Critical Essay

If the emotional is too on-top of the speaking voice, surrendering to a guiding thought ? an idea, a proposition, a question ? can pass as urgent.

In watching the premiere of Gutierrez ?Teng? Mangansakan?s Forbidden Memory last 2017, I had to quell a kind of rage gearing to erupt in the wake of a reopened rupture ? its closure is a delusion ? that has rapped the country?s memory for decades.

When we speak of Martial Law, we speak of the human rights violations; we speak of the infrastructural progress that birthed international debtswe are still paying today; we speak of Imelda?s lavishness, we speak of the Marcoses? theft; we speak against the temptation to just forget or move on.

What if one flees the enemy?or better, pursues him?only to find that the enemy is one?s self?  Such is the fate of the post-colonial subject, whether identified with the colonizer or the colonized.  Indeed, one could argue that the lines between colonizer and colonized, such as they were drawn, have long bled into each other.  

Rogelio Braga?s novel ?Colon? takes to task the narratives of nationalism in the Philippines.  It attempts to dismantle, or at least interrogate the meanings attached to the scholar and the savage, the capital and the provinces, re-presenting each one in what Braga hopes is a fresh light.  It is possible to discern an effort to present a three-dimensional view of Philippine society, where the picturesque personalities of Manilenyo call center agent, Moro merchant, or university professor, are never quite what the reader thinks they will be.