrikulturang ekonomya at kalakalang pang-komprador. Asimetrikal at di- sinkronisado ang maraming bahagi ng totalidad. Masasabing nilagom ng nobelista dito sa sintomas ng trauma/sugat sa pagkatao ni Roy ang krisis ng sistemang tiwali, ang paghahari ng minoryang oligarkiya, ng uring patriyarkong maylupa, burukrata-kapitalista, at komprador-kasabwat ng imperyo. Magkatiklop ang apat na dimensiyon ng hermenyutika sa anatomyang sikolohikal ni Roy.

“Dangal” ng pagkalalaki, hindi si Malaya, ang obsesyon ni Roy, hayag na kaiba kay Anna. Bagamat maka-kaliwa kundi man Marxista, ang sukat ng halagahan sa mga lalaking kasangkot sa rebolusyon ay piyudal pa rin. Hindi ito mahiwaga. Sa pangkat ng aristokrasya at kabalyerong maharlika sa Europa bago sumiklab ang rebolusyong

burgesya sa Pransiya, ang dangal ay katangian ng panginoong may-lupa. “Honor” at amor-propio ang salik ng minanang ugali ng katapatan sa tradisyon ng mga mayamang ginoong dumadakila sa birtud ng katapangan sa labanan (Ossowska 131-54). Maharlikang puri ang nakapusta sa giyera. Kakatwa na hindi nagapi itong lumang tradisyon sa kampanya ng “rectification” ng partidong nakasalig sa simulain ng pagkakapantay-pantay, hustisyang panlipunan, at demokratikong patakaran.

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Ibig sabihin, matagal at mahaba ang proseso ng transpormasyon ng gawi/ugali ng lipunan.

Marahil, lubhang nalukob sa pangungulila si Roy dahil sa sinapit ng pamilya. Sapagkat walang ibang lalaki sa naratibo na susukli sa kaniyang nagawa—na magdudulot ng tingin ng pagkakilala sa kaniyang halaga bilang taong malaya’t makatwiran. Ang nalalabing resolusyon sa malubhang sugat sa pagkatao ni Roy ay isang babae, si Karla. Nakuhang isakripisyo ni Karla si Malaya at unawain ang simbolikong kinalaman nito sa pagsulong ng kapalaran ng sambayanan. Maituturing na ito ang mabisang gamot sa sakit ng mga lalaki nang hukayin muli ni Roy sa burol ng mga alaala ang pagtataksil niya kay Lito sa bilangguan, at pagsunod sa utos “galing sa itaas”—mahigit 20 taon na ang nagdaan:

Pero ito’y pangungumpisal at wala nang dapat ilihim. Wala nang dapat iwanan na hindi nasasabi.

“Isa pa, galit na galit ako. Pinatay ng mga sundalo ang pamilya ko, at hindi ko kayang patawarin…at least noon…hindi ko kayang patawarin pati kahit sinong makipagkutsaba sa kanila. Nagpapakamatay akong ubusin din ang lahi nila. Nagpapakamatay akong makaganti!”

. . . “Sa iba ko sinisisi pati ang sarili kong kahinaan. Gusto kong patunayan na iba ako kay Jinky. Kahit nasubukan ko na rin kung hanggang saan lang ang tapang ko. Hindi ako matapang…duwag ako!”

At tuluyan nang sumabog ng iyak si Roy. Dito mismo, sa harap ni Karla. Sa harap ng asawa na pinatay niya.

Masuyong kinabig ni Karla si Roy ang lalaking pumatay sa asawa niya. Sa tahimik na paraan, sa paraan na wala ni isang patak na luha, kinabig niya sa balikat niya si Roy at hinayaan niya kahit mabasa nang basang-basa ang kanyang dibdib sa luha nito. (Bautista, Desaparesidos 213)

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BABAYLAN NG KATUBUSAN

Lubhang nakapupukaw ang tagpong iyon, sinematikong eksena na nakatutuksong hindi isalin sa pelikula. Si Karla ang nagsilbing ahensiya sa paglilinis ng konsiyensiya ng lalaki, katarsis na sa ultimong analisis ay mediyasyon ng diyalektika ng ideolohiya at ekonomiyang pampolitika. Himalang nahugasan ang pagkakasala ni Roy sa isang maantig na tagpo. Maitatanong lang kung ito’y pagpapahinuhod o wagas na kabatiran na walang malisya sa nagawang pagkitil ng buhay ng kasama. Nasabi na ni Karla na dapat kalimutan na ang nangyari nang “mamatay” ang anak ni Anna. Humihingi ng kapatawaran si Anna sa anak na kaniyang iniwan kay Karla dahil hindi niya iniwan ang kilusan. Sa balik-tanaw na sana’y naghanap ng ibang paraan, pakli ni Karla, batid niyang limitado ang pagkakataong idinulot ng conjuncture ng mga pangyayari. Ito ang iginuhit na eksena ng nobelista:

“Walang ibang paraan!” Maigting na ngayon, mariin ang tinig ni Karla. Inilayo niya sa kanya si Anna na para tiyakin na kaya niyang salubungin din ni Anna ang mga mata niya.” Sapalaran ang buhay natin; sino ang makapagsasabi ng tama at maling paraan? Maski ang kilusan mismo, maraming pagkakamali! Mga pagkakamali na nagsanhi ng maraming kamatayan!” (Bautista, Desaparesidos 200)

Sumaksi ang sandali ng pagkilala sa kapuwa, pagkakakilanlan, nagbuhat sa sakripisyo ng bawat kalahok. Nakita ni Anna “sa unang pagkakataon, ang mga latay ng kirot na hindi rin ganap na binura ng panahon sa mukha ni Karla.” Magkayapos at magkahalikan halos, isang imahen ng kapatiran o solidaridad, ito ang katarsis na inaabangan natin bago pa man maibunyag ni Karla sa huling kabanata ang tunay na nangyari sa kaniya. Pagliripin ang tila melodramatikong pagkasal ng dalawa: “Wala nang nagsasalita, wala nang naririnig kundi ang hininga ng isa’t isa, dinadama ang init ng luha ng bawa’t isa sa kanilang mga pisngi…silang dalawang babaing minsa’y nagsukob sa iisang bandila ng pakikibaka” (Bautista, Desaparesidos 200). Nakatahi ang literal, moral, alegorikal, at anagohikal na aspekto ng teksto dito sa siniping talata.

Maingat tayong lumundag sa dakong wakas, ang pagtatapat ni Karla kay Malaya, anak ni Anna, sa tunay na nangyari—ang katotohanan na nagpalaya kay Roy na di matatalikuran. Amin ni Karla ang pananagutang ibunyag—isiwalat o ibulatlat— ang talagang nangyari na hindi alam ng anak. Sa tulay ng anak maipahahatid ang katotohanan. Determinadong iligtas ang supling ni Anna, kaya maski kailanman, hindi binitiwan ni Karla habang siya’y nakunan. Ipinagdasal niyang maisagip si Malaya. Kumpisal niya sa dalagang 20 taong gulang na ikakasal na: “Hindi ko binalak na angkinin ka…pero hindi na kita magagawang ibalik sa mga taong walang katiyakan ang buhay” (Bautista, Desaparesidos 217). Tumpak na desisyon kaya iyon o rasyonalisasyon?

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Sa ano’t anuman, pinalaki ang bata at itinuro ang landas upang makabalik sa tinubuang lupa at maging bahagi muli ng dati’y napariwarang kabuuan na ngayo’y unti-unting bumabangon. Sinikap dito na pagdugtungin ang nakalipas at kasalukuyan, punan ang nawaglit/kinalimutang yugto sa buhay, upang magpatuloy ang kaginhawaan ng buong lipunan. Hindi lang ito personal na desisyon kundi simbolo ng kolektibong pagpapasiyang mailigtas ang mga sugatang biktima ng diktaduryang Marcos. Nakakawing dito ang lohika at rason ng pagyari ng hugpungan ng mga karanasan na isinagawa ng tagapag-salaysay.

Sa huling kabanata, naganap kaya ang rekonsilyasyon ng kahapon, ngayon, at kinabukasan? Nagkasudlong kaya ang nahiwalay na bahagi ng mga buhay nina Anna, Roy, at Karla, pati na sina Lorena at Malaya? Paglimiin natin ang hiwatig ng pagtatapat ni Malaya na siya ang kadugo ni Anna, batay sa kumpisal ng inang umaruga sa kaniya. Ibig idiin rito na ang kusang nagdurugtong ng lumipas at ngayon ay ang anak na nawaglit, nawala, at ngayo’y lumitaw upang likhain ang hinaharap. Higing dito na lumayo si Karla, naglaho na tulad ni Roy mula sa inilawang entablado ng dula: “No’ng magkasunog daw ho sa baryong pinagdalhan sa kanya ng tatay ng asawa n’yo, ako raw ho ang nabuhay. Namatay daw ho ‘yong anak niya” (Desaparesidos 218). Maiisip ang mala-bibliyang kawikaan: “Kung hindi

mamamatay ang binhi, hindi sisibol at mamumukadkad ang palay.”

Nabigla si Anna. Di akalaing makikita ang hinahanap. Pinakadiin niya ang talim ng kuko niya sa kaniyang braso—upang siguraduhin na hindi iyon panaginip o bangungot? Dugtong ni Malaya: “Kaya n’yo ho bang patawarin ang mama ko? Kasi, naging mabuting ina naman siya sa akin. Ni minsan man, hindi ko naramdaman na hindi niya ako tunay na anak.” Dama ang ambiguwidad, parikala, balighong katuparan, kakatwang ambil sa reaksiyon ni Anna. Samot-saring damdamin ang naghalo rito. Masinop nating namnamin ang dating ng makahulugang engkuwentro ng nawala at taong naghahanap na naikintal sa pinakasasabikang tagpo sa nobela:

Nang ibaba ni Anna ang kamay niya ay hindi para yakapin si Malaya kundi para yakapin ang sarili. Tumatawa-umiiyak siyang yakap at inuugoy-ugoy ang sarili na parang dalawang tao siya: isang kumokonsola at isang kinokonsola. Hanggang sa si Malaya ang yumakap sa kanya, niyakap, niyakap siya nang mahigpit, buong higpit, na parang sa yakap na iyon ay sinisikap ibalik ang dalawampu’t isang taon. (Bautista, Desaparesidos 220)

Matagumpay kaya ang pagkakabit ng nabiyak na buhay o kamalayan? Hindi komprontasyon ito ng dalawang ina kundi ina at isang taong may dalawang pusod o tali sa matris (pasaring sa “woman who had two navels” ni Nick Joaquin). Maibabalik kaya ang nakalipas? Mabubuo kaya ang nadurog na padron ng pamilyang nukleyar— ama, ina, anak—ng gitnang uri? Tiyak na oo, sapagkat sa metodo ng interpretasyon

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naipagkakabit ang apat na antas ng kahulugan sa hermenyutikang komentaryo sa punto de bista ng materyalismong historikal.

Sa pakiwari ko, ang tungkulin ni Karla bilang bukal ng paglitaw ng nawala ay mamagitan sa mga kontradiksiyong nahalungkat. Siya ang gumaganap ng mediyasyon sa mga magkakontrang puwersa. Nahinog sa kaniyang pagtatapat ang katarsis ng pagkilala sa suliranin ni Anna, at tuloy pagkilala sa traumang dinanas ni Anna. Silang dalawang ina ang nagpabisa sa papel ni Malaya bilang lumutang na kaganapan na maghihilom sa sugat ng mga magulang. Si Malaya ang nagsilbing kawing upang mapunan ang kakulangan, ang nawalang gunita ng nakalipas.

Susog ko ang thought-experiment na ito. Maipapalagay ito na pigura o analohiya ng pagpapalitan ng mga babae (“exchange of women” sa saliksik ni Claude Levi- Strauss na maiging binatikos ni Gayle Rubin; tingnan din si Webster) na ugat ng

“incest taboo” na nagpasinaya sa sibilisadong lipunan. Taglay nito ang mensahe na ang identidad ninuman ay nakasalalay sa pagkilala o pagtanggap ng Iba/Kaibhan, ang negasyon o negatibidad sa loob ng pagkatao. Maipagsasanib ang lahat kung may kasunduang batay sa isang adhikain, panata o mithiing pinapatnubayan ng buong sambayanan.

MATERYALISTIKONG URIAN

Isang problematikong bagay ang dapat linawin. Bago natin tunghayan ang kalagayan nina Lorena at Eman, at paglalapit nina Lorena at Malaya, nais kong igiit dito ang isang sagot sa tanong tungkol sa pagbuo ng pagkatao at pagtuklas ng kahulugan ng partikular na buhay sa konteksto ng kasaysayan ng buong lipunan. Ito ang temang naturol sa unahan. Maidiriin dito na sa bagsik ng krisis, nayanig ang kanayunan at nawasak ang panatag na buhay ng pesanteng pamilya. Nasira ang luma’t walang katarungang kontrata sosyal. Sina Roy at Jinky ay nakaugat sa piyudal na ordeng patriyarkal na unti-unting nabubuwag ng pagdaralita at paglisan ng kabataan upang maghanap-buhay sa siyudad. Nakataya ang halaga ng dangal ng kalalakihan.

Samantala, ang petiburgesyang saligan nina Anna at Karla ay mapanganib. Nakadepende iyon sa lagay ng ekonomiya na natigatig ng krisis ng batas militar, korapsyon, kumpitensiya ng mga oligarkong pangkat ng mga komprador at burukratang kasabwat ng dayuhang korporasyon at imperyalistang Amerika. Bulnerable ang patriyarkong pundasyon ng pamilya na naka-angkla sa produktibong

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gawain ng kalalakihan at walang bayad na trabaho ng kababaihan sa pagsustina sa reproduktibong relasyon ng kabuhayan ng buong lipunan.

Bago natin bulatlatin at tistisin ang huling yugto ng kasaysayan, nais kong isingit dito ang lagom ng mga kuro-kurong nailatag na. Walang pasubali na ang mga tauhan at pangyayari ay maipapakahulugan na representasyon ng ilang ideya at hinuha, konsepto at paniniwala, na kakabit ng ating kasaysayan. Hinihingi ito ng hermenyutikang pagbasa rito. Ang mga tauhan dito ay sumasagisag sa ugali o gawing tipikal ng mga uri, lalo na ang uring anak-pawis (Roy, Jinky) na sa paglipat sa kapaligiran ng kalunsuran ay nagkaroon ng petiburgesyang kilos at pananaw. Dahil dito, ang naratibo at diskurso ay magkalakip sa proyekto ng “national allegory,” sa depinisyon ni Fredric Jameson: “the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society”(Allegory 165). Bahagi ito ng hermenyutika ni Jameson na nabanggit sa umpisa.

Sa gayon, ang partikular na buhay ay nailipat sa mataas na palapag ng konkretong unibersal na masisipat sa mga tauhang nakikipagsapalaran. Malimit maisakatuparan ito sa pamamagitan ng testimonyal, o testimonya ng mga biktimang nilikom sa umpisa—isang demokratiko’t egalitaryang porma ng salaysay ng masang bumabangon, tulad ng testimonya ni Rigoberta Menchu (Larsen 9-10). Kahawig kay Menchu sina Maria Lorena Barros, Nelia Sancho, Adora Faye de Vera,

Angie Ipong, Resteta Fernandez, Luisa Posa Dominado, Judy Taguiwalo, at marami pang kapanalig (Chapman 120, 151; Davis 127-31).

Ang protagonistang Anna, Roy, Jinky, at mga anak ay kumakatawan sa “public third world society.” Sina Anna, Karla, Lorena, at Eman ay produkto ng urbanidad, partikular ang kapaligiran ng gitnang-saray na dinaliri ni Amado Guerrero/Jose Maria Sison sa klasikong teksto ng mapagpalayang kilusan, Lipunan at Rebolusyong Pilipino (271-77). Ang iba’y representatibo ng proletaryo’t pesante. Sa okasyong ito, baka magamit ang diyagramang ito sa pagsasaayos ng interpretasyon ng tema’t estruktura ng nobela alinsunod sa semiotikang historikal:

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DIAGRAM for E. San Juan, “Gunita, pagsusumakit…. (pageS 19-20)

KINABUKASAN / MAKABAYANG DETERMINASYON

(Malaya: kaganapang lumutang)

MATERNIDAD DANGAL NG PATRIYARKO

(Anna: trauma ng danas) (Roy: kakulangang petiburgis}

KAPATAWARANG LUMITAW
(Karla: katarsis-pagkilala, kahapong nawaglit)

(Jinky: partidong nabiyak, tukso ng multo)

NAWALANG BAHAGING UMAAHON

(Lorena, Eman: pagpapasiya)

Balangkas ng mga Konseptong Uminog sa Banghay ng Nobela bilang ———————————————————————

Pambansang Alegorya

BALANGKAS NG MGA KONSEPTONG UMINOG
SA BANGHAY NG NOBELA BILANG PAMBANSANG ALEGORYA

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DIYALEKTIKA NG PAMANAGUTAN AT HIYA

Sa gitna ng krisis, bumukana ang mahalagang gawain ng kababaihan sa domestikong larang: pag-aalaga ng bata, pag-aayos ng tahanan, pagpaplano, pagtugon sa pangangailangang seksuwal ng ama/asawa, atbp. Sandaling umatras ang salaysay sa yugto ng pangangalap ng pagkain, pangangaso ng lalaki na umaktong armadong amang tanggulan ng tribu bago bumalik sa larang ng ugaling piyudal at mala- esklabo (Gough 51-76). Sa halip na indibidwalistikong pagkayod upang mabuhay, kailangan ang pagbubuklod upang mapanatili ang kalusugan at mapaunlad ang kapakanan ng komunidad. Simbolo ang partido at hukbo ng pulang mandirigma, kaalyansiya ng mga aktibistang mobilisado sa kilusan ng Nagkakaisang Hanay ng National Democratic Front.

Natupad kaya ang pagpunla ng kolektibong pagpupunyagi sa mga sakripisyo nina Anna at Roy, nina Karla at Jinky? Sina Lorena, Malaya, at Eman ba ang matipunong salinlahing huhugot ng aral sa nakalipas? Sila ba ang nag-angkin ng katungkulang magtatapon ng masama upang konserbahin ang mabuti, at magtatayo ng masagana’t mapagpalayang lipunan? Sila ba, hindi ang partido o masang sunud- sunuran, ang makapagpapatnubay sa transpormasyon ng buong sambayanan? May himig retorikal ang mga tanong na naipahayag dito, at hinuhang nasagot ito ng mga tagpong naisadula sa nobela.

Magugunita na si Lorena ay nawaglit sa kamalayan nina Anna at Roy habang tumutupad ng kanilang tungkulin. Lubhang bumuhos ang sigla ni Anna sa paghahanap kay Malaya. Samantala, si Roy ay saklot ng balisa sa kaniyang sekretong pagtataksil kay Lito, at pansamantalang pagkukubli ng pananagutan sa pagpatay kay Jinky—dalawang desaparesidong bagay. Napawi ang trauma sa kaniyang pagkumpisal at pagpapatawad ni Karla na tila naging babaylang taga- purga sa lason ng nakalipas. Mapapansin na lumabo ang pagtingin niya kay Roy pagkatapos mabigo sa pagdalaw sa mga magulang ni Jinky at naging mapaghinala siya. Nakabaon sa obhetibong kaganapan ang etikal-moral na kahulugan, at implikasyon nito sa takbo ng buong lipunan.

Sa katunayan, hindi kasalanan kundi hiya ang problema ni Roy, hiya na panlipunang pakiramdam—hiya sa harap ni Lito at mga kapanalig. Hindi guilt o saloobing nagkasala ang argumento rito. Hindi iyon kasalanan sa paglabag sa utos ng simbahan o relihiyon kundi kabiguan sa magilas na pagpapasikat ng dangal, tapang, mapangahas na asta o atitudo sa harap ng hamon ng mga kaaway. Muli, nais kong salungguhitan, hindi guilt kundi shame ang usapan dito. Bagamat maitutulad ang asta ni Roy sa amor propio, hindi naman egotistiko sapagkat ang konsepto ng sarili (makasariling malay) ay nakapaloob sa pagmamalasakit sa mga inaapi’t

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pinagsasamantalahan—sa madaling salita, ang hiya ay nakalakip sa damayan at pasakit sa ngalan ng kolektibong interes ng bayan na ipinaglalaban.

Sa historiko-materyalistikong pananaw, ang hidwaan ng karapatan at obligasyon ay nakapaloob sa tunggalian ng mga uri sa isang tiyak na panahon at lugar. Sa kabilang dako, ang abstraktong konsepto ng kalayaan, ang indibidwalistikong karapatan sa ordeng neokolonyal, ay hungkag at laging pinabubulaanan ng kapangyarihan ng salapi at pribadong pag-uuri (Kamenka). Wasto ang pagkitil sa buhay ng kaaway kung iyon ang taktikang kailangan upang maipagwagi ang paggiba sa kapitalistang sistemang sumusupil sa mayorya. Pasiya iyon ng partidong sinumpang sundin ni Roy bilang kasapi. Ang politika ng pakikibaka ang mananaig. Hindi matatawaran ang disiplina at pakikisangkot ni Roy bilang miyembro ng partidong rebolusyonaryo. Ngunit ang kaluluwa niya ay hindi disiplinado ng partido, nangibabaw ang afirmasyon niya ng ganti o personal na pagsingil sa buhay ng mga pumaslang sa kadugo. Malakas pa rin sa ulirat/damdamin ang ideolohiya o habitus ng tradisyong piyudal.

Subalit dapat pagmuniin na hindi simple at uni-dimensiyonal ang usapin. Kung ano ang epekto ng aksiyon ni Roy o sinopamang aktor sa konsensiya, malay, o sensibilidad ng aktor—iyon ay tanong na hindi malilinaw kung hindi sisiyasatin sa konkretong suri ng sitwasyon. Dapat sikaping ilugar ang anomang kilos sa isang tiyak at takdang sirkumstansiyang pangkasaysayan kasangkot ng napakaraming puwersang nagtatagisan. Sa masinop na pagkilatis, pinakamahalaga ang resulta at kinahinatnan ng anomang ginanap. Tiwalag sa rebolusyonaryong pamantayan, ang ganting ginawa ni Roy ay saklaw sa kategorya ng “retributive justice.” Hindi iyon ispesimen ng pagtalima sa “categorical imperative” ni Immanuel Kant o etika ng birtud pangkalalakihan nina Aristoteles at mga Romanong pilosopo’t mambabatas, o maski na sa utilitaryanistikong kodigo ng kapitalismong industriyal at komersiyal.

Mabigat na pangangatuwiran ang matitimbang sa repleksiyon ni Agnes Heller hinggil sa palaisipang ito: “The modern concept of retribution excludes revenge.

Yet if the norms and rules of a society include revenge, the form of revenge carried out in terms of the norms and rules is retribution proper. The modern concept of retribution excludes collective retribution for the simple reason that we ascribe the act solely and exclusively to the individual (its actor)…But the idea of collective retribution has not completely withered. Balzac’s question, ‘Who is responsible for collective crimes?’ has been repeatedly raised in our century” (156). Ang sagot ng nobela ay walang pasubali o alinlangan: sa malupit na rehimeng pasista ni Ferdinand Marcos at mga sundalo-pulis na instrumento ng pagmamalupit at paniniil, suportado ng mga amo nila sa Washington, USA, at sa kapitalismong pinansiyal ng World Bank-International Monetary Fund.

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HERMENYUTIKANG PAGSASANAY

Sa kontrobersyang ito, maligoy ang mga argumento at hindi malulutas ang suliranin sa pormalistikong paraan. Naisusog na ni Marx (“Kant”) ang kakulangan ng burgesyang sumilang sa Alemanya noong siglo 1800, na mababakas sa metapisikang lohika ni Kant sa aksyom ng “categorical imperative.” Hindi nakamit ng marupok na burgesya ang kapangyarihan sa Alemanya, kaya nagkasiya na lang sa kanila ang aral ni Kant sa Critique of Practical Reason (ikumpara ang argumento ni Marcuse [133-47]). Indibidwalistiko at abstrakto ang pormula ni Kant na taliwas sa konkretong sitwasyon ng tao sa kasaysayan.

Gayundin ang apolohiya sa rehimeng Marcos ni Leon Maria Guerrero ng intelihensiyang ilustrado. Ikinumpara pa ang diktador kay Cromwell at pinahalimuyak ng mga reperensiya kina Rizal at Mabini. Sa kaniyang “Today Began Yesterday,” pinuri ni Guerrero ang diktador at ang tinaguriang “New Society” na taglay di-umano ang “high moral consciousness” (53). Ang punto-de-bista ni Guerrero ay nakaugat sa oportunistang lahi nina Paterno, Tavera, at Buencamino, na tuwirang ipinagkanulo ang rebolusyonaryong Republika nang sakupin tayo ng U.S. Mahigit ilang milyong biktima ang bunga ng pagsuko sa kolonyalista, hanggang sa administrasyon nina Quezon, Osmena, Roxas, Quirino, Magsaysay, at Macapagal. Sina Guerrero, Ople, Cristobal, O. D. Corpuz, at kanilang alipores ay gumapas ng 3,275 bangkay at higit 3,000 bilanggong tinortyur, bukod sa 1,000 desaparesidos. Wala pang husga mula sa sambayanang sinalanta ng terorismo ng batas militar, isang kalamidad na hanggang ngayon ay umaani ng di-matingkalang kahirapan at pambubusabos. Basahin muli ang mga ulat ng peryodiko at iskolar ukol sa malagim na rehimeng hindi na desaparesido kundi lumabas na’t narito na sanhi sa pagbabalik ng anak ng despotikong berdugo (Ferdinand Marcos Sr.) sa Malakanyang.

Napipinto na naman tayo sa malubhang krisis sa inaugurasyon ni Marcos Jr. Wala kaya tayong natutuhan sa nakalipas? Natuyot ba ang memorya o nagumon lamang sa konsumerismo at sa nakalalangong simulakra ng megamall at milagrosang malikmata ng Internet? Ano kaya ang mamanahin ng mga “martial law babies” (tulad ni Lorena) at mga milenyal kung muling mamaslang ang angkang Marcos at magmulto ang batas militar? Noong una trahedya raw, ngunit sa pangalawa, sasaksi ba tayo ng isang nakatatawang komedya, o madugo’t kakila-kilabot na interlude? Siguro makatutulong ang pagbasa sa nobelang ito.

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SUBALIT HINDI IGINUHIT NG TADHANA

Kakawing ng usapin ng hustisya ang problema ng pananagutan. Sa gerang sibil sa neokolonyang bayan, kung saan ang imperyo ay sumusulsol sa Estadong mapanupil, kumplikado ang tanong: sino ang dapat managot? Hindi lang etikal-moral na isyu ito kundi sosyo-politikal (Asad 100-26; Sontag 74-126). Hindi rin ito maihihiwalay sa espesipikong lugar at panahon. Halimbawa ang pagtrato nina Anna at Roy kay Lorena. Sa Kabanata 10 inilarawan ang dalumat ng anak: “Dinala ni Lorena sa puso niya ang feeling na ‘taga-labas’ at walang tunay na sense of belonging” (Bautista, Desaparesidos 105).

Napanood ni Lorie ang “coup” nina Enrile at Honasan laban kay Cory Aquino nang siya ay sampung taon pa lamang. Bumalik si Roy, na bumubulalas na “Ako ang tatay mo!” Pero salita lamang iyon. Si Lorena ay patuloy na galit at ayaw papasukin ang magulang sa kaniyang silid. Sinabi sa kaniya ni Eman ang tungkol kay Lorena Barros. Natakot siyang mawala si Eman, na iiwan siya tulad ng ginawa ng kaniyang tatay at nanay. Sa Kabanata 14, nagalit si Lorena nang umalis ang magulang upang mahanap muli ang nawawalang anak: “Laos na ang rebolusyon, tigilan na dapat iyan. Paulit-ulit lang ang kuwento ng panahon.” Kontra sa kaniyang katukayo ang opinyong nasambit, magiting na bayani na pinagtaksilan ng unang asawang tumalikod sa partido—isang insidenteng nakatatak din sa motibasyon ng nobelista (Hernando 65-100; Chapman 214-62).

Isa pang interpretasyon ang maihaharap dito. Maari ring ipakahulugan ang pabaling-baling na hilig ni Lorena sa mga pabagu-bagong alyansiya ng mga puwersang politikal kagyat na mapatay si Senador Aquino noong Agosto 21, 1983 (Diokno 132-75; Maglipon). Integral na salik ito ng isang ekspresyon ng pambansang alegoryang natukoy natin, kung saan ang partikular ay salamin ng konkretong unibersal ng komunikasyon ng mga lumalahok sa ugnayang panlipunan. Ang aspektong reperensiyal ay saligan ng mapanuring elaborasyon tungo sa alegorikal at anagohikal na kahulugan. Ulirang birtud ito ng sirkulo o bilog ng hermenyutikang proseso.

Tunghayan natin ang nangyari sa Kabanata 21 bilang paglilinaw. Isiniwalat ni Anna ang kaniyang damdamin kay Lorena: “Mahal kita kahit habambuhay ko,

hindi hihiwalay sa isip ko ang anak kong panganay…Dahil ina ako at anak ko rin iyon. Naiintindihan mo, Lorie?” Nawala ang espasyong nakapagitan sa dalawa: “Ito ang unang pagkakataon na damang-dama niya ang nanay niya. Na parang siya at ito ay iisa.” Sa bisa nito, niyakap niya sa Eman sa kanilang muling pagkikita:

“…Hindi lang ito ang niyayakap niya kundi pati ang nanay niya at ang tatay niya at ang nanay nito at ang tatay nito at ang buong saysay at kahulugan ng kanilang mga buhay” (Bautista, Desaparesidos 207-08). Sa malas, humihingi ito ng alegorikal at

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anagohikal na interpretasyon dahil ang mga indibidwal ay representasyon na ng yugto ng kasaysayan ng buong lipunan. Sinalungguhitan ito ng nobelista sa ritmo at indayog ng salita at sa himig-orasyon o dasal ng pangungusap.

PAGSUBOK SA PAGSULIT

Karapat-dapat nang magwakas ang salaysay sa pagsasama ng ina at anak, ng anak at kaibigan. Buo na ang mga pamilya. Sa wakas, kusang nagpakita ang nawala. Ngunit mapupunan ba ang panahon ng sakuna, ang konkretong realidad ng pagsakripisyo ng pagkatao, puri, dangal, hapdi, mahapding pasakit ng kaluluwa? Unawain natin kung iyong unang imahen o signos ng babaeng ginahasa’t pinatay ay mabubura’t mapapalitan ng magandang litrato ng dalagang ikakasal na ipagbubunyi ng mga magulang, kapatid, at masuyong kapanalig. Mahirap paniwalaan ito.

Nagkaroon na ng ugnayan sina Lorie at Roy. Kulang na lang ang panganay na kapatid, si Malaya, na lilitaw muli sa entablado bilang emblematiko ng di-mabilang na desaparesidos. Sa huling eksena, naipagtapat ni Lorie na gustong-gusto niyang makilala si Malaya buhat noong itinakas si Marcos ng U.S. at inilipad sa Hawaii. Bitbit ni Lorie ang isang album na walang laman: “Gusto kong makilala noon dahil kapatid kita, dugtong pa ni Lorie. Ngayon, gusto kitang makilala dahil gusto kong makilala ang panahong pinagdaanan ng ating mga magulang. Ang kanilang mga karanasan na ang anino ay parati pa ring nakapatong sa ating mga likod” (Desaparesidos 220-21). Tumugon si Malaya na nais din niyang makilala si Lorie,

“ang sarili kong ugat at ang dugong dumadaloy sa mga ito.” Dugo hindi lamang ng pamilya kundi ng buong lahi, ng sambayanang lumawig sa daloy ng kasaysayan, mga magkakaibang komunidad na nakabuklod sa iisang tadhana.

Mga mambabasa, itigil natin sandali ang paggulong ng montage ng dula at magbulay-bulay tayo. Kilatisin at suriin kung ang alegoryang pambansa ay usapin ng dugo at lupa, o usapin ng mga paninindigan at adhikaing ipinaglalaban. Marahil, madaling sagutin na magkasanib iyon, hindi maibubukod. Sina Malaya at Lorena ay kinatawan ng magkabigkis na tagpo ng nagdaang kahapon, ng nakaharap na ngayon, at inaantabayanang pagdating ng inaasam-asam. Ito rin ang turo ng hermenyutikang nailapat natin sa pagbasa.

Panghimasukan natin ang paglilirip na ito. Nakasiksik sa maramdaming indayog ng mga pangungusap ng talambuhay ang susi sa palaisipan kung ang mga pangyayaring naiulat ay nakatugon sa mga tanong na inilahad sa unahan: “At sa umaga

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ng kanyang kasal, mataimtim na ikinakasal din ni Malaya ang sarili sa nakaraan at kinabukasan ng kanyang bayan. Sa kasalukuyang pag-uugnay sa dalawang panahong ito. Sa mga binhi ng pangarap na walang sawang itinatanim sa lupang kakulay ng kanyang balat. Sa bawa’t isang kasukob sa kasaysayan” (Desaparesidos 220-21; tingnan din San Juan, “Panimulang Pagsubok”; at San Juan, Maelstrom; Mendiola). Panahon, binhi, lupa, balat, kasaysayan—maiging ipinagkabit-kabit sa pangungusap ang lahat ng palapag ng hermenyutikang nasubok dito. Magkabunga kaya ng kasaganaan, katarungan, at kasarinlan ang naipunlang binhi ng nobela? Nasa sa mambabasa ang kasagutan.

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PHILIPPINE WRITING IN ENGLISH (1900-1980)

Philippine Writing in English: Postcolonial Syncretism Versus a Textual Practice of National Liberation

E. SAN JUAN, JR.

J_OR T H E FIRST TIME since the outbreak of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the fall of Bataan and Corregidor to the Japanese military invaders in 1942, the Philippines dominated the world’s attention for a few days in February 1986 : an urban mass insur- rection of over a million people overthrew the long-entrenched Marcos dictatorship without firing a single shot, in the face of tanks and soldiers armed to the teeth. Scenes of this uprising were televised throughout the world, images exuding an aura of the miraculous. Distanced from the original event, those images and representations which mediated this singular event became an inspiration to the popular rebellions that soon exploded around the world, particularly in Eastern Europe, China, Pakistan, Haiti, and other countries in the Third World.

But like most Third World societies plagued by colonial under- development (from the time of its conquest and annexation by the U.S. in 1898 up to the present), the Philippines today, although nominally independent, still suffers the classic problems of neo- colonial dependency: its economy is controlled by the draconian rule of the IMF-World Bank, its politics by semi-feudal warlords, bureaucrats, and military officials beholden to Washington, its culture by the U.S. mass media and Western information/knowl- edge monopoly. With over seventy-five per cent of sixty million Filipinos extremely impoverished, the Philippines also has (despite some attenuation) the only viable nationalist guerrilla insurgency in all of Southeast Asia. The fate of the U.S. military bases as well as the U.S. business, cultural, and political interests will soon be

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70 E. SANJUAN,JR.

decided by the unfolding of these contradictions in thefirstdecades of the twenty-first century.

What happened to this much-touted U.S. experiment in colonial entrepreneurship that claimed to produce the “showcase of U.S. democracy” in Asia after World War II? Why did it fail? From the beginning, the entire discursive apparatus of U.S. academic scholarship has been committed to providing an explanation for this historical vicissitude. Challenged by mounting popular resis- tance from the late sixties on, the rationale for the U.S. support of the Marcos dictatorship—from Nixon to Ford, Carter, and Rea- gan — for almost two decades has drawn its logic and rhetoric from the scholarship of American historians, political scientists, and sociologists. T h e gravity of the crisis of U.S.-Philippines relations can be gauged by the “axe grinding” of Stanley Karnow’s 500-page productionentitledIn Our Image: America’s Empirein

the Philippines, published in 1989. Karnow’s journalistic and popularizing summary of over eighty years of massive American archival and theoretical labour to understand the dynamics of the U.S. involvement with the Philippines has yielded only the most banal but not invidious conclusion : the effort to Americanize the Filipinos partly succeeded in terms of introducing the forms of institutions like electoral democracy, mass public education, civil

service system, and so forth; but it completely failed in altering traditional “Filipino” values, in particular those sanctioning the patron-client relationship.

Now this theme of “imperial collaboration” between the Fili- pino elite and the U.S. colonial administration has been a recur- rent leitmotif in the canonical apologetics of U.S. diplomacy since W . Cameron Forbes’s two-volume inventory of the U . S . accomplishment inthe Philippines,The Philippine Islands (1924). It was extended to the Commonwealth years by Joseph Hayden’s The Philippines: A Study in National Development (1942) and elaborated against the background of Cold W a r geopolitics by George Taylor’s The Philippines and the United States: Problems of Partnership ( 1964 ). But these texts have now been compro- mised by the realities of poverty, social injustice, racism,and exploitation exposed by Filipino intellectuals, among them Filipino writers and artists who have courageously risked their lives to

PHILIPPINE WRITING IN ENGLISH 71

oppose U . S . imperial oppression since the forcible annexation of the islands in 1898 up to the Marcos dictatorship (1972-86), its latest postcolonial reincarnation.

Logos yields to the immediacy of praxis. Given the intensifying threat of Filipino nationalism to expunge once and for all the myth of U.S.-Philippines “special relations,” the project of the contemporary U.S. scholarship on the Philippines (as demon- strated by the works of David Steinberg, Theodore Friend, and particularly Peter Stanley) is to re-conceptualize the experience

of U.S. imperial domination as an equal partnership of Fili- pinos and Americans. This new interpretation would centre on a refurbishing of the patron-client paradigm ; the notion of recipro- cal obligations entailed by it would arguably serve as the theoreti- cal framework within which one can then exorcise the burden of U.S. responsibility for what happened in the Philippines from 1898 to 1946 by shifting the cause of the failure of American tute- lage to the putative shrewdness of Filipinos in “manipulating” their masters. “We tried to do our best, but ” This is the thesis of Peter Stanley’s A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, i8gg-ig2i (1974), an argument replicated by

Karnow and numerous commentaries before and after the Febru- ary “people power” insurrection. A dialectical twist of historical sensibility seems to have occurred. T h e sharp contrast between these revisionary texts a n d previous works critical of U . S . i m – perialism — to cite only the most available, James Blount’s The American Occupation of the Philippines (1912), Leon Wolff’s LittleBrownBrother (1961),andStuartCreightonMiller’sBene- volent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines i8gg-igoß ( 1982 ) — may be read also as a defensive mechanism set into play to counter a resurgent movement of anti-U.S. i m – perialism around the world in the wake of the Vietnam debacle and the renewed revolutionary struggles in Central America and elsewhere.

The issue needs to be clarified further because of its impact on contemporary cultural politics in the Philippines. In reviewing a volume edited by Peter Stanley entitled Reappraising an Empire: New Perspectives on Philippine-American History ( 1984), Robert B. Stauffer acutely points to the dogmatic ideological framework

72

E. SAN JUAN, JR.

of the new revisionist historians cited earlier. The revisionary thrust of scholars employing the paradigm of patron-client linkage instead of a concept like dependency within the capitalist world- system is meant to recast the exploitative relationship of dependency into a reciprocal one where responsibility is equalized if not dis- persed. By downplaying any serious American influence and inflat- ing the role of Filipino subalterns, Stauffer contends, Stanley and his colleagues make “empire” into a romantic ideology: “it is as if to give a Victorian legitimacy to past conquests and in so doing to j’ustify . . . future imperial ventures” (103). Since a seemingly immutable patron-client pattern of relationship determined politi- cal life during U.S. colonial ascendancy, Filipino nationalism is relegated to the “manipulative underside of the collaborative empire,” a phrase which euphemistically reformulates McKinley’s “benevolent assimilation proclamation” of 21 December 1898, the foundation of the U.S. rule over the island colony. Reviewing Karnow’s book in The Nation (5 June 1989), Peter Tarr cogently identifies the fallacy of the new apologetics in the “Immaculate Conception” view of American imperial policy as a glorious and selfless civilizing mission, part of the march of Anglo-Saxon pro- gress over the conquered territories and subjugated bodies of African slaves, American Indians, Mexicans, Chinese workers, and others from the founding of the pilgrim colonies to the closing of the western frontier at the end of the nineteenth century.

Of all the varied instruments mobilized by the U.S. to dominate the Philippines after the violent suppression of its revolutionary forcesintheFilipino-AmericanWarof1898-1902, culturewasthe most powerful and enduring in effect. In general, culture here can be defined as that ideological sphere of representations in which hegemony (in Gramsci’s terms, the moral-intellectual leadership of a social bloc avowed by consent of the ruled) is defined, or- ganized, destroyed, reconstructed. In its quest for hegemony, U.S. colonialism harnessed the educational system as the chief vehicle of “benevolent assimilation,” of acculturation. Within the educational sector of what Althusser calls “the ideological state apparatus” and other disciplinary regimes of the colonial forma- tion, it was the English language that forged the chains of acquies- cence to the superior racial power. The first Filipino writers in

PHILIPPINE WRITING IN ENGLISH 73

English (for example, Paz Marquez-Benitez, Jose Garcia Villa) were educated in the University of the Philippines founded in 1908; their writings were first published by the college journals. English displaced both Spanish and the vernaculars as the primary symbolic system through which Filipinos represented themselves, that is, constituted themselves as colonial subjects with specific positions or functions in the given social order. It was through English that the Filipinos, especially the organic intellectuals of the emerging middle class, represented and validated their linkage to the norms and projects of U.S. imperial dispensation. The Filipino historian Renato Constantino emphasizes this use of the ruler’s language as the root-cause of the Filipino’s miseducation : “The first and perhaps the master stroke in the plan to use educa- tion as an instrument of colonial policy was the decision to use English as the medium of instruction. English became the wedge that separated the Filipinos from their past and later was to separate educated Filipinos from the masses of their countrymen” (47). In short, the implantation of U.S. imperial ideology in the Filipino psyche and the routine of everyday life cannot be disso- ciated from the use of English in business, government, education, and media; this instrumentality of language acted as the synthe- sizing force which unified an ensemble of social practices through which the public and private identity of the Filipino as colonial

subject was constituted and subsequently valorized.
But what I think transformed the Filipino into the ideal colonial subject was not just his Americanization through language and with it his internalizing of a decorum of submission—an imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence — which at the mini- mum guaranteed survival. That decisive conversion occurred with William Howard Taft’s policy of “Philippines for the Filipinos,” a slogan more revealing for its opportunist rhetoric than for its substance. It was really a strategy of cooptation articulated in terms of equal exchange, as manifested in Taft’s words: “. . . and when the Filipino, in seeking a position in executive offices where English is the only language spoken, fits himself, as he will with his aptness for learning languages, in English, he will have nothing to complain of, either in the justice of the examination and its mark- ing or in the equality of salaries between him and Americans doing

74 E. SAN JUAN, JR.

the same work” (Veneración 6 i ) . What this hegemonic strategy performed with finesse is its formal conversion of a relation of domination into a relation of exchange, an exchange of services, a contractual relation. Maurice Godelier observes that “no domi- nation, even when borne of violence, can last if it does not assume the form of an exchange of services” ( 161 ). With this mode of representing colonial oppression as a service rendered by the power- ful, a form of exchange carried out in the colonizer’s language which establishes a reciprocal commitment (analogous to a volun- tary compact) between the parties involved, the consent to be dominated is won and the sublimating bondage of the Filipino sealed. The Filipino ilustrado T. H. Pardo de Tavera expressed an opinion which, though initially disclaimed by the “nationalist” bloc, became the implicit principle of the elite platform of achiev- ing independence through gradual reforms: “After peace is estab- lished, all our efforts will be directed to Americanizing ourselves; to cause a knowledge of the English language to be extended and generalized in the Philippines, in order that through its agency, the American spirit may take possession of us, and that we may so adopt its principles, its political customs, and its peculiar civiliza- tion that our redemption may be complete and radical” (Venera- ción 60 ).

Seen from this orientation, the question of language — of replacing English with a “national” language — appears as the most crucial site of political struggle in the Philippines ever since the converted cattle ship Thomas brought the first five hundred American teachers of English into the country. Despite some pro- gress, the question is still unresolved.

In Third World countries, this foundational question cannot be detached from its complicity with major ideological and political struggles. Writers like Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Chinua Achebe

(in Africa), Edward Brathwaite and Wilson Harris (representing the Caribbean and South America), and Raja Rao (representing Asia) have rehearsed the sociocultural context and ideological resonance of the debate over language as medium of imaginative expression and intellectual reflection in their respective societies (Ashcroft 38-115). In the Philippines, the question of language has been sublimated into the politics of affirming — more pre-

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cisely during U . S . colonial rule, gesturing toward — national self-determination. Syncretism, a process of abrogation and appro- priation of the alien tongue, and the invention of hybrid inter- languages have never been considered viable options.

Over the years of anti-imperialist struggle, the sign has genuinely become the site of what Deleuze and Guattari call “deterritorializ- ations” — the index of “minor” discourse. B y 1 9 8 6 , the “lan- guage problem” cannot be dissociated anymore from the quest for national-popular sovereignty. After heated exchanges in public forums and special hearings, threats of boycott and sabotage from non-Tagalog speakers, the Constitutional Convention of 1986 agreed to reaffirm “Filipino” (based on a modified Tagalog base) as the evolving national language of the land. This was the sequel to a political-cultural battle that has been waged since the early decades of this century. Although English continues to be used predominantly i n business a n d i n government, Filipino-in-the- makingaspropagatedbythemassmedia—television,films,and radio — has practically become the lingua franca throughout the islands. A systematic program of replacing English with Filipino in all universities is now under way so that within the next two or three decades, the use of English as the traditionally sanctioned medium of intellectual expression will be gradually phased out. Eventually writing in English will be relegated to the museum and antiquarian archives. What are the deeper implications of this struggle over English as the language of aspiration, of social prac- tice and artistic expression?

In essence, the conflict over language is a struggle for hegemony. Who will articulate the sovereignty of the nation, the identity of the Filipino people? In their monograph Neo-Colonial Politics and Language Struggle in the Philippines (1984), Virgilio G . Enriquez a n d Elizabeth Protacio-Martinez have forcefully pre- sented the nationalist perspective in the context of a broadly based mass movement for genuine political, economic, and cultural liberation. They advance the view that the possession of a national language is an essential precondition for autonomy. They contend that the continued use of English in an American-oriented educa- tional system (in textbooks, curriculum, and methodology) not only suppresses the democratic aspirations of the Filipino masses

76 E. SAN JUAN, JR.

but also “undermines Filipino values and orientation and perpetu- ates the miseducation and captivity of the minds of the Filipino people to the colonial outlook” ( 3 ) . For them, the English lan- guage symbolizes the belief in the superiority of American culture, values, society, as we have noted earlier; thus it can only serve the exploitative and oppressive ends of American power. To oppose the persisting effects of an inherited dependency syndrome mani- fest in the neocolonial structures of the economy, government, schools and in the institutions of civil society, linguistic nationalism must be promoted to insure the cultural survival and preserve the unique identity of the Filipino people. Pursuing the logic of this pedagogical and heuristic endeavour, Enriquez and Protacio- Martinez demonstrate their case by showing how American psy- chologists have wrongly ascribed to the Filipino character be- havioural patterns (like utang na loob or hiya) based on a wrong, basically Eurocentric, construal of their meanings and context of reference. In the process of arguing that research in psychology should proceed by searching for the “right words” in the vernacu- lar languages that “will truly reflect the sentiments, values and aspirations of the Filipino people,” and not through superimposing Western concepts, Enriquez illustrates how the repertoire of signi- ficationscondensed in the word kapwa, for example, captures a truly indigenous mode of social interaction. The vernacular regis- ters the mutations of what is both national and popular. The genius of the native languages is thus shown to be the most accurate reflection of the Filipino psyche contextualized in its interface with local and global environments. Here in this micropolitics of psy- chological linguistics, it seems that the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis of language as shaper of one’s world-view is resurrected with a vengeance.

Now it is precisely this hypothesis that Filipino writers in English seem to have implicitly rejected when they chose English as their privileged medium of artistic expression. Of course, the choice is not a genuine free choice given the constraints of limited literacy, limited access to resources like channels of publication, audience, rewards, and so forth ; on the other hand, it expresses more than a mere aesthetic decision. A politics and an ethics of writing are im- plied. No one has really explored this terrain of personal responsi-

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bility and complicity; this essay is only scratching the surface. In assessing the fate of English as a literary medium in the Philippines for the last half century, the noted linguist Andrew Gonzalez has come up with an ambiguous but ultimately ironic conclusion. Gonzalez has documented the process whereby the code or signalling system of the English language “was transferred without its cultural matrix” and this resulted in a variety of Filipino English with distinctive speech patterns in accord with “Filipino styles of thought.” This is a phenomenon underlying the development of diverse kinds of English — conceived now as an international idiom no longer fixated on a British or American model — spoken and used in Jamaica, India, South Africa, Aus- tralia, New Zealand, Canada, and elsewhere. When it comes to discourse patterns evinced in Filipino prose, Gonzalez notes the phenomenon of a new contextualization of English, the “trans- plantation of English structures and poetic discourse applied to a new environment, a new cultural matrix” ( 1 4 8 ) . Pointing out

that since the indigenous discourse conventions and techniques of a native tradition have all been practically destroyed by Spanish and American colonization, the indigenous creativity of Filipino writers has been released in their appropriation of a new language and the need to innovate within this new system. In the process, however, their imagination has been circumscribed by its strict adherence to the Western canonical tradition. Discourse structure and grammatical code are all foreign ; only the reference hierarchy, themes or topoi, and their cultural matrix are Filipino. Hence Gonzalez’s judgment that Filipino poets write poetry in the English language concerning Philippine topics, realities, and themes, “but there is no Filipino art form to speak of as transferred from the indigenous culture to the new tongue. There are no traces in this literary language born of academic and English schooling and modelled on the poetic experiments of America, of the local tradi- tions of versification and poesy” ( 1 4 9 ) . Is that proof then of “indigenous creativity” or self-induced alienation and repression?

Obviously, Gonzalez’s mode of divorcing form from content, diverse signifying practices from changing historical circumstances, essentially fails in its attempt to grasp that peculiarly Filipino “creativity” he is positing. While acknowledging Gonzalez’s lin-

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guistic expertise in canvassing conformities to and deviations from the code, his account ignores the whole contextual field of writing practices that critics like Voloshinov/Bakhtin, linguists like Jakob- son, Halliday, Ferrucio-Landi, and other social semioticians have brought to our attention particularly in the last two decades. In my previous books, particularly Toward a People’s Literature and Only By Struggle where I analyzed classic texts like Juan C. Laya’s

His Native Soil, Stevan Javellana’s Without Seeing the Dawn, andothercanonicalworks;andespecially inSubversions of Desire where I provide extended metacommentaries on the major writings of Nick Joaquin, by consensus the leading Filipino writer in Eng- lish, I concretize the parameters of the “sign,” a privileged locus of ideological contestation, within the “uneven and combined development” of the Philippine social formation.

Indeed, Filipino writers read the West — the canonical dis- courses of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, T . S. Eliot, Faulkner, and Hemingway — but they write their hermeneutic responses with an Eastern signature. As I have indicated earlier, this dialogic conjuncture derives from the historical specificity of the Philip- pines as the only U.S. colony in Asia at the turn of the century, a focal point of condensation and displacement for numerous con- flicting political, ideological, economic, and social trends. The Philippines conceived as the site of contradictory forces and hetero- geneous actors with their own transitional genealogies is what underlies the allegorical, ambiguously modernizing imagination of Nick Joaquin which I have already examined in a dialectical critique of his major texts in Subversions of Desire. Likewise,the narrative art of Carlos Bulosan cannot be understood without the rhythm of oral storytelling and the strategic inversions of folklore pervading the stories in The Laughter of My Father. Nor can one comprehend his syncretic alchemy of mapping events inAmerica

is in the Heart which combine picaresque motifs and autobio- graphical notations without contextualizing it in the experience of peasant unrest in Pangasinan and the hardships of migrant labor and racial violence in the West Coast — the existential “lived experience” of Filipinos in the master’s territory. (Both those aspects I have thoroughly explored in Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle.) The same is true with the

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prison writings of Father Ed de la Torre, Jose Maria Sison, and others; with recent oppositional texts and emergent cultural prac- tices particularly in the spheres of musical and theatrical per- formances, and in what has now become in our postmodern milieu the hegemonic cultural signifiers: film and television. One example of recent work whose form is conditioned by historic impulses and circumstantialpressuresisthe undergroundnovelHulagpos (Break Free,1980),arealisticbutalsopolemicalcritiqueoftheMarcos martial law regime. While the plot is ostensibly patterned after Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, its techniques of montage — abrupt cuts and syncopated juxtaposition of incidents — and collage of characters clearly derive frominter alia the methodoftheserialized novels in the weekly comic books popular among the masses today and from the techniques of the avant-garde cinema.

It might be instructive to sketch briefly the dialectical cross- breeding between the autochthonous tradition and modern Filipino writing in English with three examples. It seems to me that contrary to Gonzalez’s assertion of a dichotomy between native sensibility and alien tongue, a subtle intertextuality obtains in their transactions. In this sense Jose Garcia Villa’s poetic art cannot be reduced to a matter of imitated prosody such as “re- versed consonance” or “sprung rhythm.” Again, here, form and substance cannot be so easily disjoined. Villa is the exemplary case of the offspring of ilustrado gentry who rejects his class origin but paradoxically valorizes the caste privilege of the artist. This cannot be understood except as a revolt principally against the commercial, materialistic, philistine milieu of colonial society. Despite his ultra-vanguardistic alienation, Villa’s art cannot deny the influence of over three hundred years of Spanish-Malayan cultural interaction. If we compare the design and texture of Villa’s representative texts in Selected Poems and New (1958), with its characteristic surface of aphoristic verbal play and quasi- parody (even pastiche) of metaphysical conceits, with the native tradition of didactic and allegorical indirection — from the pre- Christian riddles, oratory, and dagli (vignette) to Balagtas’s epic Florante at Laura to the satires of Rizal and M. H. Del Pilar, we can begin to understand how and why his individualist revolt in the colonial milieu of the twenties and thirties assumed the form

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it took, such as exile, adoption of masks, and aristocratic distance. This genealogy of modernist Filipino writing can be concretely illustrated by comparing the tropological scheme of the first stanza of Villa’s poem No. 123 —

What, is, defeat? Broken, victory.

Darkest, sanctuary, But, solider, far.

Than, the, triumphal, star. (Villa 101)

— with a poem (transcribed by a Spanish priest/lexicographer) dating back to pre-colonial times when Indian, Arabic, and Chin- ese cultural currents blended in the Malayan aesthetic intelligence :

Ang sugat ay kung tinanggap di daramdamin ang antak ang aayaw at di mayag
galos lamang magnanaknak.

(Lumbera 9)

(Freely translated: “When one submits himself/to wounding,/ the intensest pain is bearable;/when one is unwilling,/even the merest scratch/can fester.”)

As for the invention of an authentic Filipino discourse in the shortstoryanchoredinthepeasanthabitus(Bourdieu’sterm)and the ethical milieu of an organic community, it might be sufficient to present a synecdochic example, such as the nuanced tonality and figurative resonance of this passage from Manuel Arguilla’s “A Son is Born,” whose peculiar mix would be difficult to find in Chekhov, Maupassant, Hemingway, or any other Western practi- tioner of this art :

My mother’s face was small in the growing dusk of the evening, small and lined, wisps of straight, dry hair falling across it from her head. I could see the brown specks on my mother’s cheekbones, the result of working long under the sun. She looked down upon Berting and me and her eyes held a light that I dimly felt sprung from the love she bore us, her children. I could not bear her gaze any longer. It filled me with a longing to be good and kind to her. I looked down at my arms and I was full of shame and of regret.

(Lumbera 177)

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My third example of the hybrid and syncretic nature of neo- colonial discourse production is different from the first two in- stances. Here the linguistic code of English is seized and subdued, refunctioned to serve emancipatory ends, when it is incorporated into a modernized form of the sarsuwela, a theatrical spectacle mixing songs and dances, with a melodramatic plot of threatened romantic love suturing the unravelled “thickness” of contemporary social and political issues. Introduced by the Spaniards in the nineteenth century as a popular form of entertainment, it has been Filipinized by major artists like Severino Reyes, Vicente Soto, Mena Pecson Crisologo, and others. Here is a passage from Nicanor Tiongson’s Pilipinas Circa igoj, a rewriting or adapta- tion of Reyes’s 1907 play of the same title which has been cross- fertilized by the “seditious” drama and novels of the first decade, the paramount cultural signifiers of anti-colonial resistance. In Tiongson’s script, the anticipated overcoming of American eco- nomic-political power is symbolically enacted by the ironic chorus of modernizing “girls,” part of which I quote below. The second stanza may be read as an emblematic specimen of counter- hegemonic renegotiation of the dominant linguistic code :

Ba’t nga ba may Pilipino
Na masyadong atrasado
Dumaong na’ng Amerikano
Ay! pusakal pa ring Indio!
[Why are there Filipinos
Who are still so backward
The Americans have already landed But my, they’re still wild Indios!]

I do not know to them
I do not know to them We do not know to them !

Kundi kay William Mckinley
[If not for WilliamMcKinley]
We are still swinging from a tree
Walang statue of liberty …
[We wouldn’t have a statue of liberty …]

(Tiongson 46-47)

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Given this complex historical background absent in most literary histories, writing in English in the Philippines is an ideological practice firmly imbricated in the conflicts and problems of subaltern existence. Unless the production of such discourse is historically situated, one cannot grasp its power of producing meaning, of communicatingwhatFoucaultcallsknowledge/power, ofmobiliz- ing people into action. This imperative of historicizing literary form becomes more compelling if we accept Earl Miner’s theory that Asian poetics is fundamentally affective-expressive rather than mimetic or dramatic like European poetics in general, a distinction originating from incommensurable cultural-social dis- parities (82-87). This is why I suggest that it is important to situate Filipino literary expression in the specific historical con- juncture of forces — the transition from colonial dependency to national-popular autonomy— I have outlined above. While every- one recognizes the axiom that the linguistic system (Saussure’s langue) is self-contained, a differential system of signifiers struc- tured in binary oppositions, it is also the case that (as Voloshinov/ Bakhtin has shown) parole or speech is what sets the system in motion and generates meaning among interlocutors in the speech community (65-106). Speech acts or performances of enunciation are social not individual phenomena. In other words, discourse is always intertextual; the world, the concrete historical life-situation of the speakers and horizon of listeners, is a necessary constitutive element of the semantic structure of any utterance (Todorov 4 1 – 4 5 ) so that the character of any discourse cannot be fully understood without reference to its intertextuality, its axiological embeddedness in social process, in the thickness of circumstances. To separate code from the context of enunciation is thus to annul discourse, to negate utterance in its modalities of communication and artistic expression. This is the reason why I would strongly endorse the deployment of, in Mary Louise Pratt’s words, a linguistics of contact instead of the conventional linguistics of community in order to displace the “normative vision of a unified and homogeneous social world” and foreground in- stead “the relationality of social differentiation” ( 5 9 ) . This lin- guistics would decenter community, highlighting instead “the operation of language across lines of social differentiation,” focus-

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ing on modes and zones of contact between dominant and domi- nated groups and on “how such speakers [with multiple identities] constitute each other relationally and in difference, how they enact differences in language” (60). Tiongson’s sarsuwela, Villa’s poems, and Bulosan’s fiction may thus be conceived as attempts to explore the operation of an aesthetics of contact between U.S. hegemonic culture and the Filipino artistic response to it.

There is a striking correspondence between the subject-position of the writer in the Philippines and in Latin American societies, given the historical parallels in their colonial domination by Spain and by their subordination to U.S. economic-military suprem- acy. Investigating the literary institution as an ideological prac- tice in Central American revolutions, John Beverley and Marc Zimmerman remark that the “ideological centrality of literature in Latin America has to do with the effects of colonialism and capitalist combined and uneven development in the region, which have left intact and/or specially marked elements of earlier cul- tural formations that have become extinct or marginal in the metropolis” ( 1 5 ) . I concur with this stress on the uneven, non- synchronized field of forces — textual practice being one force — where precisely a hegemonic politics becomes the only feasible, unifying, sustainable strategy for confronting a militarily and economically superior enemy. Unlike Ruben Dario’s poetry or Ernesto Cardenal’s Christian-Marxist symbolic repertoire, no con- temporary literary text — except perhaps the writings of former political prisoners like Sison, interviews of charismatic personalities like Bernabé Buscayno or Father Edicio de la Torre, or certain poems of Amado V . Hernandez — has so far exercised the role of a central ideological signifier that could generate a national- popular culture with overwhelming mass appeal sufficient to mobilize an interclass bloc which could successfully challenge the U.S.-supported oligarchic elite and its intelligentsia. A likely can- didate for this status would be the cinema-texts of Lino Brocka and of Kidlat Tahimik (if the latter’s films are thoroughly popu- larized), or the aura of myth and fetishism surrounding certain film personalities like Senator Joseph Estrada. But the future cannot be totally mortgaged to past or present achievement. In this interregnum, I consider the primary and urgent task of

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criticism to be the revitalization of texts and the invention of a wide range of cultural practices that would fulfill the function of such a charismatic signifier in a severely fragmented society which is nevertheless structured in dominance by reactionary ideology and a mendacious politics of dependency. Without this emanci- patory practice of critical reading and its mediation of meaning, literary texts can be used to advance the opposite end of reproduc- ing and reinforcing subalternity. This critical praxis entails the risk of historicism, of invoking a teleology based on superimposed values and convictions. However, since everyone is implicated in historical becoming and is (sometimes without knowing it) forced to take sides in a struggle whose stakes are life or slow death for millions of Filipinos, I take this risk. It is a price that must be paid for unfolding the power of literature—the submerged Orphic voices prophesying the revenge of the oppressed generations in limbo, victims of injustice and calculation of profit; prophesying thefulfillmentofdreams,hopes,desires— notonlyininterpreting our personal and communal experiences but also in changing the direction of our lives.

A convergence of my position as a Filipino intellectual based in the metropolis and an unprecedented nationalist resurgence in the Philippines situates my critical commentaries and researches as necessary interventions in the realm of cultural politics. For that matter, anyone engaged in a critical commentary on Philippine culture is always a participant in the arena of ongoing political and ideological antagonisms. My larger ongoing project (in which this essay functions as a heuristic mapping of the terrain) of assess- ingEnglishwritinginitshistoricalinscriptionismodest, however; it is basically revisionist in a sense antithetical to that of Karnow’s In Our Image and mainstream scholarship mentioned at the outset. It is revisionist in conceiving of literature in the Philippines as an ideological practice of national liberation, the paradigm of an alternative emergency politics with a national-popular agenda. It is fundamentally counter-hegemonic because it strives to articu- late the Filipino subversion of the “received,” legitimizing identity imposed on it by the metropolitan power and reproduced by local institutions. Finally, it is oppositional in its effort to construct a sovereign Filipino identity in the process of rereading and rewriting

E. SAN JUAN, JR.

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the U.S. inscription of the Filipino subject-position in the text of Western metaphysics and its ethical-political instrumentalities. Revision then is a form of what Nietzsche calls “creative destruc- tion.” In this reconstructive task, I share the burden of responsi- bility with my Filipino brothers and sisters in numerous organiza- tions in the homeland, in Europe and elsewhere, committed to egalitarian social justice, participatory democracy, and true na- tional independence.

Despite the particularistic impulse of constructing indigenous signifiers, the context-specific vernaculars, of each national or regional literature, a Third World intellectual shares a general orientation with all those who have past affinities, common ob- stacles in the present, and visions of a cooperative future. This does not signify a totalizing and homogeneous orientation where differ- ences are erased; what is needed is a dialogic (if not dialectical) horizon of communication. Can a Filipino writer, given the con- fluence of Asian, Spanish, and Anglo-Saxon experiences of his community, really choose to be singular and idiosyncratic? How could that be demonstrated ? This essay in fact explores the conjunc- tion and disjunction between a Eurocentric discourse of autonomy (initiated by Enlightenment thought) and an embattled sensibility trying to define itself in opposition, trying to assert what could be native or indigenous, relationally speaking. I take comfort in the thought that this is not a solitary enterprise. In the community of Third World intellectuals, I have found inspirationinthe examples of Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabrai, Lu Hsun, Che Guevara, C. L. R. James, Adolfo Sanchez Vasquez, George Jackson, and numer- ous Asian and African partisans of popular democracy. But some theoretical demarcations sometimes need to be drawn.

Within the framework of dependency /world systems analysis, the Australian critics Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin have emphasized the hybrid and syncretic nature of postcolonial writing, mainly Commonwealth writers from former British colo- nies,intheirtheoreticalsynthesisThe EmpireWritesBack(1989). While I agree with their fundamental thesis of a dialectical rela- tionship between metropolitan and peripheral cultures and the impossibility of recuperating “an absolute pre-colonial cultural purity,” I disagree with the corollary belief that it is impossible to

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create a national formation geared to realizing autonomy within the given hegemonic global system—in the post-Persian Gulf War, the “New World Order” of capital. Whether through mimetic or allegorical modes, in either imaginary or symbolic registers or both, the quest for national autonomy (even though the post- modern configuration of “nation” appears problematic) seems inescapable (see Bhabha). It is not enough simply to multiply ingenious deconstructive rereadings and rewritings of the Euro- pean or American historical and fictional records. Ashcroft claims to legislate what Third World/postcolonial artists should do: “These subversive manoeuvres [mentioned before], rather than the construction of essentially national or regional alterna- tives, are the characteristic features of the postcolonial text. Post- colonial literatures/cultures are constituted in counter-discursive rather than homologous practices” ( 1 9 6 ) . I ask: why “rather than”? A foreclosing judgment punctuates the aporia of post- colonial normative speculation and immediately suspends dialogue. Is it possible that we are confronting here once again, resurrected in the guise of unsolicited “friendly” advice, the imperial hubris of Western logocentrism and powers?

But can we, “the hewers of wood and drawers of water,” not decide for ourselves? Is a clean break foreclosed? Are all the boun- daries fixed? Can we not stake new ground? We in the decoloniz- ing societies of the Third World of course understand the historical predicament and susceptibilities of a settler state like Australia and its “White Australia” heritage (Miles 90-98) so that we have no illusions about the heterogeneity and radical Otherness of post- colonial theory arising from even the sub-metropolitan centers. But reversals and disruptions are bound to happen, as Gramsci observes: “A historical moment . . . is rich in contradictions. It acquires a personality, it is a moment of development in that some basic activity of life dominates others and represents a historical ‘advance’ .. .” (Thibaudeau 19).

Subterranean rumblings charged with “auguries of innocence” can be heard even from hitherto pacified frontiers like New Cale- donia, “zones of occult instability” (Fanon’s phrase) like Timor, the former Spanish Sahara, and large parts of the Amerindian regions. I am hopeful that from the struggles of peoples in Haiti

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and El Salvador, South Africa, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Eri- trea, and other outposts of the Empire, new theories and practices of popular resistance art will spring — not just one or two but many, and only then will a real dialogue or colloquy with the West begin. As Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin have discovered in the darkest days of European fascism, the new is permanently possible and in the fullness of time will blast the continuum of history.

In the meantime, I would urge partisans of the emancipatory imagination in the “postcolonial” zones of “occult instability” to engage in inventing new modes of renegotiating the terms of the hegemonic discourse and articulating it toward a collective project of national-popular liberation. This oppositional task is unavoid- able if we want to challenge the disciplinary regimes of imperial power. It can be dialectically merged with that of producing alter- native, even Utopian, discourses and practices. One task in this project is propaedeutic or heuristic in nature : the effort to draw up a provisional cognitive mapping of one terrain in which the fates of two cultures, two peoples, have been joined — a radical, deconstructive rewriting of how U.S. hegemonic culture has read and “produced” the Filipino, more precisely the “truth/knowl- edge” concerning the Filipino; how the subaltern engendered by interlocking if polarized and antithetical cultures (Malayan, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, North American) has finally begun to speak and act — perhaps to curse, like Caliban — in a new lan- guage, all signs of a new beginning.

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Beverley, John and Marc Zimmerman.Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions. Austin: U of Texas P, 1990.

Bhabha, Homi, ed. Nation and Narration. New York: Routledge, 1990.

Constantino, Renato. “The Miseducation of the Filipino.” The Philippines Reader. Ed. Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Shalom. Boston: South EndP, 1987.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “What is Minor Literature?” Mississippi Review 11.3 (1988): 13-33.

Enriquez, Virgilio and Elizabeth Protacio-Martinez. Neo-Colonial Politics and Language Struggle in the Philippines. 1984. Quezon City: Aka- demya ng Sikolohiyang Pilipino, 1989.

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Godelier, Maurice. The Mental and the Material. London: Verso, 1986.

Gonzalez, Andrew. “Poetic Imperialism or Indigenous Creativity? Philippine Literature in English.” Discourse Across Cultures. Ed. Larry Smith. New York: Prentice Hall, 1987.

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Forum, 1987.

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E. SAN JUAN, JR.

SPECULATIONS ON THE FILIPINO DIASPORA

BY E, SAN JUAN, JR.

Speculations on the Filipino Diaspora: 

Recognizing Ourselves in OFWs; or Progress Over Our Dead Bodies

E. San Juan, Jr.

Polytechnic University of the Philippines

In the era of “post-truth” and “alternative facts,” can we still talk intelligibly about 12 million Filipinos scattered abroad? And multiplying by the hour? Over four million reside in the United States (not including the million or so TNTs or undocumented aliens, which count among others the famous Jose Antonio Vargas). Other Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) are distributed as follows (these figures need constant updating): Saudi Arabia: 1,029,000; United Arab Emirates: 477,000; Canada: 820,000; Japan: 226,000.  The main source of remittances, now totaling $29 billion (about 10% of GDP), are Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, UK, and the United States (IBON). 

Since Pres. Corazon Aquino’s administration, these remittances have functioned as “mana” of a fabled cargo cult for us. It has solved the perennial foreign-debt burden, allowed the oligarchic few to continue to live in luxury, and the rest of 103 million folks to submerge/sublimate their misery in spending the money sent by their parents, children, relatives, in endless malling, consumption of mass-produced goods and the illusions (films, telenovelas, etc.) manufactured by the global culture industry (San Juan, “Overseas”). Aside from myriad cults and New Age panaceas, the repeated artifacts of technocratic advertising in social media and films, act now as the proverbial opium of the masses. Supplemented with the police and army, the coercive agencies of class-divided society, they function as the efficient instrument of political control and moralizing discipline.

This tally of the diaspora is forever incomplete, given the uninterrupted dispersal of Filipino labor-power around the world. I am quite sure there are Filipinas in Africa, Latin America, the Russian Federation, India, and other parts of the world, not to mention thousands of Filipino seafarers circulating around the world’s oceans—we have met them in cruises to Alaska, Hawaii, the Baltic, Mediterranean, Caribbean, and wherever laboring bodies and their intellectual byproducts are needed for corporate profit accumulation. They are needed also to reproduce the asymmetrical social relations in the various societies, as well as the geopolitical inequity in the hierarchy of nation-states.

We know at least some of them, our overseas relatives or friends or acquaintances, residing in some corner of North America, the Middle East, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan or other parts of Asia and Africa, including hundreds of cruise ships. We find them as far as the North and South Poles, working, living, surviving. I personally encountered some of them in Rome, Italy; Tripoli, Libya; Thessalonica, Greece; Taipei, Taiwan, and all over the United States, thousands of miles away from their homes in Metro Manila, Ilocos, Cebu, Iloilo, Samar, Leyte, Davao, Sulu, etc. from any of our 7,000 islands (San Juan, “Toward Filipino”). 

In Quest of the White Whale?

In Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick, one encounters specimens of the colonized Indios such as Fedallah sprung from the “watery prairies of Asia, near the Manilla isles” (Takaki, 288-289). In that microcosm of racialized U.S. society, the Pequod, where class and caste defined the place of the crew members, the despotic Ahab, in pursuing the fetishized whale, the profit-wired “machine-like monster,” dooms the whole society. It is an allegory of industrial capitalism in its adventurist booty phase, a few years before Theodore Roosevelt compared the Filipino insurrectos to the savage Apaches during the Filipino-American War (1899-1913). Today, Filipino seamen dominate the intercontinental marine thoroughfares, serving the white-supremacist corporate Empire, while being victimized by pirates and druglords. There are rumblings of mutiny and other rebellions, smoldering beneath the deck of cruise ships and cargo tankers.

About 3-4,000 Filipinos leave every day, according to IBON reports. Over a million per year decide to cast their lot by traveling and residing somewhere else, as domestics, caregivers, or seafarers.  About 3-5 coffins of these OFWs arrive at the Manila airport, with others suffering mysterious deaths. The latest I read was Felma Maramag from Tuguegarao, Cagayan, who was killed by two Jordanians. Of course, the famous victim of this practice was Flor Contemplacion, followed by others less celebrated: Sarah Balabagan, Maricris Sioson, and others executed for defending themselves or framed by criminals—Mary Jane Veloso is the latest—with hundreds languishing in foreign jails (Pineda-Ofreneo and Ofreneo; Parreñas).

In 2008, according to media tabulations, OFWs remitted $15.65 billion; in less than 10 years after, the figure rose to $29.7 billion, about 10% of the gross domestic product (Migrante International). It is more than enough to sustain the economy where the privileged patrician minority enjoys their power and wealth over the staggering poverty and misery of the majority. The genie of this modern “cargo cult” sprang from Filipinas in Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, United Arab Republic, UK, and the U.S.

We don’t need to rehearse the origin of this phenomenon, a scattering and dispersal of part of the “body politic,” diaspora conceived as “hemorrhage” of a disrupted body.  Is any emergency triage possible? Whence this symptom of a problem that, in its classic provenance, was ascribed to victims of the Roman Empire, the original Jewish diaspora? When the Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed, the inhabitants were driven out, violently deracinated, and deported to other parts of the Empire.

We also don’t need to rehearse the dull, somewhat eviscerated “facts” of its origin. The Marcos dictatorship started the flow of migrant workers in 1974 with its Labor Export Policy (LEP). From then on, the neocolonial State institutionalized this last-minute escape of people from dire straits to solve the unemployment problem and provide a safety valve from angry, desperately anguished citizens (Beltran and Rodriguez). We have now entrenched bureaucracies in the Philippine Overseas Employment Administration (POEA), Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA), and other State agencies. Henceforward, the flow has been managed according to scientific, updated Taylorizing schemes. It has been systematized, bureaucratized, technologized. We have systematic compilation and accumulation of data about them—”alternate facts”? “Post-truth” verities? Or just the humdrum signs and emblems of Foucault’s famous “biopower” rolling along in streamlined, computerized, cauterized fashion?  

Within a global business platform, the exchange and circulation of migrant labor/bodies have been more intensively subjected to administrative, regulatory biopower. This is chiefly in the interest of plotting market prices and currency exchanges, part of the attempt to rationalize an inherently anarchic market. In the age of Trump, terrorism, Brexit and the fear of refugees from the wars in Syria, Africa, and elsewhere, have triggered the frenzied call to purge the US body politic of illegal immigrants, prohibit the entry of polluting virus, and build a wall to ward off Mexicans. This is a symptom that migrancy of populations is a global problem (Anderson). The much-touted speed-up of communication and travel, the uncircumvented flow of money, bodies, etc., have now struck a moral nerve at the heart of the Empire. Or has it?

Mapping Driftwood, Salvaging Driftwords

In the first chapter of my book Learning from the Filipino Diaspora (2016), I tried to explore some of the thematic cultural ramifications of the OFWs. We cannot continue to console ourselves with Cory Aquino’s praise of OFWs as “mga bagong bayani.” This is the anodyne for the national predicament, the ideology of pride in being “global servants” or most trustworthy subalterns of the Empire. Can we continue to suffer this patronizing rubric? Is it bribery and ironic blandishment for an embarrassing if not shameful emergency that has become a national disaster?

In retrospect, the haunting question is: How did we come to find ourselves scattered to the four corners of the earth and somehow forced to sell our bodies, nay, our selfhoods as commodities in the world market? How can we continue to lament our plight by the rivers of Babylon? Perhaps the ethical-aesthetic implications of this topic can be epitomized by Angelo dela Cruz (Gorospe 118). If you will recall, he was the truck driver who was kidnapped in Iraq during the US invasion, which led then Pres. Arroyo to ban travel in that war-torn country after 9/11. Many defied the ban and said they would rather dare travel to Iraq to work and be killed instantly, rather than suffer a slow death by hunger in their beloved homeland. 

Does this existential quandary evoke Thoreau’s reference to “lives of quiet desperation”?  The pathos of this national predicament is captured by Angelo dela Cruz’s response after his release by his kidnappers in July 2004 and catapulted to world-renown by the mass media and Internet. This is what our “bagong bayani”/new hero confessed to the media: “They kept saying I was a hero… a symbol of the Philippines. To this day I keep wondering what it is I have become.” It is a cry of existential poignancy—what can be more painful than deracination, uprooting of your body from the ground that sustains you? It evokes the testimony of one OFW who confessed that parting from one’s children moments before he flew away is like gutting out your entrails, literally a disemboweling. It resembles birth, the trauma of separation from the nourishing matrix. Such is the agony of the desterrado, uprooted, deracinated, unmoored, shipwrecked, flotsam and jetsam (Arellano-Carandang et al.). 

It is indeed a national predicament, and a personal worry for some—perhaps a happy relief for many who continually wait for mana from abroad. In any case, it is now more central than incest (the Oedipal syndrome) or family feuds intervening with romantic couples (Romeo and Juliet). It confronts us more ubiquitously, demanding urgent explanations. Why engage with this historical phenomenon or process of the Filipino diaspora in literary and cultural studies? Do we consider it a theme, subject or topic, of literary works (novels, essays, poems, plays)? 

Or do we use it as a conceptual framework in which to re-think the questions of meaning, nature, identity, psyche, the relation of private to public experience, and our national destiny? Is the idea or theme of the diaspora a more effective way to do “genealogical analysis,” that is, interrogating common sense and naturalizing norms so as to expose them as historical/discursive constructions? Why diaspora instead of national-democratic revolution, anticolonial struggles, desire for true autonomy and genuine independence?

It is not a question of either/or. Rather, it is a question of handling a new genre of interdisciplinary studies. By the nature of its historical parameters, its thrust is analytical and speculative. Its fundamental aim is a critique of common sense, normative values, naturalized categories about citizenship, national identity and destiny. It seeks to unravel the given social meanings and received paradigms that construct the truth of human beings, the truth of experience and social life. It challenges the hegemony of the business/comprador elite based on the cash-nexus, the alienation fostered by the objectification of all human ties and by instrumentalizing everything. In short, it is a new pedagogical approach to re-orient scholarly and creative inquiries in literary and cultural studies (San Juan, “Reflections”; Aguilar).

Triangulating the Pedagogical Terrain 

Actually I would propose using the theme of the diasporic experience as a way of connecting all these other topics about nation, travel, transculturation, etc. so as to provoke an alternative way of criticizing and valuing our reading and writing experience. We may hope to engage with diaspora as a heuristic device to stimulate alternative approaches to the orthodox Establishment pedagogy that repeats the same institutional norms over and over, deadening our critical faculties and defeating the purpose of learning and thinking critically about ourselves and our relations. We need to transcend the limited formalist, purely aesthetic or moralistic modes of reading and interpreting in order to situate the literary work/art-work in the context of the lived experience of authors, readers, and communities of interpreters. The urgent task is to perform a cognitive mapping of the subtexts of those real-life contradictions given symbolic/imaginary resolutions in literary artifices and other cultural artifacts. We need to grasp the “structure of feeling” that enables the art-work to exert its own efficacy, its singular resonance in our lives (Jameson; Williams).

But before giving suggestions for curriculum development, it is necessary to frame this within the context of the educational institutions in our country and the position of the Philippines in the international polarization of intellectual labor.

We are a neocolonial formation defined by the contradiction between the exploiting minority elite and the exploited majority. We suffer from dire underdevelopment, whose symptom—unemployment/underemployment—stems from the lack of industrialization, failure of land reform, immiseration of the countryside, and thus the escape to countries abroad for work and even permanent settlement. We suffer from severe social inequality due to the historic legacies of colonialism, the preservation of an oligarchic system of property relations, and hence the unequal distribution of wealth and power (Constantino; Lichauco). We have not acquired true independence and established genuine democratic institutions and processes.

The escape via Marcos’ Export Labor Policy from the nightmare of the historic colonial legacy is agonizing, a tearing-apart of families, marriages, communities. It is tragic, painful, infuriating, and hopefully transformative. One is reminded of the Rizal family being evicted from their homes in Calamba at the end of the 19th century, out of which El Filibusterismo evolved, as well as the Katipunan. We recall many revolutionary heroes (such as Apolinario Mabini, Isabelo de los Reyes, and others) banished to Guam, Marianas, Hong Kong, and other prisons or quarantines for desterrados outside the Philippines. 

Crisis of the Neocolonial Formation 

By its inner logic, the capitalist market of international labor proceeds through cyclical crisis, devolving to fascist, militarized barbarism. After the disaster of 9/11 and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere, this business of warm-body-export has become more acute because of the precarious “underdevelopment” of the country. We are dependent on an erratic global labor-market subject to unpredictable disruptions.  We are vulnerable because of our unstable socioeconomic situation. We live in a violent over-determined formation where profound socioeconomic inequalities prevail (for a recent survey, see Miranda and Rivera; also regular socioeconomic reports from IBON). 

President Duterte’s regime is a symptom of these manifold inequalities. We have, among others, a serious drug problem whose current militaristic-authoritarian solution has led to over 12,000 Filipinos killed, half of whom are victims of vigilante or police criminality; there seems to be no justice for them (Coronel; Dalangin-Fernandez). We have violent confrontations between the Armed Forces of the Philippines (oriented to following U.S. dictates) and the New People’s Army, between the government and various Muslim groups, foremost of which is the Abu Sayyaf. But all these are symptoms of what I have already mentioned: the persisting social injustice and inequalities inherited from our colonial/neocolonial history (Sison). These contradictions can only be resolved by promoting the counter-hegemony—that is, the moral-intellectual leadership of the progressive bloc of nationalist, people-oriented forces—over against the conservative, reactionary bloc of landlords, corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, and fascist military and police.

On the topic of violence, I am not referring to conflicts between individuals, among psychologically troubled persons resorting to force to resolve quarrels. We have, overall, the legacy of structural violence due to unresolved grievances and historic penalties imposed on Lumads, non-Christian groups, and of course the contractual workers, poor peasants and fishermen, and slum dwellers—millions of our citizens, victims of continuing structural violence due to unemployment, lack of housing, medical care, education, and other vital needs necessary for humane existence. What can academic studies on diaspora contribute to understanding and elucidating the causes of this pervasive violence in our society?

Beleaguered Ivory Towers

In this setting, our educational system, configured by the colonial and neocolonial pressures of U.S. political-cultural hegemony, has been geared to supplying other countries with trained personnel: doctors, nurses, engineers, architects, lawyers (our lawyers and tax accountants function like call-center personnel, doing work for offices abroad). Our educational institutions do not match the needs of our economy; they serve to produce human labor-power for other countries in line with the unequal distribution of power and wealth among nation-states as a result of historical rivalries. 

All over the world, including the Philippines, the emphasis on science and technology has marginalized courses in the humanities, history, and other social sciences. General education for civic responsibility and rationality has been subordinated to a quasi-vocational training, or training to acquire specific skills needed to perform technologically defined tasks in business society. We need to resolve the contradiction between the alienating individualist business ethics dominating our lives and the humanist, emancipatory ideals of our revolutionary tradition (Lanuza).

Commodified scientism has trumped the humanities in the academy. This applies to cultural and language studies in general. The teaching of English, within the larger department of literary or cultural studies, is now geared to producing teachers for high school and colleges to prepare youth for work abroad, or for employment in prestigious local corporations or bureaucratic careers. No one would be insane enough to say we are preparing them to be scholars in our own literature (either written in English, Filipino, or the various languages). Previously the nationalist tendency in University of the Philippines and elsewhere was to encourage M.A. and Ph.D. students to focus on local authors and local cultural traditions in art, music, theater, etc. No longer is this the case, for a long time now, since I took my Bachelor of Arts degree in 1958.

Toward Conscientization

For this occasion, I limit myself to reflecting on the possible academic usefulness of exploring this historic conjuncture in our country. Here are a few reasons that we can discuss regarding why the historical phenomenon of the diaspora (in this case, the OFW as contemporary reality) can be useful in revitalizing literary/cultural studies in the Philippines. We can engage in arguing how a critical pedagogy can be developed by way of deliberating on the problems of OFWs. The following observations might schematize for the benefit of those unfamiliar with this topic the ethico-political implications of the modern diaspora problematic:

1. Diaspora unsettles what is taken for granted, deemed natural or normal, customary, respectable. It purges habitual conformism, devotion to stereotypes, and fixation on group-thinking.  What do migrants, expatriates, émigrés, refugees, and exiles have in common? Distance from the homeland, the natal surroundings, and the taken-for-granted habitat.

Removal from the customary space/place of living is certainly distressful and disorienting. Being put in prison was a common experience for rebels like Balagtas, the Cavite mutineers, the Propagandistas (Marcelo del Pilar, Lopez Jaena) and the deported—Rizal, among others, together with thousands during the Spanish colonial period. When the United States conquered the islands, those who refused to swear allegiance to the United States were deported to Guam, the famous ones being Gen. Ricarte and Apolinario Mabini who produced his immortal memoirs, La Revolucion Filipina. One can treat Rizal’s two novels as works of exile, just as Villa’s poems and fiction, and Carlos Bulosan’s entire body of work, particularly America Is in the Heart, as well as many short stories by Bienvenido Santos, NVM Gonzales, and other exiled artists (San Juan, Between Empire).

2. Diaspora interrogates the idea/discourse of homeland as a fixed territory. It generates a new subjectivity or agency, the nomadic in the process of imagining and refashioning a new habitat. It lends significance to the notion of deterritorialization, made famous by Deleuze and Guattari’s treatises, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus.

In this context, our present homeland is a neocolonized one, conquered at the cost of over a million Filipinos killed, quarantined and exploited since 1899. Is there another space/time one can designate as homeland? The Albania of Balagtas? Rizal’s forest or wilderness where the tulisanes retreated? We also encounter this in many novels from Francisco Lacsamana’s Anino ng Kahapon to Macario Pineda’s Makiling to Amado V. Hernandez’s Bayang Malaya and Jun Cruz Reyes’ Etsa Puwera. If the homeland is a utopian future, what is the present Philippines comparable to? Can it be prefigured or condensed in a negative trope of the “Pearl of the Orient Seas,” its flamboyant and ostentatiously hygienic malls as an image of dystopia?

3.  Diasporas evoke the power of imperial occupation—the Roman Empire for the Jewish, European colonialism for African slaves transported to the New World; imperial inroads into China, India, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. Wars, pogroms, fascist programs of internal ethnic cleansing—they all foreground the saliency of racism/racializing ideology, white supremacy, as justification for occupation and subjugation of non-white populations. Our current diaspora is a product of imperial subjugation by the United States, and by the modernizing impact of global capitalism and its neoliberal ideological agencies, in particular the liberalized labor-market and its stockpiling of mass-produced consumer goods and services.

The recruitment of Filipino workers for the Hawaiian plantations is the inaugural moment. We were neither citizens nor aliens. Called “nationals,” Filipino bachelor-workers drifted from place to place, establishing solidarity with other ethnic/racial groups via strikes, collective resistance, networks of cooperation for survival and fighting back. Unable to return, most Filipinos settled in the United States and Canada, just as many today are settling in Italy, UK, Germany, and countries allowing temporary stays and/or family reunification.

4. Diaspora foregrounds the phenomenon of moving commodities—body exports—embodying labor-power for the global capitalist market. Diaspora thus introduces into our theater of critical analysis and judgment the nature of commodifying bodies and personhoods, as well as psyches, dreams, illusions, the unconscious. Quanta (quantity) replaces qualitas (quality) as measure of value, in that exchange-value acquires paramount import over use-value, or at least eclipses the latter on which it is parasitic.

Identity Perplex

Filipino domestics and/or caregivers have replaced biological mothers of the host employer, becoming surrogates and maternal Others in which Filipino nationality/colonial speakers of English become valued as contributors of symbolic capital. The Singaporean film, Iloilo, can be viewed in this light. We do not yet have something like Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives that would portray Filipino nannies as singular actants or character types in a new genre of Menippean satire. The latest imbroglio surfaced concerning an expatriate’s remorseful revelation that the family’s maid called “Lola” who lived with them for many years was actually a slave, though others claimed that (following Michel Foucault) she maintained her dignity and self-respect all along (Solow). Shades of the lord-bondsman dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit?

There are indie media films or documentaries already dramatizing this Filipina predicament, including those on Flor Contemplacion. However, we are also swamped with sentimental melodramas like Milan, Dubai,and various commercialized replications. But in truth, these confections are narcotics to distract us. The Filipino diaspora is not a stage for compounding dreams and fantasies. For one, it is definitely not a transcultural or transgendered dilemma but, rather, a labor-capitalist dialectic with a classic class-conflict matrix. Thus this particular loci resonates with universal consequences and world-historical ramifications.

5.  Both sexuality and racial identity are brought into the stage when embodied in diasporic characters/figures. Diaspora heightens our awareness of the significant role that racial markers and gender makers play in configuring our role and place in the international setting. This explodes the homogeneity of the Filipina as exotic Malayan/Hispanic subject of patronizing discourse—as in mail-order bride advertisements—made sophisticated by Eurocentric scholars, whether Filipinos, American, etc. The fashionable rubric of “transnationalism” acquires poignant ambiguity in the case of Filipinas metamorphosing into syncretic, hybrid or ambidextrous protagonists in social encounters far from the homeland.

6. The actant or performative role of diasporic Filipinas in literary and cultural discourse reminds us again that humanistic studies today (aesthetic, ethical inquiries) are no longer compartmentalized into strict taxonomic categories. They are by historical necessity interdisciplinary complex speculations, blending historical, sociological, political, anthropological, linguistic, philosophical, etc. They challenge the old positivistic, narrowly empiricist philology, as well as the once dominant formalist New Critical approach. 

Reconstructive Cartography

In the United States and Canada, the Civil Rights struggles in the Sixties and Seventies, together with the feminist, youth and multiethnic struggles, forced a drastic revision of the canon. They unsettled scholastic categories inherited from the Victorian era. They destroyed the entrenched white-supremacist standards of quality, ushering in authors/readers from ethnic, gendered and racialized outsiders. Filipino scholars were of course influenced by these trends; but they simply expanded the offerings and authors. They did not effectively change the formalist/individualist approach that excluded political readings and historicist critiques. We still await canon revision and reflexive dialogues on methods and procedures to synchronize what we are doing in the classrooms with what is happening to our students and teachers in the larger society outside the academy.

Again, the aim of introducing this framework of the Filipino diaspora is to reorient our vision/sensibility regarding our individual responsibility in society. It is to initiate a re-thinking about ourselves as a people and as citizens of a nation-state with a specific history. It is to kindle a conscientization of our minds and loobs/souls beyond the rigid paradigms of traditional patriarchal-feudal society (Eviota).

In reflecting on the export of souls/bodies, a postmodern version of the Faustian wager, we are forced to scrutinize the inventory of our national identity as a palimpsest of codes, the key to which has been lost and must be found, invented or recast. Antonio Gramsci wrote this thought-provoking passage about the problem of self, identity, ethos in his Prison Notebooks (1929-1935), which we need to ponder as the propaedeutic slogan for the day:

The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is ‘knowing thyself’ as a product of the historical processes 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 (324).

A corollary to this proposition is Gramsci’s notion of culture not as a simple accumulation, or indeed a dry-as-dust inventory of facts, dates, information culled from libraries, etc. We pride ourselves in being cultured, being knowledgeable or well-informed about a million facts, items summarized in tomes and whole archives. But this hoarding, as those familiar with Paulo Freire’s teaching know, is nothing but the banking system of education, thoroughly based on the logic of accumulation in business society, our present-day neoliberal free-market global order.

In contradistinction, Gramsci proposes an entirely radical definition. He contends that culture “is an organization, discipline of one’s inner self, a coming to terms with one’s own personality. It is the attainment of a higher awareness, with the aid of which one succeeds in understanding one’s own historical value, one’s own function in life, one’s own rights and obligations” (324-25). Fundamental to this is the acquisition and cultivation of a historical awareness, a historicizing sensibility, attuned not just to our personality but to our place and participation in our specific time and place, in our society. This awareness will be actualized in the narratives we construct of our journey toward national independence, exercising genuine sovereignty.

In my view, reflection and inquiry into the discourse of diaspora, the investigation of discursive practices of what we may call the habitus of diaspora, can induce in us that historical awareness and reflexivity required to usher us into what Immanuel Kant called the age of autonomy, when we no longer need tutors and can think for ourselves and accept responsibility for our choices and actions. This thinking will be realized in our diverse narratives of homecoming. Can this solve the dispersal, scattering, disruption of our body politic? Can this provide jobs for millions so that they do not have to leave their families and homes? Will this solve the wound of division, heal the fissures and cracks in the body politic?

But, on second thought, in the neocolonial situation, the body politic has never been really unified or homogenized—except through consumerist regimentation and the vicarious fulfillments induced by State ideological apparatuses. But somehow a visceral urge surfaces in the diaspora. When Filipinos meet in the plazas of Rome, Hong Kong, Taipei, Los Angeles, or Singapore, they incorporate the lost homeland in their exchanges, rituals of eating, singing, playing, the repertoire of bayanihan and pakikisama, etc. They perform the communicative utopia that Habermas dreamed of recreating in the European Community. For them, any moment or any fissure in the continuum of time, the Messiah may appear.  

As the Messiah tried to console his companions before his final departure, we may follow in his wake. The Messiah will be there when one or two of his comrades gather wherever and whenever they find themselves—remembrance materializes in such encounters and thus reconstitutes the dismembered body. Diaspora may trigger these acts of remembrance and ultimately deliver collective redemption. The study of diasporic writing may be construed as an act of remembrance and collective deliverance.

Rhizomatic Analysis in Action

           At this point, I want to illustrate the phenomenon of neocolonial disintegration and ideological reconstitution of the “third world” subject as a symptom of uneven capitalist hegemony, in a fictional account by a Filipina author who writes in Filipino, the national language. Consider this an experiment in symptomatic hermeneutics (see Balibar and Macherey). Fanny Garcia wrote the story entitled “Arriverderci” in 1982 at the height of the Marcos-induced export of Filipina bodies to relieve widespread immiseration in all sectors of society and curb mounting resistance in city and countryside. 

          Garcia’s ascetic representation of this highly gendered diaspora yields a diagnostic illustration of postcolonial schizophrenia. In the opening scene, Garcia describes Filipina domestics in Rome, Italy, enjoying a weekend break in an excursion outside the city. One of these domestics, Nelly, meets a nondescript compatriot, Vicky (Vicenta), who slowly confides to Nelly her incredible experience of physical hardship, loneliness, and frustrated ambition, including her desperate background in her hometown, San Isidro. Vicky also reveals her fear that her employer might rape her, motivating her to inquire about the possibility of moving in with Nelly whose own crowded apartment cannot accommodate Vicky. Spatial confinement resembles incarceration for those who refuse the oppression of live-in contracts, the latter dramatized in Vicky’s earlier experience.

          Dialogue begets intimacy and the shock of discovery. After trust has been established between them, Nelly learns that Vicky has concealed the truth of her dire situation from her relatives back home. Like others, Vicky has invented a fantasy life to make her folks happy. After a short lapse of time, Nelly and her companions read a newspaper account of Vicky’s suicide—according to her employer, she leaped from the fifth floor of the apartment due to a broken heart caused by her sweetheart, a Filipino seaman, who was marrying another woman. Nelly of course knows the real reason: Vicky was forced to kill herself to save her honor, to refuse bodily invasion by the Italian master. Nelly and her friends manage to gather funds to send Vicky’s body back home to the Philippines. When asked how she would explain Vicky’s death to the next-of-kin, everyone agrees that they could not tell the truth. Nelly resolves their predicament with a fictive ruse: 

“Ganito na lang,” sabi ni Nelly, “nabangga ang kotseng sinasakyan n’ya.” Sumang-ayon ang lahat. Pumunta sa kusina si Nelly. Hawak ang bolpen at nakatitig sa blangkong puting papel na nakapatong sa mesa, naisip ni Nelly, dapat din niyang tandaan: sa San Isidro, si Vicenta at Vicky ay si Bising (1994, 334-335). 

[“Let’s do it this way,” Nelly said, “she died when the car she was in crashed.” Everyone agreed. Nelly entered the kitchen. Holding a ballpoint pen and staring at the blank piece of paper on the table, Nelly thought that she should also remember: in San Isidro, Vicenta and Vicky were also Bising.]

In the triple personas of Vicky nurtured in the mind of Nelly, we witness the literal and figurative diaspora of the Filipino nation in which the manifold layers of experience occurring at different localities and temporalities are reconciled. They are sutured together not in the corpse but in the act of gendered solidarity and national empathy. Without the practices of communication and cooperation among Filipina workers, the life of the individual OFW is suspended in thrall, a helpless fragment in the nexus of commodity circulation (for a postmodernist gloss on this story, see Tadiar). Terror in capitalist society re-inscribes boundaries and renews memory. 

Beyond the Binary of Self and Others

          What I want to highlight, however, is the historicizing power of this narrative. Marx once said that capitalism conquers space with time (Harvey 2000). The urgent question is: Can its victims fight back via a counterhegemonic strategy of spatial politics? Loading space with dizzying motion, collapsing it into multiple vectors and trajectories, may be one subversive strategy. In Garcia’s story, the time of the nationalizing imagination overcomes displacement by global capital. Fantasy becomes complicit with truth when Nelly and her friends agree to shelter Vicky’s family from the terror of patriarchal violence located in European terrain. Geopolitics trumps transnational hybridity or ambivalence when the production of space is articulated with habits, customs, daily routine of the female worker (for this insight, see Rose).

We see that the routine life of the Filipino community is defined by bureaucratized space that seems to replicate the schedule back home; but the chronological itinerary is deceptive because while this passage lures us into a calm compromise with what exists, the plot of attempted rape and Vicky’s suicide transpires behind the semblance of the normal and the ordinary: 

…Ang buhay nila sa Italia ay isang relo—hindi nagbabago ng anyo, ng direksiyon, ng mga numero.

     Kung Linggo ng umaga, nagtitipon-tipon sa loob ng Vaticano, doon sa pagitan ng malalaking haliging bato ng colonnade…. Ang Papa’y lilitaw mula sa isang mataas na bintana ng isang gusali, at sa harap ng mikropono’y magsasalita’t magdadasal, at matapos ang kanyang basbas, sila’y magkakanya-kanyang grupo sa paglisan. Karaniwa’y sa mga parke ang tuloy. Sa damuhan, sa ilalim ng mga puno, ilalabas ang mga baon. May paikot-ikot sa mga grupo, nagtitinda ng pansit na lemon ang pampaasim, litsong kawali na may Batanggenyo, at iba pang hatiang batay sa wika o lugar. O kaya’y ang mga propesyonal at di-propesyonal. Matapos ang kainan, palilipasin ang oras sa pamamagitan ng kuwentuhan o kaya’y pagpapaunlak sa isang nagpapasugal. Malakas ang tayaan. Mga bandang alas-tres o alas-kuwatro ng hapon, kanya-kanyang alis na ang mga pangkat. Pupunta sa mga simbahang pinagmimisahan ng mga paring Pinoy na iskolar ng kani-kanilang order. Sa Ingles at Pilipino ang misa, mga awit at sermon. Punong-puno ang simbahan, pulos Pilipino, maliban sa isa o dalawa o tatlong puti na maaring kaibigan, nobio, asawa o kabit ng ilang kababayan. 

     Matapos ang misa, muling maghihiwalay ang mga pangkat-pangkat. May pupunta muli sa mga parke, may magdidisco, may magsisine. Halos hatinggabi na kung maghiwa-hiwalay patungo sa kanya-kanyang tinutuluyan…. (329-330).

[Their lives in Italy resembled a clock—never changing in shape, direction or numbers.

On Sunday mornings they would gather inside the Vatican, there between the huge rocky pillars of the colonnade… The Pope would appear at a window of the tall building, and would pray and speak in front of a microphone, and after his benediction, they would all join their groups upon leaving. Usually they head for the parks. On the grass, under the trees, they will spread their packs. Some will circle around selling noodles with lemon slices, roast pork with catsup, and other viands. The picnic begins. Ilocanos congregate among themselves, so do those from Batangas, and others gather together according to language or region. Or they socialize according to profession or lack of it. After eating, they will pass the time telling stories or gambling. Betting proceeds vigorously. Toward three or four in the afternoon, the cohorts begin their departure. They head toward the churches where Filipino priests, scholars of their orders, hold mass in English or in Filipino, together with songs and sermon. The churches overflow, all Filipinos, except for one, two or three whites, who may be friends, sweethearts, wives, or partners. After the mass, the groups will again separate. Some will return to the parks, others will go to discos or movie houses, until around midnight they will go their separate individual ways to wherever they are staying.]

Resignation is premature. This surface regularity conceals fissures and discontinuities that will only disclose themselves when the death of Vicky shatters the peace and complicates the pathos of indentured domesticity. Thus we find ourselves mourning our sister, the mother of all migrants and exiles in our shrunken, suddenly claustrophobic planet when computer-armed Ahabs, now in their apocalyptic terrorizing mode, still roam and plunder the core and the peripheries of the post-anthropocene world. 

Works Cited

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FILIPINO-ENGLISH PLAY DRIVE: Reflections on the Translation Game

BY E. SAN JUAN, JR.

FILIPINO/ENGLISH PLAY-DRIVE: REFLECTIONS ON THE TRANSLATION GAME

E. San Juan, Jr.

University of Connecticut, USA

philcsc@gmail.com

What does it mean to speak of the “interpretation” of a sign? Interpretation is merely another word for translation . . . What are signs for, anyhow? . . . They are to communicate ideas, . . . some potentiality, some form, which may be embodied in external or in internal signs. But why should this idea-potentiality be so poured from one vessel into another unceasingly? Is it a mere exercise of the World-spirit’s Spiel-trieb—mere amusement?

—Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Basis of Pragmaticism” (388)

What is translation? On a platter / A poet’s pale and glaring head. / A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter, / and profanation of the dead.

—Vladimir Nabokov, “On Translating Eugene Onegin”(531)

If all discourse is effectuated as an event, it is understood as meaning… It is this dialectic of event and meaning which makes possible the detachment of meaning from the event in writing.

—Paul Ricouer, ‘“Writing as a Problem” (321)

Translation studies as a disciplinary research field has recently become institutionalized in the Western academy, with university courses and publication programs devoted to it. Translators of European authors are highly paid in the trade-book industry. The Modern Language Association of America (MLA) has a flourishing trade in publishing English translations of obscure, esoteric texts. In a recent MLA Newsletter, Barbara Fuchs laments how, when the singer Jennifer Lopez interrupted her medley of songs in English with the Spanish translation of two lines of the Pledge of Allegiance during the 2021 Presidential Inauguration, her computer screen inserted the caption: “Speaking foreign language,” thus negating the point of her intervention. Fuchs objects to that “automated, mechanistic force of its characterization” as negating the singer’s “gesture of political inclusivity”: “While the performance was undoubtedly an important moment of signaling, its immediate framing as an interruption of the foreign, the untranslatable, the unknown—in the form of a language spoken by over fifty million people in the United States—signals the important work yet before us” (2). Fortunately, in the Philippines, we sing the national anthem in Filipino, spoken by at least 80 percent of 110 million citizens, not distracted by English captions. But in the daily practice of Filipinos in social media and in government and business affairs, English easily trumps Filipino or any of the vernaculars.

Translation may indeed be more than a gesture of political inclusivity. The Vulgate translation of the Hebrew and Greek Bible by Saint Jerome (347–420), adopted by the Roman Catholic Church, underwent diverse mutations in the national languages of the Protestant countries in Europe. Luther’s German rendition and the King James version are easily the most influential. Incidentally, they all followed St. Jerome’s error of translating the Hebrew word keren (meaning “radiated light”) into “grew horns,” thus Moses was sculpted with horns. 

St. Jerome should have followed Constance Garnett’s habit of leaving out words she did not understand for her translation of the Russian classics into English. The usual expectation that a cross-language version must be a carbon copy of the original, transferring facts, style, and structure of the source into the target language, is what business and government interpreters/translators must fulfill. But the literary translation of poetry, in particular, imposes more exacting demands. The complexity and singularity of the languages involved, not just structure (grammar and syntax) but also idiomatic or metaphorical networks, demands more rigorous standards. It thus involves what Schiller called “Spieltrieb” (407), an instinctive play-drive, whose object is the living form of beauty (Lebende Gestalt), the coalescence of material and form, being and becoming.

Schiller’s concept may be seminal but arguably utopian. Almost all practitioners seek a balance between extremes (the literal and tropological), between what Croce called “faithful ugliness or faithless beauty” (Holman 451). This may explain why the impulse to translate mutates into a demiurgic motivation to create an original, such as Edward Fitzgerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859). In any case, translation is not just a matter of producing verbal equivalents, either literal or not. 

All translators produce what Charles Sanders Peirce calls “interpretants” linking signifiers to their objects on some ground, purpose, or rationale, not arbitrarily as Ferdinand Saussure assumed in his semiology. In Peirce’s semiotics, translations produce interpretants of three kinds: immediate, or the specific way that signifiers can be actualized in various ways; dynamic, or the “single actual event” or experience of making sense or getting the intent of the signifiers; and the final or logical interpretant, which is the understanding of or belief in the purpose or purposes for which the signs/signifiers are being used (“Lady Welby” 412–21). What this amounts to is that there may not be any agreement about the ultimate purpose or intent of the translation (the dynamic and final logical interpretant) except the attempt to actualize the immediate interpretant. In Peirce’s semiotics, “there is no final confluence of interpretations” (Short 187–90), that is, there is no such thing as correct, accurate, or faithful translation leading to a consensus of beliefs because authors/translators vary in time and place, as well as readers/listeners. Sociohistorical contingencies cannot be eluded and must be taken into account, one way or another.

Homo ludens Becoming Homo faber

This does not imply that anything goes, since meaning has to be formulated in further signs, into intelligible discourse for some community or other. Translation is then the versatile exercise of the play-drive. It is an artful linguistic game sui generis, its criticism a heuristic method for its appreciation. That is why, perhaps, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986), who at nine years old translated Oscar Wilde’s “The Happy Prince” into Spanish, advised that we attend more to the context (the cultural horizon of communication and nuanced speech-acts) than the text or the formalized referent (178). In short, the six functions of linguistic communication outlined by Roman Jakobson needs to be given appropriate assignments. To be sure, translation is a human, not machine, performance. This may explain why translators such as Edward Seidensticker (in the case of the Japanese Yasunari Kawabata) and Gregory Rabassa (with Gabriel Garcia Marquez) produced versions more genuine-sounding or authentic to their English readers. Consider then this conundrum: can the translation claim to be a sovereign, uoriginal source-text, with a life of its own not dependent on its author? We are then plunged into the abyss of endless semiosis.

Modern literary criticism since the romantic period posited the organic fusion of form and content, thus questioning the possibility of translation as a faithful convergence of linguistic life-worlds. Shelley, for instance, likened translation to subjecting a violet to chemical analysis while Robert Frost  opined that poetry is “what gets left out in translation” (Hyde 200). Surely, no one expects a rigorously strict correspondence between source and target texts. The English poet John Dryden translated many classic works into the contemporary idiom of his time. He distinguished his practice as an act of paraphrasing the translated work’s style, “to vary but the dress, not alter or destroy the substance,” thus violating the axiom of the organic unity of form and content (Hyde 201).  Contradistinguished from Dryden’s formula of paraphrasing, imitiation as a mode of synthetic mimesis or reconfiguring of the original may be exemplified by Robert Lowell’s “Imitations,” as well as by Ezra Pound’s “Homage to Sextus Propertius” and Louis Zukovsky’s mimicry of Catullus’ Latin originals (Hyde 201). Wether paraphrase or imitation, this mode of translation seeks to capture the complex, singular  phenomenology of a given artistic creation or artifice for their respective audiences, thus bridging disparate times and spaces.

We are reminded of Walter Benjamin’s concept of translation as the purgation of profane language so as to reach a higher spiritual divine level, releasing the “unexpressed and creative word” from its merely communicative use. However, paradoxically, we begin with the literal rendering of the syntax of words to capture the “intentio of the original”: “For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade” (79). The more incomprehensible the translation (as Holderlin’s version of Sophocles) since it is further up the ladder of truth or doctrine that language is the symbol of the incommunicable, Benjamin concludes, so much the better! The more wayward the translation, the more cogent it is, thus confirming the indictment: traduttore, traditore. This accords with Peirce’s semiotics and the hierarchy of interpretants (immediate, dynamic and final/logical), still cognizant of the six linguistic functions already invoked.

Before situating translation in the Philippine context, I want to remind would-be linguistic traders and word-players of the dangers involved in this act of transfer as a mode of communication. In the global conflicts today, thousands of Afghan translators/interpreters who worked for the U.S. military are facing assassination by the Taliban for their services. About three hundred of roughly 18,000 Afghanis have been killed since 2014; and thousands today face certain death as the U.S. finalizes its withdrawal from that war-torn country (Zuccchino and Rahim). Iraqi interpreters suffered the same fate when the U.S. destroyed and then withdrew from Iraq. One wonders whether Filipinos who translated captured revolutionary communiques for the American invaders in the Filipino-American War of 1899-1913 were prosecuted, or those who translated/interpreted for the Japanese aggressors in World War II were ever brought to trial as collaborators of the enemy. Translation then becomes treason or treachery and betrayal depending on which linguistic, political camp one happens to find oneself in the end.

Historical specificity thus informs and determines the ethical-political valence of linguistic exchanges. What is instructive is the fate suffered by Arab scholar-translator Mohamed Yousry in the wake of 9/11. Yousry, a graduate student at New York University, was then employed by attorney Lynne Stewart who was convicted for allegedly aiding the blind Muslim cleric Abdel Rahman; Sheik Rahman was then serving a life-sentence in federal prison for conspiring to bomb New York City landmarks (Preston).  Because Yousry translated from Arabic to English the messages of the cleric for attorney Stewart, he was implicated in the charge of violating prison rules, deceiving the government, and aiding terrorism. So translators, beware! Your scholarly talent and linguistic skills might render you vulnerable, since even the American Translators Association and the National Association of Judiciary Interpreters and Translators would not come to your succor in times of need or emergency, in a climate of  moral panic and jingoistic exceptionalism.

The Personal Is Not Yet Political

One of the more provocative commentaries on the politics and ethics of translation has been made by Steven Ungar in his contribution to the anthology Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (2002). Ungar summarizes the opinions of various scholars who assayed the poetics of translation as a cultural political practice open to ethical dimensions involving greater respect for linguistic and cultural differences. He cites Sherry Simon’s feminist view urging a cultural turn so as to promote a critical, pragmatic, or functionalist approach: “Instead of asking the traditional question which has preoccupied translation theorists—‘What is a correct translation?’—the emphasis is placed on a descriptive approach: ‘what do translations do, how do they circulate in the world and elicit response?” (131) (For the application of Jakobson’s functionalist linguistics on translation, see Aveling; also Heaney and Hass).

From that perspective, the historical-ethical situation of the translator in the Philippines is anomalous if not an affront to their Western counterparts. Who cares about Filipino/Tagalog poetry and its translation into English or other prestigious languages? In the early years of Spanish colonization, the Spanish missionaries destroyed much of the pre-contact literature composed in syllabary and initiated the lexicographical inventory of the vernaculars. The first translations of Tagalog poetry into Spanish were ascribed to Fernando Bagong-banta, a ladino or bilingual native. They were included in a religious instruction book entitled Memorial de la vida cristiana en lengua tagala (1605) by the friar Francisco de San Jose. Bienvenido Lumbera describes the priest’s “archaic metaphorical prose” expounding the basic doctrines of the Catholic faith (27). Translation was thus a utilitarian, pedagogical instrument for proselytizing; in effect, it was weaponized for sustained evangelization in the service of imperial domination. Analogous to that pattern was the systematic imposition of American English as the official language in the first three decades of US colonial pacification of the Philippines (1899–1930).

Three centuries after Bagong-banta’s intervention, the Jesuit-tutored Jose Rizal deployed his language skills to educate his relatives by translating Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell and the French 1789 Declaracion des droits de l’homme et de citoyen (1789) into Tagalog (Ocampo 120, 341–472). Katipunan leaders Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto followed Rizal’s example. In the period of revolutionary ferment, Filipinos who engaged in translation pursued a conscienticizing (to use Paulo Freire’s term) agenda—one might even label it “tendentious” translation—dictated by the needs of the embattled community. When English became the official and aspirational language of the US colony, the imperative to translate vernacular writing lost its rationale with the establishment of universal public education, the wide circulation of mass media in American English, and the inferiorization of indigenous speech-acts. 

Decolonizing Imperative and Agenda

It is only in our recent history that translation—between the colonized and colonizer’s tongue—can be conceived as an emancipatory act. Moving from one language system/conceptual framework to another can be construed as not just a mode of cross-cultural understanding. It is also an exploration of our motives and purposes in engaging in the translation-act. One recent example is Bienvenido Lumbera’s adaptation, not translation, of Carlos Bulosan’s classic ethnobiography, America Is in the Heart. Lumbera’s artifice was not a symmetrical transfer but a re-functioning of narrative episodes in response to the political exigencies of the mass movement after Benigno Aquino’s assassination in 1983, a strategy inspired by Paula and Carolina Malay’s earlier translation of the book into Tagalog, Nasa Puso ang Amerika, praised by Lumbera as endowed with rich, sutble, vigorous, “contemporary urban flavor” (Suri 291). 

It is now difficult to obtain copies of Bulosan’s filipinized chronicle of the early diaspora. Those two play-drive attempts at verbal gaming may be compared with Jose Lacaba’s efforts to adapt (“halaw” is his rubric) to colloquial Filipino poems by Sappho, Marvell, Neruda, Brecht, Pound, Tu Fu, etc., and Pia Arboleda’s skillful translation of Ninotchka Rosca’s stories into Filipino, in order to gauge the distance between acts done under pressure (the mass protests against the Marcos dictatorship), and those performed in more leisurely, self-reflective fashion.  The simple lesson is that we cannot appreciate and judge the art of translation detached from the historical-political situations of the translators, as well as their intentions, and the audiences that their projects addressed. Such variables constitute the parameters for evaluating the success or failure of translation-experiments.

This brings us finally to the question why we need to measure the power and potential of our vernacular tongue (in this case, Filipino) by the amount and quality of the works that have been carried out. The hypothesis is challenging, if not scandalous. In 2000, Mario Miclat cited the inventory of translations into Tagalog made by Lilia Francisco Antonio: two titles a year in 400 years since the Doctrina Cristiana (1593), the first book published in the Philippines. If it were not for the ladino Tomas Pinpin and his progeny, Miclat insinuates, we would still be barbarians, unlettered savages awaiting tutelage by our Castilian and Yankee conquerors. 

Miclat is pleased to inform us of the three-volume translation of Alejandro Dumas’s Ang Konde ng Monte Cristo by Pascual Poblete, but he bemoans the fact that no one has yet translated Don Quixote. He therefore urges more Westernization, following the path of Japan and China, forgetting the status of Chinese and Japanese as exemplary, archetypal languages with thousands of years of usage and elaborate refinement compared to our relatively primitive vernaculars. Miclat remarks that we are too lazy; however, he abruptly concludes that “Having defined the Other, we have defined ourselves”—a wholly mystifying conclusion. Undeterred, Miclat observes that we need to “define our translation needs” and rouse ourselves to satisfy those needs without which we cannot belong to the affluent industrialized nation-states of Europe and North America.

Inventory and Reconnaissance

A brief personal history may be instructive here. Long before I read Miclat’s alarming call and enjoyed the artifices of Lumbera, the Malays, and Arboleda, I had been recruited by the late Rogelio Mangahas in the 1960s to work with the collective Kapisanang Aklat, Diwa at Panitik (KADIPAN) compatriots. I helped Alejandro Abadilla edit his avant-garde magazine Panitikan. Long before I encountered the charge of “traduttore, traditore,” I had been engaged in this treacherous pursuit for some time. After a lengthy correspondence with the poet, I translated selected works of Amado V. Hernandez into English, published in 1966 as Rice Grains by International Publishers in New York—perhaps the first international edition for a Tagalog poet. The motive? Inspired by his fortitude during Cold War McCarthyism, I struck a friendship with the poet while completing my graduate studies at Harvard University where I discovered William James’s anti-imperialist writings. 

The nationalist resurgence in the sixties combined with the Civil-Rights anti-war mobilization in the US produced an incalculable impact. Our generation shifted its bearings and orientation. In that conjuncture, I had begun to write in Filipino when I became more involved with other vernacular writers, especially with the feisty maverick Abadilla. Throughout the decade, I cooperated with Abadilla in publishing his anthology Ako ang Daigdig and other projects, and with Rogelio Mangahas in gathering materials for his 1967 anthology, Manlilikha, a project of KADIPAN, and the volume Makata by Makata, Inkorporada. We were also immersed in anti-martial-law agitprop and research into Filipino labor struggles, in particular the farm-workers movement in California and the Northwest where Bulosan and his comrades were active in the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union.

Historical circumstances ineluctably overdetermine personal choices. The nationalist upsurge from 1970 to 1986 influenced my decision to write fiction and poetry in Filipino and to publish in Liwayway, Free Press in Filipino, and other venues. I was encouraged in this by Hernandez, Abadilla, Mangahas, Ben Medina Jr., Teodoro Agoncillo, Anacleto Dizon, and others. This was before the bold effort to “intellectualize” the vernaculars in line with Virgilio Enriquez’s invention of “sikolohiyang Pilipino” and Lumbera’s historical inquiries into Tagalog poetry. 

In high school, we were assigned Balagtas’s awit as an exercise in grammar and syllable-counting, oblivious to its ethico-political function. This is still the standard way of teaching this classic touchstone. In 1969 I ventured a philosophical exegesis of “Florante at Laura” entitled Balagtas: Art and Revolution, which Patricia Melendrez-Cruz and Apolonio Chua included in their anthology Himalay. Around the same time, the artist-critic Rodolfo Paras-Perez invited me to translate Balagtas’ poem accompanied by his drawings for a limited deluxe edition issued in 1978. The background for this translation is my Filipinization of Western poetics ranging from the Anglo-Saxon “The Seafarer” and “The Dream of the Rood” to Horace, Gautier, Holderlin, Lu Hsun, Brecht, McDiarmid, Hemingway, Mayakovsky, Hikmet, Langston Hughes, Vallejo, Mao Tse-tung, Ernesto Che Guevarra, McGrath, and assorted Vietnamese poets (see my Sapagka Iniigbig Kita at Iba Pang Bagong Tula). The milieu and vocabulary of those writers, not that of the hallowed George St. Clair version, mediated my play-drive performance or creative rearticulation of Balagtas’s epic narrative.

Modernizing the Legacy

My English reworking or, more precisely, my prosaic imitation of Balagtas’s masterpiece was finally given wider reception in the NCCA 2019 publication of Florante at Laura: The Exhibition, curated by Annatha Lilo Gutierrez. The flavor of that postmodern rendering of the archaic awit may be discerned in my transfiguration of the penultimate stanza: “Therefore the militant masses, in gratitude, raised their clenched fists to the sky. The king and queen thought of nothing but to scatter the fruits of production to their partisans.” The original was bare: “Kaya nga’t nagtaas ang kamay sa langit, / sa pasasalamat ng bayang tangkilik; /ang hari’t ang reyna’t walang iniisip / kundi ang magsabog ng awa sa kabig” (Paculan 99). 

The interpretants I marshalled above were intended to activate the emotive and conative potentialities of the source-text. Since my focus was on the target text/contemporary audience, I had resorted to the alchemical strategies that Andre Lefevere had catalogued in Translating Literature. Taking account of the ideological/political frame of the original, its illocutionary nuances, and contrived tactics to modernize a dusty canonical text, I opted to register the spirit, the structure of feeling, not the referential veracity of my source. Hence, the “clenched fists,” “fruits of production” and “partisans” conformed to the universe of discourse of the third-world, left-wing youth, and civil-rights movement of the translator’s time (compare the Victorian idiom and monotony of George St. Clair’s version). Immersed in the author’s milieu, I recalled how that awitinspired Rizal and the 1896 revolutionary propagandists. The aim of readability coincided with the imperative of capturing the ambience, the contour of sensibility, of the original.

Navigating Oriental Passages

Before the West Philippine Sea controversy, we were already fascinated with Taoism and Zen Buddhism via Ezra Pound and my teacher at Harvard, I.A. Richards, who had annotated Mencius’s speculations on thinking/mind. Mao’s Yenan Forum on literature was not far behind. The next act of “traitorship” occurred in the last decade of the twentieth century, with my Filipino version of Lao Tzu’s classic Tao Te Ching based on the interlinear translation of Gregory Richter. This method accords with Walter Benjamin’s tongue-in-cheek advice endorsing interlinear models as “the prototype or ideal of all translation” (82). Why this experiment? Well, before I studied Peirce’s semiotics, I was inspired by Pound’s technique of capturing the ambience of canonical texts (from Propertius and troubadours to the Analects and Japanese Noh plays). I was also then engaged in inquiries into materialist dialectics and its analogies in Taoist/Zen Buddhist dynamics. So the Tao was re-christened: “Landas & Kapangyarihan sa Makabuluhang Buhay.” 

My other purpose in grappling with Tao Te Ching was to find out if the maxims of Taoism can be expressed in the vernacular idiom. Consequently, from the two last lines of the text in the English of Ames and Hall, “Thus the way of tian [heaven] is to benefit without harming; The way of the sages is to do without contending” (204), I inferred this insight: “Ang landas ng langit ay nagsasabog ng buti at pakinabang; hindi ito pumipinsala. /Ang landas ng pantas ay nagsasakatuparan nang walang pakikipag-unahan” (66). Notice that I do more “explicitation” or emendation, as well as compensation, to use Lefevere’s terms, to foreground the senses of “benefit” and “contending,” as well as insert the notion of achieving or fulfilling some intent or mission. Viewed from Peircean semiotics, I yoked the logical (legalistic) with the immediate interpretant (enigmatic), eliding the dynamic moment of interpretation which would reconcile contradictions by dialectical mediation. This preference for analogical mirroring or mimicry as a recreative mode of translation has been observed by Prof. De Villa in her comparative appraisal of various translations of Amado Guerrero’s Philippine Society and Revolution, a problematic field of power/knowledge which requires a longer analytic inquiry we reserve for another occasion.

Beyond the Lure of Verbalism

What are the lessons deducible from the trials and ordeals of the Spieltrieb discourse of translation? Suffice it to mention one, for now. My discovery is that the Filipino lexicon needs to expand its power of abstraction. It is rich in feeling-words, gestures, vocabularies of perception and sensory apprehension (see Maggay’s Pahiwatig). But this sensorium, this organon of cognitive investigation, needs universalizing terms to appeal to a cosmopolitan audience schooled in the language-games of public argumentation from Plato/Aristotle to Kant, Hegel, Peirce, Freud, Russell, Wittgenstein, and so on. The vernacular contains words that are condensed or compressed, e.g., “buti,” that needs spelling out to elaborate its various semantic possibilities when used in diverse frames. The frame enables various scenes (connotations, tropes, expressive nuances) to surface, with the cultural/ideological contexts determining which ones are appropriate in conveying shades of meaning. Again, however, the translator’s paramount objective—to transport the source-text’s original vision, temper, modus of sensibility—serves as the controlling principle of the transfer strategy. The spirit of the original should dictate the final configuration of the product, as Heaney and Gass affirm in re-validating the efficacy of Pound’s practice.

As a testimony to what I have suggested above, I confess to fabricating an early specimen of traitorship. One can verify my failure to transliterate or transcode verbatim, but nonetheless generating a nexus of interpretants yielded by the actual process of reading/glossing on the purport of the chain of signifiers. In short, what beliefs or actions are stimulated in the reading process? Here is a famous poem by Pound entitled “The Return” followed by my version: 

See, they return; ah, see the tentative

Movements, and the slow feet,

The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

Wavering!

See, they return, one, and by one,

With fear, as half-awakened

As if the snow should hesitate

And murmur in the wind,

and half turn back;

These were the “Wing’d-with-Awe,”

Inviolable,

Gods of the winged show!

With them the silver hounds,

sniffing the trace of air!

Haie! Haie!

    These were the swift to harry;

These the keen-scented;

These were the souls of blood.

Slow on the leash, 

pallid the leash-men! (Pound 24)

_______________

Ang Pagbabalilk

Masdan mo, bumabalik sila; ay, sundan ang nagbabaka-sakaling

Paggalaw, at mga paang mabagal,

Ang bagabag sa paghakbang at ang walang katiyakang

Panginginig!

Masdan mo, bumabalik sila, isa, at isa pa,

Natatakot, at nangangalumata,

Wari bagang nag-aalinlangan ang yelo

At bumulong sa hangin,

at lumingon

Iyan ang mga “May-Bagwis-ng-Sindak,”

Di masalang,

Bathala ng mga paang may bagwis!

Kasiping ng mga asong pilak,

            inaamoy ang bakas ng hangin!

Ay! Ay!

Ito ang maliksing umusig

Mga matalim na pang-amoy;

Mga kaluluwa ng dugo.

Malumanay sa buntot-page,

maputlang umuusig!  (San Juan 133).

The biographer Noel Stock considers this poem exemplary for “the poet’s feeling for the weight and duration of words,” illustrating Pound’s belief in “absolute rhythm . . . which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed” (1964, 89–90). Sensory, feeling-ful cognitive mapping of interpretants is primary. In comparison to the accentual music of English, the Filipino syllabic mode demonstrates the possibility of a different tempo, the staccato rhythm, which evokes approximately the emotion of diffidence, anticipation, surprise. Each language enables a range of illocutionary effects that parallel or resonate with those of other languages, hence fidelity to what the poet wants to accomplish.

Semantic Extrapolations

When I wrote my 1966 essay “Translation and Philippine Poetics” after the Balagtas experiment, my orientation was primarily empiricist and formalist (following the American school of New Criticism). After my course with I.A. Richards in English poetics at Harvard University which utilized Roman Jakobson’s linguistics, I was fascinated by Jakobson’s schema of language functions, specifically his judgment that “The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination” (358). What was missing was the historical or syntagmatic process in which discourse is inflected by the cultural shifts and ideological/political contingencies of addresser and addressee. The reason why the referential function of language, the context (out of the six functions of any communication that Jakobson diagrammed), is often sidelined is due to the stress on the message/the code. 

Of course, the other functions—the emotive (addresser), conative (addressee), the phatic and metalingual, are operative, in accord with the structuralist paradigmatic/syntagmatic formula (353–57). Jakobson’s hierarchy of functions explains the varying qualities of translation, depending on which other function is allied with or catalyzed by the strictly poetic function. This then accounts for my tendency to conjoin the poetic with the conative or agitational impulse, as evidenced in my manner of translating my poems below.

Historical context is the desideratum for grasping what is worthwhile transferring. This is what I highlight when rendering the following three poems in Filipino, with the premise that readers today are familiar with the historical events and sociopolitical conflicts surrounding “Bangkusay,” “Smokey Mountain,” “Mendiola,” etc. “Elehiyang Nabuking Binigkas ng Batang Tubong Blumentritt” itself alludes to Ferdinand Blumentritt, the Austrian scientist and close friend of Rizal. “Bangkusay” designates the Spanish conquistador’s defeat of the Muslim indigenes of Tondo, near Fort Santiago. “Smokey Mountain” connotes ongoing impoverishment of a neocolony ruled by oligarchic violence (killing of Mendiola demonstrators during Cory Aquino’s presidency). The same goes for the second poem, “Lakbay ng Baguntaong Naglagalag,” where the most important reference is the recent event of a fishing boat rammed by the Chinese in the disputed zone of the West Philippine Sea, as well as to allusions of historical events from the Tamil Tigers (the Maoist guerillas) in Sri Lanka to Rizal’s tulisan filibusteros/rebels mounting an attack on Fort Santiago in Intramuros, the famous Walled City, signifying the hoary centuries-long burden of Spanish colonial heritage.

 Parenthetically, innovative transfers, not just faithful imitations, can create miracles. Consider how the Portuguese singer Dulce Pontes transformed the erotic resonance and ambience of Ennio Moricone’s “Love Song” (from the Italian spaghetti Western film, Once Upon a Time in the West) into “Amor a Portugal,” which has become a Portuguese anthem via the Internet—a dazzling performance witnessed by millions on YouTube. She converted the original text’s imagery of “Your love shines in my heart” into the impersonal “A thousand fires burn without being seen” in Portuguese, evoking the spirit of fado and the generic thematics of longing. Could we do the same with a new version of “Dahil sa Iyo” or “Bayan Ko” via traitorous transmigration?

Interpretation Cohabiting with Translation

Lest I end with a futile apologia for betrayal, allow me to use my translation of an older poem that captures the sense of estrangement linking various personae, locations, and historic intervals. My translation of “Biyernes nang Hapon sa Oktubre, Willimantic, Connecticut, USA” hopes to earn the trust of those already instructed not to expect fidelity, only assurance of the effort to aspire for being worthy of it.

Deploying a mock-surrealist tone in this poem, I attempt to suture the referential and phatic to the conative function of Jakobson’s linguistic chain so that a chain of immediate and dynamic interpretants are generated simultaneously. Meanwhile, the contemplative voice of the speaker reflects on the historical transition from rural-farm town to urban-money economy (neoliberal globalism) in the United States, especially after 11 September 2001, which inaugurated the “Global War on Terrorism.” 

The speaker observes the cracks in the asphalted road (like wounds) from the town of Willimantic, Connecticut, to the American-Indian-operated Foxboro Casino near New London, a nuclear-submarine base. The pasture-land where Pequot Indians lived long ago have been covered by a bridge with sculpted frogs on each side, reminiscent of the legend in which frog-cries warned colonizing villagers of Indian attacks. Gone are the frogs like cigarette stubs while pigeons fly around, searching for food. Especially on Friday at dusk, folks drive southward to the Foxboro casino to gamble, chance governing future stakes. Here I combined immediate, dynamic, and logical interpretants so as to fix a belief in doubting the propaganda about extremism when the inaugural genocide against native Americans (Pequots) remains stark proof of the lethal irrationality of disastrous neoliberal casino imperialism.

Indeed, after 9/11, what’s the future for migrant Filipinos avoiding the lack of employment in “shithole” countries threatened by Abu Sayyaf Muslim extremists? Is Willimantic a refuge for non-white “strangers”? Is the dream of success in milk-and-honey America an illusion behind curtains of decrepit windows in decayed towns? Here, the referential/denotative function blends with the sound symbolism of the Abu Sayyaf, Pequot, Bridge of Frogs, and Foxboro casino, in a climate of fear, doubt, and unpredictability evoked by “sugat na umaantak sa lamat” and “Naupos na sigarilyo’y ibinurol . . .”  The last two lines cannot really be conveyed by the English phrases because the efficacy of the words “sumingit” and “sinisilip sa gunita ang kutob at kilabot” depends on recursive sound echoes, while “Abu Sayyaf” and “Amerika” fuse into a menacing brew of hope and aversion. I recommend that readers just listen to the sounds of Filipino after the English prose summary to apprehend the sense/meaning as well as somatic resonance and import of the original poem, as Benjamin suggested.

Given the discordant texture of the Filipino text, I am doubtful if the English version can really convey the poignancy of the anger and pain in the source-text. This is only to say that the translator ironically succeeds by urging the reader to learn Filipino, to go back to the original, since the traitor always betrays. The melancholy ordeal of translation—as transubstantiation or sublimation of the source-text—confirms our tragic plight in the Tower of Babel, wondering if silence can be the only viable or feasible alternative. We can afford to be lazy, not translating Don Quixote, because we live in a more violent, quixotic time with nuclear windmills all defying control. But why do we need Google’s translation engine when we are plunged in jouissance, singing the refrain “magkasiping buong gabi” from a popular Rico J. Puno song? 

SAMPLE SPECIMENS:

Three Poems with English Translations by the Author

_________________________________________

ELEHIYANG NABUKING BINIGKAS NG BATANG 

TUBONG BLUMENTRITT

Oo, tapos na, ’di na tayo pupunta sa Tondo ng ating kamusmosan—

Kung saan sabi mo mahal mo ako, di malilimutan—Tapos na iyon!

Di na tayo babalik doon—Oo, sa Bangkusay o Plaza Moriones—

Hindi ko na matandaan kung sa Tayuman o Bambang tayo unang nagkita

O baka sa tren sa Tutuban o sa loobang sanglaan sa Divisoria . . .

Oo, ’di na tayo babalik sa Tondo, doon sa lumundong dulo ng buhay—

. . . Hindi ko na nga maalala kung saang liko sa Juan Luna ang daan . . .

Oo, tapos na, ngayong gabi nagpasiya kang tapos na ang pagsuyo—

Gabing kay lungkot, umaapaw hanggang sa estero ng Binondo

Hindi na tayo babalik doon tulad nang nakalipas—Ay, hindi na!

Hindi ko na magunita kung saang sulok sa Tondo tayo nagtapo 

Tapos na, hindi na tayo babalik sa Gagalangin—mundong kaylupit!

Kung saan ang sumpang binitiwan ay naligaw sa tulay ng Dimasalang

. . . Hindi ko na nga matandaan kung saang liko sa Dapitan lumisan . . .

Oo, ’di na tayo babalik sa pook ng lambingang ngayo’y Smokey Mountain . . .

’Di ko na nga maalala kung saan kita naiwan, saang lugar babalikan—

Kapus-palad na pag-ibig, ay, nasawi sa mundong nagsalabit sa pangako—

Ay tapos na, ’di ko na nga matandaan ang daang papunta sa Tondo—

’Di ko na magunita ang tipanan sa Quiapo? Sa Mendiola ba o sa Luneta?

Oo, tapos na, ’di na tayo babalik sa tinding niyapos, ay, kumilig sa pag-sinta—

. . . Dito na lang kayo muna sa Blumentritt pagkagaling sa Culi-Culi, 

Nakalimutan ko na ang ruta papunta sa sementeryong La Loma—

Oo, hindi na tayo babalik, hindi na, tapos na, magpakailanman—

Pagkasiyahin ang pira-pirasong pulutang napanis sa gabi ng sumpaan . . .

______________________________________________________________

FOILED ELEGY RECITED BY A BLUMENTRITT NATIVE

Yes, it’s over, we’ll not go to the Tondo of our childhood

Where you said you loved me, never to be forgotten—That’s finished!

We’ll never return to that spot—Yes, Bangkusay or Plaza Moriones—

I can’t recall whether it’s Tayuman or Bambang where we first met,

Perhaps in a Tutuban train or an indoor pawnshop in Divisoria…

Yes, we will not go back to Tondo, there where life’s horizon-line sagged—

. . . I can’t remember now which street-turn in Juan Luna marked our path . . .

Yes, all over, tonight you decided that our dalliance is ended—

A night so wretched, overflowing up to the stinking canal of Binondo . . . 

We will not go back there as we did before—Aie, no more!

I cannot remember at which corner in Tondo we first met,

It’s finished, we’ll not retreat to Gagalangin—a world utterly ruthless!

Where our promises, disavowed, got lost on the bridge in Dimasalang . . . 

Indeed, I cannot remember which street-corner in Dapitan I fled from . . .

Yes, we will not withdraw to the place of caressing, now Smokey Mountain . . .

I can’t recall now where exactly I left you, where I should retrieve you—

Curse-stricken love, Aie, victimized in a world bewildered by promises—

Aie, it’s done, I can’t remember the streets leading to Tondo—

I can’t find in memory our trysting spot in Quiapo? Or Mendiola or Luneta?

Yes, it’s finished, we’ll not go back to the pain we embraced, amorous shudder—

Let’s stay here, linger in Blumentritt after visiting Culi-Culi,

Anyway I have forgotten the route debouching to the La Loma cemetery—

Yes, we will not go back, no more, it’s over, forever and ever—

Let the fragments of this appetizer suffice, spoiled in the night of avowals

and disavowals . . .

___________________________________________

LAKBAY NG BAGUNTAONG NAGLAGALAG

Pumalaot na, walang tiyak na daungan o dalampasigan—

Kung saan ko naisip makarating, wala ako roon, humantong man . . .

Sandaling sumungaw sa butas ng aking himlayan, bulalakaw!

Nakabalik ka rin mula sa Taormina, sintang balikbayan,

Tumupad sa pangakong magbabalik kung kinakailangan

“Kusang binangga kami ng Intsik, di kami tinulungan—

Umikot muna upang tiyaking lumubog na, tapos tumakbo!”

Batid mong ngayon ay inaanod, napapadpad sa kinabukasan

Kaya hindi ka na tumigil sa Thessaloniki, naibsan ang pighati—

Sabi ng pilosopo, ang gumugulong ay di hihinto hanggang di pinipigil . . .

Umiiwas ka sa unos o sigwa, di mo akalaing babanggain ka . . .

“Oo, umikot sila, nilente kami, nang matantong lubog na,

Dagling sumibat, tumakbong palayo! Walang awang mga hayup!”

[Testimonyo ng kapitan ng GEM VIRI, 06/14/2019]

Nakabalik na mula sa Colombo, Sri Lanka, taglay sa pusong nawindang

Ang memorabilya ng Tigreng Tamil, mandirigmang nakaligtas . . .

Kung hindi ikaw, sino ang sasagip sa nasawing manlalayag?

Umiwas ka sa lagim ng sakuna, sa tukso ng Mutya ng Bali,

Kundi ngayon, kailan pa? Saan isusugod ang katawang naipit?

Binangga kaming pumalaot, lumayag, tinawid ang panahong masungit . . .

Binangga nga—Gulat, nasindak, daigdig mo’y abot lamang sa hiyaw

Ng saklolo sa dalampasigan ng Davao, Jolo, o Zamboanga—

Buti’t di ka napikot ng aswang sa Siquijor o tokhang sa Mindoro—

Binangga ka ng maamo’t mailap na buwitre ng imperyong sumasakop—

Di na kailangang humibik, ngitngit ng himagsik sa kapalarang nasapit—

Bakit nga ba tumawid ang hayop sa kabilang ibayo?

Tanaw mo na sa pinto ng San Agustin ang kumakaway na bisig—

Sa Balwarte ng San Diego naglalamay armadong kaluluwang lagalag . . .

__________________________________________________________

JOURNEY OF THE YOUNG MAN WHO WANDERED

[From the Philippine Customs Declaration Form No.117, Item #7 prohibited: “Materials advocating or inciting treason, rebellion, insurrection, sedition against the government of the Philippines”]

Shipped out, no definite pier to reach or shoreline—

Where I thought of arriving, I am not there, even if the drift compels the traveler . . . 

For an instant, through a hole in my sleeping quarter, flashed a shooting star!

So you’ve returned from Taormina, beloved expatriate,

Fulfilling the promise that you’ll come back if needed—

“We were rammed by the Chinese, they didn’t help us—

They circled first to make sure we’ve sunk, then scrammed!”

You know now you’re being carried away, floating toward tomorrow

So, therefore, you did not tarry at Thessaloniki, with grief subsiding—

The philosopher taught: what is rolling will not stop until it is impeded . . .

You were trying to elude squalls or storms, you didn’t suspect they will strike . . .

“Yes, they turned around, spotlighted us, when sure we were sunk,

Swiftly they fled, sped away! Beasts devoid of pity or mercy!”

[Testimony of the captain of the fishing boat GEM VIRI, 4/14/2019]

You’ve returned from Colombo, Sri Lanka, bearing in your bruised heart

Memorabilia from the Tamil Tigers, guerilla warriors who survived . . .

If not you, who else will save the disaster-stricken voyagers?

You evaded the misery of accident, seduced by the Muse of Bali,

If not now, when? What will the wrecked body assault?

We were rammed, far out in the ocean, defying the miserable weather . . .

They hit us—Shocked, panicked, your world touched only by the shout

Of succor at the shores of Davao, Jolo, or Zamboanga—

Lucky you were not tempted by the Siquijor witch or police-killers in Mindoro—

You were rammed by gentle but sneaking vultures of the colonizing empire—

No need to cry out for help, rebellious anger at the fortune encountered—

Why indeed did the animal cross the road to the other side?

You can glimpse from the door of St Agustin’s church those arms waving—

At the San Diego rampart, in nightlong vigil, armed souls wandering . . .

__________________________________________________________

Biyernes ng Hapon sa Oktubre, WILLIMANTIC, CONNECTICUT, USA  

Sa hapong tag-lagas may sugat na umaantak

Sa lamat ng mga kalsadang aspalto sa lungsod na dating pastulan ng mga 

katutubong Indyang Pequot.

Anong kabulaanan ang itinatago ng mga kortina sa durungawan?

Hindi alam ng mga kalapati kung ano ang kulay ng pag-asa.

Naupos na sigarilyo’y ibinurol ko sa tabi ng Tulay ng mga Palaka

Habang patungo ang prusisyon ng trapik sa Foxboro Casino 

na pag-aari ng Indyang Pequot.

Kung bakit sumingit sa isip ang Abu Sayyaf?

Sa takipsilim ng taglagas sinisilip sa gunita ang kutob at kilabot 

bago tayo naglakbay patungong Amerika.

(Oktubre 1, 2005, Willimantic, Connecticut, USA)

____________________________________

Friday Afternoon  in  October, willimantic, connecticut, usa

In the autumn afternoon a wound festers

in the crack of the asphalt roads in the city once a pasture field for the native Pequot Indians.

What fraud and deceptions do the window-curtains hide?

Doves and pigeons do not know the color of hope.

My cigarette stub I interred beside the Bridge of Frogs

while the traffic procession headed for the Foxboro Casino now owned by the Pequots.

But why does the Abu Sayyaf sneak into the mind?

In the Fall’s twilight hour I sneak into memory’s fissure, a voyeur filled with 

apprehension and terror 

before we journeyed to America.

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About the Author

E. San Juan, Jr. is emeritus professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Connecticut and Comparative American Cultures at Washington State University. He was recently visiting professor in the Department of English of University of the Philippines Diliman  and Cultural Studies professor at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. His recent books include Faustino Aguilar: Kapangyarihan, Kamalayan, Kasaysayan, Metakomentaryo sa mga nobela ni Faustino Aguilar (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2020); Carlos Bulosan—Revolutionary Filipino Writer in the United States: A Critical Appraisal (Peter Lang, 2017); In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern World (Lexington Press, 2007), and Sisa’s Vengeance: Jose Rizal’s Sexual Politics and Cultural Revolution (Vibal Publishing, 2021).