Killing Time in a Warm Place By Jose Y. Dalisay, Jr.
(Anvil Publishing, New Edition, 2006, 193 pp.)
How do we read a novel when it is introduced by a personal essay about the author’s prison life during martial law, and is ended by a lecture on the writing of a different book, a story collection? I assume these “bookends” were not part of Jose Y. Dalisay, Jr.’s Killing Time in a Warm Place when it was first published in 1993, and were only added in its 2006 edition. But this addition certainly recognizes the novel’s debts to national and personal history, and to the creative process, as well. How much of Noel Ilustre Bulaong, the novel’s main character, is Dalisay the Author? This much we know: they were both imprisoned when they were just eighteen (although Bulaong’s arrest, with all the action-film chase, is definitely more dramatic), and they’d both thought of writing novels, in one way or another.
The narrative moves from the present (Noel’s return from America to his hometown of Kangleong in the Visayas for his father's wake) to several pasts. Those pasts were shaped initially by the young Noel’s recognition of his nation’s geography, with all its waters, both cruel and life-giving, from the typhoons and the seas that embrace the archipelago. Later he would see his father assisting Marcos on stage in one of the latter’s visits to their town. But he was still very young then for any political activism he’d eventually get himself into when he entered college in UP. As a student activist, he served in the propaganda arm, got caught, was imprisoned, and ultimately released, and was even asked later to work under the deputy minister. He was eventually sent to write in the United States, something almost unthinkable for him, only less than a decade earlier, when he was still sopping with Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought, singing “Internationale,” and thinking of US imperialism as in the same evil league as feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism.
Was this an apologia, then?—for turning his back from the revolutionary life he once believed in, for living a life in a totally different struggle (but he’d like to believe a struggle nonetheless) that his past self would renounce and label as bourgeois? A novelist’s first novel is almost always an exorcism of one’s demons, an attempt to make peace with one’s past and the choices he made, the paths he was forced to take. The novel then acts as a confessionario (why else would the novel end with Noel uttering, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” asking for absolution, from his dead father, first and foremost, and also from the Father of his faith, of course) for all the deaths, all the time he had killed, not just the ones when he was in prison, but more so for selling his own words, “cheap as they were but many.”
The work’s central literary apology lies then on its choice of language, and the writing often betrays the guilt whenever it would make use of a term in the vernacular, like kuya and barilan, but would then immediately translate them to English (elder brother, gunfights). Who is this work’s imagined audience then? As a Filipino reader reading a Filipino writer writing in English, I felt somewhat betrayed. But of course, I'd realize that this is also part of the novel’s agenda, to expose Noel’s real doom: the distance he had to travel so that he could go back to his home, to the memory of his old self, and be absolved of his sins.
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