Storying Flood
by Erika Carreon
Abstract
"Storying Flood" is an excerpt from my ecocritical and ecofiction project called Tropical Futurism. Tropical Futurism began as a simple question: how do we write ourselves into an ever-more-precarious future? This expanded into a material ecocritical reading of select contemporary ecofiction from the Philippines and so-called Australia, with a particular interest in examining how ecofiction from and about the tropics reveal the complex and contentious relationships that generate panahon—here meaning Filipino time, tropic time, as deconstructed by Christian Jil Benitez— manifesting as conflicted storytellers.
This ecocritical framework in turn feeds into the other aspect of Tropical Futurism highlighted in this essay: as a mode of thinking about future fiction in my own creative writing. “Storying Flood” traces the impetus for Tropical Futurism within my own experiences as a middle-class Filipino writing primarily in English, attempting to surface the entanglements between myself as tropical subject and as academic—a conflicted storyteller, myself.
I follow "Storying Flood" with the creative work “women and their beasts”. While conceived prior to Tropical Futurism, I have realized how braided those same anxieties in the thesis were to the rest of my writing.
Keywords: ecocriticism, fictocriticism, tropics, temporality, hybrid
Storying Flood
When I think of an image, a possible seed, that lay at the center of my search for Tropical Futurism, I think of the photographs my father had taken just outside the gate of our house. Opaque gray-brown water rose to thigh height, disturbed by the cars still attempting to traverse Alabang-Zapote road. People waded through the murky flood, because of course they were, because they had no choice. A man pushed a cart past our gate—I can’t remember now if he had been a garbage man or had been selling some items before the waters came. My father had been keeping watch by the gate with his camera, now and then warning passers-by that the pavement leading to our gate sloped downward and had a step on either side, obscured by the dirty water. We worried for our mother, who had gone to my university that Saturday, if memory serves.
There was another image I had always associated with this day, taken just a couple of streets from our house. Two men wearing orange, presumably street sweepers employed by the city, seemingly relaxing on a floating airbed while a few people holding umbrellas waited for another vehicle to help them get out of the flooded street. The image was so ridiculous, but not altogether unusual, and such images were common media fodder.
This particular calamity was caused by Typhoon Ondoy—Ketsana internationally—which hit the Philippines in September 2009. Ondoy forced the national government to put the National Capital Region under a state of calamity and dumped an unprecedented 455 millimeters of rainfall within twenty-four hours1, a record that would, unfortunately, continue to be broken in the coming years. Not long after that, Typhoon Peping would hit us, too. And in 2013, there was, of course, Yolanda, the supertyphoon so destructive that its local and international names were retired from the naming lists2. What was "unprecedented" would occur over and over again.
Though this was one of the more memorable floodings I had experienced growing up, this wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last. I can’t remember the exact moment in my young life that I had begun to fear and dread rain. At the time these pictures were taken, my family lived in Las Piñas City, Metro Manila, the political bulwark of the Aguilar and Villar families. My first memories of Las Piñas were of its "Clean and Green" slogans, supposedly highlighting our commitment to the environment. An interesting position to take, given the current reputation of the Villars as corrupt landgrabbers with no empathy for those most affected by this crisis3. The complications arising from local and national politics would have been lost on my younger self; all I knew was that somehow, every year, the monsoon season seemed to get worse, and what I could see of my city was neither clean nor green. At least once a year the murky water would rise up and enter the ground floor of our family home, and at some point, the monsoon seasons bled into each other.
I remember worrying about rain. The moment a light shower increased even slightly in intensity feels like a countdown. No matter where I might be at that moment, I would begin to worry about the trek home, if I would make it in time before my way back is closed off by hours-long traffic, or if the power had gone out, or if I was too late to help save our things from the muck. We were lucky to have a house with two floors and a foundation built higher than street level. Many of our neighbors did not.
The Philippines is an archipelagic nation, and our old home in Las Piñas was situated near bodies of water: Zapoté River and Bacoór Bay, the latter a part of Manila Bay. Both bodies of water were witnesses to significant moments in the nation’s colonial past. Manila Bay opens up into the West Philippine Sea, site of territorial disputes between my country and China. We are surrounded by waters that hold ecological, historical and geopolitical import, but viscerally I associate these waters with devastation, the Flood and my hometown always at the back of my mind every time I hear talk of rising seawaters and of smaller, water-locked nations being the most heavily impacted—already heavily impacted, in fact, by the climate crisis. The image of Ondoy submerging Las Piñas is what had led me to thinking about Tropical Futurism and ecocritical thinking years before I had actually started it in earnest, as I keep wondering what survival might look like for small, seemingly unremarkable places like my former city. And even as I take note of this this, I am keenly aware that many parts of the country have borne the brunt of the devastation brought by so-called ‘natural’ disasters. This is where I begin: me and the Flood, and my privilege of surviving it, though perhaps not totally unscathed.
Tropical Futurism emerged from these anxieties, beginning with a skeptical look upon the future, and an equally skeptical look on the stories we have crafted about it, not least of all those I have spun, myself. To whom does the future belong, and in dreaming of the survival of the planet, who are excluded from the utopias, havens, arcologies, communes that we craft? Or, perhaps, have our futures been written for us? As an anchor for the kind of ecofiction that I have been writing—or seeking to write—I use the term “Tropical Futurism” to problematize both “tropics” as a loaded term, an exoticized zone often defined in opposition to the temperate, and “futurism”, given how visions of the future are often dominated by cities and nations shown to be technologically superior.
To quote Mixkaela Villalon, “Wala raw science fiction sa Pilipinas”/ “Evidently, there is no science fiction in the Philippines” (ix), a remark she had heard her creative writing professor state. According to Villalon, her professor further explained that only countries in the West have the privilege of producing this kind of fiction because of their strong foundation in science and education, a privilege that allows them innovations to literally and figuratively reach the moon and stars, “[h]abang tayo rito sa Pilipinas, tali pa rin ang mga paa at sikmura sa lupa”/ “while we who live in the Philippines are still firmly tied to the ground by our hunger”4 (ix).
Like Villalon, this is a sentiment I as a genre writer from the Philippines have often encountered from others in the literature community, and, like Villalon, I’ve had to slowly untangle the problematic notions bound up in those assumptions, as if the poverty of material conditions led to a poverty of imagination as well. Kristine Ong Muslim, another author whose work as both fictionist and editor involve the messy intersections between environmental disaster and the legacy of imperialism, expresses a similar sentiment regarding the fraught relationship that Philippine letters has with any kind of writing outside of realism. Expressing her frustration at how the gatekeepers of Philippine literature prioritized what she calls the “rigid, inflexible lens” of the realist mode, Muslim criticizes the short-lived establishment of a new category in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards called “future fiction” instead of “science fiction”, calling it a sign of the establishment’s “disdain” for genre writing (x).
Lito Zulueta, in his tribute to the late National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera, had an interesting anecdote with regard to the Future Fiction category. Beginning his tribute with how he had once gotten Lumbera in trouble for asking about “the future of Philippine literature”, Zulueta declared that the 2000s were “the frantic era for “futurists””, making reference to the Y2K bug and the “averted” apocalypse, the Italian Futurism art movement that sought “to capture… the dynamism and energy of the modern world”.
It is curious then to see his jump from futurism as manifestation of modernity to an actual conflict about what constitutes a valid vision of the future. Zulueta recounts how he, as a judge in the Future Fiction category, was caught between his fellow panelists, who were arguing about the scope of the category. Apparently, Isagani R. Cruz maintained that "for entries to be considered for a prize, they should be “futuristic” not only in content but also in form", while Soledad Reyes insisted that this definition was too "delimiting". Circling back to his interview with Bienvenido Lumbera, Zulueta went on to expound on the latter’s views on Philippine writing in English, specifically the limits imposed upon its flourishing by the inherent elitism in the language, and Lumbera’s championing of regional literature.
It seems to me that the future brings up so much contention in writing, and I find it telling, too, that the Future Fiction category didn’t stay long, as if we couldn’t find our way into the future, or that our visions of the future are still, somehow, limited by a linear understanding of what that future might be. Anchored by the stomach, to borrow from Villalon once more. Definitely, the conditions under which we write have a palpable effect on the visions we conjure, tied to the very languages we use to articulate them.
But I return here to Villalon’s anecdote about the professor who made the declaration that SF did not exist in the Philippines. She continued with her disagreeing in class about the genre of “And We Sold the Rain” by Carmen Naranjo. While her professor asserted this was “magic realism”, Villalon declares, “Science fiction ito”/ “This is science fiction” (x). In this simple declaration, Villalon underscores that there need not be one singular way to perceive the future, not one singular way to render our reality, and not one definition of what is possible. It isn’t so much the disavowal of the term “magic realism” so much as a disavowal of what divided the two genres in the first place, a disavowal of the regimes of knowledge imposed upon us and divorced us from other ways of knowing.
I have always been interested in genres that do not fall under literary realism, where I can, broadly, do two things: one, to explore how time can be bent, in terms of narrative structure and as premise for a speculative story; and two, to bend the fabric of reality in different ways, whether it was to see the mythic in the everyday or to make palpable the unease that hides under the veneer of domesticity, the not-quite-rightness of everyday life, the Weird contaminating the quotidian. And I realize that this is how I try to make sense of the world, or my place in it: through Story.
All the strangeness of living in a tropical country with a complicated colonial history, caught in various kinds of violences, and the many different meanings of everyday “survival” in such conditions—they had always manifested in varying degrees in my writing. It is through the lens of fiction that I try to confront both the possibilities for a better world and the limitations of such a vision, especially when filtered through a middle-class education that taught me to prioritize English as a medium of communication and artistic expression.
It is these fraught relationships that play out in writing—with science fiction, the future, and how we shape and define it—that I keep in mind when I write towards the idea of a Tropical Futurism. By invoking plural temporalities through panahon, here meaning a Filipino temporality as borrowed from Christian Benitez, and in being aware of my position as academic and writer, I hope to rethink how we story our survival in ways that can’t be neatly slotted into dystopian visions of tropical apocalypse or technocratic paradise, writing a kind of Future Fiction that rethinks the very idea of future as the end of a temporal line predetermined for us.
Christian Jil Benitez in Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (“A Deepening of [Filipino] Time”) seeks to gesture away from the idea of equating or translating panahon as simply “time”, but as a word anchored firmly in the ecology and materiality of the Philippines (Isang Dalumat 6). Through his deepening of the meaning of panahon via close reading of texts such as the various attempts to define it in dictionaries and in literary works, Benitez reclaims the notion of Filipino time from its often negative associations with the “lateness” or “backwardness” seemingly inherent in our people, bringing it back to panahon and its entanglements: tied to agriculture, land ownership, and the seasonal/temporal aspect of labor5; related to a sense of opportunity—pagkakataon—as a deliberately and carefully cultivated awareness of potentiality dependent on specific environmental and economic circumstances (Isang Dalumat 32-33); a way of life, as when periods between different kinds of agricultural labor are marked by communal activity6 (“Tungo Sa Isang Dalumat” 60).
Cautioning against caging panahon within abstract terms that remove it from its specific local context, Benitez nevertheless sees in this danger to abstraction an opportunity “para sa pagbaling tungo sa isang tangkang wikang higit na makapagsasalalay sa ekolohiko (sa halip na tanging ekonomiko) sa dalumat ng panahon” / “to turn instead towards attempts at finding a language that relies more on the ecological (rather than solely economic) in the theorizing of panahon” (“Tungo Sa Isang Dalumat”64).
Through this grounding of panahon as ever-shifting, whose very thing-ness depends on these various entanglements, Benitez points to its ontological slipperiness as an affirmation that it isn’t simply temporality as container for events and things that happen causally, but as the thing-in-itself. Where the existence of the material, living and nonliving, dependent on the aforementioned potentiality, are panahon, themselves, figures always becoming something (Isang Dalumat 46-47).
Panahon figures greatly in my work, as an attempt to find a way out of that linear timeline within which places like the Philippines only have one catastrophic destiny. Unsettling this linearity requires, in a way, a supernatural effort that genre-bending fiction has the potential to hold. Invoking panahon, then, in this slippery, living sense is also a gesture towards the mythic.
In his discussion of the desacralization of calamity, Alvin Yapan traces through the shift in Philippine literature from oral to written word the pivot from “sakuna” as “pagkabalisang emosiyonal”/ “emotional distress” to “disaster”, the “pagkasira ng mga prosesong panlipunan”/breakdown of social structures” (119). This shift in attitudes towards calamity, Yapan argues, demonstrated how Modernity had forced us to construct disaster as the opposite of nature, rather than a sacred or supernatural phenomenon whose unpredictability led to an acceptance of, and anticipation for, a radical shift in the order of things.
“Naitayo ang lipunan sa pagpapailalim ng kalikasan. Kung gayon, labis na nakatuon ang pangangasiwa ng disaster sa pagkontrol ng kalikasan” / “Society was built on the subjugation of nature. Therefore, the management of disasters largely depends on control over nature” (119). He therefore proposes that to appropriately deal with calamity now is to reframe our efforts away from attempts to control nature and towards an understanding of its unpredictability. This involves undoing the divide between nature and culture, and resurfacing the sublime phenomenon of calamity found in oral literature that makes space for the possibility of change and a new order.
In a way, Tropical Futurism attempts to negotiate between this attitude of sacredness and profanity, acknowledging the tensions between them, through the various entangled temporalities that intersect through panahon. As I write this in another country, in another climate, safe, for now, from wading through the excesses of monsoon rains but experiencing other kinds of precarity as a migrant person-of-color, this is also my attempt at making peace with the Flood.
Works Cited
Benitez, Christian Jil R.. Isang Dalumat Ng Panahon. Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2022.
---. “Tungo sa Isang Dalumat ng Panahon: Ilang Panimulang Tala”. Látag: Essays on Philippine Literature, Culture, and the Environment, edited by Timothy Ong and Isabela Lacuna, UP Institute of Creative Writing, 2019, pp. 45-67.
Muslim, Kristine Ong. Foreword. Laut: Stories, by Sigrid Marianne Gayangos, UP Press, 2022, pp ix-xiii.
Villalon, Mixkaela. Interregnum: Maiikling Kwento. Gantala Press, Inc., 2021.
Yapan, Alvin B. “Desakralisasyon Ng ‘Sakuna’ Bilang Disaster Sa Karanasang Filipino.” Katipunan, vol. 4, 19 May 2019, pp. 89–129, https://doi.org/https://dx.doi.org/10.13185/KA2019.00406.
Zulueta, Lito B. “The Trouble with Bien.” Lifestyle Inquirer, 4 Oct. 2021, https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/389253/the-trouble-with-bien/. Accessed Oct. 2022.
"Storying Flood" is an excerpt from my ecocritical and ecofiction project called Tropical Futurism. Tropical Futurism began as a simple question: how do we write ourselves into an ever-more-precarious future? This expanded into a material ecocritical reading of select contemporary ecofiction from the Philippines and so-called Australia, with a particular interest in examining how ecofiction from and about the tropics reveal the complex and contentious relationships that generate panahon—here meaning Filipino time, tropic time, as deconstructed by Christian Jil Benitez— manifesting as conflicted storytellers.
This ecocritical framework in turn feeds into the other aspect of Tropical Futurism highlighted in this essay: as a mode of thinking about future fiction in my own creative writing. “Storying Flood” traces the impetus for Tropical Futurism within my own experiences as a middle-class Filipino writing primarily in English, attempting to surface the entanglements between myself as tropical subject and as academic—a conflicted storyteller, myself.
I follow "Storying Flood" with the creative work “women and their beasts”. While conceived prior to Tropical Futurism, I have realized how braided those same anxieties in the thesis were to the rest of my writing.
Keywords: ecocriticism, fictocriticism, tropics, temporality, hybrid
Storying Flood
When I think of an image, a possible seed, that lay at the center of my search for Tropical Futurism, I think of the photographs my father had taken just outside the gate of our house. Opaque gray-brown water rose to thigh height, disturbed by the cars still attempting to traverse Alabang-Zapote road. People waded through the murky flood, because of course they were, because they had no choice. A man pushed a cart past our gate—I can’t remember now if he had been a garbage man or had been selling some items before the waters came. My father had been keeping watch by the gate with his camera, now and then warning passers-by that the pavement leading to our gate sloped downward and had a step on either side, obscured by the dirty water. We worried for our mother, who had gone to my university that Saturday, if memory serves.
There was another image I had always associated with this day, taken just a couple of streets from our house. Two men wearing orange, presumably street sweepers employed by the city, seemingly relaxing on a floating airbed while a few people holding umbrellas waited for another vehicle to help them get out of the flooded street. The image was so ridiculous, but not altogether unusual, and such images were common media fodder.
This particular calamity was caused by Typhoon Ondoy—Ketsana internationally—which hit the Philippines in September 2009. Ondoy forced the national government to put the National Capital Region under a state of calamity and dumped an unprecedented 455 millimeters of rainfall within twenty-four hours1, a record that would, unfortunately, continue to be broken in the coming years. Not long after that, Typhoon Peping would hit us, too. And in 2013, there was, of course, Yolanda, the supertyphoon so destructive that its local and international names were retired from the naming lists2. What was "unprecedented" would occur over and over again.
Though this was one of the more memorable floodings I had experienced growing up, this wasn’t the first, nor would it be the last. I can’t remember the exact moment in my young life that I had begun to fear and dread rain. At the time these pictures were taken, my family lived in Las Piñas City, Metro Manila, the political bulwark of the Aguilar and Villar families. My first memories of Las Piñas were of its "Clean and Green" slogans, supposedly highlighting our commitment to the environment. An interesting position to take, given the current reputation of the Villars as corrupt landgrabbers with no empathy for those most affected by this crisis3. The complications arising from local and national politics would have been lost on my younger self; all I knew was that somehow, every year, the monsoon season seemed to get worse, and what I could see of my city was neither clean nor green. At least once a year the murky water would rise up and enter the ground floor of our family home, and at some point, the monsoon seasons bled into each other.
I remember worrying about rain. The moment a light shower increased even slightly in intensity feels like a countdown. No matter where I might be at that moment, I would begin to worry about the trek home, if I would make it in time before my way back is closed off by hours-long traffic, or if the power had gone out, or if I was too late to help save our things from the muck. We were lucky to have a house with two floors and a foundation built higher than street level. Many of our neighbors did not.
The Philippines is an archipelagic nation, and our old home in Las Piñas was situated near bodies of water: Zapoté River and Bacoór Bay, the latter a part of Manila Bay. Both bodies of water were witnesses to significant moments in the nation’s colonial past. Manila Bay opens up into the West Philippine Sea, site of territorial disputes between my country and China. We are surrounded by waters that hold ecological, historical and geopolitical import, but viscerally I associate these waters with devastation, the Flood and my hometown always at the back of my mind every time I hear talk of rising seawaters and of smaller, water-locked nations being the most heavily impacted—already heavily impacted, in fact, by the climate crisis. The image of Ondoy submerging Las Piñas is what had led me to thinking about Tropical Futurism and ecocritical thinking years before I had actually started it in earnest, as I keep wondering what survival might look like for small, seemingly unremarkable places like my former city. And even as I take note of this this, I am keenly aware that many parts of the country have borne the brunt of the devastation brought by so-called ‘natural’ disasters. This is where I begin: me and the Flood, and my privilege of surviving it, though perhaps not totally unscathed.
Tropical Futurism emerged from these anxieties, beginning with a skeptical look upon the future, and an equally skeptical look on the stories we have crafted about it, not least of all those I have spun, myself. To whom does the future belong, and in dreaming of the survival of the planet, who are excluded from the utopias, havens, arcologies, communes that we craft? Or, perhaps, have our futures been written for us? As an anchor for the kind of ecofiction that I have been writing—or seeking to write—I use the term “Tropical Futurism” to problematize both “tropics” as a loaded term, an exoticized zone often defined in opposition to the temperate, and “futurism”, given how visions of the future are often dominated by cities and nations shown to be technologically superior.
To quote Mixkaela Villalon, “Wala raw science fiction sa Pilipinas”/ “Evidently, there is no science fiction in the Philippines” (ix), a remark she had heard her creative writing professor state. According to Villalon, her professor further explained that only countries in the West have the privilege of producing this kind of fiction because of their strong foundation in science and education, a privilege that allows them innovations to literally and figuratively reach the moon and stars, “[h]abang tayo rito sa Pilipinas, tali pa rin ang mga paa at sikmura sa lupa”/ “while we who live in the Philippines are still firmly tied to the ground by our hunger”4 (ix).
Like Villalon, this is a sentiment I as a genre writer from the Philippines have often encountered from others in the literature community, and, like Villalon, I’ve had to slowly untangle the problematic notions bound up in those assumptions, as if the poverty of material conditions led to a poverty of imagination as well. Kristine Ong Muslim, another author whose work as both fictionist and editor involve the messy intersections between environmental disaster and the legacy of imperialism, expresses a similar sentiment regarding the fraught relationship that Philippine letters has with any kind of writing outside of realism. Expressing her frustration at how the gatekeepers of Philippine literature prioritized what she calls the “rigid, inflexible lens” of the realist mode, Muslim criticizes the short-lived establishment of a new category in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards called “future fiction” instead of “science fiction”, calling it a sign of the establishment’s “disdain” for genre writing (x).
Lito Zulueta, in his tribute to the late National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera, had an interesting anecdote with regard to the Future Fiction category. Beginning his tribute with how he had once gotten Lumbera in trouble for asking about “the future of Philippine literature”, Zulueta declared that the 2000s were “the frantic era for “futurists””, making reference to the Y2K bug and the “averted” apocalypse, the Italian Futurism art movement that sought “to capture… the dynamism and energy of the modern world”.
It is curious then to see his jump from futurism as manifestation of modernity to an actual conflict about what constitutes a valid vision of the future. Zulueta recounts how he, as a judge in the Future Fiction category, was caught between his fellow panelists, who were arguing about the scope of the category. Apparently, Isagani R. Cruz maintained that "for entries to be considered for a prize, they should be “futuristic” not only in content but also in form", while Soledad Reyes insisted that this definition was too "delimiting". Circling back to his interview with Bienvenido Lumbera, Zulueta went on to expound on the latter’s views on Philippine writing in English, specifically the limits imposed upon its flourishing by the inherent elitism in the language, and Lumbera’s championing of regional literature.
It seems to me that the future brings up so much contention in writing, and I find it telling, too, that the Future Fiction category didn’t stay long, as if we couldn’t find our way into the future, or that our visions of the future are still, somehow, limited by a linear understanding of what that future might be. Anchored by the stomach, to borrow from Villalon once more. Definitely, the conditions under which we write have a palpable effect on the visions we conjure, tied to the very languages we use to articulate them.
But I return here to Villalon’s anecdote about the professor who made the declaration that SF did not exist in the Philippines. She continued with her disagreeing in class about the genre of “And We Sold the Rain” by Carmen Naranjo. While her professor asserted this was “magic realism”, Villalon declares, “Science fiction ito”/ “This is science fiction” (x). In this simple declaration, Villalon underscores that there need not be one singular way to perceive the future, not one singular way to render our reality, and not one definition of what is possible. It isn’t so much the disavowal of the term “magic realism” so much as a disavowal of what divided the two genres in the first place, a disavowal of the regimes of knowledge imposed upon us and divorced us from other ways of knowing.
I have always been interested in genres that do not fall under literary realism, where I can, broadly, do two things: one, to explore how time can be bent, in terms of narrative structure and as premise for a speculative story; and two, to bend the fabric of reality in different ways, whether it was to see the mythic in the everyday or to make palpable the unease that hides under the veneer of domesticity, the not-quite-rightness of everyday life, the Weird contaminating the quotidian. And I realize that this is how I try to make sense of the world, or my place in it: through Story.
All the strangeness of living in a tropical country with a complicated colonial history, caught in various kinds of violences, and the many different meanings of everyday “survival” in such conditions—they had always manifested in varying degrees in my writing. It is through the lens of fiction that I try to confront both the possibilities for a better world and the limitations of such a vision, especially when filtered through a middle-class education that taught me to prioritize English as a medium of communication and artistic expression.
It is these fraught relationships that play out in writing—with science fiction, the future, and how we shape and define it—that I keep in mind when I write towards the idea of a Tropical Futurism. By invoking plural temporalities through panahon, here meaning a Filipino temporality as borrowed from Christian Benitez, and in being aware of my position as academic and writer, I hope to rethink how we story our survival in ways that can’t be neatly slotted into dystopian visions of tropical apocalypse or technocratic paradise, writing a kind of Future Fiction that rethinks the very idea of future as the end of a temporal line predetermined for us.
Christian Jil Benitez in Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (“A Deepening of [Filipino] Time”) seeks to gesture away from the idea of equating or translating panahon as simply “time”, but as a word anchored firmly in the ecology and materiality of the Philippines (Isang Dalumat 6). Through his deepening of the meaning of panahon via close reading of texts such as the various attempts to define it in dictionaries and in literary works, Benitez reclaims the notion of Filipino time from its often negative associations with the “lateness” or “backwardness” seemingly inherent in our people, bringing it back to panahon and its entanglements: tied to agriculture, land ownership, and the seasonal/temporal aspect of labor5; related to a sense of opportunity—pagkakataon—as a deliberately and carefully cultivated awareness of potentiality dependent on specific environmental and economic circumstances (Isang Dalumat 32-33); a way of life, as when periods between different kinds of agricultural labor are marked by communal activity6 (“Tungo Sa Isang Dalumat” 60).
Cautioning against caging panahon within abstract terms that remove it from its specific local context, Benitez nevertheless sees in this danger to abstraction an opportunity “para sa pagbaling tungo sa isang tangkang wikang higit na makapagsasalalay sa ekolohiko (sa halip na tanging ekonomiko) sa dalumat ng panahon” / “to turn instead towards attempts at finding a language that relies more on the ecological (rather than solely economic) in the theorizing of panahon” (“Tungo Sa Isang Dalumat”64).
Through this grounding of panahon as ever-shifting, whose very thing-ness depends on these various entanglements, Benitez points to its ontological slipperiness as an affirmation that it isn’t simply temporality as container for events and things that happen causally, but as the thing-in-itself. Where the existence of the material, living and nonliving, dependent on the aforementioned potentiality, are panahon, themselves, figures always becoming something (Isang Dalumat 46-47).
Panahon figures greatly in my work, as an attempt to find a way out of that linear timeline within which places like the Philippines only have one catastrophic destiny. Unsettling this linearity requires, in a way, a supernatural effort that genre-bending fiction has the potential to hold. Invoking panahon, then, in this slippery, living sense is also a gesture towards the mythic.
In his discussion of the desacralization of calamity, Alvin Yapan traces through the shift in Philippine literature from oral to written word the pivot from “sakuna” as “pagkabalisang emosiyonal”/ “emotional distress” to “disaster”, the “pagkasira ng mga prosesong panlipunan”/breakdown of social structures” (119). This shift in attitudes towards calamity, Yapan argues, demonstrated how Modernity had forced us to construct disaster as the opposite of nature, rather than a sacred or supernatural phenomenon whose unpredictability led to an acceptance of, and anticipation for, a radical shift in the order of things.
“Naitayo ang lipunan sa pagpapailalim ng kalikasan. Kung gayon, labis na nakatuon ang pangangasiwa ng disaster sa pagkontrol ng kalikasan” / “Society was built on the subjugation of nature. Therefore, the management of disasters largely depends on control over nature” (119). He therefore proposes that to appropriately deal with calamity now is to reframe our efforts away from attempts to control nature and towards an understanding of its unpredictability. This involves undoing the divide between nature and culture, and resurfacing the sublime phenomenon of calamity found in oral literature that makes space for the possibility of change and a new order.
In a way, Tropical Futurism attempts to negotiate between this attitude of sacredness and profanity, acknowledging the tensions between them, through the various entangled temporalities that intersect through panahon. As I write this in another country, in another climate, safe, for now, from wading through the excesses of monsoon rains but experiencing other kinds of precarity as a migrant person-of-color, this is also my attempt at making peace with the Flood.
Works Cited
Benitez, Christian Jil R.. Isang Dalumat Ng Panahon. Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2022.
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Women and their Beasts
by Erika Carreon
Between her and her pupil a paper boat. She had asked them to write about their childhood, and instead he played with his scrap of paper, an already costly commodity nowadays. So, she readies her red pen, takes his boat, turns it round and round again. Its edges are wet. It smells of fish, dead on the night of the flood. She tips it over, and out pour miles and miles of milk-white sand. She turns it ‘round and sets it down on her desk. The room is waterless, save for the boy’s eyes, like the wide-eyed dead on the night of the flood. She raises her hand to feel for breath, or to close their eyes, or to shield herself from their gaze. A shadow hovers over the boat.