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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
25
listening to the radio given her by her uncle, which broadcasts in
Spanish in the morning, English in the afternoon. Through her
nanny, she learns Tagalog and is well-versed in three languages.
Deprived of parental care and family life, she learns about the
identities of her ancestors from the paintings, miniatures, and
photos stockpiled in the garage. Anna’s sense of history, private or
public, is detached and uninvolved. She is insulated from
experiencing history first-hand, and protected from affective
response to historical change. Histories are voices from the radio
or images from the past. However, voices and images, instead of
the proximity of flesh and blood, are the technologies of memories
that induce her language and feelings about national history.
11
Her
first words are an astounding observation about the history of the
nation: “It was morning when the Spanish long boats sailed from
Cebu to Mactan. . . . Everything in this country happens in the
morning. . . . Because it is a country of beginning” (Rosca, 1988:
328). The observation of the nation always stuck at the beginning
is as prophetic as it is sentimental. As if she were born to lament
the trauma of the nation, Anna’s private self is immersed in the
temporality of the collective. In Anna, one witnesses the
imbrications between the public and the private, the imminent and
the transcendent in a reversed manner. Unlike her ancestors, whose
private lives and intimate feelings are usurped and reproduced by
the interruption of the transcendent power of the Spanish
colonizers, Anna’s private life is nothing without her care for the
historical and the public, made possible through image production
and modern technologies such as radio. One can argue that these
technological aids function to supplement to her deprived body, a
prosthetic body that is part of the animating force of Anna’s
becoming Filipina.
11
“Technologies of memory,” a term coined by Marita Sturken, refers to
those cultural forms from which memories are evoked and preserved: public
arts, documentaries, photographs, memorials, bodies, alternative media, etc.
(Sturken, 1997: 10).