RECONNAISSANCE AND INTERVENTION
At the start of the Cold War, Bulosan was virtually a blacklisted writer. The recent release of his FBI files seems an anticlimactic but fortuitous exposé of “dirty linen.”21 Bulosan’s intimacy with the Babb sisters, active in the Hollywood circle of fellow-traveling intellectuals, was public knowledge. As a journalist with the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union (ILWU), Bulosan was surveilled as a dangerous subversive, threatened with deportation. But how can you deport a writer commissioned to write an essay to celebrate one of Roosevelt’s “four freedoms” then on exhibit, with an artwork, at the Federal Building in San Francisco?
By the end of the McCarthy witch hunt in 1954, Bulosan enjoyed a modest if surreptitious prestige. The bestselling Laughter had been translated into over a dozen languages, while AIH had been favorably reviewed and the author cited in Who’s Who in America, Current Biography, and others. Meanwhile, he was drafting The Cry, his saga of Huk guerrillas reconstructing their nation’s history as they sought to establish linkage with U.S.-based sympathizers.22 Charting the often interrupted self-fashioning of the Filipino subject, The Cry may be read as a cartographic fantasy of performing the quest for self-determination. What impelled Bulosan to write? “[M]y grand dream of equality among men and freedom for all. . . . Above all and ultimately, to translate the desires and aspirations of the whole Filipino people in the Philippines and abroad in terms relevant to contemporary history” (On Becoming, 216). Bulosan died on September 11, 1956, shortly after the Korean War ended, within earshot of the portentous rumblings from Indochina.
In retrospect, the tensions of the Cold War offered an occasion for Bulosan to redefine the travails of the “wretched” multitude. In grappling with life-and-death situations, he analyzed the insidious contagion of racism/sexism that complicated the epochal antagonism between capitalism and socialist experiments carried out since the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. A decade after his death, Filipino farmworkers mounted the 1965 strike that led to the founding of the United Farm Workers of America, thanks to pioneering efforts of the CIO, ILWU, and other groups whose leaders were hounded by the FBI. Filipinos joined coalitions with African Americans, Native Americans, women, and others in the civil rights struggles, reviving memories of centuries-old resistance—an epic of heroic “soul-making.” Its genealogy was already prefigured in Bulosan’s aide-mémoire, “How My Stories Were Written,” in which an old village storyteller is revealed as his ancestral progenitor, the matrix of all the “wisdom of the heart” (“How My Stories,” 142).
Amid the controversy over immigration today, over three million Filipinos in the United States are preponderant stakeholders in the reshaping of civil society. Bulosan sought to substantiate their presence in this chronicle of the subaltern’s quest for justice, equality, and respect. Before he died, Bulosan reaffirmed his conviction in the virtue of collective praxis as emblematic of humanity’s potential for reconfiguring history: “Writing was not sufficient. . . . The most decisive move that the writer could make was to take his stand with the workers” (“Writer as Worker,” 31). As long as the Philippines remains a neocolonial backwater and the diaspora languishes in obsessive consumerism, Bulosan’s works will remain serviceable as speculative tools for diagnosing its “Unhappy Consciousness”23 and its ethos of ressentiment, compromise, and disobedience. What Mark Twain called “the Philippine temptation” (32) when the United States tamed those “wild” Malays—the scandalous spectacle of the Yankee republic subjugating millions who refused to be enslaved—yielded a sharp joyful response, to which Bulosan’s lifework, with its moral cogency and provocative gravitas, bears witness.
E. SAN JUAN, JR.
NOTES
1. See Tan; Francisco; Pomeroy; and Miller, 219–76, for a calculation of victims that still arouses heated controversy. For the U.S. anti-imperialist movement, see Zwick, 1–64, 155–80, and San Juan, Toward Filipino Self-Determination, 45–66.
2. Karnow’s “apologist” version of history needs qualification—see Zinn, 290–313; Constantino, Neocolonial, 95–210; Agoncillo, 1–87; and San Juan, U.S. Imperialism, 28–36. For agrarian unrest, see Pomeroy, 118–49.
3. See Sturtevant in addition to Constantino; Veneracion; and Guerrero.
4. For a standard sourcebook on Asian American immigration, see Takaki. See also San Juan, From Exile and After Postcolonialism.
5. See San Juan, “Filipinos.” DuBois’s “double-consciousness” as applied to Filipinos is elaborated in San Juan, Toward Filipino Self-Determination and After Postcolonialism. For Chinese and Japanese immigration, see Takaki.
6. San Juan, Balikbayan, 161; also San Juan, Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination, 1–16.
7. For a representative selection of Bulosan’s poems, including the signature ode “If You Want to Know What We Are,” see On Becoming in Evangelista; and Feria. Uncollected poems are deposited in the Babb papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
8. See Feria, 273. On the problems of Filipino immigration, see Takaki, 57–62, 432–36.
9. For Sanora Babb’s documents concerning her relationship with Bulosan, and with Villa, that would supplement this account, see the files in the Babb papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.
10. See letter dated April 27, 1941, in Feria, 199. For further discussion, see San Juan, Carlos Bulosan: Revolutionary Filipino Writer.
11. See Goldmann, 35–53, which extrapolates from Lukács’s theories in History and Class Consciousness.
12. See Frye, 186–205; Frye’s archetypal concept of romance needs the historicization of forms by Goldmann, Lukács, and Jameson. For further gloss on Filipino writing, see San Juan, Hegemony.
13. See Fanon; also San Juan, Working Through, 165–86.
14. For the popular-front allegory, see Denning, 273–77. On heteroglossia, see Bakhtin, 263–72; for a Bakhtinian application, see San Juan, Working Through, 214–31.
15. On “women’s time,” see Kristeva, 187–213.
16. Jameson’s concept of the “political unconscious” derives from Lukács, and supplements Goldmann’s genetic structuralism and Kristeva’s semiotics.
17. Guerrero, 65–78; see also Constantino, The Philippines; Veneracion; San Juan, Between Empire, chapters 1 and 8.
18. On American “exceptionalism,” see Kaplan and Pease, 3–36; San Juan, After Postcolonialism, U.S. Imperialism, and Between Empire.
19. Cabral’s indigenism counterpoints Fanon; for a Gramscian standpoint, see San Juan, Between Empire, chapter 1.
20. Freire, 41–58. See San Juan, Working Through, 215–54.
21. Alquizola and Hirabayashi, 29–50; see also Cabusao, 259–82, 325–29; San Juan, Carlos Bulosan, Revolutionary Filipino, 91–97.
22. On the Huk uprising, see Agoncillo and Guerrero, 517–35, 586–91; Taruc; Abaya; Constantino, The Philippines; Veneracion; and San Juan, “An American Witness,” on Benjamin Appel’s Fortress in the Rice, heuristically effective in making sense of Bulosan’s The Cry.
23. See Hegel, 126–38; for a critique of Hegel, see Lukács. For its application on other literary and cultural phenomena, see San Juan, Between Empire, 66–129, and Working Through, 255–300.
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PART ONE
CHAPTER I
I was the first to see him coming slowly through the tall grass in the dry bottom of the river. He walked with measured steps and when he reached the spreading mango tree that separated our land from my grandfather’s, he put his bundle on the ground and sat on it, looking toward our house with the anxiety of a man who had been away from home for a long time. He was as yet unrecognizable in the early morning light, but it was evident from the way he walked that he had come a long distance. Apparently he was not a stranger in our barrio or village, for he seemed to know where he was going and to be unhurried.
I rushed out of the house and ran across the pasture where some of our animals were grazing. I headed for the rich piece of land my father was plowing. It was the season for corn and my father, like the other farmers in our barrio, had gone to our land at early dawn to start the spring plowing. I could smell the fresh upturned earth in the air and the bitter smoke of burning grass. The fields were dotted with men plowing and harrowing and raking weeds into the river.
My father halted the carabao, or water buffalo, and bit the rope. He put his wet hands on his hips and waited patiently for me. When I reached him, I leaned against the carabao and gasped for breath. The kind animal turned his head toward me and switched the flies off his back with his long tail.
“What is it, son?” asked my father, taking, the rope from his mouth and tying it to the plow handle. “Why are you running like a hound so early in the morning?”
“I think I saw brother Leon,” I said, hoping that I was right about the stranger who resembled my oldest brother. “I saw him coming toward our house.”
Father kicked the dirt off his feet and said: “Your brother Leon is still fighting in Europe. Maybe he is dead now. I have not heard from him.” He took the rope again and flipped it gently and suggestively across the carabao’s back, and the two of them, the patient animal and my father, walked slowly and industriously away, the sharp plow blade breaking smoothly through the rich soil between them.
I ran to the tamarind at the other end of the farm and climbed quickly to its top. I looked toward the m
ango tree, but the stranger was no longer there. I looked around as far as my eyes could see. Then I saw him coming toward our land with slow, firm steps, stopping now and then to look at the surrounding landscape. He was coming from the direction of our house.
When the carabao had reached the ditch and was trying to snatch a tuft of grass, I shouted to father to stop and look toward the stranger. He put the rope between his teeth, but when he saw the stranger and recognized him, his mouth opened in surprise and the rope fell to the wet ground. I climbed down the tree hurriedly and ran as fast as I could across the plowed earth. My father was already talking with the stranger.
I stopped suddenly when I saw my brother Leon. I had seen only his picture on the large table in our house in town. I did not know what to say now that I was seeing him for the first time. My father looked at me and his face broke into sudden gentleness.
“It is your brother, son,” he said, picking up the rope. “He is home now, from the war.”
“Welcome home, soldier,” I said.
Leon grabbed my shoulders and swung me swiftly above his head; then he put me back on the ground and looked blank for a moment. Suddenly, with an affectionate glance at the animal, he took the rope from my father and started plowing the common earth that had fed our family for generations.
That was how I met my brother who had gone to fight a strange war in Europe. The sudden, sweeping years that later came to my life and pushed me into the unknown, the vital, negative years of hard work and bitter trials oftentimes resurrected his face for me with great vividness. And at other times I was to go back again and again to this moment for an assurance of righteous anger against the crushing terror that filled my life in a land far away. . . .
America Is in the Heart Page 3