"Yñiga" and "Into the Forest: The Historical Imagination in Philippine Fiction"

Abstract

The creative component of my thesis is a novel entitled “Yñiga.” Set during the spate of political killings in 2000s Philippines, it follows Yñiga Calinauan, a former university teacher whose quiet life in a Manila slum is upended when an army general wanted for the murder of peasants and activists in the countryside is captured across the street from her house, and the entire neighborhood is burned to the ground days later in what many assume is retaliation. With nowhere to go, she returns to her hometown M—, a small fishing town north of the capital, where she hopes to regain the quiet life she has lost. As she gets reacquainted with her new home, she discovers that what troubles M— are echoes of the terror she thought she had escaped in the city, and now she must face the “forest of history” that has long haunted her family. In the exegesis, “Into the Forest: The Historical Imagination in Philippine Fiction,” I consider how the forest as a narrative space and conceptual trope—or forest thought—mediates the way in which history is imagined in Philippine fiction, mainly by disclosing, unsettling, and ultimately resisting the legibility that state-making and narrative require and engender. In Chapter 1, I map the historical and theoretical interconnections between history, narrative and state-making, and the dialectical relationship between the forest and the Philippine nationalist project. I trace these links and associations in the shifting rendering of the forest in different Philippine texts across historical periods, in particular the crucial shift created by colonial state-making. In Chapter 2, I use the ideas in the introduction to consider the rendering of the forest in the spatio-poetics of the novels of nineteenth-century Filipino writer Jose Rizal, Noli me tangere (1887) and El Filibusterismo (1891). This inquiry seeks to bring to the surface a disruptive potential in the works that do not register in the dominant ways in which they are read, which invariably privilege a nationalist paradigm. I focus on three broad and interconnected renderings of the forest in the novels: as “excess” of and radical threat from the center, as incubator of an inchoate utopia, and as a site of illegibility. In Chapter 3, I chart how the narrative and conceptual manifestations of forest thought in “Yñiga” similarly unsettle and contest state power and narrative, this time in the context of historical phenomena such as counterinsurgency, global capitalism, and popular movements. I locate these both in the world of the novel and its formal design, through which the forest assumes not only a position of setting and discourse but of textual form. The calibrated and strategic illegibility of forest thought in the work, I argue, enables the novel to ultimately intervene in the entwined hegemonic operations of state-making and narrativity.