Jessica Hagedorn and Manila magic - Asian Perspectives

Susan Evangelista

In 1975, a then relatively unknown Filipino-American poet named Jessica Hagedorn wrote a poem called "Song for my Father" in which life in Manila took on some of the surreal appearance of life in some Latin-American city under siege:

dope dealers are executed

in public

and senators go mad

in prison camps

the nightclubs are burning

with indifference

curfew draws near

soldiers lurk in jeeps

of dawn warzones

as the president's daughter

bogies nostalgically

under the gaze

of sixteen smooth bodyguards

and decay is forever

even in the rage

of humorless revolutionaries (Danger and Beauty 37)

The tone of this poem, and of a few other poems and stories dealing with life in the Philippines, suggested an interesting contrast with Hagedorn's other work, her Filipino-American writing which, although it shares the same sharp-edged glitter and flamboyance of the Philippine-centered work, lacks its dreamy, fantastic cast. Hagedorn's novel, Dogeaters, nominated for the National Book Award, deals with life in Manila in the 1970's, and makes this reader think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude. In contrast to Marquez, Hagedorn's story is urban-centered (and terribly urbane), moving in a milieu which could only be Manila, with its outrageous blend of Spanish elitism And elegance gone seedy, American flash and decadence, and Third world desperation and brazenness. It is slicing and cutting and irreverent, disjointed like Marquez's dream world, but a little more nerve-tingling than dust-covered Maconda. Nevertheless it carries a strong sense of magic realism, of bizarre characters and strange coincidences, of real life gone unreal with a sudden verbal twist, exposing the reader to "a world totally reconstructed and subverted by fantasy" (Llosa 5). We are left in limbo between the magic and the real, in a world as it might be described by a peasant, for instance, or a street-boy - someone far removed from the logic and power of that world, experiencing reality but a reality touched with the magic of incomprehension.

Jessica Hagedorn was born in l949 in the Philippines to Visayan Hagedorn family. She immigrated to the United States as a, twelve-year old in 1961, living in San Francisco and New York, where she was deeply influenced by black soul music, black culture, rock and roll, and a group of black and Chicana women writers and musicians. She was one of four women featured in McGraw-Hill's early collection of ethnic and women's poetry, Four Young Women: Poems. She has published in various Asian-American collections and magazines: Liwanag (1975), Time to Greez (1975), The Greenfield Review (1975), and. Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian-American Poets (1983). She has published three books of her own: Dangerous Music (1975), Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions (1981), and Dogeaters (1990).

As a Filipina writing in the United States, Hagedorn had strong literary antecedents to draw on. Filipino immigration to the mainland United States started in the 1920's, after the waves of Chinese and Japanese immigration had been controlled by discriminatory legislation. By 1932 Carlos Bulasan, an Ilocano of basically peasant stock, had launched his very prolific writing career, in effect getting a head start on what was to become the Asian American Movement of the seventies. Bulosan's America is in the Heart is still considered the classic account of the Filipino-American historical experience, and the old manong whom Bulosan loved so, still around in the fifties and sixties and seventies, older, of course, and maybe poorer, became the natural starting point for the new Filipino-American writers. Oscar Penaranda worked in the hop fields and the salmon canneries to duplicate the experience of the manongs, while Al Robles recorded hundreds of hours of taped interviews with the "old-timers" and Lou Syquia went into political activism to forestall the demolition of the old International Hotel in San Francisco, where so many of the manongs lived. And these men wrote - poems, stories, plays - which dealt with the life experiences, the oppression, and the powerlessness of the Filipino manongs, as young men in the thirties and as old men in the sixties.

Jessica Hagedorn too drew on this tradition, writing first of Filipinos in America. She does not write about the manongs, however, but about their descendants, working class Filipino teenagers in the United States in the sixties, and she does so against the background of sixties music: Smokey Robinson, Fats Domino, Little Richard, Jimi Hendrix. There is a certain seediness in the enviromnent in which her characters move, but the music relates them to time and place, making them as definitely American as they are Filipino. Nellie, for instance, in "Smokey's Getting Old," is a lower class immigrant who went to the United States in 1959, unwillingly because as a young teenager she didn't want to leave her barrio friends and the simple pleasures of wearing orange lipstick and eating roasted pig and going to the movies on Sundays. She lives in Stockton, one of the centers of early Filipino immigration to California, until her father tries to marry her off to a fifty-eight year old manong bachelor. At this Point she runs away to San Francisco where she rats her hair, hangs around Woolworth's, and goes to see Smokey Robinson at the Cow Palace, fitting in but never mainstream, in love with Ruben, a Mexican, whom her father can't stand "because he's a Spik."

We find more explicit comments on Filipinos as immigrants in the novella Pet Food. This is a wild story about an immigrant Filipina, a writer named George Sands; Boogie, George's long-time friend, gay but bordering on straight, being kept (and kept high) by a Japanophile named Prince Gengi; silver Daddy, an art-lover-slum-landlord from whom George rents a flat; Silver Daddy's daughter called Porno, after the movies she makes; and Auntie Greta, George's transvestite uncle who is eventually murdered by one of the young men he loves so. George's mother doesn't like her friend Boogie because he is gay, he is an "American born Pinoy with no class," and he "smells":

"Boogie doesn't smell," I retorted. "He wears tangerine oil."

"That boy smells like a fruit alright," my mother said smugly. (16)

George and her family, because they are upper class, seem to be less foreign, less immigrant, than Boogie's family. In a conversation about foreign status, this interchange takes place:

"How do you know? You were born in America. You've never been home," I said. "All I have to do is listen to my father talk in his broken English," Boogie said wearily. Look st his worn-out hands. See my mother's shy and frightened face every time she gets on a bus. They're permanent immigrants in this lousy place..." (36)

Hagedorn's Filipino-American voice is broader, though, than that of the male Filipino writers - broader perhaps because she is a woman and feels an easy identity with other ethnic women, other Third World women trying to operate within the First World. The First World is a dangerous one for women, especially for foreign women:

there are rapists

out there

* * *

some of them

don't like Asian women

they stab them

* * *

there are killers

out there

some of them

smile at me (Danger and Beauty 61-2)

There are other dangers too, more subtle forms of Violence done to the soul. These show up in "Natural Death" in direct contrast to the glitter of the superficial environment of gold lame jumpsuits and rhinestone cloaks and young men wearing yellow satin dresses created at the start of the poem. There is a sudden intensification into "telephone calls/from anxious mothers," then a whole list of things that these mothers warn their daughters to beware of:

beware of nightclubs

and cuban names

beware of the street

beware of doorbells and abortions

beware of pregnancy

beware of public transportation

beware of frozen meat

and strange men

and rabid animals

beware of strange color

strange smells

strange sounds

strange feelings

beware of loneliness

and the rhythm

of your heartbeat (70)

The sudden internalizing of fear that tells the daughters to beware of themselves, of their own living, is presumably the natural extension of the other fears that lead so inevitably to "Natural Death."

Still, Hagedorn's women are strong people-for-themselve, no matter how much they are victimized and marginalized by the world around them. "Canto de Nada," for instance, is the song of a woman named Nada, who is of course nothing but also everything, all women, especially all oppressed women: daughter of ainu and t'boli / igorot and sioux / sister to inca and zulu." She is also all male stereotypes of women, from "the brand new bag" to "the dragon lady's body," "the punk," "the dancing girl." She is also

the divine virgin

waiting for a trick

on the borderline

between emeryville

and oakland. (18)

She is nothing except music, but she is stir all women, and all things for herself. In that sense "She is the real thing."

Hagedorn is her most militant in a very short one-act Play called "Chiquita Banana." Here the main character is Carmen Miranda, a prostitute entertainer, who wears "her inevitable banana lady costume" and who is later to refer to herself as a militant banana. Cesar Romero, bartender and pimp, is eagerly awaiting her arrival and all but kow-tows to her. A white woman drug pusher named Jean Harlow is also there, and is as patronizing as Romero as she offers Carmen some pure cocaine. Then Carmen's mother Miranda enters, with her younger daughter Ruby Delicious, who is in a drugged stupor. Miranda sings a few lines from Cole Porter:

love for sale

appetizing love for sale

love that's fresh and still unspoiled

love that's only slightly soiled

love for sale.

Ruby is, it turns out, pregnant, and the mother has decided simply to sell her off to the highest bidder. Immediately the two white men in the place start dealing with the mother for the daughter, and it looks as if Ruby is to be auctioned off to Mr. Milktoast. Carmen, however, intervenes, demanding scathingly of Milktoast, "do you think we're in some sort of zoo for yotir amusement? Do you think we'd make good wives because we look like your mama's maid back in Sandiego? Or do you think we're gonna do the mambo for you in bed?" Carmen then produces a gun and hands it to her sister Ruby, who shoots the two white men and returns it. Carmen shoots Cesar Romero, shoots Jean Harlow, shoots her mother, and then turns towards the(, audience and shoots her absent father, presumably as being any man there. There is a blackout, and Carmen's soft voice is heard singing:

the militant banana....

peeled his chiquita sticker

and split, saying

I'm not no chiquita freak banana

i gits browner and better

sweeter and cheaper for de people!

This is the voice of Hagedorn as an ethnic writer in America. Filipino-American consciousness, as an American-based ethnic movement, was just beginning to blossom, however, when martial law was declared in the Philippines by then-President Marcos and a small group of political exiles, intellectuals, and Philippine-based writers gathered in San Francisco, and to some extent simply coopted the fledgling Filipino-American movement. These exiles had a great deal of political understanding and sophistication and tended to view the immigrant community as an offshoot of the colonial and exploitative relationship between the United States and the Philippines in general. Naturally enough, they refocused attention on the internal politics and living situation in the Philippines. The work of the women writers in this post-'72 era is most interesting; Emily Cachapero, for instance, writes in the same sort of sharp, bright, political but impressionistic style that Hagedorn learned to use so well. In "miss philippine islands," she writes in commemoration of the Miss Universe Contest held in Manila as part of the "bread and circuses" distractions offered to the Filipino population during the early years of martial law.

miss philippine islands

at the miss universe contest

miss PI at the miss universe

contest has highways across

her body

everyone at the show

has a map

and those men

un-fresh from nam

know the map

by heart

wearing their navy caps

at the same slanted angle

as an asian cunt

is supposed to be

waiting for miss PI

to parade

in a thigh high slitted

cheong-sam

even though she's not chinese

waiting for a peek

she has highways

across her body

but bypasses isabella

she hides it under that still ratted hair

trying to muffle the sound

of ating tao

cebu and leyte

her breasts

surrender time and time again

to the slightest touch

just like in the war

she has highways

across her body

and mindanao

muslim land

moro land

is under the fold in her belly

it's a secret

kept between the thighs

miss PI at the miss universe contest

knows who the winner is

even though she doesn't like

the answer

because the winner is

the winner is

the loser. (Liwanag)

The poem is worth quoting here because the same event, in slightly disguised form, figures centrally in Dogeaters - in which Hagedorn's winning beauty contestant promptly alienates the First lady by denouncing beauty contests and disappearing into the activist movement in the mountains. (Hagedorn again bases this defection on a real incident involving a young woman named Neha Sancho.)

Hagedorn's own writing of this time includes poetry of similar tone. "Souvenirs," one of her major poems, features the rather decadent atmosphere of life dominated by the church and the first lady and a false holiness:

in manila

the president's wife

dictates martial law

with her thighs

sanctity n piety

is her name

as she sips tea

in madrid (Danger and Beauty 29)

The stifling lethargy of this poem seems to suggest the lack of control people felt they had over; their own lives in these days of martial law. In one of her prose works, Hagedorn writes of a recurring nightmare she has every time she is home in the Philippines visiting her father. Guerrillas come to the house and kill everyone in it, with the exception of her totally helpless grandmother who prays incoherently but seems to inspire a bit of respect. She is home only by chance, of course, as a visitor, but nevertheless feels that such a death is her destiny. She does not fight. Her killer is good-looking, looks much like her boyfriend, and for a moment as he leans over her, she thinks he is going to kiss her, but he slits her throat instead. She remains passive, accepting, overcome by tropical inertia as much as by the knife. On hindsight Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Erendira is called to mind here, and again one suspects that this passive acceptance of things-as-they-happen is meant to suggest the real lack of power to either name or change their universe that people in such societies experience.

Dogeaters has two voices, both powerless, uncritical. One is the voice of a young girl named Rio, and the other of a young male junkie-prostitute named Joey Sands. Rio is the preteen daughter of the moneyed Gonzaga family, privileged and sheltered, but for all that still exposed, on a very personal level, to the oddities and problems (all except poverty, of course) of martial law Manila. She counts among family friends General Ledesma, who runs the abusive military, Severo Alacran, the richest businessman in the country, and Senator Domingo Avila, the outspoken voice of the opposition. Her idle mother is surrounded by gay hangers-on - a dress maker, a hair stylist. Her cousin Pucha is outrageously flirtatious in her adolescence, knowing enough even then to be attracted to the repulsive Boom-boom Alacran for his money. Her grandmother has the special diet for her. strange maladies flown into Manila through the concessions of the American ambassador.

Joey Sands is at the other end of the social scale but strangely enough knows some of the same people. He is the abandoned child of a black American serviceman and a prostitute, into prostitution himself, and into drugs, working in a seedy gay bar run by a poor relation of the Alacran family. People from the fringes of Rio's life populate the bar on occasion: Lolita de Luna, the woman kept and somewhat jealously guarded by General Ledesma, and the dress maker and hair stylist of Rio's mother. As the lover of a wealthy German man, Joey too experiences some of the high life and becomes, at great danger to himself, a crucial witness to the assassination of Senator Avila, and, in the end, finds himself ill the mountains with the "subversives."

The simple poor of Manila are also represented. Romeo Rosales is a waiter at one Alacran establishment, and his girl friend Trinidad works as a salesgirl at another. Romeo is an aspiring actor, former classmate of movie star Tito Alvarez - and he lives in a dream that his old friend Tito will help him break into movies, perhaps give him a bit part in a film of his own. Of course he never succeeds in getting on to a shooting location. His take on life remains interesting, though we last see him gunned down crossing one of the main streets of Makati, the assumed assassin of Senator Avila. We never hear anything more from or about him, presumably because at that point he has become a simple pawn, an answer to a crime, and no one would then be interested in what he might have to say for himself.

Echoes of Gabriel Garcia Marquez abound in the more bizarre elements of the story. There are a number of strange illnesses in the book, in "good" families, in which there is so much corruption beneath the surface that one would expect it to manifest itself in odd ways: Baby Alacran has skin that erupts into terrible scabs and rashes that cover her whole body. At another point she develops a sweating disease in which she soaks uncontrollably in both heat and cold. Daisy Avila wins a beauty contest and then spends months unable to stop weeping. She may be weeping in advance for her father's death and for the rape and torturs she will undergo in the hands of the military under General Ledesma, who continues to call her hija, like a daughter, through it all.

Dream sequences are also very interesting and very Pointed. The First Lady dreams of partying in the Waldorf Astoria and suddenly noticing she has no shoes on. She rushes into an elevator run by George Hamilton. Finally alone in her room, she writhes feverishly on an ice cold bed and then discovers the Pope hidden behind the curtains. His smile becomes the President's leer as the dream turns into nightmare. Girlie Alacran has a class warfare dream reminiscent of that recorded in Hagedorn's earlier novella Pet Food, only here the caddies of the golf club suddenly attack the family with name brand golf clubs. Girlie protests her impending doom and tries to save herself, first by meekly suggesting "You must be mistaken," and then in a frenzy of cowardice trying to convince her assailants that the one they really want is her brother Boom-boom, and that she doesn't even like golf anyway. In a last desperate effort to save herself, she offers the caddies her body but they ignore her, and this rejection, says Hagedorn, is what Girlie remembers afterwards of the dream.

Then there is La Sultana, the fat, middle-aged fortune teller, who lives in a Mercedes-Benz parked near the Paco Cemetery, and of whom it is said that she neither urinates nor defecates. Our introduction to La Sultana is in half a paragraph Midway through the book, in which we learn that even the First Lady comes to consult her. Here the shadowy Santos Tirador has come to see her, surrendering his last one hundred pesos to be told that he will find a woman whose life he will ruin and that he will die because of this, but he will die happy. We never really see La Sultana again, although she is mentioned, and we never see Santos Tirador either, although we find out later that Daisy Avila is carrying his child when she is questioned and tortured by the military, and that he is the subject of some of the questions put to Daisy. One gets the feeling that these two briefly defined characters are actually central to everything that goes on in the book, that Tirador is perhaps the assassination and perhaps part of the military intelligence as well until he becomes dispensable, and that perhaps the whole thing - Daisy's part in the beauty contest, the assassination that follows, even the whole subversive movement - is orchestrated by La Sultana from the back seat of her Meredes-Benz. Strange indeed, but surely many people in Manila would be willing to believe such a tale in relation to the Aquino assassination. One can certainly imagine hearing such from a street vendor or a group of watch-your-car boys in Manila's streets.

The book is firmly anchored in martial law Manila, maybe 1974 or 1975, when the government was most busily engaged in providing the trappings of a free, democratic, and rich capitalist society. Military power came with a genteel veneer but could be brutal: Daisy is tortured by a general who talks to her like a daughter. Class interests speak, but not loudly enough, and Daisy has presumably lost the protection of her class with the assassination of her father, the oppositionist senator. Interestingly enough, class interests do often transcend political differences in the Philippines, and often the members of a single powerful family may be engaged in left, center, and right-wing politics. This is probably one reason we can weather coups and revolutions without harboring much vengeance, why coup leaders are welcomed back into the government with handshakes and smiles, why Imelda Marcos could return to the country and run for president in 1992.)

Hagedorn focuses on the Manila Film Festival and a beauty contest, presumably the Manila Miss Universe Contest, as symptomatic signs of the times, with the emphasis on show and pretense - blocking out the tourists's views of squatter locations with board fences. In the midst of all this decadence is the continual commentary on it provided by the Talk Show and Cora Camacho, clearly modeled after real talkshow hosts Elvira Manahan and Inday Badiday. Cora comments on everything, interviews everyone, shows a wonderful dedication to scandal and tastelessness, and at the same time integrates all the events and characters in the book, from Daisy's weeping spells, to the First Lady's indignation over her denunciation of beauty contests, to the Alacran fortune, to the sexual habits of key military men, to the political movement of the left and the assassination of the senator - everything comes under the scope of Cora's commentaries. And of course, her shows become the subject for further commentary and interest, as they themselves are a political event. In fact, in Marcos's Manila these shows did provide such a focal point for political and other interests, seeming to provide the trappings of a democratic society enjoying the luxury of free speech, but more than once talk show guests of the era were arrested or even gunned down as they left the recording studios after their "outspokenness."

The reader may sense by now that on some levels Dogeaters is a disjointed book, with its divergent voices, characters and events. But at the same time we have seen unifying factors: relationships between principle characters, the way they all relate to the major incidents of the novel, especially the assassination of Senator Avila, surely the central incident. Joey Sands was there, caught in his own criminal act of robbing his German lover. Romeo Rosales, the slightly pompous innocent who went on believing to the end that he could call on his old high school friendship with Tito Alvarez for aid and succor, was made the scapegoat when the killing needed solution. Romeo, who had been depicted as thinking only of his own vanity, his movie hopes, and his love affair with Trinidad. Rio and Baby Alacran are family friends and class associates of the murdered Senator. Daisy is of course his daughter. La Sultana seems to know about it before it happens, and Cora Camacho does the public commentary every step of the way.

But Hagedorn leaves the connections loosely established; there is nothing neat about this book. And perhaps because of this disjointedness, along with the underlying sense of oneness that the reader gets almost intuitively, the whole thing seems both real and unreal, a little like magic but a little like life. When Gabriel Garcia Marquez was asked to explain some of the more bizarre incidents in One Hundred Years of Solitude and some of his other writing, he said that his grandmother used to tell him such stories, in a very down-to-earth, matter-of-fact tone. "Beautiful Remedios rode up to heaven on the sheets one morning." Just so. And this is the feeling one gets from the tone of Hagedorn's novel; one can well imagine someone's gay hairdresser telling the story of how Joey tried to rob the German and ended up having to flee for his life because he witnessed the assassination, or Manila's yuppies talking about "this guy Santos Tirador, who seems to be popping up everywhere," or the matrons discussing "this old woman who lives in a Mercedes-Benz near Paco Cemetery." We take in stories like this all the time, accepting them as possible or probably true - and the more outrageous the real event, the more outlandish the stories. We still have wonderfully fanciful interpretations of the central trauma of the Marcos years, which was, of course, the asassination of Ninoy Aquino.(1)

Note

(1.) Dogeaters features several historical events, albeit in somewhat disguised form and with some disregard for temporal order. Manila did host the miss Universe Contest of 1974, and, a few years later, an International Film Festival for which the Folk Arts Theater was hastily built at the cost of many workers' lives. Nelia Sancho, winner of the Miss Asian-Pacific beauty title, did later renounce such contests and join the anti-Marcos movement. (She has most recently been engaged in encouraging Filipino "Comfort Women" to speak out about their wartime experiences.) Ninoy Aquino, opposition senator, was, of course assassinated in 1983, and his murder pinned on a man called Rolando Galman. Several witnesses to this crime did subsequently disappear or die.

Works Cited

Bruchac, Joseph, ed. Breaking Silence: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Poets. Greenfield Center, NY: Greenfield Review P, 1983. Bulosan, Carlos. America is in the Heart. 1946; Seattle: U Washington P, 1973. Cachapero, Emily. Liwanag. San Francisco: Liwanag Pub., 1975. Hagedorn, Jessica. Dangerous Music. San Francisco: Momo's P, 1975. _____.Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions. San Francisco: Momo,s P, 1981. _____.Dogeaters. New York: Pantheon, 1990. _____.Danger and Beauty. New York: Penguin, 1993, Llosa, Mario Vargas. "Fiction and Reality." Modern Latin American Fiction. Ed. John King. New York: Noonday P, 1987. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Trans. Gregory Rabassa. New York: Harper collins, 1970. Mirikitani, Janice, et al., eds. Time to Greez! Incantations from the Third World. San Francisco: Glide Pub., 1975.

COPYRIGHT 1993 The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnics Literature of the United States
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