The Politics and Poetics of Philippine Festival in Ninotchka Rosca's State of War

"Both the social function and the symbolic meaning of the festival are closely related to a series of overt values that the community recognizes as essential to its ideology and worldview, to its social identity, its historical continuity, and to its physical survival, which is ultimately what festival celebrates." --Alessandro Falassi (1) Festivals serve to regenerate and unify a community; they recount a neverending story that, like all narrative, is both the product and producer of culture. But the festival tells a potentially subversive tale that fosters communal solidarity and purpose, rekindling vital energies that can form the basis of collective resistance. Throughout the more than seven thousand one hundred islands comprising the Philippine archipelago, hundreds of festivals are celebrated annually. They dramatize the conflicting histories, influences, and myths that have shaped Filipino identity: Spanish Catholicism and indigenous religions claim their authority through rituals and ceremonies; the rhythms of tribal drums and American pop music assert precolonial and neocolonial influences; and street spectacles showcase cultural icons and symbols. Engaging nearly all aspects of Filipino cultural identity from religion to language, folklore to politics, these festivals constitute, symbolically, a way of recalling the mythical and historical origins of the community. They offer a respite from oppressive structures, an exuberant affirmation of collective freedom. In this essay, I will examine the festival as a literary strategy of resistance in Ninotchka Rosca's State of War. (2) Praised as one of the finest novels of 1988, (3) Rosca's debut novel is set in the Philippines during a festival similar to the annual Mardi Gras celebration on Panay Island. The narrative traces the rise and fall of a contemporary dictatorship (modeled after that of Ferdinand Marcos but never naming him directly). Through her protagonists' personal memories, Rosca recalls the events leading to the current predicament: an ongoing "state of war" that never actually erupts into outright revolution. The festival, which sets the stage for an antigovernment display of force, establishes a context, frames the action, and informs the novel's revolutionary theme. Rosca's festival serves as a symbolic and literal site of transgression. Variously referred to as a "festival of memories," and "a singular evocation of victory in a country of too many defeats," the festival establishes the novel's connection to Filipino tradition and identity. Like her text, Rosca's festival is a celebration born of rebellion and bequeathed through language and memory. It is the locus where anything is possible--where peasant farmers transform into ancient warriors in tribal costumes, guerilla fighters feast and dance with enemy soldiers while transvestites parade through the streets with sawed-off shotguns under their skirts. At this site of radical possibilities, the symbolic dissolution of boundaries hints at the prospect of revolution. Linked to a cultural ethos of self-determination (Mikhail Bakhtin's "feast of becoming"), the novel represents, in Robert Stain's suggestive description of carnival, "the oppositional culture of the oppressed, a countermodel of cultural production and desire." (4) Exiled during the Marcos years because of her controversial writing, Rosca maintains that "the written word has an authority so vast that a dangerous status has often been conferred upon writers." (5) This "heightened sense of the value of the word" defines Filipino subjectivity. In Rosca's view, the commingling of precolonial and modern history, as well as the tension between colonial and neocolonial languages, shapes a personal identity that "shares in all of the contradictoriness of the national self" ("Myth" 242). It also informs a tradition of adversarial writing: Filipino literature reflects "the pride, the commitment to independence, that saw Lapu-Lapu skewering Ferdinand Magellan in 1521 for his crime of intervention in domestic affairs. …