The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic

by Nick Joaquin

  still amid bells, banners, fireworks, music, and the tumult of

  the city, for news of his rescue had preceded him, the marvel of

  his sojourn on the island had grown into legend in the retelling,

  and he himself had become such a figure of miracle—the man

  twice saved by the Sign of the Cross; and fed on the desert isle,

  ’twas said, by ravens, like Elijah, and with manna from heaven,

  like the Israelites—that the folk who poured forth to welcome

  him dropped to their knees with a shudder as he was borne

  past, a frail wraith that, however, had power to stun the eye

  and seize the soul, that would, indeed, in those days, possess

  the popular mind, every traveling bard having but this one

  ballad to sing, and no print hawked at the fairs but carried the

  Archbishop’s picture and a relation of his adventures, by which

  diverse manners the fame of him spread as a holy man on whom

  God had showered such mystical favors that when the

  Archbishop at last emerged from a long convalescence, firmer

  in fabric but never again to be in his prime, it was to find himself being revered in the land as a saint.

  In this passage, certainty is carried away by the irresistible torrents of chance as space falls into the vortex of time. The Archbishop’s life is condensed into a series of moments, each pregnant with other stories, other times, and other possibilities. This is a chronicle of accidents whose features emerge only after repeated recitations. One event comes after another, each as unexpected and unmotivated as the last and the next. What makes this tale arresting is its proximity to death. This is similar to an earlier story, “The Legend of the Dying Wanton” (1946), the tale of a rakish Spanish soldier in the seventeenth-century Philippines who, shipwrecked and near death from his wounds, suddenly witnesses the sublime apparition of the Virgin and Child and is subsequently found by another ship where a priest hears his confession before he finally expires. In both stories, death gives the storyteller a vantage point from which to see the unfolding of a life told in long, breathless sentences that pile up image upon image propelled by lush alliteration.18

  In “Doña Jerónima,” the Archbishop comes close to death but is saved by the very means with which he was to be killed, strung up on the mast like Christ hung on the cross. Swept toward a small desert island with nothing else but fish and prayer, he thrives in his new hermitage, finding another way to live apart from the political scheming and military adventurism of the colony. Cut off from the time of empire, he retreats into another time of isolation and meditation to become a different self. As luck would have it, he is rescued after a year. Back in the colony, he becomes a legend, his accidental history heralded as a miraculous event whose telling conveys blessings to those who hear and pass it on. His reputation for holiness is something he feels is undeserved but cannot escape, just as he cannot get away from public life once he is returned to Manila. Rather than redemption, rescue leads precisely to its opposite, subjecting him to the hell of public adulation that the island had sheltered him from.

  Long sentences unfold in many of Joaquin’s other stories. They do not represent real events so much as the possibilities of their taking place. As such, they convey the experience of remembering not what happened but what could have happened. One memory leads to another as if triggered by some involuntary process that distills the contents of an entire life into the space of a single sentence that, in its exuberant rush, delivers a series of shock effects to awaken the present to the past. Thickened with other times from other places, the past-present bursts open and becomes hospitable to other futures, beginning with the future retelling of the story. The storyteller thus conveys a particular kind of counsel: that each story is a kind of promise whose fulfillment lies precisely in its continual deferral with each successive telling and hearing. The meaning of the story is always yet to be determined, its lessons still to be applied, and its wisdom embedded in the very experience of hearing, then passing on the legend.

  VII.

  Walter Benjamin stressed the pragmatic nature of storytelling. Stories all convey something useful, whether “a moral . . . some practical advice . . . or a proverb or maxim. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.” Such counsel “is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding. To seek this counsel one would first have to be able to tell the story. (Quite apart from the fact that a man is receptive to counsel only to the extent that he allows his situation to speak.) Counsel woven into the fabric of real life is wisdom.”19

  Nick Joaquin’s stories provide us with such counsel. Swept by the catastrophes of colonialism and war, Joaquin, like St. Sylvestre, looked both ways. Lingering on the threshold of what had happened and what was yet to come, he found himself irresistibly drawn, like the Angel of History, to the debris of colonial catastrophes that just kept piling up around him. He sought to retrieve from the ruins of modernity the means for conveying experience—his own as well as others’—in stories about forgotten legends, repressed events, flawed fathers, two-naveled women, and the miracles of a merciful Virgin that continue to emerge from the ever-perplexing and vertigo-inducing history of a certain Philippines.20 We, whoever we are, receive his stories told from a ruined world, hearing and perhaps sharing them as we would the shards of our own lives.

  VICENTE L. RAFAEL

  NOTES

  1.Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 83–110. The quotations are from 83–84.

  2.Histories of the U.S. Empire are legion. For a useful historiographic survey of the topic, see Paul Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” The American Historical Review 116(5), (2011): 1348–91.

  3.There is a vast literature on the Philippine Revolution and the Filipino-American War. See for example, Milagros Guerrero, Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1898–1902 (Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing, 2015); Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Uprisings in the Philippines, 1840–1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979); Teodoro Agoncillo, Malolos: The Crisis of the Republic (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1960); Vicente L. Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); and Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

  4.Quoted in Camilo Osias, “Education and Religion,” in Zoilo M. Galang, ed., Encyclopedia of the Philippines, 20 vols. (Manila: E. Floro, 1950–58), vol. 9, 126. For a more or less critical look at the first thirteen years of colonial education, see Glenn A. May, Social Engineering in the Philippines: The Aims, Execution, and Impact of American Colonial Policy, 1900–1913 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 77–126.

  5.For a history of the use of local languages for Christian conversion under Spanish rule, see Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society Under Early Spanish Rule (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).

  6.Vicente L. Rafael, “The War of Translation: American English, Colonial Education and Tagalog Slang,” in Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), chap. 2. See also May, Social Engineering in the Philippines.

  7.See Resil Mojares, Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel Until 1940 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1983).

  8.See Rafael, Motherless Tongues.

  9.See Mojares, Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel, 336–51. See also Caroline Sy Hau, Nece
ssary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946–1980 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000).

  10.See Rafael, Motherless Tongues, chap. 2.

  11.Mojares, Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel, 336–51. See also Jonathan Chua, ed., The Critical Villa: Essays in Literary Criticism (Quezon City: Ateneo University Press, 2002); Soledad Reyes, Nobelang Tagalog, 1905–1975: Tradisyon at Modernismo (Quezon City: Ateneo University Press, 1982); and Bienvenido Lumbera and Cynthia Nograles Lumbera, Philippine Literature: A History & Anthology (Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing, 1997).

  12.Mojares, Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel, 348. See also N. V. M. Gonzalez, “Moving On: A Filipino in the World,” in Joseph Fischer, ed., Foreign Values in Southeast Asian Studies (Berkeley, CA: Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies, 1973); and Augusto Espiritu, Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005).

  Nick Joaquin himself espoused these views of the privileged role of print English in freeing the Filipino writer from the demands of and obligations to his readers versus the more “traditional” role of vernacular literature, which he considered not literature at all insofar as it was bound to oral forms and rooted in more parochial concerns. See Joaquin, “The Filipino as English Fictionist,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 6(3) (Sept. 1978): 118–24. I disagree with Joaquin’s and other Anglophone writers’ insistence on the hierarchical distinction between “modern” print literature in English versus “traditional” oral storytelling in the vernacular. I am closer to the position of Resil Mojares, who argues that vernacular literature did in fact have a modernist aspect where experiments with form and content were just as vital as those going on in Anglophone literature, which writers in English, thanks to the workings of American colonial education, willfully ignored. I am also arguing for the deep historical affinity between vernacular and Anglophone literature, at least in Joaquin’s case, where the practice of storytelling is concerned.

  13.Here, the earlier generation of American literary critics such as Carey McWilliams, Leonard Caspar, and Roger Bresnahan come to mind. While a couple of Nick Joaquin’s writings were published in American magazines, they were minor blips in the metropolitan literary scene, suffering a fate shared by most other Anglophone writers of being marginalized, then quickly forgotten. Whether or not this Penguin edition of Joaquin’s stories that you hold in your hands will mitigate the relative invisibility of Filipino writing in the larger Anglophone world is, of course, something yet to be seen.

  More recently, however, Filipino-American literary critics have begun to study Anglophone writing with great theoretical verve, including, among others, Martin Joseph Ponce, Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading (New York: NYU Press, 2012); and John D. Blanco, “Baroque Modernity and the Colonial World: Aesthetics and Catastrophe in Nick Joaquin’s Portrait of the Artist as Filipino,” Kritika Kultura 4 (Mar. 2004). See also the essays in Martin F. Manalansan IV and Augusto F. Espiritu, Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora (New York: NYU Press, 2016).

  14.For the most informative biographies of Joaquin, see Resil Mojares, “Biography of Nick Joaquin” (1996), www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyJoaquinNic.htm; and Marra PL. Lanot, The Trouble with Nick and Other Profiles (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1999), republished in bulatlat.com, www.bulatlat.com/news/4-13/4-13-nick.html.

  See also two biographies by Joaquin’s nephew and sister-in-law: Tony Joaquin (with Gloria Kismadi), Portrait of the Artist Nick Joaquin (Mandaluyong City: Anvil Publishing, 2011); and Sarah K. Joaquin, “A Portrait of Nick Joaquin,” This Week, Mar. 13, 1955, 24–26.

  The first and so far only monograph-length treatment of Joaquin’s work is Epifanio San Juan, Subversions of Desire: Prolegomena to Nick Joaquin (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988). See also Robert Vore, “The International Literary Contexts of the Filipino Writer Nick Joaquin” (PhD dissertation, Dept. of English, Northern Illinois University, 1997), which has the virtue of having one of the most detailed bibliographies of Joaquin’s publications up to 1997.

  15.Joaquin once wrote in a rare autobiographical vignette: “I have no hobbies, no degrees; belong to no party, club, or association; and I like long walks; any kind of guinataan; Dickens and Booth Tarkington; the old Garbo pictures; anything with Fred Astaire . . . the Opus Dei according to the Dominican rite . . . Jimmy Durante and Cole Porter tunes . . . the Marx brothers; the Brothers Karamazov; Carmen Miranda; Paul’s Epistles and Mark’s; Piedmont cigarettes . . . my mother’s cooking . . . playing tres-siete; praying the Rosary and the Officium Parvum . . . I don’t like fish, sports, and having to dress up.” Quoted in Resil Mojares, “Biography of Nick Joaquin” (1996), www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/Biography JoaquinNic.htm.

  16.Benjamin, “The Storyteller,” 102.

  17.For the background to this story, see Florentino H. Hornedo, “The Source of Nick Joaquin’s ‘Doña Jerónima,’” Philippine Studies 30 (1982): 542–51.

  18.Hence, Benjamin: “Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death”; “The Storyteller,” 94.

  19.Ibid., 86–87.

  20.The image of the “Angel of History,” suggested in this instance by the image of the myriad angels surrounding St. Sylvestre as he leads his procession, is of course drawn from Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus and discussed by Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, 257–58. I borrow the term “vertigo-inducing” from the great historical comparativist Benedict Anderson, who uses it to describe the conjunctural strangeness of the Philippines in world history. See Anderson, “The First Filipino,” London Review of Books 19(20) (Oct. 16, 1997): 22–23. He, too, was an admirer of Nick Joaquin and Walter Benjamin.

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  STORIES OF NICK JOAQUIN

  (And their original dates and places of publication. Note that the texts for this Penguin edition are based on those published by Anvil Publishing and not these magazines, as approved by the estate of the author.)

  “Three Generations,” Graphic, Sept. 5, 1940

  “The Legend of the Dying Wanton,” Evening News Saturday Magazine, Oct. 5, 1946

  “The Mass of St. Sylvestre,” Manila Post, Dec. 29, 1946

  “The Summer Solstice,” Saturday Evening News, June 21, 1947

  “May Day Eve,” Philippine Free Press, Dec. 13, 1947

  “The Woman Who Had Two Navels,” This Week, July 10, 1949

  “Guardia de Honor,” Philippine Free Press, Oct. 1, 1949

  “Portrait of the Artist as Filipino: An Elegy in Three Acts,” Weekly Women’s Magazine, Sept. 28–Nov. 23, 1951

  “Doña Jerónima,” Philippine Free Press, May 1, 1965

  “Cándido’s Apocalypse,” Philippine Free Press, Dec. 11, 1965

  “The Order of Melkizedek,” Philippine Free Press, Dec. 10, 1966

  CONTEXT AND COMMENTARIES

  Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” in Illuminations, edited with an introduction by Hannah Arendt and translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, 83–110.

  Blanco, John D. “Baroque Modernity and the Colonial World: Aesthetics and Catastrophe in Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino.” Kritika Kultura 4 (2004): 5–35. Web. Feb. 20, 2010.

  Bresnahan, Roger J. Conversations with Filipino Writers. Quezon City: New Day, 1990.

  Casper, Leonard. “Beyond the Mind’s Mirage: Tales by Joaquin and Cordero-Fernando.” Philippine Studies 31 (1983): 87–93.

  ———. “Nick Joaquin.” New Writing from the Philippines. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1966, 137–45.

  Cheah, Pheng. What Is a World? On Post-Colonial Literature as World Lite
rature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

  Chua, Jonathan, ed. The Critical Villa: Essays in Literary Criticism. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press, 2002.

  Hau, Caroline Sy. Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946–1980. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000, 94–132.

  Hornedo, Florentino H. “The Source of Nick Joaquin’s ‘The Legend of the Dying Wanton.’” Philippine Studies 26 (1978): 297–307.

  ———. “The Source of Nick Joaquin’s ‘Doña Jerónima.’” Philippine Studies 30 (1982): 542–51.

  Joaquin, Nick. “The Filipino as English Fictionist.” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 6(3) (Sept. 1978): 118–24.

  Joaquin, Sarah K. “A Portrait of Nick Joaquin.” This Week, Mar. 13, 1955, 24–26.

  Joaquin, Tony (with Gloria Kismadi). Portrait of the Artist Nick Joaquin. Pasig: Anvil, 2011.

  Kintanar, Thelma B. “From Formalism to Feminism: Rereading Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels.” Women Reading: Feminist Perspectives on Philippine Literary Texts. Edited by Thelma B. Kintanar. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press/University Center for Women’s Studies, 1992, 131–45.

  Lacaba, Emmanuel A. F. “Winter After Summer Solstice: The Later Joaquin.” Philippine Fiction: Essays from Philippine Studies 1953–1972. Edited by Joseph A. Galdon. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1972, 45–56.

  Lanot, Marra PL. “The Trouble with Nick.” The Trouble with Nick and Other Profiles. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1999, 3–15, www.bulatlat.com/news/4-13/4-13-nick.html.

  Lim, Shirley Geok-Lin. “Reconstructions of Filipino Identity: Nick Joaquin’s Fictions.” Nationalism and Literature: English-Language Writing from the Philippines and Singapore. Quezon City: New Day, 1993, 63–90.

  Mojares, Resil B. “Biography of Nick Joaquin.” Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation. Web. June 7, 2010, www.rmaf.org.ph/Awardees/Biography/BiographyJoaquinNic.html.