Home is so sad...

HOME IS SO SAD

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

(Philip Larkin in The New York Review of Books, Volume 2, Number 9 )

My Easter offering

The boat from Sabah


Exactly three in the afternoon, the hour of great mercy, someone announced wryly, when I asked for the time. We arrived at the Zamboanga City port area in a gleaming, cream-colored, Toyota Altis, looking ridiculously conspicuous and unsure of ourselves. We told the driver to take shade, hide a little. He parked the car closest to the wall, but within full view of the area of water where the boat was supposed to dock. To our left, we could see the façade of the gothic Bureau of Customs and Immigrations building – its grand pointed arches, rib vaults, flying buttresses, large windows and elaborate tracery providing a stark contrast to the tableau of poverty in front of it. We stayed in the car, hesitant to go out into the scorching hot afternoon, hesitant to confront what we had come all the way to this dramatically stunning but perpetually troubled region for.

The boat from Sabah had not yet arrived, we were told. An opening, however, had already been cleared between a passenger vessel and a domestic cargo ship. Military jeeps, police mobiles, two ambulance units, and an International Committee of the Red Cross wagon were also already in front of the docks. Immigration police in their green fatigues, and Red Cross volunteers in bright red shirts, took advantage of the shade offered by the swaying shadow of the big Basilan-bound passenger boat that was rocking softly in the waters, loading its passengers: women with their children bound to the sides of their waists, and men carrying on their shoulders colorful plastic bags fashioned into shapes of suitcases.

There was a palpable buzz. The atmosphere at the pier was almost festive. Comfortable, at the very least. There was a relaxed camaraderie and unspoken accord among the people waiting: government workers, local and international volunteers, advocacy groups, the police, the curious, and the cargadores.

Meanwhile, our guide, a young, vivacious nurse working with the Department of Health and the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine, gave us instructions. We were to follow her and say “From the DOH”. That was all. Nothing more.

But we had many other questions: about the boat carrying the undocumented Filipinos who had been expelled from Sabah, about that place which doesn’t want them but which most of these people consider as home, about these people whose notion of country and nation are unlike our own, whose allegiances are created by wherever there is for them a family and a means to live.


The boat from Sabah, our guide said, is a big one with three main sections. It regularly plies the Sabah-Zamboanga route. It is not at all like a prison boat, she said. The first two levels are occupied by paying passengers. A metal latch-door separates them from the passengers of the boat’s topmost section. This section is reserved for the Halaw – the expelled, the rejected, the ones who have been discarded – as the deportees are referred to in the local Tausug language.

Our guide told us that the number of Halaw varies, depending on the Malaysian government’s schedule of deportation. There is what is called a massive deportation with hundreds to thousands of undocumented Filipinos shipped back to Zamboanga every week. On a regular basis, for the so-called regular deportation, the boat from Sabah comes twice a week, Wednesdays and Saturdays, and the deportees number from fifty to two hundred per trip. The Malaysian government arranges and pays for the cost of deportation. She said that the people are probably given some food for the trip, too. But most of them have been in detention centers for months that apart from their travel documents, they do not have much else – not the money they worked for, or the families they live for – when they land in our shores. Some of them, because of prolonged detention, lose their minds, their memories, and their names as well. The most unfortunate ones lose their lives.

According to DSWD records, there has been a rising number of deaths from among the deportees. Infants almost always do not survive the trip. Even the adults, the very sick ones, the severely malnourished, also eventually succumb to death despite efforts to treat and rehabilitate them. Ironic, our guide said, that they should survive harsh conditions in detention, in sea transport, only to die when they are freed on land.


It had been almost half an hour already, and the afternoon was getting hotter, I started seeing mirages everywhere. The glare of the sun was so fierce that the skies, the sea, everything looked white. The blaze outshone the sparkling white sand of the islands in the horizon and we could only see a wide strip of wobbly, wavering, shimmering light from across the sea. The mountains and islands of Basilan had disappeared. No approaching boats could be seen.

In a few more minutes, though, about a dozen Badjao bancas started to float into our vision. Our guide told us that the Badjaos usually meet the big boats on their bancas, to beg for coins to be thrown into the water, to exhibit their magnificent diving skills to the spectator-passengers. The entourage of bancas was a sign that a big passenger boat was approaching. We then got off the car and told the driver to head back to the hotel and to wait for our call.

The heat rising from the ground and striking from above accosted us promptly. I swayed a little and had to take deep breaths to steady myself, before I could join my friend and our guide who had started to walk ahead of me toward the docks. As we were walking, the boat from Sabah came into view, spewing out two cones of thick black smoke into the air. The entourage of Badjao bancas u-turned in what looked like a choreographed move, and then they arranged themselves with a theatrical sense of blocking along the boat’s portside. The boat passengers packed themselves to this side of the boat, leaning against the rails, shouting, applauding, and waving at the kids on the bancas. A few coins glimmered momentarily as these were tossed up in the air and into the sea. The Badjao kids dove swiftly after the coins underwater.

The boat continued to move slowly toward the docks, heavily tilted to one side. I feared it would spill the people over to the water altogether. My heart palpitated in excitement, in anticipation, in anxiety, as the boat neared the pier and its anchor was thrown to the wharf.

At the wharf, the inter-agency team that had come to meet the deportees started to move as well. They pulled themselves from what were earlier relaxed, comfortable poses – leaning against cars, crouched under the shadows – and composed themselves into bodies poised for action. They accorded us with slight disinterest, polite disregard as they took their positions. “From the DOH”, we said, even when nobody bothered to ask.


The smell, the heat, the noise that met us as soon as we stepped into the cargo section of the boat were more than sufficient warning of what we were to witness.

Immigration officers filed past us, followed by the quarantine team, and the social welfare coordinator, who made their way to a room next to the captain’s cabin. All passengers had to pass and get their travel documents stamped in this room before they could be allowed to leave the boat.

I tried to catch up with everyone, slightly fearful of the estivadores who communicated mainly by shouting and routinely spewing colorful curses in Chavacano, as they unloaded cargo from the ship. I tried even harder not to stare up at the passengers of the topmost section and the panicked, anxious look in their eyes. Their cheeks were sunken, their jaws stood out, their skin had boils and spots. They leaned over the rails, peeked through the metal latch-door, and watched us, not making any move, not making any sound. The rubber soles of my shoes kept sticking to the greasy surface of the metal floor and made embarrassing sucking noises the faster I walked.

In the holding room, a young female nurse who had escorted the deportees was already briefing the team. There were 261 deportees in all. At least eight of them were in emergency medical conditions, and should be rushed to the hospital as soon as possible. But there were also some newborns, infants, and a couple of other children who had to be loaded off the boat first. There was an outbreak of some kind of pox, too. Most of the passengers had already caught it.

After the briefing, we made our way to the topmost section of the boat. The latch-door was pulled and we climbed briskly up the metal stairs. When we were safely inside, the door was closed again behind us with a loud clang that reverberated throughout the floor of the Halaw section.

There were too many bunk beds, there was hardly any space to navigate between them. The light was blocked, the air was stale, and then some of the deportees started to smoke. The smell of tobacco blended with that of unwashed bodies, grease on the steel bed frames, leftover food in the bins, and sweat on the blankets.

There was a slight confusion before we were able to locate the deportees in need of emergency medical assistance. Everybody had the same exhausted, but anxious look about them. Everybody looked in need of medical attention. And then we spotted them, the patients. Their limbs had shrunk, but their heels and feet had swollen to unimaginable shapes. This was the main, the most common complaint. They couldn’t move their legs. They couldn’t feel anything anymore. They had been sitting for too long – three, five, six months long. They were very rarely allowed to stand or to walk. They could only sit on their heels or lie on their backs. Two of them had tried to stand, they both got struck by a cane behind the knee and were forced to sit. So they did. They sat. They sat for too long.

Disuse atrophy of the most severe type, the nurses said. This occurs when there is an injury to, or disease of a nerve, or even from total lack of physical exercise, from not using the muscles enough. Considering that these people were manual laborers, the injury and utter lack of mobility they had been subjected to must have been pretty harsh, our guide said. She wasn’t sure if this would be reversed with vigorous exercise or better nutrition. She wasn’t even sure if it was just muscle atrophy that was the problem. She also suspected kidney failure, due to dehydration and a variety of insults to the body. This, she said, is fast becoming a common cause of mortality among deportees.

Six women went mad all at the same time in one cell, a young male deportee narrated. No, they didn’t go mad, their bodies were inhabited by demon spirits, sinaniban, explained another, a much older Muslim man. These women had grown so thin, had wild looks in their eyes. They howled, tore off their clothes, tried to attack the other women in the cell, they said. Good thing an Imam was around. He exorcised the demon spirits from the women’s bodies and insisted that the women be transferred to another room. The women’s chamber was a pretty bad section of the detention center, they all agreed. It was only when the women were transferred to another cell that they went back to their normal selves, that they recovered their human bodies, the men said. They shook their heads of the memory, of the sight of those women. Pinaka-kawawa talaga yung mga babae. The women really have it worst, said these male Muslim deportees, with such sadness, such anger, such sympathy. It was difficult to conceive of them as terrorists, insurgents, criminals, as they have often been referred to in the newspapers here and in Sabah.


There weren’t enough stretchers, it turned out. One of the patients had to be carried on the back of his brother who was only just strong enough to lift the patient, off the bunk and on to his back. The patient was too tall, his limbs fell limply along the sides of his brother’s body; his bare, swollen, heavy feet scraped the metal floor as his brother crouched low and lugged the patient’s body heavily along.

Then the boat started to move, the men panicked. Where are we being taken? What’s going to happen to us? My heart leaped, too. I tried not to panic. Probably just positioning the boat more closely to where the ambulances are, I said. But, why is the boat moving away from the pier? Why is it leaving the dock?! Was there something wrong with our papers? And, then, finally, the question was asked with much fear and trepidation: Are we being taken back to Sabah?

When the boat stopped, the deportees started moving frantically toward the door, eager to leave this section, eager to get off the boat. This created a commotion that proved difficult to control. Some of the patients had to be settled back on the bunk beds, to let the other passengers out first. Two men had decided to wait it out calmly and proceeded to light cigarettes instead. They had been through this before, they said. One of them had been deported thrice already, the other twice. They exit through Taw-tawi, they said. No sweat. It is very easy. In Sabah, they know someone who can produce fake IDs. You want one? They offered. No sweat, mam. It really is very easy. They insisted.

I decided to sit with one of the patients who had been asked to stay behind. There didn’t seem to be anything particularly alarming about his condition, although there was a gangrenous wound on his elbow. A red band was tied tightly right above it. What caught attention was that he spoke English, and only English. His eyes darted from one corner of the boat to another. He couldn’t look straight at any one point longer than a few seconds. When his eyes rested on me, piercingly, although for only a very brief moment, my heart tightened instantly with fear. I hated myself for it. Then he looked away and offered his right hand for a shake. It took me a while to realize that he had introduced himself. His hand was furrowed, bony, dark, and small. The back of his palm was also spotted with what looked like boils. I took his hand and shook it very lightly in mine.


I only realized that I had been holding my hand out, very awkwardly, in the air, like I was trying to dry it, when someone asked me if there was something wrong with it. I shook my head furiously, mumbled something indistinct, and hid my hand behind my back.

It had been almost four hours since the boat from Sabah had docked. We had already arrived at the Center for Displaced Persons. The deportees had been loaded off the fleet of six-wheeler trucks that had brought them to their temporary home in Zamboanga, from the pier. They had also already been oriented of their new status and situation, and had been formally welcomed to the Philippines. They were now lining up in front of a makeshift eating area for their first hot meal, since they left Sabah. All around them, the neighborhood kids were clapping their hands, welcoming them, and cheering: Halaw! Halaw! Halaw! Shouting out that derogatory term, which everyone seemed to have embraced and turned into something endearing instead.

You are now in the Philippines, you are now free, the Center Head had told them. When it was translated to Bahasa Malay, some shed tears involuntarily, but very, very quietly. When they were told that they may now stand and start making their way out of the hall and into the eating area, the silence was broken by the sighs of relief, and the shuffle of feet, of some two hundred fifty three hungry people, who had sat for far too long in a place they used to call home.


We didn’t speak to each other, my friend and I, while we were in the car, on our way back to the hotel. Zamboanga looked even more intriguing in the deep blue of a March summer evening. All around us, the city had turned on its lights, the streets were filled with cars. Elsewhere, parking lots were full, side streets were blocked. It was a Saturday night, after all. And the place is known for some real good nightlife. The visiting American forces sometimes leave their camps and risk their safety for this nightlife.

We turned all our attention to the driver, as we crawled down Zamboanga’s city streets, in search of some mangosteen and other fruits in season, to bring back to Manila the next day. We asked about his family, we joked with him, we made him laugh, and we laughed much too loudly for his comfort. But, my friend and I, we were comfortable only in this kind of gaiety, so we kept at it.

Then we passed the boulevard, which was lined with lovers and groups of friends out for some simple, inexpensive fun. From the boulevard, we could almost see the boat decked in lights, lolling softly in the water, waiting for passengers for the return trip to Sabah. We fell silent all the way back to the hotel.

At the hotel, we let each other take as much time as we felt we needed in the shower. When it was my turn, I turned the shower knob to full heat, and let the hot water scald my skin. I opened my palms, scrubbed soap several times on them, and held them up, to cup as much hot water as they could take until they hurt, until they seriously started to hurt.

Out in the hotel balcony, while we smoked, we could almost hear the boat’s droning call, the single continuous note, vibrating through the air. We listened in silence, both of us perhaps wondering, how many of those passengers bound for Sabah would be expelled right back to this very same place with their dreams, their spirits, and their limbs broken. (revised, april 2009)

a generation continues to pass

an uncle died singing. he had sung a total of three songs before he heaved his last breath and collapsed on a chair. the time was one-thirty in the afternoon. the sun was high. the heat seeped into people’s bones. tuba warmed their blood even more. a man’s ninth death anniversary was being celebrated. another man’s life in that party ended. it ended on a high note.

a most intent spectator

is what i've been these last few weeks. it is like living in high drama. it has its lows. the little crashes after the peak are unbearable,too. as R___ says, what to do, what to do with all these feelings? so many things. puede rin nothing.

so many ways of responding. you want to remember everything as they were. you want to remember you as you were. how? how to do it?

these are what i plan/want to do:

1. stalk the Ballet Philippines' resident choreographer, Alden Lugnasin (who i've talked to before and did an article on a long time ago). understand what it really takes for him to create a piece. what each movement means. what the dance does to him. how he lives his life and how it is expanded by dance. i dream of a documentary as a final output. i imagine a really intense conversation. hay.

2. do a critique of the costume design and makeup in Max Luna III's "KatiTaog" -- a rumination on the properties of water -- and arrive at an understanding of why the women had to have an aztec look about them, even if the piece is heavily based on "Pangalay".

3. do a study of the woman as subject, or subject as woman, in Alce Reyes's "Amada".

4. write about the ideology of melancholia and the forces of production in relation to the eheads concert.

5. do nothing. move on t the next spectacle. really.

what i want to do

when i grow up:

The Mechanics of Loss

Sometimes it will feel as though you are on television. What with the candlelights, the house filled with flowers, and velvet curtains in the backdrop. You will glow. You will be radiant. You will look absolutely tragic, delicate, and beautiful. Everyone will feel sorry for you. Everyone will want to be you. Even you will want to be you. The weight loss will be amazing: sunken cheeks, hollow eyes, thin limbs. The effort at cheerfulness, the ironic retorts, the entertaining anecdotes will naturally be underlined with sadness, which you will try to hide, of course, but which they will see anyway. The sight of you will soften the hardest of hearts, will move even your enemies to tears.

At some point, however, you will start to want to feel some real pain. And it will come when there is no one to see it. Then you will be truly helpless and vulnerable. Be careful: there is much too many negative lay literature on dealing with loss out there. You will want to read them all, because you will understand and believe them all. Know what to ignore. Know what’s useful. It mostly has to do with culture, you know. Various cultures deal with it in varying ways. All of which will be wrong. All of which will be worth trying. The absence is permanent, after all. You have all the time in the world.

The truth is that it takes a while. It happens while you are walking back to your apartment, one windy January afternoon, when the sunlight is so soft, it falls in various colors and in many wonderful ways, on pavements, on footbridges, on roofs of cars. The fall and spread of light is almost like a choreographed Christmas dance, or like music made visual, making the city streets kinder, the buildings and people’s houses friendlier, the strangers’ faces not so strange at all. But you know that none of this is real anyway, so you walk on. It can happen when you arrive in your empty, quiet, clean apartment, and you open the glass door that leads to a sparse garden outside, to let last night’s smell of cigarette smoke out, but the sound of a choir of birds will so surprise you, and make you forget you are in the middle of a dense, dirty city, so far from home and everyone you love. You will forget that it is only three in the afternoon, the middle of workweek; all of this will make you want to fix yourself up a tall glass of rum and soda, play some old Sunday music. You know there is something artificial about all of this natural light, this natural beauty, and then that’s when it’s going to start, but you will heave it off very deeply, and insist on putting your feet up and staring lovingly at the trees anyway. It also happens while you are having breakfast with your favorite cousin and you are laughing over old family jokes, and there is a very brief pause, the sound of your forks lightly scratching the plates will be so magnified, drinking up the glass of water will only choke you, dear. It is very possible that even while you’re in a strange country, pondering foreign faces, none of which possesses a single familiar trait, a smile, a sigh, a flip of the hair by the well-dressed, middle-aged woman across from you on the train will do it. While in a conference, the smell of the artificially cooled air will be so familiar, harmless, impersonal, but also very distinct it will finally bring tears to your eyes.

Of course, it will often be shameful, because random. Then you will know that this is what it truly means. It really is just control that you lose. Your memory is on the loose, your body is not yours, your mind has splintered into so many sectors, a different voice has taken up residence in each. This is when you sometimes really lose it. And this is also when, sometimes, you will be grateful for losing it, because it will be easier. You understand now how some people cannot go back to how they were. And, perhaps, this is the real loss: no longer having that right, that capacity, or that grace to go back. And forth. Being denied that instinctive mental movement which we used to take for granted.

Understand that this is the mechanics of loss, and it also explains in part the mechanics that bind: children to their parents, and parents to their children, in this enormous circle of pain that underlines love and life, and giving, and taking; of birth, and death, and growing, and necessarily feeling.

There’s nothing else to do but stand and excuse yourself. Personal necessity, you can always say. Walk straight to the washroom then, and do it. Do it wholeheartedly, do it soundlessly. In the stark, cold, windowless space of this white, tiled room, in the middle of nowhere.

There will be many, many more such rooms. And, the truth is, it will take a while to understand it, to lose it, to live with it.

fellows, panelists

Link

Fiction as allegiance.

And an allegation.
(paper presented at the UP centennial writers' conference/workshop
at UP Visayas-Tacloban College, Dec. 1-6, 2008)

The burden of representation
As an avid reader and an amateur critic of fiction, I have found that, inevitably, dealing with fiction entails getting to a certain level of inquiry that also, inevitably, leads to one of only two results. One is what Pierre Macherey has termed as the breaking down of the story before questions it is incapable of answering, the other is my breaking down as a reader before a story I am incapable of questioning.

This is hardly unusual. I know that I am not alone in this reading practice or experience. Instead of just asking who the characters are in a story, we ask, for instance: Whose story is this, really? Is it a good/fair/innovative way of rendering these people’s lives? Is this a sound depiction of the subject him/herself? Instead of asking what the story is all about, we ask: What, ultimately, is the story saying about stories, about history, about time? Is this a sensitive rendering of a society, a culture, a social relationship, an event, a phenomenon? Instead of merely asking what the writer wants to say, we ask: What does this say about the writer? Whose interests does the writer serve? Or, even, what does this story want from me as a reader?

These questions, of course, point to concerns that are usually considered as being well beyond the pale of craft, way outside the parameters of form. I cannot disagree more. For sure, these are questions that delve into issues of ideology, representation, language and subjectivity, questions that the creative writer, as it is stressed in workshops time and time again, need not burden herself with. But these are concerns I burden myself with only because I have found that they cannot be disassociated with issues of form. No less than an appreciation of all these other aspects is demanded by fiction itself; and by narratives, in general, primarily because of its very nature, its very form.

My preferred definition of fiction is that which takes into consideration its form and the conditions that give rise to, sustain, or break, the form. Variations of this definition appear in the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, Pierre Macherey, even Haydn White. Resil Mojares’s work in The Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel also comes to mind. So do the women’s stories in the anthology Fern Garden, edited by Merlie Alunan. Moreover, the stories of Eric Gamalinda, Erwin Castillo, Nick Joaquin, Chari Lucero, Gina Apostol, among others, illustrate the definition further. Their stories celebrate the form, question the boundaries between the mimetic and the marvelous and, in the process, engage quite intensely with the stories’ material and historical conditions. I pay much attention to these aspects because what, as a reader, I demand from (and enjoy about) fiction, are no different from what I, as a writer of it, aspire for. Similarly, the things I am dissatisfied with in some works of fiction are the very same things I want to avoid in my own writing -- monologism, univocalism, and objectivism. Kind of like the traits of this government which I also cannot stand.

I do tend to agree with the idea that fiction is necessarily burdened with issues of representation – not only in the sense of Greek Classical representation as the reproduction of something, or the elaboration of a concept corresponding to a thing perceived; but also in the sense of political, everyday representation as in formal statements made to a higher authority. Representation as the communication of an opinion, or the registration of a protest! More and more, I am seduced by the idea of fiction as a claim, a contention and, sometimes, an allegation.

(I must say that I love the word allegation. Used appropriately, it can be an effective way of stating one’s belief by merely citing the plausible opposite. The exercise of alleging can be an immensely successful way of rendering the tyranny of truth as irrelevant or, at least, relative, conditional. Allegation is a very powerful legal fiction, so to speak.)

I remember a critic from New Zealand, enthusiastically presenting a paper on one of Jessica Hagedorn’s novels, in a literary conference in UP. The critic went on to praise the novel’s style and evocative language, only to be severely critiqued right after. The poor guy did not know what hit him. What more do you want, I’m sure he wanted to ask. Here I am, telling you that I love this novel, by a Filipino writer, about the Philippines, and you complain! What the critic did not anticipate was the ultra sensitivity of the audience – literature teachers, writers, and critics all – to issues of representation. The guy was severely berated for not having recognized that the reading he just offered had long been rendered inoperable, narrow-minded, and generally unsound. His only fault: to praise the book for the wrong claims; and to claim an understanding of the state of the nation, merely through the book. What really struck the audience’s nerve was that this one particular novel by a Fil-am writer was being read by a foreigner as a representation of the entire Philippines. On the contrary, readings of it in Comparative Literature classrooms have tended to treat the novel as being quite unabashedly intended for a foreign audience, and its postmodernist tendencies merely serve to mask the novel’s ideology. At some point, I remember thinking: Well, why the hell not? Why can’t one write for the audience one wants? Would it have made a difference if the author were not a Fil-American, if she were just a Filipino? Would it have made a difference if she wrote about America, instead of the Philippines, and applied the same techniques and strategies?

Apparently, yes, one can and does write for one’s ideal reader. However, one has to always account for one’s subject position, which is revealed by the mere choice of readership. And, nowadays, yes, it does make a difference who you’re writing as, what you’re writing about, and where you’re writing from.

I have my own reading of the novel, and I do tend to go with the postcolonial critique of ideology approach. I submit though that, to a certain extent, the engagement with critical theory – particularly of these kinds – can get out of hand, get in the way of pure reading pleasure. Not to mention how it can get in the way of pure fiction-writing pleasure.

Theory indeed gets in the way. But, isn’t it only right that it should? The complexity of the world we write of and the world we write in demands that it be rendered sensitively and, well, honestly. Whether one writes of a world of simple peasants in the distant Philippine past, or the underground world of punk-gothic individuals in dizzyingly fast-paced urban New Manila, one is still writing of the here and now. One has to, in a sense, theorize the world one writes in, through the fictionalized world one writes of.

All I mean is, there is no turning back, no reclaiming lost innocence, no feigning indifference. One can no longer unread what one has read. There are pressures and demands on the writing and reading of Philippine fiction, in English, at least, that cannot, and should not, be ignored.


Home as a syndrome
As a writer from the Visayas, who is based in Manila, for instance, I cannot help but react, sometimes violently, to pressures for a particular kind of representation in my fiction. I’m sure this is a familiar experience to many. For instance, in national writers workshops, it is almost always expected of us to turn out a story with a strong, local flavor, but rendered from an ironic perspective. I mean, if you merely translate into English a perfectly sensible and successful oral narrative in Waray, for instance, it would surely be considered too simplistic, unimaginative, a failure. But, really, what does local color mean? Does this mean including snippets of conversation, expletives and curses, in the local language for emotional color? Does it involve using Waray terms, written in italics, even for phrases that have an idiomatic equivalent in English? Does this mean writing about rural folks, in idyllic seaside settings, engaging in so-called native – therefore humorous, strange, or fantastic – practices? Because I am very much guilty of all that, of submitting to such pressures and demands. What’s even more unfortunate is that these are pressures I myself exert on my own writing, almost as a matter of course.

The truth is, it is only on occasions like this that I am forced to confront questions that sometimes do spoil the pleasure of writing fiction. Most of the time, I just write what I can, whenever I can. I still believe that a writer’s role is to write. I cannot use the excuse of engaging with theory as a reason for not being able to produce fiction. Neither do I see theory as an impetus to write fiction. I do not write fiction in order to illustrate a theory. I do not write fiction in order to save the country, to improve people’s lives, or to empower the marginalized. There are other activities, other kinds of writing, that I do that, to my mind, would more closely approach those objectives. As a fictionist, my first allegiance is to the story, to memory, to play. My fiction, moreover, aims to play with the concept of fiction itself, with the concept of allegiance even, as well as of memory and remembrance.

My stories have invariably been about home – home as a syndrome, a physiological disorder: a disruption of normal physical or mental functions; a disease or an abnormal condition. The body is in one place, but the heart is someplace else. The language that is used for speech is not the language of one’s secrets. This is the main affliction, an affliction whose symptoms are not always manifest, rather latent. In my stories, the characters are always engaged with and yet distanced from home; but they never really leave it, they bring it with them wherever they go. The struggle is to accept that home is a concept, and a floating, unstable one, too. The struggle is to broaden the concept in order to encompass one’s changing conditions, one’s mobile location, one’s shifting position. The struggle is to not make everyone notice that the character is not always there; that she is, in truth, some place else; that she has actually disappeared, has established her home in the deepest recesses of her mind, a place beyond anyone’s reach.

I remember how, as a child growing up always amidst some twenty other cousins, in a small family compound here in Tacloban, or in Barugo, or Matalom, or Cebu, during the summer, I was always trying to disappear, and it was quite easy to disappear. I did it several times. I simply slipped out of the group of cousins playing out in the yard, to go back up to the house, hide in the room, go through my mother’s bags, rifle through my father’s documents, open cabinets and drawers, climb atop kitchen counters, mix up and blend condiments, write and draw figures on walls, dress and make up the saints, all the while unnoticed and unmissed. This went on for quite some time until one afternoon, when I decided to hide behind the backdoor of my grandparents’ house in Tacloban, to blend with the brooms and mops and cobwebs and dust, for about twelve hours, they say. I stood there without making any movement or sound, watching the maids, some aunts and cousins, go in and out of the house. I remember how I maintained my position even when my cousins and, eventually, the adults started looking for me. I could clearly hear and see people combing the entire house, the entire compound, looking everywhere but behind the backdoor. I stood there even when I could see my mother starting to panic and to blame hapless househelps for my disappearance. I do not, however, for the life of me, remember why I did what I did, or what was going through my mind while I stood there, very, very, very still. Neither do I know what made me step out of the dark, privileged, corner behind the door, in order to blend, inevitably, with the rest of them.

Since then, I don’t think I have been able to hide and disappear without anyone noticing. I did not mind becoming more visible only because I eventually realized that that was actually the best way to obscurity; an obscurity which served my need to observe, to create worlds within a world, story after story.

My head was always filled with stories – real and fabricated, my own and others’, for good and for bad. I think it was my father who first had the inkling that I would one day venture into writing stories, if not jokes. I think the very first time I understood what it took to make people laugh was also the time I understood how language works. I remember that it was one of those evenings, after dinner, the adults were out in the veranda, smoking, having coffee, airing themselves out. I sat next to Tatay and said, in Waray: Let’s say your name is You and my name is Me. Now answer this question: Who is the crazy one between the two of us? Tatay laughed so hard, I was instantly pleased, even if I didn’t have the foggiest idea why he found it so funny. I wasn’t trying to be funny, I don’t even think the idea for what was apparently a joke, was my original. For a while there, I was a major hit. Everyone started telling and retelling my joke, it became deeply embarrassing, especially because I was the last to actually get it. When I finally did get it, I tried formulating similar quips, a few of which elicited a wan response, none of which quite achieved the same kind of sweeping success that the first joke elicited. Until today, I am still trying.

There is nothing special about the stories I write. There is nothing special about me as a writer of stories. Everyone in my family is either a storyteller or a politician, which is basically saying that they are all fictionists. A few of them actually became highly successful writers and many became spectacularly unsuccessful politicians. My point is simply to say that the simple question of why I write has an equally simple answer: given that there have only been two fates, I think I’d rather be a failed writer than a failed politician. As for why I write the way I do and for whom I write, I think it is clear to me now: I write to please those from whom my fiction is derived. This is my fiction, my audacious allegation. Whether or not I actually do please them, can be the subject of another forum, for another time.

Speculative Non Fiction

That, according to my friend Carl, is the kind of writing that I do. Fancy term for LIES, and FABRICATIONS, really. =)

Watch for his upcoming collection of essays and stories.

CSF: creative semi-fiction

Sad, as in “also”


My mother would have been sixty today. She was born in 1948 in a town called Matalom, in the southern part of Leyte. Stories have it that when my mother was young, she would often get ill, suffer strange, undiagnosed, incurable symptoms, the only remedy for which was to bring her back to the town where she was born. At the time, it took almost an entire day to travel from Tacloban, where their family eventually settled, to Matalom, which they visited only once every year, or depending on how often my mother became ill.

My mother had six brothers and sisters, but she was the only one who was born in Matalom, her mother’s hometown. This, her siblings used to say, explains why she took after their mother the most. And, they would always add, also the reason why she took after their mother in the worst ways possible; that is, in terms of mood and disposition.

I never really knew their mother; hence, I find it difficult to relate to her, to even refer to her as grandmother. But, I shall try. Their mother, A___, was a tall, buxom woman, with a polished look about her. In the photographs hanging on the walls of the old house in Matalom and in Tacloban, she is always the tallest among everyone, man or woman, and she always carries herself with a combination of grace and ease; with a skilled, concise execution, which can only be described as stylish in a military way. Most people, however, thought that she was, on the whole, in look and manner, rather severe. Again, I have no direct, personal recollection of her severity or grace. I also do not recall any story about her being demonstrative in her care and affection for her children and her husband, or for anyone, for that matter.

The stories I retain of A___ are, on the whole, inconsequential: how tiny her waist was despite her full figure, how her height and her low, somber voice commanded attention, and how stubborn she was in her refusal to learn any other language but Bisaya. For some reason, people also referred to this language as Kana (the Bisaya term for “that one”, or perhaps the Bisaya pejorative for “Americana”). I have some very curious memory of that voice applied to what I thought was a peculiar language.

I also sometimes remember her smell, which was, invariably, a combination of fresh laundry and sweet-sour fruits. (This was how my mother smelled, too, on Sundays, without the scented lotion and expensive perfume).

A____ died thirteen days after I celebrated my third birthday, a month after my mother turned thirty.

***

It is always of these that my memory of that day is made up: tall men and women, in black and white, milling about, standing in corners; dark figures slumped, arms sagging against reddish-brown wooden seats. A glass is thrown violently to the deep-red, concrete floor, and stepped on by many grieving, angry feet shod in leather. A string of white rosary beads is pulled apart, and the round, tiny crystals slide swiftly off the string and scatter themselves on the floor, under the furniture, and under people’s soles. And then we are being lined up in front of the coffin, arranged according to some logic I could not understand. From being carried in someone’s arms, I am, against my will, settled on the floor next to my siblings and my cousins. My baby brother, who is only a few months old, takes my place in the coveted cradle-arms of some aunt or uncle. There is lightning in my face, and I am temporarily blind. I think it is at this point that I start to cry. But nobody sees.

Nobody hears, either. There are too many languages being spoken all at the same time. And my grandmother’s language is spoken the loudest by more voices than I have ever heard it spoken before. “Kana! Kani! Kana sad! Kani sad!” (which, I thought, translated to “That one! This one! That one is sad! This one is sad!” only to find out, very soon enough, that “sad” only meant “also”, or “too”). And the controversy had merely to do with flowers – over which ones to bring to the chapel, which ones to throw away, or burn.

Nothing of the nine-day wake should be left behind, a nameless grandaunt says emphatically. Unless you want a member of the family to follow suit, another one adds. Very quickly, it is settled. No one dares argue. Bouquets, wreaths, and vases of dried up and decaying flowers are thrown into a sack to join the pyre. Brighter, fresher ones are arranged atop a long, black hearse which, like its passengers, looks “sad sad”, as it waits there, strikingly odd in the otherwise car-less street.

The funeral took place at high noon and I remember the heat.

I cannot ignore the heat. It bears down on us as we walk in a solemn procession from the gates of the cemetery to the small clearing where there is an empty tomb and several priests waiting, their white frocks stiff in the windless air. A____ is the first to stake her claim in the family lot. Eventually, as the years would pass, that clearing would disappear, as it is crowded with more of her family members following her lead, despite the careful adherence to superstition. It becomes too crowded that it would not even accommodate my mother who, on the very day I turn thirty, would be, as some would say, “laid to rest”, away from her family.

At the burial, I cannot take my eyes off my mother’s face, as she watches the cement inevitably applied to the square opening of the gray tomb, sealing the niche (and her mother) off, finally, from the rest of the world. There are several broken flowers strewn all around us. The candles are melting quickly before the harsh heat of the sun. The kids are starting to surreptitiously gather them to form balls of wax. I am slumped against the chest of someone whose face I cannot see. I cannot stop staring at my mother’s face. There is so much going on in it. She has on an expression I have never seen before. I am looking and looking but not understanding the meaning behind it. And then it strikes me: it is almost the same expression she has after dabbing on “White Flower” liniment onto her temples and after inhaling the vapors. It is the look of someone disappearing, fading away. It is a look that is focused on something beyond my ken. It is a look that worries me no end.


***

Matalom, in Bisaya, means sharp. When I think of Matalom, on the contrary, the images are framed in soft light. In my mind, sometimes, I see the houses, the municipio, the plaza, the old church, the ancient trees, the coast and the sea beyond it, neatly arranged, in quaint stillness, underneath a layer of mist. Perhaps this is because my first vivid encounter with the place was through sleep-heavy, glazed eyes, encountering early morning sunlight coming at me in tiny broken streams, through intertwined foliage.

I probably slept through much of that first trip. I only remember that, when I woke up, the car we were in was slowing down, bringing the excited chatter to a hush. When I looked up, we were under a canopy of acacia leaves and branches that were tangled in a complex embrace. I would soon learn to treat the magical welcome arch, as a marker, an unmistakable sign, that we had entered the town proper, if not a different time zone altogether. As a matter of propriety and practice, everything slows down, therefore. In a minute, the plaza starts to loom to our right, and, to our left, the cathedral and the town’s patron saint, San Jose, facing the municipio and the country’s national hero, the other Jose.

My grandmother’s house is located on the same block as the church. Its “dirty kitchen” faces the small, square, black windows of the church rectory. When attending afternoon novena masses, we pass through the backdoor, from the kitchen, and enter the church compound via the rectory. We sometimes see the priests, off duty, strumming guitars, grooming gardens, meditating.

I have heard that, in every generation, at least one of the Tías carries on an illicit conduct with some young Pádre, in the much too short, tree-lined path between the women’s earthly kitchen and the men’s holy ground. It is probably not true, but not hard to imagine. I imagine this: A___ herself as a product of the prohibited passions between a Spanish man of the cloth and an otherwise pious native girl. A____’s mother is fourteen and he forty. She is much too tall for her age and her kind, while he is much too lay for his order and for his own good. It’s all very, very easy to imagine, in fact.

As soon as we passed the church, the driver took a quick left and there it was, the house where my mother was born. There is nothing remarkable, or imaginative, about the house, which, like all the others, looks like a girl’s dress, with concrete walls for a skirt, wooden and capiz windows for a top. The house would be quite easy to miss, save for the bougainvilleas, that climb wildly all over the front of the house, adhering brightly colored papery bracts, that persist for a long time as to be permanent, on the walls.

The car pulled up under the colorful vines. And as soon as the rusty door of the car was opened, before we kids could even get off the orange Ford Fiera, we were untangled from the arms of our yayas, lifted over bags and boxes, and ensconced in the warm hugs and kisses of a hundred Tías. Then the rest of the contingent spilled out of the car, and there were even more combinations of tearful embraces, as the decibel of “Kana! Kani!” chatter rose higher and higher.

“Kana sad! Kani sad!”

No, no one was sad, everybody was happy. They were actually just giving instructions on which bags to unload, which ones to leave behind. That was just how everybody was: nothing was ever not a cause for excitement.

In those times, many, many years ago, we only ever traveled in big, noisy, highly-excitable groups. We filled buses, or rented big vans, even if some of the families had their own private cars. The only time there would be a semblance of silence during the trip was when we passed the steep, winding roads, by the sides of mountains; the chatter would then turn to prayer. As soon as the most challenging part of the road to Matalom was passed, the adults instantly recovered: they sang cheesy songs, told tired old stories, and then passed around the miniature “White Flower” bottle, whose oil they dabbed on their temples, and the vapors they inhaled, like junkies, through their noses.

The last time I was in Matalom was with a much smaller, quieter contingent: my two brothers and two sisters, all of whom I had to baby-sit, without my knowing it. My brothers, who were the real junkies, were then both hooked on mind-altering substances and eardrum-busting sounds. My older sister was trying not to depress herself, while waiting for the results of her board exams. My baby sister was, well, still a baby at the age of twelve. We did not know the real reason for our overextended stay in Matalom, until ten days later when, despite the long distance calls to our parents, they still would not come for us or send us money for bus fare back to Tacloban. We eventually realized that hieing us off to Matalom was Mother’s idea of rehabilitation and spiritual exile for her children, as much as for herself, I suppose.

My baby sister was a mere foil, or an accessory, it turned out: for as long as she was with us, no one had the heart to pull the rug from under our feet, even when we older kids started depressing the hell out of everyone with our posturing. Everybody was charmed by my baby sister’s crystal clear singing voice, and entranced with her almost translucent complexion, not to mention the fact that she was named after my mother, decidedly their favorite among A___‘s children .

I, on the other hand, had just graduated from UP then, had no job, and was forever in black, agonizing over the fact that I could not, had no excuse to, be with my boyfriend who was a journalist in Manila. Before we arrived in Matalom, I was bent on showing everyone that this was all a waste of my time, and that I was there against my will. Of course, I was not able to maintain my position for long. Given the situation, I could not exactly complain about being forced to take a “vacation with my siblings in a seaside town, right across a white-sand resort island”, as my mother put it.

Mother literally packed us off, drove us to the terminal, and paid the bus driver who had already been instructed over the phone, to reserve the first row of seats for us, for the four-hour trip to Matalom. Against our will, she convinced us to go to Matalom at the pretext that it was a matter of obligation.

By then, most of my mother’s brothers and sisters had stopped going to Matalom, or, when they did, they would rather rent rooms at the only beach resort in town, than accept the hospitality offered by their cousins who were then caring for the house. We somehow gathered that there was some dispute over the old house beside the church, and over the land on which that house stood. Perhaps it was because my mother was born in that house that she could not let anything or anyone sway her from staying there or from maintaining ties with her mother’s sister, and her cousins.

We all noticed, moreover, that, indeed, Mother never had severe migraine attacks for the rest of the year, after being in Matalom for only a few days. She, therefore, had a well-founded reason for believing that a two-week stay in the place would cure us of our ills as well.

***

Mother was right, as always. We returned to Tacloban, after being deported to and forcefully rehabilitated in Matalom, healthy, happy, and detoxified, with new haircuts to boot. Our Tías cried, probably with as much relief as with sadness, as we waved to them from the bus. Half of the bus passengers were annoyed, the other half amused, that we had overloaded the bus with all sorts of items we accumulated in our two-week rehab-vacation in Matalom: corals, shells and stones from the beach, funky retro clothes from the ukay ukay, big jars of fiesta food, a sack of fruits, and several old photographs and stolen library books. We promised ourselves that we’d go to Matalom at least once every year, and preferably with the entire family. Even with the whole clan, just like old times!

We are still talking about going to Matalom. One of these days, one of these days, we say. Of course, it never happens. If it ever does, it would only ever be as a very small family that we would go, as it would be as a family without my mother. And, without her, I need to be convinced that we can go back to the way things were, with her siblings and their families, like in the old times, traveling together in one big happy pack.

What we never thought would happen, happened. We lost our mother; the migraines were not just migraines. The ties to her family were severed, not strengthened. And I, for my own little, insignificant part, cannot bear to be anywhere near anyone who has hurt her. My older sister, who is kind and generous, once suggested that we should reach out, be the ones to repair the damage. But I refused. I told her that I am still trying to be angry rather than hurt, at everyone who hurt but never angered our mother. For now, I am content to keep these images of my mother’s life and those who peopled it, underneath a film of vapor; content to condense everything onto paper.

I can not even enter the house in Tacloban, where mother grew up, and where we used to live for years, when my grandfather started to get sick, and until he expired. I hear the house is falling apart. The plants have died, the vines have dried up and detached themselves from the walls, and are now hanging limply like skeletons in the air. I hear the piano is missing, and can no longer be found, while the rest of the furniture have been divided senselessly among the siblings – a ten-seater dining table with only four chairs in one house, a platera without the platos in the other, an aparador without the mirror left behind.

I sometimes see unrecognizable men and women, dark sagging figures on wooden chairs, drinking tuba or cheap rum, and getting drunk in the afternoons, throwing up all over the porch, unmindful of people passing the street. I sometimes see faces, peering at the window, from behind dust-encrusted curtains. Most of the time, though, I just look away whenever I sense movement behind the curtains.

***

A____ was already dead, when I took my first trip to her hometown. Since A____’s death, my mother made it a point for us to visit Matalom as often as we could, perhaps as a way for us, her children, to know and remember A____ more. What I do remember is that as soon as we reached Matalom, everyone spoke differently. My own mother’s tongue shifted swiftly from Waray to Kana, and my poor father, who never acquired the facility for the language, was forced to speak an even more foreign language – Tagalog.

I think I only realized the import of my grandmother’s death, and a little bit of my mother’s sense of loss, when I noticed that no one spoke my grandmother’s language in the house in Tacloban. Not even my mother or her brothers and sisters spoke it, when they were in Tacloban. It was a silence that could not be ignored, especially after I had been to Matalom, where Kana was the only language spoken. And, that was when it hit me: A____was the only with that voice and that language, after all, and it was a sound that I would never ever hear, ever again.

Was this also why my mother had on that expression again, when people started speaking to her, in her mother’s tongue, when we arrived in Matalom?

One afternoon, in the old house in Matalom, while everyone was down in the sala, examining yellowed documents, and sepia photographs, I went up to A____’s room, and forced myself to cry. I dabbed on the strong mentholated liniment at the corners of my eyelids until they stung. I forced my eyes to remain open, even when they were tearing uncontrollably, so I could stare at my face in the mirror, to see how well I could imitate my mother’s expression. This was a few years after A___’s death. I don’t know how, in all those years, I had convinced myself that menthol vapor was all it would take.

A____ died when I was three, my mother thirty. My older sister was four, my younger sister had not yet been born. Of course we were all too young, my mother included, to understand what it would take to complete the numbers game: for me to reach my mother’s age when her own mother died, for my older sister to have her own three year old daughter, and for our baby sister to have to play the role of mother, in our almost-abandoned household.

***

Mother would have been sixty today. At sixty, she would have been happily retired from managing her office and would now be applying Oprah-style, positive management, self-help techniques on her husband who always obliged her, and the rest of the household who were helpless against her. At sixty, she would have been a beautiful young grandmother, and still very much a mother.

I see her through the mist: she is still relatively slim, young-looking for her age, and elegant even in her green Hawaiian-print, housedress. I see her tending the garden– or, at least, supervising someone on how to tend the plants and the vines starting to climb all over the front of our house. I see her trying, again, to change the colors of the wall, the location of the door, of our still-unfinished house, inspired by something she saw in a magazine, or in a dream about the old house in Matalom. I see her at the dining table, which she and my father sometimes liked to use as worktable. She is making “thing to do” lists, plans, inspirational prose, reminders and notes for her children, who have started their own families, and need her now more than ever. She is seated next to my father who, at the age of seventy-six, is still writing pleadings for his non-paying clients; is bent on saving other people but, without my mother, cannot function on his own. I see the two of them being torn away from their work, by the kids – not us, but our children! – who are doing something silly, looking so adorable, making a mess of Mother’s make up, breaking some jewelry, perhaps, wearing my father’s oversized leather shoes, trying to run in them, and falling all over their faces. My mother’s expression softens. This is the kind of chaos that appeals to her, and against which she has no power or a single management skill.

It is her sixtieth birthday. We have already been to church for the six a.m. mass. We are taking a trip to Matalom, A____’s hometown, the place where Mother was born. This was her idea, she made arrangements for everyone and everything. It is a beautiful day, just the right amount of sun and wind; a perfect day to travel with the entire family, indeed. And, of course, because it is my mother we are talking about, family means not only us – who are all home for the occasion—, but also friends, cousins, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts, and grandaunts, too. Of course, she has forgiven and forgotten past misdeeds, everyone looks to her now to keep ties bound, just like they deferred to A____, her mother, to settle family matters.

Of course, too, every now and then, she remembers A_____, her own mother, who did not even live long enough to reach the age of sixty, who barely knew her grandchildren— all beautiful and bright in their own right, although some of them have to be taught how to be happy, sometimes. She cannot help but think of herself, and how she made it without A____. Has it really been three decades? Why, every time, every single time she remembers, it puzzles her that it still hurts, it still stings, no matter how long it has been. It clutches at her heart, and it induces her to fervent prayer, mindless of the three year old granddaughter who is alarmed at the change in her grandmother’s expression. Oh God, may her children never know such sorrow, may she not have to leave this little one yet, kana sad, kani sad…

It is all very, very easy to imagine, in fact.

***
My mother would have been sixty today. And I am alone in an apartment, in a house that has no history. My husband and I live and work in a noisy, wet city, whose language has adopted us. We surround ourselves with people who do not know anything about us, whom we do not know enough about. Sure, we exchange bits and pieces of ourselves, of our families, sometimes; we highlight certain events, we hide others, we mention the colorful characters, we obliterate the rest. We have degrees in language, in cultural studies, in history. We convert to discourse and fiction and poetry what we have inevitably cut ourselves from. It has become a matter of survival.

I am looking for an excuse to celebrate my mother’s life in this city that has nothing to do with her, except that this is where she died, this is where she left us. And, wherever my mother went, she did bring home with her. I am always looking for excuses to round up old friends and whatever family we can pull in from the vicinity; to gather different tongues in one table and let them speak their language, as long as never about it. Kani sad, has become a matter of survival.

Quezon City
September, 2008

today, two remarkable things

happened in my classes.

in my composition class, i discovered a writer. unfortunately, i also discovered that among everyone, she had the most number of cuts and the least number of submissions. i had more than one reasons to give her an F for her advisory mark, which i have just submitted to the department, but i decided to be selfish. i decided i want to keep her in this class. but she will definitely hear it from me. as i also want to hear more from her.

in my literature class, i saw the kids mature in an hour. we were discussing the element of point of view and how it not only delimits the reader's scope of vision, controls the reader's reaction, but also reveals subjectivity and subject-position. i did not use these last two terms, or go into psychoanalytical critique, but illustrated the concepts by way of facilitating the discussion of a particular story. this is not what was remarkable about today's class. what really made my day was how smooth and steady and calm the discussion went. the students raised their hands one after the other, gave each other time to speak, listened to each other's answers and then responded (to their classmates' comments and to the story) not only critically and intelligently, but most of all, compassionately. normally, i restrict myself to just getting students to arrive at a comfortable critical stance, in relation to the story and the larger social context. and that, in itself, is a not the easiest thing to accomplish. after a lot of work, towards the end of the sem, i am hardly able to take pride in seeing them (or some of them, sometimes even just a few of them) arriving at that stance, confidently and comfortably using a particular critical (political) framework, employing a new vocabulary, and basically thinking unlike an over-indulged or over-eager freshman. this sem, i don't know what happened. or maybe i missed it. but before i knew it, [practically] the entire class matured as readers (and as persons), and even overshot my expectations. i cannot claim any credit for it. but let me revel in it. today's was probably the least exciting, certainly one of the most orderly, of discussions i have ever handled. i am one to encourage and instigate a boisterous, lively, sometimes out of hand, exchange, which usually characterize the discussions in this particular class. today, i didn't have to instigate anything. i barely did any facilitating, truthfully.

it wasn't so much the wonderful exchange that struck me, it was the graceful quieting that i witnessed after the discussion.

this is how i want my formalism explained

by a bad-ass writer who thinks that "magic realism sucks", and that there are only two things in life that are truly enjoyable: "Borges and making love".

***

"Yes, plots are a strange matter. I believe, even though there may be many exceptions, that at a certain moment a story chooses you and won’t leave you in peace. Fortunately, that’s not so important—the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there’s no book, or at least in most cases that’s what happens. Let’s say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you’ll see): It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge."

(Roberto Bolaño, in an interview with Carmen Boullosa, BOMB Magazine, Issue 78 Winter 2002, LITERATURE)

have i said it lately, that i love...

Ian McEwan? I do! I do!

***

"The dream, surely, Zadie, that we all have, is to write this beautiful paragraph that actually is describing something but at the same time in another voice is writing a commentary on its own creation, without having to be a story about a writer."

-- IM in a conversation with another favorite,
Zadie Smith.(August 2005 issue of Believer magazine)

ang guapo ni adam sa libro na 'to! at na gets ni krip!

please read sir krip's latest column:
http://philstar.com/index.php?Arts%20and%20Culture&p=49&type=2&sec=40&aid=2008072715

Adam & the eve of our poetry: Read Doveglion
KRIPOTKIN By Alfred A. Yuson
Monday, July 28, 2008

Encountering the Self (or more unsolicitied critiques)

as well as a few solicitied ones, for carljoe. this one here's a consolidated critique of a couple of short stories. this essay forms part of chapter 5 (i think) of my thesis.



Encountering the Self, Lack, and Desire
in Philippine Urban Fantasy,Horror and Ghost Stories



Not considering the stories in Nick Joaquin’s Tropical Gothic (first published in 1972), it was only in the last few years when collections of supernatural, horror or ghost stories saw publication by the country’s major commercial and academic publishers. Since 2003, with the publication of a series of urban ghost story collections Best Philippine Ghost Stories whose authors were mainly unknown or literally anonymous, there have been at least four more anthologies of horror/ghost/supernatural stories that have come out, three of which were put together by, and contain works of, young writers, mostly in their twenties and thirties. This is a remarkable development considering that prior to this, no anthologies of such nature were being put out by publishers.

Interestingly, it was the UP Press which published the first such anthology called Nine Supernatural Stories (2004). After a year and a half, the UP Press put out another collection of the same genre, entitled Damaged People— Tales of the Gothic Punk (2006), also by a young fictionist, Karl De Mesa. De Mesa’s works, however, while sharing many features and qualities with the supernatural stories, are ultimately in a category of their own. They are not so much supernatural, as “punk-gothic”, employing a different set of strategies and displaying more varied influences, particularly from the “punk”— anti-establishment youth movement/attitude. (As such, they are separately discussed, in another paper).

Another significant development along these lines is the publication of the three-volume anthology Philippine Speculative Fiction, spearheaded by Dean Francis Alfar, himself one of the foremost practitioners of genre fiction writing. These anthologies are comprised of stories that employ fantasy, among other narrative modes, in various ways, resulting likewise in various types and genres.

In their introduction to the anthology Nine Supernatural Stories, April Yap and Lara Saguisag, remark on the unexpected paucity of supernatural fiction in our written literature, considering the popularity of the ghost story and the abundance of supernatural characters in our collective imagination. In one of the few fora centered on supernatural, fantasy and science fiction (November, 2004) sponsored by the UP Institute of Creative Writing (UP ICW) the invited authors, particularly Emil Flores of UP lamented the fact that the only indicators that the supernatural and fantasy holds some importance in these times, are the highly popular fantasy soap operas featuring mutated and mutilated local mythical characters, aired every evening by the country’s two largest TV networks. Three years and several anthologies and single-author collections later, perhaps there are more than enough indicators that fantasy holds some importance in these particular times.

In the area of written narratives, one related local study done by Yvette Natalie Tan, “In(Visible) Monster: the Theory and Praxis of Horror in Philippine Short Fiction in English” (MA Thesis, UP, 2005), tackles the elements of horror seen in Philippine short fiction in English. It is interesting in that it offers different categories of horror images in the fiction pieces she studied. The horror images according to Tan are sourced from either: (1)Ethnic-Native Practices; (2) Western Practices; and (3) the often contradicting combination of Native Filipino and Western Practices.

Given that Philippine short story in English is dominantly realist, Tan attempts to present an interesting enough standpoint (by examining the elements of horror) from which to view the stories. Her study, however, does not focus on the horror fiction genre per se, and her approach and treatment are limited to a close reading of images and metaphors. Tan’s study succeeds in showing that what are generally considered as serious, realist literature in academe do make use of horror elements that are more commonly seen in “non-serious” and non realist genres.

My paper is not so much interested in elevating to the level of serious fiction the status of the supernatural horror genre, or genre fiction in general. It is, however, interested in studying them as already significant narratives that function in the articulation or subversion of concepts of self.

It is interesting to note that most of the anthologized Philippine short stories in English that employ fantasy as a narrative mode while exploring the mysterious and miraculous, also deal with the gloomy and the grotesque, the horrific and the macabre, whether in terms of theme and subject matter, or of setting and atmosphere. Moreover, in most of the stories, the plot unfolds in urban settings, the city’s decay and chaos serving as an important backdrop for the subject’s deracination, rupture, and fragmentation. For the few stories not set amidst the heady, confusing, and also alienating city, the narratives are set against eerie, lonely provincial locations, featuring daunting, colonial mansions; vast haciendas; and sinister landscapes.

Indeed, the stories taken up in this paper vary greatly from one another but perhaps the one quality they share is the preoccupation with or the assumption of the existence of “Other” strange beings, elusive elementals, chilling unseen presences. Most of the stories are also premised on first-time occurrences, highlighting the fear of the unknown. It is the mystery, after all, that terrifies. And my reading is partly an attempt to reveal that no mystery is more terrifying than that which involves the subject’s struggle, through narrativization, to keep certain desires unknown to others, but most of all to the self.

In an attempt to analyze and to illustrate the range of possibilities that the employment of fantasy produces in a text, I have selected a couple of stories from four different anthologies, (from Nine Supernatural Stories, ed. Lara Saguisag and April Yap; Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 1, Philippine Speculative Fiction Vol. 2, ed. Dean Francis Alfar; and Afraid, ed. Danton Remoto). More specifically, I shall look into the concepts of subjectivity that are produced, explored, or subverted, in Philippine urban fantasy, ghost and horror stories in English.

The concept of subjectivity that operates in this paper is anchored on the concepts of Jacques Lacan, through Catherine Belsey, who explains that subjectivity is related to the concept of individual “consciousness” a “consciousness-in-itself, as distinct from a consciousness of something”, and, more specifically, a “consciousness of self”. Thus, “subjectivity” implies that this “consciousness depends on differentiation, and specifically… differentiation between ‘I’ and ‘you’” (55-56), or the subject and the Other. This differentiation is “a process made possible by language” (56). The preoccupation with the Other may also then be read here as a preoccupation with the self. It is also in this sense that “Fantasy is a field of symbolically structured meaning (the unconscious) that shapes and regulates our desires…” (Tadiar 9).

This study tackles these basic questions: What concepts of subjectivity emerge in the production of the strange, absolutely ‘other’ and different? How, and to what end, are elements of realism and aspects of reality subverted in the Philippine urban fantasy ghost and horror stories?

In order to address the texts’ problematic, the stories in this paper are viewed as corresponding to a gap in the self, such that the focus of the approach is that site in the narrative wherein the social and psychological spaces intersect. This site or location corresponds closely to the location of fantasy— in the indeterminate space between mimetic and marvelous— as it is understood in this study. From a purely psychoanalytic framework, this site, wherein resides the so-called Lacanian Thing (Das Ding) is the leftover space after the process of symbolic signification has been completed. Fantasy, as a narrative mode, accommodates the display of leftover, excessive, “un-interpretible” elements after castration, thereby effectively reminding us of the cost of actualizing the process of signification and the movement toward cultural order.

Employing a psychoanalytic and structural framework in the study of classic and contemporary horror stories and films, Stefan Gullatz, for instance, states that at the core of horror narratives is a site of leftover or excess responses which cannot be accounted for by the ideological subject. According to Gullatz, this site is

"…that which cannot be signified at all, despite repeated attempts, and thus, in the popular imagination persists only as an inert, meaningless, amorphous mass. There is a constitutive void at the heart of the symbolic order designating its inconsistency. Any object that is elevated to this site becomes associated with a traumatic, excessive enjoyment and will be perceived to be radically at odds with the socio-linguistic universe of flexible meanings and controllable emotions in which 'normal' beings can live and breathe." (www.horschamp. qc.ca/ new_offscreen /lacan.html)

The source of horror, in this sense, is the prospect of having to encounter those elements which have been ejected by the self from its consciousness, a process the subject has to go through in order for the self to exist in and coexist with society. (www.horschamp. qc.ca/ new_offscreen /lacan.html).

Robert Miles in Gothic Writing echoes Gullatz’s findings in his own exploration of the horror and the gothic quality in English gothic novels. Miles notes that the qualities ascribed to the term gothic, which is generally related to a variety of the English novel that surfaced in the mid-eighteenth century, has not really changed in terms of plots, motifs and figures. This consistency, repetition, and recycling of themes and styles are seen by Miles to be an indication of a powerful drive, and of a symbolic disparity in the social self, an issue which remains relevant until now, as evidenced by the lively practice of gothic or horror fiction writing at present (Miles 1).

Rosemary Jackson further echoes Miles’s suggestion of a powerful drive seen behind the production of horror narratives, but advances further and identifies this drive as unconscious desire. Likewise, Jackson identifies the site which Gullatz mentions in his study as an ideological site. As Jackson explains, it is through the expressive functions of fantasy that it is able to indicate or point to the seemingly precarious foundation of cultural order “for it opens up, for a brief moment, on to disorder, on to illegality, on to that which lies outside the law, that which is outside dominant value systems…” In doing so, fantasy also “traces the unsaid and the unseen of culture: that which has been silenced, made invisible, covered over and made ‘absent’” (3-4).

My initial observations and assumptions about Philippine urban fantasy ghost and horror stories point to the idea that these stories are necessarily fragmentary and often inchoate, and the very form is itself an articulation of an attitude towards realist fiction, if not reality itself. This stand acquires more significance when we consider the very concept of realism as being culturally contingent. Catherine Belsey has renewed the interest in realist fiction and how it creates subjects out of its readers, by seeming to be transparent. Belsey also explains that the concept of realism is never stable, that it changes and, over the years, has made increasing demands on the form, as certain groups and movements have aspired for ever increased verisimilitude in art (47). Belsey also says that “even in fantasy, events, however improbable in themselves, are related to each other in familiar ways” (48).

Belsey then opens the possibility and reinforces the value of studying narratives such as the pieces being included in this study, by pointing out that “the plausibility of individual signifieds is far less important to the reading process than the familiarity of the connections between the signifiers. It is the set of relationships between characters or events, or between characters and events, which makes fantasy convincing” (47).

Another assumption this paper rests on, even as it does not submit to a purely psychoanalytical approach, is that there is a very palpable “schizoid” aspect to the stories which, in discussions about the Gothic novel and its progenies and descendant forms, has already been identified as not just an aesthetic device or decision, but more of an indication of a fissure, a fracture, or a wound, in the social self or the subject, which the writing of it is an attempt to address (Miles 1).

This paper considers the stories here as a discursive site, a coherent code for the representation of a disjointed subjectivity, a code that is often organized along structuralist principles (Miles 2), a la Todorov. However, I would like to posit that this site may be viewed as an unstable system, for these structuralist principles—clear binaries and opposites, such as light and dark, good and bad, humans versus non-humans—are themselves thwarted within the narratives. As the succeeding sections shall endeavor to illustrate, the stories or narratives studied in this paper contain different discourses in competition with each other, and are always in the process of revising one another.


Absence and Lack as signifiers of fear

In “The Man Who came Home” (Basilio, 85-91) and “Street Corner” (Javier, 46-52) from the Nine Supernatural Stories anthology, and, to a certain extent, “Room 1119” (Cheng, 11-16) from the Afraid anthology, terror arises when the sense of balance is threatened, when the very fiber of the character’s manhood is put to the test. In these three stories, the dominant speaking subject is a middleclass male, the series of [unfortunate] events told from his standpoint, and the state of affairs being problematized are directly/indirectly caused by the absence of the female partner. The woman here then becomes doubly absent, not merely rendered as a symbol of absence. But it is precisely because the symbol of absence is absent, that she is very much present.

In “The Man Who came Home”, for instance, the story opens with the narrator, a young professional, coming home to an empty middle-class condominium unit, for the first time, without his wife. The rest of the story takes pains then to highlight this absence, and to evoke the heightened solitary and terrible experience of the male subject by underlining the male subject’s conflicted reaction towards himself and the situation he finds himself in:

"Dante… said that the reason he came early was that he was the only one who didn’t care about his job as much as the others would. But this wasn’t entirely true… Dante told Jimmy that he was already out of the corporate game, the rat race, the desire for promotion and recognition, but he wasn’t sure if the guard understood what he was talking about… He just didn’t want Jimmy to get any bright ideas, especially since Dante knew that Mrs. Victoria, who lived two doors down to their left, was having an affair with one of her husband’s subordinates. Or at least, that was according to Leah, his wife, who said that she got it from one of the Victorias’ maids she once met at the hall and who was later fired." (86)

Here we also glimpse the reality of the young professional man whose position seems to be always under threat. He has a well-paying job that he does not really desire, but has to keep because it provides his life a semblance of stability, and himself some sense of power: “… being a bank manager already gave him a full plate at dinner, what with small and medium-scale enterprises in his area sprouting like mushrooms after a rainstorm and each of them asking for loans and letters of credit.” (86)

Despite what he is able to provide for himself and his wife, he is not a fully satisfied man, his life being one of compromises. Even the space he is occupying has to be a compromised space, his and his wife’s lives vulnerable to all kinds of interpretation from the people with whom they share space in the building. The mention of domestic rumors is a threat to him who values his independence and privacy. He is careful to show the guard, Jimmy, that he is liberal enough since he allows his wife to go out with office mates, that he knows exactly where his wife is going and what she is doing, and that she is able to do such things only with his blessing. The young man is ultra conscious about what kind of image to present to the other man, Jimmy, who, the story is careful to point out, obviously occupies a lower, inferior social status.

The husband’s conflicted reaction to his wife watching something cheap and kitschy although he knows her to not be “baduy” is parallel to his unsettled feeling about her going off alone, and him coming home to an empty condominium unit.

"Thankfully, Jimmy didn’t bother to ask him what movie it was they saw because it was a cheap bold flick starring Richard Gomez, Pops Fernandez, and Joyce Jimenez. Dante didn’t want him to think that his wife was baduy because she really wasn’t." (86)

The internal conflicts also have to be faced then, all the time. What the husband desires is utopia, balance, harmony, which he also knows to be very difficult to attain, and perhaps the source of fear is the realization that none of these is attainable.

"Although he didn’t believe in anything even vaguely supernatural, he was nonetheless disturbed by the thought of spending the whole time waiting for his wife alone in their unit, let alone the whole floor… He was the only one on the floor for the night, and so what? He could handle himself; he was a man; that was the whole point of spending a couple of hours every week in the gym." (87)

He has to constantly assure himself of his manhood and his social position, he wants the other man, Jimmy, to know where he stands, to know which position he occupies, but he is also very affected by what Jimmy says.

This is then the function of the narrative – to assure and constantly reassure him of his position. He has to create this narrative about himself and for himself, to keep his fears and anxieties about the palpable instability of his life under wraps.
Throughout the story we are shown an unmistakable expression of his aspirations, an idealization of a preferred reality, an image, a re-presentation. It is the male, the husband talking here, after all, re-presenting their lives to Others, to the guard, for instance, whose opinion he somehow values. Moreover, the Subject (the husband) here seeks to inscribe a “lack”, a sense of inferiority and inadequacy in the Other (i.e., the guard, the wife), in order to secure his own position in relation to the Other.

The almost obsessive reiteration of the husband’s masculinity is also a ploy to make readers ambivalent about the situation, but it mostly cements the fact that this character takes comfort in his being male, and thinks that this is his last bastion, against all forces that threaten him and his position. And so, after we are given a glimpse into everything that happens in what seems to be an unusual night in the life of this self-assured yuppy, the narrative takes us finally to the point of intersection between the natural, logical, practical world and that of the supernatural; the moment at which the familiar world gives in to the necessary demands of the supernatural.

"… he felt a gust of cold wind blast through the wide-open living room window. It got so cold that he, who had been waiting for his wife to arrive for the past half-hour, had felt it in his bones and begun to shiver… He felt that there was something mysterious about that wind, coming in like that on a hot night like this one, catching him by surprise. Since he liked to believe that he was a logical man, he quickly dismissed the thought, although he could not ignore the chill he felt when the wind rushed in… Dante, like the dutiful husband he was, tried to get up to close the windows…Before Dante could even get up, somebody tapped him twice on the shoulder…

With much resolve, he finally looked over his shoulder." (90-91)

When the man resolves to finally stare fear in the face, there is nothing there. The story does not provide a figure we can make out, anyway; it does not have to anymore. The signifier is absence itself; the ghostly presence of the absence, is the signified fear. We do not have to know what happens to the man who came home, without his wife –because that in itself is a scary situation (one worth telling as a supernatural horror story, indeed).

Willard Cheng’s “Room 1119”, on the other hand, has the feel of a personal essay, a testimony, complete with a postscript and footnotes. The story is a first-person account of the unusual experiences of a young Ateneo male student who lives alone in a flat in a twenty-story condominium building, much like the residential building which serves as a setting for “The Man Who Came Home”. The testimony mode used in the story implies that the narrator has an assumed listener, or the narrator naturally assumes, is used to assuming, that someone is listening. The events that he narrates are not actually so unusual, or “disturbing” in themselves. Again, similar to the concerns of the Husband in “The Man Who Came Home”, much of the horror of the situation arises from the young student’s being alone, and from his anxieties arising from the need to accomplish tasks, which the “disturbing episodes” prohibit him from doing.

"My computer would now start to open by itself , many times, when I came out of the bathroom. One night, when I was typing, a loaf of bread fell from the glass dining table… the doorbell rang in the middle of the night…" (14)

All of these are clearly non-threatening, and leads one to think that perhaps the threat is not so much external as internal. It is the psychological space which is under attack. The culmination, in fact, of al these “disturbing episodes” is no different from what the Husband in “The Man Who Came Home” experiences:

"... it was finally during bedtime when I strongly felt a spirit’s presence… I woke up when the right side of my body felt cold, as if somebody just lay beside me." (14)

But, whereas Basilio’s story ends very interestingly (and cleverly) with the husband looking behind his shoulder to stare at the disturbing presence, and offers no more explication, or resolution, Cheng’s story ends (quite funnily) with the narrator's attempt to make peace with the presence, the invisible roommate:

“I had the sense that the spirit in the apartment did not want me to move out…” (16).

All this is, of course, the narrator’s own convenient interpretation (illusion, or fantasy), because there is no actual encounter with the so-called invisible roommate, no clear sign as to what she (because the narrator assumes it to be a woman) wants from the narrator. Here, again, is a case of the subject imbuing the Other, not only with a gender – woman, who is a symbol of absence— but also with a sense of need, and desire. Moreover, the narrator does not so much desire to expel this paradoxical absent presence from the room, but seeks instead to fuse with it, to “make peace” with it. And, of course, when the narrator leaves the place, he is convinced that “the spirit” desires for him to stay as well.

In Carljoe Javier’s “Street Corner” the main character is an adolescent male who finds himself going back to, and forever psychologically rooted in, a particular spot on the street corner where his girlfriend was accidentally killed. The story hinges itself on the suddenness, the unexpectedness, of the condition that threw the boy into the very situation he was confronting. His curse is that he cannot get out of it, not by himself and his very limited human capabilities and assumptions anyway.

"The accidents occurred on the same date that Katy was killed, the 21st. Each month brought a new driver with a red taxi, but never him. And I prayed each time that it was him, that it would be over. But at the same time I wanted it to go on, because an end to the vigil would mean an end to Katy and me.

This was my way of paying her back. And it was my only chance to be with her. The warmth of her body that I used to feel was replaced by the paralyzing shiver that she greeted me with every time. But I could still feel her, know that she was with me." (47-48)

Here we are given a glimpse into how the two very powerful emotions that drive the story – fear and guilt – are also rooted in the young characters’ first sexual encounter, one that the girl was unwilling to participate in. Fear and guilt then become inextricable from the suppression/fulfillment of the boy’s desire.

"…I was still frustrated about the day before. We cut classes and went to SM to see a movie. During the movie I kissed her and forced my tongue into her mouth. At first she pulled away, but when she asked me if I loved her and I told her that I did, she gave in. She gave in to much more. Each time I tried something she resisted at first, but I assured her that I loved her, and told her that if she loved me she’d do it… When we finished I was tired and slumped back into my seat. Katy looked like she wanted to cry, like she wanted to say something to me but was holding it back. I couldn’t understand what could’ve been wrong; it was my first time too, but I wasn’t reacting to it the way that she did. I was actually pretty proud of myself." (49-50)

Guilt and fear, extreme grief, sexual frustration, are all a function of the desiring subject, who is also characterized by lack, unfulfilled desires. This story, much like “The Man…” takes effort to present the outside reality in order to emphasize the breakdown of the internal world; is grounded in the mimetic and yet is diametrically opposed to it.

In stories such as these, fantasy as a narrative mode functions to critique representation by rendering the crucial scenes, “the horror turn” purposefully ambiguously. It is remarkable how the flashbacks, reconfigured events in the mind, are the scenes that are rendered realistically, while the scenes in the narrators’ present are located in the realm of fantasy, existing in the underside of reality. This may be read as not a mere inversion of reality, but rather an attempt to question the very foundation, the structures, upon which ground rules and conventional notions of reality are founded. Robert Miles in Gothic Writing posits the idea of a “Gothic turn” by which he means “an inner momentum to break open ideological figures, the tendency of Gothic writing to turn upwards hidden discursive seams, to reveal concealed lines of power” (6).

The above-mentioned stories also seem to operate on a kind of presence/absence principle, revealing that the self is never stable, that the social self has many layers, that it is a construction (of ideology), and thus subject of and subject to psycho-social economies. More interestingly, the stories illustrate that, in the subject’s constitution or formation, the Other becomes, necessarily the locus of all subjectifying practices.



Fantasy and sustained reversals

In the other stories, it is not so much presence or absence which are the issues. In stories like Adel Gabot’s “Beggar of Description” (Nine Supernatural Stories 3-14) , the central metaphor for the site wherein resides the source of terror is a wound, a disfigurement, a physical defect. And whereas in the stories discussed above, the principle at work is absence and presence, in Gabot’s story, it is reversal, a changing of places, and thwarted expectations.

The story “Beggar of Description” opens with a scene showing a middle class mother and her child forced to take a jeepney ride one rainy morning. The story takes off from this situation which is carefully pointed out as being out of the ordinary, the opening descriptions highlighting the discomfort of the woman at being thrown in the company of strangers, the common public, in a confined space. The experience is brought to its most terrifying when a beggar enters the jeepney. The beggar is right away portrayed as a threat, but whose character goes through a reversal (as the experience is also inverted in the manufactured narrative in the female character’s memory), when he performs a miracle—wiping away and absorbing an imperfection, a live scar, from a baby’s face.

Bordering on the cliche, the beggar who is the symbol of terror in the story, is rendered also as the extreme Other. The detailed description of the beggar’s features, as well as the mother’s rapt attention on him, are really constitutive of the perceiving subject’s (the woman’s) desire. Here, once more, is a discourse on the subject’s need to inscribe a lack in the Other, in order to claim her position as the Other’s object of desire. It is necessary that the Other be portrayed as lacking in an almost non-human sense; as extremely dirty and therefore dangerous, in order to fulfill the subject’s illusion of wholeness. It is, after all, only by rendering the other in such a manner, by stressing the difference, the dirt and disfigurement, that the subject finds sense in her own self and the situation she finds herself in.

"…If Elli hadn’t suddenly drawn against me, it would have been some time before I realized we had an extra passenger. But then again, I think the smell would have alerted me before long.
The man was filthy. And that was being kind… He wore tattered, blackened clothes that were more hole than fabric, held together by grime. Old and thin, the man had long, wet oily hair plastered to his head like a greasy shawl. He was veined with light brown lines where the rain had eroded the dirt on his skin. I supposed I should be thankful that the downpour had washed him off a little. He clung to the bars at the back of the jeep and left grease marks on them.

It didn’t seem to bother him much that the jeep was full; I don’t think it mattered – empty or not, he’d likely just hang on to the back anyway. I felt Elli relax against me as she realized that the taong grasa had no intention of forcing himself inside and finding a seat. She looked as relieved as the other passengers, and I imagined my face reflected similar sentiments… I took a surreptitious look at our new passenger and was more appalled by what I saw; he was worse off on close inspection.
He looked like he could keep a team of doctors busy for a whole day straight. He had running and bleeding sores; in fact, he seemed to have a scar on every other pore, and sores in between. A nasty, scabbed and pus-crusted gash on his elbow looked raw and bleeding. If they ever got him to sit still long enough to be treated, I don’t think the doctors at Sta. Isabel would know where to start." (8-9)

Fantasy, in this story, sets the stage for the configurations of desire (literally illustrated in the spatial arrangement, the confines of a jeepney, which brings into focus the manner in which the Subject’s desire is “arranged” in relation to the Other). And yet, paradoxically, fantasy also erases the limits of desire—dramatized in the scene when the Taong Grasa, a person characterized by grease and dirt, removes, erases, a permanent wound and disfigurement in the baby.
What is more interesting to note is how the supernatural/horror turn—the point in the narrative when the natural and supernatural spaces intersect, or disappear—happens in the story, and later reveals itself to be not just a questioning of everyday reality, but a necessary truth for the woman, who has to believe that there is a kernel of spiritual profundity hidden in every new experience. Thus, the boundaries of the “stage” for the configuration of desires are erased, or at least extended.

"Sometimes when I sit thinking, I dread the moment I actually do find him because I don’t think I know what I’ll do. A large part of me wishes I forget the whole thing. Perhaps I’m better off not knowing. But I can’t let it go.

On that day, several things conspired to make me a witness to something that has changed my life. It was one of those rare cusps when things come together for no apparent reason and have dramatic effects on lives. Some people win lotteries, and some have the unfortunate luck to step in the path of a stray bullet." (3)

The story does not end with the so-called horror turn, with the taong grasa performing a miracle on the poor baby, it ends with an exposition about how the woman provides the poor mother and daughter in the jeepney employment and education, after the experience they shared in the jeepney. This story is evidently very catholic, very middle-class, very urban. There is in this story another, a stronger, narrative about the need to save and be a savior, the play of a discourse of power vis-a-vis desire. Yes, it is the beggar, the Other, who turns out to be the miracle performer, but in the end it is the woman and her family, who are the real heroes, according to the narrative woven by the subject (the mother) around herself.

Emil Flores’s story “Ghosts of Infinity” also deals with reversals, but of a different kind. Flores’s story stands out in this collection because it features qualities of a detective story (it has an investigator for a character), a mystery (there is a puzzle that he is seeking to solve), and investigative news documentary (it closely follows events and actions by the hour, and its headings mimic the form of a tv script). The allusion to factual life stops there, however, and the rest of the story teeters between the mimetic and the marvelous, questioning representation and producing new subjectivities. The TV evangelist and the Professor are recognizable as humans, but they are also “Lemurians” from “beyond this world” (34). The investigators find out that they are not just investigating the case of a missing person, but also of beings who do not leave the earth, persons who do not die, but rather transform themselves into TV evangelists and university professors.

Flores's stry is interesting in that of all the stories in the Supernatural anthology, this is the only one that sources its “supernaturalness” from religious practices and anomalies. While at it, the story also seems to be taking a jab at Philippine media for capitalizing on this, and at Filipino viewers for being easily duped and numbed by media into thoughtlessness:

"The cops were supposed to be investigating an abduction right in their own backyard but instead, the ones on duty were watching TV. I guess with meager pay comes meager work… I took a peek at the 14-inch television set sitting on top of a rusty green filing cabinet. It was the “Infinite Dream Crusade with Daniel Salvacion.” And there he was, the one who asked the Bureau to find the missing Dizon. I wanted to talk to the Dreamer but I had to schedule an appointment with him for my investigation. He was concerned but apparently his show came first… he espoused the power of dreams… Perfect for people who have nothing left but dreams." (26-27)

The story likewise draws attention to the pervasiveness of the unnatural or “supernatural” in Philippine daily life and how, because of this pervasiveness, they become “natural”. As the investigator character says, “It’s hard to tell which is real and what is imagined” (37).

Like the other stories in the four anthologies taken up in the paper, the illusion of wholeness, as is the very search itself, remains a central concern. In this case, the investigation is being carried out in order to solve a puzzle; to fill the gaps in, and lend logic to the narrative. Moreover, the fulfillment of this desire for wholeness/unitariness (of the narrative puzzle, and of the self) is always only illusory and impermanent. What is striking about this particular story, “Ghosts of Infinity”, is that its narrative is structured in such a way that highlights the illusoriness rather than glosses it over. The story ends on an uncertain note: The Professor who was abducted has gone crazy, while the perpetrator of evil, who is also a contributor to politicians’ campaign funds, retains his image as an evangelist on TV.

(To be continued)