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First and Third Worlds in U.S. Literature: Rethinking Carlos Bulosan - Critical Essay
MELUS, Winter, 1998 by Tim Libretti
Thus, in addition to memory's utopian or projective capability, memory functions in Bulosan's proletarian aesthetic in The Cry and the Dedication in at least three other ways. First, memory is a mode of agitation. When Marcuse speaks of the necessity of the recherche du temps perdu, he elsewhere makes clear that anamnesis is not necessarily "remembrance of a Golden Past (which never existed), of childhood innocence, primitive man, etc.," but also of the actual historical experiences and struggles of earlier generations. The painful oppression and humiliating defeats of our forebears may be more agitational than the prospect of an improved world (Jay 235). Second, history is instructional and gives us models of possibility and traditions of struggle to draw on for hope and guidance. Third, reconstructing one's history against the distortions of a colonial culture develops in a person a class consciousness, an awareness of her own determinate position within the class struggle, an understanding of the historical forces and the class, gender, and racial dynamics that have positioned her in the global colonial system; hence the relation between history and class consciousness.
Bulosan enacts this discursive homecoming not with the intent of returning to liberate the Philippines but rather to urge Filipinos in the U.S. to grasp their own determinate position in the global colonial system and to see as folly the idealization of the homeland--a recognition expressed by Bulosan when he writes in 1953 to Dorothy Babb that "humanity has always suffered; there was not a time in man's reality when the mundane paradise we are all seeking actually existed" (Bulosan 1960, 266). It is historical process, not any sense of nostalgic homeland frozen in his memory, that he confronts.
Indeed, it is this sense of historical process that informs the anamnesic impulse in The Cry and the Dedication. In the opening chapter, for example, the precocious young revolutionary leader Hassim is teamed with Old Bio, the wizened veteran of generations of national liberation movements, dating back to the Katipunan's war against Spanish colonialism in the late nineteenth century. As they travel, they discuss Dante's new book in which Old Bio figures prominently, as it traces Philippine history "from the revolutionary viewpoint, from Chief Lapu-Lapu and his pagan men who killed Magellan and most of his mercenary soldiers and drove the others to their boats and thence to Spain, to the formation of the underground in Mt. Arayat, where Alipato took the military leadership in this our latest struggle against tyranny" (5). Their dialogue shifts back and forth between remembrances of the revolution against Spain and the exigencies of the present Huk rebellion against U.S. imperialism:
For a moment, Old Bio was confused by the sudden change of subjects in their discussion. He was trying to assimilate what Hassim had said about their revolutionary tradition, then what they were fighting for in the underground, and now about himself and the revolution against Spain. Time and space seemed to converge in Hassim's mind freely, so that the old man was at a loss. And when he was able, at last, to keep track of Hassim's resilient thinking, he was suddenly transported to another time. (6, emphasis added)
