Gendering the Literary Identity in Soledad Reyes’ ‘From Manila to New York’: The Motherland, The Fatherland, and the Offspring of Philippine Literature

The gendered binary in the postcolonial discourse is not a foreign concept to begin with: the association of the Woman as the colony, subjected to slavery under its colonial master, the Man. This has reshaped the identity of the effeminate colonized in the academic and research writing of the 20th century.

The Philippines, or the Colonized, was subjected to the experiments of the Colonizer, or the United States, as the former embodies the feminine colonial Other. This binary suggests a power imbalance between the two, as the latter exercises its control over the former in the mask of benevolence. As summarize below by Elleke Boehmer:

To rehearse some of the well-known binary tropes of postcolonial discourse, opposed to the colonizer (white man, West, center of intellection, of control), the Other is cast as corporeal, carnal, untamed, instinctual, raw, and therefore also open to mastery, available for use, for husbandry, for numbering, branding, cataloging, description or possession. Images of the body of the Other are conflated with those of the land, unexplored land too being seen as amorphous, wild, seductive, dark, open to possession. (269–270)

It is in this paper that I will discuss the maternal and paternal signifiers in the historical development of the Philippine literature in English and Tagalog, as well as the vernacular, based on the postcolonial analysis of texts, produced under American occupation, by Soledad Reyes, and how it defined the literary landscape we know today (and continues to do so). Gendering the literary development will help determine the binary that exists within it, how it reveals certain psychological and sexual projections in literary works that continue to be relevant in defining the colonial past.

One of the remarkable features of Soledad Reyes’ From Manila to New York is her usage of the English language as an entity created “in the father’s image” (174) woven into the context of Philippine literature. This subject appears to be notable in the conception of Filipino writers’ emigration in the 20th century, at the early years of American colonization, full of hope as they “became convinced that their life in America would improve” (Allen 196).

As English became an instrument of indoctrination of Philippine society that ties us to the colonial master that is the United States, one can impose the relationship of the United States and the Philippines not just by language and literature but also by sex. The postwar years of the Revolution against the Spaniards has pained the motherland enough to gain attention from its future American colonizers, right after the Spanish-American war has ended.

It is noted that in the writings of Reyes, Philippine literature since then has been moving westward, not inward (166). The birth of Philippine literature in English, along with its popularity among the middle class, has come far in reconstituting its principles in search for national identity. It was in a 1930s comment of a critic that Reyes pinpointed its questionable objective:

In hindsight, we see a great chasm between the English-speaking Filipinos and those who spoke and communicated in the various vernaculars who actually constituted the vast majority. The kind of literature that each group patronized attested to this great difference, the world constructed in each writing indicative of writers’ different concerns. (182)

The birth of Philippine literature in English is not the basis for the quest of national identity. It is only suggestive of its hegemonic forces that run in the middle and upper classes, the ilustrados and the intelligentsia, that had no problem grasping the alien language imposed upon the mother tongue.

The Fatherland

As remarked earlier, Reyes describing Philippine literature in English modeled after the “father’s image” has asserted only one thing: the facet of American colonialism shaped by the hands of the masculine entity that Others the Philippine nation, and alienates Philippine literature.

The imposition of the English language among schools and systems in the feminine Philippines was only the beginning of the domination of the masculine America. The vulnerability of the nation after the postwar Revolution stimulated sensuality from the American colonizer that heeds its obsession to possess, analyze, dominate.

This immutable access of the Filipino writer to English, given the fact that this writer had the means to speak, to write, and to think in English, had America within his arms’ reach. It is not to say that the Filipino writer had instant access to the Great American Dream, but it is to represent his relentless aspirations after learning a certain language serves as a “window to the world” furthering his realization that “if language is power,” as stated by Reyes, “English is the will to power” (179).

As the English blossomed to infancy, there emerged an awkward literary usage of the language by young Filipino writers — literary creatives familiarizing an uncharted territory, the English language, like toddlers who learn to walk with a pair of legs. This implementation of the English language is committed as an act of penetration of the masculine America, whose initial welcome was met with genuine friendship — a benevolent assimilation. Reyes writes:

The historic specificities that shaped the fateful encounter between the Philippines and the new colonizers were glossed over in the classroom as young Filipinos were taught to read, absorb, and write texts in English whose production and original consumption bore the mark of foreignness, the writers having emerged from within a set of sociopolitical contexts. (177)

The “foreignness” of the English language has caused Filipinos of alienated sensation, to which their mother tongue has been infiltrated and marks the beginning of an estranged relationship to the Fatherland.

Even with the intervention of the Thomasites (English teachers aboard the USS Thomas) and other American professors in the Philippine education system has deemed young Filipino writers — born from the mother tongue, the language of the effeminate Philippines — in need of rescue with grappling the alien tongue, the language of the manly America. The frequent themes of romance and sentimentalism disappeared when the literary movement went to what they call the Period of Emergence, shortly after this intervention.

The Fatherland is far, distant, aloof. It is often being dreamt of and desired. It’s also marketed as a place of purpose and importance. And most of all, it embodies the traditional Father of the nuclear family: the role to constantly provide comfort and promise success. The story of the Filipino writer whose goal was to be published in the United States is not uncommon — access to English had given him an idea.

English is the alien tongue that invites the natives of the Motherland to pursue a bigger dream in the Fatherland, even after the masculine America proves true to its occupation of the feminine Philippines at her most vulnerable. She was pursued unguarded, enforced upon her are concepts alien to her Oriental mind. But she also birthed young creatives whose aspirations belong in the Fatherland.

There is a gap between Filipino writers who write in America and those who write in the Philippines, as well as the vernacular texts that exist in the small corners of Filipino literature. Reyes have called off its treatment as separate discourses that deems patronizable to the American critics that cannot give praise to the literary excellence of Filipinos without resorting to Orientalization. Short story writers of the 1930s, such as Manuel Arguilla, Arturo B. Rotor, Delfin Fresnosa, and Estrella Alfon, had the opportunity to be published in anthologized stories in the States, only to be perceived as a relief for its American readers as they hover over their sense of self by discovering Asian stories that they deem striking.

These colonies from the Motherland have provided nurturing and tending to the people of the Fatherland, whose stories of pain, poverty, suffering, and grief in narrow cities, barrio lands, the “cavernous bellies of the carabaos (188)” have catered to the satisfaction of the phallogocentric literature. These critics believe that Filipino literature is “nothing like the ones we read in the more popular magazines, for they have no objective form, no sharpness, their contours are soft and shadowy (quoted in Hosillos 122).” The “soft and shadowy” allows Filipino literature to be defined as vulnerable by the inhabitants of the Fatherland — hence, for the female Orient, the Motherland’s “exoticness” is excavated for entertainment and pleasure. In relation to the exoticism of the colonial woman, Peter Mason writes:

The link with the Orient was a tenuous one, for the stimulation of the senses which led to the feeling of exoticism was above all prompted by the discovery of the New World in the Western hemisphere; while the Orient stimulated the taste of the collector, it was America which stimulated the thirst for adventure. (167; emphasis added)

This ‘stimulant’ that provides the colonial woman the ‘ethereal experience’ of the New Age is somewhat similar to the culture imported by the American colonizers that had swept the nation off of its feet. Themes of “untrammeled individualism, lack of reverence for tradition, the new openness to sexual adventurism,” rose to prominence, that had conflicts impervious to serious consequences because of “the ‘lived life’ the texts conveyed” (Reyes 171). Even during the primary years when the colonial language was first introduced the Filipino writers had produced a number of Victorian and Romantic stories that were either “tales of the past with legendary figures or imitations of adventures, plots, themes, and sophisticated dialogues of American and foreign short stories” (Reyes 177). The extravagance of the Fatherland’s cultural exhibits employed voyeurism, exploits, larger-than-life experiences that makes fleeting dreams look seemingly easy to achieve; and permits the phallogocentric nature of the Philippine literary landscape to form as so.

It also attains the precociousness of the Filipino writer to indulge in the idea in what Reyes described as the “modern man”, or the “hollow man” (193) influenced by several authors of the modernist 20th century Westerner: T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, Franz Kafka, J.D. Salinger, Albert Camus, among a few others. This signifies the phallogocentrism now discernible in Philippine literature: the alienated psyche of a Filipino male protagonist is often devoid of (or possessed by his) consciousness and has laid down his chains to dwell in the nothingness by detaching himself from the world. N.V.M. Gonzalez writes:

With ampler education, a larger sophistication, and exposure to ideologies, a fourth theme has emerged — the theme of substance and form, of illusion and reality, of intention and outcome… The writer has found this sophistication amenable to his gifts and a comfortable area to move in, certainly one less constricting to the imagination. As his personal experience increases in scope so does the theme yield in amplitude… The premium is on his ability to recognize and discover significance in any given situation. (542–543)

It is important to note that the English language has become the phallus of the Fatherland, acquiring its power by penetrating the literary landscape as well as the cultural system that existed in the Motherland. Gonzalez’s “the premium is on his ability to recognize and discover significance” is the justification defining the phallic symbol that maintains its ability to yield and seize power.

The Motherland

The Motherland is the fertile ground of the vernacular literature, including Tagalog literature, that exists within its cultural zone, almost Oedipal in a sense. The mother-son dynamic that relishes on the nourishment and protection of its erogenous zone, and at the same time stimulated with alienated desire deposited to her by the father. As opposed to the barren land of the Father, the Motherland had shaped literature as it was nourished in the womb, familiarizing itself with the past:

In one specific sense, Tagalog literature was the site through which the writers sought to contain the erosion of traditional values related to the preservation of the family, the concept of love and fidelity, the importance of discipline and filial piety, the respect for the past — a totalizing worldview that ran counter to the vision being propagated by the colonizers. (Reyes 171)

The significance of the Motherland’s role in preserving the family and finding importance in filial piety is distinguished here. The anticolonial discourse is the result of the literature’s development within the Motherland, with vernacular texts proliferating in the early years after being ‘suckled by Mother Spain’ (McWilliams). The act of resistance was a grand gesture that averted the advances of the Fatherland, to which the Tagalog writer flourished in literary excellence through mastery of the mother tongue.

We have seen in Reyes’ article that the novel is a fully-fleshed literary form that characterizes complete narratives with flawed, imprecise protagonists. The moral weight of the character’s decisions matter the least, whose settings and background carry the gravity of the social and political factors that contextualize it. Here, Reyes recounts the well-loved serialized Tagalog novels that continued to persist in Luzon during the first two decades of American colonization as to how it allows the locals to “locate themselves within a distinct community that shared fundamental values, but one constantly threatened by the colonizer’s power and influence” (172). It is with the Tagalog novel that the Filipino reader identifies with the Motherland; streamed into his consciousness.

The Tagalog novel extends as the bridge between the Motherland and its Tagalog writer, with a devotion and loyalty of the latter to the former, building a relationship to instill and embed anticolonial narratives that are determined to resist against the Fatherland’s ambition to invade the proliferating Tagalog and vernacular literature. The colonial status of the Motherland pushes Tagalog writers to produce novels consistent with its principles, with works such as Sampagitang Walang Bango and Katalik-Laan to prove.

Themes that grappled with these principles usually depicted the protagonist with the barrio life, tackling issues like the widening gap of the rich and poor, the colonial settlements that affected both feudal and social relations in the country, and the exhausting attempt to rise again in the aftermath of the Spanish occupation that lasted for over 300 years. These themes struck familiarity and called home. They are indignant of the Motherland’s struggles and sentimental to the peaceful rural life, distant to the cacophonous wars instigated by the imperialists. They represent suppressed desires prolonged under the domination of the United States.

That is also why they are subject to scrutiny — embodying its passivity as the colonial Other, the Woman. Carrying her role as the Womb, this attested to the birth of the Tagalog and vernacular literature that arguably shaped the national literary identity, and has also manifested in the English texts published in and out of America.

Reyes had stated that invisibility of Filipinos living in the United States is a “consequence of colonialism, which was the necessary effect of a systematic attempt to contain what was perceived to be destructive tendencies” (217). These ”destructive tendencies” signifies the Motherland’s both English and vernacular texts not only implied as militant and insurgent, but dwelling in hysteria and delusion. Often, dictations of the hysteric woman only have intents to subdue her in silence.

According to Reyes, Philippine literature in English has not often taken the spotlight, forgotten in shaping American literature in the early 20th century, discredited even in the enterprise called Asian-American literature (217). Quoting Oscar Campomanes, Filipino writing is viewed as “literature of exile and emergence” as opposed to its Asian contemporaries exuding “literature of immigration and settlement” (217). This treatment of Philippine literature in English is what we will examine later on.

The Motherland’s fertility had continued to be fruitful, resulting with smaller sprouts of vernacular literature here and there. As stated earlier, it was the female Other that embodied the unexplored land. Therefore, there was little to be harvested, as the development of Tagalog literature fell behind when the gallantry of the American Father led his fate to come to our “rescue”.

The Phallogocentrism and the Nostalgic Mode

Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart has deplored power imbalance and racial struggles in the novel, to which Carey McWilliams wrote for its 1973 introduction: “Culturally, the petty-bourgeoisie villagers of the Philippines had been… ‘unfortunately castrated by the United States’” (quoting San Juan Jr. 121). There is obvious significance for phallic activity with said ‘castration’, with McWilliams attempting to distinguish the wide gap of the middle and lower class as an active site for the battle of which language is more used in popular texts, in hopes to re-arouse the anticolonial discourse that had been impossible to maintain during the post-Revolution era:

…For by publishing the works of various writers in English, the texts became disseminated among the well-educated middle class, gained more influence, and thus strengthened the position of English as truly a “literary” language. (Reyes 178)

Luis V. Teodoro Jr. and Epifanio San Juan Jr. speaks of the language’s role in mitigating proletarian literature, and the vernacular literature that exists within it, that had driven the middle-class readers enthralled into the promised land of the Father:

There is little doubt that many of the younger writers writing in English today will eventually abandon that language as events develop, and express themselves instead in the “native” languages. The writer in the languages is not subject to the same pressures as the writer in English, whose Western “traditions” demand that he maintain his middle-class existence. And because he addresses himself to a far larger audience in the languages that, unlike English, will remain viable in the Philippines, he will eventually write the literature that will make so much difference. (4)

This postcolonial anxiety manifested itself into a castrational one — from combating colonial trauma to serving bourgeois interests — and has proved to be critical of what constitutes the Motherland. It resulted in a variety of outcomes: such as the middle class becoming indifferent to the vernacular literature produced within the country, in response to the fear of being unable to grasp the exclusionary power the English language has granted them.

One of the most interesting outcomes of this phobia is the fate Philippine novel protagonists (of the early literary years) find themselves — lives lead to either death or exile. As remarked earlier, Philippine literature in America has been described as “literature of exile and emergence”, signifying an outcome of the castration anxiety projected by the Filipino writer from its fear of the Father untangling him from his Mother. Exile and death marks the alienation of the Filipino protagonist in its Americanized setting — colonial or migrational. With the latter, the situation of the promised Fatherland unfolds into a tragic regret, he becomes “a pathetic victim of abject degradation, humiliation, and untrammeled violence, deprived of his rights” (Reyes 214), and ends up desiring to return to the Motherland whose thoughts of exasperation in poverty and stuck tending to farm plots under the hot sun had considered this option impractical. He was lulled by his Mother and, under a false impression, acquired the pleasures his Father had offered only to be left undesired and isolated.

Often, this desire to return home has manifested in ways of writing that managed to untie the deep longings of the Filipino writer, and as an Oedipal effect, emerged as a mode: nostalgic mode. Criticizing Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, the nostalgic mode incorporated in the novel has not helped to reduce the “exoticization” of the Filipino identity, whose focus centered in the lives of characters from the middle-class has exuded nothing but sensationalized past. The nostalgic mode is illusory, and seen to be counter-productive in achieving national consciousness and in forming the Filipino literary identity. It does not tend to represent the historical past, as Caroline Hau describes, but can only represent the “stereotypes about that past” (119).

Even in the nostalgic mode, with an attempt to find an avenue between memory and history, has misrepresented the sufferings of the Motherland. She continues to be exoticized, sensationalized, photographed in cuts that are not able to determine the whole picture, and — we go back full circle — longed for. The nostalgic mode aims to resurrect an image of the past, an image of the Motherland — that the Filipino writer residing in the United States is doomed to forget.

But it is also in nostalgic mode that we find the Philippine novel in a state of dual consciousness: a novel like Dogeaters employs values that reflect that of the Fatherland, yet carries sentiments that reflect that of the Motherland, persisting through the nostalgic mode.

Conclusion

It is in this conclusion that we characterize literary development in its ambiguity, manifested into a dichotomy that overlaps the other. Both the Motherland and the Fatherland represent unconscious desires that prove to be ‘unachievable’ no matter how relentless and determined due to the turbulent colonial history that constitutes it. The same way deep psychological desires are formed under social relations of both the sexes, the Man and the Woman, in which the latter is impossible to describe without relating it to the former.

We can also emphasize the English language becoming the vessel of colonization penetrating within the literary identity. The symbol of the English language as a phallus acts as an agent of desire that stimulates the Filipino writer of its distant dream. This is also why the middle-class is likely to attain and indulge himself in the American culture, whose goals and deep desires will never reach far, for the Father does not embody the promise he has given to him. The anxiety that projects upon him is a result of castrating the phallus English that determines the transfer of power that is abruptly given to (and can be immediately taken away from) him.

The offspring produced in this aggrieved relationship is the Filipino writer and his works, techniques, styles, modes, and themes, that completes the transformation of the literary identity. This is the area in which the maternal and paternal manifestations extend over the other, but specifically, how the paternal half projects its power and seizure of the English phallus over the subjugated maternal other.

The literary identity is ultimately ambiguous: the Fatherland being the masculine half, the Motherland being the feminine other. This duality manifested in ways: the colonized Filipino writer, equipped with English, is determined to find his identity in the past in order to commit to the present. To write in English or Tagalog? That is his life’s dilemma.

WORKS CITED

Allen, James P. “Recent immigration from the Philippines and Filipino communities in the United States”. Geographical review (1977): 195–208.

Boehmer, Elleke. “Transfiguring: Colonial body into postcolonial narrative”. Novel: A Forum on Fiction. Vol. 26. №3. Duke University Press, 1993.

Bulosan, Carlos. America is In the Heart: A Personal History. United States, University of Washington Press, 1973.

Caroline Hau, “Dogeaters, Postmodernism and ‘Wordling’ of the Philippines,” in Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo and Priscelina P. Legasto (eds.), Philippine Postcolonial Studies: Essays on Language and Literature (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2004).

Gonzalez, N.V.M. “The Difficulties with Filipiniana”. In Brown Heritage: Essays on Philippine Culture, Tradition and Literature. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1967.

Hosillos, Lucila V. Philippine-American literary relations, 1898–1941. Indiana University, 1964.

Mason, Peter. “Exoticism in the Enlightenment.” Anthropos H. 1./3 (1991): 167–174.

Reyes, Soledad S. “From Manila to New York: Colonialism and Literature”. From Darna to Zsazsa Zaturnnah: Desire and fantasy: Essays on literature and popular culture. Published and exclusively distributed by Anvil Publishing, 2009.

Teodoro Jr, Luis V., and Epifanio San Juan Jr. “Two perspectives on Philippine literature and society.” (1981).