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

  Joaquin wanted to be a priest. Instead, he wrote nonstop for seven decades. His journalism was as psychologically sharp as his fiction, his poetry as prized as his histories. He wrote his miraculous prose through terrible times with his integrity intact: a difficult feat. He had stature like no other. He lived like a hermit. Chosen National Artist of the Philippines by Ferdinand Marcos in 1976, Joaquin almost refused. In a jujitsu move, he accepted on one condition—that the dictator free the imprisoned poet Jose F. Lacaba. Thus Lacaba went home. Joaquin’s gesture was long unknown. This tact occurs in Joaquin’s stories: it’s his characters’ ability to live that matters. He is interested in vitality. Born of war and occupation, like his country, he sat every day in a monkish room with only books, a desk, and a manual typewriter, and he wrote. History is only precursor; the past is a ruin his prose survives. Writing is his triumph.

  Reading him is ours.

  GINA APOSTOL

  Introduction

  Telling Times: Nick Joaquin, Storyteller

  I.

  Just four years before Nick Joaquin’s first story, “Three Generations,” appeared in the Manila magazine Graphic in 1940, the great German critic Walter Benjamin writing half a world away remarked on the demise of the craft of storytelling. One reason for it had to do with the attenuation of experience. To the extent that stories consist of transmitting experiences—both the storytellers’ and those of others—its waning had the effect of making it more difficult to tell and share them. In the midst of the Great Depression, the rise of fascism in Germany and Italy, and the growing threat of global war, storytelling was coming into a crisis. Conditions such as the spread of capitalism, inflation and economic depression, the commodification of everyday life, the mechanization of war, and the moral corruption of politics had in fact been going on for much of the modern era and had the effect of turning experience into private goods or public clichés, flattening their cultural singularity and historical specificity. “More and more,” Benjamin wrote, “there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.”1

  Across the Pacific Ocean, in what was then the only formal colony of the United States, the deracination of experience, along with a crisis in the ability to communicate it, had long been taking place. The Philippines had been a Spanish colony for more than three hundred years, located at the western extreme of the first truly global empire since 1565. In 1898, the United States invaded and annexed the colony as part of its war against Spain.2 Among the United States’ new colonial possessions, only the Philippines vigorously resisted American designs. Filipino revolutionary forces, having fought and defeated Spain, declared independence and established a republic, launched a protracted guerrilla war that resulted in more than four thousand American casualties and about a quarter of a million Filipino deaths—one sixth of the entire population of the largest island of Luzon. Declared officially over by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, Filipino resistance continued in fits and starts until the 1930s. In the wake of revolution and war, and in the midst of the ever-present possibility of social uprisings, American colonial policy sought to reconcile Filipinos to the so-called benevolence of U.S. rule. Casting the former as “little brown brothers,” Americans claimed to be benefactors and sincere philanthropists dispensing the civilizing benefits of the Anglo-Saxon race. These included elections, free trade, the rule of law, a public health system, a colonial military, among others—all designed to co-opt and entrench elites at the expense of the poor.3

  The most effective counterinsurgency program, however, came in the form of the colonial public school system. Starting in 1899, the American regime established a network of public schools—what military governor-general Arthur MacArthur referred to as “adjuncts to military operations,” needed to “expedite the restoration of tranquility throughout the archipelago.”4 A key feature of the public schools was the adoption of English as the sole medium of instruction. English was meant to supersede the staggering linguistic diversity that characterized the colony—a linguistic diversity that predated Spanish colonial rule and which missionaries, seeking to evangelize in the local languages, had further institutionalized.5 More than one hundred distinct languages continued to be spoken then (and to this day) in the archipelago. Complicating this linguistic landscape was the limited knowledge of Spanish, whereby only about 10 percent of the most affluent and educated members of colonial society could claim to be fluent despite 350 years of Spanish rule. For the Americans, very few of whom knew Spanish, English was the only feasible language of instruction. It quickly became the dominant language of rule and education.6

  II.

  From the start, the decision to use English, like that of colonizing the Philippines, was fraught with contradiction. It had the effect of simultaneously incorporating Filipinos into the emergent colonial regime while keeping them at a distance from the metropolitan center. The goal of achieving mass literacy in English, meant to mitigate social inequalities and pave the way for a more democratic society, was short-circuited by the chronic shortage of funds, the failure to extend universal access to schooling, and the difficulty of retaining most of the students beyond the primary grades. But by the 1930s, an impressive 35 percent of the population could claim fluency in the language, making the Philippines the most literate in any Western language in all of colonial Southeast Asia.7 Still, many remained with little or no familiarity with English depending on how much schooling they had. They continued to live in largely vernacular worlds below English and Spanish, both of which continued to be the speech associated with colonial elites. In other words, the colonial legacy of English, like that of Spanish, included the creation of a linguistic hierarchy that roughly corresponded to a social hierarchy.8

  Philippine independence from American rule at the end of World War II further intensified this linguistic hierarchy. While Spanish fell largely out of use—thanks to the passing away of the last generation fluent in the language—the vernacular languages continued to be widely used among the majority of the population as the language of intimacy and informality at home and with friends and in commercial or “low-class” entertainment venues. Meanwhile, the prestige of English grew as a direct effect of colonial schooling where English was privileged while the vernaculars were repressed, endowing speakers fluent in English with a considerable cultural capital. The American victory over the Japanese further enhanced the position of English in the country. The postwar popularity of Hollywood movies and American pop music, the expansion of the military bases, and the extension of economic ties and cultural exchanges further deepened the hold of English in the postwar and postcolonial periods. Since 1987, the national language, Filipino—which is largely based on one of the largest spoken vernaculars in and around Manila, Tagalog—has sought to contest or at least mitigate the cultural dominance of English with little success. American English continues to be the language of authority, used in official state business and the dominant medium of instruction in higher education. The imperatives of globalization have meant that English has become the linguistic commodity par excellence, essential to the training of Filipinos as workers in the world of overseas caregiving and business outsourcing—the twin pillars of the current Philippine economy.

  The historical role of English in consolidating structures of political, cultural, and economic power during and beyond the period of direct American rule helps to situate the significance of Nick Joaquin’s literary legacy. His earliest stories were published during the Commonwealth, the Filipino state that governed the archipelago under American supervision starting in 1935 through a ten-year transition period toward independence. But as the literary historian Resil Mojares has pointed out, using the language of the Americans meant that Filipino writers had to willfully ignore the long and complex vernacular literary tradition that st
retched back to the precolonial period and went through a remarkable renaissance during the early decades of U.S. rule. The growth of vernacular literature and journalism in the early part of the twentieth century came thanks to the cultural space opened up by the end of Spanish rule on the one hand and the yet-to-be-consolidated hegemony of American English on the other. The weakening of the linguistic hierarchy allowed for writing in the local languages to rise to the fore. Influenced by late-nineteenth-century Spanish modernist literature and Revolutionary nationalist writings, numerous novels, short stories, and poems in Tagalog, Cebuano, Ilocano, and other languages appeared in books and newspapers, while vernacular plays such as the Zarzuela were performed in most large towns and cities. These were often, though not always, nationalist allegories expressed through the prism of social problems such as class differences, gender politics, and the weakening of parental authority amid the influx of capitalism and American colonial rule. A few writers even espoused socialism as a way of dealing with labor problems and championed the cause of independence.9 Yet, by the late 1920s, a new generation of Filipinos educated in English emerged who were roundly dismissive of vernacular writing. Their disdain for literature in the local languages was hardly surprising. It was a direct outcome of colonial education where fluency in English was acquired in and through the repression of vernacular languages.10

  Indeed, the very identity of Filipino Anglophone writers emerged via their denigration of vernacular writings as mere entertainment and commercial fodder for the unenlightened masses. Informed by the racist claims of American colonial teachers regarding the inherent inferiority of the vernacular languages, Filipino writers came to regard serious “literature” as something that was possible only in English. Writing in American English also cut them off from the Spanish literature written by their revolutionary fathers. Instead, they saw their literary birthright to lie in the Western canon. They avidly read Cervantes and Dostoevsky (in English translation), Sherwood Anderson and Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, e. e. cummings and Marianne Moore while setting aside Francisco Balagtas, Modesto de Castro, Lope K. Santos, Macario Pineda, Faustino Aguilar, and many other serious writers in the vernacular. Even the national hero José Rizal (1861–1896), who wrote in Spanish, was often read in English translation.11

  Thus did Anglophone Filipino writers feel themselves to be a generation and a class apart: more politically advanced than their revolutionary forebears while far more aesthetically refined and intellectually accomplished compared with those who were still caught up in vernacular worlds. Among themselves, they epitomized the modernizing promise of colonial rule: the promise of eventual independence and cosmopolitan uplift precisely to the extent that they spoke and wrote in what they considered to be the very idiom of modernity itself. American English contained Philippine literature in the double sense of that word: not only did it function as the language of colonial valuation; it was also felt to be the privileged idiom for expressing the novel experience of a coming freedom. As Mojares wrote about the doubleness of English among the early generation of Anglophone writers, it became “a medium which put the writer at one degree removed from immediate experience . . . its use transfigured sensibility and vision in ways that did not only occasion alienation but also made possible unexpected illumination.”12

  One more context for understanding the unfolding of Filipino Anglophone writing was the relative absence of any serious American literary interest in the Philippines. No major piece of American fiction and no American writer of any consequence ever wrote about the Philippines under U.S. rule. No Conrads, Kiplings, Orwells, or Forsters ever emerged among the Americans with regard to their Philippine colony. It seemed that the burden of recording the colonial, and later on, the postcolonial experience fell to Filipino writers in English. But they, too, found themselves largely patronized and ignored by American literary critics in the United States. With rare exceptions—Carlos Bulosan and José Garcia Villa, for example—very few Filipino writers were ever acknowledged, much less validated, by metropolitan publishers, critics, and other American writers—again with very few exceptions.13 As a result, Filipinos, despite seeking to enlarge their readership, ended up mostly writing for and reading one another within the Philippines. Thus arose a curious situation: despite working in a world language, Filipino Anglophone writers found their cosmopolitan outlook and modernist impulses dramatically provincialized, forced to stay within the boundaries of the emergent nation-state rather than be transported and disseminated into a larger English-speaking world. They became, despite their earlier disavowals, invariably vernacularized.

  The promise of colonial modernity that English brought was destined for further betrayal. The Japanese invasion and occupation of the Philippines brought U.S. rule to a sudden end while bringing the Philippines within the imperial orbit of East Asia. Nick Joaquin continued to write throughout the Japanese occupation. The war’s end saw a remarkable surge in his output. During the first two decades of the postcolonial period between 1946 and 1965, Joaquin published his most anthologized works, eleven of which appear in this volume. Setting his stories amid the bombed-out ruins of Manila—the second most destroyed city after Warsaw—he sought to come to grips with the turbulent and uncertain present by invoking the memory of the past. For Joaquin, one of the most devastating outcomes of the war was the loss of what Benjamin refers to as the “communicability of experience.” Pressed between the Filipino-American and the Pacific wars, three generations of Filipinos struggled to survive, a task that required for Joaquin the capacity to recover what had been lost. It meant being able not just to reconstruct a city destroyed beyond recognition; it also entailed regaining the capacity of remembering itself in order to reconstitute the remembering self. How to recall not just what seemed beyond recollection, but the very faculty and agency of recollection as such? How to tell the story of a nation, let alone a city, now buried in the physical and moral rubble that made up everyday life? And how to carry out the task of recovery and recollection in English—that other tongue which called for leaving behind the mother tongue? Who would listen and who would respond? The task of the storyteller was thus steeped in endless complications.

  III.

  Like many middle- and upper-class Filipinos in the post-Revolutionary era, Nick Joaquin (1917–2004) grew up in a household under the shadow of American rule but with material and familial ties to the late Spanish colonial culture. His father was a lawyer and served in the Spanish colonial civil service. Along with many other Filipino nationalists of his generation, he joined the Revolution and rose in the ranks to become an aide to Emilio Aguinaldo. Nick’s mother was a schoolteacher who early on learned English and was the first to teach her children the language. With the sudden death of Joaquin’s father, the family’s fortunes took a sudden downward turn. The large house in the wealthy Manila district of Paco was sold, and Nick was forced to live with his older brother Porfiro, or “Ping,” and his wife, Sarah. At an early age, he took odd jobs and worked as a printer’s devil for a local magazine. He had already quit school at the age of fourteen, claiming that he could learn more on his own by regularly going to the National Library and reading whatever he could get his hands on. His voracious reading of English-language texts was combined with a dedication to walking. Joaquin’s sister-in-law recalls how he walked everywhere, frequently wearing out his shoes to see the city and talk to various people, listening to their stories, and exploring the spaces and archives of Manila’s churches. Throughout his life, his walking and thinking went hand in hand, affording him the chance to explore high and low cultures, traversing the boundaries between the sacred and the profane, all the while living within the folds of two colonial powers and speaking their languages.14

  After the war, he won a scholarship to study briefly at a Dominican seminary in Hong Kong, but, unable for various reasons to continue, Joaquin returned to Manila. By the 1950s, he began working as a journalist, writing
lengthy features on crime and politics as well as assorted profiles on actors, visiting dignitaries, artists, boxers, and other social types in ways that highlighted the strange and ironic aspects of their lives. He reveled in popular culture, reading pulp fiction, working in theater, memorizing musicals, and watching all sorts of films.15 From the 1960s to the 1970s, he also began to write insightful revisionary accounts of the nation’s history, especially of its Revolutionary period, often swimming against the currents of ethno-nationalist and Marxist historiographies. But his most powerful works are arguably still the short stories he wrote between the 1940s and the mid-1960s. It was during those times that Joaquin’s craft as a storyteller was at its height. As with other great storytellers, he enjoyed “the freedom with which [to] move up and down the rungs of [his] experience as on a ladder.”16 Such experience forms the substance of his stories. They were shaped, often to the breaking point, 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 postcolonial era. How so?

  IV.

  In “The Mass of St. Sylvestre” (1946), for example, Joaquin tells a story about telling a story, foregrounding the most essential element of all: time. It recounts the Christianized version of the Roman god Janus, St. Sylvestre, the pope and patron saint “of doors and beginnings” whose feast day falls on the last day of the year. Carrying the keys of his office, St. Sylvestre “opens the gates of the Arch-episcopal cities” in all of Christendom, which, by the seventeenth century, included Manila. He then leads a celestial procession made up of numinous angels and various saints to commemorate the first Mass of the New Year: the feast of Christ’s circumcision. Legend had it that whosoever witnesses this Divine Mass would be given the gift of time: a thousand years to witness a thousand more Masses. Hearing this, a native sorcerer and translator, Maestro Mateo, plots to see the Mass. He steals the eyeballs of the recently dead, screwing them onto his own eyes to shield himself from the blinding spectacle of the Mass. He hides behind the altar and forces himself to stay awake by using a knife to make cuts in his arms, reducing them into a bloody mess while sprinkling limes on the wounds to refresh the pain. But unable to resist the sublime sight before him, he turns into stone, only to awaken every year for the next thousand years to see again the cavalcade of divine beings marking the end of the old year and the coming of the new.