VINCE GOTERA Reviews
Dogeaters
by Jessica Hagedorn
(Pantheon, New York, 1990)
State
of War by Ninotchka Rosca
(Norton, New York, 1988)
[First published in Pilipinas:
A Journal of Philippine Studies No. 21,
Fall 1993]
“The jeepney”—these words open David Joel
Steinberg’s sociohistorical profile entitled The Philippines: A Singular and a Plural Place, second edition.
“Decorated with tassels, bits of plastic stripping, foil, mirrors, paint, and
virtually anything else that can be attached to the chassis,” writes Steinberg,
“the jeepneys are a folk art extension of their individual Filipino owners.”
Steinberg’s description is accompanied by a photograph: a jeepney emblazoned
with a self-advertisement—“ROMANTICO”—and, in smaller letters, the name of the
driver—“Roman Tiko.” Such delightful word play emblematizes Philippine culture
and the national psyche: a baroque fascination with minutiae, balanced against
a greatness of personal gesture. Such (re)doubling is exemplified in turn by
Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and
Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War, two
novels which, together, signify much about the Philippines as (in Steinberg’s
words) “a singular and a plural place.”
In Dogeaters, Hagedorn’s character Senator
Avila proclaims, “Food is the center of our ritual celebrations, our baptisms,
weddings funerals. You can’t describe a real Pinoy without listing what’s most
important to him—food, music, dancing, and love—most probably in that order.”
The very title of the novel foreshadows Avila’s first item, but more
interestingly, given the intricate co-penetration of everything American and
Filipino in Dogeaters, Hagedorn’s
title strokes the forbidden fruit—the food all Pinoys “stateside” disavow as
primitive, pre-colonial, pariah.
Dogeaters is replete with lists and
catalogs of all varieties and flavors: Rio, one of several narrators, recalls
her mother’s “perfumes, her jars of creams and ointments, her gleaming tubes of
lipstick in red and lavender shades, her jewelry boxes inlaid with pearls and
carnelian, her tortoise-shell combs and brushes, the round boxes of scented
talcum, and a black lacquered music box from Japan.” I quote at length here to
point to Hagedorn’s minute and caressing attention to shapes, colors,
textures—evoking the evanescent fragrances and ephemeral traces of memory.
The most
exotic lists in Dogeaters are
catalogs of food (as Senator Avila would aver) and these listings expose the
multiplex connections of Hagedorn’s fictional world with precolonial Philippine
life, with Spanish and American colonization, and with contemporary popular
culture as a transnational fabric. Breakfasts of “scrambled eggs over
garlic-fried rice, side of longaniza
sausages and beef tapa, kalamansi
juice, and fresh pineapple”; meriendas
of “minced red salted duck eggs dabbed with vinegar [and] rice with crunchy dilis”; dinners of “peppery sweet lechon kawali, grilled bangus, and ... an Ilocano-inspired pinakbet with bitter-melon, squash,
okra, and stringbeans stewed with cloves of garlic, bits of pork fat, and salty
fermented shrimp bagoong”; secret
midnight feast[s of] rice, lechon, kangkong
adobo, and more leche flan”; even
the folk invocation, “Asin, suca / get-teng, luya / bawang, lasona” ... “Salt,
vinegar / scissors, ginger / garlic, onion.” I am reminded of a joke from my
childhood in Manila: Elvis’s hit song “I’m All Shook Up” rendered as “Amoy
Suca”—smells like vinegar (or, if one pronounces the second word sans glottal
stop, vomit).
Hagedorn
exquisitely modulates her food lists to reveal nuances of Philippine life.
Rio’s grandmother, Lola Narcisa, for example, declares her (backstairs)
identification with the provinces, with the bakya
crowd, through her late-night snacks of dried fish, while her husband Whitman
(to be read as “white man”) is fed “special astronaut food available only in
North America’; we note here Hagedorn’s juxtaposition of racial and national
influences, but once we know that Whitman’s “exotic miracle diet” is “priceless
orange space food”—that is, Tang—we
also realize the consummate ironies of genuine and fake which pepper the entire
novel. When Hagedorn’s Imelda-figure, dreaming, sees “a box of chocolate
seashells [on] her pillow” and hears of “Iguana
stew,” we rediscover the veneer of colonialism laid over native wood. When
street kid Joey Sands, hiding out from authorities, lives on “tepid cups of
powdered Nescafé with plenty of condensed milk and too much sugar,” we know the
despair of colonial oppression, of being choked with ersatz, with the fake and
paltry. When the choice selections in Rio’s mother’s dinner party are “Del
Monte De Luxe Asparagus Spears, ... Bonnie Bell Sweet Sliced Pickles, Jiffy
Peanut Butter, packages of Velveeta,” et cetera, we note how far Philippine
life has migrated from the natural, the primal, the simple. Throughout all
these details, we marvel at Hagedorn’s panache and acumen in evoking grand
themes through such quotidian minutiae.
Ninotchka
Rosca, in State of War, uses a
diametrically opposed narrative method—the sweeping, operatic gestures of
ballet, the movement of symphonic arias and oratorios—a fictional equivalent to
Steinberg’s jeepney labeled in luminous capital letters, “ROMANTICO.” Recalling
Hagedorn’s hierarchical list of the Filipino’s favorite things, Rosca’s focus
is on the subsequent items after food:
music and dance. Like a sonata—or
perhaps more properly, a suite—State of
War is divided into three sections, or movements: an opening section which
follows three young Filipinos at a Dionysian island festival during the Marcos
years; a middle section tracing the three’s genealogies through four hundred
years in the Philippines; and a third section to close the narrative frame, a
reprise of the orgiastic festival and its explosive finale. Right from the
start, Rosca weaves music and dance into the novel’s narrative fabric; Anna is
irresistibly drawn into the festival mob dancing around the village plaza—“her
feet found their niche in the drumbeats ... the intricate patter they wove on
the asphalt, a pattern of small steps and halts”—and through her mind flits
“the disquieting thought [that] she was dancing the pattern of her life.” Dance
is translated into a metonym for the progress of one’s life, or since we are
inside a novel, narrative.
Rosca stitches
together the novel’s three movements by the use of an ostinato, a recurrent
musical figure—Ferdinand Magellan, the
crazy old coot; took five ships and circumcised the globe. This snatch
of children’s song, appearing and
reappearing throughout the novel, underlines the omnipresence of colonialism;
the replacement of circumnavigated
with circumcised is both obscenely
humorous and indicative that the Filipino “grows up” via resistance to that
colonialism. Another evocative ostinato is the recurring popular song
“Skyboats” which describes “a boat in the sky bearing a woman who said no,
she’d rather not, thanks but no.” This image initially refers to Anna’s
grandmother Mayang, who becomes emotionally estranged from her husband, but
later refers to Anna herself, as she joins the anti-government resistance and
then endures police torture. The “boat in the sky” parallels the heavenly
portents which appear throughout the novel, but also recapitulates the human
connection with the heavenly, as in the night scene of the “poor folks’
festival,” where peasants carrying oil lamps like “fallen stars” watch the sky,
believing that “angels parade up there ... with their own candles and torches.”
When a meteor shower “describ[es] a slow parabola across the sky,” the peasants
respond with song: “all the men and a women were singing and a river of melody
flowed between sky and earth”; the sacred, contrapuntal bridge between human
and heaven, therefore, is music.
While
Hagedorn dissects the ordinary yet exotic minutiae of everyday life, Rosca
paints a transcendent interpenetration of the cosmic and the commonplace,
through her often dreamlike narration and the recurrence of omens. In the
novel’s opening, Adrian’s grandfather dreams of “the sun and moon together, at
the horizon. Both were in full strength—one red-orange; the other golden.” In
an apocalyptic crescendo at the novel’s close (a section aptly titled “The Book
of Revelations”), this dream-vision is literalized: at sunset, “the moon bodied
forth from the sea, pale orange, full…. The sun and moon, nearly of equal
dimensions, shoulder to shoulder at the horizon”—a dance of heavenly bodies
hailed by various characters as “terrifying,” even “pestilential.” This image
prefigures the novel’s explosive denouement, but more importantly, it
highlights Rosca’s literary command of the miraculous: in the realm of science,
the moon, as a reflective rather than incandescent body, cannot appear full and
be simultaneously next to the sun in the sky, a near-eclipse, but in the
context of the portent-laden cosmology of the traditional Filipino, such a
conjunction is not only possible but expressive—a cosmic language, a grand
signifier, a sentence in the sky which the initiated can read. In a novel
revealingly entitled State of War, the
music of the spheres melds with the cacophony of war, the heavens in significant
harmony with the human.
Where
Hagedorn focuses on the noun, Rosca concentrates on the verb. Hagedorn’s
obsession with setting is paralleled by Rosca’s emphasis on plot. Sentence
fragments emblazon Hagedorn’s style while the periodic sentence exemplifies
Rosca’s. As Hagedorn delves into the real, Rosca flares into dream. Despite
such stylistic and narrative dichotomy, Hagedorn and Rosca inevitably meet in
the realm of surrealism, or perhaps more appropriately, magical realism. As
might be predicted by the juxtapositional ironies which are the hallmark of
both surrealism and magical realism, Hagedorn and Rosca are relentlessly
postmodern: their characters are assailed on all sides by the crushing forces
of society, the schizoid montage of late-twentieth-century life, the haunting,
double-edged beauty of an endangered world. The Philippines, portrayed in both
novels as darkly strange and aberrant, becomes a nexus of natural and social
forces, a site wherein crisscross history, ideology, and story in an
ontological and epistemological welter. Against such a tangled backdrop, the
drama of these novels is embodied in questions of individual physical survival
and, by extension, moral revival—questions which revolve around the person as
well as the body politic, the singular as well as the plural (to recall
Steinberg’s terms). Read widely as allegories of the Marcos regime, as
historical or sociological parables, Dogeaters
and State of War should be
reconsidered, I propose, as simultaneously grotesque and graceful works of art
that finally offer a glimmer of salvation, a hint of transcendence in the midst
of contemporary decay and decadence. Returning to Hagedorn’s hierarchical list
of favorite Filipino things—food, music, and dance complemented by love—what Jessica Hagedorn and Ninotchka
Rosca are ultimately about is the potential of human integration and synergy
within societal and natural fragmentation, the possibility of love among the
ruins.
Vince
Gotera
Humboldt
State University
Fall 1993
*****
Vince Gotera is Editor of the North American Review and a professor of English at the University of Northern Iowa. Recent poems appeared in The American Journal of Poetry; the HIV Here & Now poem-a-day countdown; A Prince Tribute (from Yellow Chair Review); Delirious: A Poetic Celebration of Prince; and Highland Park Poetry.
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