Final Thursday Lives

Beginning next week, Atisan Novels will review two novels each week, every Monday & Thursday. That means no more My Thursday Lives. If you want to stalk me (or if you want me to stalk you), can you please just add me in your Facebook?

For now, my farewell is an invitation: I'll deliver a talk on poetry & the novel on Saturday, February 28, 2:00 PM at the Ortigas Foundation Library, in celebration of Pinoypoets' fifth anniversary. I've been preparing for this talk for more than a month now and so I hope you'll come and give your views on the subject matter. See you.

Cubao 1980 (1994) by Tony Perez

Cubao 1980
By Tony Perez
(In Cubao 1980 at Iba Pang mga Katha: Unang Sigaw ng Gay Liberation Movement sa Pilipinas, Cacho Publishing, 1992, pp. 1-89)

Winner of the Palanca Award, Cubao 1980 is Tony Perez’s first novel and one of the first attempts in Philippine literature to use skaz to depict a specific time and place, in the voice of Tom—the sixteen-year old narrator who got himself somewhat dislocated, mostly emotionally, in the evolving alternative urban site that was Cubao. Almost all of the familiar sites that used to occupy the spaces in Cubao were there, but readers are mostly defamiliarized with them when flesh trade and transactions happen in the most unexpected places, like in between shelves of books in a popular bookstore.

Language is obviously the primary tool used by Perez to deepen the naturalism in the setting. The novel makes use of the colloquial language, in all its simplicity and truthfulness, in order to capture the spirit that animates each word. Some of the words used were “epa, alaws, sward, kets, tomguts, haybol, yos-a, lonta, yagbols, dehins, isplit, ema, spring tsiken, bagets, uring, sitak, siyota, sikyo, tumoma, durog, tsikas, dyakol, and datan” to refer to “father, nothing, homosexual, male, hungry, house, alright, long pants, scrotum, no, to separate, security guards, mother, virgin, young one, anal sex, cab, partner, to drink alcohol, drugged, female, masturbate, and old.” In all these, we get to understand Tom better: he wanted to desperately situate himself in the only place and time he thought he knew and understood. Perez pushes further his experimentation with language, when we realize that he presents highly sensitive sexual scenarios that border on pornography, but do not just fall into it, by creating fully realized psychological complexity in his main character. In addition, his artistic rendering of the commonplace reveals that lust and shame in language might really be a function of intent and integrity, more than just signification.

As mentioned earlier, the body is presented here as literally a commodity, and in Tom’s experience, his body’s monetary value improves as his knowledge of the trade widens, but is also inversely proportional to the amount of necessary innocence he thought he needed to continue to form relationships with his family, mostly his siblings, and with a prospective beloved—here, his classmate Amelia Contreras. His experience of dislocation was sudden but lasting: he’s rapidly no longer the person he used to be before he got into all these, and he realized that there was no way he could regain the sixteen-year old that he was, even when he attempted to salvage himself by seeking refuge to a faith that he vaguely understood but felt deeply, via Don Stewart.

A naturalist novel would mostly likely end in tragedy, but in a doom not entirely similar to an Aristotelian peripeteia. Tom’s was a tragedy that recognizes its further disintegration, especially when he witnessed the murder of his friend Butch by Hermie, its ex-gay lover, in a highly tense scene that closes the book.

[A slightly similar version of this essay in Filipino may be accessed here; and a summary of the novel in Filipino was posted here.]

No More Thursday Lives?

Today is day 1 of my 29th year.

Yesterday when I celebrated my 28th, the usual suspects remembered to greet me, thanks mostly to Facebook, Friendster & Multiply. But all day I was thinking of two persons who probably intentionally did not greet me in any of the hundred possible ways they could have.

I was thinking of letting go of this Thursday Lives, and instead have two novel reviews every week, every Monday and Thursday, beginning March. Let's see.

Writer Talks

Day 2 of Taboan: The Philippine International Writers Festival. I was very tired because I had to sit as panelist in the discussions on "Text & Context," along with Roland Tolentino, Danton Remoto & Isagani Cruz, with Oscar Campomanes as moderator. Tomorrow, I'll be part of the discussions on "The End of Print" at the Cubao Shoe Expo. See you there.

And on February 28:

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

Happy Man

There are days when I still think of you, of us together. And I am not being sentimental; I'm actually glad that I still have time to think of some undeniably happy things in the past once in a while. The past exists to fill in gaps in the present. When nothing happens, the past dominates. I love the way the past is related to nothing, really.

Each Thursday begins a long weekend for me, before the dreaded Tuesday inevitably arrives once more. My biggest problems these days? The phlegm that's just stuck in my throat. A wounded right arm, now in the final stage of healing. 2666, and how it still seems to elude me. Also: I terribly miss San Pablo: Kevin celebrated his birthday yesterday & I should have gone home.

Of course, you'd know I was lying, and knowing that you'd know, I'd still lie. Happy men lie. I am a happy man, Kris. Because of you, because of what you're not. Because of me, because of what I can't be. Now this is sentimental.

Para Kay B, O Kung Paano Dinevastate ng Pag-ibig ang 4 out of 5 sa Atin (2008) by Ricky Lee

Para Kay B (O Kung Paano Dinevastate ng Pag-ibig ang 4 out of 5 sa Atin)
By Ricky Lee
(Writers Studio Philippines, 2008, 243 pp.)

Ricky Lee, perhaps one of the best-known scriptwriters in the Philippines of the last four decades, is also an important fictionist whose Palanca award-winning stories anticipated the postmodern narrative in Philippine fiction, where boundaries between genre (fiction and reportage) and realities (imagined and lived) are often blurred, if not totally wrecked. His involvement with Sigwa in the seventies also positioned him as one of the more committed writers of his generation. To say that the arrival of his first novel last year was long overdue is an understatement. Good thing, Para Kay B (O Kung Paano Dinevastate ng Pag-ibig ang 4 out of 5 sa Atin) proved worth the wait: It exhibits Lee’s mastery of contemporary language, mindless of how the academicians would react, and showcases his skill in creating memorable individuals, breathing ordinary yet defamiliarizing lives. At first, we might be deceived that we were given stereotypical characters and worn-out scenarios, but a little later we would feel comfortable that Lee knew what he was doing and that they were all part of the book’s major scheme.

The novel was initially a story of five women whose experiences of love crushed them differently, save for one, as the title suggests: Irene, who had a photographic memory, could not forget the promise of love she was given when she was very young, only to find out years later that she was not even remembered by the man in her past; Sandra, who fell in reciprocated love with her own brother, only to cause his lifelong suffering in the end; Erica, who came from a community called Maldiaga where love was unheard of, left home wanting a taste of love, only to realize that she was not really capable of loving someone; Ester, a widow raising a sexually active gay son, finally admitted to herself that it was her female house helper and friend whom she really loved all her life; and finally, Bessie, the promiscous lover who seduced Lucas, who was incidentally the writer of all these five tales. The end of their stories opened the metafictional designs of the novel that were explored in the concluding chapter, where the Writer was presented as taking part in his own narrative, with conflicting visions of his own characters, both as people who supossedly lived real lives and as merely imagined personae. In the narrative rampage as the book reached its climax, the characters were able to confront the Writer, were able to decide amongst themselves for better endings in their respective stories, and were able to plea for salvation, and, well, yes, love, even in its most deceitful guise.

In a few concluding words to the book, Lee admitted that despite his success in writing film scripts, all he really wanted to do in life was to write novels. He also shared that he was able to write three novels in the last three years, and we were given a taste of the second one, called “Aswang,” which promises to be more hilarious, given the three-page excerpt. Perhaps Lee’s experiences and exposures with more popular texts, being also a creative consultant to many TV shows, paradoxically invigorates his sensibility to come up with something this creative. Or probably he was really just born to write novels this refreshing that I can’t wait for what he has to offer next. ~

Next Monday: On Paghuhunos by Ellen L. Sicat