FOREWORD [to the 2018 / SUBVERSIONS OF DESIRE] by E San Juan, Jr.
With the 2017 launching of The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic as a Penguin Classic, Nick Joaquin's status as a transnational writer, a planetary artist, was finally confirmed. Before Joaquin died in 2004, the University of Santo Tomas (UST) honored him with the establishment of the Esquinita de Quijano de Manila--his nom de plume as a journalist--at its Miguel de Benavidez Library Humanities Section (The Varsitarian, 3 February 2008). After earning his associate of arts degree at UST, Joaquin was awarded a scholarship at the St. Albert College in Hong Kong in 1947. He left in 1950 to pursue a life in letters for which he received the National Artist title in 1976 and the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Literature, Journalism and Creative Communication in 1996.
The Dominican Order awarded Joaquin a scholarship for his essay on the celebration of Our Lady of the Rosary/La Naval, the patron saint of the "Ever Loyal and Noble City of Manila." The nation's colonial capital Manila, a city born from Western-Eastern confrontations, figures as the chief protagonist in his fiction and poetry, in "The Portrait of the Artist as Filipino" as well as in Cave and Shadows and in Almanac for Manilenos. Joaquin's brief sojourn in Hong Kong as a seminarian may have inspired Joaquin to write his magisterial novel, The Woman Who Had Two Navels. Its setting in that cosmopolitan arena of two warring cultures (Hong Kong), where the Aguinaldo revolutionary junta spent time in between battles, evokes the dilemma, the duplicitous or ambiguous identity of the Filipino nation.
This problematic identity of the Filipino is Joaquin's obsessive theme in all his works. We have been subjected to over 400 years of colonial subalternization, first by Spain and then by the United States of America. The scars of this traumatic experience, its flagrant symptoms, may be diagnosed in the consumerized and commodified mores of our urban compatriots. Joaquin is one of our most acute critics of this predicament. But despite his acclaim as our most distinguished writer in English, Joaquin is scarcely read by 103 million citizens, now spread as a proletarian diaspora around the world. It is quite unikely that cohorts of the 12 million OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers) would have read his fiction or poetry. However, the recent operatic version of "Portrait" as "Larawan" may have exposed thousands to his critique of the bifurcated soul of the nation and its protracted crisis.
UST has been one of the foremost instigators of our nationalist revival by holding regular symposiums on Nick Joaquin's achievement. With the reprinting of this book, first published in 1987 by Ateneo de Manila University Press, which remains hitherto the only book-length scholarly study of the major works, UST continues its patronage of the arts. The first chapter of this book, entitled "Celebrating the Virgin and Her City," signals its primary motivation: to reinscribe Joaquin's texts in the field of sociopoitical contradictions defining our nation since the Filipino-American War (1899-1913) and its fraught aftermath.
This book's historical context of composition should not be forgotten. It was framed within the height of the Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War struggles in 1966-72 and the Central American solidarity movement in the seventies and eighties in the imperial metropole. Of crucial importance is the beginning of the exuberant Women’s Liberation Movement in Europe, North America, and around the world. Composed during the years of the Marcos dictatorship (1972-1986), and in argument with the post-structuralist, deconstructive trend in hermeneutics and philosophical theorizing in Europe and the United States, this book stages the agonized questioning of a version of Hegel's "Unhappy Consciousness" as it participates in the dialogue with national-democratic critics of Joaquin's works. It is also a product of the author's education in formalist criticism and historical-materialist polemics. In line with the dialectical method of metacommentary, this book attempts to excavate the submerged but irrepressible utopian impulses in the texts (see author's remarks on its launching, "The critic as parasite/host," (Midweek, 24 August 1988).
Thirty years have passed since then, with all the victories and defeats of the mass mobilization for popular democracy and true independence.
A massive corpus of reportage and commissioned books by Joaquin remains to be studied, interpreted, and evaluated. This is the challenge for the rising generation of Filipino scholars. What their collective judgment of this book may be, together with its uncalculated effects, will depend on the outcome of the current democratic struggles and not on any single individual critic. Of course, we cannot forget the warning that any cultural document is always two-navelled, fusing barbarism and civilization together.
Finally, as the "Preface" endeavored to suggest to the prospective readers, "'Joaquin' then may be conceived as the sign of multiple contradictions outside/inside the texts. Let Joaquin speak to/for the masses." Let us all begin a slow painstaking reading of Joaquin's project of fashioning the emergent conscience of the nation while appreciating their integritas, consonantia, and claritas--qualities that St. Thomas Aquinas deemed essential for all art-works.
For making this reprint possible, I want to thank in particular Rev. Fr. Jesus M. Miranda, O.P., PhD, Secretary General, and Michael Anthony Vasco, PhD, Dean, College of Arts and Letters, University of Santo Tomas; and for her visionary initiative, Prof. Maria Luisa Torres-Reyes, editor of UNITAS.##
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