A Neatly Folded Hope: The Capacity of Revolutionary Affect in Carlos Bulosan’s The Cry and the Dedication

In his 1942 poem “The Manifesto of Human Events,” Filipino author Carlos Bulosan stages the failure of a utopian community commemorating positive affects such as “love” (3) and “happiness” (4). In the poem’s narrative, a community prepares for a celebratory performance. However, the performance is interrupted by violence before it can even begin, as “the gunmen came and wrecked / the place in the dance of our fears” (8-9). Rather than simply foreclosing the utopian possibilities encouraged by the performance, this violence orients the poem’s speaker and his community toward an oppositional response couched within affective terms:

Now we hold a neatly folded hope.When they come again with murder in their handsnobody can stop us from touching a gunnothing can keep us from throwing a bomb.

(10-13)¹

Significantly, “fear” acts as the affective hinge between positive communal affects and a radicalized, concrete hope directed at a potential future, a move that Sara Ahmed calls an “affective form of reorientation” (8).² The poem suggests that this hope, sustained through ideals of love and happiness, motivates a collective challenge to the social and political systems that deploy fear as a tactic.³

Although the revolutionary subjects in Bulosan’s poem go unnamed, the impulse for collective resistance to violence that Bulosan describes is likely indicative of his involvement in what Michael Denning calls the “cultural front,” or Popular Front public culture (14).⁴ In 1942, in the midst of World War II, the violent opposition to aggression that the poem offers was likely understood within the context of the anti-fascist activism of the Popular Front, which Alan M. Wald describes as “Left cultural worker[s] … primarily advocating a ‘people’s culture,’ battling for ‘democracy,’ and ultimately championing an anti-Axis ‘victory’” (8). Bulosan would continue to expand on these revolutionary ideals in both his fiction and activism. Following the war, Bulosan maintained his participation in the far Left. As Marilyn C. Alquizola and Lane Ryo Hirabayashi note, in the years after World War II, Bulosan “consorted with known Communists[,] … had friendships with suspect Hollywood leftists[,] … had been a colleague and friend to Filipino immigrant union leaders[,] … long supported Local 7 of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU)” (35), and was even investigated by the FBI for his (alleged and ultimately unproven) involvement in the US Communist Party (41). The affective sentiment Bulosan expresses in his 1942 poem informs his later work, particularly his final, unfinished novel, The Cry and the Dedication, about a group of Marxist revolutionaries in the Philippines. However, Bulosan seems to have had a “painful personal reassessment” of his political and sexual life in the years before his death, which included a public distancing from the Communist Party (Wald 300), that led him to interrogate the assumptions of “Philippine [and American] radical and social formations” (Ponce 119), perhaps most explicitly the justification for violence as a path to positive social change. As a result, The Cry and the Dedication reconsiders the possibility of such a “neatly folded hope” (Bulosan, “Manifesto” 10) for revolutionary change.

In The Cry and the Dedication, Bulosan enacts a dialogue between revolutionary socioeconomic ideology and affective experience that revises the affective stance of “The Manifesto of Human Events” and, in so doing, questions the processes by which such revolutions take shape. Bulosan’s novel is set during the later years of the Huk Rebellion, a Marxist “peasant revolt” in the Philippines that began in 1942 and lasted until the early 1950s (Kerkvliet xix). The Huk Rebellion, or Hukbalahap movement (a Tagalog acronym for the People’s Anti-Japanese Liberation Army), began as an anti-Japanese insurgency during World War II. Following the Japanese defeat and the establishment of the Philippine Republic, and in large part a response to US influence and its post-war anti-communist policies, the Huk continued its guerrilla insurgency, now aimed at overthrowing the US-backed ruling government.⁵ By the 1950s, the Huk Rebellion was in decline. In his novel, Bulosan is sympathetic to the...