They might be writing what is called Philippine literature in America, in all that country’s sordid glory pre- and post- 9/11, as opposed to, say, Philippine literature in England (Maranan), Philippine literature in Australia (Bobis), Philippine literature in France (Melvin) or at the other end of the spectrum, American literature in the Philippines (Garceau).
All these classifications and counter-hegemonies, however, come to roost when we read a borrowed hardbound copy of Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle, which is dedicated to the late artist Santi Bose, and a perfect companion piece to the creative non-fiction study on the Tasaday by Robin Hemley, Lost Eden. (Hemley, by the way, is due for a visit in the country for the annual summer writers’ workshop in Dumaguete, where Iowa students are to rub elbows and shoulders – balikatan, as it were – with the regular homegrown fellows).
Dream Jungle is a fictional account of the life and times of Manda Elizalde and his so-called discovery of the stone-age tribe, as well as a narrative of the onsite shooting of what is obviously the Coppola film Apocalypse Now, two great cultural events, or debacles, or whatever you call it, that defined a decade, if not a generation weaned on martial law. The stories are gracefully interwoven through Hagedorn’s adept storyteller thread, careful not to lose the reader in the varied, shifting points of view that are not solely Ariadne’s.
Understandably critics might have a beef with that: though the novel is told from the vantage point of different narrators, ranging from the Elizalde clone Zamora de Legaspi to the child-woman as survivor, Rizalina Cayabyab, indeed interspersed with seedy accounts by the small-town mayor Fritz and narratives by the journalist and possible Hagedorn alter-ego Paz Marlowe, among other players, including a moody American actor and the director’s wife herself doing a documentary on the making of a film called Napalm Sunset, there is scarcely a difference in the overall foundation of the language and general sentimientos de patatas. Hagedorn is no Faulkner "who wrote like an imbecile when it required an imbecile’s point of view," but that may not necessarily be a bad thing. To each his (or her) own possessions and ghosts. Literature then becomes a unique Rx or diagnosis, however veiled, of a great cultural malaise. The most it can do at times, like Dream Jungle, is staunch the bleeding.
We are not familiar with Hagedorn’s earlier work, Dogeaters, where there’s a character named Pucha, and The Gangster of Love, which might lead some readers to call her (Jessica) Maurice. All we can use, really, for the sake of comparison and contrast – "the bone of comparative literature" – is Hemley’s Lost Eden, reviewed in this space some months ago.
If Hemley’s treatment of Elizalde demystified the man and yet gave a fair enough account of the eccentric as coño, Hagedorn’s novel cannot but indulge in a form of mythmaking, however snide and critical of the dictatorial regime, which at any rate is one of the intrinsic functions of fiction. Hard to believe, too, that the country bumpkin Rizalina could use a colonial language that sophisticatedly, even if only in her mind, but that only teaches us never to underestimate what goes on in the hinterlands and dark recesses of the imagination.
A note on the dialogue: Hagedorn has an ear for crisp exchanges, and never comes off phony, using the appropriate slang Filipino or whatever pidgin or Kastilaloy for maximum effect. This is one advantage the Filipino writers based abroad have over the local ones, as pointed out by the deskman Carmelo Juinio, because when fictionists in Manila use English for dialogue it somehow comes out sounding too wersh-wersh. We all know we don’t speak that way, at least those of us who are usually tongue-tied and shattered by too much shwe-shwe.
We decline, too, to label outright Hagedorn’s writing as slick, though Dream Jungle could easily lend itself to the machinations of Hollywood because it is constructed as if it were a breath away from a script. Therein lies the danger of the western world, and gives the home-based Pinoy writer some leg room: we are not yet too blinded by literary agents, fast-talking middlemen, the dog-eat-dog of technology and its artifacts and interfaces – or are we?
Hagedorn is at her best in her depictions of the city, particularly Ermita, where we get a glimpse of a favorite watering hole long since shuttered, Rosie’s Diner. Even the love scenes of the actor Vincent Moody and Lina, a.k.a. Jinx, are worthy of applause because they are pure poetry. There is, too, kind of an epiphany in the reunion scene of Lina and Zamora’s bodyguard Sonny in a Los Angeles art gallery, where the backdrop is a virtual painting by Bose. Confrontation and conflict are not always what they seem in fiction, and Hagedorn whips up a storm by trading one for the other, like a card shark with her sleight of hand.
Though we might beg the jury to still be out on the conjecture that the most compelling Philippine fiction is being written by Pinoys abroad, Hagedorn, et. al., are merely continuing the good work begun by the likes of Nolledo (But for the Lovers) and Rosca (State of War) in helping place the country’s literature in the mainstream, shoulder-to-shoulder or balikatan, as it were, with the world‚ best and fairest. And that’s no false alarm.