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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
3
One of the important distinctions between Filipino American
literary expression and the literary expression of ethnic groups
descended from other Asian countries of origin lies in the former’s
colonial and neocolonial relationships with the U.S.. In light of the
historical experiences of colonization, Filipino (American) writers’
searches for self-identity are ineluctably intertwined with the
problems of Filipino nation-building. Oscar Campomanes claims
that out of the double yoking of Filipino American experiences of
displacement and Philippine-American (neo)colonial relations
arises “a literary tradition of Filipino exilic writing and an exilic
sensibility” (1992: 51), which, instead of taking “the United States
as the locus of claims or ‘the promised land’,” projects a reverse
telos
and an opposite movement back to the ancestral land. This
obsessive return to the homeland postulates not a nostalgic
repossession of national origins, but a painstaking engagement with
the complex negotiation between past and present, the search for
identity and the obstruction of layers of colonial history that
rendered the search impossible.
1
I. History, Affect, Everyday Life
Categorized as a writer of literature of exile by Campomanes,
the US-based Filipino writer Ninotchka Rosca pays persistent
attention to excavating and reinventing the troubled history of her
homeland, tracing back to primal scenes of colonial violence,
juxtaposing the beginning of the colonial nation with the social and
1
See also Dolores de Manuel’s and Rocio Davis’s comments on Rosca’s return
to the ancestral homeland. De Manuel observes that “a provocative feature
of Rosca’s work is its ‘ancestral focus,’ which takes the form of a
literary-historical ‘return’ to an imagined homeland” (2004: 104). Rocio
Davis calls the return a “literary repossession of the homeland and its
history” and that it is “a manner of subverting the conditions of inherited
culture, a symbolic attempt to reverse the working of times and migration”
(1999: 64).