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.

i’m the last person who will look down on what people enjoy reading, nor will i insist that you must read certain books in order for you to be called “literary”. i will insist though that anyone who decides to diss any form of literature, particularly philippine lit, even more so literature in our vernaculars, has better sense than just his or her superficial notions of taste and literature, and in this case, language.

this is exactly what connie veneracion did in her column last Tuesday, where she complained about the difficult Tagalog of Amado V. Hernandez’s Mga Ibong Mandaragit, and in the end questioned its inclusion in her daughter’s school curriculum. she was obviously exasperated that neither she nor her husband could read this Filipino classic that she went on and on about literature and creativity, about writers making things more difficult on purpose, about the simplicity of Ernest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea and how it was so easy to understand, and how there are Filipino writers like Jay David who do write in a Filipino that’s easy to read. in the end, she blamed Ka Amado – and i imagine any other writer – for the difficult writing she had, and failed, to endure. (more…)

chanced upon Korina Today, with Samantha Echavez, Carljoe Javier and Dean Francis Alfar, talking about their works included in what seems to be the anthology on tales of enchantment and fantasy, which is really beside the point of this critique.

the point being this: Alfar says that having readers isn’t a matter of length or short attention spans, as with the blog and its accessibility in terms of form, but that it’s a matter of, and i quote, “the story”. he says he doesn’t think it’s true that there’s a problem with readership, and that readers will be lost to new media, because the Filipino reader wants a good story. he then of course, talks about himself, and his experiment with Salamanca, which he says, he had published in parts on his blog for 30 consecutive days, and he got a lot of comments, and he won the palanca and got published by ateneo press. (more…)

once, long ago, someone was reporting on “The House of Spirits” in my M.A. class, and she started it off with the line: this has as audience the professional as well as the non-professional reader, but their appreciation of it is different.

i don’t remember much of what else she said, but i do remember that a classmate and i could barely let her finish, because her premises were unacceptable. my mother who reads for leisure (as opposed to reading for academic purposes) does not deserve to be called an unprofessional reader, not only because of the fact that it’s derogatory, but too, because it limits her appreciation of books to the kind of market she’s part of. nor was it acceptable to even presume that all people who read for academic purposes, and are therefore professional readers, will have intelligent and informed appreciation of texts. hello, if you’ve been in the academe long enough, you’d know that this is so not true. (more…)

published in PCIJ i-report, special report on Literature and Literacy, of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism, 19 June 2007
http://www.pcij.org/i-report/2007/chick-literature.html

N.B.S.B. (No Boyfriend Since Birth). Love hurts. Hearts heal. Relationships are overrated. Marriage or living in? Promiscuity versus loyalty. Every girl needs a gay bestfriend. Better pay or fulfilling job? M.U. (Mutual Understanding). Shopping! Vacations. Self-worth and –confidence. Self-love. Single – not an old maid. Falling in love with your male bestfriend. The search for Mr. Right. H.D. (Hidden Desire).

You think superficial. I say, quite interesting. Useless crap, you say? I think, give it a chance.

Of course I understand why it’s easy to dismiss what has come to be this country’s version of chick literature – these are dismissed as mere “bestsellers” elsewhere in the world. It does, after all, use everything that is considered uncreative or easy by literary standards. It follows the formula of a young urban liberated working woman, with her life spread out in front of her, and possibilities as far as the eye can see. It highlights the search for happiness, usually towards the arms of a man, while showing how urban women actually and really want to identify themselves with a career and a life beyond just the conventions of love and family. Given such, it is inevitable that every chick novel also works towards that perfunctory happy ending of finding a man, finding oneself, and finding contentment in the process.

But I insist that Philippine chick novels, particularly the ones that have come out of Tara FT Sering’s editorship of Summit Books deserve a second glance. For not only did Summit Books start off what has become a Philippine chick lit industry – with other publishers producing their own brand of chick novels – it also started it off with a bang. Summit Media gave out its first novel for free with the October 2002 Cosmopolitan Philippines issue, along with a survey: would readers like more novels like Sering’s Getting Better? The answer, obviously, was yes. And regardless of whether or not we doubt surveys, Summit Media’s response was telling of an audience waiting to be tapped. That is, a Filipino audience willing to spend their good money on books.

This in itself is a surprise, given the often heard lamentation of “no one reads!” in this country, as well as what is always seen as the impending death of the publishing industry: paper’s become too expensive, presses are closing, workers losing jobs, no one’s buying our books. And yet Summit Media did not only start selling novels at P150 pesos (the same price as their magazines), it also sold it everywhere from the Booksale stores in every neighborhood to the magazine stands that have sprung up in every corner of the metropolis. It was obviously catering to an audience that was reading in English and was wanting to read about the lives of chicks from our context.

I know, I know. Now I’ve allowed you to think that chick literature really is only about selling out to the popular, to what it is the market wants. Maybe it’s even easier now to dismiss these novels as crap given the chick formula it must adhere to. In fact, I bet that imagining these texts to be non-existent is all that you’d like to do, because really you don’t read them. After all, since these chick novels have found a market, then doesn’t this production in fact end up debunking what it is the literary establishment wants us to believe? That no one reads in this country, and it’s not their fault at all? In reality, the mere existence of popular literature in English proves that the literary establishment just might be doing something wrong, or is just unwilling to compromise its rigid notions of “art” and the “literary” to actually gain readership within our boarders. Or maybe this proves that, for the most part, the audience that it imagines is not here; there is after all a whole Fil-Am enterprise – if not an American audience – that it feels must be tapped.

Suddenly, it makes sense, this insistence that these novels are not worth reading. Because they’re not “literature” and aren’t worthy. Because it’s just chick lit and is really just about sticking to what is a pre-set formula. Because it’s nothing but popular culture.

I say, give it one chance and read it. And prepare to be surprised.

Not only are Sering’s novels and the ones published under her wing witty and funny, they are also comfortably written in an English that is ours. Ours enough that it’s able to solidly create an urban Filipino woman’s world that’s familiar, where Makati and Ortigas are career centers, and people shop in the malls as well as the tiangges. Where popular culture becomes everything, from the clothes we wear to the movies we watch, cable television to local stars, kabaduyan to clichés, pop songs to TV commercials. Where conversations are inevitably and truthfully in Taglish with a smattering of gay lingo to boot, and everydays are lived in laughter because of idiomatic expressions and linguistic accents that are so obviously urban Pinoy.

And yet it’s not just language that would’ve allowed these novels to keep its readership. Beyond the familiar and reader-friendly English, these chicks are real to us: they could be every other middle class Filipina that we meet. And while for the duration of the novels, they are quite focused on the goal of finding a boyfriend, in the process, they are in fact shown to be more than just shallow boy-crazy girls. Within those pages are the Pinays of this new millennium who recover from break-ups because they realize they are worth more than what they were getting in their relationships. Pinays who go in search of “the one” while finding that their standards are changing and evolving because they do deserve more. Pinays who struggle with the expectations of their traditional families, created by what is purportedly a religious society, and what are the fixed and rigid expectations of Filipino women. For good middle class measure, these Pinays also deal with these insecurities and tribulations through shopping and pigging out, drinking and partying, crying and wallowing, sleepless nights and television marathons, and almost always, in the company of good friends.

So while it is limited by a set of requirements, these novels’ contexts keep it from being anything but formulaic or old. There is nothing cliché about M.D. Balangue’s novel Mr Write (2003), which works with the search for a secret admirer, recovering from heartbreak, and becoming obsessed with the possibility of intimacy with an acquaintance, all at the same time. Set in graduate classes in the University (as well as its expectations and bureaucracy), the novel is riddled with quotes from cultural theorist Roland Barthes as well as from popular songs and romantic movies. Abi Aquino’s Drama Queen (2003), while walking the familiar path of falling in love with one’s male bestfriend, is still a layered story as the dimensions of financial (in)stability and fame (the lead character’s a struggling actress finding her space in the world), as well as dependence, become issues. Even Maya Calica’s The Breakup Dairies (2003) is a welcome respite from the seemingly easy advice that magazines give to women. In diary form, the whole book focuses on what is the slow and painful process of dealing with having someone figuratively die on you, and in the end, finding the self in the form of a career – with of course a makeover.

These novels, all published in 2003, had as its predecessor Sering’s freebee novel Getting Better, which clearly set the tone for the kind of writing that would come to be known as Philippine chick lit. There is nothing formulaic about starting a novel with the month of June, and the contingent pressure on Filipino women to well, become brides, quick, before it’s too late. Here, Sering writes in the second person, engaging the Pinay reader in the struggle of being single in this country, particularly when everyone else is getting married and even when one is just considered to be “of age.” The Pinay reader who would’ve grown up hearing about marriage as the end all and be all of existence, would easily get hooked by this story, because really, even in the age of annulments and marital abuse, marriage is still seen in this country as “paglagay sa tahimik”.

Having started off the now productive industry of Philippine chick literature, there is no doubt that Sering has set a standard for the kind of chicks’ stories that need to be told – and how they can be told. It does not compete with any of the other popular romance novels ala Valentine Romance and Precious Petals Romance which obviously have a different market; nor does it pretend to be all feminist or liberal or even elitist when it talks about the middle class Filipina. Instead, Sering set the standard for a realistic reckoning of how middle class Pinays live and are merry, how they may become miserable and inconsolable, how they struggle with society and learn to deal with it, and how they go through a process of finding themselves given those limitations. Highlighted by these novels is a Pinay who, for the first time, is owning the chick label and living it out on her own terms, with her own money, within her own spaces. It almost seems as if the man is secondary.

Pinay chicks rule! These novels unabashedly say. No apologies. No disclaimers. It disengages itself from the literary establishment’s rules and regulations, as it recognizes the Pinoy reader who does exist in the Philippines – but who has yet to get interested in what is considered as “real” Philippine literature. Of course there are limits to what can be written in these novels, but if there’s anything Sering’s handling of Summit Books has proven, it’s that there is always the option of dealing with the formula and seamlessly going beyond it. Ideally, towards more realistic portrayals of Pinay chicks’ lives – diverse and varied as they are.

Given this, it is entirely possible that Sering as the brain of Summit Books has become that one chick ruling the worlds of many Filipina readers. And while she has yet to be acknowledged as someone who rocked the literary world, she undoubtedly has changed the dynamics of its existence. Because chick literature in her hands, has not only become proof of a Filipino readership; it is in fact testament to how the literary establishment can face up to the challenge of getting an audience that is here, in this country, and actually be read by those they speak of.

Because when female students’ eyes light up at the mention of a Sering short story (published in a book by the University of the Philippines Press), then that is no doubt a measure of her readership – and credibility. The contingent reaction to NVM Gonzales or Franz Arcellana are after all blank faces. What Sering has done is to blur that line that divides “real literature” from popular literature, because she is unabashedly both. Now, there is no dismissing any kind of text – any book – as just a love story, just a comic book, or just crap. Because at the very least, the beginnings of chick literature in this country tells us that we shouldn’t knock it. At least not until we’ve opened that hot pink book cover, and taken a peak inside these chicks’ writings, and their lives.

Most importantly, because of Sering’s brand of chick lit, there’s now a higher probability that a Philippine book will be picked off of a bookstore shelf, not because it’s required reading, but because there is renewed interest in reading literature that is our own.

That to me, is how chicks rule.

* * * * * *

Notes

Tara FT Sering is an oft-anthologized fictionist, and has won prizes for her short stories. She took her M.A. in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines, and became Cosmopolitan Philippines’ editor-in-chief. It was after her stint as EIC that she became Summit Books’ Editor.

Excerpts from the novels both published by Summit Books

Tara FT Sering’s Getting Better (2000) starts off with:

Chapter 1
How to Deal with June

First, pretend that it doesn’t bother you. Watch movies about how great it is being unmarried but boyfriend-ed. Single, dating exclusively and enjoying all the perks – you’ve got a kiss-and-cuddle buddy without the children and commitment, so you should be ecstatic right? Download photos of all the cute men you can find on the internet – single George Clooney is a good start, or go for someone closer to home like a topless and ripped Marc Nelson – and fantasize all day at work about strolling down the beach with each of them, hand in hand, in nothing but a skimpy gold string bikini. Toast to the ladies in Sex and the City and chat with your friends about how sex fiend Samantha should be every single chick’s role model. Tune out when your parents mention how nice it is that another daughter of a family friend is getting married in the merry month of June, but pipe in with “Didn’t Tito Celso’s daughter leave her husband after what? Seven months?” (29)

Dialogue between lead character graduate student Teri and gay bestfriend Moose, from Mr. Write (2003) by M.D. Balangue:

“I remember genuinely disliking him that night at Sukiyaki Babe then I’d see him sa corridor and he’d always look so intense and shy, and before I knew it I was nervous around him, I liked seeing him in the hallway, ewan! Maybe I’m ready to move on and maybe something inside me is –“

“—is subconsciously looking for a papa, and Gito is very papa-ble!”

Good old Moose, Teri thought. Always there to make sense of things that left her confused and bewildered. (37-38)

On broken hearts, from Mr. Write (2003) by M.D. Balangue:

What happens when someone breaks your heart?

When someone breaks your heart, first you are shocked. Someone will say you are heartbroken and you examine the words break and heart and heartbroken and you immediately decide that it’s inaccurate. You feel pain in the region of your heart and you think it’s your heart breaking but one’s heart doesn’t really break, something else does – faith. You stop believing.

No, not in the big things which are most of the time irrelevant. You still believe in God or Buddha or some Supreme Being, you still believe child prostitution is bad. You just stop believing in the small things that you do, the small things that give meaning to your daily life, and you begin to think everything is pointless: Why get up? Why dress up? Why breathe in and out? What for? What for?

<…> When someone breaks your heart, you turn into a small ball of self-pity. You lie in bed, in a ball. You hug your knees, keeping them close to your chest, like a fetus. Freud said it’s human instinct to go back to the womb where we can feel safe.

But that’s what happens when someone breaks your heart – they steal the very thing that makes you feel safe, whole, intact. (70-71)

On Starbucks from Drama Queen (2003) by Abi Aquino:

Twenty minutes later, we were sitting inside Starbucks and blowing at our cafe americanos. This is a strange and sad fact: No matter where you are, you are only 20 minutes away from a Starbucks. I keep telling myself that one of these days, I’m going to look for a map of the metropolitan area of Manila. My conspiracy theory is that if you draw a line connecting all the outlets, it would form the shape of a giant frapuccino. With whipped cream. (122-123)

Lead character Kach, struggling with dealing with bestfriend Jorge, who found a girlfriend just when Kach realized she had fallen in love with him. In Drama Queen (2003) by Abi Aquino:

Sometimes, Jorge would text to ask if I was busy or to invite me to dinner or coffee. It would take me several minutes to compose the appropriate reply:

cant. it hurts to c u i luv u paksyet (clear clear clear)

cant. hab rehersal pro i myt folow. unles kasama c angie (clear clear clear)

hi jorge! cant eh. hab rehersal. nxt tym! (send) (134-135)

Maya Calica’s The Break-up Diaries (2003) starts with:

February 1, (past midnight, my room)

Has anybody seen my self-esteem?

I think I may have tossed her out on her nice, decent, well-mannered ass in the trashcan, together with the empty bottle of Gato Negro Merlot I swallowed to the last drop last night. A girl can do that – lose things when she’s had a little too much to drink. And I don’t drink. Well, OK, but only when the occasion calls for it. <…> Or now that Itos, the guy I’ve been thinking about/breathing for every waking hour of this past year, has told me, “This isn’t working.” Like our relationship was the windup toy that came with his Happy Meal – the hopping hamburger he was so aliw with in the beginning. When it suddenly refused to walk/roll/jump, he didn’t want it anymore. (12)