EILEEN TABIOS Engages
A Small Party in a Garden: Revised and Critical Edition by Linda Ty-Casper(PALH, 2026)
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Though I didn’t read it until this year, I’d long known that Linda Ty-Casper’s A Small Party in a Garden, first published in 1988, critiqued Ferdinand Marcos, Sr.’s Martial Law rule. (Reviews of that First Edition are featured HERE.) But one advantage to reading her novel in 2026 is seeing the prescience with which the novel hearkened what since has happened in the Philippines. Simplistically, political leadership has not risen to its responsibilities of good governance such that the country has suffered from, among many other elements, the events and effects of Marcos, Sr.; Rodrigo Duterte (currently on trial at the International Criminal Court at the Hauge for charges of “crimes against humanity”); and always corruption corruption and corruption.
I am reminded of a political science paper I wrote as a college student in 1981-2 where I had noted—critiqued—the conflict of interest between the socio-economic elite as the source of political leadership in the Philippines.
That said, I was unaware of Cornell University’s role among the Philippine’s educated elite. So I was surprised—and literarily impressed—by how the author used that crowd and context for her critique. I suppose one need not be so surprised since Ty-Casper knows of the academic world through her Harvard studies and the teaching assignments of her husband, the critic Len Casper. But A Small Party in a Garden delivers the role of Ivy League-educated alumni as abusers of the system and to portray elite and complicit rule. Talk about an unexpected twist on the term “Dark Academia”! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_academia )
As Charlie Samuya Veric notes in his useful Introduction:
‘It is possibly the first Filipino novella to grapple with Cornell-educated intellectuals with care and sensitivity. Since the founding of the Southeast Asia Program at the height of the Cold War, generations of specialists in Southeast Asian Studies were trained at Cornell that produced historians, anthropologists, and sociologists whose works came to define contemporary postcolonial historiography from the 1960s to the present, including Reynaldo Ileto, Vicente Rafael, Patricio Abinales, and Caroline Hau, among others. The program was established at Cornell as a US Cold War instrument to contain communism and promote liberal values in the region. The novella touches partly on this theme but its remarkable value lies in the fact that it toggles between historicity and fictionality—namely, between truth and imagination. As a work of historical fiction, its foundation consists of facts, yet one that extends the reach of truth to include human conflicts, contradictions, vulnerabilities, and uncertainties that only literature can plumb to great effect.’
A Small Party in a Garden is powerful—lingering long in the mind long after you’ve read it. A particular strength is the writing’s palpable manifestation of an oppressive environment—what Veric calls in his Introduction as “stifling.” It’s a fitting tone: oppressive… oppression. But it’s always challenging for a writer to manifest atmosphere and Ty-Casper’s mastery makes me speculate that she’d be great at the speculative horror genre.
Another genre in which I feel she’d be masterful is poetry. I’m reminded of this upon reading an Afterword by scholar Lynn M. Grow that begins:
‘As difficult as it is to imagine that a creative writer’s publishing career could extend to 85 years, Linda Ty-Casper’s has. Her first publication was a poem, titled “The Ant,” published at age nine in the Philippine Journal of Education, a publication for which she received a one-peso honorarium. Her most recent publication is also a poem: “Running Secretly, Singing,” written in the mid-1980’s, but not published until her 94th birthday, September 17, 2025, in The Halo-Halo Review, accompanied by an article by Eileen R. Tabios, the journal’s editor. Tabios also cites and comments on the only other known Ty-Casper poems: those of the character Telly in Ty-Casper’s 1985 novel Awaiting Trespass (A Pasion). On the basis of “Running Secretly, Singing” alone it is clear that had she chosen to write more poetry, she would have been one of the Philippines’ greatest poets.”’
(The referenced articles on Linda’s poetry are available at Issue No. 20 of The Halo-Halo Review.)
Lynn's Afterword reminds me of a private (now public) speculation on my part, that is, when Ty-Casper sacrificed a law career to become a novelist, did she also sacrifice her poetry?
I am not at all saying that Ty-Casper would change her mind about her choices; she was/is correct in thinking that her historical fiction writings are needed for an outside-herself purpose that she has summarized several times: *If history is a country’s biography, literature is its autobiography.* As I said in reviewing her memoir, “With gratitude, [Filipinos] should mind the lessons of [Linda’s] life: not writing so much as speaking on our own behalf instead of letting others determine our identity and history.”
Nonetheless, I don't dispute Lynn's assessment. Ty-Casper is known as a novelist and yet I do believe that if she had written more poems, as Lynn put it, "she would have been one of the Philippines’ greatest poets.”
Still, my slogan is "Poetry as a way of life," that is, that Poetry with a capital P is something larger than writing verse-poems. In this sense, Ty-Casper used her words for a larger cause and in that way became a great poet as well.
Noting that reading A Small Party in a Garden made me think she'd be great at the horror genre also makes me think that great writers are often inherently multi-genre, and Ty-Casper seems to be such.
A Small Party in a Garden was first published in 1988 by New Day, two years after the EDSA People Power Revolution that toppled the first Marcos rule; this 2026 edition published by PALH is timely for today’s times. It’s not just politically prophetic but the novel itself literarily stands the test of time with the stellar, epigraphical quality of many sentences (hinting at her poetic prowess). One can see such with its very first words; the novel begins:
IT IS A SMALL PARTY in a garden. Firewalls trap the voices and the whirring of electric fans plugged behind new shrubs attempting to flower. The lights from the house drift out, the haze of a descended sun unable with the roses to climb the stone fence. A dark inverted pool without ripples, the sky is another wall. I think of the cliffs of Montserrat and the wrens nesting in the dry bushes …
The thought is so unattached to the evening that I look up from myself,…
Incidentally, A Small Party in a Garden is often characterized as a novella (instead of a novel). I lack knowledge of how the term novella came to be applied to this work. Perhaps it’s simply because it’s considered short; its first edition came to 98 pages. But for its breadth—and importance—that far exceeds its page-count, I consider it a novel.
A Small Party in a Garden is not just recommended reading but a Must-Read.
*****
Eileen R. Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, essays, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent publications include a children’s book Tata Efren’s Forever Laughter (with Mel Vera Cruz and Jeannie E. Celestial); the novels The Balikbayan Artist and DoveLion; the poetry collections Engkanto in the Diaspora and Because I Love You, I Become War; an autobiography The Inventor; the short story collections The Erotic Space Around Art Objects and Getting To One; and an art monograph Drawing Six Directions. More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com
