DECONSTRUCTING POSTCOLONIAL MEMORY THROUGH FILIPINO AMERICAN LITERATURE

At> 3<^ XoIf A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University E.W&L In partial fulfillment of •ASif the requirements for the Degree

Master of English

In

Literature

by

Lisa Ang

San Francisco, California

Fall 2015 Copyright by Lisa Ang 2015 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Deconstructing Postcolonial Memory Through Filipino

American Literature by Lisa Ang, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree

Master of English in Literature at San Francisco State University.

Gitanjali Shahani, Ph.D. Associate Professor

Wai-Leung Kwok, Ph.D. Associate Professor DECONSTRUCTING POSTCOLONIAL MEMORY THROUGH FILIPINO AMERICAN LITERATURE

Lisa Ang San Francisco, California 2015

This thesis argues that Filipino American literature can be viewed as postcolonial literature when viewed in relation to history and memory. It acknowledges the difficulties that lay waiting for a postcolonial analysis in general and moves past these potential complications with an understanding of the usefulness of this categorization for two unique examples of Filipino American literature today. By understanding subaltemity in Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado and Tess Uriza Holthe’s When the Elephants Dance, this thesis traces remnants of the past back to the simultaneously possible and impossible nature of constructing a national story of the Philippines.

I certify that the Choose an item, is a correct representation of the content of this Choose an item

Chair, Thesis Committee ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thank you to my family, especially my parents, William and Adelaida Ang, who have always encouraged and supported my growth as a learner and student. They have supported me through this process along with some very loyal, patient friends. Thank you to all who had to endure my writerly self at its worst, but special thanks to Dante, who makes me a better thinker and writer, but most importantly, a better person. I love you all and dedicate this to you.

This thesis would not have been possible without Professors Gitanjali Shahani,

Lehua Yim and Wai-Leung Kwok. I sincerely appreciate your encouragement during stressful times, your wise counsel in developing these ideas, and your invaluable feedback. I hope to someday be able to inspire students with just a fraction of the brilliance with which you have inspired me.

v TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction...... 1

Chapter 1: Postcolonial Memory and Fragmented Versions of the Past...... 7

Chapter 2: The Presence and Absence of Writing...... 33

Chapter 3: Ghosts and Folklore in When the Elephants Dance...... 54

Coda...... 81

Notes...... 83

Works Cited...... 84 Ang 1

INTRODUCTION

Memory exists as both a possibility of retrieving remnants of a remembered past and a reminder that this process is fraught with complications, fictions and rewritings. I identify as a Filipino American woman, the daughter of immigrants, and an academic.

This is perhaps why the concept of a country’s permanent rupture from its own past at the hands of colonial encounters resonates strongly with me. In discussing her analysis of Indian archival material and historical records, Gayatri Spivak notes, “I turn to Indian material because, in the absence of advanced disciplinary training, that accident of birth and education had provided me with a sense of the historical canvas.. (Spivak 209).

The irretrievability of national history makes me desirous and nostalgic, and this necessitates added rigor when it comes to understanding and analyzing issues of memory and history in Filipino American literature. Despite having read Filipino

American novels on my own and as part of an Asian American studies seminar, it was only in studying postcolonial literature and ruminating on deconstruction theories that I began thinking of the Filipino American literature I had read in new and thought- provoking ways. The jarring realization that a fundamental national history has always been and always will be out of reach is a harrowing and haunting thought, but it also invites an inquiry into the pieces we have to work with - the individual stories that say something useful for a rereading of Filipino American literature in a different light with a different purpose in mind. These are the shards of memory and experience from which this thesis was bom. Ang 2

What can be definitively said about an individual’s memories or personal viewpoint as it pertains to the history of a nation? Even more difficult may be the grouping of many of these individual stories into a larger category that includes multiple nations and cultures. The works of visionaries and foundation-laying writers in the field of Filipino-American literature, including but not limited to Jose Rizal, Carlos Bulosan, and Jessica Hagedom, have been referenced and included in Asian American anthologies and collections, adding unique perspectives that often resonate with the experiences and stories of other Asian American literatures. But what has been lost in the process, and what might be gained if we consider a different way of reading Filipino

American stories? Much of Filipino American history - including multiple colonial presences in the Philippines and the islands’ complicated relationship with the United

States - have spawned topics and writers that resonate with those of countries colonized by the British Empire and other areas once claimed by the West. I aim to understand

Filipino American literature with a different analytical lens with a responsible mindfulness that this is yet another privileging which I should be wary of as well.

This thesis seeks to do more than swiftly categorize Filipino American literature within the postcolonial literary canon. It is a carefully self-monitored experiment in understanding theories and ideas more commonly aligned with understanding postcolonial literature and applying them as lenses to analyze specific contemporary

Filipino American literary texts - Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado and Tess Uriza Holthe’s

When the Elephants Dance - with the aid of deconstruction and a watchful eye on the Ang 3

resulting ideas and repercussions of creating new systems of thought. Deconstruction proves useful in this undertaking as I break down binaries between readers and writers as well as history and memory in hopes of providing a more nuanced view of postcolonial self-fashioning and historical rewriting through Filipino American literature. Deconstruction allows a continual decentering, and it questions the privileged gaze of the colonizing subject to make room for multiple readings of these texts.

For the purpose of this thesis, postcolonial studies bears many well-developed, intricate tools for tackling Filipino American literature, but it is not without its own flaws and disputes. “Postcolonial Memory and Fragmented Versions of the Past” enters the pre-existing debate regarding the term “postcolonial” and all that this word should or could entail. Understanding this discussion, I use Salman Rushdie’s literature and literary criticism to demonstrate the many applications of the idea of the fragment within postcolonial literature and propose that it has untapped potential for Filipino American stories. I take up Midnight’s Children as a seminal postcolonial text that problematizes the idea of a “national history” and rewrites both nation and self in ways that I believe are useful within Filipino American literature. In conjunction with Rushdie’s essay

“Imaginary Homelands,” I discuss the power of a narrator retelling and rewriting events contrary to what “factually” and “historically” happened. History is imperfect in many ways, and no more accurate than the imperfect, fragmented memories of individuals telling their own personal narratives. This theme of fragmentation carries over to

Filipino American literary texts - in form, content, and message. Reflecting the Ang 4

unrepresentable shared heritage of a country comprised of more than 7,000 islands, the

Filipino American novels I discuss both have a fragmented form. When the Elephants

Dance is a compilation of stories that range in time periods from Spanish to Japanese occupation in the Philippines, and there is one frame tale that allows multiple characters to relay their stories of different moments in time, all while Japan, the United States and

Philippine guerilla fighters attempt to maneuver themselves into control over the future of the country within the main frame tale. Ilustrado's format shows fragmentation as well. The novel’s focalizer is Miguel Syjuco, an aspiring writer who is investigating the

sudden death and missing manuscript of a Filipino professor, writer, and Miguel’s mentor, Crispin Salvador. The tale is told through Miguel’s narration, but not through one, singular voice. Fragments of all kinds, including his mentor’s many writings,

Miguel’s ongoing biography of the professor, and Miguel’s own memories of his

interactions with the deceased are pieced together throughout each chapter of the book.

Fragmentation is pervasive in postcolonial narratives, especially these two Filipino

American novels as they collapse the barrier between interiority and the outside world.

“The Presence and Absence of Writing: Subaltern Manuscripts of Filipino

Storytelling in Ilustrado’'’ takes Rushdie’s understanding of the fragment as it relates to

national history and adds onto his ideas to create new usefulness in Ilustrado. I invoke

the term “subaltern” as Gayatri Spivak has discussed it, and I piece together my own

working definition of the word to characterize the missing manuscript that exists in and possibly may be the novel Ilustrado itself. I also expand on Derrida’s theories on writing Ang 5

from his essay “Signature Event Context” to discuss presence and absence between

sender and receiver as a way of understanding the complicated and intentionally

confusing sequence of events within Syjuco’s novel. The characters of Miguel and

Crispin are Derrida’s theories in practice; they negate the difference between presence

and absence by showing they are inextricably tied to each other within the workings of the novel’s thought-provoking twist ending.. .and beginning. Ilustrado’s mandatory

invitation for the reader to question what “actually” transpired allows for many new

interpretations and raises the issue of agency inside and outside the text.

The last chapter, “Haunted by Slight Ghosts: An Examination of Colonial

Constructions of Selfhood in When the Elephants Dance,” is an attempt at understanding

and commemorating “subaltern histories,” a term Deepika Bahri uses in her book,

Native Intelligence by building on “subaltern,” a word that can be traced to Gramsci and popularized through the Subaltern Studies Collective, a lineage I trace in the previous

chapter. For Rushdie, unexplored histories exist in Midnight’s Children with the image

of a hole, a perforated sheet, an empty jar of pickles and other objects that illustrate the

subaltern past of the nation. When the Elephants Dance illustrates the necessary

haunting of past generations through ghosts and folklore inserted into the telling of a

significant and historic national event. Ghosts are a deconstruction of existence, not

quite dead and not quite alive, but parts of both and somewhere in between. In When the

Elephants Dance, ghosts and other creatures are pivotal to the remembered stories and

vignettes that are passed down to a new generation. With no listening subject and at Ang 6

times no receiver for the sender of their communication, ghosts and mythical creatures

create an interpretive logic for thinking about the country’s history. Aided by Spivak’s A

Critique o f Postcolonial Reason, I see haunting in a new, positive light to concretize

issues of selfhood for the postcolonial subject. By commemorating previous systems of

culture, community and storytelling in the Philippines, Holthe allows her characters to

be haunted by their pasts and invites readers to call into question the colonial

constructions of self and other that occur in the forming of nations.

These two Filipino American novels create new writers and new readers: the

fictive ones described on the page and the actual readers who need a new way of

interpreting them to create meaning. They give countless examples of a young postcolonial generation that must confront the difficult task of understanding and

examining their subjecthood through the recollection of valuable but traumatizing experiences. Separately and together, Ilustrado and When the Elephants Dance invite a deconstructive and postcolonial rereading of memories to creatively examine and understand the subaltern histories of Filipinos and Filipino Americans. Ang 7

CHAPTER ONE

Postcolonial Memory and Fragmented Versions of the Past

The indiscriminate grouping of Filipino American literature under the umbrella of Asian

American literature has proven beneficial in many ways for visibility and coalition building within Asian American studies, but it has also contributed to the privileging of this categorization over a potentially fruitful conversation about Filipino American literature as postcolonial. This distinction is understandable, and perhaps it has been made in light of many formative and canonical postcolonial literature representations, which focus on telling the story of various European encounters with specific Third

World nations1. However, within much of the same time periods during which these encounters occurred, the Philippines has also seen one colonial presence after another.

These colonial forces can be dated at least as far back as Magellan’s arrival to the country in the 16 t h century, which marked the beginning of Spanish • colonization • including the spread of Catholicism. Since that time, Japanese occupation during World War II and

American sovereignty until 1945 have added to the palimpsest of colonial presences, creating especially complicated relationships between Western influences and those native to the Philippines. This has led to lasting and complex exchanges between the

United States and the Philippines that have survived past Philippine “independence” and remain all too easily identifiable to this day.

The normative grouping of Filipino American literature within Asian American literature has made sense because of some shared commonalities, but the restrictions on Ang 8

immigration into the United States that applied to Chinese and Japanese immigrants in

the late 19th century made Filipinos the exception among Asians - the beneficiaries of the

relationship between the United States’ continuing exchanges and military relationship

with the Philippines. In the years after the United States secured their position as the main

foreign presence in the islands, American influence grew stronger, an American-

sponsored education system took root, and English was increasingly spoken over

Tagalog. The effects of these changes are evident as English - not Tagalog - has stayed

the language of instruction in the Philippines. These institutionalized developments along

with the unique experiences of those who chose to immigrate to America create an

arguably postcolonial atmosphere from which Philippine and Filipino American literature

has emerged. Therefore, this chapter attempts to see Filipino American literature in a new

light by acknowledging the difficulties that lay waiting for a postcolonial analysis in

general and moving past these potential complications with an understanding of the

usefulness of this categorization for two unique examples of Filipino American literature today.

Postcolonial studies has its own longstanding debate when it comes to defining

what exactly qualifies as “postcolonial.” In part, the lack of unity in determining what this field actually studies and represents has to do with the “post” prefix of the term. Bill

Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin in The Empire Writes Back comment on the number of ways works can qualify as postcolonial, whether it is because pertinent works Ang 9

take place after the colonizing force in an area has left or they consider the moment of the foreign encounter and perhaps even the events leading up to it as important to the duration and aftermath of a colonial period of time. The term “postcolonial” “has occasionally been employed in some earlier work in the area to distinguish between the periods before and after independence (‘colonial period’ and ‘post-colonial period’), for example, in constructing national literary histories, or in suggesting comparative studies between stages in those histories” (Ashcroft 1). Some scholars including Deepika Bahri have observed that “postcolonial” has come to describe a time after World War II,2 whereas others refuse to put a date on such a long and complicated period of history.

Furthermore, not only is the issue a complicated, temporal one; it is also a difficult spatial one. In “Coming to Terms with the ‘Postcolonial,’” Bahri notes that “although

‘postcolonial’ is customarily used to generalize a recent phenomenon that has now passed

- usually indicating British and French departure from Africa, India, the Caribbean, and elsewhere over the last hundred years - the present moment in ‘postcolonial’ nations is hardly ‘post’ the colonial in any genuine or even cursory sense” (Bahri 143). Postcolonial conditions are not a thing of the past. The effects of neocolonialism and globalization still dictate much of what is happening in the areas of former European colonies today. Yet the term that the field has claimed for use connotes a misleading temporal categorization * by definition or lack thereof. The commonly cited geographical areas that make up the problematic binary of the field - colonizer and colonized - have been stretched beyond what began with the areas Bahri mentions, and one can argue that the term is useful for Ang 10

many regions that have not been traditionally considered postcolonial. Since the moment it became part of literary studies, “postcolonial” has been fraught with competing, nuanced and confusing meanings. Gayatri Spivak voiced some of her critiques of the term as follows:

the word ‘postcolonial’ is used to cover all kinds of bases. It is even used to avoid

the question: Who decolonizes? It is used to avoid the question...of what it is to

decolonize anything other than the mind. It is used to block investigation of the

failure of decolonization, which we see all over the place, and also the fact that the

relay has passed to neocolonialism, of which we are a part. (Bahri 70)

This brief assessment of some of the recurring ailments of the field challenges the way postcolonial studies has relied on its own categorization to think less critically beyond these temporal and spatial divides as well as the relationship between colonizer and colonized. The laziness that seems to come with relying on “postcolonial” as an all- encompassing category leads to ignoring the more important issues of how decolonization can be possible and calling attention to colonialism as it is still at work today. In one of the most heavily cited essays critiquing the pitfalls of the field, Anne

McClintock similarly points out the monolithic characteristics of postcolonial studies as obstacles to productive and inclusive conversations, saying,

I am struck by how seldom the term is used to denote multiplicity. The following

proliferate: ‘the post-colonial condition,’ "the postcolonial scene,’ ‘the post-

colonial intellectual,’...and that most tedious, generic hold-all: ‘the post-colonial Ang 11

Other.’ I am not convinced that one of the most emerging areas of intellectual and

political enquiry is best served by inscribing history as a single issue. (McClintock

86)

When treated as a monolith, the field of postcolonial studies spawns other monolithic constructions, and we are limited to one idea of what the postcolonial is, does and can do.

The postcolonial “Other” has often been held up as a symbol without understanding the negative effects of resolutely defining these terms, and it is just one of many generalizations that are all too easy when we do not do the work of defining what we mean by “postcolonial.”

While carefully considering the responsibility that exists for anyone choosing to engage with or create postcolonial meaning in literature, and understanding these are only a sampling of the critiques of a divided field, there remains some usefulness for a postcolonial lens and dialogue between stories of communities once colonized by the

British Empire and those of the post-World War II Philippines. Bahri reminds us “it is too early to be satisfied with the condition of Postcolonial Studies and too late to dismiss their impact” (Bahri 158). Treating the field as a monolith is problematic, but reflecting on two unorthodox Filipino American texts with a postcolonial lens can add to the discussion of this still-changing area of study, the growing field of Filipino American literature as a whole and the complexity of the works individually. Invoking my own skepticism for this term, I plan to use “postcolonial” in a way that will showcase the relationship between memory and history for communities and individuals affected by Ang 12

colonization. I hope to build on Salman Rushdie’s ideas of fragmentation in conversation

with Derrida’s ideas on writing to fashion my own definitions of postcolonial memory

and understand what this has meant in Midnight’s Children as well as what this means

within Filipino American literature. I hope to do justice to the intricate nature of

postcoloniality in general and to constantly question the ways in which I draw

comparisons to Filipino American literature and these theories. The stories I will discuss

are written by and about Filipino Americans, and they show a noticeable overlap in the

prevalent themes that arise when attempting to understand the complex aftermath of

colonization and war, adding a new element to conversations of national history and

significance for the Philippines’ relationship with colonial presences and in its own right

as a nation.

The interruptions imposed on native peoples at moments of colonial encounters

set these areas and their people on an alternate path with an alternate future. This

irrevocable change drastically affects perceptions of temporality, not only because their ideas of time often already differ from Western or European concepts, but because what was assumed to be the future drastically differs from what is now made or being made the present. McClintock discusses this plurality of notions of time when critiquing

“postcolonial,” saying “yet the inscription of history around a single ‘continuity of preoccupations’ and a ‘common past,’ runs the risk of a fetishistic disavowal of crucial international distinctions that are barely understood and inadequately theorized”

(McClintock 87). Discrete ideas on the past and the passing of time in postcolonial Ang 13

studies can be a type of colonization in and of themselves when choosing not to honor the fragmented and intricate nature of time during colonial eras. The past can seem just as important as the present or future for colonized regions as the traumatic experiences that were a part of nation-forming and war continue to haunt the peoples who now need to undertake the formidable task of fathoming what their post-war or postcolonial reality should resemble. Postcolonial and Filipino American narratives show these psychological complications plaguing postcolonial subjects when dealing with the concept of time - whether it be history, memory or notions of the past in relation to the present. These issues often lay waiting for postcolonial subjects to tackle, an immense obstacle that demands to be grappled with in order to move past historical trauma and work towards life after colonization.

Salman Rushdie attempts to explain these issues through his essays and in his novels. Rushdie’s novel, Midnight’s Children, and his essay describing the process of writing it, “Imaginary Homelands,” marked a turning point for postcolonial literature.

These texts came before the explosion of interest in postcolonial literature and before the term acquired many of the problematic implications McClintock mentions. Reflecting on postcolonial studies, Bahri comments on why the field began to experience widespread growth and acceptance in validity, saying, “Perhaps one of the most significant reasons for the exponential expansion in postcolonial discourse is.. .the development of postmodern theory and the postmodern critic’s suspicion of an objective historical consciousness” (Bahri 151). This wholly applies to Rushdie’s work as he attempts to take Ang 14

what is known widely as national history and complicate it with his own personal anecdotes and experiences and by writing fiction into the historical “truths” of India.

Rushdie laid the groundwork for many postcolonial theoretical and literary critical works to come by creating a theoretical model with his own imperfect memories. Memory arises as a theme of importance because of many authors’ and postcolonial subjects’ simultaneous desire and inability to perfectly capture a specific moment in the history of a nation, which is why his essay, “Imaginary Homelands,” can easily be applied to what makes many texts describing Third World countries inherently fragmented. The divergence in the once-future yet presently non-existent path of an area touched by colonization from the postcolonial move toward a completely different future immediately makes their home a foreign place, and when authors attempt to recall these once-native lands, the endeavor is fraught with complications, making these memories already fragmented and therefore meaningfully significant.

Rushdie addressed the unique nature of postcolonial memory and the process of reconciling his experiences with what has been taken as national history in “Imaginary

Homelands,” and rarely does a reader have the advantage of an in-depth look at the logic behind a writer’s process like the one he delivers here. Rushdie’s analysis speaks to postcolonial subjects’ search for identity, saying “it’s my present that is foreign...the past is home, albeit a lost home in a lost city in the mists of lost time” (Rushdie 9). Rushdie is speaking figuratively to show that the place he was bom and where he grew up is alive in his mind and more real to him than what sits in front of him now. His memory of a Ang 15

formative time in his childhood creates an eternal Bombay that still exists in his mind - and in Midnight’s Children - despite any changes it has undergone in reality. Because this personal city is the one most present to him, when he sees the real thing, he grapples with its appearance as “the colours of my history had seeped out of my mind’s eye; now my other two eyes were assaulted by colours, by the vividness.. .It is probably not too romantic to say that that was when my novel Midnight’s Children was really bom; when

I realized how much I wanted to restore the past to myself’ (Rushdie 9). The urge

Rushdie feels to write of the India he knew has been felt by many postcolonial writers, and it is exhibited in the multitude of texts that account for often forgotten and traditionally unrecognized histories. However, the endeavor of writing about the past is rarely as conclusive or satisfying a solution as what is sought, and Spivak also comments on the formidable task of recording one specific event that coincides with what takes place in Midnight’s Children, saying, “the generation with the memory will never be able, to write the ‘history’ of partition” (Spivak 68). This proximity to historical moments for the nation make it impossible to accurately record this part of history, and Rushdie discovered this with the added difficulty of being physically away from the country as well. When acknowledging this part of his country that can never again return to him,

Rushdie warns,

if we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge - which gives rise to

profound uncertainties - that our physical alienation from India almost invariably

means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost; Ang 16

that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible

ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind. (Rushdie 10)

Though a factually accurate or realistic account of Bombay is elusive, Rushdie’s problem eventually becomes his solution. His attempt to find the real India instead became part of his creative process of forming the novel. The result is perhaps a new genre, whether it be historiographic metafiction or simply a different kind of history.. .or a different kind of novel. He discovers that postcolonial memory exists as fragmentation. His experience shows that trying to write from outside his home country means that the world he creates is like dealing with “broken mirrors,” but this amalgamation of piecemeal shards “may actually be as valuable as the one which is supposedly unflawed” (Rushdie 11). As humans, our fragmented memory helps us along the path towards meaning, which

Rushdie admits is a “shaky edifice” itself. This reminds us of the inherently problematic nature of “national histories” and allows us to ask from whose perspective such stories originate. As a monolithic telling of the story of a multitude of peoples who only recently even imagined themselves as belonging to the constructed identity of a country, national stories and histories are easily called into question.

In reflecting on a life of exile in “The Mind of Winter,” Edward Said tells us “all nationalisms have their founding fathers, their basic, quasi-religious texts, their rhetoric of belonging, their historical and geographical landmarks, their official enemies and heroes...in time, successful nationalisms arrogate truth exclusively to themselves and assign falsehood and inferiority to outsiders” (Said 51). Said compares nationalism and Ang 17

exile to Hegel’s dialectic of servant and master - opposites that inform and constitute each other. Each of the aspects of nationalism he mentions help compose a revered story for a country, but this comes at the cost of invalidating the story of the exile or the refugee. Said points out this unfair dynamic at work in order to scrutinize the prioritization of national history and events. The nationally-touted version of glorified figures and places is raised up at the expense of the truth of individuals, especially exiles like Rushdie. Rushdie’s validation of a remembered, fragmented and fictional past as superior to what is claimed as factual events in “history” gives us a lens through which we can view Midnight’s Children as a foundation-laying postcolonial text with new eyes.

Instead of taking national history as the center, the marginalized and exiled stories now become the focus. The result invites postcolonial subjects and their narratives to find meaning and value in memories of the past that can help shape and understand their present identity.

Reading Rushdie through his fragments also shows how geographically distant postcolonial subjects can inscribe a connection to their homeland even when that relationship is also complicated by time. This is part of the reason why Rushdie uses

“Imaginary Homelands” to make a case for the imperfect, fragmented story as just as valuable as national “history” or well-known facts. Instead of revising inaccurate details on bus routes or nationally significant occurrences in Midnight’s Children, Rushdie decides he prefers “memory’s truth” (Rushdie 25) which he voices through his narrator and protagonist Saleem. Saleem himself embodies the fragment as his body is gradually Ang 18

disintegrating, and he constantly tells the reader “I’m racing the cracks” (Rushdie 310).

He feels the temporal pressures of his own story disappearing quickly and urges himself to complete the telling. The preference for memory’s truth in fragments is also apparent when Rushdie’s protagonist, Saleem, kills off his lifelong rival, Shiva, only to resurrect him with the truth two pages later. Saleem reasons,

I fell victim to the temptation of every autobiographer, to the illusion that since the

past exists only in one’s memories and the words which strive vainly to

encapsulate them, it is possible to create past events simply by saying they

occurred. My present fear put a gun into Roshanara Shetty’s hand; with the ghost

of Commander Sabarmati looking over my shoulder, I enabled her to bribe

coquette worm her way into his cell.. .in short, the memory of one of my earliest

crimes created the (fictitious) circumstances of my last. (Rushdie 510)

Saleem’s hate for Shiva is so strong that he succumbs to every writer’s temptation - revising history by recording a story different than “truth.” He fabricates Shiva’s death simply because he still lives in fear of this rival and is unable to change the past. What’s more interesting is that Rushdie as author could have chosen for Shiva to die in “truth,” but instead uses this moment to show both Saleem’s agency and unreliability as a writer and storyteller taking liberties with his past. Even though Saleem comes clean, he shows himself as a fragment once again, this time as only partially telling the truth. Derek

Walcott’s criticism on patrician and New World writers applies to Saleem. In “The Muse of History,” he claims, “for [these writers] history is fiction, subject to a fitful muse, Ang 19

memory” (Walcott 329). Walcott discusses new world poets who reject a traditional sense of history, and Rushdie does the same. He takes defining moments in the history of a nation and turns them on their head by intertwining his characters’ personal histories with those of well-known figures. He juxtaposes moments of utmost importance for the nation with those in the lives of Midnight’s Children’s characters to show that there are many untold stories and individual fragments that make up the story of his home.

Rushdie’s process of self-fashioning and remembrance of homeland happens through writing, and applying Jacques Derrida’s ideas in “Signature Event Context” illuminates this process further, for both postcolonial writers and readers of these texts.

Derrida sees words and language as completely tied to memories. He states, “the sign comes into being at the same time as imagination and memory, the moment it is necessitated by the absence of the object from present perception” (Derrida 6). Words are our way of negotiating the space between our memories and the absence of that which we are thinking. Words come into being as a way for us to signify, commit to memory and reminisce about the people, places and experiences of our past. This brings us to the relationship between writing and reading. Derrida claims,

one writes in order to communicate something to those who are absent. The

absence of the sender, of the receiver [destinateur], from the mark that he

abandons, and which cuts itself off from him and continues to produce effects

independently of his presence and of the present actuality of his intentions Ang 20

[vouloir-dire], indeed even after his death, his absence...belongs to the structure of

all writing - and I shall add further on, of all language in general... (Derrida 5)

Derrida examines communication to show that writing implies a presence and an absence between a sender and a receiver. Every piece of writing has an intended receiver, even if it is only the sender herself, and the absence of one’s home country is often at the root of the necessity for memory and imagination to fabricate both familiar and new ideas to recreate this place. Furthermore, writing or “the mark” continues to have effects beyond those intended by the writer and can even last beyond that writer’s lifetime. And just as the existence of the text can be shown as proof of or a signification of the life of the writer, death is also always already present in writing. Language implies both the presence and absence of readers and writers, and this relationship is somehow intimately tied to the relationship between life and death. This dynamic will come up again later in my discussion of Ilustrado, but for now, we can gather that this has many implications for the stories that tell the history of a nation.

According to Derrida’s description of writing, Saleem as a writer must have a reader. However, Saleem’s process has not just one reader, but many readers and many writers in response. The figure of the audience, the listening subject and the reader in

Midnight’s Children is embodied in the character Padma, but Saleem also leaves readers an invitation for both new interpretations and continuances of the postcolonial story. As he nears the end of his narrative, Saleem says, “every pickle-jar... contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand Ang 21

hope of the pickling of time! I, however, have pickled chapters'” (Rushdie 529). These

pickle jars with the same titles as Rushdie and Saleem’s chapters symbolize the

“chutnification” of their life story, the hybrid nature of truth, history, memory, doubt,

falsification and realization. Saleem is empowered by writing his own story and giving

these chapters the same titles as the ones on these jars. They are not just chapters of the

novel but chapters in his life, and probably in Rushdie’s as well. Saleem also reminds the

reader, “beside them, one jar stands empty” (Rushdie 530). This empty jar and the thirty

placed next to it create endless possibilities for the readers and writers to come as Saleem

embodies Derrida’s idea of the extended invitation for interaction between writers and

readers. Whether it is Rushdie or Saleem, and whether it is an invitation to consume,

read, or interpret the chutnified pickles or to take up the empty jar for ourselves and

create our own pickles containing “the feasibility of the chutnification of history,” these jars stand as a symbol for future readers and writers to take ownership of the novel as it

stands and to write and rewrite the stories that define them.

This move unleashes potential for a postcolonial writing and rewriting - a way of

writing back to the Empire as geographical details become different, history is changed,

and political figures are made into caricatures. Rushdie attributes this overly Active

quality of his writing to his distance from his country, and as he prefers these “Indias of the mind” (Rushdie 10). Rewriting India through Saleem, Rushdie finds his way back to his own India, his personal homeland. This connection to the past creates an imperfect yet powerful reflection and reclamation of history. Rushdie acknowledges “we remake the Ang 22

past to suit our present purposes, using memory as our tool. Saleem’s greatest desire is

for what he calls meaning.. .he sets out to write himself, in the hope that by doing so he

may achieve the significance that the events of his adulthood have drained from him”

(Rushdie 24). Writing in a fragmented way inspired by imperfect memory creates meaning for Rushdie and within the novel for Saleem. This poignant sentiment sheds

light on the meaning that is unearthed through both the author and the character’s writing processes. As writers and readers, they are able to work back through memories and writings towards an honest investment in cultural identity.

Rushdie tells us “redescribing a world is the necessary first step towards changing

it” (Rushdie 14). A common plight for the postcolonial subject is finding meaning - working to self-fashion identity in the world without the luxury of a complete or perfect connection to the past. Interruptions in history, whether they be genealogical, physical or psychological in nature occur widely throughout diverse postcolonial experiences. These interruptions create fragments of memory as well as ghosts of history and time. Rushdie honors these interruptions and imperfect connections that are a part of the postcolonial experience. This new postcolonial concept of memory values a new way of exploring truth in one’s homeland, and the story told in fragments is a theme that resonates within

Filipino American literature. Writing and reading become processes of agency through which a postcolonial subject can negotiate and fashion a cultural identity by excavating a fragmented but true connection to the past. I Ang 23

The first two segments of this chapter have concentrated on characteristics of postcolonial literature that remain useful for a discussion of postcolonial memory,

especially in consideration of Salman Rushdie’s glorification and prioritization of the

fragment within Midnight’s Children. Conversations regarding individual versus the nation or the fragment versus perfect records help us move away from the reverence given to colonially-fashioned nationhood in hopes of focusing on fragmented yet valuable versions of history. In a move to distinguish Philippine and Filipino American

literature and experiences from much of Asian American literature, I hope to draw comparisons between fragmented memories and ideas of home as Rushdie has described them and two Filipino American novels. We gain new understandings of Philippine and

Filipino American identity from these texts by placing them under a postcolonial gaze

inspired by Rushdie and his main character, Saleem.

Imperfect fragmentation is a fitting way to look at storytelling when we take up

Filipino American narratives. The understanding that no text can encapsulate 7,107

islands means that each narrative is incomplete in a way that is beneficial to forming many different aspects of the experiences of different peoples rather than an attempt to

create one unifying national story or history. Therefore, Rushdie’s ideas on fragmentation can begin to lay a new foundation for understanding stories of the Philippines, and provides a new way of examining two Filipino American texts: When The Elephants

Dance and Ilustrado. Ang 24

In When the Elephants Dance, Tess Uriza Holthe sets a frame tale near the end of

Japanese occupation in the Philippines, when a family houses their neighbors and friends in their basement as together they hope for General Mac Arthur’s return and await the end of the violence plaguing the country. Three young characters are the voices of the frame tale, but interspersed throughout their narration, many different characters, mostly of an older generation, interrupt the overarching narrative to have these elders recount stories spanning a number of diverse regions and time periods for the islands. Each vignette has a purpose within the larger frame tale and the events occurring at hand, and by the end of the novel, these individual stories have combined with the main story to also touch on each of the major colonial presences in the Philippines: Spain, Japan and the United

States. The novel is particularly fragmented in the way this compilation of personal experiences and communal struggles is presented. Though told in pieces, the story is cohesive, and the sum of its parts creates a heartening prism-like representation of the effects of colonization thus far in the Philippines.

Halfway through the novel, a daughter named Isabelle that has gone missing takes over narration to become the second of the three narrators of the frame tale. After losing her way, she is taken to serve as a comfort woman to Japanese soldiers. Traumatized yet determined to escape, she describes fleeing her captors and accidentally running into an area filled with landmines. As she freezes in place, a doe at the edge of the nearby forest approaches, and Isabelle hopelessly prays it will turn around to go the other way. Isabelle thinks, “My horror is complete when her gaze starts to wander from mine. I feel my Ang 25

scream lost somewhere above us, lost in the lightning and thunder. It mingles with the screams of a thousand women, a thousand mothers, and children, and husbands and fathers, and brothers. In a heartbeat the little doe goes bounding to the center of the mines” (Holthe 152). Much like Saleem’s experience and self-proclaimed role as the voice of the nation of India itself, Isabelle here joins the horror and pain she is feeling to that of her countrywomen and countrymen, as well as the environment itself. She joins her scream with the thousands who are also screaming for their lives as they mourn the loss of whole villages of people now desolate and deserted. The symbolism of this passage shows Isabelle searching for a voice and only being able to find it as part of an entire nation enduring war together.

The ecological undertones of the passage also show her pain resonating with the plight of the land and country as an innocent and unknowing doe from the forest is the one to set off the chain reaction of land mines implanted in the earth. The explosion ravages the area and is unfortunately triggered by an unknowing agent of the environment itself, doomed to destruction because of the intervention of military forces in the area. The sound of Isabelle losing her scream could almost be likened to the subaltemity of nature, as her voice is “lost in the lightning and thunder.” With no listening subject for her scream, the doe’s inability to listen to her, and nature’s inability to voice the oppressive violence going on around her, Isabelle at this moment is lost in the complicated relationship between self, community, nation and environment as a whole. Ang 26

This segment’s switch in narration from Alejandro to his sister, Isabelle, enables the reader to see where she has been and what she has gone through for the duration of the novel as the group has searched for her. This shift from one fragmented story to another creates individual but cohesive pieces within the narrative structure. The frame tale of When the Elephants Dance moves the narration from Alejandro to Isabelle to a guerilla leader, Domingo, and in between these shifts, older characters tell stories of an earlier time under a different kind of rule. Constantly switching the focalization and narration allows us to understand the unique ways each character is struggling to overcome the hardship of war, and it illustrates the elasticity of time. The stories move us from present to past and back again quickly as certain anecdotes are shared with the intention of imparting lessons on the younger characters who serve as the main narrators of the novel and are of the generation that will decide the future of the nation. These shorter stories are also plotted on a map at the beginning of the novel, and they span many different geographical regions and provinces in the Philippines. The stories cover different times and places for the country to represent much more of a nationwide experience than just one narrator would be able to convey. Instead of these glimpses into each character’s history being distracting or an obstacle to connecting with the overall flow of the story, the result is the opposite. The spectrum of experiences and beliefs present in each of the anecdotes and in the frame tale as a whole come together to showcase how many voices and experiences make up just one family in a diverse nation being tom apart. Their piecemeal experiences and fragmented stories create a complex Ang 27

version of what was happening in the Philippines at the end of World War II on an individual and a communal level. It also shows how these events were related to colonial experiences that had already passed but remained deeply-embedded in the memories of the Philippines, and it foreshadows the troubling road to rebuilding the nation after war.

Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado also uses its form and structure to reflect postcolonial fragmentation, but in a completely different way. The novel’s focalizer is Miguel Syjuco

(a name shared with the author), an aspiring writer who is investigating the sudden death and missing manuscript of a Filipino professor and writer, Miguel’s mentor, Crispin

Salvador. The tale is told through Miguel’s narration, but not through one, singular voice.

The fragmentation in this novel is psychological in nature as the text is made up of both published and personal writings of the two different characters - Crispin and his protege,

Miguel3 - academics who have many shared experiences and took similar paths as

Filipino immigrants to America. Their individual journeys back to their homeland are fraught with confusion and complications, and their past, present and future bleed together through the characters’ combined written works: quotes from novels, short stories, journal entries, works-in-progress, interview transcripts and blog entries written about them all combine with traditional first-person narration to create the disjointed and anachronistic telling of this evocative novel. Said reminds us, “because both [nationalism and exile] include everything from the most collective of collective sentiments to the most private of private emotions, there is no language adequate for both, and certainly there is nothing about nationalism’s public and all-inclusive ambitions that touches the Ang 28

truth of the exile’s predicament” (Said 51). This is evidently the case for Ilustrado as the text is very much about two individual, personal relationships with the Philippines as a home country, yet a new language needs to be formed through both private and public writings in order to tell the story. The format is unorthodox but necessary in order for

Syjuco to encapsulate the complicated, messy, triangulated relationship between Miguel,

Crispin and the Philippines as their home.

Ilustrado echoes the innate desire of postcolonial subjects to capture the nature of home, and Miguel as narrator presents his imperfections from the outset. His recollection and retelling of experiences is like Saleem’s - hard to decipher with moments of skepticism on the part of the reader. The endeavor to interpret a postcolonial subject’s fragmented version of history is invariably a messy one. While on his flight to the Philippines, Miguel returns to a moment a few pages back and confesses that an interaction he had with the passenger sitting next to him on the flight to Manila was his own fabrication. “In a way, I wrote that part for him. He became more than the guy beside me with annoying manners. What I said that he said to me, I could see that in him.

But no, I didn’t talk to him. When he tried to strike up a conversation, I closed my eyes and pretended to be dreaming. From this point on, I should promise to tell the truth”

(Syjuco 48). Just like Saleem, Miguel takes liberties with the factual events of the story.

This bit of supposedly genuine storytelling gives us a glimpse into Miguel’s character as a writer, and is a clue for the unreliability of the narrator, and even the narrative itself. As he describes the stranger sitting next to him on the plane, a caricature is presented instead Ang 29

of the character, and the protagonist’s words are shown to be a refraction of the true story happening underneath the events the reader is given. What actually occurs is Miguel feigning sleep, and what he dreams up is the fictive exchange with the stranger that he initially gives us. He creates a backstory and a demeanor for the person sitting next to him to lay the shaky groundwork of the novel’s events and position himself in the role of creative director of the factual events that will ensue.

This encounter on his flight back to the Philippines foreshadows the obstacles present for the writer attempting to revisit and describe a homeland. Even more difficult is the negotiation of one writer’s idea of home with that of many other writers who often feel different things about the same place. When Miguel encounters the old guard of

Filipino literary figures and well-known authors at an event in the Philippines, one of them warns him about the task of writing about your country, saying, “our heartache for home is so profound we can’t get over it, even when we’re home and never left. Our imaginations grow moss” (Syjuco 220). Miguel returns to the Philippines to find that even the authors who have chosen or been forced to stay have a nostalgic yearning for the past. Writing is their way of striving towards a version of the place they see in front of them, changed forever by the effects of colonization. Their attempts to remember leave them stuck in the past, and time wears on their minds as the complicated metaphor of moss symbolizes an unenviable life of stunted growth and a lack of vitality. Memory is a way of reaching for the homeland left behind, whether the distance is physical or temporal. Ang 30

These Filipino American novels share a theme of fragmentation, as each story told in pieces is valued as a more accurate interpretation of a national experience than attempting to recreate a perfectly linear telling of events or wholly encapsulate a moment in national history. However, employing the glorification of the fragment is only one strategy to understand Filipino American narratives as postcolonial literature. Rushdie’s ideas shed light on the value of these two novels as their structure and plot reflect the fragmented nature of Philippine culture and history. Rushdie is able to equalize the relationship between the individual’s personal truths and the nationally upheld history of events, but a focus on the fragment is potentially problematic as well. Discussing individual stories as fragments still calls attention to the existence of an all-encompassing or all-knowing whole, whether it’s a truer national history or the complete telling of the individual’s experiences. Also, while a shift in focus from the nation to the individual fragment has usefulness for empowering each person’s struggles, this shift creates yet another center to the system of individual and national narratives. Spivak warns me against some of these thoughts, saying “when you invoke the decentered subject, you make small compromises every day and you allow the systems to remain intact. Acting in the name of the decentered subject is like saying ‘this is my subject position’; it’s the same category of mistake” (Spivak 75). Therefore, my interest from this point on lies in the collapse of the dichotomy of nation versus individual with a watchful eye on the changing systems to which my analysis subscribes. Seemingly opposite forces are shown Ang 31

to be the same, especially in the two novels I have taken up. Ilustrado ends with a confusing and thought-provoking twist: after Miguel’s trip back to the Philippines to find

Crispin’s manuscript and long-lost daughter proves fruitless, the epilogue reveals an alternate scenario through the voice of Crispin Salvador, the professor thought to have perished. He describes the aftermath of Miguel’s death, turning the scenario on its head, and the many similarities between the two characters become one in the same story, forcing the reader to question what actually transpired.

In When the Elephants Dance, a particularly haunting story of twin sisters growing up in the Philippines helps to showcase the many fragments of a narrative and the orphanhood that often characterizes postcolonial conditions, but something larger is at work. The twin girls are only twins the moment the story is introduced, and one of them dies to later be replaced by a half-Russian, half-Filipina girl of the same age. Symbols of presence and absence as well as life and death recur in these stories to show substitution after substitution taking place, much like the individual for the nation and vice versa. This pendulum of shifting focus from one piece to a whole is necessary when discussing the impact of nationhood on individual people, but my analysis in the chapters to come will take up this system of ever-vacillating substitutions to question whether there is a way out of this back and forth process or whether such thought is always fated to be locked in the questionable centers of national history or fragmented personal memory.

The term “postcolonial” is fraught with complications - competing definitions, overused binaries and the temptation of seeing the field and all it entails as a monolith. Ang 32

Why, then, should it be taken up to understand Filipino American literature? The strong resonance of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children with the longing for memory expressed in

Ilustrado and When the Elephants Dance show a commonality in the desires and imaginations of these writers, even if the underlying foundation that unites them and their characters is an inability to ever go back to the time and place that was once home. This violent break from the past is unique to the postcolonial experience. Rushdie gives the postcolonial subject consolation in the form of the importance of the fragment, and it draws Syjuco and Holthe’s works into the fold of postcolonial literature presented in pieces. The irrevocable breach that comes with postcolonial temporality and spatiality will continue to haunt us, and I aim to take up this haunting in productive ways. The following two chapters will look at the memories presented in Syjuco and Holthe’s novels respectively to connect these fictitious moments with a new understanding of history while at the same time always keeping a watchful eye on the lenses we use to bring them into focus. Ang 33

CHAPTER TWO

The Presence and Absence of Writing: Subaltern Manuscripts of Filipino Storytelling in

Ilustrado

When a line o f communication is established between a member o f subaltern groups and the circuits o f citizenship or institutionally, the subaltern has been inserted into the long road to hegemony. Unless we want to be romantic purists or primitivists about ‘preserving subalternity ’ - a contradiction in terms - this is absolutely to be desired. (It goes without saying that museumized or curricularized access to ethnic origin - another battle that must be fought - is not identical with preserving subalternity.) Remembering this allows us to take pride in our work without making missionary claims. (Spivak 310)

Perhaps there is no road as arduous as the subaltern’s “long road to hegemony” except one: the First World intellectual’s journey towards encountering and understanding the subaltern. In the first chapter, I outlined many of the complications that come with discussing postcolonial studies as a field and analyzing literary works with this specific lens. Among much of the debate surrounding definitions of the term “postcolonial,” a particularly useful piece of criticism from Anne McClintock notes that postcolonial studies has tended to overlook ideas of multiplicity within the field. In addition and as a result, there is a sense of complacency and a lack rigor in neglecting to question postcolonial studies as adhering only to certain time periods, concerning only the past, or understating the importance of decolonization that still needs to occur.

Yet there remains some usefulness for these theories as we analyze stories from and about a post-World War II Philippines. With an understanding of these concerns and while acknowledging the importance of avoiding a discussion of postcolonial literature or postcolonial studies as a monolithic construction, I explored Salman Rushdie’s use of Ang 34

the fragment throughout Midnight’s Children as a way of discussing his focus on individual stories and memories as woven into national histories. I extended his methodology to two Filipino American novels to show that both Ilustrado and When the

Elephants Dance are novels that utilize the fragment in form and content. However, understanding these novels requires more than just Rushdie’s definition of the fragment and the many useful ways the fragment has been articulated in postcolonial studies. The next two chapters will look at these novels individually to create new understandings of

Filipino American experience through memory and history while remaining aware of where they fit within postcolonial literature and the rigor required when using a deconstructionist lens.

I turn to Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado, because, like Midnight’s Children, it presents a story that could easily be read as a compilation of fragments, but the pervasive theme of death and substitutions of life, particularly at the beginning and the end of the novel illustrate an author-imposed incomprehensibility for both the characters and the reader. I liken this confusion and a symbolic manuscript in the text to ideas of the subaltern at work. The story presents many choices for a reader to sift through, taking up or dismissing the purposely intricate and confusing events as true or false, creating an agency for the audience to fashion their own ideas of what happened and who the characters eventually turn out to be. In an attempt to understand the complicated beginning and end of Ilustrado, this chapter will explore the structure and events of the novel in light of Derrida’s ideas in “Signature Event Context,” particularly the Ang 35

importance of context for writing. I will also discuss Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern

Speak?” to argue the importance of the subaltern as impossibly misunderstood and how this pertains to Ilustrado. The novel leaves room for many different constructions of meaning that reflect the diverse and varied ways of telling a story of the Philippines. I discuss subaltemity in the text to unearth the many layers of meaning that are present and emphasize how Syjuco attempts the impossible task of telling the story of a nation.

Ilustrado presents two characters of different generations who resemble each other in many ways. Crispin Salvador and Miguel Syjuco are Philippine-bom academics and writers that meet in New York at Columbia University, and their lives share many experiences, including a history of familial struggles, the pressure to be a successful, culturally representative Filipino storyteller, the choice to exile themselves from the

Philippines, and the need to write of the country they still consider home. Crispin is a professor whose decades of published writing have made him the voice of the

Philippines. The novel begins when his body is found in the Hudson River, and his protege and student, Miguel,3 takes it upon himself to reveal the events that led to

Crispin’s suicide. Miguel sets out to search for the missing manuscript Crispin had been working on and to hopefully uncover the reason why Crispin chose to end his life.

Crispin appears as a representation of the Philippines; he is a writer and voice for the nation, and although the novel begins with his suicide, he is present throughout Ilustrado

- excerpts from his many novels, short stories, interviews and autobiography are interspersed between the primary story told through Miguel’s narration and own Ang 36

writings, and most of Miguel’s memories revolve around interactions and conversations with Crispin. As Miguel journeys to the Philippines to try to find Crispin’s manuscript and some semblance of meaning in his suicide, he is also composing Crispin’s biography - a superfluous text considering Crispin already published an autobiography while he was alive. The largest parts of the novel are delivered through Miguel’s narration as he describes his trip to and around the Philippines and the memories this brings up, including his interactions with Crispin. Interspersed with these memories and

Crispin’s published writings is a mysterious italicized text that is focalized through

Miguel but outside of his narration. At times, the italicized text preemptively describes

Miguel’s thinking and how he will choose to write about what is currently happening in the novel; pages later these events are repeated, now appearing in Miguel’s characteristic, non-italicized font and narration, exactly as the italicized font described.

These mysterious sections act as a god-like omniscience outside Miguel’s consciousness. Only near the end of the novel is this mysterious voice revealed to be

Crispin. The twist becomes clear when the epilogue describes Crispin, alive and well, and he has just received the news that a student he hardly knew, Miguel, was found dead in the Pasig River.

Miguel never finds the manuscript Crispin had been writing. Two chapters before, Miguel describes his choice to wade into a flooded area of highway to try to bring two desperate, poverty-stricken children to safety. Miguel blacks out in the attempt, and the story shows him bringing the children to the authorities, but not in the Ang 37

font that has thus far been used to show his voice and narration, and not in the italicized font either, but a different font, used beforehand for excerpts of Crispin’s published works. The epilogue is where Crispin decides he will create a story for this student he did not know, and the novel begins where it ends, beckoning the reader to revisit the entire story with this new information in hand, wondering if the missing manuscript of

Ilustrado is the novel we have been reading the entire time. Roles are reversed and switched in Ilustrado - the dead and the living, the student and the teacher, the reader and the writer. Examining the way these roles are substituted for one another on multiple levels shows the versatility and many applications of these levels as a metaphor for the confusing and complicated nature of reading and understanding Philippine history and culture.

The act of writing is central to the events of Ilustrado, as is the recurring theme of death; the connection between these themes brings us to the absence that is necessarily characteristic of writing. Jacques Derrida wrote extensively about communication and language, specifically on the absence that is inherent in the structure of writing. In “Signature Event Context” Derrida states, “a writing that is not structurally readable - iterable - beyond the death of the addressee would not be writing. To be what it is, all writing must, therefore, be capable of functioning in the radical absence of every empirically determined receiver in general... the ‘death’ of the receiver inscribed in the structure of the mark” (Derrida 7). Death is an essential characteristic of writing itself.

Since writing implies absence, it also implies an endurance of the message despite the Ang 38

future or current death of either the writer or the reader. Furthermore, Derrida expands on what defines writing by commenting that it must continue to be readable “even when what is called the author of the writing no longer answers for what he has written, for what he seems to have signed, be it because of a temporary absence” or “because he is dead” (Derrida 8). In the case of Crispin, death - even suicide - ultimately becomes a temporary absence, and the same could be argued about Miguel, depending on where in the novel a reader chooses to pick up the story. Because it is always inherently present in writing, death functions as a useful tool for postcolonial writers like Syjuco.

In the previous chapter, I discussed why loss and rupture are common themes that resonate throughout postcolonial literature. As the histories of postcolonial subjects are irrevocably interrupted, a new reality is created, but this also creates a need to reconcile the new reality with stories of the past as well as ideas of what alternatively would have been. Working from an understanding of writing as always already incomplete can be more useful than piecing together fragment after fragment. Crispin’s death makes Miguel’s trip meaningfully possible as he reflects on the many losses he has experienced - a recent breakup, his parents’ death when he was young, a child he fathered and abandoned, and his strained, defunct relationship with the grandparents who raised him. This novel presents the many deaths that occur in the lives of two similar individuals of different generations, but by showing these losses, it shares the feelings of rupture that exist in other postcolonial narratives like Midnight’s Children.

Rushdie’s novel includes many literal and figurative holes to emphasize the lack felt by Ang 39

postcolonial subjects reckoning with the past. This is also illustrated with his protagonist

Saleem’s confusing and misleading parentage being traced throughout the novel; his switch at birth means his assumed father ends up being an adopted father, and the cycle continues as the connection between his own son and himself is not a biological one.

Ilustrado starts with an actual death, continues through Miguel’s memories of Crispin and the act of going through Crispin’s previous works, and is fueled by Miguel’s search for the missing manuscript. Grafted one on top of another, each of the many pieces of the novel speak to the loss and grief Miguel feels, and his feelings echo those of a broken, fragmented nation. His search for the manuscript is a sign of hope that he might be able to remediate some of his grief or fill these absences with a written work that can bring positive change to his home country.

Crispin hoped this manuscript would become his culminating work - a tell-all about the Philippines’ many sordid acts in all spheres of government. The possibility of finding the manuscript serves as a glorified goal and signifies Crispin’s simultaneous presence and absence in the novel. The possibility takes on a strange subaltemity - in part, because Crispin and his book are never fully discovered or understood. To expand on the connection between the manuscript and the “subaltern,” I offer a very rough explanation of the term. The word “subaltern” has a lineage that can be traced from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to the “Subaltern Studies” group - the writings of Ranajit Guha and most notably, Gayatri Spivak’s essay “Can the

Subaltern Speak?” Spivak asks this rhetorical title question throughout her essay and Ang 40

examines the conflation of two different definitions of “representation” as a way of critically examining Foucault and Deleuze’s problematic role in conserving “the West as

Subject” (Spivak 271):

According to Foucault and Deleuze, (in the First World, under the standardization

and regimentation of socialized capital, though they do not seem to recognize

this) the oppressed if given the chance (the problem of representation cannot be

bypassed here) and on the way to solidarity through alliance politics (a Marxist

thematics is at work here) can speak and know their conditions.. .on the other side

of the international division of labor from socialized capital, inside and outside

the circuit of the epistemic violence of imperialist law and education

supplementing an earlier economic text, can the subaltern speak? (Spivak 283)

The way Spivak lays out this term corresponds to a Third World subject of an entirely different episteme that remains outside the hegemony of the West. The subaltern can never “speak and know their conditions” (by our standards of what this would entail), and “when a line of communication is established between a member of subaltern groups and the circuits of citizenship or institutionality,” this typically signifies the subaltern’s movement from subaltemity into the hegemony. Spivak later clarifies this even further, saying, “simply by being postcolonial or the member of an ethnic minority, we are not ‘subaltern.’ That word is reserved for the sheer heterogeneity of decolonized space” (Spivak 310). Spivak’s intricate and indirect characterizations of the “subaltern” attempt to illustrate the way the term can and cannot be applied without explicitly saying Ang 41

that the Third World women she mentions in her examples are subalterns. Often she actually admits they are most certainly not subaltern individuals. However, these instances show that “subaltern” can be utilized - though not summed up by this utilization - to characterize the incommunicability of actions or inaction, particularly silence. The main feature of this word that we can hold on to, is that we, from our First

World episteme, and myself as an academic, a non-organic intellectual fully embedded in the hegemony, can never communicate with a similar Third World individual in a meaningful way without inserting them into the structures in which we live. Why, then, should we use this term in understanding Crispin’s manuscript?

After a long discussion of British abolition of the Hindu practice of widow sacrifice by sati,4 Spivak describes the suicide of Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri. Bhaduri was involved in the armed struggle for Indian independence, had been entrusted with a political assassination, and “unable to confront the task and yet aware of the practical need for trust, she killed herself’ (Spivak 307). Because Bhaduri waited for menstruation before hanging herself, Spivak can deduce that she wanted to dissuade anyone from thinking her act was caused by an illegitimate pregnancy. Yet to all who knew Bhaduri, “her act became absurd, a case of delirium rather than sanity” (Spivak

308), and thus, the intended message of her suicide goes unacknowledged - a subaltern act that “cannot be heard or read” (Spivak 308). When an individual commits suicide, it leaves an unreadable message for all who are left behind. The unrecognized, incommunicable message is inscribed in the body of the deceased. However, in the case Ang 42

of Crispin, there is another message besides the act of suicide itself Miguel resolves to find the manuscript and hopes the reason why Crispin would have committed suicide will come with it. For all intents and purposes, Miguel sees Crispin’s last work as a suicide note, though it will never be understood or found. Crispin’s inexplicable and unsolved suicide makes the manuscript subaltern within the confines novel.

Miguel believes the missing manuscript will permanently solidify Crispin’s status as the most accomplished writer and singular voice of the Philippines. Miguel obsesses over finding Crispin’s “twenty years of work - a glacial accretion of research and writing - unknotting and unraveling the generations-long ties of the Filipino elite to cronyism, illegal logging, gambling, kidnapping, corruption, along with their related component sins” (Syjuco 3). The book would have revealed the untold national history of the Philippines, a despicable underbelly of corruption that is acknowledged by all yet has persistently remained throughout generations of political leaders. Miguel reflects on the manuscript’s potential import as he remembers Crispin saying,

the reason for my long exile is so that I could be free to write TBA...Don’t you

think there are things that need to be finally said? I want to lift the veil that

conceals the evil. Expose them on the steps of the temple. Truly, all those

responsible. The pork-barrel trad-pols. The air-conditioned Forbes Park

aristocracy. The aspirational kleptocrats who forget their origins. The bishopricks

and their canting church. Even you and me... (Syjuco 3) Ang 43

The book, fittingly shortened to “TBA,” remains missing through the end of Ilustrado, and the reason for Crispin’s suicide eludes Miguel as well. When Miguel ends the story, he comes to terms with the fact that these remnants of Crispin are lost forever. Only then does the epilogue emerge to change the form and content of Ilustrado completely.

Crispin’s voice and his communication through writing presents itself in the epilogue, representing the moment when the subaltern speaks. The character whose unsolved suicide began the novel now becomes the final, main, authoritative voice. If the subaltern speaks, then this moment also mandatorily represents the process of the subaltern being inserted into the ongoing and established episteme of the story, as the text that was missing arguably emerges in a different form. However, this move also creates new subaltemity, and Miguel’s voice is now lost. The reader is left with a complete inability to understand Miguel, and now he is the one whose body found in the

Pasig River, inscribed with an incommunicable message. Crispin’s narration in the epilogue tells an alternative version of what “actually” happened as he receives news of

Miguel’s death. He then bums the manuscript he had been working on - presumably the equivalent in this new, alternative reality of The Bridges Ablaze - and commits to writing a novel that will make sense of this unknown, unfamiliar student’s death. He ends the epilogue with a time-stamped date that exactly matches the date of Miguel’s narration of Crispin’s death in Ilustrado's prologue. The prologue ends with Miguel, saying, “This book therefore shoulders the weighty onus of relocating a man’s lost life and explores the possible temptations that death will always present. The facts, Ang 44

shattered, are gathered, for your deliberation, like a broken mirror whose final piece has been forced into place” (Syjuco 15). The complex issues presented in Ilustrado go further and deeper than tyring to piece together a narrative in fragments; now, it is a matter of continually replacing one fragment for another to try to make sense of which compilation of events tells the “true” story of this work of fiction. Forced to reread the prologue again, the reader is unsure of whether this moment in the text was Miguel talking about The Bridges Ablaze, Crispin talking through a fictional Miguel about the backstory for the deceased student he has just created, or the real-life author, Syjuco, speaking through them both about Ilustrado as a whole. The reader’s confusion at

Ilustrado's climactic switch - making Miguel the one who committed suicide and

Crispin the shocked receiver of this news - makes the entirety of the novel that came before the epilogue into a confusing and never fully understandable story. Roles are reversed as the novel began with Miguel trying to find Crispin’s manuscript to understand his death, and now Crispin creates a new story to try to bring meaning to the death of Miguel, whom he neither knew nor understood.

The endeavor to decode the events and “true” version of events in Ilustrado turns maddening. A reader strives to understand what is intended to be the main, “real” story that Syjuco delivers with this novel. My aim has been to show that this complex narrative has at least three layers; Syjuco turns out to have written about Crispin who is writing the story that the fictive Miguel has sought to find. Which or what from these options is the story Syjuco has written for us to take away? Derrida’s ideas can help us Ang 45

here. He describes intention as an important characteristic of a sender of communication through writing, saying,

a written sign carries with it a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the

collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription. This breaking

force [force de rupture] is not an accidental predicate but the very structure of the

written text. In the case of a so-called ‘real’ context, what I have just asserted is

all too evident. This allegedly real context includes a certain ‘present’ of the

inscription, the presence of the writer to what he has written, the entire

environment and the horizon of his experience, and above all the intention, the

wanting-to-say-what-he-means, which animates his inscription at a given

moment. But the sign possesses the characteristic of being readable even if the

moment of its production is irrevocably lost and even if I do not know what its

alleged author-scriptor consciously intended to say at the moment he wrote it, i.e.

abandoned it to its essential drift. (Derrida 9)

The intention of this narrative at any given point - real or fictional - changes depending on the moment when Syjuco wrote the novel, when Crispin wrote Miguel’s story and when Miguel narrates his journey. Conscious intention is the determining center of context, and we can switch out this center of intention depending on any version of events and any reading of the novel that we choose. In this instance, the prologue and epilogue of the novel are undeniably the contexts that a reader can choose to take into account or ignore in order to determine her own unique amalgamation of the confusing Ang 46

chain of events in Ilustrado. The reader does not need to know what Syjuco, Crispin or

Miguel intended with any level or version of the writing, because writing in itself exists through its readability and understandability in light of or in spite of whichever context the reader chooses.

Yet it is also because of context that the question of authorial intention remains difficult to ignore. The novel describes the authority and empowerment of the two characters with its title, Ilustrado - the Spanish word for “enlightened one.” However, if the characters enjoy any kind of enlightenment, it is shown to be a broken and imperfect version of such a state. Crispin’s gives a new, supplemental meaning to this term in his autobiography when he says,

my friends and I in Europe had dubbed ourselves the New Ilustrados - the New

Enlightened, taking on the yoke of revolution as our fee for our material

advantages.. .Like them we had been ambassadors to and students of the outside

world. I arrived in Manila invigorated by my experiences. I had retraced the

paseos of General Luna, listened to echoes of the Ramblas where Lopez Jaena and

Rizal debated, and taken morning coffee in a sordid cafe beside which the

ilustrados had printed La Solidaridad. I hoped I had osmosed the greatness of

these men. (Syjuco 235)

In his own travels to Spain, Crispin feels the magnitude of being in the space where Jose

Rizal and Graciano Lopez Jaena first planted the seeds of revolution. The onus is on

Crispin to follow in the footsteps of the Philippines’ national heroes - writers - as they Ang 47

spread a message of hope and galvanized support for Philippine independence from colonial rule. However, this new generation is burdened with the privileges that come with a responsibility to use their newfound wealth and education for the betterment of their country and those who are not so fortunate. As Crispin’s younger double, Miguel is also described with the term early in the novel through Crispin’s italicized text.

And so this is where he is declared our protagonist...finding purpose in the

conceit of himself as a modern-day member of the ilustrados - a potentiality

owned by every expatriate today, a precedent granted by those first Enlightened

Ones of the late nineteenth century. Those young Filipino bodhisattvas had

returned home from abroad to dedicate their perfumed bodies, mellifluous

rhetoric, Latinate ideas, and tailored educations to the ultimate cause, Revolution.

Many dying of bullets, some of inextricable exile, others subsumed and mellowed

and then forgotten, more than a few later learning, with surprising facility, to live

with enforced compromise. (Syjuco 59)

If Crispin considered himself one of the “New Ilustrados,” then Miguel is of a generation of the new, new ilustrados, twice removed from the historical figures who were first given this title. Syjuco lays out the history of the ilustrados in a way that relates to Crispin and Miguel and points to the inherent problem with the grandiosity of the term. Despite the word’s translated meaning, the forefathers of Philippine independence had to compromise in order to be free of Spanish rule. Their sarcastic glorification in the text shows them as enlightened, but imperfect. Many of them were Ang 48

doomed to fail or die trying, and this mirrors Crispin and Miguel’s flawed identities as people, as exiles, as narrators, and as writers. These passages describe the hope many have had when they return home to the Philippines. The history of the country includes diaspora, generations of Filipinos who had to travel abroad for education, occupations, and opportunity. If and when the educated Filipino returns home, they may feel like

Crispin and Miguel - ready to make huge strides towards positive change for their country, expected to create a new revolution on behalf of those marginalized by poverty, but slowed by the insurmountable complications of what these tasks entail. Syjuco’s use of “ilustrado” shows the complete inability to capture the Filipino American experience while also illustrating how this experience is shared by Crispin and Miguel in intimate ways. The texts that are present in this novel - the manuscript of The Bridges Ablaze,

Crispin’s fictional Miguel navigating his past, and perhaps even Syjuco’s novel as a whole - are attempting the work of telling a national story while also pointing to its impossibility. No tell-all of the political corruption of the Philippines can single- handedly rectify the damage done by generations of irresponsible governance. No narrative can encapsulate the diverse, multi-faceted identity of thousands of islands or do justice to what was lost in the move to call them all one nation. Miguel’s acceptance at the end of the novel that he will never find The Bridges Ablaze brings about the end of his story and the beginning of a different one, and it perfectly encapsulates what is possible when the postcolonial subject acquires two things: the knowledge that a national story can never be told, and the unflinching commitment to attempting to tell it. Ang 49

The importance of the title - of the novel and of the people it describes - becomes important not because of a true sense of enlightenment, but as a hope to live up to the ongoing struggle that must be taken up by generation after generation. This is why

Syjuco tells the story through the voice of two characters who are cut from the same cloth but different in age. The blank page that awaits a new story and a new writer to change the landscape of the Philippines is one of the most frequent themes haunting

Miguel’s memories of the past. The house Miguel’s grandparents built for him included

“four lower levels... left undeveloped, reserved for when each of us grandchildren would start our own families...This, you see, was to be their dream house, a place where they could fade away and die satisfied...they named the house...Ourtopia” (Syjuco 109). The hopes Miguel’s grandparents had for this structure are embodied in the name they gave it. Their ability to die in peace is tied to a hope for the house that has not come to fruition, and Miguel feels the guilt of this failure. The unfulfilled potential of the levels that act as the structure’s foundation make the title “Ourtopia” as broken in meaning as the title of this novel.

The difference in generations and the passing along of a hope for change is also reflected in Miguel’s memories of his conversations with Crispin. Crispin tries to guide

Miguel’s writing by telling him, “of all those things we Pinoys try so hard to remember, what are those other things that we’ve tried successfully to forget? Figure that out and write about that.. .Learn to be completely honest. Then your work will transcend calendars and borders” (Syjuco 221). Crispin is acknowledging the Filipino writer’s Ang 50

need to speak to the impossibly difficult spatial and temporal horizons of Philippine history and the modern-day Filipino’s experiences. Yet, he invites Miguel to take up this task as his inheritance as a member of a new generation of writers, a new era of ilustrados, despite everything that problematic title entails. Crispin advises Miguel to

“write to explain the world to yourself and to others” (Syjuco 222). It is not as important for Miguel to live up to the standards Crispin’s peers placed on Crispin - for “the most visible Filipino writer in the world to be more authentically Filipino” (Syjuco 173) - as much as it is essential for him to find meaning in writing about the world as he sees it.

An “authentic” Filipino - and by extension, an “authentically” Filipino story - does not exist except as a subjective social construction. Crispin’s peers demanded something impossible from him, and Crispin relieves Miguel of a similar expectation. This extends to Ilustrado as a novel. If we take up Derrida’s definitions of writing as a two-way process between sender and receiver, then we must read this text in the same way that

Crispin is advising Miguel to write. Ilustrado is not asking its reader to uncover the story’s true sequence of events; it is asking the reader to discover which version of the story is truest for the reader herself. One version of this novel shows a student that

Crispin did not know at all and Crispin fabricating a relationship between them. Another version shows Miguel having such an intimate knowledge of Crispin’s works and life that he cannot rest until he finds an incommunicable message. And perhaps another version sees both of these stories as existing in the same world simultaneously. The Ang 51

substitutions and choices are left to the reader, and the result showcases the many aspects of Philippine and Filipino American experience, history and culture.

Derrida ends “Signature Event Context” by carrying his ideas on writing even further to characterize the simultaneous existence and non-existence of signatures.

Because any piece of writing can be stripped of its context to mean anything intended or not intended by the writer, we live in a world where a signature symbolizes “the absolute singularity of a signature-event and a signature-form: the pure reproducibility of a pure event,” (Derrida 20) despite the fact that such a thing cannot exist. Thus, he concludes by extending this characteristic to writing, which he says, “if there is any, perhaps communicates, but certainly does not exist” (Derrida 21). Derrida is showing us that consciousness and meaning, when stripped of their context or when unintended contexts are applied to them, can be switched out at our discretion. He proves that a piece of writing both exists and does not exist at the same time, and Ilustrado tells us the same through the absence of the TBA manuscript. This never-written book is a subaltern communication of the version of Crispin that committed suicide, and it will always be elusively out of reach. Yet, Miguel still strives to find it, and the Crispin of the epilogue creates a new version in response. Or perhaps it is the reverse, and the latter causes the former. The circularity of substitutions of meaning comes to a head when Miguel arrives at the place where he believes the manuscript will be. “Our protagonist opened the first box. It was empty. He opened the second. Empty. The third. Empty. He was not surprised or disappointed. That which was missing only outlined that which was not. Ang 52

Their emptiness contained the entirety of what had been lived, and the certainties of how

it ended, how it must end for each of us” (Syjuco 316). The three empty boxes fittingly

house the three levels of the novel delivered through the writings of its three authors -

Syjuco, Crispin and Miguel. Each of these individuals, fictional or real, prompt the

reader to be a writer as well, inscribing meaning in ruptured, incomplete memories and

making sense of the complex nature of events. Understanding what transpired within

Ilustrado is a confusing undertaking that requires peeling back many layers, and at times

it is impossible to remember or recount where a significant, story-influencing movement

originated. This process reflects the postcolonial subject’s endeavor to understand

national history in personal and intimate ways as fragmented and imperfect memory is tied to and rests within the equally complicated memory of the nation.

Crispin advises Miguel that part of understanding history is also describing the present. The idea that a truly authentic Filipino or Filipino American story does not and cannot exist is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the unfortunate fact that this novel, which was the 2008 recipient of the Man Asian Literary Prize has resonated with

international readers but still cannot be read in the Philippine language of Tagalog.

Syjuco was interviewed about the novel and also noted this unfortunate truth as reported by Elizabeth Yuan. Although the novel came out “in more than a dozen languages and nearly 20 countries, the dream of a deal in the main language of Tagalog remains elusive. ‘We’re not a reading nation. We’re very poor, so we can’t afford books,’ Syjuco said. In 2006, nearly 28 million people - or a third of the population - lived in poverty, Ang 53

according to the government” (Yuan). What does it mean that a novel attempts to describe a home country and its people, yet the real citizens of this nation cannot even attempt to share the experience of reading it? Truly the class of privileged ilustrados still exists today, and the work in front of them has no end in sight. If I have attempted to read Ilustrado with the analytical license of a postcolonial subject searching through the memories and voices of these characters for meaning, then many questions for its translatability - if not into Tagalog, then into realistic and practical implications - remain. Still, the novel creates a space in which to have this conversation and reflect on historical as well as present representations of Filipino American experience. It leaves the door open for our own ideas on what could and should occur - both within the confines of the Active world Syjuco has created and beyond it into the present-day life of the country about which he writes. Ang 54

CHAPTER THREE

Haunted by Slight Ghosts: An Examination of Colonial Constructions of Selfhood in

When the Elephants Dance

A postcolonial subject’s desire for an uninterrupted link to her native past can never be

satiated, but the flow of that desire is not easily halted. The problem of a perceived rupture in and from the past is characteristically postcolonial, and it makes memory a complicated aspect of understanding history. The first chapter traced the broad strokes of a longstanding discussion of postcolonial studies to determine its usefulness for Filipino

American literature, specifically Miguel Syjucho’s Ilustrado and Tess Uriza Holthe’s

When the Elephants Dance, with the help of Rushdie’s ideas on the fragment. I discussed the irretrievable nature of postcolonial memory and related Midnight’s Children to these narratives told in pieces. However, partly because of the implied need for a perfect

(w)hole, the fragment as exemplified by Rushdie’s literary and critical work remains problematic. The nature of its symbolism - while free from the need to flawlessly encapsulate historical “truth” - still implies a continual back and forth, a shift in focus that Rushdie illustrates with the scenario of either sitting in the back row of a movie theater or having your nose pressed against the screen - the collective or the fragment, over and over again, with neither being the entire story. Perhaps the key to working towards what Deepika Bahri describes as “commemorating subaltern histories” (Bahri

162) is not a search for some monolithic whole of the native experience nor the fragment embodied by the individual’s broken narrative, but rather allowing the past to haunt the Ang 55

present in useful ways. In this chapter, I turn to Tess Uriza Holthe’s When the Elephants

Dance to discuss when and why she inserts folklore into the telling of a significant historical event. The communal recollection of characters’ memories allows for new understandings of selfhood and creates a different, hybridized story that honors the

subaltern nature of the history of the Philippines.

I began my literary analysis with Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, because it illustrates the need for a response to and a reflection of the intricate nature of retrieving a connection to the past. In Native Intelligence, Bahri describes Midnight’s Children as a novel that takes up the impossible task of remembering a type of nationalist struggle that was always in pieces. This idea is one that translates well to Filipino American literature, because her words could easily characterize those affected by colonial occupation of the

Philippines.

Midnight’s Children may be a novel about memory but the fragmentation and

absence of memory is not only that of the departed immigrant but also that of a

new generation that is without memory precisely because it has not

commemorated its subaltern history and has nothing to remember of the

nationalist struggle.. .consider the problem to be one not only of the immigrant

searching for “lost time” (Imaginary Homelands 24) and one not so much of a

generation that is trying to remember but that of one calling to account those who

appear to have forgotten, those who ought to have created “the chain of tradition

which passes a happening on from generation to generation” (Benjamin, Ang 56

Illuminations 98). As an elaborate exercise in failed anamnesis, the narrative

addresses a collective generational amnesia as much (or as little) as it does the

problem of the diffused subject who is multiply and ambiguously conflicted or

that of the expatriate who cannot remember but in fragments. (Bahri 162-163)

Bahri claims that the significance of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children extends beyond the

individual and the nation to include an entire generation that “has not commemorated its

subaltern history,” and this commemoration is what Syjuco and Holthe make possible by creating characters who believe in the responsibility of telling and listening to a story. I have attempted to argue that this generation exists beyond the borders of India, and that this description applies to the many Filipinos and Filipino Americans who have the nearly impossible task of remembering a type of nationalist struggle that was always already in pieces. In the previous chapter, I looked at the unique connection between the individual, the nation, and history that exists in Ilustrado by focusing on the complexity and ambiguity of multiple stories being told in one novel and discussing the ways this necessitates a reader’s agency in the search for an account of what actually transpired.

The two-way process of writing and reading allows for many interpretations in many different contexts and an ambiguous but individualistic process of making sense of past events. This process is an attempt at confronting the impossible task of writing an all- encompassing national story. Bahri continues her analysis of Midnight’s Children, saying, Ang 57

to this generation, the story of the nation and of the nationalist struggle is available

not only as historical event and record but as fairy tale, myth, and fable. Theirs is a

vision not of the nation as an ideal whole but that of a legacy and inheritance of a

nation already divided, not only through external political boundaries but

increasingly pernicious internal ones that have marginalized certain narratives...

(Bahri 163).

By definition, “subaltern histories” can never truly be known, heard or recognized.

Therefore, the Filipino American novel that attempts to speak to the history of a nation needs to account for the fact that attempts to tell the “whole” story will ultimately fail.

Bahri understands the limitations of characterizing anything as “subaltern” when she invokes this term. She clarifies that she is not trying to “falsely aggrandize Rushdie’s contribution to the representation of the subaltern” and reminds us that “attempts to compensate [for a subaltern-sized hole in the fabric of the nation] will only emphasize its impossibility, as the text itself reveals, in its formalizing of the dilemma posed by history” (Bahri 164). Any conversation regarding the subaltern will necessitate a constant acknowledgement of and return to its defining characteristic - the inability to communicate with or understand anything or anyone characterized as such.5 However, when Bahri describes these histories as “subaltern,” she implies - by establishing the significance of Midnight’s Children as a useful and important commemoration - that the difficult work of excavating these histories is just as urgently necessary as it is entirely impossible. Ang 58

Literature and history are always already intertwined within postcolonial studies,

and Gayatri Spivak affirms this in A Critique o f Postcolonial Reason. In the chapter

labeled “History,” she observes that literature and the archives “seem complicit in that

they are both a crosshatching of condensations, a traffic in telescoped symbols, that can

only too easily be read as each other’s ‘repetition-with-a-displacement’” (Spivak 205).

Spivak uses her training as a literary critic to understand what she finds in the archives

concerning the Rani of Sirmur. She finds nothing conclusively substantial but must

analyze the “condensations” left behind which point to the real woman who existed. I

will attempt to read and analyze When the Elephants Dance in a similar way to show that

Holthe commemorates subaltern history by crossing many boundaries that have defined

Filipino understanding and culture from one generation to the next. The novel

emphasizes the tension that exists during a turbulent era in the history of the Philippines.

This is a tension that exists between generations, in the relationship between history and memory, and in reconciling folklore of the past with the situation of the present. She

shows that all of these components are intimately related for the Philippines, and she

establishes a necessary connection between different temporal and spatial dimensions in the process. The folklore and ghosts in the novel illustrate a sense of insufficient mourning for the disconnect between past and present while also allowing for new hope in the postcolonial subject’s search for an always-elusive link to the past.

Spivak’s process of understanding history through researching the Rani of Sirmur is a way of examining the archives that can be transferred to a reading of Filipino Ang 59

American literature and history. She explains what could be described as her own unique

search for the subaltern history of her country, specifically her search for the Rani of

Sirmur, “an earlier incarnation of the class-privileged woman from elsewhere, as the

agent/instrument of industrial capitalism’s nascent empire” (Spivak 201). Because the

“Raja of Sirmur, Karam Prakash, was deposed by the British,” the “Rani is established as

the immediate guardian of the minor king Fatteh Prakash, her son.. .it would seem that it

was necessary to hold Sirmur under a child guarded by a woman, because the

‘dismemberment of Sirmoor’ was in the cards” (Spivak 231). The Rani of Sirmur is an

example and a symbol of the well-placed woman used by the soldiers and administrators

of the East India Company. “This, then is why the Rani surfaces briefly, as an individual,

in the archives; because she is a king’s wife and a weaker vessel, on the chessboard of the

Great Game. We are not sure of her name. She is once referred to as Rani Gulani and once as Gulari” (Spivak 231). Not even the Rani’s true name is known as she merely

served as a malleable pawn to developing colonial forces in India. She emerges in the archives “only when she is needed in the space of imperial production” (Spivak 238).

Spivak’s interest in the Rani is in part fueled by the fact that shortly after her husband was apprehended, the Rani declared her intention to be a Sati4. However, the Rani was denied this request and urged to stay alive to take care of her son. The response of the

East India Company in justifying this decision was the first step in the eventual banning of sati altogether, a problematic process that Spivak later describes as “White men are saving brown women from brown men” (Spivak 296). As Spivak searches for any clues Ang 60

as to the characteristics, actions, life and identity of the Rani, she finds little to nothing.

She discovers that, in the end, the Rani “had died a natural death,” (Spivak 238)

signifying the Rani’s request was permanently denied. Her death “naturally,” though it

seems historically uneventful, actually marked a turning point - the historical beginning

of the death of sati as an accepted cultural and religious practice, the death of the native episteme that embraced this ritual as a sacred act rather than forced insanity.

Spivak began her search for the Rani of Sirmur in hopes of finding something true about this woman and to uncover a fuller understanding of who she was, despite having to rifle through archives that only exist through a legacy of colonization. She describes the desire she brought to the search by invoking LaCapra’s ideas on transference, and she begins with his words when she writes,

It is a useful critical fiction to believe that the texts of phenomena to be interpreted may answer one back and even be convincing enough to lead one to change one’s mind.” If the “past” is quite “other,” this “useful fiction” might track the mechanics of the construction of the self-consolidating other, the past as past present - a history that is in some sense a genealogy of the historian. What is marked is the site of desire.. .1 should have liked to establish a transferential relationship with the Rani of Sirmur. I pray instead to be haunted by her slight ghost, bypassing the arrogance of the cure. There is not much text in her name in the archives. And of course there is no pretense of continuity of cultural inscription between her soul and the mental theater of the archivists. To establish Ang 61

something like a simulacrum of continuity is that “epistemic violation” that I invoked in

my more turgid phase. (Spivak 207)

Spivak hopes to find a historical figure, some remainder of a real woman whose story

might have been waiting to be discovered and told, but she realizes that she was

searching for something that was never there. As she is left with a deeper understanding

of the disconnect between the Rani’s “soul and the mental theater of the archivists,”

Spivak must take a different approach to understanding the Rani. However, this lack of

information acts as a useful haunting instead, and it leads her to see the archives as a

narrative in which the Rani was simply used for her subject position to further the

controlling needs of imperial forces. Much like Ilustrado’’s Miguel who expected three boxes to contain the manuscript for The Bridges Ablaze, the emptiness puts the onus on a reader or writer to use this absence for understanding and creating a different type of

story. Her new technique is founded on a hope of being “haunted by her slight ghost” - a reminder that though there was a woman who existed, she is never available to Spivak through the archives in a simple or fully explanatory way.

Spivak notes that her relationship with the Rani was a transferential one - she

imagined that not only does she want to find some substantial, factual details about the

Rani, but that these details also want to be found. A transferential relationship from a psychological standpoint implies a cure, just as a conversation about the fragment still implies the whole. Her shift in desire towards being haunted in a lasting way acknowledges that there is no cure for the desire to encapsulate the past, yet her search Ang 62

for that connection and subsequent failing makes haunting a useful, necessary literary tool. Spivak works with the archives to show that these “historical” documents are

literatures to be interpreted, even if what should be analyzed is the complete absence of the multi-dimensional, “real” woman she seeks. In a similar way, When the Elephants

Dance inserts - or possibly reinserts - Philippine folklore into a particularly significant moment in Philippine history. This is Holthe’s attempt to reinterpret and reiterate stories that have not been commemorated but resonate with the struggle of the nation.

Spivak’s desire to establish a transferential relationship with the Rani is one problem that arises from trying to unequivocally understand the irretrievable past. The past seems permanently ruptured from the present, especially for postcolonial subjects, and it is with this problem in mind that I turn to When the Elephants Dance, an example of the complicated nature of combating generational anamnesis in the Philippines. The novel combines two particular types of stories that author Tess Uriza Holthe’s family told her - supernatural stories of Filipino folklore and their lived experiences during the

Japanese invasion of the Philippines. In her introductory note, Holthe describes the process of researching this time period as “opening a treasure trove of memories” (Holthe ix). What is the nature of returning to a memory of a story to create a new story altogether? Her novel allows for memory and history to create something newly meaningful together. The in-between nature of the truth of her family’s experiences and the fictive quality of knowing and trying to describe a happening that did not happen to her are reminiscent of Rushdie and other postcolonial “rememberings” that resonate Ang 63

strongly in the life of a writer but do not easily fit into national history as it stands. Holthe discusses the impetus for her writing this book when she says, “growing up I longed to find the kind of fictional stories of the Philippines that I was told by my father and lola,6 but the shelves in the libraries held only travel guides. This book is my humble contribution to the empty shelf that I always longed to fill” (Holthe x). When the

Elephants Dance is her way of starting to fill a gap - “a subaltern-sized hole,” perhaps - that existed for many Filipino Americans like Holthe. The heritage, history and memories of our family and ancestors is not easily accessible for a new generation of Filipinos in the Philippines and abroad. The figurative shelf bears the absence of both the real stories of brave Filipinos who served in the United States Armed Forces of the Far East in World

War II as well as the folklore many Filipinos and Filipino Americans grew up hearing - pushed aside as legends or superstition.

In When the Elephants Dance, many characters, creatures and apparitions appear that elude definition or understanding. The folklore of the novel is not just a compilation of fairy tales that Filipinos know well; they are matters of fact that many still believe to be true. Author Victor Villasenor confronts a similar issue in researching his novel, Rain o f Gold, saying,

I began to see that maybe one person’s reality was, indeed, another’s fantasy -

especially if their childhood perceptions of the world were so different... my

parents and relatives kept telling me how they’d grown up feeling so close to the

Almighty that they’d spoken to Him on a daily basis as one would speak to a Ang 64

friend and how, now and then, God had actually spoken back to them in the form

of miracles.. .This is a history of a people - a tribal heritage.. .of my Indian-

European culture as handed down to me.. .The people in this story are real. The

places are true. And the incidents did actually happen. (Villasenor xiii)

Villasenor verbalizes and confronts the same issue a reader grapples with when

understanding Filipino folklore. Many Filipino stories include supernatural creatures and

happenings, and often many events involve a multo - the Filipino word for “ghost.”

Ghosts in Filipino culture as well as in When the Elephants Dance point to the

subaltemity of the Philippines’ past in interesting ways. Ghosts await analysis as beings

that exist and do not exist at the same time, a deconstruction of the living body. They are

not fully dead nor fully alive, and their appearance is often an attempt at some kind of

communication, written into the appearance or apparition of their physical bodies as their

main communicative tool. They resemble the folklore of the Philippines as a whole; they present a very real part of our story, but a reader can’t be sure what to do with a ghost

when attempting a critical gaze. In “Writing, Representation, and Postcolonial Nostalgia”

Dennis Walder mentions ghosts as a symbol of memory, saying,

The past is a ghost that untimely walks the battlements of our minds, like Hamlet’s

father’s ghost, posing questions that continue to alarm and trouble. For, as Jacques

Lacan once said...Shakespeare’s play is concerned with ‘insufficient mourning’; it

marks the sense of inadequacy, even paralysis, we experience when we think about

the unjustly departed. (Walder 938) Ang 65

The concept of “insufficient mourning” is a particularly fruitful lens through which we can analyze the presence of ghosts, and it also reflects the need and desire to commemorate subaltern histories. If we combine these ideas with the inconclusive nature of Spivak’s new desire of being “haunted” by the Rani’s “slight ghost,” it illuminates the way ghosts and other folklore function throughout Holthe’s novel. Folklore can easily be cast off as fiction, and Holthe is haunted by the way these stories would be seen by the very real cultural condensations they have left on her mind and the minds of other

Filipino Americans. The result is a novel that crosses boundaries between personal memories, history of the land, folklore and ghosts - all set amidst Japan’s historic occupation of the Philippines. She crosses spatial and temporal horizons as the novel spans different generations and covers many different provinces, islands and regions of the Philippines. Throughout the frame tale and the vignettes that also create a hybrid form for the text, by tracing the folklore and the ghosts of the past, the reader discovers instances that illustrate the difficult act of communication that is necessary for negotiating memory and history.

Ghosts and the supernatural appear in multiple vignettes in When the Elephants

Dance and are mentioned metaphorically in the frame narratives as well. They exist as figures of the past and signal the inability to fully connect and communicate with that past. The novel describes one family’s struggle to evade the violence and suffering of

Japanese occupation of the Philippines in 1945, and the family is an extended one that includes neighbors and community members who have taken shelter in the Karangalan Ang 66

Family’s basement. The group can easily be divided into a younger generation and an older one, and the frame tale is told through the focalization of three young people - brother and sister Alejandro and Isabelle Karangalan, and Domingo Matapang, a guerilla fighter who has left his wife and children with the Karangalans in the city of Bulacan so he can lead his troops against Japanese forces in the mountains. Interrupting each of these three frame narratives are interspersed stories from the older generation of Filipinos.

These vignettes span different regions as well as different time periods, and therefore, different eras of Philippine colonization.

In Mang Pedro’s vignette, “Twilight People,” he describes the gifts he was given since birth - being able to see and communicate with ghosts as well as the beings that inhabited the forests - the duendes, “tiny elves.. .the size of a cup, some with wings on their wrists and ankles, some behind their ears,” (Holthe 257) and a tikbalang, a mystical half-human, half-horse creature that serves as a guide to Pedro’s abilities, always speaks in riddles, and has many spiritual powers.

My family was respected because of my special gifts. I was bom under a harvest

moon, with the birthing sack still covering me. If the sack is buried immediately

under a chosen place, revealed to the mother in her dreams, the infant will inherit

certain gifts. I had the gift of sight, of seeing those beings that others cannot. I

could see the twilight people. (Holthe 236)

This quote from the beginning of Pedro’s story immediately sets a tone for a time and a place that differs in belief and rituals from the frame tale’s metropolitan family and Ang 67

present-day 1945. This forces the reader to go back even further than the time period of the frame tale, and it sets a scene that is older than even the young characters of the novel; the vignette inhabits a time and a place that were closer to the wilder, native environment of the Philippines and alive with those connected to it. Pedro describes the supernatural beings of the forest as “twilight people,” a title that reflects both the time of day when he would see them and the transient nature of their mysterious appearances.

Pedro was bom as kin to these beings who attempt to guide him through the murky waters of daylight and darkness - literally and figuratively. The fact that the “chosen place” for his placenta was “revealed to the mother in her dreams” shows that he and his mother shared a deep connection with this place that transcends the subconscious from the time before Pedro was bom. A biological piece of Pedro was buried at this place; the birthing sack housed the child inside the womb, and now that temporary home becomes one with the land to which Pedro is native. It indicates a rich, material connection between him and the forest. This folk wisdom, belief and experience create a strong bond for Pedro to honor, and it comes with the gift of sight - seeing the twilight people and ghosts. Pedro acts as a mediator between the twilight people and the people of his village, and he maintains a close relationship with the land. To support his family, he collects salangana bird eggs desired for their medicinal properties, showing that he is able to live off the land and respects it for much of his life. However, the twilight people disappear from Pedro’s sight when he is misled into supporting an effort to persuade the villagers to sign over their land and clear the forest for new houses that the people who trusted Pedro Ang 68

ultimately could not afford. “I became wealthy, but my father lost his face in the village.

No one spoke to him, and he wasted away until he had a fatal stroke. Mama could not live with the shame, and she followed Father...Addie grew delirious, and three bumps appeared on her throat the size of apples.. .1 hugged my sister, but her body was cold as the wind” (Holthe 263). His own sister falls ill, and he lacks the connection to the land needed to ask for her healing. In persuading the villagers to sell their land, Pedro chooses the division of people from place, and thereby chooses the rupture of kin from kin. This has the unintended, fatal consequence of severing his ties to his family members. The death of many duendes in the act of deforestation mirrors the death of his parents and sister; they are caused by Pedro’s lack of communal, folk-centered vision despite being given the gift of sight.

The twilight of the story is as much a characteristic of the supernatural beings as it is a metaphor for the land’s transition from a forest overflowing with vitality into a gentrified neighborhood of houses. It also describes Pedro’s brief but passing gift of mental and spiritual illumination. Mang Pedro tells the story to urge the guerilla leader

Domingo to give up his fight and stay with the community of family and friends in the basement. “I had a family once too that loved me. But I made a mistake. I was lured away by other things. I lost everything that mattered. Not the visions, I could do without those, but my family, my sister, the village where I grew up, and the love of my people” (Holthe

235, 265). Pedro attempts to pass this lesson on from his generation to the next, and he recognizes the most valuable thing he lost was “the love of [his] people.” This includes Ang 69

his family, the villagers who respected and trusted him and the twilight people of the forest. “Twilight People” reflects Mang Pedro’s own guilt and feelings of nostalgia as he is still haunted by a rupture from his entire community including the supernatural creatures to whom he was related. This is evidenced in his presence with the Karangalan

Family in Bulacan, no longer residing on the island he was bom, Samar. Permanently separated from the community he took for granted and the thriving land that housed the creatures of the forest, he only has remnants of what was alive in the past, and they appear only to live on through his story. Twilight implies an in-between state and a transition, and haunting occurs both in the story and through the story as a whole to show the complicated traces of the relationship that once existed between the villagers and the land. It is a recollection of a moment in history when other people, creatures and the place itself were alive.

When Walder comments on uncelebrated and never-commemorated histories for postcolonial subjects, he mentions E.J. Hobsbawm’s term, “twilight zone” for the place between history and memory. Walder explains, “we turn to writers to represent that zone for us.. .a visual representation or image that becomes the only remaining, half­ remembered, trace of the point at which the past of the individual connects with the wider, collective pasts of family, society, and history” (Walder 936). Walder’s remarks are significant because he does not think writers can represent the point where individual pasts connect to collective histories, but that they can help us strive toward the remnants and indicators of where the two meet. Though it can be difficult to understand how an Ang 70

individual memory fits together within a national story, we can point to the connections

that bring the fragment and the whole together and say something about the tension that

exists in this transaction. This is what Holthe is doing as author of the novel and what

Mang Pedro is doing in recollecting the experiences of his youth. For a period of time, he

was able to navigate between two simultaneous and coexisting worlds he was intimately

related to, that of the villagers and that of the tikbalangs, duendes and ghosts. Now, he

lives in a different kind of twilight knowing the true nature of the land and spirits that are

no longer acknowledged. In Spivak’s search for the Rani, she notes,

the necessary yet contradictory assumption of an uninscribed earth that is the

condition of possibility of the worlding of a world generates the force to make the

‘native’ see himself as ‘other.’ The setting-to-work mode of deconstruction would,

I think, find the Heideggerian theory judged in the force of doing and undoing the

worlded world in the work (here of imperial settlement). The telling of this story

here is a tiny part of that interminable force field. (Spivak 212)

Mang Pedro can never return to the conditions that he was bom into or Samar as it was

alive in his youth. He was bom related to the land and to the twilight people. However, though they are labeled as “twilight people,” the word “people” does not sit well as

description for the duendes, tikbalangs and ghosts. The supernatural beings, the land

itself and the relationship Mang Pedro had with them are subaltern in the inability to

represent them in a coherent way except through personification. Thus, “Twilight

People” attempts this “undoing the worlded world in the work” by passing down a story Ang 71

about how the giving up, selling and developing of a home land - and that home’s creatures and kin - also necessarily includes giving up the useful haunting of the subaltern land and ghosts who are your kin. Mang Pedro’s story is the only remnant of a time and a place that is described as always already fleeting and never fully representable.

Mang Pedro is haunted by his past because of the responsibility he feels for the death of his family, the lost respect of his community, the rupture from his land and the grief he bears as a result. Another friend of the Karangalans, Aling Ana, tells a different story of the kin she once had - Janna, her biological twin, and Corazon, a sister that her mother adopted to take Janna’s place. So begins Aling Ana’s childhood tale, “Ghost

Children,” which starts with a death that sets in motion the first of many signifying substitutions. As a young girl, Ana’s twin, Janna, died of leukemia just as a monsoon descended upon them. Like Syjuco’s Ilustrado, the beginning of Ana’s story is marked by death, and it already shows us a loss, and a gap in the telling. The commencement of the story hinges on Janna, yet she is always already absent; Ana is a twin, but she and her sister exist as parts, one half of a never-fulfilled whole, within the structure of this vignette.

The symbolism within “Ghost Children” is everywhere - neatly laid out and over­ determined. The story and its characters place importance on neatly defined sets. After

Janna dies, Mama takes up mah-jongg - a tile game of sets in which players try to make a hand of pairs or triples, matching sets of suits and numbers that go together to form a Ang 72

perfect hand. The unique tile that does not match or correspond to any others has no use in the game, symbolizing the unstable nature of that without a matching set and resembling the lone twin, Ana. Without Janna, her identity is fractured. She is still a twin, but her double is gone. She is half of a whole despite being her own complete person at the same time. She recalls, “I had been forgotten. I should have been put to sleep each night like a treasure, with my favorite blanket tucked in on all sides. I should have been comforted and sung to sleep. Instead, I became a ghost child myself,” (Holthe 164) and later, “I no longer existed for my mother. Her heart could not handle my sister’s death. It was as if I had died with her. I was like a walking ghost. A rose thorn woven into her clothes, poking at her. A sore reminder of the child she lost” (Holthe 175). The “ghost children” of the title of Aling Ana’s story is clearly a reference to Janna who dies to start the vignette as well as Ana herself; from the time of Janna’s death, Ana was only a ghastly reminder of the special set of twins her parents once had. She goes unrecognized as a whole and complete being on her own.

When Mama adopts a newly orphaned half-Russian, half-Filipina girl the same age as Ana, Corazon acts as a surrogate for the deceased twin, Janna. The shift is a harsh one, and Ana feels a jarring difference in her already tenuous state of being as she is no longer Ana of “Ana and Janna,” but rather a plain name against the impressive “Corazon,

” which means “heart” in Tagalog. Her name implies her insertion into the family as a rough transplant for Mama’s broken heart. “She had fair skin that turned a glowing tan; mine would just turn a dull brown. She had doe eyes - ‘hazel,’ my aunts cooed; ‘the color Ang 73

of leaves,’ my mother bragged” (Holthe 171). Corazon’s name signifies Mama’s search for a renewed vitality of the set of twins, and this is reflected in the language Holthe uses to describe her appearance, from her sun-kissed glow to her doe-like eyes. The result of

Ana’s mother and aunts constructing the beauty of Corazon is Ana realizing herself as other, sharing none of the physical attributes of this newer, better “twin.” Ana goes from being half of two individuals whose identity is shared to the lesser of two girls who could not be more outwardly different. She feels “like a traitor to Janna’s memory” (Holthe

172) and she takes out this aggression and frustration on Corazon by tormenting her from the moment she arrives until they grow into adults. From the point of Corazon’s adoption onward, substitution after substitution takes place, leaving each prior set permanently changed. Corazon has just lost a mother, and Mama is hoping to take her place while filling the void of her daughter, Janna. Meanwhile, Ana feels lost and devalued, because since Janna’s death, Mama has only concentrated on retrieving a lost set of twins rather than taking care of the daughter she still has.

Though Ana wants no connection to her new sister, Corazon continues to attempt a sisterly relationship with Ana through the years. When Corazon falls ill during childbirth, Ana finally goes to visit her, and she finds “sets of letters tied in ribbons. Each stack had a year written on top. Twelve stacks, twelve years of letters, all addressed to me” (Holthe 199). The letters describe Corazon’s confusion at Ana’s inability to accept her as a sister, a momentary shift in the focalization from Ana to the young Corazon.

“Are you not longing for a sister again? Do you not want the company as I?... As you Ang 74

know, I enjoy making you angry. But not for reasons you think. I enjoy it because you make me feel as though I exist” (Holthe 200). Even though Ana attempted to sever any connection to Corazon through the years, her adopted sister continued to keep their relationship alive through writing. In the previous chapter, I discussed Derrida’s ideas from “Signature Event Context” regarding the two-way process of reading and writing.

Invoking his essay once again, Ana’s discovery shows Corazon’s continuous presence through writing and how this presence existed for Ana despite its inability to reach its intended receiver. Corazon dies shortly after this finding, and another ghost materializes in the text, adding to the list of ghost children: Janna, Ana, and now Corazon. Corazon’s spirit continually appears to Ana despite the reconciliation the two had while she was alive. Ana finally remembers that when Janna died, she learned “You must tell her,

‘Sister, I forgive you for any wrongs, and in turn, please forgive me if I have wronged you” (Holthe 166). Corazon’s ghost continues to visit Ana because Ana has not yet allowed herself to be forgiven, not because Ana has not accepted Corazon. The ghost approaches Ana, saying, Yakapin ko kita hanggang- ...I will embrace you until -

‘Forgive’” (Holthe 203). The ghost symbolizes a need to communicate something urgent, and the haunting is ultimately a necessary, positive process for Ana. “I sobbed, and as I walked to her image with opened arms, she vanished... I felt her all around me, as if her love were embracing me. I cried for all that we had lost. All of it not my fault and yet all my fault. ‘Yes, I forgive,’ she said like a small song, a fragrant whisper’” (Holthe 205).

This moment represents a climactic acceptance for Ana as she has the opportunity to Ang 75

recognize herself as a whole being in and of herself, and as a sister to someone she loved,

her identity as a twin is no longer inextricably intertwined with a dependence on another person. She understands the misconception her mother gave her in prioritizing the

importance of the set of twins rather than the girls as individual beings. The moment transcends boundaries as the ghost’s words are heard by Ana and taken as both dialogue and “small song,” and she needs multiple senses to receive Corazon’s “fragrant whisper.”

For most of her life, Corazon had been reaching out to her, yet Ana’s scarring experiences as a ghost child to her parents disallowed any emotional or familial link between the adopted sisters. Now, she reaches a point of enlightenment when she can honor both the connection she had to Corazon and her own responsibility to herself. Ana is able to embrace three useful hauntings in the text - Janna’s death which taught her to forgive, her own past as a ghost child who was neglected, and Corazon’s death which allowed her to accept and forgive her transgressions. Unfortunately it is only through

Corazon’s death and haunting that Ana is able to more fully understand their relationship and take responsibility for herself. By seeing Janna, Corazon and herself as ghosts in figurative and literal ways throughout her life, Ana is able to be more attentive to the complications that arise from a lack of defined selfhood and the problematic act of being made someone else’s perpetual other. Ana is at peace knowing her parents’ delusional construction of her - first as one half of a set of twins, and later as only her adopted sister’s other - led to her internalizing years of resentment. She is able to forgive herself and take responsibility for her cruel actions. Mang Pedro is haunted by the absence of Ang 76

hauntings, and it is a constant reminder of a previous importance for strength through

community and connection. Much like Mang Pedro, Ana still mourns the deaths of her

sisters, but Ana is able to use the hauntings of ghost children to make peace with the past

and embrace the situation she is presently in.

Ana must struggle to fashion her own identity as not just one piece of a two-part

subject but as a person unto herself who is capable of taking ownership of her actions.

She finds meaning not in being a fragment, but in rectifying her identity with that of the

sister that came into her life. Her haunting finds peace in acknowledging and

commemorating the relationship she had with Corazon, just as Mang Pedro learns to

treasure the bond between self and kin. Many of the characters of the novel die in the

process of struggling for freedom from Japanese occupation. Having had the shared

experience of fighting and surviving together, the remaining characters embody a new,

strengthened extended family, and they take refuge in Aling Ana’s home. However,

Domingo, whose family and closest comrades perished in the fight, is unable to stay there

for very long. Alejandro narrates this last section, saying, “Later, when I am riding the neighbor’s carabao, Domingo looks at me strangely, almost as if he is frowning, and I feel frightened with nothing to say” (Holthe 365). Domingo does not see Alejandro, but instead sees the boy soldier in his troop who he had vowed to and failed to protect. The ghosts of those he lost continues to haunt him, and he is unable to stay with the

Karangalan family and friends in this home. “I cannot look around without seeing their faces” (Holthe 366). Domingo’s departure at the end of the novel is a final displacement Ang 77

signaled by the ghost he sees in the living. Domingo’s post-traumatic stress haunts him as he is someone damaged by violence and loss, and the novel ends with him unable to find his way back to a home that no longer exists.

When the Elephants Dance begins in the voice of a child, Alejandro, who reiterates his father’s explanation for the nature of their current situation.

Papa explains the war like this: ‘When the elephants dance, the chickens must be

careful.’ The great beasts, as they circle one another, shaking the trees and

trumpeting loudly, are the Amerikanos and the Japanese as they fight. And our

Philippine Islands? We are the small chickens. I think of baby chicks I can hold in

the palm of my hand, flapping wings that are not yet grown, and I am frightened.

(Holthe 3)

There are many problematic colonial dynamics at work in this explanation. A child is given an understanding from his father that his people and his country are the weaker animals who simply need to stay out of the way of large colonial forces. The infantilization in this excerpt exists in the Philippines as the chickens to the “great beasts” of the other countries. Colonial forces like Spain, Japan or the United States are dominant and to be feared. Even Carlito as the parent of Alejandro and the story must admit to the feelings of helplessness and terror that often play an instrumental role constructed identities necessary to the institution of colonization. The construction of the Philippines as childlike resembles Aling Ana’s many complicated and confusing memories as a permanent other to someone foreign, and this infantilization is the unfounded birth of a Ang 78

desire to grow or know self and country as something completely different than the already existing culture, communities, relationships and systems that predate colonization. This is the double-edged sword - realizing the initial moments of nation formation have been framed around a constructed identity as other, and fighting rigorously to evade the trap this sets up - a desire to fully encapsulate a non-existent, fundamental history in response.

Through vignettes of memories recollected and addressed to other characters,

Holthe is able to draw attention to the complicated connections that exist between past and present, the dead and the living, and history and memory. Her use of folklore and ghosts show a haunting for her characters remembering their past, the characters listening to these stories, and the readers making sense of what these spirits and the transactional relationship of storytelling can mean. The hauntings point to the subaltern relationships, spirits, beliefs and histories of the Philippines - not as a whole, but as an archipelagic grouping of individual regions and provinces that need more than one type of haunting, focalization or form in the text. The novel requires the transcendence of spatial, temporal, physical and metaphysical boundaries in order to attempt telling the story of a nation.

Holthe’s reader is invited to trace the hauntings of a past generation to understand the time in which they lived in new ways. When Spivak reflects on the Rani of Sirmur, she says,

to be haunted is also to lay to rest any hope of ‘detecting the traces of [an]

uninterrupted narrative, in restoring to the surface of the text the repressed and Ang 79

buried reality of [a] fundamental history, [in which] the doctrine of a political

unconscious finds its function and its necessity,’ which was Frederic Jameson’s

project some years ago. If for us the assurance of transference gives way to the

possibility of a haunting, it is also true that for us the only figure of the

unconscious is that of a radical series of discontinuous interruptions. In a mere

miming of that figure, one might say that the epistemic story of imperialism is the

story of a series of interruptions, a repeated tearing of time that cannot be sutured.

(Spivak 208)

In the case of the Philippines, the “series of interruptions” which characterize imperialism can be seen in the many colonial presences and after-effects of wars and occupations.

However a pre-colonial Philippines was never one long, continuous etching of time, one monolithic story to be told or a “fundamental history” documenting the past. There is no possibility for regeneration or piecing back together the complicated history of the

Philippines, because such a thing could never exist. The “uninterrupted narrative” and the

“repressed and buried reality of fundamental history” are never to be found; yet we must continue to be haunted by the slight ghosts of the past. When the Elephants Dance speaks to the utility of a haunting like that of Spivak’s Rani, and it does so through the characters’ communal storytelling of a country’s past. The folklore and superstition of

Filipino culture that is often disregarded proves most useful for Holthe’s characters to tell their stories, which are not reflective of an entire nation but have implications for the nation as it existed in the past and how this affects their present. The insertion of folklore Ang 80

into an evocative telling of a well-known event in the Philippines’ history allows a reader to analyze the reflections this evokes for an older generation of characters and the significant moments that continue to haunt them in meaningful ways. These vignettes addressed to the younger characters of the text emphasize the need for a new generation to examine and analyze their understanding of a lesser-known history of the Philippines, traced not through factual representations but an analysis of the lack thereof. Her novel is an attempt at partial illumination of the state of a country during an era of postcolonial twilight, and it presents a new way of negotiating personal memories with national history. Through the characters’ communal efforts to understand individual pasts, When the Elephants Dance helps honor the subaltern voices and communities that much of

“history” has long since forgotten.

L Ang 81

CODA

A postcolonial subject coming to terms with the impossibility of a unifying national history will likely run up against what Spivak describes as “a repeated tearing of time that cannot be sutured” (Spivak 208). Deconstruction has proven useful for me as I analyze Filipino American literature as postcolonial, because when I see the impossibility of the national story, I also see possibility - an opportunity to read, write and discuss what is meaningfully true about culture, communities and the events of the past on an individual level and how this relates to other individuals. This is the lens through which I have been looking at Rushdie’s, Syjuco’s and Holthe’s novels. Derrida gives me the tools to see these works as two-way processes of reading and writing, and his explanation of writing as both not existing and always existing even beyond its sender’s intentions and into an eternal drift allowed me to discuss the necessary multiplicity of readings of

Ilustrado. Spivak’s writings on the subaltern have provided the theoretical framework for approaching the necessarily-unknowable characteristics of the past, and Bahri’s ideas on the significance of Midnight’s Children helped me put Rushdie’s novel in conversation with Filipino American novels. I began with Rushdie’s fragment, because it is his way of inscribing meaning in connections to the past and to the nation, as problematic as they may be. Just as Rushdie creates a character who needs to write his own story in order to tell the story of a nation (and vice-versa), Syjuco and Holthe also create writers whose memories serve as fertile ground for an analysis of the history of the Philippines. Ang 82

Syjuco and Holthe are storytellers who create storytellers, and this allows their readers to be storytellers as well. These authors write characters who write themselves, and the act of interpreting the many layers of stories within these novels enables new agency and opportunity for us to inscribe meaning in a shared, communal, national history that is multi-faceted, not monolithic. While reading Ilustrado and When the

Elephants Dance, readers must decide for themselves what has happened - either in a plot structure that subverts decoding or in negotiating Filipino folklore with history.

Ilustrado is a story about two writers who are writing each other, themselves and the

Philippines at the same time, and it is up to us to find where we fit amidst a confusing turn of events. When the Elephants Dance is a communal story told from one generation to another that allows ghosts and folklore to create necessary hauntings in a subaltern time and place. This thesis has sought to give Filipino American writing and reading agency through new understandings of past events. The commemoration of subaltern stories is a difficult and arduous undertaking, but it allows for many new voices and interpretations of history to emerge. Memory is a powerful remnant of the past, and it has figured strongly in my coming to terms with where these novels fit into Filipino or

Filipino American history. Memory is not simply a fragment of the national story; rather, it is a haunting reminder - of what once took place, of the impossibility of returning to these events, and of the hope that what transpired can have a lasting, creative, positive impact on the future. The rigorous examination of memory enables a new postcolonial generation’s inscription of meaning in Filipino American history. Ang 83

NOTES

1. I understand the many problems that arise from calling this category “Third World

nations,” though I default to it for lack of a better term and in accordance to its

pervasive use throughout the field of postcolonial studies. The complicated nature of

defining native peoples before colonization is just one of the issues present when

invoking the term “postcolonial.”

2. Deepika Bahri, “Coming to Terms with the ‘Postcolonial,’” p. 137

3. To avoid confusion, I refer to the author of Ilustrado as “Syjuco” and the character in

his novel as “Miguel.”

4. “The Hindu widow ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself upon

it. This is widow sacrifice. (The conventional transcription of the Sanskrit word for the

widow would be sati)” (Spivak 297).

5. For a definition and discussion of “subaltern,” see p. 33.

6. Tagalog for “grandmother.” Ang 84

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