Payback time: neocolonial discourses in Peter Bacho's Cebu

MELUS, Spring, 2004 by Elizabeth H. Pisares

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      "Oh Ben, you have to understand," Clara said with disappointment,
   "you have to understand. Things are a little different.... "
      Clara paused in midsentence and glanced at Ben. His look--so
   young, forlorn, and American touched her.
      "Never mind," she sighed with a slow shake of her head. (88-89)

In Manila, the second valence of Ben's innocence, the Catholicism of Spanish colonial discourse, is challenged through the trajectory of sexual repression. Ben, devoted young priest, is a virgin. However, his commitment to the vow of celibacy begins to crumble when Ben finds that religious belief does not console him aider his mother's death. His doubt advances upon encounters with Filipino Catholics whose practices of piety repulse him. In addition to the suicide by crucifixion, Ben finds idolatry in a Quiapo church. Repulsed by this animism, he is disturbed more by the disparity of faith between him and these vulgar Filipino Catholics: unlike himself, they believe in God and resurrection through Christ. By the time he arrives in Manila, his priestly identity has all the threat and gravity of "a puppy in a box" (95). Ben's libido returns, and with Clara's beautiful Filipina mestiza assistant, Ellen Labrado, he breaks his vow of celibacy.

Confronted later by a hotel employee who says that he is no longer a "real priest," Ben returns to the US. Running away from smoggy, chaotic Manila to the orderly streets of Seattle, he believes he has retreated to safety, away from a history he believes was his parents' but never his own, away from a sexuality he thinks he would still be ignorant of were it not for Ellen. Instead, Filipino historical discourses haunt Ben in the form of recent Filipino immigrants, and utang na loob is violently demonstrated: the son of a friend is murdered by a "FOB"; in return, a murder suspect and his parents are killed; in payback for those murders, the friend and her middle son are killed and Ben is injured.

Philippine chaos repeats with vengeance in orderly American streets despite Ben's attempts to forget it or explain it away. This violence stems from conflicts between native and US-born Filipinos; yet Ben, as a Filipino American, will not recognize his culpability in these ethnic conflicts. His best friend's harassment of a new classmate, a recent immigrant from the Philippines, is introduced as "an incident in Ben's past he chose not to relate, or remember" (140-41). Confronted by a figure representing his colonial past, Ben refuses to identify with the immigrant, participating in an act of forgetting characteristic of US historical pedagogy. He is sensitive to the origins of the violence in barkada--it is at this point in the story that the narrator describes through ethnographic discourse the Filipino peer group and he comments that despite growing up in the US, Filipino Americans imitate their immigrant parents' blind, destructive loyalties. But just as the denial of one's colonial history cannot be equated with control of it, an awareness of that history by itself does not constitute the prevention of its violent consequences. The historical discourses that Ben is telling will not undo what somewhere else he is told.

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Payback time: neocolonial discourses in Peter Bacho's Cebu

MELUS, Spring, 2004 by Elizabeth H. Pisares

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