Passion and compassion : mga tula sa Ingles at Pilipino

The Postcolonial Perverse is a two-volume collection of fifteen different critiques of varying “aspects” of contemporary Philippine culture. The work’s “eclectic” topics range from the independent cinema movement to the mystifications of nationalist poetics, from sacrilegious “avant-garde” art to the deconstruction of an inaugural text in the Philippine anglophone tradition, and from reflections on the contact zone between science and art to the impertinent question of our foremost national hero’s quizzical gender and sexual identity. The title’s two concepts—“postcolonial” and “perverse”—are almost symmetrically split across these two books, urging the reader to more sharply intuit and “experience” the project’s central theme. Namely: that the postcolonial hybridity or cultural mixedness that characterizes Philippine life is the same thing as the perverse inability of its agents to stay committed to principled and categorical thought. In the Preface the author, Professor J. Neil C. Garcia, offers the reading that it is perhaps our culture’s relatively recent and uneven literacy—as well as its enduring residual orality—that has brought this “perverse” situation about, rendering Filipino social memory fluid and malleable on one hand, and social relations and norms eminently negotiable on the other. And yet, what’s interesting is that it is precisely upon this ambivalent cultural ground that Filipinos must endeavor to fashion their sense of collective being—which is to say, their national identity.