villa’s specters: transcolonial and paternal …

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VILLA’S SPECTERS: TRANSCOLONIALAND PATERNAL HAUNTOLOGIESIN FOOTNOTE TO YOUTH:TALES OF THE PHILIPPINES AND OTHERSLAURENCE MARVIN S. CASTILLO

Philippine Humanities ReviewVolume 16 Number 1, 2014, pp. 36-68ISSN-0031-7802©2014 University of the Philippines

PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 37

Jose Garcia Villa’s sole short story collection, Footnoteto Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was releasedin 1933 as his pronounced effort to penetrate theAmerican modernist canon. Villa’s literary move wasprincipally characterized by his aestheticist self-fashioning as a “beautiful soul” whose artistic practicet ranscended h i s na t ive roots and b iographica lspecificities. This essay suggests that, despite this self-fashioning, the collection ushers in the ghosts of thehistorical and personal realities that he sought toobscure. First, the essay argues that Villa’s intensedevotion to the apolitical and ahistorical tenets ofaestheticism, or the doctrine of art for art’s sake, was initself conditioned by his biographical circumstances andhistorical location within the American colonial milieu,particularly by his rebellion against his own anti-American father and against the paternity of his country.Second, it elaborates how Villa’s attempt at paternalsurrogacy in the United States fed him to the discursive

VILLA’S SPECTERS: TRANSCOLONIALAND PATERNAL HAUNTOLOGIES INFOOTNOTE TO YOUTH:TALES OF THE PHILIPPINESAND OTHERS

LAURENCE MARVIN S. CASTILLOUniversity of the Philippines<[email protected]>

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operations of ethnocentrism inherent in Americanmodernism, and how his choice to work within themimetic genre of fiction rendered his disavowed ethnicidentity bare and vulnerable to the predations ofmodernist racism. Third, employing Derrida’s notionof hauntology, the essay analyzes the collection asconjurers of the transcolonial and paternal specters thathaunted Villa’s artistic practice.

Keywords: Jose Garcia Villa, hauntology, colonialism, artfor art’s sake, modernism

In 1933, Charles Scribner’s Sons published Jose GarciaVilla’s Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others.The first Filipino-authored collection of short stories tobe released in the United States (US), the book consistedof twenty-one short stories set in the Philippines and theUS, most of which initially saw print in several Americanperiodicals. The publication of the collection came threeyears after Villa arrived in the United States, with theintention of leaving behind a relatively successful literarycareer in the Philippines and penetrating the Americanliterary scene. While the collection was rejected by severalpublishers and later on greeted with lukewarm critical andcommercia l response in the US, i ts publ icat ion wascelebrated back home as an event that beckoned Villa’s entryinto the American modernist canon.

Footnote to Youth also marked Villa’s final foray tofiction. In his essay “The Making of Jose Garcia Villa’sFootnote to Youth,” Jonathan Chua while tracing the book’spublication history analyzes how it was published andreceived within a modernist racialized framework set withinthe colonial relations between the US and the Philippines.Weaving through correspondences, documents pertinent tothe publication of the stories, and the stories in thecollection, Chua argued that Villa’s work is positioned in


“an ambivalent s i tuat ion which both chal lenges andreinforces the colonial condition” (2013-2014, 30). In sodoing, he suggested that Villa’s attempt to penetrate theAmerican literary circle by fashioning himself as a universalwriter and contemporaneously erasing his socio-politicalroots was eventually foiled by the collection’s publication.

From this suggestion, this paper argues that thecollection works to usher in the presence of historicalrealities and biographical specificities that Villa endeavoredto obscure . The re lease of these “ghosts” operatesaccording to the deconstructive notion of hauntologyintroduced by Jacques Derrida in The Specters of Marx .Hauntology, or “the logic of haunting” (Derrida 1994, 10),is a modality in which the absence of the unwritten,silenced, or dead returns to haunt the ontological structurethat renders the presence of the written, articulated, andalive.

It is necessary to mention here that the hauntologicalworkings in Footnote to Youth operated within the contextof transcolonial politics. The term transcolonial suggeststhat “the delineated boundaries of influence by colonialempires were not as fixed as one might believe” (Taylor-Garcia 2011,13). The specters in the short story collectionare in fact contingent on the conditions of transcolonialitythat afflicted Villa’s milieu, here manifested in the transitions,overlaps, and confluences of the American and Spanishcolonial powers in the early twentieth century Philippines,and in the colonial ist polit ics that hounded him andposit ioned him as migrant colonial subject upon hismovement to America.

This essay will present the historical and biographical“conditions of possibil ity” for Villa’s adherence to adeliberately apolitical and ahistorical literary practice, the

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historical cartography of the discursive operations ofethnocentrism in modernism during his arrival to America,and finally an analysis of the collection as conjurer of thetranscolonial and biographical specters that haunt Villa’sartistic practice—his paternal trauma and his inarticulatedengagement with the confluent symbolic powers of theSpanish and American colonizers.

The Ghosts of Villa’s Self-Fashioning

Villa’s historical exorcism constituted a self-fashioningmove informed primarily by the idea that the artist and hispractice are divorced from history, a notion integral to the“art for art’s sake” dictum. He openly dismissed the socio-political function of art, particularly literature, extollingabove all the work’s aesthetic virtue and its eternal anduniversal value. He rejected the integrality of literary practiceto the nationalist cause, announcing that “the nation is merelyadjectival to true art: the noun is art and ever the universalhumanity that it contains” (Villa 2002, 168). When beratedby his colleague Salvador Lopez for “having been unmovedby the ‘stress of times,’” Villa responded, “I do not mixmy politics and economics with my art…I do not believethe economic readjustment of society to be the functionof literature” (ibid., 178).

Villa’s aesthetic purism must be understood as adisposition haunted by his personal engagements with hissocio-political milieu. When Villa was born in 1908, thePhilippines had been relinquished by Spain to the newimperial master, the US via the Treaty of Paris. With thecountry’s recovery from more than three centuries ofSpanish colonial ism subsequently replaced by a newcolonizer, the country was positioned within a transcolonialphase. Villa would have been undoubtedly well-acquainted


with the political climate of the era, as his father, Col. SimeonVilla, served as physician to Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, thepresident of the First Philippine Republic. As recorded inhis diaries, the older Villa was part of the company thatjoined Aguinaldo’s odyssey during the Filipino-AmericanWar to escape from American forces before his eventualcapture in Palanan, Isabela. According to Agustin Espiritu(2005, 76), Colonel Villa was profoundly anti-American,resenting the US invasion of the country.

Villa grew up in a time when Filipinos were engagedin fierce anti-imperial and nationalist resistance against theAmerican military and civilian forces—Macario Sakay’sTagalog Republic, the Moro resistance forces, the Coloruminsurrectos, the Sakdalista, to the then newly-establishedCommunist Party of the Philippines. As the brutality againstthe subversive natives intensified, Manuel Quezon and othermembers of the Philippine oligarchy sought to assertindependence through parliamentary and legal ways, beforeeventually succumbing to compromises with the Americans(San Juan 2010, 15-16). The struggle for independence alsofound expression in literary productions, as signaled by theemergence of sedit ious nat ional ist works in var iousgenres—political plays of Aurelio Tolentino, poetry ofFernando Ma. Guerrero and Cecilio Apostol, novels byLope K. Santos and Faustino Aguilar. Subsequently, theseexpressions of nationalist resistance were contained by theinvasive Americanization throughout the country, particularlythrough public education (Villa 2002, 10).

Public education system exposed the students toWestern culture, with literature studied in relation to thehistory and culture of the Anglo-Saxon world (Hosillos1968, 39). This consequential ly condit ioned Fi l ipinosensibilities to regard Filipino literary works with disdain,dismissing their historically conditioned qualities as didactic

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and propagandist. Along with the entry of the New Criticalframework which focused on literature’s autonomy fromhistory, the Filipino student’s literary taste was habituatedaccording to Western aesthetic standards. In addition, themode of American instruction taught Filipino writers a newlanguage, and subsequently, a new direction for literarypractice. As such, the emergence of Filipino writers inEnglish like Villa shifted the imperatives of literary practicefrom commitment to nationalism to the emulation ofWestern literature and the endorsement of Western literaryaesthetics. Nationalist sentiments were exorcised from theprovince of literature, so to speak.

While Villa can indeed be regarded as what Chuarefers to as “the apotheosis of the epistemic reengineering”of colonial education (Villa 2002, 12), his assimilation toAmerican culture could have been possibly furthered byhis estranged relationship with his anti-American father.Staunchly antipathetic toward his son’s literary interest,Colonel Villa pressured him to pursue a medical profession.The younger Villa submitted to his father’s will and enrolledin a degree in medicine, and then in law, without abandoninghis literary practice by persistently writing fiction. In theUniversity of the Philippines (UP), he, together with otherstudents, founded the UP Writers’ Club, which adhered tothe credo “art shall not be a means to an end but an end ititself.” From 1927 to 1929, Villa vigorously contributed tothe literary section of the Philippines Herald, and graduallyestablished his reputation as an influential voice of hisgeneration. However, in 1929, a Manila court charged himof obscenity for the ser ies of poems “Man Songs,”published in Herald and a short story “Appasionata” whichappeared in Philippine Collegian. Most controversial in the“Man Songs” series was “Song of Ripeness,” particularlywith its vivid comparison of coconuts to a woman’s breasts.“Appasionata” is a story about a seductress who permits


young men to see her naked body through a peephole.Conceding to the charges for the newspapers’ sake, Villapaid a fine of 50 pesos, but eventually had to face a specialdisciplinary committee of the university, headed by JorgeBocobo, dean of the School of Law. Vil la defendedhimself in a statement invoking l i terary l icense andexpressing that there is no connection between art andmorality. Villa deemed that “Philippine audiences hadmisunderstood him,” and were too blinded by conventionalmorality to appreciate his artistic vision (Espiritu 2005, 76-81). Subsequently, Villa was suspended for one year. Duringthe same year, he was awarded first prize Philippine FreePress literary contestfor the short story “Mir-i-nisa,” andused the prize money to migrate to the United States in1930 and search for greater opportunities as a writer.

These personal predicaments, along with the epistemicconditioning brought about by his exposure to Americanculture, constituted “conditions of possibility” (San Juan2010, 14) that elicited his direct disavowal of what heperceived was the “philistine, Victorian society of colonialPhilippines” (ibid., 6), his rebellion against his father, andhis cultivation of the American dream. Epifanio San Juan,Jr. writes that “his rebellion against god and surrogateauthorities, against literal and symbolic patriarchs, and hisrefusal to belong to any physical/real country may be anexpression of his fear, dreams and hope of liberation fromall family entanglements and sociopolitical constraints” (ibid.,19). Villa’s act of rebellion was clearly an expression ofthe artist’s bourgeois tendency to alienate himself fromhistor ica l and pol i t ica l rea l i t ies and to search for ametaphysical self, “a spirit that the human body and worldlyreality cannot fully realize” (ibid., 23). Governing thistendency is the idea that “the singular identity of the poett ranscends t ime and space , b iograph ic par t i cu la r s ,

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sociohistorical specificity” (San Juan 2009, 18). This isparticularly evident in his bio-note in Edward O’Brien’sselection Best Short Stories of 1923:

Born in Manila, Philippine Islands. His father is aphysician, and wanted him to follow a medicalcareer. He finished his pre-medical course butcould go no further….. Was expelled from theUniversity of the Philippines in 1929 because itwas c la imed, he says , that h is wr i t ing wasimmoral….. He is very unacademic because hebelieves academism cramps the soul. As for thePhilippines, he cannot stand the old-maidishnessof its outlook on things. (O’Brien 1932, 293)

As Chua (2013-2014, 23) points out that the bio-note,which belied certain facts in Villa’s life, signifies a self-fashioning move to romantically construct the author as “avictim of the establishment,” “a rebel against convention,”and “a vanguard.” His movement to America then was aneffort to establish that he did not belong to his country,that his artistic “spirit” transcended the socio-historicalrealities of his country in particular. In the words of SanJuan:

[Villa] struggled to fashion in words and deeds‘a beaut i fu l soul ’ not in Europe or NorthAmerica but somewhere in between, in the ‘occultzone of instability’ (to quote Fanon) inhabitedby diasporic artists, exiles, émigrés, deracinatedor déclassé intellectuals wandering the arcades ofthe metropoles’ culture-industry and subterraneanart-world. (San Juan 2010, 6)

Eventually, Villa’s “beautiful soul” would be hauntedby the specters of his socio-historical subject-position when


he moved to America, where the seemingly distant colonialrealities of his renounced country loomed like a ghost overthe ethnocentric logos of modernism.

The Colonial Specters of Modernism

Arriving in 1930, Villa entered the University of NewMexico, which he attended for two years, and founded ashort-lived mimeographed quarterly publication called Clay:A Literar y Notebook, which published the early works ofWilliam Saroyan, William Carlos Williams, and Eugene Joffe(Hosillos 1968, 120-121). His attempt to enter the Americanliterary circle was however conditioned by the economicand cultural atmosphere that blanketed American society.

The Amer ica tha t Vi l l a se t foot on was be ingtormented by the damages of the First World War andplagued by the enormous economic slowdown during thethird decade of the century. The period of his arrival wasalso marked by the massive entry of Filipinos in the UnitedStates, some were pensionados or scholars who came fromthe local elite allied to the American colonial government,some were self-supporting students like Villa, while theothers were blue-collar workers hired to supply labor forcein plantations and canneries. These laborers arrived in theUS only to exper ience oppress ive labor condi t ionspropelled by racism, inciting them to engage in laboractivism. This situation was contemporaneous with the laborunrest back in the Philippines where American colonialintrusion translated to the oppressive restructuring of thelocal economy. With the closure of canneries, harsh wagecuts, oversupply in plantation labor, and attempts torepatriate Filipino laborers during the Great Depression,the plight of the migrant laborers severely worsened. By

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the late 1920s and early 1930s, white hatred toward manyFilipinos, whose growing population presented them ascompetitors for labor, became widespread. Single Filipinomen were regarded as sexual threats to white and Mexicanwomen in taxi-dance halls, and violent race riots intendedto push Filipinos away from several communities brokeout (Espiritu 1995, 11-13).

Racism likewise saddled Villa’s attempt to penetrate ahighly competitive literary market that was also sufferingfrom the economic crash. Villa, who was then virtuallyunknown in America and had to compete with establishedauthors, encountered extreme difficulty in publishing hisshort stories in American periodicals. Despite his signifyingmoves to present himself as universal writer, Villa couldnever escape the haunting of his ethnicity. Ironically, hisethnicity conditioned his publishing potential in ambivalentterms. While Kyle Crichton cited his ethnic background asone factor for the rejection of his works in Scribner’smagazine, the ethnic flavor of some of his stories attractededitors of little, non-commercial magazines. Even moredifficult was looking for a publishing house that would bewilling to release his first collection of stories. Scribnerturned down the manuscript of Footnote to Youth severaltimes, until Villa himself volunteered to shoulder theproduction expenses (Chua 2013-2014, 13-19).

The presence of this racialized violence confirmed thespecter of colonialism that hounded modernist thought.Instituted on the liberal philosophy that emerged duringthe nineteenth century, modernism served as the West’sresponse to the political and economic upheavals duringthe early decades of the twentieth century. Owing to theReformation movement’s dismantling of feudalism andclericalism, and the consequent discourse that invoked thescientific individual, not God, as the mover of history, the


Western world steered toward the path of scientif icprogress and massive industrialization. In the United States,the impact of the First World War and the rapid economicgrowth followed by the subsequent economic slowdownduring the Great Depression intensified the impulse to buildindustries, engage in massive urbanizing projects, andembark on technological ventures. Amidst the speedyoperations of industrialization and technologization thatenabled Western powers to expand their economic andpolitical exercises across non-Western territories, modernismas a phi losophical , pol it ical , and cultural frameworkresponded to the imperative of constructing the modernWeste rn se l f ag a ins t the res t o f the wor ld—anepistemological procedure founded on an ethnocentricethos that was haunted by the oppressive real i ty ofcolonialism.

From its construction in the feudal imagination as theChristian imperative to save the “native heathens from theev i l s of the i r g odless pr imi t iv i ty,” co lonia l i sm wasrediscursified by modernism as a remedy to what the Westperceived as the backward, uncivilized, traditional characterof non-Western societies. Supplemented by the invasivediscursive proliferation of the dichotomy between themodern and traditional, the West was constructed in theglobal imaginary as the center of progress. It was on thismodernist imaging of the Western self as the purveyor ofcivilization that the imperialist discourses of “benevolentassimilation” and “manifest destiny” instrumentalized bythe Americans in colonizing the Philippines were predicated.

The ethnocentric ethos naturally found its way in therealm of artistic practice, which was likewise severelyaltered with the entry of the modernist age. With thediminution of feudalism, Western artistic practice was finallyfreed from the tradition of patronage. The artist was able

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to pursue individual practice, and hence, to engage in artisticexperimentation and personalization (Barrett 1997, 20).Moreover, the imperative to create something new surfacedas a response to the changing capital ist market. Themodernist artist was promptly disposed to differentiate his/her work from “cheap” popular cultural artifacts consumedby the emerg ing mass urban soc ie ty, and tocontemporaneously pursue an artistic practice that wouldnever be carried away by the commodifying climate of theperiod. Such disposition explains the supervening alienationof the artist from the currents of the political and economicsituation. The doctrine of aestheticism or “art for art’s sake”thus burgeoned, and the view of “art (or what is sometimescalled ‘high art’) as a source of esoteric value, separate fromthe everyday values of commercialism, morality, and anyother sort of instrumental or practical purpose” proliferated(Carroll 2000, 352). In literature, this doctrine found itscritical vanguard in the emergence of the new criticalframework. This mode of literary analysis was responsiblefor defining the Western canon on strictly formal, literarygrounds. The project of American cultural imperialism incolonies l ike the Phi l ippines propagated these twindoctrines, hammering in the minds of the native intellectualsthe superiority of Western literature and alienating themfrom their own literary traditions. So to speak, aestheticstandards valorized by the West were universalized asparameters of literariness through the pedagogical andcultural workings of colonization.

Villa’s artistic practice was definitely founded on theseaccepted doctrines of modernist literature. He in fact turnedto Western literary figures for inspirations in his creativeand critical ventures. Two of whom were reputedly highlyinfluential in Villa’s literary career: Sherwood Andersonwhose Winesbur g , Ohio (original ly published in 1919)


convinced Villa that he wanted to be a writer, and EdwardO’Brien, Villa’s patron who included his stories in his annualanthology of best short stories and whose critical appraisalof art ist ic merit inf luenced the young author in hissubsequent critical work (Chua 2013-2014, 14).

Ultimately, despite his attempt to craft universalliterature by employing experimentations and emulating theliterary techniques of Western writers like Anderson, hisfirst bid for literary fame failed, especially since he chose aliterary genre that rendered him vulnerable to the discursiveviolence of modernist racism—the short story. The genrenecessitates the evocation of a fictional world, “a uniquesystem separate from, although dependent on the cultural-historical reality in which it is created and with which itholds more or less obvious affinities” (Ronen 1994, 15).This mimetic quality of the short story was not diminishedby modernist innovations, and was even highlighted withthe introduction of realism and the decline of romanticism.Any attempt to complete ly exorcise socio-histor ica lspecificities in fiction was thus bound to fail becausenarration is integral to the genre’s mechanism of expressingtemporal and spatial reality. As such, the genre is one of“the immanent forms that somehow fail to achieve risingto the level of transcendence” (San Juan 2009, 18) on whichVi l la ’s i l lus ion of t ranscendent ar t i s t ic dest iny wasparasitically reliant. In Footnote to Youth, Villa transcribedhis metaphysical explorations on the meaning of humanlife in identifiable contexts—the rural outskirts of colonialPhilippines and the desolate spaces of Depression-eraAmerica. How these mimetic worlds evoked in the storiesserve as haunting spaces of Villa’s exorcised history will beexplored in the succeeding portions of this essay.

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Tales of the Haunted Fatherland

In his introduction to the collection, O’Brien remarkedthat Villa’s literary practice was “deeply rooted in thecountry life of the Philippine Islands” (in Villa 1933, 3).Villa naturally made maximal use of local ethnographicdetails as the setting of twelve of his stories in the serviceof creating a literature of universality. Nevertheless, whilehis works were propelled by an overt lack of politicalagenda, these ethnographic constructions brought forthhistorical specters that he tried to bury under his obsessiveadherence to aestheticism.

The agrarian landscape of the rural country againstwhich Villa imposed his existentialist narratives is renderedby him in passionate and romantic descriptions. The talesof the Phil ippines are indeed brimming with ornate,carefully observed images of the tropical countryside—from the ground “broken up into many fresh wounds andfragrant with a sweetish earthy smell” in the title story, tothe field of flowers that “was like a mantle of gold andwhite…a lake of flowers…revealing dimples of all colors”in “Yet Do They Strife.” These are in fact spectral tracesof Euro-Hispanic literature that proliferated during thecolonial period and wielded an influence on the country’sliterary productions until the first half of the Americancolonial era (Lumbera and Lumbera 1997, 89), the eventualhaunting of which O’Brien recognized when he remarked“the strong Spanish sense of form and color” in thecollection (in Villa 1933, 3).

The spectral mood of Spanish costumbrismo hoversover Villa’s Philippine stories, smoothening the overalltexture of their narrative styles even when they are set indifferent temporalities spread out across Philippine history.“Malakas” and “Kamya,” for instance are set in the distant


past. The first is a folkloric love story apparently situatedin the precolonial period as evinced by non-Christiancharacter names that are visibly borrowed from the localcreation legend, and, as Timothy Yu (2006, 33) pointedout, by its narration that echoes “the style of a traditionaloral performance” even while evincing the narrativeaesthetics of Spanish romanticism. The latterperiodng theirearly colonial conquests in Manila is also a tale of tragiclove temporally structured within a few decades beforethe entry of Spanish colonial power, signified by themention of Rajah Soliman who refused to submit toSpanish sovereignty during their early colonial conquests inManila. The rest of the stories are populated by charactersbearing Christ ian names and structured on Cathol ictemporal signifiers (e.g., Christmas and Easter Sunday) thatsituate them within the later colonial epochs.

The reality of Spanish colonialism likewise prowls thecountryside of Villa’s imagination through the spectralushering of the Spanish reduccion system. From this spatialtechnology of colonial power emerged the epistemologicalproduction of identities according to the territorial binaryof urbanity versus rurality. The reduccion discourse ramifiedthe enduring view of the countryside as the space of thetulisanes and the barbarians, owing to the fact that the rurallandscape is usually the setting of colonial resistance andagrarian struggles. That the stories of Manila-bred Villaare remarkably silent and oblivious about this reality couldaffirm the workings of reduccion discourse in segregatingthe more “c iv i l i zed” c i t y dwe l l e r s f rom the rura l“barbarians.” Rehearsing his romantic evocation of thecountryside from his position as cosmopolitan outsiderexposed to the cu l tura l r amif i ca t ions of Amer icancolonia l i sm, Vi l la appropriated his v is ioning of thecountrys ide from Sherwood Anderson whose works

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exposed the “dichotomy of cosmopolitan/provincial” (Yu2006, 37) in a manner that privileges character developmentover plot structure. Attended by his poetic evocation ofthe pastoral landscape to universalize the narrative milieu,Villa adopted the Andersonian narrative mode with theintention of focusing on universal themes rather than onthe material realities of his characters.

In the story “Footnote to Youth,” which LeopoldoYabes (1997, xxiii) distinguished as “a remarkable exampleof the Anderson story transplanted to Philippine soil,” ayoung farmer Dodong asks for his father’s consent to marrythe barrio lass Teang. Eventually, Dodong encounters thehardships and sorrows of married life and regretfullyrealizes that his early marriage has taken his youth awayfrom him too soon. Soon, he finds himself in his father’sposition when his eldest son, Blas, decides to marry hischildhood sweetheart. Whipped by years of embittermentand disillusionment over his fate, Dodong muses, “Youthmust t r iumph…now. Love must t r iumph…now.Afterwards…it will be Life” (Villa 1933, 21). Here, thecapitalization of the first letters of the words Youth, Life,and Love throughout the story distills universal themes/ideals from the ethnographic specificities occupying thenarrative. The emphatic positioning of these ideals asextracted from the rural backdrop, while framed to clearlyarticulate Villa’s existential statement on the oppressive cycleof human life only highlights the dialectics of the humancondition and the socio-economic reality that contains it.In fact, the distillation of these ideals does not really serveto obscure the story’s ethnographic background. What isachieved instead is these ideals acquiring meaning from,within, and through the rural context. As such, while Villaclearly resorted to abstractions and philosophical musingsto give shape and weight to the forfeiture of Dodong’s


youth, he, owing to the exigencies of narrative worlding,also rendered these ideals visible and concrete in theepisodes of peasant l i fe—ear ly marr iage , unbr id ledchildbirth, domestic travails, and hardships of farm work.It is precisely through such narrative and semantic operationthat one may fully interpret “Footnote to Youth” as a storyof a young man’s confrontat ion with the oppressivecyclicality of peasant life in the agrarian countryside.

As the reader further moves through Villa’s provincialstories, one encounters characters similar to Dodong in thattheir existential ruminations are distilled from the materialcontradictions that afflict peasant life. Nevertheless, as inthe case of the title story, these ruminations cannot fullydisavow the historical and economic base they are situatedin. In fact, Villa’s consistent representation of rural life asan oppressive cycle of birth, youth, marriage, and death isattuned to the repetitive rhythms of agrarian activity in thecountryside.

In the second story “The Fence,” Villa made use ofthe titular image to describe the oppressions wrought bythis rural order. A woman builds a fence to isolate herselffrom the neighbor impregnated by her estranged husband,and in the process, condemns her son Iking to incurablesol i tude within the conf ines of the ir n ipa hut . Theomniscient narrator alludes to this exile as a behaviorcorollary of the feudal religion.

His mother would pray. Could she pray? His soulasked… He stood motionless. And then he sawthe fence – the fence that his mother had builtand strengthened – to crush his soul. He ranweakly, groggily, to it – allured by its forbidding,crushing sternness. (35-36)

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Moreover, the narrator mentions this detail in thewoman’s house: “A Biblia was on the table, but no one readit; they did not know how to read” (35). More than imbuingthe narrative with the temper of a Christian morality tale,this detail temporally situates the story within the Americanoccupation when Tagalog translations of the bible werefinally made available to the Filipinos. The presence of thebible and the mention of illiteracy in the story howeverrelease the specters of Spanish colonialism, conjuring thetheological and pedagogical machinery of the earl iercolonizers. Here, one could detect Villa suggesting the linkbetween rural backwardness and the enduring feudalimpositions of the Spanish colonizers.

Villa’s anti-Spanish suggestion could be understoodboth as an e f fec t o f the an t i -Span i sh propagandadisseminated by the Americans toward the end of thenineteenth century, and as a rebellion against the Voice ofthe Father, as the elder Villa reportedly spoke Spanish andno English (Park 2013, 125). In his renunciation of rurallife as a ramification of Spanish colonialism, Villa thenspectralized a preferable image that he himself was familiarw i th—that o f the c i t y mov ing l inear l y toward theindustrializing direction of modernity. In an age when “tobe ‘Fil-Hispanic’ meant being old-fashioned; (and) to speakEnglish, to be ‘Americanized,’ meant being modern” (de laPeña 2008, 105), this is a modernity founded on theAmerican colonial order—a modernity that moves toexorcise the feudal ghosts of the Spanish colonial system.

Nevertheless, in the eyes of Tona, a mother abandonedby a man who fathered her child in the story “Death intoManhood,” this modernity, signified by the public schoolwhere she enrolled her son Berto, by the Red Cross pin herson wore, and finally by the cine (moviehouse) to where hedec ides to take h is g i r l f r iend Mar ia , i s a cause for


trepidation, akin to her own fear toward her son’s eventualjourney to manhood. Fearing that Berto might eventuallybecome like his father, Tona approaches Maria’s mother,telling her to convince her daughter never to go out withher son again. Here, Tona’s anxiety to accept the movementof time—its vertical passage toward modernization—isdepicted as a traumatic consequence of the rural cycle. Thisrepresentation of the rural psyche is undoubtedly consistentwi th Vi l l a ’s perce pt ion of the conser va t i sm andbackwardness of his country of origin.

In this story and in “The Fence,” one would noticethat Villa’s rural female characters are afflicted by a counter-progressive rural mindset. In contrast, his male charactersare the ones who leave the countryside for the city, similarto Anderson’s George Willard in Winesburg , Ohio whoseeventual departure from the small town of Winesburgembodies the possibility of escape from the snares of rurallife. After the death of their infant, Ponso in a “GivenWoman” suddenly decides to leave Flora, a servant womanwith whom he lived, to go to the city. Even though unsurewhy he should leave, he decides to find a surrogate whowould be willing to live with the submissive Flora beforehe takes off. With the city functioning as a signifierh i s tor ica l l y haunted by the po l i t i ca l and economicramifications of modernity, Ponso’s impulse to embark onthis journey clearly suggests his infatuation with the thecosmopolis, yielding to which entails that he must abandonFlora. In the eyes of Ponso, the woman is the antithesis ofthe city.

The image of the woman as staple rural presencelikewise finds expression in “Valse Triste” wherein thenarrator’s Uncle Berto remembers Tinang, the womanwhom he was forced to abandon in San Diego in order tofollow to his father’s wishes and study in Manila. When he

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returns to the barrio years later, the lovers cross paths againand the woman confesses to him that she killed their unbornchild. Shocked by her crime, he bids her a sorrowfulgoodbye, leaving Tinang to realize from this brief reunionthat the beloved boy who abandoned her has f inal lytransformed into a man. Evidently, these stories usher inspecters of the patriarchal order prevalent in rural familialdynamics, primarily by constructing women as domesticfixtures in rural territories. The female characters in the ruralstories are in fact commonly represented in proximalreference to their nipa huts. In contrast, the men areitinerant, capable of moving from the cyclical trap of thecountryside to the linear progress of the city. In the caseof namesakes Berto in “Death into Manhood” and UncleBerto in “Valse Triste,” modernity signifies manhood. Themascul inizat ion of young Ber to’s body becomes hismother’s temporal marker for the entry of modernity(s ignif ied , among others , by the c in e ) in the ir rura lcommunity. In the eyes of his abandoned lover in the ruralvillage of San Diego, Uncle Berto’s sojourn in the city andhis implied encounter with the cosmopolitan realities ofManila turn him into a man. The urban versus rural binaryis hence rendered in heteronormative significations. Thecity is rendered as masculine space, headed toward thephallic direction of modernity, while the countryside isfeminized territory, confined in the cycle of domesticconservatism. Haunting this heteronormative binary is Villa’stranscolonial disposition, in which the backward, feudalpa t r i a rchy imposed by the Span i sh co lon ia l i sm i scontemptuously contrasted with the favored white malenorm of US modernity.

Complementing Villa’s transcolonial imagination ofpatriarchy is the spectral image of the repressive father thatlooms over the countryside. From the spectral father who


may possibly haunt his son in “Death into Manhood” tothe violent fathers of “Resurrection,” “Story for myCountry” and “Yet Do They Strife,” Villa’s regression fromhis estranged relationship with his father is hauntologicallyintertwined with the suffocating entrapments of rural life.In some stories, the desire for the ideal father becomesfigured in the image of the national hero Jose Rizal. In the“Story for My Country,” a boy named Jose Rosal escapesfrom the brutal custody of his father. Gazing at Rizal’smonument, the persona, Jose’s younger brother soonimagines his lost brother as the national hero incarnate,spectralizing his older brother in the Rizalian cult. Roughlycontinuing the trope of escape is the closing story “YetDo They Strife,” which tells of another boy’s escape fromhis wife-beating father, leading him to an eventual encounterwith a wounded man. This episode is haunted by thenarrative of the meeting of Elias and Basilio in Rizal’s NoliMe Tangere.

As noticeable in these two stories and the other Rizalnarratives—”The Son of Rizal,” “Daughter of Rizal,” and“The Man Who Looked Like Rizal”—the national herobecomes positioned as a surrogate for inadequate father-figures. In his essay “Unbecoming Rizal: José Garcia Villa’sBiographical Translations,” Philip Holden (2009, 287) arguesthat these stories insert the lives of ordinary Filipinos intothe official biographies of the national hero “to encouragereaderly identifications with their subaltern protagonists.”

Undoubtedly, these narratives conjure and echo thePhilippine state’s canonization of Rizal. It merits mentionhowever that Rizal’s official enshrinement in nationalconsciousness is clearly a neocolonial project endorsed bythe US empire, as comprehensively exposed by RenatoConstant ino in h i s e s say “Venera t ion wi thoutUnderstanding.” In the hands of the Americanized Villa,

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the national hero’s presence as the surrogate for the brutalfa ther and the proverbia l fa ther land—specters thatcondense in the images of domestic violence breaking outin the r ura l space—mere l y a f f i r ms the heg emonicmystifications of the US sponsorship of Rizalian heroism.The image of Rizal is therefore haunted by the phantomof the “imperial Father.”

The haunting of American paternity, amplified by theinsertion of the anti-Hispanic and American-sponsoredRizal, in the Philippine stories possesses Villa’s desire tosever his connection with his own country, which sheltersthe ghosts of Spanish colonialism, as well as his connectionwith his own Spanish-speaking father. Consequently, thehaunting mythified his sojourn in America where he aspiredto supplant his renounced paternity with the imperial Father.Eventually, as the following analysis will demonstrate, thisattempt at surrogacy would usher in phantoms of thedisavowed fatherland.

Specters of the Homeland

In “Untitled Story,” the narrator begins with anevocation of his father’s cruelty: “Father did not understandmy love for Vi, so Father sent me to America to studyaway from her. I could not do anything and I left” (in Villa1933, 73). The father in this story is strikingly similar to thefather in “Valse Triste” who sends his son Berto away toManila to preempt his relationship with a country girl.

This story, together with the other two parts (“WhiteInterlude” and “Walk at Midnight: A Farewell”) of the“White and Blue Flame” trilogy, as well as the other twoindependent s tor i e s of a F i l ip ino wr i t e r ’s mig rantexperiences (“Song I Did Not Hear” and “Young Writer


in a New Country”) are filled with autobiographical detailsthat conjure the specter of Villa’s father. The narrator,similar to Villa, goes to study in New Mexico. His ventureto “the gorgeous purple flower” (80) of poetry is treatedas a rebellion against his father who disparages any formof artistic practice. In one instance, the narrator muses “Ihad no money and I prayed to God to send me moneybecause I knew I could not get it elsewhere. But God neveranswered” (96), referring to an episode when Villa’s fatherdeclined to give financial support to his impoverished sonin America (Espiritu 2005, 76). Despite his move to encodehis narratives in the stylistic mystifications of modernistexperimentations particularly evinced in the psalm-likenumbering of paragraphs, the stories visibly resist thispoetic erasure of mimesis and release the ghosts of Villa’shistory.

The ghost of the father is a bisemic image in thesestories – more than a personal figure, it spectralizes theabandoned home country. Every ushering of the father’sghost evokes the nar ra tor ’s d is tant memor y of thecountry—from the thwarted love affair to anecdotes ofdomestic cruelty. In fact, this phantom is evoked throughromantic significations transplanted from the pastorallandscape of the country. The narrator thus ruminates:

…I took with me the tree of my father, my newlove, to the new land – America…In America, Inourished the tree of my father till his love hadbranches and although I had never played beforeunder the gentleness of his shade now I playedin fancy under the coolness of his branches. (94)

In contrast to the spectral paternal hate that floodsthe rural narratives, Villa’s persona evokes yearning in theimmigrant stories. This newfound desire is aroused in the

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very moment of his departure from his homeland and hisseparation from his father:

Before my father touched my hands on the boatthat was to take me to America, I was whole.But when he clasped my hands and said, “Goodluck to you, son,” love flowed from me into thefather I had never loved and my wholeness waslost. (93)

The absence of the father, whose presence has beenearlier regarded with disdain, now becomes the source ofincompleteness. Villa the writer tried to respond to thisunwholeness through what O’Brien treats as an effort “toimpose the ascetic pattern of the American desert uponhis memories and, in so doing, upon his writing as well”(3). This recourse is indubitably haunted by Villa’s aestheticistdisposition as literary artist, particularly by his faith in thetranscendental potential of art to go beyond the exigenciesof historical specif ic i t ies and traumatic biographicalmemories.

One expression of Villa’s recourse to the realm ofthe imagination is his persona’s imposition of the spectralpresence of his abandoned homeland against the alienatingwilderness of America. He particularly spectralizes his fatherin the foreign land. For instance, in “Walk at Midnight,” hesees his father come to him in the classroom while theprofessor lectures, the old man apologizing for a previouscruelty (108), while in “Song I Did Not Hear,” his Jewishroommate Joe Lieberman transforms into an image of hisfurious father (246).

Inevitably, Villa’s visionary evocation of alienation andyearning in the American landscape registers snippets oflife during the Great Depression, as signified temporally


by the reference to then-President Hoover. While hispo l i t i ca l ob l iv iousness toward the new count ry i spronounced, as in the line “I saw President Hoover’s homein Palo Alto but I did not care for President Hoover” (74),his observations conjure the specter of this presenteconomic misery—from the image of the crippled streetseller, the insertion of a character named David who, unableto shoulder the expenses, leaves school, to episodes of thenarrator’s own destitution in the big city. Severely alienatedby this atmosphere of economic despair, the narrator ishaunted by the ghost of his homeland in “Young Writer ina New Country:” “America is cold, for the moment that ismy thought. In the homeland – never any snow. In thehomeland, greenness. O green, O warmth, O bamboosunforgotten” (301). Here, Villa’s mythology of Americanpaternity is shattered by his firsthand exposure to thedesolation of the new country. The imperial ideal which heanticipated would be a departure from the oppressiveconfines of his homeland becomes demystified when herealized that America is a wasteland of economic misery.

In spite of his indubitably dismal predicament inAmerica, the persona’s evocations clearly pronounce hisdesire for assimilation and acceptance in this new country.Imagining such acceptance to be akin to someone pickinga handkerchief on the road, the persona, still haunted bythe traumatizing memory of his homeland, welcomes theidea of surrogacy, while rejecting the thought of returningto his father: “Who would my picker be? – I want him tohave kind eyes because I am hungry for kind eyes, God.Do not let him have my father’s eyes” (97). Moreover, Villa’spersona prefers the “desert of my white birth” over thehomeland where “I was young” (303). This contrastivearticulation is haunted by the relationship between thePhil ippine colony and the American empire, as Vil laconjured what Neferti Tadiar observes as the colonial

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infantilization of the Filipino nation. Since “America, in turn,becomes the Philippines’ masculine ideal” (Tadiar 2004, 47),the imperial dynamics of the US-Phil ippine relationseventually takes on patriarchal terms, with the colonizerpositioned as the doting ‘Fatherland,’ the Filipinos, the‘imperial sons’ (ibid., 53).

This hegemonic construction of the image of theWhite Father then becomes, for a colonial subject trappedin the alienating landscape of the empire, instrumental tothe discursive operations of paternal surrogacy. Interestingly,for Villa’s persona, the desired American paternity mustsupplant not just the absence of the homeland and thefather, but also the thwarted consummation of eroticdesire—the frustrated desire for his childhood sweetheartVi in the faraway country. Consequently, the personadevelops queer desire for the ideal White Male, figured onthe character of a poor American boy named Jack Wicken.In narrating the persona’s first interaction with Jack, Villapronounces the persona’s a l ter i ty, and in so doing,immediately positions him within the matrix of racialrelations in the colonial center: “There was a boy JackWicken ate at the dining hall who would give me uglyglances because I was a foreigner and when I reached homeI felt I hated him and could not let him know about it”(99).

Conjuring the reality of racism prevalent during Villa’sarrival in the United States, the persona’s ethnicity signifieshis removal from Jack, and in effect, from the possibilityof having his adoration reciprocated by the object of desire.The desire for integration and acceptance is visibly impeded,precisely because the persona’s identity as Filipino/foreignermarks him off as a neocolonial subject, nominalized throughthe spectral reality of colonialism that constitutes theprimary encounter between his homeland and the surrogatecountry.


The racial distance conceived by this colonial conditionfurther intensifies his desire for Jack, until it ultimatelybecomes articulated in theological significations. In “Walkat Midnight,” the persona confesses that it was his motherwho introduced him to the Christian faith: “My mothertaught me to pray. I went with her to churches and at nightwe prayed before the picture of God. God had a beard inthe picture but when I was in God’s arms I felt only thewarmth and gentleness of His fold, I could not tell if Hehad a beard” (118).

This memory, a specter of Spanish colonial theology,haunts the dynamics of the persona’s desire. This very imageof the bearded God in Christian iconography is the onethe persona implores to in his desire to be taken “backinto my mother and back into His (God’s) arms so thereshould be no more loneliness for me” (118). The specterof the Christian God provides the persona with an imaginedresolution to his incompleteness, even though the persona’sentreaty takes on a somewhat secular temper with hissymbolic non-recognition of the bearded image. Thisin fa tua t ion wi th the image of d iv in i t y i s s imi l a r l ydemonstrated in “The Woman Who Looked Like Christ,”a story of a young man who falls in a love with a womanwhose face resembles a young Christ. Queerly conjured,the male character’s romantic (erotic) desire is imposed onthe sacralized masculine image, prompting the woman tofly into a rage over the comparison to a male face.

Quite amusingly, the persona’s desire for the imageof the White Father, Jack, is seemingly reconciled with thespecter of the Hispanic God when he implores, “God, lethim love me even as I love him” (122). It turns out,however, that Vil la’s persona in the autobiographicalnarratives constructs a modernist theological revisionfounded on mythifying the figure of the desired White

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Father (Jack) as someone “who could crush God’s whisperin his hands” (114), an effort evidently intended to exorcisethe obvious theological ramifications of Hispanic patriarchy.The modernist patriarchy, the white male norm of Americancolonial discourse, therefore displaces the traditional feudaldeity in the process of violent hierarchy.

Accompanying this exalting vision of the mythicalwhite male is the persona’s realization that he will eventuallyhave to accept suffering from this unrequited adoration.Nevertheless, upon Jack’s departure, he exclaims, “I wantto see Jack. I want him always to be in my life…even if ithurts. I am ready to be hurt” (258). These emotionalarticulations of the narrator chart the allegorical narrativeof the country’s masochistic relationship with the USempire, and more particularly, of the Filipino migrant’stravail in a highly-racialized ecosystem where his desire forass imi l a t ion i s perpe tua l l y fo i l ed by h i s inev i t ab leidentification as a neocolonial subject.

In this penultimate evocation of “Young Writer in aNew Country,” the last American story in the collection,the persona, undoubtedly already acquainted at this pointwith the political, economic, and racial dynamics in his newcountry, narrates his imagined integration:

Little by little comes my white birth – a coolwhite birth in a new land…It was then that my stories were born – of thehomeland and the new land. Some of you mayhave read them – they were cool, afire withcoolth.I, father of tales. Fathering tales I became rootedto the new land. I became lover to the desert.(303)


In keeping with Villa’s aesthetic purism, the personavalorizes his artistic activity as in itself an act of paternity,and a way of resolving the political, economic and racialcontradictions that characterized his migrant experience.Reading the wri ter ’s se l f - imposed exi le through thepsychoanalytic lens, San Juan eloquently synthesizes Villa’srecourse to the imaginative realm of literary practice in hisattempt to consummate his assimilationist desire amidst thehostilities of the imperial environs of America:

…the crisis of exile…is dissolved by metaphoricsublimation: In his visionary re-presentation ofthe primal loss (exile as castration; expulsion bythe father), the antinomic discourses of place,body, inheritance, and need converge in the self-exiled native being reborn in the desert of NewMexico where the Oedipal trauma (the loss ofthe mother’s/patria’s body) is exorcised by atranscendent trope of imagination. Art thenfunct ions as the resolut ion of the conf l ictbetween solitary ego and community…betweensubjugated people and despotic conqueror. (SanJuan 1998, 87)

Conclusion

Despite Villa’s overt effort to fashion himself as auniversal writer, Footnote to Youth released the specters ofthe colonial realities that he did not seek to discuss in hisworks. In fact, this collection clearly traces Villa’s movementin the matrix of colonial relations. He disavowed thePhilippines as an oppressive fatherland fraught by the

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specters of Spanish colonialism, escaping to the Americandesert to seek a surrogate White paternity, only to be rejectedbecause of his identity as imperial subject.

Critical responses to the collection were scathingtoward Villa’s American stories, while registering interesttoward the local stories that highlight his native roots.Moreover, many reviews concur that his best stories werethose set in the Philippines (Chua 2013-2014, 25) because,“to an American reader, his stories offered variety becausethey “are news from an unknown country, the Philippines”(ibid., 122). While the book gained some attention, it wassimply on the basis of its and its author’s alterity. Thus,contrary to the monumentalizing news that circulated inthe local literary community, it did not catapult him to hisdesired place in the modernist pantheon.

Remarkably, Villa, understandably daunted by thelukewarm reception to his American publishing debut,published almost nothing for a decade, until he releasedthe poetry collection Have Come, Am Here in 1942. The hiatus,which was clearly an effort to “sever his l inks to hisprevious work,” apparently paid off, as most reviews ofthe poetry book “register) no awareness either of Footnoteto Youth or of Villa’s many publications in the Philippines”(Yu 2004, 43). Of his decision to turn to poetry and abandonprose, Villa later on claimed that “a poet is the highest thing,the hardest thing to be” (in Arcellana 1967, 608). But morethan his high regard for the art of poetry, it seems possiblethat “(l)yric poetry allowed Villa to lift his psychologicalsymbolism to a level of nearly pure abstraction, with itsbiographical and geographic bases erased” (Yu 2006, 39),and was thus more expedient to his modernist aspirationand self-fashioning as a universal writer.


References

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Barrett, Terry. 1997. Modernism and postmodernism: An overview withart examples. In Art education: Content and practice in a postmodernera, ed. James Hutchens and Marianne Suggs, 17-30. Washington,DC: NAEA.

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