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Admitting shame as part of the foundational making of the colonial
society, Rosca manages to mobilize it as a means of subject-shaping
and community-building.
III. History, Repetition, and Affect
State of War
’s exploration of affect and colonial history also
points to the repetitive haunting of such negative feelings as shame,
betrayal, fear and the sensation of impending crisis induced by
historical change. The repetition of similar affects across
generations serves to indicate or symbolize the difficulty of
breaking the repetitive cycle of colonial rules. As a double of Maya,
Mayang is doomed to reenact Maya’s sexual conduct by falling
madly in love with the German chemist Hans Zangroniz, who was
invited by her husband, Carlos Lucas Villaverde, to work in their
brewery. The outcome of that affair is Luis Carlos, the favorite
child of Mayang, and Carlos Lucas’s only heir. Paralleling the
country’s colonial history, which repeats itself time and again, the
intimate history of the family is caught in a similar loop
—
a cycle of
shame that produces still more shame in the act of redemption.
Fathered by the Capuchin monk, Carlos Lucas is anguished by the
Otherness that is at the core of his being. His shame in his birth is
revealed most tellingly after a visit by two Capuchin monks
inquiring into the possibility of holding shares in his brewery.
Carlos Lucas responds with great agitation: “‘They will not buy
into
my
business. They will not come near me again.’ The
again
slipped out before he could be aware of it. Enraged by his own
indiscretion, he knocked down her St. Anthony statue” (Rosca,
1988:
170). A Freudian slip, the
again
reveals Carlos Lucas’s
suppressed anguish over his birth, when the Capuchin monk was
“near” him for the first time. He seeks to purge the shame of his
birth by inviting Hans to be his business partner, hoping that with
Han’s doctorate from famous university in Europe, he is able to
exorcize the ghost of the Capuchin friar in his blood and his family,