Popular Filipino author/columnist & podcaster, Jessica Zafra's first novel, The Age Of Umbrage

That Jessica Zafra is a great writer goes without saying; but her wit and acerbity, her idea (only somewhat facetious) of world domination via yaya and domestic helper make the notion of a novel from her irresistible. Only consider the volumes of Twisted columns she’s sold over two decades, apart from three short story collections, and it's understandable that The Age of Umbrage (Bughaw, an imprint of Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2020) could not have come soon enough.

A slim book with easy-on-the-eye-catching cover art by Bianca Alexandra Ortigas in bright Crayola red violet, its slightness in my hands is disconcerting. Flipping through, I note the book’s entire six chapters ending at a petite 126 pages. That's thirty pages fewer than one of my all-time-favorite novels: Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (which a few critics have called a novella). And then there is her very first sentence, a wistful, heartrending line with hardly a pause for a breath through a substantial paragraph that recalls Nick Joaquin. 

From the outset, we sense a master in command of language, smooth as milk, and so all-knowingly authoritative, we relax, confident we won’t be jolted out of the reverie by awkward diction, an inorganic sentence or an overwrought adverb. We turn ourselves over, the way we might turn over in a dream. It’s hard not to hear Zafra’s voice in our head. The buy-in is immediate. 

We enter the familiar yet strange world of the unfortunate Siony, her wayward Hernani, and their extraordinary daughter, Guada, the life they live, the class differences they negotiate, their struggle, their pathos, their lunacy in the every day, and the all too surreal hilarity of living in the mansion of Don Paquito Almagro, close friend to the President, in the wealthy, high-walled subdivision of Almagro. Zafra takes such palpable pleasure in the selection of details for this world—quoting dialogue from movies, pop and classic, making references to books, from Thomas Hardy to Frank Herbert, the music of Madonna and Prince, and the 55-volume The Philippine Islands by Blair and Robertson, included for texture and the nifty little inside joke. 

We feel for Siony, grim-faced and resigned, as she accepts the only chance she has for herself and her child. We sympathize with Guada and understand her ambivalence, her reluctant acceptance of the way things are, that she is her mother’s one and only reason for living. And through it all, in the background, the events of recent Philippine history unfurl in like swathes of indigenous fabric, its designs always apparent. We delight too in the large, motley cast of vividly named characters—each so real, they might be someone we once encountered in our life. Don Paquito, who loves pork stewed in coconut milk, Dona Consuelo, distant but not unkind, Guillermo, the forlorn and flailing Almagro son, Lennon, the driver (named for his father’s favorite musician), Ding-Dong, the village security guard who runs marathons and is sleeping with the maid, Teresita, and so many more. 

 “Ding Dong was a common name in the Philippines, where people were routinely named after doorbells, TingTing, BongBong, JengJeng and so on.” 

 Zafra sifts funny lines throughout the book like pinipig—crunchy sweet toasted rice—on suman—steamed glutinous rice cake. 

 “It is a truth acknowledged in the Philippines that a single man in possession of good looks and no fortune must be in want of a benefactor, an older person of the female or homosexual persuasion. In the case of the latter, it did not follow that the party of the first part was himself homosexual or even bisexual, merely in need and pragmatic.” 

 “Rich girls could wear whatever they wanted… they could parade themselves like hookers and people would call them fashionable. If a girl from the middle class went around in shorts so tiny they were more wedgie than pants, she would be called a slut. If a girl from her barrio appeared in public undressed like that, she was a hooker.” 

 “Eventually, she came to the conclusion that only the sane worry about going crazy. The truly insane have no minds left to lose.” 

 “Pedestrians are a lower life form in Manila, destined to become roadkill, deprived even of sidewalks, which are appropriated by vendors of radioactive-looking fried snacks.” 

Her deadpan humor is the essential layer that cushions us against the stark and massive disappointments in Guada’s sad life. It is self-deprecation as self-defense, and it resonates, matter-of-fact, quintessentially Filipino. For where would we all be if we could not laugh through our tears and our rage, if we could not make fun of and mock our own mindless folly, our own contrary, superstitious, religious culture, and our now almost unsurprising, pathetic outcomes? 

Whatever it might be for Guada, the book ends bleakly…and well, with umbrage. However, it is an open end. The cruelty of The Age of Umbrage is its brevity; “age” is a misnomer. That’s it. No more. Finished. Zafra leaves us like Guada, bereft upon a precipice. To be sure, she has created a heroine to love. We root for Guada, we wish her the happiness she deserves, but we do want another six chapters to find out what happens next. Instead, we can only turn the book over and read it again. 

It is a flaw, but a bearable one and bittersweet. I will wait for Zafra’s second novel and her third and her fourth, and hope that one of them will take up the rest of Guada’s tale, which after all, has only just begun.

Danton Remoto Chats With Elaine Chiew About His Novel Riverrun: Proudly Gay, Proudly Filipino

 

Credit: PRH SEA

Bio:

Danton Remoto was educated at Ateneo de Manila University, Rutgers University, University of Stirling and the University of the Philippines. He has worked as a publishing director at Ateneo, head of communications at United Nations Development Programme, TV and radio host at TV5 and Radyo 5, president of Manila Times College and, most recently, as head of school and professor of English at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. He has published a baker’s dozen of books in English. His work is cited in The Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature, The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics, and The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Postcolonial Literature.

 

Synopsis:

Riverrun, A Novel, deals with Danilo Cruz, a young gay man growing up in a colourful and chaotic military dictatorship in the Philippines. The form of the novel is that of a memoir, told through flash fiction, vignettes, a recipe for shark meat, feature articles, poems and vivid songs. The setting ranges from provincial barrio to cosmopolitan London. The grimness and the violence are leavened by the sly wit and wicked humour. Riot.com, the biggest independent platform for the publishing industry in the USA, has called this novel “one of the five most anticipated books by an Asian author in 2020.”

 

EC: Welcome to Asian Books Blog, Danton. Congratulations on Riverrun, a delightful and poetic read, lightly trodden but deeply impactful; and indeed, as intended, it reads like a personal, intimate memoir. Why did you decide on having this ‘memoirish’ cant?

 

DR: Thank you, Elaine. I really intended it to be written lightly, as it were, since the topic is the grimness and violence of a military dictatorship in the Philippines. The narrative form is that of a memoir, which is influenced by James Joyce in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and the stories in Dubliners. Even the title of my novel comes from Ulysses by Joyce. A memoir allows for a more personal, chatty tone, and the genre itself connotes memories. Talk is one of the things banned in a military dictatorship, so I tried to capture the hidden talk, whispered conversations, snide remarks and seemingly unintended jokes cracked in a dictatorship. I also experimented with Filipino English in this novel, trying to capture the way educated Filipinos spoke in English. I had written books of poetry and essays before I wrote the first draft of Riverrun at Hawthornden Castle, an old castle haunted by ghosts, in Scotland. This influenced the way the novel is written—lyrical in some parts, chatty in others. I wrote in longhand, on yellow pad paper, and I wrote from 9 AM to 5 PM, stopping only for lunch break or to take a walk around the chilly woods that April of 1993. When I found out the voice I would use – a slightly older and more cynical person recalling his bittersweet past – the words seemed to fall into place. 

Out of the Blue

In the last quarter of 2019, two books were published by Ateneo University Press’ new literary imprint, Bughaw (Blue), and I lost no time in getting my hands on them. They are, Angelo R Lacuesta’s book of selected fiction, City Stories, and The Collected Stories of Jessica Zafra. It was an occasion to celebrate, to have two such wonderful books come out in quick succession this way—two books from writers I'm likely always going to want to buy.

Both Lacuesta and Zafra are keen observers of the Filipino psyche: they capture current and contemporary Filipino life in all its rich, textured, variegated complexity. Set aside the old cliché—300 years in a convent, 50 years in Hollywood—we’re talking about a country and culture unlike any in Southeast Asia, always set off parenthetically as “different” for its flawed US-style democracy, its proud, resilient, imperfect people who have, all too willingly, inclined themselves along authoritarian political posturing due to the abject failures of the governments between Marcos Martial Law and today’s Duterte-an ipso facto dictatorship. We Pinoys speak English (not as well as we did), work hard, are friendly and happy-go-lucky, in spite of everything. We want our K-pop TV series, our bootleg Hollywood DVDs, our fake designer goods from China and our junky American fast-food, all the while paying barely audible lip-service to being a strong, independent society, one in which family and tragically, family dynasties, reign supreme. There aren’t two better writers than these here right now for acquainting oneself with the country today.