Overthrowing U.S. Hegemony: Dialectics of Philippines-U.S. Literary Relations

san Juan 61 E. San Juan, Jr. Overthrowing U.S. Hegemony: Dialectics of Philippines-U.S. Literary Relations Whoever does not recognize and champion the equality of nations and languages and does not fight against all national oppression or inequality is not a Marxist, he is not even a democrat. —V. I. Lenin On the Asiatic Coast, washed by the waves of the ocean, lie the smiling Philippines. . . there, American rifles mowed down human lives in heaps . . . —Rosa Luxemburg The Philippine landscape is familiarly tropical and East Indian. But the world into which you have stepped is unlike anything of which you have yet had experience in the Orient. It is Spain—diluted, indeed, distorted, and overlaid with Americanism. . . —Aldous Huxley In the official biography of Ernest Hemingway, published in 1969, Carlos Baker recounts what strikes him as the impact of Philippine reality on the fabled inventor of modernist American prose style: On the 11th [of May 1941] Hemingway attended a "ghastly" dinner given by the Philippine Writers Association where everyone's attempt to be gaily informal bored him so much that he got too drunk to care. . . In Manila Hemingway made a few more notes and explored some of the Spanish bars of Intramuros. Otherwise his sole gain from the Philippine stopover was a good short summer haircut.1 In Hemingway's fiction and journalism, no reference of any importance is made to the Philippines. In July 1961, the leading Filipino writer in English, Nick Joaquin, recollected, in elaborate quotation-filled scenarios, Hemingway's two visits (February and May 1941). Every utterance of the author of For Whom The Bell Tolls was transcribed like an apocalyptic message from the guru/avatar of avant-garde Western modernism.2 Aside from Hemingway 's emphasis on the necessary political commitment and devotion to the truth that writers must cultivate, and his praise of the Spanish and Chinese people's resistance to fascism, what struck the small intimate group of Filipino writers who informally conversed with him was Hemingway's 62 the minnesota review generous concern for his fellow-practitioners in the craft, his warm and unpretentious bearing, his simplicity and candor. What this juxtaposition of past event and "present" interpretation succinctly foregrounds is precisely the complex and overdetermined transaction between metropolitan culture and colonized native sensibilities, between hegemonic centers and the decentered periphery, which has been construed often in a one-dimensional positivistic manner. It is of course indisputable that so long as the Philippines remains a colony/neocolony politically, economically and culturally, Filipino writing in the English language cannot but be a minor, regional or subordinate extension of the main body of British and American writing. I propose here, in contrast, a dialectical interpretation which might elucidate more adequately the nonsynchronous , uneven development of U.S. bourgeois ideology in the Philippine social formation. The Baker/Joaquin juxtaposition reveals two opposing perspectives: one, the typical Orientalizing discourse of Western consciousness (Baker) which fabricates and marginalizes its alien object for its own ends; the other, the native response (Joaquin) which filters, selects and organizes the raw material it imports according to its own local/national imperatives. Despite the then deepening involvement of the U.S. in the Vietnam conflict, Baker reflects the primitive, parochial level of U.S. academic consciousness vis-á-vis Third World revolutionary struggles . Joaquin, on the other hand, exemplifies a long and vigorous tradition of Filipino literary sensibilities deeply engaged in radical political and social criticism, a tradition springing from the propagandist reformers of the 18% revolution against Spain—exponents of Enlightenment ideals that were taken up, refined and further developed by the vernacular writers, by the Left-oriented writers of the thirties, and by the activist generation of the sixties and seventies. Bearing in mind the subtle and complex distinction between reception and influence, as explored by comparatists like Ulrich Weisstein, Claudio Guillen and others, we can argue that the Philippine version of Hemingway is not only historically valid in itself, but probably more true than the biographer's resumé—although it may be granted that each one reflects polar ends of a dialectical totality, for each reveals the symptomatic lacunae and silences of the purportedly veridical and authoritative...