Paghuhunos (2001) by Ellen L. Sicat

Paghuhunos
By Ellen L. Sicat
(University of the Philippines Press, 2001, 200 pp.)

Ellen L. Sicat began writing at 57, after the death of her husband Rogelio R. Sikat—who was one of the major Filipino fictionists and part of the groundbreaking Mga Agos sa Disyerto in mid-sixties. Almost inevitably, Paghuhunos, winner of Madrigal Gonzalez Best First Book Award 2002, is a story of being a writer’s wife in the historical backdrop of postwar and Martial Law in the Philippines, and of raising children who did not have a taste of democracy, and could grow up timid and non-critical of the government, and as reluctant nationalist as their mother was. There was a constant lure to equate Gloria and Carlos Magdangal of the novel to Ellen and Roger Sicat themselves. This temptation combines the excitement in discovering what could be a testament of true love between two people (despite Carlos’s concern in the beginning: did Gloria really love him, or was it only his works that she admired? is the writer separable to his art?), with the anxiety of knowing how all things would eventually turn out in the end: Carlos leaving his journals to his wife and eldest daughter Laya, who by then is also already a writer, before he breathed his last in the hospital. These journals were witness to the writer’s dedication to his art, despite the undeniable lack of opportunities to get published, especially if, sadly, paradoxically, you write in the vernacular. In many parts of the novel, Carlos’s use of Filipino borders on obsession and sometimes turns comic. An old issue againsts writers in English, as lacking social consciousness, is also invoked.

But Paghuhunos is ultimately a novel, a work of fiction, and Sicat understands the way memory functions in such: “may labis, may kulang”—it has its own excesses and deficiencies. The writer necessarily has to enter each and every one of her characters, but they’re not her—at least not fully like her. Memory imagines, and, more often than not, is fascinated with its own imaginings. Gloria often recalls the influences in the formation of her own creative memory, and perhaps, of the creative memory of her generation and class: Balagtas and Emilio Mar. Antonio, the last of the kings of Balagtasan; Liwayway magazine; dulay and the need to compose rhymes extemporaneously; the folk stories of her Impo, especially the fantastic adventures of Prince Juan and Princess Maria, besides allusions to Bernardo Carpio and Mariang Makiling; foreign writers like Browning and Shakespeare; and most importantly, the Christian tradition and narratives: Gloria, for instance, remembers and sees Christ in Carlos, and hopes for a happy image of Him, laughing, having fun, while recognizing how her husband seemed so serious and grave, even on very simple things. In contrast, Gloria sees things lightly, that even EDSA Revolution seemed just like one big party to her.

Writers never get tired of waiting, Gloria learns this from her husband, and Sicat probably tried to live up to this expectation: she built a career as an accountant, managed the household and its finances, raised their children, and supported her husband’s needs as a writer, while all those years, possibly harboring a desire of her own to write. She waited for her own solitude that often incited jealousy in Gloria whenever she saw it romancing her husband—this almost necessary aloneness that one needs to finally shed off her old skin and write. ~

Next Monday: On Unang Ulan ng Mayo by Ellen L. Sicat