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 (anf 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 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 justice to the savages. 

 

* * *

 

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.

1762 redux

 

(Related post) 

"But are the men prepared to resist not just one but a possibility of two enemies? None of us expected things would turn out like this."

It is 2024 and history is repeating itself. It was 1972 and history was waving its smirking flag. It was 1945 and a battle was claiming lives pointlessly. It was 1899 and betrayals were the rage. It was 1896 and loyalties ran dry. It was 1872 and executions were par for the course. It was 1762 and Brexit was born. 

"We've come to this godforsaken island for business. The sooner we can get out of here, the better."

Who would have thought that a 262-year old war still had so many things to say about contemporary foolishness, war trophies, warmongering and revolt, the conquered mindset, the conquistador mindset, myopic political decisions? A cryptic war, the 1762 British occupation of Manila. Buried in time, in the dustbin of history, but here resurrected with a stylistic flourish and imaginative brilliance by Vin dela Serna Lopez, a debutant novelist. Costume drama, period film, historical fantasy. It all unearthed the intrigues and hysterics of an overcast day.

They entered the walled city now sweltering in filth and wet weather. The clouds had always hung low over the Plaza Mayor since the arrival of the British, and in contrast to the pastel days of peacetime, its streets now assumed a grayish visual palette, as though they were always looking forward to the passage of some funeral.

The very atmosphere and mood of the period was captured in a prose wearing the patina of colonialism and the varnish of deathly expectation. The novel 1762 was a depiction of wartime situations in Manila in the latter part of that year when British forces, during the final year of the Seven Years' War, invaded Filipinas, which was then under Spanish rule for almost two centuries. 

An omnipresent narrator was giving his assessment of history, connecting the dots across time and place, taking brief moments to announce his presence to the readers. The narrator was not that too intrusive; he just tore the fabric of time. (See, for example, pages 245, 282, and 285). And what a story it was. A reflection about wars fueled by human avarice and Putinic delusions of power. It was not a dry recounting of well-researched events but one full of emotions, arresting imagery, and descriptive flair.

Pre-British, it started with the founding of a Filipino revolutionary group called Brotherhood of the Molave, a template for all movements doomed to fail because of a lack of cohesion and telltale signs of crab mentality. Because groupthink. Because leadership squabbles. Just because. The very same becauses and flaws that plagued the Katipunan and allowed national heroes to succumb to other (so-called) national heroes. The disruptive Chapter 4 of the novel, a rend in the fabric of time, was the master key of the novel, the break that allowed the creatures in Pandora's box to reveal their true natures and revel in the world created by the novel's fiction. The problematic Chapter 4 turned out to be the novel's problématique.

"Why is it," he said, "the we all share a single vision, but no one knows how to get there?"

"How can we know," she replied. "We do not even have an idea who we are."

The sentiment was of course shared many times over by many other Filipino novelists and cultural commentators in their own times seeking to unmask an identity straddling many different facets, diagnosed in 1987 by James Fallows as "a damaged culture" in an essay of the same name, an essay as provocative as it was obsolescent, whose words still ring true for obvious reasons and no longer ring true for not so obvious reasons.

Reading 1762 in 2024 and thinking about how its lessons reverberate (or fail to reverberate) through time felt like a quixotic preoccupation. The quixoticism was lifted by the richness of ironic ideas, revealing the rubble of history that perpetually invites materialism and the war economy to swoop down and profiteer and cannibalize on what was left. A scene immediately after the post-British cannonade:

He organized a private reception for Draper and his officers, and on that occasion obtained the contract for assessing and repairing the damage along the walls. Rafael, to whom Don Diego assigned the surveying of the fortifications without the aid of engineers, found the southern curtains all but nonexistent, the Bastion of San Andres itself crushed beyond recognition, its red adobe arsenal beaten into a pulp, its grassy courtyard converted into a grave. Puerta Real, with its thick wooden doors smashed down the middle by pickaxes and its arch and ramparts hewed and hammered by howitzer balls, stood like a proud and mighty son of a bitch in spite of its dozens of flesh wounds. The Bastion of San Diego suffered so much from the left orillon eastward, which the interlopers climbed and scaled, its tower of cut stone bared like a bone out of a blasted leg. Earth had given way and had slid out of the breach, protruding like clotted blood where the moat once flowed into.

It was in that Joaquínesque prose register that the novel gained much of its heft. The writing in the first few long chapters, prior to the British arrival up to the brutal war scenes, displayed well-thought out choreography of events and a panoramic sense of unfolding apocalypse. By the time the Spanish capitulated and political wranglings on the fate of Filipinas commenced and the exorbitant war ransom to be paid to the British was being negotiated, the chapters became shorter in length and the narratives splintered into many characters, diluting the sense of the epic while pursuing a myriad of human motivations converging on a single outcome. We were no longer in open combat but in a period of calm before a new storm, ushering the chaos of war inside the negotiating chambers of the Spanish clergy and British military men. The long drawn out negotiations of war ransom was punctuated by an exchange of nascent ideas on nationalism and old ideas about colonialism.

Draper ... instead quizzed the governor on his decisions to put the archbishop in charge of civilian affairs.

"It makes sense when you consider our lack of object for the people to assiduously venerate," Drake explained. "I had to concede some appointments to the enemy to placate the troublesome elements."

...

"You have to know these kinds of people. They cannot civilize themselves, don't know what their values are, what they exactly aspire for. They are always in need of people to look up to—their heroes, without which they willingly resort to tyrants and gods."

It was after all a colonial work of fiction in sometimes modernist, post-colonial garb. But still, a predictable analysis of imperialism, that. Veneration without understanding was the default mindset of the conquered noble savage from the point of view of the conqueror and their sympathizers. Does not really explain why in so-called civilized societies during this "enlightened" era people willingly resort to a Donald or a Vladimir. 

By 1762, the implant of Spanish Catholic faith has so rooted the Indio on the spot that his subservience to a god divine and existing in the triple guises of a holy trinity could no longer be easily swayed by the British import of brutishness. 

"By failing to raise the first million dollars demanded of you according to our terms, you, Your Excellency, have neglected the people."

...

"Strip me naked. All you can see is but the body of Christ."

Drake laughed. "Spare me your sophistries. You had the chance to surrender the Filipino but I'm afraid greed has gotten in the way of your theology."

"The Filipino is lost. For all we know she is already sunken, burnt, or captured by pirates! You've got the Santisima Trinidad, what more do you want?"

Henry Brooke, the well-bearded County Kildare native, raised an index finger from where he sat at the far corner. "The Saint Sima Trinda is a spoil of war. We captured it ourselves so it should not be counted part of the first installation [ransom installment?]."

The conversation between British military Drake and Spanish Archbishop Rojo was about galleon ships Filipino and Santisima Trinidad as war spoils. But the italics was a feint. Straighten the letters, replace "Santisima Trinidad" with "God", and we're talking business. The Filipino is lost. She was already captured by British pirates who would bleed her dry. Where before the Spanish was bleeding the country dry. God (or religion) is a spoil of war.

Our well-behaved narrator is a student of history, reconstructing momentous events, giving voice to characters of historical import, retracing their steps and motivations for destruction (of self-destruction). A few references to the pandemic (lockdown of Intramuros, the new normal), a few quixotic turns later (mention of a book being considered to be translated into Arabic, an origin story about a character called Rosinante [sic]), the reader arrives at the climactic section of the novel where Divina Paula, a young woman and seer, had been hallucinating images. In one scene, a montage of images flashed before her, some recognizable moments in history but which, in the world of 1762, was future.

A recapitulation of a hundred years of weariness which once again Divina Paula had to suffer in the recurrence of painful apparitions trapped in her memories from the future. She saw some more of those visions before his body dissolved into the wall's abysmal shadow: the end of the terrible epochs of galleons and gibbets, the midnight descent of torches from the mountains, the departure of hereditary lords and the rise of sugar barons, the transition to a long century through an orgy of blood and water, the rape of women at the ruins of bombed-out churches and universities, new empires waking up on the heels of an endless procession of widows, the blue heat in the fiery age of machines, the static quietude of a white noise known to us as the new millennium.

After seeing these fragments of the future,  she "was about to submit herself to the hopelessness present in those who had witnessed history's moral collapse." Like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, she "sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage." She had a peek into history's hysterical unfolding. Unlike her, we who never learned our lessons perceive not a single unified calamity but "a chain of events." That may be why we could not adapt to historical disruptions and the natural histories of destruction, We always came unprepared, like people perennially caught off guard by The Big One.

We did not make the connections from a sequence of past tragedies. We react too little too late. We who were drawn to the same mistakes, doomed to repeat our folly like a young moth circling a burning candle, inevitably drawn to the flame. We were toast.

Almost an interpretation

 

Pasalubong (Presents) by Maria Rilkë Arguelles (Philippine High School for the Arts and Grana-PH Book Publishing, 2022)

 

"Real art has the capacity to make us nervous," said Susan Sontag in her essay "Against Interpretation," where she expressed her displeasure at interpreting (or taming) works of art to conform to how one apprehends this world. "As if there were any other", she scoffed. Sontag viewed interpretation as an impoverishment of the soul, a depletion of the world by establishing a shadow world of "meanings". For her, interpretation is a trapdoor. It makes art manageable and comfortable. Some writers (Sontag called them "overcooperative" authors) would "be so uneasy before the naked power of his art that he will install within the work itself ... the clear and explicit interpretation of it." 

And here I come to write about a book of poetry that made me nervous. Here was a collection that resisted interpretation, that was always on the verge of interpreting itself but did not succumb to reviewer-friendly posturing which exposes hidden truths and hidden secrets and desires.

Poetry books like Pasalubong by Maria Rilkë Arguelles are what tempt me to make a deep dive into Philippine poetry. Maybe a reading challenge of reading Filipino poets for a year. Pasalubong did not fall prey to easy categorization and self-interpretation. It did not relieve the reader of his itch to explain things away. The poems stood their ground; the poet was adamant. The poems might have tried to delineate a self or an identity, zooming out time and again to the collective, the masses waiting in the train stations of urbanscape. However much the lines try to unclothe meanings, the puzzle remained unsolved, the mystery unresolved:

Ganito mo sya hinuhubaran:
paisa-isang salita,
paisa-isang linya.

[This is how you strip her:
one word at a time,
one verse at a time.]

The compactness of ideas, the fleetingness of frozen images kept the vitality of emotions vulnerable yet intact. Seesawing images were the units of discovery behind the words and verses. One image at a time: that was how the feelings unfold in the pages of the collection. Arguelles's short, crisp poems accommodated a pile of images colliding against each other. The puzzle pieces were at the brink of being fitted on the board, only for the reader to discover mismatches in the metaphors.

To be sure the poet doled out images like bread crumbs but did not make them a subject of intelligibility or palatability. Cards on a table, the poems were transparently laid out on the page. But each one appeared to be unfinished moments in the history of a young artist, the mystery at the center revealed only by tentative interpretations.

Sa aninag sa salamin ng nakakuwadradong larawan, iba na ang inuusisang hitsura. Hindi ko lubusang masabi na ako ang nasa litrato.

[In the mirror's reflection of the framed picture, the image being examined has changed. I can no longer be certain that I am the person in the picture.]

Like any search for a final identity or a final consciousness, the self remained unfinished and a work in progress. Narratives were better left unfinished because selves were never definitive, always incomplete. Life goes on long after the wisdom teeth broke out to the surface.

As in the poet's namesake Rainer Maria Rilke in the Duino elegies, we could detect in Arguelles's lines a questioning of the burden of interpretation.

Biyernes
 
Matapos ang biyahe, matapos maglapag
ng samotsaring danas at lumbay

sa pahina: magpatangay
sa hangin, hayaang mailibing ng pagkakataon.

Damhin, sa lupa, ang sigaw ng sinukob at sabayan

ang pag-angat ng alimuom na unti-unting
kukumot sa kilala nating mundo.
 

[Friday

After the journey, after setting down
the wilderness of pain and sadness

on the page: let the wind
convey you; let chance bury you under ground.
Feel, in the earth, the clamor of the world and join

the rising petrichor slowly enveloping
this interpreted world.]

Because interpreted, the world was all too familiar, and yet it was being blanketed by the haze of petrichor, the after-scent of rain. The familiar was becoming unfamiliar; the uninterpreted world became an interpreted one, the source of Rilke's anxiety in the first Duino elegy: Not Angels, not humans, / and the sly animals see at once / how little at home we are / in the interpreted world.

Is Pasalubong representative of Philippine poetry collections? No, definitely not. 

Is it representative of the best works in Philippine poetry? Yes.  

Can it stand alongside international poetry? Yes. So then let it be tested. "Let it be translated," as Roberto Bolaño exhorted, plagiarizing or paraphrasing Borges. A creative (non-literal) translation that did not presuppose mere literary interpretation.

In Arguelles's debut collection, a pragmatic and observant voice laid down her thoughts about everyday stuff. A breakthrough poet was starting to notice more deeply, however much she tried to suppress the metaphor from spreading fully its wings, however much she muted the colors of perception. The collection already had the cavalier attitude of a seasoned poet, the discipline to sustain a singular voice and be restrained, despite some unexplained, undefinable source of pain or loneliness. 

"What matters in [the film Last Year in Marienbad]," said Sontag, is not its suggestiveness but "the pure, untranslateable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images." The arresting imagery in and compact form of Pasalubong protected it from what Sontag called "the arrogance of interpretation" and contributed to the recovery of the senses.

The collection was co-published by Grana Books. In its Facebook page, Grana Books called itself "a small press devoted to publishing exciting and challenging contemporary works that expand the possibilities for creation." This vision was already realized in this book.