The premise of the disappeared is their silence. In Desaparesidos, Lualhati Baustista’s latest novel, what one is treated to is an articulation of these silences that the disappeared bear, over and above the lives that they live as names on a list of people who have been captured and jailed, raped and tortured, and killed. And while you might say Bautista has done this before, or that this story about the Marcos dictatorship is old hat, Desaparesidos is anything but a mere repetition. It is not a sequel of any sort to Dekada ‘70, but is a re-telling of that time in history and how we are clearly and inextricably linked to it, even when we’d rather imagine otherwise. And it’s precisely because of this that it’s an important read for the times.

Desaparesidos is the story of activists Anna and Roy, a couple in the present who have come together in love for each other and nation, and have one child Lorena, who they left to fend for herself, in houses of relatives and friends, for most of her childhood during Martial Law. Unbeknownst to Anna and Roy, Lorena’s childhood was riddled with questions about their absence, and what it was they were doing instead of caring for her and their family. With no answers to her questions, Lorena slowly began to harbor ill feelings against her parents, the movement they were part of, and the nation they served. But child as she was, and absent as her parents were, these feelings would be part of Lorena’s learned silence about what to her was a family that had disappeared before it even happened.

But Lorena’s parents had as many silences to bear. Forced to share their experiences of Martial Law under Marcos, they re-live what had been silenced by their unbreakable belief in what must be done for nation. As part of the group that filed a class suit against the Marcos regime’s human rights abuses, Anna and Roy are made to tell their individual stories of lost families and friends’ betrayals, of rape and torture in the hands of the military, and of renewal and hope in finding each other as political prisoners, and as freed individuals.

And yet, even when there is power in articulation, Anna and Roy continue to be silenced by their need to forget, which turns out to be an exercise in futility. Their dreams are riddled by their fears of capture, their tears are always reminiscent of those they weren’t allowed to shed, their relationship(s) in the present always a remnant of an unresolved past. It is because of this that when they return to Lorena after the 1986 EDSA Revolution, the family suffers as well. That it was missing for most of Lorena’s life made it a silence that all of them had to bear and resolve.

Which only happens when many other silence(s) are resolved, and some of the missing are found. Anna’s baby Malaya, lost since Martial Law is found through Karla, an ex-comrade who decides to come clean and return a now adult daughter to her rightful mother. Roy comes clean about killing ex-comrade Jinky, husband of Karla, the one who turned traitor and was responsible for Roy’s and many other activists’ capture. Lorena finds herself as daughter, when she is faced with the truths that her mother and father have survived through, and upon realizing through boyfriend Eman - himself a new generation activist - that all of the silences throughout their childhood was worth it.

Moving from the era of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship to the present, Bautista’s writing in Desaparesidos seems more adventurous this time around. While not new to social realism and historical fiction, she skillfully uses elements of postmodern fiction here, with a non-linear narrative that intertwines the past of Martial Law with the present of the Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo presidency as it is lived through the main characters. With this kind of storytelling, Bautista’s use of different narrative voices becomes believable as it shifts among all the characters, across the times and spaces which they inhabit. It even becomes important that Bautista cuts her story in the middle, to tell the story of nation in the chapter “once upon a fairytale, o ang pag-iibigang Marcos-U.S.” - something which wouldn’t have succeeded in a conventionally told story. The epilogue on the unjust outcome of the class suit filed by the victims of Martial Law, no thanks to the current President who decided that none of the victims would get anything, is meanwhile expected of historical realist fiction that skillfully intertwines fictionalized narratives with real stories of people’s lives.

And here lies the importance of Desaparesidos at a time when we are made to think that the vestiges of Martial Rule are gone, and in light of a current government that insists that many of the stories of the disappeared are exaggerations, that not all of those listed by human rights groups are actually victims of forced disappearances or extrajudicial killings. What they forget about the disappeared are those they’ve left behind - they who have nothing to gain by making up the story of a loved one’s disappearance.

More importantly, what Bautista’s Desaparesidos points out is that more than the physical disappearance of the people who are stolen from the lives they had a right to live, there is that which is stolen from them in soul and spirit. The intangible, the unarticulated, and the most painful things that are lost - time, love, family - are those that cannot be returned. For the disappeared, those they leave behind, and those who are allowed by sheer luck to return to tell their stories, Bautista tells us that in many ways, they all continue to deal with silence. In Desaparesidos, we are reminded that we dwell in those silences, too.

If there’s anything that made me pick up Isang Napakalaking Kaastigan by Vlad Bautista Gonzales, it was its size and title - the same things that allow me to pick up books by Milflores Publishing more often than I would any other publishing house. There’s something easy and light about the way their books are packaged, something that calls out to you as you browse through the Filipiniana section of any bookstore. And with prices that are almost always only equivalent to the price of a large cup of coffee in your neighborhood Starbucks, it’s easy to shell out for their seemingly endless set of new releases.

Gonzales’ book of essays though also had the word “astig” going for it. A word that the author himself swears to using, but really only has a flimsy because broad description for what it actually is. In the essay with the same title as the book, the word “astig” is allowed a life all its own: “Kahit saan ako pumunta may astig. Sa bahay, may astig. Sa eskuwela, may astig. Sa TV at saka sa DVD, may astig. Minsan may nagtsismis sa’kin, astig daw ako. Hindi ako naniwala (102).”

And yet, it is this instability of definitions that allows for the book itself to bank on the notion of the “astig” - whether it means to or not. Particularly to a female reader, it is the one thing that allows for the book of essays to be digestible at the very least, and downright enjoyable at most.

This is of course not to say that Gonzales’ essays are politically incorrect as far as gender issues are concerned. In fact, what he employs as male essayist, obviously talking about Pinoy male experiences, is a self-conscious - if not self-deprecating - tone. Usually beginning to tell a sexist joke by precisely saying it is sexist; more often than not speaking of male experiences (such as Military Science, or issues with other males in the family, or conversations with friends) and noting that it is precisely Pinoy ka-macho-han that is the point.

But beyond the male-female dynamic that this self-conscious Pinoy macho voice dares deal with - rare enough on this side of patriarchal Philippines - Isang Napakalaking Kaastigan has much more to offer.

For the generation to which Gonzales belongs, there is familiarity in the book’s nostalgic turn towards the lives we lived in the 90s. We are reminded by these essays that the shows we watched, the music we listened to, the roads we traveled, were by and large the same; we are told that the lives we lived then were intertwined by the technology we had (TV and cassette tapes), and learned to get used to (pirated DVDs and computers); we are made to imagine that we are bound together by the malls we started to frequent, and the changing landscape of consumerism that we began to live and believe.

It is here that Gonzales’ writing becomes even more integral to his telling of the lives he has lived, and continues to do so. In the throes of neo-coloniality and its contingent effects on contemporary culture, the form that Gonzales uses to keep his readers interested is as important as what it is he actually says.

Gonzales’ use of the essay as form, is in fact a reclaiming of a space that in recent years has come to be equated with the woman writer. Through the non-fiction narrative, the woman has been allowed her own voice and experiences - a writing back against the patriarchy that has oppressed her. With Gonzales’ self-conscious, gender-correct, use of the form in telling the lives he has lived within the expectations of becoming a full-blooded Pinoy macho, he himself may be seen as someone who writes back against this patriarchy.

It becomes clear throughout the essays in the book, that the Pinoy male is also as much oppressed and repressed by patriarchy’s expectations of its own self. That the length of the essays is sometimes as short and as experimental as blog entries is telling as well of how these experiences are dependent on memory - selective as that may be. That the experiences are almost always funny, if not downright hilarious, is telling as well of the things that memory keeps, and the ways in which we cope with the things that oppress us.

Another aspect of form that can’t be left unsaid is the language that Gonzales chooses to write in. Using a Filipino that’s easy and comfortable to read, that shifts to English when it must, Isang Napakalaking Kaastigan is representative as well of a generation grappling with the issues neo-coloniality in the forms of available technology and the changing urban landscape. What Gonzales ends up treating readers to is a language that’s urban vernacular at its best - the kind that we use everyday, but which we are told, isn’t the kind of language we can write in. Because it’s too informal, or is just not done.

But Gonzales proves it can be done. In fact, through Isang Napakalaking Kaastigan, he proves many things to be possible for the Pinoy male writer: the use of a perspective that’s critical of his “macho” self, and that’s self-conscious about the sexism that his culture allows him; finding affinity with the form of the essay and its recent function as response to patriarchal literary production; the unapologetic use of a Filipino language that disregards academic notions of acceptable writing.

In the end, and probably without knowing it, Gonzales has in fact defined what it is that makes his writing astig. And as a full-blooded female reader, I can only agree and say: “Astiiiiig!”