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Affect and History in Ninotchka Rosca’s
State of War
33
times a specific sense of intensity to which Anna’s unborn
child
—
Ismael Villaverde Banyaga
—
must respond in his becoming-
storyteller.
13
One can imagine that history as is recorded in such
sensory manners can capture the affective apprehension of the
historical present that might break the inert abstraction of official
history. In her final effort to teach the children and pass down the
memories of the ordinary people’s life and resistance, and with her
prospect of welcoming the arrival of an heir who “would be the
first of the Capuchin monk’s descendants to be born innocent,
without fate” (
Rosca, 1988:
382), Anna manages to occupy, if
temporarily, the position of a long-lost Babaylan priestess by being
mother, history teacher, healer and the healed, all at the same time.
V. Conclusion
State of War
tells the tumultuous history of the Philippines
from Spanish colonialization to the Marcos military dictatorship by
delineating the intersection of pubic history with private, everyday
life. While the historical narrative is structured on a national scale,
the ways in which the institutional powers impact individuals are
revealed as part of everyday life experiences. As such, colonial
violence, military oppression, and epochal changes in the nation
are considered crises in the environment, to which individuals must
respond affectively in order to survive. Instead of taking these
changes as devastating, traumatic events needing to be worked
through and redeemed, I read them as episodes in which the
present of history opens up to reveal the affective relations among
different agents of history. My arguments therefore underscore
affects which have been produced and mobilized in encounters
between those who are positioned in unequal power relationships:
13
Anna names her unborn child “Ismael” after Ismael Guevarra. But the name
Ismael also resonates with the narrator of
Moby Dick
, Ismael, a storyteller
and a social outcast.