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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
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breaking the spell of repetition of the family shame and misfortune
in a new socio-political setting, and with the aid of modern
technology.
IV. Betrayal, Becoming, and Story-Telling
Anna’s life story takes place mostly during the emergent reign
of Marcos’ military dictatorship, which sought to gain total control
of the country by imposing martial law and monopolizing lucrative
private industries. The novel underscores the terrorist reign of the
Marcos regime by creating allegorical figures, such as Colonel
Urbano Amor, the head of the secret police and the symbolic figure
of the state oppression and control over the people in neocolonial
Philippines, and the Commander
—
the distant, fictional version of
President Marcos, who controls the country and the military. The
oppressive social and political condition forces the people to go
underground in their resistance, resorting to guerrilla warfare and
peasant revolts. People who fight the government either take on
double identities or act in disguise. Since disguise and elusiveness
are important strategies in the popular war against totalitarian
government, the opposition between government and resistance
forces is elusive and hard to pinpoint, for the dictatorship faces an
enemy who appears to be ordinary people. Thus, Anna describes
the war as an “illusory war that was everywhere and yet was
nowhere” (Rosca, 1988: 20). The invisibility of the enemy
constitutes the crisis of the environment to which the military
government responds by resorting to measures of surveillance,
arrest, torture, and terror. In other words, the history of
dictatorship is propelled by government fear of an elusive and
invisible enemy.
Viet Thanh Nguyen has rightly pointed out that the
struggles between the government and the people signify “the
contestation over the manipulation of appearances and meaning
that contribute to the rule of society” (2002: 130). One of the