THE BEGINNING OF LEAVING by ELSA VALMIDIANO

MORGAN HOFFMAN Reviews

 

 The Beginning of Leaving by Elsa Valmidiano

(Querencia Press, 2023)

 

BOOK LINK 

 

Ilocana-American essayist, poet, and author of We Are No Longer Babaylan Elsa Valmidiano has birthed yet another child of the Philippine Diaspora with The Beginning of Leaving, a collection which honors the oral tradition of Philippine peoples while creating something altogether new.

The Beginning of Leaving pays homage to the game of telephone our Philippine ancestors played when they told stories by the fire at night, or while they kept the bedside of a deceased loved one, or while they waded through rice paddies in the hot sun. Each telling of a familiar story promised something different and new. Our ancestors recognized that stories were living beings and they summoned them to aid us in our self-understanding. Valmidiano uses this technique in her collection to dive into the contexts of what it means to be a Diasporic people on settled lands. 

In “Last Three Days in Twentynine Palms” she weaves the story of her sister’s move into her own experiences growing up in foreign lands all while analyzing the relationship between genocide, displacement, and modern-day colonialism.

 

… the coincidences of where we lived and where we find ourselves no matter how short of a time, in the land of ‘little springs and much grass’ wherever we are in the Diaspora, in Ubbog, in Lapog, in Suangna, in Mar-rah, in another’s land that was stolen by settlers of the same white skin who stole our archipelago for four hundred and twenty-five years, who stole the continent we now live on, and the legacy and ignorance of it still ongoing…

 

The medicine here, should Filipino Americans be willing to take it, comes as an invitation to ask bigger questions about what it means to be a Filipino in the Diaspora. Whether we are born in the motherland and carried away, haven’t yet set foot there, or only have one Filipino parent- our contexts affect our existence and the way we fit within our people.

She takes this theme of narration and analysis further in “Aswang Hunger” when she postulates about a new aswang born from modernity and centuries of colonization. She speaks about the rice paddies that are no longer in Cubao and the “industrial hunger” that has since replaced them: “As laughter and stories boom from every corner of the house, it feels as if everyone is looking at me and my siblings, their eyes sunken in from hard work and hunger, an aswang hunger that starves for our sweet American blood one last time.”

Her juxtaposition of aswang and the American Diaspora paints a painful picture of our relationship to our people in the Motherland and begs the question: who are the real aswang? Perhaps it is the Diaspora. We who don’t quite belong. We who are a living reminder of great atrocities and simultaneously a beacon of hope. Perhaps it is our people left behind in the Motherland, locked in the kind of survival that comes from living for hundreds of years on lands heavily exploited. Perhaps we are all aswang.

Valmidiano’s collection is a meditation on the Diasporic oscillation between existential dread and belonging and as such acts as both surgery and salve. She is knitting together multiple timelines and invoking our painful histories as an invitation to process trauma. In her final piece “The Leaving” she ruminates,

 

When my sixteen-month-old self had left my Motherland, I wouldn’t say I left.

I was carried to whatever land I was brought to. There were no explanations. No apologies. Whether my parents’ reasons were for the betterment of our lives and our future, it wasn’t my choice.

But in Murujuga is the first time I left. I. Left.

…Murujuga had marked the beginning of leaving. And when it comes to leaving, we have to start somewhere.

 

In an age where all the medicine people are in hiding the Diaspora has been forced to reinvent our medicines. If I had access to books like this growing up it would have changed the entire trajectory of my life. Assimilated amongst non-Filipinos with a mixed-race identity and no way of understanding who I was, I was nearly lost.

It took me a long time to get through The Beginning of Leaving only because I had to pause to cry, to rage, to sit with my desire to never come back. It was surprising to me that though Valmidiano and I don’t look the same and didn’t grow up in the same city with the same experiences I felt seen by her stories.

Her ability to weave analysis and narrative has created room for the liminal space where conversation and communion collide- with The Beginning of Leaving she has effectively reconstructed the birthing floor of our oral tradition and created a bridge for our ancestors to reach their descendants- wherever in the world we may be.

 

*****

 

Morgan Hoffman is of mixed heritage where her Philippine ancestral roots are Ilocano from Agoo and Masbateño from Monreal, Ticao. Her German ancestral roots are from Baden-Württemberg. She currently resides in Charlotte, North Carolina. Her works have appeared in online publications Anti-Heroin Chic and Pearl Press.

 

 

GETTING TO ONE by EILEEN R. TABIOS and HARRY K STAMMER

 HAROLD LEGASPI Reviews

Getting to One: Flash Fictions by Eileen R. Tabios / Art by harry k stammer

(Sandy Press, Santa Barbara/Australia, 2023)

 

BOOK LINK

I will begin with a close and plurilingual reading of the title—‘Getting to One’, which had led me to think about language and how inter-woven it can be. The title phrase itself is nested, in that it contains plurilingual words within words—

‘ge’ — 各 — gè from Chinese (Pinyin) to English translates to ‘each, respectively,
every, individually’…

‘ting’ — 停 — tíng from Chinese (Pinyin) to English translates as ‘to stop’ – other possible meanings of ‘ting’ include ‘to listen, to hear, to heed, to obey’, ‘a sound of a bell or a chime’ and ‘graceful’.

‘o o’ from Pilipino to English translates as ‘yes’; a green light to keep going—which contradicts the Chinese ‘ting’ — ‘to stop’.

And ‘One’ is a number loaded with symbolism and meaning; it implies unity, togetherness, but also a sense of isolation, solitude and loneliness, which I believe we all (not only readers and writers) may be familiar with. Which led me to think of the reasons for Eileen Tabios’ purpose to thread the epigraph to the vignettes in the book, and as well, Tabios’ collaboration with the writer/artist and musician, harry k stammer.

On the whole, ‘Getting to One’ implies that one is going somewhere (to oneself perhaps?), and that there is movement. 

Getting To One is a collection of vignettes from Tabios and visual poetry (vispo) from harry k stammer, which traverses highly imaginative themes, quaint characters and interesting facts. I read the book closely and seriously. I am not certain this kind of reading is appropriate for the book, but whether it is or not is not the issue—the fact it is being read at all is really something to be proud of. 

I contemplated upon the part of the epigraph for quite some time: ‘…“One”—a bar where each patron must drink alone…’ (which is from ‘Ghost’, an excerpt from Tabios’ novel-in-progress Clandestine DNA). In Tabios’ writings, this part of epigraph appears in each vignette and linked by the surreal bar—’One’, where ‘each patron must drink alone’ (8). Tabios thus weaves her narratives together—texts within texts. This is most evident in the closing vignette of the book, ‘Recycled Afterthought’, which ‘uses one sentence each from the other flash fictions with most being exactly as they were portrayed in the source material, subject to the persona’s pronoun being changed to “you”’ (51).

I will, however, skip to ‘Silence as Condition Precedent’, where the protagonist is a ‘pretender’—‘He claims to prefer being alone but he needs company to listen to his animal stories’ (37). Perhaps in the bar ‘One’, ‘silence [is] a condition precedent’—and ‘drunks bec[o]me regulars only if they’[ve] lost all appetite to be heard’ (37). I do question the paradox of One’s predication—Wouldn’t the bar need patrons that need to be heard in order to be? Otherwise, why bother with it? Stay home. Stay home in comfort. Be unheard and comfortable. And it is here I arrived at the conclusion that the bar ‘One’ is mythical—it doesn’t exist, never has, never will. 

Perhaps the irony of writing this review for Tabios is the notion of the central ‘place’ where activity derives, being ‘One’—a bar, which is the last place on earth I’d read a book. Further, compound the fact that I don’t drink alcohol nor frequent bars, and one can arrive at the comical effects and affects of writing this review. I’m rather like a vegetarian working at the butchers.

But perhaps why this work of fiction and art resonated with me was in the first story, ‘The End of Sundays’. Having friends and family who are single fathers and mothers, marginalised writers, Othered persons, I caught the notion of the bar—‘One’—as a metaphor for an orphanage, where each patron drinks alone…and ‘each would leave alone’ (9). The bar has become the place for ‘One’s’ who have been abandoned; ‘there [are] so many orphans’; each of them deserved ‘a turn’ (9). The tone of the book is thus melancholy, and this resonates with the art by harry k stammer, whose vispo often contain ‘/’ slash[es]—a punctuation used to represent division and fractions and separation. stammer’s colours are stark, and contrast upon each other, representative of the uniqueness of characters written about in Tabios’ fictions.

In ‘Planet M’, the protagonist is a monk who trips over and smashes his face in the mirror causing him to bleed. Planet M lacks aroma—one presumes the monk is celibate—but the protagonist fails to weep—he has no more tears. While the monk bleeds, one questions whether he is still human. The monk ‘feel[s] the warmth of ichor through [his] veins’ (15)…yet, he is ‘not [a] god[’s]’ (15). Planet M may be thought of as not necessarily a planet per se, but a state of mind, which affects the body and heart; conditions the spirit and soul. Planet M—where ‘M’ may stand for mirror / monk / messiah et al—is one which resonates with my ontology, and is perhaps the story which captivated me the most because it is a clear indication of ‘avatars presented by mirrors’, one which places hope in faith in of our lives—to ‘live happily ever after’ through suffering. 

In ‘Polmost Spirytus Rektyfikowany Vodka’, the protagonist is awoken from a dream, and sees his conflict in that ‘No one ever talks about how much fortitude hope requires’. He drinks as a means to forget (that he lack[s] hope and [is] hopeless’ (19). And he dreams an escapist utopia—he is ‘seasteading’—creating artificial islands. And that island is ‘One,’ a bar where each patron must enter alone, drink alone and leave alone. stammer’s art reflects slashes and backslashes—they are touching—indicative of a kind of utopia or unity. This is against a Maya Blue background, which was employed in Maya visual cultural and religious ceremony to signify the god Chaak, their patron deity of rain and agriculture.

‘The Road to Juliana[’s]’ conflict sees the protagonist looking forward to forgetting about his past—a past wherein he was ‘victim of…[a] field of eating disorders, [which] present[ed] a high burn out rate for dieticians…[who] take on [his] anxiety and trauma’ (29). It is a joy to come to the resolution of this vignette, where the protagonist ‘Learn[s] about dogs, [as] he [had] ordered himself’…discover[ing]…a Great Dane named Juliana…[who] once peed on an incendiary bomb…earning [her] a Blue Cross medal. Hence, human anxieties and trauma are turned to non-human joy and fulfilment. Further, anthropomorphism takes place as Juliana earns a Blue Cross medal. So, the protagonist becomes a friend to animals.

Perhaps then, ‘One,’ is not a ‘bar’ where the Othered drink, but an ‘escapist[s] utopia’, ‘an artificial island’ in our minds and hearts—a bar so personal that it can only be reached by oneself and one’s soul-kin, because unfortunately, one must drink alone. Do Tabios and stammer believe we, humans and non-humans, are in effect dying alone? Tabios’ collaboration with stammer indicates not. Tabios’ oeuvre is impressive and I feel she has written an imaginative, dare I say, conflicted narrative in Getting To One. Her creative persistence to imagine and re-imagine ways show our solitude may be people’d through writing/art and collaboration shows how one can mature as a writer and artist. In storytelling, Tabios has written an aporia prevalent in a writer’s pursuit to be understood; and to consciously (even fictively) express isolation in her characters, to perhaps transcend her own.

***** 

Harold Legaspi is an Australian writer born in Manila, Philippines, living in unceded Darug land (Western Sydney, Australia). He holds a Doctor of Arts from University of Sydney. His thesis: "Decolonising Transculturally via José Rizal’s Life and Legacy as Motif," re-remembers and re-imagines the Philippine hero-martyr and reveres plurilingual literatures. Harold’s first book, Letters in Language, was published 2021 in the Flying Islands Pocket Books of Poetry series. Recently published poetry collections Litany, Requiem and Edge of Seas vs Lost Generation can be accessed [here].

BEAUTY REGIMES by GENEVIEVE ALVA CLUTARIO

VICENTE L. RAFAEL Reviews 

Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898–1941 by Genevieve Alva Clutario

(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023)

BOOK LINK 

The Empire of Fashion

Roland Barthes once wrote that fashion “is a kind of machine for maintaining meaning without ever fixing it.” Further, that this meaning “is distributed according to a kind of revolutionary grace.”1 It is this distribution of meaning, always shifting and contingent in the midst of trans-imperial violence, anti- colonial revolution, and war that Genevieve Alva Clutario deftly explores in her deeply researched book, Beauty Regimes. She draws on Barthes’s notion of the fashion system—that is, an understanding of clothing as the production of social meaning and power predicated on networks of labor, goods, and services reliant on infrastructures of transportation, mass media, and commerce. Clutario shows how the ideology and materiality of beauty constitute regimes as well as regimens that were crucial to the formation of U.S. colonial rule and Filipino nationalist responses to it. 

Focusing on the period from the end of Spanish rule to the rise of U.S. hegemony and the beginnings of the Japanese occupation in the Philippines, the author demonstrates how the production of beauty by way of clothing was a means of establishing and policing gendered norms for both U.S. and Filipina women. However, such norms were never settled. They were always in process as fashion became a battleground between imperialist and nationalist notions of what counted as beautiful and therefore civilized. The imbrication of civilization with ideals of beauty brought with it enormous stakes. It shaped both the perceptions and behavior of Americans and Filipinos as they regarded one another across political divides. For the former, it was a way of measuring Filipino abilities for self-government which they found wanting; for the latter, it was a means of judging and often subverting U.S. claims of racial superiority. For example, Clutario relates the stories of U.S. women who accompanied the Taft Commission which traveled all over the archipelago in 1900 to investigate the situation in the country. Along the way, they sought to interview Filipinos, especially those of the wealthier class, about conditions in the country. White women sought to befriend Filipinas but often failed to impress the latter with their simple white clothing. Instead, they found themselves subject to what we might think of as the brown/mestiza gaze and judged as fashionably inept compared to the lavish Parisian fashions that wealthy Filipina women put on display. By exhibiting their sumptuous gowns, jewelry, and other ornaments, wealthy Filipina women accentuated their cosmopolitan difference from Americans, thereby upending the latter’s notions of Filipino backwardness. 

This war of beauty continued during the annual Manila Carnival. Patterned after the American Expositions of the early twentieth century, the Carnival was meant as a counterinsurgent effort that sought to highlight the economic and political progress of colonization amid the backdrop of the Filipino-American war. Begun in 1907 and lasting through the 1930s, the Manila Carnival featured beauty pageants where “queens” were elected to reign over the Carnival’s realm. Newspapers encouraged readers to buy votes for their favorite candidates. The triumphant queens came to be seen as the representatives of the nation. As public figures, they received wide attention for their education and wealth, undermining U.S. stereotypes of Filipinas as ugly, scheming, and unattractive. The beauty pageants thus became an important stage for contesting U.S. imperialist assumptions of Filipino cultural disabilities while forging an imagined community around the spectacular appearance of beauty queens. As in other places (and to this day), women became important icons as well as indices for evoking images of nationalist modernity. In their vivid splendor, they became touchstones for forging an anti-imperialist political aesthetics. 

A crucial part of the fashion system for the production of beauty was native labor. In what is perhaps the most detailed examination of the intersection between the political and symbolic economies of the embroidery industry in the Philippines, Clutario shows how colonial rule relied on the extraction of Filipina labor to make and market embroidered products to supply the growing demand in the U.S. market. Given the shortage of embroidered goods from Europe as a result of World War I and the union organizing among garment workers in the United States, U.S. manufacturers turned to the Philippines as a source of skilled and cheap labor. Sold in major department stores, the undergarments supplied by Filipina workers to American women made for a kind of colonial intimacy among the two groups who never met, and yet whose bodies were brought together through the mediation of commerce and clothes. 

Native workers were recruited from working class and peasant communities whose vulnerability made them available for systematic exploitation. Public schools and women’s prisons became primary sites for the production of embroidered goods, facilitated in 1907 by reorganizing the Bureau of Prisons to become part of the Department of Instruction. Industrial schools along the lines of the Carlisle School emerged to teach “pupil-workers” the basics of embroidery work while women prisoners were organized into factory-like facilities that produced lace and undergarments for export. Officials and teachers used various technologies of discipline and surveillance to govern their conduct and ensure efficiency under the guise of making “good citizens” among students and prisoners. Workers were praised for their skill by advertisers and even exhibited for visiting American tourists. But once the embroidery business lost steam in the later 1920s, they were blamed for their lack of discipline and imagination. Hence they were exploited, then scapegoated, as global conditions demanded. 

By the 1930s, as the Great Depression gripped the world, the Commonwealth government was established in the Philippines in preparation for independence while another possible war loomed on the horizon. Responding to these uncertain times, the fashion system developed the “terno,” the glamourous Philippine gown that became a symbol of national identity among the mestizo elite. A hybrid of Filipino and European styles, the terno projected the image of the modern Filipina, one whose privilege arose from a sense of autonomy from colonial rule as well as their distinction from the rising middle and working classes. The development of the terno coincided with the emergence of “dictatorial modistas,” designers who assumed the power of tastemakers to dictate new styles to reshape elite culture. This reconfiguration of elite culture became more urgent as new forms of the modern woman arose to challenge patriarchal norms: the “flapper” and the “coed.” The former was denounced by critics as the “sinful” aping of Western styles, with dresses that displayed the flesh and sexual desires of young women, while the latter was a source of unease insofar as it threatened to place women in positions of intellectual prominence and driving ambition. The terno was meant to counter these threats, redrawing the line that separated the mestizo female elite from those below. By reinforcing class divisions and gender norms, the fashion system worked to recolonize, as it were, Philippine society even as it broached the promise of a modern nation free from colonial rule. 

Clutario concludes her book with a history of the trade wars that arose between U.S. and Japanese importers of cotton on the eve of the Japanese invasion of the Philippines. U.S. manufacturers lobbied the Philippine legislature to set up protections for their cotton, showing how the Japanese-U.S. war was preceded by the trade wars over clothing materials. By the late 1940s, designers and fashion magazines were introducing “designs for evacuation” using khaki as the essential fabric, one that had colonial origins, for anticipating yet another war that would bring about massive social transitions. 

Beauty Regimes is a remarkable book, one that compels us to see U.S. rule and Filipino national history in a new light. By calling attention to the modernizing forces of beauty and fashion, it furnishes us with a way of thinking about the aesthetics and politics of colonialism and anti-colonial resistance and the relations of race, gender, and class they give rise to. 

 

__________________________

1. Quoted in Anatole Broyard, “Clothing as Language,” New York Times, July 2, 1983. Diplomatic History, Vol. 00, No. 0 (2023). VC The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com. https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhad088

 

*****

Vicente L. Rafael, author of The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte and Professor, University of Washington, Seattle.