1. What I like about book reviews and literary criticism is this: I get to know which books to skip reading. Maria Teresa Martinez-Sicat’s Imagining the Nation in Four Novels, for example, criticizes Maximo Kalaw’s The Filipino Rebel: A Roman of American Occupation in the Philippines, F. Sionil Jose’s Po-on, Linda Ty-Casper’s The Three-Cornered Sun, and Alfred Yuson’s Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe for reinforcing the elite’s appropriation of the concept of the nation “for the hegemonic project of integrating the masses in an unjust political and social system.”
Six decades of Philippine literature in English have produced only a few novels about the Philippine Revolution against Spain and the War against America. This heroic period in Philippine history is a rich source of passionate and brilliant characters, thrilling and spectacular action, provocative and relevant ideas… Instead, the topic of these two battles has been evaded in a very large majority of Philippine novels in English.
The few novels on the Revolution and the War belong to the discourse of the elite. Even in attempts to present peasant and workers as central characters, the texts are blind; they are tied to the ilustrado’s belief in his superiority; they justify continued exploitation of the masses. The real makers of history are denigrated while the opportunists are eulogized. (22)
2. Fast forward a few more years after the Sicat criticism of the four novels was published and we have the 1998 Centennial Literary Contest organized by the deposed Estrada regime. There would seem to be not much progress in the production of Filipino novels in English, however. In another piece of criticism, R. Kwan Laurel’s “A Hundred Years after the Noli: The Three Centennial Novels in English” published in the Philippine Studies Journal in 2003, the top three winners of the prize are taken to task for “a cavalier attitude toward history” which is ”symptomatic of late capitalism’s particularizing a past to suit the moment.” Eric Gamalinda’s My Sad Republic denigrates an actual anti-colonial hero, gives the colonizers and landlords the voice of reason in the narrative, and all in all “use the Philippines as exotic material to please New York.” Charlson Ong’s Embarrassment of Riches meanwhile has “hardly a hint of colonization and the problems it has spawned,” which is strange for a novel that has won in a contest that is supposed to commemorate the centennial of Philippine independence from Spanish colonialism. And Alfred Yuson’s Voyeurs and Savages is another attempt at a positive spin on the Philippine colonial experience.
Voyeurs and Savages hopes to show the reader that, from the beginning to the present, we have been watched, but we have also have been watching. We have been viewed as savages, as we have also been viewing the colonizers as savages. They have savaged us, but we in turn have also savaged them… That we live in a hybrid world is true, but how we have become a hybrid people in the first place is the story the novel has evaded, if not distorted. It has not been a fight among equals, it has been a lopsided war, heavily tilted for the colonizer. (621-622)
3. But onto the actual books I’ve read within the month. I don’t know why I read Amin Maalouf’s Balthasar’s Odyssey. I found it staid and dragging and with a plea for multicultural tolerance as the only redeeming factor.
4. Surprisingly, I actually enjoyed Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. But I would find it annoying if everybody started writing in that markedly self-reflexive way!
5. I very much enjoyed Rosario Cruz Lucero’s Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros.
6. Meanwhile, in The Food Wars, which I read the other day, Bello argues that the present food crisis is not simply the result of disastrous neoliberal policies imposed by imperialists like the U.S. but also a product of an ages-old grand showdown between large scale capitalist agriculture and the old “small is beautiful” peasant way. It would seem like a good “fastfood-type” attack against how the world capitalist system organizes the production and distribution of food if not for the excessive valorization of the small farmer as if the class could now fulfill the messianic role of the “proletariat” of yore through a “food sovereignty” paradigm that “challenges at every point the pillars of capitalist industrial agriculture.”
7. Bedridden again over the weekend because of bacterial infection from acute pharyngitis, I have taken up to reading lengthy PDFs again: Alain Badiou’s The Communist Hypthesis and Slavoj Žižek’s In Defense of Lost Causes. Rather than a spirited and “dangerous” treatise on radical politics, what I’m getting into with Žižek is so far a hodgepodge of comical literary and film criticism.
8. After the long and arduous ordeal with the university administration’s bidding process, our student publication Pagbutlak can finally have its June-September tabloid printed with the printing press. It can also be read online. ■
One more book for September.
On impulse, I borrowed Manuel Vasquez Montalban’s Murder in the Central Committee from the library. The idea behind the detective novel seemed very interesting: CP Sec Gen is knifed in the middle of a Central Committee meeting. Unfortunately, the rendering did not live up to its promise. Surprisingly for a novel in the detective genre, I found it quite a dragging read. Must be what I felt as the lack of “gelling” in the plot elements. I won’t elaborate but the connections seemed too forced. The novel’s only redeeming value are the tidbits about the history of the Spanish movement and the crisis of Spanish communism in the 70s and 80s.
Anyhow, here’s a link to a positive review of Montalban’s other works.
I recently bought Sionil Jose’s Po-on. I know it’s just one book in a series of five Rosales novels. I’m surprised that a critique will dismiss this book without regard for the story’s continuation in its sequels?
I hated Calvino’s book and never got to finish it. I guess I was not cut out for metafiction in second person point of view.
The four books in Sicat’s book were chosen for critique because they touched on the Filipino revolution against the Spaniards and the early armed resistance against the American invasion and because the texts privileged the local landlords and intellectuals over the peasants and workers in their representations of these classes.
Which is actually strange because I was expecting to hate this particular Calvino but didn’t.