“The Exoticisms Become Tiresome”: The Reception of Dogeaters and the Asian American Canon

Nicole Marie Story Virginia Beach, Virginia

Bachelor of Arts in Literary Studies, The New School, 2017

A Thesis presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts

Department of English Sylvia Chong, Advisor

University of Virginia May, 2019 Story 2

Acknowledgements

My boundless gratitude to Sylvia Chong, my advisor, for pushing my thought and myself into directions I could’ve never anticipated.

My thanks to the English Department at UVa, to the faculty, courses, and discussions that inform every citation. I am especially grateful for the summer funding that allowed me to research the Jessica Hagedorn Papers at UC Berkeley, which planted the seed for this project.

Many, many thanks Eva Höenigess, Lea Thomassen, Nicholas Lauridsen, Alex Lenkei, Dionte Harris, Joe Wei, Austin Washburn, and all my friends at UVa. Thank you for offering the emotional support that is just as critical to my writing as the intellectual companionship.

I am also grateful to the Literary Studies Department at The New School, especially to Julie Napolin, for shaping me into the writer and reader I am today.

To Arthur—thank you for listening through every major obstacle and for celebrating every minor triumph.

Thank you to my parents; I dedicate this to my mother—I am Filipina through your love.

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Introduction: The Canon Debate

Dogeaters (1990), by Jessica Hagedorn, is a dizzying overload of a polyphonic novel. Set in the Philippines from the late 1950s into the 1980s, Dogeaters follows the exploits of a large, diverse cast of characters across Manila, depicting the excess and deprivation, the exuberance and destitution of life under a dictatorial regime. At the center of the novel is Rio Gonzaga, a mestiza from an upper-class family, whose recollections of a comfortable, privileged childhood casts a slant eye towards the workings of those associated and complicit with the regime. Young, sheltered, and innocent, Rio’s narration depicts the candid benefits, and conflicting nostalgia, for this brutal period. In contrast is Joey Sands, the abandoned son of a Filipina prostitute and a black American G.I., whose foremost concern is his own survival. Though he thrives in the city’s nightlife, Joey’s days spent hustling and turning tricks is just biding time until someone, anyone, offers him a way out of Manila’s slums. Before long, the self-reliant Joey becomes embroiled in the larger machinations of the regime, revealing just how pervasive the corrupt government’s influence and power runs. Surrounding the pair are numerous characters from the city’s dysfunctional upper and lower classes. This includes those who wield the nation’s authority: The

President and The First Lady; the cruel, powerful General Ledesma; and the wealthy, influential businessman, Severo Alacran. The government opposition is led by the vocal Senator Domingo

Avila, whose daughter, Daisy, is a beauty queen turned guerilla insurgent. And then there are those at the mercy of the country’s cult of distraction: the sultry movie star (and General’s mistress), Lolita Luna; the vain heartthrob hopeful, Romeo Rosales; and his patient, poor girlfriend, shopgirl Trinidad Gamboa. Interspersed are news reports, gossip columns, and radio dramas, as the novel slowly coalesces this disparate company around the fateful assassination of

Senator Avila. Dogeaters is an effort to capture the raucous nature of the Philippines, to illustrate Story 4 a culture of contradictions fueled by melodrama, irony, and a perverse, often fatalistic, humor— all through those very forms.

Upon its release, critics immediately recognized that Dogeaters is a capacious, if ambitious, work. The novel partly fictionalizes a tumultuous time in the Philippines’ history—the infamous Marcos regime (1965-86)—while also trying to communicate the effects of over 400 years of colonial history, depicting a nation that continues to feel the extensive influence of both the Spanish and the United States. Initial reviewers used various buzzwords in an attempt to convey the wide scope of Dogeaters, often identifying its structure as a “kaleidoscope,” a

“collage,” a “mural,” and even “a spicy stew of a novel.”1 The novel received notable attention and often appreciative reviews, and it was nominated for the National Book Award. Though recognized as an exceptional, to some even seminal, work depicting urban Filipino life,

Dogeaters’ reception is also deeply embedded within a specific literary moment. Hagedorn’s debut novel appears to fortuitously concur with the release of other noteworthy fiction depicting postcolonial and/or Asian American narratives, including Salman Rushdie’s controversial The

Satanic Verses (1988) and his consequent fatwa, Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (1989), and Amy

Tan’s immense bestseller, The Joy Luck Club (1989). Indeed, reviewers constantly placed

Hagedorn’s work in relation to such authors, despite differences in both style and subject matter.

As Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong identifies, this was a pivotal period in Asian American literature:

“The year 1991, in particular, is something of an annus mirabilis for Asian American writing; it is witnessed the appearance of an extraordinary number of well-received books, some of them debuts for first-timers, others representing new directions for established authors”

1 See such reviews in Entertainment Weekly; by Anne Marie Welsh, “‘Dogeaters’ Takes a Few Bites Out of Marcos-Era Philippines” in The San Diego Union-Tribune; by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Life (and It’s Cheap) in a Colonized Culture” in The New York Times Book Review; and in Kirkus Review. Story 5

(“Introduction” 3). Novelist Robert Stone claimed that Dogeaters was already “the definitive novel of the encounter between the Philippines and America.”2 Before long, the novel was being taught in college classrooms. Dogeaters arrived when Asian American literature was increasing in range and recognition, and soon it was firmly situated within the Asian American canon.

Response to Dogeaters was not without criticism, notably from various readerships.

American reviewers found some of its “ethnic elements” difficult or confounding, even tedious.

Filipinos expressed concerns over the title and its potentially negative representation, cautious of how the nation may appear to those unfamiliar with its culture and humor. What many touted as the novel’s success—its mashup of high and low cultural modes, of tropical beauty and urban obscene, of reverence and sacrilege—was also criticized as an unfavorable reflection of the

Philippines. Hagedorn was held to a high standard from both American and Filipino reviewers, both positive and negative critics, to “authentically” represent her nation and ethnicity, readers were compelled to view author and novel as emblematic of a complicated country and its history.

To understand this complex response to Dogeaters and its lasting esteem, one must return to the novel. Reading the text through the various viewpoints of these initial reviews, I explore what is at stake when placing Dogeaters at the center of critical debates. Seeing the novel as symptomatic of larger cultural conversations at the time of its release, I question its relevance and reverberations into today. Consequently, I consider not only Dogeaters’ position within the

Asian American canon, but the role of canonicity itself.

Both the novel’s praise and its criticism are indicative of a major cultural and political issue of the time: the “canon debate,” itself a battle of the wider “culture wars” fiercely fought in the 1980s into the 90s. In the 1980s, American literature, and culture at large, was at a crisis. The

2 The quote was included in Pantheon’s press release for the novel. Story 6 calls for social change in the 1960s and 70s, including the Civil Rights Movement, Second-Wave

Feminism, and the Third World Liberation Front, were starting to percolate into college curricula. Academics and students sought the recognition and inclusion of “minority” writers, primarily works by women and people of color, in reading lists and scholarship, demanding that the academy reflect the increasing diversity of the nation. As Mary Jo Bona and Irma Maini note, though some progress was made, “literature by women and writers of color was by and large separated and ghettoized in much of the 1970s” as most academics did not see such literature as

“an integral part of the mainstream curriculum and preferred to relegate it to ‘specialty’ courses or programs” (6). The relatively small gains made in universities in the 1970s soon saw a large backlash in the 1980s, both within and beyond the academy. Conservative politicians under the

Reagan Administration, including Lynne Cheney, the Chair of the National Endowment of the

Humanities, and William Bennett, the former Chair of the NEH and the Secretary of Education, saw the need to reinforce universities against society’s radical changes by returning to the classics of Western civilization. They believed that curricula should be composed of texts that exemplify recognizable and universally-held aesthetic ideals, and not be structured according to political and ideological purposes. Their own resolutions to return to the canon were not presented as political or ideological, but rather as an effort to cultivate young minds through the great thinkers of the West.3

The canon debate was further fueled by the publication of Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) and E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy (1987). Though different in motivations, both were polemical bestsellers that lamented the current state of education and

3 See William J. Bennett’s NEH Report, To Reclaim a Legacy (1984): “Because our society is the product and we the inheritors of Western civilization, American students need an understanding of its origins and development, from its roots in antiquity to the present” (23). Story 7 promoted the need for an established canon. As with Cheney and Bennett, Bloom and Hirsch advocated for a more “traditional” notion of liberal arts education, in which students were taught to be well-versed in the texts and reading practices at the core of Western literature. While

Hirsch was relatively reserved in his concern for the basic knowledge that was seemingly left behind in progressive education, Bloom loudly lambasted the relativism of academia—his book was subtitled, “How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished Today’s

Students.” Conservative critics couched their concerns under an aesthetic criterion, claiming that the canon should be determined according to universal standards of greatness. What those standards necessarily were and who decided them, however, was left unclear. That the canon was primarily composed of white men was not a political issue, but rather an aesthetic coincidence, appearing to actively ignore that the academy and its distribution of knowledge work within larger systems of power and economic interests.

If the 1970s saw a demand for the democratization and expansion of the literary canon,

1980s escalated into an anxiety to close and fortify it. The debate seemed to divide into two camps, “traditionalists,” who wanted to narrow the canon to those classics that withstood the test of time, and “multiculturalists,” who wanted to widen the canon to include those who had been marginalized throughout history. The dichotomy, as they often do, oversimplified the complexity of the matter, but as Bona claims, “Binary constructions, such as canonical versus noncanonical, opening versus closing the canon, and the transcendent versus contingent literary value, were useful in initiating fuller debate over the ‘nature of the study of American culture’ itself”

(“Culture Wars” 26). This debate was not simply a matter of deciding what were the “great books,” an entire nation and its way of life was at threat. Women and people of color were Story 8 already diversifying national and university demographics, to allow them to diversify the canon would risk letting the writers of antiquity, the core of civilization, fall into oblivion.

Though conservative critics were not willing to admit that canon formation is predicated on power dynamics, the canon debate itself increasingly made it clear. Bona and Maini argue that “this marginalization of minority literature was yet another way to dismiss and invalidate it on the grounds that it lacked aesthetic value and had a purely political and ideological agenda,” allowing conservatives to obscure their own agenda to maintain the investment of power amongst those who have always controlled knowledge distribution (“Introduction” 6). Lisa Lowe claims that institutions purposefully responded to the demands of diversification with more

“practical” education: “the neoconservative educational agenda…operates through two platforms: on the one hand, through the advocacy of ‘cultural unification’ and a demand for recanonization of Western classics; and on the other, through an expansion (at the expense of humanities or social science research) of a technicist or a vocationalist curriculum that lames the demise of U.S. economic hegemony on the failure of education to train competitive professional and technical classes adequately” (“Canon” 39). Consequently, universities were predicated on a discrepancy: the humanities and its cultural education were to remain rooted in the canonical, thereby the West, while “the educational system (claiming a ‘multicultural’ conscience) [served] to socialize and incorporate students from other backgrounds into the capitalist market economy”

(“Canon” 40). Multiculturalism was not a matter of diversifying the liberal arts but the workforce. The moral education of students’ minds and souls was to maintain a privilege for an elite few, not only assuming that students of color would skew towards more practical majors, but actively trying to bar their entry into the humanities. The white male hegemony felt at threat Story 9 in every other sector of American life and this was an effort to hold onto to the final stronghold of literature and culture—in actuality, power remained firmly within their grasp.

Into the 90s, the conservative backlash against social change continued to see its own resistance from those who promoted the diversification of the canon. In 1988, Toni Morrison delivered “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American

Literature,” a lecture that addressed the specter of race already within the canon. In 1990, Paul

Lauter published the first edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature, which incorporated lesser known writers, especially women and people of color, and balanced them with established figures of American literature. Ethnic Studies departments, or at least its scholarship, were emerging across the country, where the concern developed into preventing the rigid institutionalization of their methods and thought. Decades later, it is now generally agreed that the multiculturalists “won” the canon debate.4 Yet, the victory did not alleviate or answer many of the questions that the debate raised. If anything, the fallout only raised deeper concerns, especially how to negotiate demands for aesthetic evaluation with political and ideological investment. The appeals of each side of the canon debate portrayed the issue as either/or, when, in reality, it became a matter of satisfying both camps: Great Books programs still operated and the classics continued to be taught, just as reading lists and curricula diversified to include more ethnic and minority literature.

The question in the ‘90s was no longer whether minority literature would be included in the canon and taught in universities, but rather how were these writers and scholars integrated. In his introduction to The Ethnic Canon, David Palumbo-Liu writes, “Instead of presenting the

4 See Rachel Donadio, “Revisiting the Canon Wars.” The New York Times Book Review. The New York Times Company, 16 Sept. 2007. Web. Story 10 occasion for a critique of the ideological apparatuses…the insertion of ethnicity into the curriculum can be articulated through pedagogical discourse that ultimately defer to monocultural presumptions of ‘aesthetic value,’ ‘expressive force,’ ‘character formation,’ and the ethnic text reduced to a pretext for the pluralistic argument that all cultures share certain expressive values” (2). Rather than utilizing the incorporation of ethnic literature to critically examine its original exclusion, it risked simply being subsumed under the universalizing aesthetic ideals of the traditionalists. In turn, ethnic literature held the potential to be tokenized and instrumentalized for what it revealed, either about a foreign culture or the general human condition, at the cost of its attendant portrayals and specific contexts. In 1995, Palumbo-Liu called for the practice of a more critical approach to multiculturalism: “A critical multiculturalism explores the fissures, tensions, and sometimes contradictory demands of multiple cultures, rather than (only) celebrating the plurality of cultures by passing through them appreciatively” (5). Actively working against a pluralist discourse that obfuscates its interpellation into a monocultural hegemony, Palumbo-Liu demanded that ethnic literature be examined with accordance to specificity and difference, and an awareness of the apparatuses that influence representational and reading practices.

Palumbo-Liu’s call for critical multiculturalism is placed more specifically at a seminal point within Asian American studies, when scholars such as Rachel C. Lee, Lisa Lowe, E. San

Juan Jr., and Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong were theorizing and examining what exactly defines Asian

American literature as “Asian American.” Constantly working within the negotiations between aesthetic evaluation and political investment—the term Asian American itself came out of a panethnic political coalition—Asian American studies has been self-reflexive and critical about the formation of its canon and its integration with the academy. I will return to discussions of Story 11

Asian American studies and canon formation, especially as it relates to Dogeaters, later on in the conclusion. In order to fully appreciate that critical conversation, and Jessica Hagedorn and

Dogeaters’ place within it, I must first analyze the novel within the context of its initial reception. Section I is devoted to examining the reviews from a primarily white, Western audience, who repeatedly commented on and increasingly took umbrage with the use of Tagalog in the novel without the aid of a glossary. Section II examines the response from Filipinos and

Filipino Americans who were troubled by the title’s ethnic slur and, in turn, the representation of their community. Each section reveals the specific readership’s expectations from the author and her work and, with both, an investment in authenticity. I consider what is at stake in the Tagalog and dogeater debates to then inform my conclusion, which examines the novel’s reception within

Asian American studies and its lasting impact within the canon. I conclude with questioning what is the contemporary relevance of Dogeaters and Jessica Hagedorn’s influence within the

Asian American literary community, especially in a political climate eerily similar to that at the time of the novel’s production and release. My analysis aims to participate within Palumbo-Liu’s notion of critical multiculturalism, attendant to the novel’s context of production, reception, and impact in a manner that does not elide its specific value to simply celebrate it as a work of diversity. Rather, I hope to engage with the novel’s fissures and tensions because, above all,

Dogeaters is a novel produced by and preoccupied with difference.

I. No Equivalent: Translation and Western Reception

In a cover review for The New York Times Book Review, entitled “Philippine Dream

Feast,” the Australian author Blanche D’Alpuget characterized Dogeaters as such: “This flash first novel, as sharp and fast as a street boy’s razor, concerns itself with the turbulent trivial people who grow so well in debauched societies.” D’Alpuget’s street boy’s razor comment was Story 12 utilized in promotional material for the novel, appearing in press releases and later on the back of the paperback edition. A largely positive review in a prestigious, well-respected publication certainly helped garner attention and sales, commemorating Hagedorn’s novelistic debut on a wider platform. But the second half of the quote—those “turbulent trivial people”—was often omitted. D’Alpuget is technically correct in her evaluation, the novel does concern itself with those seen as trivial to dominant Filipino society—women, children, queers, sex workers; those with darker skin, wider poverty, and little to lose. Promotional materials regularly utilize select phrases, often out of context, to disseminate and publicize novels. Yet, the exclusion of the rest of D’Alpuget’s comment, and its substitution with a much later quote (“a rich small feast of a book”), is emblematic of the anxiety at work within this review and its white, Western reception at large.

Moments of symptomatic anxiety appear throughout, as D’Apluget’s praise suddenly pivots to strange resentments. She calls Rio and Joey, the two main mixed-race characters,

“mongrels” though “both with quick minds and sharp tongues.” She later claims the entire cast is composed of “more or less grotesque matched pairs.” When describing the rather secondary figures of Baby and Boomboom Alacran, she parenthetically interjects, “Their names alone makes you want to roast them over an open fire.” Before long, the anxiety builds and dominates the final fourth of the review:

There are times when reading ‘Dogeaters,’ one wishes for not only an intimate

knowledge of contemporary Manila society, but also of Spanish and Tagalog. Filipino

English will be an unfamiliar dialect to most readers. Conveying its nuances to an

English-speaking readership is a task Ms. Hagedorn has set herself but one in which she Story 13

has not quite succeeded…It’s amusing to interbreed the languages and music like that.

But I would like to know what it means.

Maybe because there is no equivalent, there is no colloquial way of talking about

merienda in English (“a light meal in the late afternoon or evening”), let alone kundiman

or halo-halo. Or no equivalent for any of the hundreds of other non-English expressions

that pepper Ms. Hagedorn’s pages. Later in the book I came across one unfamiliar word I

do know: carabao. Carabao is a Spanish word derived from the Malay karvau and it

means water buffalo, and it’s a pity Ms. Hagedorn’s editor did not insist she call it that.

The exoticisms become tiresome, more a nervous tic than a desire to make connection

across the gulf of culture. (D’Apluget)

D’Apluget’s preoccupation with the inclusion of Filipino English in the novel, also known as

Taglish, and its lack of translation expresses her discomfort at not being the intended audience for such moments, and her annoyance with not having her discomfort alleviated by transcription and explanation. Exoticisms are entertaining, but they must not overwhelm—how else will your readers understand what you are representing, how else will they understand your culture?

D’Alpuget’s review assumes that Hagedorn is writing for a primarily white, English- speaking audience and is ultimately trying to enlighten them about the Philippines. It is an ambition that D’Alpuget does not consider Hagedorn capable of achieving, the linguistic novelties preventing her from rendering the nation intelligible to those unfamiliar. Her logic is predicated on a multiculturalism in which literature is utilized to depict and bridge differences, rather than examining the causes of those differences. Literature is a tool that allows an

Anglophone readership to learn of the Other and incorporate them into their sense of a diverse worldview. Yet, the responsibility falls on the Other to do the work of educating and traversing Story 14 those differences. D’Alpuget revealingly refers to Filipinos as “Ms. Hagedorn’s people,” imbuing the author with an ownership and obligation over the nation’s inhabitants rather than recognizing that her people are, in actuality, fictional characters. This impetus placed on the

Other to inform relies on both author and text to then perform their difference. It is a narrow notion of difference, however, one less invested in reality than in expectation. D’Alpuget expects to learn about the Philippines, its culture, cuisine, and eccentricities; but she also expects the novel to eventually reaffirm her worldview, a passing excursion through diversity’s cultural landscape. In other words, an uncritical multiculturalism. Dogeaters is not only unable but unwilling to offer such reassurance. In turn, D’Alpuget lashes out at what the novel does instead provide. When D’Alpuget dismisses characters as mongrels and grotesque, when she comments on wanting to roast them over an open fire (is that a reference to cooking them as one would a dog?), she does not want to bother with those “turbulent trivial people who grow so well in debauched societies.” D’Alpuget does not know what they mean, they exceed her pluralist purview.

D’Alpuget’s review, certainly one of the novel’s most widely circulated, was not alone in criticizing Hagedorn’s use of Taglish. In a review for San Jose Mercury News, Katherine Ellison wrote, “[Hagedorn] may alienate English-only readers with her frequent interspersions of

Tagalog and Spanish phrases and sentences, used without any hint of translation.” Laura Miller said, “Most Westerners don’t quite get it…Hagedorn reinforces this exclusion by her liberal use of slangy Filipino dialect, a little Tagalog, a little Spanish, perhaps some Mandarin and Chinese as well—opaque to outsiders.” Western readers felt estranged from a type of novel that they often find accommodating, they felt left out of the joke. And they were, in a sense, left out of the joke. Story 15

The humor of the novel, and the Philippines, is often an insider humor, filled with double meanings, playful pronunciations, and particular references (usually at the expense of unwitting foreigners). Perhaps the anxiety lies in the lingering awareness that in some moments they are the joke, that their lack of understanding makes it all the more satisfying for those who do. For example, these snippets of a phone conversation, which D’Alpuget quotes and criticizes:

Naku! Doña Brooding was sitting there having her merienda, you know how she likes her

ice cream and sweets…The chamber orchestra was playing merienda music—a little

Strauss waltz mixed in with the “Jealousy” tango, maybe some kundiman mixed in with

the cha-cha—alam mo na, real halo-halo stuff…Bruja, will you stop laughing?

(Hagedorn 57, emphasis in original)

Little context is given to the phone call, it is unclear who is talking or who is listening. There is only the sense that the call is an illustration of tsismis—the Filipino propensity for fast speaking, fast spreading gossip. The conversation, regardless of translation, is clearly comical, expressed in a wicked, satirical manner. An unfamiliar reader may not catch all of the nuances but the central idea is still communicated: Doña Brooding is stuffing her face with sweets. Even if one does not know what halo-halo means (later it is referred to as a sundae), one can comprehend that the gossipers are discussing Doña Brooding in a cruel tone. The humor is more so in the delivery than in the content. For those who do understand the references—she’s having a lot of food for such a “light” meal; the music is gentle and impassioned, a melancholy serenade and an angry tango, everything mixed together like the numerous ingredients of halo-halo—the scene is humorous on various levels, richer for some than for others. But the humor is not reliant on understanding each of these references, it code-switches and offers multiple modes of appreciation, as with Taglish itself. The humor in the scene is especially satisfying to those who Story 16 do speak in such a way, who have overheard or partaken in such conversations. The satisfaction comes from seeing oneself represented in a literature that often does not offer such representation.

Including a glossary would unlikely clarify what critics find tiresome or opaque. There are some elements that cannot be translated, moments that are meant to be challenging, and others that are fundamentally not catered towards certain (white, Western) readers. In an interview with Margaret Talbot, Hagedorn defended the use of Taglish, claiming “that she was striving for authenticity and that thinking in Tagalog made it easier to write the book.”

Hagedorn’s notion of authenticity by incorporating Taglish runs counter to the authenticity expected from her white, Western critics, a code-switching performance that is less for them than for Filipino Anglophone readers. Even so, just how accurately Hagedorn represents the way urban Filipinos speak is up to interpretation. Gladys Nubla claims that Hagedorn “actually uses a rather superficial form of Taglish, an almost inaccurate depiction of the Taglish used in Manila, which compromises much more Tagalog than English” (200). Nubla’s criticism is not to

Hagedorn’s detriment so much as to highlight that even this authentic, or authentically aimed, representation has its concessions—though white, Western readers might not necessarily find

Dogeaters accommodating, on a certain level it is. Caroline S. Hau and E. San Juan Jr. are more critical of this accommodation; as Hau emphasizes, the novel “was written by a Filipino-

American through the grants and endowments of American institutions, published in the United

States, read by Americans, and reviewed by American critics and writers” (113) Hau considers the novel’s moments of “linguistic difference (limited mostly to ejaculations and expressions— note production of stereotypes—or otherwise helpfully facilitated by contextual tools for easier consumption) actually constitutes the Self (standard American English), by which the Other is Story 17

Othered as exotica” (124-25). Less forgiving than Nubla, who sees possibility and resistance in the use of Taglish, Hau is always aware of the novel’s “production, distribution, exchange, and consumption,” and ultimately reads the Taglish as the Other self-producing and perpetuating

Orientalism for a Western audience (113).

As Hau pinpoints, most of the Tagalog and Spanish words sprinkled throughout are

Dogeaters are for relatively minor, and easily surmised, phrases and things. Some, such as di ba or dios ko, are common expressions. Though translatable, they are added more for local color.

Food, as in halo-halo or dilis, cannot necessarily be translated, but many dishes and items are usually described. Actually, Hagedorn often does the work of explicating unfamiliar words and phrases. In cases when certain readers are unlikely to understand a joke without translation, the author makes sure to explain it. In a scene narrated by Rio, Hagedorn works to ensure that different readerships can all follow:

After dinner we drag ourselves to the adjoining living room for coffee, cigars, and

Spanish brandy… “Johnny Walker Black, on the rocks for me,” my cousin Mikey says to

Aida…

“Genuine ba ito, or putok?” Mikey asks Aida when she returns with his drink. It

is a reference to the common practice of selling deadly mixtures of rubbing alcohol and

brown tea in brand-name bottles as imported liquor. Aida is confused by my insolent

cousin’s tone. She answers in a meek voice. “Johnny Lumalakad, ho.” “Genuine ba ito,

or putok?” Mikey repeats, growing impatient. He addresses her in a loud voice, as if she

were retarded…Raul joins in on the fun. “That Johnny Walker is sprikitik, boss!” Mikey

cracks up…My mother turns to my father, “I don’t get it, Freddie. What’s the difference

between putok and sprikitik? Don’t they both mean fake?” Story 18

My father thinks for a moment. “You might say Congressman Abad sprikitiks when

he plays golf, but General Ledesma rewards his army with cases of putok liquor.”

Tita Florence fans herself with a wove pye-pye. “Dios mio, Freddie. What are you

making bola-bola about?” (63-64, emphasis in original)

Various characters within the scene are working to help explicate the nuances of the conversation: Rio clarifies Mikey’s reference; her mother defines putok and sprikitik, mirroring the role of reader to ask their difference; her father offers another definition through example.

Unlike the earlier scene with merienda music and halo-halo gorging, the moment makes little sense to an unfamiliar reader without translation. Even those who do understand the language could fail to grasp the joke, like Rio’s mother. Hagedorn compensates for the language barrier with explanation, work that critics like D’Alpuget often ignore while others like Hau precisely criticize her for.

In Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996), Lisa Lowe values this scene for the counterhegemonic potential of gossip and critically notes that the talk “turns around the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity” (117). Lowe interprets Rio’s father’s example as crucially differentiating between “different orders of inauthenticity…on the one hand, acceptable acts of apparition or seeming and, on the other, the unacceptable counterfeit or the ‘bogus’” (Immigrant 117). In Lowe’s framework, “putok connotes illegitimacy and scandal” and is “a lower order of deception” (Immigrant 117). One can extend this reading to consider the distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity as it relates to Dogeaters and Hagedorn’s use of Taglish. When reviewers and scholars criticize Hagedorn, their investment in authenticity is Story 19 equally an investment in rejecting inauthenticity and escaping deception—either by the author, text, or themselves. As Lowe asks, “who sprikitiks and who is the putok?” (Immigrant 118).5

Reviewers and scholars are not interested in authenticity so much as ensuring the appearance of it. Western reviewers are especially invested in what Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong identifies as “the Oriental effect,” the inclusion of details that are inconsequential to plot or characterization, “but whose function seems to be to announce ‘We are Oriental’ to the

‘mainstream’ reader” (“Sugar” 188). These details are what Western reviewers laud writers like

Amy Tan for but when placed under scrutiny by an informed reader such as Wong, reveal that

“the author has adopted a certain stance toward the audience,” one that invites readers to “trust in her as a knowledgeable cultural insider and a competent guide familiar with the rules of the genre in question: quasi ethnography about the Orient” (“Sugar” 188). Hagedorn’s incorporation of Taglish is by not as redundant or essentialist as the charges Wong levels against Tan, but these moments of translation and explanation are a gesture to the audience that she is knowledgeable and, as Hagedorn said herself, authentic. Martin Ponce is critical of presupposing that “of course

Hagedorn has ‘set herself’ the task of speaking to a Western audience,” but one must also recognize that Hagedorn chose not to write Dogeaters in Tagalog or first publish in the

Philippines (20). It is, of course, not a matter of writing either for a Filipino or an American readership but for both. In recognizing the author’s efforts to satisfy another readership, the reader feels that the text is betraying their own, thereby verging on inauthentic. When Western reviewers lay claims of alienation and exclusion from the text, they are also charges of deception. With so many comparisons to Tan in Dogeaters’ reviews, it is clear that a Western audience expected a similar stance of translator and guide from Hagedorn. Invested in the

5 Except when quoting Hagedorn, Lowe consciously does not italicize these terms. Story 20

Oriental effect and expecting quasi-ethnography about the Other, they felt deceived when such expectations were not met, as with the former example. Yet, as the latter example shows,

Hagedorn is not eschewing such expectations but rather actively working within them. This tension is further emphasized in another form of translation Hagedorn offers within the novel—

English.

From the beginning of the novel, Hagedorn stresses, emphasizes, and indicates when characters speak English and the signification of interjecting such words in conversation. After watching All That Heaven Allows (1955), Rio’s cousin, Pucha, bemoans the romance between the older Jane Wyman and the hunky Rock Hudson: “AY! Que corny! I dunno what Rock sees in her…It’s a corny love story, when you think about it” (Hagedorn 4). As Rio explains, “Being corny is the worst sin you can commit in her eyes” (Hagedorn 4). The repetition and italicization of corny, a rather banal English word, establishes a class and race differential. As upper-class mestizas, the sprinkling of English and even Spanish words is indication of their privileged ancestry and status. Not only are they afforded the opportunity to regularly watch films in

English, they understand and mimic them. As Nubla claims, “The novel makes it clear that contemporary Taglish as a lingua franca is not a neutral language” (204). Pucha uses corny to dismiss cultural products she thinks are below her, rejecting lower-class entertainment like

Tagalog films and radio serials: “She has no use for Barbara Villanueva, Patsy Pimentel, or

Nestor Noralez, whom she calls ‘The King of Corny.’ She has no use for anyone who isn’t Kim

Novak, or Rock Hudson” (Hagedorn 12). Pucha’s “corny” is not mere childish parroting, it is her actively striving towards an American ideal, one that is fed through its films and language. By the end of the novel, Pucha has picked up a new catchphrase, “She stresses the word boring, one of Trixie Goldenberg’s favorite expressions. It has replaced corny as the most frequently used Story 21

English word in my cousin’s limited vocabulary” (Hagedorn 237). The emphasis of these words, as opposed to the more casual italicization of Tagalog or Spanish, highlights Pucha’s own investment in imbuing her Tagalog with more English, with infusing her Filipino identity with a more American flavor.

The effects of American imperialism are rampant throughout the text. For every reference to patis or kalamansi, there are just as many references to American food and their brand names,

“small cans of Libby’s succotash, Del Monte De Luxe Asparagus Spears, two bottles of Hunt’s

Catsup, one jar of French’s mustard, Miracle Whip Sandwich Spread,” to list only a few

(Hagedorn 234). Imported and expensive, the inclusion of such food on the Gonzagas’ dinner table are an indication of their cultural and financial wealth. American brands and products are near ubiquitous in urban Manila, though the ability to acquire them is not. Ponce is critical of

D’Apulget’s review for “mischaracterizing the ‘gulf’ separating the United States from the

Philippines—a gulf that Dogeaters undermines by alluding to the history U.S. colonialism and popular culture in the Philippines” (20). The novel incorporates American culture and phrases not because they are remarkably foreign but because they are intimately familiar to a Filipino sensibility; meanings might shift and nuances lost, but the distance between American and

Filipino culture is not a vast gulf of insurmountable difference. Actually, the Philippines is seen earnestly fashioning itself in America’s image. This is what critics are most discomforted by— not that the difference is too far, but that the similarities are too close. Highlighting the incorporation of Tagalog and its lack of translation is a matter of maintaining distance, an

Othering tactic. Katherine Ellison’s critique of the novel’s “alienation” is coupled with an appreciation of its authenticity yet strangeness: “Philippine truth makes fine fiction;” “novel shares strangeness of Philippine truth;” “truth, in the Philippines, at least, is so often stranger Story 22 than the most skillful fiction.” Critics do not want to acknowledge that the Other is its shadow, eagerly and anxiously insisting upon its exoticisms to uphold any Oriental effect.

Dogeaters’ numerous references to American brands, products, films, stars, phrases, and words surmount to a complimentary “American effect.” Far from inconsequential, these self- conscious insertions of English and American-ness work to create a sense of America’s looming presence in the Philippines. In an interview with an American journalist, the First Lady “uses her favorite American expression as many times as randomly as possible throughout her interview.

‘Okay! Okay! Okay lang, so they don’t like my face. They’re all jealous, okay?” (Hagedorn

218). The First Lady reads like a louder, more ludicrous version of Pucha, but her words are also more meaningful: her absurdity runs the nation. Later on, the American journalist reflects:

He decides he will leave her sentences unedited when the interview is over. Her

convoluted thinking intrigues him, her appropriations of American English. She is fond

of words like ‘coterminous,’ which he will later have to look up in an unabridged

dictionary. He is aware that her romance with Western culture is not at stake. (Hagedorn

221)

The First Lady may know more sophisticated English words than the American journalist but she is unable to fully grasp their usage and meaning. He considers her talk merely an appropriation, a parody who is not able to wield such words because they do not belong to her. But why would

Filipinos speaking American English be only an appropriation? America’s forceful insertion and colonization of the Philippines—its culture, bodies, and minds—produced this very linguistic effect. The reviewers’ anxiety about Tagalog is equally an anxiety about English, recognizing that the language is no longer contained to America, but rather disseminated, creolized, and utilized to its own means. An uncritical multiculturalism is invested in the incorporation and Story 23 accommodation of the Other in the service of its monocultural hegemony—dissemination and

“appropriation” for another nation’s own cultural range is unwieldy, beyond its control. The

Philippines’ romance with Western culture is not at stake, but rather it is America’s understanding of itself and its romance with the Other.

The white, Western reviews are symptomatic of a cultural conversation at large: how do we incorporate the Other into a diversifying America? There is an ambivalence to this question, both wanting to integrate and subsume the Other and to distance and maintain them. To understand this novel as an American cultural product, both in the formation of the Philippines and the formation of the author and her text, was not something that many of Hagedorn’s initial reviewers were willing to do. The American effect in Dogeaters asks an American, or at least

Anglophone, reader to recognize itself in the Philippines. Not as a trite universalism, but in an awareness of American imperialism. Americans often expect and demand its immigrants and foreigners to speak English within its borders and beyond but bristle at any occasion to grapple with foreign words. There is an investment in the notion of American authenticity at a remove from the Oriental, a need for an Other in order to define the Self. Emphasizing the use of

Tagalog offers a difference to define America by what it is not. Yet, when examining the novel, this dichotomy is so not so distinct. Tagalog serves as a reminder for what America cannot readily incorporate, while English is increasingly circulated abroad. In Dogeaters, Tagalog and

English are situated too closely, Filipinos and Americans too entangled, in a novel that pinpoints and perversely celebrates the worst of both. To criticize the exoticisms is ultimately an effort to produce its exoticism—a demand to differentiate us from them.

Story 24

II. Gratuitous Obstacle: Dogeating and Filipino Reception

While some reviewers were working to differentiate Filipinos as foreign Other, many readers were highlighting the presence of the Philippines within the United States. Although very little of the action of the novel takes place in the United States proper—only Rio and her mother immigrate—there has been an investment in recognizing Dogeaters as an American novel. In a promotional review, Ishmael Reed is quoted, “In Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, two outlaw styles of recent American writing are combined: multi-culturalism and super-fiction. It is not only a work of comic genius, but an advance for the American novel.” Reed situates the novel within an American literary tradition and, in turn, claims its successes for America. Reed portrays the novel as distinctly American in its formation with surprisingly no reference to its representation of the Philippines, let alone its influence by Filipino literature. Reed offers a positive notion of multiculturalism in so much that it lends to the novel’s value, implying that not only was Hagedorn successful in incorporating difference but in doing so through a stylistic manner. Here, not only is multiculturalism a matter of race and culture, but it is also taken up as a literary form or approach.

Though Reed’s review is a critical counterpoint to ones such as D’Alpuget’s, some voiced resistance to his evaluation of Dogeaters. In a piece that ran in Philippines News

Magazine, “courtesy of the Manila Chronicle,” Alfred Yuson contested Reed’s embrace of

Hagedorn for American means:

Eh wot? What you calling American now, Ishmael? Just because it was published in

New York ain’t gonna make it American, ya hear? Story 25

Jessica’s Makati village-bred, was weaned from Manila discos before she started

piling up those jazzy, Frisco-type poems and stories that went into two beautiful

collections…

We claim her as our own, nights she partied at Penguin on Remedios, or days she

gave interviews all across the States to plug her first novel. Whatever. She’s ours, man.

Got her title too from another of our expat poets in New York, Luis Cabalquinto, as

she rightfully acknowledges. Except she dropped the article and made the subject plural,

perhaps to apply to Pinoys in general. Something we needn’t take badly now, bro.

But as much as dear Jessica’s first novel was nominated for the National Book

Award…we claim Jessica and her book to be our own. It’s a Filipino novel. To be

precise, it’s a Filipina’s novel, her patina-ed green card notwithstanding. And we just

adored the way she’s peppered the book with Pinoyese at just about every page…without

as much as a footnote or end glossary to explain to Mr. Reed what they all mean. (17)

This review addresses and navigates through several debates surrounding the novel. Foremost,

Yuson reclaims Dogeaters for a Filipino readership and literary tradition. While proud and appreciative of Hagedorn’s recognition within American culture, Yuson wants to emphasize that the author is Filipina and that is precisely why she is distinguished abroad. Yuson also offers yet another counterpoint to the white, Western reviewers in his enjoyment of the untranslated

“Pinoyese,” reveling in Filipinos’ representation and outsiders’ confusion. Finally, this review reaffirms the title, a source of controversy amongst Filipino readers which we will return to shortly.

If the previous section saw an effort in distance and denial, these reviews reveal a tension in acceptance. Both American and Filipino readers want to claim Hagedorn and Dogeaters as Story 26 their own to seemingly opposing ends. Is the novel, with its tropical setting and fatalistic humor,

Filipino? Or is it, due to the consequences of (neo)colonialism and its turn to a Western ideal,

American? Though the novel is ultimately both, as is Hagedorn being Filipino American, this debate raises critical questions as to what is the investment underlying each position. Moreover, what makes a novel Filipino American—or Asian American? To claim Hagedorn for American literature, as Reed does, is an effort to incorporate her, and thereby the Philippines, as part of

U.S. literary multiculturalism. To claim her for Filipino literature is to celebrate the representation of a people not often appreciated abroad, along with the recognition of the

Philippines’ own literary lineage and sensibility. With both, the definition of a national identity is seemingly at stake.

In order to parse out this tension, I will turn to an analysis of Dogeaters’ reception amongst its Filipino and Filipino American readership. Numerous Filipino and Filipino

American reviewers took umbrage with the novel’s title and with the representation of Filipinos and the Philippines at large.6 ⁠ Though the title, as Yuson mentioned, is a reference to a poem,

“The Dog-Eater” (1989) by the Filipino writer Luis Cabalquinto, many were upset at the usage of what is commonly regarded as an ethnic slur. A closer examination of how Dogeaters utilizes this term reveals the racial connotations that the text is working both within and against. The reviewers’ issue is not whether Filipinos actually do or do not eat dog, which is rather beside the point, but with the perception of Filipinos by the West. These reviews speak as though Hagedorn is airing the nation’s dirty laundry for the rest of the world to see. What exactly about the term

“dogeater” unsettles Filipino readers, and what moments within the novel feed into this anxiety?

6 For the sake of ease, I will hereby refer to reviewers from the Philippines and American reviewers of Filipino descent both as “Filipino reviewers.” Though there are differences and nuances between these readerships, I refer to them collectively based on the commonalities in their responses to Hagedorn. Story 27

The following critiques from a readership that clearly wants to, and largely do, embrace

Hagedorn suggest that its Filipino audience has as ambivalent a relationship, if not more, with the West as its American reviewers did with the Other.

The term “dogeater” has a long, derogatory association with Asians, and dogmeat is often seen as an exotic, taboo delicacy indicative of Asians’ barbaric ways. The term’s connection to

Filipinos specifically is largely traced to their exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904.

The Philippine Reservation aimed to introduce Americans to their “little brown brothers” won in the Spanish-American War and ultimately served as a tool in justifying American imperialism as a benevolent and charitable enterprise for Philippine civilization. One of the most popular attractions was watching the Igorots’ ritual of dog-eating; though witnesses expressed disgust and moral outrage against the consumption of dogs, the fair’s administration also received numerous letters offering to “furnish” the reservation with dogs for the tribe to eat (Burns 26-27).

While memory of the St. Louis World’s Fair and its display of Filipinos is widely forgotten, the perception that Filipinos eat dogs continues to persist. In 1993, there was debate surrounding a banner, made by four Filipino artists, displayed in Los Angeles City Hall which depicted a monkey roasting a dog on a spit (Griffith et al. 221-22). In 1998, Joan Rivers caused outrage over a joke made at the Emmy Awards: “We’re going to commercial break, so you have time to feed your dog, or wash your dog, or, if you’re a Filipino, eat your dog!” (Griffith et al. 235-36).

Even as recently as 2018, fascination with dog consumption in the Philippines and across Asia was revived due to requests for South Korean restaurants to stop serving dogmeat during the

PyeongChang Winter Olympics (Brady). Though the contexts are different, these controversies highlight how the connection of dogeating to Filipinos can quickly cause uproar and that this stereotype has long been a site of anxiety concerning race and belonging. Story 28

Within a Filipino cultural imagination, dogeating is usually associated with religious rituals and mountain tribes, such as the Igorots, or with the poor and desperate, especially within urban areas. The former association is tied to notions of primitivism or barbarism, an antiquated practice in which only a select few still participate. The latter association is tied to impoverishment, whether financial, social, or moral. With both, there is a perception of underdevelopment in the face of modernity—those in the mountains are not civilized, those in the city are the Third World. Dogeaters is well aware of such associations and consciously deploys them. In a scene at CocoRico, the gay club where Joey Sands works, the owner, Andres

Alacran, gets increasingly frustrated at his lowly employee, Pedro. “He’s Igorot—what did I expect?” Andres asks, “He eats dogmeat” (Hagedorn 32) Later on, “Andres shouts improvised curses at the janitor: Pedrong Tamad, Pedrong Headhunter, Pedro the Pagan Dogeater with the

Prick of a Monkey and the Brain of a Flea” (Hagedorn 33, emphasis in original). Showing off a cultural flair for creative insults, the text’s insertion of the slur amongst a string of others is subtler than offering a forthright definition. In a novel that can feel as though it is broadcasting its themes and theses—on American colonialism, on the Philippines’ cult of distraction, on the dark underbelly of both nations’ dreams—the first mention of dogeaters in the text is surprisingly understated (though Andres is certainly not). The text resists clearly signaling that “this” is what the title, and thereby the novel, is about. Its introduction of the term is rather conventional, as an insult from an upper-class Filipino to an underprivileged one. That Pedro is Igorot ensures the insult is racialized and their dynamic highlights racism and discrimination amongst Filipinos. In fact, no Westerner uses the term in the novel, opposing the notion that it is simply a Western form of discrimination. The novel’s conception of “dogeater” seems ambiguous. To have a character deploy the term, especially one who is Filipino, as an ethnic slur against another Story 29

Filipino can potentially inflict violence and reinforce a painful history. Moreover, by not having a clear conception and, in turn, a clear critique of the term, one may question whether the novel and author implicitly promotes its usage. Though I argue that Dogeaters’ deployment of the term is ultimately more complex, the initial unsettlement appears to be in this apparent lack to critically examine and outright denounce the slur.

Hagedorn believed the controversy surrounding Dogeaters originated in cultural shame, in a wound that Filipinos refuse to acknowledge. In a 1991 interview with Ameena Meer,

Hagedorn defended the title as “a way of confronting the culture.” She is quoted, “I’ve said to people, ‘I don’t get the shame about eating dog.’ Let’s look at that. Is it the savage coming out in us or what? There’s this real desire to hide that under the table” (Meer). Hagedorn considers the novel an attempt to examine and overcome this shame, though just how successful she is ultimately up to the reader. N.V.M. Gonzalez is not so convinced. In a review for Amerasia

Journal, Gonzalez writes, “Indeed, you cannot but take exception to whatever the ‘dogeaters’ of the title evokes, for the indignation it invites is unfortunate” (190). He goes on to further critique:

It is, surprising, nonetheless, that no one sought an apology for so clear an offense to

the sensibility, besides being a gratuitous obstacle to the novel’s audience. For an

explanation, perhaps we have to consider the acquired numbness to countless slights of

this nature, the sclerosis of an ethnic pride so long derided, so roundly abused, so

disarmingly covered up. It is clear, however, that the author does not have in mind the

irresponsible reader, one who would gloat over the alleged popular meaning of the word

that the book is called by. (191)

Gonzalez sees the title as a betrayal to Hagedorn’s base readership, an infraction against

Filipinos. By presenting this “gratuitous obstacle,” Hagedorn risks alienating and offending those Story 30 she should be most considerate of (Gonzalez 191). He reads “dogeaters” as an internalization of racism and discrimination, not as a challenge or confrontation against racist history. Its deployment comes from a lack of pride rather than a reclamation of the slur. Moreover, Gonzalez thinks Hagedorn has failed to properly consider her Western readership, to consider those who would wield such a term pejoratively and might read this as permission to do so. Gonzalez’s review reveals the double bind that Hagedorn is in—she is both expected to represent the

Philippines honestly and critically, yet in a manner that is considerate and does not risk offense.

It is a matter of both responsibility and respectability. Hagedorn is responsible for representing her nation, but in doing so, she must appear respectable in the face of the West.

Though Gonzalez does not go as far as enforcing a politics of respectability on Hagedorn, his review highlights how Filipino critics are deeply attuned to the Western reception of the novel and, consequently, how it could affect wider perception of the Philippines. While

Gonzalez’s critique finds Hagedorn not considerate enough of Western readers, E. San Juan Jr. argues she is too considerate, perhaps to the point of capitulation. “Conflating heresy and orthodoxy,” San Juan writes, “Hagedorn’s novel possesses the qualities of a canonical text in the making—for the multiculturati” (232). San Juan Jr. is critical that Dogeaters is “[addressed] mainly to a cosmopolitan audience” and how such “trendy work is undermined by postmodern irony: it lends itself easily to consumer liberalism’s drive to sublimate everything into an ensemble of self-gratifying spectacles” (232). Rather than resisting Western literary multiculturalism’s sublimation of difference, Dogeaters feeds into with its “parodic bricolage of

Western high postmodernism” (232). San Juan Jr. does not see the novel as invested in a Filipino audience nor literary tradition, but in inserting itself through style and substance (or lack thereof) into an uncritical multiculturalism. Hagedorn is simply another voice within the pluralistic Story 31 masses. San Juan Jr.’s framework is based in Marxist thought and how Filipino literature can serve as an emancipatory practice, so it is questionable whether Dogeaters would have ever passed his criteria. Yet, when placed in conversation with Gonzalez, this review positions

Hagedorn in a seemingly no-win scenario: either she is too conscious of Western readers or not conscious enough.

Such reviews extend the notion that Dogeaters fails to critically examine the term

“dogeater” and what it signifies. For Gonzalez, the novel does not properly account for its responsibility towards Filipinos and a respectability towards the West, and that it has ultimately internalized a pernicious rhetoric. For San Juan Jr., the novel’s investment in Western literary multiculturalism devoids it of critical capacity and any attempts to do so are debilitated by its vapidity in style. Therefore, Dogeaters is seen as preserving a rather harmful notion of the

Philippines, neglecting to challenge and resist the West’s various conceptions of the Philippines as barbaric, backwards, primitive, exotic, Other, or Third World. Dogeaters is always already expected to account for such stereotypes and to respond. When examining the novel, it may appear as though it is passively representing or, at worse, perpetuating the attendant assumptions surrounding the term “dogeater.” When asked whether people eat dogs in the Philippines,

Hagedorn said, “I’ve had it; they sell it as pork. It’s no big deal” (Meer). Initially, the novel’s conception of dogeating could appear to be exactly that, no big deal. However, when positioned within a larger analysis of how food is deployed in the text, this notion becomes much more fraught.

Throughout Dogeaters, food is emphasized as integral to Filipino identity and culture. At her wedding, Baby Alacran remembers the words of the recently assassinated Senator Avila:

“Food is the center of our ritual celebrations, our baptisms, weddings, funerals. You can’t Story 32 describe a real Pinoy without listing what’s most important to him—food, music, dancing, and love—most probably in that order” (Hagedorn 154). She spends the entirety of the reception thinking of the Senator and soon associates him with a popular dish, dinuguan. She imagines

“the black blood of a pig she pours on her head, the black pig’s blood stew she bathes in, to mourn the death of a man…” (Hagedorn 156). By the end of the chapter, her half-formed daydreams coalesce into a clear connection between the two:

Senator Domingo Avila has been assassinated.

Dinuguan—it’s the black blood of a pig the weeping bride pours on her head, the

black blood stew of pale pink pig entrails she bathes in, mourning the death of a man she

never knew. (Hagedorn 158, emphasis in original)

The evocative imagery of the blood stew and pig entrails as representation of the Senator and his grisly murder redefines the integrality of food to Filipino identity as ominous symbolism.

Dinuguan is so rich and deep in color that it runs black, and the image reveals something darker and dirtier running through the Senator’s, and thereby the nation’s, blood. It’s usage when bathing Baby suggests that the spilling of his blood could have profound consequences, a potential submersion of the entire population. The notion of bathing in pig’s blood is subtly evocative of animal sacrifice and blood rituals in older forms of religious practice and conjures up conceptions of “primitive” religiosity. Yet, the reference to such a commonly eaten dish also situates it firmly within the present, emphasizing that such a “repulsive” custom is still widespread. Baby’s blood bath is “a cleansing ritual for herself;” the assassination of Senator

Avila could purge the nation of its filth and impurity, a chance for absolution (Hagedorn 158).

Within this matrix of significations, the murder of the most prominent voice in the opposition is indicative of a much greater national disease. If food is the center of the Philippines’ ritual Story 33 celebrations, then dinuguan focalizes how the murder is at the center of the novel—a climax of national corruption and a potential for revolution.

This reading of dinuguan informs the scenes that immediately follow, in which the aftermath of the Senator’s assassination connects the novel’s scattered cast of characters.

Aspiring actor, Romeo Rosales, waits on the street for his girlfriend, Trinidad Gamboa, salesgirl at the Alacran-owned department store, SPORTEX. The couple are planning to share their usual

“hasty lunch of salted balut and warm Cokes, or barbecued cubes of meat-on-a-stick from a street vendor, the sort of food that Trinidad claims to abhor but devours heartily” (Hagedorn

159). As Trinidad complains, “They always tell you it’s pork…but for all we know, we could be eating dog meat” (Hagedorn 159). Unperturbed, Romeo jokes, “I like dogs better than pigs”

(Hagedorn 159). The second reference to dogmeat in the novel, the couple’s conversation echoes how Hagedorn tends to speak of it: as rather inconsequential, a certain kind of daily life, just another part of Filipino culture and cuisine. Trinidad may moan about being deceptively fed dogmeat, but she still consumes it with abandon. Trinidad’s rejection of dogmeat is clearly based in conceptions of class, in wanting to have class. Romeo, who is even more status seeking than his girlfriend, is the one who accepts eating dogmeat. Romeo’s joke, in which he ironically embraces the notion of being a dogeater over a pig-eater, appears to be a lighthearted play on the stereotype and subtly reveals the absurdity of the term. Yet, when considered alongside the symbolism of Senator Avila’s assassination with pig’s blood, of Filipinos with pigs, Romeo’s comment takes on a disturbing edge. While standing on the street, Romeo is suddenly shot by the military police, themselves pigs, and identified as a criminal. It is later revealed in an interview with the First Lady that Romeo has been arrested for the Senator’s murder, though he is clearly innocent and being framed. C.L. Chua notes, this situation is “made doubly ironic by Hagedorn, Story 34 for, on the one hand, she presents the cynical official version of the champion of the oppressed as being allegedly gun down by one of the oppressed…but on the other hand, it contains a grain of truth when reads it’s as an allegory of a Christlike martyr betrayed by a stupid mob” (221-22). In the messy fallout of the Senator’s death, especially with the state media’s manipulation of the event, everyone in the nation is a dogeater. Everyone is ready to feast on the underdog.

What multiple critics neglected, and what Hagedorn repeatedly emphasized, were the metaphorical implications of the term dogeater. Notably, there is the notion of dog-eat-dog, of a willingness to act cutthroat and ruthless, to sellout and sacrifice others for one’s own benefit. At no point in the novel is this clearer than in the relationship between Joey and Uncle, the man who raised him and was, for the most part, his pimp. Of all the young boys Uncle fostered, Joey was his best student, the one who understood, above all, to look out only for yourself. When Joey becomes an unlucky witness to the assassination of Senator Avila, he fears the military police is in pursuit and plans to go Uncle for help. Joey, a voracious eater who was gorging right before the Senator’s murder, has suddenly lost his appetite. Now on the run, Joey smells, “Garlic, vinegar, chocolate meat. Pig entrails stewing in black blood. He gagged at the thought of his favorite dish” (Hagedorn 192). Chocolate meat is a nickname for dinuguan, a joke to trick those unsuspecting into eating the dish. Sick at the thought of the Senator’s bloody body, Joey’s inability to stomach dinuguan reveals a larger disgust, an inability to continue feeding on the nation’s deceptions. As Chua suggests, “It is as if this dominating imagery of distaste for food were symptomatic of the distemper of the nation after Senator Avila’s assassination (225).

Desperate, Joey arrives at Uncle’s shack and is given refuge until the situation dies down. In actuality, Uncle intends to sell Joey out to the military police and to utilize the situation for his own profit. Story 35

In a breakfast meeting between Uncle and a military police officer, Sergeant Planas complains about the restaurant’s owner and the food she serves. As he shovels the

“unappetizing-looking mess in his mouth,” Sergeant Planas gripes: “Garlic—my ass! I’d like to smear garlic all over that puta’s face before I make her sipsip me, goddammit, she can’t talk to me like that! I’ll bet this is some of her dog meat—you sure you don’t want some” (Hagedorn

199, emphasis in original). Besides being a gross display of misogyny and machismo, Sergeant

Planas’ rapacious appetite is all the more disgusting in comparison to the diminution of Joey’s own. Chua argues that food corresponds to the novel’s mood: “In contrast to the images of feasting that dominate the first half of the book, images of fasting dominate the latter half after the Senator’s murder” (225). Dogeaters’ early scenes almost obsessively describe the copious amounts of food that the upper-classes consume, from the Gonzagas’ dinner table to Baby

Alacran’s wedding. Following the climax, however, the novel shifts to show how little is available for everyone else. As Uncle tells to Joey, “Well, there’s nothing here to eat except the dog and you know I’d kill you first, heh-heh...I haven’t eaten myself, since yesterday! Dog eats better than me—I make sure of that” (Hagedorn 196). Uncle, the closest thing Joey has to a father figure, is literally willing to feed him to the dogs.

When Joey awakens from the heroin-induced slumber Uncle has forced him in, he immediately knows that he has been betrayed. Before making another escape, Joey decides “to leave a message the old man would understand” (Hagedorn 207). Communicating in “[o]mens, signs, Uncle’s language of the spirits,” Joey exacts revenge on Uncle’s beloved dog, Taruk:

Emitting a muffled scream, Joey grabbed the scruffy fur at the back of the dog’s neck and

held on for dear life, thrusting the sharp blade below dog’s right ear. Blood spurted

everywhere as the dog jerked in response. Joey kept stabbing the animal, the queasiness Story 36

in the pit of his stomach rising to his throat. Once again he tasted metal on his tongue.

The dog yelped and whine with each thrust of the night, horrifying Joey. He began to

weep, furious with the dog for not dying quickly. His anguished cries and the animal’s

became one and the same. His arm grew numb with the effort of killing, but Joey

wouldn’t stop until the shuddering dog finally lay still.” (Hagedorn 207)

Joey physically and emotionally struggles with the act of killing the dog, it is both deeply unsettling and a moment of catharsis. Knowing that, in way or another, Uncle would kill Joey or have him killed, slaying Taruk is the closest he can come to killing Uncle, to exacting revenge on the abuse he’s received and the life he’s been fostered for. Uncle is more humane to Taruk than to anyone else, he is willing to betray his surrogate son for the survival of his dog. As Joey weeps, it becomes increasingly clear that he can no longer stomach these cruel forms of social sacrifice. His cries become one with the dog, he does not eat the dog but rather is the dog.

Ultimately, the murder releases Joey from any obligation to Uncle and this fierce life of survival, allowing him to finally escape the dog-eat-dog mentality of Manila.

In Dubious Gastronomy, Robert Ji-Song Ku argues that Western disgust over dogmeat is a matter of creating boundaries—ethnic, racial, social, and class—and defining those who are within and without such boundaries. The disgust towards dogmeat “has little to do with food,”

Song says, “Rather, it concerns an individual’s sense of self within an imagined community against a perceived alien” (147). Dogmeat is “a signal to those in your in-group against external dangers,” distinguishing those who are in the out-group and maintaining that distance (Song

147). As with Tagalog encroaching on English in Section I, expressing disgust over dogmeat is a signal to those in the West about the impinging Other. The controversy surrounding the title is not that Filipinos just want to be part of the Western in-group, it also lies within a broader Story 37 conception of self within an imagined community. Within the novel, dogeating is the defining force of this imagined community, it is what constructs an understanding of these disparate figures as a collective nation. No one is innocent in Hagedorn’s indictment of the Philippines.

Here, everyone is a dogeater, from the upper-classes to the slums. They are either those who have power and are working to keep it, or those who don’t and seek it. Song argues that anxiety around dogmeat is, in part, an extension or displacement of the anxiety surrounding cannibalism:

“dogmeat warns against the corrupting power of the primitive Orient, just as the horror over the idea of cannibalism warned the West against the corrosive possibility of the dark savage” (147-

48) Throughout Dogeaters, characters repeatedly exhibit a willingness to devour others in a form of social cannibalism, the corrosion is widespread and the corruption deep within. Ironically, it is precisely this self-interest that connects them. Filipino reviewers are angry at being called dogeaters, but not in the literal sense. It is anger at the novel’s figurative conception of the

Philippines as profoundly dog-eat-dog, in its representation and critique of a culture that is more invested in exploitation and vengeance than in the support and protection of its people.

Many Filipinos refused to read Dogeaters based off the title alone, unable to move beyond the term’s negative connotations (Talbot). The tension in the Filipino reception to

Dogeaters is best exemplified in a response Hagedorn gave in a 1991 interview with Ameena

Meer:

I’ve read reviews in the Philippines that were lovely, but not uncritical. They point out

that the book was from the point of view of someone who was no longer there. I have no

quarrel with that, because it’s true. But the one thing that always bothers them is that

fucking definition of dogeaters. What was that? Why did that have to be there? But they Story 38

were pretty supportive. I hear it’s being bootlegged, and that there’s a course supposedly

being taught at one of the universities.

What is noteworthy about this quote is the purposeful distancing of the nation from Hagedorn, a desire to differentiate the Philippines that Hagedorn represents from the Philippines as it “really’ is. Hagedorn presents the critique of the title as different to the critique of her being no longer there but the two are more closely tied. For critics to claim that Hagedorn is no longer there is to claim that she no longer understands the Philippines or who Filipinos are, that they are no longer dogeaters in both the literal and figurative sense. Their critique suggests that Filipinos have moved beyond what the novel represents and whatever the term signifies, that they are no longer uncivilized or backward, nor corrupt or ruthless. In the late 1980s and early 90s, there was a desire to eschew this dog-eat-dog mentality, to disregard it as just part of the Marcos Regime.

Dogeaters’ configuration of dogeating as symptomatic of a deeper national and cultural decay is not how Filipinos wanted to present themselves to the West. Reviewers wanted a more

“authentic” or more respectable representation of the nation in order reflect a renewed investment in a certain set of ideals—America, after all, was founded on a set of ideals. In rejecting the title, there was also a rejection of dogeating as a set of unethical principles and a desire to embrace a nation and culture rebuilt on new ones (especially in light of the People

Power Revolution and the presidency of Corazon Aquino). What exactly were those ideals is rather unclear. For some, Filipinos should strive to model itself in America’s image, a desire to belong. For others, such as San Juan Jr., Filipinos should imagine new systems, a commitment to decolonize. In a sense, Dogeaters, as a title and novel, was a confrontation, an examination of what dogeating was and a challenge to envision what it could be.

Story 39

Conclusion: Dogeaters in the Asian American Canon

Towards the end of his review of Dogeaters, N.V.M. Gonzalez reflects, “Time will settle, though, whether this is a Filipino or an American novel” (191). Almost thirty years later, this decision has not been completely made. Perhaps such a resolution needs more time or, as I have previously suggested, time has already dictated that the novel is both. Still, the novel is situated firmly within the Asian American canon, seen as one of the seminal Filipino American entries alongside Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946). The anxiety expressed in its initial reviews do not dissolve with its canonicity but rather inform it. White, Western reviewers are indicative of those anxieties that fueled the canon wars—the incorporation of the Other into a diversifying America; the integration of ethnic writers within college curricula and the Western canon; the negotiation of this diversification without losing the “foundations” of Western

Civilization, whether it be literature or power. In turn, Filipinos reviewers reflected the anxieties of responding to such criticisms and expectations—the assertion of the Philippine presence within the American body politic; the evaluation of writers for their merits beyond cultural translator and exotic guide; the burden of representation in the face of the West, whether it be confronting stereotypes or promoting respectability.

The publication of Dogeaters arrived at the intersection of multiple critical points: the optics of the Marcos dictatorship and the People Power Revolution within the Western imagination, the rise of multiculturalism in American society and literature, and the continued development and wider recognition of Asian American studies. Dogeaters lends itself to each of these points, variously valuable for its ability to satiate Western fascination with the Philippines, contribute a Filipino American perspective to the multicultural landscape, and provide itself as a ripe text for (post)modernist analysis and numerous theoretical critiques. Its reception with Asian Story 40

American studies and literature is particularly noteworthy because it is the only interest that has sustained. American fascination with the Philippines and debates over literary multiculturalism have largely waned, but critical attention and appreciation towards Dogeaters within Asian

America remains. Even at the time of its release, Dogeaters’ position with the Asian American canon was largely assumed and accepted. I conclude with exploring how and why is Dogeaters integral to the Asian American canon, an analysis that considers the novel’s relevancy into today.

This is not to criticize Hagedorn or the novel as not deserving a place within the canon. Rather, it is to critically examine a major portion of the novel’s reception, the final piece within this larger contextualization. For, as Ponce argues, “the very circulation of Dogeaters as ‘canonical text’ contributes to its decontextualization making it available for ‘theoretical’ consumption and appropriation” (151). Though Dogeaters has largely been forgotten by a wider readership, the text continues to be disseminated and analyzed through various critical lens. From queer and feminist evaluations to readings of globalization and transnationalism, the novel is capacious enough for a multitude of interpretations. By presuming Dogeaters is always already canonical, the text risks losing the significance of its production and reception. Though I recognize this piece participates in the theoretical consumption of Dogeaters, it does so with an attention towards context; recognition of its reception is informative in understanding its lasting value.

Dogeaters is not canonical due to aesthetic qualities that transcend time and space but rather is canonical for what it indicates about a specific time and space, and for what it can offer in terms of how we think about Filipino American relations and literature into today.

Into the 1990s, as national conversations on the canon dwindled, discussions surrounding the Asian American canon expanded. Twenty years after the Asian American Movement and the

Third World Liberation Front of the 1960s and 70s, understandings of what it meant to be “Asian Story 41

American” had developed beyond the term’s original configuration as a multiethnic, pan-Asian political coalition committed to solidarity with other racial groups within America and to the liberation of people of color around the world.7 During that period of burgeoning cultural nationalism, Asian American literature was beginning to be collected and anthologized panethnically. The earliest was Asian American Authors, published in 1972 and edited by Kai-yu

Hsu and Helen Palubsinkas. In 1974, Frank Chin, Jeffery Paul Chan, Lawson Fusao Inada, and

Shawn Wong published the seminal Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writing, which

(re)introduced and promoted works by Asian American writers, many which are now considered standards within the canon. In 1984, Elaine H. Kim published the first scholarly survey, Asian

American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Contexts, which has remained influential in Asian American literary criticism and set a theoretical foundation for analyzing such texts with an attentiveness to social history and experience.

Along with the aforementioned rise of Asian American and postcolonial literature recognized by Western reviews and readers, the 1990s saw yet another wave of Asian American anthologies and criticism. Though there was certainly output in the intervening years, the early to mid-1990s was another peak of seminal works. Editors of these anthologies worked to include not only wider ethnic diversity, but also more queer and women writers, like The Forbidden

Stitch: An Asian American Women’s Anthology (1989). In 1991, The Big Aiiieeeee! was published as an expanded and revised edition of the original, though it now excluded Filipino

American writers to narrow its scope to only Japanese and Chinese American writers (in part due to Frank Chin’s essentialist and masculinist conception of “real” Asian Americans). In contrast,

Hagedorn, subsequent to Dogeaters’ success, edited her own anthology, Charlie Chan Is Dead:

7 See Daryl Joji Maeda. “The Asian American Movement.” Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Oxford University Press, 2016. Web. Story 42

An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (1993). Featuring forty-eight writers with a wide array of cultural backgrounds and literary styles, her anthology “stress[ed] both the political impetus and the aesthetic preoccupation of the project,” not unlike concerns voiced during the canon debate (Wong, “Panethnic” 246). In terms of literary criticism, the decade saw the publication of Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong’s Reading Asian America: From Necessity to

Extravagance (1993), Lisa Lowe’s Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (1996), and Rachel C. Lee’s The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation (1999). These scholars were critical to early examinations of Dogeaters and engagement with Hagedorn, and such works are still significant in Asian American studies.

Originally conceived as a political identity, Asian American increasingly became understood as a marker of only racial identity. The term developed rapidly beyond its intention as a self-conscious identification aligned with racial solidarity and anti-imperialism. By 1990, the category was included in the United States Census.8 The collection of newer anthologies and the increasingly self-reflexive nature of its literary criticism reflected this expansion of the term, as they worked to reconfigure what it meant to be Asian American. No longer propelled by a clear political movement, the analysis of such literature was attuned to examining what constituted

Asian America and its cultural production. The political aims of the earlier Asian American

Movement were not disregarded, but Asian American literary studies worked to include aesthetic concerns, questions of identity formation, and, most of all, focus on the distinctions and specificities between ethnic groups. In its wider usage, Asian American was transforming into a convenient collection of different groups into a single category; the term was increasingly taken

8 See United States. Census Bureau. Washington: GPO, 1990. IPUMS-USA. Web. Story 43 for granted. But in its theorization, Asian American was seen as a site of both collection and difference, working to navigate its tensions and struggles in ways that did not mimic the empty pluralism of Western multiculturalism. Such issues were often focused through discussions of the canon, which not only provided a site to theorize how Asian America was to be understood within the larger literature and body politic but to theorize within Asian America.

Rather than continue on in an exhaustive history of the formation and theorization of the

Asian American canon, I want to point to a few scholars writing around the time of Dogeaters’ release. Many of these scholars were, in part, responding to the wider debate on the inclusion of ethnic writers in the Western canon, which each utilized as a threshold for envisioning Asian

American literature’s own canon and defining Asian American, synthesizing these strands into a critical space for which a novel like Dogeaters could enter. In Reading Asian American

Literature, Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong writes, “Just as the Asian American ethnic group is a political coalition, Asian American literature may be thought of as an emergent and evolving textual coalition, whose interests it is the business of a professional coalition of Asian American critics to promote” (Reading 9). As with the original formation of Asian American as predicated on self-conscious identification and usage, Wong’s notion of a textual coalition “involves conscious inhabitation of a reading position” (Reading 9). For the Asian American canon to be theorized as a coalition is to consider Asian American voices and texts in relation and alliance with another, rather than conceive it as a cordoned off selection of greats held for all time. Such criticism is a form of praxis—unlike the Western canon, “whose subject matter has been canonized and protected by an established power structure,” Asian American critics have to establish “their own professional domain;” canonization is not only an intervention within knowledge production but an effort to build community (Wong, Reading 9). Wong’s framework Story 44 is a descendent and development of the earlier configuration of Asian American in which literature and its analysis is a force for solidarity and liberation, especially in opposition to the subsuming nature of pluralism and multiculturalism. In the 70s, the concern was the establishment of Asian American literature; into the 90s, it was a matter of continued recognition and legitimization. Emphasizing the autonomy of the Asian American literary tradition, Wong’s conception of canon-making is committed to approaching such texts as not a “minority” within literature.

While Wong discusses Asian American literary studies and the formation of the canon as carving a professional domain for critics, Lisa Lowe emphasizes that such a domain cannot fall victim to the rigid institutionalization of the discipline and the formalization of its methods.

Lowe values interdisciplinarity within Asian American studies as a source of criticism of institutions, for contesting domination within its very structures. To some extent an extension of

Wong’s framework, Lowe argues the need for constant reassessment within the field. In “Canon,

Institutionalization, and Identity: Contradictions for Asian American Studies,” she claims that

Asian American literature actually “defies canonization” (61). Its defiance is twofold: first, “[if] one function of canonization is the resolution of material contradictions through a narrative of formation in which differences…are subsumed through the individual’s identification with a universalized form” then texts disrupt such identifications; second, “it is a literature that is still being written—an unclosed, unfixed body of work whose centers and orthodoxies shift as the makeup of the Asian-origin constituency shifts” (Lowe, “Canon” 61). As with Asian American identity formation, the canon should be porous and fluid. The Western canon is built on sublimating difference through universal identification and aesthetic assimilation. The formation of an Asian American canon is neither a demand for aesthetic superiority nor authorial origin, Story 45 but a probing collection and conversation between texts, offering contradictions and insights into the heterogeneity within both Asian America and America. The Asian American canon is a space for critique and resistance—of stable identities, of established institutions, of canonization itself.

Consequently, within such a conscious approach to canon formation, where and how does

Dogeaters fit?

On one level, the insertion of Hagedorn and Dogeaters rectified the lack of Filipina voices originally within the canon. On another, more sophisticated level, I argue that it is the novel’s conclusion that has sustained its place as the canon has evolved. Towards the end of

Dogeaters, there are two concluding narrative threads. First is Joey’s, who, following the murder of Uncle’s dog, escapes Manila and finds refuge in the mountains. There Joey meets Daisy

Avila, the slain Senator’s daughter. In her own plot, Daisy is crowned Young Miss Philippines, only to forfeit her title and denounce the pageant as a nationalist, government ploy. When she becomes romantically involved with an insurgent, Daisy is imprisoned by General Ledesma and raped by his men. She is exiled from the Philippines but immediately returns and joins the revolution. Having lost everything, “her comrades are her only family now” (Hagedorn 233).

Joey and Daisy become especially close: “They are together all the time. She teaches him how to use a gun” (Hagedorn 233). Though the chapter’s language is rather reserved in comparison to most of the novel, it is clear that Joey, who was always restless and moving, has finally found a sense of belonging within this guerrilla coalition.

The second conclusion is Rio’s, who narrates the future of the Gonzaga family. Rio and her mother immigrated to America, leaving behind her father, who lost most of his wealth; her brother, who became a “spiritualist healer” and founded a fundamentalist Christian group; and

Pucha, who fulfilled her dream of marrying Boomboom Alacran only to secure a foreign divorce Story 46 when he turned out to be an abusive drunk (Hagedorn 243-44). Towards the end of her final chapter, Rio, whose childhood seemed so stable that it was almost timeless, describes her adulthood as one of constant unsettlement: “I am anxious and restless, at home only in airports. I travel whenever I can” (Hagedorn 247). Just as Rio appears to leave on a note of melancholia and malaise, Pucha, in the penultimate chapter, suddenly cuts in to repudiate her cousin and destabilize all preceding the events: “Puwede ba? 1956, 1956! Rio, you’ve got it all wrong…Nothing is impossible, I suppose, with that crazy imagination of yours. I’m not surprised by anything you do or say, but if I were you, prima, I’d leave well enough alone

(Hagedorn 248-49, emphasis in original). Not only does Pucha undercut Rio’s memory in recounting their family’s nostalgic past and somber future, she undermines the novel’s entire effort at narrativizing the recent past. An authorial challenge by a voice often dismissed as frivolous gossip, the insertion both echoes the novel’s effort to challenge “official” historical narratives and serves as a self-conscious, almost meta, critique of its own attempt to fictionalize and reinvent such history.

At first, these conclusions seem to suggest that there are only two options in escaping the dictatorial regime, revolution or immigration. In terms of the novel’s evaluation, it appears that

Joey has chosen the “happier” option in joining the resistance, it has offered him a sense of community and purpose. The character most desperate to leave the Philippines, he has finally found his role within the nation. In contrast, Rio’s immigration clearly has her feeling mournful, as if leaving the nation has prevented her from coming fully into her own. The contradictions between Rio’s narration and Pucha’s corrections are never resolved, and instead the novel ends with a conclusion for everyone, a kundiman: Story 47

Our mother, who art in heaven. Hallowed by thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be

done. Thy will not be done. Hallowed by thy name, thy kingdom never came. You who

have been defiled, belittled, and diminished. Our Blessed Virgin Mary of Most Precious

Blood, menstrual, ephemeral, carnal, eternal. (Hagedorn 250, emphasis in original)

The final chapter is a prayer for the Philippines, an “Our Mother” for the Motherland. A kundiman is a traditional Tagalog ballad; the singer often longs for an unrequited love and many can be interpreted as a love song to the nation. Kundimans are valued as an art form native to the

Philippines and as an artful form of resistance—they were sung when explicit national pride was inhibited under colonial rule. Dogeaters’ kundiman is a ballad for a nation that has been ravaged and violated by colonial history, the blood is spilt and heaven deferred. The disembodied singer laments the wrongs against their love, their motherland, and consequently the wrongs done against them. The love is not unrequited so much as conflicted, “I would curse you but I choose to love you instead” (Hagedorn 250, emphasis in original). If the narrative closure posits either fighting for the nation or mourning it from afar, the kundiman offers another, more ambiguous and ambivalent conclusion: deliverance.

A coda to the action of the novel, the kundiman encompasses the two modes of the earlier conclusions—resistance and melancholia—and offers a third space in which tensions are not resolved but rather possibilities are envisioned. The radical collectivity of Joey, Daisy, and the guerrillas is clearly based on the New People’s Army, an armed Communist insurgence, but they are purposefully not identified as such. Moreover, the novel does not portray the more famous, popular revolution known as the People’s Power Revolution, or the ESDA revolution, which helped overthrow the Marcos government and install Corazon Aquino as President. Some scholars, such as San Juan Jr. and Hau, are critical of this decision, claiming that the novel’s Story 48 representation of revolution, “shorn of its concrete historicism,” is simply “the espousing of revolutionary theory as a positive theory of agency” (Hau 122). Such criticism argues that this resistance is empty of critical substance or political significance and, if addressing a Western audience, ultimately non-threatening to systems of power. Other scholars value the suspension of the revolution and immigrant narratives; Rachel C. Lee claims that the novel refuses “realist affirmations, refraining from positing a harmonious collectivism or a reassuring vision of representational and spectatorial capacity” (104). According to Lee, “Dogeaters points to the ways in which simultaneously operating hegemonies impinge unevenly upon various subjects, requiring an array of counterhegemonic responses that are, likewise, multiple and uneven” (104).

As such, Dogeaters resists offering a singular national allegory or a totalizing solution for the entire population. This line of criticism reads Dogeaters’ coda as a radical revisioning in its refusal to concede to a single vision.

The novel’s kundiman shifts from praying for the motherland to praying for those who inhabit it, now praying to the motherland for some sense of salvation:

Stigmata of mercy, the blood of a slain rooster sprouts from the open palms of your

monkey hands, stigmata of beautiful suffering and insane endurance, Dolores dolorosa.

Spilled blood of innocents, dead by the bullet, the dagger, the arrow…spilled blood of

ignited flesh, exploded flesh, radiated flesh; spilled blood of forbidden knowledge, bless

us, Mother, for we have sinned.

Our mother who art in heaven, forgive us our sins. Our Lady of Most Precious Blood,

Wild Dogs, Hyenas, Jackals, Coyotes, and Wolves. Our Lady of Panthers and Jaguars,

Our Lady of Cobras, Mournful Lizards, Lost Souls, and Radio Melodramas, give us this

day; Our Lady of Typhoons, deliver us from evil, forgive us our sins but not theirs. Story 49

Ave maria, mother of revenge. The Lord was never with you. Blessed art thou among

women, and blessed are the fruits of thy womb: guavas, mangos, santol, mangosteen,

durian. Now and forever, world without end. Now and forever. (Hagedorn 251, emphasis

in original)

These final passages are a culmination of the novel’s turns between religious sanctity and sacrilege, between tropical Eden and perfumed nightmare. This prayer reworks the imagery of the crucifixion with monkey hands; the Seven Sorrows of Mary with creatures, storms, and melodrama; the divine womb with a bounty of lush, fragrant tropical fruit. The kundiman asks for the forgiveness of Filipinos’ sins—for their dogeating—but not for the forgiveness of the colonizers; salvation is also found in revenge. From what evil are they asking to be delivered from, and what evil is necessary for revolution? There is a melancholia that seems to echo that of

Rio’s, but there is also an anger that reflects Daisy and the guerillas. The Philippines is recast as

Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow, but the Father, the United States, is never pleaded to; he was never on her side. It even incorporates elements of Pucha’s conclusion, casting into doubt imperial narratives of benevolence and refusing sentimentality for the past. Rather, the finale’s eye, “Eye glowing with heavenly flames, one single Eye watching over me, on earth as it is in heaven,” is turned towards the future—impassioned with rage and reverence, it is both vigilant and ambivalent (Hagedorn 250).

The affective ambivalence of the kundiman, in which there is no savior or redeemer but there is still love, albeit unrequited and yearned, operates in a mode of resistance but offers no strategy for resistance. Deliverance is not offered but envisioned. It is debatable whether it can even be reached; as Ponce notes, “The ‘Kundiman’ chapter erupts specifically out of the

Philippines postcolonial predicament: it is a lyric of longing whose fulfillment—the Story 50 motherland’s reconstruction, the end of her torment—would spell the end of that longing, and hence, that song” (149). One can certainly criticize this ending as an evading “real” social change, failing to conceptualize a future for the Philippines. I argue that this irresolution, this seeming lack of real change to instead visualize various, ambiguous possibilities, is what makes

Dogeaters canonical. The collective conclusion of these final chapters—the range from Joey to

Rio to Pucha to kundiman—is neither wholly realist nor naively utopian. Lee argues that “it is questionable whether positing such utopian possibilities fosters, rather than quells, social change…Hagedorn’s novel resists this utopian impulse, perhaps subscribing that immersing the reader in outrage—in an unfulfilled desire for justice—serves social change to a greater degree than a conflict that has been resolved through fiction” (105). Lee’s analysis positions resistance, and the conclusion at large, as the reader’s responsibility; Dogeaters is not a demonstration of social change, it is a tool to imagine and instigate it. Ponce claims that Dogeaters is “not intrinsically laboratory or revolutionary,” but in offering an array of conclusions, each positioned as valid as its alternatives, such values can be read into and extracted from the text (145). It is precisely this lack of resolution—this potential for solidarity and liberation but not its prescription—that allows the novel to fit so well within the Asian American canon.

In valuing Dogeaters’ irresolution as canonical, I return to Lowe, who expanded her conception of the canon in Immigrant Acts:

If Asian American literary expression is examined in exclusively canonical terms, it

reveals itself as an aesthetic product that cannot repress the material inequalities of its

conditions of production; its aesthetic is defined by contradiction, not sublimation, such

that discontent, nonequivalence, and irresolution call into question the project of

abstracting the aesthetic as a separate domain of unification and reconciliation. It is a Story 51

literature that, if subjected to a canonical function, dialectically returns a critique of that

function. (44)

For Lowe, Western canon-making is predicated on resolution. Asian American literature, in its canonical and racial differences, resists such reconciliation. The ending of Dogeaters exemplifies such expression and production: the inequalities of the characters’ social strata demands that the narrative conclusions be uneven and discrepant, the kundiman calls into question whether collective resistance or nationalism need be uniform and uplifting. Inserting Dogeaters within the Asian American canon, especially when its style so differs and opposes that of its predecessors and contemporaries, is to also offer a response and critique of that canon. When placed in conversation with other Filipino texts like Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart or

Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War, it throws into relief, positively and negatively, the revolutionary thinking of the novel. When positioned next to Asian American contemporaries such as The Joy

Luck Club and Jasmine, Dogeaters suddenly appears less accommodating and assimilationist.

The novel resists unification in its text and intertextuality. If the Asian American canon is a textual coalition, particularly for solidarity and liberation, then Dogeaters both undermines and envisions such aims. The novel’s irresolution has also helped it withstand the growth and evolution of Asian America, lending itself to conversations on global capitalism and increasing transnationalism. The affective ambivalence of Dogeaters’ conclusion generates a permeable and metamorphic text, indicative of the Asian American canon writ large.

Yet, as a product circulating within the marketplace, Dogeaters is still informed by the period of its production and reception. By the time of the novel’s publication, the Marcos and the

Aquinos were familiar figures to the American public. In the 1980s, the “special relationship” between the United States and the Philippines was well publicized in the friendship between Story 52

Presidents Ronald Reagan and Marcos. In 1986, the People Power Revolution was televised and supported the world over; Corazon Aquino’s presidency was historic and hopeful. The Marcos’ exile to Hawaii, the thousands of shoes abandoned in Malacañang Palace, and the 1990 racketeering trial of Imelda Marcos continued to capture American attention, a saga worthy of a

Filipino soap opera. Throughout the decade, publishers released numerous non-fiction books attempting to explain the fall of the regime and the rise of a revolution, to analyze these incredible characters and narrativize history as it was being made. In 1990, Stanley Karnow’s In

Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (1989) won the Pulitzer Prize in History. As

Nerissa S. Balce summarizes, Karnow’s account “attributes the successful revolt against Marcos to American democratic principles but overlooks the history of violence in the United States rule over the Philippines” (59). In a way, the context surrounding Dogeaters remarkably echoed that of the Philippine Reservation at the 1904’s World Fair. Once again, recent historicization worked to recast American intervention as benevolent, to identify imperialism as the successful tool for finally democratizing, and therefore civilizing, the Philippines. As with those Americans who supplied dogs for feasting on the reservation, there was the desire to sensationalize the

Philippines as an exotic show for entertainment. Thereby, Philippine politics were presented as fascinating and spectacular, as stranger than fiction, while obfuscating American influence and involvement in the matter. It was yet another iteration of the epistemic violence against and exploitation of Filipinos. It is no wonder so many Filipinos were concerned with still being called dogeaters, the fascination with the Marcos dictatorship and ESDA Revolution highlighted that the desire to put Filipinos on display strongly remained.

Such concerns have cyclically returned in the two decades since Dogeaters’ publication.

In 2001, former actor and President Joseph Estrada was accused of corruption and threatened Story 53 with impeachment. The ensuing controversy led to yet another populist revolution, known as the

ESDA Revolution of 2001, and installed Gloria Macapagal Arroyo as President. In 2010,

Arroyo’s government was also accused of corruption and she was charged with electoral fraud.

Most infamous is the current President, Rodrigo Duterte, whose controversial statements and methods have gained increasing attention abroad. The dictatorial echoes in the current presidency—the questionable human rights record, the proclamation of martial law in the

Southern Philippines, the special relationship between Duterte and President Donald Trump, the threats to freedom of the press—have pushed the Philippines back into international focus. In

1990, Dogeaters was a response to the spectacle of the Marcos Regime; it both outdid and challenged those narratives. In 2019, Dogeaters’ irresolution can help us critically examine the

Duterte Regime and envision alternatives. Is it once again a matter of revolution or immigration, war within the nation’s borders or a case of melancholic migrancy? Or does the search for deliverance continue on? The reinvented history and cultural memory of Dogeaters asks what have Filipinos have become and what Filipinos could be. This is not to suggest that rereading the novel in light of the Duterte presidency is to judge “how far we’ve come.” Rather, this is to expand the novel into a framework by which to critique the dogeating of the Philippine Drug

War; to reorient Philippine-American neocolonial relations; to situate it in dialogue with contemporary Filipina and Asian American literature.

The issues informing both the Western and Filipino reception of the novel have not abated. Cultural and economic anxieties regarding immigrants and their presence in the United

States have only heightened under the Trump administration. Recent Filipina writers confronting the Marcos and Duterte Regimes, including Mia Alvar’s In the Country (2015), Elaine Castillo’s

America is Not the Heart (2018), and Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto (2018), are successors and Story 54 counterpoints to Hagedorn and Dogeaters. Likewise, conceptions of Asian American, both as an identity and literary canon, remain far from fixed. In Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist

Critique (2003), Kandice Chuh emphasizes the tension and nonequivalence between Filipino

America and Asian America, illustrating how cultural nationalist and collective frameworks are often limiting and demanding of uniformity (31-32). Furthermore, Chuh argues for the reconstitution of Asian American studies, pushing for deeper critiques of nationalism and its preoccupation with coherency and community— issues that have seemingly plagued the field from its very beginning. Thereby, to value Dogeaters’ kundiman as a prayer for today is not to resolve these anxieties. Instead, it is to ask, “Our mother who art, what have those bastards gone and done now?” (Hagedorn 250, emphasis in original).

Returning to Dogeaters—its irresolution and imagined alternatives—is perhaps not enough to form a coalitional politics in the face of Trump’s immigration policies or to enact social change against Duterte’s extrajudicial executions. Yet, as Hagedorn once mused, “In what language do we dream?”9 How do we dream of solidarity and liberation through literature? I, for one, dream in the language of dinuguan and durian, merienda and mangosteen—Glory be to the

Mother.

9 See “The Exile Within/The Question of Identity” (Boston: South End, 1994), 178. Story 55

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1956. DVD.

Alvar, Mia. In the Country. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015. Print.

Apostol, Gina. Insurrecto. New York: Soho Press, 2018. Print.

Balce, Nerissa S. “Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn.” A Resource Guide to Asian American

Literature. Eds. Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong and Stephen H. Sumida. New York: The

Modern Language Association of America, 2001. 54-65. Print.

Bennett, William J. To Reclaim a Legacy: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education.

National Endowment for the Humanities. 1984.

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