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89 3 The Sexual Politics of Carlos Bulosan’s Radicalism AT A RO U N D T H E time that José Garcia Villa published his last major poem “The Anchored Angel,” his compatriot Carlos Bulosan was engaged in writing an equally ambitious work. Composed during the early 1950s and posthumously published as The Cry and the Dedication in 1995, nearly forty years after the author’s death in 1956, Bulosan’s novel could not be more dissimilar from Villa’s poem.1 Whereas “The Anchored Angel” weaves idiosyncratic metaphors and distressed images into a dense web of religious and erotic evocations, The Cry and the Dedication is an expansive narrative rooted in social history and organized into a form of almost “geometric simplicity.”2 Taking place in the central Luzon region of the Philippines in the wake of U.S. “liberation” of the Philippines from Japanese occupation (1942–1945) and the granting of Philippine independence on July 4, 1946, the novel rejects the Cold War notion that the United States “saved” the Filipinos once again (echoing the exceptionalist ideology at the turn of the twentieth century that the United States “rescued” Filipinos from Spanish tyranny) and defies sentiments of prostration or gratitude toward the former colonial power. Indeed, the novel offers a literary representation of what critics take as the Hukbalahap rebellion (abbreviated from Hukbo ng Bayan Laban sa Hapon, the People’s Anti-Japanese Army). Perhaps the most significant peasant revolt in the Philippines during the twentieth century, the Huk movement emerged out of the agrarian unrest during the 1930s in central Luzon and was formally constituted in 1942 to oppose Japanese occupation. Following the war and after a temporary disbanding (owing in large part to the demand by U.S. and Philippine military forces to disarm), the group re-formed as the HMB (abbreviated from Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan, the People’s Liberation Army) and assumed a staunch position against the collusion between U.S. neocolonialism and 90 The Sexual Politics of Carlos Bulosan’s Radicalism the Philippine government’s “mailed fist” policy of anti-Communist/antiradical repression.3 Although Bulosan uses Huk code names, The Cry and the Dedication is not a “documentary transcript” of the movement, as editor E. San Juan Jr., points out.4 Rather, the fictional narrative tracks a group of seven members of the “underground” (the novel never uses “Huk” or “Hukbalahap”) who are charged to meet up with Felix Rivas in Manila. A Filipino expatriate who has returned from the United States, Felix is to deliver a large sum of money to the underground’s political cause and provide information on how to procure additional arms and medicine. En route to the concluding rendezvous in Manila, each of the characters is assigned to return to his or her provincial hometown so that Hassim, the leader of the guerrilla unit, can collect intelligence from the people regarding the social conditions in those areas and can disseminate their political message. While Old Bio, Legaspi, Dabu, Mameng (the sole female member), and Dante fulfill their respective “homecomings,” Dante’s death at the hands of his brother (a corrupt, landowning priest) brings the narrative to an uncertain close. Dante knew Felix Rivas when both men lived in the United States and therefore was designated to identify Felix since the “enemy” might subvert the plot with an impersonator. The novel’s final pages portray the group headed toward Linda Bie’s hometown, the penultimate destination before Manila, where Hassim grew up and where, presumably, Felix Rivas continues to await them.5 Engaging the Huk rebellion from the viewpoint of a sympathetic Filipino radical living in the United States, Bulosan’s novel departs in some ways from his previous work as well as from diasporic Filipino literature more generally.6 Although the autobiographical America Is in the Heart (1946) remains Bulosan’s most well known text, The Cry and the Dedication has garnered some critical attention, especially since its setting and serial homecoming plot seem to enact a kind of symbolic return to the homeland, which Bulosan himself was unable to fulfill during his lifetime . This “return to the source” has typically been understood in teleological terms, whereby the trajectory of Bulosan’s literary career neatly maps a narrative of political maturation (disillusionment with American ideals provoking a recuperation of Philippine revolutionary traditions) onto a sequential narrative of diaspora (migration to the imperial center followed by return to the homeland).7 As San Juan argues, “Bulosan’s...

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