Scan barcode
bernicillin's review
challenging
dark
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
"He looked a bit mestizo. This was a detail that automatically registered with her: a hint of European ancestry meant money, power, and the arrogance that went with them."
"You only think they're ugly because you can't accept the way we look. The way you look. [That is,] Polynesian? Negroid?"
Crime as a genre doesn't interest me as much as others do, but this isn't crime fiction (despite its trappings.) At its core, it's about the women of a household, where the house is home to more than one generation. It's about their preoccupation with beauty (where beauty is whiteness, or proximity to whiteness), their relationship with their sexuality, their existence within designated spaces. All this, with unflinching, unapologetic Filipino-ness.[1]
Thirty-something Narita Pastor commuted on the same littered roads, in too-hot FXs and too-packed jeeps, heat an oppressive weight. She went home to the same provincial community of wagging tongues and didn't—couldn't—come home a failure because no one does. Perhaps a lot of it was me relating to her, if only because I too could take refuge in my accent, my being relatively tisay, my family name. Because I could recognize the fear masked as condescension in Luth, separate by virtue of how close they are to the foreigner, looking down on the uneducated poor outside the boundaries of their university town. Her elitism was not so much a bone-deep belief in her superiority, but the fear that they're not so different, that if seen next to each other, they'd be mistaken as related. She bore the weight of her colonial anxieties, longing for cake and distance from her husband, and couldn't carry it. And Naia, in the shadow of mother and grandmother both, suffocated by people recognizing her family name. Even she was cause for her grandmother's fear.
Sitoy comments on so much here: the Philippines in the shadow of Martial Law, the futility of logging hours in this capitalist hellhole, violence and violence and violence, most of it against women. She writes with a sure hand and the fluency of one who's lived here; as the Pastor women, her narrative voice betrays an educated burgis, so different from the likes of upperclass Sol in Apostol's Gun Dealers' Daughter, or even in Syjuco's Ilustrado. With a story like this, it doesn't seem to matter much what happens after. It matters only what happens now, there. All this to say that, contrary to most of the reviews her, I loved her language, English in her Filipino hands.
As a non-sequitur, it bears repeating that just because an author writes something doesn't mean they're endorsing said something. Wink, nudge, bato, langit.
1 — I'm aware, whatever Filipino is, is still contested. It's just what it reads
More...