“This Un-American Life.”

Exactly 40 years ago, I left a Manila deeply entrenched in Martial Law for the US, with neither family nor friends in tow. When I arrived in Ithaca, the Iran hostage crisis was still going on, Ted Kennedy had lost to Carter in the primaries, Reagan eventually won the election, a deep recession followed, and soon the Iran-Contra scandal would explode. It seemed like the country was about to fall apart.

But I was lucky. Unlike Bulosan's generation of migrants in the 1930s, I wasn't denied housing, and didn’t face constant starvation; I wasn’t forced to do back-breaking stoop labor, to endure the stink of canneries, burned and bombed out of work camps by angry whites, jailed and forced to walk on foot till my soles bled while followed by laughing cops who, after stealing my last $2, nudged me with the bumper of their car to get me to walk faster to the border.

I came by jet plane and bus, not, as with other manongs, in the dank hole of a ship and not by jumping on rail cars, enduring the cold and the sickness of other hobos, escaping from train detectives by leaping out into the desert, sleeping in musty rooms with lice-infested blankets, forced to hide a knife under my pillow and witness other Filipinos brutally assault each other. I wasn't incarcerated in a concentration camp, lynched by white mobs, threatened for associating with white women. I was not killed nor was I driven to kill anyone. On the whole, it could've been a lot worse—as it continued then for many citizens and non-citizens alike—but at the rate things are going now, who knows? So here's to 40 years.

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Undated Entry

Lila read my palms and said I had a very short life line. There was something oddly comforting in knowing that I would not live to become an old man. That the way out would come sooner rather than later. 

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Undated Entry

After Thanksgiving, I was driven home at night by my 18-year-old step-granddaughter and her best girl friend from birth. I sat in the back as they cranked up the music so that the entire car shook, the bass lines tearing through the doors, sending the seats trembling. I marveled at their raw energy, their friendship and love as they danced and sang, and laughed and videotaped themselves, finishing each other's jokes and sentences as we sat thru the holiday traffic. So much joy in the two being with one another, in being 18 and not a day older. And they completely ignored boomer me, which was a good thing.

PS: She's also a great driver, much better than I'll ever be.

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“I marveled at their raw energy, their friendship and love as they danced and sang, and laughed and videotaped themselves, finishing each other's jokes and sentences as we sat thru the holiday traffic. So much joy in the two being with one another, in being 18 and not a day older.”

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Undated Entry

In September of 1996, I got news of my father’s sudden death. I was in Ann Arbor, just having finished doing a talk and seminar when I received a call from my brother, David. He was sobbing, palpably shaken. He told me that my dad was at the hospital after having suffered a massive abdominal aneurism. He was bleeding to death after an artery in his stomach burst. He and my mother were coming home from a wedding, went to lunch, came home to nap when he started to complain of severe stomach pains. He began to vomit blood and collapsed, and my mom had to call the neighbors to bring him to the car and drive him to the Cardinal Santos Hospital. I saw the X-rays they took afterwards of his stomach expanding, filling with fluid, then collapsing. The last photos of my dad. 

I hurried to return to Manila by way of San Diego. While waiting at the airport, thoughts of death filled my mind. I found myself looking at others and imagining what they would look like dead and how they would die. I found I shared something in common with perfect strangers, realizing that we all shared the same fate as well as our ignorance about that fate. Their strangeness seemed reassuring in the face of the implacable alienness of death and I began to have compassion towards them. It was a vivid experience. I often tell this story to my students who are initially freaked out. I ask them to turn to their seatmates and imagine how they will die. Not to think of them as dead, but to think of them as headed towards death. It’s always unsettling. But there is again a weird sense of community in that unsettled feeling, a new sense of sociality amid life’s ruins.

December 2012

Thinking about "home" for the holidays, or any other day for that matter.

Home is not a place so much as it is an event, an event that awaits us, one that bears a name, a name that when I say it makes me stammer in joy. Home is the event of your name that I come into, that awaits me, always speaking in tongues. 

Uber story of the day: very affable driver tells me he has a case of ‘mild emphysema’ after smoking for over 35 years. Says his medication includes taking Viagra three times a day. Helps him breathe, but creates all the other kinds of usual side-effects, gesturing with a raised forearm in case I missed the point. I can only imagine. He gets the pills in the mail, he says, from a pharmacy somewhere in the Midwest. But for the last couple of months, it's mistakenly been sending him double his usual dosage, all of which is covered by his insurance. So now he's got far more Viagra than he knows what to do with and asks me if I would like to buy a bottle for half off. Never having indulged, I said no, but I asked him how much. He says $300 per bottle. I could barely contain my laughter. But what a racket, and what a story.

May 7, 2016

On the eve of what might very well be Duterte's election and the country's slide back to the dark days, I am reminded of Jose Rizal's fantastically grim and prescient second novel El Filibusterismo. Written in 1891, it remains so relevant today. 

The main character, Simoun is someone we might think of as the latter-day Duterte, or at least his supporters. Simoun, if you recall, is really the ilustrado Crisostomo Ibarra in disguise, having wandered around the fringes of the Spanish Empire after he had narrowly escaped the Guardias Civiles (thanks to the noble sacrifice of Elias). Ibarra in the earlier Noli, had begun as an earnest and naive reformer freshly returned from Europe. At each turn, he's betrayed: his father's dead body is thrown into the Pasig; he's kept from marrying his girlfriend, Maria Clara, and thereby deprived of a future; he's accused of being a heretic, a subversive, arrested, mocked by the very people he sought to help; and then jailed. And it is only thanks to the bravery of Elias that he manages to escape. 

Years later, he returns to the Philippines, filled with rage and burning with the desire for revenge. Instead of reform, he wants payback. Simoun wants to hasten the corruption of the system, using the money and influence he had amassed, to create conditions that will utterly destroy the colonial regime—though he has no plans of what will come in its wake. To this end, he recruits men disgruntled with the government. He concocts a terrorist plot, which involved planting a bomb in the shape of a pomegranate lamp during a gathering of high colonial officials and clergy. In the end, however, his plot fails. 

In the last chapter, as Simoun lies dying from wounds he suffered, he has a fierce debate with the Filipino secular priest, Padre Florentino. It's during that debate that Florentino memorably argues that where tyrants prevail, there can only be slaves. The end of tyranny must also mean the end of slavery—physical slavery as well as spiritual slavery, for those below, anxious to survive and bereft of any other alternatives, will only want to curry favor with and mimic the actions of those above. It's a bold and utopic plea for the destruction not only of the colonial regime, but of all sorts of hierarchies. It is Rizal at his most democratic. 

Simoun then asks the classic question: what's to be done? Florentino responds, echoing Rizal's own views, (and here I'm paraphrasing since I don't have the text in front of me), one needs "to work and to wait." Waiting here takes the active form of education. Why education? For Rizal, freedom without education will only amount to a kind of barbarity: the freedom, or license, to deprive others of their freedom. Freedom, in other words, that will only encourage so many acts of despotism. Education is the cure to this barbarous freedom. Education is the key to real freedom, that is, freedom that comes with justice. 

By this, Florentino/Rizal meant moral education, not merely education that leads to a job or a profession. Not instrumental education. Moral education cultivates virtue, understood, for want of a better term, as the courage of truth-telling (or parrhesia, as the Greeks might put it): not just the ability the tell the truth, which of course means to question received or accepted truths, but to do so in the face of the dangers that will inevitably confront you. Simoun's plot failed precisely because it was based on a mountain of lies, using more corruption, more vice, more death to end corruption. 

The Fili is a moral allegory, not merely a nationalist one. It continues to haunt the country so thoroughly that we do not even realize it. It says: there can only be freedom if there is justice; but there cannot be justice without the courage of truth-telling, a courage which can only be cultivated by way of education. Now, education necessarily takes a long time. It entails patience, steadfastness, self-reflexiveness, for that is what is required in the formation of a moral being—one who is free and just. 

Duterte's rise, thanks to the intense passions and great impatience he stirs, makes it imperative for us to revisit these lessons of Rizal and prepare ourselves for the haunting of the specters of the Fili.

Facebook 2017

“Just Once”—Notes on Karaoke with Karen Tongson

Yesterday, I met up with my friend Karen Tongson who teaches at USC. She’s finishing a book on karaoke. The bar had a karaoke video machine. Karen wrote some titles on a slip of paper and gave it to the bartender. We waited for her songs to come up while some other guy, who could’ve been Pinoy, dressed in a sharp suit with tan shoes finished a respectable rendition of “Me and Mrs. Jones.” Karen’s turn came up. After a sip or two of her drink, she clutched the mic and slid into a soulful rendition of the James Ingram classic, “Just Once.” She swayed to the rhythm, her voice perfectly in pitch, filling the outlines traced by the lyrics on the video screen. She occasionally turned to the other bar patrons. Eyes closed, she hummed along the instrumental sections. She nailed the song. It was thrilling to watch and listen to her. Her body moved trance-like as she transformed, it seemed, into someone else.

I found myself moved by the song and by the sight of someone who I thought I knew turn into some other person, capturing and held captive by the music. Singing entailed moving between these two registers of possessing and being possessed by the song. It was just like translating from one foreign language into another, lingering between the two without being wholly absorbed by either. As she finished, both hands still clutching the mic, the crowd broke into applause. They recognized her for her accomplishment. However, what they saluted was not, I think, just her fine rendition. It was also the fact that she had gone somewhere else and come back, leaving them with something unexpected. 

Unlike a concert where you expect to be entertained especially since you paid for the pleasure, this was something of a surprise. I found myself, along with the crowd, transported by the song into a momentary intimacy among strangers. Karen turned to me and still clutching the mic, surprised me again: “That song was dedicated to Vince.” Which one, I had to wonder. Certainly not the one who walked into the bar twenty minutes ago, not knowing what to expect, and waiting only for his bus. It was some other Vince, the one who I did not know even existed until he or it was called out by Karen’s words, by the song and her performance, by this gift, which remained a gift to the extent that it came from some other Karen, one whom I did not know until she burst into song, drawn by the magic of a machine that played words waiting to be filled by a voice.

“‘That song was dedicated to Vince.’ Which one, I had to wonder. Certainly not the one who walked into the bar twenty minutes ago, not knowing what to expect, and waiting only for his bus. It was some other Vince, the one who I did not know even existed until he or it was called out by Karen’s words, by the song and her performance, by this gift, which remained a gift to the extent that it came from some other Karen, one whom I did not know until she burst into song, drawn by the magic of a machine that played words waiting to be filled by a voice.”

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February 16, 2019

My parents on their honeymoon, or before they were my parents. Exactly nine months later, I arrived. I was the accident they expected, the stranger-son who they loved but could never fully account for. They are the source of this curse and this blessing—this inexplicable gift called my mortal life. They are to blame and to thank for my presence in this world. Both are gone, but it's a relief to know I've made it this far. But how much farther? That's the other accident waiting to happen, the other gift waiting to come.

There is always something odd about seeing a photo of yourself as a youth: the recognition comes, "that is already me;" but, also the realization, "that is not yet me." Always already not yet: that will have been me. You're thrown off-balance, moving between fascination and incomprehension, surprise and embarrassment, the indefinite past and the future imperfect. It is the trace of something lost regained, but always and only as unending loss.

Overheard at the bus stop: “I can’t remember why I can’t remember why.”

Facebook post on the eve of PNoy’s burial, June 27, 2021

Irony upon irony: when I taught at the Ateneo from 1977-79, Irene Marcos, the youngest of the Marcos kids, was in my class (along with Tony La Viña, Victor 'Bobing' Venida, one of the Zóbel daughters, a Yulo scion, and others). In the next classroom, Gloria Macapagal Arroyo taught a class in economics and one of her students was Noynoy Aquino. So a strange moment of convergence: the daughter of a dictator was next door to the son whose father her father was persecuting, and whose mother would succeed him after his overthrow; while the son was taking classes from a future president (who herself was the daughter of a former president) whom he would succeed and prosecute for corruption years later. What a dense collection of power and history in that small space in Bellarmine Hall that none of us, least of all me, could appreciate at that time.

October 21, 2018

Whenever I meet non-Southeast Asians who did not grow up in the region but found themselves studying Southeast Asia, I try ask how their interest came about. The answers vary considerably. Today, a friend who studies Indonesia told me that growing up in Wyoming prepared him for Java. 

He grew up riding horses and rounding up cattle on their farm. But when the Reagan recession hit, they lost pretty much everything. He was so angry at the bank that he took his father's gun, determined to shoot the creditors who dared take their land. His father told him it was best that he go somewhere else far away for a while lest he end up in prison. 

Leafing through National Geographic (of course!), he read about Indonesia and was struck by the archipelago. Right out of high school, he decided to follow his interests and boarded a plane to Java, knowing no one and uncertain as to what to do there. He ended up living with Javanese rice farmers whose keen knowledge of their crops, land, animals, and weather reminded him of his family's knowledge of their land. And their history of dispossession led him to think about the loss of his family's farm which, in turn, was part of a long history of Indian dispossession. 

Two irreducibly distinct histories brushed past one another, and orientalist fascination, under Cold War conditions, nonetheless made possible a different kind of experience and knowledge. 

Facebook 2016

There's been a lively conversation in social media from non-Cebuano speakers about the need to learn Bisaya [which is a mix of Cebuano, Waray, Hiligaynon (not Ilonggo), Kiniray-a, and Akeanon] in the age of Duterte, in order to understand the nuances of his discourse. Bisaya speakers in turn have been talking about being marginalized and misunderstood by the Manila-centric media working within a Filipino/Tagalog matrix. In short, the question of language and politics—and the politics of language—have come back in a major way with the regime. 

I've long argued that the history of the Philippines is a history of multiple, open-ended, and unending translations. Spanish missionaries, to convert native peoples, formalized and preserved linguistic pluralism in the archipelago. Ilustrado nationalists and American colonizers sought to tame this linguistic pluralism by institutionalizing a common language—Spanish in the case of the former, English in the latter. Nationalists have sought to displace the hegemony of English with Tagalog, but reformulated and expanded as Filipino (thereby continuing, at least in ideological terms, the project of ilustrado nationalism and US colonialism).

The point is that as a people (if we are a people), we translate the moment we speak. So why not learn how to translate between Bisaya (which is already a creole of sorts) and Ilokano, Bikolano, etc.? I think it will force us to rethink nationalism, in which the national language privileges one of the vernaculars (and reflects that vernacular’s privilege). We can also better appreciate something that's been going on since the early 20th century: that English has long been one of our vernacular languages, since it remains the only common language that many of us—at least those of us who claim to be part of the "educated" class—can fall back on to fill in the gaps between and among the different vernaculars. Even Digong falls into English and can't help but speak in English, linking his Cebuano with his Tagalog. So, in the end, we have no nation without translation. And it is only translation that gives the nation any sense of coherence even as it ensures the circulation and persistence of mistranslation and thus, incoherence.

December 15, 2018

Always struck by the way class differences are so vividly racialized and registered on the body. In affluent malls, the shoppers are always much larger, taller, more portly, often lighter skinned, American-English-speaking-designer-bag-toting (with a sprinkling of expats, mostly white, and at times, "Chinese"), while the workers who serve and wait on them tend to be smaller, skinnier, a few shades darker, vernacular-speaking-and-uniform-wearing. The former go from one climate-controlled space into another—mall, car, house; the latter into exposed, cramped and crumbling spaces—jeepney, bus, train to crowded, unwalled neighborhoods.

Bodies carefully segregated: catered to and secured against haphazard exposure in the one case; commanded, pressed, and vulnerable to sudden loss in the other. Bodies configured as walls with heavily guarded entrances and exits, while sanctions are enforced by the very selves that are trained to occupy these bodies.

What's interesting is being at the mall as it closes. Most of the shoppers are gone. The workers are left behind to clean up. You can hear them talking loudly among themselves, laughing and joking. Casting off the mask of deference, they undiscipline their bodies, shed off their uniforms, and get ready to join the hell of Manila's traffic. They turn on their music and head out, throwing their arms around each other.

“Casting off the mask of deference, they undiscipline their bodies, shed off their uniforms, and get ready to join the hell of Manila's traffic. They turn on their music and head out, throwing their arms around each other.”

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March 24, 2017

It's interesting to listen to eulogies. As the honored corpse lies in state surrounded by elaborate floral displays, each speaker brings a distinctive rather than uniform discourse. Some are short and respectful, others ramble on, tracing disparate paths thru thickets of associations that don't quite crystallize into memories. The best are those that bring forth personal details woven into succinct narratives: stories that show a singular intimacy with the dead that tells something compelling about the uncertain and uncanny trajectory of life. The worst are those that endlessly pontificate or turn into a drawn-out enumeration of details about the living speaker rather than the honored dead. 

These last especially turn everyone into corpses of a sort but then are easily and graciously forgiven as the occasion demands. For funerals, at least the ones I am familiar with, are always about moments of secular grace and ready forgiveness.

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Caught up with a good friend today, only to discover that he was, if not exactly a Duterte apologist, then a Duterte agnostic: the "let's-wait-and-see-what-he-does-before-we-judge-him" sort of person. 

He talked about many things: about historicizing Duterte's discourse, tracing it back to provincial mayors at the turn of the century who played both sides, maintaining ties with revolutionary fighters while appearing to be "friendly" with American colonizers; about Duterte's cussing, which was nothing new and a taken-for-granted part of provincial machismo especially among local chiefs, and which, in the proper context—whatever "proper" meant—could be construed as a rhetorical aspect of their charisma.

So I asked him if he thought as president, commanding a larger world stage, it was OK for Duterte to cuss away and make misogynist and homophobic remarks, and he seemed to imply (if I understood him right), that those who complained were too concerned with "political correctness" and as someone almost as old as Duterte, he himself didn't care about being politically correct and thought one was entitled to say whatever one wanted to without worrying about offending others. And when I said that in Duterte's case, it is a kind of violent speech that suggests a readiness to commit violence against others, especially women, he said, well, polite speech also cultivates a violence of its own, just much more genteel, thereby equating civil with uncivil discourse. 

And when I asked him what he thought about the extra-judicial killings, he seemed to think that these were perhaps made up or exaggerated, that one couldn't trust the news organizations, that he preferred to see what was actually on the ground (though it wasn't clear that he actually went out at night to check on the killings, nor speak with the police), and that he believed his family's driver more than anyone at Reuters, or the Inquirer, or Rappler, or the New York Times when he said that it was so much more peaceful where he lived now because all the addicts had been killed. Besides, he said, he wasn't much concerned with the present, which will work itself out, and was more interested in the past, by which he meant the last half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. 

And then I felt a very wide gulf open between us, the kind that tests friendships built over decades, and I wondered whether we could ever talk about politics again, much less remain intimate. We said goodbye and I watched him walk away, as if receding into the distance, while I stood at the far end of the historical present.‍

“And then I felt a very wide gulf open between us, the kind that tests friendships built over decades, and I wondered whether we could ever talk about politics again, much less remain intimate. We said goodbye and I watched him walk away, as if receding into the distance, while I stood at the far end of the historical present.”

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December 30, 2017

At a gathering some time ago, I found myself sitting with some folks who were, shall we say, rather well-connected relations of the oligarchy whose families were at some point at war with one another, but who were now contently munching away on lechon and paella. I made the observation that Filipino elites seemed to be able to get along so well not because they were forgiving, but because they knew that, at the end of the day, they were all part of the same ruling class. They were, for this reason, all so incestuous. In return, I got nothing but amused looks, as if to say, so....your point?

P.S. A friend raised an important point below and I thought I'd post my response to her here: Actually, I realized that this seemingly incestuous relationship is more than just a class thing. It's a "barkada" thing, which of course cuts across classes. So those in the upper strata can always expand their circles to include those outside and inside their class, foreigners and Filipinos, those above and below, reaching downwards to the upper middle, middle middle, lower middle, lower, and even lowest of the low, cemented by moral and political economies (not to mention libidinal economies). These include: money, material, affection, sex, gifts, favors, friendships, ritual kinship ties, etc., flowing back and forth in unequal amounts, freighted and sanctioned by irregular measures of fear, indebtedness, violence, hiya, etc.....

And so you get a barkada model of power relations as the template for all social relations (and vice versa) where barkadahan governs all forms of behavior inside and outside official circles, family, school, frats, churches, gangs, paramilitary groups, sports teams, work places, households, etc. "Barkada," which is not a thing, but a social relationship, or better yet, webs of social relations that give shape to social hierarchy and individual identity, and to personal and political places. 

Barkadahan as the connective tissue of civil society and state practices dates back to precolonial society but exists in intimate connection with colonial and postcolonial histories. It is what at once both ensures and undercuts justice, love, and corruption, making heroes and mass murderers all at the same time. 

For in the end, it is the norms of the barkada that counts, not some outside universal principle; or better yet, the barkada makes the local universal and so can say fuck you to human rights while seeking to protect the rights of your immediate barkada members (while never failing to sacrifice those who are further away from those deemed more important and thus more human than the rest). 

One wonders too if the persistence of barkadahan, marking intra-class relationships, is among the reasons why inter-class conflict in the Philippines is always overtaken by intra-class conflict: class war always attenuated by civil war and patron-client factionalism (think Aguinaldo vs. Bonifacio, for example; or JoMa Sison vs. Marcos). Reformism, as a result, tends to counter revolution, and counter-insurgency remains the hallmark of Philippine state formation.

But we can also ask: what isn't captured by barkadahan? What resists its pull and logic? What is its insurgent and always rebellious other that threatens its coherence? What does barkadahan have to suppress in order to congeal?

Facebook August, 2019

Slipper story. In Manila, I can't help but notice that the only ones who wear slippers (as in rubber flip flops, not sandals) tend to occupy the extremes of the class spectrum: on one end, lower working class people—street vendors, for example—or beggars; and on the other end, white foreigners, tourists, very wealthy looking well-pedicured locals or visiting Fil Ams. While the former wear them for utilitarian and economic reasons, the latter do so while exuding an air of bohemian casualness, as if the world were their living room (tho my guess is at home they run around unshod), or that they were on an extended beach vacation. And also because it's hot, which is pretty utilitarian. (Which is to say the obvious: that utilitarianism is never self-evident, but always shaped by class.) It always starts with the feet and who gets to, or needs to, or is left with no choice but to expose them, and for what purposes.

February 22, 2017

There is a lot of understandable cynicism surrounding yet another EDSA anniversary. Much of the negative reaction is focused on EDSA's dystopic aftermath: the failed projects, dashed dreams and very sobering realization that, despite getting rid of the elder Marcos, EDSA did not amount to a revolution but to a restoration. His wife, daughters and son are back alongside their friend, Digong. But should we reduce the history of EDSA to what came after the fact? Is it still possible to celebrate it for what it was, for the experience it unleashed?

I think what is still worth commemorating about EDSA is precisely that moment when people suddenly, unexpectedly (I am tempted to say spontaneously), rushed out into the streets and in a remarkable show of solidarity decided to lay it all on the line. That decisiveness forged an experience of community, one built on a common willingness to sacrifice to the point of death that momentarily overcame social divisions of all sorts. It's the experience of overcoming and coming together—of damayan—which gave rise to the feeling of kalayaan, or freedom, that is well worth celebrating: a highly contingent and conjunctural moment that was possible only when the crisis came to a head. No one knew what was going happen; everyone expected the worst. And yet, to everyone's amazement, everyone stayed as the crowds continued to swell. People power was the discovery that lying within each and every other was their own capacity to resist and to respond to a force that lay beyond them, the power of the dictator. And with that discovery, there emerged the possibility of another truth and of another life. 

That EDSA was betrayed is not surprising. All revolutions are invariably betrayed. But that it happened at all, and the way that it happened are well worth remembering. EDSA did not lead to democracy, but to the momentary experience of a democratizing kinship, one where selflessness and sharing made up what seemed, at least for four days, like a new republic of generosity. Like every utopic moment, it could not last. But it will not be the last.

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Facebook July, 2022

History as gossip? Rather than repudiate that claim it might be better to excavate it: who's making this claim, for what purpose & to whose benefit? 

Rather than ask, What is history? ask what is gossip and how does it function, what are its conditions of possibility? 

Rather than make naive counter-claims, (i.e. history is truth, which then poses the question of what is truth, what or who determines it and under what conditions? what are facts and how are they formed? what is evidence and how is it related to interpretation?, etc.) it might be better to do an archaeology of gossip and ask: what lies beneath it, how does it circulate, what kinds of intimate relations does it make possible, how is it part of an architecture of power and disinformation?

And finally, the need, as others have shown, to do a genealogy of history: to ask how is it written today? by whom? what are its objects? who are its subjects? in what ways is it partisan? what is the history of that partisanship? whose interests has it served? whose power does it target?

So there: an archaeology of gossip and a genealogy of history that gets away from trolls and ad hominem attacks.

Pinoy historians are anxious to push back against Marcos falsehoods. The task is urgent no doubt. But why claim that history is about truth? It's not. History is about power. It's about who controls the archives & the evidence & the narratives they yield, & the truths that they produce.

My little suggestion: rather than fetishize social media and demonize trolls (they are already demons), why not produce a synoptic account of the Marcos years that situates the regime in relation to the country's colonial and postcolonial history, in relation to the history of Cold War and the US empire, and finally in relation to the landscape of Third World decolonization and dictatorships that emerged in the 1960s to the 1970s? Bits and pieces of this history have already been written by various historians. It's a matter of putting them together into some sort of synthesis that would serve as a counter-narrative to the BBM lies. It's not about producing a definitive text (no such thing), but a standard work of reference that we can throw at the deniers.

How do we know which version of history to believe? The history that matters, that in the end ventures towards truth (tho never quite reaches it) is the history that opens up to the possibility of justice.

One last point. If history is about power, there still remains the question: what is the relationship between history and truth? Consider this: truth is less a thing than a practice. It is the practice of truth-telling. It involves risk, confrontations, errors, revisions, struggles, etc. Historians have the responsibility of cultivating conditions that enable truth-telling to take place in all its messiness & urgency. 

Example: Marcos was a plunderer and a brutal dictator. That's a fact with mountains of evidence to prove it. We believe those facts to be true. But many others deny it & see things differently. We might try to convince them otherwise with the facts of the case. Still they refuse, or remain indifferent, clinging to their own version of history based on outright lies and fabricated evidence. For many of them, doing so means a measure of power and profit beyond the moralizing invocations of truth.

There then ensues a war of position. They have the advantage since they're in control of the forces of the State and a dominating presence in social media. We, for our part, hold on to our knowledge and find ways to counter them through the histories we write, keeping these in reserve as sites of truth-telling, as weapons for an on-going war. It's a war that we fight not only for this generation but for those who are to come. Historical truth-telling keeps the past open for the future beyond the trolls and red-taggers and influencers and bullshit purveyors of the present. Or so we hope.

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Facebook July, 2017

Crawling in traffic on EDSA gives you a chance to take in the architecture of Metro Manila. It is, sad to say, unremittingly bleak. From Monumento to Makati, it is an endless series of mostly cement block buildings of varying heights, brutalist in style, built quickly with no concession to human scale, open green spaces, or other features that might mitigate this urban hardscape. Sidewalks are small and crowded with little thought given to accommodating the masses of pedestrians. Paint chips off walls, garbage squirreled in back alleys, while a forest of billboards and thick electrical wiring stretch along the streets. It is an architecture of distracted development: dense, decaying, and deracinated. And when the rains come, mini-lakes quickly form as entire sections are submerged. Watery nature quickly rebukes the violence of concrete and capital with its own swift justice.

“It is an architecture of distracted development: dense, decaying, and deracinated. And when the rains come, mini-lakes quickly form as entire sections are submerged. Watery nature quickly rebukes the violence of concrete and capital with its own swift justice.”

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Facebook November 30, 2013

I've been archiving photos of the cataclysmic aftermath of Typhoon Yolanda, mostly in Leyte, and mostly in Tacloban. The photos below were taken from the web, found scattered like so much debris after a storm. Once assembled, I was struck by their effect. Photographs are supposed to make you see for the sake of remembering. These images, however, show you something else: that some things cannot be shown. For this reason, the photographs engage the senses, but suspend any attempt at memorialization. At first, I thought this album would be a way of memorializing the dead, the living and the living-dead. But that proved impossible.

Yet, we deceive ourselves into thinking that the suffering we bear when we look at these photos are anything even remotely similar to what the victims and survivors must feel. There is an unbridgeable gap that separates us here from those whose grief we vicariously share over there. 

The brilliance of these photographs, then, lies in reminding us of the refusal of the particular moment of pain to be sublated and sublimated into some general lesson about human mortality or lack of preparedness, or climate change, or some other globalizing narrative about the history of the future. 

If anything, these photos point to moments when the narratives fail, and fail completely. Reflection is of no use, and experience no guide. 

For now, only chaos: the mixture of the living and the dead, of corpses and garbage. Life, of course, continues elsewhere, outside the time of these photos, as people begin to tell stories, hold officials accountable, reunite with their families, begin to rebuild, or plan their departure. But as long as you look at these photos, living in their frozen time, your eyes remain fixed on what is absent, on what cannot yet be told, on what is beyond retrieval and relief. In the end, this can only be an archive of oblivion, productive of counter-memory.

Facebook December, 2018

Got into a Grab and into a conversation with the driver. Tony, a youngish-looking 40 year old, is listening to the radio. There is a discussion about legalizing marijuana. Asks me what I think. I tell him I live in a city where it's legal and as easy to get as aspirin. He says maybe if they legalized it people would stop doing shabu and take pot instead. Safer. Even Digong seems to agree. It only makes you laugh and eat, doesn't want to make you kill. 

I tell him pot helps people with certain kinds of illnesses. He asks if I think it would help those who had suffered a stroke. I had a stroke last year, he says. I didn't realize I was having it. Slept through the day and couldn't get up. And when my wife tried to wake me up, half my body was paralyzed and I could barely speak. Rushed to the hospital, but it was private. They wanted 10,000 pesos up front, which of course we didn't have. Went to the public hospital instead. Took eight months, but I recovered and now I'm driving, though my right foot still feels like lead. My brain sometimes has a hard time catching up with my thoughts and I forget things. Runs in the family, he continues. Mother had a stroke, and so did my sister. 

I ask him where he lives. He says in Bulacan. I said that was pretty far from Manila. He says, oh I only go home once a week. The rest of the time, I sleep in my car. Park it in a gas station where they have free showers. And the mechanics will do maintenance work on it, and you just pay them what you can. Used to drive delivery trucks, which was a lot more stressful. But at least now I own my car. Put all our savings into it. I ask him if he is worried about getting another stroke. He shrugs as the traffic eases.

Facebook 2017

A note on "alternative facts" and what it might mean for the writing of history in our particular moment. Greg Grandin wrote on his wall:

"What is Alt-History?" and cites E.H. Carr: 

"The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger's slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean s/he chooses to fish in and what tackle s/he chooses to use—these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish s/he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts s/he wants. History means interpretation." 

My comment: 

Three things about this quote: First, I like the idea that interpretation arises as a function of chance encounter with the moving fish of facts. It is thus always overdetermined, open to revision and keeps historians in business (not to mention that the inescapable contingency of interpretation makes historical writing necessarily political: an unsettled, unsettling practice). [Nietzsche: "From this moment on, all my writings are fish hooks: perhaps, I know how to fish as well as anyone? If nothing was caught, I am not to blame. There were no fish."]

Second, it brings to mind something Donna Haraway once wrote about—the idea of "strong objectivity," where writing history entails not only the selective interpretation of facts, but also a critical accounting of that process of selection. It requires asking: how did such facts emerge? What are their sources? What uses have they been put to? By whom? For what ends? And it also requires acknowledging that all facts are always partial, calling for context (which also calls for contextualization), supplementation by other facts, and so on. Facts as historical objects need to be historicized. What was taken for granted as factual one hundred or even 50 years ago may not be so today. 

In short, strong objectivity foregrounds the emergence of facts as truth—or better yet, of the truth-telling practices that facts enable or disable—in relation to and always in tension with the conditions of possibility that produce them. [Nietzsche again: truth as an army of metaphors. Me: sure, but it's also a practice that brings about historical events.]

Alternative facts are lies, but lies also yield something of the truth of their tellers and the event of their telling. They may be about falsifying the world, but just as significant, they are also about insisting on a relationship of power that determines what counts as truth and who gets to determine it. So with "alternative facts," we see a kind of truth: how fact can be made to function at the behest of power. It is not a question of speaking truth to power, but about the power to speak that is reserved for some but not for others.

Facebook 2023

Over dinner last night, a good friend tells me that her 96-year-old father, once a brilliant economist, is increasingly becoming delusional. Among other things, he claims that he was given a duty by the Jesuits of seducing beauty queens to bring them back to the Faith. Indeed, he was once married to one but could no longer remember her name, nor that he was ever married to her.

From my 2015 newsfeed. 

Photo is of a facsimile of the Sto. Niño de Cebu visiting the San Agustin Church. It is an image of idealized power and desired submission. The child-king is the paradoxical figure that combines absolute innocence with absolute sovereignty, unimaginable wealth with unbounded generosity. It conjures a beatific social order where the King is Lord over the grateful populace. Wholly undemocratic, totally dynastic, it projects an image of divinely sanctioned inequality. And one that is a reproduction that claims to convey, amulet-like, the same power as the original. A clue, perhaps, to the Christian roots of dynastic politics and the enduring desire for a benevolent dictator among Filipinos.

Recently, I was on a trip to the Central Luzon countryside, with its sprawling emerald rice fields and mountain ranges in the distance. The bloody history of peasant rebellions has been completely erased from the landscape. It is now traversed by a growing network of freeways, colonized by real estate developments, shopping malls, and other environments of urban life. How to make sense of these changes? 

Well, I suppose you could do worse than think about them in terms of the pastoral. The English critics are a good guide. William Empson famously said that the pastoral consisted of "putting the complex into the simple." Raymond Williams argued that the pastoral can only come out of an urban sensibility, one that sees the countryside in mythical terms as the pre-history of industrial capitalism, even as it is increasingly exploited by industry. Add to this Michel Foucault's genealogy of pastoral power rooted in Christian discipline and confessional practices and one can see how the pastoral continues to be a neat category for addressing the aesthetics and politics of the present. 

Together, these versions of the pastoral might make sense (or not) of the different strands of Philippine literary history (from Rizal's depiction of San Diego, to the earlier generation of Anglophone writings of Arguilla, Bulosan, Gonzalez, maybe Villa, Manalang, certainly Frankie Jose, maybe Brillantes, and writers in the vernacular, such as Hernandez). The pastoral with its notion of authority exercised by the pastor over the individuated bodies of his flock, obviously undergirds articulations of Catholic power, whether in its high ecclesiastical forms or more populist practices. Finally, the pastoral insofar as it relies on the recurring narrative of "rise and fall and hope in salvation"—a short-circuited version of Paradise Lost—applies to varieties of nationalism: the Maoist-revolutionary kind of JoMa Sison; the reconstructed progressivism of Akbayan and many other lefty NGOs; the mixed liberal/neo-liberal notions of 'national development' immersed in the rhetoric of "transparency," "human rights," and "good governance." 

All, even the most critical, entail putting forth myth as memory, "putting the complex into the simple," while appealing to those below even as it enshrines the power of those above (i.e., those who know, who have some sort of moral or political authority, dynastic identity, some sort of sovereign right, etc., or a combination of these). They are all urban (as mediated by the imperial) projections of a certain pre-urban life sullied and polluted but asking to be redeemed. Ironically, the cure is often worse than the disease, and the pastoral vision of rural redemption often leads to furthering its downfall. Is there a way out of the pastoral, or is it perhaps an enabling aspect with which to sustain the nation? No pastoral, no nation? In the meanwhile, here are some pastoral photos.

December 2023, Massage story

Lila and I were getting a massage when my masseuse began to tell a story. I told her that my back was pretty sensitive owing to a history of compression fractures. Out of the blue, she told me that her father was diabetic. He recently lost both legs below the knee from diabetes. He has yet to reconcile himself to these losses and remained bitter. He doesn't even want to get on a wheelchair and insists on being carried everywhere.

She described in great detail her father's injuries, how minor cuts developed into major wounds that would rot, and had to be eradicated. The amputations were part of a protracted process. I could only imagine the pain.

When I asked her what her father's name is she said "Vicente."

March 2024

Commenting on student work, drawing out their main arguments, pointing out the larger stakes, showing their flaws but also their strengths, so in the end the student feels like an author, authorized to keep thinking and writing.

Best kind of grad student meeting: when, at the end of office hours, you all realize that there was something buried in their projects that they didn't think existed but became apparent in the course of the conversation. Something they did not expect to find, that surprised them, and by accident refashioned their topic and the entire horizon of their research. Or at least that's what it looked like to me. Maybe just wishful thinking on my part.

May 25, 2024 Podcast notes from Ordinary Unhappiness, Sara Marcus, “Political Disappointment.”

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674248656

Listened to a terrific podcast on Sara Marcus's recent book. "Political disappointment: an untimely desire, a longing for fundamental change that outlasts the historical moment when it might have been fulfilled." 

Disappointment, like pessimism, works as an analytic to understand the history of the present, seeing wider patterns with which to forestall panic given how tough the present is.

It's not the opposite of hope and is not the same as despair. Neither is it about cruel optimism. Disappointment still maintains an attachment to its object and is thus a principle of survival and a touchstone for creativity. It is to continue to desire desire itself. To be out of tune, but not out of step. 

“The opposite of hype is not criticism, it’s specificity.”—Moira Wiegel

Phone Notes Samsung 10:

Sometimes my body feels like an open wound. Punctured and torn apart by different diseases, filled with medications that trigger side effects, making it seem that the cure is worse than the illness. My body is in a perpetual state of liminality, exposed to the outside and exposing my inside. Pain is its calling card.
Illness and injury precede and succeed wholeness and health, accompanies them as scabs and secret conditions that erupt at a moment's notice. Symptoms are the long-held secrets of this irrefutable fact.  

“Natural disaster” is of course a misnomer. Everything is caused by man-made waste. All the disasters we see today are the externalization of human's desire towards self-destruction. Guns, too.

Identity is a kind of orthopedic device. It corrects or supports you in the face of an originary disability. But it also reveals a fundamental disability. It allows for mobility, but also threatens rigidification. Like the supplement, orthopedics come before and after a lack. It is the something that enables a nothing to survive.  

Memory is the methodology of hope, paraphrasing Bloch.

“The body is our general medium for having a world.”—Marleau Ponty

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FB friends: I've been trying to search for North American novels or short stories about the Philippines that have more than an ephemeral value. Other European empires had their Orwells, Forsters, Conrads, Flauberts, Duras, and many others who wrote about the colonies. Mark Twain wrote about Hawai'i, Melville of course, wrote about the Pacific. But as far as I can tell, there is no American literature of note, or none written by a canonical writer—set in the Philippine archipelago during the period, or shortly after, of American colonization. William Pomeroy, maybe (but who is completely unknown in the US). John Sayles is the closest I could think of, and he's the exception that seems to prove the rule. And his book is from 2011.

If my hunch is correct, it seems then that it was up to Anglophone Filipino writers from Santos to Bulosan, Gonzalez to Villa, Joaquin to the Tiempos—along with contemporary Fil Am writers—to write about America, or at least the American legacy in the Philippines, and the Filipino presence in America. White American colonizers in the Philippines, compared to their European counterparts, seemed stunningly philistine and un-literary. Worse, they have studiously if not willfully ignored Anglophone Filipino literature about that most Western part of their Pacific empire. Am I mistaken? And if not, what do you think accounts for this literary invisibility?

The absence of American literary interest in the Philippines also means that Anglophone Filipino writers—with, perhaps, the exception of Villa and for a while, Bulosan, (and if you count at least one writer in Spanish, Rizal, who was praised by William Dean Howells)—were writing pretty much for one another. They all avidly read world literature (in English translation as far as I can tell, except for Spanish lit which a few could still read in Spanish), and especially American literature. But they were largely unread by American writers and largely marginalized (again with some rare, momentary exceptions) from the American publishing scene. Their readership thus consisted of a small circle of fellow writers and an English-speaking and reading, largely urban middle class public who bought the magazines they published in and read them in their college courses. 

So, the situation of Anglophone Filipino writers was such that they were at once privileged and marginalized. In the Philippines, where from the late 1920s to the 1970s, English was seen as the pre-eminent literary language (at the expense of a much longer and no less complex tradition of literature in the vernaculars and in Spanish), they were regarded as exemplars of national cosmopolitanism. And they had no competition from American writers who were indifferent to the country. But in the US, they were largely ignored, and if noticed at all were regarded as provincial writers barely capable of mastering their borrowed tongue. (In this regard, see the patronizing critiques of Leonard Casper. The exception here would be Roger Bresnahan). The rise of Filipino-American writing in English these days has been changing that dynamic with writers getting more mainstream attention, reviews in prominent journals, awards, etc. The latter trend will doubtless continue, but that’s the subject of another post.

June 2017

From NVM Gonzalez, more on Anglophone Filipino writing, specifically about writing in English:

"English, my borrowed language, separated each actuality from me at the very moment of composition. My merest jottings were not so much from the underground as from another world...The life I described [in "The Winds of April" and "Seven Hills Away"] quite literally spoke a different language in the description—and became a different life. Rendered in an alien tongue, that life attained the distinction of a translation even before it had been made into a representation of reality through form. The English language thus had the effect of continually presenting that life as nonactual, even as it affirmed the insecurity of its making." 

—NVM Gonzalez, "Moving On: A Filipino in the World," 1973.

And Resil Mojares's gloss on the dialectics of translation in NVM: "Though English is a medium which puts the [Filipino] writer at one degree removed from immediate experience, its use transfigures sensibility and vision in ways that do not only occasion alienation but also make possible unexpected illumination." 

Finally, Kafka who never disappoints: 

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.”

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