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Literature as activism: Ninotchka Rosca's political aesthetic

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Literature as activism: Ninotchka

Rosca's political aesthetic
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Myra Mendible
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Florida Gulf Coast University, USA.
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To cite this article: Myra Mendible (2014) Literature as activism: Ninotchka Rosca's political
aesthetic, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 50:3, 354-367, DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2012.717513

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 Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2014
Vol. 50, No. 3, 354–367, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2012.717513

Literature as activism: Ninotchka Rosca’s political aesthetic

Myra Mendible*

Florida Gulf Coast University, USA

This article provides a brief overview of Philippine writer Ninotchka Rosca’s literary
career, tracing her commitment to political advocacy and suggesting the ways that this
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commitment shapes her creative choices. It focuses special attention on State of War,
Rosca’s debut novel, as it best dramatizes a productive interplay between literary and
political devices.
Keywords: political fiction; Philippine writers; ethnic studies; Filipino history;
Ninotchka Rosca; women’s studies

“Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud
and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention” (Stendhal,
qtd. in Howe 15).

The politics of Filipino writing

Literature and politics have had an uneasy and often controversial relationship in the US,
and the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s only reinforced this divide. Advocates of
the traditional canon assert its ahistorical and universal quality and blame the “politiciz-
ing” of literature on the bogeyman represented as “multiculturalism”. These debates often
rely on strict dichotomies between the aesthetic and functional that claim a literary terrain
beyond the storm and strife of embodied political struggles. But as Kenneth Burke
reminds us: “whenever you find a doctrine of ‘nonpolitical’ esthetics affirmed with fervor,
look for its politics” (Burke 28). Recent moves to eliminate ethnic studies programs,
which Arizona’s HB 2281 bill in particular associates with classes that “promote the
overthrow of the United States government”, suggest that much is at stake in the battle to
define literature and politics in oppositional terms.1 This divide is especially ludicrous in
societies where creative writers’ prominent political roles make them subject to violence,
exile and persecution. In the Philippines, writers have historically challenged a history of
foreign occupations, colonialism and dictatorships with the power of their pens. In this
context, creative and political aims reinforce each other, forging a literary tradition that
begins with Philippine novelist José Rizal (1861–96), whose political advocacy made
him a martyr and national hero. But it continues unabated in the work of contemporary
Filipino writers whose work is both unabashedly political and aesthetically sophisticated.2
This strategic alliance is pronounced in Philippine writers who came of age during the
Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. Among these is Ninotchka Rosca, possibly one of the most

*Corresponding author. Email: mendible@fgcu.edu

Ó 2012 Taylor & Francis

 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 355

prolific and politically engaged writers of her generation. Rosca’s novels and stories defy
the notion that politics in literature is “something loud and vulgar” and, in the process,
challenge the boundaries separating not only politics and literature but also “American”
and “ethnic” literary histories. As a contemporary Philippine-American writer and activist,
Rosca is in a position to recognize and express the complex interconnectedness that char-
acterizes relations (and “confrontations”)3 between self and other, between “first world”
imperatives and “third world” conditions. At the same time, she is well aware of the his-
torical antagonisms that are the backdrop of Philippine–American relations. As E. San
Juan Jr points out, anyone “engaged in a critical commentary on Philippine culture and
society is always a participant in the arena of ongoing political and ideological antago-
nisms encompassing two polities, the United States and the Philippines” (Philippine Temp-
tation 254). My aim in this essay is to call special attention to Rosca’s lifetime
commitment to political activism, as her achievements as a writer “at the barricades” are
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not broadly recognized in the US. Given recent setbacks involving ethnic studies programs
and negative press about the “politicization” of literature in the US, reaffirming the power-
ful political role that writers can play seems especially urgent today, as efforts to suppress
or denigrate this role shape policies and attitudes. In what follows, I offer a brief overview
of Rosca’s oeuvre, tracing her commitment to political advocacy and suggesting the ways
that this commitment shapes her creative choices. I focus special attention on State of War,
Rosca’s debut novel, as in my view it best dramatizes a productive interplay between liter-
ary and political devices.
Born and raised in the Philippines, Rosca is both an award-winning author and
impassioned political activist. Her creative and political activities took root while she was
a student at the University of the Philippines, where she was involved in various radical
organizations. By 1967, three of Rosca’s short stories were already included in the “Ten
Best Stories” list published by the Philippine Free Press. A year later she had landed a
position as managing editor of Graphic magazine in Manila. As editor, she strove to
focus Philippine media coverage on significant and often controversial issues such as
anti-Vietnam War protests, human rights violations, and the presence of US military bases
in the Philippines. Rosca would later lose her position at Graphic for helping to organize
a union for the staff. Although she continued to enjoy acclaim as a writer, Rosca’s career
in the Philippines was cut short under Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship. After Marcos
declared Martial Law in 1972, Rosca was arrested for organizing political protests and
detained in a military prison for six months. The time she spent inside one of the
regime’s military camps would later serve as inspiration for her writing, as much of
her work satirizes, chronicles, and exposes the harsher realities of Philippine life and
politics.
Rosca immigrated to the United States in 1977 to avoid another arrest and currently
resides in New York, where she devotes her energy to issues of concern to Filipinos and
to international feminist advocacy. Much of her literary work draws on the turbulent
political history of her homeland where, as she puts it, the “only thing we have left to
retain a measure of dignity is to keep on struggling, resisting, and opposing” (Manalo
15). She earned highly competitive and prestigious fellowship grants from the New York
Foundation for the Arts in 1986 and 1991, and garnered the Women’s Political Caucus
Award for magazine writing in 1987 for her article, “Between the Gun and the Crucifix”.
Rosca is the first Filipino author to sit on the executive board of PEN American Center,
whose membership includes some of the most notable literary figures in the United
States. She is also among the authors featured in Veltisezar Bautista’s landmark anthol-
ogy, The Filipino Americans (From 1763 to the Present): Their History, Culture, and
 356 M. Mendible

Traditions (1998). Rosca’s success as a writer has provided a useful weapon for social
criticism, and she has been tireless in advocating for political and women’s rights on the
international stage.
Rosca’s artistic vision is drawn from a cultural past both distinct from and historically
linked to the United States. A former US colony, the Philippines reflects many of the condi-
tions and influences described by western theorists of postmodernity such as Jean-François
Lyotard, Fredric Jameson, Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard. This is a carnivalized world
familiar, in theory, to a postmodern sensibility versed in the language of contemporary wes-
tern critical discourse – a language that claims “polyvalence” and “heteroglossia” as part of
its lexicon. The Philippines glimpsed in Rosca’s texts is (or are – since it is a nation of over
7000 islands with a diverse people who speak 8 different languages and some 70 dialects) a
fragmented and disorienting world where American English, Spanish Catholicism and
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native legends claim the Filipino dreamscape and where stories, like histories, have multiple
authors. The archipelago has been subject to both overt and covert forms of US interference
since President McKinley embarked on a project of “benevolent assimilation” in 1898
intended to “educate” “civilize” and “Christianize” Filipinos.4 E. San Juan Jr puts the his-
tory of US–Philippine relations in far less euphemistic terms; as he points out, the Philip-
pines “was the object of violent colonization and unmitigated subjugation by US monopoly
capital” (Philippine Temptation 13). Thus it reflects the sometimes stifling sway of the
west’s modernizing project and the conflicting desire to both emulate and resist American
influence. In this cultural environment, the national Self is always already protean, multiva-
lent. Rosca’s literary imagination renegotiates the terms of a postmodern aesthetic, appropri-
ating, subverting and often mimicking its various literary techniques. At the same time, her
work resists a postmodern privileging of aesthetics over ethics (Harvey 102).5 Her novels
and stories demonstrate the kind of productive hybridization that is the mark of the postco-
lonial perspective, as Rosca’s work reinvents the literary forms of the colonizer and
expresses the experience of what she ironically refers to as her “mongrel race”. Its aims and
practices are fundamentally counter-hegemonic, as in San Juan’s description of dissident
Filipino writing that “conceives of literature in the Philippines as an ideological practice of
national liberation, the paradigm of an alternative ‘emergency’ politics” (Philippine
Temptation 255).
Through her writing and activism, Rosca engages in broader efforts to construct a
communal sense of self that recognizes its interdependent status while claiming the right
to sovereignty; her work strives to articulate and subvert the “ ‘received,’ legitimizing
identity imposed on [Filipinos] by the metropolitan power and reproduced daily by local
and transnational institutions” (San Juan, Philippine Temptation 255). This impulse fuses
political and creative objectives in ways that have powerful symbolic and concrete
effects. As Rosca puts it:

The drive to know one’s historical self created the artistic impulse to integrate modern con-
tent with traditional art forms and music. Given that as “serfs” of imperialism, Filipinos were
supposed to be consumers of culture created elsewhere, this insistence on creativity helped
consolidate the people’s sense of self and self-respect. (“Sison Way” para. 11)

Rosca acknowledges the difficulty Filipino writers face in judging and recording
national events from a personal, individual point of view. She admits that it is prob-
lematical to formulate any coherent sense of national identity in the Philippines,
where there is always a “conflict between the social orientation of the bedrock culture
and the fragmenting effect of colonialism” (Rosca, “Myth” 240). The collective self
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 357

that is conceived under such historical conditions, Rosca insists, is often gracefully
balanced “between the acceptance of the metamorphic essence of reality demanded by
one culture and the rigid classification of essence demanded by the other[s]” (“Myth”
241).
Like many politically astute writers, Rosca often assumes the ideological role of the
historian, imagining and recording her nation’s past in an effort to interpret its present
conditions. This is certainly the case in writing by Philippine-American writers longing
to remember and record their memories of home, who, as Rocio G. Davis notes, strive
“to create, ultimately, a mythos rendered official in the telling” (“Ninotchka Rosca’s State
of War” 125). In the Philippines, where there are scant indigenous records to be repre-
sented or revised, storytelling is a political act – a way to record, imagine, construct a
vision of the past. Rosca points out that:
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The destruction of our bamboo scrolls by Spanish friars wiped out records of our pre-His-
panic heritage; carpet bombing during World War II and “Liberation” reduced to rubble our
Spanish past. We have neither an Angkor nor a Burubudur to give us back a codification of
our culture, of our self. (“Myth” 242)

Her writing is therefore a vehicle for recreating and inscribing Philippine history from a
variety of perspectives, for subverting “official” and imperial versions of events. For as
Rosca’s own experience confirms, “the written word has an authority so vast [in the Phil-
ippines] that a dangerous status has often been conferred upon writers” (Rosca, “Myth”
242). As a result, Filipino writers have historically registered and paid for their literary
acts of defiance:

[Jose] Rizal was [ … ] shot in Luneta by Spanish colonial authorities; the seditious play-
wrights were exiled to Guam by American colonial authorities; Manuel Argilla was executed
by the Japanese Imperial forces; and Amado Hernandez spent 8 years in prison in the
1950s. (Rosca, “Myth” 242)

The 20 years Filipinos lived under the Marcos dictatorship resulted in often violent acts
of retribution, underscoring Rosca’s remark that “The burden of language can be heavy
indeed” (“Myth” 238).
This “heightened sense of the value of the word” shapes Rosca’s literary subjectiv-
ity: the Filipino writer attempts to “locate himself or herself within the collective self
and to look at the world with the eyes of his or her people and his or her history”
(“Myth” 242). Accordingly, Rosca’s literary works record the effects of colonialism,
exploring the impact of cultural displacement and hybridization on the collective psyche
and sensibility. In this way, she participates in a tradition of adversarial writing that
reflects “the pride, the commitment to independence that saw Lapu-Lapu skewering
Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 for his crime of intervention in domestic affairs” (“Myth”
41). Efforts to continue this tradition guarantee that “the Filipino writer still stands on
the shores of Mactan, confronting Magellan [ … ] that we are still singing the archipel-
ago’s songs” (“Myth” 43).

Rosca’s State of War

“This is then what one finds in Filipino fiction: a self that shares in all of the contradictori-
ness of the national self” (Rosca, “Myth” 242).
 358 M. Mendible

“If there is anything I would like to be known for,” Rosca has said, “I would like to be
known as a storyteller [ … ] in the tradition of the epic poets who went around reciting
poetry” (Gupit-Mayor n. pag.). This desire is not surprising, given the role that female
poets played in pre-colonial Philippine culture. As Marjorie Evasco has shown in her
review of Philippine literary history, the priestess-poet wielded a powerful influence in
Philippine tribal communities, for she carried with her “the burden of memory” (10). In
her debut novel, State of War, Rosca assumes this powerful role, weaving a tapestry with
interlacing threads of memory and myth, past and present. Set in the Philippines during a
festival similar to the annual Mardi Gras celebration on Panay Island, the narrative is at
once an allegory, a thinly disguised roman à clef and an historical chronicle. It traces the
rise and fall of a contemporary dictatorship (modeled after Ferdinand Marcos but never
naming him directly). The festival at the heart of Rosca’s plot functions as both literary
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trope and political strategy, as symbolic and literal site of transgression. It sets the stage
for an anti-government display of force and brings together the main characters of the
novel: Anna Villaverde, the widow of a murdered political dissident; Eliza Hansen, the
daughter of a prostitute and mistress to the sadistic Colonel Amor; and Adrian Banyaga,
the son of a wealthy landowner who is both Anna and Eliza’s friend and lover. The festi-
val evokes and commemorates a series of interrelated personal and collective memories
that culminate in the current predicament: an ongoing “state of war” that never actually
erupts into outright revolution.
Variously referred to as a “festival of memories” and “no one’s and yet everyone’s
personal history” (State of War 13), Rosca’s festival establishes her text’s symbolic con-
nection to Filipino history and identity. Like the novel itself, the festival represents a cel-
ebration born of rebellion and bequeathed through language and memory. As literary and
political device, it integrates private and public memories, historical and individual con-
sciousness. This fusion produces the illusion of a shared history; it imagines a lineage
that admits us into a broader community of readers and political agents. Gilbert and
Tompkins’s comments regarding the interactions between postcolonial cultures and carni-
val are relevant here:

Apart from being more complex than most western commentators generally allow, traditional
enactments have special functions in post-colonial societies and are often key sites of resis-
tance to imposed values and practices. Rooted in folk culture, these enactments are not only
mnemonic devices that assist in the preservation of history but are also effective strategies for
maintaining cultural difference through specific systems of communication – aural, visual,
and kinetic – and through specific values related to local (often pre-contact) customs. (54)

Rosca’s festival serves as the locus where everyone is granted admission and anything is
possible: peasant farmers transform into ancient warriors in tribal costumes, guerilla fight-
ers feast and dance with enemy soldiers, and military men pose as fishermen while trans-
vestites parade through the streets with sawn-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 and renewal, the festival trope
suggests an instantiation of the decolonizing impulse. As the site where competing forces
conjoin, the text-as-festival links its participants (and readers) in time – through blood
ties, interlocking ancestries, related histories, ideological bonds. It functions as an
encrypted language, an ironically public secret code that she uses to communicate and
pass on memories that are, in themselves, subversive and counter-hegemonic. Rosca’s
text-as-festival expresses, in Robert Stam’s suggestive description of carnival, “the
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 359

oppositional culture of the oppressed, a countermodel of cultural production and desire”

(95). While festival gives a wide stage to the marginalized and the disempowered, it is
nonetheless inclusive and accommodating.
As reader-participants, we are immersed in a “feast of time [ … ] of becoming,
change and renewal” that ritualizes a Filipino cultural-literary tradition of resistance
(Bakhtin 10). The festival constitutes, symbolically, a way of recalling the mythical or
historical origins of a community. The hundreds of festivals celebrated annually through-
out the archipelago help 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 pre-colonial and neocolonial influences; and street spectacles showcase cul-
tural icons and symbols. During festival, the people occupy, disrupt and claim public
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spaces, asserting their right to perform and display an identity. Allessandro Fallassi
explains that:

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 world-
view, to its social identity, its historical continuity, and to its physical survival. (2)

The festival’s role in identity formation helps to explain why new nations “discover the exis-
tential reality of their ‘social contract’ in festivals embodying the spirit of their union”
(Duvignaud 17). Drawing upon an entire system of locally determined meanings, the festi-
val reflects a “collective effervescence” identified with moments of solidarity and shared
consciousness (Duvignaud 13). It engages and represents nearly all aspects of cultural iden-
tity from religion to language, folklore to politics, recounting an open-ended story that is
both product and producer of culture. But it is a certain kind of story – a potentially subver-
sive tale that fosters communal solidarity and purpose. The festival signifies “a ceremony of
perpetual creation and re-creation of embodied beliefs [ … ] producing and reproducing cul-
ture from one generation to the next” (Duvignaud 15). By rekindling the vital energies that
form the basis of collective resistance, festivals have revolutionary potential. They help reg-
ister a postcolonial culture’s claim to self-identification and agency. As symbolic festival,
Rosca’s text is energized and informed by this decolonizing spirit; it is a social, political and
aesthetic event where dissonant voices erupt in a song that preserves a tradition begun “in
memory and in defiance” (Rosca, State of War 61).
While Nerissa Balce-Cortes points out that Rosca and other Filipino American writers
are linked to a tradition of “politically engaged narratives” inaugurated by Rizal (98), it is
also important to note that Rosca rejects a simplistic, romanticized notion of “tradition”. In
Rosca’s postcolonial frame of reference “the concept of tradition far exceeds the quaintness,
the fixity, and ultimately, the dismissibility which it represents in highly industrialised socie-
ties” (Gilbert and Tompkins 54–55). By chronicling the imaginary but emblematic histories
of her protagonists, Rosca envisions a matrix of communal identity founded on (but not lim-
ited to) shared traditions. But it is a postcolonial view of tradition that acknowledges the
“fundamentally unstable, contradictory, interdependent, and mutually transformative rela-
tions between ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ ‘self’ and ‘other’ ” (Young 11). Philippine-American
writers negotiate “markers of subjectivity and creative production in order to forge a Janus-
faced tradition that contemplates both the forms and stories of the past and new materializa-
tions of selfhood and representation” (Davis, “Introduction” 16). The segments of the novel
set in the present focus on Eliza and Anna, while the novel’s flashback sequences dream a
pre-colonial history. Hierarchies and distinctions are dissolved or destabilized as the text-as-
 360 M. Mendible

festival merges subjectivities, suggesting that enemies and friends in the present are distant
cousins or half-brothers and sisters, that even those designated the “invaders” – the “visitors
who owed no allegiance to any tribe” can be “subdued and merged” into the rhythm and his-
tory of the event (State of War 15). The reader, like the tourist who visits the festivity, partic-
ipates in “no one’s and yet everyone’s personal history” (13). In the words of Guevarra,
Rosca’s revolutionary hero 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).
The text expresses an anarchic vitality that intentionally complicates the act of reading
by appropriating, subverting and often mimicking postmodern aesthetics. It resists any sin-
gular interpreter, authority or “definitive title” (13). This indeterminacy further links the text
and the festival trope, for as Falassi points out, “the message intended by [festival] organiz-
ers, the one conveyed by the performers, and the one received by the audiences may differ
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substantially” (162). From the outset, readers are disoriented by sudden shifts in time, dis-
continuous narratives, confounded causality, fantastic and ordinary characters. Conventional
plot structure is replaced with fragmented moments in time, spatial dislocations and abrupt
leaps from present to past events, a strategy that conveys the ruptures imposed by a history
of changing colonial identities, names, languages and value systems. As festival, Rosca’s
text thwarts passive or uncritical consumption; readers must participate in “making sense”
of the often contradictory, competing influences, events and stories that inhabit Rosca’s
polyglot, polyphonic world. Festivals allow the people to temporarily “take back the
streets”; the text as festival democratizes a public space by reclaiming the power of the
word. It invites an imaginative play that fosters identification, participation and “the sense
that there are links of possibility” between the characters and the reader (Nussbaum 3). Its
political relevance lies in an ethical framework that, in Martha Nussbaum’s words, “makes
readers participants in the lives of people very different from themselves” and also “critics
of the class distinctions that give people [ … ] an unequal access to flourishing” (3–4).
The construction of cultural memory has significant political objectives and effects;
controlling the meanings of the past always involves a kind of ideological policing. Cul-
tural memory can be distorted, reconstructed and exploited by state institutions as well as
by political movements. In particular, Rosca’s work speaks to the profound relationship
between memory, writing and insurrection. Like other Filipino writers, she recognizes the
political function of memory, which “anchors us, for, though it is fragile, it is also the
longest umbilical cord” (Rosca, “Myth” 242). But 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, subject
to alterations, reconfigurations, “novel” interpretations. While language shapes communal
identity, it can also distort and delimit it. Anna’s foreboding that “even [the festival] will
be forgotten” and that they “will hide it under another name” (State of War 149) suggests
the festival’s (and the novel’s) cognate relation to a fading cultural memory. The festival’s
participants therefore dance about the plaza in a “parody of celebration” (339). This
implies that the festival – and, by extension, the novel itself – is a politically compro-
mised event. As representations, both function in dynamic relationship with the institu-
tions of the public sphere, mediating and articulating cultural memory. As Susannah
Radstone points out in her analysis of the political dimensions of memorial practices:

the terms mediation and articulation militate against any analysis of memory as reflective of
or determined by the past, and against any notion that a text [ … ] constitutes an unproblem-
atic reflection of memory. [ … ] texts and practices are complexly related to the broader
social formation in which their meanings are forged. (29)
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 361

While the festival intensifies the vital energies that form the basis of collective resistance
it also depends on the economic support and authorization of a governing or intellectual
elite – the very hierarchical structures that it is intended to subvert or overturn.
This is the paradox that simultaneously energizes and delimits the revolutionary
potential of the festival as political epistemology: it is an authorized transgression and,
potentially, a commercial venture – a locally produced spectacle to be commodified and
appropriated. Stanley Waterman’s analysis of art festivals comments on the tension
between the interests of popular celebration and business enterprise. While the festival
enables “the politically marginal to express discontent through ritual” (57), it also pro-
vides opportunities for political and social elites to maintain hegemonic control. The festi-
val is not a mere reflection of material culture but also functions as a constitutive force.
“One of the crucial roles of festivals”, Waterman argues, “is the legitimation of the elite
by shaping norms of public discourse” (57). Festivals create a public space where “hege-
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monic power actively produces and reproduces difference as a key strategy to create and
maintain modes of social and spatial division that are advantageous to its continued
empowerment” (60). The need for commercial and state funding implicates festivals “in
the politics and economics of currying favour with government subsidizers or commercial
sponsors” (61).
In the novel, Rosca calls attention to this interdependent relationship between festival
and hegemonic power during the governor’s dinner party, where the main topic of conversa-
tion among the affluent guests is the prospect of establishing a year-round festival “instead
of this annual bash which drove people crazy” (State of War 37). Seated at a 30-foot-long
table with corporate lawyers and businessmen, the governor’s accountant suggests setting
up a consortium comprised of government and private capital (37). By acquiring a vast sec-
tion of waterfront property, dredging the sea and building tourist resorts, the governing elite
hopes to reap the “benefits” of a tourism-sponsored “endless fiesta”: half the town would
“go on with the Festival for the tourists” while the other half could be trained “to work in
the hotels” (37–38). Through this attempt to domesticate the festivities, capital seeks to
define and regulate the event, securing its own interests while disregarding the ecological
and economic impact on the region. Thus an initially participatory, inclusive and counter-
hegemonic folk event can be transformed into an exclusive domain of power – where folk
“participation” means catering to the needs of an elite coterie. Further, the Commander and
his wife (modeled on the Marcoses) attend the festival accompanied by the mayor, council-
ors and the provincial commander. Authority’s presence suggests that the festival’s revolu-
tionary prospects are limited, as official power can infiltrate and regulate the event.
Throughout the festival, soldiers with M-16s slung over their shoulders seem to merge with
an unruly crowd, but they are a constant reminder of the law’s presence: the soldiers ensure
that the people’s “symbolic transgression” remains symbolic.
These scenarios dramatize the ambivalence underscoring the event, as festival’s poten-
tial for commercialization or co-optation makes it a problematic political model and episte-
mological category. In the psychosocial arena of festival, competing interests converge
and interact, but they are ineluctably bound to a network of power that shapes the course
of events. On the one hand, festival holds the potential for revolution; this is, after all, the
site that Guevarra has chosen for a daring display of force. On the other, festivals are
staged events that can function as propagandistic displays of official tolerance. Foucault’s
work reminds us that the production and dissemination of knowledge occurs in complicity
with existing power structures. Rosca re-enacts this predicament, and, in doing so, reflects
on the compromised nature of her own text, itself a cultural product dependent upon insti-
tutional support and market forces. She is well aware of the links that bind publishing and
 362 M. Mendible

distribution channels to local and global economies, as well as to the vagaries of state
power. An initially adversarial or oppositional literary work can be “tolerated” into sub-
mission, accredited by the very system it aimed to discredit. State or institutional policies
can also influence or control cultural production in diverse ways. Modern commercial
pressures have created a market-driven public sphere that works in a collaborative relation-
ship with the state, turning political constituencies into “markets” and political participa-
tion into a kind of consumer product selection. Any understanding of the “public sphere”
must consider the interaction between social constituencies of race, class, gender and ide-
ology on the one hand and commercial, institutional and political forces on the other.
This potential for co-optation fuels concerns among scholars and writers who share a
commitment to dissident or oppositional politics. Some have specifically cautioned or even
criticized academic movements in this regard, particularly postcolonial studies. Jean-Franç-
ois Bayart has called the field “a great academic carnival, a moment of emotional release”
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that allows American and North Atlantic universities to co-opt “the most brilliant trouble-
makers from the native elite” (43). Novelist and literary critic Elleke Boehmer has expressed
concern over what she sees as a “dependency relationship developing between literature
from the so-called periphery and metropolitan theory” (215). In its institutional contexts, the
increasingly recognizable term “postcolonial” is already, Boehmer argues, viewed “merely
as the disciplinary marker for a critical approach [ … ] one critical confection amongst a
smorgasbord of others which can be pushed to the side and discarded once its sell-by date
comes up” (258). E. San Juan Jr rejects “the orthodox brand of postcolonial theory that is
safely marketed in the classrooms and scholarly conferences” and which serves as “an alibi
for intellectual acquiescence to current hegemonic pieties” (qtd in Pozo n. pag.). In Beyond
Postcolonial Theory, San Juan goes so far as to argue that “Postcolonial discourse generated
in ‘First World’ academies turns out to be one more product of flexible, post-Fordist capital-
ism, not its antithesis” (8). Much of what we call “postcolonial” literature today is intimately
bound to academic environments through curricula, publications and conferences, impli-
cated in processes of commodification not just in the US but throughout the so-called “Third
World”. Kwame Anthony Appiah contends that:

Postcolonial intellectuals in Africa [ … ] are almost entirely dependent for their support on
two institutions: the African university, an institution whose intellectual life is overwhelm-
ingly constituted as Western, and the Euro-American publisher and reader. (348)

Rosca’s self-conscious critique of the festival’s political potential – and thus her text’s
– reminds us of these limits and liabilities. Such scrutiny is crucial if festival and dissent –
two traditions that inform Rosca’s text – will remain vibrant and responsive to institutional
pressures and material conditions. In State of War, the festival works as a complex literary
device with multiple inflections: it situates the narrative within a specific cultural history
while inviting wider participation and identification; registers and extends a tradition of
oppositional writing; resists an “us” versus “them” binary that presumes its own political
“purity”; and implicates her own work in a broader critique of global capitalism’s production
and consumption processes.

Spotlight on the Philippines: a lifetime of activism

Employing a variety of creative approaches and pushing the boundaries of “acceptable”
political advocacy, Rosca has avoided the kind of “radical chic” that marks some popular-
ized adversarial fiction. She has acknowledged the prominent role that writers and artists
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 363

played in the people’s movement that ousted the Marcos regime and points out that to
this day “most of the country’s leading writers and artists arose out of or still belong to
the national democratic movement” (“Sison Way” para. 11). But the political function of
the arts, especially literature, is not merely to express or expose a particular ideological
position. Boehmer describes the “creolized” story as one that invites readers to “think as
other” – that “both recalls the way in which cultures are syncretically interlinked [ … ]
and provides a gateway to feeling otherness, experiencing what it might be to be beside
one’s self” (259; italics in original). This might well describe Rosca’s oeuvre. She is one
of those rare and gifted writers Boehmer describes, whose “work moves beyond a sly
civility, whose rejection of the world’s inequalities is written into the very fabric of their
poetic, built into its structures of invoking and involving the readers” and for whom “cul-
ture is still a space of struggle and transformation” (259). But Rosca’s ethical awareness
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of a struggle that is not merely symbolic, theoretical or textual is critical to her political
role: she recognizes that a struggle endures among the world’s oppressed, poor and dis-
placed for whom reading is a luxury and books an unaffordable commodity. Her direct
participation in projects aimed at promoting basic human needs and rights extends her
commitment beyond the literary or symbolic.
Recognized as an expert on Asian women’s issues, particularly on issues related to labor
and the exploitation of women, Rosca works closely with the human rights community and
lectures and publishes articles worldwide on behalf of women who have experienced human
rights violations. She is on the board of the Survivors Committee, a network of former polit-
ical prisoners and human rights activists; was founding chair of GABRIELA Network, a
Philippine-US women’s solidarity organization working against the trafficking of women,
including the mail-order bride industry, forced prostitution of Third World women, and the
role of the IMF/World Bank/WTO in generating the global sex trade. Rosca was also among
those featured in the “1998 Asian American Women of Hope” project, a series of educa-
tional posters with study guides published by Bread and Roses, the only labor-based cultural
project in the United States. The Women of Hope series is used by public school systems
throughout the US and exhibited in galleries and community spaces and on public buses
and subways. Clearly, Rosca’s political roles are as multiple as her talents, and her work is
testament to a critical link between theory and praxis.
Rosca’s second novel, Twice Blessed (1992), again comments on the Philippines’
political culture, this time through the satirical tale of evil twins Hector and Katerina Bas-
bas, obvious caricatures of the Marcoses and their ilk. The book won the 1993 American
Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation, and was generally lauded by critics
for its “controlled, highly literate prose” (Publishers Weekly) and described as “Strong,
evocative, and absurd” (Library Journal). The story begins with a political feud reminis-
cent of the cronyism and infighting that characterized the Marcos presidency and that has
continued to threaten democracy in the Philippines. Although Hector has been elected
president, the incumbent refuses to step down. In a grand display of nepotism, Hector
calls on Katerina (who, by the way, collects shoes à la Imelda Marcos) to engage in a
series of cross-country excursions carrying shopping bags full of money in order to bribe
state officials. Along the way, the novel flashes back to the Basbas twins’ family history,
making readers privy to the various unsavory tactics they employed on their way to the
top of the political and social heap. There is also a Philippine fable embedded in this nar-
rative, as the twins’ position within a warlord clan, and their willingness to do anything
– regardless of how corrupt or deceitful – to achieve power and status, teaches readers
something about the self-serving political and moral landscape that gave rise to Ferdinand
and Imelda’s excesses.
 364 M. Mendible

Katerina’s position also speaks to the function and complicity of women in patriarchal
politics – an issue of central importance to Rosca’s life work. This complicity was most
overt in Imelda Marcos – though it has continued through the presidencies of women such
as Corazon Aquino and Gloria Arroyo. All political regimes employ stylistic and formal
devices suited to the sensibilities and tastes of their subjects, forming an aesthetic system
that is calibrated to attract a people’s loyalty and move them to action. But Imelda’s special
brand of politics exploited powerful national myths and images to powerful effect, shaping
what Crispin Sartwell refers to as the “multisensory aesthetic surround or context” of politi-
cal power (1). Imelda’s spectacular shopping sprees in New York, lavish parties for visiting
world dignitaries, romantic duets with Ferdinand at political rallies, carefully crafted image
as beauty queen turned queen mother, and often scandalous one-liners (“They hate me
because I’m beautiful”) were “aesthetic embodiments of political positions [with] concrete
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effects” (Sartwell 2). Her mystique at home and abroad managed to achieve what insurrec-
tions, alliances and a colonial relationship had not: Imelda initiated the archipelago’s induc-
tion into America’s popular consciousness. She made the front pages of The New York
Times, inspired comparisons to Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Grace, and hobnobbed
with the Rockefellers and the DuPonts. As the “new Filipina” she was transformed into a
transcendent figure –beautiful and powerful enough to grace the cover of US magazines and
charm its leaders, yet fragile enough to comply with western stereotypes of the obliging,
subservient Asian woman. Americans came to associate the archipelago with Imelda – if
only to identify her as the woman who owned 2000 pairs of shoes.
Like State of War, Twice Blessed comments on the Philippines’ colonial legacy in sev-
eral ways. For example, the notion that colonized peoples learn to survive their predica-
ment by acquiring a protean ability to maneuver and shape-shift is suggested by the
various guises the twins assume in their quest for power. In fact, Hector tells his sister
that he longs for the day when they can “drop all this pretense and be what we really
are” (Twice Blessed 77). In this world of pretense and deception no one can be trusted,
as enemies are disguised as allies and secrets are like “elaborate origami constructs”
(171). Similarly, the twisted relationship between Hector and Katerina suggests a dys-
functional family dynamic that serves as an allegory for the nation; the siblings are char-
acterized by an insatiable hunger for the wealth and power held mostly by the society’s
Caucasian elites. They must curry favor from the Spanish-descended aristocrats and strive
incessantly to attain American dollars. Rosca’s ironic comment in the novel that there are
“two countries in this country” (163) alludes to the endurance of a colonial mentality that
continues to shape the nation’s divided identity. Yet the novel suggests that a nation’s his-
tory – like Katerina and Hector’s unsavory past – cannot be ignored or escaped.
Although Katerina’s desire to recreate herself makes her prefer “blank walls and what she
called tabula rasa” (33), she cannot elude her past or her nation’s collective destiny. Like
the incumbent president’s premonition in which he “saw a nation struggling to be born”
(Twice Blessed 257), Rosca envisions the historical events and figures that would play a
role in the Philippines’ own rebirth; she effectively “uses the analysis of the cyclical his-
tories and destinies of the characters – the reminder of the dangers of forgetting, the
invention of identities, and the revelation of the overwhelming intricacies of the political
system – to develop metaphors of reconstruction” (Davis, “Postcolonial Visions” 70).
Rosca also resists “the dangers of forgetting” through her work as a journalist, essayist
and non-fiction writer. In Endgame: The Fall of the House of Marcos, she recounts the
events leading to the overthrow of the Marcos regime and the rise of Corazon Aquino, offer-
ing invaluable personal impressions and testimonials to register this extraordinary moment
in history. She provides a meticulous record of the People Power movement, which
 Journal of Postcolonial Writing 365

achieved the momentous 1986 coup without weapons or bloodshed. Rosca also includes
interviews with individual members of the New People’s Army, a move that generated some
negative responses among reviewers and readers, mostly due to the rebels’ controversial
role as communist insurgents and because their inclusion seemed unwarranted as they did
not participate directly in the coup. Rosca’s intention, however, was to include a variety of
perspective – from clergy to rebels to demonstrators and students. Research for the book
brought her back to the Philippines for the first time since her exile, and it was an emotional
experience for Rosca, especially as she was disappointed to see that, as she told Publishers
Weekly, “people expected so much [from the Aquino government] and they weren’t going to
get it” (qtd in Steinberg 46). At one point during her visit (while Marcos, ironically, was
exiled in the US), a Filipino peasant asks, “What do Americans think of our [liberation]
movement?” Rosca’s response, presumably introspective, obliquely addresses an American
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readership:

How did one explain that although the United States was – had been since 1898 – a major
force and factor in the Philippines, the reverse was not true? That the Philippines was only
one of a hundred small countries that vied for American attention – that the ocean and lack
of information – and what little information there was filtered through Western eyes – made
events in the archipelago seem like incomprehensible happenings in a never-never land?
(Endgame 68)

The events of that “never-never land” have received scant recognition in mainstream
America, despite the critical acclaim achieved by Filipino-American writers such as Car-
los Bulosan, José García Villa, Bienvenido Santos, N.V.M. Gonzalez, Jessica Hagedorn,
Linda Ty Casper and others.6 But as Rocio Davis rightly asserts, the “creative production
by Filipino/a Americans continues to grow [ … ] making a renewed appreciation of this
work imperative” (Davis, “Introduction” 5). Rosca’s “self-defining” stories and lifelong
commitment to literature as politics have helped raise the visibility of Filipino writers
and, even more importantly, invited all of us to envision the possibility of economic and
social transformation not only in the Philippines but across the developing world. Indeed,
to read Rosca’s work is to experience some of the complexity of Philippine history and
politics, to better understand aspects of a global struggle for justice, and to share – if only
momentarily – in the lives of imagined and real agents of change. Thus the compliment
she bestows on Jose Maria Sison, her mentor and the subject of her latest monograph,
speaks eloquently about Rosca’s own contribution to an “ideal of praxis”: “[Sison’s] life
and work exemplified the unity of theory and practice. Armchair or cappuccino political
theorists have not been held in any kind of respect in the Philippines ever since” (Rosca,
Jose Maria Sison 250–51). Rosca has proven that she is no “Armchair or cappuccino”
theorist, rightfully earning respect internationally as a creative writer, journalist and
political activist – roles that in a lesser talent could seem irreconcilable. Although she
concedes that “no book – and for that matter, no painting, no piece of music, no sculp-
ture – has produced profound social change; it takes collective action to do that”, Rosca
adamantly refuses to capitulate the site of struggle – the word itself.

Notes
1. Arizona’s House Bill 2281, passed in May of 2010, has elicited vociferous debates about the
role of “ethnic studies” programs and curriculum in public schools. State of Arizona, House of
Representatives, Forty-Ninth Legislature, Second Regular Session, 2010. Full text of bill avail-
able online: <http://www.azleg.gov/legtext/49leg/2r/bills/hb2281s.pdf>.
 366 M. Mendible

2. The US-led Global War on Terror has made these links between politics and writing of special
interest again today in the Philippines, where politically motivated killings have risen dramatically
under the guise of “homeland security”. See “Forum: What GWOT Has Wrought” in The Nation,
13 Dec. 2007.
3. E. San Juan Jr’s After Postcolonialism examines the impact of US policies on Philippine culture,
rightly referring to this history as a “confrontation” rather than a “relationship”.
4. See McKinley, “Benevolent Assimilation” Proclamation, 21 December 1898. It was announced
in the Philippines on 4 January 1899. Unfortunately, McKinley’s mission to “bestow the bless-
ings of good and stable government” on the Philippines would cost the lives of at least 200,000
of their civilians.
5. David Harvey’s seminal analysis of postmodernity offers an historical-economic perspective
informed by Marxist criticism. Harvey has advocated for theory “validated through revolution-
ary practice” (qtd in Castree and Gregory 37).
6. For example, Villa was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1943; Carlos Bulosan’s America is
in the Heart (1943), a classic in immigrant fiction, was selected by Look magazine as one of
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the 50 most important American books ever published; Hagedorn won the 1983 Before Colum-
bus Foundation Award, and American Book Awards for Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions and
Dogeaters (which was also nominated for the 1991 National Book Award); E. San Juan Jr has
won numerous awards for his essays and poems. San Juan’s resignation as Head of the Compar-
ative American Cultures Department at Washington State in 2001 speaks to the challenges fac-
ing “ethnic” studies in recent years. San Juan objected to the institution’s lack of “concrete
tangible resources” in support of ethnic diversity and education and referred to their claims of
promoting diversity as “hollow – mere lip service”. See “Department Head Resigns”.

Notes on contributor
Myra Mendible is Professor in the Languages and Literature Department at Florida Gulf Coast
University in Fort Myers and Interim Director of its Judaic, Holocaust, and Human Rights Center.
She was co-founder of the English program at FGCU, and has taught a range of courses in
ethnicity and politics, cultural theory and gender studies. She is the editor of two interdisciplinary
anthologies, From Bananas to Buttocks: The Latina Body in Popular Culture (2007) and Race
2008: Critical Reflections on a Historic Campaign (2010).

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