Much of writing by Filipinos have been limited by our local writers’ enchantment with “colonial, Western modes of visioning reality,” their being “caught up in a borrowed language,” their being “restricted by our social formation,” and their having been “fed the tepid versions of history and tradition that have been handed down.”[1] Philippine fiction has thus in the main failed to harness “the imaginative resources of the land out of which it is produced.”[2]
The fiction of Rosario Cruz Lucero is one of the few that has overcome these limitations by speaking “from a rich, manifold location constituted by facts of biography, gender, history, and culture.”[3] Lucero’s second short story collection, Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros (2003) is exemplary by combining “considerable narrative gifts, command of language, a sensuous and comic wit” [4] and a rootedness in Philippine socio-cultural realities.
In Feast and Famine, the story “The Death of Fray Salvador Montano, Conquistador of Negros” presents how a Spanish friar out to pacify and impose a foreign culture on a colonized people that “refused to resemble anything and remained stubbornly, unashamedly itself” [5] is himself colonized by the subjugated people. “The Composo of Hacienda Buyung” makes use of Ilonggo composo to explain the goings-on around the fictional estate. “Doreen’s Story” features stories within a story that includes real persons who are close friends to the author as intertwined with folk beliefs and real historical phenomenon. And “The Oracle of the One-Eyed Coconut” interweaves depictions of political intrigue, feudal relations, state-sponsored terrorism, and the resilience of the ordinary people and their folk wisdom.
Manifest in these stories is the departure from the conventions of the classical realist short story form “which creates an effect or illusion of reality.”[6] In Lucero’s stories, what is regarded as realistic is stretched to the limits to include the magical and the supernatural, thus warping the reality effect of these stories. Blurring the borders between the magical and the real allows Lucero to question the official versions of truth imposed by the Spanish colonial powers or the present semi-colonial and semi-feudal Philippine status quo and reconfigure history to give space for the voices of the marginalized.
Some of Lucero’s earlier stories would already point to the direction she would take with the stories in Feast and Famine. The story “Comedia,” for example, narrates how barrio folk use the traditional moro-moro, a play performed to depict the war between Christians and Muslims popularized by the Spanish friars in the 17th century, for the new purpose of portraying their oppressed condition and their resistance against the terrorism of the State and its human rights violating military forces.
Interrogating Colonial Discourse
“The Death of Fray Salvador Montano” begins with Fray Montano’s being haunted by accounts of his parishioners mating like animals in order to ward off the pestilence caused by these creatures. Here, the native resistance to “the one position that God had intended human beings to do it in” [7] is expressed in their making love like locusts, bayawaks, and frogs.
The story portrays the clash between the precolonial belief systems and folk practices and the Christian orthodoxy imposed by the Spanish overlords to show the consequences of colonialism. More importantly, it also interrogates the official versions of history imposed by the colonial power and in the process reimagines the other side of the story.
Fray Montano envisioned an idyllic life of prayer upon arriving in strange shores, Fray Montano was given a glimpse of the troubles he would face as hundreds of natives lined up to welcome him while singing “a hymn only they could recognize in voices that God had not created for the Gregorian chant.” [8] Civilizing work would indeed be far more difficult in a “savage island” where the hegemonic power of the Church and State were continually questioned from below: “he had found that in this town, the truth sprouted many heads, and whatever explanation he gave would be as valid as the many versions it would give birth to overnight over bamboo cups of tuba.”[9]
In the main the colonizers had the monopoly of armed repressive force. But they cannot completely rule on brute force alone and thus had to co-opt local pagan practices and then claim them as their own. The natives, meanwhile, had to play along with the whims of the new rulers and negotiate for concessions. The babaylan Estrella herself, for instance, consented to being baptized after realizing that her folk treatments, prayers, and herbs “had no power over the strange diseases that this white race had either brought in or released like sulfurous gases from the earth’s core: smallpox, cholera, measles, malaria.”[10]
Fray Montano’s preaching while outwardly prohibiting sex actually aids in the proliferation of a discourse on sex that is “akin to a secret whose discovery is imperative, a thing abusively reduced to silence, and at the same time… precious to divulge.”[11] “Do you do it everyday, every other day, or what? And do you tease each other with both word and hand? And as you grope and tug and stroke, do you become wet? … And do you ever engage in intercourse with an animal? What kind of animal? How many times? In secrecy or in the presence of other people? How many people?” [12]
Fray Duertas, Montano’s predecessor, wrote a manual on the engineering principle of the building of stone churches. But even as the friars of other towns all over the country have started inquiring about this, the bishop banned this architectural treatise for the reason that “it the bonding of the male and female sexual organs: “Beside the text was a sketch of the hardwood pile thrusting through the sand and another detailed sketch of the sand’s vise-like grip on a pile.”[14]
In the historical accounts of colonialists like Pigafetta and Morga, the superiority of western culture is always put above the supposedly inferior local culture. In Lucero’s narrative, this is subverted with the portrayal of colonialism’s failure to elevate the native way of life to the standards of the colonial order. [15] Baptizing villages with the names of towns fromSpainis one mode of invasion. However, Negros and “the island’s 12,700 square kilometers of ember-spewing volcano, hostile flora and fauna, and human-devouring bodies of water refused to resemble anything and remained stubbornly, unashamedly itself.” [16]
In “The Death of Fray Salvador Montano,” Lucero cleverly takes the negative characteristics thrown by the colonizers against Filipinos – our ignorance, laziness, and erotic sensuality – and use these stereotyped images to subvert the colonial discourse of defining those outside the west as inferior “Others” in order for the westerners to define themselves as superior.
Against Nostalgia
Magic realism often commemorates the supernatural in order to recuperate “the mythological power of epic and romance.” [17] The babaylan Estrella, after winning concessions from Fray Montano, chanted the ancient Hiligaynon epics of Buyung Labaw Donggon, the villainous Yawa, and the god Makagagahum. But this recovery not only celebrates the traditional culture for this past is also confronted with its own deadlocks. The epic’s quality of a “confusing story that resolutely denied gap, oblivion, and even the likelihood of its fictionality”[18] only caused the people to sleep through the incantations or make love like snails to shut out the chanter’s voice. It is not only the priest who fails in teaching the locals to sing his foreign hymns. The babaylan singer herself has been inculcated with the new wisdom from the European faith and cannot anymore recall the oral tradition without questioning its one-dimensionality and old values.
The story is hence no nostalgic reminiscing of an imaginary organic community as the model for the future. The story rather questions the nativist concept of returning to a purely semi-communal social formation and its mode of perceiving as the alternative to the Christian morality of the colonial regime. Steering clear of what cultural critic Fredric Jameson diagnosed of much postmodernist writing as “the imprisonment in the past,” [19] Lucero takes a leap towards the future. Her short fiction escapes the reactionary project of being “condemned to seek the historical past through our own pop images and stereotypes about the past, which itself remains forever out of reach.” [20]
The barrio folk of Pueblo Buyunan seem to echo this trajectory as they snicker at the fraile’s “drowning in waves of words that had lost their referents” [21] in a Hiligaynon-Spanish Dictionary he is completing. Far from merely demonstrating the standard Derridean thesis of the slipperiness of the meaning of words and the inaccessibility of the truth, the indio’s knowledge of the old friar’s getting caught in words that had already become detached from their original referents is more a shunning of nostalgia, a championing of a material reality over the convoluted discursive exertions of Fray Montano.
The Short Story as a Terrain of Class Struggle
Any serious consideration of literature should look at a literary text’s relation to the social formation and historical juncture from which the text is produced. From the socio-economic order of every period arise particular forms of laws and politics that has the function of legitimizing the power of the ruling classes, the elites who own the instruments of production. [22] This relationship between the way people produce their material life and the social relations that arise between them in the process of production is often expressed in terms of a metaphor, the base-superstructure analogy.
The superstructure also includes “definite forms of social consciousness” that encompass the political, religious, ethical, and aesthetic fields, among others: what is commonly called ideology. In every society, the dominant ideology legitimizes the power of the ruling classes. Certain structures, hierarchies and injustices that are in every way socially structured are made to appear natural by ideology. In this context, literary texts are ways of seeing the world that have a particular relation to the dominant forms of perception of a given society and period. [23]
The material utilized for stories, whether of a realist or a more imaginative bent, cannot but arise from social practice. How a text can either defend or subvert ruling class power is moreover not only a function of its content but also its form. As the youngest literary form in the Philippines, the short story was introduced to Filipino readers and writers through the public educational system imposed by the U.S.colonial regime in the early half of the 20th Century. [24] The short story form in the country thus evolved first by imitating the fictional conventions from western models. [25] To become a distinguished writer entailed adapting to an educational system that was an important component of the U.S. colonial agenda of propagating foreign values, teaching the use of a foreign language, robbing the Filipinos of their own identity, and training local puppets who would fill in the lower positions of the colonial bureaucracy. [26] This colonial ancestry did not deter subsequent Filipino writers from using the short story for depicting Philippine setting, social realities and the Filipino identity.
Fastforward to the present, the continued domination of imperialism and what Jameson in recent decades diagnoses as “the emergence of this new moment of late consumer or multinational capitalism” [27] has given rise to “postmodernism” as one of its cultural component. Postmodern modes of writing fiction, among others, encourage the blurring of the boundaries between high culture and popular culture, question the distinction between fiction and reality, and promote the loss of a sense of history. For Jameson, this is simply the replication, reproduction, and reinforcement of the ruling ideology. Postmodern devices are usually convenient ways to denigrate historicity as a means of presenting the status quo as eternal.
However, postmodern forms can also be co-opted to impart messages that do not necessarily “involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.” [28] Cultural workers of the revolutionary movement led by the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) have been particularly adept in transforming traditional cultural forms and rituals like songs, poems, dance, and music to adapt them to the needs of the armed struggle as part of transforming the lives of the country’s poorest of the poor. These cultural forms are thus raised from their feudal beginnings to become part of a new revolutionary culture. [29] The same should be possible for postmodern literary forms.
Lucero’s is no revolutionary literature that “primarily serves the interest of the basic masses of workers and peasants, Red fighters and lower petty bourgeoisie, as well as their allies in the struggle for national liberation and democracy.” [30] At the outset, the sophisticated literary devices and the language already limits the audience to a middle class one. This restriction prevents her fiction from uniting “the broadest segment of our population againstU.S.imperialism and its local agents from the big landlord and big comprador bourgeois classes.” [31]Yet this limitation does not prevent her oeuvre from combating “the ideas and values of the dominant colonial, feudal, and fascist culture.” [32] Her fiction’s value lies precisely in its ability to lure her petty bourgeoisie readers “from their cultural enclaves towards discovering a genuine culture of the people.”[33] Through stories like “The Death of Fray Salvador Montano,” “The dominant minority (the English-speak ilustrados) is allowed an experience of the dominated majority.” [34]
Notes
1. Resil Mojares, foreword to Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros by Rosario Cruz Lucero (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2003), vii.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., viii.
5. Rosario Cruz Lucero, “The Death of Fray SalvadorMontano, Conquistador of Negros,” in Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros (Quezon City: The University of thePhilippines Press, 2003), 19.
6. Catherine Belsey, Critical Practice, 2nd Ed. (London: Methuen & Co., 2003), 47.
7. Lucero, “The Death of Fray SalvadorMontano,” in Feast and Famine, 1.
8. Ibid., 2.
9. Ibid., 6.
10. Ibid., 8.
11. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Trans. By Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 34-35.
12. Lucero, “The Death of Fray SalvadorMontano,” in Feast and Famine, 18.
13. Ibid., 4.
14. Ibid., 6-7.
15. Rolando Tolentino, “Ang mga Hari Roon ay Laging Nakapaa: Panitikan at Historiograpiya,” in Sipat Kultura: Tungo sa Mapagpalayang Pagbabasa, Pag-aaral at
Pagtuturo ng Panitikan (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2007), 83-84.
16. Lucero, “The Death of Fray SalvadorMontano,” in Feast and Famine, 19.
17. Martinez-Sicat, Imagining the Nation, 112.
18. Lucero, “The Death of Fray SalvadorMontano,” in Feast and Famine, 10.
19. Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Cultural Turn, 7.
20. Ibid., 10.
21. Lucero, “The Death of Fray SalvadorMontano,” in Feast and Famine, 12.
22. Terry Eagleton, “Marxism and Literary Criticism,” in Criticism: Major Statements, 3rd Ed., edited by Charles Kaplan and William Anderson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 555.
23. Ibid.
24. Rolando Tolentino, “Ang Kwento: Introduksyon,” in Paano Magbasa ng Panitikang Filipino: Mga Babasahing Pangkolehiyo, edited by Bienvenido Lumbera (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 2000) 255.
25. Ibid., 256-257.
26. Ibid., 256.
27. Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 20.
28. Ibid.
29. Gelacio Guillermo, introduction to Muog: Ang Naratibo ng Kanayunan sa Matagalang Digmang Bayan sa Pilipinas, Kalipunan ng mga Liham, Talakayambuhay, Talaarawan, Reportahe, Panayam, Parangal/Paggunita, Pabula, Dagli, Sugilanon, Maikling Kwento, at Bahagi ng Nobela, 1972-1997, prepared by Instityut sa Panitikan at Sining ng Sambayanan (Quezon City: The University of the Philippines Press, 1998), xxxiii.
30. Kris, Montañez, “The New Mass Art and Literature,” in The New Mass Art and Literature and Other Related Essays (1974-1987), (Quezon City: Kalikasan Press, 1988), 1.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Martinez-Sicat, Imagining the Nation, 113.
34. Ibid., 116.
karlo, this sounds like a great book. I find it interesting how magical realism is used in the narrative of Fray Montano. It reminds me of a scene in Nick Joaquin’s Cave and Shadows. The colonizer being colonized and history being revised in the process. But Joaquin may be too enamored of Hispanic culture to completely propose the idea of the native triumphing over the colonialist.
hi. yes, it is. i think the book can be ordered at the UP Press. I also recommend Lucero’s earlier short story collection, A (Her)story and Other Stories. I don’t know how to get a copy of the latter though.