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read in May, 2009
Barbara said:
"Looking for Ifugao Mountain is an out of print children's book written by the late Filipino American poet and community activist Al Robles. The story is an adaptation of his poem, "Tagatac in Ifugao Mountain," which opens his poetry collect...more
Looking for Ifugao Mountain is an out of print children's book written by the late Filipino American poet and community activist Al Robles. The story is an adaptation of his poem, "Tagatac in Ifugao Mountain," which opens his poetry collection Rappin with Ten Thousand Carabaos in the Dark.
Because of Manong Al's very recent passing, I have since revisited his poetry collection, and realize that in my original reading many years ago, I missed much of the poetic and political nuance in his work. Looking for Ifugao Mountain is a bilingual story which tells us of Kayumanggi, the Filipino American son of an old Manong. As Kayumanggi encounters Tagatac in Portsmouth Square, SF Chinatown, he is transported back to the Northern Philippines, where he tries to reconnect with his ancestors.
I was very surprised to see how hostile the Philippine tribal people and the animals are towards Kayumanggi, whom I presume is American-born, SF-born. If we go back to the poem, "Tagatac in Ifugao Mountain," we see the "I" must be Manong Al himself, conflicted. He appears to be caught between that romantic indigenous Philippine past, representations of that indigenous past as lowly, base, and writing poems about that indigenous past which are worth less than toilet paper. So I take this reading with me into the children's book.
While it is important for Kayumanggi, and by extension, us readers, to connect with our ancestors, perhaps we are looking in the wrong places. The fisherman tells Kayumanggi it is useless; he is wasting his time. The rice farmer tells him to get out. The carabao and monkeys are ferocious in guarding the pass to Ifugao Mountain. It isn't until Kayumanggi sits with a tribal elder, shares a meal with him while respecting the ritual space, as guided by the tribal elder, that he is granted access to Tagatac of Ifugao Mountain.
Tagatac of Ifugao Mountain, as it turns out, is the Manong Tagatac in SF Chinatown's Portsmouth Square. Let me backtrack a little here. At the beginning of the book, Tagatac tells Kayumanggi, "Sa ilalim ng luma kong damit ay may bahag ako. Ako'y taga-Bundok ng Ifugao. Malaya at pagbagu-bago and aking isip na katulad ng hangin." That is, underneath these old clothes, I wear a bahag (Ifugao loincloth). I am an Ifugao Mountain man. My mind is free ... as the wind.
If we go back to the poem, ""Tagatac in Ifugao Mountain," we notice there is a tone almost of ambivalence here. The poems are worthless if we do not take the time to sit and eat, to talk with our ancestors. More so, why take this abstract, impersonal journey all the way back to this decontextualized indigenous ancestral past to see what is otherwise in front of you every day of your American life? It's the Manongs who are our ancestors, our source, and the filter through which we come to understand our connection with the land. This was Manong Al's poetics. Sit, share a meal, listen to talk story.
Last thing for now: Manong Al really was ahead of his time. I think of current Filipino American movements centered around indigeneity, and I'm not convinced. I do find these movements abstract, theoretical, impersonal. Certainly, the Filipino American community has grown very diverse post-1965. I am an immigrant with an actual connection to Philippine land. But my connection to that ancestral land is via my Papa, who was of the same generation as the Manongs. Towards the end of his life, it became more and more pressing for me to spend time with him, and to ask him to tell us stories. I didn't sit there with a recorder and typed up sets of interview questions. I did have a brandy or a beer or two with him while he was still healthy, and definitely many meals, and walks through his rice fields. I had to commit everything to memory, and I had to center myself in the experience of hearing story straight from the source. (less)
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Barbara said:
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
I am tempted to say that I enjoyed this book a bit more that her second, but that’s not exactly a fair thing to say, as the two books are rather different projects. I find I am more interested in Philippines-based stories than Filipino American, most likely because deep probing into Philippine-based lives as products of history is unfamiliar enough to me; whereas a healthy section of Mayor of the Roses is set in the USA, Ginseng, is set in the Philippines, in both Manila and the provinces or countryside, and these stories are set during the brutality of Martial Law. So the characters in these stories are surviving or succumbing to that period’s violence, suppression, disappearances, and economic ruin. Characters here are on the brink of making very difficult choices.
Think of the daughter Nina in “Opportunity”; she is the daughter of poor chicken farmers, and she is equipped with a college education. Her only sister has left them for her abusive husband. The first half of “Opportunity,” centers around Nina’s growing disconnect with her family and this terrible, terrible tension between her and her mother. Nina has had to decide whether to leave them to live and work elsewhere. This way, she reasons, she will be able to provide for her aging parents. Moreover, she has found a man, and he loves her. That’s where she’s going; to be with him. The turning point of the story is that elsewhere with her man: San Bruno, California, where this older American man lives. He is 60, many years older than she, a divorced father of three. He has found her via a mail order bride service.
And so these stories go, as though Villanueva has taken portraits of these Filipino families, and excavated quite deeply to expose to the reader how the political and economic state of the nation has weighted the people down so unrelentingly, broken up their families and familiar social structures, and cast them into such isolation. She writes in the book’s preface that upon returning to the Philippines after a period of absence, in which she studied abroad in California, so much had changed in her home country. She returned to witness the wreck that Martial Law had brought upon its people, what I know as today’s extremely polluted Manila air and streets, filled with so many beggars and child prostitutes.
In “Overseas,” Villanueva show us the disrupted families of the OFW’s, here primarily men, who have left their Manila slums for construction jobs in Saudi Arabia. Their intent of course is to better their families’ situations by sending their earnings to their families back home, given so little opportunity in Manila. But the story here, in “Overseas,” is what is left behind, the jeepney driver father who is never around, and the little sister, Sepa, twelve years old and dropped out of school, with no guidance of any kind, no reason to think about her future, already having sex in movie theaters and cheap hotels with random men, maybe for a little money, maybe just because no one is there to tell her otherwise. She invariably gets knocked up and seems to have no concept of that means.
In the book’s introduction, Virginia Cerenio references “the timelessness of the [Philippine:] countryside,” in Villanueva’s stories, and I am inclined to disagree with Cerenio. The countryside which Villanueva portrays, its people, are forever changed. In the story, “Siko,” we see a broken family of poor rice farmers. The old woman Aling Saturnina’s husband and many children have one by one left home for the city, and have never returned. One son, Siko, ends up a thief, one daughter renames herself “Pepsi,” becomes a prostitute in Olongapo, and the mistress of a powerful colonel.
There are ghosts still in this countryside, and while we can attribute this to the people’s superstitions or old beliefs, think about this blue jeans wearing, bullet-ridden ghost of Aling Saturnina’s son Siko, murdered by the military, because he tried to murder the colonel, because he was trying to save his sister. Not long after, Aling Saturnina and her remaining daughter are taken by the military and are never heard from again. The remaining son in law gradually falls into a state of resignation and futility. The people of this countryside appear broken, hopeless.
Whatever kind of enchantment or romance there may have once been in Villanueva’s memories of the Philippines, as we see in the point of view of the narrator Cecilia, in final story, “Island,” we see that as she examines her memories more deeply, there is an undercurrent of socioeconomic disparity and its consequences rising to the surface of her narrative. Cecilia is an expatriate, a Filipino American, and we can see her as representing Villanueva’s own position. Her husband calls her on her idyllic memories of Bacolod, and soon we begin to see the bourgeois position of Cecilia’s family, surrounded by those with much less means.
I am thinking about the allegorical component to these stories, or tales. While I have been reading them quite literally, and finding in this literal reading much political commentary being made, I suspect there is much more being said about the dictator, a nation in a state of disrepair, a pervasive lack of safety feeling throughout the collection. Think of these old, once lush gardens now barren and neglected. Think of these once powerful men now reduced to cripple and hallucinating invalids.
In the Manila noir-ish story, “Memorial,” the political (anti-dictatorship) graffiti artist, Fajardo, witnesses the aftermaths of the killings, dead bodies rotting in the streets, during his walks this now unfamiliar city that is his home, chalk scrawling political and poetic lines on the walls of the city to whomever cares to read them. Fajardo is a memorialist, and this is important, because when so many people go missing, the circumstances surrounded their disappearances are covered up, and they are forgotten. This is how their city ceases to be familiar to them, and ceases to be theirs. In “Memorial,” Villanueva asks who memorializes the memorialist when he goes missing.
Again, the theme of remembering amidst a dictatorship that is rewriting the nation’s history is seen most strongly in “The Special Research Project,” in which the building of the National Archives is leveled to dust. Housed in this building were the original writings of Jose Rizal, MH del Pilar, Francisco Balagtas, et al, the nation’s thinkers and intellectuals. Forgotten inside the building is Nicanor, the ghost writer of the President’s Special Research Project, a rewriter of the president’s biography and the nation’s history. It’s through his eyes that we see the crumbling of this dictatorship, the once grand presidential palace growing more empty, rat-infested and cavernous, the dictator himself growing more wan and exhausted and irrelevant to an exhausted and apathetic people. With so much revisioning, he has also lost his grip on his personal identity and the nation’s identity. Indeed, losing one’s control over the Master Narrative is to lose one’s control over the nation and its constituents.
Needless to say there is so much going on in this text, on many levels. Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila has been described by reviewers are subtle and elusive, but I wonder really how subtle and elusive it really is. It certainly is a dense text that is highly literal and symbolic narrative. It is intensely political. Now, as I’ve begun this write-up differentiating between Ginseng and Villanueva’s second collection, Mayor of the Roses, I will end by saying that Ginseng’s final story, “Island,” is an apt segue into Mayor of the Roses, as it is told from that expatriate point of view, the Filipino immigrant living in North America, and her memories of the homeland. She is prime for a return, and as well, we are ready to know the effect of American life on her Philippine memories, and on her Filipinoness.
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Hey BJ, I got extra copies of 'Thirdest World' for you. Do I send you one now or wait til our October reading? xo, Heathcliff Notes
