Decolonizing bodies, reinscribing souls in the fiction of Ninotchka Rosca and Linda Ty-Casper

One character who finds fulfillment in politicization is Sister Lutgarda, a Roman Catholic nun who moves beyond the silence and obedience expected of the traditional religious. Far from being anything like the caricature of the repressed, repressive, narrow-minded nun, she is vibrant and youthful: "She is sixty-five but looks about twenty years younger, almost like a 'bride adorned in readiness,' for her face is bright, shiny with joy. God's love seems to keep her lively" (83). She arrives at a profound expression of her faith by bravely throwing herself into the protest movement and speaking out fearlessly, in spite of the risk of retaliation, against the sexual abuses sanctioned by a male-dominated, militaristic society. She also endures sniggers from worldly women who find it ridiculous that a nun should be promoting sex education and ask her what she knows about sex, as well as the disapproval of elderly aunts who believe that she should have been kept in the remote Mindanao missions or that "nuns are supposed to spend their days in prayer, and look holy" (84).

Instead, Sister "Lut" tries to teach, through family workshops, that "it is ignorance of sex that causes people to abuse each other" and causes unhappiness in relationships. She decries the evils of a "sex-oriented, sex-saturated society" that "inevitably sanctions infidelities" (84) and degrades women through a double standard. Sister Lut condemns, by implication, the government-endorsed sex trade, one source of foreign revenue for the Marcos regime. Rather than reflecting the old religious ideas of the need for strict control of the body, Sister Lut's concern with the dignity of sexuality represents another strand of religion, one that stresses the belief that religion and spirituality can be expressed and lived through the body; her radiant youthfulness is a manifestation of the effect of this positive spirituality.

While Sister Lut appears only briefly in Ty-Casper's novel, this realistic portrait is noteworthy for a number of reasons. Hearing her, a male relative gets up to describe nuns as "the bravest men in the Philippines, because there are four of them to each priest who stands up to the government" (84). She could have been modeled on many real-life nuns active in the anti-Marcos movement, some of them seen worldwide in the media coverage of the 1986 People Power revolution. The widespread admiration for their reinscription of their role through political activism is evident in a popular film of the 1980s, Filipino director Mike de Leon's "Sister Stella L," which shows a nun's growing involvement in political struggle as she speaks up against the torture and murder of striking workers and opponents of the dictatorship. "Sister Stella" and Sister Lut represent the turnaround in thinking of the Catholic church, which, moving far from its position in the Spanish era, championed human rights in overt opposition to Marcos and, as an institution, supported the pro-democracy movement (Schock 357).