THE FORGETTERS by GREG SARRIS

 LENY M. STROBEL Engages

The Forgetters by Greg Sarris
(Heyday Books, 2024)

BOOK LINK

I am writing this on Wappo, Southern Pomo, Coast Miwok lands (aka Sonoma County, CA) where I have been a settler for more than four decades. I acknowledge that in the last two decades I’ve shifted my (overly cognitive/academic) focus on the process of decolonization to learning what it means to fall in love with the Land; to learn how to dwell in Place. The local indigenous stories as told by Greg Sarris teach me many lessons that I need to learn and embody.

Question Woman and Answer Woman are back. In How a Mountain Was Made (Sarris, 2019), I fell in love with the two sisters, who are sometimes seen as two crows sitting on a fence on Sonoma Mountain, as they tell the creation stories of the Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo peoples. Through these stories, I, as a settler, have come to love these lands and make my own pilgrimages to Gravity Hill, Copeland Creek, Sonoma Mountain, Santa Rosa Avenue, Sebastopol…to thank the Land for her sacred stories that continue to live on in her peoples that also now include settlers like me.

Stories are alive as long as there are folks who remember to ask the questions and there are folks who remember the answers to them, writes Sarris. I am grateful for how these stories seep into the bone marrow when one learns to listen deeply.

Now in The Forgetters, we meet Question Woman and Answer Woman again. These are stories that feel more contemporary. The Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok peoples are living among the settlers — sometimes as ranch hands, as gardeners, as farm laborers. There are also non-Indians in these stories — Filipinos, Mexicans, Chileans, Spanish, and white folks. The Coast Miwok and Southern Pomo descendants of survivors of the California genocide, are still carrying the old stories as they move about; as they wonder about the settlers’ curious habits; as they eye the quiet ones who don’t talk much; as they ponder the dilemma of what it means to share Sonoma Mountain with all who have come to live here.

There are medicine people, tricksters, shapeshifters in these stories who offer a glimpse into the indigenous world where all the animals and the fog, fish, mountain, rain, et al are all people. These stories are portals to the imaginal realm and can be made accessible and experienced as powerful mythic stories. In these stories, Sarris offers a way for white people/settlers to Hear these Stories because they, too, are part of Creation who came to settle on Sonoma Mountain. Some of the indigenous folks have forgotten the stories as well and they, too, need to hear them again. Note that I write “hear” instead of “learn”; for me, the aural quality in reading these stories adds to the visceral effect of the stories as having landed in the bone marrow. They are not just folk tales that entertain or teach a lesson. They are Medicine.

Stories remind us of the perils of forgetting. So much has changed since the settlers came. The Land has changed. The settlers started carving out the land to make room for ranches and orchards. Where the dairy farms have shrunk, now there’s housing developments and commercial buildings; the orchards are now vineyards. How to remember the ancient stories of the Land and her indigenous peoples?

Reading these stories reminded me of how impoverished my experience of the imaginal realm had become under the regime of modern/colonial conditioning. There is a temptation to keep falling back on the definition of folk tales as somehow mere entertainment to read to kids at bedtime. But in Sarris’ stories, the indigenous imagination is so much more potent; it pokes at things that hide in the shadows and keeps you wondering if you really get it.

Animism says that everything is Sacred; all is imbued with spirit. Animism has been normative consciousness for hundreds of thousands of years and that this modern/colonial/civilized way of Being is really quite young in comparison. I feel the invitation to me, as a reader, to participate in this animate world…and that this is how the world has always been before modernity’s story of disconnection and fragmentation took hold; before the ancient stories were forgotten.

“All the animals are people.” So the Osprey, Owl, Hummingbird, Rattlesnake, Sturgeon — they all speak to the humans in these stories. Sometimes the humans also shapeshift into birds and animals or turn into rocks that folks on Sonoma Mountain today recognize as they mark the places where events have happened a long, long time ago. In one story, Isabel escapes Sebastopol at night and finds herself with three people telling ancient stories of the water bug who stole Copeland Creek at Kobe-cha and other happenings on Sonoma Mountain. After the storytelling, Isabel returns to the farm campsite so as not to be late for work the next day. The three people were Hummingbird who is married to Rattlesnake but they looked white; the Indian- looking guy is Owl. The three gave her gifts — water, night vision, wings — so she can be with them at night. Isabel realizes that she remembers pieces of the stories she is hearing and she carries them on to the future until she herself becomes part of the story that is now told by the new generation.

Shapeshifting is what happens under trance states. And sometimes there is a trickster in the story, too. An Indian man in “Man Follows an Osprey” has heard that the Russians left and buried a treasure after the fur trade. Thinking that the osprey would lead him to this treasure, the man observes the bird so keenly day and night until one day, he did become an osprey in flight and comes upon what turns out not to be a treasure box but a simple box with two osprey feathers, abalone pendant, and acorn pendant.

In another story, shapeshifting does happen although no one self-proclaims as a walepu. In Marshall, there is a village called Mitco circa late 1800. The women often work as housekeepers or domestic workers for white people. There are no jobs for Indian men. As an Indian hunts in “A Man Shoots His Stepfather” he shoots a deer who, as it turns out, is his stepfather as he sees his mother pulling out the buckshot from his backside.

In “Dissenters Find a Stranger”, a stranger is taken in by Mary and she teaches him how to help around the village. The stranger learns how to build a kotcha, learns their songs, learns to hunt…and soon is doing all these tasks for the villagers that they themselves eventually learn to forget. When they realize the stranger has taken all that is valuable to them, they ask the stranger to leave and is sent on his way to San Rafael.

In one of the stories, a Chilean man is taken in by Mexicans and Filipinos and lives with them, learning all kinds of chores to help around the village. He eventually becomes a caller/announcer at the Roundhouse festival and learns the stories of the famous medicine man Tom Smith’s family. However, he overstays his welcome and is eventually told to leave. You can still see him in those rocks.

The stories remind me of an “ethic of caring” in indigenous cultures. The measure of justice is always the restoration of balance and harmony with the Land/Sonoma Mountain. Even when people are always trying to guess what is going on, who did what to whom, or trying to make sense of the new arrival or someone who got lost on their way to somewhere — these stories offer a way for the reader to imagine differently. How to live on Sonoma Mountain together. Can the Mountain hold all the different stories together?

Sarris plays with Time in these stories where the past, present, and future co-mingle and mess with our concept of time as linear. Even the reader becomes a part of the Story in this wide and deep expanse of Time. In the modern construction of binary and linear time, there are cracks and abysses that create stories of bifurcation and resistance. Not so in the indigenous framing of Time where the ancient stories are still remembered. When the stories are forgotten, there are consequences that cause suffering…which then challenge us to re-member again. This circularity feels like a liberation from the traps of limiting epistemologies of the modern mind.

For example, in the story “A Girl Sees a Giant Sturgeon” there is a deep psychological insight into trauma which can only be healed by a story that reconnects to the living world of sturgeon. The eyes through which we see ourselves in the other — to see yourself in the eye of a sturgeon when the water between Marin and San Francisco was as wide as the ocean, not yet a peninsula…where sturgeon got stuck and is no longer able to get home. What is the medicine of the sturgeon…that connects to the history of the Land and the Waters over the vast expanse of Time?

History also interrupts the flow of ancient stories. In “A Man Learns to Smell Flowers”, Kaloopis (his name means hummingbird) works for the white landowner, Mrs Luft, in the garden. Catfish gets jealous and wants to know how Kaloopis came to be chosen to work next to the landlady. So Catfish asks permission to work with them in the garden and he also becomes more and more curious about the habits of Kaloopis. He sees that Kaloopis disappears every night after he tells stories to the kids and so Catfish follows him but he gets lost along the way. When Catfish does find him, he sees that Kaloopis entertains a man so he gossips that he’s gay. With this gossip, other rumors spread until the community forbids their kids to listen to his stories anymore. As the villagers have become Catholics they have become afraid of walepus and they begin to invent stories that make them abandon Kaloopis and eventually the land that Mrs. Luft promised she would bequeath to them. Did their conversion to christianity and the abandonment of their kin lead them down the path of their own undoing?

I feel as if these stories have put me in a trance and I keep re-reading them. This collection of stories really penetrates the bone marrow and provides medicine for all of us who live on this land–and other places where colonization has distorted our relationship with the Land and her Stories. The Forgetters is an invitation to linger awhile under the spell of indigenous Storytelling; to dive deep into that corner of our Heart that is seeking Medicine. For me, the experience of feeling the sensory gates of my mind begin to melt in order to make room for the wondrous magic of timeless Story has been a precious gift.

 

 

*****

 

Leny M. Strobel is Kapampangan. Settler on Pomo and Coast Miwok lands. Founder and Elder at the Center for Babaylan Studies. https://www.lenystrobel.com/

 

 

WHERE THE WAREHOUSE THINGS ARE by TONY ROBLES

 EILEEN TABIOS Engages

Where the Warehouse Things Are by Tony Robles

(Redhawk Publications, 2024)

 

BOOK LINK 

 

I loved this book’s concept  as soon as I heard about it: Where the Warehouse Things Are by Tony Robles. From his experience of working in a warehouse (the Care Solutions Mobility Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina), Robles created poems from warehouse objects and matters that spin out beyond the warehouse doors to herald the vastness of the universe. His book reminds me of that perpetual controversy over whether objects can be creatures. I, for one, believe an object becomes a creature when that object becomes a source of inspiration—such is, I believe, what happens in Robles’ poetry collection.

A perfect example is “Cardboard Poem Written on a Warehouse Wall” (you can see entire poem HERE) where the poem’s “I” is instructed to assemble what turns out to be a recliner-chair from the innards of “a big cardboard box that had been  put together by cardboard hands and my hands / were the same color as the cardboard…”

The above quoted lines begin the poem and one can see as efficiently as the third line how the poem’s world has already spun out from cardboard to the narrative of color and introduction of the person whose hands are the same color. That personal introduction is what would allow the poet to evoke both a grandfather and a wise suggestion on hiding… on its way to evoking a worker in a fish market in Japan to a mother cutting a birthday cake to a movie director to its ending of “a thousand little poems, / a thousand little dreams that / a box cannot hold.” The poem’s journey is simply marvelous!

It's that poetic leap that makes the poems fly with lines like:

 

Boxes stacked 

like empires under the

weight of a fluorescent stare

—from “Warehouse”

 

Or

 

The mattresses at the warehouse

sit stacked like slices of

Texas toast

—from “Sewing”

 

Objects become a means of deepening humanity, from one’s inescapable history (see the above excerpt on boxes again) to identity, as in:

 

Another box with no label sits

alone on a nearby shelf

I open it

Inside are arms, legs, a torso, 

a face that looks much like mine

 

I take each part from the box

and try to piece it all together

into something that looks like:

courage

heart

fortitude

—from “Warehouse Part II”

In the poem “Fork Lift,” a massive forklift—daring one to “take a stab at it”—becomes a metaphor for a father, a source of strength for the speaker. Other examples of significances birthed by “warehouse things” abound throughout the book—“somewhere a wheel chair / is being put together while a / world tilts on its axis trying to / find its bearings” (Assembling a Wheelchair”) or “the dust mop tells me / that we are all going back / and forth and eventually back / to the dust from where we come” (“Ask the Dust Mop”).

It's no wonder then that the poet (in his Introduction) can share what he ultimately discovers in the warehouse: 

“I come upon a box, a box that has been beyond my reach. I reach upward and finally pull it off the shelf. With my box cutter, I open it. It is filled with poems.”

Readers can only be grateful Robles discovered “what was in the warehouse all along.” For “it is [his] gift to you”—a testament to his qualities of observation and thoughtful meditations. For attentive readers, to read this book is to feel blessed.

 

*****

 

Eileen Tabios has released books of poetry, fiction, essays, art and experimental prose from publishers around the world. Recent releases include the novel The Balikbayan Artist; an art monograph Drawing Six Directions; a poetry collection Because I Love You, I Become War; an autobiography, The Inventor; and a flash fiction collection collaboration with harry k stammer, Getting To One. Other books include a first novel DoveLion: A Fairy Tale for Our Times (2021) which was translated by Danton Remoto into Filipino as KalapatingLeon for a 2024 release from UST Publishing (University of Santo Tomas). More information is at https://eileenrtabios.com

SHAWL FROM KASHMIR AND OTHER STORIES by MANUEL A. VIRAY

 LYNN GROW Reviews

 

Shawl from Kashmir and Other Stories by Manuel A. Viray

(New Day, Quezon City, 1992)

            Manuel Abalos Viray is one of the most easily undervalued first-ranking literary figure in the history of Filipino literature in English. This is not due to any failure of judgment on the part of critics or lapse in taste on the part of readers. It is at least partly the result of his own reticence, as I pointed out long ago in conjunction with his poetry.¹  Viray's greatness as a literary critic has been obscured not only by his reticence, but also by the fugitive nature of the publications in which his essays appeared.²  

            Viray's short stories have also received very little analytical attention. Besides the fact that Viray used pseudonyms for some original periodical publications, his short stories were not assembled into book form until they appeared in Solidarity, September and December 1967. The book publication of his sole collection, Shawl from Kashmir and Other Stories (Quezon City: New Day) was released only in 1992. These stories are of three sorts: The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines from 1941 to 1945, which Viray lived through, stories of human interaction during peacetime, and, bookending the collection, “Shawl from Kashmir” and “First in Haldama,” both based on the life of Christ.

            The Occupation stories are among the best written about an era that most people would prefer to forget. “Broken Glass,” “Dark Eyes,” “Verdict,” “Lapse,” and “The Beleaguered” are not stories of adventure, heroism, or cowardice; for the most part they depict deprivation, not brutality. Anyone expecting something like the John Wayne movie Back to Bataan (1945) will be disappointed.³

Instead, Viray's stories depict the nuances of human life, details of the environment, both physical and emotional, humdrum aspects of daily routines of ordinary people, and glimpses of natural beauty.⁴

            “Broken Glass,” set partially in 1941, partially in 1943, and partially in 1944, is the most complex and intricately interwoven of these tales. Movement backward and forward in time is signaled by events and characters focused on at any given interval, in keeping with the atmosphere immediately before the Occupation and during the Occupation: “An oppressive element hung in the air,  reducing the regularity of mortal breath.  Everything appeared tentative, terribly naked.”(23)  The story's locale is the common denominator.  An upscale haberdashery with a soda fountain before the war, it morphed during the war into the boisterous, even crass, cafe' Asaki.⁵   The haberdashery/cafe´ emblem represents the range of human presence as well.  One waitress, politely fending off the unwanted attempted familiarity of a Japanese officer, is Marta, “an attractive figure.... The curly, brownish ends of hair, the sloping curve of the neck, the tapering torso ending at the young hips....”(20).  In contrast is the waitress taking the order of the protagonist Tonio: “The plucked eyebrows, the shiny nose, the red lips, the sagging breasts, the large hips, and the tight belt looked garish and cheap.”(20) But even Marta is the worse for wear in the dreary and worrisome wartime Manila milieu: “The fine forehead, the clear eyebrows, the slightly tilted nose, the full lips appearing a little beaten by weather and worry, the surprising body draped by the regulation uniform of the Asaki Café.”(21)  The contrasting though not offsetting factor to the degraded, drunken Japanese officers is Tom Reeves, the fresh-faced U.S. Army Air Corps lieutenant with “blue eyes twinkling”(25), whom Tonio meets in December 1941, and who asserts that “We go to war because we have to, even if we know the consequences. They say it is our duty”(25-26). This accords with Tonio's beliefs about “... the brutality of history, the sending of young men to fight wars in countries not their own”(25) and his interpretation of the broken drink glass “symbolizing the brittle quality of life, easily fragmented because of man's greed and lust for dominance.”(27) Yet this apparently sensitive, thoughtful man in 1943 “followed the lurching drunks [the two Japanese officers] out of the cafe´: Tonio, a cool and careful killer.  Tonio. Tonio.”(27).  The repeated noun of direct address is a lament, a cri de coeur, not an approbation. This scene dramatizes that the war's human destruction cannot be measured by its physical devastation, such as the loss, briefly mentioned here, of virtually all U.S. aircraft at Paraňaque by 200 Japanese aircraft that arrived undetected on December 8^th , 1945.  The raid was so successful that on December 26^th , General Douglas MacArthur was forced to declare Manila an open city, not liberated until February 3^rd, 1945.  “Broken Glass” does not tell us the fate of Tom Reeves after he reported back to his base for duty, but obviously it was tragic.

            The title of the next story in Shawl from Kashmir, “Dark Eyes,” refers concretely to the now fatherless waif dubbed “Dark Eyes” by the character Jimmy Osmundo, whose father had been taken away and murdered as a collaborator by the underground, exemplifying the moral darkness imposed on the Manila population by the Occupation.  It is a darkness more extensive than that of the individuals in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902).  The first-person narrative stance brings readers into the darkness, intensifying its murk.  The foreboding tone is set in the opening sentences: “...then the skies darkened.” (28) “I could see the air shift from a neutral dusty color to a bright ominous orange and the gusts of wind swirling the debris on Azcarraga Street. The orange hue changed into a haze of violet, and then an apocalyptic chill seemed to touch the city.” (28)  The microcosm here mirrors the macrocosm: “...the war years, with their pallid, artificial light, the people walking like somnambulists...the harsh gutturals of the invaders, the gleaming bayonets of sentries at the foot of city bridges, the tense atmosphere of every man fearing another... the hate of the underground for their money-mad countrymen...” (30)

            The narrator's own darkness comes to light when he enters Ping Li's store and has a gun jabbed on his spine.  He is warned away from doing “anything you'll regret tonight,“ (31), which turns out to be aiding a good friend who has been taken away by the underground.  The man's frantic wife Elvira implores him to intervene, but he knows that he can't, even though he is also a member of the underground; later he delivers bullets to the resistance fighters in Antipolo.  Though Elvira's husband is brutally murdered, he obviously was a collaborator.  Yet, oddly, the narrator asks himself, “Why should a Filipino kill another Filipino?” (33)  The question has already been answered: for collaboration with the invaders.  Still, the narrator, recounting these events four years after they happened , gives the now fatherless waif Jimmy, who has been reduced to beggary, a five-peso bill (a significant sum during the Occupation) so “I could feel the tumult of expiation welling in my eyes.” (35)

            “Verdict” is another story based on Occupation collaboration.  Justice Perfecto  Montenegro renders a dissenting opinion that spares the life of a convicted Makapili,^6   “the magic eye” in a refugee town in which the justice and his wife lived in 1944. In that town “everything was peaceful outwardly but ...one felt with intuitive sense sharp tension of fear, death, and apprehension.” (45) The intuition is confirmed: the collaborator fingers several men, including the justice's wife's brother.  The men are killed. The justice's wife is, of course, distraught at what her husband has done, especially because he then lies to her, saying he did not realize that the collaborator in question had turned in her brother.  But if the justice is committed to his own stated principle, “A man's death diminishes me,”⁷ the identity of the man sentenced to death should be immaterial.⁸  “Dark Eyes” and “The Verdict” constitute a colloquy about what circumstances, if any, warrant—or demand—taking a human life. In the former story, the man spirited away to be killed was guilty of collaboration in return for material gain, but the outcomes  of his aid to the enemy are unspecified, and he is convicted by no constituted authority.  If no one died because of his disloyalty, was it justified to not only put a bullet through his head but to cut out his tongue as well and throw his body into the river?  In the latter story, the Makapili is convicted by a lawful tribunal and condemned to death by the other sitting justices of the case.  Yet the Makapili, though now sentenced to life in prison, has singly and directly caused the deaths of three men. “The Verdict” ends appropriately with the dissenting justice “wearily” lying down on his bed and staring “into the alien darkness.” (51) His darkness is not the dark eyes of Jimmy the waif but instead his realization that his smug opinion about the death penalty is not as open and shut as he had thought.

            “Lapse” is set in the immediate aftermath of the Occupation, more precisely than “The Verdict” is:  “...[Allied] operations had now shifted to Okinawa and Japan.”(61)  It had been only weeks earlier that the G I's were “consistently, impatiently shelling Intramuros.”(54)  Thus, “the shelling that February [1945]”(67) had come back again in Magdalena's thoughts. In contrast to the temporal specificity is the open-endedness of the “lapse” meant by the story's title. It is more than the “time was lapsing” (64) towards death for Teresa, the protagonist's mother-in-law. It is more than the “lapse of his [Nazario's ] diminution ”(68), the diminution resulting from the hardships of the Occupation, including his loss of a job, a crumbling house, and bare minimum food.  In the story's last sentence “a lapse in his judgment” runs through his mind. But what judgment this is we can only surmise.  It could be his decision to collaborate with the Japanese invaders, which his former chief at the Ministry of Agriculture throws in his face when he re-applies for his pre-war position. Ironically, the chief also collaborated.

            It is possible to see the “lapse” in the much more encompassing theological sense of Lapsarianism, although exactly who in the pre-war Philippines might have done what to bring on the Fall from Divine Grace is indeterminable. In any case, it was hardly comparable to Sodom and Gomorrah.⁹  A Christian context is, however, suggested by the names of the characters Nazario, Magdalena, Teresa and Maria¹⁰ and that “Shawl from Kashmir” and “First in Haldama” are respectively, the first and last stories in the collection. Yet, in the second paragraph, “Nazario Munzon realized that men are confined in a world of their own diminution and failures “(52), which makes even the Occupation sound more like a result of erring, inept, misguided human actions than Divine judgment visited on intentional, wicked wrongdoers. Nazario remembers his wife Maria with respect and affection: “Her gentleness had stemmed, he thought, more from an inherent awareness of good and evil, than from the long years of training she had spent in Hong Kong where she attended an exclusive school for girls.”(56) Flora Mortal has borne Nazario a child, only to find out that he has married someone else—Maria.  When she sees him again, “he heard someone cry out his name in gladness and welcome.  It was Flora.”(58)  She doesn't want anything from him, but he gives money to Flora nonetheless.  Now, just after the Occupation, when Nazario is jobless, Flora, without prodding, convinces Major Dent of the U.S. army to hire Nazario as his personnel assistant (60).  Flora indeed has “her own peculiar brand of loneliness and kindness.”(59)  Nazario's mother- in- law, Teresa, is at first infuriated with Nazario for accepting help from a “slut. Hers is tainted money.”(62)  Yet she soon softens, remembering “how much more patient Zar [short for Nazario] had become... Sometimes he slyly sacrifices his own food.”(64)  She goes on: “There are certain things that a man is supposed to do. And he does it out of generosity and kindness. This diminution, this disorder, this cruelty Zar did not help bring about... where would Magdalena and I be if it had not been for him?”(64)

            Magdalena [called Dal for short]  is also good-hearted.  She feels about Nazario, “you are farthest from his heart and you concentrate your attention... on your ailing mother and his child, trying as much as possible to ease the pain, to help him ride over a panic, to smoothen a violent scene which catches him in its vortex.”(66)  In less dramatic ways, Dal is also thoughtful about others.  After Nazario has gone for his interview with Major Dent, she thinks “I should have darned his sock...”(67)  From all of this, we may concur with the ex cathedra conclusion that “Most men are never able to impose any kind of surcease on regret, nor any kind of order on the instability of the world, nor can they undo what seems to be a blemish in their mortal hearts, a flaw in their will.” (64) But, we might add, some can.

            The last of the Occupation stories is “The Beleaguered,” set in “the tenth month ofter Liberation.”(85)  In spite of its ominous beginning, it is a story of hope, showing the resolute and unselfish possibilities of people in distress. As such, it is a very fitting end piece to the Occupation story sequence, although it is the least substantive of them.  Adrian, the protagonist, is short of money because his employer, the Chronicle of Liberation, is late with two monthly payrolls. He attempts to borrow money from Guillermo, the godfather of Adriano's second son. Guillermo, a jitney driver, is not at home, so he asks Francisca, Guillermo's wife, for money, but she has none.  He then visits his Tio [uncle] Ponso, whose wife brings him a coke, and his uncle gives him a bill and invites Adriano to bring his wife and family for a visit on Sunday.  Adriano declines the invitation. The following day he boards a reconverted carrier and sees that Guillermo is driving.  Guillermo's wife is acting as conductor because they can no longer afford to pay a conductor.  Their son's left foot is in a plaster cast. The doctor suspects infantile paralysis, but the couple cannot afford to take the boy to the hospital. Adriano is chagrined that he had asked them for money and “thought how fiercely his friends were battling the subtle maneuvers that life was executing; that, unlike him, they had no interior hatred, no amoral verdicts on the behavior of their friends.”(91) He has realized that the resolution he had made in the hills of San Timoteo, to which he and his family had fled during the chaos of the shelling during the Liberation, never to be poor again, was “brief and brittle” (91)

            Four stories in Shawl from Kashmir center around peacetime human interrelationships.  “Portrait of a Great Man” is concerned with institutional bureaucracy and petty, selfish behavior.  “Formation” is concerned with family dysfunction. “One Man's Death”¹¹  and “To Prepare a Face”¹² depict greed, infidelity, and hypocrisy.  Together they dissect an array of day-to-day human foibles. “Portrait of a Great Man” is a title that leads us to expect a man of outstanding achievement and/or exemplary  character, but we soon realize that he is “great” only in terms of his weight: “He heaved his heavy bulk from the front seat “ of his chauffeured car(36); he has a “pudgy hand.”(38) Dr. Rufino T. Ventenilla does have impressive academic credentials.  He is an Escuela de Derecho [law school] graduate and holds from Oxford University a master's degree and a doctor's degree in jurisprudence. But his behavior is far less impressive. Although he remembers “the tyrannical, exciting lips of Lita [his querida], the fierce passionate hours at dawn,” (36) he can only remember two of the three grocery items Lita has asked him to buy.  “For the life of him he could not recall” his personnel clerk's name either(37). even when he orders the man to requisition the items for his personal use, not for his office staff, from the Republic Rehabilitation Center.  His office table is a mess, with records “scattered as far as the edge of the table.”(37)  Probably none of these situations has been mitigated by his practice of opening his workday—at 8:00 a.m.—with a “thimbleful” of Schenley whiskey. (37).  Not surprisingly, boot-licking favoritism abounds. A “thin, angular girl whom he had assigned to the research section...” (36) is “the protege of Assemblyman Juan Tuviera y Sibulsibula.”(37). Two other functionaries, Perez and Montalbo, over a restaurant lunch discuss the way the promotion ladder is handled in government service: “In this country... the ladder is incessantly pulled thither and yon by scheming politicians... the doctor should have acceded to Reyes' appointment.  After all, he is the heir, though only a nephew of Secretary Reyes.  The Secretary is the President's closest confidant.  Besides, he controls government accounts.”(41)  At the end of the story, Perez, who has succeeded Dr. Ventenilla as Deputy Commissioner, reveals his despicable character.  He plays all the right cards politically, but when an underling, the personnel clerk, asks him to sign a voucher for a partial salary advance so that the clerk can at once take his seriously ill wife to the hospital, Perez responds “Don't bother me” and walks past him.(43)

            “Formation” narrows the human interaction focus to one family, which is on the verge of becoming as deteriorated as its house, which has already “deformed” into “disrepair.” “… the warped paint, the unhinged window on the eastern side, the displaced flagstones, the rot and weeds creeping gradually... the cement driveway was now gone, broken, shattered, chipped in several places.”  Even the weather is bleakly uninviting: “It was an unusually hot June day- unrelieved, windless, humid.”(92)  The inside is in no better condition than the outside is: “She [Barbara Lys, the protagonist] had long stopped being appalled by the worn-out upholstery on the scarred sala set...the support of the coffee table was broken.” (93) “The stench from the pozo negro [cesspool or septic tank] was unbearable.  The sunlight was distorted as it entered through the bent slats of the blinds. Half a dozen tiles had been loosened from the kitchen floor. Even the tiles were also loose in the terrace.”(94)

            The dysfunction of the family in the house mirrors the state of the house.  One subtle sign is the depersonalized identification of the Father, Mother and Grandfather by title only (in each case with a capitalized first letter, no less); their given names are not supplied.  Far from subtly, Barbara presents Father “with his big mouth, irascibility, and dull business sense....[at an earlier time] he was spending his time and wasting his substance on the waitress working at their restaurant on Sampaloc Avenue.” (94) Mother “... believes only in the old-fashioned way of bringing up children.  Spanking or pinching the ear.... she only looked forward to her mahjong¹³ and novenas-- making continuous weekly prayers to St. Pancratius¹⁴ and Our Mother of Perpetual Help.”(94)  In fact, at least according to Barbara, “Everyone in the house was going to seed, except her and her family and Rick” [her younger sister]94).  But even Rick is headed downhill: “Rick used to pay the maid and the gardener on time. Not anymore....lately, the gardener had complained about his late salary. Rick was splurging on clothes, nylons, bags, shoes.”(95-96)  The maid needs her salary on time so she can send her sick mother some penicillin, but Rick says the maid will have to wait for two days. The third person narration sums it up:  “This disregard for other people ran in both their veins.”(96)  Barbara finally shows how true this summation is.   Rick is pregnant, suffering from morning sickness: “she slobbered again, the movement of her entire body racked by her spasmodic convulsions.” Barbara's reaction is “Let her vomit again. Let her convulse.  Let her retch in her misery.”(101) This story's title is only secondarily a reference to the “formation  of rows of ivory”(98) in mahjong; it is about the self-formation of the human condition.  The Occupation stories present life in survival mode from an external force, not what people have brought on themselves. “Portrait of a Great Man” is an insight into human selfishness and cupidity.  But “Formation” depicts the epitome of self-wrought degradation and misery, repellant rather merely disgusting.  

            “One Man's Death” is a mordant, bitter counter to the theme of Donne's poem. The death of Adriano is viewed by every character except his wife as an enhancement, not a diminution, in “the bureaucratic struggle for power”(70). Marcos envisions supplanting Adriano as Deputy Commissioner.  Del Mundo has the same aspiration. Estabillo is so shallow that at Adriano's funeral, he wonders whether there will be a game of mahjong.  No wonder that, as the synesthetic description has it, “The night darkness was heavy in the air...” and, grimly enough, “the hanging odor of gladioli, azucena and camia [is] strangled in wreaths.”(70) Only the taxi driver whose vehicle has been rear-ended by a six-by-six, causing Adriano's death, turns up to offer condolences, not to seek political traction, and offers a ten-peso donation for the widow.¹⁵  He is blameless-- his taxi cab was stopped by a policeman, thus causing the fatal accident--yet he does this decent thing and thus serves as a foil for the more prosperous  but callous characters.  Adriano's widow only hopes Adriano now is at peace, though  she has had to tolerate his “thrice-a-week escapades”(74) Yet when she applies for his life insurance benefits,  she finds out that Adriano has changed his beneficiary from her to his concubine.  In death as in life, sleaze is depicted as paramount,  decency as tributary.

            “To Prepare a Face”  comes across as a very bland narrative because it is. It centers around the second-tier dissipators of post war-war Manila, the “wanna be's” of declassė.  The protagonist, Patricia, with her eight-year-old daughter, Esperanza, goes to the Cafė Latino on Del Pilar street and meets a group of young men she knows. She is separated from her husband, only not divorced because divorce was not legal at that time. The third-person narrative explains that “yes, they had been married for ten years, but she could no longer bear Ernesto's nightly demands.”¹⁶ (78) This is hard to take at face value.  Only after ten years of apparently nightly conjugal relations, she now finds the activity unbearable? Motherhood must not be the variable because, for eight of those ten years, their daughter Esperanza  has been with them.  Even the name Esperanza (Spanish for “hope” or “expectation”) makes this plot element borderline boffo. Patricia's explanation to Ernesto for their rift is so idealistic that it is beyond belief that it could possibly be what now makes what she has done on schedule for ten years unbearable:  “We move in worlds so different. You have your friends in the commission and in the black market.  I have mine, the seekers of truth,  those who expose the activities of the renegades in society.”  Ernesto's rejoinder is “...you don't mind sharing the money I make--even what I make on the [black] market.” (78)  The mood of the five young men at the cafe is matter-of-fact, perfunctorily disapproving of the machinations of those who profit from illicit surplus goods disposal.  Ernesto anticipates making a fortune by taking advantage of his insider information about the location of the new capital site by purchasing real estate parcels in the area.  Patricia's even- keel presence in the face of these admissions of skullduggery is out of keeping with her stated reason for parting company with Ernesto.

            Another discordant aspect of the story is the opening scene of the Black Nazarene¹⁷ celebration: “...Friday devotees... jostled their way under the tropical sun of mid-afternoon...”(76)  Although this description localizes time (Good Friday), it doesn't  either enrich or ironically counterpoint the thematic thread of the narrative. At the cafė a beggar does approach Patricia's table and extends his palm.  One of the five young men, Tony, does give him a ten-centavo coin, but this only triggers an abstract question about whether the gulf between “glittering prosperity” and “extreme poverty” is the result of surplus goods mismanagement, a debate that could have occurred without the beggar's appearance or it being Good Friday.  

            The stories about the life of Christ begin with the title story of this collection, “Shawl from Kashmir,” which is masterful, far more than Viray's characterization  of it as  “a variation of the Nativity Scene”(9) would suggest. Actually, the Nativity is not part of the story's plot, which opens as the soldier Jarius ¹⁸  is dispatched by his commandant Roboam to intercept Mary and Joseph on their flight to Egypt to escape King Herod's order to bring the baby Jesus to him.  In the meantime Roboam(16) goes off to his tryst with Salomė.¹⁹ Jarius' quest parallels the journey of the Magi (Melchor, Caspar, and Baltazar) who also had been instructed by Herod to bring the baby Jesus to him but instead detour back to their home countries.  En route, Jarius sees a “caravan carrying its cargo of Corinthians who had just landed on the coast bringing hashish.” [marijuana]. (13) This occurrence juxtaposes travel for the wrong reason (drug smuggling) with travel for the right reason (paying homage to Jesus).  The murdering Corinthians, who have ambushed  two of Jarius' comrades, also directly contrast with the next threesome he meets immediately afterward: Joseph with his “compassionate blue eyes”; Mary, with the smooth face, gentle eyes, and “delicately shaped lips”(14); baby Emmanuel ²⁰  with his “look of pure and untainted innocence.” (16).  Jarius has proved his human worth by eschewing the concupiscence of Roboam, the blandishment of Herod (who has promised him a shawl from Kashmir for his wife as a reward for bringing the baby Jesus to him), and the brutality of the Corinthian smugglers. Years later Jarius, his wife Miriam,²¹ and his son Mio ²² a trio paralleling both the three Magi and Joseph, Mary, and Jesus, travel to Judea to again see Jesus, now a grown man.  To Jarius' surprise, Jesus has been expecting him, noting that he was “the guard at Gaza” and that his wife is not wearing the shawl from Kasmir, details that, as an ordinary human infant at the time, he could not possibly have recalled.  The story closes with Jesus saying “I was thinking of thee”(18) which intimates that Jarius is important to Jesus, as Jesus is to Jarius.  Jesus is indeed Emmanuel.

            The artistic features, not just the storyline, are what make this story exquisite, however.  Even the title “Shawl from Kashmir” is soft and smooth, redolent  of the cashmere goat wool made from the Himalayan animals in Tibet and the Kashmir region of India, the audible but invisible homonym “Kashmir”/ “Cashmere” carefully designed.  Visual imagery is used more extensively than tactility is.  It is the touch of the artist who could stand on the second-floor balcony of the charity house in which he lived and see, across the street, “an impasto in green, ” two infants “hooded in green, snug inside green coverlets” in light green prams (7).  In the story, Roboam awakens Jarius with the simile “...you sleep like a cedar from Lebanon.”(11) ²³ A sentry is “reciting a litany of nature's green and dappled blessings,”(12) imagery enhanced by the personification “A moon untangles itself from a birch tree's foliage”(13) and the alliteration of “the motionless mimosa trees” and “the infrangible sand”(14).  Soon the olfactory sense is invoked: “odors of myrrh and frankincense”,(15) and finally we get  the synesthetic “coronal for Jarius' words.”(16) These devices and the smoothly flowing storyline produce pervasive calmness, a continuous undisturbed tranquility emanating from an understood, if unarticulated,  assurance that, as in Browning's “Pippa Passes,” God's in this Heaven—and all's right in the world.”

            In striking contrast are the shrill, strident fricatives of “First in Haldama,”²⁴  which expresses anger and frustration, not hope, and is barren of the aesthetic beauty of “Shawl from Kasmir.” Unfortunately, the story is marred by a bombastic, improbably idealistic speech by Jarius, fortunately for him in his own home to only his wife and son:

 

Assassins. Unbelievers.  They have done an unforgivable thing. Usurpation, indeed. They are the usurpers! Killing the finest man on earth, the fountainhead of faith, of truth and love, the apostle of kindness.  Killers! Renegades!  They are strangers to the muted cry of a suffering humanity, aliens to the unrevealed dreams of the meek and disinherited.  They have cursed and fulminated against the gentle man of good will. They don't  know how it is to be unselfish, to help the maimed, the leprous, the palsied, the diseased, the sick of soul and body. They don't know why he came to us...he came to crucify the sinners and the publicans, to scorn the raving mad, the potentates of             power, the hot-tempered advocates of acquisitiveness, the princes of darkness.  To        banish graft and corruption in the military, to efface nepotism in the higher councils of Caesar's government, in the hierarchy of Herod!  I could kill them, kill them! (105)

 

Even in a rage, for him to say that Christ came to crucify and to scorn and that he Jarius could kill the wrongdoers is a shocking self-condemnation and an even worse denigration of Jesus.

            “First in Haldama ” also suffers from the anachronism “ One man's death diminishes me” (107), yet another Viray allusion to a line from a poem that would not be written for more than a millennium and a half after the time setting of the story.

            “First in Haldama” does at least end with at least a measure of closure.  In “Haldama, the field of blood, we're going to bury Judas...  He will be the first to be interred there.” (108) Happily, the Viray oeuvre of outstanding works in poetry, short fiction, and literary criticism will not be interred with him; they will stand as touchstones, not tombstones,  of 20^th Century Filipino literature.

 

 

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Notes

 

                  ¹ “ Reticent Resolve: The Poetry of Manuel A. Viray. ” Ariel 18.4 (October 1987): 23-35. Rptd. In L.M. Grow, World Enough and Time: Epistemologies and Ontologies in Modern Philippine Poetry.  Quezon City:  Giraffe Books, 2000. 79-90.

                  ² See my “Philippine Poetry in the Formative Years.” Ariel 15.3 (July 1984): 81-98, especially note 28, pp. 97-98. Rptd. In World Enough and Time 20-39, note 26, pp. 36-37.  As the listing in note 28 (note 26 in the reprint) shows, Viray was also a skilled anthologist.  His output was less than that of Leopoldo Y. Yabes or more recently, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, but his  choice of selections is impressive.  A significant portion of his critical work is contained in his letters, especially those to Bienvenido N. Santos, Leonard Casper, and me.  Late in his life, Viray sent me copies of his own letters,  letters to him, and drafts of a few of his literary works for safekeeping and preservation.  These manuscripts are now housed in the Banaan Museum in Lingayen, thanks to the interest and effort of Mr. Erwin S. Fernandez and Mrs. Maria Luisa Amor-Elduayan, Provincial Tourism and Cultural Affairs Officer. Relevant excerpts from these materials appear in L.M. Grow, The Epistolary Criticism of Manuel A. Viray: In Memoriam. Quezon City: Giraffe  Books, 1998.

             ³Though a movie buff may well recall Casablanca (1942).

                  ⁴ In their uniformly empirical character, they are the opposite side of the coin from Viray's poems.  His poetry's focus is ontological, abstract, especially centered around elision.  The stories are concrete, centered around the particulars of human behavior in stressful situations.  How polar oppositional this bifurcation is becomes evident when we read tertium quid selections like two from British poet Eleanor Veness in The Next Review October/ November 2015: “I am Daedalus “ (pp. 25-27) and “Remains” (p. 29), whose controlling motif is subsidence.  

                  ⁵ The irony of the name is that in Japanese “Asaki” is a girl's name meaning, usually, “Morning Blossom” or “Morning Moon.”  Depending on the Kanji used, it can have a variety of meanings related to nature.

                  ⁶ Any collaborator during the Occupation of Manila who identified suspects for the Japanese military police. Officially Makapili was a group of militant Filipinos who fought for the Imperial Japanese Army. The group formed only near war's end on December 8, 1944. The informer system was called “zonification.”  

                  ⁷ The first sentence is derived from John Donne's poem “No Man Is an Island”(1624).  “Any [my emphasis] man's death diminishes me”  is a more emphatically inclusive wording.  The literary allusion is a counterpart to the earlier reminiscence of the justice's wife, who had “an intuitive sense of sharp tensions of fear, death, and apprehension—a green thought in a green shade.”(45)  This second allusion is to a couplet, lines 47-48, in Andrew Marvell's 1681 poem “The Garden”:

 

                                                      “Annihilating all that's made

                                                      to a green thought in a green shade.”

 

The point here and throughout the poem is that intellection can destroy the natural world, so, to most fully apprehend and appreciate it, one should withdraw into a garden.  This notion has struck readers as everything from a “reductionist fantasy” to “a spiritual epiphany.”  In between these two response poles lies the middle ground of U.S transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau.  He viewed philosophy as a way of life, not merely discourse about reflective thought, so he meditated about the concrete problems of life.  He held that aesthetic responses to phenomena are ontologically significant.

                  ⁸ A subtle atmospheric backgrounding of Mrs Montenegro's rumination is present in the rhapsodic descriptive passages interspersed into the story; e.g., “The amber afternoon glided away from the door ever so slowly and soon a twilight breeze rustled the curtains.” (45)  “She remembered the town nestling in the intolerable green of the hills, the rift of soft morning sunlight slowly dissolving the filigree of blue mist floating and encircling the jutting hills like delicate threads...” (45-46)  “...the stars came out glittering in the deep blue of the sky, a wide moveless arc clearly sweeping from one rim of the world to the other.  A crescent moon shed its effulgent glow.” (48) “A faint bar of light slanted  on the bed...”(49)  “The opalescent bar of starlight lay on his bed again.” (51)  These passages are quite compatible with Thoreau's outlook.

                  ⁹ See Genesis 18:20 ff for mention of destruction of the sinful  cities.  Here and throughout I cite the King James Version of the Bible (Cleveland and New York: World, n.d. Orig pub. 1611).  The Biblical accounts differ only in recency of wording, not in content, in the Jerusalem Bible Reader's Edition (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966).  The Douay-Rheims Bible New Testament (1582),  though pre-dating the Protestant version, has the complication of being based on the Latin Vulgate text of 380 a.d. and thus rendering a translation of a translation.  In the case of the Hebrew Bible, no Ur text has ever been found.

                  ¹⁰ Nazario, from the Latin Nazarius, means “from Nazareth” and is often a name given to Christians to symbolize a connection to the Biblical city.  Magdalena derives from the ancient Hebrew name Magdala meaning “tower” or “elevated.” Teresa may be from the Greek word Theros, meaning “summer” or it may be from Therizo, “to harvest.”  She represents warmth, renewal, and vitality and, in Christianity, may refer to Saint Teresa of Avila.  Maria, in the Bible, is Mary, the mother of Jesus.

                  ¹¹ This title is another allusion to Donne's “No Man Is an Island.”  Here the death diminishes not just theoretically, as in the case of Justice Montenegro, or emotionally, as it does for Mrs Montenegro in “Verdict,” but materially as well.

                  ¹² This title alludes to T. S.Eliot's poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,”  26-27:

 

                                                      “There will be time, there will be time

                                                      To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet”

 

                  ¹³ Usually a gambling game. In this respect she is a match for Father, who “...had always

aimed at what he referred to as the 'jackpot'.  But thrice he had failed.” (94) Mother, who hosts the mahjong games, as Barbara points out, doesn't even take the customary “house cut” of the winnings.  Barbara goes on to remind Mother that the guest mahjong players “take their merienda here—free.”  The mother's weak response is “They bring us chickens, bananas, strawberries, sometimes.” [my emphasis] (95)

                  ¹⁴ A Roman beheaded at age 14 in 304 a.d. for his conversion to Christianity. His name, of Greek derivation, means, in this story's context ironically, “all powerful.”

                  ¹⁵  At the time, ten pesos was a substantial amount for the working class in Manila.

                  ¹⁶ With an exuberant tone, this could be, be depending on what the “nightly demands” are, a basis for a Cialis or Viagra commercial, not a complaint.

                  ¹⁷ A carved wooden statue of Jesus carrying the cross to the crucifixion.  It is enshrined in the Minor Basilica and National Shrine of the Black Nazarene in Quiapo, Manila.  Many impoverished followers relate their daily struggle to the Passion of Christ.  Although over the years opinion has been divided about whether veneration of this figure constitutes idolatry, it is accepted in Catholicism and has been approved by three popes, including John Paul II.

                  ¹⁸ The name is the Greek form of the Hebrew Jair, meaning “he shines,” “one giving light,” or “he enlightens.”  The story of Jarius and his daughter is recounted in two books of the Bible.  In Mark 4: 35-42 Jesus brings Jarius' daughter back to life; in Luke: 44-56 the daughter is presumed dead, but Jesus avers that she only  “sleepeth” [today we might interpret this state as “comatose”].  Jesus restores her to consciousness, able to rise and walk.

                  ¹⁹ Roboam, whose name means in Hebrew “he that opposes the people,” is identified in Matthew 1:7 as a son of Solomon.  In 1 Kings14:23 he is said to have permitted idol worship and “Sodomites in the land.”  Salomé Is a name derived from the Hebrew word “Shalom,” meaning “peace.” She was, according to Mark 15:40-41, a follower of Jesus present at the crucifixion, but it

seems implausible that this devotee could be the same person as she who purportedly  danced for King Herod  and demanded John the Baptist's head on a platter as her reward.  

                  ²⁰  A Hebrew name meaning “God is with us.” In Isaiah 7:14 it is prophesied that a virgin will bear a son called Emmanuel;  Matthew 1:20-23 applies this prophesy to Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.

                  ²¹ The Old Testament form of “Mary” in the sense of “balanced,” not as the name can otherwise connote, “rebellious” or “bitter.” ”Independent” is the best derivative of these latter two possibilities.  Taken together, the Biblical allusions are a testament to Viray's depth and breadth of knowledge about and understanding of the Scriptures.

                  ²² “Mio” has no direct linkage to the Bible. In Spanish, it means “mine.” Since “Mio” is used as a girl's name in Japanese, it has no implications for the boy in this story.

                  ²³ “The Cedars of Lebanon,”  with varying phraseology, appears many times in the Bible.  The cedars were a source of wealth for Lebanon, especially for Tyre and Sidon.  The wood was a prized building material.  David used it for his palace, Solomon used it for the Temple in Jerusalem as well as for his own palace, and rulers of nearby countries to Israel sought it as well, partly because it was the most expensive wood at the time.  Many contemporary readers recognize “the cedars of Lebanon,” here a simile and in “First in Haldama” (108) as an intensifier, by the French author Alphonse de Lamartine poem “The Cedars of Lebanon” (1833).  

                  ²⁴ Viray  characterized “First in Haldama” in his “Introduction” as “a version of the betrayal in Gethsemane ...” (19)  Actually, this first-person story is about the aftermath of the betrayal.

 

 

*****

 

L. M. Grow is Emeritus Senior Professor of English, Broward College, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. He holds a B.A. ( English and Philosophy), M.A. ( English),  M.A. (Philosophy), and PhD. (English) degrees from the University of Southern California. He has published six scholarly books and more than sixty journal articles.  His specialty is Filipino literature in English.