Showing posts with label filipino. Show all posts
Showing posts with label filipino. Show all posts

Thursday, September 23, 2010

My Brother, My Executioner by F Sionil José

F Sionil José’s novel, My Brother, My Executioner, is set in a period of Philippine history whose international significance is worthy of wider knowledge. The author’s Rosales novels describe the life of a Filipino family over several generations. Rosales is a fictitious town, but its location is quite real, as is the history that unfolds around it. Rosales is in Ilocos, in northern Luzon, whose people are seen by many Filipinos as a race apart. The events that form the backdrop to My Brother, My Executioner are the Huk rebellion.

It’s the 1950s. Don Vicente is a Rosales landowner and he is ill, close to the end of his life. He reminisces, recalling the immense suffering of his wife who presented him with multiple miscarriages. But he did have a son, Luis, born of a poor woman is a small village called Sipnget. So, unlike others from that poor place, Luis received an education courtesy of the fees his rich father could pay. He became a writer and moved to Manila to pursue a self-contained,and ultimately selfish life.

Luis writes for a magazine owned by Dantes, a rich businessman with a reputation for ruthlessness. Esther, the boss’s daughter, fancies Luis, but her advances are not reciprocated, except intellectually. Personal tragedy threatens.

Luis is also worshipped by Trining, a teenage cousin who shares some of his roots. When Luis’s father notes their affinity and also identifies the convenience that their marriage would facilitate. Luis seems quite happy to do the right thing. Trining has her way with him and promises to bear him a dozen children. The first is soon conceived.

But it is when Luis makes a visit to his father’s house, a rare excursion beyond Manila’s city limits, that he also decides to look up his estranged mother. He visits Sipnget to find his home village levelled and burnt, its inhabitants ‘disappeared’, its crops destroyed. The Huk guerrillas have been there and the military, amply aided by local militias have cleansed the area. The militias, of course, are controlled by Luis’s father and they have driven his mother from her home.

Luis resolves to publicise the injustice. He researches the events, writes an article and publishes. But when vested interests question his facts, his motives and allegiances, he finds himself challenged on many fronts.

In another twist in the scenario we meet Vic, Luis’s half-brother. He was a freedom fighter during the Japanese occupation. While collaborators made money, he fought with the resistance that sought liberation from foreign rule. Now he is the commander of a Huk unit, a leader of a communist insurgency, if I might use a word that would be employed today to describe indigenous resistance. Vic operates near Rosales.

The Huk rebellion is an era of Philippine history that surely deserves wider analysis and discussion. It became a hotspot of the early Cold War. Events in Korea occupy the 1950s limelight, of course, but the Philippine rural guerrilla war was perhaps a precursor of what we now call Vietnam. The United States was involved, of course, and when the rebellion against the landowners was defeated under President Magsaysay’s leadership, he became an internationally-renowned champion of the North-American brand of freedom. In 1980, F Sionil José received the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Journalism, Literature and creative Communication Arts.

Given this history, a history that is incidentally wonderfully described by Benedict Kerkvliet in his book The Huk rebellion, there ought to be more than ample scope for the novelist to create tension, conflict and surprise. Unfortunately, the denouement of My Brother, My Executioner is a tad predictable. The tragedy is eventually too personal, its obvious metaphor becoming a punch pulled. Little is made of the potential conflict between the inheriting Luis and Vic, his guerrilla-commander brother. The book remains an engaging and enjoyable read, but the drama of its setting seemed to promise much more.

Friday, August 13, 2010

Tree by F Sionil José

Having just re-read Ngugi’s A Grain Of Wheat, I decided to visit Frankie Sionil José’s novel Tree. Ngugi described a struggle for freedom that succeeded. The perspective he chose was that of poor people caught up in events. Francisco Sionil José, on the other hand, describes the aftermath of a national struggle that failed, and from the point of view of the middle classes who may even have benefited from the USA’s initially opportunist snatch of victory from the nationalists. 

In the Philippines, the struggle was against Spain, and it was won. But then Spain collapsed and the USA intervened and a new war had to be won. From the point of view of Filipinos, perhaps it was lost. Four hundred years in a convent followed by fifty in Hollywood is how Filipinos often sum up their history. 

In its own way, Francisco Sionil José attempts a description of that history via his sequence of Rosales novels. Tree covers the period from the 1930s to the 1950s, and follows the growth of its main character from a child to a freshman medical student. It describes the Philippines from Commonwealth to independence. Crucially, when the latter arrives, it is hardly celebrated. The social order has long since been cemented and our family in Rosales are on the landowners’ side. Independence brings the Huk rebellion and a dangerous challenge to their status. 

 Tree is a novel that is not strong on plot. It is almost possible to read its chapters as a series of short stories, portraits of the people and events that filled its narrator’s life. In concept, the Rosales novels have something – only something, I stress! – in common with Anthony Powell’s Dance To The Music Of Time. They bear witness, but only rarely interpret. In the centre of Rosales, a small town in Pangasinan, north of Manila, is a large, old and rambling balete tree. It seems to be indestructible. Even when an American soldier with an excavator runs into it, the tree survives. The excavator is ruined – the hardware, not the person – and hangs around until locals cut it up for scrap. Now there’s a comment on the USA’s legacy in the Philippines. Spain’s colonial legacy survives in the form of vocabulary, names of dishes and of people. 

What’s in a name? The answer is a culture – a landowner versus a peasant, a Catholic versus an Aglipayan, not to mention a new-fangled follower of Iglesia Ni Kristo. Tree, essentially, is an impressionistic picture of a small society. There are hints at conflict, suggestions of the unrealised, usually centred on lack of rights to land, to produce, to opportunity. In microcosm, Tree suggests what the Philippines might have been, but never achieved. Crucially, had it done so, its main character would probably never have the chance of entering medical school. It is also important to note that beneath the balete tree nothing grows. Now most tropical earth stays blank when it is denied light. In Tree, F. Sionil José uses this image to suggest that, left to its own device, maybe the Philippines might have prospered – but then maybe not. After all, the tree was indigenous. 

Tree is a novel replete with cultural experience mixed with personal reference. Its lack of linear plot has to be accepted and not criticised. It’s just not that kind of book. And, as with most things Filipino, there’s much more going on under the surface, despite the fact that under the tree there’s nothing but bare earth. View this book on amazon Tree