Novelist ‘Celebrates’ the Painful Absurdities of Life in Her Native Philippines

Anna can’t laugh, never laughs. Eliza laughs all the time, seemingly amused by everything, including death and torture.

Author Ninotchka Rosca became both these characters as she wove their fictional lives into her first novel, “State of War,” but it’s Eliza whom the Philippine expatriate resembles when she talks about her life and world view.

She giggles when describing the six months in 1972 she spent in one of the detention camps operated by the regime of then-President Ferdinand Marcos. Her despair for the future of her homeland makes her chuckle.

It’s not that she’s daft. But the dark pressures of history have twisted the Philippine sense of humor, Rosca said. “If we didn’t laugh at the situation, we would probably go berserk. So we look at it as comic absurdity.”

Absurdity of Life

Rosca’s novel, just released by Norton, celebrates the absurdity of life in the Philippines under a fictional regime not unlike that of Marcos. With its rich cast of eccentric characters, fantastic happenings, complex interrelationships of families and folklore piled generation upon generation, the book has the magical feel of novels by Latin American Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to whom reviewers compared Rosca’s two earlier collections of short stories.

But Rosca earned her reputation in the Philippines as a journalist, and “Endgame,” Rosca’s nonfiction account of the fall of Marcos, published last year by Franklin Watts, contains people and scenes no less peculiar than those in her often cockeyed novel.

“Someone said, because we never invented a person as bizarre as Mrs. Marcos in our literature, life had to invent her,” Rosca said. What’s happening in the Philippines now, with the corpse of Ferdinand Marco’s mother on tour in a glass coffin, is “pure Marquez,” she said.

Taken together, Rosca’s fiction and reportage for several Philippine newspapers--and more recently for American publications such as The Nation and Ms. magazine--compose what some observers have called “the voice of a Philippine generation.” But it’s a voice not all Filipinos, there or in the United States, are comfortable hearing.

Rosca herself is a product of the ‘60s, an era middle-class Filipinos encountered in the Westernized media and quickly adapted as their own, she said. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez provided the sound track for the massive demonstrations that erupted in the streets of Manila against the involvement of Philippine troops in Vietnam.

Mimeographed Arrest Order

But the martial law that was only a distant concern for American radicals became a long reality in the Philippines, and as American activism began fading to Yuppiedom, charges of corruption against the Marcos regime and “basic problems of underdevelopment” inspired Philippine activists to continue lashing out, Rosca said. For activists in Manila, the ‘60s never ended.

Soon after Marcos declared martial law in 1972, a white, unmarked car arrived at Rosca’s doorstep, she said, and escorted her to the headquarters of the Philippine Constabulary, she said. An officer handed her a mimeographed arrest order, with her name typed into one blank space. In the other blank were the charges: “Suspicion of having committed or being about to commit rebellion, sedition and/or subversion.”

“It was so funny! . . . I thought, ‘Wow, I made it! Heavy!”

Rosca became one of about 300 reporters, out of an estimated total of 70,000 people, detained during the nine years of martial law, she said. Her only act of rebellion, she contends, was reporting what was happening to her country.

In “State of War,” a character named Col. Urbano Amor, known as “the Loved One,” derives sadistic pleasure from watching his men torture political prisoners in a cell he calls “the romance room.” Unlike his men, he preferred to rape “the soul” by probing detainees for the minute details of their lives, Rosca wrote.

Perhaps because of the connections derived from a middle-class background, Rosca was not tortured or raped during the six months she was detained, as were many of her friends. But the interrogations took a toll.

Even now, when asked her age, Rosca becomes defensive. “I’ve reached the age of consent,” she said, then quickly apologized. “Evasion is my natural response,” she said. “I’m not trying to be difficult. (But) I went through five interrogations with the military” during her six months in detention. Answering personal questions is still not something she likes to do.

After she was released from detention, Rosca worked as a documentation specialist with an investment company in Manila. “But everyone had a double life by that time,” and Rosca was also raising money for people “who had to disappear” from government view.

In 1977, Rosca got word that her name was about to be added to a “flimsy” weapons-smuggling case she says the government had concocted. “I just freaked out!” she said. “Those trials were being held by military tribunals. . . . I thought, ‘This is too fixed a fight. I’d better get out of here’. . . . It’s so funny.”

Scaling Bookcases

Rosca had met a cultural attache at the U.S. Embassy, and decided to “cash in my chips.” He managed to get her out of the country by getting her into the international writers program at the respected Iowa Writers School.

One of the many reasons Rosca has for resenting Marcos is that she sees his reign as having sidetracked the natural progress of a literary career that began when, at age 12, her first story was published in a Philippine newspaper. Instead of continuing to write fiction, “I spent my prime years writing pamphlets, speeches, political tracts. . . . All because I had to take a stand against this stupid regime.”

She felt the pull of literature early, scaling the “huge bookcases,” at the local library while most kids were still climbing trees.

Her mother and father were “basically merchants,” providing their six children with a home in the middle-class Santa Cruz district of Manila. Both worked, and the quietude of their huge house provided Rosca with a sanctuary for her reading. “I was a kid who read Cervantes as age 7, De Maupassant at 9,” she said. “I didn’t have time for growing, didn’t go through the normal stages of childhood, I was spending so much time reading books.”

As a young girl she would hide under the kitchen table, pretending to play with a doll in order to eavesdrop on family gossip--secrets about grandparents and tales of uncles who’d fought with the anti-Japanese resistance in World War II. At the feet of her family Rosca “discovered the reality that lies behind the outward appearances of our society . . . from who’s going to bed with whom,” to allegations that “the mayor of Manila was a womanizer who used his position to provide for all these women.”

In both Rosca’s recent books, Filipinos peel back the ordered facade of their society to reveal the chaotic tangle of opposing forces underneath.

“State of War” begins and ends at an orgiastic festival on one of the Philippine archipelago’s 700 islands. Dancing in and out of the drunken tangle of revelers, Rosca’s characters come into focus momentarily, revealing in their thoughts and interactions the oppositions of the powerful and powerless, the wealthy and poor and the tender passion and cruel brutality that makes up life in the Philippines as Rosca sees it.

“Fiction is painful,” Rosca said. A short story, for instance, may take a day to write. “That means within eight hours I have to go through all the tension, all the crises, everything (this character) feels,” she said. “When you get up from the typewriter you’re totally exhausted.”

Journalism, on the other hand, “keeps me alert, keeps my brain alive. . . .,” she said. Journalism “gets me inside a lot of institutions. And it saved me from the insanity that literally affected many Filipino writers.”

In 1986, with the Marcos regime under siege, Rosca returned to Manila to report on the historic election in which Corazon Aquino squared off against Marcos--the result of which became “Endgame.”

Manila greeted her with the legacy of political repression. “When I drew up a list of friends I wanted to see upon my return from exile, I was told that to see half of them, I would have to visit cemeteries and prisons; to see the other half, I would have to convene the higher organizations of the (opposition) underground. It was a succinct summary of what had happened to my generation. . . .” she wrote in “Endgame.”

When Aquino rode the enthusiasm of “People Power” into office, Rosca “was ecstatic.” “But then I had reservations too, because I thought Mrs. Aquino was acquiring the presidency without any real understanding of the problems,” Rosca said.

Gradually she began to suspect that the history of the Philippines was again repeating itself, it’s culture doomed to the political repression of the have-nots by the haves.

Such cynicism is not universally embraced in the Philippine expatriate community, or in the Philippines, where hopes still ride on People Power. Polls show that Aquino still has strong support among Filipinos, said George Peabody, public affairs chairman of the Philippine American Chamber of Commerce.

“The government does have problems, but I think (Rosca) is expecting too much of this woman who took on the job under such difficult circumstances. . . ,” he said, echoing the sentiments of several expatriates contacted.

For Rosca, however, the elation with People Power disappeared completely when Aquino allowed what Rosca calls “the same detention centers” to reopen.

So Rosca’s neck is still adorned with a black string necklace from which a tiny red-and-yellow pendant dangles. Called a “soup bone pendant” it was made from a chicken bone a prisoner salvaged from his dinner at a detention camp, she said. One side depicts a stylized bird flying past a detention camp watchtower. On the back the prisoner wrote: “No matter how long the night, dawn will come.”

“Most of us still wear these,” Rosca said. “We don’t want people to forget.”

“The military is basically the same” under Aquino, she contends. “The same kind of structure, same faces, same guiding principles, that’s why human-rights violations keep increasing. It’s funny.”

What’s even funnier, Rosca charges, is that several of the officers who orchestrated the program of political torture under Marcos now live comfortable lives California. That includes the man--who she won’t name--upon whom she modeled her murderous character “Col. Amor,” she said, laughing again.

Such seemingly inappropriate laughter, she later explained is not uncommon among Filipinos. “It’s a kind of a nervous laughter,” she said. “It’s a laughter of exorcism.”