Stories of a bitter country

That is the title of Ninotchka Rosca’s collection of short stories recently published by Anvil. This book is an occasion for celebration, since it gathers together all the published stories of the iconic Filipino writer. 

The first part of the book contains the stories from Bitter Country, first published by Malaya Books in 1970. I got my newsprint copy of this book from the PECO Bookstore in Cubao, with its flaming red cover and the stories that remind you of Maxim Gorky. There is the same eye for physical detail, the talent for making the characters live, and her deep knowledge of the Philippine “lower depths.”

The Monsoon Collection was first published by the University of Queensland Press in 1983 as part of its series on Asia-Pacific Writing. Of this book, the writer said: “These stories were written on and off during the years 1975-79, some in Manila, one in New York, and the others in Honolulu. However, the collection itself, as a whole, was conceptualized in the Camp Crame Detention Centre in 1973. Time passes.”

I remember going to the Special Collections of the Rizal Library at the Ateneo de Manila University as a graduate student in the late 1980s, to read this book that has since gone out of print. The New York Times gave it a rave review, calling the book a slim collection of stories that shows “art’s insuperable grace over violence.” This book begins with “The Neighborhood,” which shows the new direction taken by Rosca’s fiction. The stories in the second book are shorter, more cinematic, sharper. This story details life in the urban slums, with its gossip and scandal and its sex: “It didn’t take very long for Victor to discover the sawdust scent of Flordeliza’s body.”

Then the typhoon comes, wiping away almost everything its path. But most peculiar is the appearance of millions of worms at the typhoon’s wake, “pale and blind to the sun, some as thick as a man’s finger.” One reviewer castigated Rosca for the ending of this story, saying it was not earned. But the poor guy did not see the point: in a typhoon’s wake, the poor suffer the most, and they are compared to these worms “contracting and lengthening painfully, as if trying to dig into the asphalt and throw a blackness over their frailty.”

The book alternates long stories with vignettes, more like snippets of conversations and talk stories amongst the detainees of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law. They act like abbreviated Greek choruses, commenting briefly on the darkest days of martial law. One of the most horrifying vignettes is that of Gordo tortured to death, whose body is left to rot near the detainees’ quarters, until it is black with flies. Martial law was like that: it killed thousands of people, bit the deeper scar is in the psyche of a people frightened out of their wits.

The third part is “Sugar and Salt,” a story that won an award from Ms Magazine, followed by “Epidemic,” a story chosen by Raymond Carver as one of the 100 Best Stories Published in the United States in 1985 and by Missouri Review as one of its Best Short Fiction published between 1978-88. This story deals with “an epidemic of children,” more like an epidemic of poverty, and how Lazaro Reyes, M.D., becomes an accomplice to the killing of poor children. Written more than 30 years ago, it acquires resonance again post-2016, when even children have become victims of the tokhang (police-driven killings) that blighted the land.

The last cluster of stories are the shortest, but they map the contours of late 20th-century Philippines with such elegant rage. “A Woman of the Philippines” deals with a white martial-arts fighter who later transitions into a transgender woman. “Implosion” deals with Vergara, a former superstar of Philippine show business now reduced into a coke-sniffing has-been because of a botched operation in her throat. Her formerly golden voice now comes out as a bark she tries to sing.

“But she was already barking, growling, mewling – oh, how to describe the horrible, horrid voice cracking through the room: ‘I’m living on the edge of nothing;/ Camped on the shore of emptiness;/ Beside a sea without motion;/ Under a sky of endless twilight,/ Living on the edge of nothing.”

“A Very Small Country” is only six printed pages long, but it maps so painfully the cartography of poverty that seems to be the lot of the Philippines. Maman, the mother, wakes up early one morning to leave, on her way to the sea, “the way wounded dogs dragged themselves home.”

Almost biblical seems to be the curses rained upon the land. “Later, [the people had become refugees and] in voices breathy with fatigue, would murmur about catastrophes eating up their homes. Gullies in the rice fields, craters and sink holes in villages, fused top soil, mountainsides turned to glass, molten iron for rivers, locusts as leaves…”

Aside from the pestilence and natural disasters, there are the wars – several of them – that reduced the country into a field of ashes. That is why everybody wants to leave the countryside and go to the city. 

“This city, inviolate, was simply wonderful, said visitors and refugees alike, who came pouring in like a torrent. An oasis of normality in the center of a world which had been blown, blasted and pounded moon-dead.”

But first they have to cross the sea.

“Winter Butterfly” is the last story, and perfectly enough, it is a story of exile, of a life beyond the sea of one’s ceaseless poverty. The main character is inside a subway train in a First World city, and she sees again her brother.

“She was not surprised. He had been dead, after all, for fifteen years, lost somewhere in the waters between North Africa and Europe, sometime during his fifth run around the world aboard a cousin’s ship… He came to her periodically, for no reason at all. He brought no message, no wisdom from the other realm. His presence was message enough.” These stories are messages, too, written in prose of such grace and beauty, even if they deal with the terrible realities of our times.

You should read, then, the stories of Ninotchka Rosca: she is a treasure of the nation.

(Danton Remoto is a Professor of Creative Writing and the Head of School, English, at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia. His email is [email protected])

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