Western imperialism has a long history in the Philippines. Hundreds of years of Spanish colonisation, beginning in the 1500s, culminated in the Spanish-American War in 1897. The first attempt to declare the Philippine Republic in 1899 was followed by the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), then American control, Japanese occupation during World War II, and eventual independence in 1946.
This history of subjugation, and the subversion and trauma it elicits, is so complex that any linear narrative sanitises and abstracts it to the point that it becomes meaningless.
My opening paragraph fails to describe the brutality of this history and the countless incidents that propelled it. Detailed as a simple timeline, it is as if I’m outlining geological epochs. Missing is the human toll, the centuries of cultural mutilation, the violence and political interference, and the dysfunctional, corrupt politics this long history leaves in its wake.
Review: Yñiga – Glenn Diaz (Pink Shorts Press)
Glenn Diaz is keenly aware of the sanitising nature of linear histories. His award-winning novel Yñiga resists that approach. It is composed as a series of disjointed scenes, jumping around in time within chapters, and sometimes within paragraphs, to capture the essence of memory and trauma.
The novel tells the fragmented story of Yñiga Calinauan, who returns to her home town, where she is forced to reengage with her family history. But it begins with the arrest of a retired general, who has been hiding out in Yñiga’s neighbourhood in Manila.
After the arrest, the neighbourhood is set alight. There is suspicion among the neighbours. Was the fire caused by a forgotten cigarette? Did it have something to do with the general’s arrest? Did Yñiga tip off the authorities and bring on the wrath of whatever corruption supported the general?
Regardless of the motivation, Yñiga is made homeless. Arriving in her childhood town, she reunites with her sister and a helper, Marco, who is later revealed to be her half-brother. Marco is organising a protest against a new power plant, taking after his and Yñiga’s activist father, who had been “disappeared” under the corrupt and dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos. After Marco and Yñiga participate in the protest, Marco is kidnapped.
Throughout the novel, there are flashbacks to interviews between Yñiga and a man who is writing a biography of Yñiga’s father. We never get the exact reasons for the biography, or the biographer’s motivation. But Yñiga is suspicious throughout the process, questioning her father’s disappearance and noticing details about the biographer that link him to the army.
There are suggestions of sex in each of the scenes with Yñiga and the biographer, intermixed with flashbacks to sexual encounters with a previous lover, Diego. There is an ambiguity that declines as the novel progresses – was Yñiga having an affair with the biographer or Diego, or both? Why?
The novel is laced with references to specific CIA operations, such as the psychological warfare intended to quell the Hukbalahap “Huk” Rebellion (1946-54) in the early years of independence, the lie the CIA put out that MSG makes you sleepy, and many others.
There are also references to Spanish colonisation, represented by the lighthouses that began construction at the end of Spanish rule and continued under the Americans. The signs of neo-colonialism are evident in the ubiquitous presence of Coca-Cola and the fact that Yñiga earns money writing essays for lazy Western undergraduates. The deadline for a paper on the CIA in Southeast Asia looms over the text.
An allegory of resistance
The novel jumps between minor and major storylines: the protest, the subsequent arrests, incidents before the neighbourhood fire, Yñiga’s encounters with the biographer.
Toward the end, while she is pamphleting for a sit-in in response to the arrest of her comrades, Yñiga runs into a boatman she met earlier in the narrative. As she recounts the reasons for protest and the long list of incidents that led to the arrests, she is overwhelmed. When she reflects on her factual recounting, she notices “the storyline sounded almost clinical, academic, defanged of the pain and wretched violence to which it tried to give shape”.
Although the novel ends on a somewhat hopeful note, a close reading reveals Yñiga’s suspicion of the futility to her struggle, and perhaps the wider struggle of resistance in the Philippines.
In the final chapter, the story flashes back to an incident in Yñiga’s childhood when she was forced to play the traditional Filipino game of hampas-palayok, which has its origins in the Spanish piñata. The adults push her into the square where the claypot piñata hangs. She swings and turns, missing the pot each time, egged on by the adults.
When her blindfold is taken off, a mass of laughter comes up from the crowd. She is embarrassed and ashamed at “the feeling of maniacally swinging a wooden bat in the laughing wind”.
The scene reads as an allegory of the resistance. Yñiga is playing a game introduced by the Spanish, blindfolded, too young to possess the coordination to be done with the clay pot, turned in every direction by her community, swinging her bat and missing. There is hope in the sections that follow, which is necessary for any useful writing about political struggles. Yet I can’t help but feel that Diaz could have ended the novel with Yñiga’s rumination on the laughing wind.
I am taken aback at the force of Yñiga. I have focused on its political aspects, but its artistry is in its composition. Rarely is this kind of disjointed technique deployed to meaningful effect in contemporary literature, where it often reads as an unnecessary reaching for some kind of artificial cultural value. In Yñiga, Diaz gives readers a glimpse into his country’s history in the only way that would do it justice.
Well done to the publisher, Pink Shorts Press, for bringing this powerful novel to Australia, a country that refuses to reckon with its own vicious colonial past and its complicity in Amercia’s global crusade of political interference and oppression. It’s important that these stories are told, and told well.
Sam Ryan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
