4 / 152
4
E
UR
A
MERICA
political turmoil of the Philippine’s precipitous emergence into
modern nationhood.
2
In
State of War
, her debut novel, the
compression of multifarious colonial history is marked through the
delineation of the scattered family sagas surrounding the three
major characters whose stories are connected, not by a conscious
tracing of family genealogy, but by a shared experience of violence
brought about by the historical conditions of colonialism and state
oppression. It is my contention that in reconstructing the colonial
history of the nation with detailed accounts of these characters’
intimate journeys through different periods of colonization, Rosca
is going against the grain of postcolonial historiographical practices
commonly adopted by postcolonial writers. As Marxist historian
Harry Harootunian observes, “when history in [postcolonial
societies in Asia] was written to bridge the great ‘epistemic
violence’ caused by capitalism and colonialism, it was invariably
bonded to the nation form . . . or the idea of the nation yet to
come after the demise of colonialism, thus replicating established
historiographical practice in EuroAmerica” (2004: 182). In such a
historiographical practice, nation and narration converge to unify
different local places, homogenize diverse cultural traditions, and
attain a fixed identity rooted in the imagined community of the
nation. As a result, postcolonial historical writing largely
established a monumental past of the nation that erased the lived
reality of the everyday of the masses. Historiography as such is
concerned with the past of the nation as a complete entity, which
leads to structural representation of known events and the
production of a systematic knowledge of the past. To break the
universalistic claim of historical narrative, Harootunian proposes
to attend to
the present
of history by taking everyday life as the
method to reconfigure historiography. The present of history
2
Rosca’s article “Myth, Identity and the Colonial Experience,” emphasizes the
synchronicity of history, “where the aural and visual emanations of the past,
the present, and the future are said to be trapped within the confines of a
finite universe” (1990: 241).