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Searching for Manila: Personal and Political Journeys

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Searching for Manila: Personal and Political Journeys Searching for Manila: Personal and Political Journeys in an Asian Megacity Thomas Sykes Goldsmiths College, University of London PhD in Creative Writing May 2018 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Thomas Sykes, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 14/05/2018 2 Acknowledgments Any project as sizeable and wide-ranging as this one depends upon the help and kindness of an extraordinary number of people. To name them all here would be to double the length of this thesis. Thus, I offer my thanks to everyone in the UK, Philippines and other countries who have generously given me their time and counsel over the last six years. Special mentions must go to my primary supervisor Ardashir Vakil, who has offered me invaluably comprehensive advice on the writing up and editing of the creative element of the submission, and to Dr Tamar Steinitz, who assisted me in the same ways with the critical commentary. I must also thank my original secondary supervisor, Professor Bart Moore-Gilbert, who sadly passed away in the fourth year of my studies. May he rest in peace. Avie Olarte, Nina Somera, Joel Toledo, Douglas Candano and Taja Villanueva were vitally important to my field research because they shared with me their contacts, arranged interviews and suggested intriguing places to visit. Finally, I am grateful to the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries at the University of Portsmouth – where I teach – for sponsoring my research trips to the Philippines between 2016 and 2017, and for awarding me a sabbatical in late 2017 that allowed me to complete this thesis. 3 Abstract Searching for Manila: Personal and Political Journeys in an Asian Megacity is an autobiographical travelogue based on a period I spent living and working in Manila, the Philippines in 2009-10, and on two subsequent visits to the city. The book, which is slightly abridged for this submission, addresses themes both personal (such as the difficult processes of deciding what to do with my life, of falling in love and of becoming a surrogate father) and political (the struggles of marginalised communities against official oppression, the impact of neo-liberalism on various aspects of Philippine society and the ideological reasons why Filipinos selectively remember national traumas). I interweave my lived, empirical experiences of people and places with data researched from other Manila-focused texts both historical and contemporary: novels, memoirs, travel books, media reports, statistical surveys and historiographical analyses. The critical commentary element of my thesis begins with an analysis of what I term ‘Manilaism’, a trajectory of Anglo-American travel writing, literary journalism and realist fiction set in Manila dating from the mid-Victorian era to the twenty-first century, and goes on to argue that Searching for Manila contests the reactionary and ethnocentric assumptions of these texts by employing a variety of research methods, narrative strategies and linguistic devices. The result of these creative decisions has been to situate Searching for Manila as a ‘radical travelogue’; that is to say radical according to both the formal and political senses of the word: my mobilisation of parody, self-reflexivity and inter-textuality are complemented by my endeavours to evoke Manila through the lens of my leftist commitments to peace, social equality, economic justice, anti-racism and anti-imperialism. 4 Table of Contents Searching for Manila: Personal and Political Journeys in an Asian Megacity p. 8 Part 1 1. Pearl of the Orient 2. Goodies and Baddies 3. The Not-So-Far East 4. The Occidental Tourist 5. The West is the Best 6. The End 7. Fear and Moaning 8. Pickled in History 9. Mr Lucky Leg Part 2 1. You Will Never Leave This Place (summarised in this thesis) 2. Blood is Thinner (summarised) 3. The Three-Legged Dog (summarised) 4. End Times (summarised) 5. Saved by the Pub (summarised) 6. Monkeying Around 7. Waiting for Tommo 8. Get Out Now Part 3 1. How to Write? 5 2. International Relations 3. I’m Not Chuck Norris 4. The Comfort Woman 5. Deferred Disgust 6. Housing the Ego 7. Fascist Hospitality 8. Official Fibs 9. The Politics of Mummies 10. I Was Ferdy’s Double 11. Clumsy Driving 12. Please Let This Work Out Part 4 1. Panic at the Si-mall-ation 2. Rebel with a Smile 3. A People in Between 4. The Protocols of the Elders of China 5. Myths of the MacArthur Suite 6. Whitewashing the Wretched 7. Squatters’ Rights 8. Scary Numbers 9. Selective Memorials 10. We Need a Hero 11. Animal Avenue 12. The Punisher’s Paradise 13. The Rest-in-Peace Solution 6 14. The Theory and Practice of Love 15. With Fiona in Manila Post-script: The Donald Trump of the East Searching for Manila: Critical Commentary p. 250 Introduction Part 1 1. Defining Manilaism 2. Manilaist Significations: An Historical Overview Part 2 1. Searching for Manila as a Radical Travelogue 2. Genre Self-Reflexivity 3. Polyphonic Agendas 4. Textual Experimentation 5. Challenging Spatial Assumptions 6. Representing Others Conclusion Bibliography of Texts Cited in the Critical Commentary Bibliography of Texts Cited in the Creative Commentary Appendix: Samples of Articles Published by Thomas Sykes in Travel SEAN and other Magazines 7 Searching for Manila: Personal and Political Journeys in an Asian Megacity Part 1 Chapter 1. Pearl of the Orient The first I ever heard of Manila was from my grandad. I was six, he was sixty. I was surprised how warmly he spoke of the place. He wasn’t known for his warmth. ‘Took shore leave there with the navy. Back in ‘41. We were well looked after. Bloody modern as you like. Elevators that went whoosh. Also rather pretty. Palm trees, mangoes, that sort of thing.’ Grandad always spoke in these telegram-like sentences, as if giving orders. While he talked, he’d scratch at his cropped white hair, bold and bright as the target spots of the searchlights he used on HMS Formidable to bamboozle kamikazes. He showed me black and white pictures of Manila and told me how it had been beautified by the American architect Daniel Burnham. According to Burnham’s plans, the US colonial authorities widened the tangled streets into acacia-shaded boulevards, dredged its inner city estuaries and grew gardens between handsome villas with capiz (oyster shell) windows. Grandad claimed Manila was cleaner and greener than British cities of the time. For an officer of the Royal Navy, Manila’s pleasures were varied and affordable. Grandad frequented the Manila Hotel, another Burnham brainchild. Surrounded by its own custom-built park, this 500-room Art Deco spectacle had champagne suites, string quartets and celebrity guests. One evening, Grandad spotted the imposing bulk and moustache of Mr Ernest Hemingway holding hands with an attractive blonde woman, 8 but was too shy to approach them. Grandad’s memory was probably correct – later I found out that, in February 1941, Hemingway flew into Manila with his then wife Martha Gellhorn, the famous war correspondent, en route to Beijing to report on the Sino-Japanese War. Grandad showed me the silk suits he’d bought from Chinese-Filipino tailors in Intramuros, the walled city built in the late sixteenth century by the Spanish colonisers of the Philippines. He told of lazy afternoons at a café famed for its bibingka (rice cakes) that took hours to prepare, and of long nights on the azoteas of colonial bars filling his belly with ice-cold tuba (coconut wine) and his pipe with fine local tobacco. The Army and Navy Club in Luneta Park was the place to go for poker, pink gins and beautiful women. Grandad said he resisted the latter temptation. Not that the six-year-old me really understood such adult things. At the club on Sundays, you could play polo, golf and tennis with the British and American officers. To cool off in the evening, the members would swim in the translucent, indigo waters of Manila Bay, the flower-crested island of Corregidor gleaming in the distance. Although he was later to scowl at the multiculturalism that reshaped post-war Britain, Grandad marvelled at the diversity of pre-war Manila. He joked with the fast- talking Indian-Filipino traders descended from Sepoys who’d deserted during the British occupation in the 1760s. He was impressed with the erudite, Western-educated mestizos of mixed Spanish, Chinese and Malay descent. He bantered with Greek and German and French captains of ships packed with coffee, sugar and hemp bound for Europe, China and the US. After these nostalgic flights, there was always a point when the glee would slip from Grandad’s eyes. His sneer would expose brown, jagged teeth. ‘All went to shit in Manila,’ he’d growl. ‘Japs invaded after Pearl Harbor. Wrested it from the Yanks. Place got hairier than bugger’s carpets.’ Years later, I 9 discovered that ‘bugger’s carpets’ was 1940s slang for sideburns. ‘Made it a bloody shambles,’ Grandad would continue. ‘Damned ruthless the Japs, the lot of ‘em. Killed the men. Raped the women. Bloody animals.’ At this juncture, Grandad would snuff out the rest of his glass of Laphroaig and flop back in his armchair. Grandad didn’t elaborate on the Japanese invasion, but, aged nine, I learned more by listening to stories from other veterans. A great uncle who’d fled Hong Kong after it fell to the Japanese was detained in the Philippines on his way to Australia. He became one of the few British POWs amongst mostly Americans in the horrific New Bilibid Prison, Manila.
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