Myra Mendible, Florida Gulf Coast University
"Both the social function and the symbolic meaning of the festival are closely related to a series of overt values that the community recognizes as essential to its ideology and worldview, to its social identity, its historical continuity, and to its physical survival, which is ultimately what festival celebrates."
-Alessandro Falassi [1]
Festivals serve to regenerate and unify a community; they recount a never-ending story that, like all narrative, is both the product and producer of culture. But the festival tells a potentially subversive tale that fosters communal solidarity and purpose, rekindling vital energies that can form the basis of collective resistance. Throughout the more than seven thousand one hundred islands comprising the Philippine archipelago, hundreds of festivals are celebrated annually. They dramatize the conflicting histories, influences, and myths that have shaped Filipino identity: Spanish Catholicism and indigenous religions claim their authority through rituals and ceremonies; the rhythms of tribal drums and American pop music assert precolonial and neocolonial influences; and street spectacles showcase cultural icons and symbols. Engaging nearly all aspects of Filipino cultural identity from religion to language, folklore to politics, these festivals constitute, symbolically, a way of recalling the mythical and historical origins of the community. They offer a respite from oppressive structures, an exuberant affirmation of collective freedom.
In this essay, I will examine the festival as a literary strategy of resistance in Ninotchka Rosca's State of War. [2] Praised as one of the finest novels of 1988, [3] Rosca's debut novel is set in the Philippines during a festival similar to the annual Mardi Gras celebration on Panay Island. The narrative traces the rise and fall of a contemporary dictatorship (modeled after that of Ferdinand Marcos but never naming him directly). Through her protagonists' personal memories, Rosca recalls the events leading to the current predicament: an ongoing "state of war" that never actually erupts into outright revolution. The festival, which sets the stage for an antigovernment display of force, establishes a context, frames the action, and informs the novel's revolutionary theme.
Rosca's festival serves as a symbolic and literal site of transgression. Variously referred to as a "festival of memories," and "a singular evocation of victory in a country of too many defeats," the festival establishes the novel's connection to Filipino tradition and identity. Like her text, Rosca's festival is a celebration born of rebellion and bequeathed through language and memory. It is the locus where anything is possible-where peasant farmers transform into ancient warriors in tribal costumes, guerilla fighters feast and dance with enemy soldiers while transvestites parade through the streets with sawed-off shotguns under their skirts. At this site of radical possibilities, the symbolic dissolution of boundaries hints at the prospect of revolution. Linked to a cultural ethos of self-determination (Mikhail Bakhtin's "feast of becoming"), the novel represents, in Robert Stam's suggestive description of carnival, "the oppositional culture of the oppressed, a countermodel of cultural production and desire." [4]
Exiled during the Marcos years because of her controversial writing, Rosca maintains that "the written word has an authority so vast that a dangerous status has often been conferred upon writers." [5] This "heightened sense of the value of the word" defines Filipino subjectivity. In Rosca's view, the commingling of precolonial and modern history, as well as the tension between colonial and neocolonial languages, shapes a personal identity that "shares in all of the contradictoriness of the national self" ("Myth" 242). It also informs a tradition of adversarial writing: Filipino literature reflects "the pride, the commitment to independence, that saw Lapu-Lapu skewering Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 for his crime of intervention in domestic affairs." Efforts to continue this tradition, Rosca concludes, guarantee that "the Filipino writer still stands on the shores of Mactan, confronting Magellan" ("Myth" 241-43).
Rosca's festival-text embodies a spirit of rebellion that defies anyone who believes they can "rule, regulate, manage, and control seven thousand one hundred shrapnels of a boisterous celebration" (339). Part myth, part legend and imagined history, the text resists any singular interpreter, authority, or ideological framework. Its very structure expresses an anarchic vitality that intentionally complicates the act of reading. From the outset, the reader is disoriented by sudden shifts in time, discontinuous narratives, confused causality, fantastic and ordinary characters. These fragments and dislocations reflect the ruptures imposed by a history of changing colonial identities, languages, and value systems. As readers of her text, we attend "a festival confused by time and history" (156). But we are not admitted as passive spectators-the text compels us to participate, to seek and create meaning out of "seven thousand one hundred islands of a fractured history" (337).
The festival's unpredictable, multifarious topography reflects the problematical nature of identity in the Philippines, where "there is always a conflict between the social orientation of the bedrock culture and the fragmenting effect of colonialism" ("Myth" 240). Rosca's festival-text reenacts the "confusion over language and memory" that began with the first colonial encounter (337). In melodic, figurative prose, Rosca encapsulates a history of struggle and continuity-from the first Malay exiles, to the Spanish conquest, to the norte americanos, "The new invaders, [who] could not quite understand why anyone would object to being benevolently assimilated by the great North American nation" (77). Even the name "Filipino," we learn, represents "the ridiculous mix of history that they were-Malay, Chinese, Arab, Hindu, Spanish, British," and originally refers to "pure-blooded Spaniards born in the islands" (160). Rosca registers an illusory Philippine history so confused "that in this Festival of commemoration there remained no more than this mangled song" (337).
The segments of the novel set in the present focus on Eliza Hansen and Anna Villaverde, the "laughing princess and the princess who could not laugh" (13), and on Adrian Banyaga, the son of a wealthy landowner who is their friend and lover. By chronicling the imaginary but emblematic histories of her protagonists, Rosca envisions a matrix of communal identity founded on (but not limited to) shared experience. Familial and colonial relations, the reader discovers, link Eliza, Anna, and Adrian's histories. The emphasis here is on continuity and reconciliation, as the novel self-consciously contributes to an ongoing dialogue among voices and influences past and present, precolonial and postcolonial. [6] The text suggests that enemies and friends in the present are distant cousins or half-brothers and -sisters. Even those designated the "invaders"-the "visitors who owed no allegiance to any tribe … the Japanese, the Chinese, the Caucasian, the urbanite" (15), can be "subdued and merged" into the rhythm and history of the event. The reader, like the tourist who visits the festivity, therefore participates in "no one's and yet everyone's personal history" (13).
In the psychosocial arena of festival, conflicting forces converge and interact. These forces, registered in part by the presence of Anna, Eliza, and Adrian at the festival, are ineluctably bound to a network of power that delimits the course of events. The festival "exposes the complexities inherent in community tensions and reveals the seeds of transformation located in the voices of the oppressed." But it can also express "moments in which the oppressed fail to complete the emancipatory impulses." [7] This tension operates primarily through Colonel Amor, the head of the secret police and localized embodiment of a repressive state operative. His name is an ironic inversion of his identity and attests to the duplicity of language. The Loved One is a man who takes pleasure in watching through a two-way mirror as detainees are tortured in "the romance room" (55-56). He admits that extracting information from his prisoners "was exquisite rape" and that "unlike his men, he preferred to fuck the soul" (67). Amor's love affair, the text demonstrates, is with power; his arsenal is information-knowledge which makes him "a true scholar of the human psyche" (355).
As the site where opposing forces conjoin, Rosca's festival links its participants (and readers) in time-through blood ties, interlocking histories, ideological bonds. As reader-participants, we are immersed in what Bakhtin described as a "feast of time, change and renewal" [8] that ritualizes a Filipino history of resistance. In the words of Guevarra, Rosca's guerrilla leader in the novel, "The rites of this land seize us by the hair and force us into a design begun a long, long time ago" (381). Guevarra believes he is destined to meet everyone again through time, that "before the war made us strangers … we were all kin" (360). Even Colonel Amor remarks, "We're fated to keep on meeting each other through time" (356).
The past commemorated through the festival represents Rosca's rebuttal against "official" history. [9] Anna's ancestor, Maya, is granted a voice in the text, as the festival commemorates origins and reenacts an ongoing struggle for control of the word. [10] This struggle, which begins with the Spanish conquest, is ironically voiced in children's rhymes and songs scattered throughout time in the narrative and in the local patois that hybridizes colonial languages. While Maya struggles to learn Spanish, she realizes that "the children's voices in the street were already concocting a new, hybrid language of their own" (165). The children take possession of the colonists' languages and revise their official stories. In one song that is repeated throughout the text, a grand colonizing adventure is summarily deflated in the form of a pun: "Ferdinand Magellan, the crazy old coot; took five ships and circumcised the globe" (180). The pun, as a kind of Bakhtinian grammatica jocosa whereby the official language is carnivalized, transgresses grammatical authority "to reveal erotic and obscene or merely materially satisfying counter-meaning." [11] Through this pun on the word "circumnavigated," Magellan's historical mission translates into a phallocentric ritual of initiation and marks the onset of a patriarchal cycle of "discovery" and domination.
The narrative resists the chronological ordering of events associated with Western models of historical narration. Instead, it uses repetition and contiguity to establish links between past and present, self and other, contemporary state violence and colonial violation. The Spanish monk who rapes the young Maya (whose Hindu name means "origin") leaves his imprint on Philippine history by fathering a succession of mestizo children. The monk's insidious sermons "condemned his own brood by repeating over and over again that the sins of the fathers were visited upon their descendants" (191). As Anna Villaverde's ancestor, he represents a violation that is reenacted in the present by the ruling regime (in Anna's case, "the sins of the fathers" descend in the form of a military dictatorship that uses rape as a means to subjugate and control women).
The American occupation, described through fragmented accounts, hearsay, and legends, bestows a new language on a nation with hundreds of indigenous languages and a prior colonial one already in place. Since the novel is written in English, the colonizer's voice still authorizes Philippine stories. But as festival, the text undermines the status of colonial history makers, playfully challenging the "truth" of history and inverting the hierarchy of Western supremacy. While we learn that Filipino indios were mockingly referred to by the colonizers as "monkeys without tails" (77), we also read humorous local legends and anecdotes that situate the colonizer in the "exotic other" position. We are told the tale of americanos "who were rumored to have penises as huge as their noses" (77). General Douglas MacArthur is remembered as the "son-of-a-goat" who would "strut through the flattened city of Manila and lisp, 'told you I'd be back,' gaddamit" (125). Rosca's "festival of memories" in this way refuses to forget, and thus capitulate, Philippine history. [12]
This struggle over control of the word is implicit in the rumor that gives birth to Guevarra's legendary status. What begins as a "life-and-death struggle over [Guevarra's] name" (Amor had tortured Guevarra, convinced that the young man was refusing to reveal his "real" identity), comes to signify the mythmaking power of language. Following Guevarra's capture, rumors circulate about a brave prisoner who defied Amor by refusing to disclose even his name. These rumors spread the news of Amor's failure-and fuel collective resistance. At the conclusion of the novel, Rosca unmasks her revolutionary hero, revealing that his name really was Guevarra-Ismael Guevarra. Ironically, Amor has propagated a myth by attaching legendary significance to the name. In the spirit of carnival, an inverted hierarchy here undermines Amor's power; his effort to control Guevarra by extracting "truth" from him achieves the opposite effect. Mystifying Guevarra's name, Amor creates his own enemy: a symbol of hope against oppression.
Rosca's festival-text parodies the dissembling power of "rational" discourse, most overtly in the scene where a pedantic lecturer utters indecipherable English phrases that an interpreter then translates into English. As part of an "educational program" sponsored by the Commander's wife, this segment during the festival is meant as a display of high culture amidst the festivities. In that instance, the reader attends a ludicrous festival within a festival-official discourse, unintelligible and ineffectual, is satirized and demystified. The hierarchy of high and low is inverted, so that the presumably superior speaker (who has "seven Ph.D.'s" [139]) is exposed as ridiculous. The incoherent "solutions" he offers ("options which may respond to the citizenry's spectrum of desires while coincidentally providing resolutions to this quagmiric quandary" [142]) mock official discourses presumably grounded in "reason." As Old Andy humorously tells Adrian, "[Manila] came out of chaos, lived with chaos, and would survive any chaos. The question was … whether it could survive order and reason" (28).
Rosca suggests that the boundaries separating the idealist from the tyrant, the "civilized" from the "savage," are often relative and obscure. Anna's husband Manolo, a physics professor, founded a committee "hailed as the new center of the intelligentsia, leaders of a coming rational and scientific age" (63). But what begins as "a current fancy for politics" (62) eventually leads to his arrest and presumed death. In a surprising revelation at the end of the festival, Manolo resurfaces wearing a jackal costume. [13] Interestingly, masks do not just conceal identity during festivals; they also manifest artifice itself, signaling that "a symbolic message is being conveyed." [14] The festival thus exposes the mutability of its participants: Manolo, the "young rabble-rouser, all good intentions and wisdom" (371), turns out to be an informant (the professor who taught Amor the methods for "getting at the truth," 374), and Anna becomes her own husband's assassin (375).
In the tradition of oral cultures, Rosca also evokes possibilities beyond language. She implies that human understanding is not achieved through ossifying systems, but through a collective wisdom that transcends the logic of binary representation. To the "civilized" mind, this faith in a knowledge that supersedes the word's authority reeks of superstition and issues as proof of the native's primitive and unrealistic view of the world. As one American commander, Mad Uncle Ed, remarks: "We've never changed you, you people. You still believe there's something stronger than money and bullets. Obligations and spirits, honor and monsters!" (315). Ironically, Mad Uncle Ed, a caricature of U.S. military attitudes in the Philippines, embodies this disdain. He is the "civilized" white man whose "passage was a swath of terror and destruction" (315); who "laughed with approval" the deaths of thousands of "insurgent" Filipino peasants; and who sponsored the "festival of death" (318) that would change the course of Philippine history.
While Rosca tries to "make sense" of the past that has shaped the present course and identity of the Philippine people, Rosca rejects the authority vested in conventional historical "realism." Instead, the narrative is interspersed with fanciful imagery that revels in creative freedom and stretches temporal-spatial boundaries. Incorporating a style of magical realism, Rosca's text eludes the self-assured, mastering script of colonial history. [15] As Stephen Slemon points out, magical realism foregrounds the "gaps, absences, and silences produced by the colonial encounter and reflected in the text's disjunctive language of narration." [16] Rosca's fantastic events and characters also reflect another reality: the "civilized" world created in the name of progress and reason is a sham. In this "new world" Philippine context, there is always an "elusive, almost illusory war that was everywhere and yet was nowhere" (20). Modernity seems to have inaugurated a disharmonious and grotesque reality-an "era when dead cats would masquerade as babies" in women's arms (32).
Rosca's text privileges the "truth" of storytelling, a form of folk communication that keeps resistance vital and vigilant. Guevarra's desire to hear Anna's tale in exchange for his own confirms the revolutionizing prospects of storytelling. Anna commits details of her life to Rafael's "eidetic memory," which are later repeated to Guevarra. Guevarra promises to tell Anna "the most fascinating story she would ever hear" (72). As collective memories, stories emerge in Rosca's text as redemptive and subversive; they offer the means to discredit official history or refute its authority to classify experience. Pointing to the profound relationship between memory, writing, and insurrection in Philippine history, Rosca has remarked that memory "anchors us, for, though it is fragile, it is also the longest umbilical cord" ("Myth" 242).
Of course, the task of remembering and recording a past relies on what Rosca recognizes as perishable materials, "language and memory-uncertain, imperfect" ("Myth" 242). These are vulnerable, easily tampered with, subjected to alterations and interpretations. While language shapes communal identity, it also distorts and delimits it. Anna's foreboding that "even [the festival] will be forgotten" highlights the festival's cognate relation to a fading cultural memory (149). The festival's participants dance about the plaza in a "parody of celebration" (339), suggesting that the festival is a degraded version of the first celebration, a vestigial cultural expression. But as a composite of history, legend, and storytelling, Rosca's festival-text preserves a tradition begun "in memory and in defiance" (61). It offers a buttress between cultural amnesia and cultural renewal.
While Anna stresses the importance of language as intermediary between past and present, Colonel Amor locates its function in the dynamics of power. He understands that disunity and silence are the allies of power-and that language is a mercenary at the disposal of any authority. Colonel Amor's counter-revolutionary strategies therefore include severing the people's cognitive link to their past: "Language had to be changed; names had to be changed … all moral and ethical signposts eradicated" (349). In possession of the word, Amor imagines, he becomes "the truth, the way, the life"-the keeper of history. The ancestral matriarch, Maya, had recognized and resisted this colonizing strategy, noting that "if we forget, how are we to proceed?" (186). Centuries later, Maya's words would be echoed by her great-granddaughter, Anna. Rosca's reluctant heroine is a history teacher who does not "like it when people monkey around with language" (143). Anna responds to the parodic "educational program" with disdain: "Mess up language, mess up memory. People forget. Even what they are" (143).
As a postmodern event, Rosca's festival is also a commercial venture-a locally produced spectacle to be commodified and appropriated. During the governor's dinner party, the main topic of conversation is the prospect of establishing a year-round festival "instead of this annual bash which drove people crazy" (37). This attempt to domesticate the festivities is capital's attempt to regulate the event, thus securing its own interests and participation. By acquiring a vast section of waterfront property and building tourist resorts, the governing elite hopes to reap the "benefits" of a tourism-sponsored "endless fiesta": "Modernization. Progress. Contact with the world. Employment" (38). In their view, half the town would "go on with the Festival for the tourists" while the other half could be trained "to work in the hotels" (38). In this way, a joyfully transgressive event is transformed into an exclusive domain of power-where folk "participation" means catering to the needs of an elite coterie.
This scenario dramatizes the tensions underscoring the event. On the one hand, the festival holds the potential for revolution; this is, after all, the site Guevarra has chosen for a daring display of force-an explosion that will kill or maim several government officials. The exuberant mood of the people, their licentious behavior, and the spirited defiance that energizes the event seem bound to erupt in violent rebellion. On the other hand, though festivals create a public domain where solidarity may be formed, they also reenact "moments in which the oppressed fail to complete the emancipatory impulses." [17] Once the explosion occurs, the crowd erupts into a Dionysian frenzy that momentarily dissolves individual identities. They become "things on the sidewalk, things trying to climb trees and walls, things dangling from windows" (367). In the midst of this uproar, Eliza is taken by soldiers-"a butchered pig, ready for flaying" (368). She becomes the festival's tribute, the sacrifice that will temporarily restore a semblance of order. Thus the cycle of oppression continues: extended periods of repression, then periodic outbursts of insurrection followed by a return to the law and its authority.
The commercialization of the festival dramatizes its paradoxical status as cultural model or epistemology. While the festival situates popular rebellion and expresses the complexities and tensions inherent within a community, it also depends for survival on economic support and the wink of an authorial eye. Rosca further hints at this relationship through the "unauthorized" festival occurring during the official event. The Procession, or "poor folks' festival" as it is called, takes place in the margins of the central event-and is attended by the islands' peasants (117). This event, ignored by most festival participants, is a somber and less vocal form of communication. It involves a modest candlelight display that pays homage to the spirits of Philippine ancestors. Falassi notes that in such perambulatory events, ruling groups display themselves as the keepers and guardians of the community's icons, and as depositories of religious or secular power (4). But in Rosca's text, the "depositories" and "keepers" of Philippine culture are not the community's rulers or its authorized representatives. Engaged in an ongoing dialogue with the past that is both celebratory and solemn, the peasants' festival remains unofficial, independent of the main event. It occurs on the sidelines, uncompromised by the dictates of authority.
There is, of course, a counter-resistance operating during the main event: the Commander and his wife (undoubtedly modeled on the Marcoses) also attend the festival. Authority's presence is part of a broader spectacle, the spectacle of power masquerading among the "folk." Appearing as participants, official power infiltrates and regulates the festivities. Soldiers with M-16's slung over their shoulders seem to merge with an unruly crowd, but they are a constant reminder of the law's presence. They ensure that the people's "symbolic transgression" remains symbolic.
Though Rosca's festival-text expresses the possibility of cultural transformation, she admits that no book, no work of art, "has produced profound social change; it takes collective action to do that." But Rosca adds, "there has been no profound social disturbance that has not been preceded by, accompanied by, and followed by disturbances in the realm of art and literature" ("Myth" 237). As festival, the text participates in a symbolic protest that refuses to capitulate the site of struggle-the word itself. To participate in Rosca's festival is to celebrate its decolonizing spirit and passionately hopeful vision. In the novel's final moments, Anna's pregnancy suggests the prospects of cultural renewal: Anna's child, "nurtured by the archipelago's legends," will become "a great storyteller" (382). The text's last words, "Time passes," carry the promise of another day, another story. They hold the assurance that long after this festival, others will reenact "stories of love, of abuse, of kindness, of betrayal. But of kindness above all, which enabled them to survive, which in turn allowed the archipelago to keep on dreaming its history" (381).
Notes
[1] Alessandro Falassi, Time Out of Time: Essays on the Festival (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987) 2.
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[2] Ninotchka Rosca, State of War (New York: Norton, 1988). Subsequent references are to this edition and are cited in the text in parentheses.
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[3] Edith Milton, "The Year in Review: 1988," Massachusetts Review 30 (1989): 116.
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[4] Robert Stam, Subversive Pleasures: Bakhtin, Cultural Criticism and Film (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989) 95.
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[5] Ninotchka Rosca, "Myth, Identity and the Colonial Experience," World Englishes 9.2 (1990): 242. Hereafter cited as "Myth.
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[6] For an analysis of the affiliative nature of carnival structure, see Julia Kristeva, "The Carnival: A Homology Between the Body, Dream, Linguistic Structure and Structures of Desire," The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 48-49.
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[7] Richard A. Quantz and Terence O'Connor, "Writing Critical Ethnography: Dialogue, Multivoicedness, and Carnival in Cultural Texts," Educational Theory 38.1 (1988): 104.
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[8] Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 109.
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[9] For a discussion of this impulse in postcolonial cultures, see Helen Tiffin, "Post-Colonialism, Post-Modernism and the Rehabilitation of Post-Colonial History," The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 23.1 (1988): 169-81.
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[10] Cf. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourses in the Novel," The Dialogic Imagination, ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson and M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981) 259-422.
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[11] Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986) 10.
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[12] Significant correspondence and official documents exist recounting the Philippine-American War from a U.S. perspective. They provide depictions of Filipinos (often referred to as "gugus" or "niggers") that rival Rosca's fantastic creatures and mythic aliens. See H. W. Brands, Bound to Empire: The United States and the Philippines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) 30-32.
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[13] For a documented report on American atrocities during the Philippine insurgency, see Brian McAllister Linn, The United States Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippines 1899-1902 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989) esp. 145-46.
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[14] Falassi 211.
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[15] Cf. Homi Bhabha, "Representation and the Colonial Text: A Critical Exploration of Some Forms of Mimeticism," The Theory of Reading, ed. Frank Gloversmith (New York: Barnes, 1984); and Gerald Martin, "On 'Magical' and Social Realism in Garcia Marquez," Gabriel Garcia Marquez: New Readings, eds. Bernard McGuirk and Richard Cardwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
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[16] Steven Slemon, "Magic Realism as Postcolonial Discourse," Canadian Literature 116 (1988): 13-18. In Egyptian mythology, Anubis, the god of the underworld, is sometimes represented as a black jackal, other times as a man with a jackal's head.
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[17] Quantz and O'Connor 104.
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