philippine studiesAteneo de Manila University • Loyola Heights, Quezon City • 1108 Philippines

Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels

Ricio G. Davis

Philippine Studies vol. 44, no. 2 (1996): 257–269

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Nick Joaquin's me Woman WZPO Had Two Navels

The halo-Mo is among the most typical of Philippine desserts. A com- bination of varied native fruits and fruit puddings, flavored gelatin and sweet beans, served in a tall glass with crushed ice, syrup and, occasionally, a scoop of ice cream, its name is a precise description of what it is. Halo-halo means, literally, "mix-mix." This favorite dessert is also a graphic description of the people who created and enjoy it, a people and a nation characterized by diversity and who find in that very distinction, their particular identity and strength. The diversity inherent in the Philippine psyche is equally demon- strated in its literature. From the question of which language to use in writing (Philippine literature has been written in Spanish, English and Filipino, not to mention the over fifty indigenous languages) to the thematics of postcolonialism and immigration, the literature is a vivid reflection of the "mix-mix" of cultures and influences that have worked through history to create the particular cultural configura- tion specific to the Philippine archipelago. The Woman Who Had Two Navels, published in 1961 by Nick Joaquin, and one of the most im- portant contemporary Philippine novels, may be considered as an attempt on the part of one of the country's most important writers to define the peculiarities of the Philippine cultural make-up. The novel's themes, though based on individual, psychological concerns, contain clear social and cultural ramifications through a reinscription of Filipino history and myths.

The case of the Philippines is an interesting study in world litera- ture. If we contend that a nation's literature is evidence of its cul- tural life, social integration and indigenous identity, then an analy- sis of the literature will necessarily reveal the peculiarities of a coun- try that has been colonized twice and who has one of the largest percentages of immigration to the outside in the world. The Philip- pines has been described by Jesuit historian Horacio de la Costa

PHILIPPINE STUDIES

(1964, 103) as "an Asian nation of Malay stock, socially structwd on a basically Indonesian pattern, containing a large infusion of Chi- nese blood and attitudes, but with a cultural heritage in part Anglo- Saxon." Christianity is the dominant religion, a heritage from over 300 years of Spanish colonial ahhistration (156-1898) and 50 years of American administration (1898-1946), making the Philippines the only Catholic nation in Asia. Until the ratification of the new Con- stitution in 1986, there were three official languages: Filipino, Eng- lish and Spanish. Today, the first two are the official languages of education, justice, the p m and the street, with interventions from the minority languages of the diverse provinces.

The cultural consequences of these influences have been described in various ways. Shirley Geok-lin Lim, in her valuable study on Phil- ippine and Singaporean literature in English, Nationalism and Litm- ture, has pointed out how both writers and critics in postcolonial newly independent societies like the Philippines have become increas- ingly conscious of the possibility of a disjunctum a gap lying b e tween critical expectations and operational definitions carried over from older colonizing and still culturally dominant and powerful societies and the literature produced in nxently independent coun- tries which are still in the process of evolving national and cultural identities &im 1993, 2). Filipino writer N. V. M. GonzAlez (1975,35) has classified the Philippines as a victim of the "cross-roads syn- drome"--a collision of Asian and Western cultures leading to a sense of discontinuous history and cultural hybridization. Nick Joaquin, like other postcolonial writers and critics, may also be said to be work- ing within a "cultural simultaneitf' or a heterogeneous overlapping of cultures with their attendant myths, religious, and ethical philoso- phies, aesthetic ideologies, political systems, and economic modes. This simultaneity is "a restless product of a long history of miscege nation, assimilation and syncretization as well as conflict, contradic- tion and cultural violence" (Sangari 1990,217). Salman Rushdie (1992, 19), in his "Imaginary Homelands," describes a similar phenomenon when he refers to "stereoscopic vision . . . a kind of double perspec- tive." This stereoscopic vision, which focuses from different angles to create a unified image, merges the diverse realities, in this case, the varied cultural influences, and adds the dimension of depth. As a consequence, Joaquin's fiction, as evidenced in the novel, articu-

THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS

lates the discourse of a in the l'hilippines of colonial past and independent pment, the mingling of Christian and pagan, folk and imposed values, and an i n d i b l e mix of languages.

The Woman Who Had Tun Nauels serves as a prime example of these diverse effects of the colonialism and immigration from a Philippine point of view. The novel embodies the experience of cultural disjunc- ture and dissociation: between a Hispanic, revolutionary, heroic past and an Americanized, sordid, decadent present and paints the expe- rience of the Filipino as outsider, the alienated cosmopolite who with- draws from a foreign world into a cocoon society of similarly-placed Filipinos (Lirn 1993, 70). Told from shifting and limited points of view, the novel pennits a variety of interpretations, as well as ver- sions of the truth, as it enables the author to look at the matter from many angles as well as to highlight cqmplexity.

Set in Hong Kong in 1949, the novel's immigrant setting is sug- gestive of identities forged in a cms+roads of cultures outside na- tionally defined boundaries. It tells of the meeting between two groups of Filipinos the first, survivor-victims of the rapid cultural changes in their country, the second, "forlorn exiles separately, to- gether . . ." (781, brought together by Connie Escobar, she of the two navels. Joaquin centers his action in three days early in Lent and brings it to a conclusion to a head on the day of the Chinese Moon or New Year, a manifestation of the Filipino culture that celebrates equally the Catholic and Chinese feasts. But the frequent use of flash- backs makes the reader move back and forth in time and space, cre- ating an intricate social and cultural tapestry. The actual time cov- ered by the events in the story stretches from the Filipino-American war in the 1890s to the late forties, so that we can visualize the chang- ing patterns of Philippine social life from the heroic age of the ilustradas, succeeded by the American colonial period that ends with the return of Anmican troops in 1946, to a Manila in ruins after the shelling of both American and Japanese bombs. The major charac- ters thus embody the distinguishing features of three extraordinarily different generations. Already a young man during the Revolution- ary War, Doctor Monson's memories are the pre-American era. Con- cha Vidal represents the transition generation, born during the Span- ish and living through the Anmican administration, manied first to an ilustrado poet and now to a Filipino politician who manipulates nationalist sentiments. Her daughter Connie represents the postwar Filipina who cannot reconcile events of the past to her present and runs away in an attempt to find herself.

The difficulty of nxonciling the Filipino's several heritages is dealt with in a complex manner in The Woman Who Had Two N d . Connie Escobafs obsession with what she considers two navels could be dimis& as hysterical attempts to attract attention were it not also symbolic of the interplay between the religiously oriented Spanish past and the pragmatic American-influenced present, the daily inter- section of time and eternity, as well as the ultimate question of Phil- ippine national identity. The cultural consequences of history are therefore a major concern in the novel. The ilustrado, represented by Doctor Monson, Concha Vidal's parents and her first and second husbands, had lead a life doomed to destruction. Concha would al- ways see her childhood as "a page in an epic, brilliant with tears and splendid with heroes" (18). The Philippines, under Spanish co- lonial rule, was a world in which "even the animals were ceremoni- ous and shared men's ancient pieties" (la), where educated Filipi- nos lived in luxury, fired by romantic European ideals and styles.

Manila was still a compact, rather decayed little town of lamplight and fine carriages, of red-tiled roofs and murky streets and canals, of mustachioed men in straw hats and white coats that buttoned all the way up to the throat, and of women with great coils of hair on their heads and an elaborate a-illowy skirts with trains, fussy neck- pieces, sheer blouses with wide sleeves arching over the shoulden like transparent wings (161-62).

Things were to change with the American Occupation. Old ideals were no longer valid, the ilustrado began to die out. As Leonard Casper points out, those of Joaquin's generation, the subjects of his novel, therefore had a choice: they could either suffer from customs seemingly tom between convent rigidity and Hollywood casualness or, as in his own case, try to adapt each to the other and both to indigenous Malayan practices as well as to demands made by the tropics on these intruders from the temperate zone. Just as Filipinos had learned for purposes of ventilation to pierce the solid walls of Spanish colonial churches and houses, so were they in the early twen- tieth century forced to learn to accommodate themselves not only to American ways but to revel in the remnants of what Spain left b e hind when it took its official departure (692). Those who failed to adapt were to suffer the dramatic consequence of finding themselves "discarded by historf' (176). The tragedy of Esteban Borromeo, Con- cha's first husband, is emblematic of the cultural upheaval brought about by the new dispensation.

THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS

The ferment of the Revolution had bred a climate in which poets and artists had political effects; now came the inheritors, the Esteban Borromeos--young men who, in the 1890~~ had been students plotting in the caf6s of Madrid or M o n a , or starving in Parisian garrets . . . but would come trooping home in time to pin the fight against the Americans, and to rock the 1900s with their insurgence. In two swift decades, thqr would find themselves obsolete-discarded and displaced persons gathering in each other's parlors to revile the present and re- gret the past. The future of which they had so happily babbled had turned into a dead end. They were to have no continuation; a breed and a history stops abruptly with them . . . A people that had got as far as Baudelaire in one language was being returned to the ABC's of another, and the young men writing in the 1900s would find that their sons could not read them. The fathers spoke European, the sons would speak American (170-71).

With the character of Manolo Vidal, Concha's second husband, Joaquin paints a portrait of a survivor, a man who "had been quick to see that the future did not lie with the Esteban Borromeos, had realized that they were heading for a dead end and that the coming culture, unlike that of the Revolution, would have a political, not a literary, accent. Abandoning the doomed, he shifted to that group gathering around the young Mr. Quezon" (178). Vidal's rise in poli- tics replaces his infamous early medical career, as his mamage to Concha gives his the added social status he needs in order to suc- ceed in the new republic.

Joaquin's vivid evocations of Manila before and after the war are illustrative of his perception of the cultural clashes brought about by diverse foreign interventions. Manila has always been a crossroads of culture whose unique mixture Joaquin describes with insightful energy; society, as he sees it, "is more a matter of mutual encroach- ments than simple juxtaposition" (Casper 1991, 692). Paco's descrip tion of his impressions of Manila are a clear example:

. . . that combination of primitive mysticism and slick modernity which he felt to be the special temper of the city and its people: pert girls dancing with abandon all night long in the cabarets and fleeing in black veils to hear the first Mass at dawn; boys in the latest loudest Holly- wood styles, with American slang in their mouths and the crucifix on their breasts; streets ornate with movie palaces and jammed with traf- fic through which leafcrowned and barefoot penitents carried a Black Christ in processioI+and always, up there above the crowds and hot dust and skeleton ruins and gay cabarets: the mountains, and the

woman sleeping in silence might with myth and m-&r she was the ancient goddess of the land (said the people) sleeping out the thou- sand years of bondage. (40-41)

Just as Joaquin presents the dilemma of Filipinos caught between two cultures, he also presents another side of the Philippine cultural composition: the shared experience of immigration. As Shirley Geok- lin Lim defends, expatriation, brought on by successive histories of colonization, is itself a form and an inseparable part of Filipino iden- tity (68). Many of the novel's major characters are expatriate Filipi- nos. Pepe Monson and his brother, Father Tony, his fiancee Rita and their childhood friends Paco and Mary Texeira, have lived out of the Philippines all their lives. Doctor Monson, Pepe's father, had left the Philippines after the Americans had suppressed the 1890s revolution and had raised his children with memories of his motherland and the dream of returning.

Not having known their homeland, the friends appear Filipino only in background and asociation. In Hong Kong, the British colony in Chinese temtory made up of international refugees and immi- grants, they were "child exiles." They formed a self-contained asso- ciation, oblivious to anything but themselves: "The five of them had felt utterly uninvolved in the war, moving through wartime Hong Kong as they had moved, in childhood, through the public play- grounds-a group apart,-children without a country, inhabiting an enchanted world of their own" (78). The p u p sing Filipino folksongs at parties and somehow look back at the Philippines as home in a vague way. But their relationship with their supposed homeland is ambiguous, particularly to themselves. Mary wonders "what it's like in Manila. We all more or less belong over there . . ." (27). Paco, "in spite of his obsession with Filipino jazz, however, and in spite moreo- ver, of his Filipino blood, ...had never felt any curiosity about nor the least affection for the country of his musician father, and when he went to Manila, he was stirred by no sentiments of filial piety. Unlike the Monson boys, who were always conscious of being Fili- pinos, exiles, and the sons of a patriot, Paco was a guiltless cosmo. politan . . ." (35). Nonetheless, he is the only one of the p u p who does travel back, and the one of the few memories of his Filipino father elicits and emotional reaction. His father had once told him:

THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS

about a range of mountains just aaoss Manila Bay that looked like a woman shekkd out in sleep. . . (Paco) remembed it again when from the railing of the ship that was taking him to Manila the first time . . . he had looked up and suddenly seen, with a shock of recognition, a range of mountains that looked like a woman sleeping . . . it changed the indiffemm with which he had come to his fatheis country into a stirring of clanemotiona glow, almost, of homecoming (39-40).

This mountain range, occasion of his emotional warming to the Philippines, is also symbolic of the passion that will be aroused in him in Manila for Connie, herself a Filipina who searches for a past.

The contradiction characteristic of the immigrant, between where one is and where one is from, where he functions and where his imagination is rooted, is another of the major themes of the novel. The action, ostensibly located in Hong Kong, is constantly juxtaposed with long descriptions of Filipino places and life. In describing char- acter, the author slips into long digressions on Filipino life and cus- toms: an elaboration on Southern hacienda society accompanies and gives depth to the characterization of Macho Escobar; a nostalgic description of Spanish-Filipino society makes one understand Con- cha Vidal's attitudes and choices; there is, furthermore, an analysis of Manila corruption under American influence in the flashback of Paco's visit to Manila. In this manner, though the novel's present actions are set in Hong Kong, the "emotional" setting of its themes is Filipino, a Philippines of glorious history, yearning imagination and sordid reality: the Filipino-based passages are presented as the "other" reality of memory and nostalgia in which exiles live (Lim 1993, 68). So Doctor Monson extolled the family house in Binondo, 'The house of our fathers is waiting for us to come home" (15). The expatriate characters are padully conscious of the geographic dual- ity they have been forced to live in but cannot always come to terms with. Father Tony, waking up one morning to a "dazzling' Hong Kong, feels

a sudden bitter tenderness for the city spread out and humming py- ously beneath him, for this doomed heathen town that was home and not home, that was birthplace but not native land, that he had loved and feared and finally rejected, but whose beauty-soggy in spring- time, steamy in summer, perfect in autumn, perverse in winter-his foreign bones knew like a wife and regarded like a stranger; nwer quite familiar, never wholly embraced; being still the rented habita- tion of his childhood, where he had dwelt in body though not in spirit,

PHIW[PPINE STUDIES

and in whose streets he had walked the streets of that other city, the true native aty that he had never known and had finally rejected too, whose clear image had always overlaid these hilltops he had climbed as a boy, and w h w tiers of flat rook streaming down like a million stairways to the sea, and the harbor with its femyboats, and Kowloon beyond, smoky and sprawling black and gold in the sunshine, where his father lay dying in exile (13132).

The members of this group, in diverse ways, suffer from more than mere geographical displacement since they are ignorant of their na- tional origins, and their place in Philippine history. Not to have a role in history is to be denied the basis of identity, and each charac- ter reflects that emptiness and a sense of groping for an anchor. The displacement of these Filipinos also becomes a temporal one, giving their life in Hong Kong "a sense of displaced time." Such a world, "as solid as Hong Kong's rock" (78) is jolted out of its isolated self- containment when two of its inhabitants, Doctor Monson and Paco, visit the Philippines and bring back in their wake a woman claim- ing she has two navels, the embodiment of their encounter with Philippine reality. The trips into the past function as a shattering of the illusory world carefully built by the Monsons and Texeiras by all their years of exile (Garcia-Groyon 1972, 32). Removed from the "displaced" world of Hong Kong, Pam Texeira and Doctor Monson encounter reality and frustration. Paco sees disintegration in Filipino society, and Doctor Monson experiences firsthand the destruction of the idealized memories of the past in his motherland that he had embellished in his years of exile and, consequently, of his dreams of a glorious return home. This is graphically symbolized in his descrip tion of the ruins of their old house, that no longer waits for anyone to come home. Doctor Monson "has not really wanted to come home to a land, only to a past; and not finding the past there, he had run away, fearing the reality, preferring the dream" (305). Later, while Paco claims to have lost his will, Doctor Monson retreats into the peaceful inaction of his own opium world, into a state of living death.

Shirley Geok-lin Lim believes that by placing his story among Fili- pino exiles, Joaquin is attempting to discover continuity in the dis- jointed history of double colonization as the Filipinos living in Hong Kong ironically also refer to the Filipinos living in the Philippines. The author makes the identification explicit in a key passage describ- ing Paco's visit to postwar Manila: ''The sefiora's worlds of mansions might sit uneasily in its avenues; the hovels of the poor squatted no

THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS

less nervously on their gutters . . . the people who occupied them did not seem to be living there at all. They denied the locale8' (6 47). Filipinos both in Hong Kong and Manila "denied the locale," the former because they are inhabiting a space that is not the home land and presewe only an idealization of the true nation, the latter because they have suffered American cultural colonization in their own land. Joaquin's portrayal of Filipinos abroad therefore becomes a critical reflection of Filipinos in the Philippines who have alien- ated themselves from their home culture, Filipinos in an internal exile (60). Interestingly enough, while the exiles cling to the dream of an idealized homeland, the Filipinos have, in their turn, abandoned the past for an American Hollywood fantasy

They denied the heat and the dust and the rats as well as the not quite authentic glitter of the downtown smart shops and the swanky clubs- for in the world of their minds, they moved with cool expertness, rich and poor, among marble halls and ivory baths and luxurious ward- robes; through streets that were all Park Avenues, where the men were all Pierpont Morgans, and all the women unaging, unfading movie queens (47).

Philippine Cross-culmdity

The cultural adjustments imposed by different experiences of colo- nization, as well as the experience of immigration are the two major branches of a possible definition of Philippine crossculturality. None- theless, these aspects come together in the predominant image of the novel: Connie Escobafs two navels. It is Connie Escobar's sudden flight from the Philippines and the adults in it that she thinks she can no longer trust that sets into swift and nightmarish motion the events that bring together in a foreign locale the novel's two groups of characters. The novel opens with the line: "When she said she had two navels, he believed her at once" (I), presenting immediately what will be a double outlook on everything. The navels come to repre- sent the inherent doubleness of the Filipino's experience of life, and the cultural confusion that results from this. This is a trauma spe- cific to postcolonials and immigrants. When Connie accuses Pepe of having "always lived in the world where people have the right number of navels" (21, she wrongly assumes the fact that, as Pepe has always lived outside the Philippines, he would not suffer the

same dhjmchm. The image of the navels contrapuntually unites the experiences of both postcolonials and immigrants in this novel.

The powerful symbol of the navel acquires a variety of interpre tations in a novel about Philippine mssculturality. Connie's insist- ence on the pl~sence of an extra navel betrays a confusion as to her origins, the navel being a symbol of man's life source. The connota- tion of double attachments or a double source of identity introduces the thematics of postcolonial cultural dislocation and displacement as Joaquin uses the image of two navels to articulate his vision of this postcolonial and immigrant world. Connie's psychological "prob- lem" is the unifying narrative thread of the novel as it explains her condition of dislocation and trauma and, by extension, that of the other characters. Furthermore, Josefina D. Constantino claims that the image of the two navels "is symbolic of life's two universes, illusion and fact, which Connie and most of the other characters inhabit; it is also ultimately symbolic of the two absolutes in life, good and evil" (22). Connie is schizophrenic, situated between reality and fantasy, sanity and madness, childhood and adulthood, good and evil. As the solution to the problems caused by dislocation imply, in this case, moral choices, Connie is again tom. The novel's central argument is that only by confronting their dual, colonized experiences can the Filipinos make their partial lives whole. It suggests that the major problem with Filipino identity is not its dualism, its colonized frac- ture, but the denial of that fracture (Lim 1993, 73). When COI-nie realizes she has a choice, and exercises her ability to choose, Joaquin claims, her process of healing has begun.

The Woman Who Had Two N d s is divided into five sections, each offering a flashback into the lives of the five major characters. Connie is the focal point of the fourth section, entitled "Chinese Moonf'- the symbol for "moments of decision . . . time to pay old debts: (15% 56). The flashbacks stress the need for a rediscovery and an accept- ance of the reality of the past. The treatment of time gives an im- pression of its relative quality and the constant shifts between the past and the present emphasize the idea that the present is a result of the past. Connie's doubts concerning her origins are caused by the one major disillusionment she undergoes in adolescence when she discovers the truth about her fathefs past. In the dream sequence, she says this to him:

Because I must know what I am . . . and how can I know that if I don't know where I came from? When I was little . . . I came upon a

THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS

sword and a pistol, I saw an old uniform hanging beside an old flag, I found some old books and newspapers. I began to fonn a picture of what my father was. Oh, he was a hero. But then I grew up and be- gan to notice what people were saying, what the newspapers were saying. Now I don't know which is my real father--the one in the old newspapen or the one in the new ones. But I do know I must find him (257).

Her doubts about her origins are coupled with an obsession with her object of worship, not a Christian image but a Chinese idol called Biliken, a fat Buddha, symbol of Connie's retreat and refusal to face life squarely. Having been shot at during the war, two bullet holes in his fat belly give the impression of his having two navels, a mu- tilation that Connie assimilates into her own body. With this as a starting point, the reader comes upon mirror images one after an- other and hears different versions of Connie Escobaf s story. He be- gins to experience the nightmarish quality of her world, a world grown immoral and duplicitous, in which things are often not what they seem.

"The Chinese Moon" section has Connie being metaphorically re- generated through deaths that correspond to encounters with the different elements of the earth and that reconcile her with the peo- ple that had caused her traumas. During Connie's surrealistic strug- gle with mind and soul, all within a few hours of a single night, she imaginatively goes through Death by Earth (in a train where she finds her husband Macho); Death by Water (on a ship, where Connie chooses to lie beside her mother as the sea takes them into her bosom); Death by Air (on a plane where she is reconciled with her father). At the last minute, when in a moment of grace she realizes what she has preferred, she tears herself loose from the speeding car and is saved in a Death by Fire (273). She comes to the conclusion that people are not as monstrous as she had made them out to be: they are merely human. They only become monstrous, as she had, when they refuse to recognize the arbitrariness of things and refuse to choose between reality and fantasy, good and evil, when they comfortably fall back on the excuse that they have two navels (Garcia- Groyon 1!972,33).

In the novel's melodramatic denouement, Connie finds ultimate solace when she accidentally meets Doctor Monson, the hero of her mother's childhood. She recognizes him as a heroic figure from her past, the father-figure she sought, and "confesses" her story of betrayal

to him. In this sem, Joaquin intends us to see two lost c h a r a b , the old man and this young Filipina girl, meeting in a mutually heal- ing encounter "two generations that had lost each other here met in exile" (303): the glorified past and the disturbed present. Both char- acters have found reality too harsh and have taken refuge in illu- sion A confrontation with her youth is what Doctor Monson needs to be forced out of his exilic enclosure, just as a confrontation with the past he represents is what Connie needs to develop the will power to work out her devious way to salvation, the rebirth sym- bolized by the two navels (Oloroso 1%7,787). This hero has not lived up to the ideals expeckd of him and has to also plead for forgive ness from the younger generation. Doctor Monson realizes that he had been "willing to die, not for a great public future, but a small private past . . . not for a flag or a people, but for just one town, one street, one house-for the sound of a canal in the morning, the look of some roofs in the noon sun, and the fragrance of a certain evening flower" (328). Unwilling to accept the fact that his private past could not possibly exist forever, the old man had adamantly refused to accept the present and his self-imposed exile had subse- quently deprived his sons of their national identity. Like Esteban Borromeo, he cannot adapt to the new reality that is the Philippines and will die, but not before he is able to come to an understanding of the present peration.

But now the reality had followed him into his own house, into his very room. He had been forced to face it at last--the face this girl who had been seeking and all the time he had sat there, in a foreign room, playing with swords and uniforms. Even the dignity of his disillusion had been taken from him. The exile that had begun so heroically had ended as a childish playing at soldiers in dreams and drugs, while outside life went on without him (305).

In an essay entitled "Culture as History: The Filipino Soul," Nick Joaquin has pointed out the vast difference between the Spanish co- lonial advent and the American one and how each of these helped form the Filipino. The cultural upheaval brought about by the sec- ond made the people more aware of their being Filipinos, and what this would entail: 'With the coming of the Americans and of such

THE WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS

powerful new tools as the public school and the English language, the Fil-Hispano culture became obsolete; but the new culture which ensued mnahed a Philippine culture, with featurn (like our style of religiosity, and of ethics, and of manners, and of expression, and of cuisine) that, however modified, not only kept it distinct from the American, but always kept the distinctive marks stamped on it dur- ing the original tpformation . . ." (170-n). In presenting the Filipino as a people without a memory, Joaquin seems to be redirecting them toward an awareness of the cultural simultaneity inherent to their past, and emphasizes the tragic consequences of not coming to terms with their aamxdturality. The Ffipino's two ravels, a source of both unity and diversity, need not be a liability. It is simply the particu- lar mark of the postcolonial and the immigrant.

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