A Love Song to the Philippines: The Revolutionary Power of Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters

2 weeks ago

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Dogeaters wasn’t just the first Filipino American novel I ever read; it was the first work of literary fiction I picked up on my own outside of a classroom. I was in my mid-twenties. I had already flunked out of college twice, having spent exponentially more time behind turntables, picking street fights, and stumbling out of bars than seated in an armchair reading literature.

My relationship to books had been mostly fraught. I couldn’t recall facts or characters, couldn’t remember plot. I couldn’t tell you why so-and-so did such-and-such or how x-y-z led to this-that-and-the-other.

But I did have another skill, which I culled from my family as well as all my youthful experiments in sound and on the dance floor, a whole other literacy, in fact. It was this: I could read most anything back to you aloud with impeccable pronunciation and perfect inflection. I had this preternatural gift for reading passages that had big fancy words, scientific, literary, big Greek-looking words, long French phrases sounded out with two syllables and one consonant, all kinds of texts, from simple to abstruse.

Their sounds came alive in my mind and in my ear. It was a different kind of understanding. I couldn’t read their logic really, but I could read their feeling. I couldn’t write a five-paragraph essay if my life depended on it, but I could hear a book’s voices. When I found Dogeaters, I found a book written the way that I listened.

I credit my listening to my obsessions as a boy, teaching myself to play piano and guitar, learning to dance with other boys on the street, composing elaborate multi-turntable remixes in a basement from Bach to Bambaataa. I believe I found a sanctuary on the dance floor and in music. In this way, I feel a great kinship with Jessica as a person and an artist. Dogeaters was the door that opened to welcome me.

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When I found Dogeaters, I found a book written the way that I listened.

My mother was in and out of the hospital quite a bit back then. Once, on my way back home from visiting her in the ICU, I popped into the big chain bookstore on Route 22. Dogeaters was facing out on a shelf. I swear to God, it was like I was guided to it.

It was the spring, 1995. My mother would die weeks later, in May. And I would read Dogeaters that summer. You’d be right to say I came to this book kind of late, five years after it was published. But I think I came to Jessica’s work right on time. This novel, written by another poet and performer, was and continues to be one of my sanctuaries in language.

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Dogeaters is a polyvocal work, drawing from the same formal energy as Ntozake Shange’s choreopoem. But Jessica takes this theatrical concept and pushes the possibilities of the conventional novel.

In most American fiction, you might have one narrator or at most a small cast of a few rotating narrators with limited points of view. Dogeaters does something much more wild, even mysterious. It evokes the feeling of simultaneity of those narrators. There’s no other way to describe how I’ve read this novel for the last three decades except that I can hear more than one voice at any given time.

I mean to say, the book is haunted. Phantasms inhabit every chapter. Sometimes they are actual mythological figures like the Filipino kapre. Sometimes they are the pronouncements of colonizers. Sometimes they are radio voices reflecting our own desires for love and blood; they echo across architectures of space and time, connecting the bedroom of a kind grandmother to the horrors of a torture chamber, sometimes building a boundary of safety between them.

What adds to the marvel of this book is that amid the abundance of figures and the frequent floods of imagery, Jessica displays a gift for patient portraiture. Smack-dab in the middle of a raucous congress of aristocrats and weirdos, we get to see the psychic struggles and development of complex humans as individuals.

I have a great affection for Rio, for example—her curiosity, wit, and self-possession. She is a misfit in a family of elites, a fact that she is aware of deep inside; she comes to understand this identity with a quiet ebullience by the end of this journey. We gain access to her interior world, her keen attention, her frustrations and longings. They are the lens through which we bear witness to high-class hypocrisies and silences.

Rio concedes just enough to familial obligations to attend social affairs and notice the furtive glances and unusual exchange of gifts. We learn how soulful she is, stealing away to be with her grandmother and the family’s katulong to listen to radio stories deep into the night or to hang out in her mother’s dark bedroom to relish the fabulous banter of her friends. Rio is a figure through whom we, as readers, get to experience a refreshing conjunction of poignancy and intelligence.

Dogeaters deftly and gorgeously invokes the tectonic and psychic potency of our dream life, which is often stunning, revelatory, transformative, channeling the complexity of love itself and reminding us of our proximity to beauty and death. Colonialism, environmental neglect, corporate and governmental abuse are founded upon cynicism and sentimentality, which is not feeling but an oversimplification of feeling, a desolation of feeling.

How can a society imagine when it can’t feel? That is a devastation of the imagination itself. And Dogeaters reclaims the imagination from that history, replenishes it, reinvigorates.

Dogeaters is a love song for the Philippines, but it is equally a love song for language itself. It is a luscious, slang-mouthed symphony. It is an ode, elegy, urban pastoral, and serenade all at once, recording all the sounds that pass through our rooms and drift through our windows, moving us from laughter to llanto, from cursing to keening.

It isn’t just a book about gossip, it makes gossip sing. In fact, it sings in many lexicons, from supplication to pop tune, blasphemy to news flash, radio drama to broken ballroom moan.

It is powerfully allegorical without ever moralizing. It refuses to reduce its shape or mute its awesome dynamics, its architecture rich and nuanced enough to hold story on many scales, from historical vastness to the intricacy of a single tongue.

The older I get the more I feel moved by the wisdom of this book, how it can convey a whole world continually on the verge of falling apart, but then some vibration, some electric current, some pulse, emerges, disappears, returns, finally culminates in a moment of deep intimacy, personal sorrow, catharsis, the returning to a house—for example—after many years, so charged with memory, living, laughter, the sounds of stories, elaborated, true, made up. It reminds us we can walk through decay and weep. We can let it all go.

I love that Jessica Hagedorn’s work came into my life when it did. The part of me that had gone awfully astray had also abandoned the blandness of American doctrine and entered an alternative world of music, eros, intimacy, art, and anger that challenged, however imperfectly, society’s arbitrary divisions and moral codes.

You must be familiar with the widely disseminated version of America that consists of a cozy home, a place where no one crosses a line, where everything has a pleasant aroma, and desire is a simple math, where you can live in a comfy, protected nook with tasteful decorations, and your kid’s future is predicated on shiny stars stuck to the top of their spelling tests.

I lived in another version of America, where a farmer’s-daughter-become-dietician left an island in the Pacific to cross the ocean alone and had an affair with a Catholic priest in Chicago. I am the second of three boys from that unholy union . . . so I became a poet, having endured twelve years under the stiff yardsticks wielded by the Sisters of Mercy and Brothers of the Sacred Heart.

In Dogeaters, I recognized the artfulness of an exuberant truant. I was awed by Jessica’s voracious curiosity, her capacious social world, for I, too, during any given week, might have danced drunk with janitors, divas, and hit men; I might’ve chatted with beauty queens and bishops. In the gesture of my ancestors, I had touched my forehead to the hands of military men and monsignors. I had found my chapels in dive bars, record crates, basements, and five-on-five pickup runs.

My first literature was shit-talking. My best religion was the dance floor. It was as if I had been born into more than one world and thrust among a roster of wondrous and terrifying faces, all their frustrations and desires, their manipulations, their venom, and their brilliance.

I needed an art that reflected that unruliness—for those teeming real-life figures gave me the idea that the broken universe I was born into might actually be a gorgeous orchestra of horny oddballs, visionary stickup kids, and inventive exiles.

To read Dogeaters, you’ve got to have a taste for danger. You got to love listening to someone who has kissed the devil on the cheek and lived to tell the tale. I myself have not danced with the devil exactly, but I’ve DJ’d for many who have.

And I’ll tell you, I especially love those exiles who have the gift for story and the gift for song. To listen to them is a sweet misery. And you can smell the funky sulfur on them for the rest of their lives.

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