Tuesday, June 04, 2024
DALUMAT SA ESTETIKA NI LUALHATI BAUTISTA
Dalumat sa Pagsulong ng Feministang Estetikang Makabayan: Metakomentaryo hinggil sa Sining ng mga akdang In Sisterhood—Lea at Lualhati at Sonata ni Lualhati Bautista
E. San Juan, Jr.
philcsc@sbcglobal.net
ABSTRAK (ABSTRACT)
Sinubok sa kritikang ito na ilahad ang tipo ng feministang estetika na isinadula ni Bautista sa dalawang huling akda bago siya pumanaw. Nailarawan ang pagkasira ng pamilya- maternal na sabjek ng kababaihan sanhi sa malalim na pagbabago ng lipunan mula dekada 1970—panahon ng Cold War—hanggang dekada 1990 at bukana ng bagong milenyo. Nabuwag ang patriyarkong pamilya dahil sa pulitiko-ekonomikong krisis mula diktadurang Marcos hanggang neoliberalisasyon ng rehimeng sumunod. Sinuri ang transpormasyon ng diwa/kamalayan ng mga protagonista at punto-de-bista sa In Sisterhood at Sonata. Sa analisis ng babaeng sabjek, sinikap linawin ang paghahalo ng tinig ng awtor at kaniyang inimbentong
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tauhan upang pasabugin ang makasariling ugali/ paniniwala. Tangka ng awtor na usisain ang batayan ng awtoridad ng burgis na pamilya, ng magulang-ama, at buong ordeng neokolonyalismo, sa pamamagitan ng pagbuwag sa tradisyonal na dibisyon ng lakas-paggawa na saligan nito. Intensiyon din na ilagay sa alanganin ang postmodernong karnabal ng In Sisterhood sa mapanuring masid ng protagonista sa Sonata. Si Kathleen ang simbolo ng babaeng nais lutasin ang kontradiksiyon ng sarili/ pamilya sa paraang diyalektikal. Nilagom ni Bautista sa dalawang akda ang problema at metodo ng babaeng manunulat na nakikibaka para sa kapakanan ng komunidad na siyang susi sa pagpapalaya ng kababaihan sa pagka- alipin sa ilalim ng patriyarko-kapitalismong sumisikil sa buong sambayanan.
(This critique attempts to describe the type of feminist esthetics dramatized by Bautista in her last two works before she died. The critic focuses on the dissolution of the family-centered, maternal subject of female characters caused by the profound social changes beginning in 1970—the height of the Cold War—up to the 1990 decade and the advent of the new millennium. The patriarchal family was eroded due to the political-economic crisis of the Marcos dictatorship up to the neoliberalizing regimes that followed. This essay seeks to analyze the psychic transformations of the protago- nists, their viewpoints, in both In Sisterhood and Sonata. It strives to deineate how the author explored the basis of bourgeois author- ity in the family and the neocolonial order, by way of deconstructing the traditional division of social labor. It also ex- amines Bautista’s intent to question Kathleen’s endeavor to re- solve the contradiction between family/self in a dialectical man- ner. In these two works, Bautista condensed the problems and methods of the female artist struggling for her own freedom, and for the community’s welfare as the key to liberating women from servitude to the dictates of the patriarchal-capitalist hegemony that continues to oppress the entire nation.)
Susing Salita (Keywords): kasarian, patriyarko, neokolonyalismo, kontradiksiyon, diyalektika, neoliberal
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.....Kung kinailangan pa nina Mulan ng Tsina at Joan of Arc ng Pransya na magbalatkayong lalaki para makalahok sa digmaan laban sa mananakop, sa Pilipinas ay marami ang kababaihang naging mga mandirigma o pinunong pandigma laban sa kolonyalistang Espanyol nang hindi itinatago, bagkus ay mas pinatitingkad pa nga, ang kanilang pagiging babae....Ayon kay Juliet de Lima, dumaranas ang higit na nakararaming mayorya ng kababaihang Pilipino ng tatlong suson ng pang-aapi at pagsasamantala ng uring kumprador-panginoong maylupa; at paghahari ng kalalakihan nd dinaranas din ng kababaihan ng nagsasamantalang uri.
- Adora Faye de Vera, “Ang Hindi Tradisyunal na Tradisyon ni
Kasamang Maita”
Ngunit ano ang isang / komunistang ina? / Maapoy na tanglaw / tungo sa liwayway
Sandigang bato / Lupang bukal ng lakas / sa digma, katagi sa labanan at /alalay sa tagumpay / Ang ina ko.
- Maria Lorena Barros, “Ina”.
Prologo
Masalimuot ang trayektorya ng sining ni Lualhati Bautista mula pa sa paglalathala ng unang nobelang Gapo (1988) hanggang sa huling akda niyang Sonata (2017). Bunsod iyon ng makasaysayang pagbabago sa bansa, mula sa diktadurang Marcos, 1986 “People Power Revolt,” sigalot sa administrasyon ni Cory Aquino, hanggang sa madugong terorismong inilunsad ng rehimeng Estrada-Arroyo. Ang peministang estetikang tumuhog sa mga nobelang Gapo, Dekada 70, Bata Bata, Bulaklak sa City Jail, at Desparesidos, ay bunga ng malawakang pakikibaka ng sambayanang nagpatuloy sa 1896 himagsikan laban sa kolonyalismo’t imperyalismo, at nagbubunga ngayon ng makabuluhang transpormasyon sa araw-araw na buhay ng bawat mamamayan.
Nawasak na ang simbolikong figura ni Maria Clara sa gitna ng ekonomiyang parasitiko sa base militar ng U.S noong panahon ng giyera sa Korea at Vietnam. Naging migrante na ang “hostess” sa Olongapo. Ang empleyadong sumasayaw bilang “sabjek” ay biktima ng komersiyo/ kontraktwal na paglilingkod ng diktadurang Marcos sa Washington at IMF- World Bank. Nasira ang pagsulong ng agrikultura at kalakalan, at tuluyang lumubha ang lagay ng kababaihang trabahador sa kanayunan, ayon sa saliksik nina Aida Santos-Maranan at Ligaya Lindio-McGovern. Sa pagbuwag ng pamilyang tradisyonal, ang dating masunuring “sabjek” ay kumalas at nakisangkot sa kilusang humuhubog sa kabuhayan ng nakararaming mamamayan. Narehistro ito sa magusot na sikolohiya ng mga tauhan ni Bautista.
Naging masahol ang lagay ng kababaihan nang pumasok ang programang neoliberalisasyon nina Cory Aguino, Ramos, Estrada at Arroyo. Bagamat inilunsad ni Marcos ang “Labor Export Policy” noong panahon ng “martial law” at dumagsa ang migranteng kababaihan sa iba’t ibang lupalop ng daigdig, sa dekada 1990, malaking porsiyento (55%) pa rin ang kinakabig ng mayayamang 20% ng populasyon kompara sa 10% para sa maralitang 40% (Eviota, “The Context,” 53). Masasalat ito sa magusot na pamumuhay ng mga kasambahay sa Desaparesidos at Sonata—ang away ng anak at magulang, ng mga salinlahi, ay sintomas ng transpormasyon ng diwa o physiognomy ng mga babaeng protagonista.
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SAN JUAN, Jr. | Dalumat sa Pagsulong ng Feministang Estetikang Makabayan: Metakomentaryo hinggil sa Sining ng mga akdang In Sisterhood—Lea at Lualhati at Sonata ni Lualhati Bautista
Ang diyalektikang proseso ng babaeng “sabjek” na nagdurugtong sa mga akda ni Bautista ay mamamasid sa engkuwentro ng awtor at kaniyang mga inimbentong karakter sa In Sisterhood. Sa borador ng estetikang binilangkas doon, sinikap ding ipagtambal ang modernistang awtor- dalagang anak at pamilyang tradisyonal sa Sonata. Kung matagumpay ang rekonsilyasyon ng tradisyonal na magulang/pamilya at nasugatan o napinsalang sabjek (anak/asawa), ang tanong na ito ay matutugon sa pagsusuri ng ugnayan ng kapasiyahan ng protagonista at sari-saring determinasyong dikta ng historya at balanse ng nagtatagisang puwersa sa lipunan. Masukal at matinik na tema ito na susubukang hawanin dito. Sisikapin din sa maikling sipat dito na himayin ang lohika ng pagsasalaysay mula realistiko’t naturalistikong paraan hanggang sa simboliko’t alegorikang moda ng In Sisterhood at Sonata.
Pagtistis sa Palaisipan ng Kasarian
Simula pa sa Gapo at mga unang kuwento ni Lualhati Bautista, naiakma na ang kaniyang pagkatao bilang alagad ng sining sa masalimuot na situwasyon ng kababaihan (San Juan, “Panimulang Pagsubok”). Kasangkot dito ang krisis ng kabuhayan/kalusugan ng buong bansa. Hindi lang ito isyu ng kasarian kundi suliranin ng dibisyong seksuwal ng trabahong produktibo at ugnayang panlipunan ng reproduksiyon ng katawan-diwa ng tao—ang dalawang kategorya ay dapat isakonteksto sa mga praktikang politikal-ideolohikal, sa ordinaryong pakikipagkapwa. Ito ay isyu ng pagpapatuloy ng buhay at kaganapan ng galing at kakayahan ng bawat tao sa daigdig. Usapin din ito ng pagligtas sa mga biktima ng eksplotasyon at opresyon ng imperyalismo/kapitalismong sumakop sa atin at nangingibabaw pa rin hanggang ngayon. Kilala ito ngayon sa neoliberalismong giyera ng kapitalismong global laban sa “terorismo” (“extremism”).
Maimumungkahi sa umpisa na ang ugnayang pangkasarian ay tandisang ugnayan ng produksiyon. Ang sitwasyon ng kababaihan ay kasangkot dito. Iginiit ni Frigga Haug: “All practices, norms, values, authorities, institutions, language, culture, etc., are coded in gender relations” (“Thirteen Theses,” 2020). Gayunman, dapat ilagay ito sa yugto ng moda ng produksiyong sosyal at reproduksiyon nito sa isang tiyak ng antas ng
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kasayayan. Materyalismong-historikal ang ating pananaw batay sa ating kultura. Sa gayon, mababatid na ang dominasyon at subordinasyon ng kababaihan ay hindi natural kundi niyari at pinagana ng mga relasyong materyal sa produksiyon ng buhay, sampu ng minanang mga ugali, gawi, damdamin at paniniwala. Maling sapantaha na isipin na biyolohiya o pisiolohiya ang nagtatakda sa ating kakayahan at disposisyon ng kalooban. Hindi na kailangang ipaghiwalay dito tulad ng ipotesis ng dual economy at gawaing domestiko, dominasyon at eksplotasyon (Vogel; Haug, “Gender Relations”).
Isang prinsipyo ng mapagpalayang kaisipan ang paghanap ng dahilan sa ating kalagayan sa materyal na kondisyon ng buhay at ideolohiyang supling nito. Nakasalig ang kamalayan sa katalagahang pangkabuhayan at ugnayang panlipunan. Sa gayon, ang kaalaman o kamalayan natin ay limitado ng ating panlipunang oryentasyon sa isang partikular na yugto ng kasaysayan. Ang asal at paniniwala ng bawat tao ay hinulma’t hinubog ng kaniyang kongkretong lagay sa lipunan. Sa kabaligtaran, mabisang naiiba’t nababago ang kapaligiran sa bisa ng mga ideya’t dalumat ng mga taong nais baguhin ang nagisnang kalagayan (Eviota; Aguilar, Nationalist Feminism).
Sa paglalarawan ng ating kapaligiran, kailangang alamin natin kung saang lugar o posisyon ipinipinta iyon at kung kaninong sentido o saloobin ang lenteng ginamit upang itanghal ang iba’t ibang detalye ng mga pangyayari’t gumaganap na karakter. Sa Sonata, halimbawa, dalawang posisyon ang ipinagsalisi: ang batang Kathleen at gunita ng kaniyang reaksiyon sa ama’t ina na primaryang inasikaso sa banghay ng nobela, at ang bihasang Kathleen na nagdadalamhati sa pagpanaw ng ama at nagagalak sa reunyon o muling pagsasama ng mga taong umunawa sa makatuturang punksiyon ng ama—ang imahe ng mala-utopikong pagsasalu-salo sa wakas. Sa pagkakawing ng dalawang posisyon, nilutas ang kontradiksiyon ng herarkiya sa pamilya at indibidwalismong sumupling at kumuwestiyon doon, marka ng transisyon mula piyudalismo patungong komprador- petiburgesyang kaayusan.
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Imbestigasyon sa Punto-de-Bista
Sa sining ng narasyon (nobela o kuwento), ang teknikong bansag sa lenteng gamit ay “point of view” punto-de-bista. Susubukin ng nobelista kung ano ang pinakamabisang paraan upang maipahatid niya ang kaniyang mensahe—layon na makapukaw ng damdamin, makaaliw, sampu ng komunikasyon ng dunong o kaalaman (sa doktrina ni Horace, dulce et utilis). Banggitin natin ang ilang metodo. Ang gamit ng pangunahing persona, first- person, ay mabisa sa pagbunyag sa malay ng karakter, sa mga sekretong isip at damdamin. Mahusay na naibibilad ang matimtimang daloy sa “stream- of-consciousness” teknik. Sa kabilang dako, hindi nito maisisiwalat ang isip at damdamin ng iba, na makukuha sa ibang paraan: liham, tsimis, diyaryo o magasin.
Ang mas uso’t pinakamasaklaw na paraan ay ang “third-person” na halos nagdudulot ng “omniscience” sa awtor. Masining na hinawakan ni Flaubert ang paraang ito sa Madame Bovary. Upang makahulgapos sa limitasyon ng dalawang ito, puwedeng gamitin ang pagpapalipat-lipat (tulad sa Bleak House ni Dickens o The Sound and Fury ni Faulkner). Ganito nga ang paraang ginamit ni Bautista sa Desaparesidos at Sixty in the City (San Juan, Maelstrom), sa ilang kuwento sa kalipunang Buwan, Buwan, Hulugan Mo ako ng Sundang, at sa In Sisterhood. Mula sa sapin-saping tanaw sa eksena, inaasahan ng tagapagsalaysay na mailarawan ang totalidad o panorama ng karanasan ng mga tauhang kasangkot na talagang masaklaw at makatotohanan.
Sa pagsusuri ng mga katha ni Bautista, maaring siyasatin kung paano pinili ang tauhan na gaganap sa punksiyon ng kamalayang tumatanaw. Gamit ang perspektiba o anggulo ng pananaw ng tagapag-salaysay, naisasadula ang iba’t ibang aspekto ng problema o predikamentong etikal o moral ng mga tauhan. Madaling nasakyan ito sa nobelang Bata, Bata P’ano Ka Ginawa? at Dekada 70 kung saan ang mga ina ang naitampok na pangunahing protagonista (San Juan, “Paano Ginawa”; San Juan, “Lakas”). Sa Gapo, halimbawa, ang punto-de-bista ni Michael Taylor Jr. ang nananaig, samantalang ang iba ay nasa gilid lamang, tulad niba Magda o Modesto. Ipinagpasiya ng awtor na sapat na ang piniling punto-de-bista upang matarok ang kahulugan ng mga karanasan sa konteksto ng pambansang krisis.
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Malasin ang kaibahan ng narasyon. Sa In Sisterhood, ang diyalogo nina Lea at awtor ang nakasentro, samantalang sa Sonata, si Kathleen ay nagdadalaga sa memorya (diyegetikong sangkap ng naratibo) at matalinong ina’t tagasuporta ng pamilya (mimetikong sangkap na nagpopokus at bumabalangkas sa nakapaloob na mga gunita)—magkasudlong na mimetikong tagpong nagmumuwestra, at diegetikong pagsalaysay (Rimmon- Kenan 91-95).
Transisyon Patungong Post-modernidad
Masasabi na sa yugtong ito, makabago ang estilo ng narasyon sa dalawang kathang tinutukoy rito. Naihimatong na sa una ang udyok ng intertextuality (Kristeva 37, 111; Bakhtin, Dialogic) o diayalogikong prosesong malilinang sa In Sisterhood. Halimbawa: nang balik-tanawin ng awtor ang akda noong Pebrero 14,1993, lumitaw si Magda-No-Name sa maikling pagkilala nila ni Lea. Pagnilayin ang kapaligiran ng engkuwentro: ang pagputok ng Bulkang Pinatubo na puminsala sa maraming nayon at probinsiya, lalo na ang mga tribung naninirahan sa bundok, hanggang mapamahak din ang baseng Clark Field Air Base at Subic Naval Base ng U.S. at tuloy nawalan ng trabaho at negosyo ang Olongapo, lalo na ang mga hostes o bar girls. “Cross-cutting” at “montage” ng mga pangyayari ang ginamit upang maipamalas ang pagbibigkis ng detalyeng partikular at halagang unibersal sa isang tipikal na sitwasyon.
Kasabay ng kalamidad, nagpasiya rin ang Senado na “tanggihan ang panibagong pakikipagkasunduan sa Amerika tungkol sa mga base militar” (Sisterhood 80). Gayunman, nakabalik din ang mga imperyalista sa pamamagitan ng Visting Forces Agreement. Nagbayanihan ang mga taga- Olongapo upang maitaguyod muli ang dating kalakal sa Subic Bay Free Port Zone. Dito pumasok ang mga naiwang anak at asawa ng mga Kano, kabilang na ang abandonadong anak ni Magda, na nagkapag-asawa ng retiradong Kano—ito ang sequel ng Gapo—at hindi na sila nagkita ni Michael Taylor Jr. Hilig ng awtor na hulaan ang konsekwensiya ng kaniyang panagimpan sa nobelang sinulat noong dekada 1975-1985.
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Tinahing masinsin ang partikular at unibersal sa tipikal na tagpo. Binigyan ng panoramang historikal ang partikular na insidenteng itinala na kailangan upang mabuo ang totalidad na nagdudulot ng kahulugan sa samot- saring detalyeng empirikal. Dahil dito, hindi lamang angkop sa liberalismong aktitud ang pagtuon ni Bautista sa damdamin at kalooban ng tao, kundi abala rin siya sa pagsusuri sa puwersang pampolitika’t pang-ekonomiyang umaayos sa hugis at birtud ng karanasan. Iyon ay magkatambal na pakay ng sosyalistang feminismo (Kaplan; sinagisag ni Cassandra, ayon kay Wolf). Mas importante ang inilatag na mga pangyayring pinagdugtong kaysa sa limitadong pagkaalam ng mga tauhang palaboy.
Pag-inog ng Panahon at Ahensiya
Umaandar ang forma ng sining ni Bautista sa tema ng panahon at transpormasyon ng karakter sa baryasyon ng relasyong panlipunan. Subalit hindi simpleng salamin ng ekonomiya ang kilos ng tao. Sari-saring mediyasyon ng kultura (luma, umiiral, sumusulpot) ang tumatalab sa representasyon. Mababanggit na sa mitong klasiko ang nangangasiwa sa tadhana ng tao ay tatlong mahiwagang babae magkapatid (Hornstein et al 187). May paramdam kaya na ang mga babaeng makakasalubong natin ay kahawig nila, o ng mga kabarong Cassandra o Medusa?
Sa In Sisterhood, napag-usapan ng dalawang karakter ang awtor. At sa tanong ni Lea kung bakit hindi hanga si Magda, maigting ang paghahangad ng ibang wakas sa banghay ng istoryang kinamulatan niya “Hindi. Hindi ko gusto ang ending niya sa kuwento ko. Sana, ang ending masaya...Pag sumusulat siya sa Valentine Romances, laging happy ending. Nang sulatin niya ako, malungkot na buhay ang ibinigay niya sa akin” (88- 89). Nagbago ang kapaligiran, kaya nag-iba rin ang paningin, saloobin, at husga ng awtor.
Naisiwalat ang istorya ng paglikha ng nobela na di batid ng mga karakter. Sumbat ni Magda na istorya din niya ang nangyari kay Michael Taylor, Jr. Ang taga-sulid ay siya ring taga-sukat at taga-putol ng lubid ng buhay. Payo ni Lea na patawarin na ang awtor, “Kung ang Diyos nagpapatawad, ikaw pang tauhan lang?” (90). Ano ang pagkukulang ng
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awtor? Mas importante ba ang nilalang ng imahinasyon kaysa sa mismong bukal nito? Bakit gustong dugtungan ng awtor ang nobelang natapos sa pagkabilanggo ni Michael Taylor Jr. at buhayin muli si Magda? Dumating na tayo sa pagsusulit sa heteroglossia (Bakhtin, Dialogic 426-28; San Juan, “Pagdulog sa Gapo”), ang interpolasyon ng nagsalimbayang tinig, na paraang sinanay sa In Sisterhood, ay masidhing senyas ng ecriture feminine (Jones; Moi).
Walang tangka rito na gumaya sa Kanlurang padron. Hindi idiosynkratiko ang eksperimento ni Bautista na humabi ng makabagong peministang angkop sa katutubong sitwasyon. Kabilang sa mga awtor na may hilig buhayin ang kanilang inimbentong tauhan, si Alice Walker, Afrikano-Amerikanong nobelista, ang tanyag (Casella). Sa akdang The Temple of my Familiar (1989), halimbawa, tinawag niya ang ilang tauhan mula sa premyadong aklat The Color Purple (1982). Dumadalaw ang kaniyang tauhan upang magdaos ng kumbersasyon (Flood). Magkadaupang-palad tila ang mga karakter sa kanilang adhikaing isapraktika ang kanilang paninindigan sa kanilang likas na karapatan at kakayahan.
Interpolasyon ng Mga Tinig
Sa pakiwari ni Bautista, multi-dimensiyonal ang kakayahan ng mga nagtatrabahong babae—ina, asawa, anak. Ang bumibigkis kina Lea Bustamente, Magda, Ojie, Maya at iba pa, ay ang argumento na sadyang pagkamalikhain ang babaeng responsable sa pagtatalik ng mapagkalingang guniguni at mapag-imbot na realidad. Sa dulo ng reklamo ni Lea, naisaad niya ang lohika ng katha: “Masuwerte na lang kayong mga manunulat, sumbat niya. “Nakapaglalabas kayo ng sama ng loob. Puwede n’yong isulat lahat ng mga pinagdaanan n’yo, hindi n’yo kailangang sarilinin. Puwede n’yo pa ngang gawing karanasan ng mga tauhan n’yo ang sarili n’yong mga karanasan” (177). Nahipo rito ang pagbabago ng narsisitikong bersiyon ng pagkamakasarili—reaksiyon ni Kathleen laban sa malupit na ama’t kasiping—tungo sa maramdami’t mapag-arugang pakikitungo na siyang motibasyon sa pista ng komunidad sa wakas ng nobela.
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Ang hinuha na inilipat ang karanasan ng awtor sa kaniyang mga nilikhang tauhan ay hindi kamangha-mangha. Buhat pa kina Sappho hanggang kina George Eliot at Virginia Woolf, nakuhang ipakatawan ng mga manunulat ang mga pantastikong anyo ng karanasang bumukal sa guni- guni. Binubura ang bakod na humihiwalay sa suhetibong kamalayan at obhetibong katalagahan. Matutunghayan ito sa obra nina Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Pinter, Achebe, Toni Morrison, at lalo na sa pabula ng pamilyang Buendia mula kay Melquiades, ang punto-de-bista sa One Hundred Years of Solitude ni Gabriel Marquez. Puwedeng ihambing ito sa ecriture feminine nina Helen Cixous at Luce Irigaray (binatikos ni Monique Witting, ulat ni Moi; tingnan din si Kaplan, “Radical Feminism”).
Mamasid din ang peministant praktis sa panitik nina Genoveva Edtroza Mature, Liwayway Arceo, Rosario Guzman-Lingat, Joi Barrios, atbp. Taglay nila ang estilong repleksibo, maramdamin, mapagsuri. Tumutukoy iyon sa iskemang eksperimental ng panulat, lumalabag sa patriyarkong kodigo ng autotelikong arte at batas ng patriyarkong moralidad. Tahasang gumigiit iyon sa pagkakaiba ng babae sa diskursong ipinataw ng Estado at haka-hakang kumbensiyonal. Magkahalong polemika, pantastikong salamisim, panaginip, balisang pagbubulay-bulay, bulalas ng baliw, paghuhulong lagalag, nomadikong repleksiyon, atbp. ang naikintal sa In Sisterhood. Iyon ang palatandaan ng orihinalidad nito. Mababanggit dito ang puna ni Soledad Reyes hinggil sa estilo ni Virginia Woolf na tangkang “wakasan ang identidad batay sa kasarian” sa pamamagitan ng “pauntol- untol at pagbugso-bugsong naratibo na ginamitan ng iba’t ibang pananaw” (128).
Hindi bagong imbensiyon ang estratehiya ng paglalarawang ito. Ang sabayang pag-uusap, palitang-kuro, huntahan ay tinawag ni Mikhail Bakhtin na “heteroglossia” (428). Pinaiibabaw ang halaga ng konteksto sa teksto, ang mga kondisyong sosyal at pulitikal na siyang puwersang nagpapakahulugan sa anomang salita o pangungusap. Ayon kay Bakhtin, lahat ng pahayag o binigkas na salita ay heteroglotik dahil sila ay “functions of a matrix of forces pratically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve” (428).
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Sa metodolohiya ni Bautista, litaw ang heteroglotikang estratehiya. Nagsalisihan ang ilusyon at reyalidad. Nagbunsod iyon ng katarsis sa pagiging obhetibo ng dati’y suhetibong damdamin o dalumat—diyalektikang proseso ng paglikha ng tipikal na aksiyon/tagpo. Ito ang reyalisasyon ni Bautista na kinuha sa paghunos ni Lea (sa halip na si Amanda Bartolome mula sa Dekada 70), na kinatawan din ng feministang pampulitika ng mga kapanahon. Di lang iyon, tiniyak pa ng avatar ang petsa ng pagtitik nito, “Marso 8, 2013, Araw ng Kababaihan”). Ito na marahil ang ars poetica ng manlilikha na dinulutan ng masidhing artikulasyon sa Sonata. Sinikap doong iangkop ang malay sa reyalidad sa paraan ng pagtimbang ng kolektibong pagpapasiya. Isinakonteksto ang narsisitikong pakikipagsalaparan ng batang Kathleen sa daigdig ng maskulinistang “Valentine Romances”:
....Na minsan, ang manunulat ay hindi lang ang manunulat kundi ang tauhan din ng kanyang kuwento. Ang tauhan ay ang puso’t kaluluwa, ang sarili, ng isang manunulat....
Huwag ka nang magreklamo sa mga sugat at kalungkutan na pinagdadaanan mo sa loob ng isang nobela. HIndi mabait ang manunulat na ang gustong ihain sa mambabasa ay hindi lang isang kuwento kundi isang kumpletong karanasan, kumpletong komentaryo sa ugnayan ng mga tao sa loob ng kanyang lipunan at pahanon. Ang manunulat ang kunsensiya ng kanyang bayan.... (177-79)
Binigyan ng parametro ang anarkikong daloy ng simbuyo sa loob ng mga nilikhang tauhan.Taktika ng awtor ang nasunod: inalo’t hinimas- himasan ang reklamo ni Magda na hindi nadulutan ng masayang katapusan ang Gapo. Kasi nga ang biyak-na-malay ni Michael Taylor Jr. ang nakataya roon. Gayunman, pinilit lunasan ang pagsabog ng identidad sa iba’t ibang maskara ng tauhan at likumin ang mga pira-pirasong aspekto ng budhi’t diwa sa likhang-sining. Ang banghay ng kuwento ang bagong padron ng kasal kay Bautista na negasyon ng “kasal” niya kina Rio at Carlo: “At natagpuan mo ang iyong sarili sa loob ng isang kuwento, isang tula, isang awit, isang dasal. Dito mo matutuklasan na minahal ka rin pala niya at ikinasal ang kanyang sarili sa iyo, iniangat ka rin pala niya sa altar ng kanyang kaluluwa, at binigyan ng pagpupugay ng kanyang mga bituin” (178).
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SAN JUAN, Jr. | Dalumat sa Pagsulong ng Feministang Estetikang Makabayan: Metakomentaryo hinggil sa Sining ng mga akdang In Sisterhood—Lea at Lualhati at Sonata ni Lualhati Bautista
Mapapasubalian na baka ito’y kompensasyon lamang sa miserableng kondisyon ng kapaligiran. Maaari, kung ang dating identidad, o malay-sa-sarili, ay sinira’t pinasabog ng krisis panlipunan. Nagkawatak- watak ang batayan ng egosentrikong personalidad, pati na ang awtoridad ng patriyarkong puno ng pamilya/angkan na umaalalay sa mga subordinadong kasambahay, sa panahon ng pag-salungat sa diktadurya, sa rebelyon ng anak-pawis, kabahaihan, Moro at Lumad, laban sa pang-aapi’t pagsasamantala. Ipinadama ito ni Bautista sa gulo’t ligalig na gumiyagis sa mga pamilya sa Gapo, Dekada 70, Bata Bata, Desaparesidos, atbp.
Maitanong kung ang renobasyon ng lumang sabjek ang alternatibo sa disintegrasyong sumaklot sa madla. Bumalik ba tayo sa romantikong pilosopiya ng sining mula kay Longinus hanggang kina Schiller, Coleridge at Shelley (Wimsatt & Brooks)? Hindi, sapagkat nailapat ni Bautista ang distansiyang artistiko na nagpahintulot sa pagbadya ng ironya, pagpapatawa, pagtuya sa sarili, at masayang biruan sa bitak at lamat ng salaysay. Tila hindi lubusang nalustay ang pagkatao ng kababaihan. Bagamat ang estetikang feminista ni Bautista ay negatibong kritika ng kapitalistang lipunan, taglay nito ang pag-udyok sa tendensiyang salungatin ang komodifikasyon at reipikasyon ng buhay (Donovan). Kaalinsabay ng negasyon ng status quo, may masiglang pahiwatig iyon sa aktuwalidad ng isang sakramentong espasyo ng lugod at kaganapan. Matinding kakontra iyon sa mundo ng salapi, kalakal, at mabangis na digmaan sa pagsambot ng tubong kapital at kapangyarihan.
Maungkat muli natin: bakit binuhay muli si Lea at ginawa siyang alter-ego o representatibo ng awtor sa tangkang isulat ang kaniyang memoir? Hindi na ang batang Lea sa sumunod na engkwentro dahil sa pagkatuto sa naranasan. Ipinahayag ni Bautista na sa In Sisterhood, naititik niya ang kaniyang “mga paninindigan bilang manunulat at bilang babae. Marahil, pati na ang sarili kong patunay sa walang hanggang posibilidad ng imahinasyon.” Sa kuro-kuro ko, ito ang masustansiyang tema ng libro: ang mapanlikhang pwersa ng imahinasyon. Ngunit bago talakayin iyon sa huling bahagi, pahina i-xv, detour muna tayo sa pagpapatuloy ng buhay ni Lea pagkaraang matapos ang nobela, nang siya ay treynta’ dos anos noon- ”taglibog ng babae”—di umano’y intuwisyon ni Ricky Lee, kaibigang artista (3).
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DILIMAN REVIEW | Vol. 66 No. 2 (2022) Disimulasyon at Interpelasyon
Nirepaso ni Lea ang nangyari sa nobelang Bata, Bata P’ano ka Ginawa (Torres-Yu). Ang nangingibabaw ay pagtatalik niya kay Raffy, banggit sa “umaatikabong yarian” na hindi tungkol sa pisikal na ugnayan kundi sa paghuli kay Johnny, isang katulong ni Lea sa NGO. Ang pagdukot at pagpaslang kay Johnny, tulad ng pagkamatay ni Gabe sa Sonata, ay senyas ng pagpihit ng pagkilala, kapwa peripeteia, pagpapalit ng kapalaran, at anagnorisis, pagkatalos at pagkawatas ng katotohanan. Alam ni Lea na baka maibulgar ni Raffy kay Elinor ang kanilang “yarian,” na hindi “akma sa isang pagkakataon o pangyayari. ‘Nagyarian’ kung pulos katawan lang; nagtalik kung kasama ang puso” (5). Nagtulak ito sa muni tungkol sa paggamit ng salita ayon sa situwasyon, hindi ito kabastusan. Kung tutuusin, hindi iyon “pagsasamantala ng lalaki sa kahinaanng babae,” na (kumpisal ni Lea) “di ko matatanggap dahil gusto rin naman, gusto ko rin, ang pakikipagtalik. Sa kundisyon nga lang na gusto ko ang makakatalik ko” (6). Binawi ng babae ang karapatan/kakayahang magpasiya, hindi magpatianod o magpahinuhod sa sumpong o pagbabakasali.
Feministang konsepto ng jouissance at gamot sa narsisismong makalalaki ang naitampok dito. Sa ano’t anuman, ang pagpapalaya sa imahinasyon ang marubdob na hangarin ni Lea—hindi kasimbagsik ng kagustuhang makipagtalik—na “lumabas sa kanyang libro at mabuhay bilang tunay na tao at hindi tauhan lang...tuntunin ang sarili kong direksiyon, gumawa ng sarili kong pasiya. Gusto kong magpakita” (7; hinggil sa ulirang halimbawa nina Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Florence Nightingale, atbp., bumaling kay Figes).
Ang hangaring “magpakita” at makilala ay dumaan muna sa balakid ng mga kontemporaryong pangyayari at figura: sina Isabel Allende at Leo Dee Rogierro, mga taguan ng awtor sa Annapolis, Cubao at sa Sikatuna, mga laro sa kompyuter, pornograpikong palabas, ang formula ng romance novel at sistemang kerida, at ang sinapit ni Jules, karakter sa Dekada 70. Katartiko ang talab ng huli. Napunta sa libro ni Albert Goldman, “The Lives of John Lennon,” si Lennon at ang “uugoy-ugoy na ari” nito, at ang pagbalewala kay Yoko Ono.
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SAN JUAN, Jr. | Dalumat sa Pagsulong ng Feministang Estetikang Makabayan: Metakomentaryo hinggil sa Sining ng mga akdang In Sisterhood—Lea at Lualhati at Sonata ni Lualhati Bautista
Ang bantog na artistang Haponesa, na pangunahing lider ng grupong Flux, ay sagisag ng mapangengganyong imahinasyon na naturol na (Higgins 120-21). Sa pakikipag-usap ni Lea kay Yoko Ono, nabanggit ang prehuwisyo na “Ang dangal ng babae....ay walang ibang pinagkakabitan kundi ang pananatiling buo ng kanyang hymen....Pag dalaga ka at nasira ng nobyo mo ang virginity mo? Patay ka sa tatay mo!...parang tatay mo ang may-ari ng pekpek mo...bago pa mabenta sa magiging asawa mo. O, di ba nagkakabilihan naman talaga ng pekpek? Prostitusyon ka diyan. Hindi...dowry...Pag virgin, malaki ang bayad, me kasama pang kalabaw. Pag hindi na virgin, mura na lang, manok na lang ang kasama....(61).
Sa konteksto ng saliksik at husga ni Gayle Rubin hinggil sa trapiko ng mga babae, naputol na ang pagpapalitan sa pagpanaw ni Anton. At sa Sonata, nasira ang patriyarkong poder sa soberanya ni Kathleen, ipinagbunying awtor, at sa kolektibong pista/karnabal na lumusaw sa personal hiya at kasalanan. Sa imahinaryong paglutas ng kontradiksiyon sa pagitan ng patriyarkong awtoridad at indibiduwalistikong doktrina ng artista, naisakatuparan ng nobela bilang isang pormang ideolohikal na kumakatawan sa burgesyang paniniwala, na lantad sa kritisismong oposisyonal/radikal (Balibar & Macherey 289-93).
Demistipikasyon ang proseso ng pagtalakay ni Bautista sa kontekstong historikal ng sining. Matinik at mapangahas din ang diskurso tungkol sa ari ng babae, na tuwirang tinukoy sa salitang “puke” na hindi dapat ipagkamali sa puri o dangal (In Sisterhood vii). Biolohiya versus panuntunang etika-moral ang kategoryang kasangkot dito. Pwedeng ituring ito na pasaring sa gayuma ng “Vagina Monologue” ni Eve Ensler sa mga nahumaling alagad ng Gabriela. Napuna na ni Bautista, sa kaniyang Hinugot sa Tadyang, ang maling pagtrato sa kasarian batay sa argumentong biolohikal/anatomikal, hindi sa ugnayang panlipunan. Sa patriyarkong orden, minamaliit ang reproduktibong gawain ng babae sa tahanan at sa pagsustento sa populasyon ng mga manggagawa (Barrett & McIntosh; Vogel). Marahil, ang pagsipi sa nobela ni Chart Kobjitti at tauhang Mai Somsong ay isang paraan upang ipakita na kahit ang isang baliw na babae ay may sariling pagpapasiya at katapatan na wala sa ibang karakter tulad ni Lea.
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Pinaglangkap ni Bautista ang piksiyonal at materyal na salik ng akda. Dapat unawain din na hindi magkapareho sina Yoko Ono at Mai Somsong, isa ay tunay na nilalang at isa ay kathang-isip lamang. Ngunit magkasanib ang punksiyon nila bilang babaeng taglay ang makasariling determinasyon. Sa nobela, si Lea ay nakabitin sa pagitan nina Ding at Raffy, ang dalawang lalaking umugit ng kaniyang kapalaran. Sa Sonata, baligtad ang sitwasyon: parang kinapon sina Rio at Carlo, at tuloy natunaw ang penis- envy ni Freud at phallocentrism ni Lacan.
Hinalungkat ni Bautista ang hiwaga ng kasarian: hindi ito depende sa anatomya kundi sa relasyong sosyal, sa dibisyon ng trabaho sa lipunan. Sa dalawang libro, hiniwa at tinabas ang “ari” ng kalalakihan at sa gayon, nabuksan ang pakikipagsabwatan sa ina/babaeng kapatid/lola, kahit hindi alinsunod sa siko-analitikong iskema nina Horney at Mitchell. Magkapantay sa wakas sina Kathleen at Aling Auring at Komadrona Ata; naiwaksi ang paghahanap sa sino ang magdadala ng pangalan ng ama sapagkat sumaibabaw ang kabutihan ng komunidad.
Sandigan at Lagusan
Pinaglaro’t pinainog ni Bautista, sa Sonata, ang mga kontradiksiyon sa diyalektika ng karnabal ng paglalamay sa burol ng ama. Maituturing iyon na sirkulasyon ng mga boses kahambing sa polyphony nina Rabelais at Dostoevsky (Bakhtin, Problems; Dialogic). Tinugon nito kung bakit hinabi ang mahabang kuwento tungkol kay Anton. Kumpara kina Ding at Raffy, si Anton ang naging tagapamagitan o mediyasyon sa diyalektika ng damdamin/pagnanais ni Lea/Bautista. Kahawig siya na ama sa Sonata: lumabas, pumasok—alipin ng contingency, biktima ng anarkistang galaw ng merkado at akumulasyon ng tubo/kapital. Si Anton ang naghirap, nagdusa at nag-alay ng buhay para malutas ang sistemang kerida at malinaw ang tadhana ng babae bilang kasangkapan lamang na pinagpapalitan ng paterfamilias, awtoridad sa disposisyon ng miyembro ng pamilya. Tulad ng amang pumanaw sa Sonata, si Anton ay sakripisyong inialay ng feministang sensibilidad upang purgahin ang kabuktutan ng patriyarkong rehimen.
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SAN JUAN, Jr. | Dalumat sa Pagsulong ng Feministang Estetikang Makabayan: Metakomentaryo hinggil sa Sining ng mga akdang In Sisterhood—Lea at Lualhati at Sonata ni Lualhati Bautista
Dumating na tayo sa kasukdulang bahagi ng naratibo. Pagtuunan natin ng suri ang eksena ng paghihiwalay nina Anton at Lea. Kilatesin at intindihin kung ito ay halimbawa ng kalabisang melodramatiko o sadyang pagsusog ng pathos/simbuyong pamukaw-habag. Nag-umpisa ang komprontasyon sa hikayat ni Anton kay Lea na lumayo sila at magkasamang maglakbay kahit saan:
Nabitin siya sa pagitan ng kagustuhang umiyak. Ganyan pala ang magiging dating sa ‘yo pag narinig mo ang mga gano’ng salita sa bibig ng isang lalaki. HIndi mo malaman kung ano ang gagawin mo.
Tumindig siya. Hahakbang ba siya pasulong, paurong, pakanan, pakaliwa? Ang daming retrato sa dingding na nakatitig sa kanya, o! Parang binabantayan siya, inaantay ang kanyang sagot. Tumutok ang mga mata niya, hindi na naalis, sa retrato ng dalawang kamay na magkahawak, marahil ay close-up shot ng mga kamay ng isang bagong kasal. Never let the hand that holds you, hold you down.— Author unknown.
Napakumpas ang mga kamay niya sa palibot ng maliit na opisina. Ang dami niyang gustong sabihin, mga paliwanag na hindi niya kayang isatinig (123-24).
Sumingit ang payo ng awtor kay Lea upang mapahinahon ang kalooban. Bukod dito, parang naging magkasuyo ang dalawang babae, magkatalik. Lumubog o pumailanlang ang lalaki, si Anton, biglang nabura. Nasa bukana ang dalawang babaeng nangungusap. Ilang pahina bago rito, natigilan si Lea kay Nadine, asawa ni Anton, at naibulong sa sarili: “Hindi natin kailangang magpalit pa ng kalagayan. Iisa lang ang kalagayan natin, nagkaiba lang tayo sa tatak. Asawa ka, kerida ako, pero pareho din iyon....Nakikita niya ang sarili niya kay Nadine” (122). Iyon ang husga ng patriyarkong hukuman: kapwa sila laruan/ari-arian ng isang panginoon: Lalaking May-ari. Natigil ang trapiko ng mga babaeng pambayad sa utang, o pag-iwas sa incest taboo sa kapatiran at solidaridad ng kababaihan.
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Totoo bang patag o pantay ang tayo ng kerida at legal na asawa?Ipinagpatuloy ng awtor ang tendensiyang empathy o pagdamay sa kapwa babae: “Sa mga sandaling ito, kung saan nakadamit man tayo ay ganap pa rin ang ating kahubaran, di man magkadaop ang ating mga katawan ay nagtatalik tayo sa pinakamatalik na paraan. Hinihingi ng pagkakataon na harapin natin ang ating mga lakas at kahinaan at alalayan natin ang isa’t isa” (124). Ipinaalala kay Lea ang tugon niya kay Raffy sa nobela: “Pag sumama ako sa ‘yo ay iiwan ko naman ang aking sarili. Paano ka liligaya sa isang babaing walang sarili” (124). Ibig sabihin ng “sarili”: tayong mga inapi, mga biktima, na kailangang magkabuklod upang mailigtas ang ating kaluluwa. Komunistang feminismo ang destinasyon nito.
Isang antinomya o aporia ang masusulyapan dito: pagsasariling angkin ang alay ng iba o pakikipagtalik na walang pananagutan. Paano mangyayaring sabay iyon? Lumalabas na ang gantimpala sa paligsahan ay ang “sarili” ng awtor/babae/kababaihan. Sa pagpaalam sa kalaguyo, sambit ni Lea/Bautista: “May iba pa tayong magagawa. Magagawa nating umuwi sa sarili nating lugar” (125), isang pagtiwalag sa pagnanais/kagustuhang seksuwal, at pagluhog sa proyekto ng eksplorasyon at pagtuklas ng sarling kakayahan. Nakaharap tayo sa isang palaisipan: tumiwalag sa heteronormatibong batas na nagkukulong sa babae bilang asawa/ina, o tumakas sa herarkiyang ipinataw ng patriyarkong orden at pumalaot sa dagat ng bagong karanasan. Aling direksiyon ang atas ng feministang makabayan?
Sarili Muna o Bayan Muna?
Tampok ang problematikong kuwadro ng sarili, ang tatag ng egosentrikong sabjek na biniyak at nilansag ng krisis panlipunan. Ang pagbabalik sa sarili ay pagbawi ng dignidad ng babae, bigay ng tinalikdang kasuyo. Iyon ang pagtutuwid ni Emi sa 1979 kuwentong “Anton” ni Bautista (“Buwan, buwan” 127-46). Ayaw niyang kerida lamang na pangalawa sa legal na asawa, ipinagtibay nang “Isang araw ay ‘nalaglag ang anak ni Anton kay Emi. ‘Ika nga ng kano: Hell knows no fury than a woman scorned!” (142).
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SAN JUAN, Jr. | Dalumat sa Pagsulong ng Feministang Estetikang Makabayan: Metakomentaryo hinggil sa Sining ng mga akdang In Sisterhood—Lea at Lualhati at Sonata ni Lualhati Bautista
Sa ultimong pasiya, sinubukang bawiin at kontrolin ng babae ang reproduktibong kapasidad ng katawan. Sa pangangasiwa ng katawan, ipinagtibay ni Emi na siya pa rin ang huling magpapasiya sa kaniyang kapalaran, hindi ang lalaking walang pagpapahalaga sa kaniyang identidad bilang manunulat; ayaw niya ang kasiping lamang sa banig. Samakatwid, tulad ni Juliana sa 1991 kuwentong “Ang Pag-ibig ay Isang Tula”(Bayan Ko!) at ni Guia sa Sixty in the City, ang papel na ginampanan ni Emi ay sumasagisag sa mapagpalayang birtud at malikhaing diwa ng kababaihan. Nakabuod sa pantayan ng kababaihan=imahinasyon ang sumusulong at nagpapasigla sa erotikang pagkiling ng prosa ng awtor. Nakaigpaw ito sa dating hulmahan ng sabjek na nakasentro sa sariling pakinabang at ginhawa.
Malaking pagsulong ng perspektiba ng awtor mula sa protagonista ng libido o walang limitasyong pagnanais. Umaapaw pa rin ang silakbo ng hangarin at lunggati. Maaaring mabuking ang drama ng mga kontradiksiyon sa mungkahi ng awtor na ang mga tauhan niya ay “ang puso’t kaluluwa, ang sarili, ng isang manunulat” (142). Samakatwid, wala talagang matatag na hidwaan o tunggalian—malikmata lang iyon. Bago pa ang anekdota tungkol kay Anton at Nadine, naitambuli na ng awtor ang sabwatan at pagkakaisa ng kababaihan, kahit iba-iba ang kanilang katayuan o personalidad: “Makikita mo ang iyong sarili sa kapwa mo babae...Nakaguhit din sa kanyang mukha ang sarili mong mga pangarap at pagkabigo, ang iyong mga kaligayahan at kalungkutan. Dahil pareho kayong babae. Pare- pareho kayong mga babae...marami ngunit iisa” (98). Halimbawa ito ng diyalektika ng isa-naging-dalawa’t umakyat sa matingkad na antas: sintesis ng bawat sangkap sa mas mabisa’t matalab na kaayusan.
Sa henerikong panukat ng alegorya, lahat ng babae ay si Flor Contemplacion din (sa burol niya nakilala ni Lea si Anton). Subalit bakit ba nagkaroon ng kagalitan o oposisyon kina Lea at Elinor, Lea at Nadine, Magda at asawa ni Steve Taylor? Siguro, ang sagot dito ay walang iba kundi ang pagkakapuwesto nila sa daidig ng mga ama, ng patriyarkong panginoon ng pamilya’t tahanan, ng paterfamilia, na siyang pinakaugat ng dominasyon at eksplotasyon ng kababaihan bilang grupong natatangi. Iugnay na rin ang pagsikil ng mga babaeng migrante/OFW (Overseas Filipino Workers) bilang “global servants” sa iba’t ibang lupalop ng daigdig, isang tipo ng kolonyalismong kinulayan ng positibong etiketang “bagong bayani” ni Cory Aquino (Aguilar, “Questionable Claims”).
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DILIMAN REVIEW | Vol. 66 No. 2 (2022) Sonata: Pagkilates at Pagtatasa
Ayon sa antropolohiya ng sinaunang panahon, napailalim na ang kabaihan sa paghahari ng herontokrasya ng mga nakatatandang lalaki. Ang patriyarko ang umuugit sa “matrimonial management” (Rehmann 246). Naging “incest” ang asawahan sa loob ng tribu; nagkaroon ng tabu at prohibisyong seksuwal. Kontrolado ng mga ama ang lakas-paggawa ng kababaihan. Ang simbolikong representasyon ng kasarian ay nakapaloob sa pamilya bilang paraan ng pagtatanghal ng subordinasyon/dominasyon sa isang emosyonal at pantastikong paraan. Nagkakasundo ang lahat na ang paghahari ng totemikong Ama, patriyarkong panginoon ng angkan o hinlog, ay siyang pundasyon ng pagkalugami ng kababaihan. Ano ang dapat gawin?
Isang paraan sa pagtakas sa bilangguan ng patriyarko ay makikita sa pagtuligsa kay Albert Goldman. Idagdag rin ang pagburol kay Felipe Maramag at paglibing kay Anton. Marami pa ring uri ng pagpaslang o pagkitil sa lalaking lapastangan o salaula—halimbawa, sa mga burokratang Enrile, Ping Lacson, Ampatuan, sa Cybercrime Law ni Sotto, atbp. Nilagom sila sa tauhan ng magulang—Nanay at Tatay—at sa kalaguyong Rio at Carlo sa Sonata. Naging anitong inspirasyon ang Tatay bilang guro at matalinghagang uliran.
Malakas ang banat ng awtor ng In Sisterhood sa sistema ng pagmamalabis laban sa kababaihan. Sumidhi ang malay-taong pagtutol sa sawing kalagayan ng pagkababae sa epilogo: “Dampot-dampot, pira- pirasong bahagi ng hindi matapus-tapos na memoirs.” Tila pagsubok sa pagyari ng postmodernong pastiche ang resulta. Itinampok ang krimen ng gahasa, na pinakalapastangang akto, kalangkap ng dahas ng salita— pinagtambal na tingin ni Bautista sa relasyon ng sining at realidad, wika/ salita at kilos/aksiyon. Nakakintal dito ang prinsipyo ng feministang estetikang nagsilbing lehitimasyon ng kaniyang metier bilang babaeng manunulat :
Ginamit ko ang mga salitang libog at kantutan sa “Desaparesidos” sa pinaka-kasuklam-suklam na eksena ng nobela, hindi lang para patibayan na ang panggagahasa ay paglapastangan sa pagkatao ng biktima, kundi upang
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SAN JUAN, Jr. | Dalumat sa Pagsulong ng Feministang Estetikang Makabayan: Metakomentaryo hinggil sa Sining ng mga akdang In Sisterhood—Lea at Lualhati at Sonata ni Lualhati Bautista
bigyang-diin din ang dahas ng panahong pinagdaanan ng aming henerasyon: “ ‘Tong mga putang inang ‘to, nakukuha pa palang magkantutan at magkaanak! Ano ang ‘sinisigaw n’yo pag nilalabasan kayo, ha? Mabuhay ang rebolusyon?”
Hindi ko kayang alisin ang mga salitang ito dahil kung wala ng mga salitang iyon ay hindi magiging ganap ang karahasan ng gusto kong ilarawan, hindi magiging gano’n kasumpa-sumpang isipin ang krimen ng panggagahasa, partikular ang panggagahasa ng mga sundalo sa mga aktibista sa loob ng batas-militar. Sapagkat hindi lang ang pisikal na pagpapahirap ang instrumento ng dahas sa pagmamalupit kundi gayundin ang mga salita. Ang mga salita’y nagtataglay din ng buong kapangyarihan para ang isang biktima’y mandiri at mahubaran ng galang sa kanyang sarili.
....Nanatili ang paninindigan ko na ang mahalaga’y gamitin ang salita, kahit ang pinakamagaspang na salita, sa pinakadapat at pinakasensitibong pagkakataon, dahil ang salita’y mahalaga sa pagpapatotoo ng isang karanasan....Ang paninindigan ko ay hindi ang ‘puki’ kundi puri ng isang babae. Ang puki at puri ay dalawang magkaibang bagay. Hindi ang una ang nagtatakda sa pangalawa at kailanman, sa anumang paraan, ay hindi dapat ituring ng bandila ng pananagumpay ng isang lalaki (In Sisterhood vi-vii).
Pinagtatalunan dito ay hindi lang bokabularyo kundi konsepto, katarungan, etika at moralidad. Sa pinakahuling nobela ni Bautista, Sonata, sa palagay ko’y naisakatuparan ang pagsulat ng “memoir” o talambuhay ng isang matagumpay na manunulat, si Kathleen (kinaltas niya ang apelyido ng paterfamilias [tungkol sa kategorya, konsultahin si Finley]). Sa mga gunita ng pagkadalaga ni Kathleen, lalo na sa rebelyon niya sa awtoridad ng magulang, sinikap niyang isadula ang lusaw, madulas at magusot na ugnayan ng anak at magulang. Ang amang musikero, na laging nagsasanla ng
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kaniyang biyulin at gitara, ang unang nagturo kay Kathleen ng lakas ng isip, ang potensiyal ng imahinasyon, sa gitna ng pangamba’t panganib ng kanilang kahirapan. Natuto siyang lumikha ng bagong daidig sa utak, sa guni-guni kung saan “maliit na salita ay sapat na para magbukas ng pinto ng mga alaala” (Sonata 60).
Naisadula ni Bautista ang transpormasyon ng patriyarko sa amang nagtuturo’t nagpapasigla. Naimulat ng kaniyang ama ang sensibilidad niya sa mga bulaklak, mga pantastikong retorika ng tikbalang at imaheng gawa ng mahiya; sa buwan at bituin na kanilang minamasdan mula sa bubong ng kanilang bahay; sa mabighaning tula ng lukaluka (na simbolo ng babaylan o babaeng propeta), at sa buhay ng mga gamu-gamo na naging “national anthem” ng magkakapatid: “Pare-pareho silang natutong kumuha ng inspirasyon sa tapang at paninindigan ng gamu-gamo” (88). Di makalimutan ni Kathleen ang payo ng amang minahal at kinamuhian: “Pag-buo ang loob mo at hindi mo iniinda ang sakit, mararating mo ang mga bituin” (90).
Maipapanukala rito na ang bahay-sanglaan, na pangalawang tirahan ng ama na bukal ng panustos nila, ay simbolo ng palitan ng halaga (cash-nexus). Madalas mawala-mabawi ang biyulin. Inulit sa pagtakas ni Kathleen sa bahay at pagkadiskubre sa kaniya ng ama. Sa Kristiyanidad, hindi kakatwang ituring ang buhay na sangla lamang mula sa diyos. Gumaganap na isang bangko o gusing panlipunan ang sanglaan para sa proletaryong uri, isang metaporang mailalapat sa ritmo ng pasok-labas ng mga lalaki sa buhay ni Kathleen.
Sa ultimong analisis, isinakatuparan ng ama ni Kathleen ang pagbuwag sa komoditi-petisismo, sa pagsuob sa salapi o pag-aari. Sinuway niya ang batas ng pag-iimbot, at umigpaw sa bihag ng reipikasyon kung saan ang mga bagay-bagay, alyenadong produkto ng komunidad, ay humahadlang sa makataong pagtrato ng mamamayan sa kapwa. Ibinalik ng ama ni Kathleen ang humanistikong milyu na kailangan upang makamit ang tunay na kasarinlan at kaunlaran ng buong sambayanan.
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Paghulagpos sa Bilangguan
Ang buong nobelang Sonata ay elehiya sa burol ng ama, isang paglibing sa totemiko ng kalalakihan. Subalit sa pagdaralita at proletaryong istatus ng ama, na kundi sa pananahi ng asawa ay walang ipakakain sa pamilya, hindi maituturing na tiyak na patriyarkong puno ang tatay—walang permanenteng hanapbuhay, halos walang kapangyarihan. Napanglumo siya ng sintomas ng pagka-api bilang proletaryo/anak-pawis sa mentalidad at ugali.
Nang mamatay ang tanging lalaking anak na si Gabriel/Gabe, tumindi ang sigalot sa pamilya (Kabanata 18-19), ayon kay Kathleen. Nagsimula ang deteriorasyon ang buhay nilang mag-anak. Ang tadhana ng babae ay nasikil sa pananagutan niya sa iba, kaya hindi kagyat natutulog: “Dahil sa simpleng dahilan na naghihintay siya. Naghihintay. Sa kanyang asawa. Sa kanyang kalaguyo. Maari ding sa kanyang anak...o sa bangkay nito? (127). Nang hindi umuwi ang siyam-na-taong Kathleen mula sa eskwela, sampal, sabunot, tadyak at hagupit ng sinturon ang inabot niya kay Aling Auring, nanay na mula noon ay siyang naging dahilan ng “pagkatiwalag” ni Kathleen sa magulang. Doon tandisang naglaho ang dakilang bantayog ng maternidad, “motherhood,” na pinuntirya ng mga babaeng aktibista (Aguilar, Eviota).
Si Gabe ang nawawalang bagay (“missing object”). Kataka-taka na sa lahat ng sigawan at murahan, walang banggit tungkol kay Gabe: “Hinintay niyang mabanggit si Gabe, ang pagkamatay nito, ang kasalanan dito ng tatay niya” (136). Sa burol ng ama niya, ipinagtapat ng nanay ni Kathleen na naghirap din ang ama niya sa pagkakasala sa pagkamatay ng anak at matinding pagdurusa nito, umabot sa antas na kinailangang mapahinahon siya ng asawa na patawarin niya ang sarili niya. Nagdamdam din si Aling Auring na napabayaan niya ang asawa: “Na minsan, kailangang tulungan ng babae ang lalaki na matutong umiyak...Higit kanino pa man, kailangang matutunan ng tao na patawarin ang sarilli niya. Para matutunan niyang patawarin din ng iba” (315). Mahihinuha na kahalintulad ito ng pagpapalitan ng babae sa tribu upang mapanatili ang linya ng lahi at maiwaksi ang tukso ng incest-taboo.
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Pansinin ang papel ng panganay na lalaking-anak na inakalang “taga-pagdala ng pangalan” ng ama. Naghati sa salaysay ang pagkamatay ni Gabe (Kabanata 16-18), sentral na krisis sa buhay ni Kathleen. Pumasok ang dalawang kontra-tema ng pagpaparusa sa kaniya ng ama at ina, na humantong sa kapanapanabik na eksena sa Kabata 22, abentura ni Kathleen sa siyudad, na nagtapos sa pagsagip sa kaniya ng tatay niya, na pumasok muli ang malamyos, mapagmahal, naninikluhod” na tunog ng biyulin. Hindi na muli madidinig ang musika hanggang hindi tayo makarating sa burol at pista ng komunidad na magliligtas sa sakuna’t pasakit ng lahat. Nalunasan sa publikong pakikbahagi sa nobela ang traumatikong memorya ni Kathleen, tulad ng dating ng mga “true fictions” sa mga pelikula ng nasawing OFW, The Flor Contemplacion Story, o inabusong biktima sa The Fatima Buen Story (Lim).
Salungatin ang Poder Patrimonyal
Bagamat lubhang melodramatiko ang tagpong naghilom sa sama- ng-loob ni Kathleen sa ina, hindi na maibabalik pa ang dating sitwasyon. Hindi mabura ang memorya nang buntis ang nanay niya “pero wala siyang pakialam...Natutuwa siyang isipin na mawawalan ng katulong ang nanay niya at sa gano’n, maigaganti niya ang siyam na taong gulang na bata na walang humpay na hinagupit nito ng sinturon dahil maghapong nagbabad sa library at nagsulat ng kanyang kwento” (153). Kombinasyong sado- masokista ang maaaninaw dito. Kung napigtal ang damdamin ni Kathleen sa ina, lumala ang hinanakit niya sa ama. Ang himagsik ng dalagang kinse- anyos sa awtoridad ng paterfamilia ay masisinag sa Kabanata 21. Nang hindi siya nakabalik sa isang bakasyon sa tamang oras, masungit ang ama na naghinalang “nagalaw siya ng lalaki,” kaya sapilitang paeegksamin siya. Mabagsik ang protesta ni Kathleen, pagtutol na isasatinig ng modernong kababaihan sa matapang na pagtatanggol sa karapatan ng pagmaneho sa kanilang katawan—ang “reproductive rights” (abortion, diborsiyo, atbp [Haug,”Thirteen”):
...Ibig sabihin, bubukaka siya, ipakikita niya ang pekpek niya para dutdutin ni Komadrona Paz? Hindi siya makapapayag! Anak ng putsa, bakit? Sasabihin n’yo,
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ipagkatagu-tago ng babae ang pekpek niya, tapos, pag gusto n’yo, ibibihadhad n’yo kahit kanino?...
“E ano, kung nagalaw!” Galit na galit na sagot niya, lumalaban na siya talaga. “E ano kung napasok na ng lalaki! Pekpek n’yo ba ‘to? Hindi n’yo pekpek ang pekpek ko! Akin ‘to, wala kayong pakialam sa pekpek ko!”
....Hinarap siyang muli ng tatay niya. “Tangina mo, kung makasagot ka, parang hindi mo ako ama.”...
...Yun mismong bantaan siya ng gano’n, ‘yun mismong idea na ipapaeksamin daw ang pekpek niya, ay sapat nang magdulot sa kanya ng abot-langit na galit. At nang gabing iyon, habang paulit-ulit niyang nire-review sa isip ang kalagayan niya, habang iniisip niya na tulad ng pagkakagagulpi sa kanya ng nanay niya noong siyam na taon siya, ay kakalat na naman sa buong kapitbahayan ang insidenteng ito at magiging paksa na naman siya ng mga bintang at tsismis, nagdedisisyon siya na hindi na niya kaya ang kahihiyan, hindi na niya kaya ang buong sitwasyong ito. Utang niya sa sarili na baguhin ang buhay niya at humanap ng sariling kinabukasan na malayo at ganap na hiwalay sa pamilyang ito (162-64).
Sintomatikong Polaridad
“The die is cast,” wika nga. Maitataya na ang desisyon ni Kathleen ay sagisag ng pagtakas ng kababaihan mula sa diktadurya ng mga ama, ng tradisyonal na awtoridad ng patriyarkong orden. Iyon din ang manifesto ng kababaihan laban sa negasyon ng kanilang likas na karapatan (natural rights) na pamatnugutan ang kanilang katawan, saloobin, isip, udyok o simbuyong pagnanais, at pagpapasiya, tulad ng ginawa ni Antigone, Medea, Cassandra at iba pang babaeng humamon sa paghahari ng maskulinistang estruktura ng kapangyarihan pampulitika. Ang monogamyang pamilyang nakagisnan ay nagsilbing kuta ng dahas ng patriyarkong sumisikil sa galing at talino ng
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nang magapi ang Mother-Right (Engels).
Ang pagkabuntis ni Kathleen at panganganak mag-isa (dalawang beses) ay testimonya ng indibidwalistikong gawi ng kalalakihan. Unang ebidensiya ito ng salaula’t bulagsak na mga lalaki: panguna si Rio na walang kahit kaunting kalinga kay Egay at nakuha lamang magpaalam sa ama ni Kathleen bago tumungo sa Canada. Sumbat ni Kathleen sa kasapakatan ng ama at lalaking asawa: “Lintik din naman. Nagpaalam ka sa kanya. Bakit sa kanya, bakit hindi sa akin? Ang tatay ko ba ang asawa mo? Humingi ka sa kanya ng paumanhim na binigo mo siya, gano’n?” (306). Mula sa kumpisal ni Rio, natuklasan ni Kathleen na “sa kabila ng mga ‘baltik,’ pagrerebelde, paglayo at pagwawalambahala, buong-buo ang pananalig na tatay niya sa kanya” (307).
Ang pangalawang lalaking ginawa siyang pansamantalang “kerida” ay si Carlo. Hindi nakuha ng lalaki na magtapat na nakabalik na siya sa dating asawa, kaya nakikiapid lang si Kathleen (244-46). Hindi nakuha ni Kathleen na ipalaglag ang anak na si Ainee; naawa siya sa bata. Nang pagalitan siya ng ama dahil hindi siya kasal kay Rio at walang pangalan ng ama ang mga anak, marahas ang pakli ng babae: “Hindi namin ikinakabit sa kasal ang pagsasama ng mga tao” (205). Itinakwil ang kasal bilang tradisyonal na paggapos ng babae sa ilalim ng lalaking asawa. Nagngitngit si Kathleen na bagamat humiwalay na siya sa pamilya, patuloy ang pakikialam: “Sinasabi nila na mahirap maging magulang, pero sa totoo, mas mahirap maging anak” na babae (206). Hindi pa nakahulagpos ang anak mula sa dualistikong kuwadro ng pag-iisip na minana sa lipunang kinagisnan.
Di kalaunan, naparalisado ang tatay ni Kathleen sa isang stroke sa puso. Nang manganak si Kathleen kay Ainee, dinalaw siya ng amang may sakit sa isang tagpo (Kabanata 33). Mababasa iyon na isang mala-simbolikong pag-akyat sa silid ng anak sa itaas ng garahe, kung saan narinig muli ni Kathleen ang himig ng pagsuyo ng ama sa dayuhang wika: “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen” (260). Matalinghagang referens iyon sa mga kuwento ng ama sa kaniya hinggil sa pag-akyat sa bituin at sa lukalukang hindi nakakaramdam ng sakit, at sa aksidente nitong mahulog sa hagdan dahil sa maling akala na ang pinto ay sarado.
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Isang paraang maisingit ang alienation-effect sa bisa ng taga- Irlandang pangalan. Maituturing itong isang biro o tudyong ipinapatlang sa mga tiyempong naiinis o dumadabog si Kathleen. Kapansin-pansin na ang awit sa Ingles, itinuring na “Irish ballad,” ay gawa ng isang Aleman- Amerikanong kompositor circa 1975. Pinatanyag nina Bing Crosby at Elvis Presley at pelikulang “Rio Grande” (1950), ang awit ay pangakong tatawirin ang dagat at iuuwi ang mahal na asawa sa dating tahanan (O’Dowd). Subalit ang tirahan ni Kathleen ay di na isang sulok kundi ang daigdig ng dalumat, guniguni, pangarap at panaginip na inani sa masukal at mapanganib na bukid ng buhay. Balintuna subalit angkop sa layon ng naratibo ang banyagang awit/pangalan.
Maniobra ng Komadrona
Sa bansag ng awit, batid na natin ang denouement ng salaysay. Sa gitna ng mga eksenang naghatid ng kumpletong konteksto ng pagkamatay ni Gabe at pagpanaw ng ama, dumating ang banaag ng kasarinlan. Nang tumakas si Rio papuntang Canada, binura ni Kathleen ang apelyido ni Rio sa pangalan niya, pati ang apelyido ng tatay. Mga tali o kadena iyon ng pagkaalipin. Sa panimdim, pinalagay na patay na si Rio para hindi na maghintay (bagaman bumalik si Rio sa burol ng ama).
Namuhi din si Kathleen sa insulto ng ina ni Rio. Yamang nabawasan ang bigat ng pangangailangan, natulak si Kathleen na “salungatin ang pormula” ng mga romansa,”baguhin ang kinasayanang pananaw” (239). Nang dalawin siya ng kaniyang amang halos mapinsala sa pag-akyat sa kuwarto niya, doon nagkaroon ng distansiya upang tasahin ang “mga istoryang nagsusulsol sa kanila na patuloy na magkulong sa kanilang mga ilusyon at pantasiya.” Lumuwang ang makipot na silid ng kamalayan ng artistang nakikipag-sapalaran sa lipunang burgis. Sa wakas, nagpanata si Kathleen na tumalunton sa bagong landas tungo sa bagong adhika:
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...Ang tao, lalo na ang babae, ay kailangang lumabas mula sa kuwadrong pinagsidlan sa kanila, sa silid kung saan ikinulong sa lahat ng panahon. Buksan ang mga mata at iharap sa salamin, at ipakita sa kanila, hindi lang ang luha
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at ngiti ng sariling mga mata kundi pati iba’t ibang mukha ng pangarap at pangitain, pagdurusa at pakikipagtuos, ng di-mabilang na anak at magulang at mamamayan ng kanyang lipunan. .. May iba pang ugnayan ang mga tao na dapat mabasa at maintindihan, dahil ang mundo ng tao ay hindi lang ang sarili niyang bahay o ang sariling silid. Ang mundo ng tao ay ang kanyang kasaysayan, lipunan, ang kanyang kultura, ang kanyang kaapihan at pagpupunyagi. Bahagi siya ng mundo (263-64).
Sa mithiing isingkaw ang partikular sa panlahatang muni, lumukso si Kathleen sa dakong bahagi ng nobela mula sa “differential feminism” nina Cixou, Irigaray at Kristeva tungo sa radikal-demokratikong pananaw nina Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai, Dolores Feria, Maria Lorena Barros, Maita Gomez, Nelia Sancho, atbp. Naabot niya ang antas ng unibersalidad sa etiko-politikong larang, ang antas ng kapatiran sa komunidad (Mills 82- 83).
Pagmuniin ang tulang epigrap ng Kabanata 35. Ikinintal doon ni Bautista ang bukod-tanging konsepto ng kasal, na bunga ng kaniyang pag- uwi sa tahanan na ngayo’y bukas, hindi lamang para sa mga hinlog o kadugo, bagkus anyaya sa protagonistang biktima at nilalang ng imahinasyon: “Ikinakasal ko ang aking sarili sa aking mga kahawak-kamay, sa lahat ng aking katabi at kaakbay, sa aking mga lantad at lihim na pag-ibig, sa lahat ng katalik ng puso ko’t isip” (265). Unti-unting matatarok na walang demarkasyon o hanggahan ang teritoryong sakop ng diwa ng malayang kababaihan, isang tagumpay sa paglinang ng “new forms of productivity, rationality, and if necessary (which it is) aggression” (Bovenschen 36). Binuwag ang mga bakod ng tahanan, sanglaan, kwarto ng lambingan, silid ng awayan, sa makabayang jouissance ng kababaihan.
Naihimatong sa siniping parirala ni Adora Faye de Vera na ang pag-tugma ng feminismo’t marxistang etiko-politika ay naging wastong direksiyon ng bagong anyo ng mapagpalayang mobilisasyon ng masa. Hindi lang pagdiin sa karapatan ng kababaihan o egalitaryanismo ang layon nito. Ang pangunahing tungkulin ng feministang makauri ay pagtaguyod sa kapakanan ng komunidad, kung saan ang materyal at espirtuwal na
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pangangailan (“struggle over needs” na agenda ng sosyalistang feminismo, ayon kay Nancy Fraser; iginiit din ito nina Santos-Maranan, Torres-Yu, “Ang Sarili”; Sison & De Lima), mula’t sapul, ay prinsipyong pundamental na gagabay sa rebolusyonaryong teorya at programa ng nagkakaisang alyansiya ng kababaihan.
Deklarasyon ng Kasarinlan
Ang dalawang librong sinuri dito, In Sisterhood at Sonata, ay testigo na ang mithiing obsesyonal sa feministang sining ay pagtuklas sa identidad ng babaeng nakikibaka. Bagaman iniluwal ng Kanluraning matris, makabuluhan ang lagom ni Judith Kegan Gardiner sa antolohiyang Writing and Sexual Difference: “Female identity is a process,...more flexible and relational than for men...Twentieth-century women writers express the experience of their own identity in what and how they write” (184). Kailangang isakonteksto ito sa espesidad panghistorikal ng Pilipinas sa dekada mula 1972-86 diktadurya ni Marcos hanggang sa rehimeng Duterte kung ilalapat sa panitik ni Bautista at kabarong manunulat.
Oo, mapangahas na pananalakay ang kontribusyon ni Bautista sa katutubong panitikan, sa pag-unlad ng kulturang pambakya, kulturang popular. Naagnas ang bakod na naghihiwalay dito sanhi ng bagong teknolohiya at elektronik komunikasyon: Ipad & Iphone, Tiktok, Facebook, atbp. Hindi lamang mataray o makulit na salita kundi paghawan ng hardin sa gubat ng komersiyalisadong sakuna, ang ambag ni Bautista. Bukod dito, ang munakala sa pagtangkilik sa politikang seksuwal—ang kumplikadong relasyon ng babae’t lalaki, mag-asawa o magkalaguyo—ay natatangi sa prangka, radikal at konstruktibong kritisismo sa kuta ng konserbatismo, ang pamilyang tradisyonal (Barrett &McIntosh). Sa mapagliming galugad ng nobelista, ang pamilyang tradisyonal ay unti-unting nilulusaw ng utilitaryanismong burgis at rebolusyonaryong inisyatiba ng mulat na kababaihan mula sa uring panggitna at uring manggagawa. Kabilang sa hanay ng mga liderato ng kampanyang ito si Bautista.
Sa paglagom ng komentaryo, ilang obserbasyon ang ihahain dito tungkol sa istruktura ng narasyon sa Sonata. Sa lawak ng tagpo o entabladong
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pinagdausan ng iba’t ibang eksena, masisipat na isinaayos ang nobela sa tatlong kategorya ng ritmo sa klasikong sonata, na inihimatong ng titulo. Magaspang na balangkas lang ang iginuhit dito. Una, ang masiglang exposisyon ng tema, at kontra-tema; pangalawa, ang kontrapuntong paglinang sa baryasyon ng tema at masalimuot na sayaw ng magkakaibang tono at indayog; pangatlo, rekapitulasyon at tangkang resolusyon ng kaigtingan. Mula sa panimulang tema ng kamusmusan at pagdadalaga ni Kathleen, ang birtud sa musika ng ama—sa biyulin, gitara, awit, kuwento— at paghahanap ng panustos, ay kapwa nagpunla ng binhi sa sensibilidad ni Kathleen. Kaakit-akit na pagpupunyagi ito upang maaliw at mapanatag ang kasambahay, subalit nakagagambala at nakapanghihimasok din.
Sa huling bahagi ng nobela, babalik ang memorya ng parusang naranasan ni Kathleen, ngunit iyon ay ikinawing sa pagdurusa ng ama’t ina sa pagkamatay ni Gabe, kapwa nagkasala, na sa pagdating ni Noel, ang tanging lalaki, ay nalutas ang problema ng ama kung sino ang magdadala ng kaniyang pangalan. Kaipala, ito ang senyal na hindi maisuko ang pribilehiyo maski sa gitna ng malubhang paghihikahos at pagkawala ng makasariling pagpapasiya. Pagkukunwari at pagbabalat-kayo ang panagano at atmosferang sinalansang ni Kathleen.
Sa wakas, natalos ni Kathleen na ang magulang ay biktima rin ng kahirapan at minang ugali, kapwa walang laban sa sirkumtansiyang nagisnan. Bagamat namuhi siya sa kanilang pagtratong marahas sa kaniya, natutunan ni Kathleen ang kontradiksiyon ng sarili at lipunan—hindi dualistikong analisis kundi diyalektikal. Natutunan niya na ang kasarinlan ng sarili ay hindi soberanyang karapatan tiwalag sa ibang tao, kundi galing na nakasalig sa isang balag ng obligasyon sa iba. Ang konsepto ng sarili ay kalakip sa ugnayang panlipunang umaalalay dito. Magkasanib dito ang pagkilala sa atin ng iba, at proteksiyon ng sanktwaryo ng “imaginary domain as a matter of right” (Cornell 22, 62). Nabanggit ni Rio sa huling pagkikita nila ni Kathleen na natakot ding umuwi ang tatay niya dahil sa pagkamatay ni Gabe, subalit umuwi din: “Ang tao daw, malao’t madali, uuwi at uuwi kung nasaan ang puso niya” (307). Naisatinig ng amang nagsisi ang transpormatibong panata at simulaing nagpapakilos sa makina ng makababaeng estetika ni Bautista.
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SAN JUAN, Jr. | Dalumat sa Pagsulong ng Feministang Estetikang Makabayan: Metakomentaryo hinggil sa Sining ng mga akdang In Sisterhood—Lea at Lualhati at Sonata ni Lualhati Bautista
Ang Karnabal ng Babaylan
Ang forma ng nobela ay isang Bildungsroman ng batang artista at nobela ng edukasyon ng isang manunulat. Naipatalastas ang durasyon ng aralin sa mga piniling alaala ni Kathleen na isinalansan sa kronolohiyang pila. Nadulutan ito ng bumabalot na iskema ng pagbunyi kay Kathleen bilang matagumpay na alagad ng sining sa gitna ng pagkamatay ng ama at pagburol nito. Masinop na nailarawan ang doble-karang danas ng paglalamay at kapanglawan (melancholia; Freud 587-89) sa pagbitaw sa poot ni Kathleen sa magulang—sugat na masarap kamutin ngunit mahapdi—nang mabatid ang tunay na disposisyon nila kay Gabe. Ang nawalang bagay, ugat na cathexis ng libido, senyal ng narsisismo, ay nilusaw sa pagbawi sa tunay na pagmamahal ng magulang, alalaong baga’y nabigyan niya ng puso ang mga kontrabida, ayon sa payo ng patnugot ng Lunggati, ang surrogate na awtoridad na humalili sa ama.
Sa gayon, ang jouissance (Lacan 158-60) o kaganapan/katuparan ni Kathleen, na dati’y kakabit ng nabasag na trophy (283-84), ay naisalin sa video ng kaniyang maligayang kabataan. Kasanib din ito sa musikang idinulot nina Tiyo Ipe, partikular ang kaisa-isang plaka ng ama. Sa wakas, “walang pagsisisi,” kusang nakauwi si Kathleen sa “pangunahing tahanan ng kanyang puso: ang kanyang pamilya” (327). Ngunit hindi nanatili ang dating ayos sanhi sa pagpanaw ng ama (na hindi nakuhang maging awtentikong paterfamilia, kung aalagatain na sa gitna ng selebrasyon, ang konstruksiyon ng “pamilya” ay naganap sa loob ng komunidad, ng kapatiran at damayan na larangan ng etikong unibersal.
Sa usapin kung sino ang taga-pagdala ng pangalan ng ama, ang iskandalosong “Name-of-the-Father”(ni Lacan) sa simbolikong dimension ng semiotika, hindi si Kathleen na walang apelyido, o si Noel, lalaking kapatid.Tapos na ang rehimen ng paterfamilia. Ang taga-pagdala ay ang salusalong tinig ng nagpipista, ang jouissance ng naglalamay. Musika ng komunidad, kasiyahan sa pagdamay at pagtutulungan, ang espiritung bumubuklod sa bawat taong kasali sa afirmasyon ng buhay laban sa tadhana.
Ang pagdadalamhati ay siya ring pagdiriwang ng pamayanan. Ito ay hindi pagdakila sa isang tao kundi pagkilala’t paggalang sa personalidad
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DILIMAN REVIEW | Vol. 66 No. 2 (2022) ng bawat taong lumalahok at nag-aambag para sa kabutihan at kagalingan
ng sambayanan. Okasyon din ito ng pagbabanyuhay ng komunidad.
Sa masinsinang pagtaya, ang Sonata ay elehiya o pagdiriwang sa ama/magulag hindi bilang patriyarko kundi guro, patnubay sa edukasyon ng sensibilidad. Ang ama ay nagsilbing tagapayo sa isang babaeng sumabak sa pakikipagsapalaran bilang manunulat taglay ang komitment sa katotohanan at kalayaan, na lubusang maglilingkod sa kapakanan ng sambayanan. Pambihirang pagtanggap ito sa isang mapanghamong pananagutan. Sa maingat na pagtatasa, kinatha ni Bautista ang huling nobela (na maipapalagay na burador ng talambuhay niya) mula sa mga samut-saring pagdidili-dili’t gunam-gunam halaw sa In Sisterhood, Hinugot sa Tadyang, at iba pang akda. Ang katibayan nito ay masasalat sa epigrap sa Kabanata 39 na karapat-dapat na coda sa diskursong ito:
Kung titignan mo raw, ang manunulat, walang harang ang silid, bukas iyon at malayang napapasok ng kanyang mga tauhan. Niyayakap ng manunulat ang buhay ng mga tauhan niya; ang kanilang karanasan, tuwa, lungkot, kabiguan at tagumpay. Pero ang totoo, minsan, kung sino pa ang sariling pamilya niya, siya pang di-sinasadyang napagsarhan ng pinto ng manunulat; di-sinasadyang naihihiwalay niya ang sarili sa kanila. Siguro, dahil para sa kanya, ando’n lang naman sila lagi. Mapupuntahan pag kailangan, mababalikan bago ituloy ang biyahe patungo sa iba pang paroroonan (309).
E. San Juan, Jr. is emeritus professor of English, Compara- tive Literature and Ethnic Studies, Washington State Univer- sity & University of Connecticut. His latest books are Kontra- modernidad (U.P. Press), Maelstrom over the Killing Fields (Pantax Press), The Armed Paramour in a Time of Terror (U.S.T. Publishing House), and Peirce’s Pragmaticism: A Radical Perspective (Lexington Press). He was a fellow of W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, and a visiting professor of cultural studies, Polytechnic University of the Philippines.
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SAN JUAN, Jr. | Dalumat sa Pagsulong ng Feministang Estetikang Makabayan: Metakomentaryo hinggil sa Sining ng mga akdang In Sisterhood—Lea at Lualhati at Sonata ni Lualhati Bautista
SANGGUNIAN
Aguilar, D. Toward a Nationalist Feminism. Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 1998.
__________. “Questionable Claims: Colonialism Redux, Feminist Style.” Nasa sa Women and Globalization, ed. Delia Aguilar and Anne Lacsamana. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004.
Bakhtin, M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1981.
__________. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Minneapols, MN:University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Balibar, E. & Macherey, P . “On Literature as an Ideological Form.” In Marxist Literary Theory, ed. Terry Eagleton and Drew Milner. UK: Blackwell, I996.
Barrett, M. & McIntosh, M. The Anti-social Family. London: Verso, 1982.
Barros, ML. “Mga Tula ni Lorena Barros.” Lorena: Isang Tulambuhay ni Pauline Mari Hernando. Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 2018.
Bautista, L. Buwan, Buwan, Hulugan Mo Ako ng Sundang. Manila: Cacho Publishing House, 1991.
__________. In Sisterhood—Lea at Luhalti. Quezon City: n.p., 2013.
__________. Hinugot sa Tadyang. Quezon City: Dekada Publishing, 2016.
__________. Sonata. Quezon City: Dekada Publishing, 2017.
__________. Bayan Ko! Quezon City: Dekada Publishing, 2019.
Bovenschen, S. “Is There a Feminine Aesthetic?” Nasa sa Feminist Aesthetics, ed. Gisela Ecker. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.
Cornell, D. At the Heart of Freedom: Feminism, Sex, and Equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1998.
de Vera, AF. “Introduction: Ang Hindi Tradisyunal na Tradisyon ni Kasamang Maita.” Maita Remembering Ka Dolor. Quezon City:Tanggol Bayi, 2013.
Donovan, J. “Everyday Use and Moments of Being: Toward a Non-Denominative Aesthetic.” Nasa sa Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective, ed. Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeir. Bloomington, Ind: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Engels, F. “”The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State.” Nasa sa The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton, 1978.
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DILIMAN REVIEW | Vol. 66 No. 2 (2022) Eviota, E. The Political Economy of Gender. London: Zed Books, 1992.
__________. “The Context of Gender and Globalization in the Philippines.” In Women and Globalization, ed. Delia Aguilar and Anne Lacsamana. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004.
Finley, M.I. Aspects of Antiquity. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
Flood, A. “Majority of authors ‘hear’ their characters speaking, finds study.” The Guardian (17 April 2020).
Monday, June 03, 2024
Tuesday, April 02, 2024
review of MAELSTROM OVER THE KILLING FIELDS by E. San Juan, Jr;
A Book Review
Maelstrom over the Killing Fields: Interventions in the Project
Of National-Democratic Liberation By E. San Juan, Jr.
[Published by Pantas Press, 2021, distributed by Popular Book Store, Quezon City]
By Paulino Lim, Jr.
Emeritus Professor of English California State University, Long Beach
______
From one who has written innumerable books, this volume may be viewed as an “anthology of San Juan’s best essays.” It has a powerful voice that stirs the maelstrom over “the killing fields,” a metaphor that came out of the Vietnam War (1955-1975), and most apt for the Philippines, where the first killing fields took place when the U.S. military fought and conquered the insurgents and proceeded to colonize the country (1899-1912).
The anthology presents an “agenda for change and social transformation.” It focuses on particular themes, situations and personages, e.g. the diaspora, pandemic, Jose Rizal and Nick Joaquin. (Was Rizal gay? How do you account for Joaquin’s “tragic-comic consciousness?) In each essay San Juan goes deep into the subject, deploying various analytical tools drawn from history, philosophy and literary criticism, and synthesizes the findings into a coherent “knowledge” or information about the subject. The new information may add, amplify, or revise previously known “facts,” but does it constitute Truth? Is the latest interpretation analogous to the self-portraits that the artist paints in the course of his life? It is up to the reader to decide.
A critical tool that San Juan includes in the analysis is the “structure of feeling” that informs not only the interpretation or criticism itself but also the attitude of the critic himself–a technique he adopted from Charles Sanders Peirce credited in the. Acknowledgements. In fiction, laying the feelings of a narrative is the equivalent ofs scoring a film with music.
A simple exercise is to define the feeling of some elements of the Preface. San Juan calls in awe the pandemic as a “planetary upheaval”; condemns the exploitation by “rapacious” capitalists–with the aid of Karl Marx. (i) He mourns the death in 2020 of 67 Filipino nurses ministering to Covid-19 patients. He recalls with
muted pride the militant Filipino presence in the U.S. that marked the four-day riots in Watsonville, California, in December 1929. The event prefigured the violence against Asians, Filipinos included, being blamed for importing the virus from Wu Han.
What convinces the reader as in the case of Rizal and Joaquin, for instance, , is San Juan’s close reading of the author’s works (poems, essays and novels) and tracing the development of his “sensibility” reflected in the work. San Juan’s final word on Rizal is that he was “not a messiah, only a prophetic intellectual of colonized peoples “ San Juan recalls James Michener’s remark that Rizal’s novels were “directly responsible for the author’s death.” San Juan sums up Rizal’s challenge for Filipinos to “fight and win their independence by their own sacrifices.” The essay ends with a passage from “Mi Ultimo Adios.”
I die when I see the dawn break,
Through the gloom of night, to herald the day;o And if color is lacking my blood thou shalt take Pour’d out at need for thy dear sake,
To dye with its crimson the waking ray. (89)
What entertains the reader are the human-interest and gossipy details, embellished by San Juan’s often sardonic comments. Rizal’s Austrian correspondent Ferdinand Blumentritt tries to console him: “. . . but you are one of the heroes who conquer pain from a wound inflicted by women. (64) He met in 1888 a 22-year-old O-Sei-San, a samurai's daughter, “may have experienced carnal bliss.” (65) The historian Ambeth Ocampo has interpreted the recurrence of snakes as phallic symbols in Rizal’s dreams, suggesting that Rizal may have been a closet gay. (66) Rizal performed a common-law marriage ceremony with the “wandering swallow” Josephine Bracken by holding hands together and marrying themselves. The Catholic priest Father Obach refused to marry them. (67)
Of particular interest to me is the discourse on the Filipino diaspora. I write as an OFW (overseas Filipino worker/writer), the largest segment of the Filipino diaspora. (The discourse provides a prospectus for M.A. and Ph.D., defining six “theses” to pursue.) I am glad I am not writing in Myanmar (I am three-fourths Malayan) or in Hong Kong (one-fourth Chinese). I read Maelstrom during Advent anticipating the birth of Christ. What we got instead was the “second coming” of Covid-19. Nonetheless, I took Communion to celebrate the presence, and the
booster shot to ward off the pandemic. The pandemic has introduced new modes of learning, done away with SAT and college entrance exams, re-examined Ethnic and Women’s Studies, as Delia V. Aguilar explores in the Afterword. (201)
San Juan’s review of the colonization and decolonization of the Philippines has been a welcomed corrective to my naive reading of the country’s history. The structure of my feelings was centered on gratitude. Gratitude to Spain for bringing the Roman alphabet and the Catholic Religion; to America for introducing democracy, public education, and English–the lingua franca of the world and the Internet; and to Japan, after repulsion by the atrocities the military inflicted in the Bataan Death March, for Buddhism, calligraphy, and the films of Ozu and Kurosawa.
In San Juan’s capsule review, “The history of the Philippines may be read asseculaone long chronicle of the people’s struggle against colonialism and imperialism for the sake of affirming human dignity and universal justice.
Gratitude still centers my feelings toward the U.S., despite the white supremacy movement and the “Big Lie” of the 2020 Presidential Elections being. Stolen. UCLA exempted me from paying the $600 out-of-state tuition fee; now it runs to about $32,000. San Juan earned his bachelor’s degree in English at the secular University of the Philippines, modeled after the U.S. state university system. I attended the Dominican University of Santo Tomas, Manila, with its compulsory Scholastic curriculum requiring courses in Ethics, Cosmology, . And two semesters of Logic. This prepared me for writing term papers in my UCLA graduate courses in Linguistics, Drama, and American, Romantic and Victorian Literatures. (I did my Ph.D. dissertation on Byron).
Teaching at California State University, Long Beach, gave me time to research and write. I wrote four interrelated novels dealing with the Marcos Dictatorship that I call, perhaps inordinately, “The Philippine Quartet.” It is an homage to Lawrence Durrell whose Alexandria Quartette fascinated me as an undergraduate. In the first novel Tiger Orchids on Mount Mayon, the protagonist Mark is a surrogate for Marx. Mark studied at U.P., joined the teach-ins conducted by the Marxist professor Saldivar and read Mao Tse Tung’s
Red Book.
In Maelstrom over the Killing Fields, San Juan persuades Filipinos in the homeland and in the diaspora to act on an agenda for change and social transformation. No other Filipino approaches his scholarly output and world-wide
stature as an intellectual. I honor him, as I do the journalist Maria Ressa–the first Filipino to win a Nobel Peace Prize. There is so much love in what he writes, so much light in what he says —###
Monday, February 19, 2024
LESSONS FROM GRAMSCI
12 AntonioGramsci’stheoryofthe “national-popular” and socialist revolution in the Philippines
Epifanio San Juan Jr
Though in substance, yet in form, the struggle of the proletariat with the bour- geoisie is at first a national struggle. The proletariat of each country must, of course, first of all settle matters with its own bourgeoisie. ... The workingmen have no country. We cannot take from them what they have no [sic] got. Since the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself as the nation, it is so far itself national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word.
(Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party)
Gramsci has been pronounced “dead” so many times that one suspects the announcement to be unwittingly premature and question-begging (Day 2005). Of all the Western Marxists, Gramsci is exceptional in being the subject of an immensely burgeoning archive of scholarly studies and the object of furious worldwide political debates (Rosengarten 1994). Except for the somewhat opportunist inflection of “subaltern” by Derrideans/Foucaultians and the trendy fashion of reinterpreting “hegemony” as pluralist consensus, Gramsci’s thought seems useless for postmodernists, including establishment postcolonialists. Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School successfully popularized Gramsci as an innovative cultural theorist and founded the academic discipline of mainstream Cultural Studies. It was Gramsci’s resurrection in advanced capitalist forma- tions, the birth of what David Harris (1992) calls “gramscianism.” This followed the Eurocommunist view of Gramsci’s “revolution against Capital” – to quote his famous article of 1917 – in which the Italian road to socialism (classless society, socialization of crucial productive means) would be won not through revolutionary violence but through cultural reform – through education and moral/ethical persuasion. Communist parties will thus gain hegemony, that is, domination by consent, peacefully or legally.
Communism will win without replacing the prevailing “common sense.” Pre- sented as ideals to be aspired for, and naturalized as “common sense,” the belief system of bourgeois society does not require armies or police; only a finely tuned art, schools and mass media, ideological apparatuses that would do the job (Finnochiaro 1995). From this prophylactic stance of postcolonial scholastics,
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Gramsci is seen as a precocious neoliberal avant la lettre, committed to “rational persuasion,” political realism, methodological fallibilism, liberal democracy, and pluralism. Something is surely wrong with this picture.
Clearly, history – or, better yet, neoliberal metaphysics exacted a vengeance on Gramsci’s historicist “good sense.” While reborn as a theoretician of the superstructures, civil society, rule by consent, and non-economistic “open Marxism,” Gramsci became irrelevant to socialist revolutions as they were occurring in the “Third World.” He had nothing to say to peoples struggling against finance–capitalist imperialism, old-style colonialism that ruled by brute force, or neocolonial rule masquerading as latter-day “civilizing mission,” humanitarian intervention. For postcolonial studies, in particular, the obsession with Eurocentrism (the fallacious subsumption of capitalism into an abstract Western modernity) in the case of Edward Said, as Neil Lazarus (2002; see also San Juan Jr 2007a) has shown, led soon to the speechless subalterns of Gayatri Spivak and the sly mimics of Homi Bhabha. Meanwhile, the logocentric discourse of poststructuralism wrought its dire effects on the critique of the nation/nationalism launched by Bhabha and the Australian “high priests” of the discipline after the collapse of “actually existing socialism.” With nations and nation-states abolished or rendered defunct by the “New World Order” and later by triumphalist globalization, we are on the way to the heady disjunctures of Arjun Appadurai and the nomadic multitudes of Hardt and Negri’s Empire. Until September 11, 2001 exploded over this academic scenario and overtook our missionary enlighteners who had attended Gramsci’s redundant burials.
We owe it to Benita Parry’s appraisal of the historical-political contexts surrounding the disciplinary formation of postcolonial studies that we can now begin to appreciate Gramsci’s relevance to “Third World” social transformations. Parry’s argument on the centrality of Marxist principles (internationalism, perman- ent revolution) in liberation theory actualized in anticolonial revolutions, is salutary. The erasure of socialism and an anticapitalist modernity in postcolonial discourse coincides with the refusal of a national-democratic stage in anticolonial revolutions led by a historic bloc of anticapitalist forces. What kind of nation-state do postcolo- nialists have in mind? Certainly not the Italian nation of 1861 that witnessed the colonization/annexation of the South through the subjugation of the insurgent peasant masses, and produced the “Southern Question” that Gramsci considered decisive in carrying out a socialist revolution in the twentieth century (Verdicchio 1997). Postcolonialists erase the ugly fact of neocolonized nation-states (the Philippines, Haiti, Colombia, etc.) resistant to their fantasy of a world-system of hybrid social formations equal in power and wealth, all inhabited by transnational consumer-citizens.
Postcolonial obfuscations
The asymmetry of uneven and combined development distinguishes the structure of nation-states born in the shadow of finance–capitalist imperialism. Archaic, feudal, and modern sectors coexist in these societies. The Althusserian idiom of Bhabha
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Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular” 165
is revealing when he problematizes the “ambivalent temporalities of the nation space.” For Bhabha, nationalism is fascism tout court. Ultimately, the culprit is “that progressive metaphor of modern social cohesion – the many as one –” and so, Marxist theories of culture and community defined as holistic, expressive social totalities should be repudiated. Unity, solidarity, the multitude envisaged by Gramsci as “national-popular” collective will (Jessop 1982) are all anathema, contaminated by bourgeois universalism and other archaic irrationalities.
For her part, Spivak rejects anticolonial revolutions as hopelessly controlled and manipulated by a native bourgeoisie. The colonized subaltern is made not only speechless but immune to experience. Parry’s comment applies a Gramscian optic to this fantasized self-erasure:
It dismisses the experiential transformation of the “subalterns” through their participation, and disregards situations where an organic relationship was forged between masses and leaders sharing the same class interests and revolutionary goals – there is after all no essential and invariable correlation between objective class position and ideological belief or political stance.
(2002: 144)
In short, history as a dialectic of subject–object is denied by postcolonialists for whom pacified subalterns are speechless or tricky ventriloquists (for Gramsci’s concept of subaltern, see Green 2002).
With the formalization of canonical postcolonial studies as an academic discipline, a reconciliatory attitude seems to have emerged. Stuart Hall’s inflection of this fetishism of ambivalence or difference is only symptomatic: anti-imperialist opposition, for Hall, must be conceived in terms of “transculturation” or cultural translation “destined to trouble the here/there cultural binaries for ever” (1996: 247). This postcolonialist bias against binarism, telos and hierarchy, as we have seen, returns us to the question of agency and the role of the subaltern in a revolutionary disruption of the colonial predicament. But, as Parry notes, this impulse to find a middle ground between domination and oppression, to describe colonialism as “generically ambivalent,” the site of dialogue and cultural assimila- tion, is both historically mendacious and “morally vacant” (2002: 144). This applies to the tendentious genealogy of nation/nationalism offered by Ashcroft et al. (1998; see my critique in San Juan 2001). In effect, the nation (and its attendant set of beliefs called “nationalism”) is a foul ideological invention, a dangerous myth of exclusivism, homogeneity, and naturalness. It refuses internal heterogeneities and differences. It informs the violence of the nation-state (such as the Stalinist Soviet Union, as well as European imperialism as “an extension of the ideology of a ‘national’ formation”) against those who are different, thus making the cause of national liberation for oppressed colonies suspect if not hopelessly tainted.
Postcolonialists cannot face the truth of sustained colonial legacies and their insidious resonance in everyday lives. As to the notion of the “subaltern,” Ashcroft et al. (1998) cannot but invoke Gramsci’s terminology but not the polit- ical project that motivates it. They elide the whole issue of hegemony (consent
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armored by coercion) and replace Gramsci’s framework with the entirely dis- parate paradigm of the Indian historians’ Subaltern Studies Group (with which Spivak is affiliated). This group’s primary preoccupation is the criticism of elites and elite culture in India whose anti-British nationalism worsened the oppression of the landless peasantry. Consequently, they criticize Marxist class analysis which to them ignores the “politics of the people,” and by implication Gramsci’s notion of the popular as a transcendence of economic–corporatist position, and a national-popular culture as a crystallization of the diverse interests/sectors consti- tuting the nation (SCW: 203–212). Their concern with power and authority, with governability (a variant of Foucault’s governmentality), displaces the question of sovereignty vis-Ã -vis the occupying colonial power. While Gramsci envisioned the “national-popular” as a process of lay intellectuals expanding and elaborating a secular “humanism” attuned to the grassroots, for the Subaltern Studies Group, an implacable fissure exists between the nation represented by the native elite and the people, specifically the peasantry. Gramsci is accused of essentialism, though it is unclear how the Indian historians can be credible when they themselves pos- tulate a rigid distinction between the elite and the subaltern, subject-positions which are constituted by converging and diverging lines of differences. Again, difference becomes fetishized or reified when Spivak claims to establish a fixed incommensurability between elite and subaltern, even canceling the at least relational category of dominant/subordinate groups in structural-functionalist sociology. Since the categories of nation and class are rejected, subalternity becomes mystified or trivialized as all or any kind of subordination removed from any revolutionary socialist telos.
The habitual imposition of a monolithic grid of difference in postcolonial methodology sets it apart from a historical-materialist analysis such as that subtending Gramsci’s “Notes on Italian History” (1934–1935) in the Prison Notebooks. It accords with a nihilistic and even cynical skepticism toward any emancipatory project of overthrowing capitalist social relations of production. For those desiring to change the impoverished and exploited condition of what is now called the global “South,” it is better to forego Establishment postcolonial studies and go straight to Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (see the lucid exposition of Bellamy and Schechter in Gramsci and the Italian State). The twin issues of the peasantry and national sovereignty constitute the blind spot that defines the limit of postcolonial critique.
In quest of Gramsci
“A new way of being Gramscian” – to quote Pasolini’s (1982) slogan – is to apply Gramsci’s dialectical–materialist (not homological) approach to the task of popular democratic mobilization against finance capital in specific national settings. I am not interested in deriving axiomatic truths or formulas from Gramsci’s texts. Nor am I interested in ascertaining which text represents the “real” Gramsci among the multiple Gramscis now available (Holub 1992), including the “rightist” Gramsci quoted by neoconservatives. My task here is
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Gramsci’s theory of the “national-popular” 167
circumscribed: to see how we can deploy or adapt certain modes of analysis initiated first in Gramsci’s historical studies. I would locate Gramsci’s useful- ness today in the application of precisely the speculative tools he devised earlier in his vocation as a radical activist. One key concept is the “national-popular” and its resonance with the conceptual archive of alliances, anti-corporativism, blocs, ensembles, etc. Following the nuanced approach of Nicola Short (2007) and Stephen Gill (2003c) to the historical-materially structured nature of inter- national production in the context of antagonistic core-periphery relations, I would argue that Gramsci’s dialectical analysis of class-realignments, especially the stratified divisions of epochal and conjunctural sequences, would prove most useful in elucidating what is involved in the theory of combined and uneven development first formulated by Lenin and Trotsky and explored by activists in the Marxist tradition. Gramsci is, as Boothman (1995: liii) aptly puts it, “the theorist of the historical bloc” engaged in a concrete analysis of relations/ articulations of social forces in a given country at specific conjunctures or periods for the purpose of calibrating at which exact point human agency can produce the most decisive transformative effects.
The “Southern Question” epitomized for Gramsci the problem of uneven, disarticulated, non-synchronous development carried out by the bourgeois liberal state. Before Gramsci became a socialist, around 1913, he was a Sardinian nationalist, alienated as he was by the industrial North’s subjugation of the predominantly rural South. Even when Gramsci became an active socialist intent on constructing a proletarian-led state within the fabric of civil society, he never stopped insisting on the need to concentrate on the specificity of the Italian situ- ation, its “particular, national characteristics,” compelling the party to assume “a specific function, a particular responsibility in Italian life” (LP: 4). The premise here is the forced unification of Italy by the northern bourgeoisie’s subjugation of the southern peasantry and the unresolved issue of landed property. What this implies is an active program to counter the transformist politics of the liberal state which maintained the fragmented social reality of Italy characterized by diver- gent regional traditions, polarized classes and economic disparities. The material inequalities were reflected, and in turn sustained by, the ideological/cultural incompatibilities between a popular culture of the quasi-feudal, rural areas and the elite culture of the caste of cosmopolitan intellectuals. To mobilize the masses, a whole program of education and organization of the entire populace was needed, a pedagogical mobilization led by a political party of the proletariat and its organic intellectuals. New values and ideals were needed to generate a critical consciousness – “unitary” and “coherent” thinking, as he put it – of the social situation, together with the ethico-moral imperative for organized collective action.
Gramsci had in mind a national-democratic liberation project based on the protagonism or participatory mobilization of the people that would constitute the emergent nation. What was needed is a mass movement to emancipate the prole- tariat, together with the peasantry, and the establishment of a communist society, the precondition for the full liberation of the individual. This fundamental
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Marxist belief Gramsci enunciated in his articles of 1914 and 1916, “An Active and Functional Neutrality,” and “Socialism and Culture.” It was specifically in the 1917 article “The Revolution against Capital” that Gramsci expressed for the first time his distinctive Marxist conviction that without organized political will and social consciousness of the people, even the most favorable objective con- ditions of crisis will not lead to revolutionary change. Economic statistics do not mechanically determine politics; it was necessary for people “to understand ... and to assess them, and to control them with their will, until this collective will becomes the driving force of the economy, the force which shapes reality itself ” (LP: 40). In colonial and peripheral societies, historically sedimented divisions of class, race, religion, nationality, and so on present more formidable obstacles to mass mobilization. The appeal of national self-determination in such colonial formations as India in the 1920s and 1930s led Gramsci to conceptualize the “national-popular” movement as a powerful agent of revolutionary change (Bocock 1986). The centrality of organic intellectuals and the pedagogical strat- egy of mobilizing the masses is immediately relevant to peripheral societies (such as the Philippines) where bureaucratic and authoritarian institutions support and are reproduced by patronage, clientelist politics, reinforced by police–military coercion and para-military gangsterism and warlordism, all beholden to the dictates of US finance capital.
We owe it to Forgacs’ review of its historical context that Gramsci’s concept of the “national-popular” has been foregrounded into a site of controversy and revaluation. While textually faithful in his reconstruction of its genealogy, Forgacs’ renovation is qualified by the British/European political and ideological milieu of the 1980s – the rise of neoconservatism in the UK, North America and the industrialized nation-states. Like Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (against the background of the Althusser/Poulantzas/Foucault orbit of dissonance), Forgacs’ chief concern lies in using Gramsci’s idea to transcend economistic Marxism and assert that there is no necessary correlation or link between class and ideology. Forgacs is correct in appraising Gramsci’s concept as integral, fusing the political and cultural, but at the expense of the economic – a term misconstrued as a separate, independent sphere usually isolated to the “base” in the misleading couplet “base–superstructure.”
Removing “national- popular” from the underlying historically specific relations of production in any given society, Forgacs concludes that the notion “recognizes the specificity of national conditions and traditions” in which multi-sectoral and cross-cultural struggles are strategically linked together to promote common interests (1993: 219; compare Hall 1981).
In effect, Forgacs has re-inscribed Gramsci’s idea in the process of “passive revolution,” or transformism, at the same time as he marginalizes the role of the state. By detaching the “national-popular” from its Gramscian framework of socialist transformation, its link with the abolition of private property and class inequality, in short, an expansive proletarian hegemony, Forgacs confuses himself and others in wondering how a class alliance can contain a collective will, and how such an alliance can become reorganized by bourgeois hegemony.
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This is due to the mistake of using the term “alliance” for a populist, sponta- neous trend that has no will, no purposive direction. Once a collective will is defined as non-class (in the functionalist sense) since it has transcended narrow corporatist class interests, then it is impossible to fashion a collective will lacking goals that are defined as simultaneously national and popular. Nation and people (both the discourses and institutional practices associated with these terms) are class-stratified and acquire coherence by articulation into a hegemo- nized nation-people. Hegemony is not only ethico-political but also economic, given “its basis in the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive core of economic activity” (Boothman 1995: li). Why this is so from Gramsci’s perspective, can be explained by his own singular understanding of “collective will.”
Beyond idealist hermeneutics
Two earlier texts may illuminate the political condition of possibility for the theory of the “national-popular” will. The first is the 1916 article “Socialism and Culture.” Here Gramsci defines culture as a creation of humans as products of history, not natural evolution. Culture is:
The organization, the disciplining of one’s inner self; the mastery of one’s personality; the attainment of a higher awareness, through which we can come to understand our value and place within history, our proper function in life, our rights and duties.
(Gramsci [1916])
This inventory and ordering of the layers/aspects of one’s self becomes the staging-ground of class consciousness. Change occurs gradually, through “intelli- gent reflection” of a few, then of a whole class. Revolutionary change comes about through critical reflection and enlargement of one’s awareness via solidarity or collective mobilization of the people constituted as nationwide directing agency (Jones 2006).
The formation of a socialist collective will thus results from “a critique of capitalist civilization.” Gramsci emphasizes the growth of a collective will through critique, through the discovery of the self (ultimately social) as an inventory of traces inscribed by history. Gramsci focuses on the objective or goal pursued through discipline and order:
Discovery of the self as it measures itself against others, as it differentiates itself from others and, having once created an objective for itself, comes to judge facts and events not only for what they signify in themselves, but also according to whether or not they bring that objective nearer. To know oneself means to be master of oneself, ... to emerge from chaos and become an agent of order. ... And one cannot achieve this without knowing others, ... the succession of efforts they have made to be what
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they are, to create the civilization they have created, and which we are
seeking to replace with our own.
(Buci-Glucksmann 1980: 348–349)
The labor of acquiring self-knowledge is key to grasping the nation/people as a site of constituting oneself as an agent of change. The dialectical interface of nation/people found in self-understanding – a form of cognitive appropriation of the world – leads to the integral state, thus abolishing the liberal distinction between civil society and state: “State = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armour of coercion” (SPN: 263; Williams 1980). Learning has an ultimate emancipatory drive (LP: 11–12). It epitomizes the “catharsis” bridging economics and politics (ideology). Space limitations prevent my elaborating on this “catharsis,” the cognitive praxis enacted by the national-popular subject; as a corrective to the sanitized interpretation of Gramsci (e.g. Germino 1990; see Gedo 1993; Haug 2000; Thomas 2007).
The second text for elucidation is the 1917 article, “The Revolution against Capital.” Here Gramsci spells out the versatile diagnostic power of historical materialism, “the real, undying Marxist thought” purged of positivist, naturalist incrustations. This Marxism upholds, as the most important factor in history “not crude, economic facts but rather men themselves, and the societies they create, as they learn to live with one another and understand one another; as, out of these contacts (civilization), they forge a social, collective will.” This collective will understands and controls facts, becoming “the driving force of the economy, the force which shapes reality itself, so that objective reality becomes a living, breathing force, like a current of molten lava, which can be channeled wherever and however the will directs” (LP: 40). Knowledge, will, and practice/action all coalesce in the collective transformation of social life in a determinate historical milieu.
Beyond being a united front tactic, the project of a national-popular ensemble is the project of a mass-based proletarian party constructing hegemony – moral- intellectual leadership – as it confronts “the problems of national life.” Gramsci’s collective will arising from historically determined “popular forces” is premised on “the great mass of peasant farmers” bursting “into political life” (SPN: 132). This event will materialize through a Jacobinist strategy: when the working class overcomes its “narrow economic–corporative” outlook and incorporates the interests of the peasantry and urban artisans into its own program and praxis. In the “Notes on the Southern Problem,” Gramsci predi- cates the capacity of the proletariat to govern as a class on its success in shed- ding “every residue of corporatism, every syndicalist prejudice or incrustation” (1995: 27). While this may be described as an educative, universalizing and expansive alliance, the strategy does not abandon class – does not break the connection between ideology and class, as Forgacs et al. (1985) insist. Rather, the class ideology used to dominate the peasantry and other intermediate strata is thoroughly analyzed (as witness Gramsci’s meticulous anatomy of traditional, petty-bourgeois intellectuals, their ethos and worldviews). Gramsci thus asserts
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that aside from getting rid of inherited prejudices and sectarian egoism, they have to take one more step forward: they have to think like workers who are members of a class that aims to lead peasants and middle classes into a collect- ive project of releasing human potential for the benefit of all; “members of a class which can win and build socialism only if it is helped and followed by the large majority of these social strata” (LP: 28) – the majority – whose subsump- tion by bourgeois leadership serves as the chief obstacle to socialist reconstruc- tion. This process of a generating directed consensus through organic intellectuals who will synthesize the cultural traditions of the whole people is a process not only of education but of organization for class war. Proletarian agency is thus universalizing and sublating at the same time. This entails the imperative of further elucidating the purpose of a national-popular alliance and the goal of constructing a national-popular will.
Again, Gramsci directs our attention to the shifting balance (equilibrium/ disequilibrium) of political forces. Given the situation of the South as “a social disintegration,” and the peasants’ inability “to give a centralized expression to their aspirations and needs,” Gramsci notes, the landlords and their intellectu- als (Croce, for example) dominate the political and ideological field. Likewise, the proletariat as a class “lacks in organizing elements,” just as it lacks its own stratum of intellectuals with a left tendency “oriented toward the revolutionary proletariat.” With the mediation of intellectuals as organizers, the proletarian party will facilitate the alliance between peasant masses and the workers prepared to “destroy the Southern agrarian bloc.” The party needs to organize the masses of poor peasants “into autonomous and independent formations” free from the stranglehold of the “intellectual bloc that is the flexible but very resistant armature of the agrarian bloc” (1995: 47). Thus the people, not the bourgeoisie nor the Church and its cosmopolitan intelligentsia, will proceed to constitute the nation by releasing the productive forces needed for a more humane civilizational project, a new social order.
While the educational–pedagogical task seems a prerequisite, Gramsci does not envision an ideological-moral reform as an end in itself, a continuous “war of position” regardless of changed circumstances. Nor does it have anything to do with the numerical weaknesses of the proletariat nor of the fascist monopoly of military reserves and logistics. Rather, the problem Gramsci faced then was historically dictated by the deleterious moral-intellectual leadership of the fascist bloc enabled by the continuing political and economic subordination of the peasantry and the failure of the workers and their party in mobilizing them. For Gramsci, one of the ways (specific to Italy but not to all social formations) in building a counter-hegemonic bloc is the cultivation of organic intellectuals that can help shape a genuinely democratic national unity (the Italian nation as a legal, formal entity had no real cultural unity rooted in the people’s lives) on the basis of a unified struggle with the popular forces (peasantry, middle elements).
Before applying Gramsci’s theory of the national-popular strategy to the Philip- pines as a model neocolonial formation, I want to summarize its fundamental elements:
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1 A national life and field of action is needed for the proletariat to settle first with its bourgeoisie, as Marx and Engels stipulated in the Manifesto, and a synthesizing historical program based on commonalty of experiences will be used to unify, activate and lead the majority of the population.
2 For socialist revolutionaries to defeat the capitalist bloc and its feudal or semi- feudal supports, the party of the proletariat needs to move beyond sectarian- ism, that is, beyond corporatist/syndicalist tendencies and win the consent of the peasantry and middle elements by including their interests/demands in a common program/platform of action through concessions/compromises without abandoning their humanist, secular principles and the goal of a classless society.
3 To build such an alliance or historic bloc of subaltern masses under the leadership of the party of the working class, organic intellectuals are needed for organizing the nation-people, and to supervise the inculcation of discip- line in thinking and action; these tasks aim to generate a collective will informed by a knowledge of the totality of social relations that is its condition of effectivity.
4 The field of political mobilization involves civil society and the state institu- tions, without any predetermined approach (as always, an orchestration of frontal assault in a war of maneuver needs to be synchronized with political- legal actions in a war of position); the tactics of mass actions will depend on the concrete situation and the alignment and balance of political forces in any specific conjuncture. Consent is always armatured with the legitimacy of coercion.
5 The national-popular has a socialist orientation based on internationalist solidarity, geared to utilizing the scientific and progressive achievements of all of humanity to improve the material and spiritual well-being of all communities and national formations.
Historical triangulation
I will now summarize briefly the political history of the Philippines and sketch the most crucial problems of neocolonial development in the epoch of globalized capitalism and the US-led “war on terror” gripping the whole planet. This exercise is intended simply to illustrate the usefulness of Gramsci’s thesis on the imperative of a “national-popular” will applied to a colonial/neocolonial formation. While Italy and the Philippines belong to sharply disparate temporal and spatial regions and scales, with incommensurable singularities, one can discern rough similarities. The principal difference, of course, is that the Philippines was colonized by theocratic feudal Spain for 300 years and by the industrialized capitalist United States for nearly a century. US colonial rule preserved the feudal infrastructure, heightened ethnic divisions (principally between Christian and Muslim), and deepened class inequality by supporting a comprador-merchant class and an army of bureaucratic intelligentsia. After forcibly subjugating the revolutionary forces of the first Philip- pine Republic, it used a transformist “passive revolution” to win the subaltern
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intelligentsia and thus incorporate the peasantry into a colonial order and eventually a neocolonial setup. It suppressed the birth of a Filipino national-popular will.
The parameters of revolutionary socialist change in the Philippines are clearly drawn by the legacy of its colonial history, first by Spain and then by the United States. This resulted in the continuing fragmentation of the country in terms of class, language, and religion with deadly consequences (instanced by the undefeatable Moro separatist struggle). Spain used the Philippines primarily as a trading post for the galleon trade with China, using natural and human resources it found, until primitive mercantilism took over in the nineteenth century. The Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was killed in the Philip- pines as a result of tribal conflicts which the Spanish civil authority resolved mainly by force and partly by concessions to the local chieftains. Unable to occupy the Muslim territories with its limited resources and personnel, the Spanish colonial administration used this conflict to heighten insecurity and legitimize their authority. They relied mainly on the friars of the religious orders to extract tribute from the Christianized inhabitants who were reduced to serfhood or abject slavery.
In time the encomienda system generated a stratum of Spanish landlords who, together with the Catholic Church, maintained a tributary system in which only a few selected natives functioned as petty administrators and bureaucrats. So Spanish hegemony was tenuous, obtained mainly through the disciplinary regime of religious practices and institutions. When the children of Chinese and Filipino creoles or mestizos succeeded in acquiring formal education in schools adminis- tered by the religious orders, and also in Europe, they absorbed liberal ideas that formed the basis for the nationalist movement which began in the 1870s and ripened in the 1898 revolution. But this consciousness of Filipino nationality was confined mainly to the artisans and professions led by the ilustrado gentry class. It was not shared by the peasantry who were mobilized in terms of kinship or traditional loyalty to their village elders; or in terms of affiliation with millenary, chiliastic sects. In time, because of the organizing efforts of the Propagandists (reformist intellectuals, ilustrados, from the classes of rich farmers, artisans and petty traders) with their ideals of enlightenment rationalism and autonomy, and the recruitment of the petty landlords–merchants, a hegemonic social bloc of anticolonialists emerged: the Malolos Republic led by General Emilio Aguinaldo. This signaled the emergence of a Filipino national-popular intelligence and communal-oriented sensibility.
A sense of Filipino nationhood founded by the cosmopolitanized petty bour- geoisie with allies in the merchant and small landlord class was aborted when the United States suppressed the young Republic in the 1899–1903 Filipino–American War. The formal republican institutions built on the ruins of Spanish theocracy collapsed when the ilustrado leadership surrendered to the US colonial authority. While the Spaniards used violence armored by Christian evangelization, the United States occupied the islands with brutal force armored by diplomatic propaganda, the promise of “Benevolent Assimilation” and eventual independence. Using scorched earth tactics, torture and mass imprisonment, the US killed 1.4 million
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Filipinos, 10 percent of the population. Unable to defeat the Moros (Filipino Muslims) despite a series of massacres, the US deployed a combination of diplo- matic chicanery, subterfuge and “bribery” to pacify them. Up to the present, US Special Forces are still battling the Moros (Muslims living in the Philippines) in the form of the “Abu Sayyaf” terrorist bandit group, a proxy for the massive and more formidable Moro insurgency forces of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and disaffected sections of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) (San Juan 2007a) who refused to cooperate with the current US-subservient administration.
One can summarize the 50 years of direct US colonial rule as an illustration of hegemony won initially through military power and stabilized through the twin methods of bureaucratic coercion and cooptation. When the Philippines was granted formal-nominal independence in 1946, the US had set in place an Americanized privileged minority, an oligarchy of landlords, bureaucrat-capitalists, and compradors that would fulfill US economic needs and global foreign policy. Consensus on elite democracy and the formal trappings of representative govern- ment was obtained through decades of violence, cooptation, moral persuasion, and a whole range of pedagogical–disciplinary methods, with the active collaboration of the religious institutions (both Catholic and Protestant). Hence the Philippines today is a nation of impoverished peasants and workers, with less than 1 percent of 90 million people comprising the middle class and landlord-comprador elite (Lichauco 2005). It is basically agricultural and dependent on foreign investments (lately, on remittance of Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW)), devoid of the full exercise of its sovereignty (the US has veto power over its military and foreign policy). Its political system is characterized by the presence of formalistic liberal- democratic institutions administered by a tiny group of oligarchic families, reinforced by the Church, and a vast military–police apparatus chiefly dependent on US aid (economic, military, political) rationalized by the US-led “war on terror” (on US support of “low-intensity conflict” see Agee 2003). There is as yet no national-popular will exercising genuine independence, only a subalternized elite whose ascendancy and survival depend on direct or mediated (via World Bank–IMF–WTO) US military and political patronage.
The Southern Question in the Philippines
Gramsci of course did not directly engage with the process of Western colonization of a “Third World” country. However, even though there are considerable differences, one can consider the Philippines as analogous to the Italian “southern region” vis-Ã -vis the US industrial metropolis. The current metaphorical use of “North” (industrialized nations; center) and “South” (underdeveloped regions; periphery) in international relations is clearly indebted to Gramsci’s geographical–economic polarity. To be sure, Gramsci’s categorization of the North–South binary is less economic than sociopolitical and cultural, in contrast to the orthodox Marxist definition of a nation histori- cally predicated on the existence of a market and a commodity exchange system.
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Contrary to orthodox Marxism (Rosenthal and Yudin 1967: 304), which considered the capitalist national market as the basis for nationhood, the sense of a Filipino nation was born in armed struggle against Spanish theocratic rule and later against US military aggression. No full-blown commodity market existed in a feudal-theocratic mercantilist order. However, the emergent national identity was cancelled outright when Filipinos were excluded in the 1898 Treaty of Paris (Spain, militarily defeated, was forced to cede the islands to the US for 20 million dollars). Laws were immediately promulgated to criminalize anticolonial dissent: the 1901 Sedition Law and 1902 Brigandage Act punished anyone advocating separation from the US. The 1903 Reconcentration Act relocated entire rural communities into towns to deny refuge to rebels; the Flag Law, which prohibited displays of the revolutionary flag of the Filipino Republic, was enacted in 1907, the same year when the last revolutionary Filipino general, Macario Sakay, was hanged in public. Nationalist discourse and symbols were proscribed, thus destroying the material practices sustaining the collective spirit of resistance and will to independence. This period of pacification (1898–1935) involved a variable if shrewd application of force and consent, violence and persuasion, guided over- all by a transformist, “passive revolution” strategy administered by the local oligarchy and its bureaucrats tutored by American overseers.
US colonialism thus applied “transformism” by supplementing coercive tactics with a long-range strategy of ethnocentric, opportunistic extraction of consent from the new subjects (Pomeroy 1970). After Filipino guerilla resistance waned in the first decade of the twentieth century, the US established the Philippine Assembly as an auxiliary law-making body under the US-dominated Philippine Commission appointed by the US President to manage the colony. It was one way of implement- ing the slogan of “Benevolent Assimilation” of the natives proclaimed by President William McKinley in the midst of the violent pacification of the islands under the aegis of the white-supremacist slogan of “Manifest Destiny.” This Assembly served to co-opt the native elite (elected by at most 3 percent of the population) and defuse the popular agitation for “immediate independence,” a submerged, repressed tendency in the majority of colonial subjects.
A neocolony was born from the destruction of the insurgent nation and the systematic deepening of divisions among the people (Schirmer 1987). The principal instruments for winning consent were the school system of universal public education and the enforcement of English as the official medium of instruction, government communication, and mass media. Among progressive intellectuals, Renato Constantino (1978; see also Martin 2001) was the first to stress the crucial role of the pedagogical apparatus and the modes of the production and transmission of knowledge, specifically through the English language, in enforcing the allegiance/conformity of the majority of citizens whose national imaginary has thus been captured and detained. Americaniza- tion of the Filipino through education and cultural domination may be viewed as a kind of “passive revolution” aimed chiefly to defuse nationalist impulses in the peasantry and working class, and re-channel the energies of the middle strata of intellectuals–professionals to serve the interests of US policy in Asia
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especially in a time when Japan was rising as an imperial power and revolu- tionary ferment in China and other countries was dangerously looming in the horizon. Future independence was promised to pacify the nationalist intellec- tuals while recruitment to the Hawaii plantations gave temporary relief to unmitigated misery in the countryside.
In the process of revolutionizing the political and cultural institutions “from above,” the US colonial regime also cultivated its own intelligentsia. Politics imitated the prevailing patronage system binding landlord and tenant. Filipino ilustrados serving the defeated Republic – the educated gentry – were enticed to join the colonial administration as teachers, policemen, clerks, and technical help in the bureaucracy; as judges and municipal legislators. One example of a traditional intellectual who participated in this negotiated compromise was Trinidad Pardo de Tavera. In 1901, Tavera wrote to General Arthur MacArthur, the chief administrator of the military occupation:
After peace is established, all our efforts will be directed to Americanizing ourselves, to cause a knowledge of the English language to be extended and generalized in the Philippines, in order that through its agency the American spirit may take possession of us, and that we may so adopt its principles, its political customs, and its peculiar civilization that our redemption may be complete and radical.
(Quoted in Constantino 1978: 67)
This stratum of neocolonized intellectuals cemented the tie between the oligarchic elite and the colonial rulers, performing a necessary role in disinte- grating the popular memory of past revolutionary struggle and alienating this elite from the everyday lives of the masses.
When the Philippine Commonwealth was established in 1935, the Filipino intellectuals who came from the peasantry and working class gathered around the US-sponsored President Manuel Quezon and his program of “social justice.” This populist rhetoric re-channeled nationalist impulses toward legal ameliorative schemes won as concessions from Washington. The social bloc of landlords–bureaucrats–compradors funded cultural programs with a sentimental patronizing attitude toward the native or aboriginal populace. While writers in the vernacular gravitated toward more activist left-leaning circles on the fringes of the Communist Party of the Philippines (formed in August 1930), the writers using English remained “cosmopolitan,” as can be gleaned from this reflection of a progressive-minded critic, Salvador P. Lopez (written during the Japanese occupation circa 1942–1944):
For culture is fluid, volatile, impossible to confine in an air-tight compart- ment; and nothing is truer than that real culture is universal, the exclusive property of no particular nation but of all nations that have intelligence to harness it to their own uses.
(1945: 61)
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Cosmopolitanism Filipino-style lurked astutely behind this left-wing nationalist figure who eloquently voiced proletarian sentiments in the 1930s and 1940s against European fascism and Japanese militarism.
Uneven and combined development
Unlike Italy, then, the Philippines were distinguished as an undeveloped rural- agricultural economy without any heavy industry, under US ideological-moral control and political “tutelage.” Utilitarian and pragmatic norms permeated the social habitus of the middle strata. This hegemony flourished due to the acquiescence of the oligarchic bloc of landlords, comprador merchants, and bureaucratic intelligentsia, complemented by overt and covert tactics of violence and bribery unleashed on the unruly sections of landless peasants, workers, and artisans. Challenged by numerous peasant insurrections and workers’ strikes, US hegemony continues as a compromise setup enforced by juridical-police means of untenable legitimacy.
Filipino cacique/elite democracy is built on the parasitic dependency of the local clients on US military, economic and political assistance. The Philippines is a polity formally identified as “national” (since the Philippines is recognized by the United Nations as a “nation-state”) without genuine sovereignty, but only “popular” on the basis of periodic elections. This is concealed by John Gershman who, in a historical survey of the country, describes the Marcos dicta- torship as a hybrid of personalistic caudillo rule, aided by technocrats and regional alliances of governors, without any mention of US dependency of the whole structure validated by bilateral treaties and secret stipulations (1993: 162).
From 1899 up to 1946, the US utilized the Philippines as a source of cheap raw materials and labor (the colony began earlier to supply the Hawaii plantations with contract workers), as well as a military-naval outpost. The semi-feudal system of land tenure, especially in the sugar plantations, maintained landlord/rentier power that shared governance with the comprador merchants in the cities. Clientelism and patronage regulated class friction. More impoverished than before, the peasant masses staged regular revolts culminating in the numerous peasant uprisings in the 1920s, the Sakdal uprising of the 1930s and the Communist-led Hukbahalap rebel- lion of the 1940s. The Moros for the most part followed their tribal chieftains who were allowed limited local power by the central government. After World War II, the neocolonial government re-located landless peasants, former Huk partisans, to the southern island of Mindanao, temporarily relieving population pressure and unemployment in the North. The question of land and the demands of the peas- antry eluded the leaders of the Communist Party of the Philippines because, in a one-sided manner, they gave priority to the issue of formal independence, thus subordinating them to elite politicians like Quezon and abandoning the peasantry to the military, church and landlord private armies. Based on the small urban industries (printing, cigar-making, etc.), Crisanto Evangelista and other trade unionists set up the party with 6,000 members, a few from the peasant sector. Impatient, they tried to skip the necessary stage of winning hegemony in civil
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society, opting mainly for confrontational tactics within a narrow geopolitical arena. Within less than one year, however, the leaders were in jail and the party criminalized and substantially dismantled.
James Allen, a leading Communist Party USA functionary, visited the Philippines in 1936–1938 and helped amalgamate the urban-based Communist Party with the peasant-based Socialist Party led by Pedro Abad Santos. In his memoirs, Allen criticizes the limitations of the Filipino Marxists, influenced by anarchist and syndicalist notions absorbed from Spanish progressive intellectu- als rather than from “liberal and radical ideas emanating from the United States” (1993: 27) – for example, the Popular Front perspective. Allen describes the peasant leaders Juan Feleo, Mateo del Castillo, and Pedro Abad Santos who, in contrast to the Communist Party leaders, emphasized the need for unifying the peasant and proletarian movements. Even though they were not familiar with the debates among Western Marxists, at least they paid attention to the “Southern [peasant] Question.” With the merger in 1938 of the communists and socialists into one Communist Party, the theme of national independence was eclipsed by a “democratic front policy” to oppose the victory of fascism in Europe and Japan. The mediation of Allen and other patronizing mentors displaced the “national-popular” agenda with an internationalist one, thus legitimizing the continuing authority of the US-patronized cacique, Quezon, who had terrorized the party and persecuted its officials, and only grudgingly tolerated their 1938 convention. Proletarian and socialist principles were displaced by the virtues of entrepreneurial individualism and US-style pluralism, ironically conveyed by a trusted “tutor”/adviser from the US Communist Party.
From a Gramscian point of view, a shift of party policy from the national to the international (in Gramsci’s specific case, this was brought about by the need to confront the rise of Italian fascism in the 1920s) sacrifices the interests of the party’s mass base. It subordinates the party to the oligarchy whose defense of elite/cacique democracy would conceal their subservience to US authority. The outcome in the Philippines was disastrous. When the US forces returned in 1945, the axiomatics of US imperialism, which disappeared in the struggle against Japanese occupation, had to be re-learned after the arrest and killing of anti-Japanese Huk (Filipino commu- nist-led) guerillas. A similar situation occurred 30 or so years later when former leftists made a fetish of “civil society” as an entity separate from the state, following US Cold War strategy against the Soviet state. Filipino postmarxists (now flunkeys of the Establishment or ideologues of globalization) glamorized a hypothetical “democratic space” and electoral democracy without any substantive land reform or even token social-democratic improvements during Corazon Aquino’s presi- dency. Meanwhile, Aquino and her successors welcomed US advisers to supervise terrorist and fascist measures against the left, up to inviting US Special Forces to help wipe out Moro dissidents. This policy of systematic terror against leftists, nationalists, and indigenous advocates continues under de facto president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, with over 1,000 extra-judicial killings (also designated by human rights monitors as “summary executions”) and enforced disappearances since 2001.
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Again, Gramsci’s lesson here is clear: replacing the need for an anti-imperialist “national-popular” bloc fighting for genuine national sovereignty, and the democratization of social property to abolish class privileges, means abandoning the entire socialist project. It is a formula for defeat.
During the Marcos dictatorship (1972–1986), the revolutionary project of building socialism through a worker–peasant alliance took the form of a united front – the National Democratic Front (NDF) agenda initiated by a party estab- lished under “Marxism–Leninism–Mao Tsetung Thought.” Established in April 1973, the NDF sought to fight Marcos’s authoritarian-martial rule through the transitory alliance of the proletariat, peasantry, urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie in a national-democratic revolution – a people’s war geared to forming a democratic coalition government (on the postwar elite, see Agoncillo and Guerrero 1970: 670–671). According to the 1985 draft program, the NDF
Provides a framework and channel for the unity and coordination of all groups and individuals adhering to, and advancing, the general line of fight- ing for national liberation and genuine democracy. It wages armed struggle – specifically a people’s war – as the principal form of struggle at this stage of the Philippine revolution; but it also recognizes the importance of other forms of struggle, and in fact combines and coordinates the armed struggle with all types of clandestine and open, non-legal and legal struggles.
(National Democratic Front Secretariat 1985: 5)
In later elaborations of this program, one finds the “armed struggle” accentuated as the primary form of struggle nationwide, taking pride of place over all the other forms. The first item in the 12-point general program reads: “Unite the Filipino people to overthrow the tyrannical rule of US imperialism and the local reactionaries.”
Clearly, the NDF may have sidetracked, at certain conjunctures, the primacy of the armed struggle in favor of peace negotiations with the government begin- ning with the Hague Joint Declaration of 1992 (NDFP 2006). Combined with armed political mobilization, I see these negotiations as an astute move of the NDFP to build public consensus on the most crucial issues of land reform, social justice, and sovereignty. This is an opportunity denied to it except in the liberated zones where the New People’s Army (NPA) exercises precarious ascendancy. However, the NPA cannot win consent in the domain of civil society (including the economic sphere) unless its program is translated into community-wide practicable agendas. But the drive for winning consent (through a wise strategic balancing of frontal assault and positional warfare) seems premised on a mechanical reading of the prevailing social production relations (not just the economic base, in the conventional sense). For example, there is a recurrent stress on the developing crisis as engendering the imminent collapse of the regime. Conversely, there is a belief that a spontaneous outburst of mass action may precipitate revolutionary victory, ahead of any nationwide acceptance of the legitimacy of the NPA as the liberating people’s army.
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Whereas Gramsci proposed that what is decisive is moral-intellectual leadership of the historic bloc of social forces subtending the people’s army, a leadership which does not passively anticipate crisis breakthroughs but in fact prepares the ground for such direct confrontations. In addition, the forces of the ruling bloc need to be sufficiently demoralized, disaggregated, and decapitated of its intellectual-moral leadership before proletarian hegemony can be assured.
Toward clarifying the problem of transition
The problem of the national-democratic transition to socialism in the Philippines has been surrounded with the endless and often futile debate on the mode of production, in particular, whether feudalism or capitalist social relations obtain. Numerous volumes have appeared contradicting Sison and De Lima’s (1998) thesis of the Philippines as a semi-colonial and semi-feudal formation. For example, Ben Reid (2000) argues that the Philippines is now overdetermined by rent capitalism which is more vulnerable to urban insurrections, therefore a peasant-based insurgency is no longer valid or tenable as a revolutionary strat- egy. This kind of empiricist-positivist thinking is what Gramsci warns us to reject when he states: “it is not the economic structure which directly determines the political action, but it is the interpretation of it and of the so-called laws which rule its development” (quoted in Bobbio 1979: 33). And for Gramsci, such laws in Marxism are tendential laws that are historical, not methodological, because they always beget unpredictable countervailing forces. “Economic contradiction becomes a political contradiction” and economic law passes into political strategy (Bensaid 2002, 283).
Statistics proving uneven and combined development in neocolonial formations like the Philippines can be interpreted to serve either progressive or reactionary purposes; they cannot by themselves propose a revolutionary strategy. A leader- ship formation is needed. Gramsci writes that the mythical “Modern Prince” (van- guard political party) is a creator or initiator, basing itself “on effective reality” which is not something static or immobile, but rather “a relation of forces in continuous motion and shift of equilibrium.” Hence, normative ethical judgment and realistic critical analysis fuse in political action: “What ‘ought to be’ is there- fore concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality, it alone is history in the making and philosophy in the making, it alone is politics” (SPN: 171). The ascendancy of the national-popular will as the sign of accom- plished hegemony does not hinge on the resolution of the feudal-or-capitalist debate but on the meticulous analysis of the balance of political forces, that is, on theorizing the alignment and conflict of social blocs on the terrain of a specific historical formation.
The Philippines is indeed a complex test case for any revolutionary socialist politics removed from its European provenance. In such a highly differentiated political economy with divisions and fragmentation on every level, what is imperative is precisely an inventory of social-political forces. For there to be a revolutionary change there has to be a national-popular movement in which
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masses will be “led to think coherently and in a unitary manner an existing reality” (Fontana 1993: 45). This critical and coherent practice of understanding is expansive, moving beyond sectarian, corporatist or parochial views. Gramsci’s strategy of striving for a national-popular bloc is premised on the notion of catharsis, the dialectic of the war of position and the war of maneuver, neither one nor the other but always contingent on the highly mutable balance of political forces:
The term “catharsis” can be employed to indicate the passage from the purely economic (or egoistic-passional) to the ethico-political moment, that is the superior elaboration of the structure into superstructure in the minds of men. This also means the passage from “objective” to “subjective” and from “necessity” to “freedom.”
(SPN: 366)
In short, proletarian class ideology becomes universalized; it becomes the nation-people’s “common sense,” pervading everyday life. All these have been prefigured in the emphasis Gramsci laid on the need for self-inventory, order gained from self-discipline, knowledge of social relations, and collective will in the essays I have cited earlier.
Failure to heed this dialectical analysis of the ever-shifting equilibrium of political forces, which is essentially a symptom of positivistic or dogmatic think- ing, has led to catastrophes in the past. Most notable is the prediction by the leadership of the Huks in the 1950s that the neocolonial regime would collapse because of the sharpened crisis of international capitalism (Dalisay 1999: 116). This error stems from ignoring the form of the state being challenged and the existing balance of political forces, allowing the supposed transnationalization of production and finance to dictate the terms of the national-democratic struggle. It is the current malady afflicting anti-globalization “leftists” who consider the battle against the IMF/World Bank/WTO as more important than fighting the ruthless fascist acts of the US–Arroyo regime. The other lesson in ignoring the problematic of achieving hegemony via a national-popular bloc may be found in the CPP/NDF’s boycott of the “snap elections” of February 1986, a mistake due (to quote the official explanation) to the mechanical analysis in terms of class standpoint and subjective intentions, without taking into account “the objective positioning of each of the political forces in motion and in interaction with others” (Schirmer and Shalom 1987: 384). But that self-criticism does not mention at all where and how the protagonism of the masses will intervene in the conjuncture.
With the demise of the Soviet system and the proliferation of Western-funded NGOs (Non-governmental organizations) in the civil society of “Third World” countries, Gramsci was discovered as a quotable sage. In the Philippines, the “new social movements” opted for US-promoted electoral democracy instead of socialism or national independence. In this milieu, Gramsci’s notion of engaging the state from bases within civil society was refunctioned to resolve the crisis of
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left-oriented political forces. It was purged of its historically realist theorems (see Jaluague 1993). The Filipino “civil-society” advocates were dutifully silent about US imperial plunder of the Philippines and the utter subservience of its rapacious local agents to the Washington Consensus. Thus Gramsci is instru- mentalized to deflect attention away from the lack of national sovereignty, the fragmentation and anomic decay of society, and the unprecedented impoverish- ment of the masses – a majority of Filipinos subsist on $2 a day – and the endemic unemployment, which explains why eight out of ten households are stricken with hunger (Lichauco 2005; Oliveros 2008), and why between nine and ten million Filipinos are exploited migrant workers in over 200 countries around the world. This use of Gramsci was surely an exercise in tendentious extrapolation at the tail of the Cold War when neoliberal themes/slogans purveyed via privately funded NGOs led by managerial technocrats flourished. Gramsci’s hegemony was equated with radical democracy, all struggle being reduced to the ideological realm (Wood 1986). In fact, the call for hegemony (construed as electoral supremacy) eclipsed and erased the call for revolution, for people’s war. This is of course a prelude to the trendy, chic sectors of the anti-globalization movement embodied in the World Social Forum and its eclectic, opportunist accommodationism.
Imperial terror contra revolution
Immediately after September 11, 2001, the Philippines was declared the “second battlefront” after Afghanistan in the “war on terror” (Tuazon 2002). In October, Secretary of State Colin Powell classified the CPP and the New People’s Army as “terrorist” organizations, clearly revealing the normative unilateral criterion of “terrorist” as any group or individual that opposes US imperial policies and its effects. President Bush dispatched thousands of US Special Forces and Marines to pursue members of the Moro guerilla contingent called “Abu Sayyaf,” actually a kidnap-for-ransom gang, alleged to be Al Qaeda followers. The informed public in the Philippines already knows that this group was set up by government military/police, local politicians and businessmen to split up the Moro revolutionary camp and also channel ransom money into their private bank-accounts (Vitug and Gloria 2000; International Peace Mission 2002). Notwithstanding this truth, the Bush regime utilized the brutal 1899–1903 colo- nial pacification of the islands to justify sending US troops to the Philippines as an example of the US spreading democracy and freedom to benighted lands at horrendous costs for both Americans and Filipinos (Katz 2004; Kolko 1976).
There is no doubt that US policies of hegemony succeeded in making the Philippines one of the first genuine neocolonies on the planet. Concluding his history of Philippines in the twentieth century, Renato Constantino states that after the 1946 grant of formal independence, “the culture, the institutions, the sciences and the arts that evolved only served to confirm in the minds of orthodox Filipinos the need for some form of dependence on the United States” (1975: 393–394). Lichauco contends that “the contradiction between colonialism and
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nationalism remains the principal contradiction of Philippine society” (2004; see also CENPEG 2005; Bauzon 1991).
Consequently, parasitic on US support, the Filipino ruling bloc has never really won hegemony over the nation-people. Like the previous administrations from day one of the Republic up to the present, the Filipino elite has never enjoyed the full and total consent of the governed, as witness the uninterrupted peasant rebellions in the first 50 years of the last century, as well as the periodic eruptions of Moro antigovernment resistance. Even after the end of Marcos’s “constitutional dictatorship,” the military and police apparatus of the neocolonial state continues to be fully deployed both against the communist guerillas and the Moro insurgents – the Moros in fact receiving worldwide recognition of its legitimacy by the Organization of Islamic Conference. Class war persists in both its positional and confrontational dimensions, across ethnic, sexual, and regional heterogeneities (Eadie 2005).
Despite their unflagging struggle against fascist violence in defense of people’s rights and welfare, the NDF, CPP and NPA are branded as terrorists by all those who succeeded Marcos. At present, the Arroyo regime has been accused of unprecedented and massive extra-judicial killings and abductions of over 1,000 citizens, priests, lawyers, journalists, human-rights advocates, labor union leaders, women, and activists from “civil society.” Amnesty International, the UN Special Rapporteurs, World Council of Churches, Human Rights Watch, and others have all agreed that Arroyo’s government, in particular the US- funded and supervised Armed Forces of the Philippines and the National Police, are all guilty or complicit with those crimes. In March 2007 at The Hague, Netherlands, the Permanent People’s Tribunal held a trial of the US–Arroyo regime and found it guilty of “crimes against humanity,” a judgment conveyed to the United Nations, the European Parliament, and the International Court of Justice (San Juan 2007b). It would be logical to conclude then that following Gramsci, the war of maneuver, frontal assault, may be considered appropriate (as it was in Russia in 1917), especially if the state (military-police power) was everything and civil society “primordial and gelatinous” (SPN: 238). But is that the case in the Philippines today where, behind the army and bureaucracy, the trenches and fortifications of civil society – church, media, schools, etc. – have already been taken over by the national-popular bloc, the alliance of workers and peasants? If so, then the revolution has won. If not, we need to go back to the mass grass-roots organizations and reassess our frameworks, paradigms, conceptual tools, and experiences.
We may sharpen our inquiry further. While the situation may be crisis-ridden and Arroyo deprived of majority support in “civil society,” has the working class party achieved hegemony in that realm? Apart from the current logistical weak- ness and decreased size of the NPA (the Moro insurgents, though massive and well-equipped, appear to be plagued with leadership problems), the CPP and other left-leaning or socialist-oriented groups have not yet fully attained “national-popular” stature. That is, their leaders and intellectuals have not yet achieved that “organic cohesion in which feeling–passion becomes understanding
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and thence knowledge,” precisely that moment when they can be said to be representative insofar as a “shared life” exists “which alone is a social force ... the ‘historical bloc’” (SPN: 418). We do not yet have proletarian-oriented “common sense” operating in everyday social life. In other words, the historical bloc of national-popular forces has not been realized as yet, despite the utterly corrupt, mendacious and criminal actions of the illegitimate president. The neo- colonial state survives by virtue of superior military-police organization (though rent by factional in-fighting, as attested to by several mutinies in the last decade, which persist up to now), the inadequacy of its challengers, and sheer psycho- cultural inertia. Above all, the neocolonial state is able to function with a semblance of normality (though quotidian life is replete with emergency episodes and punctual ruptures) because of unremitting US support. Aside from US military-political aid, the elite is able to survive because of the $12–14 billion annual remittance of OFWs (Overseas Filipino Workers), enough to pay the growing foreign debt and fund the irredeemably corrupt bureaucracy and military-police apparatus.
Globalizing the nation?
Viewed from the neo-Gramscian perspective of international political economists (Gill 2003c; Bieler and Morton 2003), we need to take account of the current world order, the appearance of trends such as “the new constitutionalism” and “discipli- nary neoliberalism.” Future research should take into account the “recomposition of state-civil society relations” that generate new structures of exploitation, forms of class-consciousness, modes of resistance and class struggle (Bieler and Morton 2003). World-systems analysis has to be supplemented by a historical-materialist critique of mutable forms of political subjectivities generated by new innovative forms of commodification and marketization of both private and public spheres, as well as the corresponding changes in the planet’s bio-eco system (Gill 2003c).
Gramsci’s theory of hegemony operating through the historic bloc of the national/popular conceptualizes the idea of socialist revolution as a transformation in the relation of political forces. Protracted people’s war, if it is not just a carry- over slogan from the Chinese experience, needs to be judged as a tactic, not a long-range strategy of political struggle where the land problem coexists within the question of neocolonial dependency. “People’s war” also needs to concede if not incorporate the more urgent demand for Moro self-determination within its parameters. Within the dual perspective that Gramsci applies to the revolutionary process, the military moment of a relation of forces – the moment of maneuver or frontal assault – must be located within the unity of the whole formation and the complex relation of the elements within it. Gramsci warns us that it is foolish to be fixated by a military model since politics must have priority over its military aspect: “only politics creates the possibility for maneuver and movement” (SPN: 232; Sassoon 1980).
Notwithstanding the primacy of class struggle in historical materialism, the people-nation (mainly in the “Third World”/global South) remains the pivotal
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agency for a strategy against finance–capital imperialism. The people (prefigured by the revolutionary worker–peasant alliance) and the emergent nation endowed with critical universality (Lowy 1998) remains the dual thematic and narrative vectors of any socialist praxis in neocolonized formations. In the case of the Philippines, as long as the peasantry, rural middle stratum, and indigenous communities remain the base of landlord–comprador power, and therefore of bourgeois (US and local capitalist–bureaucrats) control, the insurgency in the countryside will always be an irrepressible part of the “civil society + political- ideological domain” (the integral state) which is the paramount terrain of the national-democratic struggle (Q2 §6: 763–764). Again, we need to be reminded that civil society includes the economic sphere lest everything be reduced to the cultural or ideological realm. The immiserated countryside and its urban exten- sions continue to serve as the reservoir for the thousands of migrant contract workers who now remit billions of their earnings, enough to pay the country’s huge foreign debt to the World Bank and financial consortiums. And as long as the Philippines is a deformed or inchoate “nation-state,” without real sovereignty, the nationalist project – global decolonization as “the most significant correlate of US hegemony” (Arrighi 1993) remains pivotal and decisive in socialist trans- formation. Without the Filipino nation-people, there is no agency to carry out the socialist revolution in a neocolonial location. Without the national-popular, there can be no historical specificity to analyze, no particularity to authenticate the universal drive of global socialist transformation of the global capitalist system. By grasping the full implications of Gramsci’s “national-popular” as applied to the historicized formation of a neocolony like the Philippines, by exploring its heuristic and explanatory value for socialist goals, we may be able to find to explore the most fruitful way of being Gramscian in this new millennium of imperial terror and impending planetary ecological disasters.
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