Arts, Faculty of
English Language and Literatures, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Undaloc, John
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
How is the post-1986 figure of the heroic overseas Filipino worker (OFW) sedimented by literary representations of revolution and sacrifice? This thesis argues that the valorized image of OFWs as the nation’s bagong bayani, “modern heroes,” emerges by way of a catachresis: a “misnaming” or “the misapplication of a word” that situates the OFW in a longer lineage of misnamings in the twentieth-century Philippine discourse on revolution. It proposes reading for catachreses as a method of critiquing the political act of claiming revolution, which engenders subjects that exceed, persist in, and “fall away” from discourse. This thesis supports its arguments by critiquing two social realist texts: Jose Maria Sison’s 1968 poem, “The Guerilla Is Like a Poet,” for its formalizing the bifurcation of the revolutionary subject amid the rise of postindependence Philippine nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century; and Ninotchka Rosca’s 1988 novel State of War for its formal innovations in representing “Festival” and revolution amid life in the Philippines.
THE IMAGE AS OFW: REVOLUTION AND CATACHRESIS IN JOSE MARIA SISON’S “THE GUERILLA IS LIKE A POET” AND NINOTCHKA ROSCA’S STATE OF WAR by John Undaloc B.A. Hons., The University of Alberta, 2022 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) July 2024 © John Undaloc, 2024 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: The Image as OFW: Revolution and Catachresis in Jose Maria Sison’s “The Guerilla Is Like a Poet” and Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War submitted by John Undaloc in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in English Examining Committee: Dina Al-Kassim, Associate Professor, English Language and Literatures, UBC Supervisor Kimberly Bain, Assistant Professor, English Language and Literatures, UBC Supervisory Committee Member iii Abstract How is the post-1986 figure of the heroic overseas Filipino worker (OFW) sedimented by literary representations of revolution and sacrifice? This thesis argues that the valorized image of OFWs as the nation’s bagong bayani, “modern heroes,” emerges by way of a catachresis: a “misnaming” or “the misapplication of a word” that situates the OFW in a longer lineage of misnamings in the twentieth-century Philippine discourse on revolution. It proposes reading for catachreses as a method of critiquing the political act of claiming revolution, which engenders subjects that exceed, persist in, and “fall away” from discourse. This thesis supports its arguments by critiquing two social realist texts: Jose Maria Sison’s 1968 poem, “The Guerilla Is Like a Poet,” for its formalizing the bifurcation of the revolutionary subject amid the rise of postindependence Philippine nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century; and Ninotchka Rosca’s 1988 novel State of War for its formal innovations in representing “Festival” and revolution amid life in the Philippines. iv Lay Summary Overseas Filipino workers are often called the Philippines’ bagong bayani, “modern heroes.” This thesis argues that this name is constructed and informed by twentieth-century Philippine discourse on revolution. Although social science scholarship has been crucial to understanding the history of overseas Filipino workers, a method of literary analysis that centers their misnaming opens new points of inquiry into the subjective experiences, speech and power relations, vulnerabilities, and communities that are made possible through shared but different experiences of misnaming. v Preface This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, John Undaloc. vi Table of Contents Abstract......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary................................................................................................................................ iv Preface............................................................................................................................................ v Table of Contents......................................................................................................................... vi Acknowledgements..................................................................................................................... vii Introduction................................................................................................................................... 1 Imagining the Masses: Revolutionary Nationalism in Sison’s “Guerilla”............................. 10 The Masses as Revolutionary Image................................................................................. 10 The Revolutionary Image as OFW…................................................................................ 32 Festival, Revolution, and Commandement in Rosca’s State of War......................................... 34 Festival and Vulgarity........................................................................................................ 36 Conclusion.................................................................................................................................... 47 Works Cited................................................................................................................................. 48 vii Acknowledgments I offer my enduring gratitude to Dr. Dina Al-Kassim for her generosity, insight, patience, care, and mentorship over the past year and a half. Dina, this research would not have been possible without your guidance and your attentiveness to my voice. Really, I can only understate how much I’ve learned from your classes and our many conversations. It has been nothing short of a gift to learn from and think alongside you. I also want to thank Dr. Kimberly Bain, who has been a firm believer in me and my work before I could even find the words to say what I needed to say. Kim, I’m especially grateful for all the grace and kindness you’ve shown me this past year. You’ve not only been there to help me start small, pause, and take my time, but you’ve helped me learn how to summon enough courage to speak on matters that I care deeply about. I’m indebted to you for your time and support. 1 Introduction A 2023 article by the Harvard International Review refers to overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) as the nation’s bagong bayani, “modern heroes” embodying an archetypical Filipino resilience (Eugenio). Bago is the Tagalog word for “new,” or in this case, “modern,” and bayani means “hero,” sharing an etymology with the word bayan, that is, one’s “country.” This epithet is not new, originating in 1988 at Hong Kong’s Saint Margaret Chapel as then-President Corazon Aquino expressed her gratitude to a crowd of Filipina domestic workers for their contributions to the national economy and the sacrifices they endure to support their families.1 Scholars frequently recall this address for the force of its irony, as rising reports of unpaid and undocumented labor, oppressive working conditions, and sexual and physical violence by foreign employers in the nineties would find their time to speak back to Aquino’s solemn praise. Amid the present scholarship, less attention has been directed toward reflecting on how the workers sitting on the pews of that chapel might have responded to the address—whether relief, or terror, or indignation might have broken the spell of the prose, or whether silence is all that is theirs worth remembering. Aquino’s speech marks a shift in the state’s recognition of the OFW, its glorified image admitting to the strength of the Filipino spirit, juxtaposed by a familiar pathos for the inevitable travails of overseas work. The image is so familiar because it seems almost like a memory, faded and worn, like the flickers of an old television screen amid an evening teleserye: this mother, who, by the end of her thirties, will dream of a better life for her family, travel abroad to worlds unknown, bear humiliation and violation to secure a future for her own. So goes the pathos of maternal virtue, its worth, her sacrifice. In fact, it is difficult at present to 1 For the speech in Tagalog, see https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1988/04/17/address-of-president-corazon-aquino-to-the-filipinas-working-in-hong-kong/. 2 hear talk of the OFW, whether in the privacy of domestic life or as the face of success stories on social media posts announcing once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for overseas work, without falling back to some redemptive claim over her sacrifice. I mean “sacrifice,” here, in no exceptional terms, though the word’s valence along the lines of the sacred may precisely be what is at stake to bear upon the subject of Aquino’s address—one who is named only insofar as her sacrifice constitutes the cultural boundary by which the “OFW,” as a novel category of human capital, essential yet expendable, materializing as she vanishes, holds any meaningful distinction from other forms of commodified export. I say “her,” with no intention of gendering heedlessly the manifold human lives who, upon joining the mass migrations of the second half of the twentieth century, seek futures beyond the limits of their material circumstances at hand; nor of positing any essential relation between OFWs and the structural conditions that frame their precarity. I mean to suggest that gendering here assumes its normative value via figuration, the image a founding fantasy, the OFW “made to matter” through a rhetorical sleight of hand. The state might boast of its pride and joy, though this image belongs to no worker, no nation, but the idealized anonymity of its historical production. Since the “feminization” of Philippine migrant labor in the late twentieth century, feminist scholars, social scientists, critics, families, and concerned citizens across the globe have voiced concern regarding the new forms of precarity imposed on Filipinas entering the global workforce. As the nineties would see women steadily outpace men among OFWs, rising public anxieties against the loss of mothers and sisters to increasingly “vulnerable” occupations would seem to frame gender as a new matter of national policy.2 The complex history of this rise in female migrant workers, from nurses to entertainers to caretakers to domestic workers, cannot be 2 See Rodriguez 93-115, esp. 102-115 for her analysis of the “Philippine Domestic.” 3 condensed into a neat overview. A key point of interest, however, is the 1974 Labor Code, which social scientists generally understand to be the start of the contemporary remittance economy. Prior to this policy and the new waves of Filipinos who would travel abroad in response to the 1965 U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, overseas work had been imagined to be an individual affair: a “secular pilgrimage” for a middle-class subject who sought to develop his character and find his fortune abroad; or as the seafaring work of “Manilamen” in a more extended history of migration.3 1974, however, would see the state institutionalize its role in actively promoting and managing its migrant workforce.4 Among others, Valerie Francisco-Menchavez, Anna Romina Guevarra, Robyn Rodriguez, and Rhacel Parreñas have argued that, since the rise of neoliberalism, the Philippine government has maintained an ongoing interest in regulating the export of a particular form of OFW, owing in part to her difference from other migrant workers from the Global South: the “added export value”5 in being docile, family-oriented, modest, dutiful, temporary, efficient, and proficient in English. If we follow this lead, then, that the Philippines’ transition into a “labor brokerage state”6 was not merely a matter of arranging the export of migrant labor but involved a new disciplinary order in the realm of culture, we might determine what fantasies ascribe value to these virtues that subject their migrant workforce. 3 See Aguilar 24-52 for the history of “Manilamen,” 83-127 for this notion of a “secular pilgrimage.” 4 There is a vast and diverse body of social science scholarship on overseas Filipino workers and the significance of the 1974 labor code. Although I cannot hope to be exhaustive, this thesis is especially indebted to and informed by the following works: Aguilar, Migration Revolution; Bautista, “Export-Quality Martyrs”; Eugenio, “Overseas Filipino Workers”; Francisco-Menchavez, The Labor of Care; Guevarra, Marketing Dreams; Liu, “Dual-Chain Migration”; Maca, “Education in the ‘New Society’”; Parreñas, Children of Global Migration; Parreñas, Force of Domesticity; Parreñas, Servants of Globalization; and Rodriguez, Migrants for Export. 5 “Added export value” refers to “a specifically racialized form of productive labor power that is pitched as the comparative advantage of Filipinos, as compared with other Third World subjects, in the global economy” (Guevarra 11). As monetary value is ascribed to a racialized docility, it is worth theorizing what myths, tropes, and representations materialize this “added export value.” 6 Rodriguez’s notion in Migrants for Export. See Rodriguez ix-xxviii. 4 The seventies had been a critical historical juncture for other reasons; many decenter the OFW from its narrative. The 1974 Labor Code was implemented two years after then-President Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and extended his term beyond the six-year constitutional limit. Another decade would pass before the 1986 EDSA Revolution forced him and his family into exile, twenty long years after his violent kleptocratic rule impoverished the national treasury in the makings of a “New Society.” That the Marcos dictatorship remains a profound point of trauma in the country’s history is no overstatement, owing to the brutality of Marcos’s rule, his family’s decadent expenditure of public funds, the suspension and violation of democratic rights, and the censorship of political opponents, critics, activists, religious workers, journalists, and writers. As the administration received millions of dollars from the United States in support of Marcos’s campaigns committed to quashing the threat of communist insurgency in the country, martial law had been contemporaneous with a radical turn among a new generation of workers, student activists, artists, and thinkers, who would press their claims on an “unfinished revolution.”7 It is this tumultuous dialectic of revolution and counterrevolution that prefigures Aquino’s address, and what would later move her to refer to OFWs as the “unsung heroes of the Revolution.”8 Following the wealth of social science scholarship on migrant work, reproductive labor, and revolution in the late twentieth century, literary critics in Philippine studies have worked to trace a genealogy of the OFW as a discursive phenomenon. To posit the OFW as the effect of discourse is neither to mince words with nor abstract the reality of millions of migrant workers as they perform their services in the flesh. Rather, it is to recognize the materiality of language, 7 I discuss this in greater detail in “Imagining the Masses.” 8 For the full speech, see https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1988/08/30/speech-of-president-corazon-aquino-to-the-filipinos-in-brunei/. 5 “sedimented” by re-cited acts of discourse and extant sociocultural norms beyond one’s control that engender one’s body and subjectivity but do not wholly define her.9 Paul Nadal argues, for instance, in his analysis of the prehistory of the 1974 Labor Code “that a critical precursor of the OFW was the Filipino anglophone writer, whose English-language novels in particular…came to be integrated into, indeed were seen as an integral part of, the formation of a national culture” (3). With its capacity to shape and develop the body politic, a national literature is not exterior to politics but has long been a means of weaving together commonality via difference among disparate ethnolinguistic groups into the name “Filipino.” Following independence, this project of imagining the postcolonial nation is no doubt haunted by its “excess,” as Caroline Hau suggests: the foreign presences that “inform[], but which cannot be fully grasped or encompassed by, nation making” (Subject 13); the internal exclusions that constitute the name “Filipino.” What is perhaps distinct about the abstracted OFW is that her claim to the nation is imagined and transnationally determined by interests outside the country. It is for this reason that Vincente Rafael refers to OFWs as “spectral presences…extruded parts of the body politic” (205). That state discourse exalts and concomitantly regulates these “modern heroes,” these “export-quality martyrs,” as Julius Bautista calls them, is no empty analogy but rather attests to a shared lexicon of national sacrifice and to social norms at play that imagine the OFW at the moment of her disappearance: a commodified body revered for her absence, though whose monetary remittances realize the development of the country’s future as what has kept its economy afloat since the end of the twentieth century. 9 See Butler 12-16 for their notion of “sedimentation.” 6 Neferti Tadiar has written extensively on this subject at the heart of the global service economy and the disappeared “historical experience” of Filipinos subsumed by globalization.10 In her critique of the nascent “prostitution economy” rising under the Marcos administration, as prostitution, sex tourism, and the hospitality industry would garner Manila’s then-reputation as the “sex capital of the world,” Tadiar argues that this epithet cannot solely be understood symbolically but points to the material reality of a sexualized economy and nation, prostituted to the globe according to racist, sexist, heterosexist, neocolonial systems of investment and exchange (TFA 25-6). Here, prostitution serves as the “central metaphor” for the failures of a body politic, the crisis of a national culture where the Filipina is metonymized as the “symptom” of a “nation of prostitutes” (TFA 26); a “bodily synecdoche[] of a beleaguered nation” (TFA 105), whose labor is cheapened and rendered disposable in the makings of a self-sacrificing femininity. Such a subject comes into being by a founding mistake, a trope, or, to borrow from Tadiar, by materializing an order of global “fantasy production.”11 In what follows, I aim to show that the errant and flexible substitutability of the gendered OFW, whether as sacrificial body or naturalized surface or ungendered hero or foreign commodity, can be formally identified as a catachresis: that is, a founding error, “the misapplication of a word”; a misnaming of that which is made to bear a proper name that it cannot utter; an act of naming that stretches beyond the name’s given limits.12 As “the unsung 10 In Things Fall Away (TFA), Tadiar refers to “historical experience” as “both the imaginary, affective, sociosubjective activity that impels and shapes prevailing relations of production in a particular sociohistorical formation and the hermeneutic perspective that recognizes alternative agencies in the making of history, which such activity affords” (15). 11 Tadiar uses “fantasy production” to denote the “imaginary of a regime of accumulation and representation of universal value, under the sway of which capitalist nations organize themselves individually and collectively in the ‘system’ of the Free World” (Fantasy Production 6). 12 A brief but useful definition of “catachresis” by The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory: “The misapplication of a word, especially in a mixed metaphor” (106). For the theoretical merits of the name and “catachresis,” my research is indebted to and enriched by the intellectual works of Hortense Spillers’ “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” in which Spillers theorizes the patronymic property relation in the formation of the modern 7 hero of the Revolution,” the catachrestic OFW carries a name that does not represent her per se, but a discursive history of all who would claim revolution. Insofar as any representation cannot fully capture what it represents and discourse fails to fully claim its object, any claim to revolution that is spoken in the name (of history, of the ideal, of the people, of the nation, of social transformation) I argue to be an act of naming that doubles as a misnaming and carries within the name an internal excess it cannot contain: that is, what persists amid a shadowy lineage of misnamings subsumed by discourse. Indeed, the very notion of a historical “lineage” of catachrestic figures must itself be catachrestic, as the bastard status of that which is misnamed entails that it cannot inherit history as a concatenated succession of events but must nevertheless carry both its virtue and its burden. Further, the “image” holds a privileged place in my analysis as I hold that it materializes the abstracted body, gendered and ungendered, that one might call the OFW; and it establishes that the valorization of OFW labor is a form of recitation to resemble and recreate a founding image, a fantasy, a trope—a catachresis that repeats and forcibly serializes mistakes until fiction can call itself law, falsities claim truth. Thus, this thesis does not theorize the OFW by beginning with the present status of migrant workers; it instead works with a sedimented past of other excess misnamings in Philippine discourse that are not endemic to the late twentieth century nor its rising revolutionary thought. By understanding the OFW’s construction as a “modern hero” in literary terms, it theorizes a form of critique that does not depart from history but insists on the internal limits of historical narrative—its constitutive excesses that “fall away.” Thus, if the valorized OFW, whether as mother, as seafarer, as sex worker, as bagong bayani, as domestic helper, emerges by American family and (un)gendered Black(ened) bodies; Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter and Antigone’s Claim, for Butler’s many insights on unrecognized sexualities and social relations that speak in catachresis; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, for her critique of Kant’s foreclosure of the “native informant.” 8 way of catachresis—a mistake whose rhetorical force it inherits from the unspoken pains of an “unfinished revolution,” then a genealogy of OFWs can do more than propose a series of signs and symptoms but might bear upon feminist theory and practice as a refusal to abandon the voices of all who have bided their time to speak. My first chapter, “Imagining the Masses: Revolutionary Nationalism in Sison’s ‘Guerilla,’” begins by presenting a terse summary of the rise in postindependence Philippine nationalism to contextualize my analysis of Jose Maria Sison’s 1968 poem “The Guerilla Is Like a Poet.” “Guerilla” is a short but noteworthy poem composed of five stanzas, exemplifying a recurring trope in Philippine revolutionary literature that speculates a harmonic union between land and people: the “masses as land.” As a new wave of radical workers, intellectuals, students, and activists would claim an “unfinished revolution,” the role of the revolutionary artist as both an acting and thinking subject had been transformed amid calls to “awaken” and serve “the masses.” I use psychoanalytic theory to critique “Guerilla,” which, I argue, formalizes the bifurcation of the revolutionary subject as a specular performance identifying with the natural image. What is misnamed here is the loss immanent to revolutionary subjectification. This chapter draws significantly from Tadiar’s work in Things Fall Away, which I build upon to identify a catachresis in “Guerilla” and the catachrestic structure of the OFW. Chapter two, “Festival, Revolution, and Commandement in Rosca’s State of War,” turns to Ninotchka Rosca’s 1988 novel State of War, a piece of historical fiction set in the Marcos era that allegorizes a recurring history of revolution and counterrevolution. Rosca’s novel has garnered much attention from literary critics, but the prevailing scholarship tends to focus on the significance of her tale’s political allegory. This chapter analyzes State of War’s depiction of “Festival” alongside the novel’s formal innovations and experimentations with language as it 9 materializes and sexualizes a plurality of selves. Here, I draw from Achille Mbembe’s notion of commandement to read for catachreses and to theorize the problem of representing the reproduction of life in the postcolonial Philippines. 10 Imagining the Masses: Revolutionary Nationalism in Sison’s “Guerilla” The Masses as Revolutionary Image One of the principal concerns for Philippine literature in the second half of the twentieth century was its capacity to fashion a national consciousness. For instance, as the landmark 1956 Rizal Bill mandated that every educational institution include courses on the life and writings of José Rizal, the state would turn to literature as a means of developing a citizenry who could claim a shared history and model themselves according to the civic virtues of the country’s now most famous national martyr.13 Indeed, “[i]n the act of locating Rizal’s texts within a national fantasy of origins, the Rizal Bill established nationalism’s origins in literature at the same moment that it claimed to regulate literature in the name of the nation” (Hau, Necessary Fictions 3). The first two-and-a-half decades following independence had been haunted by the question of a “Filipino” culture, its vernacular, its future after half a century of colonial tutelage. After all, it had been the “master stroke” of U.S. colonial policy, at least in the view of one prominent Philippine historian, Renato Constantino, to introduce an educational system with English as the medium of instruction (24). Amid the “Great Divide” between the literati who claimed to represent the nation and the nation that seemed only to appear in and as representation, the rise in postindependence nationalism emerged against the anxiety of a knowable community. 13 José Rizal is the Philippines’ celebrated national hero, scholar, and writer. His two most famous novels, Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo, continue to be taught regularly in the national curriculum. There has been a great body of work dedicated to debating Rizal’s writings and whether he was a revolutionary in support of armed struggle or a reformist calling for non-violence. Notably, however, this pacified image of Rizal as propounded by the church and state has played a significant role in legitimizing the authority of the nation-state and in consolidating the stability of liberal democracy. My explanation here draws heavily from Caroline Hau’s scholarship. For the language of the Rizal Bill, see https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/1956/06/12/republic-act-no-1425/. For Hau’s analysis of its historical impact, see Necessary Fictions 1-48. 11 In this postwar cultural crisis, Tadiar distinguishes between two strands of nationalism: that of the state, which prescribed a national literature according to an image of Filipino virtue and sacrifice; the other, a revolutionary nationalism that sought communion with the “masses” in their historical struggle against foreign powers. Whereas the former had been irredeemably bourgeois, rarefied, and inculcated in universal humanist values, the latter imagined a national culture through the “unfinished revolution” of the Filipino peasantry. This progressive commitment to the people and their liberation from extant forces of domination was what differentiated left-wing politics from the neocolonial interests of liberal elites and inspired new social realist writings that took on the task of identifying with the masses (Tadiar, TFA 268). Against a state nationalism that continued to serve the interests of landowners and American oppressors, a “revolutionary imagination” charted an alternate path for both culture and politics, for which the “people” would serve as a “heuristic object for the creation and mobilization of a revolutionary nationalist subject” (Tadiar, TFA 267). Becoming one with the masses had become a central trope in Philippine revolutionary literature. This turn to the struggle of the “people” or the “masses” as the source of national consciousness was contemporaneous with a radical turn among a new generation of Filipinos. The powerful idea of an “unfinished revolution,” drawing on the historical significance of the 1896 Philippine Revolution, had been politically charged for decades since the labor movements of the early twentieth century. Indeed, the phrase had often been co-opted by populist sloganeering under the colonial state and would later become the focal point of the historiographical debates of the late fifties to the seventies.14 That history could be represented 14 I draw this information from Reynaldo Ileto’s essay “The ‘Unfinished Revolution’ in Philippine Political Discourse,” in which Ileto traces the discursive history of the phrase “unfinished revolution” onward from the early twentieth century to a “break in historical consciousness” (“Unfinished” 72) in the Marcos period. Teodor Agoncillo’s 1956 The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan was an especially 12 truthfully by literature and that literature could intervene in and shape history had been presupposed by Filipino nationalists, who sought to address the problem of social fragmentation by locating the nation in its anti-colonial origins.15 By the sixties, it had been clear to politicians, scholars, and radicals alike that claiming the “Revolution” was of no minor importance to representing the “people” and imagining the “nation,” mired as it is with its internal exclusions. A “cultural revolution” (evincing the Maoist influence on Philippine leftist discourse) had never been more salient by 1970, as a new wave of Filipino workers, intellectuals, student activists, peasants, and artists would come together in mass protests to demand radical social change and redistribution.16 In the spreading calls to “awaken” and “serve the masses,” revolution carried not only the promise of transforming the country and excising its neocolonial influences but of transforming the “collective self”—the revolutionary as both artist and cadre. 17 controversial text in circulation at the time for challenging the prevailing historiography on the 1896 Philippine Revolution. Agoncillo reframed the revolution as a movement that was spearheaded by the peasantry, rather than by an enlightened class of Filipino intellectuals: for Agoncillo, it was the indio rather than the ilustrado, Andres Bonifacio the militant peasant rather than Rizal the “reformist,” who would seek freedom from the Spanish through armed revolt. Indeed, as Ileto explains, it was this very critique of the middle class’s failures in the revolution (directed toward a primarily middle-class readership) that was particularly offensive—that is, a betrayal against the armed struggle of the peasantry—that would prefigure the alienation of liberal elites from the masses postindependence. This historiography centered on the “masses” resonated with a new generation of radical thinkers in the 1960s. To quote Ileto, “[t]he notion of ‘Unfinished Revolution’ became more widely established, to serve as the rock upon which more elaborate edifices, such as the Mao Zedong-inspired ‘struggle for national democracy,’ could be built” (“Unfinished,” 75). 15 This is one of Hau’s opening arguments in Necessary Fictions (see 7). As she elaborates, “The historiographical turn toward increased attention to the study of culture and language…was instrumental in proposing the idea of a reinvigorated (and reinvigorating) Philippine ‘culture’ as a solution to the problem of social divisions that haunt Philippine reality and the writing of its history” (12). 16 These mass protests and demonstrations are also collectively known as the “First Quarter Storm” of 1970. As journalist and poet José Lacaba would write on the movement, “[t]he students themselves would insist that the revolution they were waging was primarily a cultural revolution, and in the days that followed they made clear what that was all about. In demo after demo, in ‘people’s congress’ and ‘people’s march,’ the militants would bring their cause to the people, explaining the issues and problems that they felt needed to be known. The aim was to ‘politicize the masses,’ to awaken them to the truth of their social condition, to make them aware of their own history and the roots of their current misery, which decades of brainwashing and historical distortion had blotted out of the national consciousness” (20; qtd. in Hau, Necessary Fictions 26). Marcos himself would appropriate the language of this revolutionary nationalist discourse to mythologize his rule (see Rafael 122-61). Tadiar’s work in TFA further builds upon this meeting point between radicalization and dictatorship. She argues, “the authoritarian state comes into being through the political usurpation of the collective power issuing from this radical social experience” (183). 17 Rosca’s phrase in “Myth” to denote a communitarian view of the nation prior to its fragmentation by colonization. 13 Chief among those espousing this revolutionary imagination was Jose Maria Sison, who became chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in 1968 and cofounded in 1969 the CPP’s armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA). A fierce critic of American imperialism, Sison insisted on the need to attend to the “concrete experiences” of Filipinos toward the making of a national democracy. In his 1966 speech, “The Need for a Cultural Revolution,” he speaks candidly about his view of the relationship between culture and political economy: To have a scientific view of culture as we should, we need to understand first of all that culture is a superstructure that rests upon a material basis. The ideas, institutions and all cultural patterns are dependent on the material mode of existence of a society. These change as all societies are subject to change. There is no permanent society or culture. The cultural balance, pattern or synthesis that exists in a society at a given historical stage is nothing but the unity of opposites—the unity of opposite cultural forces. This unity is always a temporary balance subject to the dynamism of opposites. (215) This “material basis” of culture was not solely regarding the productive forces and economic wealth under the control of an oligarchic ruling class but included the institutional structures that stultified Filipino nationalism. Echoing Constantino, for Sison, Filipino culture suffered from a lack of ideas due to the coming of U.S. imperialists and a colonial education system that divided the educated from the masses. A socially produced historical amnesia was thus what deprived the new generation of a sense of national community and the cultural values fostered by the anticolonial movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Insofar as this 14 alienation had been the modern plight of the Filipino, the masses embodied both the “unfinished revolution” and a “source of transformative knowledge” (Tadiar, TFA 267) that could carry forward this struggle into the present. As Sison makes clear on the tasks of a Second Propaganda Movement, “The Filipino youth should go to the countryside to learn from the people and to arouse them for the national-democratic revolution…Learning from the masses and being with them will make our generalizations for action and formulation of solutions more correct and more dynamic. We become immediately one with the masses in their mobilization” (222, 225). In reading Sison’s writings, I take care here not to center the work of the CPP’s leadership as an authoritative representation of the party’s politics, its potentials, its faults, its promises. Nor is the intent of my critique an indictment of revolutionary thought as it gained fervor in the sixties and seventies. Under the persistent and bitter failures of liberal reformist policies to address the socioeconomic divisions that continue to render millions of human lives increasingly precarious, one cannot understate, I think, the significance of the CPP and Philippine Marxism more broadly for presenting “the most comprehensive and compelling account and critique of neocolonial capitalism and the repressive postcolonial state in a nation-state riven by deep-seated political instability, glaring economic inequality, and everyday violence” (Hau, Subject 63). Insofar as any Marxist analysis, however, must be “slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue” (5), as Frantz Fanon cautions us, one cannot fully attend to the “material basis” of a national culture without a serious engagement with the materiality of subjectivity as it takes shape in the postcolony. Such psychical realities may not be foregrounded by historical inquiry nor veritably quantifiable as problems of political economy but are matters of textuality that are nonetheless crucial to understanding this need for a national community. It should be unsurprising to say that the desires of the radicalized 15 intelligentsia like Sison—who, by their own account, are not of the masses from which they have been alienated and who nevertheless envision a path forward beyond a colonial form of governance fashioned by the “civilizing” project of American imperialism (the nation-state)—participate in the production of culture that they critique and what literary forms could represent the people. Such desires are inscribed in the exchanges and evasions between author and text, subject and referent, waging revolution in the name of the masses. Indeed, it is this metaphorical relation to community through the fiction of a name that is perhaps the self-defeating, albeit necessary gambit in claiming any political horizon: that is, the impossible task of naming in unison the pains, aspirations, dreams, and desires of all who continue to fight for and claim an unfinished revolution that obliges us to question what forms of subaltern experience cannot be uttered in Sison’s stadial view of culture as a “unity of opposites” in a dialectical progression toward emancipation. I say “cannot” in the normative sense, that is, what ought not to be spoken and is rendered unspeakable under conditions in which one’s voice, one’s selfhood, one’s body are subordinated by the ideal of the nation to come. This ideal is precisely that, of course—that which the reality of politics approaches but fails to achieve, bound by the finitude of its material conditions. Such a familiar aphorism is worth reciting here to reflect on what fantasies become necessary to sustain that pursuit of revolution and to uncover what tropes, in turn, materialize these fantasies. A close reading of Sison’s 1968 poem “The Guerilla Is Like a Poet” is helpful to examine one such paradigmatic trope in Philippine revolutionary literature: the “masses as land,” to borrow Tadiar’s formulation, 18 whereby the masses, as an exterior object and collective ideal, are embodied (that is, given material presence) through the author’s use of natural imagery—the 18 See Tadiar, TFA 269-73. 16 land as a feminized object of desire. Certainly, one can point to entire collections of social realist literature in which the countryside holds symbolic and political meaning for resistance fighters and guerilla insurgents beyond its reification as property; and in which the masses are ascribed a maternal status with the land as the terrain of struggle for providing food, resources, shelter, succor, and inspiration for the movement.19 Sison’s poetic oeuvre frequently evokes this intimate communion between the land and the people, “memorializing an eroticized, Orphic harmony of nature and man…and summoning in vision the lineaments of a long expected reunion many times postponed” (226), as E. San Juan Jr. vividly describes it. “Guerilla,” however, is particularly noteworthy for what I argue is its formalizing the bifurcation of the revolutionary subject (the revolutionary as both guerilla and poet, artist and cadre) as an effect of this identification with the “masses as land.” In its slippages between authorship and succession, sacrifice and subjection, the poem encounters the political problem of speaking of and for the masses through literature: a double bind that, in my view, Sison confronts by reifying the universality of a “people’s war” without attending to the loss internal to its reproduction. One imagines and enters the fiction of a national community through her subjection to its laws, an act of conversion that transforms the author who sees the self through the eyes of the people. The image materializes the ideal that moves one to name a political reality yet to come. Insofar as my analysis centers the power of the image, I am indebted in part to Lacanian psychoanalysis for its theorizing the image’s formative role in the subject’s constitution.20 In the 19 It is also helpful to consider this re-imagining of the land as a combative and speculative decolonial act against what Aimé Césaire calls “thingification” (42), which enervates both colonized and colonizer in the destruction of systems of thought that exceed the property relation. Further, as Tadiar suggests, this relational understanding of land beyond its status as a “thing” in revolutionary literature combats a capitalist metaphysic that reifies social relations in the commodity form (TFA 275). 20 More precisely, the “imago,” which “is often defined as an ‘unconscious representation’. It should be looked upon, however, as an acquired imaginary set rather than as an image: as a stereotype through which, as it were, the subject views the other person. (Lacan; explained in Laplanche and Pontalis 211). As evident in this section, my 17 classical account, it is an identification with the fiction of a unitary self observed in the specular image that generates the ego and alienates one from the fragmentary experience of her body—her psyche reifying the relation between exteriority and interiority once she has identified herself (or her “self”) through the gaze of the Other. This repressive stage to subject formation, whereby one learns to identify with the exterior image that imbricates narrative and fantasy (that is, the fiction of an exterior, transcendent “I” that dissolves the subject’s past into the perfection of the self’s “indestructible” appearance), also allegorizes the subject’s entry into the symbolic order: the domain of speech, law, and language, where she, like others before her, finds her voice and arrives at a speaking position, but at the cost of losing the reality of the object—access not to the “[m]Other” per se, but to the word “mother” that reveals only an absence in the flesh. Silent and docile, the image, this hallowed surface, however illusory, is what mediates the psychodrama that severs the subject from her knowable desire, “the desire of the Other” (Lacan, Four Fundamental 38); and is that toward which she directs a fundamental “aggressiveness” in the act of identification.21 In the meeting place of community, wherein the subject is bound by socio-ethical relations among other subjects to whom she must be signified as other, the prohibitive function of differentiating difference between subjects is that of the nom du père: the “Name of the Father,”22 which, if it calls to mind the name of the nation, the successionary metaphors over property, the “human” speech the “nonhuman” mimes, haunts the unity of the revolutionary community and might indeed make all the difference. In any political reality firmly of and in the symbolic order, the subject is thus constituted by a lack that structures the movement of her analysis presents an idiosyncratic use of Lacan’s “mirror stage” and the Oedipus complex to analyze the artist’s subjection by and imagined entry into a revolutionary community. See Lacan, “Mirror Stage” 75-81; and Laplanche and Pontalis 250-1. 21 See Lacan, “Aggressiveness,” 82-101. 22 See Evans 122 for Lacan’s “Name of the Father.” 18 desire according to a retrogressive fantasy of enjoying an originary (albeit impossible) access to presence from which she is barred. Oedipal subjection into speech is no less cruel, no less repressive in the constitution of sex, mandating the subject’s assumption of a sexed particularity, the position of being or having the phallus, which determines her place in the social order and its reproduction once she has successfully internalized neurosis. The psychoanalytic account of subject formation is pertinent to my analysis insofar as the vision of a new community, allegorized in a radical literary imagination, is a specular act of identification that the author-as-revolutionary performs by instrumentalizing the image. Against a more Lacanian reading, however, my supplementary use of psychoanalysis to critique Sison’s “Guerilla” does not posit a transcendental necessity to this lack immanent to subjectivity, insofar as I suspect it to be historically determined rather than an a priori condition of subjective experience. In the postcolony, I am less convinced that the dialectical failure of a “collective self,” or of intersubjective relations that can withstand an ethic of living with alterity in times of perpetual war, occurs in the misrecognition of mythic taboos or in the benefaction of being “granted” rather than claiming independence, than I am uncertain of whether this anxiety between self and image results from the precarity imposed on exceeding the name that is given, that which scandalizes the patronym as fiction rather than law. If so, then Oedipus has far to go, but his loss, bearable, might be open to share, and one less encumbered by guilt. Indeed, this loss might be historically mutable—and it is no mean habit to remind ourselves that history is not written in the name of the gods—though it cannot be realized by history insofar as it serves as the silent (rather than unspeakable) gap necessary to any act of narration, to any account of the human self, that history might be tempted to close, the meaningless “nonsense” against which the rational mind convulses in its failing to enunciate the language of the Other. The “people” might 19 live only in the fiction of an allegory. Neither does my analysis ascribe any originary significance to the domestic scene of the family as the domesticating unit of community. As Dylan Evans clarifies, Lacan himself was interested in the specularity of the ego for its being a structural rather than temporal element to the imaginary (42); thus, the metaphor of a developmental “phase” to consciousness ought to be understood as precisely that, a poem with no pretense of completion. In any case, my goal here is to understand why even the most committed anti-imperialist texts and personalities among the Philippine Left had been so troubled by a tendency toward the singularity that underpins the question of a unified national politics, rather than attending to this loss immanent to revolution. For despite investments in a real, rather than solely symbolic commitment to the “people,” what is evidently lacking in Sison’s call to arms is an awareness of its figuration, its form as an “imagined community”23—itself subject to the dynamism of social forces and everchanging norms, itself occupied and potential occupier—rather than a bare reality that escapes the pull of fantasy or the allure of the poet’s looking glass. Insofar as such a (social) reality is governed by a set of fictions, politics by the horizon of a liberated future, I hope to build upon why the masses’ configuration as land, as Tadiar argues, takes on a fetishistic character vital to awakening a revolutionary consciousness. In reading “Guerilla,” we should observe closely how Sison analogizes guerilla resistance to poetry: The guerilla is like a poet. Keen to the rustle of leaves The break of twigs 23 Benedict Anderson’s well-known idea of the nation as an “imagined community” in his Imagined Communities. 20 The ripples of the river The smell of fire And the ashes of departure The guerilla is like a poet He has merged with the trees The bushes and the rocks Ambiguous but precise Well-versed on the law of motion And master of myriad images. The guerilla is like a poet. Enrhymed with nature The subtle rhythm of the greenery The inner silence, the outer innocence The steel tensile in-grace That ensnares the enemy. The guerrilla is like a poet. He moves with the green brown multitude In bush burning with red flowers That crown and hearten all Swarming the terrain as a flood Marching at last against the stronghold. 21 An endless movement of strength Behold the protracted theme: The people’s epic, the people’s war. (Brown River 242-3) “The guerilla is like a poet,” though what the simile betrays, of course, is that the guerilla is not quite a poet, at least not until he rediscovers himself in the image of his native land. The refrain echoes a repetitious process of revolutionary becoming whereby the guerilla’s identification with the land’s topography is mirrored by Sison’s act of writing. This repetition narrativizes a proximity between guerilla and poet, author and subject, that is not an autobiographical account of Sison’s subjective experience but rather the vision of another self—what he and other dissidents might become through the image of guerilla resistance. That the repetition is necessary to weave further resemblances between guerilla and poet illustrates a codependency and lends the refrain an oneiric quality, an aspirational tone, while also attesting to the guerilla-poet’s fundamental incompleteness: that he is not a poet, but that he could be, a lack that moves him to reimagine himself and the land that shapes him. Like the “unfinished” revolution, the pursuit produces its own horizon, and, with it, a relation to the other. Insofar as both the text and the imagined land function as the surface for this realization, the guerilla-poet’s performative act as both subject and author depends on what is being authored (that is, both the poem and the land as what bears the authorial act and what, in turn, authors the subject) to affirm the subject’s act of authoring (that is, the guerilla-poet as what authors the act and what, in turn, is subjected by it). Having “merged” with the “trees / The bushes and the rocks,” the guerilla exhibits careful knowledge over his terrain, “enrhymed with nature” and “the subtle rhythm of the greenery” that attest to his “keen” sensitivity as a poet and his attunement to the faintest sensations, inflected by the accents on the first noun of each line in the first stanza: “The break of 22 twigs / The ripples of the river / The smell of fire / …the ashes of departure.” The present perfect tense of the guerilla’s “having merged” with the countryside suggests a prior, albeit occluded, stage to this “merge,” as the land from which he was once alienated returns to him through his return. Such a return is no reclaiming of a mythic past, no saccharine recollection of lost origins. In the absence of a “Great Tradition”—that is, an essential Filipino culture that could speak for all the millions of a nation composed of disparate ethnic and linguistic groups—a cultural revolution needed instead to be founded on the historical struggle of the masses.24 History, envisioned here as the movement of the people’s struggle, is materialized in the act of making history, of authoring national destiny. Revolutionary time carries forward into the present the sediments of the past by asserting the narrative continuity of revolution as an “unfinished” event, and one feels its momentum in its brash insistence on prefiguring a future victory—the guerilla-poet who strides forward from the perfect to the progressive through a “swarming,” a “marching,” an “endless movement of strength.” Such a progression is intended to mimic the dialectical structure by which Sison sees guerilla and poet, man and nature, ultimately elevated into a higher stage of social consciousness. The synthesis at the poem’s end sees the disappearance of the refrain and, in its place, the awe-inspiring arrival of the “people,” now in possession of their history: their “epic,” heralding their long-awaited awakening to a protracted “war”—appositive to the “epic,” its fictitious double, highlighting the aesthetico-political project of revolutionary nationalism and its unitary voice. This sudden evocation of the “people” is 24 As Ileto explains on the absence of a “Great Tradition,” “[t]he lack of a ‘Great Tradition’ preceding the Spanish intervention in the seventeenth century prevents any identification of contemporary Filipino leaders with god-kings and sultans of a glorious past…Both Marcos and Constantino [representing opposed political factions] agreed that Filipino identity would be found, not in an illusory precolonial past, but in the people's struggle for liberation…Without great monuments or a court culture to serve as an alternate focus or centre of national aspirations, the ensemble of events and ideas called “the Revolution of 1896” has had to serve as some sort of charter or as the legitimizing principle for subsequent calls for unified action” (“Unfinished” 62-3, 78). 23 striking, not solely because it signals the end of the refrain but because at a cursory glance the “people” are only now to be found, indestructible and inevitable, triumphant. Rather, the poem’s initial focus is on the askesis of the revolutionary subject (the “guerilla” who is not quite but becomes a “poet”), a self-disciplining that abnegates the question of origins in favor of the power to narrate history in the present. Nameless, this guerilla may have no family, no kin, no past to speak of. Nevertheless, he claims a future by becoming one with the land from which he has been estranged. For it is through this reunion that he realizes himself as other, as “poet,” his fictitious double, which reacquaints him not only with the land’s power to create, once freed from its captive stasis, but prepares him to relinquish his life for a communal cause: this “gift of death…the willful immolation of the self…[that is] the very style and substance…of nationalist imagination” (Hau, Subject 196) upon joining the revolution.25 And it is this point on a sacrificial authorship that shifts the poem’s structure from one of codependency between land and guerilla to that of an authorial succession from Sison and the guerilla-poet to the people whom he serves—the future that begets the present, the child that begets the father. He fights, he writes, and indeed he dies, but his sacrifice authors the people, who succeed him as the subject of national history. This disappearance of the guerilla, selfless and self-less, into an “endless movement of strength” is a perplexing conclusion to the poem, insofar as the very people for whom the guerilla draws breath should also signal his unmaking. Must the imagination meet its end at the image of self-immolation? Is the repetitious drama of revolutionary subjectification fixed by a succession of authorial power? Does the author’s succession attest to the entrenched law of the 25 No doubt, the passage from life to death to the rebirth of the guerilla-poet is evident in Sison’s nom de guerre, Amado Guerrero (“beloved warrior”). 24 patronym, redoubling the anxiety for the future and who inherits its name? Or is this anxiety effected by the threat of a future that calls the name’s very authority into question? For what begins as a co-authoring between land and guerilla, poem and poet, culminates in an act of sacrifice, of loss, of legacy, anticipating the masses as a revolutionary force that inherits the guerilla-poet’s authorship, drawn from the land’s originary being. Pressed by the material constraints of the text and the limits of his imagination, Sison sees fit to subordinate four stanzas of natural imagery to that which exceeds language at the poem’s end: the nation to come for which he wages war, the poem’s speculative excess that it cannot contain. It is this contradiction between the people’s being and becoming that seems to haunt Sison in the final stanza and what, ironically, spurs the need to finish an “unfinished revolution” with the signature triumph of a “people’s war.” He elides that such guarantees are few and far between. If this is correct, then for Sison, it is the poem’s very (f)utility to speak of but fail to speak into being the masses that evinces the narrow limit of his use of poetry as a pedagogical instrument of combat as well as his misconceiving the “people” as an unchanging ideal: a people that have a history, perhaps, but a people that is itself unspeaking and ahistorical, the “people’s war” an abstraction. 26 Which people, then, are so destined for victory, if this people should reside outside their own discourse? This is not to insinuate, of course, that the “people” or the “masses,” which, in the sociological sense, describe an aggregate of individuals, are entirely an effect of language. Nor is this to posit an identity between the textual object and its referent. It is to argue that Sison mistakenly trivializes poetry’s capacity to materialize the masses that subject him, that move him to speak, and for poetry to surface, in turn, the people through language. 26 Against this tendency to dehistoricize and abstract the “people,” Tadiar insists that “[w]e also need to recognize that the people itself is a dynamic product of the continuous, active involvement of people’s cultural practices in the changing conditions of political economy” (TFA 283). 25 Otherwise, if this general anonymity of the “people” is troped as the particular fate of the nation, the “imagined community” that is ultimately derivative of a modality imagined elsewhere, then, to borrow from Partha Chatterjee, what does the postcolonial world have left to imagine (5)?27 If we can consider instead, however, the people to be neither a telos that structures the poem’s content nor a fixed ideal of communal experience, might we consider whether it is the loss of the people, like the interminable distance between “guerilla” and “poet,” author and text, that acts as the very transformative absence through which invention is possible for revolutionary literature like Sison’s “Guerilla”—the invented nation neither bound by commonality nor subordinated by the “no” of the Father, but by the other that grieves this loss in return? Indeed, the other that longs for return—might that make the difference? Perhaps, then, we can shift the question away from who the masses are, or will be, in their perennial stupor and belated awakenings, and ask instead which voices are subsumed by that of the author? In revolutionary poetry like Sison’s “Guerilla,” Tadiar argues that “[c]onfigured as land, the masses act as a feminine object of loss through which the revolutionary subject constitutes itself as the agent of historical transformation. Guerilla zones thus become feminized substitutions for the lost object” (TFA 272). Such a substitution alludes to the masses’ role as “both the objective and means of the desiring movement of revolution” (Tadiar, TFA 269). Insofar as the masses are feminized, such a substitution also disarticulates the sexed female body as what engenders the masses as an object of revolutionary desire—the incomplete failure of the metaphor that spurs aggressivity and gives lie to the image’s perfection. Here, the aesthetic experience of revolution, which is felt through an intimacy with the land and the “people”—that 27 This is Chatterjee’s objection to Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an “imagined community.” See “Whose Imagined Community?”. 26 is, an unstable symbol representing millions of lives; a fictitious exteriority with which the guerilla-poet seeks to become one; and “a technology of the imagination…fundamental to the practical life of the movement” (Tadiar, TFA 270)—narrativizes the formation of national consciousness through an oedipal fantasy. Insofar as loss is felt as historical amnesia, or as atomized social relations under neocolonial capital, or as an alienation from one’s labor and language, revolutionary desire substitutes a trope of femininity as a culturally coded reproductive body with the land’s material/maternal presence that drives its unitary movement. Thus, it is not that the revolutionary community holds an arbitrary relation to the signifier that differentiates it as a collective unity of subjects; rather, it is an affective response to loss, shared though differentially experienced among subjects, that drives communion—in this case, an aggressiveness that resolves into fraternal control over feminized land. One might say, to draw from Judith Butler’s critique of the sexed production of matter, that Sison’s “Guerilla” misnames this imaginary feminine as what figures and is figured as the land’s creative potency, but which, as an effect of authorial power, is repressed and left unthematized.28 The construction of the feminized masses-as-land thus depends on the construction of “feminine-(as maternal)-land,” a construction that is itself premised on the exterior perfection of the silent image. After all, a resplendent nature in its “outer innocence” is staged here as the scene of negation against an “inner silence,” a steady consciousness in motion, a disembodied body yearning for incarnation. This revolutionary consciousness attempts to resolve its alienation by discovering an original materiality through a oneness with the land, metonymized as fragments in relation to a greater whole: “the trees / The bushes, and the rocks” that come together to form a “green brown 28 Butler draws heavily from Luce Irigaray’s critique of hylomorphic metaphysics and the excluded femininity misnamed by a phallogocentric system of language. Butler, however, offers an important response to Irigaray and identifies the misnaming of this femininity as a contingent effect of power that is otherwise scandalized by nonheteronormative relations. For Butler’s full critique of Irigaray, see Bodies That Matter 3-27, esp. 11-22. 27 multitude,” that is, the masses and the land as the bedrock of the nation. The territorialized matter of the sexed female body, banished and spectral, essential yet expendable, is acted upon as the space of inscription for the revolutionary subject: the guerilla-poet, who, as “master of myriad images,” speaks for the feminine as that which is exchanged and exchangeable; that which is given but not permitted to speak its name; that which is nevertheless depended upon to sustain revolution; and whose body mediates the “people’s war.” The condition of these substitutions of an effaced maternity, displaced symbolically both onto and as native “country,” is that the feminine cannot speak, or if it does, it can do so only catachrestically at the threshold of intelligibility. If the lucent image of guerillas “In bush burning with red flowers / That crown and hearten all” should cast the people as the sovereign of a new political order, it is precisely the intermediary function of the natural image to surrender the power it initially emanates to materialize a reality (“the people’s war”) that appears illusorily autopoietic in succession. By serving as the constitutive absence of a speaking position, feminine vacancy and the loss of a creative agency is what gives a heteromasculine revolutionary consciousness its voice, its need for singularity, its aggressive claim to insurgency. What is misnamed here is precisely that which is otherwise ascribed a trope of maternal virtue with no recognition of its bearing forth revolution insofar as its loss is the very founding metaphor that engenders it. Indeed, in the strictest sense, a “feminine” or “feminized” revolutionary cannot “bear” the revolution as one is rendered a surface to be desired rather than a desiring movement. Yet this relation is not one wholly of silence but speaks, crucially, in the refuge of allegory. It is worth quoting at length Tadiar’s keen assessment of the image of guerilla warfare waged in the name of the masses: 28 While the nation is a feminized symbol serving as the point from which revolutionary forces imagine themselves as a unified historical subject, the land is a feminized object which, as experientially shared by the revolutionary forces in the process of struggle, becomes a significant structure of collective sexual identification. The shared feminized object is the means by which the collective body of these forces become an acting subject; it also functions as the object of desiring action on which this fused revolutionary subject enacts its particular masculinity. Land and woman are places of tilling and insemination, defining the revolutionary action that is performed on them as heteromasculine…Watered and nourished by the blood, sweat, and tears shed by the guerillas, land becomes the surface of inscription of the vicissitudes and sacrifices of the revolutionary movement. (TFA 272; italics mine)` Here, Tadiar identifies a sexual relation within revolution, a relation that Tadiar herself can illustrate only by extending the metaphor of feminized land to uncover a voice that appears only in and through her critique, that is, a desire that surfaces only in analysis. Figuration makes legible that excrement is a sharp rejoinder to a unitary nationalist movement in exposing the trace of a repressed sexed body and an order of excess, base matter undergirding the totalizing tendency of revolutionary nationalism. If we read this provocation along the gendered politics of the CPP, whose calls for equality frequently met its internal impasse at the sexual division of labor,29 that is, in essence, what simultaneously determines which bodies can give themselves in death and which are to be given, then an unburied and shadowy figure to the revolutionary narrative is unveiled: one that deflates, though perhaps alleviates, the image of self-immolation if 29 See Hau Subject 148-88, esp. 166-88, for an account of the gendered politics of revolutionary nationalist movements in the Philippines. 29 the sacrificial act is borne not solely by the guerilla but by the hands that wash his soiled clothing. What is unthinkable for Sison in “Guerilla” is that the act of bearing the revolution; opening its conditions of possibility; its affects, its experiential disfigurations; its material effects on the body; the bodies it materializes; the bodies it sexualizes; the demands on sustaining life to wrest power over death; the insistence on grieving those who are lost; the care work for those who live; the evasions and displacements for that which is spoken only in and as passing figuration; and the unspoken sacrifices by which the nation claims the future and secures its own continuity, might not merely be an object of class analysis but the disarticulated loss at the heart of the revolutionary subject: that is, the reproductive labor of revolution. By “reproductive labor,” I borrow the term from Marx and Marxist feminists who have critiqued Marx’s labor theory of value for his devaluation of housework, sex work, affective and care work relegated to the “private sphere”—both notions bifurcated by and premised on a disavowed lineage of Black women and women of color, whose labor and subjective experiences are subsumed under the racialized ideal of bourgeois domestic space. Nevertheless, my idiosyncratic use of the term can only index provisionally and name catachrestically the absent content of revolutionary becoming that, in my view, cannot be wholly demarcated by “labor,” or an “unconscious,” or “subjective experience.” The phrase fails, as any would, I think, insofar as what is determined by a catachresis can be nominalized only as a mistake, or lost as soon as it is found in the act of naming. Tadiar has elsewhere expressed the difficulty of describing what I gesture toward here in her arguing for the subsumption of Philippine “historical experience,” in 30 her reflections on “remaindered life,” and what escapes the notion of “labor” in the twenty-first century. 30 I suspect, however, that this experience is not specifically “Philippine.” Further, I am careful here not to literalize the oedipal allegory in the poem’s glossing over the problem of “feminine” absence, an absence that is not strictly occupied by feminine alterity, or a lack that attests to the universality of revolution’s failure. I certainly do not propose any facile reading of revolution as a patricidal tendency toward the regulation of desire. Rather, I urge a closer reflection on the material stakes in revolutionary nationalism’s adopting the language of sovereignty amid the community it aims to build, in order for us to attend to the voices that are subsumed and sacrificed in raising any movement antithetical to the contemporary violence of the postcolonial nation-state. It is a heavy task to speak of liberation for all, a muscular presence in the throat that one cannot withstand without the body’s disassembly. Finally, my argument attempts to center loss, lack and the catachresis between self and image, re-signifying gender as constitutive of revolutionary desire in the postcolony. Insofar as feminist theory in the late twentieth century once called for a systematic rearrangement of kinship toward egalitarian, nonheteronormative social relations, the fate of a Philippine Oedipus appears to be more ambiguous, if his charge had not merely been a matter of which sovereign to slay but, amid the nascent global servitude of Filipinos departing the country, what spurs his desire to war. At the very least, such reflections might bear upon why the revolutionary community continues to be imagined in heterosexual terms. If, as Viet Thanh Nguyen argues, 30 The vocabulary Tadiar offers, “fantasy production,” “historical experience,” and “remaindered life-times” in her collective works Fantasy Production, Things Fall Away, and Remaindered Life each describe, in my view, different elements of this absence while also attesting to the difficulty of wholly formalizing it. 31 A nationalist revolution seeks to cast its language in the terms of a familial and heterosexual romance…[a]s the logical inversion of the colonizer’s use of heterosexuality and romance to justify colonialism, summarized in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s phrase “white men are saving brown women from brown men[,] [then i]n the anticolonialist articulation, the heterosexual romance of revolution might be “brown men are saving brown women from white men.” (128) “White men,” of course, are not quite present in “Guerilla,” though we know from the poem’s historical context that its unnamed “enemy” refers to feudal landowners, bureaucratic capitalism, the neocolonial state and its extractive partnership with the continued American presence on the islands.31 Nguyen’s comments, however, are useful to call attention to the internal crisis of a colonized masculinity that revisits the oedipal scenario in the formation of a national community, reinscribing the Name of the Father under the banner of revolution. The subordinated and imagined being of a “female,” or “feminized,” or “queer” revolutionary, in my view, delimits at present the decolonial act, the burden faced by the once colonized to claim their people’s history. To quote Hau: For countries that were subject to colonial rule, nationalism marks the entry of the “national” subject of moral thought and action into history; this subject is, in a sense, a subject in and of history. But the irony that attends this fully realized historical being lies in the fact that this subject is always incomplete. This is because the national subject’s transcendent, self-realizing freedom must always be posited alongside the reality of the 31 As outlined by Teodor Agoncillo in the introduction to Sison’s Struggle for National Democracy (vii-viii). 32 subject’s finite capacity for thought and action, and the reality of material constraints on the subject’s thought and action. (Necessary Fictions 27) It is within that grave difference between finitude and transcendence one might hear a gasp in the refrain, break their voices into the sky. The Revolutionary Image as OFW In Pasyon and Revolution, Reynaldo Ileto’s historical study on the popular movements of the nineteenth century, Ileto reflects on the subjective experiences of the masses regarding the coming revolution: “How,” he asks, “…did the masses actually perceive their condition; how did they put their feelings and aspirations into words?” (10). One of his principal arguments is that the Pasyon, a Philippine social epic narrating the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ reenacted during Holy Week, would shape the language of late nineteenth-century anticolonial thought. Against a historiographical tendency to privilege a Hispanized middle class that would organize and give form to the insurgent desires of the masses, Ileto’s attempt to recount a “history from below” that would center the people as a historical agent would do so not by authenticating the voices of an unchanging precolonial past nor an irrecoverable subalternity but by speculating on their attachments to the Christ story—what resemblances might have been felt through the image of a familiar poverty, humility, and sacrifice. I conclude this chapter with Ileto’s thesis on the Pasyon for two reasons: first, to stress once more the power of the image as a founding fantasy that moves revolutionary subjectification and desire; second, to draw attention to the pretense of the name, insofar as what the historical archive might deem atavistic, or nativist, or proto-nationalist movements forecloses a view of the subjectivity irreducible to communal relations that is not derivative of 33 Europeanness. My insistence that any act of naming necessarily produces a misnaming might offer us a glimpse into the structure of the historical subsumption of the people’s voices—their being represented only to affirm the rule of the ilustrado but present, nonetheless, through an absence that resists it. “The problem, perhaps,” Ileto speculates, “originates from the refusal of the ‘modern, rational and scientific’ mind to study, much less accept the reality of other conceptual systems” (Pasyon 30). An aversion to the sacred surfaces in this heritage of Enlightenment thought, even though, as Tadiar elaborates, in the masses’ unorthodox performances of the story of Christ, awa (“mercy”) and damay (“compassion” or “empathic grief”) were crucial to sustaining resistance movements as “cultural practices of mediumship”: that is, the affective practices by which the people had been learning of and working against their alienation on their terms through their language and play; and which had been reworking the notion of the “people” itself and the political relations that constitute it, “transforming struggle by creating new modes of social praxis…[a] poiesis…of new realities, new selves” (TFA 298). For Tadiar, these practices persist in, fall away from, and exceed twentieth-century norms of liberal democracy as that upon which the latter depends. In my view, they speak through catachresis. I stress this point once more because this dual structure of the masses’ exaltation and silence, subjection and sacrifice in the name of the revolution since the early anticolonial movements is what, like the spectre of the sacred, recurs in the present neoliberal state’s contemporary naming of overseas Filipino workers as “modern heroes.” These historical misnamings appear to have no shared lineage precisely because each persists in, falls away from, and exceeds the norm, and can thus only be serialized insofar as each misnaming shares that they are determined by difference. 34 Festival, Revolution, and Commandement in Rosca’s State of War The postcolony is characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion, as well as by distinctive ways identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation. But the postcolony is also made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence. —Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony It would seem we never had the Revolution. —Ninotchka Rosca, State of War The second epigraph from Rosca’s State of War appears in the novel’s second chapter. After being summoned to the company of his father and the governor who plan to transform the island of K----- into a tourist destination, Adrian imagines how his grandfather, Old Andy, might have reacted to the sight of a mestizo leadership who resemble the country’s imperial masters: “It would seem we never had the Revolution” (State of War 27). Written in the subjunctive and jutting out in italics, Adrian’s response is speculative. His would-be protest, which he can speak only through the gaze of an imagined other (that is, his paternal namesake who lived the very history Adrian can never recall), neither bears upon nor interrupts the conversation at hand; rather, it is spoken introspectively as a cold realization. It is not that things have not changed since the country’s independence—the renamed streets, the bustling festivities, and the very faces before him attest to a new surplus of signs. It is that, amid the constancy of change and every promise of progress, his psyche resists the present moment as mere pretense—a fiction he is forced to inhabit, an order of alienation twice removed whereby he cannot know the terms of 35 his malaise. It lives only as the spectre of a speculation, reality the text of another’s fantasy. It would seem we never had the Revolution. State of War is a disorienting piece of historical fiction. Disorienting, because of its ambivalence toward the history of Philippine revolution. Ambivalent, because it markedly scrutinizes any revolutionary imagination that holds little regard for sexual politics. As the post-Marcos economy would increasingly depend on remittances and the concomitant feminization of the migrant workforce, the novel was published in 1988 after Rosca spent her time in self-exile in the United States and two years after the 1986 EDSA Revolution saw the end of the dictatorship. A journalist, writer, and political activist, Rosca was one among many students in the late sixties to early seventies who took to the streets, organized protests and demonstrations, and became increasingly vocal in her criticisms of the Marcos regime, for which she would be illegally arrested and forced into exile (Mendible 355). It is unsurprising, then, that her acclaimed debut novel is often read in relation to the political repression from which it emerges. Allegorizing what Vincente Rafael would call the “tragic—and therefore ironic—relationship between revolution and counterrevolution…[that is] one of the most enduring motifs in Philippine history” (12), State of War can no doubt be read as a text that diagnoses a chronic history of colonial warfare and oligarchic rule. Beyond the historicist preoccupation, however, with reading history vis-à-vis literature, less scholarship has been devoted toward reading State of War’s formal innovations: specifically, its pluralistic, confounding language and its proliferation of subject positions that gesture toward the materiality of discourse as it structures social relations in the postcolonial nation-state. As Nadal notes, the prevailing literary criticism tends to read the novel for its allegorical significance (142-3). But Rosca had also been contemplating language’s capacity to materialize 36 and remake a “collective self” reckoning with colonization—language which did not presume “the representation of self…[as] a function of fiction” (“Myth” 238).32 In this chapter, I center State of War’s representation of “Festival” to analyze the novel’s forms of play that resist and exceed allegorical interpretation. Drawing on what Achille Mbembe calls “commandement,” I theorize these excesses in relation to the structure of power in the postcolony as it is sedimented by sexed discourse. In so doing, I aim to show that State of War’s language demands that its reader attend to the perennial remainders of an unfinished revolution. Festival and Vulgarity State of War is set in the same milieu of military dictatorship as the Marcos-era Philippines. An equivalence between Marcos and the story’s “Commander” is never established, of course, as the novel’s premise is of an entrenched state of war that is not exclusive to the late twentieth century but originates in centuries of colonial subjugation. Through this “elusive, almost illusory war that was everywhere and yet nowhere” (State of War 20), Rosca allegorizes a recurring history of resistance, revolution, and counterrevolution alongside a stultified Filipino subjectivity that never entirely comes into being. The “struggle over historical meaning” (Nadal 106), then, both imagined and remembered, is the book’s central anxiety. The tale progresses initially from the perspective of its three protagonists: Adrian Banyaga, the young scion of a line of wealthy landowners; Anna Villaverde, the tortured widow of a guerrilla dissident; and Eliza Hansen, the opportunistic mistress of the story’s key military officers and government officials. The three depart for the island of K----- to partake in the island’s “Festival,” where the events of the present day unfold. Over three days, the story 32 Rather, as she elaborates, “part of that miasma of reality is language itself, that language is in a dialectical relationship to reality, creating, as it were, some aspects of that reality” (238). 37 introduces its reader to a mélange of characters intended to resemble familiar political archetypes: Rafael, Anna’s old contact from the underground resistance, who plots an explosive ambush for the third and final day of the Festival in an (ultimately failed) attempt to assassinate the visiting Commander; Adrian’s wealthy father and the governor of K-----, who plan to transform the annual Festival into a regular spectacle, representing the developmental projects of a national bourgeoisie; and the corrupt Colonel Urbano Amor, who, among his other duties, is tasked with interrogating suspected dissidents and keeping in check resistance forces. “Life in the Philippines,” as the novel’s subtitle suggests, is steeped in political intrigue. Divided into three parts, the Book of Acts, the Book of Numbers, and the Book of Revelations, the narrative does not follow a linear chronology of events; rather, it takes numerous detours into the past, relying on flashbacks, repetitions, abrupt shifts in viewpoint, unresolved conflicts, and incomplete testimonies drawn from the lives of each character to form a tenuous connection between the past and present—the lingering coloniality of history felt in truncated segments as the novel recounts a series of past wars and intrusions into the islands. This reflexive turn to history to narrate a continuity between contemporary state violence and the terror enacted by the country’s past colonizers becomes most vivid in the Book of Numbers, in which the plot transitions from a tale of would-be revolutionaries into a lengthy family saga that focuses on the lives of each character’s ancestors at the close of the nineteenth-century Spanish colonial era. Beyond each’s individual knowing, Adrian, Anna, and Eliza share a common lineage, their fates interwoven “not by a conscious tracing of family genealogy but by a shared experience of violence brought about by the historical conditions of colonialism and state oppression” (Chen 4). These “alternately stretched and compressed temporalities,” formalized in the novel’s bifurcation of time and its hybridized genre, represent, as Jini Kim Watson explains, 38 Rosca’s primary innovation in State of War, that is, “the formal attempt to explain the constitution of the present dictatorial state by reaching back into history to unveil its colonial and transnational preconditions” (265). That she begins with these lacunae in the Book of Acts to be answered later by the Book of Numbers illustrates the plot’s dialectical structure (Nadal 155). That she withholds this latent knowledge of persistent (post)colonial trauma to be privy solely for her reader speaks to the allegory’s didactic import. Certainly, if there is a warning that Rosca wishes to convey to her readership, it is as Monica Macansantos makes clear: “The numerous historical discontinuities that take place throughout the novel result in a historical amnesia that forces Filipinos into a perpetual state of beginning, in which they end up mirroring the lives of their ancestors (and repeating their mistakes) due to their inability to learn from a forgotten past” (15). We should add here, as well, that it is not solely that forgetting history will engender further iterations of war, violence, and resistance in the country, but that this historical amnesia is itself structured by language and discourse as much as it is imposed by a complex political machinery, entrenched political dynasties, conniving oligarchs and corporations, all of which graft these affects onto the country and its millions of human lives. Indeed, reifying a vanishing past is an investment in social control. Among the recurring structures perpetuating this historical amnesia, the novel’s representation of “Festival” has garnered significant attention from literary critics for the nonnormative identities, excesses, and subversion that are made possible through Rosca’s theatrical depiction of a heterogenous Filipino culture at play. Macansantos, for instance, describes Festival in all its capaciousness as “an embodiment of the nation as character…an all-accepting space in which foreign tourists dance with locals, where men don women’s clothing without being mocked or ostracized, where the rich rub shoulders with the poor, and where 39 Communist rebels move in and out of the crowd, incognito, while the state constantly reinforces its presence amidst such chaos by positing soldiers at every corner” (4). Marie Rose Arong and Daniel Hempel have argued similarly that “the festival not only represents a symbolic arena in which religion, indigenous tradition, and consumerism vie for cultural dominance; it is an actual battleground on which the political struggle of the Martial Law period is fought out, as the constant presence of armed soldiers and disguised rebels makes all too clear” (58). In his analysis of the novel’s depiction of an essentialized hybridity co-opted by the neocolonial state, Christopher Patterson argues that “Rosca’s carnival captures the bacchanalia of a racially mixed society as soldiers, tourists, transvestites, and insurgents all interact on an island of festival” (62). Finally, Myra Mendible argues that “Rosca’s festival serves as the locus where everyone is granted admission and anything is possible: peasant farmers transform into ancient warriors in tribal costumes, guerilla fighters feast and dance with enemy soldiers, and military men pose as fishermen while transvestites parade through the streets with sawn-off shotguns under their skirts” (“Literature” 358). Raucous, unruly, and alive with the country’s discontents, Festival overflows with effervescence as a “singular evocation of victory in a country of too many defeats” (State of War 5). It is a decolonial act of claiming difference and a counterfactual imagining of culture according to what it could have been and what it might be—a communal celebration that belongs to “no one’s and yet everyone’s personal history” (State of War 5). These have undoubtedly been generative discussions of Festival that speak to the robustness of Rosca’s world-building and to the weight of “dreaming a Philippine transnation,” as Arong and Hempel put it. Indeed, much of what I see these critics gesture toward is Festival’s intimate relationship to Revolution: both a communal gathering opposed to the dominant epistemology; and, in the Bataillean sense, both a lively explosion of surplus energy that speaks 40 to the need for nonproductive expenditure.33 Certainly, the ruse concealing this relationship dissolves in the climactic Book of Revelations when the Festival is revealed to be a “nest of insurgents” (State of War 346), and Rosca reworks her frequent description of the country’s “seven thousand one hundred islands” into “seven thousand one hundred shrapnels of a boisterous celebration” (State of War 315). Nevertheless, I mean to trouble this tendency toward reading Rosca’s representation of Festival as a transparent literary device that speaks only insofar as it fails to close the gap between fiction and history, that is, only insofar as it is speculative. By this “transparency,” I mean the tacit presumption that State of War’s imaginative dreamwork does not encounter its own resistance, its own hauntings by the reality that underpins the farce; and the presumption that the novel’s language does not put forward a claim on materiality as one experiences the materiality of modern discourse in the late twentieth-century Philippines. State of War is, after all, a piece of social realist literature that attempts to speak about real historical conditions, fictional as the novel may be, and even as some of its voices reside solely at the edge of its consciousness. Following my discussion of Sison’s poetry and the (mis)naming of the masses, it is useful to recall that any claim over the people can only approximate the object it attempts to represent, and that, while transgressive and destabilizing to the present social order, the lives of those who inhabit the margin of excess that is catachrestically determined by the political function of the name are also marked by the law to exist in a position of utmost precarity. Yet, conversely, the foreclosure of any name that renders difference itself a thing of the past—a radical indifference 33 See George Bataille’s “The Notion of Expenditure.” 41 to difference that claims transgression as its own law—disavows its internal violence by failing to question the social and symbolic norms by which these differences are made possible. This, then, is the internal limit to Festival, which might allow for the proliferation of new identities, subject positions, resistances, and, with them, new political liberties, or it might amount to the old conservative adage that, sadly, some things do not change. More eerily, perhaps, we can theorize this recalcitrant sedimentation as it is told through the specter of Old Andy’s voice: that they do, only to feel entirely the same. Even at the level of the plot, one should not gloss over that Rosca’s Festival is bound together by fraternal norms, inebriation, intoxication, and orgiastic tendencies among the nameless crowds who comprise its hedonic parade, as Anna, Adrian, and Eliza find themselves frequently pulled, groped, and taken by the “shifting masses of bodies” (State of War 20) at a “festival confused by time and history” (State of War 142). Indeed, though Nguyen observes keenly the forms of theatrical subversion and masquerade enacted by the novel’s queer characters,34 the presence and play of queerness within revolutionary space does not negate the reality of sexual and gendered violence subsumed by the bacchanalia of discourse. Does Rosca’s novel, then, attempt to speak its language through a reimagining of the postmodern carnival in which the sovereign is made the fool, or does the propensity to read Rosca’s realist fiction for its excesses speak to the stubborn difficulty of imagining the body-politic beyond its old vices? Can one interpret the allegory’s desire for reality without sublimating its passions in the traffic in women and queer bodies? Here, I have in mind Achille Mbembe’s notion of commandement to critique readings of power and play in the postcolony that do not attend more closely to what forms of subjectivity are not so easily transformed by ribaldry and ecstasy; and to locate the silent remainders 34 See Nguyen 129-33, 138-41. 42 subsumed in the exchanges between carnivalesque excess and authoritarian state control, between commodification and speculative demystification—what falls “away” rather than “apart” between these dualities.35 Festival—which refers not solely to the event in the story but determines Rosca’s formal choices throughout State of War (that is, improvisations, cacophonies, parodies, absurdities, anachronistic imagery, fragmented dialogues, and multiple subject positions)—depicts the “chaotically pluralistic” world of the postcolony that is, for Mbembe, “par excellence, a hollow pretense, a regime of unreality” (108). Under the guise of “convivial” relations that mask an internecine intimacy between rulers and ruled, commandement moves a “regime of signs” endemic to the postcolony that privileges appearance over any stable ontology. To draw from what Mbembe calls an “aesthetics of vulgarity,” “obscenity…constitutes one modality of power in the postcolony…the production of the burlesque is not specific to this group [the dominated]. The real inversion takes place when, in their desire for a certain majesty, the masses join in the madness and clothe themselves in cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology, and when power, in its violent conquest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence. (133) Mbembe’s point is that vulgarity is by no means a strategy of resistance that the masses adopt in opposition to the violent fantasies of state officialdom; rather, vulgarity is a shared modality that speaks to the everyday conditions by which power expresses itself ubiquitously through sexual metaphors and the exchange of bodies. Sex continues to speak, and speak indeed it does as currency. Following Mbembe, it is useful to read power’s operation in a more 35 As Tadiar puts it, in her introduction to TFA. 43 Foucauldian sense within authorized spaces of exception like Festival, which cannot be separated from the world of the state, its language, its signs. Watson has already noted that State of War does not make any such clear demarcations, that Rosca’s “extended historical narrative offers a less clear-cut model of political agency and the boundaries of the state. Indeed, in the long chronicle of colonization, abuse, and exploitation that characterizes the archipelago, we are unable to name who is complicit and who represents resistance. Sexual unions and unconventional kinship structures frequently result in reconfigurations of state or state-like authority, which blend official, religious, and economic power” (279). In fact, the notion that saturnalian displays of speech and sexuality can form the basis of a liberatory politics in the postcolony—a sexual “revolution,” one might say, to dethrone Oedipus—is mocked by commandement when the state’s own surplus enjoyment depends on the resistance that it openly calls forward. This perversion of power is embodied in State of War by the sadistic figure of Colonel Urbano Amor, the “Loved One,” a man who “preferred to fuck the soul” (State of War 57) and who revels in torturing resistance fighters and cataloging the resistance in its perennial return. As he confesses to Eliza regarding the insurgents to be interrogated in the “romance room,” “If there’s anything at all I’ve learned in my years as—well, as an expert on conspiracies—it is the living nature of resistance. It exists in a constant flux, changing, breeding, metastasizing…From time to time, in the complexity of its growth, the resistance evolves into a structure similar to predecessors we have in the files. Then, it’s easier to piece together its modus operandi. Not exactly the same but close enough. Of course, the traitors don’t do that. We do that. For some reason, they can’t seem to go beyond their experience—like they’re caught in a time warp.” 44 “You’re saying it’s not easy to deal with the resistance?” “Oh, God, no. Rather, thank God, no. Otherwise, I would be bored to death and ask for a transfer.” (State of War 43) Amor’s investments in torture hint toward the “zombification” (Mbembe 104) effected by commandement, which enervates and dehumanizes both the dominated and the dominant “caught in a time warp,” as Rosca describes it—everyday life and resistance a “metastasizing” “structure,” a disembodied archive that spurs an aggressive need to claim power in a cyclical desire to break the stillness. Amor’s aversion to the “boredom” of an otherwise bureaucratic job under the military dictatorship not only illustrates the forms of gratuitous pleasure that operate along state-sanctioned violence; it also signals the banality with which commandement consolidates this violent fantasy onto its subjects (cibles, for Mbembe, that is, “targets”) in private and individual acts of enjoyment. And although Amor is certainly no ally of the resistance, rather a figure that the reader might be tempted to call the novel’s antagonist, these familiar designations are no easy given as the conceit of conviviality among the story’s cast renders ambiguous at best the difference between friend and foe. Eliza can only get close to Amor by participating in the militarized world she resists, internalizing its violence, and frequently vocalizing her desire to take his life—her personal mission that Rosca describes, at times, with unsettling detail, and that proves fatal to Eliza by the novel’s end. Amid the Festival, Amor’s excesses are counterposed by the silent yet resilient Anna. Certainly, if there is any character in State of War whom Rosca writes to embody a history of resistance, Revolution and Festival, it is undoubtedly Anna, the history teacher dubbed “a true child of the archipelago” (State of War 5). For it is Anna’s connections to both the underground resistance upon which the plot of the present-day narrative turns. Like a modern Antigone, it is 45 Anna, the widow of the resistance leader Manolo Montreal, whose main concern at the island of K----- is to find news of her dead husband, insist on knowing his cause of death, and honor her promise of giving him a proper funeral. It is Anna, among the three visitors of K-----, who undergoes months of torture and suffers heinous acts of physical and sexual violence under Amor to confess information of the resistance that she, ironically, does not have. And it is Anna’s eventual romance with Adrian that foretells the potential for a future beyond the form of the present dictatorial state—the child in her womb that, by the tale’s end, survives the “state of war.” Any romantic readings of State of War are spoiled by the end, however, when it is revealed unexpectedly in the penultimate chapter that Anna’s husband is alive and well after all. To further this betrayal, we learn that the once idealistic Manolo has defected to the dictatorship, and Anna, once ambivalent to politics, takes his life in a cold act of self-preservation. Finally, if Amor depicts one obscene state authority (specifically, gratuitous military punishment) and Anna depicts a recurring feminine resistance to state violence, other figures that appear exterior to the Festival like Adrian’s landowning family, the governor, and the businessmen who plan to transform the Festival into “an endless fiesta” (State of War 29) illustrate the entrenched rule of the market. Certainly, the island of K----- is no utopia; it is contained within the bounds of the state and the gaze of corporate institutions. Mendible is thus surely right to say that “[t]his is the paradox that simultaneously energizes and delimits the revolutionary potential of the festival as political epistemology: it is an authorized transgression and, potentially, a commercial venture—a locally produced spectacle to be commodified and appropriated” (361). This raises the difficult question as to whether Festival, amid the endless supply of gin and beer—whether smuggled as contraband to conceal explosives or consumed jubilantly in a virile celebration of life—is another means by which both the state and those who 46 would oppose it enjoy capital, and with it, its logics of sexual commodification, privatization, abstraction, and dehumanization. It is for this reason that Mbembe urges a reading of “conviviality” in the postcolony rather than adopting binary theories of power as it operates in the metropole that fail to grasp commandement. For it is not that Festival and its economy of signs are truly this or that. It is that one cannot make such claims with certainty owing to the baroqueness of its discourse, in which beyond every sign and beyond every appearance appears to be another appearance. And, though an allegory Rosca’s tale may be, it is not that each of its characters is fixed by nor corresponds to a stable political archetype; it is that the very representative function of allegory is put into crisis when the name betrays the object as representation. Like the distant “Commander” who resembles Marcos but also represents a recursive history of violent sovereigns, one appears to be one but is in fact many. It is in that exaggeration of possibility where the reader feels the materiality of the novel’s language, its vertigo, through the multiplicity of these differences that dissolve difference into similitude. “Festival” thus calls for the reader to return to the central epistemic and ethical problem posed by State of War, with no guarantee of an answer: how does one know a “life in the Philippines?” 47 Conclusion This thesis has critiqued the catachrestic figuration of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) as bagong bayani, “modern heroes,” to propose a method of literary analysis that centers catachresis: “the misapplication of a word” that engenders a misnamed subject in discourse. After historicizing the valorized image of the OFW in relation to the martial law period, the rise in Philippine revolutionary nationalism, and the “feminization” of the migrant workforce, this thesis analyzed two social realist texts, Jose Maria Sison’s “The Guerilla Is Like a Poet” and Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War to shape this method of reading catachreses; to trace the sediments of other misnamings; and to attend to what “falls away” amid calls for revolution. 48 Works Cited Aguilar, Filomeno V., Jr. Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age. NUS Press, 2014. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 1983. Verso, 2016. Arong, Marie Rose and Daniel Hempel. “Towards a Philippine Transnation: Dreaming a Philippines in Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War. Ariel, vol. 48, no. 2, 2017, pp. 53-71. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
English
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Al-Kassim, Dina, 1966-
The image as OFW : revolution and catachresis in Jose Maria Sison's "The guerilla is like a poet" and Ninotchka Rosca's State of war
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