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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
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indigenous tradition “is a person who is gifted to heal the spirit
and the body; the one who serves the community through her role
as a folk therapist, wisdom-keeper and philosopher; the one who
provides stability to the community’s social structure; the one who
can access the spirit realms and other states of consciousness and
traffic easily in and out of these worlds; the one who has vast
knowledge of healing therapies” (as cited in Strobel, 2010: 1). For
critics Leny Mendoza Strobel and others, excavating and invoking
the precolonial indigenous matriarchal cultural tradition serves to
offer an alternative consciousness to that shaped by the colonizers.
Specifically, Strobel highlights a kind of indigenous consciousness
rooted in the body. Strobel believes that the body is the site where
the trauma of colonization registers, but it is also the place that the
residual memories of precolonial cultural practices are stored
(
Strobel, 2010: 5-6)
. Katrin De Guia, on the other hand, teases
out a “personhood” theory from Babaylan myths that opens up the
possibility to see the body not just as the vessel that contains
residual cultural memories, but a passage whose function is fulfilled
only through its connection with the other bodies. As De Guia
observes: “the shared self of
Kapwa
nurtures
Pakataog Filipino.
Beating at its core, shared humanness regulates the life-blood of the
Pinoy.
Kapwa
, the central value of personhood, builds a bridge
between the innermost core of one person to anyone
outside
—
including total stranger” (2010: 90).
However, when the community of precolonial indigenous
matriarchs no longer exists, the practice of interpersonal
connection is disrupted. On one level, the connections among
native women are disrupted by colonialism; on another level, the
“persons” in the interpersonal alliance are contaminated by their
encounters with colonial force relations. For the interpersonal
connections to be reestablished requires chance encounters in
which women alienated from their original matriarchal culture can
be shaped and made to reemerge through the
act
of encountering
each other. That is to say, there is no preexisting “native women”