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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
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environment
—
“a morning shrouded by antiquity” (Rosca, 1988:
154). The Malayan girl emerging from a river is portrayed as “an
image of a brown Venus rising from the waves.” Yet in the
subsequent action, during which the monk forces himself upon the
girl, the latter, though surprised and appalled by the attack, reveals
that she knows such violence is commonly practiced by the friars:
She “knew enough not to resist the priest, having grown up
surrounded by the gossip of elders and taken to heart the
admonition that the tenderest of thighs, whether of chicken or of
women, belonged to the friars” (155). The native women have
grown so accustomed to sexual violation as mode of encounter
with the monks that rape is already a coded action
—
an all too
common enforced intimacy that calls for a set of “proper”
reactions. But while the girl is disciplined enough to surrender
herself to the “unholy entrance,” she is already thinking about the
payback of her “sacrifice”: “She . . . bit her lower lip, and thought
of how much all this silliness should cost the stupid priest” (155).
In this particular case of “emotional education”, the brown
goddess of innocence is transformed into a subject of cold, calm,
rational calculation.
This early form of counter-conduct in which one moves in
the field of power yet repositions one’s relation to it is to be
echoed fifteen years later by another woman, whom the friar takes
as his mistress. Like her predecessor, the cook’s wife Maya
accepted her fate without a fight when she encountered the friar in
the monastery’s kitchen one morning. From the endearing tone of
her memory for the friar in her recollections, one can surmise that
their first intimate encounter might have been predicated upon
mutual consent. Maya was thus both inside and outside the
disciplinary admonition of the local community; not only did she
conform to the custom of submitting herself, she actually enjoyed
the submission. She became the friar’s mistress, protected by the
priest’s power “and yet outcast by her status as a priest’s whore”
(Rosca, 1988: 156). Maya’s response to this in-between position