Foreword for Nolledo Book

I wrote the foreword a while ago for the Philippine reissue of Nolledo’s But for the Lovers. Teaching the book now and putting the foreword up here as one more resource for the book. (In rereading the book to teach it, I noted an error in a textual detail in this foreword; I’ve corrected it.)

Rereading Nolledo

I’m not exactly sure how many times I’ve read Nolledo’s But for the Lovers. My dim recall of teenage days is a daze of books indiscriminately devoured, with that sluttish glut of my sense of those times: as if words existed for my satisfactions. My early memory of coming across Nolledo’s novel, somehow in Diliman, very likely from the library because I have no trace of any old Manila copy on my shelves through the back-and-forth of my migrations, is simply this shock of discovery.

I know my reading of it was extra-curricular, as the best finds go. Of course, it did not come up in my Philippine Lit Before 1950s class (it was first published in New York by Dutton in 1970). I don’t believe I understood it. I remember having juvenile critical claws out, as if in self-defense (I had many of those biblioleptic moments where I guarded my ardor with heresy): in my memory I begrudged what I thought was its allegory, in that immature way a young reader thinks a jaundiced eye is important. But the fact is, my recall is hazy because for a kid like me—to read this book is to fall in love with it. This book, in my memory of that first time, was about words—the play with words, the chutzpah with words, the sheer romance with words. Nolledo has this in abundance—alliteration and assonance, zeugma and synecdoche: I open a page now at random (page 170 in the 1994 Dalkey edition) and see neologism, a geographic joke, consonance, and slant rhymes all in one paragraph. It’s a fever-dream of language play, and that type of book, for me, was match to kindling, I was moth to flame. I had friends at UP who casually referred to the author as “Ding,” and in this way the book’s history remained a mystery because in Diliman the writers people actually knew were objects of gossip not study, and anyway if you left the country, as “Ding” had, it was as if you were dead. I know I came across the book again when I returned to America in the nineties because I have this copy of the Dalkey edition—which I’ve reread several times in the past few decades, the last time being when a magazine asked me to write an essay on the question What book do you always recommend?

The book I always recommend is But For the Lovers.

Practically flawless in its use of free indirect discourse as a weapon of national memory, this novel set in Japanese-occupied Manila during World War 2 is written (so I wrote in an essay for Boston’s Post Road) with delirium’s precision. When Jane Austen in the early nineteenth century began her forays in the free indirect style, she amid the hedgerows of Hampshire, England, did not imagine how her narrative simulation of the vagaries of consciousness might engender the dream-novel of a Filipino expatriate in Iowa. It’s interesting that the Austenian novel, for me the exemplary harbinger of the realist-novel form, appears at the time of the Napoleonic wars (and during an era of violent colonialism also unmentioned in the novels): those experiments with the articulation of consciousness, which some call romances (thus elevating romance to philosophical art), are partners with disruption.

In his novel, Nolledo, who was also a journalist, short story writer, and playwright, weaves pitch-perfect voices, each haunting and distinct, of multiple misfits on the ragged edges of a war-torn city—a city fractured not only by violence but by language, rent not just by war but by history. Having been plundered for centuries by Spain then raped by plan by America, Manila in 1945 is in the grip of the lunatic Japanese as it waits in numbed thrall for the arrival of its tardy saviors, Douglas MacArthur’s equally insensible GIs. Witnesses to the city’s dissolution are an aging star of the obsolete Spanish theater, a pensive urban thief, a provincial virgin left for dead, a Japanese ‘ghost,’ a downed American pilot used in an elaborate guerrilla operation as demented prop. The lush fevered imagery never descends into mere tropical cliché because of Nolledo’s absolute mastery of voice. From the extravagantly worn Spanishisms of his vaudeville Manila clown to the tour de force hallucinations in Midwestern slang of the raving American pilot, Nolledo crafts with conviction the story of a doomed city, ravaged, as the Dylan Thomas allusion goes, ‘but for the lovers, their arms/ round the griefs of the ages/ who pay no praise or wages/ nor heed…craft or art.’ Nolledo’s prose is a powerful marriage of modernist poetry and disciplined narration. Reprinted by Dalkey Archive in 1994, with an introduction by Robert Coover, But for the Lovers has been hailed as a cult masterpiece, another term for those great books unjustly unread.

So I purloin above my comments in that magazine. But what is it really to say of a novel that its delirium is precise? And do words like absolute mastery of voice stand up over the years? And why did I feel discomfort then, as now, over the phrase cult masterpiece as a description of this book (the phrase to me has always been a diminution of this book’s power)? When Mara Coson asked me to write this Foreword, I reread the novel one more time. I reread it now not only as a reader but also as a novelist, and being the novelist that I am now, I also reread it as a woman. I admit, when I took it up again, I read it as I would reread any of my novels before publication—testing it. Testing it for error. Testing its diction for irrelevant word. Testing its syntax for possible rearrangement. Testing its sentences’ rhythm. Testing its scenes for detail a narrative moment might not need. Testing its narrative arc for cracks: where the design broke or whether the invisible trajectory of time (which is the novelist’s structural secret) ever lost me.

Page after page, in this rereading, But For the Lovers never lost me.

The book is a marvel. It cuts no corners. It knows its purpose. Like the best of our Filipino novels, like Noli Me Tangere, it is sui generis: it comes seemingly from nowhere to speak an experience of trauma unspeakably Filipino. It marks its ambition by its existence. And line after line, page after page, for me, it was also sheer fun—rereading it, every day I took the book up with an almost giddy, comforted pleasure—the comfort of reading a book that does exactly what its imagination requires and its truth demands.

An unflinching book, written with a sense of art’s freedom (and freedom is a word no Filipino takes lightly).

And this is odd because too many moments in the book are violent beyond pity’s range, rife with torture, orgiastic perversity, and the unimaginable cruelty of a horrific war’s reality.

The heart of terror in Nolledo’s plot is, I will underline, one of the most damaging battles not only in the Pacific theater of World War 2 but of that entire global moment—its heart is the drive toward what we now call the Battle of Manila in 1945, when the so-called savior of Filipinos, their American GI allies, thrust its artillery toward the historic, storied city held by the Filipino and American enemy, the Japanese. The Americans shelled Manila, an allied city, into rubble: a quarter of a million civilians dead, the old city of Intramuros, center of ruin, never to be rebuilt.

I grew up with this battle as a day of “American liberation”—and I’ve always hated the story of World War 2 as my mother’s generation would tell it because the toxic lie of the white savior is a cup of gall.

As William Manchester, MacArthur’s biographer, notes, “Of Allied capitals in those war years, only Warsaw suffered more. Seventy percent of the utilities, 75 percent of the factories, 80 percent of the southern residential district, and 100 percent of the business district was razed.”

In the middle were the citizens: whom Nolledo resurrects in this novel.

It is hard to replicate this moment with only rancor or to do justice to it only with empathy.

That is, to write this book, empathy cannot save the artist from history’s fallacies, and rancor cannot salve the artist of history’s wounds.

And so it’s through fugue-like trance states that Nolledo achieves truth and a bitter nation’s memory.

The novel follows the protagonist trio—the virgin, the thief, and the clown—in a surreal landscape that moves from tropical jungle to urban rooming house to parachute landing in mountain fasts, threaded only, it seems, by language: the high-jinks of Nolledo’s English, the book’s modernist omniscience.

For a Filipino novelist writing in English, language is always not just a tool but the weapon. Like Joyce, an avatar of the postcolonial artist, Nolledo confronts the power and potential and trap of English by brandishing and claiming it as he desires but, above all, for his immodest purposes. And for a Filipino novelist, there is no escape from the purpose of English—the purpose, every time we write, is subversion.

We can’t help it.

As N.V.M. Gonzalez once retorted when asked by a foreign critic why (so the story goes) Gonzalez’s novels seemed to have no irony—“Is it not ironic enough,” so went Gonzalez’s immortal riposte, “that I write in English?” No writer anywhere for whom circumstance has chosen her language, the tool of her power, not Phillis Wheatley or Joseph Conrad or Vladimir Nabokov or Chimamanda Adichie or Chinua Achebe or Jhumpa Lahiri or Jose Rizal, whatever their effects might be—grocery-store realism or revolutionary satire, neoliberal romance or anti-colonial tragedy, eighteenth-century ode or anti-imperialist dudgeon or arch art-piece—takes that tool without sense of doubleness: of duplicity. The Filipino writing in English is wrenched from the unease of her choice by history. History has handed her a bitter tool, and it is ineluctably hers: this tongue gained from violence. One thing I read in Nolledo’s virtuosity is this: to merely wield language is his curse—his spell upon history—but his potent subversion for me is not in the brandishing of the weapon. I’d say that’s his joy. That’s why his title, for instance, comes from a poem disjunct from the novel’s frame. Nolledo, in this novel, is above all having an artist’s fun.

Rereading Nolledo, I see that I had overlooked that a part of his fun is not-so-furtive injections of his other tongue, Tagalog, which he springs on his English with no fucks really given. As Rizal does with his Spanish, opening up El Filibusterismo with a Tagalog in-joke on the word Tabo—the untranslated name of the boat Simoun and company are riding in that first scene in Rizal’s second novel—and peppering scenes in the Fili with Cavite Chabacano or Tagalog or even English, Nolledo romps through English, seeding it with Tagalog or Spanish as a phrase might turn or the case may be.

But no Filipino novelist’s fun, cursed as we are by time and Rizal the novelist’s preemption of our plans, comes without history’s comeuppance. And so Nolledo, an expatriate artist in America, just as Rizal was an expatriate in Berlin, Barcelona, and Paris, wrestled with history. It’s not his fault or his fate: it’s just that truth for a Filipino seems to require at first that struggle with our past.

So this time, as a novelist, I appreciated Nolledo’s design in a way that had escaped me in my other readings: the marriage of his narrative voice with the ethics of his sense of history. As a child reader, I mistrusted allegory in novels: one of my unexamined truisms. But as an adult novelist, I also resisted historical allegory in my rereading of But for the Lovers. I believe my resistance is text-based and correct. Reading Laura in Balagtas, Maria Clara in Rizal, and Alma in Nolledo as allegories of motherland disturbs me. Rape, too, as an allegory of motherland and colonization disturbs me. And this is not because those tropes have no truth: they do. But the conjoining of women with violence and oppression in this allegorizing of nation is a reduction that, in my view, does not read Rizal, Nolledo, or the nation as well as one could.

Certainly, there are sections where the imagery of women in Nolledo takes on the casual sexism normalized in U.S. novels of the sixties and seventies that Nolledo’s prose easily tracks as influences. But at the same time, unlike the feeble women in Updike’s Bech books, for instance, or the overall ambient misogyny in novels by men in the twentieth century—like Joaquin in his short stories, Nolledo does intriguing queering of women’s agency in his novel. Even a brutal orgy I could barely stomach, early on in the Santo Tomas prison, in which a woman’s body is gang-raped under the panopticon of Japanese rule, has an absurdist power dynamic in which the woman’s vagina enacts revenge on the greedy soldiers made comical by their rapacity: a woman’s corpse and her vagina torture these abusing soldiers. The physicality of the description has sexist overtones that we need not disclaim, but the ethical point is pungent: the woman’s body ultimately has control.

Thus, Nolledo splits the reader’s lenses through this violence upon women: but resisting the allegory of nation in the novel allows one to read Nolledo’s historical ethos—and his women crafted from this ethos—more productively. In my view, he is interested in the subjective historical experience, and not necessarily in an abstract, collective one. A classmate of mine from the UP’s English Department in the eighties, Neferti Tadiar, (I would have been in writing workshops with her when I first read Nolledo), now a professor in Women’s Studies at Barnard, sets up in her brilliant, essential books on Philippine contemporary history a key framework by which to read this novel’s ethos. In Things Fall Away, Tadiar theorizes “historical experience” as a tenet of revolutionary action: “By ‘historical experience’ I do not mean only people’s collective responses to the objective social and economic conditions in which they find themselves. I also mean the collective subjective practices they engage in that help to produce and remake these objective conditions.” Though “collective subjective practices” seems a deliberate oxymoron, in Philippine fiction since Rizal the simultaneity of the collective and the subjective in the novelist’s “practices” has had interesting effects—the most potent one being that we extract the collective more readily than we see the subjective. Again, this is not necessarily an error. But for me, as a novelist reading Nolledo and his powerful sense of the subjective within a collective, historical frame, Nolledo’s characters are best traced through their consciousnesses moving within their precisely drawn geographies, urban or rural or transnational (as is the case with the American pilot)—that is, their specific historical experience—before being abstract symbols of nation. Thus, we’d redeem Alma from the allegorical traps of rape and race by following instead her urgent, transforming acts of survival. Alma exists emphatically in her world and, in some mysterious way, never dies: she is always physical, not just soul, always her curious, exploring, discovering self, breathing. This is true, for me, of all of Nolledo’s characters—they exist as their own selves, not tropes of history. It’s also true that Nolledo’s prose gives their subjectivity transcendence. But that’s his gift to his readers: we must read both the subjective experience and the collective history simultaneously to read him well.

Lastly, Nolledo’s imagining of historical experience, via the “collective subjective practice” of his art, became clearest to me as I reached his novel’s ending.

The gem of this novel is how Nolledo read—with one of the most artistically lucid anti-colonial and anti-imperialist moves I’ve seen in a Filipino novel, bar none—the tragedy of his chosen history: the 1945 Battle of Manila that is his novel’s climax. I underline this because above all Nolledo’s is an art-novel. But in my view, it’s an art-novel as a form of beautiful rage. It’s a classic example of beauty as polemic.

Which, of course, in my view is a virtue.

Because of my own work on the much earlier Philippine-American War, which when I started my novels I found curiously erased in Philippine contemporary subjectivity, I was keyed to traces of that past in Nolledo.

He did not disappoint.

I will admit that the tour-de-force at the end that enlaces two Battles of Manila, 1899 and 1945, completely escaped me in every single previous reading I had done of the novel—which, sadly for me, is a feat of my misrecognition.

Engrossed in his words then, I did not see his design.

An aside: one aspect of Nolledo’s feat is that this is a Cold War novel—the Philippines and Nolledo are locked in the brainwashing of those times, and few Filipino writers in English of his era, for instance the Tiempos who were also Iowa Workshop alumni, were immune to American political fetishes (I can think only of Nick Joaquin who in “The Mass of St Silvestre” had a clear anti-American lens on World War 2 despite his very colloquial American prose).

Perhaps because he experiences the savagery of isolation as a lingering expat in America (who knows: I personally would not reduce him to this, but I would posit there was alienation in the U.S.A.), in his novel’s end Nolledo accurately narrates the brutal history of America in the Philippines with laser artistry, through what seems a passing stroke of minimalist, somewhat structuralist ingenuity (after the dazzling maximalism that is this novel).

His culminating stroke of genius is a palimpsest of around one hundred fifty-six lines that, at first, one might miss as his prime conjuring trick of truth. (And yes, in my previous readings of this novel, I glossed over it as stylistic rather than substantial: I did not get its genius.) As the Americans arrive in Manila, suddenly you’re beset with a jumble of anachronisms: places and names from a dislocated era. Tinio in the Ilocos, Concepcion and Alejandrino in Central Luzon, Cailles and Malvar in the Tagalog provinces, Lukban in Samar.

These are not the guerrillas of World War 2. These are the katipuneros of 1899, subdued by the same American battalions coming to save in 1945.

One can read this set-piece of jumbled battles as basic irony: two sets of Americans arriving in the Philippines at different times, in overlapping, enjambed sentences, creating satirical dissonance. But as the ghosts and incidents from the war against the Americans of 1899 keep entwining, twinned, hauntingly enjambed with the onslaught of the “saviors,” the Americans of 1945, the inexorable historical doubling doubles one over with history’s grief.

Analyzing empire through this simple syntactical stunt, Nolledo delivers his coup de grace.

Having read so much on that earlier war, I recognized the names, and his obdurate sense of history dawned on me: I saw the interlacing of the two wars as if witnessing his conjuration—his thesis of empire’s rapacity and the occupied’s rage through war’s simultaneous double-times—and part of the “historical experience” revolutionary in the novel is the unraveling of the reader’s gradual awareness of its ethical design, that is, the way we see the novel processing historical truth: we in fact always live with the sense of rhyming moments of time that Nolledo’s Battle of Manila carries, in which all along the text contains our repressed past in ghost sentences sliding under our present violence.

I will not underline here exactly at which moment that occurs in the novel: pick it up for your puzzling pleasure.

Throughout the novel, through his ventriloquized voices in his omniscient lens, Nolledo pulls his punches as he occupies his haiku-quoting gentlemanly Japanese assassin or imbecile American pilot. Empathy keeps leavening our disgust, even to the end when refrigerators blow up looters, and still we follow the dreams of the sadists who mined them.

But Nolledo’s eye on history is not divided or ambiguous: his rage against his city’s ravage is singular. It is knife-sharp.

My beef about World War 2 in the Philippines has always been that this concept of “American liberation” further alienated us from understanding our past and ongoing violation under capitalism and empire—especially true in that era of Nolledo’s writing. It is hard to replicate the Battle of Manila in 1945 only with rancor or to do justice to it only with empathy because of our complicated history both with our allies the Americans—our colonial abuser—and with our enemy, the Japanese, our brutal fellow Asians. Nolledo’s triumph for me is that he did: he measured rancor and empathy by centering, without compromise, art’s demand—in his case, his roaming, ruminant omniscient lens, his hold on perspective through the most careful play with words, his unflinching eye on ruin.

What readers often fail to note in our false divisions of art from polemic is that it is precisely art’s play, its anarchic discipline, that produces the ethical, political gaze.

In at least two of my novels, I’ve mentioned But for the Lovers in passing genuflections. Our job certainly is not to build altars but to read our art and thus our selves with care. Rereading Nolledo, I am grateful for this reissue, a labor of love and memory for Philippine literature that I hope does not stop at Nolledo even as this publication energizes us—by rightly beginning with him.

Gina Apostol

New York, 2022

Notes on Noli #1

I’m teaching the Noli for the first time. So because I had time and was not working on it in order to write a novel, I decided to read it in the Spanish alongside the English. Previously, I’ve only looked at the Spanish for reference, needing mainly the English to get to what I needed. I enclose here my notes on the reading that I did for the kids (grad students at UH-Manoa), where I’m teaching for a term. The course is called Nation and Narration, and I’m teaching Rizal, Joaquin, Nolledo alongside two Anderson books + maybe Toni Morrison and Robert Coover. Found some fascinating matters I did not get in my various readings of the novel—especially Rizal’s studious avoidance of the word indio in his narration voice; indio mostly appears in quotes and so on. Also, Rizal remains very fun, maybe more so in Spanish—because you can see the play with other languages more clearly than in the English for some reason. It’s easier to read now in the Spanish because I know the book so well at this point and also, of course, I’m just cribbing with the English text before me. The notes below are for my students—several of whom don’t know Rizal or the Philippines at all. (Previously, they’ve read stories in Borges’s Labyrinths—hence references to Pierre Menard, “Averroes’s Search,” etc.—and they’ve read 6 chapters in Anderson’s Imagined Communities; they’ll be reading the Fili next then Anderson’s Under Three Flags. We’re using the Penguin Classics translations.)

Here are my notes for my students:

My notes on Noli reading so far + questions/Noli structures for you to consider re: narration —

Epigraph 1: quote from Schiller (German poet) from a text called Shakespeare’s Ghost: this first epigraph seems to see Shakespeare as a dramatist who is not-classical, writing in the vernacular about ordinary, not-great people (there’s no Orestes, Andromache and so on—just “persons”). Thus, like a Borgesian figure who sees “all men [as] Shakespeare,” in this quote from Schiller Rizal seems to liken himself to Shakespeare in eschewing classicism to focus on just “persons,” the not-great. (seems to be a German concept of Shakespeare, not a British one; I point out this Schiller quote mainly to note Rizal’s text seems more German-centric than usual to me in this rereading: it’s true he studied to be a doctor in Heidelberg and published Noli in Berlin—it was cheaper than Paris, he said [Paris was his base, off and on, while writing the Noli [1884-1887])

Epigraph 2: “A Mi Patria” (to my country): main metaphor here is cancer: the Philippines as cancer patient. (Rizal was actually also a doctor: even in exile in Mindanao he remained a practicing ophthalmologist—operated on cataracts etc—clients had to get permission from military governor to see him; he had a thriving practice.) The other main image is ancient Rome: he says ancient Romans exposed the sick at temples to be cured by “a divinity.” Thus, like an ancient Roman he’s exposing a sick country—who’s the “divinity” that will cure? [interesting read here on Anderson’s author/reader concept of imagined community]

Notes on title: Noli me tangere (touch me not) is 1) a line in the Latin Vulgate from the gospel of John (it’s what Jesus says to Mary Magdalene, who was one of the first to see him when he rose from the dead); 2) a popular subject for Renaissance and Baroque paintings; 3) a medical term for cancerous ulcers.

Thoughts on reading the Spanish text:

1. There’s an interesting improvisational aspect of nation-making in the improvisations of terms for Filipino that Rizal worked through in his first novel. His narration uses the following to denote Filipino: filipino, naturales, nacionales, paisanos, pueblo (which means town or country), gente (which means people). (Rizal uses extranjeros, españoles, etc to denote non-Filipinos.) The English translators mostly simplify his problem by saying natives, or Filipinos, or just people. But it’s clear one of Rizal’s issues was that at the time filipino had commonly meant specifically Philippine-born Spaniard. The Spanish term for indigenous Filipino was derogatory: indio. But he and his fellow agitators for reform (La Solidaridad propaganda movement: 1880s) were in the process of neologizing themselves: creating a term of identity for what was not-yet—and would claim the word Filipino on their own terms. As I noted in class: the hierarchy of Spanish-colonizer labels was first peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain who got all the positions); insulares or filipinos (Spaniards born in the Philippines; what Anderson called creoles; an insulares, Father Jose Burgos, executed by Spaniards for “filibusterismo” or subversion, was likely the “ancient priest” Ibarra mourns [anachronistically and wistfully perhaps: it was Rizal’s brother Paciano who was student of Burgos] as his late mentor when he gazes at Bagumbayan [the field on the Luneta where Burgos—and Rizal 24 years later—were killed; both were dead at 35]); mestizos (mixed: chino or español, usually), then last indios. Only once in text so far has he used nación, but it indicates Europe: “ ‘esas dulces tonterías que se parecen mucho á las jactancias de las naciones en Europa: gustan y saben á miel para los nacionales, pero hacen reir ó fruncir las cejas á los extranjeros’ ” (“Idyll on the Balcony”: it’s the flirtation dialogue between the two lovers who are both “sister/brother of Cain” [47].) (Note in that sentence how, in this omniscient 3^rd narration, he separates natives [nacionales] from foreigners [extranjeros], though in this case nacionales are lovers and extranjeros are those not in love; so even re: romance Rizal invokes nation). Rizal’s multiple words for Filipino people bring up several issues: a) at that point (1887) there was no stable word—except for derogatory term indio—for the Filipino people, who were not yet a nation—so in Rizal’s multiple improvisational terms one can see how the word we use now, Filipino, is a neologism [a made-up, or coined, word] that came to mean a people, a nation; in terms of nation-making, it’s important that the revolutionaries didn’t give themselves the term katagalugan [tagalogs] (a term some used) not just because it’s a tongue-twister, but because the emerging choice Filipino recognizes a way to denote all different kinds of [settler] Philippine island groups—Warays, Kapampangans, Ilokanos, and so on—even including any creole who considered himself Filipino etc; b) he was solving a problem of narration with his multiple terms for filipino BUT his problem of narration highlights a problem of nation: narration- and nation-making interestingly go together here, like doubles. But it’s the improvisational quality of this making that is interesting to consider, in my view—
2. He uses indio in dialogue, in a character’s free indirect discourse, or in quotation, esp. in a friar or Spaniard’s voice (even the helpful Spanish military guy with the mustache, who tells Ibarra his dad’s story, uses indio). But La Consolación and Doña Victorina (both Filipinos) also use it. The omniscient narrator does not use the word indio except in one instance (Ch 10, “El pueblo” [the village], when the narration is historical, going back in time to when Ibarra’s great-grandfather arrives in San Diego: the narrator’s ventriloquizing of the historical voice produces a slip—one might say a Freudian slip—and uses indio this once in 3^rd person narration; note also that elsewhere the term pueblo in novel is used interchangeably for country, town, village, people, or a people, etc: while the English translation for the chapter title chooses The Village). Thus, the use and non-use of indio could be seen as an aspect of the novel’s nation-project, however consciously or unconsciously it’s used—in the novel, the term indio usually indicates colonizer-voice so that its void and multiplying metonyms [nacionales, naturales, pueblo, gente, etc] in the narrator’s voice seem to indicate a political, decolonizing consciousness [or unconscious]. The discipline the text shows re: use/non-use of indio is kind of remarkable if it is not a so conscious decision because Rizal had no proofreader nor copy-editor: he alone worked on his manuscript. (NOTE: at this point, in novels on themes of Black enslavement, for instance, the novelist must consciously figure out the n-word—you don’t want to retraumatize your reader, but at the same time the word has resonance in certain scenes/voices—when would you use the n-word? A good option, for some, is never. This is an issue for me as well as a novelist—given the pervasiveness of n-word as well as gook / googoo for Filipinos in the colonizer-military-texts that I read, when do I use those terms? My policy so far is—don’t use them, if possible. In this way, Rizal’s problem in the Noli—to use or not use indio—is a living issue even now for those who write about national traumas. If viewed as not so conscious, these choices by Rizal are interesting psychoanalytically; I lean toward their being conscious decisions and Ch 10 use of indio is a slip; either way, conscious or unconscious, the diction’s interesting.)
3. There’s more Tagalog in the Spanish original than in the English translation: ex. cualquier bata en la escuela lo sabe [spoken by Father Dámaso]. Penguin Classics trans: any schoolboy knows that. Bata is Tagalog for child (no gender). (Filipinos would call Dámaso’s mix of languages Spangalog, just as Tagalog-English [the current language of many Filipinos] is called Taglish; however Dámaso’s Spangalog is an aspect of his racism: to call someone bata pejoratively would be like the white man calling people boy; use of Spangalog among Filipinos would be more of a joke.) Rizal sprinkles Tagalog throughout, often not bothering to translate (esp. for food [tinola, sinigang], domestic fixtures [kalan, dinding] games and toys [chonka, sigueyes], plants [guayabas, zacate], and some words that he prefers over the Spanish: dalaga [instead of doncella or la joven, meaning young, also single, lady], tulisan [instead of bandido, or bandit], etc.) Again, one can see Rizal here solving a problem of narration because his novel is a Minotaur [unique] and he’s constructing a genre as he’s going along. The problem for a multilingual writer using the majority/colonizer language is—what do you do with reality—e.g., the realism of a multilingual community? What do you do with the occult languages that exist beneath the power-language that you have also made “vernacular” (as Anderson noted the Irish have done with English, and in my view the Filipinos have done with English as well: English is now one of the Filipino vernaculars). This question of one’s occult, primal language (in Rizal’s case Tagalog) layered within the majority language remains an issue for multilingual authors, e.g., many Asian Americans, etc. Simply by using Tagalog, sometimes explaining sometimes not, Rizal modernized and innovated the novel—in fact, he brought it into our 21^st century—at the same time that he is producing a mirror of nation in the multilinguality of his text. So again, issues of narration here are linked to an aspect of nation—many Filipinos basically exist quite casually and “unconsciously” in translation, existentially having multiple languages in one’s head at any one time (which is true even if you don’t speak a Filipino language and are Fil-Am—because your parents’ tongues are, let’s be honest, also in your head, like a haunting). The casual multilinguality in the Noli simply mirrors this occult-like existence of multiple tongues in Filipino psyche/ experience: a people haunted by language.
4. Tagalog (both explicit and implied) as a signifying figure in this novel creates multiple frames of “knowing” in the Noli, among them outsider-narrator frame (omniscient narrator who seems to be reporting from the outside, explaining what a word means); insider-reader frame (reader who knows Tagalog becomes an insider of the novel: intimacy/familiarity); outsider-reader frame (reader who does not speak Tagalog is excluded when Tagalog appears untranslated: a political act lies in that as well); character frame (Dámaso who speaks Tagalog badly; Crispin and Basilio who speak Tagalog mainly but their words are in perfect Spanish [79]; Ibarra who speaks Tagalog, Spanish—his possible other languages being German, French, English, Italian, as well as Latin—fluently: very likely, when he speaks to Basilio’s father [137] the language is tagalo; Tasio the philosopher is the figure Rizal explicitly notes code-switching from tagalo to castellano [78-83]: in the novel so far [to Ch 33] he explicitly speaks more languages than Ibarra). NOTE: I’d claim Rizal is aware of what language his characters are using as he’s writing them—but he doesn’t always tell us whether, in fact, they’re speaking all in Tagalog or all in Spanish. This is very common in implied-multilingual texts written in the majority or power language. So with Rizal’s Tagalog-within-Spanish there’s also the author-frame of knowing: what Rizal knows that he doesn’t narrate to us. We have to imagine that as well. (EX. when the guardia civil are abusing Sisa, the dialogue between them, in my view, would be Tagalog—many guardias civiles were actually Filipino (and enough joined the revolution to make a good novel :); but Rizal doesn’t go on about what language they’re speaking because, in truth, we don’t need to know or think about it in that cruel scene—the emotion of the scene is most important.)
5. Tagalog in this Spanish-language novel thus creates interplay among reader/narrator/author as outsider/insider/and so on (heightening and complicating the reader/text dynamic that Anderson says is part of the “imagining community” process that novels/print-capitalism helped beget). So it will be useful to consider how the narration’s frames of knowing therefore (outsider/insider/etc etc), conjured through the signifying figure of Tagalog, resonates with decolonization, or anti-colonial nation-making, etc—

Some thoughts on how to read the Noli’s complexity:

A Pierre Menard reading of Rizal is useful: consider the text as having multiple resonances all at once—and that readings across multiple times but also including our actual contemporary identities as well as our insider/outsider statuses and so on make the text “infinitely richer,” as Borges called Menard’s Quixote.

1. Consider Rizal (1861-1896) as a novelist of his time (Noli was published 1887). First, at the time he has no peer, actually, as a native of a colonized country writing in the colonizer’s language anti-colonially, with clear propaganda purpose and explicit political aims but doing it through ART. (that’s actually quite weird—war is the preferred strategy for nation-making—not art) The novels of his somewhat-contemporary, Brazil’s Machado de Assis (1839-1908), are aesthetically gorgeous, even avant-garde, but not explicitly political—though unlike Rizal, who was bourgeois, privileged, and expressly political, Machado was part-Black, grew up lower-class, and had grandparents who were freed slaves. Machado wrote amusing, peerlessly elegant, philosophical, novels. Their key difference is that Brazil was free from Spain in 1822 (the “Creole nations” Anderson talks about); so Machado grew up in independent Brazil. The Dutch Multatuli (1820-1887) wrote an anticolonial novel in Dutch but was not Indonesian. The one contemporary whom I like to compare him to is WEB Dubois (1868-1963)—Rizal was only 7 years older than him—who also wrote a novel but, unlike Rizal, lived long enough. Rizal died before the revolution: before he could even change his mind about war 🙂 (Much is made about Rizal’s thoughts on war: in 1896, the Katipunan—revolutionary secret society that eventually waged war against Spain—went to see Rizal in exile in Mindanao to ask him whether they should go to war—they needed him to be on their side—but what he said is garbled by history—huge controversy rages even now). Second, though Rizal had no peer at the time in terms of his art project, he did have novelist peers, of course: Rizal is writing during a golden age of novel-making—when novels were in fact shaping nations: Austen in England (1775-1817) gave the modern novel its supple, plastic form—free indirect discourse was not her invention but she is its avatar; but it was the French who at the time were the bestsellers of the genre. Rizal’s favorite book as a kid was Hugo’s Montecristo; Eugene Sue’s Mysteries of Paris—a weird, extremely long potboiler that was like Les Miserables but polemically anarchist—was also one of his favorites. So it’s useful to think about the Noli in terms of 19^th-c novel-making. Among Filipino texts, he read Francisco Balagtas (also called Baltazar): he mentions him with reverence 2x in the Noli so far—but he also makes fun of the “Tondo comedies” that dramatize the kinds of romances that are actually the plot of Florante at Laura. (He loves Baltazar for his use of Tagalog; in one letter—I think either to Paciano or to Blumentritt—he uses Baltazar like his dictionary of Tagalog.)
2. Consider the contemporary, current Filipino reading of Rizal: at this point Filipinos’ received notions of Rizal characters and scenes, from Ibarra to Maria Clara to Crispin Basilio Sisa, etc, are hardened by nationalist piety and cultural conditioning, almost frozen in ‘custom’—without even having read the novel, Filipinos have received notions of these characters in terms of nation/ embedded now in culture, unexamined pieties/ etc. The self-hating, white-thinking Filipino [Doña Victorina], the truly sad abused child laborer [Crispin], the wise village madman [pilosopo Tasio], the irremediably wicked Dámaso—they now are nation-tropes by which Filipinos examine self. On one hand, they are now also “lifeless,” trite (like the line of verse about camels and destiny in Borges’s “Averroes’s Search”); on the other hand, they are renewable concepts of nation that have already helped “imagine community.” As Elijah noted in class, the fact that one can always reread Rizal, in effect imagining through the Noli an imagined community being imagined into being every time one reads, is something. For those who are reading this the first time, it’s still useful to recognize/ figure out the scenes/characters that helped imagine nation. We have the luxury in historical hindsight of examining the complexities the novel actually produces as novel [not nationalist screed] [as in the superhero Basque figure Jake noted—what’s up with that?? (In that case: it would be good to read who’s describing him as hero [a Spaniard] and note the back story of Basque figure [Don Rafael]: tainted by explicit plot detail as son of corrupt landgrabber in Ibarra’s genealogy, etc: so the taint of greedy colonizer overlays heroic Basque—upon his creole hero, Rizal enacts duplicity [in the two senses of that word: he’s treacherous toward Ibarra and makes him 2 things at once]. (Also, one can look up what Spaniards thought of Basques (as Jake did). Thus, even that one line on the Basque figure complicates the received idea of Ibarra as hero, if one reads the Noli through its novel elements: when one reads political meaning through fictive ploys, often the result is layered—one considers narration mode, who’s describing, the ironies of detail, etc., while the tendency of nationalist readings or desire is to flatten: the nation must be singular, easy to adore, and unitary, the hero must be pure and revolutionary, the novelist must be serious and grim, and so on. Thus, reading the Noli as nation but apart from nationalist cant can surprise.)
3. Consider the Noli’s historical reception: There is no ambiguity about how the novel was read at its publication and by the revolutionaries—it was thrilling and explosive for fellow Filipinos who read or knew of it—this is all clear in Rizaliana letters—one friend writes to say riots and brawls with guardia civil are happening because of rumors/knowledge/reading of the novel—Bonifacio, plebeian founder of revolutionary society that toppled Spain, was its huge fan. Its effect is also clear in the novel’s actual consequence for Rizal: instantly a hunted man who did not go home until 1892 (left Manila 1882 at 21; wrote Noli ages 23-26; returned briefly in 1888 [?], but family made him leave again, to avoid friar anger) and when he finally returned (despite family and friends’ telling him not to go home) he was arrested, exiled to Dapitan in Mindanao in 1892, executed in 1896. There is the fact that the Filipino propagandists disseminated the Crispin/ Basilio scene as propaganda leaflet (Chapter 15: Los Sacristanes)—as if it were a news report; etc. So it’s useful to consider this historical reception of the novel VERSUS a current reading in which, for us who are not under the gun of oppressive Spanish 1880s rule, the narration might seem distanced, impersonal etc (it never is for me 🙂 )—when in 1887 it was literally the bomb; interesting to see it for ways it could be “dead” for some, a lifeless text, at the same time it is “explosive”—the Menardian strategy here is useful.
4. Consider gaps in the work from our current political lens—in almost every text of this sort, issues of sexuality, gender, class, colorism, racial matters, settlerism, etc. will arise—Rizal’s work is shot through with sexism, typical Filipino animus against Chinese, settler sentiment, heteronormative complexes, unexamined homoeroticism (the question of Rizal’s gayness is as old as the nation), and so on—how do we include them in our analysis to create a complex reading of nation?
5. My answer to the above question is, and this is the core of our work on Rizal—consider and read closely the narration itself—what are its structures (just as we noted Borgesian structures)? What problems of narration is Rizal solving by choices he makes? What complexity about nation do we learn from reading Rizal as narration? [one question I have is the mystery of attachment and identification in imagined communities: if a work of fiction is the avenue to attachment, makes you sacrifice your life, what does that mean about nation?? In what way is fictiveness a productive way to imagine community??] NOTE: Rizal in the Philippines is not read really as an artist. He’s nationalist hero and martyr. This makes reading this novel as art-project—a text that problem-solves narration issues—seemingly antithetical (even blasphemous) to the country’s nation-project. I’m still looking for a good replete reading of Rizal’s work as narrative art. (I mentioned issues of free indirect discourse in the Fili to Anderson once, and he noted no one talks about it; he was one of the few people who talked about Rizal’s pronouns.) It’s weird for a Filipino to even imagine Rizal revising: he is a figure set in stone. But in my view reading him through his forms of narration, problem-solving matters as a writer, is the best way to read nation in Rizal.

So as you read him further, look for the following structures in Rizal—

1. His moves from third to first person omniscient (“pronominality” as Anderson calls it): what does this narration mode’s reflexive quality, its sense of a contingent (not absolute) knowing, tell us about how community or nation is imagined in this novel? [also, there might be a basic contemporary-political reason: plausible deniability before the frailocracía 🙂 possible but not interesting, as the luckless detective says in “Death and the Compass.”] And does the pronoun-slippage signal anything at its various points?
2. When does Rizal use free indirect discourse: with which characters? Note them as you go along. Are there any interesting patterns for when and which character he uses this intimate, narrated-monologue form?
3. Direct discourse and dialectical structures: polemical conversations or juxtapositions that set up duality, or at least 2 ways of thinking. I noted in class the juxtaposing of two Filipino types in the azotea (balcony) scene (47): the traveler Filipino (Ibarra) vs the at-home [literally in a convent] Filipino (Maria Clara). (Here, the two types are also gendered; common traveler type now would be balikbayan [homecoming Filipino].) If Rizal often conjures at least two ways of defining or imagining, what do we learn about Rizal’s nation project—how can we theorize nation via this dialectical pattern?
4. Doublings: Elías/ Ibarra. Tasio/Ibarra. Tasio/Sisa. Sisa/Consolacíon. Etc. Compare/contrast.
5. Genealogies: note what’s brought up via stories of genealogy: genealogy as a structuring device for telling the past and puzzling out identity (both the concept of identity as well as a character’s identity: e.g., Ibarra’s grandfather’s story indicts Ibarra’s ancestry thus also Ibarra—but Rizal also makes him his hero: what’s Rizal doing? Also what do we make of his mom’s name, a Tagalog infinitive verb: Magsalin (to translate; also, to transfuse)? Anyway, find other genealogy-subplots or plots-within-plots: how is the character’s genealogy linked to history as well as plot; how does genealogy complicate identity and/or read nation?)
6. Notice spatiality and specificity: Rizal is profligate and precise about Filipino detail, liberally strewing Filipino place-names, actual Manila characters, some still living (Paterno the poet [Ch 23], Mendieta the Quiapo fortuneteller [Ch 1], Piernavieja [in Spanish original, Rizal footnotes him in Ch 17, “Basilio”]—he’s a notoriously abusive Augustinian later captured by revolutionaries during war against Spain), and Filipino food and customs and culture and so on, placing them on the same plane as other, better-documented cultures: modern West/ancient Egypt/ modern and ancient Rome/ ancient Greece/ China-Japan-etc (what he very rarely does in Noli is bring up the Americas—the other Spanish colonies—though the Americas enter in the Fili). Note his moves re: Filipino specificity (this is related to his use of Tagalog) and what such specificity is saying politically. Again, in 1887 there has been no novel yet that centers Filipinos and how Filipinos view the world—he’s innovating here—at the same time, he’s aware of the Spanish genre of costumbrismo—novel of local color—this is not, however, a costumbrismo novel (local color for its own sake). He’s doing something else—in a way, I’d say he’s rebelling against the Spanish costumbrismo novel—
7. Demonio de las comparaciones: setting up Europe vs Philippines, often via Ibarra’s lens but not always (e.g., in “Memories” chapter—but really, all throughout the text). This is part of the dialectical feature of the novel, as well as related to space-and-character specificity, but there are also line-by-line comparaciones—within a line a comparison might arise—note the novel’s comparative ploys re: Europe/West vs Philippines or colonizer vs colonized. (e.g., “Todos los santos” (All Saints) chapter: comparison with New Guinea/Dahomey/etc in cemetery/death discussion is particularly fascinating [Ch 12])
8. Satire: what does he satirize? Consider what he satirizes of Filipinos as well as Spaniards.
9. Humor: what do you make of it? What exactly does the text find funny? How does humor make nation and why?
10. Anticlerical scenes: he has a lot: is his novel a novel about anticlericalism or a novel about nation?
11. Themes: schools, literacy, education; homecoming; death; religion; love; racism; etc; and patría, of course.
12. Texts within texts: parodic texts: etc. Where do these occur in the novel? What are their effects?
13. Anderson correspondences: note where Rizal’s novel can be read alongside Anderson’s theories:

calendrical, homogenous, empty time;

meanwhile structures;

 the pattern of plurals;

colonial-pilgrim identifications (the oppressed group traveling to and from metropole identifying with each other);

textuality and intertextuality (how acts of reading and/or writing attach and bind and create identity and identification).

death + religion: (Anderson posits that with falling-away of religious feeling [a way humans cope with death], nation filled a gap) Note: religion and dynastic rule are two key cultural paradigms Anderson raises as preceding nationalism; in the Philippines religion has more sway than dynastic attachment (though oligarchs remain).

ETC: add more correspondences that occur to you as you read.

Does Rizal’s novel fill in any gaps in Anderson’s theory? What does it add?

What do we learn about Anderson’s theory by reading the Noli?

On Responding to Art as an Activist

I’ve been reading people’s politically anguished responses to the play Here Lies Love (I refer specifically to those who are anti-Marcos; I don’t care about pro-Marcos people 🙂 ) I’m intrigued by the responses. I understand them and I honor them: I think they come from a very good place. The anguish, it seems to me, is part of the story of our too-long, enduring subjugation as Filipinos under fascist rule (Marcoses and Duterte), and it’s particularly relevant as a new Marcos is in Malacañang Palace: a play centering Imelda, no matter its intentions, will hurt.

At the same time that I honor this anguish as a Filipino, as an artist it pains me. I believe the anguish, though understandable, is also misplaced. It misdirects our rage. I saw the play when it was first out off-Broadway, in 2013 at the Public; I wrote about it. As this play is now staged on Broadway at a different time, what strikes me is how this response to art is one more symptom of the harms of fascism, of historical violence, and of capitalism.

So this piece contains my thoughts on political responses to art in our very difficult times.

I’ve been thinking about how our current political responses to art—especially as we hear them on social media—can also be read as trauma responses (there are other, productive, activist aspects to them as well). I’m struck by this sense of trauma in the case of Here Lies Love because the feelings of anguish seem, to me, an aspect of transference: rage against dictatorship is being transferred to a work of art that both mirrors and contests fascism. I see the anguished political response to this play as symptom rather than solution. Arising from the trauma of being from a country or with ties to a country, the Philippines, and another country, America, whose histories of violence and injustice still harm, the responses to this play provide a point of reflection on how we, as an audience demanding justice for all, contend with art.

When I first saw the play in 2013 at the Public, I noted what I thought about the play from an art perspective and as someone who grew up on Imelda’s island: that response was personal and political, but it mostly addressed the play as art. (I have yet to write about its current version, which I’m still mulling.)

In this note, I’d like to respond to art discourse on this play from an activist’s perspective.

I write about this mainly because I think there’s a diminishing at times of our ways of reading and understanding art that comes actually from a good place—our desire to have a better world, a world without harm to those unheard, unseen, marginalized—and our desire to condemn fascism and violence. But to have a better world, I also think a healthy response to art is important. What is powerful to me about art is how it is this (at least) double way of seeing: it can (and in some sense must) mirror reality, but it is also a construction: and to be fully engaged with art, and our humanity produced by art, we actually need to keep in mind art’s doubleness, its duplicity—we need to keep seeing the difference between art’s subject and means. Art mediates reality, but the practice of encountering art requires that we learn to read in at least two ways: as if the text is real, but knowing at the same time that it is not. When art is mirroring fascism, is it also the fascist? There are many ways to answer this question (yes, no, and many ways in between, depending on the text and our time and mood and space and activated personae at the moment we are viewing/reading art 🙂 ), but I think there are productive, ie activist, ways to respond that at the same time do not diminish nuanced ways of seeing art.

• Fight the real enemy (thanks, Sinéad). For me, in the case of anti-Marcos activism, this Broadway play is not the enemy. The Marcoses and the fascists are the enemy. Here Lies Love did not kill martial law victims. The Marcos regime did. Deflecting one’s anti-Marcos anguish onto a play (in this case a play that uses the simulacra of Imelda) instead of the fascist is one way I can see how hegemony works: our activist energies are deflected onto a mis-identified enemy, no problem is solved, and the enemy is untouched. And this waste of energy can serve the enemy. I’d like to write one day about emotions (esp aesthetic emotions, including politically left aesthetic emotions) under hegemony, and how I believe their mis-identifications at times can serve the abuser, the fascist (they do other things: but we need to be alert about the point of our rages, if only to conserve our vital activist energies, among other urgencies).

• Question the desire for representation. This is going to be hard to explain in one paragraph, but I’ll do this for now. To me as an artist the issue of representation has always been problematic. To me, representation is not a good in itself. It may be part of art, and a productive one, but it is not the reason for art. The desire for representation is a symptom: it tells us what is lost under capitalism. So it is a potent and absolutely profound desire. I have it, too, all the time. But desire for representation can also deflect from the actual horror (see above). But most of all it is not essential to making art, and for me, in my experience and art-making process, it is not primary. It is certainly one reason, but it is not the necessary one: it is only contingent—a condition of our dire times. I say this because for me art is an organism in itself responding to the world around it but also it is its own material and “thing.” (In Marx-terms, I’d bring up his theory of use-value versus exchange-value: his section on the commodity-fetish early on in Capital Volume 1). I’m going to refute two things here right off the bat: A) I absolutely don’t mean this in an art-for-art’s sake way—for me, art that does not see itself as part of the political world and its processes is shortsighted and will likely not be any good: for instance, many classics we admire have powerful artistic integrity, for one thing, precisely because they respond to their moment’s political structures: Dante, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Murasaki, even Austen; B) I also don’t mean that one’s identity, one’s personal history and attachments, are not part of one’s making of art: identity is part of art—it’s an integral piece of oneself, therefore inescapably an aspect of our art processes. The artist who doesn’t understand that his identity is part of his art deceives himself. When I talk about the desire for representation, I’m thinking about the response to art in our dire white-supremacist, capitalist world. I’m thinking of the difference between what Marx calls use-value (in this case, the artwork and its elements, including the artist’s identity etc) versus exchange-value (in this case, the artwork’s value in circulation, when it faces its public). For me, the angst for representation is relevant because of the predations of capitalism, but it is not really integral to artmaking. We give representation value because capitalism has over-valued some identities over others. So the artist in the minority culture gets taken as writing mainly to represent (not fair to that artist), and the artist in the majority culture gets privilege (not fair to the world). For me, representation, despite its social-justice uses, is an aspect of what art means outside of itself, when it’s received by others, but its use-value for the artist as one is making the piece is zero. Representation has use-value outside of the making of art. For instance, for me it is weird to say don’t watch this play because David Byrne isn’t Filipino (NOTE: for discussion of his identity as part of his art, see point below). I think primarily one should watch or not watch a play because of questions relevant above all to plays—how does its form create its content in truthful or meaningful ways, adding to our understanding of our world, what pleasures does it provide (because art’s pleasure is an element necessary to it), and so on? What use-values came into its making? Art is more than representation, and how can we recognize its other values within our demand for representation?

• Analyze Byrne’s whiteness but do it in terms of his art. Contend with the art (which, as I said, includes the matter of his identity) even as one acknowledges the structures in which it exists. I get people’s sadness that it is a white man’s play about the Philippines that gets on Broadway. I’m sad, too, not to see great Filipino art on a larger stage. But, you know, that is the crime of capitalism. That sadness sheds light neither on Filipino art nor on the art of this play. That David Byrne is on Broadway and not Jessica Hagedorn or HP Mendoza or Eric Gamalinda above all reflects on a system, on Broadway. (Broadway as emblem of capitalism, its spirit and flag, became most palpable to us when it shut down in March 2020: that the pandemic shut down Broadway gave many the chills, as if capitalism itself had gone dark. NOTE: To be clear, I’m not of the opinion that Broadway is our best chance for seeing good art. Broadway is great at doing a particular kind of art that, more than other venues, emphasizes exchange-value. I love theater but actually like to watch plays off- and off-off-Broadway [they’re cheaper, less hyped, their wider success still in suspense, and so there’s a thrill in discovering the art experiments of off-Broadway Here Lies Love, Strange Loop, Fat Ham, etc]; still when those plays do go on Broadway, I root for them. Because Broadway alters their exchange-value [the play certainly must make a lot more money], the concept of use-value becomes apparent to me: commerce changes how we view the commodity, the play is still the play.) But my point here is: David Byrne’s white face might be a symbol of capitalism, but still it’s capitalism that’s the enemy. The problem with capitalism is that because it exploits simulacra that respond to our desire (what Marx called the commodity–fetish), we need to be very alert about our desire. We always need to question what actually are the use-values in the thing and what is mere exchange-value (a work of art has both, of course, as all commodities do). This problem of the imperative of analyzing our desire, of figuring out what it is about art that we value, of course is another aspect of hegemony, of capitalism’s horror. In a way, we have to be more judicious about how or why we hate or love a thing. For instance, I do see that David Byrne’s handling of Imelda is precisely because he’s white, which makes sense—he’s white! (he’s been very aware of his whiteness as a maker of this play—which admission is not a reason to give him a pass: but it’s correct to read his identity as definitely part of his playmaking). In my view, recognizing his whiteness is part of analyzing the artwork: it is not reason to outright condemn it. An intriguing aspect (and yes, as Eric Gamalinda has pointed out, a problematic crux) of the play is that Byrne contends with Imelda head-on, which, for instance, I cannot do: it is too painful for me to write about Imelda straight on. But it is intriguing for me as reader/audience to see what another artist, who is not me, does. (This may be why I watched this play in the first place [back when Obama was still president, before Trump, before Duterte, before the second Marcos]; being from Tacloban and saturated with Imelda stories, I think then I wished to see what he would do with it.) When I first saw the play, in 2013, the convergence of disco with dictatorship through an immersive Imelda story was revelatory, for me—I recognized it as intuitive politically and thus formally astute. This white man’s act of artistic license was weirdly exhilarating—maybe precisely because it was the kind of license I could not give myself (and I still cannot and will not). It’s been instructive for me, reflecting on my own art, to consider that this head-on look at Imelda could likely have been done only by a white man: for me as a Filipino writer, such centering is not bearable—it’s too painful. As an artist (note: not as a reader), I can address Imelda as a figure only sideways, aslant (I can barely mention her actual name in my novels; in my life she is that monstrous). But I could also see why Byrne, given his white musician identity, could address her differently, head-on. He’s distanced from her. I’m not. And yet I think the play’s understanding of her monstrosity is not so different from mine. I can see that we deal with her monstrosity differently. I’m not saying this makes his or my art necessarily better (of course, I am partial to my own art; also, of course, his is a disco musical, I write novels), but considering his identity allows me to understand the art in its own light. I don’t agree with all aspects of the play, and not everyone, of course, will read the play as I have (in fact, many people, including my very good friends, don’t, which is also fine). But my point is that it makes better sense to analyze the play through Byrne’s white identity rather than denouncing a white man for making art about Filipinos at all. It is injurious to our own story to castigate non-Filipinos for making informed and researched art about our world. (Note: “informed and researched art” is the key term.)

• Support the Filipino cast and team because they are workers doing their job. They, too, are not the fascists. They are actors. The Marcoses are the fascists. Don’t just support the actors because they represent you. Honor them as workers in a difficult, white-supremacist world, like yourself.

• Be on the side of the anti-Marcos ally. The struggle against the fascist is long and hard. We need all our allies. This play is decidedly anti-Marcos. It’s not the kind of play the Marcoses wish to succeed.

• Instead, use this anti-Marcos play to serve productive ends—use it as part of an information campaign on martial law, on Philippine history, Philippine-US relations, imperialism, colonization, our current fascist times, and so on.

• Mention the Philippine Human Rights Act in your anti-Marcos posts anguishing about this play—try to get people to ask their US congressperson to sign onto it. If you don’t know what the Philippine Human Rights Act is, join groups like Malaya (I’m a member of Malaya—though in this post I am speaking only for myself). Join groups that are actively campaigning against fascism on the streets and in community events (and not just on social media). Use the play as an opportunity to organize others, or yourself.

• Choose the good if the better is not in reach. This is why I voted for Cory Aquino in 1986 instead of boycotting that election, as the Philippine hard left mandated (I agreed with the hard left’s reading of Cory as inadequate [to say the least]; I did not agree with abandoning that election’s possibilities, which in fact [and quite surprising to all of us on the streets] led to rebellion and the flight of the Marcoses). This is why I’d choose to support this play that is actually informing the world of the Marcoses’ crimes: if it has uses for anti-Marcos activism, I’d choose to use it to my advantage.

• Consider black propaganda. The Marcos PR—and now troll—machine has been and is historically extremely agile. I would not put it past the Marcos machine to underwrite absurd comments such as “the musical is funded by the Marcoses”—this reverse logic is how blackprop works: you use the emotions of those against you for your own purposes. We need to understand always when and how our own good desires are being used. (For instance, I’ve seen how the anti-Noynoy complaints were used and then morphed into pro-Duterte desire in the lead-up to 2016—sorry to all my friends I warned so long ago—but it’s true, your posts and reposts were used by the Marcos/Duterte blackprop machine. No, those posts were not the reason Duterte won: Cambridge Analytica took care of that. But “behavioral microtargeting, psychographic profiling, predictive analytics” from your social media posts are exactly what blackprop machinery uses for its vile ends.) The Marcoses do not want an anti-Marcos play to succeed. It’s not good for them. It’s always useful to consider how your posts will be used by your actual enemy.

• If you’re still angry about a white man’s play about the Philippines on Broadway, make sure you have in fact gone to plays by Filipinos, read books by Filipinos, and so on. I think too many cry over not seeing Filipinos on the world stage but then barely consume Filipino art—and you know there’s a lot of us doing art. I don’t know how many times I’ve been to political gatherings and too many good-minded people don’t know Filipino books or films or plays. (Personally, I have even watched a silly movie like Easter Sunday and enjoyed it because in my view Filipinos should also be allowed to make movies as dumb as Ticket to Paradise or Meet the Parents etc; I mean, social justice should include a right to be mediocre 🙂 ) But too many don’t support Filipino work. How regularly do I hear someone say—oh, I’d love to read your books—but what the hell, my books have long been available. Why not just make a habit of actually seeking Filipino art instead of crying over white people and so on? To be honest, I truly don’t begrudge anyone their art choices: one can rewatch Frozen all day for all I care. I have no axe to grind about reading or not reading my books (I’m a novelist: my main concern always is simply to just complete my novels). But one should be reflexive about one’s own art choices if one is denouncing art in the guise of fighting for Filipino causes. (Of course, there are many who have seen the Byrne play, still can’t see its point, unlike me, and make and/or support Filipino art: I honor you and this piece is not talking to you 🙂 )

• Be kind to yourself and to all who oppose fascism (our different experiences of fascism and dictatorship will mean we will have many different ways of responding). Recognize as Filipinos we have intergenerational hurt: in a way, we are all under trauma. This is why I value the voices responding to this play. But as an artist and an activist, this is also why I am responding in this way. Heeding and yet also analyzing our desires for justice—asking which are the most productive—are ways that one day, maybe, we can also heal.

One can demand justice but also contend with art in healthy, complex ways. Padayon. Fight the fascist. Makibaka: huwag matuliro.

Carter G. Woodson, Black History, and the Philippine-American War

Carter G. Woodson, founder of Black History Month, spent time as an educator and superintendent of schools in the Philippines, beginning in the year 1903—when the Philippine-American War was still ongoing (though US declared it over in 1902). As an official website on Woodson states, “Woodson learned about mistakes made in Filipino education, lessons he noted for making education more relevant back home.” He went on to include these insights about “mistakes” in his book, The Mis-Education of the Negro. US imperialism links Black and Asian radicalism in this little known story of Carter G. Woodson. The great Filipino poet Patrick Rosal also writes about it here, and in one talk he linked it beautifully, with poetic symmetry, to hiphop—The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill!

“Woodson learned about mistakes made in Filipino education, lessons he noted for making education more relevant back home”

Another fascinating connection between Black lives and the Philippine-American War is not just the better known Buffalo soldiers, particularly the famous Black defector to the Philippine cause, David Fagen, the most wanted American figure by US Army forces when he went up the hills in 1900 to join the forces of the beautifully named Filipino general, Urbano Lacuna, in the mountains of Nueva Ecija. I know there has to or will be a movie somewhere out there on David Fagen. But in terms of the history of cinema, we must bring up the unnamed Black National Guardsmen in New Jersey in 1899 whose link to the Philippine-American War and that US imperial moment of the early 20th century is as ACTORS. In some of the first films ever made in the US, Edison’s film company created simulations of battles in the Philippines and used Black members of the National Guard to play dead Filipinos killed in Luzon trenches by US forces—a fascinating interweave of erasure and imperial conquest in this story of Blacks acting as Filipino rebels in the earliest US movies.

An interlay of Blacks and Asians in the Philippine-American War thus seeds Black History Month and US cinema.

Here are three films of Black men portrayed as Filipino revolutionaries in imperialist films on the Philippine-American War:

Filipinos retreat from the trenches

Capture of Candaba

Kansas Volunteers at Caloocan

BIBLIOLEPSY!

Bibliolepsy is out from Soho Press January 4!

I began this book when I was nineteen: the year Ninoy Aquino was murdered on the tarmac by Imelda Marcos’s goons. In a weird loop, a circular pattern that mocks my own work’s ways of shaping time, this book, my first novel, is out two-times-nineteen years later—two times the length of my life when I began it. It marks the time I became a writer. To see it in print beyond its home (it was first published in the Philippines in 1997, winning the country’s National Book Award that year) is for me a kind of grace. For personal reasons having nothing to do with the novel, I never tried to sell Bibliolepsy when I ended up living in the United States. Its appearance now does not sum up my life (by no means), but it makes me glad. I’m glad to be experiencing the happiness I had when the book first came out.

I hope you can share in the gladness of this time. Buy the book, share it with others, be glad, I hope, in reading the book—which is about reading, about readers, and about books.

(Of course, the revolt that backgrounds my book only gives us pause—in that the Marcoses are returning, the son with a huge lead in the upcoming presidential elections—two-times-nineteen years later. As the Jan 6 Insurrection anniversary comes upon us here in the United States, the Philippine experience says: Beware when justice is not done to those who wreck democracy 😦 Bad things return.)

I talk with Viet Nguyen about Bibliolepsy at Politics and Prose on January 4, its pub date: link here. I talk with Sabina Murray at Books are Magic Jan 5, with Neferti Tadiar at Vromans Jan 6, with Zack Linmark at Literati on Jan 11, and with Malaka Gharib at City Lights Jan 18

You can read about the book (it’s about sex and revolution, about fucking over dictators as well as writers) from Publishers’ Weekly here, from Soho Press here. The New York Times reviewed it on its pub date— “Craving Books, Sex, and Revolution”! Link here!

You can preorder and buy it at any bookstore, but I hope you do not choose Amazon. Bookshop link is here. 

Bibliolepsy was about my wish to preserve ardor—the ardor I had for books the minute I learned to read. It’s about recalling the sense of that very first time. I hope you can find it, Bibliolepsy, both the book and your own recall of that kind of love—in this pandemic, we need that memory of primal ardor (that’s for sure).

My best to you all in this new year—hope to meet up one day again, in person, to toast all books—

Grazie, Italia, Utopia Press, and Alessandro Raveggi

Italian edition of The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata! To be translated by Alessandro Raveggi of Cà Foscari, from Utopia Press in Italy. My novels always, in some way, have Italia in them, so this is a thrill.

still my favorite byline in the New York Times #fuckthisVAR

so sick of the use of VAR in the premiership!! it’s beginning to look like goddamned American football, where the game gets stopped every minute because of a stupid machine!

I once got so worked up about this possibility, way back, in 2010, that I actually wrote about it—to the NYT. I stand by it!

#goddamnfuckthisVAR

To the Sports Editor:

Those who urge FIFA to use goal-line technology presuppose this argument: technology will provide an absolute truth that referees’ perceptions lack. But FIFA’s reliance on humans to solve existential moments of doubt is correct.

Soccer’s power lies in its poetic narrative—the indeterminacy of each second of the game presents us with something primal: that our lives are subject to the limitations of human perception. Anguish and doubt are endemic to the current rules

We may have fewer dubious decisions if FIFA appropriates goal-line technology. But soccer will lose something more beguiling and lasting: its correct perspective that we will never be able to eliminate indeterminacy.

Continue reading the main story

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Gina Apostol, Dobbs Ferry, N.Y.

On Wilfrido Nolledo’s But for the Lovers, originally in Post Road

Gina Apostol on But for the Lovers

Writer Gina Apostol wrote this brief paragraph about But for the Lovers for Post Road, a journal from Boston College. Thank you Gina ~ Mimi Nolledo

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But For the Lovers, by Wilfrido Nolledo

Practically flawless in its use of free indirect discourse as a weapon of national memory, this novel set in Japanese-occupied Manila during the Second World War is written as if in cold-blooded delirium. When Jane Austen in the early nineteenth century began writing in the free indirect style, she of course could not have imagined how her narrative simulation of the vagaries of consciousness would engender one day the dream-novel of a Filipino expatriate in Iowa. Nolledo, who was a journalist, short story writer and playwright as well, weaves pitch-perfect voices, each haunting and distinct, of multiple misfits on the ragged edges of a war-torn city—a city fractured not only by violence but by language, rent not just by war but by history. Having been plundered for centuries by Spain, then raped by plan by America, Manila in 1945 is in the grip of the lunatic Japanese as it waits in numbed thrall for the arrival of its tardy saviors, MacArthur’s GIs. Witnesses to the country’s dissolution are an aging star of the obsolete Spanish theater, a pensive urban thief, a provincial virgin left for dead, a Japanese ‘ghost,’ a raving, downed American pilot mistaken for a savant. The lush fevered imagery never descends into mere tropical cliché because of Nolledo’s absolute mastery of voice—from the extravagantly worn Spanishisms of his vaudeville Manila clown to the tour de force hallucinations in Midwestern slang of the raving American pilot, Nolledo crafts with conviction the story of a doomed city, ravaged ‘but for the lovers, their arms/ round the griefs of the ages/ who pay no praise or wages/ nor heed…craft or art.’ Nolledo’s prose is a powerful marriage of modernist poetry and disciplined narration. Reprinted by Dalkey Archive in 1994, with an introduction by Robert Coover (!), But for the Lovers has been hailed as a ‘cult masterpiece,’ another term for those great books unjustly unread.

Below are some things I wish to add

My time at National Bookstore’s Philippine Readers and Writers Festival has been rewarding, unsettling, fulfilling, destabilizing, and above all moving. It is the first time I return home only for my books (I usually return for my family). This conjoining of home with such intense focus on Insurrecto, which is a novel about a return home, creates spin in my head, the kind I perpetrate on readers. On top of this, I am deep in the writing of a novel. I’m jetlagged and in the time-free fever-dream of a first draft (actually a revision of the 266 pages of William McKinley’s World, but I have decided to junk almost all of those pages, I’m writing again from scratch). So in between my immersion in this new novel and my interviews on my old one, all enjoyable (this year of Insurrecto I made up my mind to enjoy the book events), this has been a whirl—fun, but intense. So of course I did not eat lunch on the day of my actual public event for Insurrecto—I kept working on the novel. Then I rushed to get to Ambeth Ocampo’s then Viet Nguyen’s then Butch Dalisay’s panels—all great! By the time it was 5, I was lightheaded—I was dizzy and I realized for some reason I was very very hungry. So at the end, I felt I had left gaping holes in the answers, befuddled as I was by my body. So below are some of the things I wished I had elaborated or fleshed out a bit during the discussion. I feel huge gratitude to the Philippine Readers and Writers Festival for inviting me—to the tireless employees of National Bookstore, esp JB Roperos, all of whom made the stay easy, to Xandra Ramos who led it all, to James Abuan who facilitated the prep for the events, to Raffles Hotel (for the breakfast buffets!), to Andrea Pasion-Flores who supports my books at Anvil, to Yvette for moderating the talk. The audience at this festival was wonderful—rapt, intent, intelligent, curious. Above all, they were readers reading these Filipino books. It is a gift that any book festival offers to us, to readers and writers—this gift of connection. So thank you to the festival, to all the readers and writers that I met.

• The Role of the Reader. A smart reader asked a lovely question: was the name Chiara connected to chiaroscuro, since in the novel the filmmaker Chiara began in the dark (oscuro), and as she proceeds to Balangiga she has more clarity (pun on Chiara)? I loved the question. And I said—aha, that is exactly what I mean by “the role of the reader.” What I mean is—if the novel is open enough, and the reader knows detail closely enough, it can produce a creative reader. For me, in a book, it’s not only the writer who creates. I did NOT have to answer his question because his lovely reading made my own intentions as a writer moot. (This does not mean you can have ANY reading; it is still possible to read irresponsibly.) If you create a text that is a labyrinth, parallels and conjunctions and puzzles for the reader to figure out, wordplay such as the questioner’s chiaroscuro can be part of a good reading—the reader also makes his own connections, and that is the fun of a text. In one book group in the States, a reader said to me, You know I’m Mexican so I could see so many connections to Filipino colonization, but [blank], he said, who is Irish read other things—we all had our own connections. (I will say I like this chiaroscuro reading because there is in fact an Italian painter in the novel, the master from Umbria, Piero della Francesca, and the act of painting and capturing and shading in a character’s face [the portrait of Caz—and it is interesting to note which scriptwriter created Caz] is also part of the novel, so the art allusion in the question is proper, in that a close reading of textual detail can explain how chiaroscuro might occur to one: it comes from the text.) A novel that deliberately creates an open role for the reader and requires reader-discovery allows for the creativity of the reader.
• Parallels in History. Asked about Duterte-era scenes in the novel, I noted how it was sadly easy to include tokhang, though I had begun the novel before Duterte’s election, originally designed to make parallels between violence in Marcos and Phil-Am war era; but it is terrible that I could seamlessly insert Duterte’s violence into the novel. I pointed out in the discussion that the close structural link between the executive and the police was material history: when the executive (governor-general) was set up in the American era, the functions of the police were directly linked to his office, since of course it was an occupying government that still hounded suspected revolutionaries—American rule was first set up as essentially militarist, counterinsurgency-oriented, in my view terrorist. (This is mostly from Al McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire.) The Phil-Am war explains the executive-policing structure of Philippine governance-by-counterinsurgency, which Marcos exploited and Duterte does now, too. It’s odd how the Phil-Am war explains many things we do not think about. I forgot to add this logical extension (which I have pointed out at other Q&As)—in this policing structure, the victims are materially different, of course (Americans killed katipuneros; Marcos killed “communists”; Duterte kills drug “criminals”), but the structural similarities are chilling: e.g., in a transitive effect, the drug “criminals” = katipuneros. All execute extra-judicial killings. Thus, Duterte IS the violent Kano in our age.
• I regret what I said about Kring-Kring. It’s the Romualdezes who are the devils of Tacloban. The former mayor Cristina just unfortunately married into the family; I should not go after the poor woman. I still stand by what I said about Imelda though.
• The organism and the reader. A question frequently asked of writers—for whom do you write? As I said, for me, I write for the text—the text is the organism I am trying to keep alive. I seem to be writing for this organism—to figure out how to keep it alive. But the reader is part of that organism: part of the text. So it is not true, as I said in the discussion, that I would not think about the Filipino or white or whatever reader. I’d revise that to say that if the novel’s structure demands an address to Filipino or to white etc, then I’d address or consider those readers in the organism. For example, the Phil-Am war topic of Insurrecto means that any of the scenes might be read differently by 3 key readers embedded in the novel’s design: Filipino, Filipino-American, white/American: the novel directly relates to their histories. So I did work hard in Insurrecto to think about how each might see the scenes I was creating. The organism of Insurrecto required that the scene could have layered, different meanings depending on which of those three is reading it.
• What Advice Would I Give a Young Writer. My advice about pleasure and enjoyment is often the following: write if writing gives joy, don’t write if it doesn’t, there are other ways to be happy apart from being a writer, the goal is not to be a writer but to take pleasure in living in this world. I would say this advice is hard-won, for me. Also, what I’m saying is that for me, writing gives me great joy—because of course I have kept doing it. But I’d like to add this recurring experience—whenever I find that the work is hard to write, when I labor at it, it is usually not good—my choices are probably wrong. When I find the tone and technique that make it fun to write, a huge pleasure, I know the novel is working. With Gun Dealer, I found writing laborious, excruciating. But I kept working on it—I finished a whole draft. But late in the writing, I found the key—I needed to shift to first person (the original mode of Gun Dealer was snarky, sarcastic third person). Once I did that—the novel was lots of fun to write. Both Raymundo Mata and Insurrecto were just fun fun fun from the start—as I have said, writing Insurrecto was like butter. That’s because I think from the beginning I felt I had made the right choices—tone, technique, structure. From the get-go, Insurrecto was structured like a banig in multiple third person free indirect style, and that was correct. Very recently, just last week, I found the key to Wm McKinley’s World, and I’ve been so immersed in it, and it is so much fun I don’t eat.
• Syntax and Words. Yvette, the moderator, asked me about my use of language: she read aloud a description of a cockroach: “An obscene dead cockroach, its genitalia splayed out for the world to see, is coming and going in waves, like an upturned boat with frail masts. ” I said instantly I had seen that cockroach—in 1975 during a typhoon when waters flooded our home in Tacloban. But the choice of words was linked to the psychological reality of the character, her moment in time, plus the themes of alienation and historical obscenity in the book, as well, of course, as that personal memory. But I will add—because this is actually very important to me—that the heart of the work is the sentence. I hear syntax and sound—I’m an incorrigible fan of assonance and its twin dissonance! which is both error and pleasure—but most of all I work with the sentence, and I always think the sentence is linked to the character’s voice, her temper and times, as well as the book’s need. So Gun Dealers’ Daughter has florid sentences mirroring the word-bound damage of her storytelling that, in my view, Insurrecto does not—I needed to pare down sentences in Insurrecto because the banig, the weft of voices, was complex (I even used fragments, which I don’t remember much in Gun Dealer); whereas the journal of Raymundo Mata (not the footnotes) was based on late-19th century syntax lifted from Rizal (I more or less plagiarized Rizal’s Memorias of his time in Ateneo, which helped me write the rest of the book). I stuck to reading only work from pre-1896 to write Raymundo Mata, just to get that syntax down. Of course, I claim complete culpability for all those puns, whichever book I write 🙂
• Insurrecto was Recess. That Insurrecto was recess from writing Wm McKinley’s World is part joke, part truth. I’d write it when I was tired out by the excruciating thing that was Wm McKinley’s World. Then at some point it became the only novel I was working on. Then suddenly I finished it. That recess metaphor is instructive. Why not approach all work as recess—to consider the novel always as experiment and play? I think of that now—I am trying to change my perspective—turn writing into recess, just free play. See what happens.

Book Expo Talk on Insurrecto

I was invited to speak at LibraryReads this year to talk about my book, Insurrecto, to a roomful of librarians (my FAVORITE people!). I know I teared up a bit being in a room with just READERS, but I was also so happy—and just so honored to be invited. This was the talk.

First of all I want to say how happy I am to be here, how honored to be among you, the People of the Book—my compatriots in this country of books for which the passport above all is passion—I’m so glad and honored to be here among you. I grew up on an island, in a city called Tacloban in Leyte. It’s the easternmost island in central Philippines, facing the Pacific, and Ferdinand Magellan the Portuguese explorer landed on it in 1521, after his legendary naming of that ocean the Pacific, in the process so-called discovering the Philippines in the name of Spain. In 1944 Douglas MacArthur landed on my island, fulfilling his promise to the Philippines in 1941, when as the commander of the US forces in the Far East, he had left Manila, saying, “I shall return.” He returned to my town’s beach, Red Beach in Leyte. I grew up dancing as a child every year on October 20 for soldiers who would return, to remember their war—they would come as guests of another famous person—my curse as a kid apart from staring at Douglas MacArthur for so long was that Imelda Marcos is from my hometown, and as kids from her school we had to dance for her every time she visited.

So I grew up with tales of grand personages landing on my little beachfront city with great consequences—but that did not keep me from being bored in it. I was always being punished for my indifference to my environment—I’d go to school—it was a Catholic school, I had a uniform forgetting my necktie, not bringing my handkerchief, and so on—but the trick to this was, whenever I did not obey the rules, so bored with the facts of my existence—I would be punished by being sent to the library. It was like a bee being punished with a bouquet of flowers.

I read everything, and for me, the library in fact was where history begins.

Of course the books I read when I was a kid were pretty haphazard—I was indiscriminate—I read the entire set of Bible Stories for Children—one story in that series about a sick boy named David reading Bible stories turned out to be about Dwight David Eisenhower, for some reason—and I remember my favorite volume in the World Book Encyclopedia was the letter M, because it had all the tales of Greek and Roman and Norse mythology in it—and I gobbled up this series of books about creatures on Cape Cod, it turns out, because I found the Thornton W Burgess Museum on Cape Cod when I first came to America, and among the group of Americans, I was the only one who knew who the writer was—I loved his stories of otters, and buzzards, and minks, and foxes they’re called The Old Mother West Wind stories—and I loved the tales of these creatures that I never saw in Tacloban.

Doing research on my novel, Insurrecto, which is about the Philippine-American War—1899-1913 I realized much later how that library must have come together.

As part of the pacification of the islands, the United States sent teachers on a boat called USS Thomas, and my school library must have still had the kinds of books deposited in it from those Thomasites, as the teachers were called, who arrived in the 1910s and the 1920s. I memorized the poems of Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson and knew the Gettysburg Address and the Song of Hiawatha by heart and became very comfortable with first names like Waldo or Wadsworth or Fennimore. In the 1970s, I had a great American 1920s-era education, thanks to my wearing the wrong neckties.

And oddly because of war. It’s odd to me now, having done all this research on the Philippine-American war—how vestiges of that war hang over my growing up. The fact is, the Philippine war against America is unremembered in the Philippines, just as it is unremembered in America. I never studied it as a child. Americans study it, if they do, only as a sidelight of the Spanish-American war of 1898—in the Philippines, we call it our war of independence. But the history Filipinos learn is really our revolution against Spain—we barely talk about the war that followed it, when our allies the Americans decided to occupy us when we mistakenly believed we would be given freedom after helping to wage war against America’s enemy, also our enemy, Spain.

That era of peacetime, as the Philippines oddly calls the period of the American occupation, 1902 to 1946, is one long era of forgetting. We forgot the brutality of how we were occupied. And so has America. I think such gaps have consequences. What I have come to see is that Philippine history is part of America, and American history is part of the Philippines. In my experience, this twinning of the two is so weird that for a long time, honest to God, I thought Elvis was Filipino. No, really, I only learned a few years ago that all the songs my uncles used to sing during their long guitar-strumming nights were not, in fact, Filipino kundiman, or love songs, but Elvis. Are You Lonesome Tonight? Love Me Tender—I had no idea they were Elvis. It was a very odd recognition, and to be honest it was a pretty staggering, let’s say, misapprehension on my part—and so let me say this—I put Elvis in my novel of the Philippine-American war.

What my misrecognition of Elvis led me to think about was — how do we really know the things that make us? We put ourselves in categories— and above all, others put us in categories— Filipino, islander, woman—when we know very well we are fragments and fractures and parts of so many others. We are named by our mothers, for instance, in acts of misrecognition—we carry our mothers’ unknown desires in our names that we did not choose. We call ourselves American—but the richness of Americanness lies in its multiplicity, including not only the known worlds it has occupied but, in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, including also the unknown unknowns —the things we don’t know we don’t know about ourselves. And I call myself Filipino—but I have multiple cultures in me—Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Douglas MacArthur—I claim Warhol’s Double Elvis as irreparably part of my imaginary—my world of images.

And what I must do is figure out how to include all my worlds as part of my sense of self and find sense in my fragmentation—in the traumas and the wars and the violences that have made me.

Of course, as opposed to the colonizer, the world of the colonized is visibly and thus irreparably multiple—because included in the world of the colonized IS the world of the colonizer.

Whereas the colonizer is so-called privileged in thinking his world is exceptional and singular. Unfortunately he is mistaken— “privileged” is not the correct word for such a world view—ignorant, or poor, is more correct—because of course such exceptionalism impoverishes and diminishes his reality. And with such a misperception, considering only the known knowns—if he persists in his misperception, he is unable to see himself clearly.

It is only when the world of the colonizer includes the world of the colonized as part of his reality that such a world can heal itself.

On the other hand, I must inevitably read that world of the colonizer in which I live with at least two gazes—it’s simply a daily part of how I exist: the colonizer’s world is in fact also my reality—it is part of me—but I must simultaneously see this world awry, in an inverse gaze, in order to see myself whole—

This is why libraries have been such a refuge for me, from the time I was a child. It is a place of multiple worlds, it offers multiple identities, and because it is so, in a library paradoxically one can always be oneself.

I could be part of the world of otters in Cape Cod even as I left the streets and found myself facing the dictator’s bazookas.

By the time I was sixteen, I was going on marches, against the dictatorship—we called it the U.S. Marcos dictatorship because the man’s murderous rule was propped up by the United States during the Cold War as a hedge against communism in Asia—but when the march would pass by the business district, which was also where the US embassy’s cultural center—The Thomas Jefferson library was—I had no qualms about leaving the march in a kind of recess to read Harper’s magazine in their library. And that’s where I learned that this writer that I loved—I loved his book called Chimera and The Sotweed Factor—The Sotweed Factor is an extremely beautifully crafted book about early American history that’s practically footnoted—I love that novel—and I loved the novelist John Barth—anyway, he wrote an article in Harper’s called “Teacher”—and I learned that this great writer—taught—so the next time the march passed by the American library, I checked the address of Johns Hopkins, his school, and I wrote John Barth at Hopkins.

And in those days of the marches and the bazookas, miraculously I got this letter back—it was like getting a letter from Andromeda Galaxy to be honest—there I was, marching amid rubble, and I had had the temerity—or let’s say ignorance—to send Barth my novel and asked him what he thought—I thought that is what you did with writers—and what Jack said was, thank you for your novel, but you need to send an application. And he included the forms in his reply. So I got into Hopkins, because I took a detour from being in the revolution, and that is how I came to America, and what I’ve ended up doing—coming from that island I grew up in—is that I ended up thinking a lot about history.

The vestiges of the two histories, Filipino and American, exist like a haunting—a trace that is both invisible and unknown yet whenever I look up around me now, at this world of Trump and Duterte, for instance, twin fascists who now lead my two countries—it is relentlessly present.

The book Insurrecto is a trace of that relationship between the Philippines and the United States, that history that haunts me. Insurrecto is a story of valiant women, starring actors in their own dramas, trying to become whole, some in very ordinary ways—by taking a road trip, by sharing stories and space in a car—and there is of course one mother haunted by Elvis. And there is one  ctual historical figure in the book, Casiana Nacionales, who becomes an insurrecto, a revolutionary, simply by being a woman in her time and place.

The novel’s structure follows my sense of a self—open to multiple identities, synchronic, that is, inhabiting multiple eras and stories simultaneously—so that in my novel the world of the current dictator, Rodrigo Duterte, is linked to the world of Marcos’s martial law, the world of Trump, and the world of the American invaders in 1901—that is, the novel grapples with my synchronic sense of history, the way I think we exist in simultaneous times—of horror but also of resistance—in which by recognizing the limitations of our human gazes, maybe we will heal. Thank you so much for including me in your event today. Once again, I am so honored.