The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic Read online

  Acclaim for Nick Joaquin’s

  The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic

  “Manila was Joaquin’s birthplace and his muse, yet the priests, socialites, and activists who populate these pages also evoke a globe-trotting intellect and a wondrous universe all his own. This book brilliantly captures the singular genius of Nick Joaquin, and will seduce readers everywhere who are meeting this giant of Philippine literature for the first time.”

  —Mia Alvar, PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize–winning author of In the Country

  “One cannot overstate what Nick Joaquin is to Philippine literature. Writing in English with the melody of Spanish and Tagalog, Joaquin was the first Filipino writer to focus on the impossible contradictions of a tribal civilization overlain by Spanish and American world views. And because that tribal civilization was woman-centered, Joaquin’s heroines are as complex, romantic, and defiant as Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina.”

  —Ninotchka Rosca, American Book Award–winning author of Twice Blessed

  “Nick Joaquin was both a brilliant poet and intense chronicler of doubleness that is a defining attribute of postcoloniality, in his case a Hispanicized Philippines complicated by Anglo American colonial rule. Underneath his use of English one senses the patriarchal tone of Spanish and the feminist susurrations of Tagalog. Hence, Joaquin’s world, particularly in A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, is one where remembering offers both solace and grief, and a subtle critique of empire. An exemplar of postcolonial literature at its best, Joaquin moves us with his empathetic depictions of a divided consciousness. Penguin’s reissue of his works is a benediction and cause for celebration.”

  —Luis H. Francia, PEN Open Book Award–winning author of Eye of the Fish: A Personal Archipelago

  “Nick Joaquin was such a presence in my childhood. I remember having a collection of Joaquin’s stories for children in my personal library. They were large, beautifully illustrated volumes that provided commentary to our culture in language so engaging for a child to understand. He has been a beloved storyteller for the Philippines for generations and now his memorable stories and play will be made available around the world.”

  —Lea Salonga, Tony Award–winning singer and actress

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS AND TALES OF THE TROPICAL GOTHIC

  NICK JOAQUIN (1917–2004) is widely regarded as the greatest Filipino writer of the twentieth century. Born on May 4, 1917, in Manila, Joaquin grew up in a household under the shadow of American rule but with material and familial ties to the late Spanish colonial culture and the turbulent legacy of the Philippine Revolution. Novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, historian, and biographer, Joaquin produced a body of work unmatched in richness and range by any of his contemporaries. As literary editor of the Philippines Free Press magazine in the 1950s and 1960s, Joaquin stood as an inspiration to generations of Filipino writers. His works include two novels, The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Cave and Shadows; three collections of short fiction; two volumes of poetry; and numerous works of nonfiction. His novel The Woman Who Had Two Navels (based on the short story) was first written on a Harper Publishing Company fellowship awarded in 1957, which brought him to the United States and Mexico. The book was published in 1962 and was awarded the first Harry Stonehill Novel Award. His play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, has been widely performed in the Philippines, in both dramatic and film adaptations. His most celebrated short works and play written between the 1940s to the mid-1960s span the end of U.S. colonial rule, the Japanese occupation, Manila’s near total destruction from World War II, and its uneven reconstruction in the post-colonial era. They show the height of Joaquin’s craft as a storyteller. His stories, for which he coined the term “Tropical Gothic,” were shaped by the spiritual pull of Spanish Catholicism, the violence and promise of American colonialism, the profound destructiveness of the Pacific war, and the turbulent beginnings of the post-colonial era. The recipient of numerous awards, Joaquin was honored as a National Artist of the Philippines in 1976 under the regime of late dictator Ferdinand Marcos. Joaquin accepted the award and requested the release from political detention of an imprisoned fellow poet and journalist Jose F. Lacaba, which was granted. In 1966, Joaquin received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for journalism, literature, and creative communication “for exploring the mysteries of the Filipino body and soul in sixty inspired years as a writer.” On April 29, 2004, Joaquin died of cardiac arrest at his home in San Juan, Metro Manila.

  GINA APOSTOL won the Philippine National Book Award for each of her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. Her third novel, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize and won the PEN/Open Book Award. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts.

  VICENTE L. RAFAEL is a professor of history at the University of Washington, specializing in southeast Asian history. He has written widely on the political and cultural history of the Philippines, and his works include Contracting Colonialism, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, The Promise of the Foreign, and, most recently, Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Copyright © 2017 by Rosario Joaquin Villegas

  Introduction copyright © 2017 by Vicente L. Rafael

  Foreword copyright © 2017 by Gina Apostal

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  The selections in this volume were first published in the Philippines. “Three Generations” first appeared in Graphic, “Legend of the Dying Wanton,” and “The Summer Solstice” appeared in Saturday Evening News; “The Mass at St. Sylvestre” in the Manila Post; “May Day Eve,” “Guardia de Honor,” “Dona Jeronima,” “The Order of Melkizedek” and “Candido’s Apocalypse” in the Philippine Free Press; “The Woman Who Had Two Navels” in the Manila Chronicle Sunday Magazine; and “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Acts” in Weekly Women’s Magazine.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Joaquin, Nick, author. | Apostol, Gina, writer of foreword. | Rafael, Vicente L., writer of introduction. | Container of (work): Joaquin, Nick. Woman who had two navels. | Container of (work): Joaquin, Nick. Tales of the tropical gothic.

  Title: The woman who had two navels ; and, Tales of the tropical gothic / Nick Joaquin ; foreword by Gina Apostol ; introduction by Vicente L. Rafael.

  Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016040950 (print) | LCCN 2016045469 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9780143130710 (print) | ISBN 9781524704544 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PR9550.9.J6 A6 2017 (print) | LCC PR9550.9.J6 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016040950

  Cover illustration: Kristina Collantes

  Version_1

  Contents

  Acclaim for Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navel
s and Tales of the Tropical Gothic

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword by GINA APOSTOL

  Introduction by VICENTE L. RAFAEL

  Suggestions for Further Reading by VICENTE L. RAFAEL

  Acknowledgments

  THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS AND TALES OF THE TROPICAL GOTHIC

  Three Generations

  The Legend of the Dying Wanton

  The Mass of St. Sylvestre

  The Summer Solstice

  May Day Eve

  The Woman Who Had Two Navels

  Guardia de Honor

  Doña Jerónima

  The Order of Melkizedek

  Cándido’s Apocalypse

  A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Scenes

  Foreword

  Nick Joaquin had the look of a dissolute emperor and the discipline of a monk. He lived, worked, and died in the city of his birth. He loved San Miguel beer, walking around Manila, and attending Mass. He spoke Tagalog, Spanish, and English, plus kanto-boy Tagalog and street Englishes. His style has a term: Joaquinesque. His command of voice, language, and form is absolute. Some of his sentences are like labyrinths that if you pulled a string through, you get this architectonic surety, a marvel. As a writer, I am always falling in love with him again. I study his sentences. Puns lurk in his precision. His favorite is “going for lost”: inside the phrase is Tagalog, nagwawala, meaning both to lose and to go nuts. He likes gerundizing (Tagalog is verb based) and history puns. For Filipinos, Joaquin is sui generis. Almost maddeningly Manileño, subversively religious, pitch-perfectly bourgeois, preternaturally feminist, historically voracious, Joaquin’s work has a fatality—it simply is.

  I read him when I was a child in Leyte. MacArthur had landed on my island in 1944; and since May 1, 1898, when Spain’s ships fell to American cannons in Manila Bay, the Philippines—condemned on that May Day to English—has made art in English from seeds of violence.

  For the Philippines, an archipelago geographically fragmented, linguistically fissured, occupied by not one but two invaders heralding a fierce but frayed republic dominated by the oligarchic spoils of our split, postcolonial selves—in a land tectonically and climatically doomed to dissolution—for the Philippines, perhaps it is only through its fictions that it can conceive itself a unity.

  These fictions are in multiple tongues. Some say the country is distinct because it was created by a novel—José Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere. Joaquin is tonally different from Rizal not only because he wrote in English, Rizal in Spanish, and Rizal wrote before war, while Joaquin, like Aeneas carrying Anchises, bore war’s effects. But Joaquin is equally oracular, with that slippery, ironic humor of the triple-tongued (or double-naveled) who writes in a conscious, resistant space between translation.

  Rereading Joaquin, I feel ghosts, all of them women. Time-traveling Natalia in “Guardia de Honor,” always about to lead the La Naval procession, the celebration of Manila that Joaquin loved. Child-heiress Guia in “Melkizedek,” who undergoes metamorphoses: an array of freedom-hungry desires none of which guides her to liberation. The Grandmother in “Cándido’s Apocalypse,” soother of psychosis. Above all, those twin indelible figures, desperada and despot—Agueda of “May Day Eve” and my favorite, Lupeng of “The Summer Solstice.” That searing moment in “The Summer Solstice”—when the husband Don Paeng “clawed his way across the floor, like a great agonized lizard . . . lifted his dripping face and touched his bruised lips to [Lupeng’s] toes and grabbed the white foot and kissed it”—is stamped like a fever in my brain. I realize I was too young when I read that. And the scene in “May Day Eve” of Agueda staring at the mirror at her prophesied demon is an abiding portrait, since the Philippines still grants no divorce. I may not be the only Filipino for whom both empowered Lupeng and tragic Agueda embody two sides of one electrifying, inescapable Mother.

  It is especially through his women that Joaquin diagnoses the spiritual horror of impassioned but truncated lives—his existential theme. His cure lies in the same women: they are daemons of the life-spirit—babaylan and Tadtarin and witches and supernatural powers that run through Joaquin’s work. Joaquin is prescient and contemporary because he excavates what’s ancient—women are vessels of transformative godhood: versions of Mary, animist, earthly.

  But in “The Woman Who Had Two Navels,” the eponymous woman is secondary beside the male ghost—the revolutionary Monzon, exiled in Hong Kong since 1901, when he refused to pledge allegiance to America after the war for Philippine independence failed.

  His trauma—that crippled independence—is at the heart of this collection.

  The 1899–1904 Filipino-American war is a blind spot—we do not remember it. A brave, anti-imperialist war is the birthright of the Philippines: the nation was founded on revolt against imperial America in the aftermath of the so-called Spanish-American War of 1898, when the United States decided to occupy its ally against Spain rather than liberate it. The Philippines commemorates its 1896 war against Spain when it celebrates its revolutionary history; the Filipino-American war that succeeded the Spanish war is, oddly, forgotten. Joaquin once famously noted that he wrote to “bring in the grandfathers, to manifest roots.” Some fault Joaquin for Hispano-centrism: but his gaze toward Spain is not nostalgic; it is a tool in his arsenal—a weapon in his critique of empire. That failed revolution, the wound of the American war, is the invisible scar in Joaquin’s stories.

  In “The Woman Who Had Two Navels,” Joaquin recalls Monzon’s past through the solipsistic babble of socialite Concha (that burlesque of the bourgeois voice is a Joaquin specialty): “She would always see her childhood as a page in an epic, brilliant with tears and splendid with heroes.”

  Through vapid Concha, Joaquin sketches the Revolution. Similarly, “Melkizedek” evokes the American occupation in one line about a charlatan, Melchior: “In March 1901, General Otis sent a Gringo infantry battalion . . .” to throw the cult into jail. In Joaquin’s plots, war and resistance at first seem farce, barely drawn, and not foregrounded. Historical ellipsis, a recurring structural element in Joaquin, expresses his masterful understanding of his country. It marks hurt.

  Nick Joaquin’s father was a colonel under General Emilio Aguinaldo. The 1899 Battle of Manila was the eternal present of his father’s generation: after that loss, to recall its acts was sedition. The 1945 Battle of Manila was Joaquin’s: he lived through it. In Joaquin, a consummate Manileño, these two events, Manila’s fall to Americans in 1899 and Manila’s destruction by Americans in 1945, occur like doubled stereograph pictures, a history pun—as if, once refocused, they are the same trauma. Sketched most candidly in “A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino” and “Woman,” this mourning—over ruined place, unsung heroes, lost hopes—perhaps comes from Joaquin’s being an observant son. He took on with blithe sin the language of his father’s enemy, mastering it to witness the paradoxical ways a nation survives.

  His unapologetic, Calibanic choice of English is both rebuke to the occupier and revenge upon it.

  Monzon the exile vows to return only when his country is free. In 1946, America “gave” the Philippines its freedom. But “it’s not there anymore, your father’s house,” Concha reports, “. . . this last war had finally destroyed it.”

  In World War II, American artillery blasted old Manila to rubble in order to recapture it. The old city has never recovered. Among Allied capitals, only Warsaw was worse hit. Joaquin knew this destruction to the bone. In “Mass of St. Sylvestre,” he summons it: “the city he knew has been wiped out by magic more practical and effective than any he had ever dreamt of.” In Binondo, all that is left of Monzon’s house is “a sad stairway in a field of ruin, going up to nowhere.”

  Joaquin “queers” history. His slant is invariably transgressive, questioning the norm—the revolutionary is catatonic, en
slaved women are bosses, the virile are a mess, a GI, an ally, witnesses the destruction he made as if it were only illusion. Joaquin reads his country like the visionary madman in “Cándido’s Apocalypse”: people walk about exposing their truths, naked. But they do not know their own truths. Anachronism, psychosis, time traveling, fantasy, mirrors, ghosts: these are structures with which Joaquin sets the view awry in order to see it more right.

  The past haunts Nick Joaquin. But as I reread him today, Nick Joaquin is more present than the world around me. His voice is vivid, idiosyncratic, sure, replete. Joaquin creates, as one reads him, his own precursors—his existence modifies the textual landscape.

  My own whimsical list of precursors produced by Nick Joaquin includes Machado de Assis crossed with Holden Caulfield (“Cándido’s Apocalypse”), shipwrecks in Melville (“Doña Jerónima”), neurotic women in telenovelas (“The Woman Who Had Two Navels”), Chaucer (“Mass of St. Sylvestre”), bastos conquistadors in Tagalog komiks (“Legend of a Dying Wanton”), García Márquez’s Melquíades (“Order of Melkizedek”), a line in Dylan Thomas (“Three Generations”), Borges’s magician dreamed by another (“Guardia de Honor”).

  In my mind, Joaquin alters his precursors. Catcher in the Rye is flat, after “Cándido’s Apocalypse,” because Holden has no Filipino grandmother. I start imagining Melville’s harpooners passing unnamed wrecks of Manila galleons, and TV soap femmes fatales reciting Rizal’s “Mi Último Adiós.” The Romanism of Chaucer is archaic, but the Romanism of Joaquin is current: it’s about grief under empire.

  Of course, this amusing trick with texts I appropriate from “Kafka and His Precursors,” a Borgesian joke about paradoxes of reading (and a fable on postcoloniality). Borges says, “Every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” Thus, in some stories, Joaquin reveals the Philippines as indigenously European, that is, grotesque and medieval; in others, Manhattan and Hong Kong are just flighty provinces of Manila. In all of them, women are central, casting healthy suspicion on all phallocentric plots that have come before Joaquin.