At the outset, an apology seems to be in order: this book took forever in putting out, and the fault is nobody else’s but ours.
Indeed, if there’s one thing that Ladlad, as a series, has undeniably and perhaps inadvertently performed, it’s the prompting and promoting of gay writing in all its gorgeous contrarieties all over the country. We can almost say that in its wake, Filipino gays have been emboldened to come out, and to come out in and through their poems, stories, essays, and plays. Of course, I mean this in the demonically plural sense: they have done so in legions.
As you can imagine, the problem this situation creates is an editorial one, in the main: how to select which pieces to include, from among the multitudes that have been submitted. We have accomplished this fairly enough, I feel, as our touchstones have not quite changed across the years: formal excellence, as well as something we may provisionally call “representativeness.”
The former is something any teacher of literature can readily appreciate, off the cuff: a sense of design and deliberation in the written composition; a haply congruence between artistic intention and execution; the irrefutable presence, in the text’s form and content, of a painstakingly practiced craft, whose purpose is the incitement of imaginative and hopefully visceral pleasure. The latter is admittedly a little more problematic, for here we confront the litigious issue of typicality.
The one criticism against Ladlad that I can bring myself to take seriously relates to the charge that its themes are not inclusive enough, and that the concerns of its authors are not exactly representative of the situations and interests of the many different Filipino gays, who are the books’ declared audience. Such like-minded critics have pointed out the obvious fact, for instance, that our authors all come from the same class (middle), and that none of them is engaged in that most emblematic of occupations, completely appropriate and predictable in this case: beauty parlor work.
How does one politely answer such a charge except by saying, with a hint of self-irony in one’s voice, Touché? Indeed, it cannot be denied that our contributors have so far not included hairstylists, manicurists, and your friendly neighborhood costureras.
At the same time, one needs to quickly qualify that it’s not as though one has willfully excluded them, after all. As is probably the case with most feminist anthologies, none of our many calls for manuscripts could apparently alter the refractory fact that writing itself is class-specific, and that in our country in particular, writing is ultimately a matter of privilege—to be more precise, of leisure. Echoing the typical feminist “editorial” caveat, allow me to say that in no way do we presume Ladlad is perfectly representative of all the varieties of gays and gayness in the Philippines. Nevertheless, as I earlier mentioned, we believe it is, in certain important ways, representative enough.
The reason for this isn’t only that aspects of the bakla’s experience of oppression may be said to cut across classes, but also that the writers of Ladlad are, I’d like to believe, sensitive and responsible “participant observers” of the realities they have chosen to attend to in their works. In a manner of speaking, we may reasonably assume that such works are, at the very least, ethnographically informed textual renditions, by intimately involved actors and agents, of gay life as they have suffered and enjoyed it in the country today. While it’s true that none of our writers is a parlorista, it is nonetheless equally true that many if not all of them have at least one close acquaintance or friend who is a parlorista, with whose gayness, erotic life and abject position as a “sexual outsider.” they can identify harrowingly—and as their respective works should illustrate, triumphantly—enough.
On the other hand, detractors of a more political, “nativist” sort have likewise been quick to dismiss Ladlad, because its pieces apparently do not address the national issue, nor promote the national cause. What’s worse, as they contend, some of them even betray such a cause, for by being unapologetically written in the colonial language—English—they effectively endorse the continued colonialism, by America, of the “Filipino soul.” While I am generally loath to engage in such pointless discombobulations over what is and isn’t the Filipino soul—and just who has the God-deemed right to describe it—I must admit that regarding the vexed and vexing question of Filipino nationalism, I do have a few observations to make.
Let me begin by saying that if there is one present-day reality that seems to affect Filipino literature and culture as a whole, it is the increasingly transitional character of Filipino life. Given the dizzying developments in information technology, the new structures governing the flow and traffic of international labor, patterns in migration and diaspora, the massive restructurings of cultures and economies arising from globalization in general, and with the two CNN-covered Gulf Wars, the virtual unmasking of the de-facto American empire—all the genres and forms of the various Philippine literatures and cultures can only be irrevocably transformed. Of course, just how and in which specific directions are eminently open to debate.
Of late, insights into the general “framework” within which these changes are taking place have been offered by the social sciences. For example, recent sociological theorizing on the incongruities of culture to which Filipinos are being subjected identifies three distinct levels or “dimensions” of culture within which we are currently living, namely: the local, the national, and the global.
The local is, of course, the immediate reality, largely uncritical or prereflective, for it is where the urgency of experience occurs. We may think of the local as the “real,” which artists, gay or otherwise, always attempt to capture in their work—no matter how obliquely, no matter how “marvelously.” By contrast, the national is the level of culture to which Filipinos occasionally participate, for it is largely ritualistic and normative. As such it defines, through the ideologies of nationalism, the exemplary forms of conduct in the various social realms (in the fields of arts, for example, such “exemplars” are supposed to be the “National Artists”).
The national reality is, paradoxically—as various thinkers have told us—“a work of imagination.” This is another way of saying it is far from what’s immediately present, remote from what’s “real.” In fact, we might say the many norms the national government seeks to implement need to become “translated” into the local first, before they can even be known by the vast majority of Filipinos. And what usually happens is this translation from the national to the local doesn’t succeed, as the failure of so many national programs in the country’s many towns and municipalities would show. Perhaps the reason for the stubborn “impermeability” of the local community to the imperatives of the national dispensation is the perceived and actual unreliability—that is to say, corruption—of its various agencies and institutions, which nobody really trusts anymore.
The newest level of culture is the global, for it’s not just the old internationalism, but is exponentially more “virtual” and powerful than that: the global enters the local directly and immediately, through the Internet, cellular technology, or cable television, bypassing the national and thus creating new forms of local-global subjectivities seemingly detached from the national context. Otherwise, the global exercises its inexorable “control” over both the local and the national, in the form of trade and labor relations that impact directly on individuals in the “grassroots” level. Because of America’s ascendancy as the de-facto global “superpower”—with whom Filipinos have enjoyed, fortunately or unfortunately, “special relations” over the last hundred years—we are exposed to the pressures of the global in a different and slightly more “vulnerable” way. Indeed, it would seem that the global as American has, for a long time now, wielded a kind of special “mystique” over us, continuing to transform even the very texture of our dreams.
The implications of this sociological model are pretty troubling, for with the progressive obsolescence and weakening of our national culture, the local ground in which Filipinos really and inevitably exist becomes an increasingly easier prey to global incorporation and “erasure.” On one hand, the “virtual” component of globalization is largely a matter of technology, and may therefore be seen as essentially neutral. On the other, the increasing dependence of national and consequently local systems on the global “circuit” of exchange is a real threat, for it can, in fact, overwhelm and annihilate them. It is precisely this imminent danger that would seem to have galvanized local artists and cultural workers in recent years, forcing them to step up their campaign for a “national reawakening.”
I submit that while Ladlad—and Filipino gay literature, in general—does not appear to engage with the nationalist question per se, it nonetheless constitutes a unique reaction to this “crisis in culture,” and represents Filipino gays’ own special contribution to this “reawakening.”
We’ve seen how, in recent years, a number of “canonical” Filipino fictionists seem to hold out hope that the national ideology isn’t obsolete or bankrupt, for despite the fact that they collectively recognize the failures and evils of the nation-state, in the same cadenced breath they profess their faith in an eventual “nationalist salvation.” This can be seen in the various ways they have written their “historical fictions”—various because while the intent is the same remaking of the nation, the methods they’ve chosen range from the realist to the surrealist; from the romantic to the satirical; and finally, from styles that presume a positivist understanding of history as objectively knowable fact, to textually sophisticated strategies that assume a necessarily “fictive” quality to all forms of historical narration.
As regards the nationalist “common sense” underlying such works of fiction, I would like to register a specific demurral, at this point: while writing as a selfconscious act of creativity cannot ever be completely located in the “local” (which by its nature is unselfconscious), it’s important for us to remember that there has not been—nor should there ever be—any singular way Filipino writers have attempted to address the intrinsic problem that is the nation, from which they’re otherwise supposed to write. In other words, while writing necessitates moving out of the local reality by imaginatively identifying with a bigger community—of readers and fellow writers—this community has not, for all Filipinos, always been synonymous with the national, at least not in the way this ideal has been officially endorsed by the country’s many “national institutions.”
Precisely, global technologies like the Internet have added to the list of “imagined communities” to which Filipinos could opt to belong. Inscribed in the works of many of our young writers, including those to be found in Ladlad, is the desire to commune with “significant others” defined not so much in cultural, ethnic or indeed national terms, as in the alternative terms of non-normative gender and sexuality. Perhaps these alternative identifications are the clearest examples of how, by virtue of information technology, the local and the global meet without necessarily passing through the national. After all, the allure and power of cyberspace lie in the fact that it offers not only opportunities for listening, but also for “being heard.” Many of our gay writers know that lurking inside the hyperlinks of cyberspace is the luminous promise of fellowship and community with others who are suffering forms of oppression comparable to their own, despite the fact that their contexts radically differ from each other.
All this has happened and continues to happen because, obviously, the way the Filipino “nation” and its necessarily conflicted present and past have been conceptualized and promulgated by official nationalist discourses has, thus far, not offered Filipino gays and lesbians a cognitive and affectional home in which to belong. And yet, by choosing to write about their own specific situations and libidinal experiences, Filipino gay writers are in fact grounding themselves in the local, and addressing its variously urgent needs and concerns, even as they may be said to be imagining, exactly by the same token, increasingly diverse forms of collectivity and/or community.
Perhaps, more than our country’s many canonical and self-important writers, Ladlad’s contributors are poignantly aware of the fact that it is the local that is the real, that is the “sponsor” of all our poetry- and fiction-making, that feeds us and nourishes our bodies and our minds, and that ultimately needs our enlightenment and the “salvation” that only our painfully lived arts can bequeath.
I believe that Ladlad, and the many other works coming out of an increasingly vibrant and efflorescent Filipino gay culture, do not mean to contest the nationalist project per se. Rather, they only wish to “educate” and enrich it, by supplementing its vision with other, discrepant realities, which shall henceforth hopefully be allowed to circulate in the symbolically privileged “national” space. Because Ladlad is a collective effort by and for Filipinos, already it can be said to affirm and to celebrate its own versions of the Filipino nation and the Filipino “soul.”
Finally, what Ladlad reminds us is that, over and again, the idea or story of “Filipinoness” itself needs to be re-thought and re-told by as many Filipinos as possible, until it signifies less and less a fantasized selfhood, time or place, and more and more the local identities and communities—the irreducible and beauteous differences—of which it is, in fact, constituted, and in which we all, in fact, exist.
J. Neil C. Garcia
29 June 2004
Gelderse Kade
Amsterdam