Todas las almas

Notes on The Pole: A Novel by J.M. Coetzee (Liveright, 2023)

1. "The decision to invite the Pole ... is arrived at only after some soul-searching." The Pole then is the soul being searched for. And reading The Pole by J.M. Coetzee is an attempt to find the soul in a human being. 

2. If our searchee is Witold, the Pole, our searcher is Beatriz, a board member of a concert organizer in Barcelona. "Dante", the poet, is mentioned 21 times in the novel.

3. For those not into Chopin, Forest of Piano might be a good crash course into the master.

4. Spanish phrases are led astray into the novel. I was half expecting Jesus (or David) to make an appearance. El Polaco first appeared in Spanish translation a year before the original.

5. "Enough to quench whatever spark there is in the soul." The blog's title is a tip of the hat to the late Javier Marías, not least because the novel is partly set in Barcelona. Coetzee was given by the Spaniard the honorary title of Duque de Deshonra, in 2001, for the inaugural Reino de Redonda Prize. Learning of the award:

Professor Coetzee replied, from the University of Cape Town (he now lives in Australia), with a most polite note of thanks, and chose to call himself "Duke of Dishonra" [sic] in Redonda. "Although I am conscious," he wrote, "of both the denotation and the connotations of the Spanish word 'dishonor,' and unless you consider that I am thereby treating the company of Dukes too lightly, I will adhere to that title, which seems to me suitably quixotic." [Google Translate]

6. The word "soul" or "souls" (including words appended with "soul") appears 21 times in The Pole: seven times in the first chapter, 10 times in the penultimate chapter. The novel consists of six chapters and 167 pages in Kindle.

7. The word "feel" (including "feels", "feeling", "feelings", and felt") appeared 30 times.

8. "Happy" (including "unhappy" and "happiness") occurs 18 times. "Music" (and "musical" and "musician"), 40. "Life" and "live" (plus associated words), 82. "Language/s", 12. "Word/s", 41.

9. Witold Walczykiewicz, the Pole pianist, is being confused with Max von Sydow. The novelist Coetzee has finally admitted the resemblance.

10. 

He certainly does not have a big stomach. He is even a bit—she reaches for a word she does not often have a need for—cadavérico, cadaverous. A man like that should bequeath his body to a medical school. They would appreciate having such big bones to practise their skills on.

The black humor in that passage is simply vampiric. Language is a conscious mannerism in the Coetzee universe. An inner translation exists. The Spanish thought, rendered in English, befits the novel's first appearance in Spanish. Novel writing is such a suitably quixotic exercise for Coetzee.

11. As of today, December 26, 2024, 112 other people highlighted this part of the book, according to Kindle:

‘Why is he important? Because he tells us about ourselves. About our desires. Which are sometimes not clear to us. That is my opinion. Which are sometimes desires for that which we cannot have. That which is beyond us.’

 

12.

It is not Chopin who fails to speak to me, Witold, but your Chopin, the Chopin who uses you as his medium—that is what she would say. Claudio Arrau—you know him?—she would go on—Arrau remains, for me, a better interpreter, a better medium. Through Arrau, Chopin speaks to my heart. But of course Arrau was not from Poland, so perhaps there was something he was deaf to, some feature of the mystery of Chopin that foreigners will never understand.

 

Is a Polish pianist the best interpreter we'll ever have of Chopin? Is it because the native pianist breathed the same air and lived in the same landscape as the Pole's, nuances that the foreign interpreter will never be able to incorporate in his repertoire? Such a nativist perspective will forever preclude a foreign genius from being acknowledged.

 

13. 

She writes a second email. ‘Why are you here, Witold? Please be frank with me. I have no time for pretty lies. Beatriz.’ 

 

She deletes I have no time for pretty lies and sends the message. It is not just lies that she has no time for, but also circumlocutions, word games, veiled meanings.

 

A Coetzee novel is a word game. A Freudian slip unmasks the foreign speaker. Lies can be pretty too. Lindas mentiras.

14. "Heart" words, including "heartache" and "heartless", are mentioned 28 times in the novel. "Peace" is used 23 times. "Love", as well as other words with "love" as a root word or as half of compound word (e.g., "lovemaking"), appears 86 times. "Sexy", "sex", and "sexual", 10.

15. The inability to access a language is a tragic barrier to communication. Beatriz had the poems from her lover Witold translated from Polish to Spanish by a translator.

 

The shame is that Clara Weisz, who is no one to her and no one to Witold, has had access to what was going on in Witold’s soul, clearer access than she, for whom the poems were written, will ever have, given that there must be tones, echoes, nuances, subtleties in the Polish that no translation can ever transmit.

 

16.  What was left for Beatriz to interpret—a sheaf of translated pages—was only second-hand Witold, not the essence of her Polish lover. No translation can ever transmit the soul of the original. 

 

17. Not a word of "Quixote" or "quixotic" appears in the novel. 

 

18. Neither does the name "Jesus" appear. Yet the phrase "I am who I am!" appears once.

 

19. "Spanish", meaning the language, or native speaker, or as an adjective, appears 15 times.

20. "Mean" (not the adjective), "meanings", etc., 35 times.

Prefiguration of a madness unforeseen

 

Does he know what his sentence is?” “No,” the officer said, wanting to continue with his explanations, but the traveler interrupted him: “He does not know his own sentence?” “No,” the officer repeated, pausing briefly as if to insist that the traveler should give a more specific reason for his question, and then said: “There would be no point in announcing it to him … He will come to know it on his body.”

—Kafka

 

Among stories of Franz Kafka, including those contained in Selected Stories, translated and edited by Mark Harman (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2024), "In the Penal Colony", a tale of brutal torture in a remote garrison, was perhaps the most violent. Yet physical violence or bloodletting was almost an antithetical characteristic of the "Kafkaesque", which often relied on interior or psychological violence, a disorientation so unsettling and pathetic as to unmoor one's self (or one's conception of self). 

The Kafkaesque was on my mind lately as I read Ronaldo Vivo Jr.'s The Power Above Us All, translated by Karl R. de Mesa (Penguin Random House SEA, 2024). The first book in the Dreamland Trilogy, Power was an uncompromising look into police lawlessness and human rights violation. First published in Filipino in 2015, it appears this year in two editions: the English translation and the 10th year anniversary edition of the original Filipino novel.

But going back to the Kafkaesque. Reams of book pages and scholarly materials must have been expended on this "absurd" topic. The closest definition was maybe from translator Harman himself, characterizing his first reading of the writer in German: "Many readers (including myself) tend to identify with the protagonists of Kafka's stories and novels as they grapple with mostly horrible, grotesque, tragic, or inexplicable situations." This was a simplistic definition of the Kafkaesque, taken out of context and probably misused, but, for the purposes of this blog post, it would do.

Power delineated a society in the grip of paranoia and darkness, or a world that could only be described as Kafkaesque. No, scratch that. Power originated the nightmare world of Dreamland, not like a story of Kafka but a director's cut of Kafka, a story where scenes of brutality were digitally restored and transgressive bloodshed was aplenty. In Dreamland, we were far from the politeness of the Kafkaesque though the pervading sense of unease and humor (behind the gratuitous violence) was just as palpable.

I first read Kapangyarihan in early 2015. Its unnerving story of serial killings and torture was lightened in some parts by stories of friendship. Mere anarchy was loosed upon Dreamland. The last two novels of the Dreamland Trilogy were in fact published outside the time frame of the Duterte presidency (2016-2022). Still, their thematic concerns and brutality were Dutertean. Vivo's Dreamland Trilogy must be contextualized within the era of Duterte violence as it was both a diagnosis of and a response to the societal breakdown whose origins and symptoms came much earlier. 

* * *

Is there such a thing as a Duterte novel? Maybe. To date, the reading list featuring EJKs and published around the time of the Dutertards was short. Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay. Sindicato & Co. by Jose Elvin Bueno. Andrea: Oyayi sa Daluyong by Rom Factolerin. At Night We Are Dancers by RM Topacio-Aplaon. Even Norman Wilwayco's Migrantik (translated by Peter Dominique Mutuc), whose OFW protagonist was busy sowing curses, ennui, and terror in the morning, noon, and arvo Down Under was touched by the tentacles of EJK madness unforeseen. A tokhang episode in Wilwayco's novel provided its soulful pathos and was arguably the core of the book.

The "Duterte novels", if they could be categorized as such, were a literary condemnation of the police state during the capital War on Drugs under the six-year Duterte regime. Killings, corruption, and impunity backdropped their fictional fabric. The protagonists were visited by desperation or neuroticism, walking aimlessly along streets of darkness, navigating places of urban decay, confronting a society in the grip of necrosis. In the concluding novel of Dreamland Trilogy, Ang Suklam sa Ating Naaagnas na Balat (2024), Vivo used necrosis of the flesh as a fitting metaphor for the damaging impact of corruption and injustice on the soul of the body politic who, fed up by the fucking system, was given an option to collectively turn the tables on their aggressor and fight back, tooth for tooth, savagery for savagery.

* * *

Like the labyrinthine journeys of Kafka's characters trapped in a modern bureaucratic society more than a hundred years ago, Vivo created a consistent world of deepfuckery, describing how it is to live under an authoritarian regime, in a world where "waking nightmares were more dreadful than the ones you had when you slept." The very air, the very atmosphere of that world was suffocating. Something weighed heavily on your chest. Breathing was a chore. The matter of death was a matter of fact.

Here in the Inners, for example, it’s a never-ending inside peek into the gears and cogs of death. We’re all fucking dead down here. Only thing we can’t predict is when we’ll be six feet under. None of us have the inside scoop on that, yet we know full well that death isn’t just measured by getting shipped out in a box. Even with gambling and prayer, we keep vigil at our own wakes on the daily. Because we die every day. With every neighbourhood in this country that’s like the Inners, death carries absolutely no mystery.

...

‘You should be used to it by now. Seems like it’s every month these days there’s a corpse dumped on our streets.’

Published a year before the ascension of Duterte to the throne, Power was a Duterte proto-novel (or ur-text) that anticipated the unspeakable evils of a fascist state, with graphic scenes of violence rendered in transgressive manner. Power was a red band trailer version of the bloody aspects of Philippine society where people of power take advantage of people bereft of power. Except that the red band trailer went the whole fucking length of an R-rated horror movie. The movie foreshadowed a society paralyzed by fear and retribution. It chronicled serial murders and the hunt for the perpetrator or perpetrators. One could not find a more obvious prologue or preamble to the drug-related crimes of an emergent lawless kingdom. Up to now, the official number of victims of the Drug War was still not established. One government estimate pegged it at 20,000 deaths at the hands of mostly policemen who, in a short span of time, became dedicated serial killers at the behest of a sitting president.

When a body is conditioned over and over to an indignity visited upon it, it became normalized. Though he denied it to himself, Butsok realized he was physically craving the experience, that he now equated it as a sign of affection. He despised it. He had come to subconsciously like the violations.

It was grotesque and it must be addicting. And so with the murder spree. As body bags piled up, the nation stood silenced and sidelined, shocked and wide-eyed; the living daylights of hell opened. The initial shock was followed by a numbing sensation of normality. Everything, everyone moved on in his/her daily routine.

In this recent variation of the dictator novel, the agents of malevolence controlled the outcome. They ruled without order and coherence. As with Kafka's story, the citizens were treated like insects; individuals were dehumanized; dignities trampled. Human liberties and happiness were lore. The novel operated on dream logic, nightmare mode. The banality of evil was stultifying. The lopsided power structure gave rise to domestic violence, rape, and serial killings.

"Was there another way out of this clusterfuck?" Karl R. de Mesa surely had the mean streak in spiritedly translating the crass language of this novel. Bad cops were central to the turn of events in Dreamland where the mastermind/s of the killings were hard to pin down. For his part, the kingpin was artistically conducting the music of terror in plain sight. Characters found solace in black humor, struggled sisyphusly in spite of the fear of something ominous, of the power haunting all, dwarfing all.

For my carelessness in forgetting they weren’t human but rather police scum, here I was, only just realizing like a fool that even before we’d arrived at the room where Buldan and I lived, all the evidence had already been planted, all potential allegations to fit their story already ironed.

The body would bear all fresh wounds and old scars of assault. The body would come to know the knowledge of what evil was capable of. The body was the involuntary test subject of political crimes. The official narrative was already decided by the powers that be. Given that the crime story was already foretold and prefigured, how does one resist the madness unforeseen?

I do not think there is such a thing as a Duterte novel inasmuch as there are horror stories of Kafkaesque proportions. Narratives of violence belong to all periods because wars are constant. A tumultuous period in Philippine history is already that: history, for better or worse. Why beget a new fictional category or genre if it was all just a wicked blip in the history of dictators opening a precipice under our feet. If any genre has to stick at all, let it be a reckoning of history, a tallying of crimes, an inventory of sins. Let it not recover our lost innocence and relive the hells we'd been through. Let it reject or transcend notions of what a proper novel should be. Novels about crass society had to be crass and abject, written in obscene language, a public register of private anguish.

If we do not need a novel of restitution or stocktaking tales of guilt and retribution, if not that kind of novel, then what creation?

* * *

"To create today means to create dangerously," said Albert Camus, in a speech translated by Sandra Smith. "Every publication is a deliberate act, and that act makes us vulnerable to the passions of a century that forgives nothing. And so, the question is not to know whether taking action is or is not damaging to art. The question, to everyone who cannot live without art and all it signifies, is simply to know—given the strict controls of countless ideologies (so many cults, such solitude!)—how the enigmatic freedom of creation remains possible."

He went on to say:

What characterizes our times, in fact, is the tension between contemporary sensitivities and the rise of the impoverished masses. We know they exist, whereas before, we tended to ignore them. And if we are aware of them, it is not because the elites, artistic elites or others, have become better. No, let’s be clear about that—it is because the masses have become stronger and won’t allow us to forget them.

If there be a novel that creates or recreates the trauma of the times, then let it be a dystopian novel for the victims of history. The poor, the petty thieves, the drug addicts, the prostitutes, the innocent bystanders, the common people caught in the crossfires.

Camus, once again: We must know that we cannot hide away from communal misery, and that our sole justification, if one exists, is to speak out, as best we can, for those who cannot. And we must do this for everyone who is suffering at this very moment, despite the past or future greatness of the states or political parties that are oppressing them: to artists, there are no privileged torturers.

Fiction must give voice to the powerless, give power to the voiceless. Let the novel be told from the perspective of victims, not tyrants. Let it be told in a language that is crass but sounds true, in passages that were unrefined but communicated the truth. The novel, after all, is a medium of communication. It has the capacity to awaken the victims of history.

 

The spirit of déjà vu

 

Asinkrono: Isang Nobela by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2021)


People say the novel is a way of imparting knowledge. Well, maybe. But for me it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn't know you knew. You say 'yes'. It feels true even though it might be uncomfortable.

– Javier Marías


What is a novel? A jumble of words written on blank pages. A tumble of meanings out of chaotic sentences. A succession of illusory paragraphs. A confabulation of chapters and closures. A number of twaddles and wee things. A muddle of characters and plot. An entity, a being, a flat pavement, a cumbersome mountain. A writer’s opus, a master’s magnum. A reader’s delight, a reader’s curse. Something new in old, something old in new. If innovative, a novel has no boundaries, being boundless, depthless. Unfathomable and flawed. A futile exercise. A coloring book. A text in search of a form. A self-sustaining machine. A reader’s paradise; a reader’s purgatorio and personal hell. A self-propagating, self-determining organism. A sequence of sleepless nights. Narrative gestating in the mind, swallowed whole by the orobouros.  

Decentered. Asynchronous. What is a novel capable of these days? Unbordered. Unmarginalized. Does the novel still have the capacity to mystify and stupefy in this modern times when social media mediated our lives?

As we scan the pages of a novel. We find simultaneity is impossible. We read one letter, one word, one sentence, one punctuation, one paragraph at a time but we are unable to multitask. We find in reading that we can only read so much, one act or situation at a time. We cannot simultanenously see or hear everything else but what's in front of our eyes. Omnipotence is impossible. We are impotent of phenomena. The novel cannot be an asynchronous form of art. 

Of course various novelists, in their elusive search for form, in their mimicry of metamorphosis, and smooth handling of situations, tried their best to get around the situation. Nolledo and Coetzee had to put texts side by side to make the claim of simultaneous or parallel unfolding of events in a split screen. A novel, the most amorphic of arts, could after all approximate cinematic techniques. 

A novel could contain the spirit of déjà vu. A proof is Asinkrono: Isang Nobela (Asynchronous: A Novel) by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, a distinguished experimental poet, a practitioner of erasure poetry, and now an avant-garde novelist of fine caliber.

Unsurprisingly, Asinkrono, like his highly conceptual and experimental poems, produced an innovative novel that made obsolete the concepts of "characters" and "plot". Not that it was plotlesss. The novel's narrative plodded along ten discrete chapters, each bouncing against and refracting each other. It would be futile to provide a plot summary; it would be better to describe the form.

Not that the characters were flat or unimportant, or the novel was not character-driven; it's more like the characters were better considered as "identities" in so far as the characters in each chapter may or may not be related to each other. And in so far as the "characters" harbor fragments of memories that form a self. The puzzle would or would not be fitted in the reader's mind. Reading Asinkrono was an attempt to piece together fuzzy ideas and fluid memories.

For Javier Marías, the novel was an art (or an act) of recognition of unknown things. You never knew until the Archimedes moment of recognition. Failure to recognize was not a crime. It was the act of reading and recognizing semblances of meaning that matters.

Animated by the ghosts of many writers (and filmmakers) and their works, including famed Filipino memoirist Rene O. Villanueva, Jorge Luis Borges, Roland Barthes's Mourning Diary, Auster, and Beckett--a skit channeled the character and ideas of Villanueva; two brief chapters emulated the prose style of the latter two, in Filipino!--the novel seemed to pose a lot of questions about the acts of writing and reading in this social media-savvy world.

Ano pa ba ang silbi ng pagsusulat? May puwang pa ba ang pagsusulat sa mundong laging nagkukumaahog.

[What is the use of writing? Is there a place for writing in a fast-paced world?]

A taunt to writers and readers alike, the text which subtitled itself "a novel" ultimately posed a self-reflexive question for a world in perpetual hurry: is the book I'm reading a novel?

In the dialogue between two doppelgangers Rene and Reny--stand-ins for Rene Villanueva--Reny expressed his preference for the world of literature over reality due to the former's deliberateness: in literature, everything is well-planned and calculated, even the parts that are unexpected or surprising. Arguelles the novelist would subvert further that idea in another chapter in the form of a short screenplay.

The varied subjects of the ten discrete chapters made for a portrait of an artist in various guises. What must have been autobiographical details about a novelist's childhood and the sociology of jueteng during its heyday in the country, among other materials. As a whole, it was a unique species of the fragmentary novel built on tangential connections. The chapters were open-ended and asynchronously connected to one other.

The central chapter was the screenplay partly set in Japan in which well-planned and calculated scenes took the spirit of déjà vu to the extreme. Characters bled into each other; scenes were reenacted in a different light. One character's desires dissolved onto another. All the while, Kawabata Yasunari's novel of failed connections, Yukiguni (Snow Country), hovered in the background like an emblem.

Brave novelists have profound respect for the readers to make sense of their works without prompting them or leading them to the abyss of interpretation. Arguelles's novel of deliberately planned and chance encounters showed there was much to consider in a world of perpetual hurry and the place of reading and writing in this world remained central in the transaction of literary ideas.

The most interesting novels reinforce the mystery of reading to fill out the homogeneous, empty time (to borrow the concept from Walter Benjamin). The unexpected is in the eye of the reader and his perception of deliberateness in the swirl of texts and images before his eyes. Within chapters of Asinkrono, asynchronous "breaks" in time disrupted the narrative and carried off fractal scenes, characters with spectral presences, and literary consciousness to unfamiliar ground. 

In the spirit of Nicanor Parra's antipoemas, the best novels are antinovels like Asinkrono. They have spontaneous freedom. Unplanned or not, they are form-centric, courageous, not time-bound. Their events are asynchronous, vivifying the mystical present.* 

The spite on our putrefying flesh

 

Ang Suklam sa Ating Naaagnas na Balat by Ronaldo Vivo Jr. (19th Avenida Publishing House, 2024)

I dreamt of a difficult case,
I saw corridors filled with cops,
I saw interrogations left unresolved,
The ignominious archives,
And then I saw the detective
Return to the scene of the crime
Tranquil and alone
As in the worst nightmares,
I saw him sit on the floor and smoke
In a bedroom caked with blood
While the hands of the clock
Traveled feebly through the
Infinite night.

– Roberto Bolaño, "The Detectives"

 

The novel opened with a crime scene: a skeleton of a woman was discovered in a burial site, the fourth victim in what was believed to be a femicide: serial killing of women working in stores and malls. Rushing to the scene were cops, detectives, reporters, and the brother of a young woman who went missing two weeks ago. He was told it was his sister. And since this was a noir novel, heavy downpour accompanied the discovery. 

In Ang Suklam sa Ating Naaagnas na Balat, the final installment in Ronaldo Vivo Jr.'s trilogy of crime novels, the Dreamland universe has expanded, geographically and thematically. The urban space and urbanscape radiated from the Dreamland wasteland to the adjacent metropolitan cities, from the slum community to suburban areas of dank safehouses and warehouses, vacant lots, depreciated real estate, and rundown housing projects. 

Suklam was dedicated to the oppressed masses: Ano'ng higit sa nagkakaisang suklam ng taumbayan / para patumbahin ang nag-iisang kaaway? (What could be greater than the collective spite of the people / to bring down the solitary enemy?) Clearly, there's strength in numbers, and the power structure would crumble before the fed up majority. 

 

As with the other novels in the Dreamland Trilogy, Suklam was a graphic detailing of horrendous crimes perpetrated by those in power, the corruption and impunity with which they operate, and the desperate search for justice and truth by the victims' kin. In the background, hovering like an incubus, the bloody drug war of the Rodrigo Duterte regime. 

 

The tentacles of historical materialism finally bared its fangs; the narrative encompassed and fully embraced the larger history of discontent and labor struggle. The city as a parasitical technoecosystem feeding on cheap labor. The unequal relations between the powerful and the laborers giving unlimited freedom to the capitalist and surplus time for him to exploit and abuse, paving the way for the devaluation of the person. 

 

The main protagonists in Suklam were two aggrieved brothers—the businessman Dondi Amadeo and the ex-convict Boni Fly—searching for the whereabouts of their missing sisters. They were aided in their search by an investigative reporter and photographer: Marisol Gatdula and Pancho Alvarez. In the process of their investigation, they came face to face with a dystopian society where the oiled machinery of power and influence was calling the shots and where heavy-duty spitefulness—never in short supply—was the only thing that kept them going.

 

Hindi na bago ang tanawing nasaksihan niya. Isang bahagi ng kaniyang pandama ang minanhid na ng paulit-ulit na karahasang naging sistema na ng kaniyang pag-iral mula laya papuntang loob, at sa kaniyang pakiwari, hanggang sa napipintong pagbabalik niya sa mas malawak at malupit na bilangguan sa labas ng rehas. Ngunit wala nang mas marahas sa mga katotohanang sumambulat sa kaniyang harapan—na darating at darating ang mga pagkakataong walang ibang posibleng depensa sa mga pamiminsala kundi ang tumunghay lamang. Lunukin ang mga sigaw. Mahirinan sa suklam.

(What he witnessed was nothing new. A part of his senses was already dulled by systemic violence that accompanied his waking life from freedom to captivity, and in his estimation, to his impending return to the wider and harsher prison outside the slammer. Yet there's nothing more brutal than the truth that exploded in front of him—that there will come a time when the only possible defense against oppressiveness was to be a complicit witness. Swallow the protestations. Choke on spite.)

 

The novel was only a novel and it could never be an instrument of social change. But in Vivo's case, the novel could be tested as an instrument of provocation on the part of the characters, on the part of the reader/s. The title was in the first person plural. The epigraph was addressed to the collective mass: the electorate. The novel's ruthless, relentless violence were a fulsome treat to a community of readers.

 

In the nightmare world of Dreamland, no walls or boundaries existed between the hellish prison and what's outside. Crimes occurred in both planes of existence. The jail guards would only joke that the heat felt by the inmates inside their cells was but a fitting rehearsal for hell. 

 

* * *

 

On August 5, 2022, Jovelyn Galleno, a 22-year old female employee of a shopping mall in Puerto Princesa was reported missing. Eighteen days later, on August 23rd, a skeleton believed to be hers was found near her residence. The locals followed the case with intense curiosity and dread. The twists and turns of the case were surreal: suspects identified and arrested, confessions made, blurred CCTV of Galleno’s final moments analyzed, social media posts scrutinized, her relatives interviewed, two DNA tests confirming the skeleton was Galleno's, suspect's confession (said to be made under duress) recanted. It was worthy of a full treatment in S.O.C.O. by Gus Abelgas. Three months after the discovery of the skeleton, the charges against the suspects were dropped.

 

I mentioned the Galleno case not to question its outcome or to compare its handling with the circumstances in Vivo's novel. I wonder to what extent the Amadeo case in the book was influenced by it. In any case, Suklam established its own "logic of decomposition" (in Chapter 10: Lohika ng Pagkabulok) and embudo, a funnel-like scheme to wrongfully assign guilt to suspects. 

 

In Suklam's universe, a spade was called a spade, and logic-defying circumstances were meant to be objectively questioned and weighed. Hence, all assumptions, press releases, official statements, and platitudes in the novel were questioned. Couched in bureaucratese language and clichés, the speeches in the book (press conference to introduce the murder suspect, introductory speeches to honor philanthropists and their work) were spelled out in carabao English. Invisible sarcasm was dripping from the words.

 

 * * *

 

The novelist relied on his main characters to take on the mantle of detectives.  

"Pagdating ko sa crime scene, doon sa burial site, no'ng makita kong kalansay na ang labi na sinasabi nilang si Divine, mabilis kong naiproseso na may mali."

(When I arrived on the crime scene, in the burial site, when I saw the skeletal remains of a person they claimed to be Divine, I immediately recognized that there is something wrong.)

When asked what he would like to have been if he hadn't been a writer, Roberto Bolaño said in his final interview, "I should like to have been a homicide detective much better than being a writer.... A string of homicides. I’d have been someone who could come back to the scene of the crime alone, by night, and not be afraid of ghosts." A year after his death, Bolaño's novel 2666 was published. In it, he dramatized in unflinching journalistic style the investigation into numerous murders based on real-life killings of women that spread like a pandemic in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. The victims were mostly female workers in maquiladoras, factories run by transnational companies.

In Bolaño's post-mortem and dry description of each murder victim, interspersed in the narrative one after another, one could not help but question his intent. Would not a couple of victims suffice to give the reader an idea of the base and superstructure? A litany of murders could dull the senses. A segment of readers would not be able to cope; they needed respite.

"Sunod-sunod na pagpatay. Nais kong balikan ang pinangyarihan ng krimen", wika ni Bolaño, "mag-isa, sa gabi, at hindi naduduwag sa mga multo". Like Bolaño, Vivo's detectives would rather visit the crime scene and face the ghosts. They would take stock of grisly details, look at available facts with unflinching eyes, sift through and try to make sense of an inchoate body of evidence, try to arrive at a truth or a version of it that establishes hidden connections. 

The crimes told in Suklam might or might not be designed to elicit a response to the litany of uncalibrated violence and accumulation of spite. Once choked on something, the reflex reaction was to gag or to eject what's blocking the airway. Or else one would die of spite. To live, one needed to clear the airway; truth-seekers needed to pursue their mission: to pry out the truth (pag-ukilkil ng katotohanan, p. 151).  

 * * *

Beyond knowing what happened to their siblings, Vivo's accidental detectives were haunted by a specter much more basic (more base) and practical: by human acts that could bring more peace of mind and satisfaction. His detectives would avail themselves of an option more tangible than being at home with the ghosts: retribution. 

 

Ano'ng saysay ng mga susunod na araw ng buhay ko kung hindi ako patutulugin ng kaisipang tinarantado ako at ang pamilya ko ng mga otoridad dahil lang kaya nila? 

(What's the use of living the remaining days of my life if I would forever be haunted by the thought that I had been had—me and my family—by these authorities just because they could?)

* * * 

 

Dahil hindi sapat na nakita lang natin ang hinahanap natin. Dapat lang na makita rin nila ang hinahanap nila.

 

(It is not enough that we find what we are looking for. They themselves must find out what they got themselves into.)

 

Boni Fly and Dondi Amadeo were the novel's unwitting savage detectives, destined to give justice to the word savage and to bring the savages to justice. 

 

* * *

 

A string of homicides: a murder spree. In the urban blight of Dreamland, the scene of the crime was the Philippines where, between 2016 and 2022, during the infamous reign of Reino Rodrigo Duterte, human lives were dirt cheap. So dirt cheap as to be without value. During his war on drugs, a legacy for the ages, the king made the taking of dirt cheap human lives his sublime life mission. Patricia Evangelista chronicled her own investigation of this murder and mayhem in Some People Need Killing. But some killing need people. And so the king empowered cops to lead his war. At an alarming scale, bodies of suspected drug users, pushers, and innocent civilians piled up.

 

The Dreamland Trilogy erected a nightmare world of crime and punishment. It stood as a blistering critique of impunity. The business model of the powerful was revealed, fulfilling the preferred template for a noir novel outlined by Resil B. Mojares: "a medium for social investigation and political critique, a form of representing a society ruled by violence, corruption, and criminality". The trilogy embodied the precarious state of living under a police state, where every breath one takes clouded the atmosphere of state-sponsored human rights abuses.  

* * *

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so", wrote Shakespeare in Hamlet. The ending of Suklam reinforced the relativist nature of evil once circumstances forced one to commit acts one would rather not do. Because the novelist’s legislating mind and executive hand had the ability to stupefy and stun, one could not afford to identify with or root for a hero. Every crime was contingent upon the objective. One’s justice is another’s injustice. One s redemption, another’s hell. For the novelist was also granted the power of omnipotence: something that could dwarf the readers. He could command the abyss to yawn and open before our feet. He could just up and pull everything under the rug. 

More than a critique, the novel might as well be an inoculation against complacency and a call to action. Disgust is the opium of the people. Once it enters the system, it is only a matter of time for the purgative to take effect. 

The first two volumes of the Dreamland Trilogy are forthcoming in translation: The Power Above Us All (translated by Karl R. de Mesa) and The Abyss Beneath Our Feet (translated by Mark Frederick Bulandus). The translators will have to ransack the urban dictionary to find street-smart, shovel-ready, and sturdy approximations to the novels' street language, prison code words, txt msgs, and crimespeak. The trilogy's language was what authenticates its power and abyss. Stoppered and sealed, its language of desperation could detonate once the accumulated spite had us in its chokehold. For we have no choice but to resist. We have no option but to give vent to the spite on our putrefying flesh.

  

 

Extract from "The Detectives", in The Romantic Dogs: 1980-1998, translated by Laura Healy (New Directions, 2008). Quote from "The Last Interview", interview by Mónica Moristain (2003), in Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, translated by Sybil Perez (Melville House Publishing, 2009).

Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway (Bleeding Sun)

 

Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway (Bleeding Sun) by Rogelio Sicat, translated by Ma. Aurora L. Sicat (Penguin Random House SEA, 2024)

 

 

 

 

The agrarian novel was a rich vein in Philippine novel writing. It pitted farmers against landlords, the powerless against the powerful. Class conflict was the canvas of the novelist where he painted stories of social injustice and human rights abuses. The imbalance of power originated from cacique democracy, which, according to Benedict Anderson, prevailed during the latter part of the Spanish occupation of the Philippines in late 19th century up to the American imperialism and beyond. Several masterful Filipino writers explored this type of dramatic conflicts, the most notable of which were produced by novelists such as Lázaro Francisco (The World Is Still Beautiful, translated by Mona P. Highley), Servando de los Angeles (The Last Timawa, translated by Soledad S. Reyes), Amado V. Hernandez (Crocodile's Tears, translated by Danton Remoto), and F. Sionil José (Dusk and Tree). An important Filipino novel which had the same thematic concern was Rogelio Sicat's novel Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway, first serialized in Liwayway magazine from September 1965 to February 1966. It was now finally translated by his daughter Ma. Aurora L. Sicat and published in English translation after almost 60 years.

Dugo means blood while bukang-liwayway is a mouthful, yet beautiful, Filipino term for daybreak or sunrise. The title of Sicat's novel could literally mean "blood (spilled) at dawn." Bleeding Sun was an inspired choice for a title; it had a poetic ring to it. And it was apt, given the agrarian struggle depicted in the novel, which was also subtitled "The Tale of a Farmer's Crushed Dreams and Hopes." The publication of this translation was of great cultural and literary significance. Hence, one could forgive the misspelled "liwaway" in the book cover and title pages. I read the Kindle version, and I'd also buy the print edition, once available, for my collection of translated Philippine novels.

There are two farmers in the novel: Tano and his son, Simon. Their story was set against the backdrop of Philippine history. The novel deliberately interspersed "journalistic" narration of historical events during and after the American colonial period. There were also scenes of Japanese occupation in the country. Through this novelistic melding of public and private histories, Sicat welds the political and historical forces with the farm labor and land economy which favors the landlords and brings them wealth. For tenant farmers working the rich landowner's farm, work was backbreaking.

His [Tano's] legs were shaking. He had patiently been planting the seedlings the whole day. Like other farmers, he was moving swiftly because they did not own the land and hence were not too eager to cultivate the best crops. Nonetheless, growing rice was their livelihood, their bread and butter, their only means of survival. Their only choice was either to work to survive, or starve to death.

Simon's mother died while giving birth to him after the landlord refused to extend help during the delicate childbirth. Tano took care of the child on his own, sent him to school, and taught him farming (the only way he knew to support their living) although Tano never wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and become a slave of land. It was not only masters, however, that poor farmers like Tano had to contend with. Natural disasters, in the form of a very destructive typhoon or an extreme dry spell, were tricks of fate that befall the unfortunate tillers of land. Sicat realistically portrayed the rhythms and routine of agricultural life in the first half of the twentieth century. He imbued his struggling characters with dignity despite the bad luck and cruel and whimsical landlords that accompany their lot in life. 

The sun in the title was the constant witness to this daily grind and toil on the land. In setting and rising without fail, the sun was arbiter of time and shaper of destinies. Tano later fell sick, lost his right to farm the land due to this illness, and died. Although poverty was not a birthright or an asset, it was passed on to Simon. It was now Simon's time to struggle on his own. Because of the abuses he and his family received from the landowner Paterno Borja, Simon vowed to amass wealth and seek revenge.

‘I’m leaving for Manila again, Ka Tindeng.’ Simon embraced her. ‘I will go back to Manila, Ka Tindeng. I will not return without a plan for vengeance. I swear, Ka Tindeng.’

 

That was Simon's promise in the novel's second chapter ("Escape: 1942"), one he would fulfill in a decade's time. His name, of course, recalled the jeweler Simoun, the vengeful character in José Rizal's El Filibusterismo. In "Return: 1951", the third and final chapter of Sicat's novel, the word "vengeance" appeared three times and the word "revenge" appeared twice. The Simoun revenge storyline of Rizal was borrowed or appropriated in other Tagalog novels: sequels or spinoffs of El Filibusterismo like Lázaro Francisco's Ilaw sa Hilaga (Light in the North), Amado V. Hernandez's Birds of Prey, and Macario Pineda's Isang Milyong Piso (One Million Pesos).

In Simon, however, Sicat conflated the vengeful Simoun with the idealistic Juan Crisostomo Ibarra. His Simon was not only going after his enemies but also establishing an agricultural school in his hometown to enhance the lives of the farmers.

The novel's climax directly referenced Rizal, and its ending was a nod to the ending of Noli Me Tangere. The final words in Bleeding Sun paraphrased the dying Elias's lament in the last chapter of the Noli (translated by Charles E. Derbyshire): "I die without seeing the dawn brighten over my native land! You, who are to see it, welcome it—and forget not those who have fallen during the night!" In Bleeding Sun, this lament was transmuted into a challenge to the next generation, urging them to act, to strive to prove that the death of a progressive man was not in vain.

* * *

 

In Kapag Sumalupa ang Gunita (When Memory Lands on Earth), a selection of Sicat's journal entries published in 2018 by Ateneo de Naga University Press, he expressed his ambivalent and often hostile attitude toward Filipino writers writing in the English language. He was uncompromising in his position that only one's native language can fully and authentically express one's aspirations.

Saang wika susulat? Sumulat ka sa wika ng iyong panaginip. Iyan ang bukal ng tunay mong sarili. Aral, kundi man artipisyal, ang sumulat sa ibang wika. May malalalim na lugar na di nasisid ng Ingles. Sa tabi o sa gilid lamang ito nakapapaligo pagkat di marunong lumangoy, o kung marunong maý sa swimming pool lamang.

Di sa ilog o lawa o dagat.

(In what language should one write? Write in the language of your dreams. That is the source of your true self. To write in other languages is, if not artificial, merely an acquired habit. There are depths that the English language could not fathom. Because it does not know how to swim, it could only bathe in the shallow parts of the water. Or, if it does know how to swim, it could only immerse in swimming pools.

 

Not in rivers or lakes or seas.)

Sicat believed that revolutionary thought was only possible through the use of Filipino language. It enabled one to look inward, not outward, and to bring out the inner self. The use of foreign languages, he wrote in his journals, destroyed Philippine folklore. Filipino writers in English were only able to build artificial worlds. Ang paggamit ng banyagang wika'y pagbura ng gunita. (To write in a foreign language is to erase memory.) This linguistic position put Sicat at odds with many established writers in his time.

In Bleeding Sun, it was safe to say that he would make an exception to his attitude toward the English language, and that he would even be proud of the result, not only because it was his novel that was translated and that it was his daughter who translated it. Ma. Aurora L. Sicat's version captured well Rogelio Sicat's depiction of rural Philippines farm life of the previous century. It produced English equivalents for the Tagalog rhythms of farm work and its interplay with the natural world, as well as the heroic struggles of peasant farmers.

Rogelio Sicat himself was a translator. He produced a Filipino version of Karel Čapek's R.U.R.: Rossum's Universal Robots (reviewed here) and William J. Pomeroy's The Forest: A Personal Record of the Huk Guerrilla Struggle in the Philippines. He knew how supplanting words from one language to another was a creative act that goes beyond mere word substitution or replacement. In Bleeding Sun, the world of Dugo sa Bukang-Liwayway was not artificial but a dramatic world of feelings and conflicts, an assembly of chronological scenes contextualized in history. Despite its dark ending, the novel was inspiring and fully alive in its story of enduring class struggles from the point of view of the working class.