The Philippine Online Chronicles

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The two decades of dictatorship by Ferdinand Marcos is embedded deeply within the Filipino psyche. How else to explain the vast number of literature examining, critiquing, and reliving the turbulent period? Poetry, short stories, novels and even graphic novels have explored life under Martial Law . National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose sets a number of his books during the Martial Law era. Arnold Arre uses the setting for his graphic novel Martial Law Babies while Fil-Am Jessica Hagedorn takes a post-modern approach with Dogeaters .

Jose Dalisay Jr.'s contribution is the darkly realist Killing Time in a Warm Place.

As a former student activist, Dalisay plumbs real-life experiences as well as national headlines to tell the coming of age of an idealist caught within the storm of history. Killing Time is the story of Noel Ilustre Bulaong, born in the coconut groves of Kangleong in the Visayas region, but he braves the hovels of Manila for a better life and finds the capital seized within the clutches of Martial Law imposed by Marcos.

Bulaong goes to the University of the Philippines to study and becomes a student activist. He serves under the propaganda arm of the movement but gets caught and imprisoned by the government. After some time, he is released from prison and eventually leaves for the United States to pursue writing. As he goes through these experiences, Bulaong reaches an ambivalence between his former life as an activist and his new existence in the United States as a writer and government employee.

"Fantasy" of America

Dalisay's novel gained the attention of a number of literary critics early on. Ed Maranan, in a 1999 talk given to students and faculty of the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London said, "Jose Dalisay's Killing Time in a Warm Place (1992), a first-person roman a clef and reconstruction of an activist's life under martial law, in which historical necessity and personal circumstances can be as much in contradiction as are opposing political forces."

J. Neil C. Garcia, fictionist and literary critic, cited a study made by Neferti Xina M. Tadiar]] on the elements of fantasy in Dalisay's novel who characterizef it as "a symptom of the unequal history of Philippine-American relations... [The Filipino protagonist] identifies himself with the Other (America) only because he knows - that is to say, he fantasizes - that this Other owns everything in his world, including even the revolution he used to believe in, his own wished for redemption, his very soul."

Edgar Samar said that first novels are usually an author's "exorcism of one's demons." As such, he asks whether Dalisay's novel is an apologia-"an attempt to make peace with one's past and the choices he made, the paths he was forced to take."

In the end, Samar said, "The work's central literary apology lies then on its choice of language, and the writing often betrays the guilt whenever it would make use of a term in the vernacular, like kuya and barilan, but would then immediately translate them to English (elder brother, gunfights).... As a Filipino reader reading a Filipino writer writing in English, I felt somewhat betrayed. But of course, I'd realize that this is also part of the novel's agenda, to expose Noel's real doom: the distance he had to travel so that he could go back to his home, to the memory of his old self, and be absolved of his sins."

Partly autobiographical

Jose Dalisay Jr., in his Penman blog, admitted that his novel is partly an autobiography. It would be fruitless, however, to determine which of the novel's elements are his own and which ones are unique to the main character. He says:

"In the case of Killing Time, I've made no secret of the fact that it's partly autobiographical, like many first novels tend to be. Like my protagonist Noel Bulaong, I was born in an island village, grew up in Manila, became a student activist, was arrested and imprisoned during martial law, then worked for the government after my release."

He continued further, "But I can't and won't say which parts are "true" and which aren't; I made up a lot of things for that book-I was supposed to, since it isn't a factual memoir (and even memoirs can be liberal in their imagination). The novel is based on fact, but in the end, it's fiction."

Roman Carlo Loveria of The Varsitarian, praised the novel for its grand multiplicity of plots: "The novel progresses from a feeling of oneness with all things to the almost irrational struggle of a teen against an evil of which he has only a very vague idea, then to a mid-life crisis of sorts, and finally to a junction where the very meaning of life is revealed in the path one takes."

In the end, Dalisay's first novel is an examination of one man's life and struggles of growing up and making choices that would define his directions, his ideologies and his very identity in the context of the Martial Law and all the conflicts and controversies that happened then.




Photo taken from Wikipilipinas.org . It is believed that a low resolution image of book covers to illustrate an article discussing the book in question qualifies as fair use under Philippine copyright law.