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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
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as if the shame in the origin of his being had to be purged by the
aid of some higher civilization. But the method of purgation results
in the creation of another ghost in the family, rendering the
bloodline of the family even more complicated and untraceable.
Significantly, the intimate family history is contextualized by the
transition of power from Spanish colonialization to American
imperial conquest of the Philippines, turning the predicament of
personal history into a metaphor for the collective history of the
nation.
The family history surrounding the generational shifts from
Maya to Mayang-Carlos Lucas, and from Mayang-Carlos Lucas to
Luis Carlos, foregrounds the broader history of the Philippine
Revolution against Spain (1896-1898), the Philippine-American
War (1899-1902), and Japanese occupation during World War II
(1941-1945). Rosca weaves the complex and precipitous histories
of multiple colonialisms with repeated intrusions of war, uprising,
violence, and revolution, creating a sensation of unending
repetition to the extent that the historical present starts to take on
a spatial dimension, forming the ambiance of the characters’ living
space. That is to say, historical violence often confronts the
characters on the level of affect before it is made available to them
as historical events. Instead of giving a full scale account of the
tumultuous history of the Philippine’s attempt to shed the shackles
of colonization and establish an independent republic, Rosca
concentrates on how the chaos of the period is experienced by the
Villaverde family, not as historical events, but as a crisis within the
ordinary
—
not war, but the
state
of war. The characters are
constantly confronted with the intensity of the historical present
and are pressed to respond to it affectively. These moments of
affective reaction to the impending historical changes are translated
into magical realism accounts of the bizarre sensation for the
looming of a major historical event, or of some dumbfounding
change. On the eve of the Philippine-American War (1899-1902),
Maya’s son Carlos Lucas “was struck by the tremendous quality of