PAULINO
LIM, JR. Reviews
Writer in Exile/Writer in Revolt:
Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan, edited by Jeffrey
Arellano Cabusao
(University Press of America, an
imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, 2016)
Decentering Carlos Bulosan
This
remarkable anthology introduces Carlos Bulosan to 21st readers, and
bares the need to remember the history of one’s country as a way to know who
you are as a person. Thanks to Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao, associate
professor at Bryant University, for editing this volume that serves both as a
primer of the work done by and about Bulosan within a span of nearly fifty
years, and a prospectus for projects that an interested student, critic, and
cultural historian undertakes. It gathers essays, poems, facsimiles of art
works, letters and photos from artists and literary critics in the United
States and the Philippines at different historical moments of tension and
change – the beginning of the Cold War period of the 1950s, the Asian American
Movement and mass movement for Philippine national sovereignty in the 1960s and
1970s, the People Power Revolution in the Philippines in the 1980s, the rise of
the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s, and the antiwar and environmental
justice movements of the 21st century. The anthology is a repository
of the collective memory of Bulosan, whose struggles mirror the plight of the
Filipino people fighting tyranny and enduring the hardships of a capitalist
system that enslaves them.
The
editor Jeffrey Cabusao assigns a chapter to each item of the collection, and
groups them under its four parts. For example, Part I includes three chapters:
an elegiac poem “Bulosan Now,” by Alvaro Cardona-Hine; a brief biography
Dolores Stephens Feria, and an essay by E. San Juan, “The Achievement of
Carlos Bulosan.” Like the book’s two-part title, Writer in
Exile/Writer in Revolt, the heading of sections also has two parts: a
nominal title indicating the subject covered, and a participial subtitle as its
theme, both fulfilling the primer and prospectus design of the book.
Part I.
“Bulosan’s Voice: Listening to the Manong Generation,” the participle listening
invites the reader to recreate in the imagination the poet’s “voice” that
comes through in the poems that Feria analyzes in her affectionate brief
biography of the poet. A glance at the remaining subtitles gives the reader an
idea of the scope of the anthology: Part II. “Creating an Alter/native
Filipino Literary Practice”; Part III. “Broadening the Bulosan Canon”; and Part
IV. “Becoming Filipino—Becoming Free.” The participles, listening, creating,
broadening and becoming —expand the possibilities of the biographical,
critical and literary projects that the collected items establish or
illustrate, hence the subtitle “Critical Perspectives on Carlos Bulosan.”
The
section and chapter headings, as well as the detailed listing of the topics of
each chapter, facilitate the search for any topic. Detailed notes at the bottom
of each entry, and a selective bibliography at the end of writings by and about
Carlos Bulosan are also helpful in supporting various projects: archival,
biographic, and investigative. “Commentaries on his works abound,” San Juan
writes, “but a definitive biography is still wanting” (284). He names Dolores
Feria as the real “angel” of Bulosan’s works. It’s a gracious tribute from San
Juan who, more than any other critic or historian, has defined “the position,
meaning, and significance of Bulosan’s writing” (285). Full-length critical
essays of San Juan, dated 1969, 1979, and 2008 anchor three of the four parts
of the anthology.
Jeffrey
Cabusao, who credits San Juan as the central figure in Bulosan criticism,
follows the latter’s pointers for guiding future studies: historicizing,
decentering, and renewing the emancipatory goal of the writer. San Juan
centers Bulosan (his novels, poems, short stories, essays, letters) with the
historical materialist approach of Marxist philosophy. Applied to the
relationship between the U.S. and the Philippines, Marxism can account for the
role of the elite that profits the most from the capitalistic economy, in the
ascent of dictators like Ferdinand Marcos and a fascist president like
Duterte.
On May
20, 2016, six months before the U.S. Presidential election, the Philippine
edition of The Guardian ran this opinion by Tom Smith: “Don’t compare
Trump and Duterte—the Philippines leader is far worse.” Does Trump’s victory
signal the collapse of a broken capitalist system? It seems to be a revolt of
the working class against the established system, but does it merely expose and
further unleash the vicious racism beneath the myth of American Exceptionalism?
How it plays out remains to be seen.
San
Juan has successfully decentered Bulosan from platonic, sentimentalized
romantic, and formalist readings. He has choice epithets (e.g. inept and blind)
for those who misread Bulosan and align his work with the prevailing assimilative
tradition of immigrant writing. Cabusao includes many decentering studies of
Bulosan, some tilting back to San Juan’s Marxist centering. An example is
Michael Viola’s essay: “Filipino American Hip Hop and Class Consciousness:
Renewing the Spirit of Carlos Bulosan” (283). The archival research of Marilyn
Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi has disclosed the existence of an FBI
dossier aimed at gathering evidence of Bulosan being a communist enough to
deport him. The textual analysis of two letters (facsimile and transcription in
the anthology) by Oscar Campomanes and Todd Gernes makes a case for
intertextual reading, showing the epistolary element in the writer’s narrative
strategy. The selective bibliography lists other decentered essays. One entry
stands out: Melinda de Jesus’s “Rereading History/Rewriting Desire Reclaiming
Queerness in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Bienvenido
Santos’s Scent of Apples.”
As a
literature and criticism teacher, I applaud Cabusao for bookending his
anthology with two poems, because it opens up for me the possibility of a
phenomenological reading. The poems are Cardona-Hine’s elegy and Melba Abela,
moving tribute and pledge to continue poet’s quest for realizing the fulfilling
dreams dormant in America is in the Heart. Phenomenology brackets
the subject from the knowledge that surrounds it, and investigates as a
construct of words, for example, Bulosan’s description of his autobiographical America
Is in the Heart as a “mosaic of our lives.” As a Filipino, he must have
known that mosaic is a plant virus that infects abaca, the source of hemp
fiber. This reading intensifies the resonance of mosaic as a pattern and mosaic
as blight. Bracketing the poetry and investigating its construct could yield
knowledge about its “essence,” a suspect term I know, and enshrine Bulosan in
the pantheon where, in the words of the platonist Shelley, “Poets are the
unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
*****
Paulino Lim Jr. is a professor emeritus of English at California State University, Long Beach. He is the author of a quartet of novels set against the dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos, and three short story anthologies. His Alma Mater, the University of Santo Tomas has recently conferred upon him a Lifetime Achievement Award for "significant contributions in Philippine Literature. Lim is also the recipient of the 2016 Presidential Award for overseas Filipinos who have distinguished themselves in their profession.
No comments:
Post a Comment