SHEILA BARE Engages
Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn
(Pantheon Books, New York +, 1990)
(Pantheon Books, New York +, 1990)
Prefatory Note: I had
originally planned to write an analysis of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters.
But the comments on her text, nearly thirty years old, are
well-rehearsed. Commentators, all of
them more insightful me, include: Elaine Kim (on Hagedorn’s poetry, 1982); Lisa
Lowe (1996); King-Kok Cheung (1997); Rachel Lee (1999); Vicente L. Rafael
(2000); Viet Thanh Nguyen (2002); Allan Punzalan Isaac (2006). This list is by
no means exhaustive. Instead, I chose to
engage with her in the hopes of enticing the reader to read her works, many of
which continue to grace college syllabi today.
Jessica
Hagedorn’s Kundiman
“Kundiman” is the
title of the last chapter of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters. A song of love to
the (m)other/land, or so the title suggests, but the chapter itself is no love
song. The song is in the form of a
prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, but where the masculine form should be, the (M)other
replaces Him: “Our Mother, who art in
heaven. Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” And
while it is seemingly a prayer, the chapter, in fact, anathematizes the
(M)other: “Thy will not be done. Hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom never
came. You who have been defiled,
belittled, and diminished. Our Blessed
Virgin Mary of Most Precious Blood, menstrual, ephemeral, carnal, eternal.” The
writer, ostensibly a voice removed from the rest of the novel, apostrophizes
the (M)other and continues the recitation, “Dammit,
mother dear. There are serpents in your
garden. Licking your ears with forked
tongues, poisoning your already damaged heart.
I am suffocated by my impotent rage, my eyes are blinded by cataracts [.
. .] I listen intently for snatches of
melody, the piercing high-pitched wail of your song of terror.”[1]
I sing
my own kundiman song to Hagedorn,
though my song is one of gratitude to her and her work. Like her, I was an immigrant during my
formative years. At the tender age of
twelve, my mother, sister, and I left my father to seek a better life in the
United States. Perhaps it was my own
naïveté that allowed me to put on a mask amidst a sea of white faces. I knew then what many scholars of Philippine
American studies have said, that “Americanization” for Filipinos in the United
States, begins at home. The comment
hints at war, the Philippine American War—dubbed by scholars as “America’s
first Vietnam”; at colonialism and all its brutality; at Hollywood’s reign in
the Philippines, successfully exporting the “American” way of life; of
neocolonialism and the “McDonald-ization” of Manila, all of which are major
themes in Hagedorn’s novel.[2] In many ways, the U.S. has
had a hand in the making of the Philippine nation and its citizenry.[3] Nevertheless, to think myself “Americanized”
then is quite a naïve thought. My accent
belied my command of the English language; my clothes revealed the class of a
new immigrant. Our migration, after all,
had much to do with the economic instability in the corrupt and dictatorial
Marcos regime. Though I spoke the
language well enough, I was lost in its idioms.
As soon as I opened my mouth, people thought I was odd: my speech
betrayed a learned, not a vernacular, language.
Unusual, to say the least, of a twelve-year-old. As “Americanized” as I thought I was, I was
experiencing culture shock. And so I
turned to books. I know this is where my
love of reading began. But at that time
there were few books about people of color, by people of color.[4] And the few that were published then I didn’t
know about until my early thirties, when I finally entered college. And so I identified with the characters in my
novels based on my gender and my class.
When I finally had the resources to consider college seriously, not just
a semester here, a class there, as I worked to help support my family, I knew I
wanted to be a literature major. I would
teach literature at the college level, I thought. I loved to read and I loved to talk about
what I’ve read. And the author I enjoyed
reading most: Dickens. I would be a
Victorianist, I thought. A Dickens
scholar, perhaps. That was the plan
until I took an undergraduate course in Asian American Literature and I read
Hagedorn’s Dogeaters. I thought I recognized myself in the
pages of her novel. This is where I
belong, I thought. This is my
people. This is my history. By the time I graduated college I had written
a thesis on two Asian American texts, one of which was Dogeaters. But her novel
continued to haunt me throughout graduate school, where I continued to write
about her work. To say that she has
changed my life isn’t the least an exaggeration.
Published in 1990, Hagedorn’s Dogeaters continues to attract a wide
readership today. The play, which is
based on the novel and first published in 2003 for readers, premiered at the La
Jolla Playhouse in 1998 and at the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York
Shakespeare Festival in 2001. From New
York to California, Hagedorn’s play, like her novel, continues to attract a
wide patronage. San Francisco’s Magic
Theatre, in fact, produced the play early this year. It enjoyed a tremendous success that Magic
Theatre extended its run. Perhaps it was
the campaigns for presidency in the Philippines that brought a re-emergence of
the play, as one of the candidates, Ferdinand Romualdez Marcos, Jr., otherwise
known as “Bongbong” to his compatriots, ran—unsuccessfully—for the
Vice-Presidency. A roman-a-clef about
life in the dictatorial regime of the late Ferdinand Marcos, the play and the
novel seemed a timely reminder and a cautionary tale of what another Marcos
government might bring. Scholars,
journalists, writers, and other commentators, most of whom were alive during
the Marcos presidency, decried the younger’s qualifications and bid for the
Vice Presidency. And though there may be
some who still believe that novels and plays are an aesthetic form, “palpable
and mute / As a globed fruit,” as Archibald McLeish would say of a poem in his
“Ars Poetica,” (though surely no readers in this forum) and though Dogeaters’ literary aestheticism is
indubitable, revealing the writer’s craft, even her musicality (as poet,
playwright, novelist, screenwriter, and bandleader, Hagedorn is also known as a
multimedia performance artist), it is without question a trenchant criticism of
colonialism, neocolonialism, nationalism, the oligarchy, and the oppressive
treatment of the working class, women and LGBTQ. As the scholars Elaine Kim and Rachel Lee
once said, literature elucidates social history and is thus in the service of
social change.
Whether it’s the novel or the play,
it isn’t any wonder that Hagedorn’s Dogeaters
remain popular today. The jaded may say
nothing’s changed, corruption still reigns; I would argue that Bongbong’s
unsuccessful bid is an indication of the Filipino/as’ growing political
awareness.[5] Whether the literary arts is responsible for
such an awakening—whether we can even call it an awakening—is hard to say. Dogeaters
continue to be relevant today because we continue to wrestle with the knotty
issues Hagedorn had set forth nearly thirty years ago.
[1] For all quotations in this paragraph:
Hagedorn, Jessica. Dogeaters. New York: Penguin
Books, 1990. 250, original emphasis.
[2] My use of quotation marks around the
term “American” is to emphasize the ways in which the term participates in and
perpetuates the myth of American exceptionalism. In this case, “America” is a continent that
includes many nations but is used to only designate the United States, thereby
rendering other sovereign nations invisible.
In addition, the myth of American exceptionalism expounds, among other
concepts, the belief that the U.S., unlike other nations, never colonized other
nations. The U.S. history of its
treatment of Native Americans, its history of war against Spain and the consequential
ceding of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, Cuba; the putative “Cold War”
fought in Korea and Vietnam—putative because it was never “Cold” but very
violent in certain geographies—that established the U.S. as a world power all
belie the notion that the U.S. is unlike other countries with a history of
colonialism.
[3] At the same time, Filipinos in the U.S.
dating back to the turn of the 19th century have had a hand in the
making of the U.S. nation state. Several
writers, Carlos Bulosan among others, chronicle this history in their literatures.
[4] “Is there a ‘Filipino American
literature?” Oscar Campomanes begins his seminal essay “Filipinos in the United
States and Their Literature of Exile.”
In Reading the Literatures of
Asian America. Shirley Geok-lin Lim
and Amy Ling, Eds. Philadelphia: Temple
UP; 1992. 49-78.
[5] The novel itself is replete with
metaphors of sleeping and waking.
*****
Sheila Bare is an independent scholar and a life-long student. Lately, she has been studying Buddhism. When her nose is not in a book or in a cooking pan, you may find her on a yoga mat or out for a run. And there are those days when she tries to write. Best to stay away from her during those times. Unless, of, course you bring with you a good bottle of wine and talk about books. She was raised by two parents and now lives somewhere on planet earth.
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