JOSE DALISAY AND THE MARCOS PERIOD by NOEL KING
At the Sixth Philippine International Literary Festival held in Davao on November 20-21, 2015, the first time the festival had been held outside Manila, one of the central themes was “writing in place/creating your space.” That theme recalled a comment made by Jose Dalisay Jr. in his introduction to a reprint of his 1992 second collection of short stories, Sarcophagus and Other Stories (Manila: University of the Philippines, 1996):
When I came out with my first book of stories (Oldtimer and Other Stories) seven years ago, I wrote that I was searching for a “style” – some distinguishing flourish to make the stories mine as if they were at risk of being someone else’s but for this elected word or that moulded phrase.
Since then, I think I’ve come around to see that it isn’t so much “style” one chases after, but a sense of place, or, more acutely, a sense of home: that point in the story where author and sympathetic reader recognize, with astonishment and pain, a sudden familiarity. It may seem an odd thing to say of a book that spans, in its locales, several countries and ages, but it is, after all, the only thing to say, the only thing to go for.
In my Contrappasso interview with Dalisay, he alluded to his imprisonment under the Marcos regime’s Martial Law in Manila in the early 1970s:
I entered university in 1970, and very quickly got involved in the student activist movement, which was both anti-Marcos, anti-dictatorship, and also to some extent Marxist. For all these reasons I got imprisoned in 1973 for a little over seven months, and yes, that experience formed the basis for my first novel that was published in 1992, almost twenty years later. My experience is shared by many others of my generation, coming out of that Martial Law period.
Dalisay attended and gave a presentation at the 2015 Davao festival, which had on display a new edition of his book about that period, Killing Time in a Warm Place. Also attending the Davao conference was New York based Mia Alvar whose much-praised debut collection of stories, In the Country, included the titular long short story addressing this same period of recent Philippine history.
Some indication of the immediate poetic agit-prop reaction to the end of this repressive Marcos period is contained in the “Editors’ Preface” to Versus: Philippine Protest Poetry, 1983- 1986, which explains:
These poems are of a political season, the thirty crucial months between the assassination of Benigno Aquino Jr. on 21 August 1983 and the inauguration of his widow, Corazon, as President of the Philippines on 25 February 1986. The collection begins with poems in praise of Aquino, the slain political leader whose blood on the airport tarmac was seed of a new political faith. His assassination unified not only the people of the opposition but the entire people in opposition, for we had become a nation grown weary of an authoritarian regime, though our anger had been inchoate until that fateful Sunday.
Later in that introduction they add:
There was a lot to write about, for in this period, too, were highlighted themes and events that, while previously spoken of only in whispers, were now the subject of open popular conversation. The war in the countryside was one rich lode; the deaths of friends who had gone up to the hills were now open to elegy and that meant Filipinos on both sides. The foibles of the Marcoses were subject of satire, the Great Stone Face of Mr Marcos in La Union pilloried with as much venom as Mrs Marcos’s infrastructure project.
F. H. Batacan was unable to attend the festival but the November issue of Cebu Airlines’ inflight magazine featured an interview with her on the occasion of New York’s Soho Press’s publication of a much expanded edition of her 2002 novella, Smaller and Smaller Circles. At one point in the interview Batacan is asked, “If you could urge the President of the Philippines to read one book, what would it be?” She replies, “It would probably be Some Are Smarter than Others by Ricardo Manapat. The minutiae of his investigation of the Marcos plunder drives home the point that there is very little the powerful can hide from history.” Another excellent book on the Marcos period is by James Hamilton-Patterson, now resident in Austria but who for several decades spent at least six months of the year in the Philippines. His book is America’s Boy: The Marcoses and the Philippines.
In the coming days Contrappasso will publish both the introduction to, and an extended extract from, the new edition of ‘Butch’ Dalisay’s Killing Time in a Warm Place. The novel provides a haunting vision of the era:
Sometimes they use ice. They lug a block of it into the room–a block the size that trucks used to deliver around the neighborhood stores before the invention of tube-pressed chunks in plastic bags–and let it lie there, while in another room the blindfold is applied. Clothes are stripped off, and–despite the crying and the whimpering or, in those instances that evoke both bafflement and challenge in the torturer, the hot outrage that spews out of battered mouths–he or she is walked into the room with the block of ice, and without the slightest notion of what is coming next, he or she is kept standing, is talked to, is prodded between the legs, for an hour or so until the knees give in to exhaustion and the chill from the back of the room, and then, having caught the shiver that betrays the body, they cluck sympathetically and shake their heads at each other and one of them, perhaps the chief himself, will snap his fingers and say next to him or her something like “Santiago, what terrible hosts we are, look how tired this person is, get a chair somewhere–yes, that one will do.” Then he or she is seated on the ice, is made to lie on it, for fifteen minutes, or an hour, however long it takes for the ice or the person to melt.
Texts Cited.
Mia Alvar, In the Country (New York: Knopf, 2015
F. H. Batacan, Smaller and Smaller Circles (New York: Soho Press, 2015)
Jose Y. Dalisay, Jr., Killing Time in a Warm Place New Edition (Manila: Anvil Press, 2015)
Jose Y. Dalisay, Jr., Sarcophagus and Other Stories (Manila: University of the Philippines, 1996)
Jose Y. Dalisay, Jr., Oldtimer and Other Stories (Asphodel Books, 1984)
James Hamilton-Patterson, America’s Boy: The Marcoses and the Philippines (London: Granta, 1998).
Ricardo Manapat. Some are Smarter than Others: The Marcos’ Crony Capitalism (Alethia Publishers, 1991)
Alfrredo Navarro Salanga and Esther M. Pacheco, ed., Versus: Philippine Protest Poetry, 1983- 1986 (Quezon City, Metro Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1986).
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NOEL KING has worked in many Australian universities, in a variety of media and cultural studies contexts: at Griffith University (1977-1980), the South Australian College of Advanced Education (now the University of SA, 1980-1986), Curtin University (1986-1989), UTS (1989-2001), the University of Tasmania (2002-2003), and Macquarie University (2003-2012). He has co-edited two special issues of Contrappasso on Noir and Writers at the Movies.
Contrappasso Magazine: International Writing 