Where the planet Jupiter begins

The writer Katrina Tuvera was researching in the basement of the library in UP Diliman when she came across an old article on the “Jupiter effect,” the heavenly alignment of planets believed to trigger great upheavals and catastrophes on planet earth. The image stuck and became the title of Tuvera’s first novel on growing up during the martial law years, published last year by Anvil.

The name may sound familiar enough to those old enough to remember the fallen Marcos regime, as Tuvera through her novel comes to terms with being raised on the side of the powers-that-be, and though this may largely be a work of fiction, the personal circumstances surrounding the main character Andrea cannot but be imbued with specific political events and popular trivia in history, down to the last hit song and movie showing downtown.

As such the inevitable parallels can be drawn with Jose Dalisay’s Killing Time in a Warm Place, a novel set roughly in the same time period but told from the renegade’s point of view. Both can be said to be historical novels though the subjective narrative may tempt the reader to catch glimpses of thinly disguised autobiography. This is not entirely an error in reading especially if we are privy to the writer’s lives: Dalisay was an activist who spent time in a military stockade, while Tuvera had a privileged upbringing as progeny of a Palace speechwriter and an editor of the leading magazine of the 1970s.

Through Tuvera’s character’s eyes then we get to see what it was like growing up on the Marcos side of the fence, a view long maligned since the first people power revolt. But far from being apologist, the writer situates the life of the fictional information minister in the novel in an almost neutral, domestic setting, suggesting that the political choices made were less of convenience and power play than of family necessities.

The lead character’s elder brother is afflicted with an eye disease at a young age, and if not for the father’s connections the boy might well have gone blind. The suburbs south of Manila are given somewhat underwritten descriptions, and they are pictured as a kind of new frontier fast easing out the former backwoods. We can only imagine it to be either Alabang or Parañaque, where many upper middle class families relocated in the early Sixties to escape from the encroaching metropolis.

Political landmarks as well as social events of the period are given worthy coverage, many of which we can remember with a hint of nostalgia: the Miss Universe contest, the Thrilla in Manila, the Ninoy Aquino homecoming complete with a subplot on the elusive identity of the senator’s assassin.

In this manner fiction becomes a revisionist history, as the Galman character is effectively absolved of the crime, at least in the novel. At some point the reader gets drift of Tuvera’s conflicted version of incidents, as if the lead character’s maturation coincides with the writer’s self-therapy and coming to terms with her past life of privilege.

The novel comes to a head with the EDSA revolt of 1986, with the now grown up kids of the information minister evaluating their politics amid the snowballing movement to oust the strongman. More than 20 years after the first people power, Tuvera has gained enough distance to write about it with circumspection, even in the context of fiction.

What seemed at the time a dizzying sequence of events is now viewed with a keen objective eye, the novelist weighing the Jupiter effect on the lives of her characters, as well as her own. There may be a sea change around us, but there are some things meant to stay the same.

Raise a glass or two then to those bygone years, when south of Manila was virtual outback and a drive through Roxas, then Dewey Boulevard, was clean as a whistle.

Another novel of note and worthy contender in the critics’ book awards for long fiction is Charlson Ong’s Banyaga, A Song of War (Anvil 2006). Ong is an older, more mature writer than Tuvera, and his style has a natural breadth and expansiveness in scope beside which Tuvera’s novel seems underwritten.

We surmise that the first drafts of the novel were submitted for the writers’ prize some years ago, when the Tagalog writer and filmmaker Mes de Guzman beat a formidable field. But this did not dampen Ong’s determination to finish the project, and the result is this song of war in a time of peace, a timeline in the life of a Chinoy family in Binondo dating back to the old homeland in China.

As far as language is concerned Ong can easily get drunk with it, handling narrative with deliberation and cinema-like ease so that some sequences are easily etched in the memory — the death fall of a younger brother while trying to reach out and retrieve a pet pigeon, young boys pissing over the railing on the slow boat from the mainland to Manila, the praying before the old Peranakan-like cabinet filled with the scent of incense sticks and pictures of ancestors.

At least one reader has commented that to fully understand and appreciate such an expansive novel, a sort of family tree and genealogy as diagrammed by Ong would have helped, not unlike Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, Salman Rushdie in Shame and Carlos Fuentes in Terra Nostra.

Because of the somewhat roundabout, almost rambling plot that could well complement the winding streets and alleyways of Binondo and Sta. Cruz, complete with rusty fire escapes and dark stairways that lead possibly to nowhere, some navigational chart should have been provided. As it is we get an inkling that the major characters are in one way or another related by blood or kinship, we just aren’t sure how lest we pay full attention to and take note of the similar-sounding Chinese names.

Yet for all its warts there is no denying the importance of Banyaga not only to the local Chinoy community but to Philippine literature in general. Ong has raised the bar for the subject begun in the 1970s with Paul Stephen Lim’s Some Arrivals, But Mostly Departures. We are only now starting to grasp the many hidden stories lying in ambush in such a street as Ongpin, where the songlines chase us all the way to the fire station like sad-eyed, sauna fumes.