Payback time: neocolonial discourses in Peter Bacho's Cebu

Grounded in the material conditions of neocolonialism and racism, a Pinoy discourse manifest through premonition gives Teddy agency amid what becomes in Cebu the limited and violent parameters of Filipino American life. Through his social network of similarly constricted men of color, he acquires street-smart mobility and can access, for example, beforehand knowledge of a hit on a Filipino family (180). Teddy's embeddedness in a multiracial community contrasts with the lonely individualism of Ben, who had escaped the neighborhood through seminary school and assimilated into white society. Such achievement cost Ben his connection with his childhood peers; though he returns to his neighborhood parish and is accepted by its community, he continues feeling alienated and he interacts with other Filipino Americans solely as a distant religious authority. The imperial theme of innocence directing Ben gives way to Teddy's Pinoy theme of premonition. Without valorizing the pre-1965 Filipino American condition of severe racism, Bacho suggests the possibility of resistance through the social capital of Pinoy identity and offers an alternative language of Pinoy visibility, one which cuts through the incommensurability of neocolonial discourses obstructing a viable Filipino American presence.

Notes

(1.) For example, Santos's manong protagonist in The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor audits an English course at a Washington, DC university and recites lines of American poetry learned from US teachers in colonial Philippine schools. Instead of being impressed, his white classmates are amused at the spectacle of a colonial subject mimicking the American classics with a thick Filipino accent. The manong is left to brood on pessimistic aphorisms as if spitting upon Franklinian pedagogy (46-56). Of Hagedorn's Dogeaters, Lee observes that when Hagedorn quotes directly from President William McKinley's "benevolent assimilation" speech, she presents it "not as a polemical text that asks for its audience's consent but rather as a relic wherein Christian ideology 'rationalizes' the United States' 'taking' of the Philippines" (138). In the disco-era Hawai'i setting of Linmark's Rolling the R's, Filipino immigrant children continue experiencing the US colonial pedagogy of assimilation and learn in school not to roll their "r's" or pronounce "f's" as "p's." Yet on an English test requiring students to form sentences from assigned vocabulary words, one Pinoy signifies on the neocolonizer's language to hilarious effect and thereby indigenizes his colonial inheritance (48-54, 120-23).

(2.) Such identification with US localities differs from most Filipino American writing, which is characterized by a sense of exile from the Philippines. Like Gier, "I am interested in the predicament of second, third, fourth and even fifth generation Filipino American writers who have come to identify with a specific American landscape and locus of culture(s), who speak English as their first language, whose parents or grandparents decided to settle in the US, yet who still continue to feel set apart, foreign" (6).