The Philippines’ brutal history informs Glenn Diaz’s powerful political novel

Western imperialism has a long history in the Philippines. Hundreds of years of Spanish colonisation, beginning in the 1500s, culminated in the Spanish-American War in 1897. The first attempt to declare the Philippine Republic in 1899 was followed by the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), then American control, Japanese occupation during World War II, and eventual independence in 1946.

This history of subjugation, and the subversion and trauma it elicits, is so complex that any linear narrative sanitises and abstracts it to the point that it becomes meaningless.

My opening paragraph fails to describe the brutality of this history and the countless incidents that propelled it. Detailed as a simple timeline, it is as if I’m outlining geological epochs. Missing is the human toll, the centuries of cultural mutilation, the violence and political interference, and the dysfunctional, corrupt politics this long history leaves in its wake.

Review: Yñiga – Glenn Diaz (Pink Shorts Press)

Glenn Diaz is keenly aware of the sanitising nature of linear histories. His award-winning novel Yñiga resists that approach. It is composed as a series of disjointed scenes, jumping around in time within chapters, and sometimes within paragraphs, to capture the essence of memory and trauma.

The novel tells the fragmented story of Yñiga Calinauan, who returns to her home town, where she is forced to reengage with her family history. But it begins with the arrest of a retired general, who has been hiding out in Yñiga’s neighbourhood in Manila.

After the arrest, the neighbourhood is set alight. There is suspicion among the neighbours. Was the fire caused by a forgotten cigarette? Did it have something to do with the general’s arrest? Did Yñiga tip off the authorities and bring on the wrath of whatever corruption supported the general?

Regardless of the motivation, Yñiga is made homeless. Arriving in her childhood town, she reunites with her sister and a helper, Marco, who is later revealed to be her half-brother. Marco is organising a protest against a new power plant, taking after his and Yñiga’s activist father, who had been “disappeared” under the corrupt and dictatorial regime of Ferdinand Marcos. After Marco and Yñiga participate in the protest, Marco is kidnapped.

Throughout the novel, there are flashbacks to interviews between Yñiga and a man who is writing a biography of Yñiga’s father. We never get the exact reasons for the biography, or the biographer’s motivation. But Yñiga is suspicious throughout the process, questioning her father’s disappearance and noticing details about the biographer that link him to the army.

There are suggestions of sex in each of the scenes with Yñiga and the biographer, intermixed with flashbacks to sexual encounters with a previous lover, Diego. There is an ambiguity that declines as the novel progresses – was Yñiga having an affair with the biographer or Diego, or both? Why?