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.
