Five or six notes on Y*

I considered calling it my ‘Palparan novel.’ Handy shortcut, like ‘call center-call center’ for TQO. I remember struggling to describe the then work-in-progress to my cohort at a residency, going straight to capsule–political killings in Arroyo-era Philippines–rather than what the novel is about (although, not to be a social realist on main, isn’t historical context what novels are ultimately about, Jameson’s epochal horizon of interpretation, no matter how disavowed). The genesis as usual from a suspicion around an unsettling thing (counterinsurgency) and how it may be connected to a deeper, even more unsettling thing (neoliberalism), all of it mediated by my own banal interface w/ them (Palparan being arrested not far from my house, my paternal family being from the same province as Magsaysay, etc). Then the formal and thematic minutiae from all over: the interview bit from Alias Grace; the Cold War earnestness from The Americans; the ebb and cadence of God of Small Things; the bida prototype from Nancy Botwin, except not quite suburban and lugubrious; the forest as a narrative apparatus from Mojares. Then I realized the book isn’t about Palparan, of course not, it just happens to make use of him, and to call it a Palparan novel capitulates precisely to how these realities and experiences are often narrativized, i.e., around the state and its dumb imperatives.

*

Lately I’ve been thinking about baggy clothes and khakis and creams (w/c may or may not have to do w/ the K-pop group that had taken over my life and digital algorithms). That I’ve been thinking about clothes at all spells something either great or terrible, mental health-wise. Years back my return to the formal workforce made the idea of a capsule wardrobe attractive, in my case a plain form-fitting gray shirt and jeans and boots. I switched to a navy blue shirt a couple of years after, w/c remains my go-to these days, and w/c time spent in a place w/ winter didn’t change. The whole thing is of course also connected to the swings in body weight, from heavy to heavier, to going back to teaching full time, to getting old in general, but now I wonder if it may have been due to an urge to change something in light of Y coming out. The self-important sophomore novel, as if it is something that requires to be performed, externalized. Might it be relief? Surrender? Delight? Esp after a heinous couple of years in w/c some things were attained and others irretrievably taken? Might it be a celebration?

*

I tried to do an R word** in one of the false starts I had for Y. A cast of characters hefty enough for omniscience, a LeGuinesque narrator narrating in decorous sentences, a crocodile even, though this last one was again subliminal, w/c I didn’t realize I was doing until much later. The attempt went to about three chapters or so, easily18,000 words, before it was stoppered. Too slow, my supervisor said (slaur?), a reminder that the requirement was closer to a novella at 60,000 words than a novel, you’re already a third of the way and still introducing characters, what gives? Samples were identified. Pedro Paramo, As I Lay Dying, Sula, a ton of Cesar Aira. Two weeks later, I sent in a new first chapter. ‘You’ve nailed it,’ supervisor replied. ‘Now you have to again ramp up the pace after this great section.’ (Familiar w/ his form-bending work now, I wonder about that constant exhortation to mind the narrative line, not to mention the scandalizing impatience about the cat-related sections.) This was May 2019. Seven short months later, the record forest fire season freshly taking hold in the nearby Adelaide Hills, I had a completed first draft, w/c more or less resembles the forthcoming version. There was not one moment during those months and years when the idea that I was writing fiction full time didn’t strike me as strange, heaven-sent, finite. This will never happen again, was a recurring line between M and I (M who is now in Berlin where in fact it has happened again). I have no idea yet what the lack of material struggle has done to the work, the exertion that I’d like to think hums between the overwritten, plotless pages of TQO. I just know, w/ the usual useless guilt, that I continue to live off its largesse, and hope, weeks before Y finally comes out, that it hasn’t been for nothing.

*

There was a fire in my childhood. The screams rang out just as the end credits of a movie began to roll. It was after midnight. The movie was The Nutty Professor (I think). As w/ such things, a paralyzing moment of disbelief. Then titos and titas emerging from their houses (we lived in a compound). Then the lights flickered and died and we, my sister and brother and lolo and lola, were shepherded down the mad street, away from the blaze we still couldn’t see. Our house is insured, my father kept reminding us, we have insurance, don’t worry, voice trembling w/ worry. Ours would have been next if the blaze wasn’t halted, the flames close enough to lick a lightbulb outside a tito’s house. In the weeks and months that followed, our neighbors rebuilt their houses, some w/ even better, taller structures (the one next to us, w/c belonged to a carpenter/handyman who helped us w/ so many school ‘projects,’ was replaced by a four-storey apartment). What disappeared forever was the looban, w/c snaked around and between the main streets in the area, the ones visible on maps. When I realized decades later that the houses had been deliberately burned to the ground to drive people away, I was hauled back to the long afternoons of unruly, sweaty rounds of patintero and tumbang preso and agawang-base w/ the neighborhood kids. Was there a hierarchy between those from the looban and some of us who were also poor but had the completely arbitrary luck of somehow being born to a family that had land and thus a place in this world. Yet another reminder that ‘development’ is often impervious to human suffering. To childhoods and memories and community. That the violence ‘is the point.’ That it is signally inhumane.

*

‘Novels arise out of the shortcomings of History.’ – Novalis

*

In one of the events for her latest book, Elaine Castillo (who wrote a blurb for Y) had said something along the lines of a bourgeois, self-censoring tendency that has embarrassed us out of referring openly to the revolutionary potential of literature. As far as pursuits go, the reasoning went, there are simply Other Things to do. More pragmatic things. What we need, she said, is to recover this certain ability to speak in terms of revolution and art. I remember thinking then how lucky we are in these parts that we have a real still-unfolding still-rustling revolution as source of an urgent revolutionary imagination, a movement that makes legible an alternative in a world of compromises and sullen pragmatics, at an age in w/c that door, that great portal of History, is forever declared closing, if not foreclosed. This other world that we must keep imagining, through acts big and small, acts naive and effete and hopelessly optimistic, to me kept alive first and foremost by this sacred knowing. How did Arundhati Roy put it? That world is en route? ‘On a quiet day I can hear her breathing.’ There are currently no plans to do any formal thing for Y, but should our paths cross let’s talk about any of these things, or something else, or not. The acknowledgments is three pages long; we survive thanks to community; let me thank you in person. Until then. See you.

*W/ apologies to Chingbee
**Rizal

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