White Man, Black Dog

Book Review: The Tesseract by Alex Garland, Viking 1998, 226 pages

Judging from the mixed reviews that the British writer Alex Garland’s second novel is reaping, “The Tesseract” is not quite the sensational success that his debut bestseller “The Beach” was in ’96. But “The Tesseract” is no less (if not more) important (and sophisticated) a piece of writing, a must-read for thinking Filipinos, both as a dark cryptic thriller set in Manila and as a young white dude’s fictional-metaphorical abstract of the Filipino predicament in the image of a tesseract.

Garland’s tesseract is a three-dimensional crucifix, an unraveling into three dimensions (height, length, width) of an imaginary four-dimensional cube (or “hypercube”) that is beyond ordinary apprehension, much as the plot of “The Tesseract” is an unraveling into three-stories-that-collapse- into-one grippingly violent tale of life, love, and death in the Philippines that is beyond grasp unless viewed in the light of our colonial history (the fourth dimension is time), if we would only turn on the light and see.

But Garland doesn’t make it easy to see. He is such a tersely descriptive and engaged storyteller, it is easier to get caught up in the three synchronous stories unfolding and racing to and fro and crashing into each other, never mind the cryptic clues that dot the sometimes strange yet mostly familiar landscapes, never mind, even, the “hindi ba” for “hindi pa”.

The first story is Sean’s, a British sailor whose captain lost his life for refusing to pay protection money to the Filipino tyrant Don Pepe, the same Don Pepe he is to see in a few hours, minutes, seconds. He had hoped to meet in an Ermita bar, perhaps Penguin? but Don Pepe insisted he stay where he is, at Hotel Patay, in an abandoned district of Manila that has streets named Sakit, Sugat, Sayang. Rather than be killed – he knows what “Patay” means – Sean literally jumps the gun on the Don, pumps him with bullets, then runs for his life. Teroy and Jojo, bodyguard and driver, give chase, the first without a second thought, the last with some reluctance, remembering stories told him about Don Pepe who hated to be touched (off with the hands of anyone who dared) and who never sired a child for fear of diluting further the faintly mestizo blood now bubbling from his mouth. The chase takes them out of the deserted district into a slum area where Sean is baptized in an open sewer and emerges filthy and black, the object of curiousity of two streetkids cruising. Don Pepe’s men dog his tracks, the streetkids tailing them, all the way out of the slums into a middle-class neighborhood. Eventually the shit-covered foreigner loses steam and enters the yard of the nearest house where lives Rosa, a doctor.

The second story is Rosa’s, once a provincial beauty foolish enough to fall for Lito, a cute fisherman with a deformed torso, (“like a chocolate bar”). But her mother Corazon would have none of Lito, much less of a deformed grandchild, and would give up none of her dreams for Rosa, specially medical school that a rich uncle was eager to fund. The dutiful daughter, Rosa wrenched herself from Lito and Barrio Sarap, became a doctor, married Sonny, settled down in a Manila suburb, and had two children, Lita and Ralph. Ralph was just a baby when Rosa’s father, Doming, died. The funeral in Sarap was a nightmare. Separated from Sonny by the crowd, Rosa and her baby were confronted at the graveyard by spurned lover Lito who proceeded to transform Ralph into his image, chest eaten by acid, and then to wash and soothe the screaming baby as though he were the father. Like Doming who once survived a dynamite explosion and made it home on autopilot, Rosa and her family survived the pain of Ralph’s rebirth. Waiting now for Sonny, she remembers, and wonders still, what it was she was being saved from when she moved to Manila.

The third story is Vincente’s and Totoy’s, the streetkids tailing the chase. Cente came to Manila with his father five years ago. Within the day his father had disappeared, just never came back from an errand. For a year or so, Cente didn’t speak a word, mutely casing, and surviving, the streets. Until he met Totoy, also 13 but smaller, streetsmart in a sadder way, his mother a drug addict, whore, and pimp. Totoy won’t let her sell his body but he sells his dreams and fantasies, as Cente does, to Alfredo, a rich scholar doing research on Filipino street children, tracking their sleeping dreams over time. Cente is Alfredo’s star dreamer, his dreams startling, his notions of self (“I’m just me.”) unsettling, and his questions about hell and paradise (pricked by an Irish priest’s soup-kitchen lectures) confounding. As confounding as Alfredo’s wife jumping from their penthouse balcony.

On this night, Cente and Totoy are on U.N. Avenue, playing war games. Armed with “grenades” (a handful of rusty nails) Totoy zeroes in on a passing Honda saloon and “disables” the “enemy tank”. A good choice, they agree, as they take note of the driver speaking to a cellphone: apparently a family man on the way home to his loved ones. Then they run for their lives, and continue to run for the sake of running, until they’ve run so far they find themselves in an unfamiliar district, strangely abandoned, just in time to hear gunshots. The two boys home in on the action, out of the wasteland into the slums nearby where their path crosses the dirty foreigner’s. It is Cente who decides to go on. It’s all too close to his recurrent dream of a running man (his father maybe?) that always stops short of identification and resolution. This running man’s story he would see through to the end. As violently as it began in Hotel Patay the story ends in Rosa’s kitchen with Corazon caught in the crossfire, Teroy emptying his gun into Sean, and Rosa in shock. It’s familiar territory, she’s been here before, in “the aftermath of dynamite”, but she hears her frightened children calling and she snaps to autopilot. Sonny, as usual, arrives too late on the scene. But not too late for Cente and Totoy who recognize the enemy tank. `We’d better go,’ said Totoy quietly as the Honda driver ran past. ‘Rosa?’ yelled the driver. ‘What the hell is going on?’ ‘We’d better,’ Vincente agreed. As they hit the street, they heard a woman’s voice behind them and the driver’s sudden gasp of alarm. ‘God!’ he exclaimed, as if his faith had been punched out of his body. Totoy looked back over his shoulder and Vincente didn’t.

In a sense, the critics are right. It would seem that Garland barely manages to tie the three stories together. It would seem that only the chase connects them and there’s nothing for Cente to get but a sense of figuring unwittingly in a bloody affair. There is nothing for Rosa but the inescapable pattern of violence in her most private life, in Manila or in Sarap. There was nothing for Sean but death — he may as well have died in Hotel Patay.

In another sense, the critics are wrong. There is more to “The Tesseract”. Look beyond the storyline and turn on to the Black Dog. The black dog running in a red mist on the cover. The black dog running through titles: “Black Dog” for Sean’s story, which is also the book’s first chapter. “Black Dog Is Coming” for Rosa’s, midway into the book. And “Black Dog Is Here” for Vincente’s. And what seemed minor and unrelated elements – the black dog (as omen of death) and the red mist (of violent madness) – suddenly connect and throb with meaning. Black is white and white is black. The Black Dog in our lives, the omen of death, is the white man Sean gone mad, killing Filipinos by mistake (Don Pepe wasn’t out to kill him, but to offer him a job) and then running for his life. Unhappily for the white man, he runs out of bullets (or is it, his gun proves useless after falling into the sewer with him?) and the Filipinos prove indefatigable, dog him to the end, and waste him. Happy ending, sort of. Infinitely better than if the white-man-turned-black got away with it.

The question is, does the resolution have to be so violent? Will Rosa never have peace? Amazingly enough, Garland has an answer if you’re looking. Rewind to the “wasteground”, the abandoned district of Manila, site of Hotel Patay and streets named Sugat, Sakit, Sayang, which freaked out Sean and led him to kill, and which spooked the streetkids who were surprised to find themselves lost in Manila.

“…It was confusing to have stumbled across such uninhabited desolation in Manila. Not that desolation was a rarity, but you would find people living in it. Equally confusing, it was clear that the area had once – perhaps even recently – been full of life. The evidence was everywhere, in filth-blackened shop-fronts, peeling fly-posters and busted neon signs. Moreover, peering inside the buildings, bizarre details appeared. Through broken windows, restaurant tables with placemats and beer bottles could be dimly made out. One derelict bar even had a juke-box. It lay on its side, dusty but apparently intact, surrounded by crumpled drink-cans and torn newspaper, like a Japanese treasure chest in a sea of cursed banknotes. It was hard to imagine why such reusable and recyclable assets had been abandoned, rather than expertly stripped. It seemed as if, in the space of one bad hour, the night-life had been chased away.”

There is no such place in Manila, except possibly in a fourth dimension of Garland’s imagination, where past and future fold into the present, as in a science-fiction kind of time-warp zone, and where appearances are deceptive – grim setting for ritual encounters with the white man. To break through the time-barrier, you run, fast as the Black Dog running for his life, fast as Vincente and Totoy running for the sake of running, running as meditation. “They fell into a compromise rhythm that took into account the differences in their sizes and length of stride. While they were running, a roughly equal distance was maintained between their shoulders – or, for that matter, any chosen point on their bodies. Every time one of them looked to the side, he saw his friend in the same space he had been occupying before. In fact, relative to each other’s position, the two boys barely moved at all. But around them, the neighbourhood changed.”

Imagine the strange neighborhood as part of a four-dimensional Manila, Manila as a hypercube, impossible to grasp. Garland’s story begins in such a center and then streaks out in linear fashion, unraveling into real-time, crashing straight into Rosa’s life at the foot of the tesseract that is a three- dimensional crucifix. Fittingly (and ironically) enough, the story’s final spoken word is from the man of the house (Sonny-come-lately). “‘God!’ he exclaimed, as if his faith had been punched out of his body”.

The white man is the cross we bear. How much longer? Who knows, but Garland is saying it can be resolved in real time, in the hell of a world of Sonny and Rosa,though I would think only with deliberate effort on the part of every Sonny and Rosa to get their act together in a common cause.

Fancy gaining such insights from a white dude of 28, young enough to be my son. Perhaps there is something to look forward to, after all, from Generation X.

Our language predicament

Philippine Daily Inquirer 15 August 1998

I HAVE a feeling that Education Secretary Andrew Gonzales was pulling his punches when he conveyed to media his concern that some 20 percent of the high school population of 5 million is deficient in the use of English as well as in math and science subjects. Only 20 percent? And which 20 percent? The rich? A cross-section?

As a writer for print and television in English and Filipino, I have had occasion to grapple with our language problems, most recently last August 1997 in the company of Gina Lopez and the production staff of ABS-CBN Foundation, producer of TV shows for children. I had been invited, along with other TV writers and teachers, to brainstorm on a 30-minute show in English that would complement English-language classes for Grades 2 and 5. This was in response, I was told, to a clamor from public school teachers who found the foundation’s programs helpful and who admitted that they needed help too in teaching English. I accepted the position of headwriter and for a couple of months sat down with public and private school teachers as well as with the program’s producers and directors to get a handle on academic requirements and creative parameters. Unfortunately the project never got off the ground (the peso fell) so I don’t know if my concept and treatment would have worked (I was thinking drills). But I do know that the problem is much bigger than Brother Andrew’s figures suggest.

My estimate is, it’s the other way around! It is not that 20 percent of 5 million high school students are deficient in English but that only some 20 percent are proficient in oral and written English. And, except for rare exceptions, these are likely to be the ones who go to private high schools where teachers speak good English and who live in homes where the elders speak English as a second language and who provide the children with ample reading fare (newspapers, magazines, books, computers) all in English, because the only way to learn a language well is to become immersed in it.

Time was when Filipinos were famous for being the only English-speaking people in Asia. From the American occupation until the ’60s, it didn’t matter if you were rich or poor. As long as you went to school, you learned to speak English, it being the official medium of instruction. I remember picking it up more quickly than most; I supposed it was because I got a lot of practice both in school and at home. In school it was all we were allowed to speak except in Sariling Wika class. At home it was the second language; I was always trying out my English on my mother who would always correct my mistakes, and my father was always asking me to read out loud the daily columns of Teodoro Valencia and Joe Guevara.

It was in the ’70s (if memory serves) when Marcos decreed a bilingual policy for education: English would still be taught and used in teaching math and the sciences but other subjects would be taught in the mutant Filipino, the Tagalog-based national language enriched with words from other dialects and languages that defy translation or require none because they’ve become part of the mainstream. At the time, it seemed like a victory for nationalists who had long been advocating such a policy in the interest of developing a truly national language that would allow full expression of the native psyche and intelligence and which would bind all Filipinos.

In the long run, however, the bilingual policy hasn’t worked. We failed to guard against problems we should have anticipated.

I submit that we took our English-speaking skills for granted. We didn’t realize what it took to speak good English and what it would take to sustain it in a bilingual environment. Perhaps we thought that we had our English too down pat to ever lose it. Maybe we thought it was so ingrained, it would get passed on through our genes. No such luck. Without sufficient practice in speaking, reading and writing, we’re losing it instead, and it’s beginning to show. Even on TV newscasts, the English is becoming sloppy, with newscasters breezing through all the wrong prepositions and mixing up idiomatic expressions.

Students are said to be doing better in classes conducted in Filipino than in English, but it could just be the natural advantage of a native language. It doesn’t mean that the bilingual policy has been good for the Filipino language. In fact, it has failed to evolve into a truly national language, what with the Cebuanos still fighting it and the authorities still insisting on what a writer friend calls ”laboratory Pilipino” na ang hirap namang basahin at intindihin, at napaka-pormal ng dating. It is so stilted, so different from the lingua franca, or the Filipino spoken at home, in the streets, and in media, that it confounds and bewilders rather than grabs, excites or inspires.

I can understand the reigning authorities’ desire to preserve the old forms and expressions, but it will have to wait until we get the hang of Tagalog again. Most of us Tagalogs who became fluent in English lost a lot of our Tagalog along the way. In the early ’80s, when I started writing in and translating into Tagalog, my vocabulary was terrible. A script that was a breeze to do in English was always a struggle to do in Tagalog, lalo na in laboratory Pilipino.

Even with help from dictionaries, I found that to render many English ideas or concepts in Tagalog I needed to do more than translate: I had to do some rethinking too. The writer-translator has to rethink the idea in terms of Filipino experience and find ways of expressing it in the kind of Tagalog that gets the message across in one reading. And even then, I found there’s no dropping English altogether because in many instances the English words (and English spellings) are already more widely used and understood than the Tagalog. In the end, I settled into a kind of Filipino that is more Tagalog than English but more Taglish than purist.

For now the President might have to settle for the same kind of Filipino. Given the admitted inadequacy of everyone’s Tagalog, anything else would slow down rather than speed up communications among government officials and between government and the people. Also, the President would have to continue working with English pa rin, given the fact that in the Visayas and Mindanao, no Tagalog or Filipino is spoken and English is the official medium of communication. So, yes, for the present, all Filipino communications should have English versions for the non-Tagalogs and all English communications should have Filipino versions for the poor-in-English. Until we get back the hang of both.

Meanwhile, we would be wise to value Taglish for its capacity to take in and keep up with the English language, and as a starting point for learning Filipino. Taglish works just fine, gets messages across in no uncertain terms. That is, as long as we don’t try to Filipinize English words spelling them Tagalog style, which only trips up readers and impedes comprehension and reading appreciation. Taglish does need reining in where it’s gone wild, but it also deserves affirming where it is correct and especially where it is effective, be it spiced by gayspeak or street slang.

The bottom line is, we can have both English and Filipino but only if we work at it. Schools should bring back drills, big time, and everyone should be encouraged to practice by reading aloud, with or without an audience. Media, specially television, should help out by making space and time for children and adult programs that teach good Filipino and good English. And it would help greatly if the language minorities would bow to the Tagalog majority and give Filipino a break, for the common good and for democracy’s sake.

Falling chandelier and other omens

Inquirer Commentary 25 July 1998

Filipinos are a superstitious people. We see meaningful relationships between apparently unconnected events that happen to occur at the same time or in close sequence: the number 13 and the Estrada presidency, the chandelier and the inaugural, the chandelier and the number 13. It comes from an intuitive grasp of Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity which, going beyond science (cause-and-effect), “takes the coincidence of eventsin space and time as meaning something more than mere chance” and which is the very principle underlying the use of the I Ching and astrology (among other occult arts) in making sense of “the essential situation prevailing” for any one person or group at any moment in time.

This is why we continue to be disturbed by the story of a Palace chandelier crashing to the floor just a few seconds after President Estrada passed beneath it. The President had just taken his oath that noon in Barasoain. He had just arrived in Malacañang that afternoon and was on his way to swearing in the new Cabinet officials when the chandelier crashed. Happening as it did in the first few hours of the new administration, it changed the quality and temper not just of the rest of the day – hitherto happy and hopeful – but of the rest of the presidential term.

Clearly, a warning. If it were not an attempt on the President’s life, then a warning of danger, of sinister human forces at play. If an accident, then of forces less menacing but quite as startling and disturbing. The message is, expect the unexpected, a pattern has been set.

The National Bureau of Investigation has since declared the crash an accident caused by faulty electrical wiring, but of course we refuse to drop it. Perhaps because we’re not convinced that that 70-kilo chandelier was not more securely attached to the ceiling than by electrical cables.

Unfortunately, no photographs or videotapes of the fallen chandelier and the hole in the ceiling have been released, which makes you wonder what’s really going on. Surely there were media around, surely pictures were taken. And yet media have been (and continue to be) kind enough to desist from printing or showing them until now. Perhaps it was not an accident after all, the investigation is still ongoing, better for media to cooperate with government and not alarm the public?

Would that media had been as prudent about declaring Estrada the 13th President of the Republic – which has proved just as scary, the number 13 being associated in the minds of Catholics with the Last Supper and the subsequent betrayal of Christ by Judas.

Estrada is the 13th only if we count all the presidents starting with Aguinaldo, including Quezon and Osmeña of the Commonwealth period, and Laurel of the Japanese occupation, and continuing with Roxas, Quirino, Magsaysay, Garcia, Macapagal, Marcos, Aquino, and Ramos.

But why count Quezon and Osmeña when we were openly still a colony during their terms of office, and why Laurel when he was merely an appointee of the Japanese invaders? And if we’re going to count Aguinaldo, why not the Supremo Bonifacio? By my count, including Bonifacio and discounting Quezon et al, Estrada is the 11th president. And if we count them all, Estrada is the 14th.

Again, you wonder what the media are up to. One moment they’re playing fast and loose with numbers, sorry na lang si Erap, the next moment they’re playing down a crashed chandelier, kawawa naman si Erap? It would help if we could get our facts straight so that we know what we’re really up against; only then can we focus our energies on countering the negative vibes, whether through prayer or political advocacy.

It would also help to keep in mind that the chandelier missed Erap, which was damned lucky – sinusuwerte talaga. And that in the horoscope of June 30, high noon, the Sun, symbolizing the government, occupies the Midheaven, the highest point in the chart, which augurs well for the republic, indicating a government that has the power, against all odds, to withstand opposition and fulfill its promise of Erap para sa mahirap.

Of course, what’s lucky for the masses won’t be lucky for the privileged few who have long enjoyed the care and protection of government. As some astrologers and feng shui experts already have said, the chandelier is symbolic of the rich, and shattered lights signify shattered illusions.

It’s the rich, the people who can afford (and who like) chandeliers, who will be most affected by the radical changes that President Estrada would need to institute to lift up the impoverished masses.

It won’t be easy, as current events reflect – change never is. But if the rich could rise to the challenge of reinventing themselves for the sake of the nation, and if Erap stands fast, guided above all by considerations of the common good, he could well be right: This could truly be the greatest performance of his life.

Edsa ’98: The Dating Game

Inquirer 3 Mar 1998

At least the level of discourse on the Edsa Revolution has progressed from simple stuff answerable by yes or no – was Cory in Edsa or not? did Ramos hesitate to join Enrile or not? did Marcos order the soldiers to shoot or not? were the Marcoses kidnapped or not? – to a real question: When should the nation celebrate Edsa?

As an astrologer with a fetish for correct birth times, I would say it depends on what we want to celebrate.

If we want to celebrate the defection of the military reformists which led to the display of People Power, then the 22nd it is. What time? Juan Ponce Enrile says 3 p.m., when (according to my chronology) he rejected Gregorio Honasan’s and Eduardo Kapunan’s suggestion that he escape to Cagayan and decided instead to make a last stand in Camp Aguinaldo. Fidel Ramos, however, might prefer a 6:45 birth time, when together he and Enrile faced the press and announced their rebellion. And then, again, if we’re going to be true to story of Edsa, which is all about People Power, I would push for a 9 to 10 o’clock birth time, when the people first got into the picture through Butz Aquino and Manila Archbishop Jaime Cardinal Sin.

But if what we want to celebrate is the inauguration of the new democracy ushered in by Corazon C. Aquino, then the 25th it is. What hour of the day? Corystas would say 10:46 a.m., when she was sworn in as President. Except that at the time, Marcos was still in Malacañang Palace and still held legitimate power. He did not leave the Palace until 9:10 p.m. and he didn’t leave Clark Air Base in Pampanga until 5 a.m. the next morning. Until either time, the old government was arguably still in place. Only when Marcos was really gone did the new democracy begin.

Actually we should be celebrating Edsa neither on the 22nd nor on the 25th but on the 23rd of February, when unarmed throngs stopped the tanks (the first of such encounters) at the EDSA-Ortigas intersection. That display of People Power, captured on satellite TV for all the world to see, not only rendered the tyrant and his army powerless, it also forced the reconciliation, for the sake of peace, of the two anti-Marcos camps (Cory’s end Enrile’s) that were poised to grab power. That mind-boggling manifestation of People Power between 2:30 and 4:30 in the afternoon of the 23rd – and none other – was the high point of Edsa.

So why haven’t we been celebrating that? Basically, because it’s taken this long for our political leaders to acknowledge that Edsa wasn’t just one big blur of miraculous events but a definite series of explainable events with a beginning, a middle, and an ed. There was no miracle in Edsa – no sick were healed, no water turned into wine, the sun didn’t dance, and the Marian apparition is all in the cardinal’s mind. Edsa was about ordinary people in great numbers who dared to confront, unarmed, the military might of the dictator and discovered in the process their extraordinary powers when united by a common intent. Walang himala! As it turned out, the formidable task of removing a dictator was well within a people’s power, and the Filipino people proved it in Edsa.

Everything that happened during those four days, from the Enrile-Ramos defection to the stunning debut of People Power to the Marcos-Ver escape can be explained. None of it happened by miracle. Enrile and Ramos, for instance, didn’t wake up on the 22nd to the voice of God telling them to drop Marcos and join Cory. They defected so that Enrile could challenge Cory for the presidency. Unfortunately for Enrile, the people wanted no other than Cory, and the rest is verifiable history, except that the defectors have yet to straighten out their twisted accounts, allowing instead the Church’s miracle myth to prosper.

The effect has been not only to diminish the people’s part in the Edsa uprising but also to place it beyond the reach of human comprehension and recreation. Unlike other peak human experiences, Edsa is one that we are not being encouraged to recreate in our minds and analyze and learn from. I suspect it’s a conspiracy (shades of Hillary’s right wing), deliberate or not, to suppress what may be perceived as subversive material.

But truth has a way of coming out. And hope springs eternal. At least now (even if it has taken 12 years) we are clear about a beginning, a middle, and an ending. Same time next year, we might even be celebrating People Power. For a change.