How to Pacify a Distraught Infant

by Anna Felicia C. Sanchez

JOY IS AT best a fleeting feeling in which the women of How to Pacify a Distraught Infant barely have the time or opportunity to bask, yet it is with emphatic and enduring joy that I celebrate the publication of this book. Sanchez’s clear-eyed and crisp storytelling honors both her fictional women and their real-life counterparts, whose difficulties, though not unfamiliar, are far from obsolete. — CONCHITINA CRUZ

RICH TEXTURE of the stories in this collection owes much to the author’s keen eye for details; complex characters on the cusp of change— adulthood, marriage, loss, even a first airplane ride and first sex—that leads to a transformation, no matter how subtle; dialogues that ring true; consistent and well-handled points of view. In most of the stories, Sanchez uses a peripheral approach. There’s little exposition, no compulsion to explain. One who is unsuspecting and is reading only for pleasure will be jolted by “Inventories,” my personal favorite.
— SUSAN S. LARA

ANNA FELICIA C. SANCHEZ has written the kind of book that will provoke reams of scholarly papers on gender identity and marital politics—in other words, it’s clearly important and insightful, the well-crafted product of a mature sensibility that has managed to capture her generation’s domestic tribulations. But the best reason to read it is to welcome the long- overdue emergence of a remarkable literary talent who can write about pain—about itinerant and impermanent affections—with uncommon poignancy. — JOSÉ Y. DALISAY JR.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

121 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Neil Franz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hindi ko na-gets yung ibang stories. So, 3 stars!

[John Rey Dave · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am familiar with the women of “How to Pacify a Distraught Infant” if only because I have heard these stories time and again, that is, how men violate women in the many ways afforded to them—marital, physical, emotional, sexual—in a world made for men and only men. But the violences in this book are filtered through the eyes of its characters—some children, mostly women, one a man—that renders the violence muted, hidden, but still present and painful. It doesn’t matter that a husband calls his wife a whore when he tells her he loves her in the end (“The Importance of a German Cut”), or that a husband leaves his wife for a few days because he only wants to recuperate in Sagada to come back a better husband (“How to Pacify a Distraught Infant”), and perhaps this is what the stories tell us: that violence can be rendered invisible when excuses are made for them. Love and pain, after all, come hand in hand. (Though I believe it doesn’t have to be. I am sometimes idealistic.) Personally, too, I read this collection and was reminded of my own parents, their fights and making up, and saw myself in the position of the children in the stories: aware of but not really/fully understanding what the problem is.

My favorite stories here are the two I already mentioned: (1) “The Importance of a German Cut” where a married couple’s troubled relationship is seen through the eyes of a young girl, a visitor, whose own parents have troubles; (2) “How to Pacify a Distraught Infant” where a wife is (temporarily) abandoned by her husband (who went to Sagada), leaving her to take care of their child alone, when an accident prompts to her to consider “how every single event that transpires, no matter how small or immediate, is always a life and death situation, ultimately involving the finality of a decision” (119). I also liked “Distances” (a mother stalks another mother whose child resembles her own), and “Turning the Wheel” (a couple in their sexual primes both reveal themselves to and keep secrets from one another).

[Jade Capiñanes · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are only two ways to know how terrific this short story collection is: (1) read Conchitina Cruz’s foreword, and (2) actually read the entire book. I did both, and—not exaggerating here—I was like, “Why did I read this just now?”

I mean let me just talk about Anna Felicia Sanchez’s range as a writer.

The first short story in this collection, “Inventories,” is filled with references to anime, like “Ghost Fighter,” “Samurai X,” and “Naruto.” And they’re not just mere mentions: the narrator, who is a mother, uses the Principle of Equivalent Trade in “Fullmetal Alchemist” to explain what she feels about what she’s gone through. If you think anime isn’t serious, this story will make you rethink that assumption.

Just when you think that that is the overall vibe—chill, breezy—of this collection, Sanchez drops a flash fiction entitled “Collaborative Effort,” which is totally Carverian in its restrained and elliptical style, only that it’s also lyrical. Then you also have “The Importance of a German Cut,” a coming-of-age tale of a woman looking back on her childhood days, specifically the summer when she, as a 12-year-old, saw her older cousin’s freshly circumcised penis. But before you get some weird ideas, the story reminds you it’s not really what it is all about. It’s more about childhood wounds that never heal.

You want a story that revolves around the scent of durian? Read “Durian.” You want a story written in an elevated English register, narrated by a dirty old man suffering from midlife crisis? Read “To the Memories of Nipples and Whiskeys.” You want a very short story, but written in Proustian sentences? Read “Distances.” Erotica? Read “Turning the Wheel.” A poignant story simultaneously about a woman in love with her gay friend and a Chinese empress in love with her castrated male servant? Read “Fag Hag.”

And of course read the titular story, which I think proves how narrative focus is what makes or breaks a short story. At first glance it’s just a story about a mother finding it hard to calm her baby to sleep, but when her husband, who is out in Sagada, calls but suddenly drops the call due to terrible signal, leaving her and her baby somehow utterly alone, it becomes a totally different story altogether.

The thing with short story writers is that their often singular and unique voice, while reassuring to the reader who loves their work, may seem repetitive at some point. This short story collection feels like an anthology of stories written by different writers, but it’s just Sanchez all along, offering you a variety of themes and styles, showing you that there are a lot of ways to pacify a distraught infant.

[Pia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Conchitina Cruz's foreword so perfectly encapsulates what the book is about it was almost a spoiler:

There is no having it all for Sanchez's female protagonists, who may have options, but whose options are limited... Against these banal odds, the women engage in the heroic-pragmatic effort of getting by and making do.

I liked this book for it's recognition of the more banal female suffering and oppression. There is more to find out about the daily, casual cruelty that hangs over each woman like a cloud. It's not challenging to say that rape is bad. It's literally illegal. But many Filipinos would argue about a male breadwinner's domestic entitlement extending as far as the female housewife's emotional labor.

To contextualize this aspect of the female Filipina experience, Sanchez excellently creats vivid and realistic backdrops where the various types of violence take place. All these scenarios are familiar, from the dreams of Sagada to anime's PH pop culture invasion. The imagery of ripe aratiles falling from a tree, the pervasive and distinct smell of durian, Catholic school encounters, judgemental choruses in the cinema. It gives the stories a strong a sense of closeness, of too close to home, that tugs at you.

Three stories in particular feel like they were plucked out of my own memory. A specific helplessness as a child, as a girl, stuck in volatile situations (an angry man holding the wheel)(a shouting match between adults in the dead of night and the fear of being seen awake) and being acquainted with the feeling of sheer powerlessness before you have the words for it.

No graphic depictions of a sexual assault are here. In fact, the 2 stories with descriptions of sexual intercourse involve an enthusiastic female participant. This was refreshing to me, and was the reason I picked this book at the UP Press 59th Anniversary sale. I told my partner (male): "I like this because nothing bad happens to a woman here." What I really meant was no woman had to be driven to a point of absolute trauma, and thennot even be given the dignity to not have the site of her ruin depicted pornographically to create the narrative's conflict.

That's what I meant, because I knew that there something bad that was going to happen them. Because something bad happens to all of us. But since it happens to all of us, I didn't imagine it as bad. I imagined it as the default.

I liked this book because the willpower that allows us to keep going, what Cruz calls the "heroic-pragmatic effort", is not romanticised or alluded to have a mystic origin or considered biologically innate to the female gender by hormonal secretions. It is attributed to the woman and her choice to carry on.

We keep going in different ways, and for a lot of us it is flawed. I liked that the book didn't shy away from that too. An overworked, neglected housewife keeps going by teaching her teenage niece her lower position in the domestic hierarchy as a way to spread out the domestic labor. A young wife keeps going by marrying a rich man in his midlife and secretly seeing an Adonis on the side. A grieving mother keeps going by isolating, by selling off her child's anime VCDs, by drinking, by trying new things everytime the previous thing stops to work, by doing everything except accept her child's death.

Our protagonists' short-sighted and sometimes (frankly) weird decisions have made parts of my reading experience uncomfortable, I'll admit. They also stayed with me for longer.

[Macky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Required reading for men, high-five RELATE NA RELATE reading for (at least middle-class Pinoy) women. My favorites are Inventories, The Grand Homecoming, Turning the Wheel, Fag Hag, and How to Pacify a Distraught Infant. It is a book of short stories about real women struggling through different life stages in a country still mired in the fucked-up colonial patriarchy, however much we deny it, however much we think we've overcome.

Her words flow into one another so well, I suspect there is another level of craft she's demonstrating this way that I'm only feeling and enjoying (and not describing very well heh). I think the author understands what the short story is for, and through that has made me understand as well.

[Mx. Andy Feje · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ang ganda. May bago na akong susundang babaeng fictionist. Nagustuhan ko kung paanong tinalakay ang gender dynamics at women’s struggles sa mga kwento rito. Ilan sa mga paborito ko ay ang title story, Ride Home, at Importance of a German Cut. May ilang nagmukhang palaman dahil sadyang angat ang pagkakatha ng ibang kwento. Would be nice siguro kung malalalaman ko ang panahon o phase kung kailan nasulat ng kwentista ang bawat kwento rito kasi ang dating sa akin, yung ibang works ay punong-puno ng wisdom. Sobrang notable din ng kung paanong magdescribe ng feeling or moment si Anna Felicia Sanchez, ang galing huhu

[max · Rating 2 out of 5]

Actual rating: 2.5 stars