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RE-SIGNED SUBJECTS: WOMEN, WORK, AND WORLD IN THE FICTION OF CARLOS BULOSAN AND HISAYE YAMAMOTO
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Spring 2004 by Higashida, Cheryl
We waded through this dangerous road, holding onto each other firmly to keep from falling; and sometimes in our intimate grasp we communicated a rare and lovely understanding. Maybe it would be only the sudden tightening of my mother's thumb or forefinger on my arm, but the delicate message would be transmitted and it would linger in my memory. (37)
More so than his interactions with his brothers, this moment of tactile communication signals an "unmistakable cry for help between two suffering people" (37), foreshadowing the familial bonds that Allos will try to re-create in America once he, Amado, and Macario are separately driven there by Philippine underdevelopment. These familial ties lead Allos to generalize and to imagine a larger collective of workers "holding onto each other firmly to keep from falling."
Juxtaposed with the familial, peasant solidarity intimated by Meteria and Allos's journey to Puzzorobio, their vending within the village leads to the boy's first clash with the native bourgeoisie in the person of an elegantly attired girl who upsets Meteria's beans in response to her admiring gaze. As Meteria retrieves the beans, Allos distances himself from her: "I was one peasant who did not crawl on my knees and say: 'It is all right. It is all right...'" (38). For Lee, this passage illustrates the mother's submission to and identification with the bourgeoisie, but it is not only Meteria who displays such attitudes: later, Allos becomes exasperated with Macario's subservience as a servant in a white household, and he contends with his own longing for bourgeois trappings. Furthermore, in an earlier passage Bulosan establishes Meteria's love of beauty in order to intimate the social dimensions of art. Meteria comes across a woman "who had nothing to give except a beautiful drinking jar that she had made out of the red clay in her backyard" (33). Immediately drawn to the pottery, Meteria "gave the woman more than the pot's value" (33). In this light, Meteria appears to be attracted by the elegant girl in the market not because she desires to belong to the bourgeoisie but because she longs lor a beauty which Allos "had never known her to appreciate..., but perhaps it was because she had no time to express the finer qualities in her" (33-34). Similarly, it is not until time slows for Allos-when he is hospitalized in America for tuberculosis brought on by years of malnutrition, harsh work, and cramped accommodations-that he can develop his own aesthetic sensibilities. And, like his mother, Allos will come to value beauty over profit.14
Meteria never develops the class consciousness that Allos does; she is incapable, for example, of explaining to her son the meaning of a peasant revolt organized by the Colorum Party. However, Bulosan associates ignorance not with Filipino womanhood but with the political perspective of certain segments of the peasantry. Allos's father is equally ignorant of the significance of the Tayug revolt, preferring the reformist tactic of fighting for his property in court. This leads the narrator to pose the question, "What could a poor and ignorant peasant like my father do in an organization such as the provincial government of Pangasinan?" (58). Bulosan then shows that the answer lies not in individual lobbying in the capital but in collective, armed struggle on the land where he and his mother happen to be engaged in seasonal agricultural labor. Yet they are "so deeply absorbed in [their] work that [they are] not aware of what [is] going on" (59). The narrative, however, does not simply imply that Meteria cannot understand the revolt because she is a woman; her ignorance is overdetermined by the fact that she, like her husband, has accepted the socio-political hierarchies of the neo-colonial regime (which is why she suggests to Allos that he use his education to become a lawyer). Nonetheless, she does prefigure and shape the young Allos's radicalization through her work and, just as importantly, through her work ethic of prioritizing concern for the livelihood of other peasants. In this sense, Bulosan reveals some of the "intimate connections" between women in Asia and Asian men in America that Okihiro wants to recenter.19
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