On Soledad’s Sister: Unsaid, Untold

I’ll start this (non)review by saying that I want to write about Gina Apostol’s Gun Dealers’ Daughter, but as I have not yet gathered my thoughts into coherence about it, I’ll delay (once again!) and talk about a more recent read, even if it’s likely considered a “classic” in the canon these days.

When I think of Soledad’s Sister by Butch Dalisay, I think of a school bag slung over my shoulder, a list of books to read for the semester, the hustle outside the glass doors — out into the sunshine, the busy street — so analogous is it with my university days. But there’s a kind of freedom in reading a book everyone tells you is canon, reading it because you can, and because you know every curriculum has its limits.

Ah, but precisely: this novel is premised on what the reader doesn’t know.

Para lang maiba: Jose “Butch” Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister in sepia

A coffin arrives in Manila, you are told, and from the get-go it’s a disaster veiled in what looks to be orderly logistics. But what captivates in the novel is not the mystery that the dead body has been mislabeled Aurora V. Cabahug’s — who is, in fact, Soledad’s sister, alive and well — but the language in which the author deftly describes the crudeness of life, which outlines not vulgarity, but rather simplicity. It is not that life is reduced to physical needs, but rather that life is defined by the concrete and the puddles and the karaoke bar as much as the inner turmoil of never understanding a family member.

When the crate arrived, Al had just finished his supper of fish in black bean sauce, two cups of rice, a glass of watery coffee, and a banana, taken in the outdoor stall just beyond the airport fence. One of the new helpers, a girl from Ozamis, has blushed when he mentioned something about a Sunday walk at the Luneta, and how relaxing and cheap it was to spend the night on the grass, like many couples did. I’ll give her a week, he thought, picking the fish out of his teeth—or was it the gummy young banana—as he strode through the gate toward the cargo warehouse (Dalisay 6-7).

In reading novels, we are told that suspension of disbelief is a must. What they don’t tell you, but which you suspect anyway, is that suspension is always more difficult when the setting is your own. When a novel shuttles between Manila, Hong Kong, and Jeddah, but pivots in its attempt to solve mystery in the small town of Paez, talking about the construction of a village named after a mayor’s wife and then a play between Bagumbayan and “bayani,” the multiplication of its phases, its cheap architecture, and even when the narrative winds its way to nineties EDSA, nothing of it is romanticized.

Interestingly, the novel is easily mistaken for the hundred-odd takes into the lives of the OFW: the plight, the struggles, the families left behind, the bodies shipped back in boxes, neither luggage nor package. And while its mystery looks to be how Soledad, taking the name of her sister Aurora, met her demise, the tragedy is in the unnamed space the latter occupies, that ever-fragile, long-winded pause between thinking up a goal and achieving it, stuck as one is in a pale imitation of success (in the case of Aurora, or Rory, a cabaret-cum-bar complete with a DJ, karaoke, and GROs.

It was a little past six <…> indeed he Flame Tree was home to a good many of these gentlemen, for whom dinner was achieved by ordering several platefuls of diced pig’s cheeks or tuna sashimi, washed down with a few cases of San Miguel. Rory got a kick out of pretending before newcomers that she was just one of the girls, and a particularly hardworking one at that. Her name was on the bill outside the bar, but it was a tiny sign that had become more than shopworn over the past three months. Few people made the connection between the routinary “Tonite’s Queen of Song Ms. Rory Cabahug” of the white plastic letters (with the broken right leg in the second ‘A’), punched into velvet backing like a funeral announcement, and the slim, pale woman who left her guests feeling that she had known them all their lives but that they would never know her with the same unnerving confidence (Dalisay 37-38).

These little tragedies are what make the story tangible, hold the disbelief at bay. The entire novel is told not only in different places, from different points of view, but from different points in time, all without taking leave of the present timeline, where Rory Cabahug and her less-than-a-white-knight policeman Walter G. Zamora fetch a body, lose it, and discover, with the reader, that what is at stake is more than the act of reclaiming a body, a name, but blood ties, relocation, identity.

In the end, the novel (re)turns to what it has only apparently promised you from its first word: Soledad in the name of Aurora, well and alive, just before death. But more a glimpse into a narrative than an actual narrative itself, she disappears, elusive. After all the details, after the suspension of disbelief, the unraveling of character pasts and segues into car theft and various petty crimes in the metro, the novel shows, incidentally, not just a mystery, but becomes a mystery in itself.

Now if only I, as reader, could reconcile myself to and appreciate this path.

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Gun Dealers’ Daughter next, I promise. That’s a whole other Soledad.

The Difficulty in Dancing

In order to hold procrastination at bay, one must, well, do. I thought about starting this review long hand, while I have no time to really focus on a laptop or computer screen when there are handouts to think about, but no: what I want to say is easily available in my mind, about Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance. I don’t know if it’s taboo to read this right after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – only that I would not recommend these two one after the other.

One and the other

Of course, blatant comparisons are also supposed to be a no-no when writing reviews; let the work stand for itself, is the likely rule. But I refuse, if only because Dance Dance Dance, I feel, strips away what is usually the given (and therefore practically expected) premises of Murakami’s novels, such that they also serve to suspend disbelief. The ability of his protagonists, to put on hold the search for economic stability, in favor of searching for what will fill their frenetic unease, has always attracted me because I believe that it is what many of us would opt for, if we did not believe that even our physical (read: financial struggles) are also somehow integral to our concept of self.

In Dance Dance Dance, all these things (the search for an existential answer, the momentary leave from the day job, the inner turmoil, the unexplainable need to follow one’s guts although nothing else in the plot prior seems to dictate its necessity), are present, but the chronicle of actually telling it is garbled. Many times I wondered if the novel was really meant to start this way, in medias res, and if so, then why?

I rolled over in bed, stared at the ceiling, and let out a deep sigh. Oh, give in, I thought. But the idea of giving in didn’t take hold. It’s out of your hands, kid. Whatever you may be thinking, you can’t resist. The story’s already decided (Murakami 6)

Here, too, Murakami’s protagonist searches for someone he believes is crying out for him. We are told — as we can assume strikes a similar note in his other novels — that something is incomplete in the protagonist’s life, that there is something he missed when he previously underwent a self-imposed hermitage. These, undoubtedly, are the things that make Murakami’s characters endearing, particularly to me; this is why it was a surprise, even to me, that  the protagonist in Dance Dance Dance disappoints.

Yes, I remind myself even now. All of Murakami’s characters dance to a tune that is understood only by the reader seeking refuge from a mega-capitalist world and the characters themselves. But Dance Dance Dance‘s protagonist reads more like a pale reckoning of the other two protagonists I’ve encountered in Murakami — of indeed, all his other complex characters. When I think of this particular nameless protagonist, I realize that I agree with many of his principles on capitalism, and the apparent self-defeating value of “popular” industry.

And with not one speck of ambition, not one iota of expectation. My only concern was to do things systematically, from one end to the other. I sometimes wonder if this might not prove to be the bane of my life. After wasting so much pulp and ink myself, who was I to complain about waste? We live in an advanced capitalist society, after all. Waste is the name of the game, its greatest virtue. Politicians call it ‘refinements in domestic consumption.’ I call it meaningless waste. A difference of opinion. Which doesn’t change the way we live (Murakami 12).

The real problem though, is that as the novel progresses the protagonist becomes the horrific, transparent character one might pride herself or himself on hearing about but only encountering (with luck) once in a blue moon. There’s not much excitement in the plot, because no matter what moral dilemma presents itself, Murakami’s character is able to untangle the knots in the situation. The journey to clarity is not as fraught with pathos as would be needed to captivate the reader’s attention. Whether it’s rearing a child, treating women with grace, or confronting instances that only vaguely resemble the paranormal, the protagonist becomes a straightforward book of morals, minus, at least, the condescension.

Ah, but there is the matter of a redeeming quality (sold separately most of the time, as it is not a requirement).

There is still something that at least attempts to be a ballast to the protagonist’s transparency, and probably because of Murakami’s material, it should come as no surprise that it lies in fear of losing one’s anchor. So while the protagonist’s consciousness holds no surprise (perhaps like the mega-capitalist world the novel accepts and bewails), there is still a breath of fresh air at the end of the novel, but it is so faint, it comes only as a sense of relief, instead of catharsis.

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The rest (to be read, or if already read, to digest, digest, digest):

A question of time (from L – R): Skyworld Volume 1 by Mervin Ignacio and Ian Sta. Maria, The Collapse of What Separates Us by Vincenz Serrano, Love and Other Lemons by Katrina Stuart Santiago, Gun Dealers’ Daughter by Gina Apostol, and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy not included because it was too big

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To end, imagine yourself in the Dolphin Hotel, disoriented by your return to the real world:

Let’s Talk About Power

More specifically, let’s talk about power at its dirtiest: when it abdicates due process for ulterior motives[1]; when it threatens you at the slightest – but vague – provocation; when it lashes out with all the angst of a fifteen year-old instead of using logic or sincerity in order to rectify a mistake; when it pulls other people down in order to justify its own beliefs, via an article that reads like it’s more concerned with university competition than the actual state of the poor[2].

Let’s talk about corruption as an open secret; let’s talk about celebrity and politics; let’s talk about how elections, no matter how rigged, are rooted in ideology – one that reinforces the power of the state, so that the winner is the winner is the winner, no matter what; let’s talk about the convenience of forgetting, and the cheap luxury of saying we remember, without any action.

Let us talk about these things, and then let us listen to the deadly (no pun intended) silence that ensues.

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[1] See also here.

[2] Because seriously, this is no time for intimations of competition, UAAP-wise or no.

And an aside: while we’re at it, let’s be clear that cybersex, hacking, cyber-squatting, forgery, and fraud, ought to be illegal. The libel clause, however, is another matter altogether.

___________

It’s a wonder what people can talk about during a one-hour lunch break; and how all else, it is a double-edged sword.

Past Percentages: The Right to Rage

Bayo has announced that it’s most recent ad campaign isn’t over yet.

Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within everybody’s power, that is not easy. - Aristotle

It’s strange, I think, because what I want to see in people these days is not mere anger–not what many would easily (and, without batting an eyelash) call being negative. What I want to see, is a thorough understanding of what makes them complex and why, when this complexity is simplified or glorified just when particular hybrid celebrities are on the rise, the instance becomes not mere advertising, but an attempt to follow a trend without question, and worse, an attempt to make profit on the concept of hybridity which is admittedly something that not many of us completely understand, or even bother to question at all.

Let me say this, at least, about the continuing Bayo ads: what disturbs me is not so much the ads themselves–not anymore–but the reaction that people have had to it. I feel that whereas Filipinos find it convenient to feel proud about the next international star, we are slow to anger where the questions of identity and nation are provided a reductionist answer.

At the same time, I’m perpetually astonished and disturbed by the ease in which people point out that there is no one of pure Filipino blood anymore, not because this sentiment has more than a grain of truth in it, but because it is used as an excuse not to be insulted. The fact that the copy is badly written is valid, but it is not the point here: grammar and its awkward wording can be forgiven, truly, I think. The greater question is why the copy seems so uncertain of itself; about why it feels the need to downplay what it’s really implying: “This is just all about MIXING and MATCHING…Call it biased but the mixing and matching of different nationalities with Filipino blood is almost a sure formula for someone beautiful and world class.”

People may say: “It’s just an advertisement! Get over it!” They’ll tell you, “You’re the one being unhelpful because you’re not supporting a Filipino brand.” They’ll insist that “You’re going against your own blood.” They will insist on the goodness of the intention–which may still be there; there is no reason to say otherwise. The problem is that when you emphasize the possible goodness of the intention, you tend to forget the actual failure of execution.

By all means, we should support Filipino brands. By all means, this is not to downplay the importance of the advertising industry. This is not even to encourage people to shun those who write copies or help companies with their branding (if so, then I should really just write a self-deprecating piece on all the copies I’ve produced since 2010, concluding with what a “sell out” I am). This is, in fact, to emphasize that advertising is a significant factor in our lives. And precisely because it affects everything–reading preferences, fashion, hygiene, family values, Internet downloads–then all the more should we learn to question its premises, scrutinize its meaning, root out where it went wrong from the depths of an apology that points its finger back to us and calls us too sensitive.

Because otherwise, we let ads about whitening creams fool us into thinking their product has nothing to do with social class. We smirk and move on (another great excuse for those who will not stop to question such matters: “Move on to more important issues!” they insist), until the next ad shocks us and we decide that hey, let’s take pride in this, without stopping to think what “this” actually is.

Don’t be fooled by people telling you it doesn’t matter.

It is your right to feel insulted. It is your right to feel belittled whether or not you are of mixed race or not (because you should not have to labor under the delusion that this ad does not discriminate against hybrids; in fact it reduces their identity in the same stroke which implies that blood is a product that can be improved). It is your right to find out, for yourself, what makes you special (no matter your heritage) and how you can then use that to the advantage of the third world country that you live in.

Make no mistake about it, it is the same right that will allow you to ask, how can Bayo hope to turn this around with its next two phases? It’s the same that will let us ask, how will changing the notion of percentage to local diversity and character traits make the campaign any better–or any different at all? It is a rage that is our birth right, one that cannot be measured by numbers. The fact, I think, that the campaign will continue, on a not altogether different premise but with only a few changes in words, tells us how much the outrage against the initial phase went misunderstood: simply flew over people’s heads.

So I urge you, open your eyes and claim this right to anger. Use it, not to inflict harm on others just as unquestioningly, but to question, ultimately, yourself, and the world around you. Allow yourself to see past celebrations of identity, to point out the struggle that is there, without completely diminishing the value of such celebrations. It’s not easy, and I know because I fail at it, too. But to not even try means to flatline, and I shudder to think that so many of us would be so willing to do that.

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Here’s Anthony Bourdain now, because I suspect he has a better-nuanced (note: not a “better-in-all-senses-of-the-word” type) understanding of [post]colonialism, and the kind of hybrid culture it gives birth to, than a lot of us care to admit, and because the irony of his being a white, straight male is not lost on me:

Something Old, Something New

The age at which I distinctly remember becoming an avid reader was around thirteen years ago, when I was ten years old. Back then, receiving a Borrower of the Month certificate from the library seemed like an accomplishment, not a witty, institutionally-accepted way of saying “Oo na, ikaw na ang nanghiram ng gustong hiramin ng iba! Ikaw na talaga!”

But like I’ve said before, I’m not a very good reader when it comes to a collection of short stories. I can gobble up novels like there’s no tomorrow. I can be patient enough with poetry to enjoy annotating. But I become impatient both with myself and what I’m reading when faced with an anthology of short fiction: not that I haven’t enjoyed Leopoldo Y. Yabes’ Philippine Short Stories Part I (1941-1949). Or that, truthfully, I am entirely finished reading it (I’ve only got a few more stories to go! I plead the distraction of other books, I am sorry).

A strange confession: I don’t think myself special or particularly brilliant for learning to love reading, and for consistently doing so for a huge chunk of my life. I guess this is because I am surrounded by people who, without (or at least just a lick and no more) of self-righteousness, view reading as a form of productivity–not to be mistaken with any economic achievement, but with a kind of hunger-cum-panic-mode that comes with the thought of not reading anything in the interim. But the real bite of the confession is that I didn’t realize until recently, how much I was bound to discover when I read things beyond my comfort zone.

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Ah, you think, but this is an old piece of advise, yes? Read broad and wide, in and out of your comfort zone! I suppose it’s only by inference that I know now, that what I’m bound to learn isn’t about the material, but about myself as a reader.

I can’t possibly discuss every story in Mr. Yabes’ anthology. I can only enumerate here, the things I learned about myself when reading, one after the other, stories so old that, let’s face it, they are either classics or just plain old–perhaps more reminiscent for what they tell us of how our craft has evolved than anything else.

I learned that I am a city girl through and through. And that this works against me, makes me an impatient reader when I read Antonio S. Gabila’s “Going Away, Far,” or “Two in a Clearing” by Romeo C. Velasco (which until now I am struggling to finish). I learned that even in terms of interests, mine lie the urban way, leaning towards Vicente Rivera, Jr.’s “All Over the World” and “Another Country” by Edilberto K. Tiempo.

I learned that I appreciate stories that revolve around a singular moment, stories that stretch the narrative to encircle the instance only to neatly come back to it, more explicitly, in the end: for instance, Ligaya Victorio Reyes’ “A Peace Like Death,” “Christmas Visit,” “I Am Thinking of Us Today,” and “Return to Capas.”

I remembered the ability of a favorite author to change voice, easily shifting from one milieu to another: Nick Joaquin’s “It Was Later Than We Thought,” “May Day Eve,” and “A Pilgrim Yankee’s Progress,” and recall, with guilt, what I can’t say I’ve failed at in my own writing, because I haven’t tried enough.

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A year ago, I sat in a workshop where we ended up discussing the idea of “preciousness” in early Filipino literature in English writing. I sat there listening, curious and alarmed, the former  out of personal interest, the latter because the discussion was a spin off of a critique for my story. I probably cannot recreate here what was said in that discussion. I probably cannot talk of my own writing without coming off as defensive or pretentious. I can only say, I think, regarding what I learned reading Mr. Yabes’ anthology, and recalling that wonderful discussion, that I see stories from this anthology as offering the same comfort as, well, fairy tales.

I suppose distance and time does that to a reader: makes almost fantastic the experience of impending war, or its immediate aftermath on civilians; makes fancy old notions of courtship. But I have learned that most of all, I find comfort in old stories, long after I’ve zigzagged my way around postmodern, sci-fi, medieval epic fantasy, and (prose) poetry, both local and foreign.

It’s strange, because I categorize my (local) literature like this. The ones I buy (and help sell, sometimes, haha!) these days, and the ones I talk about with friends, I separate from the ones I read as a schoolgirl, in plaid again, to be discussed with chalkboard and seatmate and professor. I draw the line not out of any inherent quality that I find better in one set of works and not in the other, but to delineate one self from the other, to realize what brought me comfort then (Carlos Bulosan’s “My Father Goes to Court,” Gregorio C. Brillantes’ “Faith, Love, Time, and Dr. Lazaro”) and what I enjoy picking apart today (Tara FT Sering’s “Preview,” Vincenz Serrano’s “If You Can’t See My Mirrors I Can’t See You”).

It’s the same, I think, when you’re still too young to notice that a grandfather or grandmother will tell you the same story again and again long after you’ve tired of it. And again the same when, years later, you delight in the memory of them again. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis writes to his goddaughter,

My dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realised that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it.

I’m not sure that I’ll ever re-read the entire Part I of Mr. Yabes’ anthology cover-to-cover. Most likely I’ll pick out a story or two every now and then, when there’s nothing else to read: look back then, feel some comfort now, wonder about books yet un-bought, think of ways I’d misunderstood, like bildungsroman, like things I’ve yet to read but tell myself I can understand.

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This is where I admit that this is one heck of a post I delayed making.

Second Person, A Second Time: Getting Better and Amazing Grace

What was it about Tara FT Sering’s “Getting Better” (also featured in Reconnaissance) that pulled me in? Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, in the book’s end note, discusses its character’s modernity, infused with a kind of hip urgency, which I believe to be true. For me, personally, the allure of chick literature is that it invokes pop culture with no apologies. There’s not doubt you’ll find the title Sex & The City more than once, not just in “Getting Better,” but in countless chick lit books and short fiction; there will also be references to 90′s romantic movies, or the titles of John Hughes films that were a collective yearning growl making up one generation.

Still at the personal level but mixed with a heightened interest for the possibilities of narrative-writing, the instant attraction I felt towards “Getting Better” had to do with its use of the second person narration. Of course, that might not be as novel as it sounds; if you look hard enough you’ll find other books and short stories in other genres that use the same technique.

But Tara Sering’s Kar in “Getting Better,” narrated through the second person establishes an intimate fixture in the reader’s mind because almost all of it reads as a steady “Keep Calm” guide. It’s practically list of reminders on what to do on emergencies (i.e., when the Mr. Right in the text becomes shady–which happens quite often), only in the form of a short, fluid novel.

It’s difficult (and not really worthwhile) to have to convince people that between the lines of every chick lit fiction lies a sliver of profundity. It’s strange, because as I’ve found in “Getting Better,” it’s not so much the huge life lessons you find in this kind of text, but the little tidbits that your mother has shared with you as a toddler, but have forgotten in the rush of adult life.

At some point, like, say, three in the morning, stop kicking yourself. You never imagined that at twenty-seven, you’d be trying to remember something your mama said to ease a late twenties kind of pain. Did she say you’re too nice? Or was it “be nice to yourself?” At eight in the morning, you wake up from a weird dream. In it, you were making out with Miko on the couch of your apartment and your mom suddenly breezed by holding a large black tire salbabida. Under her breath she said,  ”‘Yan ba ang being nice to yourself? (Sering, Getting Better 68)

Structurally speaking, I prefer “Getting Better” to Amazing Grace, which is also told from a second person point-of-view, although lacking in weight. If in the former, the reader gets a whiff of Something Fishy, the rest of the narrative finally reveals that the problem per se isn’t what Kar first believes but is actually something else. In Amazing Grace, meanwhile, right off the bat readers are told what went down and why Grace is Holly Golightly in tears on the first page.

My copies of Tara FT Sering’s Reconnaissance (UP Jubilee Student Edition) and Amazing Grace (Anvil Publishing, Inc)

The problem, I think, is that Amazing Grace unknowingly paralleled the show it’s a pun of. The revelation that leads to character development could have happened earlier, but not without the fuel the rest of the novel needs to go on, so what happens is a long drawn out narrative that almost (just almost!, never fear) crosses into wild goose chase territory.

But the charm is still there–if not in Grace and her (in)consistency, then in her two travel companions, Lena and Han. Not all of us might be able to relate to Grace’s problem of tracking a cheating fiance across Singapore and Bangkok, but Grace’s (in)consistency, contrasted with Han as urban girl without rest while nursing a broken heart and Lena as married woman desiring space and quality bonding time with the girls, succeeds in nudging readers towards the direction of Total Life Enjoyment.

As in “Getting Better,” though, the moment of enlightenment in Amazing Grace stretches into relaxed breathing after the chaos of Something Fishy, Revealed. While I believe the latter’s epilogue was unnecessary (I think inference is always a fun activity for the reader), Grace arrives at much the same place Kar does, because she’s able to look past the chaos, and find peace in her own self.

Feel a light breeze blow through the alfresco cafe. Trace the wrinkled bark of the tree next to you, from the trunk all the way up along its branches. There is something nice and wonderful, you think, in the way its top looms large with a burst of green leaves against the sun (Sering, Amazing Grace 180).

Learning, Again: On Reconnaissance

Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of people diss chick lit. I know all the arguments: It’s shallow, pretentious, and all about romantic love showered with a helpful description of choice branded items when the protagonist goes on a shopping spree to cure her heartache: four-inch Manolo Blahniks, a tube of MAC Viva Glam Nicki, or an eighties-back-with-a-vengeance structured party dress from Mango for a Saturday night out with the girls.

But I’m not here to overthrow those (mis)conceptions.

My first foray into local chick lit: Sering’s Between Dinner and the Morning After

It’s been some time since I last read Tara FT Sering’s Between Dinner and the Morning After–once, to sample the genre, and again, to make a paper for my sophomore year in college (Want to read it? Don’t…). To make the long story short, I was blown away, not because I was treated to the usual elements of chick lit (a modern-day city girl, the “perfect guy”, hilarious but tasteful descriptions of sex, a bevy of girls ranging from chic best friend to shy young woman), but because the narrative used all these to turn the usual concept of the protagonist in chick lit on its head.

Oops, here’s another but!

But I’m not here to talk about Between Dinner and the Morning After. Just this week, I bought myself a copy of Tara FT Sering’s Reconnaissance, a collection of her short fiction. Now if there’s one thing I noticed recently about my reading habits, it’s that I’m a slow-goer when it comes to short story collections. I either get too hung up on this one story which makes me reluctant to read the next, or I go through them at snail’s pace, always somewhat bothered that what I’m reading doesn’t have one absolute plot supported with minor conflicts along the way (as is the case in novels).

Remembering [chick] literary preference

 

So while I knew that I certainly liked the author’s writing style, I was still surprosed to find how quickly her first protagonist in “Preview” pulled me in. The character might as well have said, Here, you see, is where I am; see the meal finished, here is my new family. This is the taste it leaves in my mouth; this is what makes itself clear to me. The first thing you have to know about Ms. Sering’s fiction? It’s captivating. It’s simple. It’s concise.

I’ll refrain from discussing all the stories (particularly “Getting Better”, as I want to write about it in length vis-a-vis her novel Amazing Grace), although I will say that my preference for her writing stems from two things: first, a value of fiction that I learned but have yet managed to successfully apply to my own hopes of writing, and second, my personal context (Ah! The so-called glory of the twenties!)

I learned a long time ago that there are different kinds of stories. There are loud, fast-paced stories, with expressive protagonists and exciting points-of-view. There are melancholy stories that leave you almost catatonic. There are stories that will leave you wanting to turn society upside down.

And then there are the quiet kind of stories; the ones which, if you don’t read carefully, you’ll breeze through and reach the endings of, with an expression of complete bafflement. These are the ones that’ll leave you asking if the author really did just waste all that ink and paper to tell you a story about nothing.

And I only want to know that we are having a family crisis. That this is a crisis so bad it blurs our view of the future. I don’t want to know for sure if we will all be fine after this; it’s too soon to tell. I want to know that now is too soon to tell. But already they believe themselves to be fine. So alarmingly certain are they (Sering 24).

That’s what Tara Sering’s fiction is like. To those convinced that chick lit belittles women by subjugating them to the shopping mall or glorious office halls where the sound of heels echo everywhere in the beat of the city and by reducing them to needy lovers, her fiction will seem the prime example of why chick lit is substandard literature, no capitalization required.

The secretary whose desk is stationed right by the door of the small inner room glances up at me every so often while her hand goes on writing and her lips resist, it seems, parting from the thin, stern line they form. She checks to make sure I don’t fold the magazine into my bag, my enormous bag of folders, full of papers, full of information about who I am, where I’m from, what I’ve attained educationally, and what job I want (Sering 10).

But to the women who are puzzled as to why a movie with cars, guns, and male leads can be considered valid while a movie about a group of women trying to balance their careers, love lives, and personal growth (with a healthy mix of makeup, fabulously-named cocktails, and designer clothes) is considered shallow, this is the kind of fiction that goes straight to the heart of the aspiring young woman who is baffled by society’s expectations of her family life and is constantly trying to find stable career ground.

What I’ve attained educationally is so much more than what I want, my mother says and gives my shoulder a reassuring squeeze. This whole business of getting work will be like finding a small brown table on which I can arrange family pictures, over which I can put a nice vase with pink, plastic flowers (Sering 10).

Personally–and here I talk about context–it is the kind of fiction that, as I told T, gives me that treasured moment of reading about yourself, right at your own narrative’s unfolding.

So here I end, with a quote I read as I sat waiting on the eleventh floor of a building in Makati, wondering.

 When it is over they ask me to step out, please, and pick out something nice to read while waiting. I step out and pick an ancient, almost brittle copy of Time. I make myself comfortable on the couch inside the waiting room, inside the office, on the eleventh floor of the building, a building among countless, nameless many in a gray forest of a city… (Sering 10).

Reconnaissance, indeed.

–

This is probably the part where I say that I love both movies, the trailers of which I linked to in this entry.

The Things that Belong to Us

I’ve been thinking lately of the things that belong to us; and of what makes us believe that they belong to us.

In part, this is because I’ve been thinking of what possessions leave behind, when they are taken from us (in retrospect, we lose things everyday, but the passive silence and lack that an active getting-from-us creates is more powerfully a hollow that is more palpable because involuntary). Reading V‘s doctorate thesis brings to the mind (at least on a scale of relativity), the thought of missed opportunities: what careful planning might have saved us from, even if the fault was not perhaps voluntary.

But if one is not careful, what is also tool for redemption becomes excuse for wallowing; in the opposition of reimagining versus linear thinking, what is hollowed out becomes similar to staying put. That is the danger, to become obsessive rather than forward-looking; to lose ground rather than to find the potential of future footing.

Moreover, the essays, precisely by way of their construction, evoke a sense of openness: gaps between elements are as crucial as the elements themselves. Benjamin writes that dialectics at a standstill produces a figural relation between constellated elements: it is this figural relation of openness that Joaquin proposes by way of the Almanac‘s structure. By privileging porosity, non-linearity, and simultaneity, the Almanac forces its addressees–principally ManileÑos but theoretically any reader–to reckon not just with what Joaquin has blasted apart but also with what he has put together: to come to terms with relations between fumigant and myth, architecture and festival, calendar and essay. Joaquin’s aesthetics of historiography doubles back and forth from present to past, referring simultaneously to one of the most ancient of genres, and to an open, indeterminate present shot through with clips of the past (Serrano 91).

What are, really, the things that belong to us? In moments of wakefulness (what I like to call Our Most Rational Selves), we realize that the world doesn’t owe us anything. Yet it is our right to claim what is ours (in such cases, what are the chances of misunderstanding; of our work being attributed, even by implication, to be not-ours, somewhere else? Quite a lot, in fact).

Perhaps because in losing things, we are decentralized: the reason, then, why we assign to the dispossessed the area of the margins. Then, I think, in losing things, we can then ask if the footnotes weigh us down or enrich us (ending, in my experience, at least, to the intersection of both; a conjoining of interstices), and reminding me ultimately of Gina Apostol and her The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata:

Entry #2

January 20, 1872 [20] [21] [22]

…We played the game Guess What the Branches Look Like, Tanga. Stumps of gnarls and tangled crosses. Corpses, scimitars, and rocking chairs (Apostol 37).

And then there is also the opposition between dispossession and longing, and the fight for what is believed to be a nation’s belonging: at a time when it becomes important how we call what it is we claim is ours: Scarborough, or Panatag? We claim possession even when we believe we are being stripped of what is ours.

*

The game of territory possession can be discussed in length by another source. I have better knowledge of the politics of my own.

Personally, I believe that what ties our principles to our belongings to ourselves is the principle of time: moments fingering twisting lipsticks, applying them in a semi-smile; the rush-touch of hands in a bag looking for a pen; the thankful ownership of a USB for a needed file. Life is broken down into moments and the moments are linked with the objects we spend them with; hence we believe they are ours, just as we believe that the time we spend is ours.

Not so for the field of postmodernism, which is not so much a space of play as it is of acknowledging that linear development, which is repudiated in distinct ways, in turn by Agoncillo, Ileto, and Benjamin, can also mean stasis (Serrano 91-96). But in Hooks, we learn that it is also of identifying not only where the center lies but who is talking of the margin when there is actually little contact with the margin.

When desire for footing and multicultural experience, without actual emphasis or tangible evidence or impact in the economics and personal politics of real life can be found, theory fails. What we believe we posses, achieve, or are given become instruments to disengage with the discourse we are trying to touch base with: an aunt who died who gave you that branded zip-up makeup kit is hardly remembered, except in the gift’s loss: in this realization, the rupture is not just the dispossession of what was taken, and gives a reason to disengage from the object itself so that the hollow of its loss creates a more tangible connection to the deceased.

Always, it must be remembered: that every act of severing ties means new space, and this is true even for the things which we believe belong to us.

Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the space where the ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and varied forms of bonding. To some extent, ruptures, surfaces, contextuality, and a host of other happenings create gaps that make space for oppositional practices which no longer require intellectuals to be confined by narrow separate spheres with no meaningful connection to the world of the everyday. Much postmodern engagement with culture emerges from the yearning to do intellectual work that connects with habits of being, forms of artistic expression, and aesthetics that inform the daily lives of writers and scholars as well as a mass population. On the terrain of culture, one can participate in critical dialogue with the uneducated poor, the black underclass, who are thinking about aesthetics. One can talk about what we are seeing, thinking, or listening to; a space is there for critical exchange. It’s exciting to think, write, talk about, and create art that reflects passionate engagement with popular cultures, because this may very well be “the” central future location of resistance struggle, a meeting place where new and radical happenings can occur. (Hooks, Postmodern Blackness)

*

These, of course, are mere meanderings. I mull over concepts, things left in the dust or margins, and stop, telling myself to exercise the mind. I leave to those who would know better, the degree of seriousness with which these words should be treated. And just think! That I almost lost this pendant, too, while writing this entry.

*

[20] This, of course, is the year of the Cavite Mutiny, often considered a vestigial phase of the revolution of 1896. In fact, in     the Calendar for ManileÑos, I note that it is the date of the Cavite Mutiny! But the Calendar is unreliavle (it has no bibiliography); so let me check Agoncillo’s Revolt of the Masses. Yep, it’s the day of the Mutiny (Trans. Note.)

[21] On this date, fiesta fireworks went off in Bilibid, a jail town visible at the time from Cavite (now obscured by miles of videoke bars and the diesel belch off Southern Luzon Expressway). Philippine-born Spanish solders of the Cavite arsenal mistook fiesta noise across the Bay as a signal for battle (but why?!), and so began their sorry motin . It was a bourgeios riot, similar to the Boston Tea Party instigated by American-born British merchants. Some historians call this “the first labor strike” in our history. I call it katangahan, yes, idiocy!–typical of the tragic absurdities that bedevil the province of Cavite. The mutiny ended up killing Gomburza: three innocent priests of varying reformist tendencies, Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos, and Jacinto Zamora–further proof of the errors of Cavite! (Estrella Espejo, Quezon Insitute and Sanatorium, Leyte)

[22] Clue; three-syllable dvandva used as Katipunan password. Answer: What is Gomburza? And why was it a password? Because Gomburza mattered! No one (except invalid scholars writing in primitive spleen) disputes the importance of the Cavite revolt (just as few would portray the Easter Rising of 1916 only as some drunken Irish mayhem–though some have tried). The Cavite Mutiny is a glorious case of dysrecognition and mis(taken) identification! Every Filipino should take a stab at interpreting its mess(age). In “The Garrulous Garrote: What is GOMBURZA Says, “I point out that the triad Gomez-Burgos-Zamora is, ies, a pancit mix, a noodle combination that will never cohere. The triplet priests, each of whom has nothing to do with the other, are a symbolic knot. Sure, Father Gomez, saintly reformist, was by then retired. Father Zamora was perhaps just a jugador, an unlucky gambler; no wonder he lost his mind at the scaffold: he thought all he’d been doing was losing at cards! Father Burgos, the radical heresiarch–he was the genius provocateur, prelude to the overbearing genius, Rizal. His talents as prator, philosopher, and elegant blasphemer–the panoply of his skills–give lie to the notion of equality among this Holy Trinity. He is the center of tragedy. This, the notion of GOMBURZA as a salutory unit and singular heroic entity is, yes, arbitrary, a bad yoke: the sad fate of the signifier. But that does not lessen its importance. (Dr. Diwata Drake, Clyde, Ohio)

Form(s) of Ecstasy

Coming out of an illness these days is like coming out of an uneasy sleep; the kind where you were sure you dozed off in the midst of noise, which you were only ever able to effectively block out with some meds and the insistence of your body on enough, enough.

The actual awakening, per se, is not so much a barrage of things you don’t want to hear, not because they are irrelevant but because they are less than comprehensive: cue the Facebook posts about the latest corporate massacre of trees in the summer capital; cue the SM-as-evil graphics;

cue the endless outpouring of criticism/metacriticism/anti-criticism parading as metacriticism in the form of status updates, x number of shares, and convenient, takeaway comments, for an article about the status quo that you’ve heard of and experienced.

It’s a slower process than it sounds.

In the interim, while hacking your throat out and trying not to forget the antibiotics to combat your infection, you ask yourself why you were so concerned in the first place; why you bother about how your country makes you feel, at all, when most of the day–which you spend, anyway, these days, toiling in front of an old laptop for the usual peso-per-word rate–you don’t experience the grand heat of such hatred anyway (But of course there’s the knowledge that the bigger picture is only ever thus because of its instances: in the way your elders tell you there are outfits that shouldn’t be worn in the event of using public transportation; in the way narrow back alleys and groups of men should be avoided; in the danger of cat calls and good morning greetings that are anything but because their eyes say more than their mouths do. So you attempt to articulate, because you feel it is the little you can do).

Then, thankfully, P posts something that makes sense. Maybe it isn’t the best kind of criticism, lacks that lauded university flair (no heavy school-of-thought name dropping, here!), but good god, it’s still more fair (the informed kind, mind) than the news you see on TV or the angry Facebook outbursts

(There’s also this: calls to boycott SM? I’m sorry, did we suddenly and with ease just magick ourselves from the specific confines of our third world country? Have we re-eimagined into sheer nonexistent delusion the convenience that the said establishment brings, og perhaps not immediately to the middle class to which I belong, but rather to the masses? But then again there’s the more sound suggestion: not to boycott it, but merely to avoid it; patronize the competition whenever possible and go to SM only as a last resort.

Please. I’ll be the first to tell you that even having read Indolent Indio, followed the story on TV and radio, and attempted to compartmentalize this issue aside from whatever personal biases I may have gathered against the great Henry Sy empire, I would still rather those trees stayed put, period. I would rather we invested in more sustainable means of construction and forestry. I would rather we didn’t need an SM in every effing city.

But my next move would be to tell you that frankly, it’s a mall culture, baby. Bobby Chinn has noted it, but if you missed that you need only to walk around a mall or two to note the many passersby without a clear destination in mind, the clumps of people sitting around busying themselves with their cellular phones without any particular urgency.

And this stasis goes on, mind you. I witnessed it myself, having had to wait for an appointment and having nowhere else to go. It’s not a matter of passing the few spare minutes but of literally wasting away in a mall, waiting for something I obviously couldn’t name for them.

Boycott? Avoid? I can try, but when push comes to shove and I need a place where I can pay my bills or today’s price of gas (the bulk of which, no matter how much I may try to shoulder, still largely falls on my elderly parents) says it is more convenient to go to where they insist We’ve Got It All for You rather than somewhere else, I can’t say I’ll put up much resistance).

But hey, it’s all in a day’s work, isn’t it? Because to live is to come to terms with life and its forms of irony.

And all the better when it’s the third world, Philippine kind of irony.

In the slow awakening of still recovering, you will learn that James Templeton needs the Internet to give him a conscience, because he’s been “stealing from a 23-year-old freelance designer from a third world country.” And your guts scream that this is wrong. It is wrong.

How do you know? Because you have principle. Then you back up slowly and think of how much of what you know as principle was shaped by your alma mater, and how that education has limits (Ironically, and therefore in keeping with an observation, for an article that discusses a Western take on the matter, there’s this, found first by M and thereafter shared with G).

But you also know that “to go beyond” means “to construct the specific limits which your Jesuit, Filipino, and yet still tongue-in-cheek ahistorical education gives you.”

Oh, you wish the answers wouldn’t come so easily, but they do. You know it, because you do gush about Harry (and to a great extent Katniss and Jonathan Strange and Chrestomanci, all):

but you can gush local, too!:

And it sounds like such a privileged state, doesn’t it. But because it is privileged, it is questionable, as such:

Where then, if you stand so proudly thus, are the rest of “you”? Why do you have to go to such lengths to describe what this is? Why do so few of your peers understand the politics of publishing (You are flattered by their insistence that you should come up with your own book, admit it; but you are even more immensely fearful of the fact that even the thought of it already tastes of backlash and the already um no thanks, I’d rather not), when their very own book-buying preferences and the structure of your friendly neighborhood bookstore dictates it?

The answer is in believed normalcy, in the status quo. In an uneasy peace, built on the premise that we should agree to see what is wrong as simply what is–cue the sight of endless shanties covered up by MMDA insistence on Metro Gwapo, cue the reality of children selling sampaguita held up on strings perceived as nostalgic cultural icon instead of something that ought to move us into no pun intended action–this is where we are and where many voices will insist we stay.

And you ask me why I am stressed? Or why I seem a little “nega”?

My dear, writing and talking about these things don’t constitute being a cesspool of negative energy. It means simply to be alive and accept the fact that I am an intellectual. I am this intellectual, born and bred not by mere institutions but by my milieu, by friends and teachers who became friends, by book-buying habits, by mistakes I made as an employee and now as whatever it is you would deem to call me.

(Puwede rin namang sabihin na ‘di tulad ng iba, tila hindi naman malupit ang naranasan  ko. When it comes down to it, I don’t have the industry coming at me with claws and fangs but a small but steady stream of comments made in passing. Ang pagsusulat ko dito ay hindi rin naman upang subukin na makihalo sa isang hot na isyu o para lamang mapag-usapan tulad ng kilala kong nasabihan na, tulad ng natukoy ko na, ng mga mas marahas pang mga salita. This isn’t a case of misrecognition or projection, either, as I cannot help if I feel some empathetic solidarity with those who have experienced so much worse, without mistaking myself for them.

Besides, I have asked myself if the very fact that what I experienced would amount to a collection of passing remarks only, would make these instances acceptable. And after some thought, the answer I received was “No.” And it continues to be “No” as I type this).

And isn’t it ironic, now? So you thought I was going to stop at getting good grades. I am reminded of my brother, when, in my teenage years he kept lashing out against people who call themselves “critics.” Anong klaseng trabaho yun, he would say, sisiraan mo lang ang gawa ng iba. So we know that not only is there a deep misunderstanding of what criticism actually is; the other ugly head of the problem is that critics are boxed separately from intellectuals, and too, critics are seen as nothing but–oh no wait, I repeat myself.

Destructive? Noisy? Negative? Did you think we were coming to inspire ideological peace? Non-violence as a way of life, always. But harmony in criticism? Ah, my dear, you make me laugh.

–

I suppose I wrote this because I was seriously considering shutting this blog down.  Which wouldn’t be a catastrophe, mind you. I have no delusions about academic credibility, and better writer-critics have said similar in sleeker styles than mine.

But then stopping this would have meant to stop reading the people I read online; would have meant to stop talking to certain friends at all because largely what holds us together are the things we know better than to be silent about. And I would fool myself into thinking I am okay with this. But if I think the field needs anything but ideological/critical peace, what right have I to fake a conscience that is at peace with silence?

And well then, thank god for meds*. I think.

_

*Edit to add: or perhaps for the after-the-stasis feeling they inevitably lead to later on.

On His Two Novels and a Story: Why I love Nick Joaquin

I was seventeen and clad in plaid when I borrowed Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels from our high school library. My first experience of reading Joaquin came when, as a freshman in the same high school, we were made to read his short story, “May Day Eve.” More than that seemingly never-ending opening sentence that captivated me, I genuinely felt that I’d finally found something I can sink my teeth into.

“May Day Eve” as published in Leopoldo Y. Yabes’ anthology of Philippine short stories in English (1941-1955)

The story (in case you haven’t read it, and by way of telling you that You Should, You Should, You Should), is set in 19th century Philippines. I can’t explain why, but I have a strange fascination with the society in that era. I won’t go in depth as to why, except to suggest that this might be because I loved studying history even as an elementary student: the butterfly sleeves, the cobblestone streets–everything that Joaquin described in that relentless sentence, I found I was quite in love with.

The first sentence of the story ends just above my bookmark

Still, as in life between (and well outside) the lines, I found that a deeper political belief simmered just beneath the sweet spell of words strung together by [semi-] colons, dashes, and commas. In my first year of college, I was properly introduced to Nick Joaquin’s views on local history and literature, and where I once again picked up a copy of The Woman Who Had Two Navels–this time, to take it up for class.

Then again, what use is it to write about a novel I clearly already love? More recently, I read Joaquin’s Cave and Shadows. The premise, I promise you, is nothing but intriguing. Jack Henson returns to Manila to solve the mystery behind the death of his ex-wife’s daughter in a cave. Between the first chapter and the last, you’ll meet characters of august political lineage, a modern-day priestess who insists on the return of paganism-as-salvation, and goons ready to run down anyone who spills the beans on their big boss.

But the denouement and the ending both, in my opinion, disappoint.

I found that though the reason behind the daughter’s death was logical enough, many threads introduced in the novel were suddenly dropped. Maybe this was necessary as, being a mystery novel, false leads eventually had to be dropped. Truth to tell, I think this is just me-as-reader being disappointed that the many layers of the myth of the Hermana (as well as other significant socio-religious females) didn’t play a more concrete role in the key to the mystery.

The combination that means a good evening

You know what’s funny, though?

Once I finished the novel, I couldn’t understand how readily I subscribed to the events and characters in the novel: how instantaneously I accepted the idea of an almost military-type pagan group backed by a politician; how almost greedily I gobbled up the myth of a cave that could cause so much filial strife and national intrigue. And I look at society now and I have to admit, I’m a little less puzzled, having now figured that these things in the novel were but hyperbolic expressions of elements we can find even today.

Because in the end, that is truly what I love about Nick Joaquin. More than his eloquence in arguing his points about history or his storytelling prowess, he possesses that inherent ability to create a nearly fantastic world within the mundane Metro that you see everyday. He’ll write a sentence about the state of narrow side streets and not only will you find yourself agreeing that we’re all turning our noses up and pretending not to smell our own filth, we’re also travelling in the throbbing veins of a city that thrives in the occult, the Roman Catholic, the morally perverse, and the generations-strong, landlord-ruled political system.

Paco sensed an unreality in both worlds: the people who occupied them did not seem to be living there at all. They denied the locale–but their denial was not the asceticism of the mystic nor the vision of the reformer, but merely the aversion of the opium eater. They stepped over reality as they stepped across their gutters–with the transient frown of the tourist, the neutral disgust of the foreigner…

One might have to eat cold rice and squat on a pail in the outhouse and sleep on a bug-ridden floor: one sighed and pressed a scented handkerchief to one’s nose and invoked the vicarious magic of one’s wrist-watch (just what all the Wall Street tycoons are wearing now) or of one’s evening dress (just what all the New York hostesses are wearing now) against the cold rice, the rank pail, the buggy floor…One smiled and floated away, insulated from all the drab horror of inadequate reality by the ultra-perfect, colossal, stupendous, technicolored magnificence of the Great American Dream.

-Joaquin, The Woman Who Had Two Navels, p. 47-48 (The Bookmark Inc. copy)

(And it takes more than a whit of wit in order not to romanticize it all)

Where Ms. Lanot calls him “Dahling Nick”

But on a more personal level, I now more clearly love Nick Joaquin because I have realized how he assures me that the stories told by my parents about their past (which, I will admit, bored me as a child), are not mere instances of nostalgia. In reading him, I feel closer to the stories my father tells me about city streets that were once grass fields, of a boy walking to school on a hot day, of a narrow road that leads to a rowdy neighborhood that boasts of two churches, rows of sleeping drivers on sun-warmed tricycles, and a Chowking to boot.

In the fantasy of Joaquin, I find that the place I live in becomes more substantial, without having to sacrifice the bittersweet reality of a history built on many a contradiction–and in my case, that includes all the irony of being part of this country’s middle class.

Nine years after my first foray into his writing and I’m still in awe.

–

Well what do you know; another non-review.