October 15, 2014

Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao:  In a recent interview with writer and activist Naomi Klein on the relationship between global climate change and our neoliberal economic system, journalist Juan Gonzalez provided the following inventory of ecological disasters around the globe: “Scientists from NASA have confirmed that last month was the warmest August on record globally.  Much of the world, including central Europe, northern Africa, parts of South America and the western portions of North America, saw much higher than normal temperatures.  According to the National Climatic Data Center, August was the 354th consecutive month with a global average temperature above the 20th century average.  The news comes as flooding in India and Pakistan has killed more than 400 people and displaced nearly a million.  The flooding is the worst to hit the Kashmir region in half a century.  Severe drought in Central America has left nearly three million people struggling to feed themselves.  And California is suffering its worst drought in over a century.  Meanwhile, a new report by the Norwegian Refugee Council has found more than 22 million people were displaced from their homes by extreme weather last year—more than three times the number of people displaced by war.  In the Philippines alone, over four million people were displaced by Typhoon Haiyan.”[1]

Could you talk about the relationship between the devastating effect of Typhoon Haiyan on the Filipino people (displacement of over four million) and U.S.-Philippine relations?

E. San Juan:  Occurrences in our natural environment acquire meaning only in the context of the history of each society, its past and future.  The Yolanda/Haiyan catastrophe in November 2013 killed at least 6,300 people (according to official figures) and displaced 1.9 million people in the Visayas region.  But testimonies of the victims claim at least 10,000 residents of Tacloban City, Leyte, died and a total of 11 million people made homeless in Samar, Leyte, Aklan, Capiz, Cebu, Palawan and Iloilo. The Red Cross estimates that 22,000 people are missing.  The tropical cyclone was the strongest in recorded history for the Philippines, with 315 km per hour winds (195 miles per hour) with as high as 17 feet storm surge or tsunamis, unprecedented in the annals of storms.  From November 8 up to December, the survivors received no real tangible help from the government.  Up to January 2014, bodies still littered the totally devastated cities of Tacloban, Guian (eastern Samar), and adjacent areas.

     Proof of the neocolonial State’s negligence was CNN Anderson Cooper’s on-site report that no organized relief was in site.  His eyewitness account was denounced by Benigno Aquino’s regime.  Meanwhile, the U.S. Navy, Air Force and assorted logistics were deployed to aid victims in regions where the Communist-led New People’s Army is active.  Evidently this was a diplomatic-propaganda success, capitalizing on widespread distress and misery.  Geopolitical surveillance combined with philanthropic maneuvers overshadowed the help and presence of other international agencies and groups (the Chinese government sent relief aid and a hospital ship, among others).

     But the U.S. intervention opportunistically foregrounded its reach, reinforcing earlier pressures on the country's sovereignty in the form of the Visiting Forces Agreement and eventually the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement signed last April 2014.  The apocalyptic effects of the Haiyan/Yolanda disaster exposed the following:

1.)   The bureaucratic corruption and ineptitude of the neocolonial State in confronting climatic changes occurring every year

2.)   The neocolonial State’s vulnerability to U.S. pressures due to utter dependency on U.S. military/political aid

3.)   The habitual resort to invoking people’s lack of discipline (the devastated areas were “war zones” of desperate, hungry survivors) and blaming Cooper and other reporters for calculating the depth and extent of the suffering of millions.

In short, the Yolanda storm was an epiphanic revelation of how the colonial history of the Philippines left the cities, towns and villages unprepared for coping with a mammoth destruction – a sociocultural event more than just a natural phenomenon – symbolic of the true measure of what neocolonial subjugation really means.

JAC:  The People’s Climate March in New York City last month (with 400,000 participants – the largest of march its kind in history) was followed by the launching of another U.S.-led war in the Middle East.[2]  What kind of intervention could Filipino intellectuals (artists, writers, and scholars) provide to illuminate the connection between global ecological disaster and global war?

ESJ:  There was a visible emotional response by the Filipino delegate to the 2013 United Nations Climate Change Conference, decrying the international indifference or apathy to controlling carbon emissions and other ecological pollutants.  But there was no linkage between Yolanda/Haiyan as a long-term symptom of climatic change and the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, to cite only the most current U.S. imperial adventures.  How can Filipino public intellectuals connect war and ecology if not by focusing on the devastation caused by major fossil-fuel corporations not only in underdeveloped regions but also in the North Atlantic hemisphere itself (for example, the Gulf of Mexico).  And particularly the damage caused by logging and mining by multinational corporations operating in Mindanao as well as in Northern Luzon, causing floods in local areas and in Metro Manila itself.

War is propelled by profit-driven global capital seeking natural resources (oil, minerals, timber, etc.), defying nationalist forces that struggle to protect their homelands from barbaric and predatory business dismissive of the rural peasantry, fisherfolk, and millions who depend on the natural habitats.  While there are Filipino environmentalists active on this front, the connection between climate change and global capital is never made, blaming people's carnivorous appetites instead.  There is much work to be done in making linkages ignored by fragmented, atomistic thinking encouraged by the academy and individualist consumerism.

JAC:  In your collection of essays From Globalization to National Liberation, you speak of the necessity of advancing a tradition of “Filipino… alter/native writing [that] interrogates the ‘post’ in ‘postcolonial’ theory” by dramatizing the complex process of “becoming Filipino.” 

This question is twofold.  How does the one-year anniversary of Typhoon Haiyan provide an opportunity for reflecting upon the significance of a Filipino praxis of alter/native writing?  Could you share an example of this unique approach to Filipino writing from your own collection of poetry?

ESJ:  I illustrate the praxis of alter/native Filipino writing with my poem “Sagot ng Kaluluwa ni Richard Pulga sa Sumpa ng Kawayan” (“Richard Pulga’s Soul Replies to the Bamboo Curse”).[3]  The poem constitutes the dramatic reply of a victim of the Yolanda storm reported in the New York Times, November 15, 2013 – Richard Pulga, 27 years old, who died in Leyte for lack of medical care.  The modality of the poem is a satiric, polemic denunciation of the compensatory slogan, “Filipinos’ resilience is to be praised for their transcending misery and death,” which became the nauseating refrain of Filipinos, Filipino-Americans, assorted do-gooders, and especially the public afflicted by the “white-savior mentality.”  It also addresses the familiar, even ideologically iconic image of the Filipino character compared to the bamboo that bends wherever the wind blows.  It involves the whole revolutionary memory of people who refuse to be like bamboos – Gabriela Silang, Maria Lorena Barros, etc.  It rejects the boxer Pacquiao’s resort to religion as medicine for social afflictions.  It calls on the storm itself as a symptom of people’s wrath, a prophetic metaphor of the rising tide of revolution.  Of course, the dramatic persona of Pulga is a mode of ventriloquism reminiscent of the dead who come back to life, an augury of resurrection, not unlike the voices of those whose bodies were not given proper burial – a portent of what’s to come.

Needless to say, Filipinos also displayed other forms of sympathy or “damay” in the Internet – groups, for example, that composed songs entitled “We Shall Rise,” a song for Yolanda victims.  There are compilations of essays, poems, fiction and others published in ANI magazine, so the range and complexity of artistic-literary responses are as varied as the heterogeneity of the united front of national democracy forces fighting against U.S. imperialism and its client, the Aquino oligarchic State. This multiplicity of expressive resistance assumes invariably an allegorical figuration.  Fredric Jameson argued that “third-world” decolonization narratives always take on allegorical meaning because the experience of the individual/subject in this colonized formation participates in the collective fortune or destiny of the entire community to which she belongs.  I agree with one qualification: allegory in the Philippines dates back not just to the modern period but also all the way back to Spanish colonization.  Folk culture then was not yet the infamous mass culture of Adorno and Benjamin.  Personality cannot be divorced from solidarity since all, without exception, are disciplined and dominated by the imperial power.  Hence, my poem (“Sagot ng Kaluluwa ni Richard Pulga sa Sumpa ng Kawayan”) resonates allegorically but also realistically, given the peculiar circumstance of the Yolanda/Haiyan conjuncture.  In short, Richard Pulga is himself and also the Filipino people rebelling against social/historical fatalism.  We shall see more expressions of this Filipino praxis of alter/native writing in the years to come.

***

SAGOT NG KALULUWA NI RICHARD PULGA SA SUMPA NG KAWAYAN

ni E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

"....Iniluwa ko na ang galit sa pusong nagpupuyos
Nang putulin ang aking binti, ngunit di pa rin nakaligtas
Sa sumpa ng marahas na kalagayan-- O Yolanda!  Yolanda!

Walang kailangan, elastiko't "resilient" daw ako
Mapagbigay, pigil ang luha't tiis ang gutom--sino sila?
Sina Gabriela Silang, Gregoria de Jesus, Lorena Barros kaya iyon?

Di ko malilimutan, O Yolanda!  malanding Yolanda!
Ang kasakiman at kalupitan, di ko mapapahintulutang
Di sumpain ang walang katarungang rehimen ng mga oligarko--

Nawa'y di yumuko't umindayog lamang sa turista
Ang anak ko, tumigas siya tulad ng molabe't lawan sa gubat
Di makuhang ipaghampasan ng dayuhan--  O Haiyan!  O Haiyan!

Ayaw kong lumuhod sa Bibliya tulad ni Manny Pacquiao
Habang dumarating ang mga kasamang armado mula sa dagat--
Ayaw kong ipagpaumanhin ang walang-hiyang panginoon,

"Pork-barrel" tulisang busog sa 'ting dalamhati't pagluluksa--
Tigil na ang pagpapabaya, bumabangon ang sambayanan--
Haiyan, O Haiyan, walang-hiyang sigwa ng himagsikan...."

(Iyan ang iniluwang galit ng bangkay--O Yolanda! O Haiyan!--
na dating ari ni Richard Pulga, 27 anyos, taga-Tacloban, Leyte.)

[Namatay si Richard Pulga, 27 taon, sa Tacloban, Leyte, dahil
sa kakapusan ng tulong ng mediko; New York Times, 11/15/2013]

RICHARD PULGA'S SOUL REPLIES TO THE BAMBOO CURSE

(Translation by the author, E. San Juan, Jr.)

" I vomited the hate boiling in my furious heart
when my leg was amputated, but still I did not escape
the curse of the violent situation--O Yolanda! Yolanda!

Never mind, they said I'm elastic, "resilient"
ready to give way, suppressing tears and enduring hunger--who are they?
Are they pointing to Gabriela Silang, Gregoria de Jesus, Maria Lorena Barros?

I cannot forget it, O Yolanda! mischievous Yolanda!
The avarice and cruelty, I cannot allow that none will curse
this unjust regime of oligarchs, indeed I cannot--

I pray that my children will not bow nor sway for tourist's delight
And that they will stiffen, stay hard like the molave and lawan in the forest
that cannot be so easily twisted by invaders-- O Haiyan!  O Haiyan!

I refuse to kneel down to the Bible mimicking Manny Pacquiao
While armed comrades slowly arrive from the ocean's horizon--
I don't want to plead for the vicious tyrants to be forgiven,

"Pork-barrel" thieves, criminals nourished by our pain and grief--
Halt, you careless heartless fools!  The people are rising--
Haiyan, O Haiyan, shameless storm of revolution..."

(That's the vomited anger of the corpse--O Yolanda! O Haiyan!-
of what was once the property of Richard Pulga, 27 years old, dead at Tacloban, Leyte.)

[Richard Pulga, 27, died in Tacloban, Leyte, due to lack of medical care;

as reported in The New York Times, 11/15/2013]

E. San Juan, Jr. is emeritus professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Ethnic Studies from several U.S. universities.  He was recently Harry Ransom Center Research Fellow, University of Texas, Austin; previously, he was a fellow of the W.E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University; and Fulbright professor of American Studies, Leuven University, Belgium.  A prolific author of over forty books, his recent works include In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation and Ethnicity in the Postmodern World (Lexington Books); Critique and Social Transformation (Mellen); From Globalization to National Liberation (U.P. Press), and Critical Interventions: From Joyce and Ibsen to C.S. Peirce and Maxine Hong Kingston (Saarbrucken, Germany: Lambert).  He just published a revised edition of Sisa’s Vengeance (create-space; amazon.com) and two collections of poetry in Filipino: Ulikba (UST Publishing House) and Kundiman Sa Gitna Ng Karimlan (U.P. Press).

Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University (Smithfield, Rhode Island).  During the 2006-2007 academic year, he was a Mellon Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of English at Kalamazoo College (Michigan).  He received a 2011 Early Career Educator of Color Leadership Award from the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). His teaching and research focus on U.S. Ethnic Studies (specifically comparative approaches to Asian American and African American Studies), Cultural Studies (literary and cultural theory, critical pedagogies), and Women’s Studies (feminist movement and social change).