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criticism
Postcolonialism and
Filipino Poetics*
by J.
Neil C. Garcia
This paper is an abridged
version of a chapter from my forthcoming book, Postcolonialism
and Filipino Poetics, which itself comes out of my
recently completed dissertation in Creative Writing [1] at the UP Diliman. The book is
comprised of essays and critiques on poetry—the
former being personal reflections on themes, aspects,
occasions, influences and concerns of my poems over
the course of roughly ten years, the latter being a
critical interrogation, from the perspective of postcolonial
discourse, into the dominant poetic theories in the
Philippines today.
For this presentation,
I will attempt to synthesize my critiques of the poetics
written by the foremost commentators on Filipino poetries
in Tagalog and in English—namely, Virgilio S.
Almario and Gémino H. Abad. Here, I summarize their
individual “positions” on the question not
only of poetry but also of agency and identity. Proposing
a reconsideration of my earlier polemic against each,
I shall conclude by describing an alternative, postcolonial
“frame,” within which to revaluate their
respective projects.
First, a statement of the
obvious: the foremost critics of Filipino poetry are
themselves its producers and/or promoters.
Nonetheless,
that the most sustained work in this otherwise scholarly
area of Filipino poetic theory has not come from the
critics but from the writers to me reveals how routinary
this activity is: it seems, in this country, there’s
no division of labor between scholars and artists, so
much so that most of them happen to be both. Despite
its implications regarding the incestuous insularity
of the country’s literary community, still I find
this an inspiriting thought. To my mind, it indicates
the presence of a measure of reflexivity in our writers,
who may be seen to “reflect” on the intricacies
of the creative process, now and again.
In
engaging the writings of the foremost critic of Tagalog
poetry, the poet Virgilio S. Almario, as well as the
musings of his counterpart in Filipino poetry in English,
another poet, Gémino H. Abad, I have availed myself
in this study of a generous helping of theories of postcoloniality.
Examining these Filipino critics’ premises and
contentions in the dappled light of postcolonial discourse,
we discover that while there are clear divergences,
there are also, surprisingly enough, convergences between
them.
Unlike
Almario's study of twentieth-century Filipino (actually,
Tagalog) poetry, Abad's work
[2] has primarily been the anthologizing of what
he considers the most "important" poems of the country's
most "important" poets in English. Nonetheless, in his
introduction to the anthology's last volume, he articulates
a theory of Filipino poetry. Its intriguing thesis is
that Filipino poets have succeeded in Filipinizing,
in the course of a hundred years, the otherwise foreign
medium of English. To him, the three phases of Filipino
poetry in English—Romantic, Formalist and Post-structural—adumbrate
the contours of this history of Filipinization. Our
poets have accomplished this goal using the power of
their imagination, an intuitive faculty which has been
guided by a collective desire to return to the Filipino's
"spiritual homeland." For Abad, a country is how its
poets figure her, a nation is nothing if not "a work
of imagination."
By
emphasizing the poet's role not only in the imagining
of the nation but also in the decolonizing of English,
Abad's may be called an "expressive" theory of poetry,
in the main. He doesn't much talk about the role of
the reader, nor of the reading and writing contexts
of Filipino poetry in English, which constitute what
are otherwise known as the affective and referential
functions of literature.
Crucial
elements in his expressive theory are, first, the strangely
“Romantic” contention that a “natural”
language (like English, Tagalog, French, etc.) is merely
a tool or technique which a writer avails herself of,
and which she uses and isn’t used by; and second,
the reason poetry is able to “decolonize”
the language in which it is written is that it is, in
fact, another language altogether, whose evocative power
enables the writer to “transcend” the cultural
and historical ground in which she writes, for every
poem is, in the end, not in any natural language but
from it. And yet, despite downplaying the mimetic
function of poetry, Abad does emphasize the “Filipinoness”
in his selections. What’s significant is that,
in his articulation, this Filipinoness would seem to
lie not so much in a poem’s stylistic qualities
as in its representational content. Thus, his “transcendental”
tendencies notwithstanding, Abad views Filipino poetry
as having a very real, referential link to Filipino
social and historical realities.
On
the other hand, Almario’s work,
[3] spread out over several books, describes a
more dizzyingly plural (as he put it, masalimuot)
terrain. His project in his monumental study from 1984
is to attend to the tensions between traditional and
Americanized systems of poetic composition, which he
calls Balagtasismo and Modernismo, respectively.
The former is comprised of both indigenous and “naturalized”
elements from the Hispanic cultural legacy in the islands,
while the latter stands for all the ideologies of modernization
introduced into the country from the American period
onward. As a whole, we can see his preference for modernist
poetry, not the least because of all the verbally invigorating
innovations it has wrought on the otherwise stodgy and
“backward” tradition of Tagalog prosody
that had been codified by and as Balagtasismo.
In any case, despite their differences in terms of aesthetic
concerns, both ismos are, paradoxically enough,
equally committed to various projects of nationalist
liberation. (They champion the emergence and spread
of a national language, for example.)
It
must be clarified that such ideologies and influences
have largely been “indigenized” (isinakatutubo)
by the Filipino poet, who would seem to be, for Almario,
the person best equipped to undertake such a task. In
a later book, he assigns to the poet the task of rediscovering
what he alternately calls the “Filipino genius”
(henyong Filipino) and the "national self" (pambansang
kaakuhan). In fact, the method of poetic analysis
he endorses—a method he calls "Bagong Pormalismong
Filipino"—may be seen to lean toward the examination
and celebration of just this "genius/selfhood" In other
words: precisely because it is a politically and culturally
interested kind of formalism, this criticism's main
mission is to identify and ap/praise all the formal
choices which the Filipino poet makes in the process
of creating his Filipino poems. Here, we realize that,
just like Abad, Almario is pursuing an “expressive”
theory of poetry.
Absent
in Abad but present in Almario is a lengthy diatribe
against the old kind of “colonial” literary
criticism that uncritically employed Western theories
and concepts in the reading of local texts. Not surprisingly,
such criticism found these selfsame texts “wanting.”
Almario makes certain intriguing pronouncements in this
respect, and they all have to do with his belief in
the unassailable agency of the native in the face of
the colonial project. For Almario, the cross-cultural
“contact” that was imperialism may be described
as the invariable victory of the native in its struggle
(tunggalian) against the foreign.
In
his account of things, the colonized have never lost
the power to transform and indigenize the "colonial
imposition," to turn it relevant and responsive to the
native situation— needless to say to divest it
of its ideological baggage, and thereby make it "originally
Filipino." His own decision to "adapt" Western terminologies
and even, in his critiques of individual modernist poets,
philosophies like Existentialism, Romanticism and Marxism—in
seeming violation of his own declared polemic about
the need to abadon all colonial mentality—proceeds
from his unflinching confidence in his own ability to
nativize, to borrow what is useful, and to throw away
what isn't. Unfortunately, just exactly what cognitive,
linguistic and/or cultural mechanism makes this "native
opportunism" work remains unclear in his discourse.
Another
distinction in Almario’s work is its “programmatic”
quality. That all his critical engagements profess an
avowed agendum may be witnessed in his discussion of
Filipino national culture and the especially fraught
question of the national language.
To
Almario's mind, Filipino national culture is fed by
three sources, which he calls "constellations": the
Filipinized Hispanic legacy (chiefly Christianity and
the colonial system of feudalism); the Reform and Revolutionary
movements in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries; and finally, the oldest, most important and
least acknowledged source of all—the many indigenous
cultures, of whose invaluable wisdom the great majority
of Filipinos have yet to become aware. In a particular
critique, he dramatizes his preference for this third
source—this native "constellation" of nationalist
awareness or pambansang kamalayan—by lauding
the efforts of two young poets in "appropriating" images
and objects from various Philippine myths.
Missing
in his "conceptual galaxy" is Filipino culture during
and after the American conquest—a predictable
omission, come to think of it, since in all his books
he consistently displays a suspicious if not downright
hostile attitude toward Americanization's most enduring
legacy, the English language. It would seem that despite
his periodic acknowledgment of the "debt" Filipino Modernists
owe the Americanization process—for instance,
he surmises that it was precisely because of their colonial
education that a number of Filipino writers came to
realize the beauty and "greatness" of their own native
culture—Almario will not grant the possibility
that Filipino writers working in English may, in fact,
be "good" nationalists as well.
As
compared to Abad, Almario bears the extra burden of
“theorizing” not only poetry but also the
national language. Thus, while both of them traffic
in their own versions of nationalist polemics, Almario’s
critical oeuvre covers ground that Abad’s simply
cannot. Perhaps as an extension of his “inward-looking”
and “indigenizing” perspective on matters
of poetic “importation,” Almario defends
the idea of a linguistic “standard,” a selfconscious
“basis” in the otherwise “natural”
and unselfconscious evolution of the supposedly aborning
national language, the Philippine lingua franca
henceforth to be called "Filipino."
Unlike
the other players in the boisterous game of the pambansang
wika, Almario doesn't mind declaring that Filipino
ought to be based on Tagalog, especially as far as its
grammatical structures and orthographic principles are
concerned. On the other hand, he welcomes the prospect
of lexically "enriching" this Tagalog-based Filipino
by allowing it to assimilate the culturally unique words
(especially nouns and pronouns) of the "regional" languages.
Thus, Almario's belief in the indigenizing power of
the Filipino writer is an expression of his generally
conservative attitude toward cultural transformation
as a whole, both as it occurs in literature and in the
broader field of language. In the same way that he insists
contemporary poets "go native," despite their modernist
inclinations, Almario prescribes a fidelity to the traditional
grammatical and orthographic principles of Tagalog.
This prescriptiveness is apparent in his bellicose critiques
of Taglish, swardspeak, and all other hybridizing
registers of the native language. (The names he calls
the words such registers engender are all variations
on the “mongrel” theme.)
It
should be clear, then, that both Abad and Almario propose
comparable theories of agency that do not seem to recognize
its historically and culturally constituted and therefore
constrained “nature.” They also make very
similar assumptions regarding the essential difference,
or “gap,” between the native and the foreign,
the colonized and the colonizer, the powerless and the
powerful. Their idea of the poem as the logical and
extraordinary result of an author’s “formal”
decisions bespeaks a humanist attitude toward the unproblematic
knowability of the poetic object. They both believe
in the all-important role literature plays in national
liberation, and apotheosize the Filipino poet as the
exemplary kind of writer who can, in Almario’s
case, recover the indigenous self, and in Abad’s
somewhat “messianic” discourse, lead her
people back to their “spiritual homeland.”
If only because of their unshakeable faith in the Filipino
poet’s ability to successfully “negotiate”
the cultural content of language (among other amazing
feats), we may conclude that there appear to be clearly
personal and “expressivist” investments
being made in their otherwise critical and even “historiographic”
enterprises. This is only to be expected, after all,
since Abad and Almario are also poets.
On the other hand, it cannot
be denied that Almario's ambitious study of Tagalog
modernist poetry and Abad's survey of a century's worth
of Filipino poetry in English are primarily accomplishments
of a highly deliberate, analytic and critical sort.
Thus, as has been my own considered judgment in my critical
study, they must finally be treated as such. We must
remember that disavowing any theoretical affiliation
is itself a theory—"Romanticism" or "Post-Romanticism,"
we may for the most part call it—and even as this
supposedly "atheoretical" position simply seeks to celebrate
the artist's individual genius and sovereign imagination,
in the end it doesn't offer a personal theory of artistic
creativity alone. Romanticism is, despite its humanist
claims and the ease with which it seemingly lends itself
to the pleasurable use of such claims, also a critical
theory. [4] That is to say: it purveys a
certain method of "viewing" or "thinking about" literature—an
interpretive approach, thus. Nevertheless, the Romantic
nostalgia for lost origins is clearly at the heart of
both Abad's and Almario's theorizings, which purvey
comparable notions of an essential Filipino soul, selfhood,
etc. that are supposedly pre-social and beyond historical
determination. Admittedly, in this respect, it is Almario
who has, however, covered a lot more ground. Not only
does he purvey a poetics, he also offers a literary
history as well as the outlines of a national language
policy.
By
virtue of these orientations, Abad’s and Almario’s
theorizings evince similar “problems,” especially
in relation to postcolonial theory. As my study has
demonstrated, these involve questions of hybridity,
language, essentialism, universalism, and in Almario’s
“pro-Tagalog” case in particular, internal
colonialism. Insofar as both of them profess nationalist
beliefs, we might say that these problems have a lot
to do with the hegemonic discourse and practice of the
species of Filipino nationalism to which they subscribe,
and of which they probably are, within their own respective
“fields,” the most popular proponents.
Central
to all these is the question of “agency”;
that is, of exactly how colonized peoples are able to
respond and resist, given the overwhelming determinations
of colonial power. The Algerian revolutionary, Frantz
Fanon, believes that there is, in the “cultural
nationalist” phase, a teleological movement away
from false consciousness toward true consciousness that
“naturally” exists in any decolonizing project. [5]
From
being utterly and helplessly "enslaved," the native
subject of colonialism awakens from her slumber and
progressively becomes more and more aware, until she
is able to challenge the imperial dispensation, first
through culture, and then, finally, through armed revolution.
This Fanonian model isn't what Almario and Abad obviously
believe in—even as it partially accounts for them—for
while they assume a similar narrative of cultural national
"awakening" and discursive struggle against the foreign
aggressors, they do not and perhaps cannot imagine the
need for a material revolution to complement what to
them is probably a permanent period of cultural nationalism.
Like
Fanon, however, who built his model on a refunctioned
version of Enlightenment “humanism,” both
Abad and Almario forego problematizing the question
of agency in their poetics, positing the existence of
a native self, consciousness or imagination, that exists
apart from the epistemological structures that colonialism
set in place, and attributing to this self, as with
Fanon, the same humanist hubris of self-determination,
sovereignty, and a form of transcendental knowing. In
both their reflections, it is the poet who is the exemplary
Filipino, for it is she who can decolonize and indigenize
the foreign (in Abad’s case, English; in Almario’s
all the “modern” ideologies and practices
of Americanization, except for the pestiferous scourge
of English, which obviously needs to be expunged), as
well as recover the erstwhile lost “Filipino homeland,”
“country,” or “indigenous self.”
Precisely
because of their comparable obsessions with nationalist
questions of identity, what Abad's and Almario's poetics
will be similarly had put to answer to is the postcolonial
critique of essentialist politics, as well as the kind
of critique that the late Marxist critic, Petronilo
Bn. Daroy, as early as the 1960s, already valiantly
proposed: situating all issues of literary and cultural
"development" within the context of the Philippine nation-state's
dominant mode of production—which is to say, its
socioeconomic system.
[6] We might say that in the past century, the
class-oriented critique mounted by Daroy and other Filipino
Marxist critics against the purely “culturalist”
position of nationalists like Almario and Abad offers
what may well be one of the strongest and most challenging
theories of the Philippine postcolonial situation. In
the first place, in Western academe where it was first
recognized, postcolonialism represented and continues
to represent the return of “class” as an
index of analysis, [7] all questions concerning Europe’s former
and present colonies being inescapably linked, to the
Western critic’s mind, to the issue of political
and economic power, after all.
It
is in locations within the "non-West"—for instance,
the Philippines—that the specifying of class needs
to be visibilized inside the broader spectrum
of anticolonialist discourse, for in these places power
is so dispersed across multiple hierarchies and structures
that resistance against colonial domination cannot necessarily
be seen as leading to a liberation from all forms of
social depredation, inequality, and “poverties.”
Fanon may have wisely foreseen that new and oppressive
bourgeoisies will continue to hold sway in post-independence
nations, which is why he needed to qualify that in the
“natural evolution” of things a revolution
is unavoidable, despite or precisely because of the
intervening period of cultural nationalism. But like
many other Marxists of his time, he did not completely
realize how issues of identity and subject-positionality
other than class—namely, gender,
sexuality, ethnicity, religion, etc.—would end
up complicating the question of liberation, thereby
effectively confounding the "national problem" itself.
As I hope to have limned in this study, postcolonialism
and its polyvalent critiques and analyses represent
such a complication and "confounding." On a certain
level of argument, and especially in relation to the
imbricated questions of power and class, postcolonial
discourse may be seen as nothing if not an updating
or a "reworking" of Marxist ideals. [8]
Because
postcolonialism—despite the singular experience
of colonization to which it arose as an oppositional
response—isn't quite a unified movement across
the world, postcolonial accounts of agency are admittedly
split along the opposite lines of "determination" and
"freedom," as well. In recent years, however, on account
of postmodern revisionings of the central precepts of
Western hegemony, postcolonial theory has tended toward
a more dialectical and complicated rethinking of the
problem of resistance and agency. In my analyses of
Abad's and Almario's poetics, I invoked Homi K. Bhabha's
theory of hybridity, inasmuch as I feel it provides
one of the more cogent—not to mention, interesting—explanations
for the necessarily "agonistic" relationship between
colonizer and colonized in the necessarily ambivalent
colonial space. [9]
Bhabha
expatiates upon this ambivalence using a recognizably
Freudian vocabulary: both the colonizer and the colonized
deride and desire each other, and this is because their
respective identities are nothing if not fantasies constructed
against (and thus founded upon) an Otherness they secretly
crave and yet passionately disavow.
[10] Moreover, the mimicry by the latter of the
former may be seen as enactments of this ambivalence,
for the colonial subject ends up becoming an “approved,
revised Other” who embodies both a likeness and
an unlikeness, “a difference that is almost the
same, but not quite.” [11] Precisely for this reason,
colonial mimicry poses a menace to imperialist authority,
simply because at its very best it can only amount to
a mockery and caricaturizing of the colonial models.
Finally, all this leads Bhabha to conclude that "in
the very practice of domination the language of the
master becomes hybrid—neither the one thing nor
the other." [12]
As
I have argued in my critiques, what Bhabha is crucially
implying is that no colonial imposition ever maintains
its original integrity and no “imported”
concept ever stays the same in the context of a local
culture that always manages to syncretize, resignify,
renew and “transculturate” them. Thus,
colonial power isn’t anything like the monolithic
and totalizing mechanism that Edward Said’s Orientalism
assumes it to be, for it is always already mimicked
and menaced, hated and loved at the exact same moment
of its arrival in the “native” space.
[13] Obviously, as against the xenophobic and “reverse
ethnocentric” dogmatisms of Philippine nativist
discourse, Bhabha’s complications of the colonial
encounter and its aftermath are necessary if we wish
to come to even the remotest understanding of the situation
of our ambivalent, helplessly hybridized lives.
The
charm the notion of hybridity holds for me is that,
precisely, it offers a way of rereading what is otherwise
the dominant defeatist narrative of native supremacy
as far as the colonial encounter is concerned. I say
this is defeatist because, obviously, practically all
of Filipino culture cannot be called, short of lying
through one's teeth, native or indigenous anymore, and
if we are to follow the dictates of this form of "purist"
nationalism then we will have no choice but to reject
what is, to all intents and purposes, already, undeniably,
us. Almario's dismissive tirades against "colonial-minded
criticism," for instance, foreclose the possibility
that such criticism isn't hopelessly colonial at all,
but rather—as is typically the case in postcolonial
literatures—intimately informed by local forms
and thus, hybrid. We might say, because he chooses not
to benefit from such criticism, Almario ends up depriving
himself of a vast repository of local critical sapience.
In
a famous study,
[14] Isagani R. Cruz discovers that “Formalist”
and “New Critical” are misnomers when attributed
to even the early critics of Filipino poetry in English,
who apparently were performing other, extra-literary
tasks alongside what used to be seen as strictly formalist
analysis: for instance, myth-making and nationalist
polemicizing. And in an anthology of contemporary literary
criticism in English, I register a similar realization:
judging from the twenty-three essays I selected, it’s
clear that no matter the conceptual sophistication and
level of verbal difficulty, current literary criticism
in the Philippines invariably assumes a social value
indissociable from the literary act, thereby preserving,
in the critical enterprise, a surprisingly old-fashioned,
didactic character.
[15] This "feature" obviously derives from and
harkens back to earlier, more local traditions in literary
appreciation, and thus provides incontrovertible proof,
even in the otherwise "advanced" field of theory and
criticism, of a kind of "hybridity," too.
This
only goes to show that Almario’s supposedly brave
and “principled” perspective redounds, tragically,
to summarily surrendering what it seeks to defend and
emancipate. We see a comparable distrust or disdain
for hybridity, especially as concerns its linguistic
manifestations, between the poetics of Abad and Almario,
for they both assume “standards” for English
and Filipino (actually, Tagalog) respectively. The latter
of course articulated it in his columns for the now-defunct
Diario Filipino, which subsequently came out
in a book, Filipino ng mga Filipino, [16] while the former's linguistic
orthodoxy, his preference for the grammatically precise
and polished poetic language, is implied in his selections
for his anthologies. [17]
And
then, generally speaking, Almario’s theoretical
“quandary” has precisely been the question
of how to keep his nativist claims of cultural authenticity
and integrity alongside the screamingly obvious syncretism
that inheres even in his own subject-position, his own
erudition and tastes, needless to say in each and every
one of his “scholarly” utterances. In the
absence of a theory that can offer a way of liberating
the “colonially contaminated” from its dogmatic
rejection and negation, Almario’s puristic species
of discursive “nationalizing” is bound to
collapse under the weight of its own contradictions.
Proposing
that we look at our contemporary “transcultural”
situation through the lens of cultural hybridity doesn’t
mean that we need to overlook those spaces in our local
and national life that are obviously still being “governed”
by imperialist imperatives. Hybridity doesn’t
deny the reality of neocolonialism, even as it seeks
to clarify just how possibly it functions as a mode
of representation, what its discursive fate most likely
is, in the ambivalent context of non-Western cultures.
In such settings, as we have seen, Western dualistic
logic most likely gets refracted, modulated, deformed,
hybridized. The African philosopher, Kwame Anthony Appiah,
writing about contemporary art and literature in his
native Africa, acknowledges that “the postulation
of a unitary Africa over and against a monolithic West—the
binarism of Self and Other—is the last of the
shibboleths of the modernizers that we must learn to
live without.” [18] He is thus quite skeptical
of nativist attempts to retrieve any pure “essence”
of a fully indigenous African culture, for, as he says,
at this point in global history and owing precisely
to the global experience of imperialism “we are
already contaminated by each other.” It is the
theory of hybridity that can most capably address this
“contamination,” and rather than declare
it a contagion, refunctions it as one of the more effective
grounds of resistance, as a powerful form of postcolonial
“cure.” It is this theory that can most
convincingly explain the postcoloniality (that is to
say, oppositionality) of otherwise colonial literatures,
especially those written in the various languages of
colonization.
Another African critic,
Abdul JanMohamed, makes a related point. His work on
imperialism's "cultural logic" offers the following
analysis: the binaries of colonial discourse—Self-Other,
inside-outside, civilized-primitive, us-them, etc.—are
"Manichean polarities," and like all dualisms, they
are inherently unstable and available to deconstruction. [19] Thus, he proposes that critics locate those moments of anticolonial
rupture, those instances of subversion and dissidence
in the many contemporary literary texts coming from
the "Third World"— relative to the master narratives
of which they are "re-inscriptions," to which they all
transgressively "write back."
Needless to say, in order
to ascertain these critical “locations,”
the postcolonial critic must first be willing to accept
colonial hybridity and its necessarily “complicit”
character in those texts that allude to and seemingly
revel in the logics and enticements of the imperial
center. What’s interesting is that reckoning with
cultural hybridity or “impurity” seems to
prove difficult not just for our country’s grantedly
Romantic and nostalgic poets, but also for its “nationalist”
thinkers in general, as Caroline Sy Hau points out in
her wonderful and devastating analysis of the cultural
and linguistic “turns” in recent Philippine
scholarship. [20] In her critical survey, Hau examines the
studies written by the most influential Filipino historians
in the last three decades—Reynaldo C. Ileto, Vicente
L. Rafael and Zeus Salazar—all of whom proceed,
to her dismay and despite the scintillating promise
of their varied topics and fields of expertise, from
the same idealized "linguistic" premise concerning the
comparable Philippine national "communities" to which
they attend.
Hau suggests that Filipino
scholars begin rethinking the issue of language-and
of languages-in more dynamic and plural terms. She also
recommends that they be sensitive to the uses and limitations
of various linguistic approaches, as well as critical
of their own privileged position as "intellectuals."
Above all, they must complicate and particularize their
theories by focusing on the "structures of everyday
life." Turning their attention to these "micro-exercises
of power" entails giving up the search for an "authentic"
or "pure" Filipino culture, soul, self, etc.—a
foolish obsession, really, that misrepresents and misapprehends
Philippine history itself, whose vicissitudes and dynamics
cannot be completely appreciated using naively culturalist
or indeed "discursive" terms alone. Hau concludes that
in order to become truly relevant, Philippine scholarship
needs to take greater stock of the tremendous economic
and material forces that are constantly shaping and
reshaping Philippine realities. Given that Abad's and
Almario's poetic theories both intend a nationalist
polemics of "postcolonial liberation" exclusively through
literary and "culturalist" means, for this very reason
their respective theorizings may be said to be oblivious
to Hau's admonishing, which is the call to integrate
considerations of political economy in Philippine literary
theory and criticism.
As we have seen, Almario
also seems quite incapable of successfully accounting
for the realities of hybridity and “contamination,”
mainly because his nativist dogmatism has deprived him
of the ability to read ironically, that is to say, subversively.
Because it is the nature of subversion to undermine
“from within,” Almario, refusing as he contumaciously
does to “enter” the contaminated space of
colonial discourse (for instance, Filipino literatures
in English), simply cannot do it. This insular and
retardataire position comes in stark contrast
to that recently adopted by a companionable nationalist
thinker, Bienvenido Lumbera, who in a keynote lecture
at the first Iligan National Writers Workshop several
years back
[21] declared the need for national academe to
relax its orthodoxies concerning issues of cultural
identity and creative writing, and to allow and encourage
the innovations by young Filipino writers—including
those writing in English—so that an "authentically
Filipino voice" can finally be heard. What Lumbera would
seem to be saying is that it is through the subversiveness
of "new" or "young" (need we say, hybrid?) Philippine
literatures that a less defensively fearful and more
confident sense of "Filipinoness" can prosper. Like
many other postcolonial thinkers, he must have intuited
how, ironically, subversion rather than complete and
utter rejection from a purely native space or coign
of vantage is the only possible form of resistance,
for all anticolonial reactions are necessarily underwritten
by the terms laid down by the experience and reality
of colonialism itself. Because colonialism is the "constitutive
other" of postcolonialism, the postcolonial position
that fancies itself the most "native," may well be the
most colonially invested position of all.
On
the other hand, while occasionally speaking of the primacy
and prevalence of the indigenous “consciousness”
or “sensibility” in such poetic phraseologies
as “Filipino matter,” “the spiritual
homeland,” and “a native clearing,”
Abad’s notion of the Filipino imagination comes
very, very close to the liberal humanist, for he refuses
to recognize how it can be determined by the cultural
context in which it historically exists. The struggle
this imagination needs to mount against the essential
“emptiness of words” sounds very much like
a romantic or post-romantic jab at postmodernism’s
routinary voiding of language,
[22] rather than, perhaps, an anti-imperialist
critique of contemporary Western culture’s self-referential
epistemology. Admittedly, Abad hasn’t really expounded
on his ideas of subjectivity enough, and even offhand,
his poetics comes across as being not as nativistic
as Almario’s, whose mystical Filipino selfhood
regally rides on top of the “carabao” of
linguistic determinism. Nonetheless, Abad’s own
essentialist beliefs present themselves clearly in his
imputing of a singular “sense and sensibility”
to all Filipinos, poets or otherwise. Thus, the universalist
orientation is more “universal” in Abad,
who has absolutely no qualms quoting French, Spanish,
and other poets and literary commentators, believing,
as he must, that there is, at bottom, an undeniable
commonality in the poetic experience across the world.
This relative freedom to quote and traffic in global
avenues of knowledge and information is an upshot both
of humanism and of the new global reality of postmodernism,
which strikes me as a supremely ironic thing.
If only because it is within
postmodernism that the most radical dissections and
re-sections of the monstrous conceptual mother called
humanism initially took place, we may need to relate
it more fully to the postcolonial question. Postmodernism
and postcolonialism have often been confused with one
another. This is because they share certain common preoccupations:
the deconstruction of Western “master narratives”;
the inversion of binaries like center-margin, Self-Other,
inside-outside, etc.; the “turn to language”
and its rhetorical strategies, like irony and parody;
the sophisticated and dialectical analysis of power;
the “indeterminacy of textual meaning”;
the dismantling of the Self,
[23] among many others. And yet, postcolonialism
isn’t merely a political deployment of postmodernism,
for it is primarily a critique of the colonial enterprise,
an analysis of the various material and discursive effects
of colonization, a sustained theoretical challenge to
Western hegemony which has, of late, taken the form
of postmodernism, precisely.
Postcolonial discourse realizes
that a good part of the world isn’t leading a
postmodern but rather a postcolonial existence, and
that should postmodernism be seen as slowly becoming
globalized nowadays it is because the old colonial structures
of Eurocentrism remain stubbornly in place. In terms
of literary studies, postmodernism differs from postcolonialism
in that it encourages a return to the Canon (especially
the post-Romantic Canon), [24] even as its primary intention
for doing so is admittedly a polemical and critical
one. On the other hand, because postcolonial challenges
to the Western canon problematize the idea of canonicity—and
of literature, in general—for this very reason
they cannot, indeed may not, ever be confused with the
poststructuralist project of decentering meaning for
its own sake alone. As we have seen in the discussion
of postcolonial literatures written in englishes
across the world, there still are non-Western modalities
of meaning of which postmodernism hasn’t fully
taken cognizance, and that for this reason the wholesale
rejection of the search for meaning cannot be haphazardly
carried out by and in postcolonial theory.
The usefulness to postcolonial
discourse of postmodern decenterings of the subject
and of signification can be seen from the perspective
of what they say regarding the question of universality
and specificity. That is to say, in the mutually constitutive
terms of sameness and difference. Simon During explains
that postmodern thought has two interlocking “moments.” [25] The first recognizes and celebrates
difference, the second denies the possibility that difference
can ever be fully represented or known. What makes postmodernism
germane to the postcolonial project is that it “refuses
to turn the Other into the Same.” Meaning, postmodernism
opens up a space for alterities, including those which
postcolonial societies and “beings” represent.
On the other hand, postmodernism,
as a philosophical stance, is also informed by the “crisis
of representation” and the peculiarly postmodern
concern with meaning’s indeterminate nature, and
so it very quickly qualifies that there exists no way
for the Other to actually “speak of itself as
Other.” (Here Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s
caveat concerning the danger and foolhardiness of seeking
to make the subaltern speak serenely comes to mind.([26]) This corollary postmodern thought threatens
postcolonialism, which in this particular economy of
representation is precisely to be seen as an Other that
wishes to speak (for) itself.
The only way out I see from
this impasse is to qualify that while postcolonial theory
has obviously benefited from the postmodern challenge
to universalist humanism—quickly appropriating
the space it has cleared for all manner of lived and
indeed "suffered" difference in the world—it nonetheless
needs to insist that there are certain occasions when
postmodern assumptions that represent new forms of universalism
simply need to be challenged or at least "contextualized."
In the end, despite the obvious postfoundationalist
orientation to be found in my critiques of Abad's and
Almario's poetics, I need to acknowledge that the question
of identity and/or agency needs to be seen as one such
possible occasion of demurral. To the nationalist question
of identity I shall once again recur, for it is obviously
the one issue that demands the most careful and sustained
reconsideration in the whole of postcolonial discourse.
The tendency of postmodernist
criticism is to challenge and dismantle all essentialist
notions, precisely because they refuse to allow for
the recognition and proliferation of differences that
they conceptually subsume into a deluded and finally
inequitable “unity.” The “national
self” is one such notion, and indeed, in my critique
of Abad’s and Almario’s poetics I simply
needed to champion the “plurality and difference”
of the people whom history has come to call Filipinos,
in view of their overeager desire (Almario calls it
lunggati) to collapse, summarize, and reduce
to an abstraction what really aren’t just bloodless
ideas but actual persons and lives. But perhaps, at
this point of closure in my disquisition, it is only
appropriate that I modify this objection a bit, although
I certainly am not saying I am giving it up altogether:
as I have already indicated in relation to Spivak’s
concept of “strategic essentialism,” perhaps
I need to relax the postmodern/postcolonial grip on
the handle of the whip called difference for the moment,
and seriously admit that, in certain contexts, dwelling
and insisting on sameness can have its own felt usefulness.
In his essay dedicated to
N.V.M. Gonzalez, Resil B. Mojares decides that the ailing
body that is the Filipino nation is haunted by the possibilities
it has yet to become, and that its “soul”
needs to be rethought and revisioned by its artists
and thinkers. [27] He thus carries out a rather wondrous “nationalist
poetics of the soul,” which pursues the various
indigenous explanations for why the soul is lost or
leaves the body: because of “shock, seduction,
and sin.” Using his own soulful “national
allegory,” he reads these as the trauma, allure,
and depredations of colonialism, and true to the folk
belief, insists there is still a way to halt this process
of “soul loss” or “soul drift,”
and to “call the soul back.” Mojares then
argues that, using the Malay animist conception of the
spirit as a guide, we must think of the national soul
not as essence but as process, not as fixed but as ambulant,
and finally, not as singular but as multiple, and plural.
Mojares's proffered reimagination
of the Filipino soul—his poetics of the Alma
Filipina—bespeaks a wish to open up the notion
of national unity to the heterogeneity of cultural and
local communities, indeed to re-imagine the Filipino
nation itself so that it reflects less Mario Vargas
Llosa's view of the nation as being a "malign fantasy,"
[28] and illustrate the validity of Benedict Anderson’s
faith in “the goodness of nations.”
[29] Thus, we might say that even as he recognizes
the abuses that have been committed in the name of such
monolithic norms as the Filipino identity, Filipino
selfhood, etc., he nonetheless cannot completely turn
his back on the ideal of a community that the nation
luminously promises. Thus, in his own poetic way, he
argues for a strategic essentialism that can recuperate
all the lost objects, memories, lives, and indeed souls,
from the forgetfulness that is colonialism, back to
the healing space of the national present.
Of course, all this is easier
said than done, for Mojares’s mystical and soulful
poeticizing is itself haunted by that spectral and unspoken
truth: what he speaks of as the “national soul”
does not and cannot pre-exist the formation of the nation-state,
which discursively enforces it and constitutively imagines
and narrates it as its transcendental point of origin,
even when it is really the other way around. Borrowing
the insight of queer theorist Judith Butler on the performative
“nature” of gendered identity, [30] and rephrasing it for the
purposes of this discussion, we might say that the performance
of the Filipino identity retroactively produces the
effect of some true or abiding essence behind that identity,
when it is really the repetitive and ritualistic performance
of the Filipino norm that constitutes the Filipino self,
and that socially produces the performative effect Mojares
lyrically calls the Filipino soul.
So, it's not as though Mojares
can recover this soul from outside the discourse, facticity,
and "performative life" of Filipinos as they presently
are—a state which he lamentingly confesses as
being "depressing," "miserable," and horribly "littered
with the unburied dead." The national soul, if it does
exist, is precisely what is present, what is undeniable,
what is real in the lives of the people who have helped
constitute it as a retroactive and regulatory fiction.
The national soul never left the body it supposedly
now haunts. Or if it has, then perhaps it simply never
was. Thus, even as he argues for a more plural and "less
essentialist" (if such can be possible) conception of
the Filipino soul, Mojares nonetheless cannot escape
the "trauma, seduction, and sin" of nationalist thinking
itself, for if indeed it traffics in things soulful
and metaphysical, then it naturally forecloses any inquiry
into the ground of its constructedness, its finite
truth inside space and time. Perhaps the violence that
shocked the Filipino soul out of place and caused it
to wander in strange lands is nothing but the epistemological
violence of the Filipino nation itself—a violence
that dissimulates itself behind the veil of transcendental
unity, a violence that relentlessly turns the other
(or rather, the others) into the same.
I suppose all I'm saying
is that essentialism is, indeed, "risky business." And
yet, like Mojares and the Peruvian poet, Cesar Vallejo—whom
he quotes in his essay's rather oracular conclusion—I
find myself by turns loving and hating the ideal of
the Filipino nation. This is because despite my refusal
or inability to consciously engage with the question
of nationalism in my writing, I suppose I must have
had a modicum of awareness of it, after all, as my avidity
in reading the works of international writers, in immersing
myself in cross-cultural imaginations, in locating alternative
forms of community founded on the viscerally irrefutable
truth of my bodily libido, was itself motivated by a
form of inchoate "nationalist" sentiment. As Fanon puts
it, "it is at the heart of national consciousness that
international consciousness lives and grows." [31]
I am thus compelled to consider
adopting the position at which the Caribbean critic,
Stuart Hall, has arrived, after giving the subject of
postcolonial identity much thought. According to Hall,
there are two distinct ways of understanding the question
of identity, ways that should now be familiar to us
because of the structuring power they exercise on virtually
all thinking: the first defines it in terms of sameness,
the second in terms of difference.
[32]
In the first, identity is
a matter of a common culture, a shared or collective
“true self,” that inhabits the artificially
imposed “selves” of people who share an
ancestry and therefore, a history. This conception of
identity is precisely what postcolonial struggles initially
upheld¾a nativist search for that pristine point of
origin that can unify and “resolve” the
contaminated incongruities of the present. This is what
Almario and Abad themselves propose, in their appealing
to such essentialist abstractions as the “native
self” (katutubong kaakuhan) and "the Filipino
spiritual country," and in their niggling willingness
to confront the hybridity of the present Filipino realities
they seek to understand. And yet, it's clear, as we've
seen, that this "search" isn't so much a rediscovery
as an invention. It offers a way not so much of recovering
as of retelling the past. This is a very crucial point,
certainly: in imaginatively revisiting the Filipino
past, nativists like Almario do not so much find it
as reconstitute it. Which makes the whole project all
the more dangerous, and a sustained critique of it immensely
necessary and important. Needless to say, the past is
extremely important because it provides the terms by
which the present can be imagined, by which it can be
made tolerable, by which it can be "lived."
The second position on the
question of identity begins with the recognition that
it isn't so much sameness as difference that characterizes
"who we really are." To a great extent, it was the intervention
of colonial history that brought this about, making
being in the postcolonial world a constant state of
becoming. As a marker of difference, cultural identity
belongs to the future as well as to the past. It doesn't
"really exist"— meaning it isn't transcendent
of history—but is rather always transforming precisely
because of the "unfinished" character of that history.
Hall believes that only by thinking of identity in this
manner can the "traumatic character of the colonial
experience" be clearly appreciated.
Like Hall, we might think
of postcolonial cultural identity as being “split”
along the axes of similarity and difference, of continuity
and rupture. We need to realize that our identities
as postcolonial peoples are not fixed but rather “subject
to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture,
and power.” This is another way of saying that
we must accept the hybridity of our identities and lives,
and that we should not look to the “recovery”
of a glorious past if we wish to discover who we are.
Instead, we need to be aware of just how we are using
the past in order to find ourselves in the present.
Thus, we need to rethink the irremediable gap between
that unified vision of the past and our own cloven and
hybrid realities in the present. We need to be ever
mindful of the provisional and fundamentally fractious
character of the “we” that we must always
take the utmost care to speak. We must ever be conscious
of the fascism our provisional utterance of this “we”
is perfectly capable of performing upon the irreducible
differences “we” thereby presume to successfully
unify, represent, and enflesh. To my mind, Hall puts
it perfectly, when he says that “[i]dentities
are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned
by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of
the past.” Identity, then, isn’t fixed or
inevitable but rather a kind of “self-arrogated
fiction” made necessary by an awareness of historical
exigency, a choice of identification with a norm that
is as much personally expressed as socially ascribed.
In the end, like Hall, I
suppose I do not really want to condemn the nativist
project per se. As postcolonial critics, we simply must
remain sensitive to the contexts within which claims
about identity are being made—to understand why
they are being made, and to offer alternative conceptions
of identity when and where they are so needed. Given
the "violent" and fantastical duality that Almario and
Abad propose on the question of Filipinoness, I have
thus felt it necessary to insert into their poetic discourses
the notion of the "Third," the hybrid space of irresolvable
crisis, within which Filipinos tortuously—yet
unquestionably—exist. As Bhabha explains it, this
is the space of cultural liminality or "difference,"
the indeterminate space of translation and negotiation
in which authority and signs are not fixed but rather
open to reading and re-reading, uniquely vulnerable
to appropriation and rehistoricizing by those whom power
subordinates. This is the discursive and temporal context
where culture is finally located, and where postcolonial
peoples "may elude the politics of polarity and emerge
as the others of [them]selves." [33] To repeat what has often been said, nativism—which in
its "best" form is the strategic use of essentialist
notions of culture in the project of reversing colonialism's
"violent hierarchies"—may be necessary during
the initial decolonizing moment, but not any more after
that.
It's just that, already,
it feels quite late in the hour of imperialism.
Which is why I refuse to
believe we are only now awakening from its charmed gift
of sleep.
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