Decolonizing bodies, reinscribing souls in the fiction of Ninotchka Rosca and Linda Ty-Casper.

While many Filipino American women writers are immigrants who have lived much of their lives in the US, their work tends to center on a Philippine setting. This might be easily dismissed as a nostalgic attempt to return to a lost ancestral Eden, but their focus reflects a more complex project of negotiation between past and present, between physical and psychic relocation. These writers reconstruct their country of origin as a means of reaching back through the barriers and dislocations caused by colonial history and migration, and thus aim at a recovery of the Filipina (1) and the Filipino American woman as colonial and neocolonial subject. The writers examined in this essay explore issues of postcoloniality in a variety of its manifestations; one of the central figures in these writers' project of reformulation is the postcolonial body. Filipino American literary critic Oscar Campomanes states that by its very nature, Filipino American culture is "marked by chronic and multiple displacements," as its texts "were and continue to be created under material, historical and political conditions that are better described by the (post)colonial analogy of world literature rather than the 'immigrant analogy' of US multiculturalism" (Gonzalez and Campomanes 74). While the term "postcolonial body" is often posited as monolithic and essentialist, these Filipino American women's fiction examines its layers of complexity, syncretically appropriating colonial structures, texts, and narratives.

Filipino American fiction traces the strains of hybridity in the Philippines, which critic Lisa Lowe, in her analysis of Asian American cultural politics, defines as produced by "the histories of uneven and unsynthetic power relations," and marked by the survival of these inequalities (82). Thus, these writers record and enact their emergence from colonial domination, their reinscription of the female self figured as a fighter who actively resists domination. This resistance may not be as spectacular as that of Assia Djebar's women of Algiers leaping down ramparts into battle, or pulling out grenades "as if they were taking out their own breasts" (150), but it is part of a similar project, not only in recording the colonial violence against women but also in countering it by creating an authentic subjectivity through the female body. In figuring their resistance to Spanish and American colonialism, and to their descendant and surrogate, the neocolonial "US-Marcos dictatorship," these women define themselves through layers of dislocation and negotiate these uneven power relations in a number of forms, as Filipinas who have lived under the effects of multiple colonizers--as women dealing with patriarchy, and as minority women living in the US--to form a rhetoric of self-determination that enables them to take their place in the world to which they have relocated.

This recreation of identity is particularly evident in the writing of a number of Filipino American women who have been producing significant fiction since the 1980s: Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Jessica Hagedorn, Marianne Villanueva, Ninotchka Rosca, and Linda Ty-Casper. All of these writers are part of a development described by Rachel C. Lee as "an evolving tradition of literary works that detail Asian/Pacific feminine postcoloniality" (74). This paper will focus on the postcolonial body as a "crucial site for inscription" in the attempt at representation and control in the postcolonial experience, (Ashcroft et. al., Key Concepts 183) and in particular examine it as a site for resistance of domination. The process of this resistance involves the interrogation of social and cultural codes of control of the body. This essay will analyze two novels, Ninotchka Rosca's State of War (1988) and Linda Ty-Casper's Awaiting Trespass (1985), as particularly illuminating in their representations of bodies and souls, which, in their engagement with these codes, make their way through their complexities to arrive at a decolonizing of the postcolonial body (deconstructing the term in the process) and lead to the creation of a spirituality that is predicated on their ethnic identity.

The many effects of colonization and imperialism in the Philippines have been widely documented. (2) In the specific context of literature, it is the "historical engagement with the legacy of colonialism, that charges the Filipino (American) literary tradition with its constitutive tensions" (Gonzalez and Campomanes 62). These tensions are summarized and encapsulated in the issue of the postcolonial body. Filipinos are sometimes seen as an anomaly, a physical and cultural hybrid that is not truly Asian, while they themselves can take pride in being more Western than other Asians, with Eurasian "mestizos" not despised as half-breeds as they are in other Asian societies but admired for bearing in their bodies the imprint of the "superior" race. Filipino American literary theorist E. San Juan, Jr. argues that even those who are not genetically "mestizo" are still physically and culturally hybridized: "long before the Filipino as immigrant, tourist or visitor sets foot on the US continent, she--her body and sensibility--has been prepared by the thoroughly Americanized culture of the homeland" (118).

The process of cultural syncretism involved in Filipino and Filipino American identity formation is evident in popular culture as well as in religion, which will be discussed morn fully later in this essay. Westerners themselves can find Filipino appropriation of their culture bizarre, "as if they were some kind of lost American tribe that had somehow become detached from the US mainland and floated across the Pacific" (Karnow xi). However, in Rachel Lee's analysis, Filipino identification with icons of US popular culture alters the meaning of these "iconic acts," blurring the boundaries showing where the American "cultural markers" end and where the Filipino ones begin (75). The colonizers' unease with Filipino interpellation may reflect a fear of the subversion and implied resistance of cultural control, a discomfort with the use of these icons in an unfamiliar, "foreign," way that decenters their Western character and instead asserts the centrality of the subaltern experience. Leonard Casper, who has been writing on Filipino authors since the 1960s, points out that while there has been much discussion of Hispanization and Americanization of Philippine culture, there has been little attention paid to "the counter Filipinization of these influences" ("Four Filipina Writers" 143). The project of the contemporary Filipino American novel can be seen in this light as the Filipinization of the American experience through the insertion of the story of the colonial subjects into American history; thus it presents a fascinating picture of the complex manifestations of a national, postcolonial, multiracial identity, seemingly shattered and yet somehow finding a new locus of power.

Current Filipino American fiction is strongly informed by the Western critical debates on the history of colonial powers and on multiculturalism and ethnicity. However, the cultural and psychic impact of colonialism has long been a focus of Filipino fiction; the novels of Jose Rizal, written ...