The first to be consumed in her were our memories.
We forgot her the way we burned things

that we wanted consigned to the past. That’s why now
we could return to nothing but the grief

of other goddesses: Cacao, Makiling, Sinukuan.
We stare at the conflict and wonder

why no myth of fire resides anywhere
within our breast and consciousness.

What nymph stole Ladlao’s flame,
our sun god, to fill her body

with life’s warmth? We are lovers whose past
spill with emptiness yearly in the dry

and rainy seasons. Surviving on our swiddens
burned out of forest, why are we frightened still by the slash

and warning from nature: wind thrashing
and floods raging in heart of city lashed by typhoon; earth

cracking in parts visited by temblors.
Our hearts are numb in the mingling

of water, earth, and wind, that’s why we ask:
when will it rage, the fire in the breast?

She must have disappeared at the time when forests
were burning, and we were ashes who were left loving

her–which was forbidden because it was ordinary:
if we got just a bit closer our bodies burned.

And so we say now: there is no fire goddess,
even as we grieve over victims of conflagration

or can’t sleep in Amihan’s cold during the rainy season.

[Translation by Marne L. Kilates of "Walang Diwata ng Apoy." Together with the original in Filipino, this translation was published in Pitik-Bulag, Letra at Liwanag: A Celebration of Contemporary Filipino Art & Poetry (Manila: Government Service Insurance Service, 2009), edited by Virgilio S. Almario, p. 129. It was accompanied by an art work by painter Leonardo Aguinaldo.]

With all the lack of rootedness in the Filipino precolonial psyche that proliferates in Philippine local primetime viewing, thanks mostly to the fantaserye hype that’s been going on for several years now, it is about time that Filipino novels revisit our epics in order to reawaken our true imaginative gifts as a people. I had never read a novel in Filipino that dealt entirely with the epic world, until T. S. Sungkit, Jr.’s Batbat hi Udan came out early in 2009. A true Higaonon by blood and sentiment, Sungkit wrote an interesting adventure set in a land where places were still called by their olden names, like Kagayhaan for Cagayan de Oro City, Yandang for Bugcaon and Kimambong for Malaybalay City.

~
Naturally, this is a story that involves a central hero, named Udan, who had to undergo his own rights of passage: go through some adventures (which in the epic translates to wars and battles) to save his tribe, fall in love with the most beautiful woman conceivable in their world (here named as Ananaw, but more known as the Hapoy ha Tagkalegdeg, Bolak ha Mahumot, which means “naglalagablab na apoy, mabangong bulaklak”), lose almost all his beloved (his father Datu Maghusay, and later, even Ananaw) in the course of pangayaw, meet his fiercest enemies (from Kalibato to the Tium). In the end, of course, he’d be able to overcome all the challenges, as a true epic hero, and that would signify the beginning of a new era for his ethnic group.

~
Two l’s are at the top of an epic’s concerns: land and lineage (or lupain & lahi). To introduce onself is to invoke one’s roots: Mansugkil, when he introduced himself to Datu Maghusay, would tell the latter that he was the son of Mambulawan, who was the son of Manlagunha, who was in turn Mambinunsad’s son. During battles, Udan would summon the spirits of his ancestors, Buuy Manlunggo and Apu Maliga, to give him strength. But everyone from their land, from their banuwa, is considered a brother. That was why Udan was saddened upon learning that Mansugkil’s troop was salvaged by Kalibato acting as Datu Masagila: “Sapagkat ang mga kasama niya’y kanyang mga kapatid. Sapagkat ang lahat sa Lantapan ay kanyang kapatid. Sapagkat iisang dugo lamang ang nananalaytay sa kanilang mga ugat.”

~
Of all the places mentioned in the story’s geographic map, Lidasan was the most mysterious and dangerous of all, “a crossroad of secret passageways.” In that land once headed by Datu Mansugyang before he was defeated by Datu Maghusay and Datu Manlidasan lived the aligasis, mantianaks, bakesans, busaws, kabug and other creatures that could cause ordinary humans unimaginable harm. Lidasan was now headed by Datu Binigsulan, the chief of the aligasis and father of Kalibato and Ananaw, and assisted by Datu Mangiyab-kiyab, chief of the mantianaks, and Datu Magahiyup, chief of the tagbayang ahas. After a series of deception and cunning and deaths, Lidasan would eventually fall under Udan’s command when he defeated even the Tium hi Gaun, the tagbaya of his own great ancestor. Further revelations on real blood relations were untied in the end.

In Batbat hi Udan, we get a classic narrative rendering of an epic, only in prose and written form. For instance, details are being repeated several times, often successively, only in different ways, clearly a mnemonic device in the epic. In the end, this is a story of beginnings, for, as the real Datu Masagila told Udan, there are stories only because they have roots.

Ito ang bersiyon ko ng #ThrowbackThursday, at dahil Biyernes ngayon, tawagin nating #BinabalikangBiyernes, at sa halip na picture: isang blog entry mula sa lumang blog, tungkol sa panonood ng Bunso ni Ditsi Carolino, halos isang dekada na ang nakalilipas:

12 Disyembre 2004: Noong Biyernes, pinanood namin ni Jema ang Bunso sa UP Film Institute. Bagong dokumentaryo ni Ditsi Carolino, tungkol sa mga batang bilanggo. Hindi nalalayo sa atake niya sa Riles: Life on the Tracks, hindi kasimbigat ng paksa ang atake niya rito (higit na may siste, kaysa sa una niyang Minsan Lang Sila Bata). Sa panayam halimbawa sa isa sa mga bata, sinabi ni Tony na hindi siya nagnanakaw sa mga tindera sa kalye, dahil kamukha aniya ito ng kanyang mga tiyo at tiya. Maraming bahagi na di mapipigilan ng mga tao na mapatawa sa sitwasyon at katapatan ng mga bata, bagaman alam natin na higit pa sa tawa ang hinihingi ng dokumentaryo.

Pagkatapos ng pelikula, may isang babae mula sa Commission on Human Rights na nagbigay ng puna. Aniya, kinakailangang maging maingat ng pelikula sa paggamit ng mga termino. Sa ibinigay umanong bilang ng child “offenders,” mahalagang kilalanin na marami sa kanila ang hindi “guilty” sa anumang krimen na ibinibintang sa kanila, kaya mainam aniya kung child “accused” ang terminong gagamitin. Habang sumasang-ayon ako sa puna ng babae mula sa CHR na maging maingat sa mga termino, naniniwala rin akong hindi ito usapin (lamang) kung nagkasala ba ang bata o hindi. Totoo nga naman: ang tatlong bata na pinagtuunan ng naratibo ng dokumentaryo ay pawang “guilty” sa kani-kanilang krimen: pagnanakaw, paggamit ng droga, pagnanakaw muli. Bakit hindi tinalakay sa dokumentaryo ang kaso ng mga batang wala talagang kasalanan? Sa palagay ko, mahalaga ang pasyang ito ni Carolino. Kapag ipinakita niya ang kaso ng mga batang iyon (na naniniwala akong marami rin), may panganib na matabunan ang totoong isyu. Maaaring makisimpatya sa kanila sapagkat “wala silang kasalanan,” at hindi dahil “bata pa sila.” Naniniwala akong hindi pa ganap ang pananagutan ng isang tao sa kanyang mga pagkilos kapag wala pa siya sa sapat na gulang. Higit kaysa sa bata, mas may pananagutan ang magulang na nagkulang sa paggabay sa kanya. Bata pa sila. Hindi dapat ganito ang mundong ginagalawan nila.

Samantala, may isang banyaga (mula sa UNICEF) na tumayo upang magbigay ng puna. Bumati siya ng magandang hapon sa Filipino. Akala ko, isa lang iyon sa mga limitadong alam niya sa wika natin, pero nang nagpatuloy siya sa pagpuna at pagtatanong sa Filipino, hindi ko maiwasang mamangha at humanga. Wala siyang binanggit kahit na isang salita sa Ingles! Sana’y nakadama ng pagkapahiya ang lahat ng mga Pilipinong naunang nagbigay ng puna, na kung hindi sa Ingles ay sa Taglish (Fililish?). Tuwang-tuwa ako’t may ilan akong estudyante sa Fil 12 na nanood. Mahalaga ang itinanong ng lalaki: bakit aniya magaan ang pagdadala ni Carolino sa paksa? Bakit hindi naipakita na may karahasan sa loob ng piitan at mapanganib ito para sa mga bata? Tiyak naman ang tugon ni Carolino: limitado sila ng kayang makunan ng kamera. Pagsasara ng kulungan sa gabi, hindi na sila maaaring manatili roon kaya naman, kung ano man ang mga nagaganap sa pagpatay sa mga ilaw, hindi na nila maisasali. Gayumpaman, sinikap nilang ipakita ang panganib na ito sa pamamagitan ng pagbanggit sa mga estadistika sa dulo: kung ilang bata ang bilanggo sa kasalukuyan, at kung paanong marami sa kanila ang nabibiktima ng panghahalay sa loob.

May Comprehensive Juvenile Detainees Bill pala na nakabimbin na sa kongreso sa loob ng limang taon. Hindi ko maunawaan kung ano-ano ang maaaring pumigil sa mambabatas upang patagalin ang pagpapatibay ng batas na mangangalaga sa kondisyon at karapatan ng mga bata, kahit pa nga ba bilanggo sila bunga ng mga krimen na maaaring hindi pa nila ganap na nauunawaan.

Shortlisted to the inaugural Man Asian Literary Prize, Jose Dalisay’s second novel Soledad’s Sister somewhat paved the way for contemporary Filipino novelists based in the Philippines to gain international recognition. Only a year later, Filipinos would dominate the prize’s longlist, and Miguel Syjuco, a Filipino now living in Canada, would win the award for his novel Ilustrado.

~
Unlike Dalisay’s first novel, Killing Time in a Warm Place, that obviously had a number of autobiographical inspirations, Soledad’s Sister is a novel that pushed him to imagine more of other people’s lives and sentiments. Although this is primarily a story of the encounter between Aurora V. Cabahug, a bar singer in Paez whose sister Soledad died of drowning in Saudi, and Walter G. Zamora, a police officer from Marikina that was assigned to the same remote town of Paez after a failed case on the kidnapping of Charlie Uyboco and an affair with masseuse Noemi that ultimately sacrificed his marriage with Bessie, we also get a glimpse of the stories of the other people that were somehow involved in theirs, no matter how tangentially: Filemon Catabay, the OFW beheaded in Saudi; Ms. Principe, the Paez chief of police’s secretary who had some affection towards Walter; Choi the Korean engineer who would table Rory in between her sets; Mercedes Laquindanum, more known as Mama Merry, the one who manages the Flame Tree after the demise of her husband Filomelo, the name of the bar being her “last concession to poetry and metaphor”; Nick Panganiban, the old piano player who taught Rory some classic songs; Nathan, Soledad’s son to the teenager Edison, a Hong Kong national and only son of the Lau family she formerly served; Paez Vice Mayor Tennyson Yip, who had some fling with Rory, and, later, with a bar newbie, Francine; Jose Maria Pulumbarit, or Jomar, aka “Boy Alambre,” who carnapped the van driven by Walter that contained Soledad’s casket; Meenakshi, the maid from India, who escaped with Soledad in the night of their disappearance; and a lot lot of other names and faces that made this a novel that recognizes that there were no uninteresting characters, only a limited space to have their own stories fully fleshed out.

On the side, the novel made references to pop and contemporary culture that somehow affect the common Filipino’s psyche: Brother Mike, People’s Tonight, Megamall, National Geographic, Readers Digest, Ruffa Gutierrez, Joey Marquez & Alma Moreno, Schwarzenegger, Ricky Martin, Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the divas Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Donna Summer, Olivia Newton-John, Sharon Cuneta, Ivy Violan, Vernie Varga, and Regine Velasquez, and several pop songs that remain to dominate our airwaves: “Rainy Days and Mondays,” “Love Is Stronger Far Than We,” “I’m a Fool to Want You,” “Am I Blue.”

~
In the end, we would realize that both Rory and Walter had deep desires to be remembered, even by people they didn’t know personally, to not just be lost in obscurity in their ostensibly mundane lives: Rory, by trying to be a successful singer, and not just be one of the Regines in this country that so loves to sing both in its lowest and highest points; and Walter, by dreaming of eventually writing that master’s thesis on “criminal propensities in the Philippine countryside,” that hopefully would be of some use to someone. They hoped to accomplish their dreams without having to leave their country behind, despite the allure of working abroad (in the case of Rory), or following his estranged family in England (in the case of Walter), so unlike the thousands of other Filipinos who would gamble on where their fate and dreams would lead them––even if it were to their own deaths––outside the Philippines.

This Earth of Mankind is the first book in Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s The Buru Quartet, supposedly composed initially as a spoken narrative–and was written only two years later in 1975– while Toer was imprisoned in the Buru Island Prison Camp. As far as memory serves, this was the first novel by a Southeast Asian, other than a Filipino, I read.

Even if it was mostly a chronological narration of events that happened in the lives of some natives and Indos toward the end of the nineteenth century in the Dutch East Indies, there was an attempt to complicate its internal narrativity and textuality. The novel, as revealed by the narrator early on, supposedly began as short notes that were thirteen years later read and studied over again, merged “together with dreams, imagining. Naturally they became different from the original.” It was also recognized, nonetheless, that this fetish to make notes was probably caused by the narrator’s “European training.” In the latter part of the novel, Europe’s dependence on paper, on what’s been documented and set on record, was argued to be almost proportional to its disregard to the human person, to relationships built on emotion and faith.

~
The novel is a story of Minke—not his “real name,” but the name he’s been called by other people. Later we would realize that the moniker could have come from “monkey”—a recurring image to which the natives were compared, something not unlike the allusion that the Spaniards made to the natives in the Philippines during their colonization, as revealed in Fray Miguel Lucio y Bustamante’s Si Tandang Basio Macunat. In This Earth, name is a central issue. The natives, like Minke was, did not have surnames, and in the then modernized and educated milieu in which he was a part of, the fact could cause one’s shame—or pride, depending on one’s attitude toward the Dutch colonial policies. Born on the same day (August 31, 1880) as Netherland’s Queen Wilhelmina, Minke was situated in a conflicted position: he was the only pure native studying in the most prestigious Dutch High School (H.B.S.) in Surabaya. Would he be the perfect colonial subject—or rebel?

~
Minke turned out to be a good writer (writing stories and essays as Max Tollenaar for Surabaya Daily News) and the perfect lover to Annelies, daughter of a nyai or a Dutch’s concubine, and, true to the tradition of the beloved in most classics, simply the most beautiful woman that this earth of mankind could possibly conceive.

~
Chapter 10 is a fascinating brief account of being an Asian prostitute in the late nineteenth century, as recounted by Maiko, a Japanese working in the brothel owned by Babah Ah Tjong. Except for Annelies who was always lovesick with Minke until she found a strong resolve in an almost melodramatic ending, Toer presented a cast of strong women: Nyai Ontosoroh, Minke’s Mother, and Miss Magda Peters—all in their respective ways had guided Minke to the ways of tradition and civilization.

~
Miss Magda Peters was fascinated with the amount of reading that a nyai like Ontosoroh’s had. Faithful to the thrust of the written word, this is another novel that encourages reading. There was even a period when Minke would make a reading list for Annelies that she had to consume for a certain amount of time. Aside from the Western canon (like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend), it also mentioned several Malayan titles like G. Francis’ Nyai Dasima and the legends of Babad Tanah Jawi.

~
When Minke told his father that he did not want to be a bupati like the latter was, and said that, “My world was not rank and position, wages and embezzlement. My world was this earth of mankind and its problems,” I felt that it was a little naïve for him to not recognize that politics played a major role in the problems of this world. Of course he would acknowledge it a little too late in the end when even his wife Annelies would be taken away from him by the European law that clearly contradicted their Islamic tradition. But it was a rite-of-passage novel, and no such story would prove successful unless the main character proved to have some shortcomings, a little shortsightedness, for where would his potential toward growth be if not for these lack and failures of vision?

Page 21: This unlikeliest of fictions. To think of another life. A dog’s. Dreaming of heavens. A beyond: Timbuktu.

*
In one of Willy’s schizophrenic moments, while talking to Mr. Bones, Henry James and James Joyce are thrown in together with other “American know-how” that “keeps coming at you, and every minute there’s new junk to push out the old junk.”

*
Again, Willy: “I was reading a book. The Magic Mountain it was, written by Thomas Mann… I never finished the damned thing, by the way, it was so boring, but said Herr Mann was a muckety-muck, a hotshot in the Writers Hall of Fame, and I figured I should take a look.”

*
And so that’s what it meant to be human, Mr. Bones must have thought. To aspire for a certain literacy. To have a culture, and then to laugh at it, to think it unnecessary–waste even–in order to live life, a life, no matter what, after all.

July 20, 2009: Aneka and I met at Cello’s in Katipunan so that she could give me a copy of her then newly-released young adult novel-in-verse, Displaced, co-published by Adarna House and Filipinas Heritage Library. The 152-page book contains illustrations by Mitzi Villavecer, who also did the cover design.

I was glad that I saw how the novel evolved from the manuscript we critiqued in the 6th Barlaya Writing for Young Adults Workshop in 2007, where I sat in the panel with Heidi Abad, Astrid Tobias and Zarah Gagatiga, up to its pre-printing form in more than a year of intermittent conversations over coffee that Aneka and I had discussing her revisions of the novel, the state of Philippine YA literature, and the condition of artistic production in general.

*
Displaced is the story of Gabriella–Elay to her family & Gabby to her friends–and the events that happened during her last year in high school. Her experience of displacement is triggered by the return of her mom from working abroad for four years, on the one hand, and the introduction of Justin in her life, which challenged her long-term friendship with Trixie, on the other. All these amidst the challenges of academics, especially her difficulties with Physics. Gabriella tried to make sense of learning and life with her interest in music; chapter titles are consequently based on physics concepts and/or musical terms and titles of U2 songs.

*
The novel, while concerning itself with issues of the young (crush, friendship, school life), primarily deals with a larger issue of how family relationships are disrupted by the continued movement of Filipino workers outside the Philippines. The novel is touching without necessarily falling into the trap of the romantic. It does not involve death, premarital sex, addiction, sickness, or any other issues that are by themselves disturbing. Displaced deals with an ordinary life that has currency, the kind that many young girls of Gabriella’s age living in the city experience at present, and the novel’s charm rests in its simplicity of concerns and rendering, coupled with the complexity of truths it tries to confront.

Edited by poet Emmanuel Carmelo D. Nadera Jr. and fictionist Jun Cruz Reyes, Ang Aklat Likhaan ng Tula at Maikling Kuwento 1999 was the very first national literary anthology that included my work. The book was published in 2002 by the University of the Philippines Press.

My poem “Stuffed Toys,” first published in Heights, was among the forty poems chosen by Nadera as the most representative, if not the best, of the year. In his introduction, Nadera said that: “Hindi rin nagpahuli sa mga naunang Atenista ang editor na si Alwynn Castillo Javier, mang-aawit na si Jayson Pilapil Jacobo, at iskolar na si Edgar Samar Calabia [sic].” It was clearly also one moment in my long history of typo error victimization.

Joel Lamangan’s adaptation of Carlo Vergara’s highly successful graphic novel Ang Kagila-gilalas na Pakikipagsapalaran ni Zsa Zsa Zaturnnah (Visual Print Enterprises, 2002) into a Metro Manila Film Festival entry in 2006 failed to maximize the audio-visual nature of the film to translate the magic that was in Vergara’s comic work. The basic storyline and the problematics in gender politics were there, but they were Vergara’s; the direction did not bother to complicate it further with its own take on the issues: Ada (Rustom Padilla) got a superheroine power from a huge stone that would turn him into Zsa Zsa Zaturnnah (Zsa Zsa Padilla) when swallowed. She was initiated by her sidekick and parlor assistant Didi (Chokoleit) into the tasks of being a hero. While keeping her love for Dodong (Alfred Vargas) a secret, she fought the arrival of a giant frog and zombies in a small town far from Manila. In the end, she fought against the team of Amazonistas from outer space headed by Queen Femina Suarestellar Baroux (Pops Fernandez) who wanted to eliminate the male species on Earth. When Zaturnnah emerged the winner, Ada was doubly triumphant (as in win na win) when Dodong expressed his true feelings for him.

I have failed to watch any of the book’s stage adaptations before (something I still feel miserable about) and the bad reviews and low box-office returns of the movie during its film festival run kept me then from spending money on it. I recently got a DVD copy of the film and began watching it when the rain fell heavily here in Marikina. The film, thanks to the mother of coincidences, opened with a musical sequence on the coming of a heavy rain. It was potentially a beautiful opening, if only the choreography and direction were not so bad. The cinematography also looked amateurish, the singing horrible and the extras who uttered some lines were so robotic that they’d beat every Metro Manila mayor who uttered lines badly in the MMDA’s Metro Gwapo campaign that was also shown in the movie houses during film festivals, I believe. I’d cringe over the MMDA campaign everytime I’d see it; I wanted to turn off my computer when I heard the extras comment on the rain in Lamangan’s movie. But it was now or never, and so I decided to keep on watching.

I finished the movie for the sake of just finishing the movie. Zsa Zsa Padilla tried to be “gay” all throughout but somehow just fell short of being one. She was more confused than someone experiencing an identity crisis. The opening’s choice to comment on the rain would not echo in any other part of the film. Lamangan could not decide if he wanted it to be a musical or just a film with random song and dance numbers that would not even pass as MTV’s. The songs on and of Dodong’s were presented as dream sequence and as a scene entirely out of the narrative because of the movie’s indecisions with form. The ending hinted on a part two in a very Okay Ka Fairy Ko movie kind of way, but I didn’t think I can stand another two hours of it. I’m not even commenting here on how disastrous the graphic design was–which was supposedly the asset of any decent fantasy film!

Did I say I was disappointed? Now I understand why they had to remove the kagila-gilalas in the title of the original graphic novel.

I first read this novel as an M.A. thesis called “Kamatayan sa Piling ng mga Lilang Nimpeya” back in 2001. Yapan changed the novel’s title in its eventual publication for it to reflect, perhaps, the various senses in “mata” that the narrative attempts to deal with. The most obvious of course is “mata” as sense of sight.

In Filipino, we use our eyes to have paningin and pagtingin, which may connote opinion and affection, respectively. In the novel, we get to know the stories from Esteban’s point of view, an albularyo who supposedly saw all that could be seen in the events that he recounted, even those that only his sixth sense could witness. Of course, he did not have only his “views” of the things that happened in Sagrada; he also certainly had emotional stakes in them for they involved Selya, the one he used to love but could not help in the moment (perhaps one of the most central “sandali” in the story) she needed him most. If Esteban’s view of things seemed very intimate, there were also distant pananaw and pagtanaw, like the opinions of the unnamed people of Sagrada when they learned of Estela’s suicide in the beginning of the novel.

*
Mata could also mean “the center” or “from where things come,” as in the “eye of the storm,” and this certainly does not overread for Sagrada is in Bicol, one of the regions most visited by typhoons in the Philippines—and the chapter “Mga Bahay sa Gitna ng Bagyo” dealt with the very naturalist relationship of the space’s climate and weather to the internal and external conflicts that the characters had to deal with.

*
Mata, when used as a verb in Filipino, could additionally mean two things. One is “to make obvious, to reveal.” We say this to people in frustration of their inability to see commonsensically. This is probably Esteban’s reason why he had to write the stories he already narrated before: the textuality of the story corners it, makes it subject to the storyteller’s gaze, unlike the fluidity and context dependence of oral narration, that is more likely the reason why deaths ensued after Nene, and later, her son, Boboy, “heard” the stories of their epic heroes. They misheard or missed entirely the metaphors that function as both representation and revelation at the same time, like the unbridled presences of snakes and Oryol throughout their family history and the local history of Bicol. Mata could also mean “to devalue” someone or something (as in “matahin,” “ipamata”): and so this is also certainly a story of reviewing the marginalized, those outside the center. For example, the woman, the native and the uneducated that Agatha somehow represents.

*
In the end, mata, when pronounced as máta, is also death, the inescapable death that was expressed more overtly in this novel’s first working title. The novel began with Estela’s death, and it was maybe a death that had to happen—not just for her, but—for the child in her womb to end the curse of Nuevas growing up fatherless, like Boboy and Nene did.

Somewhere in the middle of the novel the narrator reported that A and Franck had both finished reading this African novel that they’d been discussing for sometime. Robbe-Grillet, via his narrator, made a commentary on the nature of our “readings” of texts–on how we focus not on “the novel’s value” but on its “reality,” and so we blame the characters for certain acts, or we comment on the implausibility of some events, and we even suggest alternative outcomes, although we know that in the end, nothing could be changed, the “reality stays the same.” But I would like to underscore the tendency of interpretations as mentioned by Robbe-Grillet: “They seem to enjoy multiplying these choices, exchanging smiles, carried away by their enthusiasm, probably a little intoxicated by this proliferation… .” Intoxication by proliferation. This is the ecstasy of reading, the apex of interpretation. To multiply meanings–to be more than what the text probably is or was just intended to be.

*
The narrator/husband refers to himself as the “third person”–in front of A and Franck’s, and unlike these two, he does not read the African novel they are so enthusiastic about.

*
To the jealous every moment becomes present, again and again; he reviews the same scenes, hears the same words–from the same angle, from the same distance, although with a different focus.

*
“A novel whose action takes place in Africa” was lent by Franck’s to A–and it gave connection to the two of them; yet the novel turns out to be a symbol of the narrator’s disconnection from his wife, the unknown, what couldn’t be fully shared with him, what he could only half-guess. The novel connected Franck and A even if, paradoxically, it provided them with different, and sometimes opposing, understandings.

*
When the narrator had to describe the novel toward the end, based on what he could get from the conversations, he summed it up as, “Psychological complications aside, it is a standard narrative of colonial life in Africa, with a description of a tornado, a native revolt, and incidents at the club.” In other words: Not unlike Jealousy (or Robbe-Grillet’s narration of it), he wants to strip the novel of “psychological complications” and so everything is seen from the outside–toward the physicality of things; and also, that there’s really nothing special with the novel at hand: it is a “standard narrative”–and with the label comes the expectations of its contents.

Still the trademark Robbe-Grillet obsession with details, with visuals. But towards the end, near the end, the soldier who until then was mostly just the observed, the object of the I’s gaze (who told us s/he was alone, in the very first sentence of the novel), was now allowed a glimpse of his interiority–even if only to justify the compulsion to record the surroundings: “… the soldier is still perturbed by such a gap in his memory. He wonders if anything else in his surroundings might have escaped him and even continues to escape him now. It suddenly seems very important to make an exact inventory of the room.”

*
The novel begins with I and ends with me, and yet s/he does not reveal anything about her/himself; s/he’s the least known in the end. The self is ultimately the location of the most intricate of labyrinths.

Calvino admitted that he wrote this romanzo “almost for fun,” and that he was “not prepared for the outcry that greeted it.” His idea of fun: to thrust a character into the middle of a war between Christians and Turks and have a cannonball fired “right in his chest,” splitting him into the novelist’s own Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Later the two halves would fall in love almost inevitably with the same woman, leading to their reunion in the end, but only after a bloody duel & a few people’s intervention–a closure that was almost bound to happen yet I wished the novelist avoided, even if only to arrive at an ending that was as disagreeable as the premise.

*
Now I could understand an outcry, but more for its narrative discontentment, rather than for what it actually contains. Perhaps Calvino was aware of this, and so he sent away Dr. Trelawney, with whom our young narrator “found a companion such as [he] never had,” aboard Captain Cook’s ship, while the boy, who also happened to be the viscount’s nephew, was “deep in the wood telling [himself] stories.”

The novel is made possible by divisions. Coetzee divided the book into two sections called “Strong Opinions” and “Second Diary” in order to differentiate issues extrinsic and intrinsic to the self, only to reveal that they’re actually both driven by external events on the one hand, and limitations of intellectual and affective visions on the other. Additionally Coetzee divided each page into essays supposedly written by Señor C, an aging Australian writer born in South Africa, who wrote a novel called Waiting for the Barbarians, not unlike Coetzee himself; his narration of encounters with and thoughts of Anya, a Filipina who never lived in the Philippines whom he invited to work as his typist; and Anya’s observations of Señor C’s writings, and of his actions and reactions towards her.

*
An excerpt from Señor C’s essay, “On terrorism,”: “… a secret is an item of information and as such falls under the wing of information science, one of whose branches is mining, the extraction of scintillae of information (secrets) from tons of data. The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible.” He liked to call his brand of political thought “pessimistic anarchistic quietism, or anarchist quietistic pessimism, or pessimistic quietistic anarchism,” even if he doubted his own qualification as a thinker.

*
Anya recognizes herself, and knows that she’s most probably viewed, as “racy, exciting, exotic” yet “just the little Filipina”–but with a tinge of irony, which is the only probable tone Coetzee could have given her, if he would like to survive in our age of political correctness. She even teased, that is return the gaze to, the old man when he asked her where she was born: “Why do you want to know? Am I not blonde-eyed and blue-haired enough for your tastes?” Señor C was speechless, but in another occasion, upon seeing Anya’s clothes “enough to outfit a middle-sized cathouse,” he asked if she had “a shoe collection too.” Filipinas are remembered for how little they are, and how extravagant. But Anya remembered her mother as someone very loyal to her Australian father, and mused: “That is how we are, we Filipinas. Good wives, good mistresses, good friends too. Everything good.”

*
Movies, aside from literary works, are among Señor C’s immediate intertexts in his essays, like Kurasawa’s Seven Samurai and Kubrick’s film adaption of Lolita. His was a commissioned series of essays because he admitted to no longer have the endurance needed for writing novels. He told Anya that, “To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out.”

Anya was eager to tell the old man, however, that his essays, especially the one about the terrorists, were a bit “idealistic” and “unrealistic,” and then shared her own uncle’s encounters with the Islamists in Mindanao, who don’t mind dying if it could bring nearer “the day of the battle to end all battles, when the infidels are defeated and Islam takes over the world.” She was so opinionated, a “little Filipina typist who thinks she knows everything,” that Señor C wondered if Anya was the real mother of the thoughts he was putting down on paper. But, really, where does authorship begin and end?

I am not supposed to teach this semester: I need to focus on research and creative work. But when Martin (Villanueva) invited me to teach a fiction writing workshop course this semester, how could I resist? I am always excited to read new works. That is the reason why I attend workshops, I publish Tapat, and I teach literature. Yesterday I met my class of 16 students for the first time and I presented them this syllabus:

In Leaf Storm, Gabriel Garcia Marquez introduces Colonel Aureliano Buendia––although we did not actually see him––who supposedly wrote a letter of recommendation for the doctor whose death is at the center of the story. Did Marquez know the first time he wrote the colonel’s name that it would figure in a more ambitious novel that would bring him to world’s attention, and eventually give him the Nobel Prize?

*
What drives a story? Most of the time a death and an interesting past. The more extraordinary yet familiar they are, the more potential they’ll have to tread a significant narrative. Here we have a doctor, a colonel, a priest, a child, a mother, and a whole town that could not forget, could not forgive, and would only be appeased by one form of revenge.

I haven’t heard of Luis Fernando Verissimo until I saw his Borges and the Eternal Orangutans in 2009. I also haven’t read any Brazilian author before (as far as I could remember), but how could I resist a novel where Borges himself was made a character? In the story, Borges was supposedly working on his The Final Treatise on Mirrors; Borges later commented on “paternity and mirros [as] being equally abominable because both increased the number of men.” Expectedly, there was a reference on Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass.

*
A whodunit, the novel is necessarily an existential novel, like most detective novels. The main protagonist is Vogelstein who attended a conference on Edgar Allan Poe in Buenos Aires where he met his idol Borges, and where a murder was committed. “Excessive symmetry is either unnatural and conceals some human thought behind it, or else supernatural and conceals some mystery,” Borges said while musing on their clues.

*
The novel is also a satire of critics and writers, and on their obsession with the (supposed) relatedness of details. The Poe geeks were talking about the writer’s stories, and were expected to remember every single detail on them and find relevance to the present murder: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Gold Bug,” and “X-ing the Paragrab’.”

There were other writers mentioned in the novel: Walter Benjamin, Sir Thomas Browne (“Treatise on X”), H. P. Lovecraft (The Nameless City), Abdul Alhazred/ El Hazzared (Al Azip/ Necronomicon, translated by John Dee in 1600; but is this “factual”?), and Jules Verne, but commented that the latter had “no literary talent.”

*
But what is the writer’s talent but, still according to Borges, this: “We have a gift for placing one word after another coherently and creatively, but we could unwittingly be serving a coherence entirely unknown to us and thus inventing terrifying truths. We write in order to remember, but those memories might belong to other people. We could be creating universes, like Akhenaten’s god, merely to amuse ourselves. We might unwittingly be placing monsters in the world. And without even leaving our chairs.”

*
And what initiates the writer? “I’ve always felt that in order to be a great writer, one should have experience of life at sea, which is why Conrad and Melville and, in a way, Stevenson, who ended his days in the South Seas, were better than all of us, Vogelstein. At sea, a writer flees from the minor demons and faces only the definitive ones. A character in Conrad says that he has a horror of ports because, in port, ships rot and men go to the devil. He meant the devils of domesticity and incoherence. The small devils of terra firma.”

Finally! Yesterday while waiting for the Faculty Day program in Ateneo to begin, I received a text message from Anvil that my complimentary copies of Eight Muses of the Fall would be delivered to my office that afternoon. The book is the English translation by poet Mikael de Lara Co and fictionist Sasha Martinez of my first novel, Walong Diwata ng Pagkahulog, which is incidentally currently being featured in the group reading of Pinoy Reads Pinoy Books group in GoodReads. I was also told that some copies of the book were already delivered to some National Book Store branches in Manila yesterday, and that all NBS branches should have copies by next week. I hope you’ll all get yourself a copy. Thanks for all the support.

After reading two of his novels, The Porcupine (1992) and Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), I’d been quite ambivalent with Julian Barnes. His intellectual register was quite high, but the affective impact was not as much. (It is not the case with Milan Kundera, for example; Kundera’s novels are for me both intellectually and emotionally engaging.) Nonetheless, I couldn’t quite put away Barnes altogether, which also says a lot.

When I finally read his A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, I decided that I loved Barnes more rather than less. His speculation in the accounts on Noah and the great flood is the best first chapter I’ve read in a long time. I am tempted to say that it could be a stand-alone story, but it wouldn’t be right. That first chapter (“The Stowaway”) holds the rest of the novel thematically: the indefinite forms of survival, the randomness of our salvation.

*
Novels are the foremost advocates of novel-reading; they are likewise inclined towards commenting on the craft and practice of novel-writing itself. In the “half” chapter of the book (“Parenthesis”), which discourses on love (how I wished Barnes knew of our “mahal kita”), the novelist revealed himself and his thoughts on the ironic virtue of the prose, at the expense of poetry (a lot similar to what Kundera did on the “lyric” in his Life Is Elsewhere):

“All novelists know their art proceeds by indirection. … Still, it’s natural for the novelist sometimes to fret at the obliquities of fiction. … Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible ‘I’ (when I say ‘I’ you will want to know within a paragraph or two whether I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented; a poet can shimmy between the two, getting credit for both deep feeling and objectivity). Then again, poets seem able to turn bad love—selfish, shitty love—into good love poetry. Prose writers lack this power of admirable, dishonest transformation. We can only turn bad love into prose about bad love. So we are envious (and slightly distrustful) when poets talk to us of love.”

To be nothing within a closed helmet and armor (for what are they, then? whom to protect?) is Agilulf’s predicament, obviously quite unlike all the other soldiers (armored, shielded) who mostly dislike him for being a model one: he “could not know what it was like to shut the eyes, lose consciousness, plunge into emptiness for a few hours and then wake and find oneself the same as before, link up with the threads of one’s life again.”

Calvino’s novel then becomes a meditation on existence and nothingness, on what separates humanity from mere consciousness and voice, which Agilulf both had, aside from a name. But: “World conditions were still confused in the era when this took place. It was not rare then to find names and thoughts and institutions that corresponded to nothing in existence. But at the same time the world was pullulating with objects and capacities and persons who lacked any name or distinguishing mark.”

*
But is Agilulf also––despite being disembodied––a man? Although he had “immunity from the shocks and agonies to which people who exist are subject,” we would realize in the end that he depended on the very honor of his knighthood; he existed because of the recognition of that honor. When he found out that he probably lived on a lie he disappeared. He did not even have a carcass.

The people he touched became people who searched for his nothingness in order to fill whatever, whoever, is missing in their own lives: Bradamante, a lover; Raimbaud, a confidante; Gurduloo, a master.

*
A romance is often marked by a narrative complicated by some secrets and unknowns, mostly of confused blood relations that is the stuff of our everyday soap operas. “You are the daughter of the King of Scotland and of a peasant woman, I of the queen and of the Sacred Order, we have no blood tie,” Torrismund told Sophronia, whom he believed as a child was his mother, later revealed to be her half-sister, before he eventually found out the truth, which, true to the thrust of romances, will make their love for each other possible.

Additionally, only in the fourth chapter would it be revealed that the story is being recounted by one Sister Theodora, who was tasked to do so by the abbess for the health of her soul, as an act of penance, even if she had doubts: that “maybe the time when one wrote with delight was neither a miracle nor grace but a sin, of idolatry, of pride,” and that “one may go writing on and on with a soul already lost.”

In the beginning she made us believe that she was having difficulties because she was writing about things she failed to experience herself, in the safety of her convent: the battles of war, and “that greatest of mortal follies, the passion of love.” In the end it would be told however that she was also one of the characters in her tale, the one named Bradamante, who was running after Agilulf, making everybody convinced that “if a girl has had her fill of every man who exists, her one remaining desire could be for a man who doesn’t exist at all.”

*
There are moments when Sister Theodora would speak to the book itself, while deciding on what her narrative needs to move forward. Most of the time her novel-writing overwhelms with all the adventures that still need to be written, with all the possibilities looming. In Chapter 9, she tries to make maps, to make use of images, of lines, instead of words, in order to see her tale through; the irony of course is that we as readers do not see those lines and images but are rather confronted, still, with words.