Review of Jose V. Aguilar's THE GREAT FAITH, published by Pantax Press, Popular Book Store, available at

 The Great Faith: A Novel.  By Jose V. Aguilar.  Quezon City, Philippines: PANTAS Publishing, 2020.  (Originally published in 1948 by Diolosa Publishing House, Jaro, Iloilo City.) Available from POPULAR BOOKSTORE, Morato Ave., QC; also available from <amazon.com>

Review by Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao

Department of English and Cultural Studies, Bryant University

February 9, 2022

Originally published in 1948, Dr. Jose V. Aguilar’s The Great Faith provides a riveting account of the Japanese occupation of the Philippines from 1942 until the return of MacArthur and American forces.  While the novel documents and dramatizes the brutality of Japanese colonial violence and its devastating impact on the Filipino people, it also functions as an eloquent testimony to a durable tradition of anticolonial resistance in the Philippines.  The novel affirms faith in the ability of the Filipino people to survive and to resist collectively—an ability developed through the Philippines’s long history of colonial occupations by the Spanish, the Americans, and the Japanese.  

The Great Faith provides insight into the sheer terror of the Japanese occupation.  The novel, which is set in Capiz, opens in the midst of silence and darkness of wartime blackout as characters find themselves at crucial crossroads in their lives.  Concha, who expresses anxious concern for her friend Florentina in the midst of childbirth, must decide to stay in town or flee with her family to escape the Japanese forces which just captured Bataan.  For four months since the Japanese invasion in December 1941, “the brightly-lighted, carefree nights of pre-war days had turned into dark, slow-moving hours full of grim foreboding.”  For three long years, the people of the Philippines experienced unspeakable forms of violence under the Japanese which materialized in myriad ways—from displacement due to homes destroyed and lives upturned to colonial domination of body and mind.  

Dr. Aguilar’s novel dramatizes the insidious ways in which Japanese colonialism was imposed by direct force and ideological conditioning in the name of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere—a pan-Asian construct used to justify Japanese imperial expansion.  Captain Takahashi’s sword dance at the garrison’s dance hall where the “air was full of repression” functions as a vehicle for conditioning the Filipino audience to give consent to Japanese domination—“to teach us love for the state” according to Licdaw, a character captured and conditioned by the Japanese “through an intensive rejuvenation course.”  The sword dance begins with Takahashi in “flowing kimono… advancing to the sad tune.”  As the music intensifies, “Takahashi’s angular movements… become ferocious… he drew the sword… with both hands he swung it down with terrific force, stopping the blade barely an inch from the floor.”  As one elderly audience member observes, “That sword was meant for all of us… if we should show opposition to the new regime.” While some characters collaborated with the Japanese (Bulcarin and Suton), others stood their ground (Agnes) or joined the guerrilla forces (Lino and Solinda).

Japanese colonial occupation, not unlike the Spanish and the American, thrived on creating divisions among the Filipino people.  An antidote to this poison is collective resistance informed by collective memory.  The novel reminds us that the guerrilla resistance against the Japanese must be contextualized as part of a Filipino “long memory” which is embodied by the character of Concha who traces “her lineage to Datu Imbang… [h]ale and hearty at sixty when the Revolution broke out, this coppery-skinned man had kept alive the famed prowess of the datu, thus forging another link… that bound the family to the remote past.”  This yearning for Filipino self-determination continues in Concha’s children.  Agnes is courageous and unflappable (as evidenced by her standing her ground in the face of Takahashi’s sexual aggression) and Rustico joins the guerrilla resistance.  

At the forefront of resistance are the younger characters who must learn to navigate the crossroads of youth, specifically the many challenges that accompany transition into adulthood (love, courtship, marriage).  The love triangle that includes Agnes, Lino, and Solinda functions as a contested space within the novel—a space within which notions such as love, desire, and passion are reimagined and rearticulated against the backdrop of war, occupation, and resistance.  The novel ends with Agnes and Lino facing forward as “American planes flew over” and signaled the dissolution of Japanese colonialism.  

Dr. Aguilar’s emphasis on youthful agency from a nationalist orientation in the novel is informed by his work as a committed and compassionate educator of the Filipino people—specifically the youth.  Dr. Aguilar is a pioneer of the Philippines’s Community School system and recipient of the first Ramon Magsaysay award for Government Service in 1959.  In the early years of U.S. neocolonial control of the Philippines, Dr. Aguilar experimented with the use of Filipino language (specifically Hiligaynon) within the classroom in Iloilo between 1948 and 1950.  He expressed concern over the use of English in classroom instruction (introduced by the Americans at the start of the 20^th century) because the “context of education transmitted through it (English) does not grow roots in the native soil.”  The experiment was a success and became a model for effective classroom instruction.  Dr. Tito Clemente of the Bureau of Public Schools observed that “the local vernacular was a more effective medium of instruction than English for reading, arithmetic, and social studies in Grade One.”  A prolific author, Dr. Aguilar has published numerous articles in the field of education—such as “Education of the Forgotten Masses” in The Philippine Journal of Education (1948) and “Seeing Education Whole: A Philosophy” in Education Quarterly (1958)—and books including This Is Our Community School (1951).

The introduction to the 2020 edition of The Great Faith highlights the significance of youthful agency and literacy which Dr. Aguilar encouraged through his work as an educator.  Delia D. Aguilar, in her introduction, provides the following invitation: “I particularly urge young people to read the novel not because my father wrote it but because this is a record, even if in fictionalized form, of a very critical and revealing moment in our country’s history.  There will not ever be another book like this.”  In many ways, The Great Faith which ends at a crossroads in Philippine history anticipates the work of Luis Taruc (Born of the People) and Carlos Bulosan (The Cry and the Dedication) where guerrilla resistance for Filipino self-determination continues—this time against U.S. neocolonialism.  The recent republication of The Great Faith provides an invaluable contribution to sustaining and reconstituting our “long memory” as a people in the 21^st century.