Firebrand

Narkokristo, 1896 by Ronaldo S. Vivo Jr.

Mararating na nila ang kahustuhan ng unang bahagi ng kanilang pag-aaral. Nakalatag na ang mga talang pinagtibay ng kanilang mga isinagawang pagsusuri. Pinakamahalaga ay ang mga kasunod na preguntas de investigación o salitang sa Aleman ay forschungsfragen—na kanilang dadalhin sa Universität Heidelberg sa Alemanya—para sa gagawing pagsasala ng mga kapuwa iskolar at propesor. Sa gagawing presentasyon, layon nilang itanghal ang kanilang mga materia tulad sa nangyaring Exposition de las Islas Filipinas noong 1887, sa Parque de la Vuelta del Duero, Madrid.

[They are on the brink of completing the first phase of their study. The findings, certified by their investigation, are now on file. The most important thing are the new preguntas de investigación or what in German is called forschungsfragen—what they plan to bring to the Universität Heidelberg in Germany—for peer review by fellow scholars and professors. In the upcoming presentation, they aim to showcase the specimens, just like what was done in the Exposición de las Islas Filipinas in 1887, in Madrid’s Parque de la Vuelta del Duero.]

The 1887 Exposición General de las Islas Filipinas was an event meant to showcase the economic resources and human populations of the Philippines as a colony of Spain. The exhibits included living people from various ethnic groups of the Philippines, among them Igorots, Manobos, and Negritos. They were displayed as if in a “human zoo” for the colonizers to mock and gawk at. Even José Rizal was scandalized by such an exhibition mounted by the “civilized” people of Spain; he viewed it as a violation of human rights. This kind of exposition was a fad during colonial times, meant to assert the superiority of the western colonizers over their subjects.

An “expo” akin to this was recounted in Ronaldo S. Vivo Jr.’s Narkokristo, 1896, a novel that disrupts the template of the Filipino historical novel. Vivo trained his sights on the consequential events in and around Pateros town during the flashpoint year 1896 when the revolution against Spanish occupation broke out. The characters in the novel shared profiles of the novelist's characters in his previous books: corrupt people in power (now in the robes of Spanish friars and military rulers) and victims navigating the maelstrom of violence and forces which transformed them into desperate vigilantes seeking justice to avenge personal wrongs. The readers knew they are situated in a new dreamland world with the same restless nightmares when they are thrust into a spate of killings and injustices, both extrajudicial or state-sponsored (although the two may be synonymous). The readers also knew they will bear the impact of this violence and trauma.

What are the uses of historical novels in an era bursting with information both factual and fake? The outline of events in Philippine Islands, circa 1896, has already been recreated in books and films a hundred, a thousand times over. Do we still need new configurations of characters, motivations, and plot points in the competing narratives of history? These “research questions” are moot once the novel applied its brute and blunt force, i.e., once the characters were triggered and emboldened to enact the ideas of Sun Tzu and Machiavelli.

A novel can retell or reiterate things past. It can tell a good story and entertain readers, explore facets of history already familiar or in a new light. Yet a novel can embroider history just as well. It can falsify things, create new characters, motivations, and storylines in the service of the story or some other agenda. It can be a corrective of history to set the record straight about some unknown characters or unreported/misreported events. At worse, a novel can be a false revision of history.

In 1904, as part The Philippine Exposition in the St. Louis World’s Fair, American organizers boasted off the conquerors’ new possessions: the peoples and natural resources of the new colony. Unlike the Madrid exposition, this one was grittier and more cinematic: “Entire villages were built to replicate those of the Visayans, Bagobos, Samals, ‘Moros’ (as they were called then), Igorots, Tingguianes, Negritos, and 30 other tribes. These villages were ‘stocked’ with over a thousand tribal men, women, and children as living exhibits.”

In the Negrito Village, half-naked Negrito men and boys displayed their bow and arrow skills to curious fair-haired men and boys in suits and bowler hats.

The Igorot Village, spread over six acres with 100 natives, was a World’s Fair hit. Every day, throngs of curious Americans flocked to the village to witness the G-stringed tribe boil a dog for dinner. [Filipinas Magazine, 1994, reprinted in Ortigas Foundation Library]

The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair would go down in history as the “largest human zoo”. But we are getting ahead of ourselves with the American occupation. Vivo's projected trilogy will be set in three colonial periods (Spanish, American, Japanese). In this opening move, he already dramatized the literal and metaphorical caging of human lives during colonial times. In this novelistic draft of history, we recognized how conquest and colonialism wore the same garb as human trafficking, slavery, and establishment of a human zoo on a massive scale.

So the historical novel could have many functions and purposes. An annotation of historical events; an exposition of human tragedies and capacity for cruelty; a “living exhibit” of crimes, violations, and iniquities; a corrective against ignorance and forgetting. As written in Narkokristo's dedicatory page, the novel resurrects the heroes whose names never reached our consciousness.

If it has power at all, the historical novel could be a diorama of stories that give life and agency to characters who act in unforgiving situations and take justice into their own hands. It arms the subjugated and gives power to the vanquished so they can achieve justice denied them by history. While the novelist has no power to rewrite history, he has the power to reimagine actions and situations, the power to choreograph power plays, and the power to yield power to the oppressed. The historical novel can be a form of redress. In troubled times or at any time, it dispenses justice when no authority can.

But what of the colonial mindset, the caged spirit? The colonized is caged if their mindsets do not allow them to hatch resistance and revolt. The colonizer is caged whose mindsets do not allow them freedom to think beyond their perverse beliefs.

If it has power at all, the historical novel is also a decolonizing instrument. It subverts power and decolonizes worldviews. It overturns notions of racial superiority, manifest destiny, and bigotry. Western pseudoscience, xenophobia, slavery, and racism. These kaput ideas and ideologies propagated through a caged mindset and toxic doctrine of dehumanization cry for obliteration.

The radical novelist decolonizes history by shattering the zoos and cages of the mind. He sets fire to entrenched values and philosophies of race superiority. He arms tortured souls and demystifies the grand spectacle of savagery. He torches imperialistic dreams and razes naked power to the ground.

The radical novelist is an arsonist. 

The ephemera of Bernardo Soares

 

I read and am liberated. I acquire objectivity. I cease being myself and so scattered. And what I read, instead of being like a nearly invisible suit that sometimes oppresses me, is the external world’s tremendous and remarkable clarity, the sun that sees everyone, the moon that splotches the still earth with shadows, the wide expanses that end in the sea, the blackly solid trees whose tops greenly wave, the steady peace of ponds on farms, the terraced slopes with their paths overgrown by grape-vines.

I picked up The Book of Disquiet, again, and started from the very beginning. I wasn't able to mark where I left off so I decided to begin this fragmentary novel from the first page, from the introduction by editor and translator Richard Zenith. By fragment #87 – which ended thus, "Better and happier those who, recognizing that everything is fictitious, write the novel before someone writes it for them and, like Machiavelli, don courtly garments to write in secret." – I knew that my first pass already brought me up to a fifth or a fourth of the book. Rereading could be futile. Bernardo Soares himself could not bring himself to reread.

I reread? A lie! I don’t dare reread. I can’t reread. What good would it do me to reread? The person in the writing is someone else. I no longer understand a thing… [Text 63]

Soares was not the one flipping the pages but Fernando Pessoa. The author's identity is fickle. In a book about states of being and consciousness, hyperreal dreams, and intellectualized tedium, we detect the inconsistent protests of a poet suffering from impostor syndrome. His only recourse was random jottings; he could be the forerunner of modern blogging. He devoted his life to art and its contradictions and so embraced the contradictions of a life lived on the fringes of art.

We may know that the work we continue to put off doing will be bad. Worse, however, is the work we never do. A work that’s finished is at least finished. It may be poor, but it exists, like the miserable plant in the lone flowerpot of my neighbour who’s crippled. That plant is her happiness, and sometimes it’s even mine. What I write, bad as it is, may provide some hurt or sad soul a few moments of distraction from something worse. That’s enough for me, or it isn’t enough, but it serves some purpose, and so it is with all of life. [Text 14]

Blogger without a platform, Soares killed time writing to give his readers some sort of distraction. He believed it served a purpose because otherwise he'd be forced to admit that the time he spent on writing was all a waste.

Zenith's introduction prepped the reader for the chaotic and tedious composition of the book. Soares struggled writing and organizing it for most of his life. "Unfinished and unfinishable", the art consumed the artist. If only the novelist was born in the age of NaNoWriMo, then he could have made progress on his unfinishable enterprise, copy-pasting and tracking changes to his heart's content. Zenith believed though that it would not be the same masterpiece had Soares completed the task. Tightly edited, coherent, smoothly flowing, and possibly streamlined to half its published length, the non-posthumous Book of Disquiet would have been more daring and more passionate but less disquieting.

The editor said that the sequence he followed to shape the fragments was not definitive and was informed by a rough skeleton of dated fragments arranged chronologically. According to him, the reader could open the book at any page, create their own order of the texts, and proceed to any random page. A chaotic species of composition deserved an equally chaotic decryption. An unorthodox reading would not lose the decadent spirit and drift of Disquiet. 

With so many entry points and possibilities of arranging the texts and countless ways of reading and ordering the fragments, backward, forward, skipping every two or three pages at a time, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Disquiet is the definition of an infinite book. A book by Pessoa, the father of pluralism, had a secure place in the invisible library of Borges, a prominent place in the Library of Babel.

If it was up to me, I would appreciate holding a fragmentary version of Disquiet, the way Soares left it for posterity. In a large envelope and in a trunk, the texts written in different formats and all forms of paper. "He wrote," Zenith said, "in notebooks, on loose sheets, on the backs of letters, advertisements and handbills, on stationery from the firms he worked for and from the cafés he frequented, on envelopes, on paper scraps, and in the margins of his own earlier texts." 

These ephemera deserved a better packaging, printed and preserved just as they languished for almost half a century (47 years) before their publication in a bound book. Opening that vessel of texts, the closest feeling I would potentially compare it to was when I, trembling, opened the box containing the stapled chapters of The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson. Plus, I would throw in the lists Pessoa made of non-existent poems, stories, and books. Who is to say they do not exist? The fact that their titles exist made them exist. If only we would look hard enough.

"Each writer," Borges wrote, "creates his precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation, the identity or plurality of men doesn't matter." In his writing, Pessoa created his own precursors: fictional authors writing about fictitious writers and fictive pieces, dreaming dreams inside dreams and daydreams. His "plurality of men" (heteronyms) doesn't matter. 

I am still obsessed with creating a false world, and will be until I die. Today I don’t line up spools of thread and chess pawns (with an occasional bishop or knight sticking out) in the drawers of my chest, but I regret that I don’t, and in my imagination I line up the characters – so alive and dependable! – who occupy my inner life, and this makes me feel cosy, like sitting by a warm fire in winter. I have a world of friends inside me, with their own real, individual, imperfect lives. [Text 92]

The writer fully inhabited the fictions of his beings. The writer inside the writing was somebody else. Soares needed to recover himself from himself: "I gave birth to my infinite being, but I had to wrench myself out of me with forceps."

 

21 books I look forward to in 2025+

 

Before I get depressed about finishing a draft of a post on the state of this blog or the state of my reading, I decided to list books to be published this year (or beyond) that I want to read. And this cheers me up. I'm still reading "books-books". But ever since enrolling in a doctorate program, my reading fare lately consists of peer-reviewed journal articles and chapters from academic books. The worrying thing is that, since these texts are made up of words and they somehow contain narratives and storylines, I am quite enjoying the academic drudgery and all talk about "framing", "worldviews", "contestations", and "navigating complex, uncertain, and unsustainable societies". The arguments in some of those readings somehow resemble some concepts in the short stories of Borges. Academic reading and writing replaces time spent on reading and blogging. Yet I find I can still manage to squeeze the time to finish the quasi-philosophical ramblings of Clarice Lispector. In her A Breath of Life (Pulsations), for example, I discovered I can no longer distinguish the boundaries between reading and imaginary transcendence, between sense and sensemaking.

AUTHOR: I looked for you in dictionaries and couldn't find your meaning. Where is your synonym in the world? where is my own synonym in life? I'm unequalled.

After encountering four Lispector novels in the span of two years, I came to the conclusion that novels are instruments and vehicles for unearthing found meanings and found feelings. 

I have thoughts I cannot translate into words — sometimes I think a triangle. But when I try to think I get worried about trying to think and nothing comes up. Sometimes my thought is only the whispering of my leaves and branches. But for my best thought words are not found. 

 

I discovered that I need to not know what I’m thinking — if I become conscious of what I’m thinking, I can no longer think, I can only see myself think. When I say “think” I’m referring to the way I dream words. But thought needs to be a feeling. [tr. Johnny Lorenz]

The cumulative effect of passages like this is indescribable. I sometimes think I stumbled upon a comedy bar with a breakthrough artist performing a monologue in laughter and tears. It is alright to be sometimes all over the place. To think with a straight face can be difficult.

I've digressed.

 

1. Wildcat Dome by Yūko Tsushima, translated by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda

2. No Man River by Dương Hương, translated by Quan Manh Ha and Charles Waugh

3. Women, Seated by Zhang Yueran, translated by Jeremy Tiang

4. The Aesthetics of Resistance: Volume III by Peter Weiss, translated by Joel Scott. - the end of a trilogy to end all trilogies.

5. Silent Catastrophes by W. G. Sebald, translated by Jo Catling - John Banville said this will "diminish" Sebald's reputation as a master of Central European high literature. I'm not bothered by this pronouncement. It's now more than two decades after Sebald's death. I very much look forward to see Sebald diminish in my fanboy eyes. 

6. Vastlands: The Crossing by João Guimarães Rosa, translated by Alison Entrekin - Coming in 2026, actually. That Cormac McCarthy-inspired subtitle, though.

7. A Suitable Girl by Vikram Seth - may be out next year, or the year after that.

8. Borges by Adolfo Bioy Casares, translated by Valerie Miles. - what, 700 more pages about Borges?

9. Yñiga by Glenn Diaz - Tilted Axis Press, 2026.

10. Out of the World by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken - 2027 or thereabouts.

11. Into the Sun by C. F. Ramuz, translated by Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan

12. Schattenfroh by Michael Lentz, translated by Max Lawton

13. Unusual Fragments: Japanese Stories by Taeko Kono, Nobuko Takagi, and others, translated by Lucy North, Margaret Mitsutani, and others. From Two Lines Press.

 

From locally published books, I look forward to reading

14. I Am a Voice by Genoveva Edroza-Matute, translated by Soledad S. Reyes - One of the books I bought last Thursday, Day 1 of 2025 Philippine Book Festival (PBF), from the booth of Ateneo de Manila University Press.

15. The Compendium of Impossible Objects by Carlo Paulo Pacolor, translated by Soleil David. This received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. I bought the original Filipino (and some other goods) in the PBF booth of the publisher, Everything's Fine PH.

16. Narkokristo, 1896 by Ronaldo S. Vivo Jr. - I finished it in one sitting yesterday.

17. The Twentieth-Century Philippines in Ten Novels: Literature as History (1913-1975) by Soledad S. Reyes

18. Sa Ibang Kariktan (Another Beauty) by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles - The poet's latest nonfic from The University of the Philippines Press. I also managed to snag his triptych on sonnets, which is part of a septology on a poetry movement Ayer calls "Sonetoismo": Laging Patúngo (Always on the Way), Monstruo, and "Not the Stuff of Sonnets": Ilang Talâ sa Sonetoismo (Notes on Sonnetoism).

19. Pagkamangha sa Parang-Katapusan-ng-Mundo (Awe at the Apocalyptic-ish) by Genevieve L. Asenjo - Not yet on the shelves when Rise dropped by the PBF booth of Balangay Books. 

20. Pitumpung Patnubay sa Paglikha ng Palagiang Panahon (Seventy Guideposts on Creating a Stable World) by Edgar Calabia Samar

21. Cerco un Centro di Gravità Permanente by RM Topacio-Aplaon - the second installment in the Southern Quartet. And to think I haven't started yet anything from his Imus Novels, a projected septology, and am still in the middle of At Night We Are Dancers, which might be the first book in a trilogy. 

Perhaps I want to collect all of these books so that when I see any of them online I can say, just like Borges, "What a pity I can't buy that book because I already have a copy at home."

Women's Month: Filipina novelists in translation

Last October, someone from Canada emailed to ask if I have updated figures (gender statistics) to a 2016 blog post Women in Translation Month: Novels from the Philippines.

Yes, I have.

Here are the updated numbers:

• Between 1900 and 2024, a total of 50 novels from the Philippines were translated and published into English. In the past century (1900-1994), only seven of these novels (14%) appeared in English translation for the first time. The first English translations of the rest (43 novels) were published in the last 20 years (2006-2024). Note that "novel" is loosely defined in my list.
• Out of the 50 translated novels, 13 were written by female novelists (26%). The percentage is expected to go down as 11 novels by male novelists are forthcoming in translation. 
• Four languages were represented: 30 were translated from Tagalog/Filipino; 10 from Spanish; six from Cebuano, and four from Hiligaynon.
• The most prolific translator (11 novels) was Soledad S. Reyes.
  
• The 50 novels were written by just 39 writers: 31 male and 8 female novelists.
• The eight female novelists, arranged by number of novels translated, were:  
  1. Rosario de Guzman Lingat (3 books)
  2. Austregelina Espina-Moore (3 books)
  3. Magdalena Gonzaga Jalandoni (2 books)
  4. Luna Sicat Cleto (1 book)
  5. Lualhati Bautista (1 book)
  6. Liwayway Arceo (1 book)
  7. Fe Esperanza Trampe (1 book)
  8. Jonaxx (1 book)

The information came from a database I maintain online: Bibliography of Philippine Novels in English Translation.

The most controversial book in the list, after Noli and Fili, was probably La Loba Negra (The Black She-wolf). The translated book (1958) was published under the name of José A. Burgos, a Catholic priest. Although the original Spanish novel was attributed to Burgos, historians later proved it to be one of the forgeries or hoaxes by Jose E. Marco. The hoax novel was adapted into an opera in 1984.

Todas las almas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10. 

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

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

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

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

 

12.

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

 

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

 

13. 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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