Nick Joaquin’s tropical gothic tales now in Penguin Classics
Premier Filipino writer Nick Joaquin passed away on April 29, 2004, five days short of turning 87. He was born on May 4, 1917. This Thursday, on his 100th birth anniversary, the Cultural Center of the Philippines and National Commission for Culture and the Arts will begin to celebrate his centenary at various venues at the CCP, starting at 1 p.m.
Honoring our much-loved National Artist for Literature isn’t confined to our country, as Penguin Classics has chosen this year to release the 432-page collection, The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic.
The book’s foreword was written by distinguished New York-based Filipina novelist Gina Apostol, while the Introduction is credited to Seattle-based Filipino scholar and author Vicente L. Rafael.
Well, more than the intro ought to be credited to “Vince” Rafael. He relates of a visit to New York in October 2016: “Gina Apostol and I were having dinner with Sheila Coronel at the apartment of Neferti Tadiar and her husband, Jon Beller. We had started to talk about Filipino Anglophone writers and why they were not well-known outside of the Philippines despite the fact that they wrote in a world language. I then brought up the idea of putting out a collection of Nick’s stories since his centennial was coming up, and I thought of Penguin since they had done Villa and Rizal. But I didn’t know anyone there. Gina knew Elda Rotor of Penguin from the Fil-Am literary events in the New York area and offered to get in touch with her. Next day, she responded positively, and wanted us to submit a proposal. She also suggested that I do the intro while Gina writes the foreword. And that’s how it started.”
Fil-American Elda Rotor is vice president and publisher for Penguin Classics. Among her recent big-ticket projects were The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry edited by Rita Dove and the New York Times bestseller The Inaugural Address by Barack Obama. She had also published Penguin Classics editions of Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo by José Rizal, translated by Harold Augenbraum, and Doveglion: Collected Poems by José Garcia Villa, with an introduction by Luis H. Francia.
Vince selected the stories, and insisted that the play be included. He had substantial help from Ateneo’s Jonathan Chua in tracking down publication data for each story. Vince supplemented his Introduction with “Suggestions for Further Reading.” Andrea Pasion Flores, director of Anvil Publishing, Inc. and the literary agent for the Joaquin family, was indispensable for arranging permission and royalties. As Vince says, “the collective hope is that this Penguin edition of Joaquin, like the Rizal and Villa books, would open the way for more Filipino writers to become more visible in the world republic of letters.”
From the time of its conception, it took The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic less than half a year to get off the press.
Last Wednesday, April 26, with Vince in attendance, the book was launched at the Philippine Center in San Francisco, thanks to coordination between the Philiipine Consulate General and Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc. (PAWA) and its president, Edwin Lozano, as well as the Philippine Folklife Museum Foundation and Arkipelago Books.
The following day, April 27, the Philippine Consulate General in New York with Consul Tess de Vega took its turn hosting a launch, with Gina Apostol presiding over the proceedings, which included a dramatic reading by Ma-Yi Theatre Company. Food was catered by Purple Yam Brooklyn.
National Book Store already has copies available in some branches, and has been accepting orders online. Plans for a local launch are also being arranged with CCP. For its part, Anvil Publications Inc. is offering a bundling promo this May, with Nick Joaquin titles at a discount at NBS branches.
The Penguin book includes the stories “Three Generations,” “The Legend of the Dying Wanton,” “The Mass of St. Sylvestre,” “The Summer Solstice,” “May Day Eve,” “The Woman Who Had Two Navels,” “Guardia de Honor,” “Doña Jéronima, “The Order of Melkizedek,” “Candido’s Apocalypse,” and the play, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Filipino: An Elegy in Three Acts.”
Gina Apostol’s foreword is a gem, from which we delight in sharing brilliant passages as excerpts:
“His style has a term: Joaquinesque. His command of voice, language, and form is absolute. Some of his sentences are like labyrinths that if you pulled a string through, you get this architectonic surety, a marvel. … For Filipinos, Joaquin is sui generis. Almost maddeningly Manileño, subversively religious, pitch-perfectly bourgeois, preternaturally feminist, historically voracious, Joaquin’s work has a fatality — it simply is.
“… It is especially through his women that Joaquin diagnoses the spiritual horror of impassioned but truncated lives — his existential theme. His cure lies in the same women: they are daemons of the life-spirit — babaylan and Tadtarin and witches and supernatural powers that run through Joaquin’s work. Joaquin is prescient and contemporary because he excavates what’s ancient — women are vessels of transformative godhood: versions of Mary, animist, earthly.
“… He took on with blithe sin the language of his father’s enemy, mastering it to witness the paradoxical ways a nation survives.
“His unapologetic, Calibanic choice of English is both rebuke to the occupier and revenge upon it.
“… Born of war and occupation, like his country, he sat every day in a monkish room with only books, a desk, and a manual typewriter, and he wrote. History is only precursor; the past is a ruin his prose survives. Writing is his triumph.”
Vicente L. Rafael concludes, in his exhaustive introduction titled “Telling Times: Nick Joaquin, Storyteller”:
“Swept by the catastrophes of colonialism and war, Joaquin, like St. Sylvestre, looked both ways. Lingering on the threshold of what had happened and what was yet to come, he found himself irresistibly drawn, like the Angel of History, to the debris of colonial catastrophes that just kept piling up around him. He sought to retrieve from the ruins of modernity the means for conveying experience — his own as well as others’ — in stories about forgotten legends, repressed events, flawed fathers, two-naveled women, and the miracles of a merciful Virgin that continue to emerge from the ever-perplexing and vertigo-inducing history of a certain Philippines. We, whoever we are, receive his stories told from a ruined world, hearing and perhaps sharing them as we would the shards of our own lives.”
On May 25, 2017, at 9:30 a.m., Dr. Gémino H. Abad will deliver the Nick Joaquin Memorial Lecture as part of Far Eastern University’s year-round celebration of Joaquin’s centenary. This will be held at the Nick Joaquin Special Collections Room, 3rd Floor, FEU Library, Nicanor Reyes Hall. The Special Collections will also be relaunched.
We can look forward to more events in celebration of our greatest writer’s centenary.
