Ambivalent/Alternative Histories: Imagined nations in novels by Filipino migrant writers

Katrina Macapagal

How do migrant writers imagine the nation through narration? The question’s turn of
phrase, of course, alludes to the theories about the nation and literature popularized by Benedict
Anderson and Homi Bhabha. Recalling Anderson’s definition of the nation as an imagined
political community, he posits a paradoxical idea: “The nation is imagined as limited because
even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if
elastic boundaries, beyond which lies other nations. No nation imagines itself coterminous with
mankind. (1983/1991, 7). The idea of the nation being limited remains a strong argument today
given the mass migration of people across the world in the age of transnational capitalism.
However, as the passage suggests, it should be stressed that the limits of the imagined nation is
simultaneously finite and elastic, which is manifested, for instance, in the emergence of
hyphenated identities such as Asian-American, Filipino-American, and so on.

Here is where Bhabha’s insights become useful. In narrating the nation, one may find
himself/herself participating in the cultural production involving the “turning of boundaries and
limits into the in-between spaces through which the meanings of cultural and political authority
are negotiated. (1990, 4). For migrant writers, the idea of negotiating with meanings within in-
between spaces has a literal basis, in the sense that s/he is actually in between the homeland and
the foreign land. The migrant writer may be said to occupy an “international dimension both
within the margins of the nation-space and in the boundaries in-between nations and people.”
(ibid). The question posed about the migrant writer’s imagined nation implies a kind of
consciousness common, though not absolutely similar, to writers occupying the ambivalent
position of neither here nor there.

While recognizing the danger that the question posed might turn into a matter of authorial
intentionality, I recall Stuart Hall’s insight regarding his own migrant experience: "We all write
and speak from a particular place and time, from a history, and a culture which is specific. What
we say is always 'in context,' positioned. (Hall in Chen 1996, 222). What complicates the context
of the migrant writer is his/her experience literal and symbolic position. As Hall explains, “the
diasporic experience is far away enough to experience the sense of exile and loss, close enough
to understand the enigma of an always-postponed arrival.” (1990, 490).

In this paper, I wish to explore the ways by which the nation is narrated by three US-
based Filipino writers through representative novels that simultaneously create and refute the
imagined Philippine nation. But before doing so, it is useful to provide some notes on the
development of the Philippine nation and what led to the mass migration—what US-based
Filipino scholar Epifanio San Juan (1998) prefers to call the Filipino diaspora—alongside the
development of the Philippine novel, in order to better locate the context from which these
novels were produced.

The Philippine nation and the novel

Much like the paradoxical position of migrant writers, the Philippine nation may be seen
as the product of conflict. Filipino scholar Teresa Sicat argues, “The foundation for imagining
the selves as comprising a community was provided by the Philippine Revolution against Spain
[1896-1898] and the war against America [1898-1903]. (1995, 420). Against the three hundred
years of Spanish occupation, the revolutionary society of the Katipunan was founded by
nationalists in 1892. The revolution against Spain culminated with a treaty that signalled the
independence of the Philippines, only to be interrupted by the mock Spanish-American war1 and
the occupation of the United States. The US occupation was interrupted by the Japanese
occupation (1941-1945), but the US later regained control after waging war with Japan. The US
then “granted” independence to the Philippines in 1946. (Guerrero et al 1996).

Even before the formation of the Katipunan, the rise of Philippine national consciousness
was already apparent in the founding of elite-led organizations. The Propaganda Movement
(1872-1892) was a European-based reformist group founded and comprised by Filipino exiles
and students led by the country’s national hero, Jose Rizal. Recognizing the futility of anti-
1
Historians note that by the time the Spanish-American war took place, the Americans had already purchased the
Philippines from Spain for $20M through the Treaty of Paris.
colonial actions outside the country, Rizal returned to the Philippines in early 1892 and formed
the reformist group of La Liga Filipina, which quickly fell apart as members were arrested and
detained by the Spanish government, and Rizal being exiled to the province of Dapitan. It was
from the failure of these reformist organizations that another key historical figure, Andres
Bonifacio, recognized the need to organize the Katipunan. (ibid).

It was during the Spanish occupation of the country that the two nationalist novels of Jose
Rizal were produced. According to Filipino national artist for literature, Bienvenido Lumbera,
Rizal’s social realist anti-colonial novels, Noli Me Tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891)
“set the direction for the development of a nationalist tradition in Philippine Literature.” (1995,
3). Lumbera notes that “Although the language in which they were written [Spanish] put them
outside the reach of most Filipinos, the mediation of educated natives involved in the
Propaganda Movement or sympathetic aims of the movement made it possible for Rizal’s
message to reach his countrymen. In this way did the books become instrumental for agitating an
already restive populace.” (ibid, 3-4).

Until today, Rizal’s two novels remain popular in the Philippines and are required
readings for students in secondary education. Says Filipino writer Resil B. Mojares, these novels
“remain to date the most important literary work produced by a Filipino writer, animating
Filipino consciousness to this day, setting standards no Filipino writer can ignore.” (in Laurel
2004, 265). For this paper, it is also worth noting that Rizal’s novels are said to have been
influenced by European and American social realist novels that he read while he was studying in
Spain. Thus, Rizal and the other members of the Propaganda Movement may be considered the
pioneers of the tradition of Philippine migrant writing.

During the American occupation, English was institutionalized as the medium for
teaching. Many Filipino writers used English as the medium for writing literature, including
novels in the 1920s. (Hidalgo, “Fabulists and Chroniclers”). It was also during this period that
pensionados or government scholars were able to study in the United States, (Sterngass 2007,
41), including early canonical Filipino writers in English like Bienvenido Santos and Carlos
Bulosan. In universities founded under American rule, Filipino writers in English flourished.
(Hidalgo). Even though the Tagalog komiks was the popular genre (Jurilla 2010, 9), novels in
English were regularly being published. According to an account on publishing, 64 novels in
English written by Filipino writers were published, which led a scholar to remark that: "In none
of the former British colonies in Asia, Africa, and the West Indies was an English novel
produced so shortly after the arrival of the English language. Even India, the first of the British
colonies to issue a novel, did so only after more than two centuries British rule." (Altbach and
Hoshino 1995, 502). For Sicat, “Language alone limits the Philippine novel in English to the
elite and severs itself from the masses.” (428). On the other hand, today many writers contend
that Tagalog has already “colonized” English; that the kind of English writers use now is their
own, no longer the master’s tongue. (Yuson 2001).

As a product of colonial history, the concept of the Philippine nation remains besieged
with conflicting and unstable issues of history, language, identity, and culture, and these conflicts
manifest themselves in contemporary literature. Reacting to novels published in the 1990s, Sicat
asserts: “The Philippine novel in English is a literary practice plagued by divisions in
conceptualization and belief: in class, in language, in religion, in ethnie, in the nation.” (428). As
for the case of literature in general, Japan-based Filipino critic Caroline Hau writes: “By virtue of
its relative inaccessibility to the majority of the Filipino people, Philippine literature has no place
in Philippine society; yet it is invested with a great deal of social, indeed subversive,
significance. (2000, 271).” Hau notes, for instance, how the Rizal Law was passed on the
assumption that Rizal’s novels could “remake the national character.” (ibid, 2).

These are the issues that continue to cast a long shadow on Filipino writers today,
whether they like it or not. And all the more so for the migrant writer who chooses to write about
the home nation from the “belly of the beast.” Filipino critic Oscar Campomanes observed that
for early Filipino migrant writers in the United States, "Motifs of departure, nostalgia,
incompletion, rootlessness, leave taking, and dispossession recur with force in most writing
produced by Filipinos in the United States and by Filipino Americans, with the Philippines as
either the original or terminal reference point.” (1992, 51). For contemporary migrant writers,
however, like those whose novels will be read in this paper, these motifs are not as clearly
manifested. But what’s clear is that their “terminal reference point” in the novels in question
remains to be the Philippines.

Migrant/Exilic/Diasporic?

All three novelists included in this paper are now based in the United States.
Interestingly, Eric Gamalinda, Gina Apostol, and Miguel Syjuco all live in New York. Among
these novelists, Gamalinda has been in the literary scene the longest, and his list of awards,
publications, and fellowships attests to the fact that he’s the most established. Apostol is a two-
time winner of the country’s National Book Awards and has published in anthologies and
journals. Syjuco is a newcomer in terms of publication, but made a huge entrance when his debut
novel won the 2009 Man Asia Literary Prize and the First Prize in the Carlos Palanca Awards
(the most prestigious literary contest in the Philippines) in the same year.
I raise these biographical notes to interrogate which term in critical theory will best
capture the position of these writers. The terms “migrant”, “diasporic” and “exilic” have often
been used interchangeably. Here, however, I’ve decided to use the term migrant, because this
implies that the writers described above had a choice in moving away from the homeland,
although it’s evident that they have their own migrant struggles to contend with. What I would
refer to as comprising the Filipino diaspora are the thousands of Overseas Filipino Workers
(OFW) who are forced to leave the country in order to survive, given the scarcity of jobs in the
Philippines. I point to this reaction to an essay by established Filipino-American NY based
writer, Jessica Hagedorn (author of Dogeaters), who stated in an anthology that Fil-Am essays
are literatures of protest. The reaction:

With all the sympathy in the world for the diasporic search for a home that will
suffice, it is still worth noting that 'exile' and 'displacement' are hardly apt when
the migration is voluntary. When driven by motives of gain (whether economic or
virtual), to invoke the moral indignation of 'protest is less than apt, especially
since what it objects to is not injustice by the inertia and insularity of a white
majority readership whose liberal minority is still being solicited for sympathetic
attention. (Patke and Holden 2010, 145).
 I will return to the striking comment about seeking attention from “white majority
readers” later in the essay. At this point, I only wish to point out that these migrant writers
occupy a privileged position relative to the Philippine diaspora. However, like the history of the
nation, this phenomenon of massive labor export is one of the most pressing national issues that
haunt the Filipino migrant writer today. Now on to the novels.

My Sad Republic (2000)

The national significance of Gamalinda’s My Sad Republic is not just that the writer
received a hefty 1 million pesos cash prize for it (which is huge compared to what is offered by
the Palanca). It is significant because it won the 1998 Centennial Literary Prize, a state-
sponsored nationwide contest held to commemorate the centenary of the 1898 declaration of
independence from Spain, as led by the Katipunan. Thus, it may be argued that the novel was
deliberately and consciously written to say something about the nation.

The narrative tells of the rise and fall of Isio, an indigenous peasant and magical faith
healer who declared himself Pope and led a revolt against the Spaniards in the Visayan province
of Negros. The story is also structured by a standard love triangle: a poor peasant (Isio) versus a
rich landowner (Tomas Agustin) fighting for the love of a beautiful girl (Asuncion) who is also a
member of the landed elite. In other words, it’s your standard poor boy meets rich girl story, but
in the context of a revolution.

On the last page of the novel, Gamalinda includes some notes on the historical accuracy
of his novel. His main character is based on the little-known revolutionary figure, Pope Isio. “I
took the liberty of fictionalizing his life as well as his meeting with General Smith [American
General].” (391). He also noted that Pope Isio’s obscurity in Philippine history is much like the
forgotten Philippine-American War.

Filipino writer Angela Stuart-Santiago’s review is a useful starting point, as it captures some of
the issues I would like to discuss. The review reads:
 It is a rare novel in the Philippines that tells the story of the Filipino-American
war as seen through the eyes not of victorious colonizers but of the vanquished
people who suffered through it. Gamalinda tells the story exceedingly well in
marvelous Pinoy English that is now as much a language of misery and sorrow as
the native tongues that English "exorcised" a hundred years ago. (2000).

On the issue of language, the reviewer perhaps is referring to Gamalinda’s insertion of

Filipino expressions throughout the text. For example, some of the English dialogue is
punctuated by the Tagalog words po and ha, which reminds the reader that this text, written in
English, is set in the Philippines. (Personally, I always find it strange whenever I read stories set
in the Philippines that’s written completely in English). Gamalinda’s strategy of using Tagalog
words is common to many Filipino writers in English who attempt to “Filipinize” the colonizer’s
language.

The more important issue raised by the reviewer is the perspective through which the
“forgotten war2” between the Philippines and the United States was told. In the postcolonial
sense, Gamalinda’s project may be seen as historical intervention, given how he attempts to
recuperate an obscure figure in revolutionary history. This is related to Filipino historian
Reynaldo Ileto’s argument that the 1896 revolution was actually a religious revolution, in that it
was motivated by the narrative of the Pasyon, the Catholic rite of reciting Christ’s death and
resurrection. For Ileto, this Spanish ritual was effectively subverted and appropriated by Filipino
revolutionaries: “Holy Week fundamentally shaped the style of peasant-brotherhoods and
uprisings during the Spanish and early American colonial periods.” (1979, Ileto).

Indeed, through the fictional character of Pope Isio, Gamalinda attempts to show how
indigenous religious beliefs were fused with Catholicism towards the goal of revolution. Isio’s
character declared himself as Pope and would often quote verses from the bible, but his strength
is also derived from a spiritual amulet or anting-anting. Ileto and other historians have noted that

2
For a long time, the US refused to refer to this war as the Philippine-American war. Early American historians
referred to it merely as an “uprising.”
many of the Katipuneros used these amulets during the revolution in the belief that it granted
immortality. (ibid, 22). The Pasyon, contrary to the Spanish intention that it would prevent
rebellion, "was to provide lowland Philippine society with a language for articulating its own
values, ideals, and even hopes of liberation.” (ibid, 12).

In contrast to Stuart-Santiago’s brimming review, R. Kwan Laurel published a critique of

My Sad Republic and the runner-ups of the Centennial contest. Laurel thinks that Gamalinda
only trivialized the character of Pope Isio, and argues that the novel serves to “validate the
dominant ideology” as it assumes postmodernist irreverence towards history. Moreover, Laurel
asserts that Gamalinda should have been more careful in his representation of Pope Isio, whose
prime motivation for waging and failing the revolution was his love for Asuncion and his rage
against Tomas Agustin. Laurel’s conclusion goes:

A hundred years after the publication of the Noli, a novel Rizal wrote to assert
Filipino dignity, Gamalinda’s novel attempts to use the Philippines as exotic
material to please New York, the center of his world. He will one day discover
that the most astute readers in New York are not interested in sad republics
anymore, nor will the most astute readers in the Philippines. (2004, 274).

Laurel’s criticism reveals one of the ways that a Filipino migrant writer might imagine
the nation: through a narrative that is constructed primarily for international readers, even though
it was a novel written for a Philippine contest. This, perhaps, was what was referred to earlier
about Fil-Am writers soliciting “white majority readership.” Or, if Laurel is to be believed, the
winner of the Philippine Centennial literary contest was specifically made for an American
audience. Laurel’s reading moreover reveals how Gamalinda’s novel cannot escape the shadow
of Rizal’s Noli.

Extending Laurel’s reading, it may be argued that Gamalinda’s narrative might appeal to
an American audience, precisely because he knows how to imagine the nation from the
colonizer’s perspective given his migrant position. It is noticeable, for instance, that Gamalinda’s
portrayal of the Spanish colonization seems harsher than how American colonization is
represented. The Spanish friars are depicted as sex-hungry maniacs, such as in a scandalous
scene where a Spanish friar was “inserting a sacred host into the lips of a native girl’s vagina.”
(174).. Also to be considered is the first encounter between the Isio and James Smith, the latter
drifting into shore as though signifying the accidental arrival of American colonizers.

Isio and Martinez [the right-hand man] looked on with surprise and awe, because
this was not an angel but most certainly a man. He held his hands up to show he
wasn’t armed. He looked like a Spaniard but they could tell he was not, because
the expression on his face showed no fear, only the disconsolation of one who had
travelled half the world to get here. His drooping moustache gave him an
expression of exhausted benevolence. His cotton shirt and dark slacks were
drenched and clung to his body like shrivelled skin. As the two men peered at the
apparition they gradually made out the rest of the figures in the shadows: lying on
the stone floor, draped in heavy blankets, haggard, soaked and half-dead.

“What heaven did you fall from?” Isio asked in disbelief.

“America, the stranger replied.” “We need help quick.” (200).

Allegorically read, the scene depicts the arrival of Americans on Philippine shores and
how they were regarded as liberators from Spanish rule. The description also refers to the
“benevolent assimilation” policy that Mckinley endorsed, to differentiate American occupation
from European empires. A related scene is where Isio finds a copy of the American Constitution
and discusses it with Smith, and the drunk Isio proclaims that he wishes to follow the
constitution “to the letter.” (226).

More importantly, it seems that the idea of the nation that My Sad Republic recounts is
found in the precolonial past, a period which Gamalinda refers to in several parts of the novel as
that time before the sadness began. The source of the republic’s sadness is the colonizer’s
interruption of indigenous history. While this may be considered a postcolonial project of writing
back, there is always the danger of nativism, in which the recovery of the past becomes complicit
with the colonizer’s perception of the native’s uncivilized culture.
The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (2009)

The fact that Gamalinda wrote the blurb for Apostol’s novel could perhaps point to the
close community of Filipino writers in the US. For Gamalinda, the novel “takes on the keepers of
official memory and creates a new, atonal anthem that defies single ownership and, in fact, can
only be performed by the many—by multiple voices in multiple readings.” Perhaps this is the
best way to introduce the novel, which is a struggle to read, to say the least. From the beginning,
the reader will find himself/herself trying to figure out what is happening. I won’t even say that I
enjoyed reading it; this is not the kind of novel that one can judge in terms of liking or disliking.

There was obviously a great deal of research that went into the writing of Raymundo
Mata, and I would agree with Gamalinda’s observation that Apostol’s project is a “fearlessly
intellectual novel.” Much like Gamalinda’s project in recovering the unknown Pope Isio,
Apostol’s novel recovers the character of Raymundo Mata, a blind man whose name is
mentioned only in passing in history books. Here is one version:

On June 15, 1896, Dr. Pio Valenzula, acting as Bonifacio's emissary, sailed for
Dapitan to get Rizal's support for the armed revolution. To cover his real mission
from Spanish authorities, he brought with him a blind man named Raymundo
Mata, who was in need of Dr, Rizal's medical services. Rizal did not agree to the
Katipunan's plans of armed uprising since the people were not ready for it. (Halili
2004, 142).

The novel is a translated manuscript comprised of Mata’s writings from “unpaginated

notes and mismatched sheaves packed in a ratty biscuit tin and stuffed in a medical bag, the
edges of the papers curled up in permanent rust.” (2). From the onset, the reader already doubts
the accuracy of the story that is about to unfold. What’s immediately interesting in Apostol’s
version of history is that most of the story is told in footnotes. While this is not the first novel
that makes use of this style, it makes sense that the story of Mata, a footnote in the nation’s
history, should also be told in footnotes. But Mata is not the one speaking in footnotes. Below
Mata’s entries, we encounter the comments and competing voices of extreme nationalist
historian Estrella Espejo, a Fil-Am Murkian psychoanalyst Dr. Diwata Drake, and the translator,
Mimi C. Magsalin. Mata’s already doubtful story is mediated and translated through and
through, up to the multiple endings that the novel offers via these characters. Mikhail Bakhtin’s
heteroglossia is a useful concept to understand the Apostol’s project. Applied to the discourse of
a novel, heteroglossia “represents the co-existence of socio-ideological contradictions between
the present and the past, between differing epochs of the past, between different socio-
ideological groups in the present, between tendencies, schools, circles and so forth, all given in
bodily form. (qtd. in Vice 1997, 21).

Such a concept is seen in this novel that interrogates the accuracy and interpretation of
the Philippine revolution and history, foremost manifested in the exchanges between Espejo and
Drake, both parodies of the nationalist and the academic who create and interpret history—
Espejo sees Mata as a saint, Drake thinks he is a hoax. As for language, most is written in
English, but interspersed with Spanish, Tagalog, Bisaya, etcetera—multiple mediums.
Traditional historians would probably find this novel blasphemous (which is quite apt given the
gospel-like title), but then again, that’s precisely the project: to de-center, de-settle, to question
the truths of official history. The nation is continuously re-imagined in the act of reading. This,
perhaps, is how Apostol illustrates her own contradictions as a Filipino writer in English. In an
interview, she states:

It is always my dilemma that I write in English. But I am always myself writing in

English--that is, I am a Waray educated in Tagalog grammar writing in English.
My speech is always multiple; I am always multiple; all of these tongues are
always latent in me, simultaneously occurring;…It is obscene to write in English.
Of course, writing in English is the sign of the perversions of our history, our
mutilated selves. Writing in English is always a dagger in the heart,
postcolonially. And yet why do I feel no guilt at all? Why does it make sense that
I write in English? That is my dilemma. (in Delgado 2010, 293).
 One way of reading Mata’s character is that he is the product of the conflicting
imaginaries of the nation, the imagined cause of why the promise of the 1896 revolution did not
come to pass. In the fictional Philippines of the novel, Mata stole the rumoured manuscript of
Rizal’s third book and hid the money of the Katipunan.

A line that struck me was delivered in Drake’s epitaph, a line that captures the paradox of
history, literature, and the imagined nation: “And if so her enterprise [Mata’s manuscript]
preserves the country’s painful paradox: it is full of writers who believe a text will save it, even
when they know barely anyone will read it.” (277). This perhaps is also the paradox of this
particular novel that has so much to offer: who will able to read it? Is it, like Gamalinda’s novel,
only written for an international audience.

Ilustrado (2010)

From the narratives set in the past, this final novel by Syjuco takes us to the present. The
novel enjoys local and international praise—on the local front, one writer has called it “one of
the finest novels written by any Filipino. Perhaps, even, by any writer.” (Hidalgo 2008). From
this declaration, it is clear that compared to the novels discussed above, Ilustrado has received
the most hype and has thus been conferred with a huge burden of representation. For the Filipino
reader, the title itself is a clear signifier of Rizal and the Propaganda Movement, the Spanish
word for the European-educated elite during the Spanish occupation. Hau makes this same
observation in her review of the novel: “In terms of form and content, Ilustrado invites
comparison not so much with any American or even Filipino-American novel as with two of the
most important novels ever produced by a Filipino, José Rizal’s Noli me tangere (1887, 1961a)
and El filibusterismo.” (7).

The novel’s experimental form provides several subplots, but the main narrative revolves
around the death of Crispin Salvador, an established Filipino writer-thinker-professor. The
subplots appear in the form of online forums, periodicals, interviews, and several excerpts from
Salvador’s writings. The main narrative is basically driven by a search conducted by Salvador’s
student, Miguel Syjuco (the novelist named the character after himself), who wanted to learn
more about his mentor’s life. The fictional Syjuco also wants to find the manuscript of the last
great book that Salvador was rumored to have written before his death. In the interspersed plots
within the novel, we find various representations of the nation, as expressed by both Salvador
and the fictional Syjuco.

From the description above, it’s not surprising that Ilustrado has been called a
postmodern novel in various occasions, in both the positive and negative light. For instance,
Filipino academic Edel Garcellano criticizes the novel’s aesthetics that attempts to hide its
privileged ideological position in terms of class representation:

This mode of imagining that dares to pursue the so-called infinity of meanings—
in postmodernism, singularity is almost a fallacy—& skirts the abyss like
Nijinsky patrolling the mid-air, inspires local writers to lay claim even to
approximating events [for instance, the underground in the Philippines but
visualized from the vantage of Columbia University] outside their own
knowledge, actualizing on their pages what could be superfluously concocted.
(2010).

On the other hand, Hau focuses on how the novel showed how the term “ilustrado” has
been resignified/reappropriated to include the OFW phenomenon, regardless of the literary
aesthetics used in the writing. For Hau, notwithstanding limitations in representing class
divisions within the larger Filipino diaspora, the novel was able to at least reappropriate the term
ilustrado as a “critical stance” rather than a status symbol assigned to Filipino expatriates. (2011,
37).

To his credit, Syjuco comes off as a self-conscious writer who recognizes that his novel,
in many ways, reflects issues confronting the Philippine nation. In response to my query about
whether he considered his novel as “nationalist” or simply a novel about the nation, his response
was clear: “No, I would not say Ilustrado is a nationalist text at all. It is about the nation only
insomuch as it is partly set in the Philippines and is about characters who happen to be Filipino.”
He moreover discussed that in writing Ilustrado:
 “I didn't so much seek to define the country by touching on its history; but I did
try to examine, with objective fairness, the role of the privileged class in the
Philippines and how they've continuously let the country down, and why they've
continuously done so (I wanted to challenge the simplistic knee-jerk reactions of
the class war, wherein the rich are simply feckless and selfish, and the poor
ignorant and opportunistic. I meant it to be an indictment of the unchanging ruling
class, but an honest and compassionate indictment). In that sense, Ilustrado's a
book about the nation, but only because it is about certain aspects of the nation
that I felt needed to be written about. (2011).

The double-ness of Syjuco’s portrayal of the elite in the novel is expressed in some lines
that have surely raised many eyebrows. For instance, in one of the excerpts from Salvador’s
publications, we find these lines: “Pity not the elite but do not condemn them all…The
Alienation of the Elite is the unpolitical effect of the political. It concerns the plutocracy’s own
legitimate, and sympathetically human, frustration with this downwardspiraling human
condition, and not just the malaise of having.” (70). And perhaps, through the death of the
fictional Syjuco in the act of sacrifice towards the end of the novel, the real Syjuco implicates
himself and interrogates his own stakes in the developing history of the nation.

The novel’s closing favors the option of return for the modern Ilustrado, with the return
of the Crispin Salvador (as well as his resurrection, if he did die in the beginning of the novel)
from exile:

And so, my return. I write these final words as I approach my first day home.
Home to what remains of my family.
Home to my child, for whenever she’s ready.
Home, with the discovery that we are only enlightened at a new beginning,
at what we perceive to be the end. (303-304).
 “The act of writing [the novel],” Terry Eagleton notes, “crosses the border between
subjective and objective…In this sense its very existence can be seen as an imaginary solution to
the social problems which it poses.” Ilustrado’s imaginary solution is an appeal to the nation’s
elite, that they may find it in their hearts to denounce greed and excess, as they themselves are
victims of the nation’s tragic history. I think that this imaginary solution is the novel’s
revolutionary potential, and perhaps, also reveals its limitations.

Provisional endings/nations

What’s common in these novels by migrant writers is the idea that the nation is found in the
return. For Gamalinda, a return to the pre-colonial past; for Apostol a return to the unfinished
revolution that the novel “unfinished” all the more. It’s interesting that for both writers, the
nation is narrated through historical interventions. Apart from the shadow of Rizal that haunts
any Filipino writer, perhaps there is also the shadow of that “always-postponed arrival.”

For Syjuco, the promise of return is also a physical return. There is a scene in Ilustrado that may
hint at the migrant novelist’s position of being in-between, and why perhaps despite the distance
the writer still writes about the homeland. While the fictional Syjuco is on a plane back to
Manila, he sits beside a Filipino migrant worker who was on his way home for good. I end with
the fictional Syjuco’s reflection after handing over a wad of money that the migrant worker
dropped: “I feel unspeakably happy for him. And sad that I’ve come home with less definitive
intentions.” (41).
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