LYNN M. GROW Reviews
The Balikbayan Artist by Eileen R. Tabios
(Penguin Random House SEA, 2024-2025)
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Eileen R. Tabios’ newest novel, The Balikbayan Artist, uses in its title the word “balikbayan,” which refers to Filipinos in the diaspora returning to the Philippines. In reading what is her second published novel, I was reminded of her first novel: DoveLion: A Fairy Tale For Our Times.1 Both books intertwine the history and techniques of painting in a context of dictatorship in the Philippines. Both plots include the machinations of the CIA. Both books rely on a fictional parallel island country to the Philippines for partial development of their stories. Both end with the dictatorship overthrown. Both also rely on the Filipino indigenous trait known as “Kapwa,” 2 which posits the connection of all things, as the philosophical construct in which the stories are interlaid.
But the differences are as important as the similarities. For one, The Balikbayan Artist is more accessibly written than the more experimentally written DoveLion. A salient factor in this distinction is the decreased number of topics and references that may not be known immediately without research by the reader. DoveLion calls for rumination about scientific matters such as Einstein's relativity theory and quantum physics; philosophical theories such as presentism and eternalism in conjunction with compatibility with Kapwa3; and the psychological significance of human interactions such as bisexuality, bondage/domination and sadism/ masochism. The Balikbayan Artist dispenses with these considerations as well as other erudite allusions in DoveLion, like that to d'Yquem wine. The reader has to bring less to the table also because Tabios brings more, including the directness of didacticism. Although the astute critic Thomas Fink termed Tabios' ex cathedra dicta in DoveLion “overt and persistent didacticism,” she is, through the voice of the male protagonist in The Balikbayan Artist, Vance Igorta, forthright about the value of didacticism: “it's not necessarily a bad thing. It wasn't until the nineteenth century that 'didactic' came to be used as criticism for work that appears overburdened with instructive, factual, or educational information to the detriment of the reader's enjoyment.”
Didacticism originally was meant both to teach and entertain, notes Igorta. (141) He goes further with didacticism's value: “didacticism is not only appropriate but necessary in interrogating dictatorships.” (145) Readers, though, are not simply handed all conclusions and assessments along with information and even instruction. Each reader must still determine the value and implications of the material, even as basically as whether it is preachy or inspiring. Here is one—admittedly lightweight—example: “The uncles said that the Carlos Rossi [jug wine] tasted like carabao shit.” (125) While a reader might not question that this was the concurrence of the uncles, some readers might demur from the taste assessment, if only because they had no taste experience with carabao excrement.
The tone early on is kept lighthearted, yet still in keeping with Igorta’s art. “It was time to reflect the Filipino—including my Filipino self—in my art, not through abstraction but through didactic specificity.” (46) Early in the book, Igorta invites Juan, an artist in the neighborhood, to lunch. Aga, another artist, invites himself. Upon their arrival, Igorta announces the menu, consisting of ten Filipino dishes which were gifts from a wedding celebration that never transpired. (47-48) (Chapter 15 opens with the culinary note that “One of the best parts of being a balikbayan was catching up on sorely missed Filipino food.” (193)) After being joined by Eve, a balikbayan poet, the group later enjoyably recalls halo-halo which was not part of their feast since its shaved ice would have melted during the journey from the wedding location to Igorta’s house. But their discussion of halo-halo allows for Igorta’s assessment of the dessert, which can be considered ironic, comic, or straightforward (or some combination of these possibilities): “It's no exaggeration to say that the halo-halo is one of the country's greatest achievements.” (96)
The lighthearted, good-natured banter among Igorta, Juan, Aga, and Eve creates the sensory pleasure of a congenial social atmosphere, especially when the social joyousness is accompanied by the sensuous natural beauty of the land and sea: “the ocean...Its greenish and light blue waters presented a pleasing contrast to the beach’s light brown and cream sand. The sand's grains were so fine, it was powdery and pleasant against the fingers I was raking through it. Meanwhile, the water was so clear that, depending on its ebb and flow, it occasionally revealed the lovely formations of pink, purple, yellow, and orange coral connected with each other through a lacey structure.” (68)
The sunny, beautiful, and joyful facets of life—life as it should be—in The Balikbayan Artist exacerbate the contrast of violence, greed, insensitivity, depredation, and degradation of the human spirit brought on by the dictatorship of President Caasi, Jr.4 One example is the fate of Archie Francisco, a university student activist who, at an open forum, asked the dictator's brother Tirso whether he would have been able to acquire the country's largest electrical utility had he not been his brother's favorite sibling. Archie is thrown out of the forum by Tirso's guards, who then “broke Archie Francisco's nose, some ribs, and one leg in a dirty smelly alley with no witnesses.... A few days later, Archie Francisco was found dead with signs of beating and torture on his mangled body and face.” (168-169) This violent lawlessness increases as other functionaries, like the mayor of Surat, the town in which Vance has settled, feel empowered to do what the dictator does. The mayor's soldiers (a private mini-army) scour the area for girls (not women) for him and kidnap Perla, a schoolgirl. A male friend, Henry, tries to intervene, but the soldiers beat and kidnap him too. The mayor spends hours raping Perla and then turns her over to the soldiers, who gang rape her and then murder her and Henry. Later that afternoon Igorta and Juan meet at the Surat beach. Juan looks toward Igorta “and turned to the direction where the sun would die” (117), symbolic of the extinction of joie de vivre that the country’s beauty could otherwise have fostered.
While many balikbayans return as tourists, Igorta returns permanently, given his disappointment with his treatment in the U.S., both as a person of color and as an artist. While aging into art world obscurity, Igorta is nonetheless “The Foremost Artist of the Manong Generation.” The Manongs were Filipinos who had immigrated during the 1920s and 1930s to work the agricultural fields of California and Hawaii as well as Alaska’s fishing industry.
But Igorta did not suffer in the U.S. as much as other Manongs because his artistic talent facilitated his escape from the backbreaking stoop labor that field work entailed, labor that left many Manongs with crippled knees and backs. As well, Igorta was able to leave the California agricultural areas where racist restrictions and violence abounded. In Chapter 9, he recounts that he was beaten and called “Monkey” and “Fucking Flip” by a group of angry white men when, in town running an errand for his boss, he so desperately needed to use the bathroom that he did not see the “NO FILIPINOS ALLOWED”5 sign over the entry to the eatery he had entered. And he has never married because of the shortfall of Filipinas in his area and the proscription against marrying—or even consorting with—white women. All these factors left him lonely and isolated, with no family to love him and an art world that had become unreceptive to his paintings.
But it seems Igorta also may have returned at the behest of Jane Wentworth, daughter of an art mentor and now CIA Director. He is tasked with keeping his ear to the ground for potentially useful intelligence to transmit back to a U.S. government concerned about events brewing in Southeast Asia. In this capacity his life depends on practicing the art of passing as a normal, harmless balikbayan, and in this way he entwines art and politics, which is the novel's driving force of plot.
Igorta’s return, then, is not only motivated by nostalgia or yearning to see family again, as it has been for so many others. He knows that he will not be returning to the environment from which he emigrated in 1924: peaceful, stable, and imbued with traditional “timeless folkways' sacred, seasonal mysteries,” as Leonard Casper once put it.6
In fact, Igorta ends up in the predicament of not being fully comfortable, respected, and appreciated.7 As Aileen Cassinetto puts it in “Advance Praise for THE BALIKBAYAN ARTIST, “Eileen R. Tabios has redefined the word “Balikbayan” to signify existential longing and fortitude.” (n.p.) This implication of balikbayan as existential, in its application to Igorta, involves more than “pertaining to existence” or “empirical.” It also extends to the foundation of existentialism itself, the philosophical position of isolation of the individual in a hostile or an indifferent universe and the principle that existence precedes essence.8
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In The Balikbayan Artist, art directly drives the plot, whereas in DoveLion it is the controlling motif but not as inextricably entwined with the plot. In The Balikbayan Artist, each chapter in Part I opens with “The artist thought” and then an assertion about color. Within the chapters are passages about art theory and history, techniques of painting, explications of aspects of the individual works of an artist, and information about the lives and milieus of various artists. Between DoveLion and The Balikbayan Artist, enough material is presented to constitute a respectable university level Introduction to Art course while, in the process, exemplifying Tabios' stance on didacticism. In The Balikbayan Artist, readers glide through this material minus angst over a final exam buoyed by the secret agent type of plot and the array of interesting characters. Igorta does not drive an Aston Martin, carry a Walther PPK, or imbibe Bollinger '53 champagne; his sophistication emanates from his artistic genius and his human worth, not the price tags of his trappings, but he does arouse intrigue on the part of the reader.
The novel's first three words are immediately riveting: “Colour is promiscuous,” delivered in the first-person voice of Igorta himself. He then explains, “I created many paintings exploring how colours engage with each other.” (1) He has just arrived in Surat, a fictional village named by the Filipino word for 'letter.'” (Chapter 1, note 1: 258) And, though not quite a homonym, “Surat” and “Seurat” are so orthographically similar that how Igorta’s “colours engage with each other” calls to mind Seurat's chromoluminarism, the Neo-impressionist style defined by separation of color into individual dots (a practice also known as divisionism) and pointillism—applying small strokes or dots of color to a surface so that from a distance they visually blend. In turn, this blending (merging) serves to metaphorically invoke Kapwa, to which Tabios' “Author's Note” (xi-[xii]) is devoted: Kapwa, the interconnection of all things throughout time, including the oneness of past, present, and future, accounts for Igorta’s realization that “being an artist required being a voracious learner of anything and everything because art's expanse encompasses anything and everything.” (5)
By Chapter 11 readers are cognizant that, while the novel intertwines allusions to Western and Filipino artworks and artists (cf., Juan's T-shirt “emblazoned with Matisse's words: “Creativity takes courage” (68)), its plot and characterization concentrate on Filipino art. Juan's experience with Baguio artists' modus operandi starts with selection of material on which to work: “They were experimenting with different types of materials...they used bamboo, used nails, old posters, books, textiles, feathers, rocks, computer parts, broken tiles, broken glass, hand-made paper, threads, rubber pieces, trash, bones, beads. One even used a dead cat. They were sticking everything and anything that they thought would enhance their visual story-telling.” (69) Other Filipino artists are noted, like Amorsolo: “Fernando Amorsolo y Cueto (1892-1972) was a portraitist and painter of Philippine landscapes that were often populated by Filipinos in local garb. The first to be recognized as a National Artist of the Philippines, he was acclaimed for his application of impressionism as well as the use of lighting and backlighting. I admire how his illuminated landscapes often portrayed the radiance of Philippine sunlight while presenting traditional Filipino customs, culture, fiestas, and ordinary labour such as harvesting.” (87-88)9
Chapter 22 features Igorta and Eve discussing the value of art, answering Eve's concern about it being self-indulgent: “Making art ...can be as much about exploration of what's unknown as it is an affirmation of what we already know or what we find interesting.” (138) In other words, artistic creation is at one with scientific research as a quest for truth about the fundamental ontological question “What is real (existent)?”10
In Chapter 34, a discussion of Jenifer K. Wofford's painting “MacArthur Nurses” (2008) provides a concrete example of art being literally a search for truth. It brings to light how the famous photograph of General Douglas MacArthur and his white American officers landing in Leyte on October 30, 1944 had been tampered with before its dissemination. President Sergio OsmeĆa and diplomat/general Carlos Romulo11 had been cropped out, giving the false impression that Americans alone had liberated the Philippines from the Japanese Occupation. Wofford's painting replaces the men of the photo with Filipina nurses as heroes. (210) Wofford depicts the eight nurses in knee-high water with very mild wave action. The background of light blue-grey with an irregular white band of sky behind the shoulders of the nurses—who symbolize healing as well as healing of the nation—conveys placidity, as though all is now stable and peaceful, unlike the theatricality of MacArthur's coming ashore in the photo.12
Chapter 22's concluding example illustrates that just discovering what we don't—or even can't—know has epistemological as well as ontological value. Igorta recounts that “While I'd painted the back of a woman's body to indicate she is looking at an abstract painting further in the background's depths, I also could not paint her looking back at the viewer(s) because I could not imagine what her face would look like. As a Manong and a person whose brown skin made me a target for racists, I had scant opportunity to engage with women. I'd wanted to portray the opportunities lost to me as a lover, a husband, and even a father. By painting the back of a woman, I made her identity unknown to me because her face was hidden. I made her no one.” (144-145) This can serve as a quintessential exemplification of the inextricable intertwining of art, politics, and the explication of reality. Even if we find ourselves in the position of Igorta or of the title character of Thomas Carlyle's 1834 novel Sartor Resartus, shouting questions into the “Sibyl cave of destiny” yet receiving no answer save an echo, we have found the cave and we have propounded the questions. But in The Balikbayan Artist as in DoveLion, much more has been accomplished. The dictator has been supplanted; hope has returned. In Parts II – III (chapters 33-39), “The artist thought” no longer opens each chapter because Igorta has died, but his legacy of art, theoretical formulations about art and its political ramifications, and his courage and successful mission to help restore democracy to the Philippines live on. Thus, The Balikbayan Artist is accessible yet richly substantive.
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Notes
1 DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times. [New York]: AC Books, 2021.
2 I have transcribed the quoted material containing British spellings but in my commentary used American spellings. In the same vein, I have transcribed the non-English expressions but followed the customary American practice of italicizing them in my commentary.
3 Tabios defines and elaborates on the applications of Kapwa in recent works such as The In(ter)vention of the Hay(na)ku: Selected Tercets 1996-2019 (East Rockaway, New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2019): 203; The Inventor: A Poet's Transcontinental Autobiography (East Rockaway, New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2023): 38 , 42-44; and DoveLion: 240, 267. A book-length work on Kapwa, especially its application to Philippine lifestyles, is Kristin De Guia, Kapwa: The Self in the Other (Pasig City: Anvil, 2005).
4 Transparently, the Ferdinand Marcos years of despotic rule in the Philippines. Marcos' reign, sustained by his “detention centers” (concentration camps), private army of thugs committing horrific acts of violence, and plunder of national resources totaling many millions of dollars to enhance his own personal fortune while his people suffered deprivation to the point of impoverishment and desperation have been well documented.
5 A variant, yet more emphatic, was “POSITIVELY NO FILIPINOS,” which was the antithetical impulsion for naming the current weekly on-line news magazine Positively Filipino.
6 New Writing from the Philippines: A Critique and Anthology. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1966: 38.
7A much more minor scale of separation anxiety is expressed concretely in the lyrics of Neil Diamond's 1971 vocal solo “I am”: L.A.'s fine...
But you know I keep thinking about
making my way back....
I'm New York City born and raised
But nowadays I'm lost between two shores.
L.A.'s fine but it ain't home
New York's home but it ain't mine no more.
I am. I said
To no one there.
And no one heard at all,
Not even the chair.
I am, I cried.
I am, said I.
And I am lost, and I can't even say why.
Diamond said that this song was so difficult to write that it took him four months to do, which provides some perspective on how much more excruciating it can be for someone from a different country, a different culture, a different first language, who grew up with different food around mostly different-looking people to move even semi-permanently to another land, especially when the result includes prejudice and hostility to the point of physical violence.
8 This is, technically, titled atheistic existentialism, but it does not mandate repudiation of religion and/or the ontological absence of the Divine. It only need require the premise that we first exist and then make ourselves into what we are, for better or worse. Thus, each individual has free choice, and we are totally responsible for what we do and cannot shift blame for our own evil to the Divinity or other entities. Christian existentialism, usually classified as the only other form of existentialism, originated with the 19th Century theologian Soren Kierkegaard and is considered theo-philosophical because it is bound up with Divinity. But this binary polarization between atheistic and Christian is faulty. Many religions other than Christianity can espouse existentialism (e.g. Judaism, Islam, Hinduism), so the more accurate and less incendiary terms for existentialism would be theistic and non-theistic.
9 Also, mundane scenes of ordinary daily life, like “Under the Mango Tree” (1955), which exemplifies his backlighting technique. Amorsolo's rural scenes may remind some viewers of Norman Rockwell's depictions of United States small town life.
10 The precept that art is a procedure for finding truth is famously imbedded in the last two lines of John Keats' poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) and is supported by renowned British mathematics professor Ian Stewart's book WHY BEAUTY IS TRUTH: A HISTORY OF SYMMETRY (New York: Basic Books, 2007):
Beauty is truth, truth is beauty, – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know
11 Romulo also was, early in his adult life, a playwright. His plays in Daughters for Sale (1924) are lightweight comedies, but Romulo did have a place in the early emergence of English language Philippine literature, though his 1951 novel The United is propagandistic, devoid of literary merit. His non-creative writing was more highly respected: he won a Pulitzer Prize for his articles about military preparedness before World War II, and he authored 18 books. He was also co-founder of the Boy Scouts of the Philippines, Brigadier General in the Philippine Army and Major General in the U.S. Army (during wartime service awarded both a Purple Heart and a Silver Star), President of the U.N. General Assembly in 1949-1950, and a diplomat who was Ambassador to the U.S.
12 Tabios has great regard for this work: “I'd consider Filipina-American artist Jennifer K. Wofford's ‘MacArthur Nurses’ painting to be among the greatest that will come out of the 21st Century—as magnificent as last century's 'Guernica' by Picasso.” In Lynn M. Grow, “Writer Eileen Tabios' Lines of Work: The Hay(na)ku.” Positively Filipino 6 September 2023: 6 unnumbered pages.
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Lynn M. Grow is Emeritus Senior Professor of English, Broward College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He received all his degrees from The University of Southern California: B.A., English and Philosophy, 1967; M.A., English, 1968; Ph.D., English, 1971; M.A. Philosophy, 1972.
