Glenn Diaz’s second novel is set in the busting-at-the-seams capital of Manila, in a district named only as T—, characterized by “the density, the closely packed, in-your-face life that sometimes felt like drowning.” Diaz’s complex female protagonist is ex-academic Yñiga Calinauan, now reduced to ghost-writing theses for foreign students. She also believes in astrology which “made better sense than religion, just a nice, healthy balance between faith and free will. And at night when you look up you see proof of it every time.” She survives on coffee, diet Coke and cigarettes and dotes on her rescue cat Jestoni, yielding “first waking thoughts, punctual and constant: caffeine and cat.”
Yñiga has escaped from her province named only as M—. Her father Garlitos (or “Itos”) was a farmer “who looked after the two hectares their landlord had grudgingly parceled out to farmers post-land reform.” He is also a poet, cadre and a “desaparecidos” (disappeared), one of the 1,300 missing during Martial Law in the Philippines and presumed to have been killed by the military. Her mother Eugenia (or “Yusing”) is an ex-teacher and a President Ramon Magsaysay fan, even naming her first born Ramona. Yusing had an operation described as “successful” but had reduced her to a vegetable. She is cared for by Yñiga’s other sister Hilaria.
Although never explicitly specified, the chronology of the novel seems to place it in the first part of the 21st century with flashbacks to encompass the Magsaysay and Marcos periods.
The novel opens with the dramatic arrest of a fugitive general (inspired by the real-life Major Gen Jovito Palparan Jr., “The Butcher”) whom Yñiga had spied living above the nearby bakery: the “retired general, the butcher, proud steward of the bloodbath against peasants and activists in the countryside.” Yñiga had made the phone call to tip off the authorities. In retaliation, her neighborhood is set on fire.
Homeless, she returns to her hometown, a fishing village where a new power plant has ruined the corals and killed the fish in the bay. She finds a young man occupying her old bedroom. Marco turns out to be a half-sibling. He has taken up their father’s activism and organizes campaigns on the “environment, education, agriculture, and others, the sort of things tirelessly ignored by the government”. Yñiga joins Marco’s activities and they come up against the town Mayor who, typical of nepotism in the Philippines, had replaced his own father “who served three consecutive terms as mayor and was constitutionally barred from one more.”
In flashbacks to the events before the fire, a man shows up who expresses interest in writing her father’s biography. But Yñiga quickly works out that he wasn’t who he said he was. What she does to him is the second climax which comes midway through the novel.
The second half doesn’t match the tautness of the first; Yñiga’s post-fire displacement and search for new direction doesn’t exactly rise from the ashes.
Diaz grapples with the theme of American influence in the Philippines post 1946 Independence. Specifically, direct CIA involvement led by Major General Edward G Lansdale in the 1953 election of the much-loved and “Champion of the Masses” President Ramon Magsaysay. Diaz writes about the CIA operatives’ continued involvement inserting themselves with the “Presidents, senators, governors. Name every single contender for the presidency from the forties onwards. Business people, journalists, academics.”
Diaz writes that Marcos (père) “is gone, ousted, it’s a new world.” But he also writes in the acknowledgments that the novel was being revised for publication in 2022, the period of transition between Duterte and Marcos (fils) when the political situation in the country “erratically swung from violent to paralyzing”. Diaz quotes Jose Maria Sison, the writer and poet who founded the Communist Party of the Philippines: ”The guerilla is like a poet’”.
Diaz particularly excoriates when writing about political corruption. On the arrest of the fugitive general who emerged dazed but smiling, the face “of a megalomania that ran unchallenged for too long.” At the evacuation center for the homeless after the revenge fire, the mayor’s face is printed on the paper fans, on the care kit backpacks and even on the truck that delivered the arroz caldo. In the queue for the food, pamphlets were distributed “bearing the mayor’s face (with) a list of his supposed accomplishments.” Residents were barred from returning to the burned houses to rescue personal items as the firefighters “were still clearing things (shorthand for stealing the salvageable and planting the foundation for the fences, she’d learn later).”
Food is front and center in the Filipino culture and likewise features prominently in the novel. Solidarity is found in the suffering in meager rations or cooking together in plenty. It was food deliveries that exposed the fugitive general. Food features not just in the fiesta celebrations but also in betrayal, in abandonment, in death, in wakes and in bribery. At an audience with the Mayor to discuss the disappearance of Marco, the activists were served a sumptuous lunch —“the best they would ever eat in their lives” featuring “rock lobsters with oyster sauce and the taklobo ceviche” – items that were no longer available at the wet market. It left the activists “too stuffed for proper indignation” who had been “thoroughly compromised by their hunger.”
Diaz doesn’t use quotation marks for dialogue. He doesn’t always translate the Filipino words that pepper his novel nor put them in italics. Diaz’s portrayal of his female protagonist’s Yñiga’s psyche is less convincing on a couple of the plot points. This doesn’t in any way, take away from what is an enjoyable novel. Diaz’s fierce and articulate intellect dazzles in his very evocative and at times funny but mostly deadpan and wry prose. He has captured the often absurd and peculiar life in the Philippines with a fond but critical eye.