Cons: Surfeit of characters; untranslated vernacular expressions; unexplained cultural references; not an easy read.
The Bottom Line: Jessica Hagedorn offers the reader the rare scoop on Philippine socio-political culture and history from both an insider's and outsider's viewpoint, through her vibrant, breathlessly paced Dogeaters.
virtuelle2's Full Review: Jessica Hagedorn - Dogeaters: A Play About the Phi...
N.B. The American Book Award was given to the NOVEL, and not the play adapted from the novel. Hence my posting of this revised old review in this Epinions entry (another fine screw-up in the Books section).
‘Dogeaters’ (1990) is a brief but dense roman à clef by Filipino-American Greenwich Village resident Jessica Hagedorn that presents a vivid, colourful, and tellingly accurate snapshot of the political and socio-cultural landscape of the Philippines, focusing especially on Manila.
In ‘Dogeaters,’ we have both the ‘dogs’ and the ‘dogeaters’ of society. Ms Hagedorn presents a mélange of ordinary and eccentric characters drawn from all social strata, some fictional and others, easily recognizable real-life personae. She traces recent Philippine history and current events through the tangled lives of a slew of characters:
- Severo Alacran, the powerful, corrupt businessman with fingers in every big business pie across the country;
- Isabel, his beauty contestant-turned-bit-actress-now-retired shrewish wife;
- Rosario, their shy, unpretty, pathetic daughter (burdened with the nickname ‘Baby’ even in adulthood);
- Joey Sands, the African-American-Filipino disco disc jockey-male prostitute-hustler, born of a prostitute and an American GI and brought up in the slums of Manila;
- Andres Alacran, Joey's boss, who comes from the poor branch of the Alacran family;
- General Ledesma, a high-ranking military officer who shares a starlet mistress with Severo Alacran, and whose main distinction is running the military camps that are thinly disguised detention quarters and torture chambers for political ‘subversives’
- Orlando ‘Romeo’ Rosales, waiter and aspiring actor from a nearby province;
- Trinidad, Orlando’s trusting girlfriend, a naïve and optimistic shopgirl.
There's also the idealistic Senator Domingo Avila, outspoken human rights defender and political activist and critic; his daughter, Daisy, who wins a national beauty contest, marries and divorces an Englishman, then runs off to the hills with her guerrilla lover; the anonymous President and First Lady of the land whose true identities are obvious to all; and even more characters far too numerous to list here.
The novel’s main narrator, Rio Gonzaga, appears at the opening and relates her tale from her present-day perspective as an adult resident in the US. She likely represents the author's alter ego. She has a Caucasian-American for a grandfather, a Spaniard for a father, and rumours of a Spanish missionary and a Chinese woman from Macao somewhere in the family tree. Such mixed genealogies are rather common in Filipino families and bear witness to the varied ethnicities of those influx populations received by the archipelago over many centuries.
Rio grows up as a typical upper middle-class child of the 1950s, with chauffeurs and servants a given in the household. Her parents, relatives and friends haunt the expensive country clubs and hobnob with diplomats and VIPs, her imagination held captive by American movies—Rock Hudson, Liz Taylor, etc.—with their unreal pictures of perfection, in contrast to the chaos and nonsense that she sees all around her and simply accepts with nonchalance.
‘Four hundred years in the convent, and forty years in Hollywood’.
Rio's mixed heritage also reflects the country's history, a history comprised of several centuries of medieval and decrepit Spanish rule followed by decades of modern American ‘benevolent rule’. A Filipino writer was supposed to have summed it all up in the oft-quoted, clever phrase that precedes this paragraph. Given such a past, it’s not hard to see how a people could turn schizophrenic about their history, as traces of the scattered, pre-Hispanic tribal culture were virtually eradicated after centuries of Spanish colonization.
The personal stories of this wretched cast of characters intersect in web-like fashion, something not at all unusual in the small-town, closely-knit society that is Manila, a place where one is likely to have a relative or friend who knows someone else's school friend, aunt, godparent, or second cousin. The lives of the disparate personalities play out against major national events that include a political assassination, an international film festival (with a lengthy chapter devoted to the sexual dalliances of a famous, real-life German filmmaker identified only by his first name), even a beauty contest.
Besides the scant modifications and embroidering by Ms Hagedorn, all the incidents described are news-like retellings of actual Philippine events of the time (the 1970s through the 80s). A few stories may strike some readers as too bizarre, but—trust me—they all hit close to the truth, sometimes painfully so. One recalls the slaying of Senator Benigno ‘Ninoy’ Aquino upon his descent to the Manila airport tarmac in 1983, whose suspicious killing was officially blamed on a fall guy who in turn was swiftly ‘disappeared’ after the senator's assassination. (The death would spark an unprecedented political consciousness and activism amongst the middle and lower classes, which would lead to the ‘People Power’ Revolt against President Marcos in 1986.) Not to forget the true-to-life beauty pageant winner in the Seventies who fled to the provinces and made a name for herself as a prominent Communist guerrilla leader. (She has since come down from the hills to continue her political activism in a more socially acceptable but no less radical manner.)
The chapter entitled ‘Bananas and the Republic’ amuses greatly with its ironic but hilariously dead-on portrayal of the tortuous, elliptical, semi-psychotic logic and reasoning that former First Lady Imelda ‘Iron Butterfly’ Marcos learned to perfect, and which she showed off to stunned, puzzled foreign newspersons during interviews. This was often done to deflect criticism of the ‘conjugal dictatorship’ she and her husband would helm for two decades. In addition, gruesome as it may seem, the horrendous disaster befalling the construction of the venue for the short-lived Manila International Film Festival (with its much-ridiculed acronym, MIFF) is recounted in as factual a manner as possible short of straight news reporting. Yes, these tales tell little that is truly fictional.
The novel is less a narrative of events than a tableaux of multiple personal histories that are at once personal and socio-political, as the individual in this milieu is often inextricably bound with the family, the clan, the province and the region—ah, but not necessarily the nation. For better or worse, nationalism is a concept that still eludes the Filipino.
Depending on one’s attitude towards the novel, a possible weakness lies in Ms Hagedorn's use of many untranslated words and phrases in Tagalog (or Filipino, same thing), Tagalog-English, and Spanish, that she sprinkles liberally throughout the book. A pity, as the full impact of these is lost on some readers. (Always a devil of a problem with foreign languages, since overkill in translation isn’t desirable, either!) The polyglot lingo she uses captures with such expressiveness and accuracy the mongrel lingua franca that is Manila middle class talk—a hybrid of English, Tagalog, and Spanish. Related to this are the numerous pop cultural references that can mystify non’insiders’. And yet, the use of these elements paints such a true picture of the culture, and raises the question of which audience Ms Hagedorn writes for. I think it’s mostly for herself, and that’s fine with me. One might gain a touristic superficiality to the book’s tone that could dismay those wanting deeper understanding, but this isn’t meant to be a novel of facts. It certainly captures the cultural pastiche that Manila remains, and only those who’ve actually resided in the metropolis for some time will fully understand the novel.
A more legitimate concern is the awfully large number of characters Ms Hagedorn introduces to the reader. Even I occasionally struggled to keep track of them all. Although a few are adequately fleshed out, many are sketchy profiles that quickly disappear from view. However, these fictitious creations will surely draw smiles (or smirks) of recognition from readers armed with inside knowledge of the country’s culture and recent history, although the inclusion of some highly placed figures in the social circle of Joey Sands might leave some knowing readers a bit incredulous.
The novel can seem more like a literary collage: the writer blends traditional narrative with flowing, punctuationless dream sequences, poetic ramblings, journalistic news reports, even actual historical quotations, producing a novel that is stylistically hip and modern yet accessible. It isn’t an easy read by any means, as it tends to episodic chapters whose connexions are often subtle, or non-existent. What really redeems it is the wonderful writing. With this work, Jessica Hagedorn—poet, screenwriter, rock-and-roll bandleader, and multimedia artist—has crafted a rich debut novel that passionately expresses her ambivalent feelings for her homeland, a fondness tempered by a clear-eyed, strong and slyly critical tone. Her style is slick and lively, with an exuberant and exciting prose that often runs at a breathless pace. It’s an invigorating read that will seduce and draw the reader into the psychedelic, sordid and extravagant world of these Manileños, a world that seems fantastical only to uninformed outsiders.
As a native of the same sorry land as Ms Hagedorn (who herself moved to the US at age 13 in the early '60s), I found this book to be an enjoyable and intensely personal journey. One got to live through those seminal events all over again (while blessed with the comfort of distance in time and space) with feelings not too dissimilar to the writer’s own: a motley mix of amusement, anger, longing, frustration, and, yes, even some disbelief.
Here's the thing: ‘Dogeaters’ is a vibrant, sprawling novel that packs a lot –perhaps too much for some – within its covers. It’s a bit of a challenge to read, but would reward those seeking an exhilarating literary experience in what would be a wild and exotic world to many. The novel presents a rather unflattering portrait of the country, the kind not found in overly pretty and optimistic travelogues about the Philippines and Filipinos, and what ails this sorry Southeast Asian country. It’s hardly an academic treatise, but gives the reader the gritty scoop on the ground level, with an insider’s view of things. Although the dictator is long gone, the country today remains gripped by the same powerful forces that keep it stuck in banana republic mode.
I'd recommend this novel to any adventurous reader curious enough to want to learn more about that country whence came the ‘shoe lady’, Imelda, her brilliantly devious strongman-husband, Ferdinand Marcos, that garlicky, piquant ‘national’ dish called adobo (not officially made from dog meat, as far as I know), the ashes of Pinatubo volcano that remained suspended in the atmosphere years after the eruption, the so-called People Power Revolution (oh, heady days that suggested the possibility of real change—alas, those hopes have since been dashed to a zillion pieces), and so forth. The reader will gain some recent historical context with which to understand a bit why political shenanigans continually curse this small country, one that is otherwise blessed with a smiling, easygoing populace, a bounty of natural resources, and breathtaking tropical splendour. It's a surreal and dizzying trip into a culture and society that mystifies many foreigners—hell, even the natives themselves, some of them, some of the time. Those ‘strandees’ on that fake ‘reality’ show, ‘Survivor,’ have nothing on the many desperate inhabitants of this strange, insane, absurd, melodramatic, but always fascinating tropical country and city, the Pearl of the Orient. Welcome to Heaven and Hell on Earth!
[ Copyright 2000, 2007 by zerbine28 ]
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Notes:
The spelling of the country’s name is PHILIPPINES (one L and two Ps in the middle) and the citizens are referred to as FILIPINOS (Those who’ve been to Spain will recognize the term from the name of a rather delicious cookie product whose eponymic origins were not at all politically incorrect—to the contrary.) The language is also called ‘Filipino’, ‘Pilipino’ (a more ‘nationalistic’ variation) or ‘Tagalog’ (strictly speaking, Tagalog is just one of the hundred or so distinct regional languages in the archipelago, and was selected to be the basis for the official national language, although English is used in government documents).
The term ‘Filipino’ is a throwback to the time under Spanish rule when the country was called ‘Las Islas Filipinas’, or, alternatively, ‘The Philippine Islands’ when the conquering Americans engaged in their first imperialistic adventure at turn of the 19th century.
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In print on amazon.com
PENGUIN BOOKS ISBN: 014014904X
PANDORA P ISBN: 0044408471
This novel was a finalist for the 1990 US National Book Award and, as mentioned at the top, won the American Book Award in 1991.
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