Scan barcode
dessuarez's review
2.0
I’ve been trying to figure out what I hate the most about this book, and I’ve decided it’s this: it being set in a Visayan province post-Yolanda, featuring a Yolanda survivor as one of the narrators, and exploring themes of colonial mentality, patriarchy, and class conflict — that’s exactly what I’m looking for in a book and yet Yabes bungles every single aspect of what would have made it a perfect critique of our national situation through a local lens.
First of all, because my prof refuses to use the term on the paper she is writing about this book, this is literally Yolanda-baiting. It is hyped up as a Yolanda novel in the back cover blurb, but the story it’s telling could honestly stand without Yolanda. Sure, Yolanda serves as an inciting incident that sets the drama in motion by putting Alba in the care of the Cimafrancas, but after that, what else? Luna’s dad would have still gone to Olango to see that bird, Bina still would have yielded to foreign investors, Kiko would have eventually brought Vincent to Borbon at some point, Manoy still would have raped Alba, and everything that happened in the past regarding Luna’s mom did not need the supertyphoon to come into light. The Yolanda thread is really Alba’s narrative more than anything else, and Yabes hardly let her speak in favor of Luna’s telenovela life. There were parts of Alba’s own experience during Yolanda that the author let Luna narrate. Why?
Alba was mistreated so much as a narrator. Not just based on the frequency of the chapters which she is allowed to narrate, but also because she was made to narrate them in such a caricatured way I think just so her chapters could be distinguished from Luna’s chapters (why not just use a proper marker?) but in the end resulted in the infantilization of Alba and prevented her from properly expressing her feelings in the same way that Luna is able to express hers (see how Luna creates pictures of the grief that she feels about her father’s loss versus when Alba is grieving her innocence for a second time after being raped by Manoy, which, by the way, she was not even allowed to narrate herself). Why is it that Luna is allowed to earn sympathy from the reader through extremely vivid imagery, whereas Alba is only allowed short, simplistic sentences, simply because the author had her speak this awkward, accented, non-standard English when there was really no reason, story-wise, for her to do so? It’s not like she is writing a letter to a white person, why does she have to speak in English when she could just speak in her native tongue and the author could translate that to the reader?
Unless, of course, both narrators are speaking to white people. I don’t think this is a novel for us, Cebuanos. I think it’s a novel for white people to, I guess, see what years of colonization has done to our country, except what they’ll get from it after reading the whole thing is that Filipino culture is inherently sexist and nepotistic, and the way to solve that is, I guess, to replace the current rich, well-connected female mayor with another rich, well-connected female mayor. I don’t know why that ending was supposed to be a good resolution to the poverty, misogyny, lack of environmental education, lack of education in general, and most importantly corruption in Borbon that has been problematized in the entire novel. Just because she had a whole epiphany about her dead dad and missing mother and she made a - frankly, terrible - speech about unity, I’m supposed to think she is going to save this town from the evil mayor Bina?
Speaking of that, why is every woman in this novel evil? And every man is redeemed, even the actual rapist? I kept asking myself, is this the point? Is Yabes trying to trigger my critical thinking, to make me uncomfortable so that I can get what she’s saying about all the themes she’s crammed into this 300-paged novel? I honestly don’t think so. It seems like the author has an affinity with Luna, and all Luna does in her narration is reinforce the colonial mentality, patriarchal notions, and elitism that she critiques but does nothing actually useful about. She keeps saying something profound about white people or governance and then just reinforces it. She’s not a character that is worth giving authority to, and yet it seems that the author wants us to accept her opinions as true, or to at least sympathize with her. In fact, a lot of Alba’s narration only serves to confirm what Luna has already said. Poor Alba. I only cared about her. I didn’t care about Luna at all. She’s just another privileged woman who thinks that the world revolves around her. There are so many novels about those kinds of people already.
hulkytwobelts's review
3.0
An interesting insight into the family structure of generations toiling with the affects of Yolanda. After reading a few Filipino books, it was nice to hear some female voices come to the forefront. Worth a read.
More...