To read the stars

Driftwood on Dry Land by T. S. Sungkit Jr., translated from Cebuano by T. S. Sungkit Jr. (UST Publishing House, 2013)

I. Oral literature

In the age of the printed word, Nick Joaquín shared a damning assessment of the vernacular literature in "Expression in the Philippines", an essay from Culture and History (1988, reprinted 2004 by Anvil Publishing, Inc.) and a book review of Brown Heritage: Essays on Philippine Cultural Tradition and Literature, edited by Antonio G. Manuud (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1967). Joaquín was devaluing the orality of works written in the vernacular, as opposed to works written in English, in his discourse on the Filipino writer's "language problem". (Bear with me on this longish quote.)

A related mystery is the continuing "naivete" of writing in the vernacular, including Tagalog. The language problem of the Filipino writer is usually posed as a choice between the native tongue and a foreign medium. But Bienvenido Lumbera has made a most perceptive redefinition of the problem: the choice is really between a written literature and an oral one. The modern writer writes to be read; it’s not so much his training in English as the readership he would reach that obliges the 20th-century Filipino to write in English. However well he may know Tagalog, he cannot write in it because, in a sense, Tagalog is not yet a written language. What Tagalog literally has is an audience that does not so much read print as listen to it, the way it listened to bard or storyteller in pre-Hispanic times. It’s still in the age of the ballad, not yet in the age of prose.

Says Lumbera:

One of the fantastic ironies of the literary history of Tagalog writing is that much of the poetry produced seems to have been written as though it were meant to be oral literature. In spite of the fact that it is through the magazines that poetry is disseminated, poets continue to write poems that are often effective declamation pieces but hardly worth anything as reading material. This is an indication that the Tagalog poet has yet to come to terms with the printing press. But he cannot ignore much longer the fact that literature today is more often read than heard. If he is to command more than passing attention, he has to enthrall the reader with what he can do with the written language, such as illuminate the individual's experience of this time and this place. Earlier in our history, the Tagalog poet was a singer. In our time, he can remain a singer only when he accepts that, first of all, he is a writer.

Earlier in our history, the Tagalog poet was a singer. That should provoke a reinspection of certain assumptions about our pre-Hispanic culture – for instance, the claim that we were all highly literate then. But if we were so literate, what did we read? All the evidence, including that of today, points to an oral literature. The supposed writings on tree bark could not have amounted to a book culture, if by book we mean writing for permanence. And the further argument that our books were destroyed by friar and conquistador merely leads to a damaging question: Where, then, are the undestroyed libraries of the Moros? The Moros claim to have had the most advanced culture in the islands circa 1521, but even today theirs is not yet a book culture. The literature they have is, like the Tagalog, still mainly an oral literature.

Still mainly an oral literature. Joaquin's offense – for his judgement is offensive – was the typical denigration and snobbish temperament of the Filipino literary establishment-slash-imperial Manila leveled against Tagalog and other vernacular writing. One of my prized finds in the recent Manila International Book Fair held three months ago was the supposed writings on tree bark, or bamboo, for that matter: Bamboo Whispers: Poetry of the Mangyan (Bookmark, 2017).

I opened this debate on the Filipino writer's language problem – if this could be considered a problem at all in the first place – precisely because one Filipino writer was able to skirt around this problem when faced by a choice between writing in English and Cebuano. T.S. Sungkit Jr., in his novel Mga Gapnod sa Kamad-an, gave two correctives in fact. First, he basically ignored the language problem (choosing between English and Cebuano) and celebrated the oral tradition of epic literature. Second, he wrote in both by translating into English his own novel originally written in Cebuano. And it was ironic that we (I) could only appreciate these correctives after reading Driftwood on Dry Land.

Orality was what propelled this novel's aesthetic registers as myth, as legend, as epic. As it navigates a native peoples' history of a hinterland, the novel succeeded in part because of its singular design and its deep respect for the oral storytelling of the past.

I am that lad. I am that young man. I, who am now nearing the sunset of my days. I, who will narrate to you now the stories I've heard from my grandfather. I, who now believe all the predictions about us who are like driftwood on dry land. I am writing this in the hope that someday, one of my descendants will learn how to read the stars.

The novel was populated by driftwood-like drifters who inhabited the island of Mindanao and who were now adrift in their land of birth like internal exiles: displaced, driven away, marginalized. It began fairy tale-like or Biblical story-like during a time of plenty, when "rice grains were the size of a fist" and "rice plants ... could grow as high as palms", when men and women could live up to 250 years old, and life was guided by maxims so simple as to resemble clichés.

It was a peaceful night. The stars made the sky look like a white sandy beach. Everything was touched by a cool and gentle breeze. The chattering of a brook could be heard in the stillness of the night. The chorus of the insects called kulaleng could also be heard along with the sporadic hooting of an owl from a big balete tree overlooking the Kulaman River. The cogon grasses were swaying in the cool and gentle breeze. Even the few remaining trees seemed at peace in making the birds roost. Like the trees, those birds were already nearing extinction.

It would take a different kind of reading metabolism to get acquainted to the folkloric pace and rhythm of the prose. The telling was at times simple and direct, preserved as they traveled as if by word of mouth from one end of the village to another, from one generation to another. At times it could get incantatory and lyrical in its anger, wonder, and despair. It recapitulated the whole history of Mindanao Island, in southern Philippines, the land now known for its never-ending conflict and struggle for peace and justice.

The beginning was the time of the gods and personages with special abilities, a time of enchantment and magic: far longer than the time immemorial now used as a benchmark to lay claim to ancestral domains by indigenous peoples and indigenous cultural communities. The ancestors of those times were powerful. Magic was commonplace.

Our present-day story has its beginnings then when one day at mid-noon, Buuy Manlugong saw a vision.

So please listen. For this is our origin.

The captive audience was beholden to the teller of the tale who built words and metaphors out of the natural world and the blood and sacrifices of the Lumad (native inhabitants) of Mindanao. What repaid their interest was the mystical and imaginative ways the storyteller combined mythology, ethnography, and fantasy to create a unique blend of postcolonial fiction. For the lengthy duration of the tale, the listeners were rapt in attention because they respect the wisdom and experience of the storyteller.

"Before I answer your questions, I'll first narrate how we arrived into these times according to the stories of our parents."

And so Datu Mambulalakaw told his people about their race since the first great gathering in Tag-olowan which was led by Buuy Manlugong. He traced all the events up to the arrival of the alien Castilians all the way to the noontime when he saw a vision. His narration was even longer than a taltag for it was already a long time since such gathering had been called. It lasted for three weeks. And even in that duration, he was not able to tell everything.

Significant events became the baselines to reckon time, such that new tales hereafter were referred to previous events (e.g., "in the time of Mampur", "up to the arrival of the alien Castilians all the way to the noontime when he saw a vision"). New tales piled up on top of old ones. Each time a new story commenced, the previous ones were consolidated, and summarized up to a certain point.

Sungkit's novel was also a work history in the form of imaginative fiction, taking in the arrival of foreign religious influences which were eventually imbibed by ancient peoples and still prevalent up to now. Wars were frequent: "As the inhabitants of the island multiplied steadily, quarrels over boundaries started to occur." But this was an origin story (the peopling of Mindanao) filtered through the prisms of colonialism and neocolonialism: the provenance of old words, events, and legends giving way to historical fractures and disruptions. The modern interpretation was rather flamboyant and reckless, appropriating knowledge and references from ancient lore and artifacts. (I was amused of a borrowed images of the Manunggul Jar from Palawan and the Great Wall of China.)

Although presented from the perspective of the colonized, the non-domesticated English translation carried over many native words whose meanings (etymologies and even modern usage) were given in context or explicated in footnotes. The copious names of characters and places were constant: the deliberate mapping of unknown or forgotten aspects of Mindanao history, details that were consigned to cultural history and anthropological curiosity. The non-linear, episodic narrative kept being disrupted by external forces (new colonizers, new waves of migration to Mindanao). And yet, after all was said and done, the teller kept circling back to previous poetic images, motifs, and reference codes. Time dilation and time contraction – reliable agents of disruption in fiction of imaginative history – were resorted to at will.

Readers unfamiliar with Philippine, let alone Mindanao, history could resemble the title of the book. Like driftwood journeying from shore to shore, they might get lost in transit and the historical references and waves of events unfolding. But they could readily sense the broad outlines of the history of a people who time and time again faced colonial injustices against outsiders who brought harm and injury to life, property, and lifeways.

Reference was made to Sungkit's first published novel, Batbat hi Udan (Central Book Supply, 2009), a novel in Filipino which I have been trying to locate for some time now but seemed out of print already. Sungkit, who writes in four languages – Higaonon, Cebuano, Filipino, and English – had difficulty publishing his original Cebuano language novel because "there seems to be no mainstream publishing for Cebuano literary outputs". He already finished writing Agalon sa mga Balod (Lord of the Waves) – a sequel to Driftwood, which hopefully would also be translated so that one could luxuriate in the waves of more magical oral storytelling, more disruptive historical narratives, and language problem corrective.

II. Counter-literature

Another critical corrective was at work in the pages of Driftwood, one that was evident in the latter half of the book. It opened up the debate on – or rather challenges – the constitutive power of national literature. In its direct confrontation with colonial and postcolonial agents and its goal of erecting a native, tribal history of the Lumad, Driftwood on Dry Land was a corrective to the centric "national" literature of the Philippines. "The Unending Conflict", the title of the final and longest chapter in the book, gave a glimpse of this corrective in this scene of Japanese invasion of Mindanao in World War II.

The time of trouble arrived one morning. A boat landed with fully armed men called bow-legged by the elders, landed in Dabaw. The Americans were caught by surprise. The people called Filipinos, who were with the Americans, were also surprised. They fought along with the Americans but they lost badly.

I highlighted the phrase above – and the other phrases below – to show how the novelist, through the narrator, exhibited non-identification, almost ambivalence, with the national identity. This was understandable. The Lumad faced one of the most systematic erasures of cultural identity in Philippine history, gross violation of human rights, and involuntary participants in "the unending conflict" that plagued parts of Mindanao then and now.

"One of them said that he will return," said Amay Pidyong when they talked about it at the ilian in Idong. "He [General Douglas MacArthur] was very tall and very white. I'm sure he's an American. But I think the other man with him has the same height with me."

"Then who do you think was that man who came with the American?" asked one of their cousins.

"Well, I really don't know," said Amay Pidyong. But his family was with him. He seemed to be a high ranking official." Amay Pidyong then had no idea that the man was the president of the nation called the Philippines.

Again, Mindanao was as if apart from the nation called the Philippines, as if the people of Mindanao were not living in a Philippine territory. All pointed to the idea that this meta-history or counter-history was in fact counter-literature, running kontrapelo (against the grain of) the constituted national literature.

When the Japanese were booted out from the island, the so-called Filipinos had the government in their hands. Most of the officials were Dumagats but the people knew that it was actually the Americans who gave the real orders. The situation was clear for everyone to see throughout the island.

This was but the acknowledged consensus that the post-war Philippines was nothing but an American-sponsored government, given the neocolonial policies in the islands that practically yielded sovereignty to previous colonizers (Americans and Japanese), the caciques (landed), and the elite. The Dumagats (people who arrived from the sea; essentially outsiders) were the new ruling class running Mindanao, including the diminishing ancestral lands of the Lumad.

Driftwood thereby emerged from outside of centric literature, from the periphery, so to speak. It was directly imagined as apart from national (Philippine) literature, in so far as that literature also emerged from revolutionary and anti-colonial stirrings against the Spanish regime in the 19th century. This consciously decentered literature culminated in further aggression against the indigenous peoples in the southern island via the deforestation and systematic despoiling of natural resources and, later, the massacres perpetrated by an extremist paramilitary group in the 1970s.

It was during those years when the influx of a myriad of people from Luzon and Visayas reached its peak. The news spread that Mindanaw was a promised land. And through the help of the government and some American missionaries, the aliens took root in the wide and fertile plains. It did not take long for some Japanese businessmen to see that they could cut trees on the island. They could use the trees to rebuild the houses in their country which were destroyed by war. The frenzied cutting of trees started. The island was crammed with logging companies. This phenomenon added to the influx of men from Visayas and Luzon.

...

Soon, the thudding of felled trees echoed in the forest. Many places suddenly had roads so that the logging trucks could haul the logs. The areas which were uninhabited once were occupied by settlers who were usually workers of the logging companies.

At this point the tone of the novel shifted from epic storytelling to contemporary political realities. It was already obvious that the period of magic and enchantment was replaced by neoliberal market economy orientation. The gods no longer descended the earth to talk to warriors and wise elders who in turn told of tales of blessed past alongside future anxieties and dark presentiments. This shift or disruption was the most pronounced in the novel. To train oneself to read between genres or between tonal shifts in hybrid texts, adjustments in reading metabolism could point toward much-needed correctives to Western hegemonic tradition. The map was in the constellation of stories handed down from generation to generation.

He realized that for him to learn how to read the stars, he must remember all things that were already written in the history of their race.

All things were thus remembered and transmuted into old forms and words of mouth. The counsel of the past was the covert mantra of the story. Later, the wind whispered it again to our narrator, the novelist: Gather all the stories to know what the future brings.

Joaquín and the angel of history

Last February 2017, I wrote the following in a blog post about the impending publication of Nick Joaquín's The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic:

The inclusion of his famous play A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (1966) in the Penguin anthology was an inspired decision. The three-act "elegy", which the playwright also labeled as "a novel in the form of a play", was a distillation of his romantic ideas on Spanish Filipino culture, its struggle against modernity and war, symbolized by the protagonists—two spinster sisters—and their tenacious hold on a highly symbolic picture painted by their disillusioned father and inspired by Greek mythology. A Portrait was the writer's statement about art and its role in restoring ceremonial traditions, art and its fragility against the savage wars of peace. The writer was much concerned about the inability of culture (Spanish Filipino customs and ceremonies) to adapt to encroaching lawlessness and to reconcile the history of the past with the chaos of the present. Much like Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" in On the Concept of History (Thesis IX), after Paul Klee's Angelus Novus (1920), Joaquín's elegiac source spring was looking back at the past with the foreknowledge that the future storm would bring ruin to memory.

Vicente L. Rafael, who introduced the book, was reading my mind, and I, his. The book was published in April 2017, and I did not recall reading an advance copy of Rafael's introduction prior to that. The final paragraph of his introduction reads:

Nick Joaquin's stories provide us with such counsel. Swept by the catastrophes of colonialism and war, Joaquin, like St. Sylvestre [in his 1946 story "The Mass of St. Sylvestre"], looked both ways. Lingering on the threshold of what had happened and what was yet to come, he found himself irresistibly drawn, like the Angel of History, to the debris of colonial catastrophes that just kept piling up around him. He sought to retrieve from the ruins of modernity the means for conveying experience—his own as well as others'—in stories about forgotten legends, repressed events, flawed fathers, two-naveled women, and the miracles of a merciful Virgin that continue to emerge from the ever-perplexing and vertigo-inducing history of a certain Philippines. We, whoever we are, receive his stories told from a ruined world, hearing and perhaps sharing them as we would the shards of our own lives.

Rafael provided an endnote to the penultimate sentence:

The image of the "Angel of History," suggested in this instance by the image of the myriad angels surrounding St. Sylvestre as he leads his procession, is of course drawn from Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus and discussed by Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, 257-58. I borrow the term "vertigo-inducing" from the great historical comparativist Benedict Anderson, who uses it to describe the conjunctural strangeness of the Philippines in world history. See Anderson, "The First Filipino," London Review of Books 19(20) (Oct. 16, 1997): 22-23 [online]. He, too, was an admirer of Nick Joaquin and Walter Benjamin.

Anderson was of course an admirer of Benjamin. He wrote an introduction to the Filipino translation of Benjamin's treatise, Hinggil sa Konsepto ng Kasaysayan (High Chair, 2013), translated by Ramon Guillermo. To me, the image of the Angel of History, in relation to Joaquín's oeuvre, was suggested by Anderson himself, by Benjamin  himself, and by Joaquín himself.

I bought Guillermo's translation in the Manila International Book Fair 2016. According to my Goodreads account, I marked it as "to-read" in October and "shelved" it in the "2016" folder in December (i.e., read the book in the latter part of 2016). Anderson's striking description of the Angel of History was what particularly drew me to it. Here's the relevant passage; forgive the lengthy context at the start.

In the growing darkness of the 1920s and 1930s, Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist thinker and leader wrote, incarcerated in Mussolini's Fascist jails, that communists had to combine "pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will." Kafka had written not long before his early death: "There is hope, but not for us." Benjamin, who had to flee to Paris when Hitler came to power in 1933, watched Franco bloodily win the Civil War in Spain, Tokyo's armies cruelly occupying a huge part of China, anti-Semitic dictatorships in Portugal and central, eastern and southeastern Europe, France defeated by Hitler and now led by Marshal Pétain's rightwing dictatorship, but only in its southern regions, and Stalin's compact with Hitler in 1939, whereby eastern Europe was divided between them. Benjamin's, [sic] "Theses on the Concept of History", never fully finished, was written in the doomed Paris of 1940. It is from this devastated last work which come some of the most unforgettable, despairing passages. "All documents of civilization are at the same time documents of barbarism" is the shortest, while the most melancholically beautiful is the image of the Angel of History, who has his back to the future and contemplates all human history as an accumulating, unending pile of wreckage, ruin, and disaster. Benjamin wrote that the Angel can not turn his back from the past because his wings are caught in an unstoppable storm coming from paradise, "the storm that we call progress."

Joaquín himself was that same angel of history, enacting the same gesture of looking squarely at the ruins of Manila after the Japanese bombed it in the Second World War. The anguish of the novelist was evident in his elegiac and edgy descriptions of postwar Manila in The Woman Who Had Two Navels (the novel version) as "flat and spiky, its bared ribs and twisted limbs a graph of pain in the air", "traffic brimming between the banks of rubble", "the ruins noisy with night clubs", "a glittering fashion show in the bullet-pocked ballroom of a gutted hotel".

In Nick: A Portrait of the Artist Nick Joaquin (2011)—a biography of the novelist co-written by his nephew Tony Joaquín—the angel of history was pained at the image of destruction and atrocity in the walled city in front of him. The book was quoted in Ruel S. De Vera's review article:

There are many memorable scenes in “Nick,” but probably the most heartbreaking was that of Nick surveying the ruins of Intramuros after it had been razed to the ground during the Second World War: “Intramuros was so familiar and close to Nick’s heart. He knew where each building had stood. As he gazed around him and took in the destruction and realized all that had been destroyed and lost, a deep loud groan escaped from him and his body began to shake all over as sobs rose from the very pit of his stomach.”

I saw Ang Larawan: The Musical in cinema early this year. This adaptation of Joaquín's famous play was full of intimations and prefigurations of war. The role of art, history, tradition, and culture was sustained amid the spreading tentacles of modernity, war, and progress. The controversial portrait at the center of the play, the one owned by two unmarried sisters, might as well be the same horrifying image the angel of history was witnessing: the image that could crush his wings and send him tumbling into the future.

Joaquín's navels and tales

My wing is ready to fly
I would rather turn back
For had I stayed mortal time
I would have had little luck.
– Gerhard Scholem, “Angelic Greetings”


The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic. Quite a mouthful title for an anthology. I am happy to finally see Filipino novelist Nick Joaquín being made available to a wider audience via the Penguin Classics edition. Coming in April are some of his "tropical gothic" narratives in his famous tropical baroque prose. Apparently, the selections include his several stories and a play from 1940 to 1965. At 480 pages the edition is bound to be a fulsome, moveable feast. In stories like “Three Generations” (1940), “The Summer Solstice” (1947), and “May Day Eve” (1947), Joaquín made a name for himself as a preeminent postwar Filipino writer who displayed a unique approach to storytelling. He fused elements of magic, horror, folk-lore, myth-making, and history into a blend that was entirely unique and alive. I included The Woman Who Had Two Navels (1952) in a reading list of the best Philippine novels in the English language of the past century. The novel is an expanded version of a story of the same title. I do hope that the version included in the Penguin edition was the full novel instead of the origin story so that one would get the full shock value of its mannered telling.

Joaquín dabbled in various genre of writing: drama, novel, short prose, the essay, historical writing, politics and journalism, children's stories, news writing, literary criticism, translation of poems and newspaper columns from Spanish, cultural commentary, biography. In each genre, he used a cosmopolitan approach to writing, balancing wit with drama and sprinkling his prose with some ornate details, some whimsies and whimsical revelations, some occult and mysticism, as in his second novel Cave and Shadows (1983). The inclusion of his famous play A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino (1966) in the Penguin anthology was an inspired decision. The three-act "elegy", which the playwright also labeled as "a novel in the form of a play", was a distillation of his romantic ideas on Spanish Filipino culture, its struggle against modernity and war, symbolized by the protagonists—two spinster sisters—and their tenacious hold on a highly symbolic picture painted by their disillusioned father and inspired by Greek mythology. A Portrait was the writer's statement about art and its role in restoring ceremonial traditions, art and its fragility against the savage wars of peace. The writer was much concerned about the inability of culture (Spanish Filipino customs and ceremonies) to adapt to encroaching lawlessness and to reconcile the history of the past with the chaos of the present. Much like Walter Benjamin's "Angel of History" in On the Concept of History (Thesis IX), after Paul Klee's Angelus Novus (1920), Joaquín's elegiac source spring was looking back at the past with the foreknowledge that the future storm would bring ruin to memory. The play was adapted into a classic 1965 black-and-white film and a modern Filipino musical. In commemoration of the writer's centenary of birth this year, a new musical adaptation will be shown in theaters in the country.

Nick Joaquín's small rowboat

"Society for the Filipino is a small rowboat: the barangay," wrote Nick Joaquín in the beginning of "A Heritage of Smallness," one of the essays in Culture and History (1988). This provocative essay made the argument that the Filipinos' tendency to act on the small scale was detrimental to the development of their society and culture. This includes the Filipino writers' apparent preference for writing short stories. The lack of novels in the country was proof of the Filipino writers fearing the daring and bold enterprise. This habit of "thinking small" was, for Joaquín, a recipe for poverty and pettiness. The Philippine national heritage, according to him, was nothing but "a heritage of smallness."

However far we go back in our history it's the small we find – the nipa hut, the barangay, the petty kingship, the slight tillage, the tingi [retail] trade. All our artifacts are miniatures, and so is our folk literature, which is mostly proverbs, or dogmas in miniature. About the one big labor we can point to in our remote past is the [Banaue] rice terraces – and even that grandeur shrinks, on scrutiny, into numberless little separate plots, into a series of layers added to previous ones, all this being the accumulation of ages of small routine efforts (like a colony of anthills) rather than one grand labor following one grand design. ... Many little efforts, however perfect each in itself, still cannot equal one single epic creation. ... [Y]ou could stack up all the best short stories you can think of and still not have enough to outweigh a mountain like War and Peace.

The depressing fact in Philippine history is what seems to be our native aversion to the large venture, the big risk, the bold extensive enterprise. The pattern may have been set by the migrations. We try to equate the odyssey of the migrating barangays with that of the Pilgrim Fathers of America, but a glance at the map suffices to show the difference between the two ventures. One was a voyage across an ocean into an unknown world; the other was a going to and fro among neighboring islands. One was a blind leap into space; the other seems, in comparison, a mere crossing of rivers. The nature of the one required organization, a sustained effort, special skills, special tools, the building of large ships. The nature of the other is revealed by its vehicle, the barangay, which is a small rowboat, not a seafaring vessel designed for long distances or the avenues of the ocean.

Like his predecessor José Rizal before him who lamented the "indolence of the Filipinos", Joaquín was here lamenting the lack of imagination of his compatriots. The barangays he talked about referred to the smallest political unit in the country, roughly the same as barrios or villages. The word had its origin from balangay which was the sailing vessel the ancient inhabitants of the islands used as transport within the archipelago and neighboring regions.

Philippine society, as though fearing bigness, ever tends to revert to the condition of the barangay: of the small enclosed society. We don’t grow like a seed, we split like an amoeba. The moment a town grows big it become two towns. The moment a province becomes populous it disintegrates into two or three smaller provinces. The excuse offered for divisions is always the alleged difficulty of administering so huge an entity. ... What we're admitting is that, on the big scale, we can’t be efficient; we are capable only of the small. The decentralization and barrio-autonomy movement expresses our craving to return to the one unit of society we feel adequate to: the barangay, with its 30 to a hundred families. Anything larger intimidates. We would deliberately limit ourselves to the small performance.

The exhortation of Joaquín was premised on his study of Philippine artifacts that constitute the national cultural heritage. Specifically he observed three things about them: (i) the Filipinos worked best on small things ("tiny figurines, small pots, filigree work in gold or silver, decorative arabesques"); (ii) they worked in soft and easy materials like "clay, molten metal, tree bark and vine pulp, and the softer woods and stones"; and (iii) they tended to rut in his mastered skill ("material, craft or product") and did not move on to a higher level. For these assertions, he offered examples in pottery, agriculture, and wooden sculpture.

In contrast to this, the writer offered Christian statuary and architecture as indicating a semblance of a "heritage of greatness." He added three critical phases in the Spanish colonial period: the defense of the land against two centuries of attempt of Dutch and British invaders to conquer the islands; the Propaganda Movement; and the 1896 Philippine Revolution against Spain.

There were a lot of things to quibble about Joaquín's essay. His assessment was too harsh. Yet one could not easily dismiss him as having a "colonized mind" for extolling the Spanish virtues and contribution to Philippine culture. The essay was presented as a challenge for present readers not too "blame our inability to sustain the big effort on" colonialism. This was a sore point, for "colonial mentality" was a legacy that calcified in the country after one colonial regime was replaced by another (by Americans), then further replaced by the Marcos dictatorship, and after a series of "people power" revolutions – the recent ones becoming more and more dubious through time – we have the current specter of postcolonial or neocolonial capitalism.

The archeological and anthropological evidence Joaquín marshalled in writing his 1988 essay was based on the available data set at the time of his writing. The small balangay sailboats he referred to pertained to small excavated remains of boats in 1970s in Butuan, Philippines.

In 2012, almost a quarter of a century after Joaquín published his essay, a suspected much larger balangay "mother boat" was unearthed that could disprove the things he mentioned about lack of organization, effort, skills, and tools of ancient Filipino seafarers. The discovery of the large balangay – measuring 25 meters in length compared to previously excavated balangays that measured 15 meters – could disprove his argument on the lack of maritime skills, boldness, and daring of the early island people.

According to [National Museum archeologist Dr. Mary Jane Louise A. Bolunia], this new discovery suggests that these [the eight small vessels previously excavated] may just have been support vessels for a much larger main boat, where trade goods and other supplies were likely to have been held for safekeeping.

The discovery also suggests that seafaring Filipinos were much more organized and centralized than previously thought. [Source: http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/321334/scitech/science/massive-balangay-mother-boat-unearthed-in-butuan]

The interpretations Joaquín supplied for his thesis were based on artifacts available at the time that might be an incomplete data set in the light of recent discoveries. The latest information could bring in new perspectives that could weaken some of his impassioned opinions. It seemed like, for our essayist and seasoned cultural commentator, the absence of evidence is evidence of absence.

All of which was but a long prelude to a review post I was planning to write on the novel Shri-Bishaya by Ramon Muzones, which came out this year from New Day Publishers in a translation by Ma. Cecilia Locsin-Nava. This was a maritime novel, in fact Muzones's second to be translated. The first was Margosatubig which like Shri-Bishaya was an "epico-historical" novel partly set in the waters of Sulu and Philippine Seas.

Somehow the translation and publication of these two novels disproved the assertion of the writer Jose Dalisay, in an article or interview that I can no longer locate in the blogosphere, that there's a lack of novels in this part of the world that deals with the sea, which for an island nation was a bit puzzling. Well, here we have Muzones narrating in dynamic fashion the story of seafaring people gallivanting across seas, from Bornay to Paragwa (Palawan) to Aninipay/Madyaas (Panay) to Bruni (Brunei?).

The Hand of the Enemy

The Hand of the Enemy (1962) by Kerima Polotan (University of the Philippines Press, 2010)


If Nick Joaquín was to be believed, it was Kerima Polotan's protracted relationship with her father that impelled her to write The Hand of the Enemy, her first and last novel.

Her anguish over a relationship left dangling in the air, unresolved by a deathbed embrace, troubles her fiction, so cold on the surface, so angry at the roots. The Polotan heroine is a lonely, embittered, unsatisfied woman who craves to be loved but sees in the hand of the one loved, the hand of the enemy.

Private grief had become literature.

And that's how books get to be written. But grief that had become a book has also become a public commodity, which must be sold, peddled, advertised. How important are such commodities to public life? Do the forms one woman has given her anguish really matter as much as rice and groceries?

Joaquín was spot on in identifying the hermeneutics of grief as the positive, conscious force driving Polotan's text, feeding the manic momentum of her prose. This was, for example, the same force that wrote A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Handke's autobiographical novella about his mother's suicide.

Private grief was indeed laminated in the pages of The Hand of the Enemy. But as with the best works of grief literature, the personal and the political (historical) were intertwined. Set in the postwar period of 1950s to 1960s, the novel was the story of two marriages and their dissolution. The title was so ambiguous it could be applied to any enemy, and to either of the two hands.

"Kerima Polotan Skips a Dinner", Nick Joaquín's witty introduction to the novel, echoed the novel's skewering of the hyprocrisy of the noveau riche. During the literary dinner in honor of Polotan's publication of her novel (which she skipped), Joaquín asked questions about the relevance of the novel in the time of the rice shortage (this was 1961). Food for thought or food for stomach?

The blather of one "chairman of the cultural committee of the Philippine Columbian", as quoted verbatim by Quijano de Manila, was not lost on the reader.

I submit that literature—and novels in particular—should not be considered as just a form of entertainment. In portraying characters and dramatizing conflict, novelists can influence society and change behavior patterns. Novels and other forms of literature can serve a social purpose; in the present preoccupation with intensive economic development we are likely to neglect this powerful tool for social change, if we could only show that contemporary novels can be an effective vehicle in attaining the economic objective, then the campaign will have been won.

Novels? Change behavior patterns? Powerful tool for social change? Effective vehicle in attaining the economic objective? My goodness. What daunting tasks for the contemporary novel! One could detect the journalist's amusement in hearing such nonsense. As with any highfalutin dinner, the spirit of Rizal was invoked in full measure.

Andres Cristobal Cruz wrote a paper on honoree Kerima Polotan. He began with a long quote from Rizal, ended with another long quote from Rizal. The rest of the paper was also mostly about Rizal but Mr. Cruz occasionally remembered that his subject was Kerima Polotan, who, he said like D.H. Lawrence, explored the theme of forbidden relationships with a passion that touches the heart. He opined that, by "the hand of the enemy," Kerima Polotan meant the superstitions still around us, the poseurs and phonies of our society. This inevitably reminded him of what Rizal had said about superstition and Kerima Polotan vanished for good in the incense offered to the national hero.

Ever attentive to the nuances of literary reception, our guide Joaquín quoted at length from a Chronicle column published the next day by fellow writer Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, expressing her minority position. She must have, Joaquín presumed, "shuddered at what seemed hucksterism running wild at what was supposed to be a cultural soiree".

"It must have been curiously humiliating for writers to sit at a dinner-forum intended to create more awareness of the need for reading books by Filipino authors—as many of them did last night at the Philippine Columbian. It was rather an uncomfortable feeling—rather as if one were a brand of soap whose sales had fallen off or a consignment of abaca matting which was losing out to a more popular, washable, colorfast kind imported from the United States.

...

"One cannot help wishing ... that people ... would buy and, more important, read what one had to say between the covers of a book without someone important beating a large promotional drum or holding the sword of philistinism over their heads.

And what of the novel itself? What of the anguish between its covers?

No, this novel would not alleviate poverty or prevent rice shortages. On the contrary, Polotan offered a healthy dose of reality. She must have a checklist for the purpose of avoiding any sense of redemption or indulgence or absolution for the reader. Every action seemed to be haunted by the past—the transgressive, unforgiving past. Every other scene allowed for restrospective leaps of telling, for further digressions into the past, always auditing the temporal present for an account ("Just two weeks ago ..."; "But that day ..."; "Earlier that week"; "that day long ago"). She imbued every gesture, every word with import.

Fleeing Glo's over-percolated charm, Emma Gorrez ended up in front of the largest department store in the city. The mannequins in the window, the silks, the porcelain ware, all seemed vaguely familiar. The curving bridge nearby and the fetid odor of the shallow creek brought back that day long ago when she had come to this same place, money and misery together, to bury the presence of Mr. Navarro. She had interred the memory of that tragic old man beneath piles of the most useless things she had ever brought in her life. How instinctively a woman turned to bangles for surcease! She had bought a pendant that day and hung it around her neck, loud and noisy and vulgar, as if the sound of brass would exorcise the dangers of the dark—there was something fundamentally comforting in the process of buying: you pushed your money over the counter and clutched whatever foolishness you had paid for, grasping it like a talisman against the shadows in the long corridor of the mind.

Like holding a talisman, yes. Hers was a careful exercise of the apocalypse. She was a conjuror of doom, an existential witch. The vision of the novelist was one of fatalism. Life was a force majeure. As one character said: "Life is a bitch ... a foul-smelling, filthy bitch".

The world was something outside him; life was something outside him; a great big something, a mighty merciless great big hand picking up people and lives and hopes and tossing them athwart the sharp prow of circumstance.

So how to conduct and keep one's self, how to keep it "dear, inviolate, true"? In the face of the merciless blows dealt by the hand of the enemy, the hand of circumstance, how not to make it—one's self—one's own sworn enemy?

For one, one must avoid unhealthy literary soirees that bred further bitterness and disillusion. Joaquín concluded just as much.

The state of Philippine literature may be as bankrupt as the critics say; but Kerima Polotan is not concerned with improving the state of literature or the state of the nation. She simply writes; her motives are private. If she should stop and ponder if she should not be writing in Tagalog instead of English, or be writing pamphlets instead of novels, or be writing books that are easy to sell, or not writing at all at a time when people are standing in line to buy rice but should do something to solve the rice crisis, go to the province, maybe, and plant rice—she would be destroyed. Her selfishness is her salvation.

No wonder Kerima Polotan skipped the dinner held in her honor. There were temptations everywhere of violence and misconduct. There was enough drama already. The book was written already.

The Woman Who Had Two Navels (Nick Joaquín)

The Woman Who Had Two Navels by Nick Joaquín (1961; Bookmark, 1991)

Over damp Hong Kong the day dawned drizzling, astonishing with sunshine the first passengers huddled inside the ferries, luring them out on deck to spread cold fingers in the blond air and to smile excitedly (that night was full moon of the Chinese New Year) at the great rock city coming up across the black water, rising so fat and spongy in the splashing light the waterfront's belt of buildings looked like a cake, with alleys cutting deep into the icing and hordes of rickshaws vanishing like ants between the slices.

The postwar Hong Kong setting of Nick Joaquín's first novel was significant in at least one respect. It highlighted the exiled condition of its Filipino characters, exile of the physical and spiritual kind. The Monson family—the elder Doctor Monson and his sons Doctor Pepe Monson and Father Tony Monson—had been living in Hong Kong for the better part or the whole of their lives. The elder Monson was veteran of the turn of the century wars against Spanish and American colonial armies. It was also to Hong Kong where General Emilio Aguinaldo (first president of the Philippine Republic), whose image adorned the younger doctor's clinic, went into a short-lived voluntary exile after a political settlement with the Spanish government. It had been Monson's dream to come back to the country only when "it was a free country again", which he finally did after the second world war. What he had seen when he came back to Manila, however, had so disappointed him it dashed the idyllic images of the country he harbored in his mind.

Also fleeing to Hong Kong was Connie Escobar, the woman who thought she has two navels. Whereas the elder Monson was haunted by the specter of the past and the shame of discovering its impermanence, a different kind of shame, anatomical in nature, was haunting Connie Escobar. She ran away from Manila, presumably to flee her husband and to seek out Doctor Pepe Monson. She wanted to undergo an operation, "something surgical", that would remove one of the two orifices that supposedly peered from her belly like eyes. Her complaint may be psychological yet it clearly had something metaphorical about it. It seemed like a product of her sensitivity and a trauma from childhood, a projection of her repressed anxieties. The same physical deformity marked a "defaced" statue of the Biliken, a "toy" grudgingly given to her by her parents when she was a child. Although meant as a good luck charm, owing to its perpetually smiling face, there was something sinister associated with the Biliken in the novel—"an old fat god, with sagging udders, bald and huge-eared and squatting like a buddha; and the sly look in its eyes was repeated by the two navels that winked from its gross belly".

BILLIKEN STATUE

Connie's "imagined" condition could also be caused by emotional rebellion. She felt betrayed by her husband (Macho Escobar) and mother (Concha Vidal) when she learned that they were former lovers. She was so affected by this that it may have triggered a kind of internal division in her, a branching of consciousness that manifested itself on her body. Those around her, those she told of it, denied the possible existence of an extra navel, almost taking her for a madwoman. The symbol of the two navels, the aberration it signifies, was so rich with implications that unraveling it almost made for a mystery story, although to call the novel a horror story was not farfetched either.

Another character seemingly in search of direction was Paco Texeira, a married band vocalist living in Hong Kong. Paco, a Filipino-Portuguese, went to work for a while in Manila's entertainment clubs and became entangled with Concha Vidal (La Vidal), Connie's mother. He became her constant escort, accompanying her in various parties and functions. Paco also got involved with Connie but he had to flee the two women as he detected a kind of evil force around them.

"They're both agents of the devil—she and her mother. They work as a team: the mother catches you and plays with you until you're a bloody rag; then she feeds you over to her daughter.... They work for each other. Whenever I was with one of them I could feel the other watching greedily. They share each other's pleasure, watching you twitch. And when they've screwed you up to the breaking point the daughter springs her abominable revelation [of having two navels]—and you go mad and run amuck. And there's one more soul that's damned."

Connie's mother was also in Hong Kong, presumably on business. The two women were actually pursuing Paco. To add to the complication, Macho Escobar arrived looking for his wife. These characters were all exiles of a spiritual kind, imprisoned by their desires and baffled by their pride.

Connie's characterization, with her unstable mental condition, was already a far cry from that of Maria Clara in José Rizal's nationalist novel Noli Me Tangere (1887). The latter had always been seen as the representation of the ideal Filipina and symbol of the 'motherland'. Maria Clara turned out to be an illegitimate child of a villainous Spanish priest (Padre Damaso), a secret which when she discovered brought her unimaginable shame. The source of Connie's shame, for her part, was seeing her own self as a freak of nature.

An obvious meaning of the two navels was Connie's inheritance of a dual identity, her being a child of two worlds, of Spanish and American cultures. Her cultural environment, wracked by a recent war, created in her soul a kind of hybrid self. It may be too transparent a metaphor: the Filipino identity being frayed twice by conquistadors during bloody conflicts and colonial administrations, native culture hostage to two cultural axes. Punctuating these cultural crises were the major wars (the Philippine Revolution against Spain, the Philippine-American War, and World War II against the Japanese) which left destruction in their wakes: the savaging of lives, landscapes, and, again, identities.

This transparent reading of the Joaquín's inquiry into Filipino identity was complicated by the clash of the male and female. The dramatic battle of the sexes that figured in the novelist's other works of fiction was here played out in its full barbaric sensuality. And Joaquín being Joaquín, the writing was a celebration of existence. His sentences were acute expressions of beauty, horror, and vitality.

From the ramparts where the Spaniards had watched for Chinese pirate and English buccaneer, the younger taller city beyond the walls seemed rimmed with flame, belted with fire, cupped in a conflagration, for a wind was sweeping the avenue of flametrees below, and the massed treetops, crimson in the hot light, moved in the wind like a track of fire, the red flowers falling so thickly like coals the street itself seemed to be burning.

The prose was rich with color and details; reading it sometimes felt like watching a fashion show. The Vidal mother and daughter strutted their clothes, hats, pearls, and furs like ramp models. Even the description of postwar destruction had a surreal energy about it.

Macho had suddenly packed up one day and flown off to Manila; not really caring to see the city again or anyone there; not really moved when he saw it, flat and spiky, its bared ribs and twisted limbs a graph of pain in the air; not really astonished even by its vivacity—traffic brimming between the banks of rubble; daylong blocklong queues at the movie houses; the ruins noisy with night clubs; and, on his third night there, like a nightmare's climax, a glittering fashion show in the bullet-pocked ballroom of a gutted hotel, where Macho, turning away from the sequins and diamonds, the shattered ceiling and the bloodstained floor, had so abruptly come face to face with Concha Vidal ...[H]e had suddenly and sharply and exultantly known, with the old ache in the marrow and a blaze of flametrees in the mind, that he had never stopped wanting, he had never stopped desiring this woman.

The imagery that lighted the novel's hallways was determined by poetry. But it was a fixed form poetry, as the repetitions of details were deliberate, creating the patterning effect of an elaborate tapestry. The symmetric structure of repetition was like that of a villanelle's, with the images repeated like a refrain after several lines.

Consider a flashback scene near the novel's end, in the final chapter titled "DOCTOR MONSON". (The penultimate chapter was called "THE CHINESE MOON", the double letter O's in these titles almost concretized the presence of the two navels).

Behind him now, like smoky flames in the noon sun, the whole beautiful beloved city, the city that he guarded even now, here on this mountain pass, and for which he had come so far away to die—to the edge of the land, into the wilderness, up the cold soggy mountains of the north—and he told himself that, finally, one discovered that one had been fighting, not for a flag or a people, but for just one town, one street, one house; for the sound of a canal in the morning, the look of some roofs in the noon sun, and the fragrance of a certain evening flower.

He told himself that, finally, one found oneself willing to die, not for a great public future, but a small private past; and he picked up his pistol, having finished eating, and crawled back to the cliff's edge.

The elder Monson was here on his deathbed dreaming retrospectively of his participation as a young fighter in the decisive battle in the mountain of Tirad Pass, the last stand of Filipino fighters against Americans. It was an inspired juxtaposition of his imagined death years ago in the battlefield with that of his actual dying in old age. The same images were repeated later in the novel, a kind of closure for the old man as he finally defined his once conflicted nationalism.

Opening his eyes he saw, not the stars or pine branches, but the canopy of a bed and the faces of his two sons hovering over him; seeing suddenly in their faces all the years of foreign wandering, the years of exile, but knowing suddenly now that the exile had, after all, been more than a vain gesture, that his task had not ended with that other death in the pinewoods, that he had stood on guard, all these years, as on the mountain pass, while something precious was carried to safety. For there it was now in the faces of his sons—the mountain pass, and the pinewoods, and the shapes of the men who had died there. There it was now in their faces—the Revolution and the Republic, and that small private past for which he had come so far away to die. It had not been lost ... [T]here was no need to cross the sea to find it. Here it was before him (and he strove to rise to salute it) in the faces of his sons. He had saved it and it was now in the present, and the hovering faces brightened and blurred about him, became the sound of a canal in the morning, the look of some roofs in the noon sun, and the fragrance of a certain evening flower. Here he was, home at last ... and before him, like smoky flames in the sunset, the whole beautiful beloved city.

Nationalism was here depicted as a homage to one's "small private past" and testified by Monson's two sons who will carry on after his death, even if they remain as exiles in Hong Kong. (Contrast the same battle of Tirad Pass in the closing scene of F. Sionil José's nationalist novel Dusk wherein nationalism was proffered as an inborn "duty".) This scene was a form of making peace with the past, the kind of closure that eluded Connie Escobar. In one of her imagined death scenes, she was arguing with her father, Manolo Vidal, about acceptance and letting go of the past. Her father's advice hinted at looking back at their lives with a critical eye, repairing the generational break, the severed connections:

"If you must go down, go down raging. Do not lose that ability, like I did. Take things hard, make a fuss, and refuse to accept what we are—no not even now. Rage, rage against us—even now!"

The reference here was to the poem by Dylan Thomas, with "Do not lose that ability" paralleling "Do not go gentle into that good night". The poem was in fact a villanelle constantly echoing the famous passage about raging against darkness and stagnant death.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

...

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The poem's subject was the poet's dying father. Joaquín's paraphrase was relevant as the poem's theme contextualized his discourse on memory and nationalism. In addition to the borrowing of novelistic structure of repetition, it anticipated the death scene of old doctor Monson and illuminated the meaning of Connie's (four) death scenes. Four times, the poet urged his father about why he must rage against the dying light, must not go gently with the good night. In the particular hallucinatory scene in the novel, the roles were reversed. Connie was with her father on an airplane ("there on the sad height", as in the poem; atop Mount Tirad as in the case of old Monson). Manolo was appealing to her to finally face the specter haunting her and embrace her destiny, her identity, whatever she may have thought of it. Present reality check as key to affirming life, to attaining rebirth and regeneration.

In The Woman Who Had Two Navels, as with his only other novel (Cave and Shadows) which appeared more than 20 years later, Joaquín abstracted his ideas on memory and identity and played the devil's advocate on the subject of nationalism. He was ever the sly novelist and consummate prose writer.

Cave and Shadows (Nick Joaquín)

You have shown me a strange image, and they are strange prisoners.

Like ourselves, I replied; and they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one another, which the fire throws on the opposite wall of the cave?

True, he said ...

- Plato, The Republic

The most mystical Filipino writer is probably Nick Joaquín (1917-2004). In his books characters are seized by visions, the faithless become converts, and the faithful turn into seers. Nick Joaquín was a novelist, poet, dramatist, historian, journalist, and biographer. His significant contribution to Philippine literature in English led to his conferment of the title National Artist for Literature.

He was, as he wrote in his dedication, a "man who has two novels," alluding to his first novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels. His second novel, Cave and Shadows, dealt with a literal cave and some metaphorical shadows. Yet the reference to Plato's cave was not lost.

From its first surreal sentence ("The vision—a crab on a string being walked by a naked girl—occurred in deep-hotel corridor twilight and moreover when he, Jack Henson, was feeling himself in a swoon.") the novel was propelled by the mysterious death of a girl found in a cave that was practically sealed from the outside. The girl was naked, had no sign of any injury or violation on her body, and a scent of flowers seemed to emanate from her. Was she the same crab-walking girl that Jack saw in the hotel corridor? If yes, why was she haunting him?

Jack Henson, 42, divorced, and an American expatriate living in an island in southern Philippines, was asked by his former wife to get to the bottom of the unexplained death of her daughter, Nenita Coogan, the girl found in the cave. A possible explanation for her death, as "folk memory" would have it, would be the sacrificing of youth at planting time so that the harvest of the fields will be more fruitful and abundant. The sweet-smelling body of a "saint" will appease the gods. But then it could also be a crime of passion. Or some other primal offense. No neat explanation was at hand.

As Henson investigates, Joaquín traced the increasingly surreal and mysterious circumstances surrounding the girl. He came to interview a number of quirky characters that were associated with her while still alive. As the story progressed, the present started to play against the insistent echoes of the distant past. Forgotten incidents were projected onto the pages of history, becoming more and more pronounced as they filled narrative gaps. Amid the reverent themes of religious fanaticism and the search for an authentic native god, Joaquín used the genres of the detective story and historical documentary as creative vehicles for exploring the intersection of various spheres of Philippine life: history, politics, religion, activism, and colonialism.

The main thread of the detective story was alternated with chapters that foregrounded the mythical and superstitious elements of the story. These include: a discourse on the origin of the cult of the cave; a documentary investigation into the rise of the religious figures known as the Hermana, the Beatas, and the cave goddess; and an exposition of events sometime in the 17th century, events that go back to the roots of religion and could rewrite the official history on paper and the articles of faith etched in stone. Yet again, as in Joaquín's short stories and his first novel, readers were privy to a subtle battle of the sexes in the book, wherein a feminist revisionist approach to history was enacted.

Joaquín situated the "present" of the story in August of 1972, a month before the declaration of martial law in the country. This avoidance of an important political turning point in history is significant in terms of Joaquín's deliberate gloss over an event that is still shaping the course of the present. In any case, the novelist did not completely detach himself from the political sphere since major characters in the story are either public officials or have direct connection to people in power. As Henson said in one conversation, "politics is what we have to have instead of love; it's how we arrange for safety and justice in a society where people don't really care much for one another."

The cave in question was subject to previous worship and ritual ceremonies as early as the 16th century before being literally obstructed by the Spanish clergy - it was covered by an embankment twice over. Out of sight, its existence gradually vanished from memory. The obstruction was meant to suppress the practice of pagan rites by the villagers which was threatening to eclipse the Catholic faith that was then being aggressively spread by Spanish colonists. In 1970 the cave was uncovered by an earthquake which brought down the paved scaffold and revealed the gaping entrance. What was once buried from memory was unearthed from memory.

The rediscovery of the cave became a sort of trigger that invaded people's consciousness, eventually excavating folk memories lying in the recesses of the mind. The process was aided by researchers who reconstructed the events in history. At least two versions came out of submerged history: the native and the colonial religious histories and their associated customs.

Culture, Joaquín seemed to be implying, is not forever dormant even if systematically suppressed. It is very like strands of DNA that remain intact even after several millennia. It only takes a blunt force of nature for it to uncoil itself and spread its contagious doctrine.

With the cave once again "in place," it was thus inevitable that the cultural DNA will be resurrected by its modern-day adherents, the neo-pagans. The vestiges of anito - old faith of the forefathers, sticks and stones ready for worship - can survive in the new and can reclaim its once strong foothold in people's hearts and souls. Naturally, in the reorientation of belief systems, there was bound to be a clash of beliefs, an overt war, between introduced Christianity and home-grown paganism. Each of the two sides had proponents who will go to such length as to form new cults and recruit followers to protect the interest of their gods. The all-out war on faith and the unchecked ceremonies of the faithful could turn deceptive, violent, and deadly, as they in fact did. The cave was ordered closed to the public before Nenita Coogan was found dead in it.

I will hazard a guess as to what the cave probably signified in the novel. It may be a stand-in for memory, particularly that of cultural memory. Its reopening allowed paganism, a recessive trait, to be reborn in contemporary times, brought out again to the light for everyone to inhabit and cultivate. It would only take a well-timed stimulus, a natural calamity, or perhaps a demagogue's fiery speech during a demonstration rally, to trigger a crisis of faith. The objective histories told in books and in official documents belied the deep-set motives and desires of the characters. Everyone was capable of compassion; everyone was capable of murder and machination.

The novel was so opaque and tangible that it can harbor many interpretations, many individual readings and tellings, of fortune and literary meanings. As a variation of the Socratic allegory, the philosophy proceeded to its dark conclusions. Along the walls of the cave, the shadows conjured confusion and mystery such that the viewers of these dark images could not distinguish the shadows from the objects that cast them.

The cave became the canvas in which the novelist projected his own portraits of shadows, characters like trapped animals, darkened by their savage capabilities and blinded by their own appetites and desires. Shadows that were like figments of one's susceptible beliefs, readily accepted as rock-hard beliefs, but ultimately hollow and easily ground. They were fooled by perverse forms reality takes, the objects dissolving into their petty projections.

The characters' shadowy attitudes reflect our own inherited failings, our national defects. This is the un-reality we cannot face and yet we must do so to escape it. As the dying words of a female mystic in the novel put it: "All only shadows in a cave ... Oh, fly me outside!"

A note on the prose. Joaquín was a poet and he wrote in beautifully observed sentences ("The kneeling light was also examining the purple thread in their plaid, the curl of bead or shell, the jewelry of white buds in dark hair, the throb of gold in the flesh."). He was one of the best Filipino stylists in the English language. Even with descriptions that were somehow excessive or accessorized with bourgeois accoutrement, he was an original at the level of the sentence. His writing breathed and throbbed in quick flashes, like gold in the flesh.



Review copy courtesy of Anvil Publishing and Honey of Coffeespoons.